147 TEN Agency and History in Sapienza’s L’arte della gioia and Morante’s La Storia Alberica Bazzoni This chapter offers a comparative reading of L’arte della gioia by Goliarda Sapienza (1998, posthumous) and La Storia by Elsa Morante (1974), 1 with history as the central focus of analysis. To start with, I trace a map of general affinities and structural similarities between these two texts, ac- counting for the extent of their overlapping areas—either by homology or by symmetrical opposition. I then focus specifically on the representation of history, discussing Morante’s and Sapienza’s understanding of time: punctiform, a-chronic, mystical time in La Storia, and a combination of circular and linear time, ultimately with a positivist tension, in L’arte della gioia. The different representations of time are connected to diverging configurations of the relationship between the characters and history: on the one hand, there is the couple formed by Useppe and Ida, the protago- nists of La Storia, who are characterized by a lack of agency and obliterat- ed individuality, and who live in a state of utter passivity with respect to history. At the opposite extreme, Modesta’s magnified agency originates in erotic desire and emphatic individuality. The powerful protagonist of L’arte della gioia draws a sense of agency from her sexual and vital drives, which she employs to reject a destiny of submission. What these two complex novels have in common is a sort of excess with respect to the norms of realism: Sapienza in the direction of a superomistic will, Mo- rante toward tragic condition of irredeemable passivity. Through a dis- torted use of realism, they both voice a critique of a restrictive under- standing of individuality, reason, and history, inhabiting the margins of Goliarda Sapienza in Context : Intertextual Relationships with Italian and European Culture, edited by Alberica Bazzoni, et al., Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/warw/detail.action?docID=4550021. Created from warw on 2020-01-13 06:11:30. Copyright © 2016. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. All rights reserved.