Elsa Morante: la mémoire comme examen patomorphologique des mensonges romanesques
Elsa Morante: la mémoire comme examen patomorphologique des mensonges romanesques

Summary/Abstract: The article brings into discussion the grand „topic” of the modern world: the non-identity with oneself of the individual invaded by the other and by the knowledge offered by the other/others through fable, invention, representation, illusion, fiction, artifice, creation. In other words, the literature views as a lie and its opposite – the defying through self-illusion, witchery, make-up, „conjuration” of the tales told since the birth of humanity. The parallel world of the „dream in wake” rivals the reality and substitutes it duet o an excessive complexity of what we attempt to grasp. The interchangeability of the fiction and reality, of the need to fable and the paranoia imposed by it, is brought boldly into stage by René Girard, the leading specialist of the literary lie. The poetics of the reverie to which Elsa Morante subscribed is defined precisely in the same manner. All the characters in the novel are mythomanical, aboulic becoming victims of a defective relation with the reality caused by an uncontrollable production of the lie. Having a don quixote and bovaryan ascendancy, their madness is not derived from the reading of books, because her characters are „posthumous”, they appear after the book and after the reading, when the Great Books had jumped into reality, infecting it, being known without being read. Their lie is a sign of memory, of the knowledge of the past, of the invasion of the „other” and of the alienation.

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