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

Narrative and Essays: The Ethical Commitment of Elsa Morante

257 Enrico Palandri Narrative and Essays The Ethical Commitment of Elsa Morante In speaking of Elsa Morante, it is difficult to draw a line between her commitment to the foundations of writing and to those of living itself.1 Thinking about life through art, and working through literary problems in a perspective that implied absolute moral responsibility: these two positions are axiomatic in her work, and will brook no deviation or approximation. Within this commitment we can recognize a questioning of the relationship between thought and writing that goes back to the most ancient formulations central to Western culture, such as the seventh letter of Plato. In this letter, Plato explains that nothing of what he has written can represent his thought. A certain level of mistrust in the possibility of language to represent reality is deeply embedded in our tradition, whether in the form of analytical thought dealing with structural shortcomings of expression (from Cicero to Leibniz), or in religious attitudes seeking control of expression through censorship. Morante inherits this broad sense of sacredness around the poetic word prior to the rise of the bourgeoisie in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the word is inspired in a manner that is divine, transhistorical, and transcendent. She adds to it a romantic and individualistic vision of the poet as a solitary beacon, a Prometheus in fatal combat with the gods, spoken by the poetical world rather than speaking it. This stance later created many problems for Morante. In the secularization that characterizes our times, the novel-reading public sees art as a substitute for religion. Since Fra Cristoforo, Cardinal Borromeo, and the atypical ending of Stendhal’s Chartreuse, characters inspired by a religious ethos have been few and far between. With due exception made for Alyosha Karamazov, they have also been of relatively slight literary 258 Enrico Palandri weight. The bourgeoisie has other problems and other models: Bovary and Bezuchov, Zeno Cosini and Gregor Samsa fulfil their novelistic destiny within the fabric of relationships with other characters rather than in a transcendental surge. The reality of this fabric is then questioned by the inadequacy of the social context to express all their humanity; something is left over that dooms them to a kind of incommunicability and loneliness , but does not find a solution in the otherness of religion. Religious reflection is thus reduced to a metaphysical nostalgia , a bare trace of the problems that dominated medieval Europe and still preoccupied Dante and Tasso. Modern writers feel increasingly less compelled to tackle these problems; while they still recur in Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi, here, too, social questions are already more important than religious tension, explicitly fundamental only to the episode of the Innominato. Morante registers with extraordinary intensity this shift of focus from transcendental aspiration to material and social contexts . Like Pasolini she, too, has her roots in a lower middle class only recently emancipated from an archaic world, where a pre-modern vernacular mythology has been suddenly and sharply eroded by the onset of industry, with its language and its values. Saints’ names have disappeared from calendars, the day is no longer tolled by the bell in the local belfry but by the siren that marks the change of shift in the factory, the cycle of the seasons has been relegated to second place, distances have shrunk. More so than Pasolini, Morante is willing to speak in the language of this transformation. She seeks neither dialect nor any kind of mixed genre; she writes the novel, or rather the Novel; she appropriates the Word within the bourgeois drawing room, at the heart of the social group responsible for this change. More than anyone else she explores the split between these two worlds. The first world is where truth is the reality evoked by Plato, divine and yet close to man, attainable through thought but untranslatable into words and where art, just like any other language, is on a lower plane, aesthetic, related to the feelings, as the etymology of the terms aesthetic (“to feel”) suggests, and in opposition to the pure conception of the soul that has no need of language. The second world on the other hand is that of the bourgeoisie, which in the material aspect of 259 Narrative and Essays: The Ethical Commitment art, in feeling, in the textuality of the artistic object, seeks to reify what it feels has been...