Leo's Passion

The article examines the role of suffering in Tondelli's Camere separate and argues that the evolution of Leo, the protagonist of the novel, is best understood as a painful struggle to achieve fullness of being. The aspiration to fullness or plenitude finds an almost insurmountable obstacle in Leo's education and socialization which inculcate in the protagonist the dichotomies of mind and body, masculine and feminine, life and writing. Leo's excruciating suffering is the direct result of these culturally and historically specific dichotomies which divide the character against himself and bring him repeatedly on the threshold of physical and psychic death. These confrontations with death, however, ultimately lead Leo to reject an abstract, inhuman and life denying transcendence, and embrace immanence and human life in all its fragility

Aesthetics · Art · Character (mathematics · Dichotomy · Epistemology · Immanence · Literature · Passion · Psychic · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Transcendence (philosophy · Educational and Social Studies · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Italian Literature and Culture · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology