Teatro di Guerra: Of History and Fathers

This study of Althénopis and Guerra di infanzia e di Spagna, by Neapolitan writer Fabrizia Ramondino, argues that Ramondino’s characters, family sagas, and even the ever-transient position she assigns to her narrators, could not be fully comprehended without taking into full account the suggestive presence of Morante’s novels, and her particular sense of life as a large-scale baroque mise en scène. The notion of war as a futile theatre for demonstrations of power and authority are represented first in Menzogna e sortilegio through a subjective narrating I-eye, and later through La Storia’s omniscient narrator. I argue that, while not openly facing issues of philosophy and ethics, Morante and Ramondino propose in their works a literary revisitation of some of the tenets on which modern Western civilization is based, namely war and the position of individuals, particularly children, within its orbit, based on a common conceptualization of human action in the terms perceived by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition.