Madness and writing in L'armata dei sonnambuli, de Wu Ming

Abstract

La armata dei sonnambuli (2014) is the last novel by the italian group of writers Wu Ming. By their own speech, it is a summa of twenty years of experiments on the forms of the historical novel. The writers tell the history of French Revolution by a latera point of view, setting part of the events in Bicêtre asylum in 1793. For this reason they refer to the Historie de la folie a l’age classique, by Michel Foucault, and especially to its republication in Italy in 2011, where the curator Mario Galzigna include the first preface of Foucault (1960). By Foucault’s suggestion, Wu Ming tell a diffent story of the Revolution and go even further, trying to translate the “antagonism” of madness in their writing.