History by Elsa Morante

First published:La storia, 1974 (English translation, 1977)

Type of work: Historical realism

Time of work: 1941-1947

Locale: Rome and its environs

Principal Characters:

• Ida Ramundo, a widow and schoolteacher
• Nino, her teenage son
• Giuseppe (Useppe), Ida’s infant son by a German soldier
• Davide Segre, also known by the alias
• Carlo Vivaldi, an escaped political prisoner

The Novel

History draws on the depth of Elsa Morante’s personal knowledge of and research into the lives of the common people in Rome during World War II. Following the lives of two presumably fictional characters, Ida Ramundo and her son Giuseppe, the novel depicts the toll of suffering, fear, and deprivation inflicted by war on its innocent victims. Though each section of the novel is preceded by a capsule summary of the year’s major events, the narrative concentrates with an attention bordering on moral outrage on the histories of ordinary individuals.

The novel begins with a German soldier named Gunther walking along the streets of Rome. His encounter with an Italian widow, Ida Ramundo, is preceded by a detailed description of her past and family history. Ida has carried with her since early childhood, almost like a racial memory, a “sense of the sacred: meaning by sacred, in [this] case, the universal power that can devour them and annihilate them, for their guilt in being born.” In this immediate instance her foreknowledge is of being raped and impregnated by the German soldier, during the midst of which she suffers an epileptic fit. The soldier is never seen again and dies shortly thereafter in a plane crash.

The result of this violent encounter is Ida’s child Giuseppe, or, as he comes to be called because he cannot pronounce his own name, Useppe. Despite the war and Ida’s guilt over his birth, Useppe leads an almost idyllic existence described with the innocence of a child’s point of view. His great friend is his brother Nino who in between frequent adolescent adventures always seems to have time, at least initially, for his younger brother. Together with Nino’s dog, Blitz, who like Useppe is a bastard, as Nino points out to a horrified Ida, Nino and Useppe play and discover the joys of nature.

As the war progresses into the year 1943, the story becomes more bleak. Along with the air raids and wartime deprivation, there is Ida’s continuing worry over her other great secret in addition to her epilepsy—her Jewish ancestry. Nino enlists and disappears, while Ida and Useppe are left homeless by the bombing. They move to temporary shelter where the deprivations of war are felt all the more strongly. Nino returns, having deserted, with several friends. Carlo Vivaldi, one of these friends, tells the horrified refugees of his experience in the “antechambers of death” while awaiting deportation to Germany for political crimes. Ida, in one of the central events of the novel, witnesses, by accident, the roundup and deportation from the Tiburtina train station of the major portion of Rome’s Jewish population (of the 1,056 who leave, only fifteen will return). This event pushes Ida even further into a nearly paralyzing paranoia compounded of fear and guilt.

While Ida withdraws into her fearful isolation, Useppe’s contact with the outside world comes primarily through Nino, who by this point is active with a group of partisan Resistance fighters. Several of the engagements with the Germans are described in graphic detail, culminating in the destruction of the group and the violent rape and murder of Nino’s girlfriend, Maria. Particularly active in the Resistance action is Nino’s friend Carlo, who seems to be all the bolder for having suffered at the hands of the Nazis. As Rome is declared an open city, Ida and Useppe move into an apartment with a family, though Useppe’s health continues to suffer because of Ida’s overwhelming guilt and secretiveness.

Once the war is over Ida and Useppe move to yet another apartment and Ida resumes her teaching. Useppe begins having terrible nightmares of people burning, and Ida takes him to a specialist in neurological disorders. Nino’s postwar exploits take him from the Resistance to the black market, where he displays the same mix of street smarts, luck, and savvy. In one memorable episode, he gives Useppe a tour of Rome on the back of his motorcycle. They also receive a long letter from Davide Segre (the real name of Carlo Vivaldi, indicating his Jewish parentage), which contains a long discourse on his bourgeois background and subsequent rebellion against it. Nino brings Useppe another dog, Bella, to replace Blitz, who was killed in the bombings, but Useppe continues to have nightmares and—despite his precocity—trouble in school.

Ida receives the shocking news that Nino has been killed. After serving in the army and fighting the Germans as a Resistance fighter, he died when a truck he was driving overturned during a chase with police. Ida’s troubled interior state now includes hallucinations of Nino as well as increased concern over Useppe, who has begun to suffer epileptic fits of increasing frequency and seriousness. Useppe and Bella, however, take advantage of Ida’s work schedule to explore the city and meet with Davide, who has returned to Rome. Davide has become a drug addict and lives in a squalid room once inhabited by a prostitute, but he is Useppe’s great friend and the two of them exchange poems and conversation. Just before Davide’s death from a drug overdose, he yells at Useppe for the first time; soon, Useppe himself dies in his mother’s arms after a severe epileptic fit. The story of Ida Ramundo, her family and circle, has been one of suffering, fear, and deprivation, caused by the larger forces of history and brightened only by the childish innocence and exuberance of the doomed Useppe.

The Characters

Ida Ramundo is a complex and tragic figure. A good and simple woman, Ida carries the burden of a double secret, her epilepsy and her Jewish heritage. Though in other times she might have lived and taught school in relative tranquillity, the war and its devastation touch Ida in both external and internal ways. While her daily life is changed, uprooted, and degraded as a result of the war, her inner life amounts to a crucible in which the most dehumanizing aspects of Nazism are compounded.

Morante gives careful attention to Ida’s background, the lives of her parents and her husband, Alfio. Especially poignant is the story of Ida’s mother, Nora, a story which prefigures Ida’s fate. Nora marries and seeks to hide the fact that she is Jewish but eventually dies of exposure in a deluded nighttime flight from her enemies. Throughout the novel Ida is haunted by the racial laws and their baroque prescriptions, even going so far as to draw charts of her sons’ lineages to determine their legal status (all the more ironic since Useppe is fathered by one of the Aryan conquerors).

As the war progresses and its deprivations increase, Ida’s efforts to forage for her young son are poignant even in their ineptitude. Her own paranoid secretiveness effectually prevents her from making the most ordinary contacts with her fellow refugees that would ensure Useppe’s basic nutrition. Later, his problems with school discipline are all the more perplexing to her because she is herself a schoolteacher. It is finally the hidden genetic link of epilepsy, compounded by malnutrition, that dooms her son to an early death.

If Ida is the novel’s figure of unremitting tragedy, then Useppe is its figure of innocent joy and childish delight. In a story dominated by the fate of Rome’s Jews and Ida’s fears about her Jewish background, Useppe is a clear Christ symbol, from his not-so-immaculate conception to the Pieta typology of his death in his mother’s arms. Morante does not insist on the religious aspect of this symbolism as much as its universal aspect. Useppe has the same joy and openness to life and nature that all children have, the same chance to start anew, but he is predestined to suffer the fate of a collective societal destiny. As Ida’s character recedes into the externally imposed depths of guilt, Useppe’s adventures with life begin to assume major importance in the work.

Useppe is small at birth and undernourished throughout his short life. Yet his ground’s-eye view gives him a special appreciation for life’s small joys. His brother Nino is his greatest joy but is only erratically present. During Nino’s lengthening absences, Useppe’s substitute friends are his dogs, Blitz and Bella, and the birds. Useppe is a natural poet, uttering verses about the birds and nature around him. This aspect of his personality draws him into an affinity with Davide, who is another kindred soul. Useppe’s fate, like Ida’s, is to be struck down by forces beyond his knowledge or control. Malnourished and subjected to virtual refugee status, he develops acute epilepsy of which he is incompletely aware. He is one of the simple and one of the doomed.

Nino seems to be one of the lucky and charmed. With a glib savvy and insouciance he moves easily from the black shirt of the Fascists to army gray, and from the partisan’s irregular uniform to the sudden prosperity of the postwar black market. His erratic behavior, including sudden appearances and disappearances, causes anguish to his mother and a mixture of profound joy and disappointment to his little brother. Always an easy friend to his comrades and an instant success with women, he lives intensely until he is cut down by a violent death.

Violence is the sign of Davide Segre as well. He first appears as a troubled escapee from the death cells and then becomes vengeful as a particularly ruthless partisan. Through letters and flashbacks the reader learns of his Jewish middle-class background and his politically motivated rebellion against that. Davide ends his life as a haunted drug addict whose only friend is the precocious Useppe.

Critical Context

Morante’s History follows and extends her earlier work in L’isola di Arturo (1957; Arturo’s Island, 1959) and Menzogna e sortilegio (1948; House of Liars, 1951). It takes its place in the larger postwar Italian movement termed neorealism, but with a clear attempt to transcend the bounds of any particular school or style. Morante in History wishes to write using a transparency of style that will make the novel’s content immediately accessible.

As the title of the work indicates, Morante’s novel also represents an attempt to rethink the very concept of history. From a background that is clearly dialectical and historical, Morante moves to establish a position where one might realize that history is not only, or even primarily, a collection of facts concerning large-scale geopolitical events. Rather she seems to urge a reorientation of thinking and writing about history in such a way as to be able to see the suffering of the individual. From an eclectic blend of Jewish background, Christian symbolism, and leftist political orientation, Morante seeks to discover the meaning of history in individual lives along with the need to resist all large-scale political forces or entities.

Morante’s work has long been prized and respected in Italian and European critical circles. In the United States it may well be that feminist literary approaches which share her distrust of male-dominated power structures and her belief in the necessity to concentrate on human values will succeed in integrating her vision into the critical canon. The power of Morante’s vision in portraying the central tragedy of the twentieth century clearly succeeds in the only task that truly matters to her—bearing witness to human history.

Bibliography

Amoia, Alba della Fazia. Women on the Italian Literary Scene: A Panorama. Troy, N.Y.: Whitson, 1992. A survey of the works of nineteenth and twentieth century Italian women writers, including History, offering an overview of their place in that country’s literary history. Includes a chronology marking the years between 1846 and 1991 when various women writers were born and dates of significant publications, a selected bibliography of primary and secondary sources, and a comprehensive index.

Aricó, Santo L., ed. Contemporary Women Writers in Italy: A Modern Renaissance. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. A collection of essays on twelve Italian women writers active since the 1940’s. The chapter on Morante looks at autobiographical elements, as well as traumatic central motifs, in her body of work. There is a bibliography of works in Italian and in English on Italian literary history, general works about women authors, and literary theory, as well as comprehensive bibliographies for individual women writers.

Caesar, Michael, and Peter Hainsworth, eds. Writers and Society in Contemporary Italy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Prefaced by a description of post-World War II Italy’s political and literary culture, this collection includes essays on ten influential Italian writers of the period. Each essay is followed by a bibliography of the author’s work and suggestions for further reading. The chapter on Morante examines the use of imagination, Magical Realism, and the themes of childhood and history in her works.

Mandrell, James. “The Prophetic Voice in Garro, Morante, and Allende.” Comparative Literature 42 (Summer, 1990): 227-245. A comparison of three female writers’ historical novels, including History, suggesting that the narrative structures in women’s historical novels differ from the male model.

Mora, Gabriela, and Karen S. Van Hooft, eds. Theory and Practice of Feminist Literary Criticism. Ypsilanti, Mich.: Bilingual Press, 1982. This collection of essays first describes diverse feminist approaches to literary criticism, then offers analyses of the works of fiction using these frameworks. The short article on Morante focuses on her condemnation of the bourgeois Italian family structure and values in three novels, including History.