Il seme del pianto

Elsa Morante lettrice di Simone Weil

Abstract

Reading Simone Weil’s works represented for Elsa Morante the discovery of a thought close to her own and at the same time the occasion for a deeper understanding of her original intellectual and spiritual dispositions. A now established writer, the comparison with Weil’s thought was decisive in guiding her poetic exploration toward a direction that might have seemed at odds with her personality, but which led her to a different perception of herself and of the world destined to give form and substance to her last works, especially La Storia. This second Morante, just like Weil who had passed through the factory and the civil war in Spain, found themselves forced, at a crucial moment in their lives, to take a step in an unknown direction and had the moral courage to follow it to the end, leaving no stone unturned to make tangible in thoughts or poetry the part of truth that was manifesting itself to them, to the point of overturning the relationship between reality and unreality. The comparison with the work of Simone Weil had an important role for Elsa Morante also played a crucial role in reinforcing Morante’s conviction about the political function of art, which she would end up assuming as a task: to oppose with the weapon of poetry the disintegration of human consciousness.