Contrastare con le frasi: la fatica, il coraggio, l’atto della scrittura manzoniana

This contribution wants to add a piece to the vast panorama of the achieve-ments of the critics regarding the strategies of Manzoni as author, narrator and remak-er of the story told in the Promessi sposi and to the investigations on his metanarrative interventions. Starting from the author’s insertion into the silence between cardinal Federigo and don Abbondio passing from XXV to XXVI chapters, we will investigate Manzoni’s position towards the detractors of literature and, on the other hand, the seri-ous responsibility that he assumes himself as man of letters. He wants, indeed, remain faithful to the story - in its truth as well as in its beauty - certain of the performative force of ‘counteracting with the sentences’. Read together with the lexical signs scattered in the previous and subsequent chapters, the authorial intervention of chapter XXVI al-so reveals itself as a renewed legitimation of the guide role to which the writer is called and of the moral nature that Manzoni recognizes to literature. Since many linked ele-ments converge in the passage, it is possible to consider it among the mises en abyme of Manzoni’s poiesis