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Fantasy and Narrativein Anna Maria Ortese

Questo 6 il mondo: una cosa fatta di vento e voci dolci-fatta di attesa erimpianto di apparizioni, fatta d i cose che non sono il mondo.-AnnaMaria Ortese, In sonno e in vegliaA novel is often it seems to me, nothing but a long quest for some elu-sive definition.-Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel

Anna Maria Ortese is one of the most iconoclastic and individualvoices of modern Italian literature. Her work remains intractableto the favorite game of classification and labelling, and it is extremelydifficult to place her novels and short stories within any coherentgroup of writers or school of thought. The world created by her narra-tive is not one which we can conveniently map or superimpose ontoour own conventional and consensual perception of reality, of whatlies beyond the limits of our own bodies and impinges on us throughthe senses. The most suggestive of her narratives indeed wrench lan-guage away from any direct representation of an external world uponwhose existence we might all agree; instead, her texts function as amode of apprehension or cognition, as an investigation of the spuri-ous notion of the real. Ortese's texts resist the notion of narrative as areflexive world, the equivalent of something external to it; literatureis, for her, a "cry in the wilderness," a witness not to what is, but towhat has been lost: "la letteratura, quando Vera, non e che la memoriadi patrie perdute, non e che il riconoscimento e la malinconia del-l'esilio." l Reality for Ortese is never a question of the present moment,but is always either recalled, from childhood, or deferred, to anutopian future.

Ortese's best known text is perhaps the prize-winning I1 mare nonbagna Napoli (19531, which is amongst other things an exposure of theappall ing living conditions of 'la bassa Napoli', as powerful asMatilde Serao's strong condemnation of dreadful conditions in thesouthern city in I1 uentre di Napoli (1953). But Ortese's most 'realistic'works, too, push against the boundaries of realism as narrative mode,and constitute an implicit polemic against prevailing Neorealist liter-ary and cultural ideology of the post-war period. In one of her most

ITALICA Volume 71 Number 3 (1994)


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FANTASY AND NARRATIVE 355denunciatory stories, "La citta involontaria," Ortese condemns thesqualid living conditions of thousands of Neapolitans. Here, oppres-sion and poverty reduce men and women to larvae or to animals,suspended between life and death, in an intermediate state: "Unapatina, misterioso intruglio di piogge, polvere e soprattutto di noia, siera distesa sulle facciate, velandone le ferite, e riconducendo il pae-saggio a quella immobilita rarefatta, a quell'espressivo equivoco sor-riso che appare in volto ai d e f ~ n t i . " ~arratives which most clearlypresent themselves as a reconstruction of preceding events, based onprevious experience, also debate and expose the insignificance andreductionism of real, and of the realistic as narrative technique. Evenin the most realistic of her works, Ortese shows a continuing anddeepening preoccupation with the edges, the limits, with the fine di-viding line between life and death, real and unreal. Poveri e semplici,published in 1967, relates the story of a young struggling writer whowrites "racconti di stile neo-realista, come si diceva al10ra."~This real-ism, in art or literature, is directly criticized at a later point in thestory. The protagonist and her friends go to visit an elderly relative inthe country:

Lo Zio, intanto, s'informava delle nostre professioni, e saputo ch'era-vamo Soniuccia pittrice, e Andrea e io scrittori, si rallegrb molto; per6non sapeva, essendo da anni lontano da tutte le mode, che fosse'realismo', anzi 'neo-realismo'. Sonia, in modo un po' infantile, glielospiego, ed egli, con quei suoi occhi azzurri e vuoti, sembrava pensare:

"Si, forse P bene," disse poi (alludendo a1 'neo-realismo'), "maquesto non deve farvi dimenticare la nostra cara realti, bimbi." (87-88)

The Zio goes on to describe the "reale" not as the visible, the external,the object of our perception, but something which has yet to beachieved:

Soffre molto il reale, bimbi . . .perch6 ancora non P reale. Solo il bene 6realti, l'amore, e questo ancora non si vede sulla nostra povera uma-niti. . . . Ma un giorno-i partiti non ci saranno piu, neppure il Socia-lism-il reale sa ri avverato, la bont i avr i il suo luogo. . . . La mentemalata dell'uom-malata di male-sari sana e lieta. (88)

The foundation of the real is to be found not in material presence butin ethics. Here Ortese overturns one of the fundamental tenets of theNeorealist position, which sought moral regeneration through directrepresentation of the material and physical world. For Ortese this re-ality, which Neorealists took for granted, is problematical, yet to becreated, utopian. In its straddling of forms and genres, its overlapping


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356 SHARON WOODof "r ea lt a and "irrealth," body and mind, life and dream, her workcontinually crosses the fragile border which we perceive or try to erectbetween the conscious and unconscious, between the real and the un-real, between the inner and outer world. It is this notion of border, ofedge, which I would like to examine in her work, and which a consid-eration of her work as fantastic literature would help make clear.There are many forms of fantasy writing, but here I would like to dis-cuss Ortese's works in context of narratives which, like hers, use thedimension of the fantastic not to create an alternative, consolatory andescapist world, but precisely to encourage the reader to question theworld around her, to destabilize the normal boundaries between realand unreal, and to superimpose onto our narrow consciousness of thepresent the hidden desires and anxieties which we prefer to omit fromour definition of the real.

Ortese's first collection of stories, published Angelici Dolori (1938),was published with the help of Massimo Bontempelli, at that time edi-tor of La Fiera Letteraria where some of Ortese's poems had alreadybeen published. This early association in the eyes of critics with Bon-tempelli's contentious "realismo magico" made of Ortese's work apawn in a wider controversy, and led to some vitriolic criticism bycritics such as Enrico Falqui of what was, after all, a first work. Bon-tempelli's is a rallying call for modernity, for imagination to free Ital-ian narrative from the dead weight of the academic and elitist past."Realismo magico" is the revelation of the irrationality of banal, thecognizance of the everyday and ordinary as risk and adventure, con-stantly disclosing another dimension of experience and meaning.Bontempelli's understanding of the literary imagination implies forwriting a hallucinated exactitude of representation:

L'immaginazione non P il fiorire dell'arbitrario, e molto meno dell'im-preciso. Precisione realistica di contorni, solidith di materia ben pog-giata sul suolo; e intorno come un'atmosfera di magia che faccia sen-tire, traverso un'inquietudine intensa, quasi un'altra dimensione in cuila vita nostra si proietta.4

While Bontempelli acknowledges the existence of the inner world, hecan still make a clear distinction between "il mondo esteriore" and "ilmondo interiore." His definition of "magic" realism as revealing an-other, hidden reality is closer to the more politically committed writ-ing of some of the South American authors such as Marquez, VargasLlosa, and Cortazar; in these writers, too, magic operates within andon the realistic structural framework of the "mondo esteriore." Orteseshares the sense of anxiety described by Bontempelli, yet we see in herwork a continual blurring of distinctions, a greater reluctance to tran-


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FANTASY AND NARRATIVE 357scribe and name any external reality at all, a continual questioning ofthe frontier between the mind and the world. Her novels and storiesundermine the "real" even at their most realistic, while the mostcurious of these texts short-circuit the reading intellect's desire forpattern and order. They inhabit the dangerous, risky and yet poten-tially joyful territory between real and unreal, seen and invisible,work and mind, reality and dream, and it is here that Ortese comesclose to avant-garde writers of the fantastic in the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries.

The fantastic is a genre defined by the boundaries it blurs ratherthan sets between fact and fiction, the real and the unreal, indeed, themind and the world, "a break in the acknowledged order, an irruptionof the inadmissible within the changeless everyday legality."5 For T.E. Apter,

The impact of fantasy (Hoffmann, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Borges) restsupon the fact that the world presented seems to be unquestionablyours, yet at the same time, as in a dream, ordinary meanings a re sus-pended. Everything proliferates with potential meanings and becomesa potential danger.6

We are not speaking here of those texts which Todorov defines as the"marvellous," "the class of narratives that are presented as fantasticand that end with an acceptance of the supernatural." Todorov goeson:

In the case of the marvellous, supernatural elements provoke no par-ticular reaction in either the characters or in the implicit reader. It is notan attitude toward the events described which characterises the mar-vellous, but the nature of these event^.^

This is not Dune , Star Trek, or the world of Tolkien, but a fiction builton the fracture between two orders of events. It is this suspension ofthe 'real' world which characterizes Ortese's work, as her texts sit onthe margins of meaning and refuse to coalesce into a coherent whole.In making reality opaque, Ortese goes to the heart of the twentieth-century literary enterprise; if she is a romantic gothic writer she is alsoa modernist one. Todorov points out the ambiguous semantics of thefantastic: "literature of the fantastic leaves us with two notions-real-ity and literature-each one as unsatisfactory as the other" (77).Thefantastic does away with dubious distinctions between form and con-tent, for here the strange is a matter of structure as much as of seman-tics; supernatural event cannot be held as simply content, but becomesinstead a formal element.


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358 SHARON WOODIn terms of literary genre it may be possible to see a parallel be-

tween the unreal's interrogation of the real within the text and the ap-pearance of fantasy literature itself as counterpoint to realism. The riseof the bourgeois, realistic novel was paralleled by the rise of tales ofgothic horror: the gothic and fantastic, we might way, voices preciselywhat is suppressed in the dominant realistic discourse-indeed, forRosemary Jackson the literature of the fantastic is "nothing more thanthe uneasy conscience of positivist nineteenth century."8

Fantastic narratives of the nineteenth or the twentieth century donot operate by simply replacing the real with something of a totallydifferent order. Imagination cannot be separated wholly from obser-vation and experience and even the most extraordinary creatureimaginable, such as the Martians in H. G. Wells's Wa r of the Worlds orthe Aliens in the film of that name, still carry out the same functionsof feeding, growth, and reproduction as mankind. Despite thespectacular special effects these Aliens are not alien at all but aknowing reconstruction of all our worst fears and nightmares.Meanings proliferate not through imagining something new butthrough a recombination of recognizable elements, as in Calvino'sCastle of Crossed Destinies; and Calvino echoes the Scholasticphilosophers in his perception that we can create nothing new:imagination is a matter of syntax rather than lexis. Coleridge makesthe same point, remarking that "Fancy has no other counters to playwith but fixities and definites. It is a mode of memory emancipatedfrom the order of time and place."9

In an essay on fairy stories Tolkien describes the fairy tale-whatTodorov would classify as the marvellous-as a means of setting freeneeds and desires; for him, fairy stories represent the recovery offragmented or lost desires, and in this way they form a literature ofconsolation and wish-fulfilment.1 But fantastic fiction, from Kafkaand Nabokov to Borges and also to Ortese, "discovers and aggravatesdisintegration. It is not a means of consolation and recovery but ofregistering losses and fears" (chapter 6). In both the recombination ofelements and its attention to what Calvino calls "the hidden desiresand nightmares of contemporary man" l we can see that there areparallels between literature of fantasy and literature of psychoanaly-sis-particularly in the psychoanalytic interpretations of dreams asmanifestations through displacement and substitution, throughmetaphor and metonymy, of the individual's fears, anxieties, and de-sires. Indeed, Todorov wondered whether the advent of psychoanaly-sis heralded the demise of fantastic fiction, turning its psychic formsand preoccupation with hidden desires and anxieties into the object ofscientific study. It is arguable that psychoanalysis, rather than makethe fantastic redundant, actually extended its range.


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FANTASY AND NARRATIVE 359Ortese's first book, Angelici dolori, is closer to Elsa Morante's Men-zogna e sortilegio or "I1 gioco segreto" of Lo scialle andaluso than to Mas-

simo Bontempelli. A series of short stories which re-evoke the magi-cal, privileged, imaginative fantasy of childhood, the atmosphere isone of enchantment: 'incantato' and 'allucinato' are words which oc-cur repeatedly, and as in Morante the hallucinated eyes of the childlook out on and recreate the world in their own image. Imaginationcan be here a form of escape: "Si sara veduto intanto come la mia vitaoscillasse tra l'incanto e la tristezza, fra i cieli e la squallida gente"("Isola" 10).These stories are concerned with the "felici e incantevolimomenti della giovinezza" the "prediletta ombra del sogno" ("Vitaprimitiva" 24). As the young Anna draws her beloved Comanche In-dians, for example, she sees them come to life before her, bursting intothe room and filling it with noise and color. It is the dream, the imagi-nation, which gives shape to reality.The story which gives its title to the whole collection, "Angelici do-lori," describes the emotions of a first adolescent love. Love, like imag-ination itself, is seen to be something which is not totally self-originat-ing, but which has its roots in early, primary experience, in repressedmemory. "I1 primo amore (quell0 che per forza di connezione sembratale) e sempre il piu triste," comments the narrator: what we perceiveas our first love in fact recalls a more primitive, earlier love, which inFreudian terms would of course be the love of the baby for the motherfigure, for the blissful plenitude of infant life when the whole world isan undifferentiated extension of the child, when division into self andother has not yet occurred. Neither love nor imagination can come asanything totally new. If adult love recalls and re-works this primallove, then adult imagination similarly functions as a recombination, are-working of elements which have already been apprehended by ourmind. Ortese's first book is a reminder that all desire and imaginationhave their roots in a past from which we are permanently exiled, andreach towards a future of which we can only dream.

Both love and the hallucinated captivated imagination, as evoca-tions of memory and desire or fear, refer not to the present but to thepast or to the future. The present constantly slips from beneath ourfeet, becomes almost a fragile, porous dividing line between othermoments which are collapsed in upon it. The first story of the collec-tion, "Isola," sees the young protagonist entering enchanted territoryin which past and future are mapped onto each other in the ghostlyappearance of her dead grandfather: "tenevo gli occhi fissi su passatoe futuro." Ortese has here a motion of time which goes back to Lu-cretius and indeed she describes the shock of reading De RerumNatura, in which the epicurean poet refutes the existence of the pre-sent moment as anything other than a fragile dividing line between


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360 SHARON WOODmemory and what we perceive is about to happen.12 Todorov relatesthis notion of the fragility of the present, its porousness, to the'evanescent' genre of the fantastic:

The classic definition of the present . . .describes it as a pure limit be-tween the past and the future. The comparison is not gratuitous: themarvellous corresponds to an unknown phenomenon, never seen asyet, still to come-hence to a future; in the uncanny, on the other hand,we refer the inexplicable to known facts, to a previous experience, andthereby to the past. As for the fantastic itself, the hesitation which char-acterizes it cannot be situtated, by and large, except in the present. (42)The problematic nature of the real reveals itself as soon as attention

is given to the surface of things. Conventional language and form areunable to capture or contain reality, which constantly slips away,which changes in the process of being observed, which will not giveitself up to the gaze or to an ordering, categorizing, classifying ratio-nality. In the first story of I1 mare non bagna Napoli, "Un paio di oc-chiali," the myopic Eugenia is to be given a pair of spectacles by heraunt. The spectacles represent the hope of change, a turning point inan ungifted and unprivileged life. Yet when the long-awaited specta-cles finally arrive and Eugenia finally sees the world around her, shepasses out from horror. In Arthur Miller's novel Focus (1965) the pro-tagonist acquires a pair of glasses, is subsequently mistaken for a Jewand subjected to all forms of discrimination and abuse. Ortese's storyworks the other way around: here the distorting lens discloses the un-bearable nature of the world. "Un paio di occhiali" also bears a strik-ing similarity to Edgar Allen Poe's short story, "The Spectacles." Inthe earlier, more comic tale, a myopic but vain young man falls in lovewith and marries Eugenie (the names are identical), whom he believesto be a great beauty. Once married, she gives him a pair of spectaclesand he sees her clearly for the first time. The moment of revelationand recognition in Poe's story is humourous: the young man discov-ers that he has in fact married an eighty-year-old woman who indeedis his grandmother. Poe's story is a joke, the marriage a fake to teachthe boy a lesson. Ortese's humor is much blacker, closer to despair.

The later collection of stories, Silenzio a Milano, depicts a pair ofjournalists carrying out research for a series of articles on aspects ofMilanese life such as the stazione centrale, a boys' home, the nightclubs.In these stories the surface of things, object of the realist enterprise,constantly caves in. The first story, "La stazione centrale," demon-strates the impossibility of locating meaning in objective description.The narrative becomes a process of transmogrification whereby thisliving forest of cement, described in awesome and statistical detail,


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FANTASY AND NARRATIVE 361becomes more and more unreal. Again surfaces disintergrate to revealthe horror which lies beneath and thus remains inaccessible to astrictly realist approach; in her vision of people themselves turned toconcrete or stone by the Medusa-like power of an industrial civiliza-tion, Ortese shares something of Surrealism's undermining of realifyin search of a deeper truth:

Uomini e donne, dalla prima alla seconda guerra, dalla seconda allaterza, probabilmente; senza parola, muti, docili; senza verde, luce, aria;trasformati in cemento, vetro, acciaio; trasformati in lucidatrici,frigidaires, essi che magari li desiderarono. Senza parola, trasformati incose; senza pih braccia, mani, volti, ma ancora caldi, per sempre caldi,incrementano la civilth industriale.'

Dino Buzzati's short story "L'inferno a Milano" portrays Milan as avery modern Hell, easily reached by the new underground. Ortese'sview of the infernal city is more gothic, where the industrial machineperverts desire and where every aspect of human existence has be-come regulated and dehumanized, where language no longer exists,where madness becomes the only authentic form of human expres-sion, as the "uomo-gatto" who haunts the central station says:

Signore, se io ho fame, in Italia, questo fa parte del paesaggio. Se ioperdo la moglie, in Italia, questo riguarda il turismo. Se io camminoper strade eccessivamente chiuse, in Italia, desiderando il mare, se lamia stanza P soffocante, se i rumori mi uccidono, se, in una parola, iomuoio, questo riguarda esclusivamente l'ente per la conservazione delpatrimonio artistico. I1 diritto, in Italia, mette d i buonumore, se non 6scartato dalla potenza economica, anzi, il solo vero diritto sta nellapotenza economica. Allora, il pensiero si perde, le parole si ritiranoconfuse nella gola, e la pazzia rimane il modo piu compito di es-primersi, per un galantuomo. (29)

Ortese's rejection of the catastrophic consequences for individuals ofmodern economic and industrial power instinctively had much incommon with thinkers on the ideological left such as Marcuse, and atleast one of her characters regards Communism as "un ponte perunire il passato all'avvenire, per introdurre gli uomini nell'avvenire"("Lo sgombero" 89). Ortese herself, however, retains a measure ofscepticism as to the ability of Communism to bring about the trans-formation of the present world and launch it into the 'real' (Poveri esemplici), even while one of the most expressive passages of this story,in which the journalists talk with a prostitute, a woman who is out-


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362 SHARON WOODside the law as social code and outside the law as economic distribu-tion and regulation, recalls both Vittorini and Silone in its lyricism:

"I1 cuoio si vende," disse il fotografo, "e ogni genere di lusso, e anche ilpane e il vino. Ma i fiumi tornano sempre pii3 indietro, e cosi il mare, etutto quanto P azzurro e verde."

"Non si respira," disse la donna."Non si dorme.""I muri crescono sempre.""Vi sono tanti uomini, e nessuno.""Nessuno, davvero, nessun uomo e nessuna donna," disse la prosti-

tuta. (127) '~In rejecting Neorealism Ortese also rejects the associated Marxist po-litical position as too narrow to encompass her ambitious hope for theworld. Instead, the existential alienation of Pirandello or of Kafka isechoed in her work, as mankind drifts in an incomprehensible world,fettered by mental activity which would seek to seize and constrainreality. Just as for Pirandello we are cut off from the world precisely byour attempt to make it the cognitive object of our "macchinetta infer-nale," so for Ortese mankind is the only creature whose ridiculousefforts to understand the world estrange him from it:

Si, I'uomo P veramente, con la sua curiosita, i suoi inutili interrogativi,il tallone dfAchille delle cose reali, che tutte . . . si limitano a rinnovarsie ripetersi in una specie di sonno divino, cui I'uomo non pub invecetornare. La sua malattia e questo crescere della mente, questo suo con-tinuo intendere, ascoltare--quests cultura e coscienza.l5L'Iguana (1965) takes Ortese's discussion of man's position in the

universe, the nature of the material world and reality, a stage further.The novel belongs to the genre of fantasy; the Milanese CountAleardo, arriving on a mysterious, haunted island off the coast ofPortugal inhabited by a would-be poet and his two uncouth brothers,falls in love with their servant-girl, an iguana. The appearance of theiguana is already an echo, or perhaps an embodiment, or even per-haps a dream of a conversation between Daddo and his publisherfriend before his departure: the two had speculated on the literary(and marketing) potential of a man falling in love, precisely, with aniguana.L'lguana is representative of Ortese's fantastic fiction in its crossingof frontiers, its disconcerting of the reader. Identities shift and meta-morphose, one into the other. The young poet on the island is now theeager, literate, lonely don Ilario, now the powerful, self-confident hi-


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FANTASY AND NARRATIVE 363dalgo Jimenez. Dream states are barely distinguishable from moreconscious ones, as the Count lapses into hallucination of the trial ofGod's murderer, and the corpse of God is a white butterfly. The novelclearly represents Ortese's humanitarian and political concerns aboutman's relationship with nature, which she sees as fundamental to hiscontinued existence on the planet, and with the absurd oppression ofpower, and her literary polemic is synonymous with her political dis-sent from orthodox Marxism. Daddo wryly admits the taste of thenew reading public for stories about barbarism and oppression, anx-ious for novelty on which to squander its new-found wealth. Yet forOrtese both a degenerate reading public and political theorists fun-damentally misunderstand the nature of oppression in assuming theoppressed has a voice at all, is able to speak, defend, and redeem it-self:

I Lombardi avevano per certo che un mondo oppress0 abbia qualcosada dire, mentre, se l'oppressione e antica e autentica, l'oppresso nonesiste neppure, o non ha piu coscienza di esserlo, ma solo esiste,sebbene senza una Vera coscienza, l'oppressore, che a volte, per vezzo,simula i modi che sarebbero legittimi della vittima, se ancora esistesse.Ma queste, naturalmente, erano sottigliezze o fisime impossibili da sot-toporre alla fame che editori mostravano di cose stuzzicanti il languid0appetito del pubblico.16L'lguana is a clear refusal to legitimize either the platitudes of Neo-

realism or the orthodoxies of post-war, left-wing politics, but thenovel is reducible neither to metaphor nor allegory. It does not repro-duce the complete pattern, a narrative of equivalents, that marks alle-gory. It would be possible to regard the novel as the account of a Fall:of the Segovia Guzman family, of the iguana-nature, of the relation-ship between man and nature, indeed, of the relationship betweenman and reality, but a multi-layered and dense text dissuades us fromsettling on one meaning to the exclusion of others. The image of theiguana herself is similarly complex, more than a metaphor but neveroverburdened with too specific a meaning. She stands for the inarticu-late and helpless oppressed who oppresses in her turn when she hasthe opportunity; she is Nature, once beloved by man but now aban-doned and treated harshly and abandoned to fend for herself. It is alsotempting to see her-and in conversation, writers such as FrancescaSanvitale and Sandra Petrignani share such an interpretation-as animage for the woman writer herself, cast out and vilified for daring towrite, for thinking don Ilario could love her.

In the Convivio, Dante defined Fantasia as the representation of theintellect's dream, and the link between fantasy and 'visionary imagi-


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364 SHARON WOODnation', fantasy and dream, is still made. However there is a majordifference here, since for Dante dreams were worthy of the respectaccorded to products of the intellect illuminated by the light of God.The modern conception of the dream, from Romanticism through psy-choanalysis and beyond, is of a product of faculties in opposition to theintellect. While the dream of the Romantics provided enlightenment,it did so in the face of the prevailing esteem for reason. In Problems ofDostoyevsky's Poetics, Bakhtin makes a similar distinction when hecomments that:

Dreams in the epic did not destroy the unity of a represented life anddid not create a second plane; they also did not destroy the simple in-tegrity of the hero's image. The dream was not counterposed to ordi-nary life as another possible life.. . . [In its more modern form] thedream is introduced there precisely as the possibility of a completelydifferent life, a life organised according to laws different from thosegoverning ordinary life (sometimes directly as an 'inside-out' world).The life seen in dream makes ordinary life seem strange, forces one tounderstand and evaluate ordinary life in a new way. 7

The significance of "sogno" and "sonno" shifts in Ortese's work. Inthe short story, "Anastasia," the young woman of that name, disap-pointed in her romantic hopes, returns from a dream of happiness tothe sleep of everyday, gray, incomprehensible banality: "un sogno, erastato, non c'era piu nulla. . . .La vita era una cosa strana, la vita. Ognitanto sembrava di capire che fosse, e poi, tac, si dimenticava, tornavail sonno" (I n sogno e in veglia 4 4) . In other stories, "sonno," sleep,emerges both as an image for particular states of mind induced by thebarriers and constraints of modern society, an "oscurita mentale," andin a wider sense becomes representative of a whole way of perceivingand mentally constructing reality. This mental sleep indicates an in-termediate state where distinctions between mind and matter begin toblur, and this is the border territory of fantasy: when we are unclearas to whether we are awake or dreaming. In sonno e in veglia addressesprecisely this middle state. The first story, "La casa del bosco," is lo-cated in classic fantasy territory, the house in the middle of a vaguelythreatening wood (from fairy tales such as "The Three Bears" and"Hansel and Gretel" to Landolfi's Racconto d'autunno). The atmo-sphere is one of unexplained anxiety and fear, the light a constantdusk. The house is full of uninhabited spaces and surrounded bywalls which can never be breached, an element reminiscent of Kafka'stunnels, burrows, and endless winding corridors which lead nowhere:"si cerca la porta (per uscire da li) e gia si sa che essa e introvabile.Non c'e porta, o uscita, da questa situazione: il muro della corte e in-


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FANTASY AND NARRATIVE 365trovabile, le porte non conducono a niente" (I n sogno e i n veglia 24).While the Garden of Eden or some promised land may lie beyond thewalls, within them the protagonist can only retreat into ever smallerinner spaces and into a state of dream which constantly intertwineswith reality, unless what is then taken as reality is simply anotherdream. The figures who appear to her, who at one moment appear tobe the plumbers come to fix a broken pipe, a t another moment twopostmen, constitute the very edge, the fragile demarcation line be-tween mind and matter: the protagonist describes herself as

stretta da una malinconia cosi terribile, Lettore, da una tale con-sapevolezza che quei due figuri non erano ne ladri, n6 attori, n6 qual-siasi cosa che si possa nominare a1 mondo-diciamo la materia in-visibile di cui parla la fisica nei suoi momenti di sogno. (I n sogno e inveglia 2 6 )

While the figures of the plumbers are to some extent humorous, it is ahumor laced with anxiety.

Dreams within dreams serve to defer constantly the notion of whatis real; figures appear and mysteriously disappear, from the pipes is-sues forth not water but a stream of diamonds watched over by a fig-ure called M'yskin, an amalgam of a figure from Persian fairy talesand possibly Dostoyevsky's The Idiot. The ghost of the dead cat Lucinoreturns as M'yskin's companion. The atmosphere is one of undefinedanxiety and desire, of "terrore melanconico" with the protagonist liv-ing in fear of her mysterious and vengeful companion Trude, at onepoint explicitly described as an embodiment of repressed conscious-ness, but which again cannot be reduced or explained away in psy-choanalytic terms:

Trude . . .questo il nome--comprenderai: provvisorio-era tutta quellaparte, realmente, tumefatta, del tuo animo o citta o vasto paese che tisei lasciato indietro, crescendo o non crescendo ..La sua natura P ri-masta immutabile: una aggressivita-comprendi: continua-e unaavidita dura e instancabile. ( In sogno e in veglia 44)

The protagnists is a condition "dove mondi e sogni, passato e futuro. . . si alternavano." This is the characterizing feature of Ortese's workas of all fantasy literature, that, as she puts it herself, "tutto questomondo senza chiavi e misto d i terreno e ultraterreno, e si fiancheg-giano, in questo mondo, tutte le condizioni" (I n sogno e in veglia 50).Reality constantly slips away form the present moment and seeksrefuge in the past or the future. And it is on account of this future re-ality, yet to be brought about, that Ortese's work cannot be seen as an


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366 SHARON WOODanarchic juxtaposition of experience and dream. In her search for a"piu profondo reale" in which men reject violence and "il male delmondo," she is asking us to look at the spectres which live alongsideus and within us, and to create a world which is not the hallucinatory,dream-like one we inhabit but which is, precisely, reale. It is also thissense of the world-to-come, of our present experience as one of irrealtawhich makes her work profoundly moral rather than political. Thedeeply moral tone of her work bases itself on a vision of reality ratherthan a representation of it, an evocation through memory and desireof another world where the reality and freedom of the individual isnot purchased at the price of the liberty of another. Fantasy in Orteseis not anarchy but a deeply-held hope for the future of the world-notorthodox political utopianism, but a separate hierarchy of moralvalue. Chesterton, too, maintains the link between the magic and themoral:

Every deep or delicate treatment of the magical theme, from the light-est jingle of Peacock Pie, which may seem as nonsensical as Lear, to themost profound shaking of the phenomenal world, as in some of thebest stories of Algernon Blackwood, will always be found to imply anindirect relation to the ancient blessing and cursing; and it is almost asvital that it should be moral as that it should not be moralizing. Magicfor magic's sake, like art for art's sake, is found in fact to be too shal-low, and to be unable to live without drawing upon things deeper thanitself. To say that all real art is in black and white is but another way ofsaying that it is in light and darkness; and there is no fantasy so irre-sponsible as really to escape from the alternative. (207)

In its hovering between the black and white, its stripping away of re-ality, Ortese's work not only sends out strong challenges to realist fic-tion, to accepted modes of representation. It investigates the edges,the limits, the borders and in so doing puts those borders themselvesinto question. A later novel, I1 porto di Toledo (1975), is describedwithin the text as "quest'opera di ricostruzione del paradiso infantile"(36). Ortese's effort is to restore to us the "vivere estatico" of child-hood, to rescue us from our shipwrecked or exiled lives:

In una certa gaiezza e languore formale, o anche incertezza disperata diparola, lo scrivente stesso si affannava poi a conoscere tale suo stato dinaufrago, atterrito non giA dal mare, come potrebbe pensarsi, bensidalla condizione marina, tutta enigmatica e mutevole, dell'uomo. (62)

Ortese would have us acknowledge the spectres which live alongsideand within us, and in a constant crossing of borders of genre, mind


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F A N T A SY A N D N A R R A T IV E 367and world, reality and unreality she both reminds us of their fragilityand urges us to explore these other regions in the hope of restoring areality that she describes as "piu reale." For Ortese we live in theshadow of the real: as Milan Kundera expresses it in The Book ofLaughter and Forgetting,

I t t akes s o li tt le , s o in fin i te ly l i tt le , fo r a p er son to c ros s th e bor de r be-yo nd w hic h every th ing loses me anin g : love , convic t ion , fa i th , h i s to ry .H u m an life -and h e r e i n l ie s i t s s ec re t- tak es p l ace i n t h e i m m ed i a t ep r o x i m i t y o f t h a t b o r d e r , e v en i n d i r ec t co n t ac t w i t h i t; i t i s n o t m i l e saw ay , bu t a f r ac t ion of a n inch .18

S H A R O N WOODUniversity of Strathclydee

NOTESl ~ n t e r v i e wwith Anna Maria Ortese in Sandra Petrignani 's Le signore dellascrittura (Milan: La Tartaruga, 198 4) 79.2 ~ n n aMaria Ortese, I1 mare non bagna Napoli (Turin: Einaudi, 19 53) 76.3 ~ n n aMaria Ortese, Poveri e semplici (Firenze: Vallecchi, 1967) 12.4 ~ a s s i m o ontempell i, "Fermenti poetici di questo secolo," Valo ri prirnordiali(Milan: Bompiani, 1938 ) 22.5 ~ o g e r a il lo is , Ima ges, im age s: Essais sur le r61e et les pouvoirs del'imagination (Paris: Gallimard, 1966) 63; m y translation.6 ~ .. Apter, Fantasy Literature: An Appr-ouch to Reality (London: MacMillan,19 82 ) 2-3.7 ~ .odorov, The Fantas t ic: A Structural Approach to a Li terary G enre(Cleveland/London: P of Case Western Reserve U, 1973) 54.8 ~ o s e m a r yackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen,1981) 25. G. K. Chesterton makes the same point, more elegantly perhaps:"Humanitarians of the nineteenth century were haunted by no spirits, except a fewthin ghosts; but these were the lost spirits of Calvinists of the seventeenth century. Intheir philosophies, the huma nitarians believed in heaven but not in hell. In their novel,they believed in hell but not in heaven" ("Magic and Fantasy in Fiction" [1929], TheChesterton Review 8.3 [1982 ]: 202-20).9 ~ .oleridge, quoted in Rosemary Jackson (20). E. A. Poe makes "The mind ofman can imagine nothing which has not already existed." Freud puts it only veryslightly differently when he writes that "the creative imagination, indeed, is quiteincapable of inventing anything; it can only com bine compo nents that are strange toone another" (S. Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis [Middlesex: Pelican,19731 206-07).IOJ. R. R Tolkien, "On Faery Stories," Tree and Leaf (London: MacMillan, 1964)32.

l ~ t a l oCalvino, The Literature Machine, translated by Patrick Creagh (London:Secker and Wa rburg, 198 7) 73.


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368 SHARONWOOD

2' '~ime tself does not exist; but from things themselves there results a sense ofwhat has already taken place, what is now going on and what is to ensue. It must notbe claimed that anyone can sense time by itself apart from the movement of things ortheir restful immobility" (Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, translated byRonald Latham [London: Penguin, 19511 40).

13Anna Maria Ortese, Silenzio a Milano (Bari: Laterza, 1958, reprinted Milan:1984) 30.141bid. 41. Vittorini's Conversazione in Sicilia is recalled in Ortese's later novel,

I1 porto di Toledo, where the "doubling" of reality is compared to a drug experience.Interestingly, Todorov's concluding remarks on the fantastic in his study of the genrecompare it to either schizophrenia or a drug experience: "In tutto solo la droga cinese,a quanto mi dissero poi persone che ne avevano fatto uso, pub dame di simili. Unaintensith straordinaria. I1 cielo era due volte cielo. L'azzurro due volte azzurro. I1vento tenero, due volte tenero. Vennero le ginestre gialle, ed erano due volte ginestree gialle" (I1porto di Toledo [Milan: Rizzoli, 19751 79).1 5 ~ n n aMaria Ortese, In sonno e in veglia (Milan: Adelphia, 1987) 99.16Anna Maria Ortese, L'Iguana (1965; Milan: Adelphia, 1986) 4.1 7 ~ .akhtin, Prohlems of Dostoye vsky's Poetics (Manchester: Manchester UP,1984) 147.1 8 ~ i l a nKundera, The Book of Laughter and Foregetting (London: Faber, 1989)75.

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