Un’India di carta. Spazi fisici e Letteratura in un viaggio di Giorgio Manganelli

Manganelli’s India is still the enchanted country Western people have been dreaming of since the Middle Ages: a place where the monstrous meets the fantastic. This paper addresses the relationship between Manganelli’s literary notion and the description of his trip to India. If you compare his writing from Esperimento con l’India to his theoretical works, you will note that an amoral and nocturnal world corresponds to his principle of “literature as a lie”. While Manganelli’s voyage takes him to real places, he also travels, through words, into a kind of labyrinth made of landscapes, different characters, and monuments that are no longer real, but trapped in their allegorical transformation; for travelling across India is always a two-dimensional trip, a journey between the real and the imaginative worlds.