The Bread and Wine of Ignazio Silone
CHIAROMONTE, NICOLA
WRITERS and WRITING The Bread and Wine of Ignazio Silone By Nicola Chiaromonte IF "SOCIALIST REALISM" meant what it seems to mean, the only contemporary writer to whom the formula could be...
...The contrast was so elementary that it became comical...
...The conflict between Communist orthodoxy and socialist faith appeared to Silone simple and fundamental...
...The themes and the style are those of a peasant who has been to school and seen the world, and wants to tell his countryfolk about his experience...
...Yet, to stress only this would be an oversimplification...
...This is the question out of which Silone's work as a novelist was born...
...It is simply about the secret that Luca, the peasant, has kept at the price of 19 years in jail, to protect the honor of the girl he was courting...
...No reward could be expected by Luca, and no rehabilitation for a crime that he had not committed...
...Downtrodden, ignorant and obtuse as the people are, the ways and mores of the mythical Fontamara...
...In this...
...WRITERS and WRITING The Bread and Wine of Ignazio Silone By Nicola Chiaromonte IF "SOCIALIST REALISM" meant what it seems to mean, the only contemporary writer to whom the formula could be properly applied would be Ignazio Silone...
...It is sufficient to make us wonder what principle, in our way of living, would be strong enough to account for such behavior...
...It was a matter of self-imposed principle, of personal honor pushed to an extreme...
...This experience was to become decisive for Silone, the Communist...
...Literary preoccupations have to be left at the door...
...In Bread and Wine (1935), the question was the relation between Communism, with its dogmas and "line" on the one side, and the cafoni on the other...
...He does not make the world of his cafoni (peasants) an object of admiration or nostalgia, does not in the least consider it as the only real one...
...Hence, he must express himself as plainly as possible, through examples that are familiar to his audience...
...It is the combination of firm belief and irony that makes for the unique quality of his writing...
...Silone's questioning of modern society began in his early adolescence when he became first a Socialist and then, mainly on account of his opposition to World War I, a Communist...
...Silone's novels are about moral truth, not political ideologies...
...Such are the questions that Silone, the novelist, addresses quietly, ironically and wisely to the modern world by way of the old one...
...This is the ironical situation Silone has again and again illustrated in his work...
...The novelist simply offers the example of a man who has kept faith with his conscience...
...As a boy, for all his militancy, he had already had many occasions of measuring the distance that separated party bureaucrats from the real life of the people...
...From Fontamara (1929) to The Secret of Luca (1957) his exclusive theme has been the problem of social justice, as reflected in the daily life of the peasant community, which has remained the subject matter of his storytelling...
...HIS CHOICE was not between the church and heresy, but between the church and faith...
...To him, the peasants remain as fixed terms of comparison, simply because they offer the last example of a coherent society in a world in which fixed moral standards no longer exist...
...And it so happens that the Communists, who are now in control of the peasants' union, have made themselves, for tactical reasons, the allies of the usurper...
...can stand comparison with the inarticulate virtues of the cafoni...
...His style is simple and straightforward, shy of sophistication, meant to be understood above all by the people it portrays, even at the cost of being misunderstood by the literary elite...
...In Fontamara, to explain Fascism—that is the relation between Fascist power and the cafoni—Silone imagined the example of the forbidden stream...
...To believe and to remain in the church was impossible, since the place of faith had been taken by orthodoxy, which requires not faith but obedience...
...It was not a conflict between opposed doctrinal and tactical views, but between ideology and everyday life, between a hierarchical power and society, between the officials of a far-away Power and the cafoni themselves...
...Once the conflict became clear in his mind, Silone never for a moment got involved in the intricacies of ideological politics: and this was to save him from the despair typical of the modern intellectual...
...Could life in Fontamara be less real than the Historical Process...
...Luca's silence is not even intended as an indictment of human justice...
...Silone's storytelling resembles that of a country priest, a priest without theology and without a bishop to be afraid of...
...This the novelist expressed by recounting the peregrinations of Pietro Spina, the Communist emissary, through his native countryside, and his meetings with the local "dead souls...
...No is the answer...
...For all their simplicity and rustic quality, his stories raise the fundamental question of what are, in our civilization, the lasting values that NICOLA CHIAROMONTE, co-editor of the Italian monthly magazine, Tempo Presente, here pays a tribute to Ignazio Silone, who recently celebrated his 60th birthday...
...In A Handful of Blackberries (1952) it is the trumpet at the sound of which the peasants used to assemble in the public square before the Fascist period, and which was hidden by one of them during the dictatorship...
...It leaves out the fact that Silone's socialism is religious, while his realism is profoundly ironical...
...Socialism and realism cannot indeed be separated, in Silone's writing...
...And Silone is certainly a realistic writer...
...if the party line represented a superior kind of truth, then the very existence of the peasants, down in Abruzzi, was a "deviationist error...
...Silone's most recent novel, The Secret of Luca, is remarkable for the absence of any apparent political theme...
...to which Silone has never ceased to go back after his first novel, have remained firm, simple and unambiguous, while those of the outside world, the world of the powers that be and of political parties, are as shifty and ambiguous as the people are arrogant and overbearing...
...If the ideology was true, then reality was a fiction: if the hierarchy was infallible, then the community of the oppressed people was in error...
...In Seed Beneath the Snow (1938), the symbol is the dumb peasant with his donkey...
...The confrontation between the automatism of Muscovite bureaucracy and the real life of the people, as he had known it, persuaded him to throw off the Communist yoke...
...Rather than novels, Silone's books are apologues and moral fables...
...Things had not changed enough to merit such celebration: The forest that used to belong to the community, and then was appropriated by one family, had not been returned to the community...
...On the contrary, he describes it as pitiful and grotesque, and is perfectly aware that its ancestral habits are on the verge of being upset and destroyed by the march of urban civilization...
...It is by remaining faithful to his origins, and to the beliefs of his youth, that Silone has succeeded in delivering to his contemporaries one of the most persuasive messages of modern literature...
...Hence, the emissaries of urban civilization can deceive and conquer the people of Fontamara, but thev can never persuade them...
...The trumpet will remain in hiding until the day of justice...
...Should it be taken out of its hiding place and be blown again, as the Communists wanted, now that Fascism had come to an end...
Vol. 43 • July 1960 • No. 27
