Plotting the Past: Metamorphoses of Historical Narrative in Modern Italian Fiction

Conclusion

Conclusion In Del romanzo storieo, Manzoni maintains a dualistic approach toward history and fiction and denies that they can be combined into a single genre. Although he concedes that both history and fiction are ideological and linguistic constructs, he is nevertheless convinced that they are, both ideologically and formally , two mutually exclusive types of discourse. According to Manzoni, fiction is rooted in the universal and the transcendental , while history instead belongs to the factual and the empirical . Therefore, he concludes that fiction and history address the problems of representation, referentiality, truth, and commitment in contrasting ways. By choosing a new form of creative historiography, however , Manzoni transcends the idealistic and absolutizing aesthetics ofhis age. He directly challenges the cognitive strategies implied in the process of historical emplotment and examines the subjective powers and limitations involved in the historian's reappropriation of the historical referent. By questioning the central assumption of canonical historical discourse-namely, objectivity, impersonality, and neutrality-he emphasizes the ideologically determined nature of all historical representations. Manzoni's I promessi sposi remains a model for the twentieth century. Although modern critical historical fiction rejects his teleological vision of history, it nevertheless takes up his commitment to narrate the unwritten histories ofthe marginal members of society traditionally excluded from official records. Critical historical fiction thus challenges the authority of written records, denounces their subservience to existing ideologies and power structures, and creatively reports the inverted res gestae of those who do not belong to the dominant orders. 195 Conclusion In Il Gattopardo, Lampedusa takes up Manzoni's debate and examines the cultural and ideological codes and the cognitive and psychological patterns that interweave to reconfigure the historical past. By combining-and at times juxtaposing-the constructive strategies of the omniscient narrator with those of the novel's protagonist, Don Fabrizio, Il Gattopardo emphasizes that reconfigurations of the past are by no means objective and neutral, but rather dependent upon the subjective views, and historical positions, of their interpreters. Lampedusa's presentation of an episode of the Unification of Italy from the marginal and decentered point of view of a Sicilian aristocrat polemically reverses the traditional epic renderings of these historical events. Il Gattopardo questions the logic of linear chronology and causal connection as the founding criteria of historical reconstructions. Lampedusa reveals that these forms are by no means universal and natural, and juxtaposes them with significantly "other" forms of historical emplotment, such as analogy and repetition. Il Gattopardo's alternative history questions the absolute accessibility of the historical referent; the past as it really was remains an absence, an elusive ghost. Its ontological void may, however, be filled by the various and transient figures that individual interpreters evoke from their cognitive involvement and emotional participation in the past. In particular, Il Gattopardo examines how the analogical codes and the figures of repetition that structure the novel counteract the linear rendition of historical becoming, and explores how they become ways to preserve the cultural heritage of communities about to be submerged by the flow of historical change. Much like Il Gattopardo, Morante's La Storia confronts one of the staple concepts of traditional historiography, namely, knowledge of the past as it really was and faithfulness to the facts that really happened. The binary opposition between historical chronicle and fictional emplotment in La Storia is less an opposition of the "true" to the "verisimilar" than a subversion of this opposition. La Storia questions the validity of historical truth altogether by denouncing the omissions and the silences that plague ordinary historical chronicles. Fiction becomes a legitimate, yet alternative, form of historiography. Fiction creatively recounts the stories of those who have not been 196 Conclusion able to inscribe the public records, and by doing so denounces the biases of official versions of history exclusively geared to bolster and maintain the existing power structures and the worldviews they support. La Storia also teaches us that rival versions of history imply rival perceptual and cognitive schemes and alternative ways ofconceptualizing and emplotting the past. A monumental, cyclical, and intersubjective notion oftime alters the linear succession of teleological history, revising the universalist pretensions that make the historical continuum appear exclusively as a causal chain of meaningful political events. The utopic and prophetic tone that closes the novel not only calls for a different and better world for women to inhabit but also envisions new representations of this world, representations that would no longer subscribe...