Italian Literature: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Hainsworth Peter & Robey David

Author:Hainsworth, Peter & Robey, David [Robey, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2012-02-22T16:00:00+00:00

8. Elio Vittorini (right) with Alberto Moravia in the 1950s

Like Vittorini, the narrator and protagonist is a Sicilian, Silvestro, living and working in the north, who recounts a journey in which, in a state of depressed indifference and astratti furori (abstract furies), he leaves a bleak and wet Milan to visit his mother in Sicily. Most of the book consists of conversations with the characters encountered first on the train going south and then in Sicily, where he travels on to his mother’s cold, sunny village in the ‘pure heart’ of the island. The journey is both external and internal, material and moral, a ‘journey in the fourth dimension’, as the narrator calls it. It is a process of inner awakening, the revival of the ability to respond and feel, and also one of progressive understanding. Silvestro learns from each of the emblematic characters he speaks with, and then moves on to learn something from the next, as the ‘wheel of the journey’ stops and restarts. The reunion with his mother brings back childhood memories, and also his ability to respond to the world around him, in both its good and bad aspects. This raises the central question of the book: how does one retain the clarity of feeling, the ‘certainty’ that belongs to childhood, in the face of the extreme poverty and suffering of the mondo offeso, the offended or outraged world. His mother’s attitude of gruff practical charity is one answer, but plainly an inadequate one. So too is that of his companions in the next stage of the journey, who, in the course of an extended drinking bout in a cave-like tavern at the top of the village, both celebrate the beauties of the world and lament the offences that blight it. This act of lyrical effusion (Vittorini later associated drunkenness with ‘subjectivity as an end in itself’) also leaves Silvestro dissatisfied, and is in turn superseded by an encounter with the ghost of his brother, a soldier who has recently died on the battlefield fighting, we may assume, with the troops that Mussolini sent to Spain to support Franco against the republicans. When the next morning the whole chorus of Sicilian characters assembles, the issue is now death in battle: to their question ‘Is it much to suffer?’, the dead man, speaking more within Silvestro than to the others, can only reply with an enigmatic ‘Ehm’. Silvestro has recovered his capacity to feel and respond emotionally and imaginatively, and can see that something needs to be done for the mondo offeso. It is the next and final stage that is problematic, as the ‘Ehm’ seems to suggest. Action may result in pain and death, and it may be misguided. The novel ends in a final dialogue with the mother, whom he had compared to the Roman matron Cornelia, whose sons, the brothers Gracchi (both tribunes of the people), died for their country. She has now discovered the truth: as she says in the line at the head of this chapter, it wasn’t on the battlefield that the Gracchi died.

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