Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon

– Special take-home final on Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon.

Write a 5-7 page, double spaced, typed essay on one of the three writing prompts below. Regardless of which one you choose, be sure to do each of the following:

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Organize your paper with a coherent argument that progresses through a well-conceived introductory paragraph and several distinct points that contribute to defending a clearly stated thesis, ending with a conclusion that takes the argument, as it were, to the next level. So, write an essay!

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Proofread the paper carefully, preferably several times, to ensure that the argument flows well, makes sense, and is persuasive. In addition, make sure the following have been eliminated:

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Misspellings.

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Incorrect word choice.

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Grammatical errors, including incomplete sentences and run-on sentences.

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Colloquial language.

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Sentences that do not make logical sense, or whose meaning is opaque.

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Support your argument with quotations from the book as well as some secondary references. As appropriate, you may use:

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Reviews of and articles about Lessico Famigliare, Family Sayings, and/or Family Lexicon.

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Interviews with Natalia Ginzburg.

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Critical or biographical writings about her.

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Broader historical or theoretical texts on Italian political and literary life, or the relevant genres (e.g. the novel, memoir) or cultural practices (e.g. translation).

You should have at least five quotes from Family Lexicon and at least three other sources. Be sure to avoid anonymous sources such as unsigned web postings or Wikipedia (though there is nothing wrong with using Wikipedia to find other sources where the authors’ names are given). Remember to list in your “Works Cited” any sources you use, whether for direct quotes or content you rephrase in your own words. Not to do so is plagiarism.

About secondary sources: I did a search for “Natalia Ginzburg” using OneSearch and applied three filters: full-text online; subject Ginzburg, Natalia; language English. That produced 58 results, a reasonable number, I thought, for you to scroll through and pick and choose some appropriate sources. That said, I also suggest some recent articles of a more journalistic sort:

Margaret Drabble https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/writers-vocation-natalia-ginzburg/ ]

Rachel Cusk https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/violent-vocation-natalia-ginzburg/

Eric Gudas https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/i-know-that-story-on-natalia-ginzburgs-family-lexicon/#!

Cynthia Zarin https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/hiding-in-plain-sight-natalia-ginzburgs-masterpiece

Here are the three prompts – choose one, please:

1. The modern European novel, as a genre, links and at the same time separates public and private realms. At the risk of oversimplifying, one could say that the novelist is a public figure who writes about individuals’ intimate lives – thoughts, feelings, relationships with others – for private citizens to enjoy in a private reading experience. But the characters in a novel are immersed at the same time in a social milieu, from which political and other public affairs are not excluded, though they may be subordinated to more subjective concerns. So there is a kind of mediation going on between public and private, through which a space of intersubjectivity that is not entirely private or public is modeled for the reader — and the novelist is the conduit for presenting this model. It is worth pointing out, as well, that this special slippery status for fiction in relation to bourgeois social structure is tied, undeniably, to what might be termed the division of labor within the family, whereby the private realm was traditionally associated with women’s experience, it was (and is?) a feminized domain.

Although Family Lexicon presents itself to the reader as a non-fiction book, its subject matter connects it with the novel, since it, too, puts the public and private realms in relation to one another and uses the writer as a kind of conduit between them. It a manner not entirely unlike the way fiction often prioritizes the personal over the political, Family Lexicon approaches the experience of living under Fascism obliquely, through the way it impacted Ginzburg’s family, disrupting an otherwise insular existence. Nonetheless, the experience of reading Family Lexicon is quite unlike the experience of reading a novel. Use the comparison of Family Lexicon to the novel as a genre to illuminate the interactions between the distinct realms of public and private, cultural and political. You may refer to specific novels if you wish, but it is not necessary that you do so.

2. Lessico Famigliare first appeared in 1963, a period in European literary history remembered as the time of postmodern experimentalism in fiction, particularly self-referential “metafiction,” but also the French nouveau roman (associated with Michel Butor and Alain Robbe-Grillet), in which the modernists’ emphasis on deep subjectivity is replaced by a discursive, flattened subjectivity that is simply the mirror of language, of textuality. Barthes’ “The Death of the Author,” for example, first appeared in 1967. One can think here of Borges as well, whose texts ironically putting into question the “authenticity” of the self were becoming popular in Europe and the U.S. around this time. In many respects Family Lexicon seems like a throwback to an earlier time, with its documentary impulse, its emphasis on bourgeois domesticity, and its nostalgic evocation of the pre-war years. But there is something about it that seems, on reflection, very much of its era, the mid-1960s. (As if the entire picture she paints were meant to be taken ironically…)

Try reading Family Lexicon as a postmodern book. Examine some aspects of its style in relation to literary experimentation with language, time, repetition, and, especially, the flattening of the narrator’s subjectivity. How does this approach change the way you view the book in terms of some of the issues it obviously raises, towards which it might seem to take a rather outmoded stance, such as women’s role, political engagement on the part of the bourgeoisie, or issues of class and the elitism of Italian literary culture?

3. The subject of Family Lexicon is, in a certain sense, language itself. Examine some of the ways language is a theme in this book. What is a “family saying?” (Family Sayings was the title of the first translation, and Things We Used to Say was the title of the second.) How does Ginzburg deploy the phrases that were repeated in her family as structuring devices? How does the emphasis on these phrases influence the reader’s experience of her text? (I am thinking, on the one hand, of a kind of decentering, orienting us away from what we would usually try to focus on – plot development, the inner life of the characters, some kind of dramatic conflict. On the other hand, she does string them like beads to give a different kind of cohesion to the book, as a book, making it into a kind of anthology of these sayings, like a verbal scrapbook.) How do these sayings work emotionally in relation to their context? (Don’t they sometimes reinforce, but sometimes counteract, the emotion in the scene?) What is their thematic significance? (Don’t try to answer all of these questions! They are just there to give some ideas about how one might approach this issue.)

In answering this last prompt, it might be interesting to compare some passages between the new translation by Jenny McPhee, Family Lexicon, and one or both of the two previous ones, Family Sayings, translated in 1967 by D. M. Low and/or The Things We Used to Say, translated in 1999 by Judith Woolf. (I still don’t have either of the other two or the original, so I am just working right not with D. M. Low’s version, which seems inadequate to me. If you want to compare translations, previews of both Low’s and Woolf’s are available through GoogleBooks.

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