Sally Bonn’s essay Writing Writing Writing (Metauro edizioni, SOFFÌA series, translated by Matteo Martelli, with a foreword and an essay by Margareth Amatulli, p. 203, €20.00) is in an area that is not easy to classify.
Halfway between an autobiographical story, an art book and the story of an intellectual development, the book is above all a meditation on writing and the gesture that it itself implies from antiquity to the present. Imbued with childhood memories and an iconographic apparatus that situates the writing subject in equally precise times and places, giving it the form of a kind of “bildungsroman”, the essay also seems – in a broader sense – to be a real excursion into the history of ideas.
Writing as a relationship
Since writing is a relationship, the author does not just talk about himself, but starts from the autobiographical act and then welcomes the testimonies and peculiarities of other authors and writings. If the act of writing actually means leaving a trace and being present even after disappearance (the echo of Jacques Derrida is evident), it is no coincidence that Sally Bonn draws on authors who have focused their work on this dilemma: Proust, Benjamin, Robert Walser.
But it is above all the “gesture” of writing that prevails, the development of which in the essay goes hand in hand with the history of human evolution, as shown by the various vehicles on which Bonn exercises her literary hand over time in the twenty chapters of the volume . It is no coincidence that Margareth Amatulli states in the book’s foreword: “Sally Bonn’s work offers a new look at writing, freeing it from the emphasis on content and focusing on what it represents in itself, starting from its very materiality “of history, of the supports that evolve over time, of the places and objects that preserve their traces”, the author follows in the footsteps of “auto theory”, a new female genre that has recently appeared in the United States was introduced by Maggie Nelson and its originality would consist in fusing one’s own autobiographical experience with a personal theoretical reflection, all within an interdisciplinarity of genres that was already felt necessary in the French critical debate since the 1970s.
An act that dates back to the mists of time. According to the author, writing is little different from the loving gesture necessary for the survival of the species and our identity, so much so that it connects them in a crucial passage: “And I don’t know why, that expression “written down”, perhaps because it matches the other “laid out on paper” makes one think of a bed, white sheets and bodies lying there. Bodies intertwined between unraveled sheets. On smells, on moisture. With erotic gestures. And then I don’t know if we should conclude anything from this, but the emergence of this verb coincided with the emergence of the first epics in French and with the development of courtly poetry. Write love?”.
