MLN

MLN 116.1 (2001) 162-176

Rosetta Loy's Search for History in Childhood

Giuliana Minghelli

Sempre al pensier tornavano / gli irrevocati dì"

(Manzoni, Adelchi Atto IV, coro vv. 29-30)

"Per me il passato è qualcosa che continua a essere" says Rosetta Loy in an interview. ¹ Her 1997 book, La parola ebreo, gives a narrative articulation to the ceaseless return of personal and collective history. This autobiographical memoir that "non è un saggio ma neppure un racconto di fantasia" (Loy, 149) revisits 1930s Fascist Italy, documenting the steps that led to the persecution of the Jewish population against a narrative of family life in a Catholic high bourgeois Roman family. La parola ebreo, told in the present from two points of view--one of a child and the other of a writer-historian--unfolds through the contrapuntal play of historical and childhood narratives.

Childhood, like history, is something that continues to be. Childhood figures largely in all of Loy's narrative production, the metaphor "for a condition," in the words of the critic Sharon Wood, "from which it is almost impossible to escape: like the innermost figure in a babuska doll which prefigures all future containments and confinements" (Wood, 122). In La parola ebreo, Loy complicates this idea of childhood as an imperfect prefiguration of a greater drama yet to come, and grants the world and the language of childhood an equal [End Page 162] standing with adult historical discourse. The search for the word Jew constitutes the possibility of a critical confrontation between these two apparently irreducible points of view. La parola ebreo creates a silence in which the voice of childhood can be heard and by doing so it gives voice to the silence at the heart of history. It is from the point of view of childhood, of the not yet--that is, an untold story still to be understood--that Loy interrogates History.

I will start by quoting a passage from Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida in order to get to the heart of the tensions between history and childhood, and between remembering and forgetting, that give rise to the multilayered narrative structure of Rosetta Loy's novel.

History is hysterical: it is constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it--and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it. As a living soul, I am the very contrary of History, I am what belies it, destroys it for the sake of my own history (impossible for me to believe in "witnesses"; impossible, at least to be one . . . (Barthes, 64)

Barthes opposes, as mutually exclusive, two modes of apprehending time: the one of the historian, a belated and dispassionate spectator who with instruments of science and logic measures what "has been," and a subjective and affective experiencing that is the very negation of the historical, that must destroy the historical in order to exist. Between these two emerges another position, the one of the "witness," the negation of choices either rational or spontaneous. It is the position of unfreedom; it testifies to the untenable position of living within an historical moment while looking at it; it attests to destruction, the trauma of the invasion of the personal by the historical. Although for Barthes the position of the witness is untenable, "testimony"--as Shoshana Felman noted--"has become a crucial mode of our relation to events of our times" (Felman, 5) as well as a preferred literary and discursive mode.

Like the one of the witness, childhood constitutes an extraordinary subject position. Its relation to time and the world is simultaneously one of total absorbtion and exclusion. Because of its absolute devotion to the present, the child is a formidable actor. But, given its marginal relation to the world, it is only and inevitably a spectator, potentially endowed, nonetheless, because of this exclusion, with a point of view truly historical, because absolute. ² [End Page 163]

But to complicate the matter further, the child who remembers in La parola ebreo feels compelled to remember events that happened outside...