Hilarotragoedia was one of the most unique debuts in 20th-century Italian fiction. Originally published in 1964, Giorgio Manganelli’s first book does not follow the usual forms of storytelling, but instead constructs a verbal and allegorical journey through a descent into hell. Instead of a linear plot, the text proposes a conceptual progression in which a being—half man, half deer—crosses metaphysical thresholds that refer more to rhetorical structures than to concrete spaces. The narrative takes multiple forms: catalog, report, glossary, thus becoming a device that questions language itself, not as an instrument of representation, but as the matter and limit of all possible experience.
This procedure places Manganelli in a literary lineage that privileges formal operation over anecdote. His prose, complex and self-referential, deliberately avoids mimesis and launches into a systematic exploration of the possibilities of discourse. Far from the conventions of realism or traditional fantasy narrative, his writing operates as a critical machine that analyzes itself in real time. In Hilarotragoedia, each sentence seems to design an autonomous universe, unfolding meanings and undermining the idea of an underlying plot. In this gesture, we can see an experimental will close to certain structuralist and formal practices, such as those of the Oulipo group, although with a less playful and more speculative orientation.
This singularity is no accident. Manganelli, born in Milan in 1922, began publishing in his maturity, after having developed an intense career as an editor, translator, and essayist. This trajectory not only delayed his entry into the literary field, but also endowed him with exceptional erudition, built on a vast network of philosophical, religious, literary, and philological readings. This experience translates into writing saturated with references, articulating voices from heterogeneous sources: theological treatises, nineteenth-century encyclopedias, scholastic glosses, apocryphal literature. Rather than quoting, Manganelli absorbs and reconfigures these traditions, turning each paragraph into a kind of palimpsest. His position as an editor gave him access to a living archive, a symbolic reservoir from which to develop a form of essayistic fiction in which each word carries historical and rhetorical weight.
In the context of postwar Italian literature, Hilarotragoedia appears as a deliberate anomaly. His closeness to Gruppo 63—a movement that included authors such as Edoardo Sanguinetti and Nanni Balestrini—is more due to conceptual affinity than explicit membership. While the group promoted a break with bourgeois realism and the critical use of language, Manganelli radicalized this proposal from a solitary position. His relationship with Italo Calvino was crucial: both shared an interest in self-referential structures and literature as artifice, although Manganelli leaned toward a darker and more conceptual path. Compared to the combinatorial games of Raymond Queneau or Georges Perec, his work reveals less enthusiasm for mathematical permutation than for the philosophical density of the sign. In this sense, his prose can be considered akin to Oulipo, but also to a hermetic tradition where the text is more oracle than game.
Finally, Hilarotragoedia is situated in an intermediate zone between fantasy literature and metaphysical essay, where the journey to Hell does not refer to a supernatural geography but to a structure of thought. The work does not represent the descent, but embodies it in its very form: the reader descends through layers of language, confronting a proliferation of meanings that seek not resolution but intensification. This strategy anticipates concerns that Manganelli would later develop in titles such as Del infierno and Centuria, where microfiction and speculative meditation converge in the same constructive logic.
In all cases, the idea prevails that language does not represent the world, but rather produces, interrupts, and reorganizes it. From this perspective, Hilarotragoedia is not only an inaugural work, but also a radical manifesto of a poetics that, since its appearance, has continued to operate as both an exception and a model. The translation is by Carlos Gumpert. The notes are by Italo Calvino.
