Natalia Ginzburg's characters and the variants of La città e la casa

Abstract

La città e la casa (1984) is an epistolary novel written by Natalia Ginzburg. The author donated its manuscript to the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma, which reveals some corrective habits at an advanced stage of the composition of the narrative. In the absence of a pen exclusively dedicated to corrections, late temporal stages were recognized because of onomastic clues, articulated with a process of polishing the constructions of the characters. This article proposes an interpretative hypothesis for the variants linked to the characters based on the term “physiognomy” [fisionomia], a word recurrently used by Ginzburg in literary criticism articles to express the strength of a text in transmitting images and human features with clear contours. By analysing the variants considering the newspaper texts and interviews that signal the author's conception of character and representation of reality, it is possible to perceive that the interventions in the text are part of an effort to unfold visible characteristics into habits that give concreteness to their attributes so that they inscribe a memory or be turned into words that can circulate between the different senders as a residue of understanding among a dispersed community of friends.