Lies and sorcery

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Lies and Sorcery (Italian Menzogna e sortilegio ) is the first novel by the Italian writer Elsa Morante . The novel from 1948 is about the creeping decline of a family in southern Italy at the turn of the century and their flight from the increasing bitter financial and social reality in fantasy and delusions. The family saga, spanning three generations, interweaves aspects of fable and fairy tale as well as social and educational novels . The novel was awarded the Premio Viareggio in the year of publication .

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The young southern Italian Elisa leads a withdrawn life in the house of her warm but moody adoptive mother, the lovelorn Rosaria. Elisha's only companions are the ghosts of her past who populate her vivid imagination. After Rosario's death, Elisha tries to free herself from these ghosts by writing down the history of her family.

Elisha's grandmother Cesira, an ambitious governess from the country, attracted the attention of the much older nobleman Teodoro, who was friends with her employers, because of her youthful beauty. Initially only interested in an affair, the latter lets himself be carried away with a sentimental impulse to marry the orphaned and destitute shopkeeper’s daughter. The marriage does not bring her the hoped-for social advancement, but leads to a break with Teodoro's family, whose patience with the lavish serious destroyer is now finally exhausted after countless scandals due to this improper relationship. With the support of his family and the prospect of a lucrative marriage, Teodoro also loses the credit with his creditors, has to sell his palace and moves with Cesira to a working-class district, where he hatches dubious but rarely profitable deals in pubs while drinking plenty of alcohol while Cesira feeds the family through private lessons. On the constant flight from his wife's accusations and the bitter reality, Teodoro is gradually drinking himself to death. For his daughter Anna, however, he remains a nobleman until the end, who treats her like a princess and enchants her with vivid descriptions of past glory and unlikely but no less promising promises of traveling together.

Anna later transfers this blind admiration for her father to her cousin Eduardo, whom she met by chance in the city during one of his teenage pranks. Eduardo writes her a love song and sings it in front of her window at night, gives her an engagement ring and torments her with his jealousy and enthusiasm for other women and travel plans that do not include her. In contrast to her mother, Anna realizes that Eduardo would never condescend to marry her, but still wants him to have a child. In her passion she wants to sacrifice her good reputation to him without expecting anything in return. Eduardo, however, wants to start a new life after a life-threatening fever and sees Anna only as a legacy, which he gets rid of with a sober farewell letter without giving any reason.

One of these legacies in Eduardo's life is his friend Francesco di Salvo, a young student from the country with great dreams of fame and revolution, but which never diminish his uncritical admiration for Eduardo's great name and wealth. Francesco loves the former whore Rosaria, whom he regards as his future wife, even though he fundamentally rejects the civil convention of marriage - until Eduardo makes fun of her and she immediately sinks into Francesco's respect beyond recovery. When Francesco finally finds evidence that Rosaria is cheating on him, despite all the bitterness at his injured pride, he is mostly relieved that he now has an excuse to end the relationship. He himself has long been in love with someone else - Eduardo's cousin Anna, who doesn't even look at the poor and pockmarked Francesco.

Francescos never learns that it was Eduardo who seduced the good-natured but ostentatious Rosaria with jewelry and flattery. Eduardo drops Rosario immediately and urges her, half with threats, half with bribery, to leave the city as quickly as possible. In parting, the embittered Rosaria prophesies an imminent death. In fact, shortly thereafter, Eduardos' illness broke out again: after several stays in sanatoriums, repeatedly interrupted by short phases of deceptive recovery, Eduardo finally died of consumption.

However, Anna and Francesco do not find out about this for the time being. Out of pride after Eduardo's disappearance, Anna has forbidden any financial support from the House of Cerentano and married Francesco as a material security, but, as she made it clear from the beginning, she deeply despises. He gave up his studies for her and took a job as a post office clerk. Just as unrequited as Francesco's love for his wife is the love of his daughter Elisa for her mother, who seems to see Elisa only as a chore.

On a walk, Francesco and Elisa meet the meanwhile returned Rosaria, who immediately does everything to win Francesco back without being discouraged by his undisguised disdain. Francesco meets with her regularly, initially accompanied by Elisha, later without her, but continues to love only Anna.

She has since learned of Eduardo's death and is falling into a deep crisis. She forges letters from her cousin in order to read them to his mother, who has gone mad with grief, in which she imposes ever harsher punishments and trials on herself in the name of her lover. Finally, she confesses to Francesco an affair with an unnamed lover, which only takes place in her head, with the intention of provoking the husband to a jealous murder in order to be reunited with Eduardo in death.

The jealous Francesco actually repeatedly threatens her with death, but ultimately shrinks from the act every time. When he finally had a fatal accident while trying to jump on a moving train, Anna had a nervous breakdown. After several days of agony, she dies of physical exhaustion.

Before that, however, there is a confrontation with Rosaria, who found out about Francesco's accident through the newspaper and blames Anna for his death because of her lovelessness. Anna takes the blame. She recognizes the engagement ring by Rosaria's finger, which she returned to Eduardo when they separated, and demands it back. Out of awe of death and compassion for the dying, Rosaria complies with the request. She also organizes a nurse for the last few days, takes care of the funeral and adopts Elisa. She hands the forged letters from her cousin to Elisa, who wants to burn them when the story is over.

people

Elisa

Daughter of Anna and Francesco di Salvi. After the death of her adoptive mother Rosaria, she becomes a chronicler of the family history. Shy and withdrawn, neglected by her parents and isolated from her peers, she shares her parents' unfortunate tendency to seek love especially where it is not reciprocated. The emotionally inaccessible mother idolizes her; She rejects the father's sporadic expressions of affection out of distrust of his motives and partiality for the mother. Rosaria, the father's former lover, quickly wins Elisa’s affection through her open-hearted manner, but often uses this for her own purposes, and thus brings Elisa into a loyalty conflict. Ultimately, however, in Elisha's eyes, Rosaria cannot hold a candle to her mother. The father, who shares this view and lets Rosaria feel this at every opportunity, is, however, resented by Elisa for his contemptuous behavior. Like all members of her family, she takes refuge in fantasies, in which she initially elevates the events into mythical proportions and covers the characters with a fairytale glow. Due to her comprehensive and ultimately relentless coming to terms with the past, she is the only family member to face reality.

Anna

Daughter of the teacher Cesira and the impoverished nobleman Teodoro. From childhood on, distinguished by rare grace and beauty, which she preserved, even if only in the eyes of her husband and daughter, until death, spoiled by her father, feared by her mother, she soon developed a pronounced awareness of her failed splendid inheritance that made her feel the humiliation of her poor circumstances all the more sharply. Like her mother, she doesn't want to have anything to do with the other residents of her neighborhood; the relationship with neighbors is characterized by mutual contempt. Her unconditional submission to her beloved cousin Eduardo is in stark contrast to her haughty demeanor towards everyone else. She is happy to make the constant sacrifices that Eduardo demands as proof of her love. When Eduardo asks her to cut her chest with the curling iron for her curls, she feels that the resulting scar is her most beautiful jewelry. While Eduardo soon loses interest in her, she remains loyal to him in her heart until death, even if she finally marries Francesco di Salvi for financial security.

Francesco

Elisha's father, Anna's husband. His biological father is the Cerentanos estate manager, who seduces a farmer's wife while passing through, which she successfully hides from her husband. Francesco proves to be a bright child who learns to read early and who soon stands out in the village school through special achievements. The parents make huge financial sacrifices to send him to secondary school in the city. Francesco becomes aware of his disadvantaged social position there and he begins to feel ashamed of his origins. The feeling of inferiority is heightened when he becomes ill with smallpox. Francesco feels disfigured by the pockmarks and henceforth attributes every rejection to this circumstance. He is particularly affected by the sudden indifference of his beloved biological father, who was initially introduced to him as a friend of the family and breaks off contact overnight. In fact, the land manager embezzled his employer's property and dies impoverished in prison. The only inheritance from the son is a love of music and a tendency to boast.

Eduardo

Anna's rich cousin. Shielded from all negative consequences of his actions by his privileged origins and the idolatrous love of his widowed mother since early childhood, Eduardo soon develops into a tyrant who only perceives other people as more or less suitable tools for satisfying his own needs. He particularly enjoys savoring his power over others by first letting all his charm play out in order to win them over, then exploring their tolerance limits through more or less concealed cruelty, in order to finally counter them at the first appearance of boredom or complications to exchange new companions. He drops his cousin Anna, whom he woos passionately for one summer, when he is recovering from a dangerous illness and striving for a radical new beginning.

Rosaria

Francesco's mistress. In the city she began an apprenticeship as a hat maker and quickly made friends with the prostitutes, who let her furnish her. When she was thrown out of the shop for theft, she found shelter with these friends and also took up this trade until she met Francesco di Salvi. Francesco presents himself as a noble savior who would like to lead her back on the path of virtue, promises her the wedding and forbids her to interact with her former colleagues - a commandment that the frivolous and soft-hearted Rosaria, who cannot refuse friendliness, despite all love but cannot obey for her fiancé. So she begins early on to deceive Francesco about her daily routine.

worldview

The novel paints the picture of a backward, closed and repressive society in a region in which little seems to have changed since the rule of the Normans . Coexistence is characterized by rigid hierarchies and great contrasts: bitter poverty exists alongside stately splendor, ancient superstition alongside the Catholic cult of grace.

This imprisonment in traditional structures is also reflected on the psychoanalytic level: The tragedy of the family portrayed lies in the generational pattern of narcissistic love relationships, which lead to an over-identification of the love subject with the completely inaccessible love object and ultimately to complete self-destruction. Only the last offspring succeeds in breaking with this tradition through the literary processing of the family fate, albeit at the cost of completely renouncing the pursuit of interpersonal intimacy.

shape

The novel's polyphonic narrative structure fluctuates between dream and reality, fairy tale and realism . In the first half of the book the dreamlike effect predominates, culminating in the depiction of the romance between Anna and Eduardo. In the second half, a realistic representation dominates, which increasingly deals with the social environment, but without losing any of its passion.

The division of the capital and chapter headings, the narrative perspective and the dramatization of psychological conflicts are reminiscent of narrative techniques from the 19th century. Characteristic of Morante are the juxtaposition of omniscient and subjective perspectives, frequent direct interventions by the narrator, the use of flashbacks and digressions, the insertion of poems and the balance between psychological character studies and realistic descriptions of the milieu.

Position in literary history

Classification in the work of the author

The theme of the dysfunctional family is found in all of Elsa Morante's novels. Difficult mother-child relationships and intransparent family relationships run like a red thread through her literary work. Parallels to the author's biography are easy to find: like the fictional narrator Elisa in the novel Lie und Zaubererei, Elsa Morante grew up in the working-class district. Both Elsa and Elisa have a mother who has frequent nervous breakdowns, locks herself in her room, and is hostile to her husband because she loves someone else. In the novel, this great love of the mother remains unrequited except for a brief, ultimately unconsumed youth romance; In reality, it finally turns out that the mother's lover, presented to the children as “uncle”, is actually Elsa Morante's biological father.

Forerunners and role models

When the novel appeared in 1948, it could not be assigned to any current trend in Italian literature. The trend at the time was socially critical neorealism , represented by authors such as Elio Vittorini , Cesare Pavese or Natalia Ginzburg , who thematically focused on the modernization of Italian post-war society and used a slag-free, simple narrative style for this. In contrast, Morante relied on baroque, sensual language, complex syntax and mythical, archaic references that give the characters involved a timeless aspect.

Lies and sorcery can best be placed in the epic tradition of the chivalric novel based on the models of Ariosto's Rasender Roland and Cervantes Don Quixote . Echoes of this can still be found today in the Sicilian puppet theater . The dark mood of the novel also led to comparisons with the sisters Brontë , Dostoevsky , Melville , Julien Green and Edgar Allan Poe .

reception

In the year of publication, Elsa Morante was awarded the Premio Viareggio for lies and sorcery . The author, previously known mainly for her short stories, became known to a wider audience overnight. Georg Lukacs even ranked lies and sorcery among the most important Italian works of the century.

But the criticism was just as vehement as the praise: the novel was a good hundred pages too long, the characters too numerous and the end result confusing. The narrative technique borrowed from the 19th century was also a source of ridicule. As in France, the post-war period in Italy was also characterized by polemics about engagement and realism - a supposedly apolitical book such as Llie und Zaubererei , primarily concerned with poetry , did not correspond to the zeitgeist and met with great rejection, especially among communists loyal to the line. The impression that the book is apolitical was not shared by everyone: Calvino, for example, warns against being deceived by the picturesque charm of the novel and overlooking the underlying analysis of class society.

Three years after it was first published, an edition was published for the American market under the title House of Liars , but it had little success - the novel had been shortened by almost 20% and the translation was poor. One critic equated it to a guillotine, which suddenly destroyed all of Morante's hopes of gaining a foothold in the English-speaking world.

bibliography

Primary literature

  • Menzogna e Sortilegio (1948). Novel.
    • German-language edition, translated by Hanneliese Hinderberger: Lie und Zaubererei . Gutenberg Book Guild, Zurich 1952

Secondary literature

  • Susanne Kleinert: literary couple and family novel: Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia . In: Bärbel Meimietz, Anne Altmayer (Ed.): Focus: Women and Gender Studies . Universitätsverlag GmbH, 2004, pp. 95-97.
  • Rocco Capozzi: Elsa Morante . In: Rinaldina Russel (Ed.): Italy Women Writers. A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook . Greenwood Press, 1994, pp. 261-266.
  • Maike Albath : novel, dreams: Moravia, Pasolini, Gadda and the time of the Dolce Vita . Berenberg Verlag GmbH, 2016.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Isabella Pohl: An absolute work before eyes . In: The Standard . August 17, 2012 ( derstandard.at ).
  2. ↑ Susanne Kleinert: Literary couple and family novel: Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia. In: Bärbel Meimietz, Anne Altmayer (Ed.): Focus: Women and Gender Studies . Universitätsverlag GmbH, 2004, p. 95-97 .
  3. ↑ a b c A lot of money for lies and sorcery. In: the mirror . No. 40/1984 , October 2, 1948 ( spiegel.de ).
  4. ↑ a b c d Rocco Capozzi: Elsa Morante. In: Rinaldina Russel (Ed.): Italian Women Writers. A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. Greenwood Press, 1994, pp. 261-266 .
  5. ↑ Maike Albath: The bitter life. For the hundredth birthday of the Italian writer Elsa Morante. In: Barbara Whalster (Ed.): Deutschlandradio Kultur / Literatur. August 12, 2012 ( deutschlandfunkkultur.de [PDF]).
  6. ↑ a b Dominique Fernandez: Afterword. In: lies and sorcery. Suhrkamp, ​​1984.
  7. ↑ Maike Albath: Rome, dreams: Moravia, Pasolini, Gadda and the time of the Dolce Vita. Berenberg Verlag GmbH, 2016.
  8. ↑ a b c Andrea Crawford: Glamor and Peril . In: tabletmag . December 1, 2005 ( tabletmag.com ).