Under Arturo's Star: The Cultural Legacies of Elsa Morante

Models of Narrative in Menzogna e sortilegio

Sharon Wood Models of Narrative in Menzogna e sortilegio 94 The novel was to be buried in the name of historical justice, like poverty, the ruling classes, obsolete cars, or top hats. Milan Kundera The Art of the Novel While the Marxist critic Gÿorgÿ Lukács heralded Elsa Morante’s first novel, Menzogna e sortilegio (1948), as one of the most important Italian works of the century, many subsequent critics decried it as an outpost of classical realism, a late and overripe fruit of nineteenth-century narrative forms, a work that was out of step, out of time, out of date in its supposed unproblematic reproduction of reality, decidedly unmodern in its unfolding of tormented and tortuous sentimental drama. And a majority of critics appeared to be aghast at a novel of these dimensions—at over 700 pages—in an age of increasingly fractured texts that purported to indicate a reality both shattered and fragmented by the experience of modernity. It is certainly true that Morante had not the slightest interest in being “al passo”; indeed, she despised the urgent rush of many of her contemporaries to appear modern, new, or avantgarde . But this is far from saying that Morante is a logorrheic scribbler, unaware that times have moved on. Appearing at a time when the historical and traditional forms of the novel were under consistent and persistent ideological attack, whether from the aesthetic avant-garde or current political orthodoxies, Menzogna e sortilegio evades any standard definition of the form, at the same time ambitiously and self-consciously presenting itself as a kind of “summa” of the possibilities of the 95 Models of Narrative in Menzogna e sortilegio novel as genre. The cover of the 1975 edition, written by Morante herself, informs us: Il modello supremo di Menzogna e sortilegio è stato il Don Chisciotte, senza dimenticare, in diversa forma, l’Orlando furioso. Difatti, come quegli iniziatori esemplari della narrativa moderna segnavano il termine dell’antica epopea cavalleresca, cosí, nell’ambizione giovanile di Elsa Morante, questo suo primo romanzo voleva anche essere l’ultimo possibile del suo genere: a salutare la fine della narrativa romantica e post-romantica, ossia dell’epopea borghese. (Opere 1: lvi) The supreme model for Menzogna e sortilegio was Don Quixote, while not forgetting, in a different way, Orlando furioso. In fact, just as those exemplary initiators of modern narrative marked the end point of the ancient chivalric epic, so, in the youthful ambition of Elsa Morante, this first novel of hers aimed to be the last one possible of its kind: to salute the end of narrative and post-romantic narrative, in other words the bourgeois epic.1 Morante remained convinced that despite the opprobrium heaped on it by critics and the addetti al lavoro, the novel, and the novel in its most expansive form, was nonetheless the genre best suited to approaching the complexities of the modern world and to encapsulating our obsessive, neurotic, modern selves. With each successive novel she describes herself as “romanziere,” or the work as a “romanzo,” even when the title would appear to point in a different direction, such as La Storia. Like the Czech novelist Milan Kundera, several decades later, Morante saw the novel as defining the modern era in Western culture, the talisman of an age of exploration, both of exterior and inner worlds. Morante, too, lays claim to a wider view of modernity and to what Kundera called “the depreciated legacy of Cervantes,”2 the store of accumulated wisdom and discovery , the weighing of possibilities, the suspension of transcendental or authoritarian judgments, which the novel has to offer. Her image for the novel, to go down in a final blaze of glory, is that of the phoenix, the “fenice lucente” that appears in the dedicatory poem to this first novel. The image of the phoenix, rooted in poetic tradition (Petrarch’s “Questa fenice de l’aurata 96 Sharon Wood piuma”),3 recurs throughout the novel, a symbolic trope of fiery splendor and ashes, of death and resurrection, and, on the level of enunciation and narration, of metamorphosis and transformation. Morante brings to her novel, then, the weight of tradition, but this too is not enough to dismiss her as unfashionable, to be discarded like one of Kundera’s top hats. This first novel is an extraordinary tissue of fabulation, drawing on numerous literary models from Cervantes himself to family sagas, from the...