The World must be the Writer's Concern

This essay concerns Elsa Morante's preoccupation with her own Jewish roots. It defines a trajectory of her works starting from 1936 and arriving to La Storia. Morante’s 1974 La Storia organizes in its novelistic format ideas, themes, and linguistic images related to the topic of social exclusion by the means of power and becomes an emblematic container for the private story of powerless characters to whom Elsa Morante lends her (rather authoritative) voice. She is convinced that “il valore, anche storico, di un romanzo non dipende dai suoi pretesti narrativi, ma dalle sue verità.” 1 By juxtaposing its powerful novelistic structure to such important authorial intentions, La Storia illustrates the artist’s unease for a lasting history that tantalizes the subaltern and justifies the use of war as instrument for prevarication. It also sets a precedent in describing what until then had not quite been a frequent task for Italian writers usually preoccupied with our own totalitarianism: making Hitler and Nazism integral parts of the novel, as Adriano Prosperi noted in a conversation with Cesare Garboli (Il gioco 237–39). The unbelievable was retold in great detail and precision while the plot endowed readers with the ability to provide their own conclusions to the story of violence and love presented to them. In its awareness of commenting upon a century that is the site of a “passaggio drammatico” (“Sul romanzo” 64; dramatic passage), La Storia sets a precedent in Italian literature that is still today difficult to parallel.