{"id":2398,"date":"2018-02-12T06:56:37","date_gmt":"2018-02-12T06:56:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/?p=2398"},"modified":"2018-06-02T16:15:00","modified_gmt":"2018-06-02T16:15:00","slug":"writer-vs-public-intellectual","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/writer-vs-public-intellectual\/","title":{"rendered":"Dramatis Personae"},"content":{"rendered":"[aesop_content color=”#333333″ background=”#FFFFFF” columns=”1″ position=”none” imgrepeat=”no-repeat” disable_bgshading=”off” floaterposition=”left” floaterdirection=”up” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”]\n[\/aesop_content]\n

La Storia<\/em> is conceived as a chronicle,similar to Defoe\u2019s masterpiece, A Journal of the Plague Year<\/em>, and as such encompasses a great many characters. Yet the narration focuses mainly on the lives of four protagonists: Ida (and beyond her, her parents and her ancestors), Nino, Useppe, and Davide Segre, as well as two dogs \u2014 Blitz and Bella\u2014\u00a0 two unnamed songbirds, a rabbit that vanishes, and an unnamed cat. All of them die.<\/p>\n

And yet the tone of the book is not tragic but rather moves from picaresque to a survival story, with death looming large as an inescapable aspect of life.<\/p>\n\n[aesop_character img=”http:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/antoniettaraphael1.jpg” align=”left” force_circle=”off” revealfx=”off”]\n

Something about Ida is slightly off from the start. Her parents wanted to name her Aida, but an error of the municipal clerk registers her as Ida. We encounter her at 37, a widow: her rather undernourished body, shapeless, the bosom withered, the lower part awkwardly fattened, was covered more or less by an old woman\u2019s brown overcoat, with a worn fur collar and a grayish lining whose tattered edges could be seen hanging from the cuffs of the sleeves.<\/p>\n

A dispirited schoolteacher, turned into a life-giver. She is instinctively resourceful: she knows how not to worry about one son and how to protect the other.<\/p>\n

For over 700 pages we follow her action and struggles, yet much about her eludes us. We are told of her looks, her actions, her homes; we observe her fears and her courage, and yet we know nothing about her thoughts.<\/p>\n

In the classroom where she taught, in the center of the wall, just above her desk, next to the Crucifix, there were enlarged framed photographs of the Founder of the Empire and its King-Emperor. [\u2026] However, in Iduzza\u2019s eyes, the images of the two figures (no less, you might say, than the Crucifix, which to her meant only the power of the Church) represented the absolute symbol of authority, that occult and awe-inspiring abstraction which makes laws. In those days, on instructions from higher up, she wrote on the blackboard in large letters, for her third-grade students to copy as a penmanship exercise:<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cCopy out three times in your good notebooks the following words of the Duce: Hold high, O Legionaries, your banners, your steel, and your hearts, to hail, after fifteen centuries, the reappearance of the Empire on the fatal hills of Rome! Mussolini\u201c\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Ida is frightened by her Jewish origin, which she perceives as\u00a0dangerous and inscrutably mysterious. Yet she is attracted by the Ghetto, particularly by its women.<\/p>\n[aesop_character img=”http:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/DePisis.jpg” align=”left” force_circle=”off” revealfx=”off”]\n

Nino is all carefree vitality and unbound enthusiasm, a master at the art of getting by. As a teenager, he is a thug, enthralled by Fascism, and uncaring of his mother\u2019s woes. Soon he grows disillusioned with the dictatorship, picks up arms as a partisan, and fights courageously with the communist-leaning Resistance only to end up disillusioned by all ideologies. He embodies, among much else, the quintessentially Italian trasformismo<\/i>, the capacity to quickly change political sides.<\/p>\n

He has a big heart (we are shown his instinctive love and acceptance for his half-brother and his relationship with his dogs), yet is a womanizer with a predisposition for a free, nomadic and anarchist lifestyle.<\/p>\n

Cesare Garboli and other critics have seen him, I believe insightfully, as an Achilles-like figure because of his courage and near-invincibility.<\/p>\n\n[aesop_character img=”http:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Useppe.jpg” align=”left” force_circle=”off” revealfx=”off”]\n

Useppe (Giuseppe), son of a\u00a0 German soldier and a half-Jewish mother \u2014neither circumcised nor baptized\u2014 this memorable premature, sickly, innocent, and poetic character, for six years is Ida\u2019s child, companion, and raison d\u2019\u00eatre<\/i>. In the midst of wartime fears, poverty, and squalor, Useppe explores his immediate circumstances with the eye of the poet. By observing and naming things and people, he creates a parallel universe which he inhabits.<\/p>\n

[\u2026] Any music, to Giuseppe, was a pleasure: even the tormenting notes of the radio in the courtyard, or the clanging of the tram. Any vulgar music, in his little ears, developed in fugues and variations of unknown freshness, precedent to all experience. And even simple isolated sounds (like colors)\u00a0 echoed in him through all their harmonics, as his astute attention perceived even their\u00a0 intimate murmurings\u2026\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

[\u2026] But even more than by notes, perhaps, Giuseppe was bewitched by words. Obvious words, for him, had a sure value, as if they were one with objects. He had only casually to hear the word dog, to laugh heartily, as if suddenly the familiar and comical presence of Blitz were there, before him, tail wagging. [\u2026]<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

One day, seeing the printed drawing of a ship for the first time in his life, he exclaimed, in a tremble of discovery; \u201cSip! sip!\u201d[\u2026] Furniture and domestic object became for him, houses, trains. Towels, rags, even clouds were lags (flags). The lights of the stars were grass, and the stars themselves were ants around a crumb (the moon).<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Useppe relates with equal raptured intensity to humans and animals. Toward the end of his life, together with his she-dog companion, he discovers a miniature paradise along the Tiber.<\/p>\n

Critics, including Amos Oz, see in Useppe a Christ figure; for me, he remains one of Morante\u2019s immortal child-poets, a member of that wondrous elite she describes in The World Saved by Kids: And Other Epics<\/i>, as the \u201chappy few.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1970, Morante wrote an essay on the Florentine friar\/painter Beato Angelico. Graziella Bernabo\u2019 suggests that Angelico is in some sense a poetic model for Useppe. Certainly, Useppe is a precursor of Manuele, the orphaned protagonist of Aracoeli<\/i>, Morante\u2019s last novel, published in 1982.<\/p>\n[aesop_character img=”http:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/CarloLevi.jpg” align=”left” force_circle=”off” revealfx=”off”]\n

Davide Segre, a Jew, is the only northern Italian and the only intellectual in the novel. He presents himself under a variety of disguises: at first as an anarchist named Carlo Vivaldi, later as a Partisan with the battle name Piotr, and finally, at the mercy of his drug addiction, as Morante\u2019s alter ego and a clear-eyed critic of power dynamics, capitalism, and the mechanisms of oppression.<\/p>\n

By far, the most tormented character, Davide is in perpetual revolt against his bourgeois\u00a0origin. In a memorable scene, in a tavern in Testaccio, he lectures the card playing drinkers with drug-induced fever, yet lucid passion, on history, the war, and its millions of dead:<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026 all History is a history of fascism, more or less disguised\u2026in the Greece of Pericles \u2026 and in the Rome of the Caesars and the Popes \u2026 and in the steppes of the huns.. and in the Aztec Empire\u2026 and in the American of the pioneers \u2026 and in the Italy of the Risorgimento \u2026 and in the Russia of the Tsars and the Soviets \u2026 always and everywhere ere, sempar e departut, free men and slaves \u2026 rich\u00a0 and poor\u2026 the buyers and the bought \u2026 superiors and inferiors \u2026 leaders and herds .. <\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

The system never changes \u2026 it was called religion, divine right, glory, honor, spirit, future \u2026 all pseudonyms \u2026 all masks \u2026 But with the industrial age, certain masks won\u2019t hold up \u2026 the system bares it\u2019s teeth, and every day on the flesh of the masses it prints its real name and title\u2026 and it\u2019s no accident that,\u00a0 in its language, mankind\u00a0 is called MASSES,\u00a0 which means inert matter \u2026 And so, here we are\u2026 this poor matter, mater, material for work and labor, becomes fodder for extermination\u00a0 and destruction \u2026 Extermination camps, this is the system\u2019s real name today! [\u2026]\u00a0 <\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Elsa Morante had a life-long fascination with her dreams. From January to July 1938, she kept a diary, mostly of her dreams and sexual disquietude, which was published posthumously as Diario<\/i> 1938. There she writes:<\/p>\n

It is a strange gift from God to be able to remember, when awake, the different world of dreams.\u00a0<\/span> <\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Interestingly, in La Storia<\/i>, all four protagonists are frequent dreamers and their dreams\/nightmares, reveal much about their inner lives.<\/p>\n

It would be hard to describe the many memorable minor characters of the novel without giving away essential parts of the plot, among them, the Mille, Eppemondo, Carul\u00ec, Rosa and Celeste, the Marroccos, Mariulina, Ida Di Capua \u201cEzekiel\u201d the midwife, Giovannino, and Vilma, the mystic Cassandra of the Ghetto.<\/p>\n[aesop_character img=”http:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/plume.png” caption=”Image: Antonietta Raphael Mafai, Cat, drawing
\nMusic: Hans Werner Henze, Sonata for solo violin” align=”right” force_circle=”off” revealfx=”off”]\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[aesop_content color=”#333333″ background=”#FFFFFF” columns=”1″ position=”none” imgrepeat=”no-repeat” disable_bgshading=”off” floaterposition=”left” floaterdirection=”up” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] [\/aesop_content] La Storia is conceived as a chronicle,similar to Defoe\u2019s masterpiece, A Journal of the Plague Year, and as such encompasses a great many characters. Yet the narration focuses mainly on the lives of four protagonists: Ida (and beyond her, her parents and her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2767,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2398"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2398"}],"version-history":[{"count":40,"href":"https:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3360,"href":"https:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2398\/revisions\/3360"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}