The Dead Boy and The Comets as a Pictorial Novel.

Considering Parise’s statement for his first novel, Il ragazzo morto e le comete as a «Cubist novel», the paper aims to reflect on the profound connections between this work and contemporary painting. Although Montale immediately noticed «a flavour of Chagall» in the novel, the relationship between this work and painting has not yet been thoroughly investigated. The study of the novel’s interdisciplinary relations is a pretext to investigate how the genre relates with other Arts, especially painting, and finally, also via Mario Praz’s theoretical work how Arts can be defined as the receptacle of the spirit of the time. Starting with two biographical references, Parise’s past as a painter and his visit at the Biennale of 1948, as affirmed the author the very turning point of his artistic career, the paper intends to ponder how Cubism influenced the composition of the novel as in the formal and the aesthetic sphere. Specifically, the paper analyses the influences of Chagall and Picasso’s paintings, which Parise saw in Venice before he started to write the novel. Firstly, the paper explains how Parise assimilates and transforms some of Chagall’s peculiar characteristics of paintings into writing. Secondly, it investigates how the Italian author absorbs and translates, to use the Sauriou’s vocabulary, the Cubist concept of simultaneity and Picasso’s lessons, implementing it with the art of the novel. Cubism and its simultaneity are a unique way representing contemporaneity of Parise.