Le Lacrime: Morante and Her Critics

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Morante’s famous statement that the writer is “an individual whose concern must be everything that happens, except for literature” (“Pro o contro” 97; emphasis original) reflects her intention in the composition of her 1974 anti-illusionist historical novel La Storia: Romanzo (History: A Novel). A canonical retelling of the horrors of the twentieth century—an epoch that Bernard Brunetau dubbed as “the century of genocides”—La Storia embodies the ideal literary work whose programmatic content molds its form without overshadowing it. In its novelistic format, La Storia organizes the topic of social exclusion by means of power: the ideas, themes, and linguistic images of the novel become an emblematic container for the private story of the powerless characters to whom Elsa Morante lends her voice. La Storia illustrates the artist’s unease with a lasting history that tantalizes the subaltern and justifies the use of war as instrument for prevarication (i.e., the concept of just war). It also creates a precedent in its undertaking of a task that, until then, had until not been frequently engaged in by Italian writers: making Hitler and Nazism integral parts of the novel (Prosperi, in Garboli 237–39). In its awareness of commenting upon a century that is the site of a “passag-gio drammatico” (“Sul romanzo” 64; “dramatic passage”) La Storia sets a precedent in Italian literature that is still today difficult to parallel.