Elio Vittorini’s Men and not

Elio Vittorini wrote Uomini e no (Men and Not) between the spring and fall of 1944. The novel follows En 2, a captain with the Italian partisan resistance, over the course of three days of guerilla warfare against the German and local Italian fascist troops occupying Milan. As the title suggests, Men and Not is concerned with boundaries, the false dichotomy of human and not human. As a result, the novel is unfused, cleaved into two simultaneous modes of narrative. The “regular” chapters follow the daily battles of the partisans, but that narrative is interrupted by six italic sections that enter the psyche of En 2 and other characters. These italicized sections reach deeper into the philosophical and moral implications of the partisan battles, of their cause, and what it means to commit acts of violence when your enemy does not consider the same moral dilemma. The novel is split between portraying the historical fact of fascism and the impossibility of conveying its effect. What the reader is left with is a persistent questioning. What is a man, and can he become not a man?

There are times when language must rattle. As warning, as insistence, to unsettle, to mark unsettlement, but most of all to make noise. This book makes silence—what is unspoken, erased—loud. It blooms the silence following the impossible but inevitable question of “why” after instances of brutality.