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

Poetry and Reality in “The Aesthetics of Our Time”

67 Marco Bardini Poetry and Reality in “The Aesthetics of Our Time” While the critical essays published by Elsa Morante in her lifetime were hardly numerous, they contain, nonetheless, a coherent framework of reflective judgments on aesthetics and on the figurative arts, and demonstrate the same level of clarity , precision, and insight as her writings on literature. Alongside the better-known writings, collected in the posthumous volume Pro o contro la bomba atomica,1 are a number of equally significant essays and reflections on art, dating from the 1930s onward. Current research suggests that the earliest non-narrative writing by Morante was an article from 1938, when she was twenty-six years old. “Mille città in una” (“A Thousand Cities in One”) was published in volume 4–5 of Curzio Malaparte’s journal Prospettive,2 in the feature column “Viaggi” (“Journeys ”). This article is of particular interest, appearing after the short fairy tales for Il Corriere dei piccoli and Il Cartoccino dei piccoli, the short fictions for I diritti della scuola and the short stories for Il Meridiano di Roma. This remarkable piece is clear evidence of a writer whose compositional skills are already highly refined. Despite the occasional flaw, such as the term razza (“race”), for example, which is used with regard to culture and in particular the laws of the day, as is, if more blandly, the term patria, the text demonstrates the intellectual qualities of the author and the eclectic breadth of her reading. As well as the authors recalled or quoted, whether Pirandello, Balzac, Zola, Proust, or Dante, the piece also points to Morante’s knowledge—ingenuous, maybe, but never banal— of philosophical terms and concepts, with particular reference to Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, and 68 Marco Bardini in more indirect fashion to Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. “Mille città in una” opens by describing a viewer’s subjective perceptions: Esiste davvero per sé una realtà concreta del mondo, o di esso non vi sono che infinite apparenze, una per ciascun soggetto che guarda? Così che, spentosi l’occhio, anche la visione si spegne, come i colori dileguano col cadere della luce? O forse ancora il vero aspetto della realtà è inscrutabile , nessuno può vederla quale essa è, ma ciascuno porta in sé un’apparenza del mondo, limitata alla sua propria sensibilit à, effimera quanto egli stesso, e incomunicabile? [. . .] Ogni nazione o città apre al viaggiatore la sua fisionomia vera, la sua anima ricca di forme, di tempo e di esperienza, o tiene segreta questa sua realtà profonda, e si copre il volto di maschere sempre diverse a seconda di chi guarda? Maschere che sono appunto il riflesso del carattere del viaggiatore , della sua vita, della sua sensibilità. Così che egli non può dire di aver visto Roma o Parigi, ma una Roma, una Parigi, o meglio la sua Roma e la sua Parigi. [MC 465; emphasis in original] Is there a concrete reality of the world that exists per se, or do we have nothing but an infinity of appearances, a different one for each subjective eye? Such that when that eye dies, the vision dies with it, just as colors fade with the light? Or perhaps the true aspect of reality is inscrutable, nobody can see it as it is, but each of us carries within an appearance of the world, limited by one’s own sensibility, incommunicable and ephemeral as we are ourselves? [. . .] Does each country or city open up its true physiognomy to the traveler, its soul rich in form, time, and experience, or else does it keep this profound reality secret, covering its face with masks that are different according to who is doing the looking? Masks that reflect the character of the traveler, his [sic] life, his [sic] sensibility. So he [sic] cannot say he has seen Rome or Paris, but a Rome, a Paris, or rather his Rome and his Paris. Even in this brief extract it is interesting to note how Morante finds a coherent and logical connection between the Schopenhauerian beginning, which she borrows almost to the letter (Schopenhauer 5), and the later Nietzschean concept of “mask” 69 Poetry and Reality in “The Aesthetics of Our Time” as transfiguration and antidecadent transposition of the relationship /divide between being and appearance. In speaking of “Viaggi,” of journeys that instantly become an allegory of existence...