Every Word I Write Is History: Memory and Literary Analysis of Italian Postwar Literature

University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository

Journals and Series PURE Research Report

2018-09-15 Every Word I Write is History: Memory and Literary Analysis of Italian Postwar Literature

Pennetta, Sabrina

University of Calgary

Pennetta, S. (2018). Every Word I Write is History: Memory and Literary Analysis of Italian Postwar Literature (Rep.). Calgary, AB: University of Calgary. http://hdl.handle.net/1880/108054 report https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca Every Word I Write is History: Memory and Literary Analysis of Italian Postwar Literature

PURE Award Summary Report 2018 Sabrina Pennetta Supervisor: Dr. Francesca Cadel Date submitted: 15 September 2018

Signature of Supervisor: fffu~ Analysis: My project centres around the notion that literature and history are not mutually exclusive. They both aid one another in understanding the complexities of a time and place. For my research, this time is the postwar period (l 945-l 980s) and the place is Italy. Authors included in this study are Italo Calvino, Cesare Pavese, Ada Gobetti, Natalia Ginzburg, Maria

Occhipinti, Elsa Morante, and Alberto Moravia. I will organize my analysis thematically rather than chronologically, because, while the distance from the war may affect memories or recollections, the goal of this project is not to discover the truth or the most accurate accounts.

Rather, the function of memory as a literary tool is used to understand how complex the nature of remembering can be and how authors use literature to understand the past.

I divided this project into three main themes; nationalism, gender, and memory. The first, nationalism, looks at how these authors constructed an Italian identity following the war. They used their surroundings, their language, and their families to create a world away from war and death and acknowledge the collective experience they were a part of. The second theme is gender. In particular, I analyzed the way in which women and men experience the war through literature, as well as how their class, sexuality, occupation, and familial background affected their situations. Women occupy a pivotal role in the study of the total effects of the Second

World War and this project will show that their agency and actions offer insight into gender relations in the postwar period. The final theme is memory. Memory studies, ironically, have a short history. Within the last twenty years, there has been a renewed interest in the function and construction of memories and how significant events impact the ways in which societies develop.

It is important to consider the temporal nature of this type of literature and understand how it functions alongside historical developments.

1 Perhaps the most notable novel about the resistance is Italo Calvino's Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, written in 1947 which tells the story of Pin, a young boy looking to belong in a world of

war and intrigue. The fictional story finds Pin encountering a number of challenges, both

external, such as bombings and gunfire, as well as internal questions of selfuood. Calvino

returned to this work in 1964 to write a preface that addressed the resistance as a myth-making

experiment in Italian history and justified his choice and desire to write a novel about the resistance. In this preface, Calvino made several important assertions, specifically regarding

ideas of memory and how they fit into a larger history which he incorporated creatively into

Pin's story. Specifically, Calvino addressed this need to be a part of a collective memory when

discussing his decision to write about the war and the resistance (vi). Pin's story is fictional, but

the story and reality of the author and the historical placement of the novel are grounded in an

understanding of the war period as a time of change and struggle for people on the peninsula.

In contrast to Pin and the partisan brigade of boys, Cesare Pavese's work, Lacasa in

collina, written in 1948, tells the story of a man desperately seeking to remove himself from the

war-torn cityscape and retreat to his house on the hill. Even when Corrado, the protagonist, is

alone, there is no escaping the sounds and sights of the war. Rather than being immersed in the

fighting or the resistance like Pin, or like Ada Gobetti and several other characters from authors

in this study, Pavese's protagonist prefers solace and separation. His dog, Belbo, acts as his

companion and true friend. Human interaction reminds Corrado that the war is waging in the city below and his relationship with his dog keeps the war at a distance. At the same time, Belbo is

important for the novel's author as Pavese was born in Santo Stefano Belbo in Piemonte.

Therefore, the comfort of the house on the hill and the accompaniment of the dog transcends the reader/character boundary and allows Pavese to speak through Corrado.

2 While Pavese and his protagonist tried to remain distant from the war, Ada Gobetti

became an active participant in the resistance movement. Gobetti's Diario partigiano, is an

autobiography, in the form of diary entries, that tells the story of her role in partisan activities in

Northern Italy, specifically in the Torino and Meana areas. Gobetti offers a valuable insight into the role of women in the resistance and the struggles that presented themselves as these women risked their lives to deliver covert plans and hide partisans and documents from the Gestapo, all

while challenging gender norms.

An analysis of Gobetti' s work in relation to national identity also marks a fitting

transition to understanding the role of gender in postwar literature. Other authors such as Natalia

Ginzburg and Maria Occhipinti also share autobiographical stories about their lives under

fascism and during the war. Ginzburg's work Lessico famigliare, shares the story of her family

and focusses on oral and communicative memory. Her fictional work Tutti i nostri ieri, also uses the Second World War as a fixed historical setting. The episodic style of both works allows the reader to be swept into the everyday family happenings in mid-twentieth century Italy. Ginzburg

equates personal and collective history, showcasing that both have important functions in relation to memory.

Maria Occhipinti outlines her involvement in the anti-draft revolt of 1945 in Una donna di Ragusa. She also shares her childhood and her confinement in an Italian women's prison near

Palermo. Occhipinti exposes the struggles of women exiles as she details the horrific conditions in the prison, and her fight to get adequate food for women and their children. Although different

in style and tone, Occhipinti and Ginzburg's work encourages a discussion on the role of

autobiography. These stories by women authors add to a palimpsest of memories and stories by

3 Italian women in the modern period. Their stories attempt to overcome the marginality they

faced during the war and postwar years.

Elsa Morante and her work, La storia, which tells the story of Ida Ramudo and her two

sons, is also pivotal for a study of gender in postwar literature. The story focusses on the internal

fear and struggle oflda to come to terms with her Jewishness in late 1930s Italy, her rape by a

German soldier, as well as to see the destruction and violence that surrounds her family,

especially her younger son Useppe, whose untimely death leaves a lasting reminder of the pain

imd suffering associated with the war. Gobetti, Ginzburg, Occhipinti, and Morante all challenged

the postwar literary canon of heroic soldiers fighting in the resistance and exposed the realities

that women faced. Alberto Moravia's 1957 novel, La ciociara, also has two women at the centre

of the story. Cesira and Rosetta are a mother and daughter who travel from Rome to a small

village in the Ciociaria region south of Rome to escape the bombing of their home city.

Moravia's story exposes the peasant lifestyle during the war, the lack of food, the money

laundering and extortion, as well as the bitter cold winters and scorching summers.

The real and fictitious locations and stories described in the novels above all share one

-common theme; memory. Both individual and collective memories have a place in Italian

postwar literature. Based on the Jan Assmann's distinction between communicative and cultural

memory, I have concluded that these works form a canon of cultural memory. Assmann develops

this idea of cultural memory as an analysis that interrogates the relationship between culture,

society, and memory (129). In this sense, the authors of this study have all been subjects in a

larger historic memory as well as engaged in the process of memory by constructing a literary

past. Therefore, the interplay between history and literature illuminates a new perspective of

4 postwar Italian society that acknowledges the differing experiences of those in the north and

south, of men and women, resistance fighters and solitary men; stories that need to be heard.

Experience: This project gave me the opportunity to research at my own pace with material that I am

truly interested in. I also developed my Italian reading skills as well as my ability to critically

analyse historical and literary documents. The unique interdisciplinary nature of this project

provided me with the tools to adapt it to a number of academic settings. As is such, I presented

part of my research at the 2018 Italian-Canadian Archive's Project Conference at the University

of Calgary. My presentation focused on the importance of memory in historical and literary

studies. I would also like to present my research at the 2018 Student's Union Undergraduate

Symposium, as well as other conferences aimed at the study ofltalian literature, history, and

memory.

I would finally like to extend my gratitude to Dr. Francesca Cadel, for mentoring me

through my Italian degree and offering her support for this project.

Works Cited and Books Mentioned:

. Assmann, Jan, and John Czaplicka. 'Collective Memory and Cultural Identity'. New German

Critique, no. 65, 1995, pp. 125-33. JSTOR. Web. 8 Aug. 2018.

Calvino, ltalo.1/ sentiero dei nidi di ragno. 6. ed., Milano: Oscar Mondadori, 1993. Print.