To get a clearer view, we can turn to Verga, whose work has always been at the heart of Italian discussions of direct speech. For Italians critics, Verga’s stature is almost the equal of Alessandro Manzoni’s because he represented the absolute success of the use of free indirect speech and dialect.10 He portrayed the life of peasants in the then newly-created Kingdom of Italy with a unique warmth using what some critics have called “regression”.11 In many of his works, particularly in his great novel, I Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree), the point of view of the author “regresses” to one of his characters: even the narration is both from the point of view and in the style of the peasants introduced in the scene.12
8 Ibid, p. 151.
9 Ibid (emphasis mine).
10 By “dialect” I mean all speech that reproduces distortions of the language that denote the social or geographic origin of the character. Verga’s work on dialect represents an original contribution, in tune with the work of the folklorists of his time, always stressed by critics. See for example Giuseppe Lo Castro, Giovanni Verga: una lettura critica, Saggi brevi di letteratura antica e moderna, 5 (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2001), p. 5, pp.
45-56 and 49-70.
11 See Guido Baldi, L’Artificio della regressione. Tecnica narrativa e ideologia nel Verga verista (Naples: Liguori, 1980).
12 Giovanni Verga, The House by the Medlar Tree (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983). The novel describes the efforts of the Malavoglias, an essentially honest and
9. Dialogue and Character Discreditation 141 Russo was fundamental in establishing this idea of Verga’s greatness.13 At first Russo claimed that the author, through his constant use of regression
and direct speech, always achieves an immediacy with his characters: he enters into their existence and creates an empathy with their world view, both in his short stories and The House by the Medlar Tree.14 However, when Russo begins to examine the style of the texts, only the novel retains its claim to such an affirmation. All the short stories, after close analysis, reveal, to the contrary, a radical distancing, and Verga is even described by Russo as an “artista di ferocia”.15 Russo’s intention was to trace an historical evolution in Verga: The House by the Medlar Tree together with the collection of short stories, Vita dei campi (Life in the Fields), represented the height of his work, after which he was seen as reverting to a more distant and decadent style.
In fact, although he does not observe this explicitly, Russo was essentially distinguishing between the form of the novel and the short story.16 It will not then come as a surprise to us, after what we have seen in the last
poor family, to raise themselves above their social station as very unimportant sailors in the Sicilian town of Aci Trezza. Verga reproduced the point of view of peasants in not only his style but also his focus. The classic example is that, in the novel, the Battle of Licodia has no more importance than the appearance of rats in the garden of one of the
“busybodies”.
13 There are three different versions of Russo’s Giovanni Verga: 1919, 1934, 1941; all references here are to Luigi Russo, Giovanni Verga (Bari: Laterza, 1976), unless otherwise stated.
14 Leo Spitzer also gives proof of this in “L’Originalità della Narrazione nei Malavoglia”, Belfagor, 11 (1956), 37-53.
15 Russo (1976), p. 206. In his 1919 edition, it is only in the collection Vita dei campi (Life in the Fields) that Russo identifies as having this “miracle” of entering in the characters’
logic. In the course of this analysis he eliminated the Milanese stories (Per le vie) and those belonging to Little Novels of Sicily, which reveal an author “more distant from his characters” (p. 180, translation ours). In 1941, Russo added eighty pages of truly stylistic analyses on the problem of this “regression”. These analyses, which are much more precise than in the earlier edition, agree on everything except one point: the few stories he had cited as the very example of immediacy no longer withstand such an examination — they are seen now as revealing an irreducible distance from the characters. We find the same dynamics at work in criticism on Luigi Pirandello. Renato Barilli argues that Pirandello’s perspective is one of compassion. But, when analysing them, he finally establishes a hierarchy among his various short stories, from satires that cultivate distance to the few texts that, in the course of his analyses, are still considered to have a true attitude of compassion and of immediacy. Several of these texts are not
“classic” short stories to my mind, but already what I would classify as “modern” stories.
See Renato Barilli, La Barriera del Naturalismo (Milan: Mursia, 1964).
16 In his speech in praise of Verga on 2 September 1920, Pirandello also finally recognised that only in The House by the Medlar Tree does Verga achieve the goal of immediacy which he had set for himself in Gramigna’s Mistress. Luigi Pirandello, Opere di Luigi Pirandello (Milan: Mondadori, 1956-60), available at http://lafrusta.homestead.com/riv_pirandello.
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142 The Classic Short Story
chapter, that Russo finally emphasised the very intimate interrelationship that Verga’s short stories establish between animals and men (particularly in Jeli il Pastore [The Shepherd]). These “primitive” men, once again, are shown as closer to animals than to the rest of society.17 While his novel offers nuanced characterisation, Verga’s “intimate” portrait of peasants in his short stories largely rests on stereotypes.
After Russo, a series of important Marxist critics further helped to create the colossal stature of “il caso Verga” in Italy. Unlike most critics, they saw Verga as a wonderful example of critical-cognitive realism, and they were the ones to bring to light the distancing of his characters in his short stories.18 Their starting point was diametrically opposed to Russo: they saw this distancing in all of Verga’s texts, both novels and short stories. But Donato Margarito is forced to recognise that in The House by the Medlar Tree the distance does not exist: the heroes are shown to be making disastrous choices, while at the same time holding sympathetic values.19 Their point of view can be challenged, and the novel does indeed show the failure of their endeavours — and that this failure is a result of contradictions in their value system — but it is a discussion that allows them to have a full “voice”
of their own. Their values cannot be refuted in totality, as is the case with
17 This, moreover, did not bother Russo who acknowledged the primitivism in Verga, which he saw as a good antidote to the modern world. However, this is only true in the short stories. Russo plays with the two scenarios: on the one hand, he praises the absence of distance in Verga, providing examples, in fact, only from The House by the Medlar Tree.
On the other hand, taking his examples from the short stories, he salutes the return to the primitive. A cursory reading of his book could ignore that this “primitivism” is, in fact, accompanied by a distance.
18 See Romano Luperini, Verga e le strutture narrative del realismo: saggio su “Rosso Malpelo”
(Padova: Liviana, 1976); and Donato Margarito, “Verga nella critica marxista: dal ‘caso’
critico al metodo critico-negativo”, in Verga: l’ideologia, le strutture narrative, il “caso” critico, ed. by Carlo Augieri and R. Luperini (Lecce: Millela, 1982), pp. 235-89. Baldi (1980) gives a superb example in Rosso Malpelo, where he shows the clash between “reality” and how it is actually represented. Rosso is a poor miner, crushed by his work and hated because he is red-haired and “therefore bad”. The author denounces the social and economic order of this inhuman society by having the narrator and characters justify it, and then distancing us from their views.
19 “The value system of the Malavoglia, from wisdom to love, is worthy to be considered at a certain narrative level, and acquires a tangible materiality, something noted by both peasant and intellectual commentators, sometimes very sympathetically”; Margarito (1982), p. 273, translation ours. See also Vittorio Lugli, “Lo stile indiretto libero in Flaubert e in Verga”, in Dante e Balzac con altri italiani e francesi (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1952), p. 221-238. For a more complete presentation of this discussion, see Florence Goyet, La Nouvelle au tournant du siècle en France, Italie, Japon, Russie, pays anglo-saxons. Maupassant, Verga, Mori Ōgai, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Tchekhov et James (doctoral thesis, Université Paris 4-Sorbonne, 1990), pp. 438-45.
9. Dialogue and Character Discreditation 143 the characters of his short stories — for example, the miners and mine-owners in Rosso Malpelo, who proclaim that the world of the mine is good.
The polyphony of the novel is untenable in the short story.20
In passing, we can recognise here one of the criteria necessary for immediacy through direct speech. As Russo and Leo Spitzer have well demonstrated, for immediacy to be possible there has to be a total absence of external intervention. And “total” must be taken literally: this is far from the impersonality of, say, Gustave Flaubert, whose most “objective”
passages are shaped by the author’s value judgements. In fact, from the moment we allow the possibility of interpreting the character’s words other than by the meaning and status he himself gives them, then we fall into irony.21 However Russo, like Baldi, shows that this is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Rosso Malpelo employs the same technique as The House by the Medlar Tree; for all that, no one doubts that the worldview presented in it must be rejected. Direct speech is neither an automatic guarantee of immediacy, nor an infallible means of assuring distance, as Margarito would have it. The rhetorical technique in itself is neutral, and its use within a given strategy is what gives it meaning.