Andrea Cominetti
University of Verona.
This paper analyzes the figure of the Protagonist in The Card Index (1960), examining it through the lens of traumatic memory and the complex psychological legacy of the Second World War. The play, which marks Tadeusz Różewicz’s theatrical debut, stands as one of the most significant documents of the impossibility of reconstructing a subject’s integrity after the horrors of war. The Protagonist is presented as a man «without a biography», or rather, as an individual whose personal history has been pulverized by the experience of the occupation. His state of perpetual passivity, symbolized by his remaining in bed at the center of a room-square, embodies the existential paralysis of the survivor. The bed is not merely a stage setting, but the site of an «inner occupation» that does not cease with the formal end of hostilities. The analysis intends to demonstrate how the historical liberation of 1945 did not coincide, for the veteran, with a true ontological liberation. The character remains a prisoner of a chaotic memory and ghosts from the past that parade before him like fragments of an archive (the “card index”) that is impossible to order or definitively close. The text reached Italy thanks to the fundamental direction of Carlo Quartucci, who transformed the voice of the post-World War II veteran from an individual testimony into a universal voice on the crisis of the post-war man. Through this scenic mediation, the fragmented memory of the survivor becomes a collective reflection on the enduring trauma of the conflict. Bio:
Andrea Cominetti is a PhD student in Performing Arts at the University of Verona. His research interests primarily focus on the work of Luigi Pirandello and the avant-garde movements in Italy and the United States.