Introduction

Abstract

Meditating on the curious status of the Iguana who lives and works for a family of dissolute Portuguese noblemen, the protagonist Daddo in Anna Maria Ortese’s novel The Iguana (L’Iguana, 1965) muses, consoling himself, that “only the greatest philosophers and most elevated scholars can begin (perhaps) to tell us where the animal ends and where the true human being commences; to say nothing, then, of the way such differentiations grow ever more tenuous with the flowering of civilization, and of how one is often uncertain as to which of the two castes is encroaching upon the other” (112). As his relationship to the Iguana transforms throughout the novel, Daddo’s uncertainty in the face of the purported border dividing the human from the animal echoes a line of questioning that has been driving discussions across the humanities in the past decade.