Is it possible to cast an "anarchic gaze" on Giovanni Verga's literary
production? ---- Marxist critics, who for years have argued over thegreater or lesser concordance of Verga's works with Marxist canons, have
nevertheless highlighted their polysemy (that is, the plurality of
meanings that allows for different and sometimes conflicting readings)
and their "relevance" (the ability to provide today's readers with
something that relates to their lives, their experiences, their values).
These aspects should also make the task easier for those seeking
libertarian implications in those works.
Among these, Graziana Maniscalco and Nino Romeo, actress and director of
the CTS (Sicilian Theater Center), stand out. On July 25th and 26th,
they staged Rosso Malpelo, "the pinnacle of Verga's short story writing
in terms of awareness and expressiveness," according to literary critic
Guido Baldi. The performance took place inside the Daniele quarry, where
in the 19th century, small-time miners like Rosso Malpelo extracted the
red gravel destined for the homes and port of Catania. The
interpretation of the novella essentially drew on the readings of Romano
Luperini, another important Verga critic, in several of his studies.
Luperini had used Rosso Malpelo as a model to reconstruct the poetics of
the author, so sparing in discussing himself and his work, through the
changes he had made over time, from the first edition in 1878 to the
last, twenty years later, in 1897, in which Verga had taken to the
extreme his attempt to "eclipse (sic) the writer as much as possible, to
replace observation with representation, to place the author as far as
possible outside the field of action, so that the drawing acquires all
the prominence and effect necessary to give the complete illusion of
reality."
However, as in all veristic works, in this one too, the writer's
"impersonality" ultimately reveals itself to be a "fiction" (Barberi
Squarotti) that spills over into "mystification" (Roland Barthes),
"masking" (Di Silvestro, Lo Castro), and "concealment" (Trifone). The
expedients and artifices that Verga employs profusely to "give the
illusion of reality" ("different facts," regression, estrangement, "free
indirect" discourse, lack of plot, description, presentation,
psychological analysis of characters, use of the imperfect past, popular
language, proverbs, etc.), allowing him to reach the pinnacle of
European realism, almost never manage to conceal the author's true
positioning (the message, the judgment, the passion, the interest).
Luperini, first, and many others after him, have demonstrated that the
author's "interest" emerges and overflows from the "whole" of the
performance, from its progression, from the choice of context and
characters, from the "direction" (for example, the montage of one
particular scene after another), from the contrasts between the various
subjects of the story, from the reader's distance and otherness from the
depicted subject, from the alienating effect that ultimately leads the
reader to root for the victims rather than the tormentors. The
protagonist of Rosso Malpelo, who witnessed the death of his father,
Misciu Bestia, in the quarry, and the fatal illness of his friend
Ranocchio, is seen as seized by a surge of conscious rebellion,
"Machiavellian" in its ability "to look lucidly, without hypocrisy, at
the actual truth of things" (Luigi Russo), which will lead him to seek
even in death liberation "from his condition as a boy without a future"
(Nino Romeo). For Luperini, Rosso "carries within himself a potential
element of rebellion against violence, that is, of social danger, which
escapes no one... All his reasoning represents a dark, initial capacity
for rebellion against violence." Then, addressing the context in which
the short story first appeared-in a workers' newspaper and as part of a
campaign against child labor in the mines-the Tuscan critic hypothesizes
that it served to give "a modicum of awareness to the workers."
Therefore, the denunciation of child labor and workplace deaths-by no
means eradicated today worldwide-is not the only key to a "modernizing"
reading of Rosso Malpelo: it is accompanied by a "potential" awareness
that would be incomprehensible if one were to consider Verga, in
politics, a conservative, even a reactionary, without seriously
investigating his ideological evolution through its various stages.
Verga long belonged to the democratic camp, a follower of Giuseppe
Carnazza Amari and Francesco Crispi, whose transformations he followed,
from his initial Garibaldi-like movement to senile imperialism, with
attendant nods to circles of the radical left, first, and later to the
enlightened right à la Sonnino. However, he maintained some particular
points of view: in philosophy, he was anti-capitalist, materialist,
atheist, determinist, and Darwinian, a fact he shared with many of his
contemporary thinkers, including anarchists. In literature, Verismo,
derived in part from the democratic Scapigliatura, was nevertheless an
avant-garde movement that "broke" with previous literary traditions and
was unpopular with the bourgeois public because it exposed their vices
and flaws. Moreover, Verga was dedicated to a stark, disturbing, and
provocative portrayal of the conditions in which the lower classes were
held in Sicily.
What most strikes the reader of Rosso Malpelo, however, is not what
emerges from the author's ideology, but what, repressed from his
experience, suddenly resurfaces within him in the fraught relationship
with Ranocchio and the recurring figure of his dead father. Here, Rosso
reveals that "non-egoistic dimension of existence" (Lo Castro) that the
narrator had until then denied. Verga's hidden humanitarianism thus
encounters the author's "deep" psychic impulses, which have not been
sufficiently explored until now.
Other elements of the novella lend themselves to a distinctly
libertarian reading. First of all, the prospective vision, which allows
us to grasp and develop reality "from below", through a narrator or
popular voice who stands up to represent social groups living in the
countryside, in the mines and in the seaside resorts of the island, with
all the prejudices, biases and mythologies that go with it, but also
capable, within a few years, of uniting in the most impressive
organization for social demands in the history of European socialism,
the Fasci dei lavoratori. The emphasis on working-class environments,
with their strong sense of community and solidarity, has led another
Verga interpreter, Vitilio Masiello, to equate the Sicilian writer with
Tolstoy and to echo Trotsky's definition of the latter: "aristocratic
and anarcho-conservative" (sic!)
It's true that Verga's quarrymen, and Rosso Malpelo is one of the most
tireless, are superficially imbued with a traditional culture, violent
and unjust-like the masters who dominate them-to their fellow men. But
they also retain that profound humanity that, if cultivated and under
certain conditions, can erupt into open revolution. Verga doesn't make
it a class issue: Rosso's tormentors, after all, are present at various
levels of the social ladder, and even among his own relatives! It is
Malpelo himself who, as an individual and beyond his class, must
emancipate and redeem himself, setting an example, even if this may lead
him into the labyrinths of death. Verga attempts a "parabolic
representation of human existence" by resorting to "psychologically and
socially exceptional cases" (Asor Rosa): reality does not correspond to
that embodied by his characters. But what some critics consider a
"limitation" appears, from an anarchist perspective, to be a virtue.
Rosso, in fact, "is aware of being an example of opposition and refusal
by the very fact of his existence: and so he plays his part to the
fullest, indeed he makes it an even more radical form of protest against
the system of the world within the quarry and against his own function
as a conscience of how life (and, with life, society) is metaphysically
organized" (Barberi Squarotti). Once again, it is the author's message,
the expressed or unexpressed potential of his characters, that prevails
over objective reality.
A final word on Giovanni Verga's extreme coherence. Unlike many writers
of his time, even those with avowed socialist ideology (such as De
Amicis), he never attempted to mediate, rewriting or censoring his works
according to the tastes of the time, thus avoiding certain failures with
a bourgeois audience. Fidelity to his own narrative model accompanied
him throughout his life, and it is likely that the silence of his final
years was rooted in the inability, having definitively become a
"codino"-as he expressed himself-to continue along the path of revealing
unacceptable and horrendous realities.
Natale Musarra
https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
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