Polisemia, plurilinguismo e intertestualità in limine: sui titoli delle opere di Meneghello

By looking at the titles of the works by Luigi Meneghello, this article proposes a narratological analysis of his oeuvre, informed especially by Genette’s theories of the paratext. Titles are here considered as textual spaces crucial for the interpretative process, since in them one aspect or detail of the text is invested with a metaphorical value. The heterolingual and/or polysemic titles of Meneghello’s novels and essays establish a relation with the text that is programmatically ambiguous and open to interpretation. More precisely: 1. They are often intertextual, inspired by references to both Italian and foreign literature (ancient and modern, written and oral); even the author’s personal memory is a fundamental intertext, together with stories told by friends and relatives; 2. They function as ‘hooks’ between the text and both the extratextual world and the intratextual reality (in the second case they contribute to reinforcing the internal consistency of the corpus); 3. They signal to the reader the author’s poetics of multilingualism, either implicitly or explicitly, which uses in fact the Venetan dialect of Malo (the author’s home village), courtly/literary Italian, Latin, and English, including authorial neologisms; 4. They reveal a major feature of Meneghello’s writing, namely that desacralisation of officialdom, not only on a linguistic level, which Cesare Segre has interpreted using Bakhtin’s category of ‘carnivalization’. In their connotative stratification and interpretative ambiguity, Meneghello’s titles therefore reflect the articulated textual constructions and the elaborate linguistic weaving that characterise his work. In short, they act as signals of the exegetic industriousness expected from the reader who decides to go beyond the cover and delve into the author’s fictional universe.