Cavalleria rusticana and Other Stories (2 page)

Those early novels, reflecting the ideas and moral attitudes of the Bohemian milieu of Florence and Milan, abound in stock characters, bogus psychological notions and artificial situations.
But it was already
clear from what Verga had written in his prefatory comments to
Eva
that he was dissatisfied with the late Romantic style that typifies these works.
In that preface, he developed the plausible argument that all societies have the art they deserve, and claimed that his own work was merely reflecting the corrupt society that he observed all around him.
Less convincingly, he went on to argue that the kind of novel he was writing had a moralistic function, in that it revealed the shortcomings of the society from which it had emerged.
One cannot help feeling that Verga was being a little disingenuous in making such an assertion.
Fully three-quarters of the population of the brave new Italy were illiterate, the reading public consisted of a minority of the remaining quarter, and the success or failure of a fictional narrative was dictated by this inevitably restricted consumer demand.

Be that as it may, a change in the attitude of both the writers and the consumers of narrative fiction was soon to become apparent.
The mood of disillusionment that followed the attainment of the great Romantic political ideal of Italian unification was accompanied in the mid-1870s by the birth in Italy of the literary movement known as
verismo.
The chief theorist of the new movement was Verga’s close friend and fellow Sicilian, Luigi Capuana, who had been persuaded by Verga to join him in Milan.
Capuana’s aesthetic theories were strongly influenced by his extensive reading of major French novelists, in particular Balzac and Zola.
Verismo,
as propounded by Capuana and others, including Verga himself, was in essence the Italian counterpart of French naturalism.
Its practitioners concerned themselves with the presentation of the day-to-day affairs of ordinary people.
In Verga’s case, he came to see the writer’s role as that of studying life and reproducing it faithfully in its most minute particulars.
The opening paragraphs of ‘Gramigna’s Mistress’ summarize his intentions, though whether the theory he expounds there could ever accord with his practice is highly debatable.
⁹
In a famous phrase from those prefatory remarks, he declares that the work of art should seem ‘to have created itself, to have grown spontaneously and come to fruition as though it were a part of nature, without preserving any point of contact with its author’.
The hand of the author was to remain completely invisible.
No longer should the writer engage in the wordy descriptive passages and lengthy moral
considerations that characterized the works of earlier, Romantic novelists.
The narrative and its implications were to be conveyed through dialogue, which now assumed central importance in the work’s overall structure.
Even the intervening prose between passages of dialogue had to possess such dialogue characteristics as a
non sequitur
or an imprecation, so that the total impression would be one of a story told exclusively by and through the characters.
¹⁰
By this means, Verga introduced an exciting new prose style, a
prosa dialogata,
which is intensely dramatic and naturalistic and which constitutes one of Verga’s most significant contributions to the historical evolution of Italian narrative prose.

The first signs of what Benedetto Croce called Verga’s liberating thrust’
(spinta liberatrice)
are to be found in ‘Nedda’, which was published in 1874.
This pathetic story of a Sicilian peasant girl’s struggle against sickness and poverty is introduced by a passage in which Verga claims that the idea of writing it came to him one evening as he was applying poker and tongs to the log fire in his comfortable Milanese apartment.
He associates the darting sparks and fluttering flames of the burning logs with the arousal of his ‘other self, and in a significant phrase he writes of the sensation he experienced of casting off a suit of clothes as he settled into his armchair and reflected on memories of people and places in Sicily, the region of his birth and upbringing.

Verga’s metaphorical change of clothing signalled the beginning of the most original and productive phase in his writing career.
From that point onwards, a new concern with the lives and aspirations of his Sicilian compatriots became a regular feature of his narratives.
In ‘Nedda’, as in many of his later stories, he reveals with amazing clarity and understanding the conditions under which the Sicilian peasants attempted to grind out a living for themselves and their families.
The evocative opening scene, describing an evening in the huge kitchen of a farmhouse on the slopes of Mount Etna during the olive-gathering season, reflects a part of his own childhood experience.
As the son of a Sicilian landowner, he would himself have witnessed annual harvesting rituals of this kind, marked by an atmosphere of tension between the seasonal labourers and their employer.
True to his veristic principles, he expresses no opinion on the social justice of the situation he depicts, being content merely to view it through the eyes of his characters,
whose own opinions are conveyed through the dialogue.
The women’s complaint over being forbidden to eat the olives that lie rotting on the ground in the rain is countered by Nedda’s ‘logical’ argument in favour of the owner of the land.
The readers are left to decide for themselves whether Nedda’s argument is plausible.
And the same applies when the proprietor’s son, in whom we may detect a brief glimpse of Verga’s younger self, orders the steward to supplement Nedda’s earnings to make up for what she has lost, and is persuaded that this would arouse the hostility of neighbouring landowners.

Nedda is the victim of a series of catastrophes that culminate at the end of the story with the death of her baby from malnutrition.
Her total innocence and resignation in the face of her appalling personal tragedy are the distinguishing characteristics of a narrative that explores in greater depth and with much greater conviction a theme common to several of Verga’s earlier works and most of his later ones: the inevitability of defeat in the pursuit of happiness.
Hence the overall title that he was later to give to his projected series of novels in which he set out to investigate the human condition at five different levels of society,
I Vinti (The Defeated Ones).
As one of his commentators has written, ‘there is something about the world in which we live, he seems to be saying, that ineluctably thwarts our dreams, irrespective of our merits or defects’.
It is not so much a pessimistic view of life as a tragic one because ‘it is permeated by a sense of man’s impotence’.
¹¹

The objective narrative technique that Verga employs in ‘Nedda’ enables him to achieve a remarkably clear presentation of the compassion-demanding poverty and loneliness of the story’s main characters.
His depiction of the minor characters, such as Nedda’s fellow workers at the olive farm, is equally assured.
The contrast between Nedda and the protagonists of Verga’s earlier novels is not simply a question of their different social environment.
Like Nedda, the painter in
Eva
was a ‘defeated one’, but he was the victim of his own capricious fantasies.
In ‘Nedda’, and with few exceptions in the stories that follow, the characters are presented as the victims of life itself.
Although traces of his earlier manner are still evident in his description of Nedda early in the story, Verga no longer dwells on the personal idiosyncrasies of his main character.
His attention has switched to the creation of that
atmosphere of tragic inevitability which he sees as enveloping men and women as a whole.
It may be objected that in ‘Nedda’ Verga is dealing with people afflicted by extremes of poverty, and that prolonged poverty inevitably breeds a sensation of hopelessness and tragedy.
But as may be observed in several of his other realist narratives, for instance in ‘Property’, the lives of rich and poor alike are underlain by this same sense of tragic inevitability.

In the year following the publication of ‘Nedda’, Verga employed a comparable veristic narrative technique, this time in a novella set in Milan.
‘Springtime’, published in 1875, like his earlier Florentine and Milanese narratives, is a love story with an unhappy ending, but it differs from them in two important respects.
Although the tale’s literary antecedents can be traced back some thirty years to Henri Murger’s
Scènes de la vie de Bohème,
both of the main characters are presented in terms that are psychologically convincing, and immense care is taken to ensure that the background against which the story unfolds is a colourful and accurate representation of post-Risorgimento Milan.
One of Verga’s contemporaries records that the writer spent his evenings with his artistic and literary friends at the Biffi, a fashionable Milanese café, sometimes going on from there to La Scala, where from the stalls he could be seen, all smiles and elegance, passing from one box to another to chat with the Milanese bigwigs and their ladies.
The Milanese world depicted by Verga in ‘Springtime’, with its Galleria, its famous opera house, its garrets, its cafés, its ambitious young artists and its seamstresses, was to be given definitive form some twenty years later in Giacomo Puccini’s
La Bohème.

After publishing ‘Nedda’ and ‘Springtime’, Verga wrote a number of short stories based, like ‘Nedda’, on Sicilian peasant life in the region around Catania and the slopes of Mount Etna.
These tales, published in 1880 under the title
Vita dei campi (Life in the Fields),
included ‘Picturesque Lives’,
¹²
a powerful and evocative account of the precarious existence of the people living in Aci Trezza, a fishing village north of Catania.
As in ‘Nedda’, so in ‘Picturesque Lives’ Verga describes the hardships and aspirations of his peasant characters with an unusual degree of sympathy and understanding, but in this case their lives are brought more sharply into focus by the polemical contrast with the
futile and self-absorbed existence of the Milanese society woman to whom the novella is ostensibly addressed.
The lady concerned has been identified as the Countess Paolina Greppi, one of a number of women whose company Verga cultivated in the course of his strictly bachelor existence.
The countess held court in her Milanese salon on Thursdays, and Verga is reported as always being the last to leave.

The contempt that Verga displays in ‘Picturesque Lives’ towards the trivial and meaningless way of life of the woman to whom the story is addressed may perhaps be taken as a further sign of his rejection – for the time being at least – of his own earlier concern with the portrayal of characters and incidents drawn from the northern Italian
haut monde,
and his resolve to switch his attention to a realistic account of the day-to-day lives of his fellow Sicilians.

With the exception of ‘How, When and Why’, a tale set against the Milanese high society background of his earlier narratives, that made its curious and unexplained appearance in the second edition of 1882, all of the stories in
Vita dei campi
are concerned with aspects of Sicilian peasant life.
When the most famous of these, ‘Cavalleria rusticana’, was adapted by Verga for the theatre a few years later, he made several major changes to the story, including the expansion of the character of Santa, who now became Santuzza, to provide a starring role for Eleonora Duse.
The play was first performed in Turin in 1884, and it was this version on which the libretto of Mascagni’s opera was based.
In its original form, the tale is notable for its structural compactness and the precision and clarity of its narrative detail.
Considering its brevity, the tale is remarkable for the way in which all five of the main characters emerge with clearly defined, distinctive personalities of their own.
Verga skilfully creates an atmosphere of tragic inevitability before plunging the narrative into the final, starkly uncompromising encounter between Turiddu and Alfio, a vividly chronicled scene that in the stage version, as in the opera libretto, is replaced by a simple announcement of its fatal outcome: ‘
Hanno ammazzato Compare Turiddu!
’
¹³

Adultery and the satisfaction of honour are themes that reappear in other stories from
Vita dei campi,
for instance in ‘Jeli the Shepherd’, where the ending is both sudden and intensely dramatic.
The tale is notable for its lyrical evocation of the wild and desolate Sicilian landscape
against which the events of the narrative unfold.
As in ‘Nedda’, the outlines of the main character are sketched in with enormous sympathy and understanding.
The accounts of his childhood friendship with the young aristocrat, Don Alfonso, and with the girl, Mara, who eventually becomes his wife, are characterized on Jeli’s part by a deep sense of trust and innocence, and become all the more moving when viewed in retrospect against the tale’s final catastrophe.
The central episode of the novella, describing the cruel fate of the colt lying wounded and helpless in the ravine, foreshadows the ultimate fate of Jeli himself.

In ‘Rosso Malpelo’, another of the stories from
Vita dei campi,
Verga creates an unforgettable main character, and brilliantly evokes the atmosphere and working conditions in a sand mine on the slopes of Mount Etna.
The personality of Malpelo is a curious compound of intense filial love, cruelty, kindness and superstition.
Verga analyses with great subtlety the intimate friendship that develops between Malpelo and the boy who, because of his unfortunate physical handicap, is known by no other name than The Frog.
Malpelo unconsciously prophesies his own fate in telling The Frog about the legend current in the village about a miner lost in the maze of underground caverns.
Once again, as in ‘Cavalleria’, ‘Jeli’, and another immensely powerful narrative from the same collection, ‘The She-Wolf’, there is a gradually heightening presentiment of the final catastrophe.