Public Memory, Personal Memory & Fascism in Natalia Ginzburg's "Family Lexicon."
An essay on Natalia Ginzburg and her fictional, non-fictional family.
“I have written only what I can remember,” warns Natalia Ginzburg in the preface to Family Lexicon. The retrospective retelling of the beginning stages of her life—decades before the novel’s 1963 publication—is fictionalized not by deliberate insertions of imagination, but by a reliance on memory. Her sharp pivots from one plot to the next, detached tone, and omission of seemingly important details demonstrate a refusal to participate in the simplified narratives of “historical nostalgia.” This form of memory—as generalizing as it is dangerous in its assertions of historical storytelling as historical truth—has been a mechanism for fascists to pollute facts with fiction as part of their political agendas. By recognizing memory’s subjectivity and preserving it through her family’s language, Ginzburg simultaneously narrows, personalizes, and deemphasizes history in her recollections to remove its romantic and collective valence as a means to sever fascism from mythology. Family Lexicon is a political novel in its simple reminder that memory is not as neat as some would like to believe.
There exists a fetish, not only inside fascism but also in the modern reader, to categorize and divide the past into those who stood on the right and wrong sides of history: the resistance leader versus the fascist dictator. Ginzburg rejects this need for cohesion by mimicking the brutal honesty of a child not in her speech or action but in the transparency of reporting the contradictions that pervaded her adolescence. The narrator’s father, inhabiting the role of both a staunch anti-fascist and the micro-level authoritarian of his own family, defines Ginzburg’s complicated bank of personal memories. In the narration’s first page, and as part of the first piece of the family’s lexicon, the father’s use of “negrosim” to describe “inappropriate” behavior is introduced. One such example is “Protecting your head from the sun by wearing a handkerchief or a straw hat…were also deemed negroisms…If my father laid his hands on any of them, he would angrily throw it out” (Ginzburg, 6). The father is not only attributing false racial dichotomies to everyday behavior (believing straw hats are a symbol of the “bad” Black person and not wearing them is a symbol of a “good,” or “proper” white person) but he is enforcing his opinions with the conviction they are sanctimonious, in the way an authoritarian leader would. Notably, and also quite humorously, Ginzburg isolates the modern reader by removing any sense of personal identification with the novel’s characters—the father is socially incriminated through his chronic wrath and racism (among other —isms)—and the family by proximity to the father.
Ginzburg asks the reader to confront and question the irony in the fact that the father, a Jewish anti-fascist socialist who despises Mussolini, is described with the language of a dictator, as a man who causes her family to live in “a recurring nightmare filled with [the] father’s sudden outbursts” (Ginzburg 35). A palatable account of the father constructed by selectively choosing memories for a clear narrative is missing, and its absence is political in its ability to depoliticize memory. Ginzburg simultaneously acknowledges the “ephemeral” or unreliable quality of memory yet cautiously avoids embellishing; she sacrifices the romantic binaries of storytelling for the ugly and complicated nature of childhood and its memories. Moreover, a daughter attributing authoritarian and “nightmarish” traits to her father whom she (complicatedly) loves and is intrinsically tied to conjures a suspicion toward the unwavering sense of cohesion and harmony in national memory as propagated by fascists and others. But, it is a harmony that exists only on the surface, a lie branded as an ultimate truth.
The Levi family lexicon—a foundation for which memories can be built on due to their quirkiness, repetition, and specificity—immunizes them against fascism’s “pervasive, rigid distinction between the bellowed in-group and the rejected out-group.” As part of its jungle of contradictions, the fascist belief in a collectivist society—to make one feel part of a national community—appears inconsistent with fascism’s reliance on exclusion, naturalizing false binaries. Whether an individual was accepted into the “in-group” or placed in the “out-group,” the division gorges interior worlds in its methodology, replacing personal memories with an Italy “united” by a “shared” memory of a romantic imperial past. As Mussolini put it, “Here the Roman tradition is embodied in a conception of strength.” One would expect the half-Jewish and socialist Levi family to internalize “weakness,” or a rejection from not only the Italian present but from its appropriated past.
Yet, against all odds, the idiosyncrasies of the narrator’s childhood occupy her memory; in this way, as awful as it may sound, even “negroism” becomes a way to fortify a family identity and belonging so it is strong enough to block out artificial belonging. Impressions left by the family during the narrator’s formative years of childhood ignore or rather resist, a fascist presence. It is the father and mother’s use of “nitwittery” that insulates and narrows memory. “‘It’s a bore. A nitwittery,’” the father said to describe a novel he was reading, and a few lines down the mother exclaims: “‘Will you look at what nitwitteries out Beppino reads!’” (Ginzburg 55). “Nitwittery” is infectious; the repetition of their lexicon reinforces its presence in memory. The father’s reaction to air raids later on in the book embodies their lexicon’s fortitude: ‘“Nitwitteries!’ he’d say afterward. ‘No way I’d ever go into a shelter! What do I care if I die!’” (Ginzburg, 188). The whimsical continuance of “nitwittery” ruptures the seriousness of the moment. The political present is viewed as peripheral to the father and his humorous stubbornness. Personal memory, therefore, is not only inextricably linked to the language of the family, but it is this very language that protected the Levis from succumbing to Mussolini’s psychological hemorrhaging of society. Returning to Ginzburg’s preface, it is the fuzziness of memory which makes it so comforting. Even if the family was terrified during such threatening circumstances, what matters is how it is recalled, as that is arguably felt the most central to the narrator. “Nitwitteries” taking up more lines than descriptions of an air raid is not only a blow to the “Roman strength” of Mussolini, but when packaged inside memory it also protects the family even after the war ends. The narrator is able to access a traumatizing past because of these quirks. Without them, dissociative amnesia—memory loss due to psychological or emotional trauma—could have easily blurred her childhood. This is what makes this book, composed entirely out of personal memories so radical. A lack of belonging in society is not a chronic condition; rather, it can be mitigated by forces such as the family.
Family Lexicon is not entirely transparent, either. Omission is hinted at through the sharp switches from one scene to another, seemingly leaving out what transpired in between the moments we are offered. Again, the preface tells us that these gaps are a reflection of the natural difficulty of drawing from a childhood experienced decades ago. Yet, just as nothing is made up to gloss over the memories that are less comforting—e.g., her father’s anger—nothing is made up to fill in these holes; it is Ginzburg’s removal of herself from the text, the voluntary decision which exists with the involuntary, to not fill in the bold presence of these voids. In doing so, she purposefully starves the reader of emotional satisfaction, and again, interrogates why satisfaction would come about if she spilled each of her bloody wounds into the text. The death of Leone, the narrator’s first husband, is mentioned only in passing: “Tragedy always made her feel terribly cold and she’d wrap herself up in her shawl. We didn’t talk much about Leone’s death” (Ginzburg, 148). The reduction of mourning and sorrow into a feeling of coldness, and the fact that this coldness is felt by the mother and not the narrator highlights the fact that the reader is not granted access to the narrator’s interiority.
It is not that her grief does not exist, or has been forgotten, but that it has been privatized as part of the narrator’s refusal to not only give in to the collectiveness of fascism but the collectivity of pain that exists in its memory for future generations. As part of one of the few rare moments where Ginzburg inserts herself into the narrative, stepping away from the reporting of experiences, she expresses how even after fascism fell in Italy, there still existed an urge to feed its strength by immediately historisizing, and by extension mythologizing its memory in art. As she notes, writers of the moment did not “choose his own words because in one case the words were inextricable from the dreariness, and in the other words got lost among the groans and sighs” (Ginzburg 153). These words “only had the ephemeral origins of a shared illusion” (Ibid.). This illusion, upheld by writers, is arguably an extension of the myths of national memory and its language of empire and strength because it likewise removes the self; the individual is again part of the masses, albeit of a different kind. Ginzburg’s removal of her own grief, and the narrative hole which forms around it, is her way of separating the private and the public, instead of sacrificing the entirety of the former to be a part of the latter’s in-group. Further, she refuses to take part in the public performance in the postwar period of grief and trauma, as she does not view their publicization as a testament of their existence or validity. It is not a dishonesty in retelling her private memory, but a refusal to trade in her most miserable moments for the sake of joining a literary movement. It also is her way of returning her parents and siblings to the novel’s core.
Remembering is also a form of forgetting, a fact Ginzburg is keenly aware of. Rather than exploiting memory by not only collectivizing it but injecting it with myths—as fascisms did to nourish its “hive mind” or masses which require the death of the individual—Ginzburg safeguards the memories of her youth and early adult years by simply presenting them as is. The lack of embellishing in the descriptions of her life, the inclusion of all of her family’s idiosyncrasies, and the purposeful use of omission for emotionally charged moments in her life all stand as a refusal against reducing or translating her experience so it could neatly fit into popular narratives of memory—whether those memories exist during the fascist era or in its aftermath. As a result, a form of radical power is given to a novel dedicated to the surfaces of life, as this dedication is an immunization against the death of one’s individuality when memory is solely collectivized.
Works Cited
Adorno, T. W. “Freudian theory and the pattern of fascist propaganda.” In G. Róheim, Psychoanalysis and the Social Sciences, International Universities Press, Vol. 3, pp. 279–300.
Ginzburg, Natalia. Family Lexicon. NYRB Classics, April 25th, 2017.
Mussolini Benito. “The Doctrine of Fascism.” Vallecchi 1935.
Dude!!! you killed this, so interesting!!