A-Infos (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria #463 - VERGA SUBVERSIVE. Rosso Malpelo (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Is it possible to cast an "anarchic gaze" on Giovanni Verga's literary 
production? ---- Marxist critics, who for years have argued over the 
greater 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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