The Politics of My Novels
Silone, Ignazio
The following comment by the Italian writer was made in response to a critical article written about his work in a French magazine. Mr. Silone has ben kind enough to send it to DISSENT for...
...Otherwise, the "trumpet of Lazarus" [in A Handful of Blackberries] would be only a literary finding...
...The South is not merely a geographical but a social and historical notion as well, almost everywhere antagonistic toward the North...
...As for what concerns me, I can say that, in my formation as a writer, the experiences of life, much more than those of my schools and readings, have exercised a decisive influence...
...Instead, even without taking into consideration the fact that it was suggested to me by a chronicled event, it represents for me an attempt to depict a popular spiritual heredity which is still alive in our South...
...Almost everywhere it is poorer than the North and predominantly agricultural, whereas the North is industrialized...
...The following comment by the Italian writer was made in response to a critical article written about his work in a French magazine...
...Their conscience is on a different level, and in this sense Fontamara is a tragic book...
...The catastrophe takes place unexpectedly and inevitably...
...In all critical epochs, this nostalgia for the Kingdom has inspired revolts and heresies, from Gioacchino da Fiore, Francesco d'Assisi, Celestino V. to certain anarchic and communist groups of today...
...Truly, the cafoni oni [poor peasants] are repressed Christians...
...Had I had a different existence, I am convinced that, even after attending the same schools and reading the same books, I would not have written at all, or at least not what I wrote and in that manner...
...How can a writer discuss decently an aesthetic appraisal of his own works...
...It is a phenomenon which has not yet been sufficiently investigated...
...5) I do not feel that I portrayed poor peasants of the South as if they were in an a-critical state of innocence and provided only with a potential of conscience...
...3) In Italy, we have already had the "case" of the great novelist Giovanni Verga, who, for some time, was neglected and little appreciated by critics because of the coarseness of his language and the simplicity of his syntax...
...It seems to me that not enough attention has been given to one of the factors of this crisis, namely, to the importance which people of the South have assumed in various countries...
...Now, this is exactly the fate that the Christian ideal of a socio-religious transformation has had among us...
...1) There exists a certain crisis of national literary autarchies which has social origins, because it is a crisis of the dominant educated class, and of its language, formed in the 19th century...
...Despite the clergy's corruption (or because of it) and the ignorance and superstition of the South's agricultural masses, there survives in them the primitive Christian concept of the expectation of God's Kingdom, hinc et nunc, as the Apostles brought it to them...
...Contrary to the Marxist scheme, the poor peasant has become a more international person...
...age than the factory worker...
...As has been said, this makes for a certain inconvenience for national literary autarchies, and for the disorientation of critics educated in the literary tradition...
...In fact, nothing is more false than a merely bookish concept of tradition...
...As in tragedies, the inner tension of the story results from the clear separation between the characters' conscience and the "objective" development of events...
...Yet they do not bloom necessarily from other books...
...This could also explain why such works have less to lose than others when they are translated into different languages...
...All he can do is draw the critic's attention to some aspect of these works which he feels has been neglected...
...When such a situation is prolonged, the consequences can be serious...
...But it is possible that posterity will reverse the decision and speak of the "case" of Italian criticism of today...
...But how can one not admit that, in an unhealthy society, inhibitions push even honest feelings and ideals down into the personal and collective "subsurface...
...Then there have been other "cases" of the same origin...
...2) The almost simultaneous appearance in literatures of many countries of poor peasants from the South constitutes a political coincidence on a world scale of particular facts and situations which, in the past, contributed only to dialect and folkloristic literature...
...Tradition is not only literary, and no literary tradition has ever developed like a homogeneous chain whose links would be made up of the individual writers and poets...
...Agreed...
...6) Literature has accustomed us to consider the "subsurface" of the human soul as the place of demonic tendencies, and psychoanalysis has confirmed and explained this...
...This may be due to their poetic quality, which is bound more to the situations and modality of the literary representation than to their linguistic garb (without which quality there would be no literary translations, anyway) . 4) But books, the apologists of tradition tells us, are like trees: they are not born from nothing...
...Their deepest conscience is archaic and subterranean...
...But toward the end of the story the Unknown One (who seems to me a prefiguration of Pietro Spina) appears, in whom an attempt is made toward a dawning of conscience...
...It is certain that linguistic purity, as elaborated by tradition, is no longer a sure measure of judgment for works having a new social inspiration...
...7) It cannot even be said for Fontamara that the cafoni are innocent and deprived of conscience...
...Silone has ben kind enough to send it to DISSENT for American publication...
...This can be said about them, at most, in their encounters with political life...
Vol. 3 • April 1956 • No. 2
