The Timeliness of Elsa Morante’s La Storia, Fifty Years after its Publication

On the 50th anniversary of Elsa Morante’s La Storia (1974-2024), the novel continues to captivate our collective imaginary with its striking timeliness. This stems primarily from its portrayal of human experiences that are both ordinary and extreme, concrete and intense—a form of traumatic realism.¹ In light of a global geopolitical context increasingly threatened by conflicts, radical tensions, and apocalyptic sentiments related to ecological disasters and pandemics, La Storia‘s narrative and thematic power resonates with a new contemporary urgency. In fact, the novel strikes a chord not only due to its unique interweaving of micro and macrohistory, of subaltern destinies and reportages on the major events of the 20th century, but also through its engaging and multi-layered storytelling which superimposes a surface realism onto a traumatic dimension that resides in its oneiric abysses, images, and subterranean spaces.

The rereadings of La Storia collected in this section of «Allegoria», edited by Tiziana de Rogatis and Katrin Wehling-Giorgi, engage with new critical perspectives to highlight the extraordinary modernity of a novel that continues to shape contemporary fiction and redefine our cultural memory. La Storia deeply affects readers because it tells the anti-heroic feminine epic of a humble mother, subaltern and discriminated Ida who—amidst the chaos of World War II and the postwar period—desperately but vainly tries to save her child, Useppe. Against this «scandal that has lasted ten thousand years» (Morante), the author asserts the power of a narrative imagination that subverts overarching power structures and their official archives.² This counter-narrative redefines the status of the victim (Savettieri) and communicates to readers in a direct and unmediated form the violence and epistemic injustice experienced by the subaltern, including their transgenerational transmissions.

La Storia is, thus, a political novel (Savettieri). The essays collected in this volume valorise Morante’s ability to dialogue with History by way of a narrative pathos that solicits the readers’ emotional immersion (de Rogatis), plunging them into the metamorphic universe of those escaping terror (Porcelli).

The choral universe of La Storia also mobilizes narrative resources capable of healing the very traumas that are staged within the story. The novel ends, after all, with an extraordinary epigraph from Gramsci’s Letters from Prison: «All the seeds have failed except for one, which I don’t know what it is, but it’s probably a flower and not a weed». The novel’s potent political charge lies in the seed representing the spaces of resistance cultivated by the mother-child duo, but it also resides in the novel’s engaging and readable narrative. From this perspective, storytelling is a creative and political act that heals the cognitive and psychological fractures caused by the traumas of History—a form of narrative medicine.³

As de Rogatis’ essay demonstrates, the novel’s narrative mosaic, with its composite and polyphonic forms of storytelling, offers an immersive rewriting of the “scandal.” This generative and restorative potential is decisive both for narrative medicine and for rethinking the contemporary notion of literature and the narrative imagination. By exposing censored archives and illuminating the blind spots of History, the novel’s female narrative voice emerges by relating to the memory of others, including both characters and readers. Thus, writing becomes a powerful reparative medicine of the historical imaginary, including collective and individual violence (Wehling-Giorgi).

The rewriting of monumental, patriarchal history through the anti-heroic microstory of the mother and child is furthermore told from the equally timely perspective of the trauma of migration and its pathos.⁴ Ida and Useppe live in Rome, uprooted by internal migration from Calabria, isolated in a large metropolis, shamed by the epileptic illness they both suffer, and facing the everyday microtrauma of antisemitic racism. The novel’s great dramatic migratory epic envelops the mother and child, staging a heterogeneous humanity on the move, composed of Southern families settled in Rome, the displaced, partisans, and deported Jews. As Rubinacci’s essay published in this section of «Allegoria» shows, archival research unveils a genealogy of migratory imagery already present in La Storia’s precursors, including primarily Oedipus and Antigone from The Chemical Comedy, part of the collection of poems The World Saved by Kids (1968). The linguistic and cultural displacement later culminates in the mature migrant figure of Aracoeli in Morante’s eponymous last novel (1982), further evidencing a thematic connection between the author’s various works beginning with Lies and Sorcery (1948) (Lucamante).

After decades of academic delegitimizations of La Storia, a more openly positive critical trend is finally emerging in Italian literary scholarship. However, within this new critical landscape scholars continue to base their verdict on a distinction between Morante and certain deplorable contemporary “Morantisms”. differentiating the apocalyptic, high-quality aesthetic pathos of La Storia from the sentimental, commercial tendencies of contemporary women’s writing. These judgments often stem from a form of “reluctant acknowledgement.” This is not to say that these departures from pathos into sentimentality do not exist; as a hybrid expression, pathos is inherently difficult to gauge and to negotiate, especially when a century of modernist and postmodern poetics has dismissed it as an anti-aesthetic mode of expression. This form of 20th-century censorship has weighed heavily on the repertoire of pathos, stifling not only its visibility but also its very experimentation. What is self-serving about these judgments lies in the assumption that those imparting them position themselves as gatekeepers, granting or denying access to a majority of (in this case, women) writers to the contemporary Italian literary canon (and beyond). But as Montale noted a century ago, tradition is sanctioned not by who desires, but often by those who can carry it forward, «sometimes by who knows least about it».

Limiting the “Morante effect” is an attempt to regiment the hybrid, disorienting, and transversal narrative power of La Storia, which has been and continues to be, first and foremost, an immersive and complete experience of pathos. This experience does not involve making the readers think, but it makes them live its aesthetics in a plural and anti-monological, in an absolute and at the same time relative way. It is an aesthetics of traumatic realism that makes La Storia a «LIVING book», as Ortese wrote to Morante in 1975. It is also a living book because, for the reasons outlined above, La Storia still resonates far more with today’s students than many novels sanctioned by the modernist and postmodern canon, which are increasingly difficult to teach in Italian schools (de Rogatis).

La Storia today constitutes a legacy that transcends the boundaries of nation and genre, allowing us to see this work by Morante as a precursor of the epic, polycentric, and polytemporal narrative found in the global novel and contemporary reportage. Moreover, the novel also generates recurrent trends in contemporary Italian fiction, primarily through Elena Ferrante’s global novel My Brilliant Friend and other contemporary Italian women writers.

Rather than perpetuating the dualism between Morante and “Morantisms,” it seems to us far more productive to establish the practice of what we might term a Morante Observatory (Osservatorio Morante):⁵ a survey of this specific literary landscape that stems from an impartial approach and, as the term “observatory” implies, remains open to the complexity of our present world. From the perspective of a Morante Observatory on contemporary Italian women writers, we can outline several recurrent trends that are important in terms of our contemporary imaginary and anthropology, as well as in the search for a new aesthetics and forms of expression, which are therefore intermittent and dynamic. These trends include: the authorial project of crafting a substantial plot with strong expressive and dramatic resonances; the authorial awareness of inventing this type of narrative from a serious (rather than detached, cynical, or ironic, as many modernist or postmodern poetics would have it) stance; the resulting attention to popular and transmedial repertoires of storytelling; the unapologetic reference, from the title to the book cover, to the vast realm of sentiment and emotions, rooted in the body; the ambition to narrativize past or recent major historical events, often with a profoundly traumatic imprint, transforming «facts into history» (to quote the most recent addition to this genealogy: Alma by Federica Manzon, winner of the 2024 Campiello Prize); the tendency to link the storytelling of current affairs and/or History to glocal spaces—enigmatic locations marked by ethnic, regional, and/or social differences that, due to their marginal or border position, are decipherable and universal at the same time. Finally, in a synthesis of all the elements listed above, there is the desire to graft this macro-history onto the great, multifaceted Mother-Daughter myth: a micro-history that oscillates between the pathological and the reparative, with rhizomes of this myth in the parallel and interconnected myth of dual, symbiotic, conflictual, and ambivalently allied and conflicted female friends.

Recovering the mother-daughter plot from Morante’s first novel (i>Menzogna e sortilegio), and also finding it in the masterfully ambivalent relationship of the narrator who is both a witness and a shaman of History—sometimes a maternal and emotionally distant mother, at other times compassionate and empathetic toward her first creation (the protagonist, Ida)—the contemporary storytelling of the Mother-Daughter myth emerges as one of the most timely aspects of the Osservatorio Morante. Different types of writing, in terms of style and genre, are nowadays increasingly converging around the indicative form of a great enigma. An ever-growing number of reportages, autobiographies, autofictions, and novels by contemporary women writers are delineating a vast geothermic gap: a magmatic crater of female subjectivities, transmitted from Mother to Daughter. This represents the ambivalent yet vital latency of the archaic and the redemptive, envy and recognition, matrophobia and matrophilia, always ready to reawaken.

In recent years, Morante’s works have opened to a transnational and transmedial dialogue, facilitated by recent (re)translations of her works in the Anglophone world and beyond,⁶ as well as by the success of the TV series based on La Storia, directed by Francesca Archibugi (2024). Key developments include the first full translation of Morante’s masterpiece Menzogna e sortilegio (Lies and Sorcery by Jenny McPhee, New York Review of Books, 2023; scheduled for publication by Penguin in 2025), which follows in the footsteps of Ann Goldstein’s retranslation of L’isola di Arturo in 2019 (Liveright Publishing/W.W. Norton & Company). Best known as the translator of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, the well-known Goldstein played a significant role in its international success. Also recently published is the first English translation of Morante’s essay Pro o contro la bomba atomica (For or Against the Atomic Bomb), translated by Goldstein and included in a recently published special issue of «Annali d’italianistica» (Vol. 42; 50 Years of «La Storia»: Elsa Morante Beyond History, edited by F. Baldasso, U. Fanning, M. Josi, S. Porcelli, and K. Wehling-Giorgi).

The availability of Morante’s works beyond Italian-speaking confines has generated a richer and broader critical-theoretical dialogue. This section of «Allegoria» includes contributions in English to enhance and promote the growing number of transnational studies on Morante, while also integrating Italian scholarship in this area on the author. For instance, the essays by Lucamante and Josi make important contributions to Jewish and Holocaust studies.⁷ Lucamante re-examines the ethical-political inspiration of Morante’s novel through the lens of Benjamin, Weil, and Arendt, while Josi offers a new interpretation of the Jewish characters in La Storia who survived the Holocaust, arguing that the figure of Davide encapsulates the novel’s collective and individual traumas.

Other recent critical approaches include trauma studies, applied to Morante’s work by scholars like de Rogatis and Wehling-Giorgi,⁸ who propose a new interpretation of La Storia as a foundational trauma narrative of post-war Italy. De Rogatis suggests that rereading the novel through the lens of trauma studies allows us to revalorise the narrative’s pathos as an immersive experience allowing readers to confront the epistemic scandal revealed by the silencing of subaltern voices. This critical lens also encourages new interpretations of Morante’s poetic structures and opens comparative pathways with other collective traumas, such as migration in the urban space of Igiaba Scego, as discussed in Wehling-Giorgi’s essay. Trauma studies also engage with broader cultural memory studies, yet another significant contribution in the re-evaluation of La Storia‘s role in shaping collective memory around historical events, including persecution and post-war resistance.⁹

Postcolonial and migration studies have also gained prominence in Morante scholarship, analysing the author’s translingual and migratory imagination,¹⁰ as explored in the essays by Lucamante, Porcelli, de Rogatis, Rubinacci, Savettieri, and Wehling-Giorgi. Porcelli focuses on the metaphor of the migratory bird, symbolizing the deep-rooted displacement of the protagonists and secondary characters, as well as the transgenerational transmission of anxieties related to persecution. De Rogatis links the novel’s genealogical migrations to the subaltern imagination at its core. Themes of migration and racial otherness also underpin the continuity or pastiche between Morante’s so-called first and second phases, as discussed by Lucamante and Rubinacci. While Savettieri explores Morante’s interest in postcolonial thought, Wehling-Giorgi offers a comparative and multidirectional reading (following Rothberg) of the trauma of Jewish persecution (Josi) and postcolonial trauma narrated by Igiaba Scego, both set in the palimpsestic urban space of Rome.

Another important area of recent study is affect theory, which has redefined hermeneutic theories by affirming the centrality of interactions between subjects. Affect theory plays a crucial role in reinterpreting Morante’s pathos and the significance of emotions, as discussed by de Rogatis, Lucamante, Porcelli, and Savettieri. Central to the new readings of the Morantian pathos and the meaning of emotions suggested in this volume (de Rogatis; Lucamante; Porcelli; Savettieri), the insights of affect theory are indeed crucial for an interpretation of the primacy of bodies and passions in the author’s work. The insights from affect theory also interact with neo-materialist and ecocritical approaches, which are essential in understanding the profound material rootedness of stories, events, animals, and bodies in Morante’s works.

The extraordinary timeliness of La Storia that has emerged from its productive dialogue with the aforementioned new epistemologies is further confirmed by its affinities with contemporary transnational writers who have diversely reinvented the narration of individual fates, intertwined with major historical events. These writers draw from a collective imaginary of suffering, expressed through new narrative forms and lives documented through images and objects. For instance, the narrative realism of Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich (The Unwomanly Face of War) stands out for its focus on the undocumented fates of one million women enlisted in the Soviet army during World War II, and its deep affinities with the traumatic philosophy of La Storia.¹¹ The interplay of micro- and macrohistory is furthermore central to the autofiction of Annie Ernaux (The Years; Les années, 2008), another Nobel laureate in 2023, whose work reconstructs a transgenerational fabric through collective and individual memory, crystallized in stories of objects, images, and bodies. Finally, Morante’s tendency to narrate inexpressible traumas through images foreshadows the iconotexts—narrative fragments that interact with analogue photographs—of European Strega Prize winner Katja Petrowskaja, another great storyteller of the horrors of recent history, in The Photo Looked at Me (2016), recently published by Adelphi 2024.

Building on this broad array of critical approaches, this section of «Allegoria» aims to chart a new direction in our dialogue with La Storia, one of the works that has shaped—and continues to shape—literature, expressiveness, and emotions in the post-war Italian and transnational landscape.

¹ T. de Rogatis, K. Wehling-Giorgi, Traumatic Realism and the Poetics of Trauma, in «Allegoria», 83, 2021, pp. 178-183; T. de Rogatis, Elsa Morante’s «History: A Novel» and Svetlana Alexievich’s «The Unwomanly Face of War»: Traumatic Realism, Archives du Mal and Female Pathos, in T. de Rogatis, K. Wehling-Giorgi, Trauma and Women Writers: A Transnational Perspective, in Trauma Narratives in Italian and Transnational Women’s Writing, SUE, Roma 2022, pp. 79-112; K. Wehling-Giorgi, «Come un fotogramma spezzato»: Traumatic Images and Multistable Visions in Elsa Morante’s «History: A Novel», in Trauma Narratives, cit., pp. 55-78.

² See C. Della Colletta, Plotting the Past: Metamorphoses of Historical Narrative in Modern Italian Fiction, Purdue University Press, West Lafayette 1994; L. Re, Utopian Longing and the Constraints of Racial and Sexual difference in Elsa Morante’s «La Storia», in «Italica», 70, 3, 1993, pp. 361‒375; S. Lucamante, Quella difficile identità. Ebraismo e rappresentazioni letterarie della Shoah, Iacobelli, Roma 2012; A. Borghesi, Una storia invisibile. Morante, Ortese, Weil, Quodlibet, Macerata 2015.

³ T. de Rogatis, Homing/Ritrovarsi. Traumi e translinguismi delle migrazioni in Morante, Hoffman, Kristof, Scego e Lahiri, Edizioni Università per Stranieri di Siena, Siena 2023; K. Wehling-Giorgi, «Come un fotogramma spezzato», cit.

⁴ T. de Rogatis, Homing/Ritrovarsi, cit.

⁵ The study of the genealogy of Morante’s works was first introduced by the following scholars: A. Giorgio, Writing Mothers and Daughters: Renegotiating the Mother in Western European Narratives, Berghahn Books, Oxford 2002; S. Lucamante, S. Woods, Under Arturo’s Star: The Cultural Legacies of Elsa Morante, Purdue University Press, West Lafayette 2005; L. Benedetti, The Tigress in the Snow: Motherhood and Literature in Twentieth-Century Italy, University of Toronto Press, Toronto 2007; S. Lucamante, A Multitude of Women: The Challenges of the Contemporary Italian Novel, University of Toronto Press, Toronto 2008.

⁶ A retranslation of La Storia was also recently published in Germany, translated by Maja Pflug and Klaudia Ruschkowski (Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 2024). For a detailed outline of the translations of Morante’s works, see M. Zanardo, Elsa Morante in altre lingue, in «NewItalianBooks», 12 luglio 2021 (last accessed: 4 September 2024).

⁷ See S. Lucamante, Forging Shoah Memories: Italian Women Writers, Jewish Identity, and the Holocaust, Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2014; S.E. Ziolkowski, Jewish Images and Transnational Histories in Italian Writing. From Elsa Morante to Helena Janeczek, forthcoming in «Annali d’italianistica», 42, 2024; M. Josi, Rome, 16 October 1943. History, Memory, Literature, Legenda, Cambridge 2023. See also the following works in the area of Jewish and Holocaust Studies: M. Beer, Costellazioni ebraiche: note su Elsa Morante e l’ebraismo del Novecento, in «Nacqui nell’ora amara del meriggio»: scritti per Elsa Morante nel centenario della sua nascita, eds. E. Cardinale, G. Zagra, Quaderni della Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma, Roma 2013, pp. 165-220; A. Cavaglion, Il grembo della Shoah: 16 ottobre 1943 di Umberto Saba, Giacomo Debenedetti, Elsa Morante, in Dopo i testimoni: memorie, storiografie e narrazioni della deportazione razziale, eds. M. Baiardi, A. Cavaglion, Viella, Roma 2014, pp. 245-246.

⁸ T. de Rogatis, K. Wehling-Giorgi, Traumatic Realism and the Poetics of Trauma in Elsa Morante’s Works, cit.; K. Wehling-Giorgi, «Come un fotogramma spezzato», cit.; T. De Rogatis, Elsa Morante’s «History: A Novel» and Svetlana Alexievich’s «The Unwomanly Face of War», cit.; K. Wehling-Giorgi, «Una stampa lucida»: Traumatic Images and Ruinous Landscapes in Elsa Morante’s «La Storia» and «Aracoeli», in «Annali d’italianistica», 42, 2024, pp. 105-124.

⁹ See Josi, Rome, 16 October 1943, cit.; G. Bartolini, La «Storia» come vettore di memoria: il romanzo di Morante nella cultura del ricordo del dopoguerra, in «Annali d’italianistica», 42, 2024, pp. 147-175.

¹⁰ See T. de Rogatis, Homing/Ritrovarsi, cit. See also the essays by de Rogatis, Porcelli, Rubinacci and Savettieri in this volume.

¹¹ T. de Rogatis, Elsa Morante’s «History: A Novel» and Svetlana Alexievich’s «The Unwomanly Face of War», cit.