Ginzburg’s Worlds: The World-making Power of the Short Story

In his introduction to Un’assenza, a recent collection of short stories and memories by Natalia Ginzburg mostly published for the first time, Domenico Scarpa explains his criterion for the selection of the stories included in the volume. The scholar highlights how, in his view, what characterizes the novel as a genre is, in his own words, “a different dimension of reality” and “the ability to create a world that is complete with everything,” as opposed to the short story, which “moves within a constrained dimension of reality.” This chapter argues that Natalia Ginzburg’s short stories can be read as examples of world literature precisely because they undo this distinction. Through a close reading of some of the stories in Un’assenza, I show how the writer here does create a world, thus carrying out what Pheng Cheah has described as the “world-making activity” that is at the heart of world literature. The world that Ginzburg’s stories foreground is often characterized by a tension between center and periphery, familiar and unfamiliar, the inside and the outside. The impossibility of resolving this tension within the constraints of the short story allows the writer to create a world that is not fixed, but rather always in potentia, captured in the process of its own making.