Elsa Morante

> There is no word, in any human language, capable of consoling the guinea pigs who do not know the reason for their death (a Hiroshima survivor). Elsa Morante places this quotation as an epigraph to the novel, indicating that her aim is to recount the victims during a dramatic and painful period of our recent history: the years between 1941 and 1947. It would nonetheless be mistaken to think oneself before a modern version of Riccardo Bacchelli's novel (*Il Mulino del Po*, reviewed on this site), with which the great Bolognese writer intended to narrate post-unification history from the perspective of the humble. And how could that be, when the author is the very same behind *Menzogna e Sortilegio* (see review on this site)? How could we imagine ourselves before a historical, combative, trenchant, ideological novel, when Elsa Morante's narrative universe is oneiric and introspective? Ida, widow Mancuso, lives in Rome: a schoolteacher by profession, thirty-seven years of age, with a restless, engaging son named Nino; she has an > undernourished body, and formless in its structure, with a withered chest and an awkwardly swollen lower half, the face of a worn, delicate little girl. (...) In her large, dark, almond-shaped eyes there was a passive sweetness, of a deep and incurable barbarism, resembling a precognition. (...) The strangeness of those eyes recalled the mysterious idiocy of animals, who know the past and future of their destiny not with the mind, but through a sense of their vulnerable bodies. We shall call that sense (...) the sense of the sacred (...) the universal power that can devour and annihilate them, for the guilt of having been born . While returning home, she is raped by a German soldier, who impregnates her; Giuseppe, known as Useppe, is born. Nino is always out roaming; alone with little Useppe, Ida endures the bombings and the destruction of her house, the evacuation to Pietralata into a vast communal room devoid of intimacy, the harsh German occupation, the deportation of the Jews, and, indirectly through Nino, the partisan resistance; then she somehow retreats into a small rented room, still alone with Useppe, sharing quarters with a family waiting in vain for their son missing in Russia. Finally, she achieves a respectable security that seems to set her on course for a peaceful life. All these tragic events pass through the lives of Ida and Useppe like a fairy tale, wherein the child resembles a cheerful yet wise gnome: > one would have said, indeed, from his laughter, from the constant brightening of his little face, that he did not see things confined within their usual appearances; but as multiple images of other things, infinitely varying . It is as if the song of two woodland birds, whose words were crystal clear to Useppe's ears, expressed in their repetitive refrain the indecipherable meaning of what was taking place: "it's a joke, a joke, all a joke!". Were it not for the fact that Anna Maria Ortese's novel *Il Cardillo addolorato* dates from 1993, and Elsa Morante could thus not have drawn inspiration from the mysterious little song ( > and fly, fly, fly, cardillo...., see the review on this site), there nonetheless emerges the same subterranean world, the magma seething beneath ordering rationality. Ida, Nino, and Useppe seem to survive just like their two dogs, Blitz and Bella, unwitting victims; dreams, on the contrary, reveal from the very beginning the anxieties stemming from the unconscious, submerged in fear and pain, to which one can neither assign meaning nor simply bear witness to such cruelty. Ida walks with her father, who shelters her beneath his coat; when suddenly the coat flies away as if on its own, without her father. And she finds herself a little girl alone along certain mountain paths, trickles of blood escaping her vagina. (...) Instead of running away, she has stopped on the path to play with a young goat.... But she does not notice that the goat is crying out, in labor, about to give birth! And meanwhile, right there, already waiting, is a quartermaster from the electric slaughterhouses....(...) In the dream, Useppe was not on the shore, but in the water of the river-lake. And this water, though enclosed in a circle by the hills, appeared infinitely vast. (...) Useppe swam in this water naturally, like a little fish; and around him throughout the warm lake emerged countless little heads of other swimmers, companions of his. (...) But the most extraordinary thing about this joyful lake was that the circle of hills, battered by the bleak tempest, was mirrored within it, instead, intact and blissful, in the serene fullness of an early summer > . How to attain peace, how to break free from pain? Nothing remains but death or madness. The reader departs from the book with a deeply evocative image. Useppe has fallen ill, suffered an epileptic seizure, Bella rushes toward home to summon Ida, and she awakens from a dream ( and then the kid and she, joyful, board the ship together"), is seized by an "incoherent panic" and rushes to save her son. "The three of them walked, huddled close together: Useppe perched on Bella as on a hobbyhorse, his head resting against Ida's side, who encircled him with her arm to support him > . What muted, melancholy tenderness! Clustered together, in the only solidarity they know, the three hope to save themselves! Elsa Morante stated in a 1959 interview, the novelist (...) presents, in his work, a complete system of the world and of human relations of his own. Only, instead of expounding his system in terms of reasoning, he is driven, by his nature, to configure it in a poetic fiction, by means of narrative symbols" (quoted by Cesare Garboli in the introduction). With the aim of speaking of the victims, the writer seeks to abide by this canon; she gives her novel a nineteenth-century imprint, with a meticulous description of stories, places, and details, in an effort to legitimize the imaginary and grant it coherence. She slips into a lengthy, redundant scene in the manner of Dostoevsky, almost a replica of the Grand Inquisitor chapter from *The Brothers Karamazov* (see review on this site). However, the oneiric world is irrepressible; the unconscious bursts forth and dismantles the novel's overarching order: what emerges is a *zibaldone*, a miscellany where History merges with individual stories in an exaggerated and prolix mixture; Useppe lends a chivalric momentum to the narrative that might have redeemed us, but it is not enough. Why read it? Certainly a great novel, but surely not on par with *Menzogna e Sortilegio*.

> One of my earliest boasts had been my name. I had soon learned (it was he, I think, who first informed me of it) that Arturo is a star: the swiftest and most radiant in the figure of Boötes, in the northern sky!. Thus begins Arturo Gerace’s long quest for Love: > an indecipherable dilemma, without the solace of hope, or of revenge ; a quest that, to unfold, required an enchanted place like Procida: > a land of adventure, a blessed garden! , but also > a bewitched and voluptuous mansion. The novel encompasses three distinct natures, profoundly intertwined: the narrative, the fantastic, and the oneiric. Orphaned at birth, Arturo was nursed on goat’s milk by the foster-nurse Silvestro. He grows up alone in a ruined Castle. His father is perpetually traveling, and the boy roams across the island and along the shores. Arturo lives freely yet melancholically, fulfilled only when his father is at home. > My childhood is like a happy land, of which he is the absolute ruler! (...He who strode resolutely forward, like a sail in the wind, with his blond, foreign head, swollen lips, and hard eyes, looking no one in the face. And I followed behind him, proudly casting my dark eyes to the right and to the left, as if to say: “Men of Procida, my father is passing!”. This adoration is unmarred by the brusque and severe manner the father displays toward Arturo, nor is it broken by the arrival of the stepmother, a girl barely older than Arturo (who was then fourteen), perhaps married on a whim. The boy’s relationship with his stepmother wavers between jealousy and attraction, typical of an adolescent undergoing his first stirrings of love and perpetually searching for a maternal figure. One day, the father returns to Procida accompanied by a convict, who is locked up in the island's penitentiary. The man grows taciturn, no longer wanting to walk or sail with his son; instead, he frequently vanishes to sing a love serenade beneath the convict's cell. Arturo's infatuation with his father dissolves painfully, especially when he overhears him being dubbed a “Parody” by the malicious convict: a pitiful imitation of a man of the world, of a great traveler, when > it will be a stretch if he even made it as far as Benevento, or Rome-Viterbo!. Arturo enters adulthood because he sees his father in his true nature, selfish and petty: he must also leave the marvelous island, overly steeped in joyful roaming and anxious anticipation. Adolescence has ended; Arturo sets out to discover the world and resolves to go to war. Thus far, we are faced with a coming-of-age novel, at times verbose and banal. What renders it original and compelling are the narrative’s fantastic and oneiric dimensions. Consider the ascent toward the Penitentiary, trailing behind the father: the alleyways of the ancient village, the narrow, climbing streets, the walls plunging sheer over the island's high cliffs made the Penal Colony look like the > Castle of the Knights of Syria; fairy-tale adventurers (...) crowded that walled palace , and Arturo became > a funereal Knight Errant, (...) and the voices of the village not far off (...) seemed to me the voices of a childish race. A central episode of the novel takes on fairy-tale suggestions, evocative of distant, fabulous worlds and spoken tales. Consider, on the other hand, the image of the seashell, a dreamy naturalism applied to a celestial phenomenon. > Outside the midnight window, (...) a tiny cloud could be seen which, drifting across the turquoise of the sky, within moments took first the shape of a seashell, then of a small hot-air balloon, then of an ice cream cone, then of an old man's beard, then of a ballerina. Reality, fantasy, and dream hybridize, and the narrative tones blur; the novel bears less and less resemblance to a coming-of-age tale (a sort of Neapolitan *Treasure Island*, see the review of *Treasure Island* on this site) and increasingly assumes the imagery and cadence of *The Thousand and One Nights* (see the review on this site). Morante makes no attempt to impart a traditional stamp to the novel, as she had attempted in *Menzogna e Sortilegio* in 1948 (see review on this site); imagination soars from the opening pages, from that singularly starlit incipit. Even within a meticulous and ostensibly naturalistic style, the narration is so oneiric and fairy-tale-like that it suggests a journey deep into consciousness. An early clue lies in the choice of Arturo as narrator, and hence the first-person perspective; then, the disordered, invasive succession of images, bordering on dreams and visions; finally, the characters, who resemble archetypes of different facets of the psyche: the stepmother, an animalistic figure obstinately faithful; the father, stubbornly selfish and hostile; the foster-nurse Silvestro, embodying the Mother figure and returning to rescue him; the wicked malice of the convict, destroyer of Absolute Love. It is as though the protagonist (Morante herself?) hung in the balance, poised before divergent paths, ultimately choosing detachment: a separation also from the yearned-for place where one was born and raised. The narrative proceeds at a leisurely pace, intent as it is on plumbing the depths of the narrator-protagonist’s soul when faced with the diverse situations that unfold before him. It is a continual excavation, marked by detailed descriptions that would border on tedious were they not sustained by grammatically exquisite prose, an airy and elegant lexicon, and a pervading atmosphere of pleasure. Why read it? Fascinating, even if at times verbose.

Elisa wanders through the rooms, in silence and solitude, and when she unexpectedly catches sight of her own reflection, she seems to see > a shape moving in these funereal, solitary waters, (...) like a jellyfish , not a saint: “rather a witch.” It is precisely to explain the sorcery that led her to shut herself up in a few rooms that Elisa offers us the tale of her family: and it is “an appearance of shadows,” a “fantastic malady” that speaks of love and death, as in fairy-tale books: “with thee, Fiction, I gird myself, fatuous raiment.” The novel can be divided into two parts. In the first, Elisa has not witnessed the events and characters she narrates: everything is filtered through the reminiscences of those who were still living when she was a child, or through clues, papers, and places. On the other hand, > the past and the future are two fields of mist and vertigo, which the living cannot explore except through fantasy and memory. (...) What is the use of plumbing this palace of death? The mere attempt to plumb it produces anguish and nausea, as when one looks out over a precipice . We will never know whether what she tells us is true, not least because it reads like the narration of a grand deception, of lies meant to cloak the beloved in “fire and splendor.” Thus the maternal grandfather is a scoundrel and a sluggard, yet he captivates his daughter Anna with wondrous tales of travel, jewels, honors, and glory; and Anna forgets that she lives in poverty, venting her rage on her mother Cesira, a petty and desperate woman. The paternal grandparents are hardworking peasants and could have been an anchor of solid substance: their son Francesco, however, was born of the mother’s fleeting affair with a rogue, himself a fabulist and a peddler of "smoke > . One should not be surprised if Francesco, upon going to study in the city, introduces himself as a baron, and one with revolutionary ideas to boot. And what of Edoardo, the wealthy cousin of the destitute Anna: charming, with feminine features, vacuously intelligent, enamored of himself, ready to love, beguile, and betray anyone, purely for the ambiguous pleasure of amusing himself. Anna and Francesco are too naive not to fall into his tempting coils: Anna falls in love with her cousin, dreaming of a bond that can never materialize due to the difference in social standing and, above all, Edoardo’s character, far too superficial for an enduring and responsible relationship; Francesco believes he has found a true friend in Edoardo, unaware that he is being led by the hand from a genuine love (that of the prostitute Rosaria) toward a yearned-for and idealized one, his passion for Anna. And so Anna and Francesco find themselves married, as if under a spell: Anna loves Edoardo and binds herself to Francesco out of despair, while the latter has deceived the woman, masquerading as a wealthy landowner and a young man on the rise. At this point Elisa steps onto the stage, no longer merely the narrator. Henceforth ended is my privilege of attending, a solitary spectator, a comedy of spirits. (...) A lucid insomnia takes hold of me, and in this taciturn and deserted room, henceforth I can interrogate nothing other than my true memory. I can recount nothing, that is, except the things I saw with my own eyes, heard with my own ears, and of which my father and mother, in their differing insanities, made me their confidante and witness > . To be protagonists is an act of maturity, and at the same time of sorrow, because one cannot defend oneself with imaginary remembrance. Memories, like animals that have lain in hibernation, stir at my call, and approach me with velvety, funereal steps > . The experience of the adolescent Elisa is truly extraordinary; she is not merely a party to a toxic and perverse relationship, the cause of her parents’ psychophysical decline; the girl is swallowed into a kind of triangulation with Francesco and Anna on one side, and on the other the ghost of Edoardo, dead of consumption. To humor Concetta, Edoardo’s now-deranged mother, but in reality to gratify herself, Anna invents an epistolary exchange of letters from her cousin. What virtue did this counterfeit correspondence possess? > Dwelling within it, full of feast and fire, was a Thought: (...) it possessed inspired movements, chivalric demeanor, and a coquetry cast, like a bold and light armor, over its bitter voluptuousness. Moreover, its shadowy beauty flaunted adolescent fatuity like an oriflamme, that dear, venial fatuity > . But who was truly the author of this correspondence? The Cousin in his ethereal form as a ghost, or Satan, as might appear from the infernal postmarks > of the letters, or Anna herself, as any doctor would have said, hybrid fruit of a poor, morbid mind”. Were this so, “the counterfeit Epistolary turns within me into a mirror, in which Anna’s beloved face appears to me so disfigured and contorted that memory, will, and fantasy urge me to choose a lie in place of this diagnosis. (...) Of Anna, of this twofold idol of mine, of my sleeping, precious Phoenix, it makes an object of wretchedness and pity. And finally, over the fantastic Epistolary, over our renowned correspondence, it sheds the dismal pallor of insanity, and the shapeless tedium of death > . And then the fantastic Epistolary, just like the novel as a whole, comes to be a stanza of love”, a desperate way by which “the spirit that presides over childish things” seeks to overcome death, “at least in play. The novel has a nineteenth-century architecture: a complex plot, meticulous description of settings, in-depth character analysis, richly vaporous prose of refined elegance. One must not, however, be deceived; if love and death are tightly interwoven—because as soon as one loves, one already knows the beloved will perish—only dreaming, fantasizing, lying to others and to oneself allow us to survive, to keep suffering at bay. The sorcery lies in this: Elisa prefers to shut herself in the solitary rooms, pursuing her own shadows, rather than reckon with reality and retrace the demented aspirations of those who came before her. Does the novel not speak, perhaps, of Elisa’s consciousness? Might it not be the fruit of her diseased mind? Only Alvaro the Cat, Elisa’s faithful companion, knows. When every light is quenched, kindle your pupils in the dark, o torch of my half-sleep, and the solemn truce cracks, a thousand ephemeral torches blaze, childish tigers chase one another in sweet deliria". In reading *Menzogna e Sortilegio*, the mind turns to Thomas Mann. We are in Southern Italy; the colors and characters are those of our South; and yet there is the same demolition of the traditional novel, and one breathes the very same air of decay, of slow decline toward death. Its excessive length is regrettable: we are before a work of great originality, which deserves to be rediscovered and read anew. Why read it? Splendid writing, and long live the imagination!