The Powers and the Powerless

By Paul Gray

HISTORY: A NOVEL by EISA MORANTE

Translated by WILLIAM WEAVER 562 pages. Knopf. $10.95.

Novelists are becoming steadily less audacious. Unlike their 19th century forebears, they rarely offer themselves as omniscient puppetmasters, privy to the thoughts and motives of an entire cast. Attuned to the jet hops of the screen--so the conventional reasoning goes--audiences will shun the long ocean cruises that fiction once traversed. Thus the fragments of 20th century life are all too often rendered in views, not visions.

Will to Live. Against all such trends, Italian Author Elsa Morante, 65, has turned out a supremely unfashionable book. History: A Novel is a long, slow read. It is almost entirely lacking in sex or suspense; when characters are doomed, Morante sounds a warning well in advance of the event. The novel's main figures--Ida Mancuso, a widowed Roman schoolteacher, and her two sons --are neither witty nor especially bright. Ostensibly the book shows what happens to these three between the years 1940 and 1947, during the ravages of World War II and the uncertainties of its aftermath. In building her story, though, Morante also constructs a profound portrait of this lethal age and of the uneven struggle between the machinery of annihilation and the simple will to live.

She prefers to use the most obsolete devices of traditional fiction. It seems a century since one act of illicit sex led the heroine to pregnancy. Here, when Ida is raped by a homesick German soldier, little blue-eyed Giuseppe appears promptly nine months later. In bygone books, the children of such misalliances were frequently provided with preternatural or otherwise spooky talents. Hester Prynne, for example, was unsettled by the prescience of her illegitimate daughter Pearl in The Scarlet Letter. Similarly, Ida frets naively about Giuseppe's intense otherworldliness. Morante's symbolism is rarely more modern than the 19th century. Ida's greatest fear is that people will learn she is half Jewish--and the mother of a bastard. Ignorant of these facts, her son Antonio brings home the stray dog Blitz, and proudly announces that it is "a bastard" with a star mark on its chest.

Yet in History it is not the personae who possess magic skills or truly utilize coincidence; it is the author. Morante continually makes old tricks fresh--not as a paring down of life's complexity but as short cuts into the absurdities of conflict and the urgencies of peace. The effects are cumulative. Details are meticulously piled up: the dress and appearance of all the players in a casual card game, the entire contents of a small room that Ida rents. This tangible solidity is threatened by the destructive mania that is called history. Morante prefaces her chapters (each of which deals with the occurrences of a single year) with lists of events that come close enough to scorch the Roman populace: treaties made and broken, victories, slaughters, final solutions, barbarities parading as statecraft. This constant juxtaposition of power and the powerless begins as an easy irony but slowly swells toward a cosmic pathos. While Mussolini strutted like a deranged buffoon, "Rome took on the appearance of certain Indian metropolises where only the vultures get enough to eat and there is no census of the living and the dead."

Roman Stoicism. Morante does not try to account for the carnage of this century. Her characters bleed and fall, or carry on with Roman stoicism, the buffeting of their lives "a natural consequence of being born." The only sustained political argument in the book is given to a drug-addicted anarchist who argues, tautologically, that people would be better if people were better.

In her elevation of simple virtues, the author may dwell longer than necessary on the nobility of dumb animals. She even allows selected dogs and cats to speak intelligently to the mystical child Giuseppe. Such sentimentality intrudes on the book's naturalistic tenor but seems, in the end. integral to Morante's purpose: to look at horror with innocent eyes and ask "Why?" In articulating that question, this demanding, powerful novel meets the stipulation laid down by Albert Camus: "The writer's role is not free of difficult duties. By definition he cannot put himself today in the service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it." Paul Gray

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