Il Gattopardo pt. II - The novel

Today is the birthday of Alessandro Manzoni, the man who in his masterpiece "I Promessi Sposi" (The Betrothed) not only encapsulated italian aspirations for self-determination and independence from austrian influence but provided, in standardised toscana idiom the "official" languange for the nascent Italian State.

However, at this time I choose to continue on a related subject, the novel Il Gatopardo (The Leopard) by the prince of Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi.




The italian Risorgimento created what had not been achieved since the days of the Roman Empire: A unified Italy. The old establishment of petty Kingdoms, Duchies, Republics, city-states and the Papal States was swept away in its obvious obsolescence.

However, the new, predominantly Piemontese, establishment had to contend with centuries-old mindsets, customs and practices that brought each region of Italy a world apart from each other. Perhaps Fürst von Metternich's deeply reactionary comment that "Italy" was nothing but a geographical term, held some measure of truth.

Sicily had seen a change of hands way too many times but it seemed that the sun-baked landscape induced the same state of inertia to any change of rule, moulded the psyche in such ways as to make it a timeless extension of those interminable, lazy, hot summer middays that characterised - in name as well - the wider region: Il Mezzogiorno....


Change, by definition is something relative. This time however, there was real change in the air and it came with a piemontese bourgeois face.

The time was 1860 and the Kingdom of Two Sicilies was about to end, with the power shifting not from one aristocracy to another, but rather to a more dynamic form of power: centralised politics and by inevitable necessity, money.

I used to be more concerned with the sociopolitical aspects of the novel. It is a keen insight on the failings of the Cavour-Garibaldi centralization that disregarded local character. It also takes an ideological position that came under fire by almost everyone: For the left it is a reactionary idealisation of dangerous aristocratic ideals and for the right it is an impious novel that portrays the clergy as corrupt and weak. I will not be writing about that however. Tons (literally) of books have been written on The Leopard's sociopolititcal profile. I need and can not add to that. The state of modern Italy is way too complicated a subject and for me a deeply emotional one as well.

What has grown to concern me most about the book is the astonishing depth in which, in his measured and accurate (too accurate one may say) language, Tomasi explores the psyche of the vanishing aristocracy, a self exploratory journey into the nobility of quiet decay and the acceptance of the inevitable as the world moves on, at an ever increasing pace towards new and unprecedented ways to distribute power and influence.

The prince (the author, since we will spell the hero, Prince Corbera with a capital P ) was a man of great depths but apparently little... let us say "nerve". He spent his life (a phrase leaps into mind, "life of quiet desperation" or something like that, now where have I heard it before?) travelling and reading and doing little besides that. He became a member of the intellectual literary societies of Palermo and he published some critical works but nothing further than that.

It seems as if his whole life was a single observation period that led to a single novel in his final months of life that encompassed in the most comprehensive way the psychological aspects of the fading of the old as the new came to the foreground.

The main character, Don Fabrizio Corbera, principe di Salina, a charismatic person with a passion for mathematics and astronomy did nothing to reverse the family's fortunes. By refusing to enter the Senate, he kept his dignified stance but that meant that he gradually faded into the background, while the slimy face of the new order revealed itself in the crude but wealthy mayor Don Calogero Sedàra, who made a fortune with the acquisition of assets that the nobles sold to balance the liabilitites of their decadence, lands that in the novel pass by in a sad roll call of property long gone.

Is don Calogero, however, worse than the opportunistic Tancredi, the Prince's nephew, who with the Prince's backing marries the beautiful and beautifully rich Angelica Sedàra, don Calogero's daughter, who inherited the maternal beauty - and never mind the fact that her maternal grandfather was a man named Pepe Merda (Pepe Shit) ?

Hints to the author's feelings (without any declared sympathies - Tomasi, in all probability because of his psychoanalyst wife, was conscious of the self-destructing capacity of nobility) are provided by the victims: By the sad, slow fate of the dog Bendicò, by the loyal, but naive in his faith for the divine right of nobility and absolutely scorned don Ciccio and by Concetta, the Prince's daughter, who in the end reamins unmarried and childless, ending the Corbera line forever.

By the fates of these people the novel raises a very serious question:
What is nobility?

Now I believe that it is the collected weight of the world, borne upon the shoulders of some individuals who through upbringing, stimuli, ancestral memories or special sensibilities grasp the very meaning of terrible purpose, dictated by something loftier than simple day-to-day survival with concessions and the steady grinding into the amorphous mass of people that pressures from society mandate.

From those nobles (today do not look for them only in palaces and towers - even though it is unlikely to find them in hovels) some discover the inner strength to carry on, day by dogged day, carrying the burdens that dignity and duty demand and some (most) others simply choose to wallow in their emotional ivory tower (like Concetta) simply because they are tangled in a maze of irrelevant misconceptions that obscures their true self and the inner core of perseverence that each human has within him.

In many ways it reminds me of Ismini, in the play of the same name by Yiannis Ritsos. A figure of ultimate dignity, a timeless testimony of the past, practically frozen while all around her in her halls, time passes bringing with him an almost audible decay. The burden of the tragic currents of humanity all around her have rendered her an island of introversion. Until it is time for her to make her splendid exit, and lie, as in sleep, poisoned by her own hand.

___________________________________________________________________________

The Leopard has many aspects and can be read in many ways. Most of them are well documented. Besides all that, to me the Leopard is prominently an elegy to the past, not because it was lost (the concept of loss begins and ends the book and the Prince's life, and he argues successfully that in human terms, how long may one resist change? One century, two? Then what? ) but because it is preserved just enough to trap its heirs in its legacy.

It is an elegy to the inner strength that people who needed it most never developed.
And that is a very astute observation from a prince who spent all his life in quiet introspection.

***

"Noi fummo i Gattopardi, i Leoni; quelli che ci sostituiranno saranno gli sciacalletti, le iene; e tutti quanti Gattopardi, sciacalli e pecore continueremo a crederci il sale della terra."

(We were the Leopards, the Lions; those that will come in our place will be the petty jackals, the hyenas; and the whole lot, Leopards, jackals and sheep, will continue to believe that we are the salt of the earth - trnsl. by me).




PS: "Prince of the island of Lampedusa, duke of Palma, baron of Montechiaro, lord and master of Torretta, baron of Falconeri, Raffo, Rosso, Santo Nicolò, Colobrino e Zarcati, lord of the fiefs of Montecuccio, Bellolambo e Bigliemi, dei Communi, Communaccio, Mandranuova, Ficoamara, della Villa, Celona, Casarino, Poggilo, Carobitto, Affacio Mare, Santa Domenica, Gibildolce , of the three areas of Donna Ventura, Casa Romana e Rennella and of the farms of Facio, Casotte, Argivocale e Manca". These were the, long lost in the author's time, titles of his grandfather, the astronomer Giulio Maria Tomasi.