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

A Difficult Legacy: Morante’s Presence in Contemporary Italian Literature

188 Concetta D’Angeli A Difficult Legacy Morante’s Presence in Contemporary Italian Literature Critical theory on literary influence, as taught in the university lecture theater, would frequently have us believe that the connections between an author and his/her successors are more direct and unproblematic than is, in fact, the case. Indeed, these connections rarely reveal an illuminated and rational transmission of the cultural legacy in question. While not wishing to invoke every step of the way the Oedipal model of Harold Bloom, I am in agreement with his postulation of a large measure of irrationality, pockets of resistance and passions that are not always decipherable, unexpected byways and epiphanies, and tortuous meanderings that shape the fundamental operation of constituting a cultural heritage and transmitting it to future generations. While these considerations on the transmission of literary or cultural heritage hold good in any relationship, not just those within a particular “school,” in the case of Elsa Morante there is a particular rather than general argument to be made, because of elements specific to her own writing. Morante is, in fact, an original writer, or rather from the very start an anti-conformist one, since she came onto the literary scene with a lengthy nineteenth-century-style novel, Menzogna e sortilegio (1948; House of Liars, 1951), a work utterly counter to the current trend in the Italian novel. Critics of the time, as at other times, were decreeing the death of the novel. Her publication of this rich and convoluted family saga, so at odds with the current popularity of war memorials, the fascination with American writers, and the favored dry, spare fictional prose of the times, marks the beginning of a whole series of anti-conformist gestures Morante was regularly to repeat, most strikingly with the publication of La Storia (1974; History, 1977 and 2000). In the 189 A Difficult Legacy: In Italian Literature 1970s, when writers were engaged in experimental writing, drawing from French writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet, Philippe Sollers, and Italo Calvino and their experience of the Oulipo, Morante published this lengthy novel characterized by numerous narrative strategies that would not be out of place, indeed, in a work of Neorealism. What Morante most clearly transmits to future generations of writers is her faith in the narratability of the world, the recuperation of large-scale narrative structures, attention to psychology, and psychological coherence. These are the techniques and tenets that writers were to turn back to when, at the beginning of the 1980s, they began once more to show interest in novels that exhibit a strong interest in form. If, on the one hand, Morante found followers, it has to be said that she is only with difficulty “imitable,” in the sense that she never adopts a fixed style; neither does she profess an explicit and definite poetics even loosely based on theoretical writings. Her poetics must be deduced from her creative writing , and should be assumed to be in constant evolution, in tune with the evolution of artistic creation. Aside from her famous interview on the novel, “Nove domande sul romanzo,” the few theoretical writings by Morante were collected posthumously. Morante refuses to strike the pose of the intellectual, distinguishing herself from numerous writers of her age and times, who tend to accompany their artistic production with a critical reflection that becomes the insuppressible corollary of their creative work. Often this relationship is so evident that the two territories coincide, but not in the sense of making the practice of writing the dominating container enveloping its underlying speculative system: rather, in the sense of creating a sort of hybrid genre, half way between narrative and critical essay, as in the paradigmatic case of Calvino’s last works.1 Along with recognition by younger generations, the consecration of an author and the defining of his or her role as the founder of a school also comes about through the activity of critics, whose role it is—or which role they take upon themselves —to elaborate genre and literary canons. It is interesting to explore the problem of Morante’s critical reception and evaluation on both anthropological and, of course, cultural grounds, as well as for the example of that irrational passion 190 Concetta D’Angeli that, according to Bloom, informs the transmission and reception of artistic matter. The gulf between the critics who immediately appreciated...