SOURCE: Pastore, Judith Laurence. “The Sounds of Silence: The Absence of Narrative Presence in Natalia Ginzburg's La cittá e la casa.” Italian Culture 11 (1993): 311-22.

[In the following essay, Pastore discusses Ginzburg's use of a narrative absence approach in her fiction, especially in La cittá e la casa.]

Natalia Ginzburg has done well to “rely on her own ear for the dramatic transcript of a language within which resides the secret of her narrative powers and beneath which one senses the presence of something unsaid.”

—Raul Radice

Masterpiece Theatre's adaptation of Samuel Richardson's one-million-word, nine-volume epistolary novel Clarissa (1747-8)—the longest in the English language—into a three-part television series may generate renewed interest in this seldom read classic. But it probably does not herald a widespread revival of a writing technique which took literate Europe by storm in the second half of the eighteenth century. “Writing to the moment” was the label the shy, former printer Samuel Richardson gave his method of telling realistic stories about everyday people in letter form. His first attempt Pamela (1740), which became as beloved as the Beatles and Elvis in our century, employed a single narrator, thus limiting Richardson's ability to demonstrate his astounding psychological insight. In Clarissa, however, he expands the technique to include a multiplicity of complex correspondents from a variety of classes, thus enabling him to tell his tragedy of rape and death from a variety of perspectives.

His amazing success allowed the epistolary technique to dominate the novel for many decades. As late as 1816, Mary Shelley is still using it for the opening and closing segments of Frankenstein, but her abandonment of it for the major portion signals that by that time the form was in decline. Since then, though occasionally still used, the epistolary technique tends to be looked on more as a curious exercise of novelistic skill than a viable means of exploring the human psyche as it was for Richardson, who used it to transfer the Puritan practice of self-scrutiny to in-depth fictional analysis of character.

In the hands of Natalia Ginzburg, this creaky old vehicle takes on a postmodern existence, which substitutes meaningful silence for Richardson's minute probings. Richardson, eager to promote “virtue,” proclaimed his didactic intentions to the rooftops and was devastated when readers, preferring Lovelace the rake to the noble Clarissa, misread his text. In her numerous essays, Ginzburg has much to say about the chaos she sees in modern society, particularly the breakdown of the traditional family. But as narrator of fiction she remains silent. Following Derrida, it is la diffèrance which speaks for her in her texts—what her characters do not do and do not say hammers home her belief that much of modern society resembles Lucrezia in La cittá e la casa (1984), who learns too late that she has got herself in “a real fucking mess” (134).

Ginzburg's silences have earned her criticism from a few. Oreste Del Buono, in “La Finta Tonta,” calls her narrative absence a pose. He considers her refusal to judge her characters an artificial literary device, rather than a genuine response to twentieth-century reality (Weaver). Most critics, however, praise her compressed, highly conversational prose. Introducing Ginzburg's short story “La madre,” in the Longman Anthology of World Literature by Women 1875-1975, Natalia Costa-Zalessaw describes her writing as “deceptively simple in style and purposely antiliterary” (566).

Her use of the epistolary mode, partially in Caro Michele (1973) and totally in La cittá e la casa, has also not met with universal delight. Daniel Harris considers it: “a dilapidated anachronism” (687), “an unusually maladroit contraption for exposition,” “a quaint, faintly ridiculous non sequitur in an age of instant electronic communication” (688). Peter Brunette likes her use of it in fiction better than in La Famiglia Manzoni, where historical necessity requires the reiteration of “religious piety and polite sentimentality,” which soon palls (13). Fictional letters though can be molded to seem to express much more than their surface initially suggests, which makes them, in my opinion, optimal for Ginzburg's particular brand of narrative absence. I tend to agree with Rita Signorelli-Pappas, a long-time Ginzburg scholar in America, that use of the epistolary mode in La cittá e la casa enables Ginzburg to achieve “effects of poetic condensation and tension,” “more potent suggestive force” than in any other of her works thus far (14).

Ginzburg's unique style did not come easily to her, but rather was the end result of many years of painful self-doubt and long periods of “writer's block.” Resolving to be a novelist from early girlhood, it took wartime exile in 1940 to the Abruzzi village of Pizzoli, which she both loved and hated, to flesh out a genuine response to modern existence rather than the artificial and contrived, which had plagued her earlier attempt in “Un'assenza” (1933) and “Casa al mare” (1937). Admiring Chekhov, Flaubert, and Proust, she nevertheless could not use them as the spiritual fathers Harold Bloom insists artists must have. Ginzburg found a spiritual mother instead in Ivy Compton-Burnett, whom she discovered while living in London with her second husband Gabriele Baldini. Burnett's style eschews description which Ginzburg hated. Instead, Burnett's novels are almost completely in dialogue. Imitation of Burnett led to a breakthrough, which produced one of her best known works Le Voci Della Sera (1961). Paolo Milano complained about the “mannered simplicity of Ginzburg's dialogue,” and Walter Mauro accused her of striving for an “effect, something which is no longer spontaneous but mannered and insincere.” On the whole, however, the novel was successful enough to give Ginzburg the confidence to try her hand at a totally new genre—theatre—creating six plays in five years: Ti ho sposato per allegria in 1963, followed by L'inserzione in 1965, Fragola e panna in 1966, La segretaria in 1967, and Paese di mare and La porta sbagliata in 1968. This rapid production is astounding in a writer who frequently could not write anything for years at a time. But it was five more years before she used Caro Michele to experiment with writing a portion in letters as a way of combining extended dialogue with reflective self-analysis. This was the necessary revolt against her artistic parent she had to make before she could develop her own unique style.¹

Early in her career, the role of narrator had troubled her. In the 1964 preface she added to earlier works published as Cinque romanzi brevi, Ginzburg describes how Delia, the main character in La strada che va in cittá (1944) contained part of herself.

And from that moment on whenever I wrote a narrative in the first person I realised my own personality would infiltrate my writing …

(quoted in Bullock 18)

The epistolary mode opens the narrative to a multiplicity of first-person viewpoints which Ginzburg used with great humor in La cittá e la casa. Deceptively simple on the surface, it is written in a style which Dick Davis describes as “clipped, deadpan, clear, seemingly impulsive but in reality extremely controlled” (1115). It employs two major plots which complement one another beautifully. The one involves Lucrezia's seduction and betrayal by Ignazio Fegiz, or I. F. as she calls him, and the breakup of her open marriage with Piero. The other involves her former lover Giuseppe, who moves to America to be with his older brother. But Ginzburg constantly introduces numerous other sub-plots all narrating the extraordinary mess most of its characters make of their lives.

Ginzburg's decision to write the novel entirely in letters, a form couched in the conventions and stable social values of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is connected with her work on La famiglia Manzoni (1963), where her narrative absence is in signal contrast to the authoritarian world its letters portray. This postmodern disappearance of the author emphasizes the conflicting values of that lost world and ours, underscoring in what is not said the radical changes which have occurred in almost every area of existence. Its order contrasts markedly with the chaos of modern life.

This lost world appears also in her early novellas La strada che va in citté and É stato cosí (1947), both of which depict a patriarchal society, where young women are manipulated by strong, often indifferent men. In La strada, Delia's father is totally indifferent to her until she becomes pregnant by the wealthy village doctor's son. Then he beats her and refuses to set eyes on her. At her makeshift wedding very soon before she gives birth, her father kisses her in an “embarrassed fashion and turned his head away.” Whatever brutal strength he once had is gone. “He had changed a great deal … and looked permanently hurt and sad” (56).

This change portends the absence of authoritative vision in Ginzburg's world and the subsequent quest of her characters for the lost father of their youth. The men she depicts in later fiction are usually weak, indecisive figures, confused by the changes occurring all around them. Lucrezia longs for a strong father figure. Her own father died when she was very young. As a young woman, she is totally dependent on her mother and marries Piero to please her. Piero is like an indulgent parent, consenting to an open marriage which only Lucrezia avails herself of. In reality, she longs to be dominated. When her mother has a nervous breakdown and has to be committed, Lucrezia is frightened because she now has no one to protect her. Her former lover Giuseppe, who mirrors her dependent nature, tells her that “all your life you have been searching for a father, in your mother, in your husband, and in me” (35).

Both Lucrezia and Giuseppe fantasize that they have found their lost fathers. Lucrezia mistakenly thinks the flamboyant art restorer I. F. will become her longed for protector. Instead, he refuses to take responsibility for his sexual conduct, hiding behind his long-time relationship with the neurotic Ippo. After seducing, impregnating and allowing Lucrezia and her five children to leave the faithful Piero, he abandons her when she is ready to have their son. When their son dies, he becomes furious when Lucrezia tells him that it was his refusal to leave Ippo which caused the baby's death. From that point on, their affair disintegrates.

Giuseppe also imagines he is going to find a father in his brother Ferruccio. “He has always been a secure point of reference for me, a tree-trunk I could lean against, someone from whom I could at every moment ask for explanations, judgements, reproaches and absolution” (57). Symbolically, in Ferruccio's home, he is given a child's bedroom with “flying bear-cubs” each one holding a “red balloon” (55). Nevertheless, he realized that “adults should not need to be protected” and tells Lucrezia “perhaps neither you nor I have ever become adults nor Piero either. We are a brood of children” (35).

Emphasizing how few today are willing to take on the traditional adult roles of the past, few people in the text, either male or female, accept meaningful responsibility for their own children. Like Fegiz, Giuseppe refuses to become a real father to either Alberico or Graziano, who Lucrezia insists is also his son. Remembering her disappointment that he did not want her and her children to live with him, Lucrezia rebukes him later: “You said that you didn't feel up to being a father to the children” (21)—a truth which nevertheless hurts Giuseppe to read. Both the hippie Nadia and the neurotic Chantal leave the nurturing of their daughters to men, ironically Giuseppe and his son Alberico, whom Giuseppe completely ignored as a child. Ferruccio's widow Anne Marie, totally dedicated to her scientific career, has difficulty getting along with her daughter Chantal and openly dislikes her granddaughter Maggie. Lucrezia and her sixteen-year-old Cecilia also have a troubled relationship. Cecilia is furious with Lucrezia for leaving Piero, but instead of confronting her directly, she constantly finds fault with her mother for petty things. In turn, Lucrezia's new view of Cecilia as fat and ugly reflects her unconscious jealousy as a youthful rival. By allowing herself to be dominated by romantic passion, Lucrezia subverts whatever maternal authority she may once have had, thus reversing traditional roles, with pubescent youth trying to return straying middle age to some semblance of the bourgeois family circle.

In the novel, both the hippie world of Alberico and the fleeting feminism of the ironically named Serena are seen as unfulfilling and potentially dangerous. Serena's ambition is to play the role of Dante's wife beside an enormous fire. Fortunately, no one will allow her to do so. The hippie women, Nadia from Catania and Anais from America, both from rich families, are both promiscuous and on drugs. Anais steals for kicks, Nadia spends her days sleeping and reading magazines. The one who achieves the most success both financially and as a caring person is Giuseppe's neglected son Alberico, a gay filmmaker who has been imprisoned for drugs and whose associations with unstable characters leads to the death of Nadia, the loss of her baby who loves him, and finally his own death. Alberico cares nothing for fame or money, tries through psychoanalysis to work through his problems, finally makes his peace with the childlike Giuseppe, and at the end is planning to buy back the flat for him which Giuseppe so foolishly gave up to chase an illusion in America. Again, as with Cecelia's criticism of Lucrezia, Alberico reverses the parent-child relationship.

This loss of traditional parental authority is echoed in Ginzburg's style where the narrator simply presents the surface of events, refusing to make any authorial comment—author as parent refusing to take responsibility for her creation. The act of disappearing from one's text thus parallels the disappearance of parental authority, since prior to World War II in both Italy and America, as in most of the world, the strong father was central to the bourgeois family myth. Ginzburg's father Giuseppe Levi dominates her often dreamlike autobiography Lessico famigliare (1963) in the same way he dominated his home. An aggressive, eccentric, often intolerant father, the rest of the family conceal their real attitudes and tastes so they will not risk his anger. The adult narrator depicts him with an ironic fondness, whereas the children in the text obviously fear him.

The feared father is a common figure from the past. He dominates much of western literature—Jehovah, Hamlet Senior, King Lear, even the comic Harpagon. Angry fathers dominate eighteenth-century British novels, where they disinherit rebellious children right and left. Some abandon their children at birth, refusing to marry the woman they have seduced. Many heroines in eighteenth-century and indeed early nineteenth-century novels end up marrying strong father figures: Pamela's Mr. B, Pride and Prejudice's Darcy, Jane Eyre's Rochester. Perhaps the most unpleasant angry father of this lot is Clarissa Harlowe's, who curses the daughter who refuses to marry the man he has chosen for her and elopes instead with the heartless rake Lovelace. After Lovelace drugs and rapes Clarissa in a brothel, she literally dies of a broken heart, asking only that her father revoke his curse. Although he doesn't, she dies saying: “I am going to my father's house.” Here the father meant is God, who forgives the repentant sinner even when the earthy father will not.

The strong authority of the father both earthly and heavenly is reflected in the texts produced. Richardson certainly wrote his tales of women sorely tempted by would-be seducers to warn the young women of his day. The twentieth-century author cannot write with any such explicit didactic intent. In Ginzburg's later writings, there is no longer any strong father in the house to utter curses—either on earth or in heaven. The sound of silence in her novels echoes the absence of any respected authority in the modern world, including that of the author, which is why they have vanished from their texts.

Symbolic of this loss of strong authority figures is the shift from men to women as the dominant ones in relationships. In all four couples, Lucrezia and Piero, Ippo and I. F., Giuseppe and Anne Marie, and Chantal and Danny, it is the women who act while the men remain passive. Even I. F., who cruelly uses people and dominates in every other setting, remains silent and attentive when he is with Ippo. Yet this power does not bring the women happiness. In fact, each is signally neurotic. Lucrezia spends her life looking for a protector, and like Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina, is willing to sacrifice marriage, children, security to pursue the chimera of eternal passion. Serena's feminism is merely an amusing diversion until she can find a man to look after her as her rich father has always done. Ippo, for all her cosmopolitan chic, is nevertheless an anorexic and “is on drugs, they say” (72). Anne Marie, with her eternal smile, is unable to communicate with either her husband Giuseppe or her daughter Chantal, who in turn is totally self-absorbed and hates her mother so much that she had casual sex with Giuseppe.

The only healthy figures in the novel are its older women: Aunt Bice who brings up Alberico, Roberta whom everyone loves and uses, and Giuseppe's next-door neighbor in Princeton Mrs. Mortimer. Significantly, none of these “good” women has any current authority. Aunt Bice is dead, and Mrs. Mortimer is a marginal character. Roberta, although central and known to all the novel's diverse cast, exercises no real authority. Giuseppe ignores her excellent advice never to give up “bricks and mortar.” Lucrezia uses her when she first comes to Rome alone and pregnant, in need of an apartment, but drops her later for the more amusing and simpatico Alberico.

In mid-eighteenth-century England, Richardson wrote his tales of sexual seduction as warnings to women not to sacrifice their virtue to desire. The old rules on the surface at least seem to be gone. Theoretically, women today can behave as freely as men. In practice we learn everyday from the Thomas-Hill hearings to the increasing numbers of reported rapes that women are still not as free as men. Although the old double-standard is said to be dead, economically it persists in the income disparity after divorce, where the husband becomes richer and the wife much poorer. In practice, Murphy Brown not withstanding, the reality of single parenthood for most women still means financial hardship. Granted, the stigmas that awaited the Pamelas and the Clarissas should they once stray from the straight and narrow, or even the Delias in prewar Italy, by the 1980's when Ginzburg is writing La cittá e la casa have disappeared. And yet in some ways she is still working with the time-honored seduced and abandoned plot. The difference is that adultery is no longer looked on as dishonorable—a fate worse than death. Notice incidentally how much Ginzburg plays with names in this novel: from the “Nazi” buried in Ignazio which echoes his brutal character to the blatant irony in the names Serena and Lucrezia, the latter recalling the Roman matron who stabbed herself after Tarquin raped her. Quite different from her namesake, Lucrezia uses adultery as a relief from boredom and pregnancy as a way of playing earth mother. To her, marriage and motherhood are games in which one finds amusement where one can. Like a child, she has no conception that both demand constant personal sacrifice.

Lucrezia's “crime” is her refusal to grow up. After their baby dies, Fegiz tells her that he doesn't understand why she has left such “an extraordinary man” as Piero, and tells her that “[w]omen … are real idiots” (151). His cruelty to her at such a time angers her, but it also fuels her obsessive need of him. Her inability to see that Fegiz is a selfish, egotistical sensualist shows the power of physical desire to blind. Even practical Roberta, who fails in her attempt to make Fegiz “do right” by Lucrezia, falls partially under the spell of his animal energy: “I must say I didn't entirely dislike him when he was walking along the street. He strides along quickly and has a cheerful air about him” (136). Lucrezia's foolish willingness to abandon a perfectly good husband, to become pregnant when she already has five children, to give up a lovely home in the country for a dreary apartment in Rome strike us not as immoral, just quintessentially stupid.

In 1990, Wiley Feinstein gave a paper at the AAIS conference on Ginzburg, in which he spoke of Lucrezia's quixotic longings for the perfect lover. The nineteenth-century bourgeois world which Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina inhabited demanded that they pay dearly when they abandoned themselves to sensual passion, and their fates are told as moral exempla by authors who strongly condemn their mistaken romantic notions. Ginzburg also conveys her disapproval of Lucrezia, but in a markedly different manner, primarily through contrast and minor details such as food and clothing, the latter suggestive of the diminished role moral imperatives play in the modern world. We first see Lucrezia, for example, saying goodbye to Giuseppe in a “shaggy white woolen jacket … and rather grubby white trousers” (7). Choosing an impractical color, frequently favored by the rich who can afford to keep it clean, signals the foolish carelessness which characterizes Lucrezia's actions. Ginzburg also makes Lucrezia's cooking foreshadow later events: her meatloafs taste very good, but they always fall apart. As her affair with I. F. progresses, her “open relationship with Piero is “going to pieces,” which in turn is externalized in the house itself where “everything is breaking up” (96).

Like Lucrezia, Giuseppe also foolishly allows his life to fall apart. He sells his apartment to the Lanzaras “for a song,” according to his practical cousin Roberta, who keeps insisting that “[y]ou should hang on to bricks and mortar for dear life” (8). To use the Quixote analogy again, in the past such practical people as Sancho Panza and Roberta merely served as foils to the nobler dreamers. But in the chaos which prevails in Ginzburg's postmodern world, such figures symbolize longed for solid values which no one respects or believes in anymore. Throughout the novel, Roberta is “a woman who is always ready to run when she's needed” (69). Giuseppe acknowledges her virtues: “a splendid, noisy, interfering, rough diamond of a woman who is devoted to everyone” (9-10). Significantly though he ignores her frequent advice, calling it “pretty crude” (41).

Roberta, Aunt Bice and Mrs. Mortimer reflect the discarded values of an earlier age, an age when couples stayed together and children grew up in stable households. These households may have been authoritarian, and parents may have been indifferent or even cruel. But there was a strength and stability which has vanished in modern life. Although nostalgic for the lost order they represent, Ginzburg has no illusions that these partriarchal households accommodated much individual fulfillment. The antithesis of the woman destroyed by passion in the traditional bourgeois novel is the woman saved by her sense of familial duty. Albina's self sacrifice epitomizes this earlier plot. Ever the dutiful daughter, she gives up her beloved Roman bed-sit to enter a dreary, loveless marriage, hoping thereby to care for her impoverished family.

Longing for the return of the strong, benevolent father has dominated much of twentieth-century politics: Lenin, F. D. R., Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Churchill, de Gaulle, Ronald Reagan, H. Ross Perot. By refusing to assume a godlike authorial presence, Ginzburg signals her awareness of the dangers inherent in such longings. The sound of silence in her fiction in this sense becomes a positive moral act.

Note

1. Alan Bullock, “Writing as a Vocation: Life and Work” and “Female Alienation: Childhood and First Youth,” Natalia Ginzburg (New York: St. Martin's, 1991).

Works Cited

Brunette, Peter. “Natalia Ginzburg Defeated by the Manzoni.” Los Angeles Times Book Review 27 December 1987: 13.

Bullock, Alan. Natalia Ginzburg, Human Relationships in a Changing World. New York: Berg Women's Series/St. Martin's, 1991.

Costa-Zalessaw, Natalia. Introduction to “La Madre.” Longman Anthology of World Literature by Women 1875-1975. Eds. Marian Arkin and Babara Sholler. New York: Longman, 1989.

Davis, Dick. “At the Breaking Point.” The Times Literary Supplement No. 4305, 4 October 1985: 1115.

Feinstein, Wiley “The Unanswered Letter of Women's Desire in Natalia Ginzburg's Epistolary Novels.” Unpublished paper delivered at 1990 annual meeting of the America Association of Italian Studies.

Forman, Laura. “An Interview with Natalia Ginzburg.” Southwest Review 72 (Winter 1987). 34-41.

Ginzburg, Natalia. All Our Yesterdays. Trans. Angus Davidson. Manchester, England: Carcanet, 1985.

———. The City and the House. Trans. by Dick Davis. New York: Seaver/Henry Holt, 1987.

———. Family Sayings. Rev. from the original trans. by D. M. Low. Manchester, England: Carcanet, 1984. Trans. Beryl Stockman. New York: Seaver/Hold, 1988.

———. The Manzoni Family. Trans. Marie Evans. New York: Seaver/Henry Holt, 1987.

———. The Little Virtues. Trans. Dick Davis. Manchester, England: Carcanet, 1985.

———. The Road to the City [and The Dry Heart, Two Novellas]. Trans. Frances Frenaye. New York: Arcade/Little, Brown, 1990.

———. Voices in the Evening. Trans. D. M. Low. New York: Arcade/Little, Brown, 1963.

Harris, Daniel. “To the Letter.” The Nation 247.17: 686-88.

Mauro, Walter. “Un romanzo di Natalia Ginzburg: Le voci della sera.” Il Paese 21 July 1961: 3. Quoted by Bullock, p. 25.

Milano, Paolo. “Natalia Ginzburg: La vita come attrito.” L'Espresso 2 July 1961: 17. Quoted by Bullock, p. 25.

Radice, Raul. [book review] Corriere della sera 2 June 1968: 11. Quoted by Bullock, p. 37.

Signorelli-Pappas, Rita. “Lives in Letters.” The Women's Review of Books v. 3 (December 1987) 14.

Soave, Bowe C. “Narrative Strategy of Natalia Ginzburg.” Modern Language Review 68.4: 788-95.

Weaver, William. “War in Classical Voice.” The New York Times Book Review 5 May 1985: 39.