SOURCE: Bowe, Clotilde Soave. “The Narrative Strategy of Natalia Ginzburg.” The Modern Language Review 68 (1973): 788-95.

[In the following essay, Bowe investigates the function of the first-person narrator in Ginzburg's short fiction.]

‘In realtà chi scrive non ha diritto di chiedere, per la sua opera, nulla a nessuno.’

—N. Ginzburg

With the publication of Mai devi domandarmi (Milan, 1970) the enigma of Natalia Ginzburg's literary personality as it presents itself to critic and reader has come no closer to a solution. The book was a collection of thirty-one pieces in prose (four of which had not previously been published in periodicals or newspapers) which only served to confirm the impression of a diffident, fugitive writer who has at different times condemned every feature of her narrative (reliance on memory, frankness and simplicity of tone) and seemingly placed herself outside the reach of critical discussion. In essay after essay of Mai devi domandarmi, we have a celebrated novelist stripping down her own intellect in the characteristic succession of flat, functional sentences which caused Pavese to call her style a ‘lagna’ and invite the reader to feel superior and at the same time unaccountably ignored. Placidly, yet with considerable evocative skill, she recalls the little girl who could not tell the time when she was eleven, who was terrified of her father and ashamed of her mother, incapable of doing athletic exercises, incompetent at arithmetic and clumsy at writing. The young woman in her first job is no better; she saw a pathological laziness and incompetence in herself: ‘La mia costante preoccupazione era che non venisse scoperta la mia grande pigrizia, e la mia assoluta assenza di idee’ (p. 43), and here the accumulation of emphatic adjectives is unusual for a writer who habitually understates her case. Contentedly she cites her eldest son's judgement that she is ‘una scrittrice dolciastra e sentimentale’, and that her recent writing for the theatre is ‘da dormire in piedi’ (pp. 232, 234). In another essay she admits that she is merely afraid of being bored at the theatre, while at the opera she is always uncertain whether she should watch or listen, and consequently fails to do either. As for politics, which is surely a testing-block for a number of subtly developed characters in her fiction, we find the writer tumbling over herself to put the record straight: ‘L'unica cosa che so con assoluta certezza, è che di politica io non ne capisco niente … Se mi chiedessero come vorrei che fosse governato un paese, in coscienza non saprei rispondere. I miei pensieri politici sono quanto mai rozzi, imbrogliati, elementari, confusi’ (p. 151). By 1968, Natalia Ginzburg feels that she is becoming old and pointless, entering the grey crowd ‘… le cui vicende non potranno accendere né la nostra curiosità, né la nostra immaginazione’ (p. 30). The whole article on old age from which this latter statement is taken is perhaps the most deliberate and amusing depistamento in the book, for it provides an analogue of the blurring between subject and manner which is too easily transacted in order to dismiss her novels.¹ In other words, we finish reading a plot dealing with an unfortunate love affair between a grey, unstriking woman and a grey, unsuccessful man, and the book may then remain in our memory as ill-defined and unsatisfying because it has depicted the twilight world of fractured relationships and unheroic encounters only too exactly: it has borrowed the language and atmosphere of the effect which it aimed to produce. Ginzburg sets out, like Flaubert in Madame Bovary, to reproduce the colour grey and will always run the risk of being accounted a failure because she succeeds in depicting greyness absolutely. Unless we are prepared to approach her fiction from this angle and dismiss most of the elegant red herrings in the preface to Cinque romanzi brevi and the essay “Il mio mestiere” about the admissibility or no of autobiographical material and the legitimacy of the novel of pura memoria, we risk ending up at the bottom of the blind alley to which Ginzburg is happy to consign all her readers except ‘four or five ideal interlocutors’.²

There is an initial soporific effect in all Ginzburg's fiction: its delimitation of the fictional territory to the family. The plots of her main novels and stories all involve one or more family units into which the reverberations of political and historical events in the exterior world are filtered through by reportage of its members as they return centripetally from outside. The reader is thus at once presented with a context that is familiar and undisturbing. No surprise or alarm is elicited by the fictional setting; what is required from the reader is a genteel curiosity. In order to accentuate this impression of routine reality staged inside the walls of a family domicile, Ginzburg adopts the strategy of inserting a first-person narrator into the household so that every event in the novel is related from the limited emotional viewpoint and intellectual involvement of the particular family member conducting the story. The narrator who is providing this io interno is not necessarily the most impressive or attractive member of the household, so that the spectator-reader often faces an entirely plausible but defective or even neurotic interpretation of the events which he is witnessing. This further contributes to the illusion that it is the author herself who is expressing a limited and partial view of the world.

In her first short story, “Un'assenza” (1933),³ written when she was only seventeen, Ginzburg adopts the authorial strategy of making her protagonist a man, and sees the simple story of his wife leaving him to go to San Remo, and his own rejection of suicide in order to call on a prostitute, all from the man's point of view. But in her second narrative, “Casa al mare” (1937), the male protagonist becomes a narrator speaking and recalling events in the first person. Already the writer is uncompromisingly entangled in the emotional stance of the protagonist who has the internal vantage point on events and is simultaneously (but not retrospectively) conducting the narrative. In Ginzburg's next story, “Mio marito” (1941), the first-person narrative is shifted for the first time to a female figure emotionally involved in the events described, and this, with one or two exceptions, will remain Ginzburg's standard procedure in the remainder of her published work, except, of course, the plays. The canonical subject matter with its disintegrating marriages, infidelity by one or both partners and concluding suicide is also established by “Mio marito,” and developed along set lines which will recur with varying degrees of expansion and ornamentation in Ginzburg's subsequent novels. Here we have the standard situation in germ: a young woman marries, without initially being in love. The couple have children. The husband cannot renounce a sexual infatuation with a peasant girl, and the narrator becomes gradually more devoted to him as their relationship breaks down. When the peasant girl dies bearing his child, the husband promptly takes his life, and the story, in characteristic Ginzburgian fashion, seems to stop dead, killed off by the elimination of one corner in the emotional triangle.

Ginzburg's fourth published short story, “La madre” (1948), is narrated in the third person, but from the point of view of two small boys with a widowed mother who goes out at night and seems to their childish imagination slimmer and younger than the mothers of their school companions. This woman is constantly referred to without a name, as la madre, like the baby born to the protagonist in È stato così, who dies of meningitis in a hotel at San Remo and appears as la bambina throughout this novel. In the already quoted prefazione Ginzburg declares that she had such a horror of surnames that she could never use them fluently until her last novel Le voci della sera, but it is also noticeable that a character's Christian name is usually held back until it is necessary as a device for labelling the speaker or distinguishing between the four or five children in a family who form Ginzburg's average narrative cast. Her characters' names are never fully integrated emotional components of their personality; they are functional tickets for recognition. The story “La madre” ends with the little boys' mother swallowing poison in a hotel room. Thus suicide again occurs as a resolution to a love intrigue. This time the emotional triangle has a closed corner in that the husband (Eugenio) has already died at the time of the story, but the squalid and lonely setting for the suicide will recur in a number of later novels. In fact, as one moves on to Ginzburg's longer fiction, one can see that there is no qualitative difference between short story and novel as such. The novels seem to differ from the short stories, which have a standard cast of three characters, merely by being longer and expanding this cast to between twelve and twenty, each involved in their own variation on the same unhappy love relationship or disintegrating marriage. Concerning her first novel, La strada che va in città (1942), Ginzburg commented later that when she had finished writing the book, she counted the characters and found out that there were twelve: ‘Dodici! Mi sembrarono molti’.⁴ Here the plot revolves around another triangle, which consists of Delia (the first-person narrator), Giulio, the doctor's son, who makes her pregnant, and Nini, a distant cousin who becomes increasingly fond of Delia. By the time Delia is safely married and in hospital after the birth of Giulio's child, Nini is living alone in a rented room, drinking heavily and neglecting his health. In fact his death amounts to a suicide and again closes the plot: each of the sections in the story presents a character in the grip of solitude, which Ginzburg presents as the necessary condition of existence even after people are entangled in the permutations of love relationships. Delia is alone and isolated when she is sent to a remote village to conceal her pregnancy, and she is isolated again after the marriage when she fails to respond to her husband's pride in the child. Nini meanwhile slides to his death in the solitude of a filthy rented room: one critic comments: ‘è già avviato … in questo lungo racconto, il motivo ricorrente poi in tutta l'opera della scrittrice: la lunga desolata solitudine delle sue donne radicate in una vita mediocre, nel ripiegamento muto e passivo su se stesse, alla ricerca continua di un sostegno per vivere’,⁵ and there was a general impression that the writer had already produced a definitive style: precise, compact and moving along with a rhythm closely matching daily life. She seemed never to indulge in expressions that were superfluous to the plot.

Ginzburg's second novel, È stato così (1946-7), re-opens the same question of merged style and content and operates a fresh dissection of the amorous triangle. The story consists of a long monologue which is almost completely bereft of commas (Ginzburg later explained that commas are like steps, and steps cost effort, and she was so depressed at the time of composition that she wanted to eliminate all sense of physical effort).⁶ This is Ginzburg's strategy for conveying the protagonist's total recall of her failed marriage with Alberto, who refused to give up an eleven years old liaison with another woman. The plot is again resolved by death: the wife murders the husband and plans to commit suicide herself. There is also the promiscuous and cynical older friend Francesca who offers an alternative way of dealing with men, and who is essentially a repetition of the elder sister Azalea with the string of lovers in La strada che va in città. Towards the beginning and end of the narrative, the harsh phrase ‘Gli ho sparato negli occhi’ occurs, out of context in the surrounding body of narrative like the intruding pistol shot itself, and acting as a kind of cornice to all the recalled material on the inside of the phrase. The manner of the novel is lax, off-hand and grey, a formal orchestration of monotony and hopelessness which reaches its nadir when the wife and the other woman meet and discuss Alberto in his absence:

Ti ho chiesto di venire qui. Non ho niente di particolare da dire. Era una curiosità e basta. Magari forse una curiosità senza senso.—[…] Ho preparato il tè. Abbiamo preso il tè e abbiamo mangiato dei biscotti e ha detto che li trovava buoni. Pensavo adesso che poteva anche andarsene. Mi sentivo molto stanca, con un grande senso di stanchezza nei muscoli del viso.

(pp. 133-4)

In Ginzburg's third novel, Valentino (1951), we again hear a female voice narrating the story in the first person. The story is once more located inside a marriage, which brings together a rich landowner Maddalena and the narrator's brother, Valentino, ten years younger than her. With her money, Maddalena can afford to maintain both households and indulge all the whims of Valentino, who is the most extreme of Ginzburg's egoistic and fastidious male characters: ‘Lui venera soltanto il suo corpo; il suo sacro corpo, che bisogna nutrire bene ogni giorno e vestire e badare che non manchi di niente’ (p. 181). The placid, studiedly monotonous narrating voice of Caterina, Valentino's sister, becomes sharper in tone only when she is describing her brief engagement to Kit, Maddalena's cousin: ‘Pensavo a tutta quella giornata che avevamo passato insieme, ricordavo ogni cosa: il vino, le piccole pere, la ragazza coi capelli rossi, i cortili e i campi. Era stata una giornata così felice; m'accorgevo ora come avevo avuto poche giornate felici nella mia vita: poche giornate libere, solo per me’ (p. 184). However, Kit breaks the engagement just before marriage (as Tommasino will withdraw his proposal to Elsa in Le voci della sera) and eventually gases himself in his home. What is new in this suicide is the linking of a homosexual liaison with Valentino as the reason for the act. The plot thus has a double solution, because Kit's death and Valentino's desertion involve Maddalena in double disaster, both directly brought about by Valentino's entry in her life. Consequently she opts out of her former business activity and decides on a solitary life with her children. Caterina and Valentino also take a flat and end up living in dreary domesticity. This resolution of the plot by a suicide and two parallel domestic arrangements in isolation is the most artificial of Ginzburg's negative statements on life in a closed fictional circuit. All the characters return to a position inferior to the point from which they started out. Each is shifted through an emotional crisis for which he has insufficient strength of will, and the ‘greyness’ of their final predicament is too explicitly stated by the cadenced language of the close: ‘[Valentino] è ingrassato, perché non fa più nessuno sport; e si vede qualche ciocca grigia nei suoi ricci neri’ (p. 192). ‘Vedo Maddalena qualche volta. È diventata molto grassa, tutta grigia e fa proprio la vecchia signora’ (p. 193). So both the protagonists are fat, both are grey, and Maddalena only wants to sit at home and mend socks for her children. The tone of this final tableau, as the author's son might have observed, is close to a pulp fotoromanzo, and indeed it is hard to avoid the impression that the writer has dismissed this particular plot with a somewhat facile conclusion.

Tutti i nostri ieri (Torino, 1952), is the longest of Ginzburg's novels. The book has a maturity and fluency which makes it, together with Lessico famigliare (Torino, 1963), one of the writer's greatest achievements. Its success seems in part a function of its unusual length, which offers the writer scope for a fuller deployment of the intricate inter-relationships of two separately defined family units. The division of the book into two main parts (town/North, country/South) gives it a much improved structural balance when compared to her previous fiction, where the narrative leaps between urban sophistication and rough countryside can seem sudden and arbitrary. The first part shows the vicissitudes of two quintessentially bourgeois families who live on opposite sides of the same street in an unnamed Northern town. Although for once events are not narrated in the first person, the key character is a younger sister in the less wealthy of the two families, Anna, and the movement of the narrative has the same rhythm as her own adolescent awakening and involvement in the situation which surrounds her. In the early pages of the first part we find a kind of childish filter applied to everyday occurrences, and this distorted perspective by the internal narrator can again be seen as Ginzburg's most sensitive narrative device: ‘Il cane non c'era perché l'avevano mandato da certi amici a sposarsi’ (p. 29). Clearly the device places a kind of natural limit on the collective insight which is permissible in a given situation. P. de Tommaso sees it as a reduction placed on the social context of a character: ‘Il limite di fondo ci sembra di doverlo cercare … nell'adozione di quella che vorremmo definire l'ottica interna al gruppo familiare: … un'ottica di tal genere è per forza un'ottica riduttiva: per essa il personaggio risulta depauperato della dimensione pubblica, (del) correlato storico.’⁷ Yet the girl/woman's privileged view of her elder sister Concettina allows the author to present a masterly refinement of the characteristic female, vain and mediocre, which has so far dominated her fiction without being given a fixative portrait. In relation to Concettina, Anna is in a position to hear half-understood gossip at table or the crying behind a locked bedroom door; she witnesses Concettina's gloom in front of a new dress or a bathroom mirror and the continuous politics of fidanzamento as played out by a selfish elder sister. Hence the cumulative picture becomes irresistibly credible: a little over twenty, the girl is idle and slow-witted. She is worried about her university thesis on Racine, but only writes twenty-five pages. She cries when it is turned down. She agonizes about her fat thighs, small breasts and disorderly hair; she hides at a window to take down the measurements of a neighbour's coat which she wants to wear after her wedding. When Anna herself, pregnant by the son in the family living opposite, receives a proposal of marriage from a middle-aged friend of the family, Cenzo Rena, Concettina alternately shouts and weeps at the predicament of this sister whom she has in any case ignored.

A further twist of Ginzburg's presentation is to make Concettina marry a Fascist despite having taken a romantic interest in the clandestine activities of her brother Ippolito and his friends. Ippolito himself ends up dead on a park bench, committing a suicide which is this time peripheral to the novel's plot and suggestive of Pavese's suicide two years before the novel's date of composition. Before his self-destruction Ippolito is depicted as a depressed figure, an insomniac who takes to wandering around the town on his own after the German invasion of France. Cenzo Rena (always referred to by the curious combination of nome and cognome, for the author has still not solved her stated aversion to surnames) is an inspired fictional creation for Ginzburg: here is the character who can swing the novel's setting to the country and the South (Leone and Natalia Ginzburg's exile to Pizzoli in the Abruzzi had supplied her with a fertile store of descriptive and psychological material which she ransacked systematically for the country scenes in all her subsequent writing). In fact, Cenzo Rena is a village intellectual and rich man somewhere in Puglia, takes a positive attitude to social problems, and shows a real understanding of political issues in their context: the malnutrition of peasant children, the non-payment of grants, the need to replace the podestà by a post-war sindaco, the inadequacy of the medico condotto, and so on. Thus he provides Ginzburg's fiction with an authentic left-wing engagé figure, and his decision to take the blame for a German soldier accidentally killed in his house—tantamount to an act of suicide—rounds off the second part of the novel with a politically motivated sacrifice which is all the more plausible by being the exact counterpart to the depressive suicide that resolves Ginzburg's story line elsewhere.

This is the only novel, in fact, which ends on a positive note, creating a rift in the otherwise uniformly grey curtain which falls over the Ginzburgian family. The style is misleadingly flat and placid for a story ending in violence and war. Ginzburg is not so much banishing horror or macabre tones from her account as naturalizing them to the point where they lose their power to shock or surprise the reader, who is under the general narcotic of the casual juxtaposition of chatty inconsequentiality and family disaster. The elemental moments of birth or death are thus cut down to the status of a visit or a meal or a new hat: ‘Il bambino era una bambina e nacque al principio di maggio’ (p. 203). ‘Sulla panchina Ippolito sedeva morto, e accanto a lui per terra c'era il revolver del padre’ (p. 143). Even the dramatic climax of the book, where Cenzo Rena and the Jewish refugee Franz are brought to the wall for execution, is related with the even tone of its least significant events:

E poi furono portati fuori sulla piazza del municipio e Franz fu preso e sbattuto contro il muro e ci fu l'ordine di sparare e Cenzo Rena si coprì la faccia con le mani. E anche lui fu sbattuto contro il muro e sentì l'urto del muro contro la testa e campane e voci. E così morirono Cenzo Rena e Franz.

(p. 305)

Still, in Tutti i nostri ieri, Ginzburg cannot resist her functional motif of a character's death in isolation, and this time we find the comic figure of La Signora Maria (governess to Anna's family) reduced to living in a guest-house for old women in Torino. During a bombing raid she is last out of her room, stuffing towels into a suitcase. Afterwards she is stone dead on the stairs, still clutching the pathetic case (pp. 238-9). The novel, in fact, is constructed to include the whole range of Ginzburg's recurring motifs: Giuma's seduction of Anna, Anna's marriage to Cenzo Rena, at first one of convenience, later developing into love, Ippolito's suicide, the nanny's lonely death in a pensione, and the obsessive preoccupation with holidays, clothes and motor car of a prosperous bourgeoisie. But the strength of Tutti i nostri ieri lies both in the working out of Ginzburg's central themes and a sustained combinative interest in the infinite possible permutations of the siblings in two large households. Her attention is focused not on why people do things, but on how they act. New women or girl characters are invariably described by the clothes they wear (colour, fashion, cut, material), and several men in Ginzburg's fiction are presented with a ciuffo or piumacchio of hair, which in subsequent scenes they straighten or throw back from the forehead. This perfunctory characterization, deliberately close to caricature, throws an unusually large part of the reader's attention on to the transactions of the cast, the old unfashionable plot line.

It is revealing that in Ginzburg's next, much shorter novel, Sagittario (1957), the mother-protagonist goes to a cinema when she has an empty afternoon to fill and her complaint about the film to her daughter (again the first-person narrator) concerns precisely its lack of a recognizable plot:

… davano un film di cacce africane, a colori; e lei rimase a guardare, nella sala semivuota, mandrie e mandrie di bufali su sconfinati orizzonti color rosso fuoco; non c'era intreccio, non succedeva niente, si vedevano solo bufali, bisonti e elefanti; senza intreccio lei si annoiava.

(p. 256)

Sagittario is a short, static study in petit-bourgeois femininity with canonical Ginzburgian ingredients: there is the vague, fussy, easily bored mother who wants to set up a fashion shop and is cheated out of all her savings by her only friend. The first-person narrator is again the younger of two daughters. The elder daughter contracts a marriage without love. The resolution of the story is the same pointless solitude that awaits the main characters in Valentino. After she has been robbed of her shares in Italgas, the mother has no resources to fall back on: ‘… pensava che lei ormai era vecchia, e la vita non le avrebbe dato più niente’ (p. 267).

Le voci della sera (1961), Ginzburg's most recent novel to date, is a return to the extended family saga of Tutti i nostri ieri. It was written in London, where the author says the sights and sounds of her Piedmontese childhood flooded her memory and provoked a narrative which we may judge to be already more than half way to the pure autobiography of Lessico famigliare. The story presents a successful businessman, ‘il vecchio Balotta’, who has a string of more or less indecisive sons and daughters, and therefore gradually passes on control of his textile factory to Purillo, the orphaned child of a distant relative who has been brought up in his home as a son. Elsa, the first-person narrator, is a girl with vague, gossipy parents who admire Balotta's family but are unaware that she is having an affair with one of the sons, Tommasino. Tommasino and Elsa become engaged, but she releases him from the engagement when she becomes aware of his weakness.

As a subject, this material seems loose and tenuous, and the strength of the novel lies entirely in the texture of shifting fragments of conversation, sketches of past events, reports, juxtaposed blocks of dialogue which recall the particular timbre of a person's voice or the favourite phrases in their everyday vocabulary. Thus Montale has spoken of the basso continuo del gossip as the scope and effect of the book, and others, such as L. Crocenzi, go so far as to see Le voci della sera as the author's most sensitively conceived and executed work. Calvino, in a comparison with Tutti i nostri ieri, considers it ‘… più bello dell'altro, perché tutti gli elementi che erano nell'altro, sono qui fusi con più rigore e compattezza e ironia e affetto, e un'ombra di tristezza che ci raggiunge senza cercare di soverchiarci’,⁸ and G. M. Cecchi also sees as its special strength ‘… il modo con cui l'A. riesce, con così struggente adesione, a resuscitare il piccolo e chiuso mondo piemontese attraverso quel suo disadorno, spoglio, oggettivo raccontare e quel moderato uso del dialetto, che par esso divenir qui oggetto di accorato amore’.⁹

It is outside the scope of this analysis of Natalia Ginzburg's fiction to consider Lessico famigliare, for the ingredients of this her most successful book are those of a journal intime, coolly exhibited to the public, unadorned autobiography where there is no narrative re-invention of the well-known figures or historical events which occur in the text. Her previous narrative family settings finally merge into the author's own family when she was a child, and the internal first-person narrator becomes, as seemed increasingly likely, none other than the author herself. But the self-portrait of a clumsy girl with inferiority complexes is partly the projection of a retrospective literary persona for herself. It strengthens the image of a writer who with perverse humility wishes to appear shocked and surprised at her own success.

Ginzburg, therefore, passes herself off as a product of chance and culture rather than art. She is the self-confessed and self-condemned minore. Because her text pretends to claim nothing from either reader or critic, we have come to see her as part of the immobile background of a contemporary national literature. In her essays she has done nothing at all to correct this error of perspective. Like Ivy Compton Burnett and Emily Dickinson, two other women writers she deeply admires, Ginzburg works with no sense of her public and has always underestimated the importance of her books. She would have us believe that the little she had to say was said in the slightest possible way.

Notes

1. Thus L. Crocenzi, in ‘Natalia Ginzburg’, Narratrici d'oggi (Cremona, 1966), p. 83, dismisses È stato così speaking of ‘contrapposizione troppo angolosa dei personaggi’ and ‘un senso di glaciale, un'inerte freddezza che alla fine sormonta su tutta la vicenda’, which are after all the effects the novella is designed to produce.

2. See Cinque romanzi brevi (Torino, 1964), pp. 5-18, and Le piccole virtù (Torino, 1967), pp. 73-90, respectively.

3. The short stories mentioned here are all collected in Cinque romanzi brevi. All subsequent references to Ginzburg's work, unless otherwise stated, are to this edition.

4. Cinque romanzi brevi, p. 12.

5. Crocenzi, p. 84.

6. See the Prefazione to Cinque romanzi brevi, p. 15.

7. P. de Tommaso, ‘Natalia Ginzburg’, in I contemporanei, Vol. III (Milan, 1969), pp. 827-8.

8. In ‘Natalia Ginzburg o le possibilità del romanzo borghese’, in L'Europa letteraria, giugno-agosto, 1961, p. 136.

9. In a review of Le voci della sera, in Il ponte (1961), p. 1442.