Visions of Extermination in "La Storia"

Abstract

Starting from a moral blame of history, based on the philosophy of the French thinker Simone Weil, Morante, which also considers the suggestions from the new historical approaches (e.g. the micro-history), proposes in her most known novel La Storia different images of extermination; from the one hand there are individual deaths which have a strong symbolic meaning, from the other there are the massacres of a big number of persons. As example of the first case of extermination I propose the couple Useppe/Davide. Useppe is destroyed because, although his innocence, he took on himself the Evil of the history. Davide is annihilated by the history which he tried to interprete with the means of culture and thought, but he took out the disease against which he would combat. Animal metaphors symbolize the massacre of Jewish persons. The usual and everyday routine, which consists in killing animals to give nourishment to the men, symbolizes the tragedy of the Shoà. This justapoxition culminates in two images which have Useppe saw at Tiburtina station: a calf which attend to go to the slaughterhouse and the Jewish persons from the Roma ghetto which are going to the lager.