Medicina narrativa, emozioni estreme e nuovi paradigmi della lettura nel "vivente libro", la Storia di Elsa Morante

The essay adopts the categories of Narrative Medicine to analyze the traumatic and cathartic intensity of Elsa Morante’s History (1974) and to propose a new paradigm of pathos and its ethical-aesthetic dimension. Narrative Medicine makes us experience the novel as the submerged part of a narratological iceberg: a backstage of pathos thanks to which readers live a cathartic experience and acquire a narrative tool of political resistance. History is the narration of a transgenerational disease (epilepsy) and its clinical-social tangle: a mosaic of stories and a mosaic of narrative layers. The gradualness of pathos is guaranteed by a multiplicity of points of view, at the same time interconnected and irreconciled and already represented in the narrator’s double voice. History thus increases the methods and repertoires of a storytelling aimed at enhancing empathy and relationship in the area of Narrative Medicine.