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

The Morphology of Desire in Elsa Morante’s L’isola di Arturo

129 Cristina Della Coletta The Morphology of Desire in Elsa Morante’s L’isola di Arturo It has become almost a cliché to note that when the literary establishment decides to open its ranks to a woman writer, it does so by praising her uniqueness, her absolute originality.1 Thus, Cesare Garboli places Elsa Morante “fuori da ogni tracciato. Estranea a qualsiasi tradizione consacrata del Novecento , la scrittura della Morante non lascia intravedere modelli” (v; “outside of all categories. Contrary to established twentiethcentury traditions, Morante’s writing reveals no models”). Because similar statements define many of the currently anthologized women writers, their double edge merits further scrutiny.2 On the one hand, Garboli identifies a uniquely feminine kind of writing, one that precisely because of its difference has been overlooked by generations of critics, and therefore now demands consideration. On the other hand, claims such as Garboli’s inevitably isolate women writers: exceptions as they are, these women are separated from the clusters of recognized authors and schools, and doomed, at best, to follow a bright yet lonely trajectory. Having no models , women writers are bound to leave no legacy of their own. “È nata da se stessa Elsa Morante” (“Morante was born from her own self”) Garboli writes, her style being “natural,” her narrative movements, “magical,” her attitude toward storytelling, “child-like” (v–vi). A novel such as Morante’s L’isola di Arturo (1957; Arturo’s Island, 1959) appeared to give succor to this interpretative approach. Set on an island that has less in common with the geographical Procida than with a mythical, a-temporal island as axis mundi, this text has been consistently read as the archetypal story of a fanciullo divino, the pure narrative of a universal child’s coming of age.3 While it is true that Morante delves 130 Cristina Della Coletta deeply into myth, her rendition of Arturo’s initiation into adulthood is far more sophisticated than these interpretations would imply. Morante’s narrative strategies can best be defined by Luce Irigaray’s notion of “mimicry.” In mimicry, a model is repeated in a self-conscious manner in order to expose the citational, distorted nature of the repetition (76). Arturo’s Island freely borrows from the generic models of the epic and the Bildungsroman, repeating and intermixing them with an ironic slant. In blurring conventional genre boundaries, Morante thus creates a hybrid textual space controlled by a narrating “I” who recaptures the mythical world of his past while charting his discovery of the meaning and “dangers” of parody, as applied to that same world. Arturo’s estranging narrative journey brings him back to his native island, to the time when his all-consuming and singular passion was forced to confront the collective onslaught of his multiple desires, and when his absolute code crumbled under the pressure of a relative, changing reality. Borrowing what Mikhail Bakhtin identified as one of the founding elements of the epic—the absolute distance separating the narrated world from the time in which both author and audience live—Morante defines the island’s space-time paradigm around the concepts of distance, separation, and selfsuf ficiency (Bakhtin 13). In spite of its geographical vicinity to the mainland of Campania, Procida appears as different, remote and inaccessible, its atavistic isolation verging on self-imposed captivity. Morante uses the island, mythically, as a distinctive and total space—the space of a unique and exceptional tale: Se per caso uno straniero scende a Procida, si meraviglia di non trovarvi quella vita promiscua e allegra, feste e conversazioni per le strade, e canti, suoni di chitarre e mandolini, per cui la regione di Napoli è conosciuta su tutta la terra. I Procidani sono scontrosi, taciturni. Le porte sono tutte chiuse, pochi si affacciano alle finestre.4 A foreigner perchance disembarking at Procida is amazed to find none of the promiscuous and cheerful life for which Naples is famous throughout the world: no parties, no chatting in the streets, no songs, no guitars and mandolins. Procidans are unsocial and silent. All doors remain closed, and few people appear at their windows. 131 The Morphology of Desire in L’isola di Arturo Procida’s uncommunicative and secluded inhabitants have no equals elsewhere. Doubling one another in their exotic and solipsistic identities, they are different both physically and psychologically from the mainlanders just a few miles away: “Sono di razza piccola, bruni...