The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone 9781442682184

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THE REINVENTION OF IGNAZIO SILONE

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ELIZABETH LEAKE

The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2003 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-8767-1

(po) Printed on acid-free paper Toronto Italian Studies

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Leake, Elizabeth The reinvention of Ignazio Silone/ Elizabeth Leake. (Toronto Italian studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-8767-1 1. Silone, Ignazio, 1900-1978 - Criticism and interpretation. 2. Silone, Ignazio, 1900-1978 - Political activity. I. Title. II. Series. PQ4841.I4Z6492003

853'.912

C2003-901193-3

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Remigio U. Pane Fund. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: // caso Silone 3 1 Silone and the Fascists 17 2 Silone and the Symptom: 'Viaggio a Parigi' 51 3 Torn Loyalties: Fontamara 89 4 Consummatum est: Pane e vino 117 5 Past Imperfect: Critical (Self-)Revisions Notes

159

Bibliography Index

197

187

143

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Acknowledgments

This project would not have been possible without the generous support of friends, colleagues, and institutions. A year-long fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities provided the crucial and timely practical means for the completion of the book. I also wish to express special gratitude to the late Professor Remigio U. Pane, whose substantial bequest to the Department of Italian at Rutgers University has provided important support for the book's preparation. The staff at the Archivio Centrale dello Stato and the Biblioteca Nazionale in Rome, the British Library, and the Kongelige Bibliotek in Copenhagen greatly facilitated my research. At University of Toronto Press, Ron Schoeffel was a wise and trusted adviser on book matters great and small, and Curtis Fahey's attentive editing improved the work im-mensely. In Rome, Dario Biocca generously made available his knowledge and materials, and the many discussions about our findings were similarly invaluable. Romolo Tranquilli, Jr, kindly shared a volume of stories and his own memories, both of great worth to my understanding of Silone. At the University of California at Berkeley, the late Gian Paolo Biasin was a guiding light and an inspiration. I am deeply indebted to him both for his unwavering support of this study, and for the exemplary wedding of intellectual rigour and human compassion provided by his work. Steven Botterill, Gavriel Moses, and Mark Sandberg challenged and encouraged me throughout the early versions of this project, engaging with it in ways that consistently broadened my intellectual horizons. In conversations about the writing process, Barbara Spackman made suggestions that proved both immediately applicable and enduringly useful. Mia Fuller read and commented on numerous later

viii The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone versions, and taught me much; her eagle eye, critical acumen, and unflagging enthusiasm helped me both to stand the heat and stay in the kitchen. I would also like to thank the people who took time away from their own projects to help me clarify my ideas, reading part or all of the manuscript at various stages, especially Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Valerio Ferme, Meg Gallucci, Judy Gaughan, Rosemary Leake, Manuela Marchesini, Jenni Ross, Robert Rushing, Beth Severy, and Laura Wittman. Equally important to this study are Suzy Anderson, AnnaLee Allen, and Florence Tsai, who made writing a possibility when it otherwise would not have been. Brian Hupp enriched my experience in Italy in ways too varied and numerous to describe. And it is only fitting that a book about the importance of maintaining curiosity pay tribute to the two who pique mine every day, Alexandra and Frederik. In the end, though, this book is for S0ren.

THE REINVENTION OF IGNAZIO SILONE

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Introduction: II caso Silone

Until a few years ago, Ignazio Silone (born Secondino Tranquilli, 190078) was among the most beloved folk heroes of the Italian Left. As a representative of the Federazione giovanile socialista italiana, he was one of the founding members of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) at its inception in 1921, and over the course of eight years he held a series of high-profile positions, including a stint as a PCI delegate, along with Palmiro Togliatti, to Moscow in 1927 for a meeting of the executive committee of the International. In 1929, at the height of his power within the party ranks, Silone left Italy for Davos, Switzerland - a selfimposed exile he claimed was intended to improve his health. Many years later, however, he would attribute that departure to the desire to distance himself from the party, which was becoming increasingly beholden to Russian policies. Rejecting appeals to return to the PCI fold, he was expelled from the party in 1931. He remained in Switzerland until after the war. There he embarked upon the career as a novelist for which he would become worldfamous. He wrote novels that both extolled the theoretical virtues of Communism and berated its practices. Silone's personal history as a high-profile political figure intensified the popular reception of his novels and gave weight to their emphasis on the primacy of individual conscience and its incompatibility with authoritarian institutions. Thoughtful and unprepossessing, his novels conveyed the almost wistful criticism of one who had witnessed, from the inside, the moral collapse of the institutions that he had previously held in high esteem Communism and the Catholic Church. Silone succeeded in orchestrating the complete reinvention of his public image around the shift from professional revolutionary to

4 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone novelist. In his fiction, he capitalized on his celebrity as a former militant to create a new public identity as the prescient figure who foresaw the rise of Stalin's dictatorship and the impending 'Fascistization' of the Communist Party. With the publication of his first novel in 1933, he established himself as the spokesperson of the cafoni (peasants) of his region, the Abruzzi. The years he spent in the PCI gave him material to write about as well as a position from which to write. Silone's fame as a writer, in other words, is inextricably linked to his fame as an ex-Communist. His novels enjoyed considerable success. Fontamara (1933) was translated into twenty-seven languages, and Pane e vino (Bread and Wine, 1937) into nineteen.1 Outside Italy he was consistently popular, and in 1965, when he published the non-fiction collection Uscita di sicurezza (Emergency Exit), interest in his writings was renewed, in part because of his rediscovery by American counterculture, for whom his name became synonymous with a certain kind of anti-authoritarian stance. Within Italy, while his reception varied according to the political motivations of his readers, he was nonetheless read regularly and appreciated by many. Recently, however, new light has been shed on Silone's activities during the 1920s, and it has not been welcome. In the spring of 1996, evidence surfaced in the press that this beloved cultural icon and exCommunist writer had spied for the Fascists during the ten-year period he was a high ranking member of the PCI.2 These disclosures published in the United States in 1999 and more extensively in Italy in 2000 by Dario Biocca and Mauro Canali3 - initially provoked an emotionally overwrought, defensive response in the Italian papers. They have given rise to many interesting historical questions as well as some foolish ones (such as the hotly contested, purely rhetorical, issue of whether Silone was a spia [spy] or a delatore [informer]). Silone's position on the roster of Italian writers had been unchangeable for fifty years. His is still a household name in Italy; hence the enormous outcry that ensued upon the publication of documents proving Silone's collaboration with the Fascists. Discoveries of this kind are not inherently scandalous. After all, they fit squarely into the trend, particularly current in Western Europe, of revisiting the wartime roles of writers and political figures. But to date, Silone's case is that trend's most egregious exemplar, one that has thrown arbiters of Italian culture into a profound crisis of identity. Silone's status as an icon of the political Left has become a topic of

Introduction: // caso Silone 5 intense debate among Italians, provoking deeply personal responses, partisan wranglings, and numerous bouts of public hand-wringing on the culture pages of major newspapers. Once again, Silone is big news. Although he is not the first literary figure to be re-examined and found to be less than unequivocal in his opposition to Fascism (think, for example, of the recent studies on Alberto Moravia4), current discussions about Silone's history meet with adamant denial. Indeed, notes of hysteria have crept in, along with a reactionary logic bordering on the absurd. What is it about Silone that raises the stakes so high? History, Literature, Revision The answer is to be found on two levels: the literary-historical and the cultural. First, there are facets to Silone's writerly history that differentiate him from the other figures who have come under similar scrutiny. For example, there is ambivalence about Silone's position in the pantheon of Italian leftist writers. His works were first read at a heady time in the development of the twentieth century's most influential Italian critics, who were cutting their teeth, so to speak, on the works of writers who expressed a kindred sense of political possibility. When Silone first started writing in the early 1930s, the lessons of verismo (Italy's version of French Naturalism) and decadentismo had been learned, the influences of Futurism and the avant-garde were on the wane, and the conventional novel was on the rise again after a period in which its forms had been considered ossified. Italian readers of a particular political bent were seeking more accurate expressions of their own experiences; these were to become Silone's first and most important readers. Though his writings captured the spirit of the age, it must also be said that he has always been on the margins of the literary canon. His books have been widely reviewed in Italy and abroad for over fifty years, but they have received a mixed reception. Depending on whether they focus on style or content, critical opinions have varied greatly about just how good a writer he is. Detractors who call his work heavy-handed or lacking grace and style have been countered by equally vociferous supporters who champion, among other things, his consistent commitment to the poor. It is in part on account of this debate, dubbed il caso Silone decades ago, that opinions are heated: far from being old hat, rehashing Silone's writerly history apparently never goes out of style.

6 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone Revelations from the archives have sparked an enormous response in Italy for cultural reasons as well. After le ire corone (Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio) and perhaps Machiavelli, Italian literary figures have made few inroads into the public consciousness abroad. Even fewer names from the twentieth century are celebrated outside Italy, so that, alongside Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino, Silone is one of the few modern Italian authors known internationally5 The recent scandal aside, his fiction is regularly assigned not only in Italian schools but throughout the world in Italian language courses and survey courses on Western literature. Italy exports itself both linguistically and culturally in part through Silone's works; he is a crucial element in the way the rest of the world understands Italy, its culture, and its modern political history. It is therefore all the more disquieting for some Italians to contemplate what amounts to Silone's double life. Partly as a result of recent scholarship about Resistance movements in Europe, we are accustomed to the notion that all of history is a process of revision: that generations, nations, and cultures invent themselves not out of whole cloth but on the basis of what has come before. We recognize the possibility of recasting events in a different light, of shifting paradigms in such a way as to favour current perceptions of good and demonize the bad. Dictatorships, separatist movements, and religious cults are particularly skilful at reinventing histories; indeed, it is their stock-intrade. Their agendas, though, are generally stated openly, more or less debated by an opposition, and are designed to benefit a group of people. In Silone's case, on the other hand, the recently revealed documents coupled with his literature make us privy to one individual's successful planned revision of his own public image (arguably for the benefit of none but himself) and the enthusiastic adoption of that revision by generations of readers around the world. Recent scholars have questioned the temptation to locate public figures somewhere along one axis of what historian Herman Lebovics calls the 'trinity collaborator-opportunist-resistant.'6 But whatever else has been debated about Silone's writing, his ostensible political history has always located him squarely on the side of resistant. That such certainty is no longer possible contributes to Silone's singularity as well. We are fascinated by the characters in a Graham Greene or John Le Carre novel in part because they are neither good nor bad by design, but by accident. Deserving neither praise nor censure, they are compelling for the choices they confront. So too with Silone. Like characters in

Introduction: // caso Silone 7 these novels, his identity developed around a series of apparently incoherent decisions. When the contradictions of his life and his fiction are taken into account, there is no way to determine where he lies on the moral spectrum. The paradoxical nature of his identity is thus insurmountable; but what we can explore is how those paradoxes were constructed, in public, over the course of almost fifty years. As with the notion of history as a series of revisions, we are used to arguments that weigh writing against actions, arguments in which writing is frequently weighted more heavily: for example, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote throughout the war that one should be prepared to die for what one has written.7 Some critics call for us to make distinctions between different kinds of writing and the circumstances of their production, as well. In debates about Paul de Man's wartime journalism, for example, he is generally credited with a lifetime of literary scholarship before he is condemned for contributing to a collaborationist newspaper. Similarly, in The Collaborator, Alice Kaplan describes how attorney Jacques Isorni argued on behalf of Robert Brasillach the writer, not Brasillach the editor of a pro-Nazi newspaper, by asserting that 'Brasillach was at the heart of French letters, he was the very soul of his generation.'8 Indeed, Isorni's poetic defence of Brasillach's literary legacy could easily describe Silone's, despite the apparent opposition of their political views: 'It is he who expressed our tastes, our anguish, our combats, our first disillusionment as men. He was our youth-mine ... It is through him that the legacy of our twenty-year-old selves, our thirty-year-old selves has some chance of surviving.'9 Today, however, that defence rings hollow. Writing Silone This study is about Silone's novels and their relationship both to the image he crafted of himself and the image others hold of him. The endurance of that image is a testament to its importance, as public reaction to the documents has demonstrated. I will explore Silone's intimate, idiosyncratic, nearly obsessive identification with a highly idealized, indeed nearly Christological, self-portrait. This investigation into the development of the internal paradigm by which Silone scrutinized the morality of his own actions engages the discourses of history, psychoanalysis, literary criticism, and religious studies. It aims to elucidate the way Silone's early literature is rent by tensions between his religious and political convictions. At the time of his departure from

8 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone the Italian Communist Party, Silone was undergoing psychotherapy with C.G. Jung, who encouraged him to narrativize his problematic political and personal choices by absorbing and reinterpreting aspects of Marxist theory, Christological theology, and his own childhood. But narrativization breeds excess. The claim advanced here is that Silone appeared to internalize each of those influences to the extent that he no longer distinguished between his fictional accounts of his experiences and his actual experiences. The discrepancy between the historical Silone and his literary self-representation, however, was nonetheless a productive one in terms both of his works and of his readership. It gave rise to an opus that permits a wealth of insights not only into Silone the historical figure but also into the evolution of his mythification within and outside Italian culture, as well as into Silone's engagement with the psychoanalytic process itself. Beyond Silone, this discrepancy allows insight into the relationship between a life and a text, and the ways each can be used to understand the other. I began this study after noticing two particulars in connection with Silone: the ambivalence with which Italian critics have consistently approached Silone's literature, and the reverential tones that crept into conversations with Italians whenever I mentioned him. I was surprised as much by the phenomena themselves as by the apparent contradictions between them. Why do many of the critics who have written about Silone - normally acute readers - seem unable or unwilling to approach his work on any level other than the superficial? After all, Silone was known as a hero of the Italian Left, not a Fascist; there should be no reason to expect what Emily Braun has called the 'pervasive discomfort' she encountered when studying Fascist artist Mario Sironi.10 Is there something about Silone's fiction that is discomfiting to an Italian reader? Does it have to do with the quality of the writing itself? And despite this unease, why do Silone and his texts provoke a worshipful response among Italians? Beyond the first, historical level of response, there is a second, cultural one that runs deeper. Though it is impossible to quantify, this response intensifies the partisan reactions that Silone has provoked both at home and abroad. I am referring to the degree of personal investment his readers have in the figure of Silone. This manifests itself in what I call the 'liturgical response' I encountered when discussing him with Italians I met socially and in the archives and libraries immediate, positive, name recognition and praise, coupled frequently with the total identification of the novelist with his protagonists. The

Introduction: // caso Silone 9 response Silone's name provoked before the recent revelations indicates that Italians have always had a particular need for this figure. He fulfils a crucial function in the collective Italian psyche by representing a political stance that transcends party politics and by challenging authority in good faith and without consideration of the personal consequences: writ large, by living what many consider to be a life of ideological independence, that is, a life devoted to freedom for all and governed by individual conscience. Silone, in other words, was not a skeleton in the closet of the post-war Italian psyche; on the contrary, after the end of Fascism, many Italians were proud of his image abroad and at home. By the time I was studying materials at the Archivio Centrale dello Stato (ACS), my initial curiosity had become a research project. I began to consider the historically strong connection in the Italian literary-critical tradition between biography and political motivation. Working at the time in tandem with historian Dario Biocca, and thinking initially about Silone's relationship to his brother, I was looking for something to help situate the relationship between Silone's self-presentation, his public image, and his fiction. A new host of questions presented themselves: Is it really the man himself who provokes this discomfort with his writings? Do Italians separate the man from the texts? What does the imbrication of two conflicting ideologies, Catholicism and Communism, mean in the context of his works? My experience of the 'liturgical response' developed new meaning for me when a journalist became interested in my findings and, in a departure from standard professional behaviour, followed me around the archives attempting to remove documents from my files. This book is an attempt to come to grips with the need for figures such as Silone as much as it is a study of the reinvention of a key player in Italian literary culture. My goal is to provide a new analysis of Silone's fiction. The questions I answer were framed without knowledge of the 'truths' of his life that came to light as I was doing research, yet the revelations have confirmed the validity of those questions and have informed my analysis. On the one hand, the documents illustrate precisely the ambivalence that I had sensed in the literature, revealing another dimension to the man. On the other hand, in my reading, the texts themselves are my beginning and my endpoint. The documents are not the sole source for our understanding of Silone, since the ambivalence corroborated by the documents has always been present in the texts.

10 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone In the context of Silone scholarship, my reading is unique in its methods and its means: I use a psychoanalytic approach to Silone's texts in light of the archival materials the study presents. This analysis differs radically from extant Silone scholarship, which instead reflects the strong tradition of politically motivated criticism in Italy. The contours of the construction of Silone's public profile in Italy and elsewhere - as a literary scandal, as an historical figure, as a body of texts, as a manifestation of a certain political thought, as a subject of psychoanalysis - are remarkable for their apparent seamlessness and their coherence. In my reading, however, those contours are in a continual state of eruption. Silone's personal and literary opus abounds with numerous explicitly autobiographical recollections, images of and references to his own experiences. These are filtered through the lens of his fixation with the idea of redemption through transfiguration, the model of which, for Silone, is Christ. There is such a high degree of factionalism, hagiography, and nostalgia surrounding the figure of Silone that it bears underscoring that the most interesting questions about him ultimately have nothing to do with attacking, defending, justifying, or condemning. My project is a non-partisan one, which seeks to illuminate aspects of the texts under consideration, in part through the examination of other texts. The theoretical groundwork for the project has benefited from encounters with psychobiography, psychoanalysis (specifically, elements of Slavoj Zizek's psychoanalytic readings), and ideological studies. Nor is it my goal to trace the meaning of Silone's literary texts back to some psychological 'event,' real or imagined, which spurred the artist's unconscious to develop a narrative that could obfuscate almost all traces thereof.11 Such a goal is tempting; it might allow us to locate the origins of the messages Silone's novels promote in experiences as diverse as the author's childhood in an impoverished Abruzzo village, his visits to Moscow, his loss of family members in the devastating 1915 earthquake in Avezzano, or the trauma of his brother Romolo's incarceration and premature death. Indeed, Silone's earliest forays into literature, particularly the oneiric and fantastic elements of the short story 'Viaggio a Parigi' (Voyage to Paris), lend themselves to such an approach. That said, however, my study is based on a different perspective. I believe that what is required above all is a method that explores the relationship between event and literary work in a productive way from the standpoint of literary criticism. As the three Silone texts under discussion in this project demonstrate, the method I favour

Introduction: // caso Silone 11 is one by which underlying psychological or historical events can be explored with the goal of illuminating the work of literature, not one by which careful reading of the text provides clues to a provisional diagnosis of the author. The Silone Case I am a literary critic, not an historian. The questions that interest me have little to do with judging Silone's activities from 1919 to 1929. Unlike Robert Brasillach, Silone never was and never will be brought to trial. Most literary critics have responded to the discoveries of 1996 by debating Silone's morality. But ultimately, regardless of which side they take in the argument, they feel duped. A further result of the new caso Silone, in other words, is what now appears on the surface to be his transparently self-serving revisionism. In my analysis, Silone's supporters are caught in the double bind of having forgiven the shortcomings of his writing because of the importance of its message, only to discover that its goals were in a certain sense tarnished by the ulterior motive of self-preservation - or worse yet, self-therapy. The issue of dupery transcends national boundaries. Like Italians, Americans have needed this kind of model of leftist intellectual commitment, and until recently Silone fit the bill beautifully. It is useful to recall responses to the de Man debate: 'World War II was the last time in American history that everyone agreed about who the good guys and the bad guys were, and ... this is what makes the scandal so satisfying - we are relieved to be thrust temporarily into the realm of good and evil again.'12 Indeed, the American Left's response to Silone has included some of the most vituperative condemnations of all.13 Consider, for example, a telling debate that took place between two of the most outspoken voices of the American Left press, Alexander Cockburn and Christopher Kitchens. Cockburn's article 'Even Worse Than Orwell'14 presented an unequivocally damning summary of Silone's association with the Fascists, which he called 'truly repugnant' and 'at a considerably greater level of infamy than that of George Orwell/ The article, which reads like the retort of a jilted lover, is dismissive and contemptuous at the same time, coupling a stance of mock-awe at the way Silone was 'horribly successful' as a spy with characterizations like the one condemning Silone's 'habitual high respect for his own moral fiber.' Similarly, the first of two articles written by Christopher Hitchens15 seemed at first blush to be cut from the same cloth as Cock-

12 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone burn's as regards Silone or, as he is called in the piece's title, 'Ignoble Ig-nazi-o.' Ultimately, though, the article is much less interested in anything to do with Silone than in taking Cockburn to task for both using faulty logic and for 'irrelevantly recycling his own stale slanders against Orwell' - a debate that we get the impression is closer to their hearts. In contrast, Hitchens's second, much briefer, piece16 backed away completely from the position taken in 'Ignoble Ig-nazi-o' on the grounds that Hitchens no longer considered the book on which he based his views (by Biocca and Canali) to be a legitimate or trustworthy source of information. Citing Norberto Bobbio and Mimmo Franzinelli (two Italian intellectuals who are central proponents of Silone's defence17), Hitchens retracted the views he had aired earlier, stating, 'I cannot myself be confident, and I lack the necessary linguistic and historical expertise, but I now feel fairly sure that the first draft in this argument was allowed too much authority. In the circumstances, I feel that I should alert Nation readers to a possible grave injustice and direct those who are literate in Italian to [a recent rebuttal of Biocca and Canali's work].' The articles, taken together, present a snapshot (through a distinctly American lens) of the debates taking place in Italy, debates that start out lamenting the dimming of, as Cockburn puts it, 'a major star in the anti-Communist firmament' but end up questioning the viability of the documents as historically accurate or credible. (This will become a consistent factor in the debate in Italy - how public intellectuals discuss the archival materials with the voice of authority, without having seen them.) As for the two authors of the articles, consider their debate from another angle. Neither one of them is known for his painstaking research or careful and balanced views; they both operate, rather, at the level of the fast and furious: and that is, in part, why we read them. It is somewhat surprising, then, to see Hitchens retract a view on the grounds that he is not competent to express it. Nor does he specify whether the 'possibly grave injustice' was perpetrated by Silone, Cockburn, or Hitchens himself, or on whom. What is clear, according to the economy of this debate, is the sense that Silone has caused us to lose our collective bearings yet again, just when we had felt, for the first time since the de Man debate, so glad to be back in the 'realm of good and evil.' The universal ethical stance of Silone's novels, even the fact that an industrious student of the Italian language can read him in the original, if s/he chooses, contributed to his fame outside Italy. American

Introduction: II caso Silone 13 students in the 1960s and 1970s read Bread and Wine in high school, and his 'discovery' by American readers, notably by the politically active of various stripes (hippies, liberal Catholics, and so on) occurred at a time in American culture when it was stylish to be on the Left. Silone's early novels in particular were instant classics. Many of the same readers who loved his work in the 1960s and 1970s, still committed to the ideals he espoused, have found themselves increasingly at odds with recent trends in American political culture. In addition to American leftist intellectuals, all those Silone readers for whom the end of the century was marked primarily by the erosion of socially responsible policy making nonetheless still believed in the vision of freedom and equality described by Silone. After the 1990s, the notion of a Marxist pre-history is no longer a possibility for such readers, but the dream of social justice has not disappeared. Thus the shock of the new information about Silone: it has struck the beleaguered American Left at a bad time. Interestingly, the virulence of the American press's attack on Silone recalls none other than Palmiro Togliatti who, during his years as leader of what was later dubbed Communism's 'cultural holocaust' in Italy, prided himself on demanding higher standards for Communist writers than for non-Communists. Demonstrating the fervor of a recent convert, the American Left press has shown that Americans need Silone too. He serves either as a Proustian madeleine transporting them back to their student days or as whipping boy and cautionary tale. Things to Come Chapter 1 of this study presents archival material that establishes the duration and nature of Silone's relationship to Guide Bellone, a highranking Fascist questore (police official), and explicitly indicates the personal and professional trajectory that Silone intended to follow when that relationship ended, beginning with his decision to become a writer. This move represents a critical moment in Silone's life, a break from the past that was more dramatic and farther reaching in its repercussions than either his expulsion from the Italian Communist Party in 1931 or his brother's death in 1932. Silone's break with Bellone signified, effectively, the burning of all bridges to his past. At the same time, the program he outlined for himself then marked the moment at which a new Silone was conceived. Over the course of writing his first works of fiction, Silone reinvented his identity in order to overcome the psy-

14 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone chological crisis provoked by the figurative death and burial of his own past. This chapter also points to analogies between the revelations regarding Silone's and Paul de Man's respective political pasts, in order to situate the theoretical issues raised by Silone's structural position as a 'case.' By re-evaluating Silone's fiction we are in a position to distinguish the various embryological stages by which a 'new' Silone developed. Chapter 2 examines Silone's first foray into literature. The story 'Viaggio a Parigi' is part of an eponymous collection of short stories that mark Silone's debut as a fiction writer. I read the protagonist Beniamino's journey to the brink of suicide as coincident with Silone's therapeutic engagement with his biological, ideological, and literary figures of paternal authority: his father, Paolo, the Italian Communist Party, and the Sicilian writer Giovanni Verga. Surreal and oneiric elements commingle in this story with oblique but revealing autobiographical references, because of which Silone later repudiated the collection, ostensibly on the grounds of its style. Beniamino of 'Viaggio a Parigi' stands as Silone's earliest avatar: his first attempt at selfrepresentation. Beniamino marks the negative pole from which the saintly, ascetic, enduring Silonian protagonist will eventually evolve. The development of Silone's first literary alter ego also coincides with his rediscovery of religion. 'Viaggio a Parigi' is the first step along the trajectory by which Silone's despair resolves itself as faith. Chapter 3 concentrates on Silone's first novel, Fontamara. The novel marks the middle phase of Silone's self-reinvention. Its protagonist, Berardo Viola, is no longer cast in exclusively negative terms like Beniamino. Rather, Berardo demonstrates the potential for personal and community redemption in spite of his negative qualities. Fontamara chronicles an idiosyncratic reconstruction of Marxism in the selfsacrifice of Berardo Viola. The novel's ambivalent political stance results in the production of an accidental Marxist, or, rather, a Marxist anti-hero. Chapter 4 demonstrates that, with his next novel, Pane e vino, Silone reveals the final product of his reinvention of self. The autobiographical references of his previously published works, repressed in 'Viaggio a Parigi' and framed as folklore in Fontamara, explode onto centre stage in Pane e vino. After the publication of the novel, Silone becomes inextricably identified with the protagonists of his future works, all of whom will be but slight variations on Pane e vino's Pietro Spina, if not actual reprisals of his character.

Introduction: // caso Silone 15 Here the author unveils the fruits of his meditation on the possibilities of intercalating Catholicism and Communism, the two systems of thought represented, respectively, by his two early protagonists. With Pietro Spina, Silone reconciles his two previous protagonists to one another, overcoming their foibles and rejoicing in their conversion. This meditation results in, quite literally, a new holy trinity; Silone's trinity is a radical revision of that of Christian thought, in which Christ is at once Man, the manifestation of God, and the Holy Spirit; Silone's hypostatic protagonist is both Man and the incarnation of Revolutionary and Priest. Conclusions Finally, Chapter 5 returns to the paradoxes presented by Silone's 'case.' It is impossible to focus exclusively either on Silone's commitments to the Communist Party or on his association with the Fascists. The usual categories (like pro-communist and anti-Fascist) are deceptive in Silone's case because his political affiliation is not a zero-sum game. Any thorough investigation into his life must take account of the many ideological contradictions his activities evince, including the risks to his own personal safety, the destruction of others' lives, the adherence of his fiction (at least in the public imagination) to the Communist cause, and the devotion he showed to his Fascist contact Guido Bellone. It is impossible to argue that he merely infiltrated one or the other party with the goal of damaging it, because he was too effective in the service of both. His was a different order of allegiance. Understanding his story, then, means measuring his legacy against a different set of principles, which cannot be cast as exclusively political at the same time that they manifest themselves as political. Herein lies the paradox: while Fascism can no more be dismissed as a cover any more than Communism can, demonstrations of fealty to one or the other are the only clues by which Silone makes his identity visible. As I will demonstrate, the archival materials raise issues that were not otherwise visible in Silone's fiction. Considered in this light, they demand a radical revision of Silone's public historical position but not of his literary position, since these revelations are nothing but the confirmation of the quiet confession Silone rehearsed throughout his literary career. From a structuralist standpoint, in other words, these materials are irrelevant to our understanding of his novels since they are, after all, unchanged. But the very same documents undermine the

16 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone redeeming confessional aspect of his fiction when considered as the foundation on which the emotionally charged public image of Silone was constructed. The documents demand an understanding of Silone's fiction that transcends the structuralist argument of textual independence, for the simple fact that however powerful the positive effects of his novels may be, they cannot bring back the dead. Hence, in my reading, one of the most intriguing aspects of the ongoing caso Silone is the provisory nature of the responses it provokes. Silone's life and works challenge us to countenance the paradox of a deeply flawed cultural icon, keeping the circumstances of its creation in strong focus. It is to that challenge that this book is dedicated.

CHAPTER ONE

Silone and the Fascists

'II primo dovere di uno scrittore e la sincerita.'1 'Ho una tremenda paura della terribile ambiguita delle parole.'2 In 'Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression/ Jacques Derrida writes that when a culture records its own misdeeds, TUn se garde de 1'autre. The One guards against/keeps some of the other. It protects itself from the other, but, in the movement of this jealous violence, it comprises in itself, thus guarding it, the self-otherness or self-difference (the difference from within oneself) which makes it One.'3 A death drive results, Derrida asserts, that opposes the drive to conserve, and violence - le mal d'archive, archive fever - ensues from this double move: 'L'un sefait violence. The One makes itself violence/4 In the spring of 1996 an outbreak of archive fever hit Rome's Archivio Centrale dello Stato (ACS), when it was discovered that a beloved cultural icon, ex-Communist writer Ignazio Silone, had spied for the Fascists during the ten years when he was also a high-profile member of the Italian Communist Party.5 Some of the difficulty Italians have had with the revelations seems to be, as Derrida suggests, as much about guarding against as keeping: guarding against the continual barrage of 'revelations' that have impugned many of their beloved cultural figures (Alberto Moravia, Elio Vittorini, and Cesare Pavese have come under scrutiny for their activities during the war6), and keeping their reputations intact. That ambiguity or double drive that aims both to preserve and to obscure, to promote and yet limit knowledge, is inscribed within the very notion of an archive. Before the discovery, Silone maintained a singular

18 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone position as both the One and the Not One, to borrow from Derrida: having made his name as a Communist, he stayed in the limelight by writing from the vantage point of an ex-.7 After the discovery, as the sole inhabitant of a particular Italian political geography, he was located both within and outside ideological systems whose core values are incompatible at the most fundamental level. And throughout it all, though the body of his writings grew, he was nonetheless intermittently denied the status of both writer and politico by members of both professions. Togliatti was said to have quipped that, to writers, Silone was a political figure, whereas to those active in politics, he was a writer. And when they were not bandying him back and forth like a shuttlecock, both sides were glad to claim him as their own; his past life in politics, after all, lent credence to his writings, which in any case were really just about his past life in politics! With so much unyielding indeterminacy indelibly marking his reputation, by the time of the discovery Silone was already inscribed within the archive as a figure to be preserved and defended against. That his position as such (there are files about him in the Polizia Politica archives from as early as 1919) should present itself so concretely nearly eighty years later, though, is not so astonishing as the fact that so many of the voices of Italian culture would be so adamantly, publicly averse even to considering the very possibility. In what follows, I examine that reluctance to revise Silone (which began with Silone himself) in light of recent work on trauma theory (most notably Cathy Caruth's), and offer a reading of Silone's works that is sensitive to its source, namely, the singularity of Silone's position both within the archive and on the cusp of Italian culture: a Communist/Fascist hybrid, a history and its disavowal. Silone and Ovra On 7 March 1996 the Corriere delta Sera published an article8 that described documents referring to Silone's attempts to provide the Fascist police, Ovra (Opera di vigilanza e repressione antifascista), with information about the Communist Party. In the weeks that followed, the same newspaper published a series of denials, defences, and qualifications written by historians, journalists, and Silone's widow, Darina, in which, among other things, the source for the article was accused of falsifying the documents on which it was based.9 But a week later, on the eve of the annual Silone Prize,10 those voices were silenced. A com-

Silone and the Fascists 19 peting newspaper, La Repubblica, published excerpts from a letter11 written by Silone on 13 April 1930 to Guido Bellone, an Ovra operative and Silone's one and only contact in the Fascist police, in which Silone announced that he would no longer provide information about the Communists12: Mi scusi se non le ho piu scritto. Cio che le interessava sapere non e piu un mistero (la stampa gia ne parla). Non so cosa io e i miei faremo. La mia salute e pessima ma la causa e morale (Lei comprendera se ricordera cio che le scrissi Testate scorsa). Io mi trovo in un punto molto penoso della mia esistenza. II senso morale che e stato sempre forte in me, ora mi domina completamente; non mi fa dormire, non mi fa mangiare, non mi lascia un minimo di riposo. Mi trovo nel punto risolutivo della mia crisi di esistenza, la quale non ammette che una sola via d'uscita: 1'abbandono complete della politica militante (mi cerchero un'occupazione intellettuale qualsiasi). Oltre questa soluzione non restava che la morte. Vivere ancora nell'equivoco mi era impossible, mi e impossibile. Io ero nato per essere un onesto proprietario di terre nel mio paese. La vita mi ha scaraventato lungo una china alia quale ora voglio sottrarmi. Ho la coscienza di non aver fatto un gran male ne ai miei amici ne al mio paese. Nei limiti in cui era possibile mi sono sempre guardato dal compiere del male. Devo dirle che lei, data la sua funzione, si e sempre comportato da galantuomo. Percio le scrivo questa ultima lettera perche lei non ostacoli il mio piano che si realizzera in due tempi: primo, eliminare dalla mia vita tutto cio che e falsita, doppiezza, equivoco, mistero; secondo, cominciare una nuova vita, su una nuova base, per riparare il male che ho fatto, per redimermi, per fare del bene agli operai, ai contadini (ai quali sono legato con ogni fibra del mio cuore) e alia mia patria. Tra il primo e il secondo tempo ho bisogno di un po' di riposo fisico, intellettuale e morale. Nessuna considerazione di carattere materiale ha influenzato la mia decisione. I disagi non mi spaventano. Quello che voglio e vivere moralmente. L'influenza e la popolarita che in molti centri di emigrazione ho acquisiti mi inducono a concepire la mia attivita futura (appena saro ristabilito in salute) nella forma di un'attivita letteraria e editoriale del tutto indipendente. Devo aggiungere che in questo tempo, delle grandi modificazioni si vanno compiendo nella mia ideologia e mi sento riattratto, molto, verso la religione (se non verso la chiesa) e che 1'evoluzione del mio pensiero e facilitata dall'orientamento cretino e criminale che sta assumendo il parti to comunista. La sola cosa che mi fa allontanare da esso

20 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone con rammarico e il fatto che e un partito perseguitato nel quale, all'infuori del dirigenti, vi sono migliaia di operai in buona fede. Per poter esercitare un'influenza sugli elementi di base, io esito ancora ad annunciare pubblicamente la mia rottura col partito ed attendo, prossimamente, il momento propizio. Questa mia lettera a lei e un'attestazione di stima. Ho voluto chiudere, definitivamente, un lungo periodo di rapporti leali, con un atto di lealta. Se lei e un credente, preghi Iddio che mi dia la forza di superare i miei rimorsi, di iniziare una nuova vita, di consumarla tutta per il bene dei lavoratori e dell'Italia. Suo, Silvestri Forgive me if I haven't written you any more. What it interested me to learn is no longer a mystery (the press already talks about it). I don't know what my people and I will do. My health is terrible but the cause is moral (you will understand if you remember what I wrote to you last summer). I find myself at a very painful moment in my existence. The moral sense which has always been very strong in me now dominates me completely; it doesn't let me sleep, it doesn't let me eat, it doesn't leave me the briefest respite. I find myself at the resolution of my crisis of existence, which only allows one way out: the complete abandonment of militant politics (I will seek any intellectual occupation). Aside from this solution nothing was left but death. Continuing to live in the wrong was impossible to me, is impossible to me. I was born to be an honest landowner in my village. Life has flung me down a slope from which I now want to remove myself. My conscience tells me I have done a great harm neither to my friends nor to my country. Within the limits of the possible I have always avoided wrongdoing. I must tell you that you, given your function, have always behaved like a gentleman. For that reason I am writing you this last letter so that you don't prevent my plan, which will take place in two phases: first, eliminate from my life everything that is falsehood, duplicity, equivocation, mystery; second, begin a new life, on a new basis, in order to repair the wrongs that I've done, in order to redeem myself, to help the workers, the peasants (to whom I am tied with every fiber of my heart) and my country. Between the first and the second phase I need a bit of physical, intellectual and moral rest. No considerations of a material nature have influenced my decision. Discomforts don't frighten me. What I want is to live morally. The influence and the popularity which I've acquired in many emigration centers induce me to conceive of my future activity (as soon as

Silone and the Fascists 21 I've re-established my health) in the shape of a completely independent literary and editorial activity. I should add that these days great modifications are taking place in my ideology and that I feel greatly attracted again to religion (if not to the church) and that the evolution of my thought is facilitated by the cretinous and criminal orientation the Communist Party is assuming. The only thing about my separation from it which causes me regret is that it is a party under persecution in which, except for the leaders, there are thousands of workers in good faith. In order to exercise a little influence on the lower elements, I continue to hesitate about publicly announcing my break from the party and will wait for an imminent, propitious moment. This letter of mine to you attests to my esteem. I want to close, definitely, a long period of loyal relations with an act of loyalty. If you are a believer, pray God to give me the strength to overcome my remorse, to begin a new life, and to spend it all for the good of the workers and of Italy. Yours, Silvestri13

The article unleashed a firestorm of newspaper and journal articles. From senators to Silone's widow, everyone weighed in on the issue.14 Emotions ran the gamut from shock and disbelief to (more frequently) hostility and denial. Even Silone's grandnephew, Romolo Tranquilli, Jr, with whose blessing and assistance Dario Biocca's original research had been carried out, said of the revelations, 'E' una bomba!' ('It's a bomb!').15 Eleven pages of articles in the magazine Regione Abruzzo (March-April 1996)16 entitled 'Silone oltraggiato' ('Silone Desecrated') and 'L'archivio segreto dello scrittore al comune Pescina' (The Writer's Secret Archive in the Commune of Pescina') exalted, in tones that ran the spectrum from defensive to jubilant, the reliability and completeness of personal papers donated by Silone's wife to the archives at Pescina. At the same time, these articles raised, like Leo Valiani and Darina Silone had before, the spectre of a state archive full of 'counterinformation,' manipulated by the news media in order to raise circulation or promote a new book. The initial shock, outrage, and denial were followed by explanations. The letter was interpreted as referring exlusively to the years 1928-32, during which Silone's brother Romolo Tranquilli had been imprisoned. Scholars were quick to suggest that Silone had probably offered only generic information,17 and that the tragic circumstances of his brother's situation mitigated the gravity of the charge of collaboration.18 This is the background against which, in 1996, scholars originally

22 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone placed the 1930 letter with which Silone sought to halt his collaboration with the Fascists. The four years of Romolo's imprisonment had indeed coincided with radical changes in Silone's life. The crisi di esistenza to which he referred in his letter to Bellone eventually led, as he foretold, to nothing short of total self-reinvention. By 1932, Silone had emerged a different man than he had been in 1928. During this period Silone began sixteen years in exile, first in France and then in Switzerland. He was in poor physical health and spent much of his time in and out of clinics. He also suffered 'nervous illnesses' and underwent intensive psychotherapy, first with Carl Gustav Jung.19 His acrimonious rupture with the Communist Party not only put his safety at risk but also complicated his relationship with his brother, since the party's Soccorso Rosso fund represented one of the only ways to provide Romolo with material support in prison - support which, needless to say, would be cut off as soon as Silone left the Communist Party. At the same time, his letters to Romolo revealed that their relationship was deteriorating, in part over financial issues. It fell to his partner of many years, Gabriella Seidenfeld, to correspond with Romolo, who by now required medication to alleviate psychological problems of long standing. At one point, all correspondence between the brothers halted. Moreover, Silone was in moral crisis; in 1931 in Switzerland he began an intimate relationship with Aline Valangin: the worldly, wealthy wife of a friend, she helped him with both financial problems and psychological ones, since she was also the therapist who took Silone's case over for Jung. In short, internal conflicts and external hardships sent Silone's life on a downward spiral, which reached rock bottom with his official expulsion from the PCI in 1931. Despite Silone's assertion that he did no harm to his party or his country,20 he had broken one of the fundamental injunctions of his party. By leaving the Communists, he invited the worst kind of ostracism, placed himself in the most vulnerable position, had the worst insults heaped upon him, the grossest falsehoods told about him, and he had no recourse.21 For many years after the break, Silone suffered public vilification by Palmiro Togliatti, with whom he had been of one mind in 1927 during the events that precipitated Silone's break.22 His novels, which enjoyed enormous success in the rest of Europe and in the United States, were dismissed by Italian literary critics as soon as they were made available with a lack of sensitivity that was not typical of them.23 And yet, years later, scholars were outraged by the mere thought that Silone might have been a Fascist collaborator. As the storm subsided, Silone's activities were elucidated further

Silone and the Fascists 23 with the publication of another of his letters to Bellone. This one was significant for several reasons. It pointed to material remuneration as a partial motive for Silone's collaboration. The tone of the letter - amicable, thoughtful, cooperative, and explicitly full of esteem - indicated that Silone and Bellone's relationship was based on mutual respect, not coercion. It revealed that one of the methods whereby Silone and Guido Bellone camouflaged their association was by feigning romance.24 Despite appearances, the letter is not intended for a woman, but for Bellone, and makes veiled reference not to a romantic relationship but to their collaboration. 5 luglio 1929 Egregia signorina, Tr[anquilli] e arrivato qui, dove si trova in una clinica privata; non esce mai, dato che il suo stato di salute e ancora delicate. Nella clinica e difficile visitarlo, perche tra il personale vi sono dei conoscenti. Sembra che restera nella clinica ancora 2-3 settimane e poi andra in una pensione. Allora sara possibile avvicinarlo. Le scrivero nuovamente fra giorni. Lei giustamente si lagna della rarita delle mie lettere: i nostri rapporti potranno essere piu regolari e frequenti se cambieranno natura e carattere. Al punto in cui sono nella mia formazione morale e intellettuale mi e fisicamente impossible restare con lei negli stessi rapporti di dieci anni fa. Suppongo che in una sistemazione diversa dei nostri rapporti potrebbe anche lei avere interesse. La prima cosa da eliminare, perche mi lascia indifferente o umiliato, e il denaro. Ma di cio parleremo a voce con maggiore comodita. Saluti cordiali, Silvestri25 July 5,1929 Distinguished young lady, Tr[anquilli] arrived here, where he is now in a private clinic; he never goes out, given that his health is still delicate. It is difficult to visit him in the clinic, because here are acquaintances among the personnel. It seems he will stay in the clinic another 2-3 weeks and then will go to a pension. Then it will be possible to approach him. I will write to you again in days. You correctly lament the rarity of my

24 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone letters; our relationship can be more regular and frequent if it changes nature and character. At this point in my moral and intellectual development it is physically impossible for me to stay in the same relationship with you of ten years ago. I suppose that with a different arrangement of our relations you too might be interested. The first thing to eliminate, because it leaves me indifferent or humiliated, is money. But we will speak of that in person at greater length. Warm regards, Silvestri25

More interesting than the methods and manners of their communication is the fact that the letter reveals a much more crucial detail about their correspondence: by 1929, Silone and Bellone had been in contact for ten years. Bellone and Silone's correspondence began in the fall of 1919, long before Romolo was imprisoned, as had been believed initially. In fact, it began a few months after Silone (still using his real name, Tranquilli26) was appointed secretary of the Unione Giovanile Socialista Romana. Silone provided Bellone with reports on the activities, policies, and goals of the Federazione Giovanile Socialista Italiana. Starting at that point, Dario Biocca and Mauro Canali confirm, there was a strong positive correlation between Silone's various whereabouts and the points of origin of the letters, as well as a positive correlation between the letters' contents and the kinds of information to which Silone would have been privy according to the positions he held in the party hierarchies.27 The biographical ramifications of the year 1919 as the starting date for Silone's association with the Fascists are significant, since the Italian Communist Party was not founded until 1921. For Silone, providing information to the Fascists and organizing and being active in the PCI were simultaneous, not sequential, aspects of his formation. In other words, we cannot logically argue that Silone turned to the Fascists after becoming disllusioned with the Communists, because he was contemporaneously in the service of both. This is less contradictory a stance early on than it would be in later years, since the boundaries between Fascism and the Left were not yet entirely clear; even as late as the mid-1930s, members of the PCI leadership were attempting to locate a point d'appui from which to join ideological forces with the ruling party.28 The following letter, written two weeks after Romolo's arrest and also published in the Italian papers in 1996, confirms that Silone was

Silone and the Fascists 25 not motivated by the hope of aiding his brother. On the contrary, Silone protected his relationship with Bellone and encouraged the latter to disseminate information about his brother in order to help the Fascists. Furthermore, he did not provide them with merely generic information but with real specifics, including the names and locations of party militants. Despite Silone's later claim that he did no great harm, the ramifications of his correspondence were often deadly. Da Berlino, 28 aprile, 1928 (Al commissario Bellone) Sospesi il viaggio per Roma in seguito ad informazioni della Polizia di Lugano, secondo le quali io ero segnalato a tutti i posti di frontiera italiana. I miei amici, che erano gia contrari al mio ritorno in Italia, non vollero allora che io partissi. D'altra parte, il partite comunista ha la lista degli ispettori che come lei, Nudi ecc. si occupano particolarmente dei comunisti, percio esitai a scriverle dalla Svizzera. Anzi, il Nudi faccia attenzione perche un giorno o 1'altro a Pavia (non capisco perche li) possano fotterlo. Io le scrivero anche domani, intanto voglio avere assicurazioni su mio fratello. Mi faccia scrivere da qualche parente fascista (es. un membro del direttorio del Fascio del mio paese) delle informazioni sicure in merito, ad un indirizzo che ho mandato alia nonna. A quell'indirizzo (di Berlino) non puo assolutamente scrivere perche la sua calligrafia, come quella del Nudi, e conosciuta. L'organizzazione comunista in Italia si e un po' ristretta in alcune zone del nord (Milano e Trieste) ma sarebbe un errore supporla sradicata dalle masse. Per contro essa fa progress! nell'Italia settentrionale e in Sardegna. II 1 maggio sara calmissimo. Non vi sara nemmeno (eccetto la Liguria, parte del Piemonte e Roma) la solita distribuzione di stampati. Questo e voluto dagli stessi capi comunisti i quali si propongono di 'far riposare' per un po' il partito allo scopo di rafforzarlo organizzativamente. Mi faccia inviare da qualche parente fascista dette notizie su mio fratello. Pud servire anche a calmare 1'attuale campagna di stampa che c'e all'estero per lui. II noto Viacava che, dopo aver fatto il compromesso con il Nudi, si e ampiamente confessato con i dirigenti comunisti, si trova come sapete a Bordeaux. Sarebbe utile farlo scappare di li perche puo accadergli qualche brutto incidente. Tanto per lui, come per lonna, 1'esecuzione sarebbe protratta solo per ragioni di opportunita politica del momento ma in linea di principio ho saputo che e stata decisa. La posizione di Sportelli e invece

26 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone migliorata. In genere dall'insieme dei dati che Viacava ha messo per iscritto appare che voi non operate con intelligenza superiore a quella di La Polla. Certe sciocchezze sembrano incredibili! II comp. Buscemi ha scritto un rapporto che Lei viene spesso in Francia. Mi sembra esagerate! Silvestri From Berlin, April 28,1928 [to Bellone]: I delayed my trip to Rome following information from the Lugano police, according to which I had been reported to all the places along the Italian border. My friends, who all opposed my return to Italy, didn't want me to leave then. On the other hand the Communist Party has the list of all the inspectors who like you, Nudi, etc. are occupied especially with Communists, so I hesitated to write you from Switzerland. In fact, Nudi should watch out because one day or another in Pavia (I don't understand why there) they might screw him. I'll write you tomorrow too; meanwhile I want reassurance about my brother. Have some Fascist relative of mine (for example a member of the director's board of my village's Fascio) write me with genuine information about it to an address that I sent to my grandmother. You absolutely cannot write to that address (in Berlin) because your handwriting, like Nudi's, is known. The Communist organization in Italy has reduced itself a bit in some parts of the north (Milan and Trieste) but it would be wrong to consider it eradicated from the masses. On the other hand, it's making progress in northern Italy and in Sardinia. The first of May will be very calm. There won't even be (except in Liguria, part of Piedmont, and in Rome) the usual distribution of published materials. This was wanted by the same Communist leaders who propose to 'let the party rest' a little with the goal of reinforcing its organization. Have some Fascist relative send me that information on my brother. It may also be useful to calm down the current press campaign that's going on abroad for him right now. The famous Viacava who, after having compromised with Nudi, confessed everything to the Communist leaders, is in Bordeaux as you know. It would be useful to let him escape from there because some ugly accident might befall him. Both for him and for lonna, execution would be postponed only for momentary reasons of political opportunity but at least in principle I learned it has been decided. Sportelli's position, though, has improved. Generally from the ensemble of material Sportelli

Silone and the Fascists 27 wrote down, it appears that you don't operate with any more intelligence than La Polla. Some absurdities seem incredible! Buscemi has written that you come to France often. That seems exaggerated! Silvestri29 Silone and Trauma

After the memories of his acrimonious public break with the Communist Party in 193130 had faded, Silone was partially re-evaluated by the Left. Judgments of him straddled the fence between vilification and veneration; the apparent sincerity of his writings on Communism made him into a cult hero in some circles, while in others he never lost the epithet that almost inevitably preceded his name (rinnegato, renegade). But the news sixty-five years later of his purported activity was decried as mudslinging and immediately rejected as impossible by otherwise well-informed scholars and friends. Recent disclosure of analogous information about Paul de Man's wartime journalism polarized supporters and detractors into equally impassioned (and occasionally equally delirious) action. Yet, as regards Silone, in spite of the noise surrounding the case, no real debate has been sparked in Italy or elsewhere. Observers of this new phase of il caso Silone have been surprisingly uniform in their response. The colpevolisti (those who held Silone to be guilty, that is, Biocca and Canali) aside, the great majority of scholars and political and cultural figures who have intervened in the debate have aligned themselves with Silone's difensori. But the debate raises myriad questions: What are the ramifications of these revelations for Silone the writer, as opposed to Silone the political figure? Can they now, and can they ever be, differentiated? Beyond the events themselves, what does the public response they have provoked reveal about Silone's position in Italian literary and political cultures, and about the very relationship between Italian literary and political cultures? Such questions originate not exclusively from evolving critical interests but also from the texts themselves. For the production of Silone's literary opus bears the earmarks of trauma,31 by necessity hampering its legibility. Issues of belatedness - the chronological gaps between the writing and publication of some of his works, as well as between the development of a body of critical readings and the recent need to revise them - obfuscate the always already faint boundary between the man and his fiction to which his critical reception

28 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone responds. They also, however, simultaneously reveal a map on which we can trace the traumatic progress of Silone's self-invention. To begin with, the question of belatedness, visible in the chronology of his works, complicates traditional readings of Silone's literature. Viaggio a Parigi, Silone's only collection of short stories, was published in 1934.32 As we will see, however, though this is uncertain, its contents, style, and structure indicate that it was written most likely in 1929 and thus preceded the composition (1930) and publication (1933) of Fontamara?3 Silone's first attempt at non-political writing, the collection may be located at the very beginning of what I argue forms a trilogy together with Fontamara and Pane e vino.34 Later in this study I focus specifically on the protagonists of these three texts, whose progressive evolution represents the three stages through which Silone rehearsed his own rehabilitation. Suffice it to say at this point that the proposed completion date of 1929 is significant, since it was the year that Silone went into exile in Switzerland and began psychoanalysis under Jung, and it was the second year of his brother Romolo's imprisonment by the Fascists for suspected connections to a bombing attempt. The difference between 1929 and 1930 as the actual date of his debut as a writer is significant in that it may or may not overlap with his attempt to terminate relations with Bellone. The imbrication of critical ambivalence towards the author (recall Togliatti's quip, for example) and this equivocation over when, and why, he began to write is crucial to understanding the traumatic in Silone's person - along with what Freud, Derrida, Caruth, and others define as central to the notion of trauma: belatedness. In her discussion of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Caruth describes how 'trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual's past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature - the way it was precisely not known in the first instance - returns to haunt the survivor later on.'35 Silone tolerated and even encouraged critical imprecision about his debut as a writer, and doing so allowed him to avoid public confrontation with his own history. By disavowing his earlier work he effectively made his expulsion from the PCI seem to be the crucible from which he forged artistic creation into a new passion. More important, later on this move established the conditions for a traumatic reception by the Italian press of the revelation that Silone was not what he had claimed to be. In other words, this latest chapter in the caso Silone is traumatic, in part, because of its very 'archivization,' that is, the way Silone's move away from political action into literature was

Silone and the Fascists 29 produced, not recorded, or, to return to Caruth's formulation, 'not known in the first instance/ Finally, it has not yet been ascertained whether after 1930 there were further communications between Silone and Bellone.36 How does the possibility that Silone continued to be in contact with the Fascists after he began to write fiction colour our reading of that fiction? In the event that there was continued contact with the Fascists, it becomes much harder to make the argument that his literary production was an act of contrition for all that had gone before. As we will discover, his early writings are unequivocal in their critique of Fascism, a theme that contributed greatly to the construction of his public persona as a writer. His later revisions of his early works, however, are marked by the attenuation of those critiques and a sharper focus on the ideological contradictions within Communism, as well as by a growing tendency to value personal relationships over ideological differences. To what do we attribute his eventual softened stance towards the Fascists in his literature when in 'real life' he was moving in the other direction? The liminal status of Silone's texts, too, affects the archivable content of his personal history. His literature borrows heavily from his real life, just as his non-fiction is heavily laden with depictions of highly mediated events. The hybrid collection of fiction and essays Uscita di sicurezza (1965) is a case in point: in effect, the distinctions between fiction, non-fiction, and autobiography are negligible, since the pieces are presented to the reader without structural distinctions. Further complicating those issues is not the literature itself but the skills and strategies Silone developed before he started writing, in response to his position on the wrong side of two iron-fisted political systems. For anyone involved in the anti-Fascist resistance, the art of false self-representation would have been crucially important from the standpoint both of physical safety and of effectiveness. This was doubly the case for anyone who was playing both ends of the board - Silone himself describes it as a useful skill in Uscita di sicurezza, though, of course, he makes reference only to those who feared discovery by the Fascists: Quelli di noi che gia da tempo vivevano con 'generalita' alterate, dissimulando 1'attivita cospirativa sotto apparenze innocent! e banali, si trovavano allora in una condizione certamente piu vantaggiosa; ma neppure troppo sicura, poiche 1'eventuale tradimento o debolezza di qualcuno degli arrestati poteva offire alia polizia indicazioni portanti sulle notre tracce.

30 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone Those of us who had already for some time been living with altered 'features/ concealing our conspiracy with the appearance of innocence and banality, then found themselves in a much more advantageous position; though it wasn't really too safe, since the eventual betrayal or weakness of anyone who had been arrested could lead to clues that put the police on our trail.37 As early as 1926, when this was written, the art of dissimulation was not only familiar but a central tenet in Silone's strategy for survival. Though his fiction associates this practice with the anti-Fascist resistance, we may also attribute it, to a certain extent, to the influence during the period of Silone's early political development of a Fascist political culture that encouraged the concealment of all traces of its fluctuating ideological alignments. It comes as no surprise, then, that it continued to define Silone's self-presentation in later years; by continuing to rewrite, refine, and redefine his public persona, Silone, too, covered over the traces of own metamorphosis. He achieved this by favouring a stable, idealized imaginary political system over a real but mutable one. Silone's narrative of events from the late 1920s and early 1930s bears witness to the extent to which Silone perfected the skill of dissimulation, which is central to our understanding of the development of his literary voice. An examination of his accounts about his brother Romolo is particularly instructive in this regard. I linger on his story in part because it ranks among the great adventure stories of the era, and also because of its role in the creation of Silone's public persona as a writer. His brother's story both glamorized Silone and lent him a narrative authority, not to mention that, with Romolo dead, there was no one left to corroborate or to contradict Silone's stories. One of the defining events of Silone's life, his brother's imprisonment and death, later became a selling point for Silone, a battle scar that garnered sympathy and proved his credibility as a tried and true survivor of the early anti-Fascist resistance. Silone's 'spin' on Romolo's story illustrates the former's strategy of passive misinterpretation in its incorporation of historical fact. Silone and Romolo, 1928-32 On 12 April 1928 a bomb planted at the base of a lamp-post in Milan's Piazzale Giulio Cesare exploded, killing seventeen people and wounding forty. The occasion was the opening of the Fiera di Milano, and it

Silone and the Fascists 31 was thought that the bomb was intended for Mussolini and Vittorio Emanuele III, who were present to inaugurate the celebrations. The Fascist police presumed that the instigators of the attack were members of the PCI. Over five hundred suspects were arrested, but no one was convicted. Guido Leto, then head of Ovra and responsible for investigating the bombing, revealed many years later that as investigations proceeded it became clear that all leads pointed to Fascists with republican tendencies; that Mussolini had been forewarned about the attack, which was intended to kill the king; and that the bombing was related to a similar incident which had occurred several days earlier, when a bomb under the Milan-Rogoredo tracks was discovered just before the royal train passed through.38 Despite indications that a group of Fascists was responsible, many of those arrested were from the ranks of the PCI, as well as from anarchist groups. Romolo Tranquilli, Silone's younger brother and the only member of Silone's immediate family to have survived the devastating 1915 earthquake in Avezzano, was among those arrested.39 Tranquilli was arrested on 13 April, the day after the bombing, near Brunate. He had been fleeing the police for over twenty-four hours at that point, having eluded capture by jumping through the ground floor window of a hotel on the evening of 12 April. Immediately upon his arrest, Tranquilli proclaimed his party affiliation, thereby disregarding one of the fundamental strategies suggested by the party: negare, negare sempre (deny, always deny).40 According to fellow prisoners, he was badly beaten: besides having three ribs broken and being pummelled with bags of sand, [n]on era stato trascurato, cosi come non erano stati trascurati per quasi tutti gli imputati del gruppo di Piazzale Giulio Cesare, la stringitura del testicoli, la bruciatura del piedi, lo strappo del peli del pube, la luce abbacinante e 1'obbligo di una posizione equilibrata tenuta per ore e ore fino a venir meno. he was not spared, as almost all the suspects in the Piazzale Giulio Cesare group were not spared, testicle squeezing, foot burning, yanking out of pubic hair, blinding light and the obligation to maintain a balanced position for hours and hours to the point of unconsciousness.41

Did Silone play a role in the events leading to Romolo's arrest? Witnesses from the house in which Romolo was staying in Venice during his linotyping apprenticeship recalled how in March 1928 (a month before the bombing) a young man resembling Romolo ('forse suo fra-

32 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone tello' - perhaps his brother)42 had arrived and asked for him. Upon meeting the visitor, Romolo, emotional, left immediately with him to talk in private. The next day Tranquilli, wearing new clothes, paid his bills and left Venice, never to return. In 'Le ultime ore di Ignazio Silone' ('The Last Hours of Ignazio Silone'), Darina Silone transcribed her last conversations with her dying husband. In a rare conversation about Romolo, Silone described how he had suggested to Romolo that he emigrate to Switzerland in order to avoid the police, who followed him everywhere because he was Silone's brother, and thus provide a future for himself and his fiancee, whom he could not hope to marry without a stable job.43 It was his brother's dream, Silone recalled, to study at the Politecnico in Zurich: admittedly an expensive undertaking for Silone to finance, but one that paled in comparison to the cost of supplying Romolo with warm clothes and decent food while he was in prison. Silone told his wife that, 'con 1'aiuto di amici comunisti' ('with the help of his Communist friends'), he himself would provide Romolo with the false documents necessary to live abroad.44 Did Silone offer to help his brother emigrate? If so, did that offer transpire during his conversation with Tranquilli in March of 1928, as he claimed? Silone's account of the events surrounding Romolo's arrest is unclear. Whether Silone actively recruited him to act as a courier on behalf of the Communists, promised to produce the documents necessary for emigration, or merely proposed Romolo's emigration cannot be known. What is clear from the archives is that on 16 March 1928, less than a month before the bombing, Romolo arrived in Nervi (Liguria) and, according to the testimony he wrote for the Tribunale speciale, began performing courier duties for the PCI. Silone maintained, many years later, that on the day of the bombing, Romolo believed he was going to receive emigration documents Silone had prepared and entrusted to Luigi Longo (a high-ranking, high-profile Communist, nom-de-guerre Gallo). Longo, however, told it differently. It was he, recently returned from France to reorganize the Centre interne del partito, who acted as intermediary between Romolo Tranquilli and the PCI, and not Silone. According to Longo, he was to have met Tranquilli in a bar in Como on 12 April. Longo had furnished Romolo earlier with a sketch of Piazza Cavour, where the bar was located. Longo later recalled: Era una mia mania allora che conserve ancora, quando davo qualche appuntamento, di tracciare sempre, sul primo pezzo di carta che mi capi-

Silone and the Fascists 33 tava sotto mano, un abbozzo di pianta per indicare 1'ubicazione del caffe, del bar o del luogo dove incontrarsi. Lo stesso feci per il mio appuntamento a Como con Romolo Tranquilli. Schizzai su un fogliettino di blocnotes una specie di quadrate aperto su un lato, lungo il quale alcune linee ondulate volevano indicare le acque del lago. Sull'angolo, in alto a destra, del quadrate, feci una macchia piu scura per indicare che li stava il caffe dove io lo avrei atteso, il giorno fissato per 1'appuntamento, alle ore 2,30 pomeridiane; gli raccomandai puntualita, la massima puntualita. It was one of my manias then, which I still have, that when I made some appointment I would always draw, on the first piece of paper I lay my hands on, a sketch of the area in order to indicate the location of the cafe, the bar, or the place where we were to meet. I did the same thing for my appointment in Como with Romolo Tranquilli. On a little piece of notebook paper I sketched out a kind of square, open on one side, along which some wavy lines were supposed to indicate the water of the lake. In the top-right corner of the square, I made a darker spot to indicate that there was the cafe where I would have awaited him, the day we set the meeting, at two-thirty in the afternoon; I advised him to be punctual, extremely punctual.45 At the time of his arrest Tranquilli was in fact carrying two sketches with him, one of which represented the piazza in Como where he was to have met Luigi Longo on 12 April.46 Longo, however, is no more a reliable witness than Silone. His recollection of the day and the way he learned of Tranquilli's arrest is highly detailed but also highly flawed: Longo's description does not jibe with the facts of the arrest on two counts. There were two sketches, not one, and he gave the wrong date of arrest for Romolo Tranquilli.47 Finally, the physical evidence and Tranquilli himself both contradict Silone's and Longo's reconstructions. Tranquilli gave a description of his mission and the contact who had assigned it which pointed not only to actual courier duties but also to his naivety about the serious risks he ran: Ricevetti fogli scritti a macchina nell'appuntamento del mattino e un piccolissimo involto che, al dire di chi me lo diede, conteneva il veleno. Mi disse il nome e lo scopo per cui serviva: parole difficili che non capii neanche in quel momento e che non ricordo affatto. Presi 1'involtino senza preoccupazioni e neanche mi domandai a che potesse servire: del resto mi era stato detto.

34 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone Non chiesi adunque perche nessun sospetto mi venne di cosa grave o di importante che mi si volesse far rappresentare. L'individuo che me lo consegno dimostrava una quarantina d'anni, e certo di poca confidenza e forse anche per questo non chiesi schiarimenti. Dunque io assolutamente non sospettai che quel veleno avrebbe potuto essere causa di tanti gravi sospetti da parte delle autorita. Cosa dire al riguardo? Erano pochi giorni che agivo, ero cosi poco in confidenza con quel1'individuo che presi 1'incarico di consegnarlo a Como con la massima indifferenza, anzi riposi 1'involtino nel portafogli. I received type written pages at the morning appointment, as well as a tiny package which, according to the person who gave it to me, contained poison. He told me its name and the purpose for which it was used: difficult words that I didn't even understand then and that I don't remember at all. I took the little envelope without worrying and didn't even ask myself what it could be used for. Anyway I had been told. So I didn't ask because no suspicion came to me about what serious or important thing it might represent. The individual who delivered it to me seemed about forty years old; he was unfamiliar to me and perhaps for that reason I didn't ask for clarifications. So I absolutely did not suspect that that poison could have been the cause of so many serious suspicions on the part of the authorities. What can I say about it? I had only been acting for a few days, and I was so unfamiliar with that individual that I took on the assignment of delivering it to Como with the utmost indifference - in fact, I stuck the little package in my billfold.48 On 13 April 1928, after a series of daring escapes from the police, Tranquilli was captured and imprisoned in Milan, Rome's Regina Coeli, Aquila, Perugia, and finally on the island of Procida. His case did not come to trial until 6 June 1931. He was no longer charged with participating in the Milan-Rogoredo attempts or the bombing of Piazzale Giulio Cesare. Instead, he was convicted of belonging to the Communist Party, of using fake identity cards, and of committing crimes against the state by way of his services as a typographer.49 He was sentenced to twelve years' imprisonment, three years of special observation, and a perpetual ban on holding public office.50 On 27 October 1932, he died of tuberculosis.51

Silone and the Fascists 35 Aiutami a vivere senza tradire52 Throughout his life Silone insisted that his brother had never been a member of the Communist Party, that indeed he was not at all interested in politics: Egli era un giovane vagamente antifascista, di educazione e sentiment! cattolici. Lo sport 1'interessava assai piu della politica; e lo sport aveva aggiunto, alia sua naturale fierezza, un particolare senso dell'onore. He was vaguely anti-Fascist as a young man, of Catholic education and sentiments. Sports interested him rather more than politics; and sports had added to his natural pride a special sense of honour.53 Others, however, like Li Causi and Longo, have said that Romolo Tranquilli had been an active party member long before the arrest.54 Tranquilli himself stated in his verbale that he had been active since 1927 and described his courier activities in great detail. Yet Silone denied Romolo's PCI connections and, what is more, admitted to feeling responsible for Romolo's death55 because of the poor role model he provided his younger brother: Era senz'altro antifascista, ma non iscritto ad alcun partito, almeno non allora [nel 1921]. Magari lo fosse stato, magari avesse fin dal principio accettato consapevolmente i rischi della politica clandestina: sarebbe stato un po' meno atroce per me il peso della mia responsabilita ... Fu a causa mia che mori innocente, a ventotto anni, colpevole solo di essere mio fratello ... La prigionia e la morte di mio fratello sono rimaste il mio tormento intimo, perche non sarebbero accadute se non fosse stato per me. Percio di Romolo non ho quasi mai parlato. E' un genere di dolore difficile da comunicare. He was certainly anti-Fascist, but not enrolled in any party, at least not then [in 19211. Perhaps if he had been, perhaps if from the beginning he had consciously accepted the risks of clandestine politics: the weight of my responsibility would have been a little less atrocious for me ... It was because of me that he died innocent, at twenty eight years of age, guilty only of being my brother ... The imprisonment and the death of my brother have remained my intimate torment, because they would not

36 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone have happened if it hadn't been for me. That's why I've almost never spoken of Romolo. It's difficult to communicate that type of pain.56 For the rest of his life, Silone refused to discuss his brother with family or friends, except under the most controlled circumstances.57 As in all of his autobiographical writings, in the case of his brother's political affiliations (was he Vaguely' or 'certainly' anti-Fascist?), Silone's consistent reticence with regard to his personal and family history was only intermittently punctuated by moments of apparent candour. And even then he portrayed events through the lens of his own personal logic and in direct contrast to historical documentation. For example, Silone employed an expression whose ambiguity raises suspicion: Ma un particolare che da gravita di tragedia a quel destine, era che, almeno fino al momento dell'arresto, non era infatti mai stato membro del Partito comunista, non aveva mai chiesto di fame parte, non vi era mai stato ammesso, non aveva mai partecipato ad alcuna sua adunanza o attivita, non ne conosceva neppure lo statute e il programma. But one detail which gives the weight of a tragedy to that destiny was that, at least until the moment of his arrest, he had never been a member of the Communist Party, had never asked to be a part of it, had never been admitted to it, had never participated in any of its meetings or activities, didn't even know its statute or program.58 What did Silone mean when he said that Romolo had never been a member of the PCI almeno fino al momento dell'arrestol Silone cannot be accused of lying; he does not categorically deny Romolo's activity in the party. But his qualification of Romolo's membership has the effect of a denial, in that it is predicated on a practical impossibility, since Romolo did not actually become a member of the PCI during the act of arrest, and thus it reduces Romolo's affiliation to the level of metaphor (whose logic runs thus: 'Romolo was not a member in the same way that I was'). Upon his arrest, Silone implies, Romolo's identification with his brother was so strong that he underwent a temporary conversion in the form of kinship with those who fight for Communist ideals. Note the complexity with which Silone approached questions as apparently straightforward as whether or not his brother was a Communist. Silone must work, as it were, to maintain Romolo's status not

Silone and the Fascists 37 just as a martyr (since Romolo's death in prison qualified him already) but as a martyr whose death resulted only from brotherly love and emulation. By Silone's logic, Romolo's downfall derived from wanting to be like Silone, not for devotion to any political cause. Silone's mastery at revealing and concealing illustrates his highly idiosyncratic and contextualized sense of 'truth' as well as the extent to which he controlled the dissemination of knowledge about his own and his family's lives.59 The ramifications for our comprehension of his non-fiction writings, and for his reputation as the embodiment of political, ethical, and spiritual coherence, are far-reaching. The misrepresentations, imprecisions, and prevarications we know of concerning one aspect of his life tempt us to be sceptical about other aspects - and all the more so since Silone himself characterized his need to write, using the language of the courtroom, as 'a need to testify.'60 The catchphrase, consistently historically attached to him, provides an outward assurance of the truthfulness of his writing. But close examination of that 'testimony' reveals its highly subjective nature. In a court of law, jurors are told that if a defendent is caught lying under oath, they may legally consider anything he says to be a lie. Silone is not a defendant, nor in a court of law, but a public figure in the realm of public opinion. Seen in the light of his highly mediated recollections, the unequivocal claims made of and in his non-fiction raise warning flags about the unimpeachability of his persona in the public imagination. We must also consider the other kinds of writing in which Silone engaged. After all, his principal channel of communication/ self-presentation was always fiction, which by definition demands to be read as a product of the imagination with claims to truth that are debatable at best. But in Silone's case his fiction is interesting and valuable because of the ways in which it is what his readers identified as truth.61 Silone was excused by some readers from having a flawless style (or, at any rate, his style was the source of some critical misgivings) on the strength of his political commitments. A survey of the responses his literature has provoked over the years shows that battle lines between Silone's critics were most visible around the issues of form and content. That interpretive uncertainty stemmed from the critical establishment's inability to negotiate the relationship between his literary works and his personal and political history. The assumption of an autobiographical relationship between the author and his protagonists was further troubled by Silone's penchant for passive misrepresentation of himself, by not correcting others' projections.

38 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone Difficult Readings Paradoxically, critics of Silone's literature have usually been consciously reluctant to engage with his texts (as opposed to his persona), for reasons that have never been clearly articulated. As the well-known literary critic Emilio Cecchi noted in 1952: 'Deve esserci ... qualcosa d'intrinseco all'opera, che almeno fino ad ora ha impedito un incontro piu convinto fra Silone e quella parte, pur limitata, del nostro pubblico, che non legge per ammazzare il tempo/ ('There must be something intrinsic to his work that at least up till now has impeded a more thorough meeting between Silone and that perhaps limited part of our public that doesn't read just to kill the time/62) Since the era of Cecchi's remark, we have come to be sceptical about the concept of 'intrinsic' textual qualities, whether positive or negative. We can ask, though, how it was that Silone's texts evoked the notion of the 'intrinsic/ how that notion was instrumentalized, and by whom. In hindsight, this critical diffidence has been attributed to two causes: Silone's personal and political history, and his style of writing. The simple fact of his writing from exile - until the end of the war his books were banned from Italy, for obvious reasons - coloured his reception both positively and negatively at home. His novels circulated clandestinely in Italy and, in retrospect, aroused a battery of intensely personal emotions which were indistinguishable from the hopes and desires of the era. Those who reread them after the war (mostly young soldiers) would recall the emotions of that first encounter with his texts, and find themselves inundated with a nostalgia for those times which can be aroused only years after the memory of hardships has faded: Ho letto per la prima volta un romanzo di Ignazio Silone ... durante la guerra, mentre, proprio negli Abruzzi, risalivamo lentamente la costa adriatica in direzione di Rimini. Allora di lui conoscevo soltanto, e vagamente, il nome, e un alone di esilio che lo accompagnava come un necessario complemento di leggenda; i suoi libri, al reggimento, passavano di mano in mano febbrilmente, come una segreta anticipazione di quella liberta che sembrava aspettarci al di la della guerra e degli Appennini, come una prima testimonianza del 'nuovo mondo' e della nuova poesia. Era un modo, lo riconosco, molto 'impure' (seppure incredibilmente felice) di leggerlo. E tuttavia, anche oggi che quei romanzi li ho ripresi con tutt'altra disposizione e attenzione, per parlarne criticamente, non

Silone and the Fascists 39 riesco a liberarmi dalle impression! di allora, dalla suggestione romantica che i romanzi dell'esule sconosciuto portavano con se; diro anzi, che liberarmene mi e sembrato e mi sembra impossibile. I read a novel of Ignazio Silone's for the first time during the war while, right in the Abruzzo region, we were slowly reascending the Adriatic coast toward Rimini. Then I only knew, and only vaguely, his name, and an aura of exile that accompanied him like a necessary complement to his legend; his books passed from hand to hand through the regiment feverishly, like a secret anticipation of that freedom that seemed to await us on the other side of the war and of the Appenines, as a first testimony to the 'new world' and the new poetry. I recognize that it was an extremely 'impure' (though incredibly happy) way of reading it. And yet, even today when I've taken those novels up again with completely different disposition and attention, in order to speak of them critically, I can't manage to free myself from the impressions of that time, from the romantic fascination that the novels of the unknown exile brought with them; I'll even say that to free myself from it seemed, and seems, impossible.63 That 'alone di esilio' ('aura of exile'), however, did not provoke an exclusively romantic fascination. For a while, at least, some critics were also, though not equally, influenced by a kind of bourgeois modesty. They averted their eyes, so to speak, from the sad spectacle of the orphan exile. As Cecchi points out, '[a]l reduce dalla tristezza del1'esilio, si capisce che nessuno si sarebbe sentito Tammo, ed avrebbe avuto il cattivo gusto, o convenienza, di fargli il viso dell'arme' ('to the survivor of the sadness of exile, it is clear that no one would have felt the courage, and have had the bad taste, or convenience, of displaying [to Silone] their weapons').64 Thus, Silone's readers both during the war and after engaged with the writer's early texts more, and more self-consciously, by way of their own individual identification with him: as a man, as an anti-Fascist, and as a victim. Outside Italy, as well, Silone's popularity was directly connected to his status as an anti-Fascist in exile. The majority of his readership from the time of Fontamara on was abroad. Fontamara was translated into twenty-seven languages, Pane e vino into nineteen.65 Throughout North America, Great Britain, and Scandinavia, he enjoyed favorable reviews and a fairly wide, if heterogeneous, readership.66 Both Fontamara and Pane e vino were considered 'best-sellers' in the United States and the latter held the unusual honour of being a selection in the Book-

40 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone of-the-Month Club. By the time II seme sotto la neve (The Seed Beneath in the Snow) was published in 1941, however, his popularity was-waning, particularly in the United States, a fact that some attributed to his disengagement from politics. By the end of the war, disenchanted critics no longer hesitated to pass judgment on what they felt were the stylistic weaknesses of his novels. Fascist censorship and Silone's exile in Switzerland, then, determined the official stance on his writings in Italy until after the war. But by the time he returned to Italy he had published six works of fiction67 which had enjoyed considerable success throughout Europe and in America, and he could no longer be dismissed as a phenomenon of exile, writing abroad for a foreign audience. His physical presence in Italy established and the war ended, critics had to confront a new kind of censorship: the hegemony of the Left. It found its most stringent advocate in Palmiro Togliatti, who exerted a firm hand as party secretary, actively moulding literary taste and forming a Communist literary canon. Togliatti tirelessly monitored the output of the Communist press and took a polemical stance towards all that he saw. He was said to be particularly tough on Communist intellectuals, much more so than on writers and artists outside the PCI.68 But ex-Communists were spared none of his venom. Never did he vent his feelings more vehemently than when // Dio che efallito (The God that Failed, a collection of essays that deal with the authors' disillusionment with Communism) was published.69 He called that book's contributors (Silone, Richard Wright, Andre Gide, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, and Louis Fischer) 'failed know-it-alls/ 'shadows, not men/ capable only of 'a crazy person's reasoning/ lost in 'an abyss of corruption e degeneration.' Silone was singled out as an 'opportunist' and a 'double-crosser.'70 Togliatti actively sought to discredit Silone's Associazione per la liberta della cultura (Association for the Freedom of Culture) at the apex of its popularity in the early and mid-1950s by announcing to its readers that it was directed 'dal noto agente anti-comunista Ignazio Silone' ('by the famous anti-Communist agent Ignazio Silone').71 Ultimately Togliatti led the PCI into an era of widespread 'cultural holocaust' from which neither the party nor Silone, as one of its favourite targets, would recover. Ironically, Russian Communists, beginning with Trotsky and Karl Radek, the theoretician of Socialist realism, had been well disposed towards Fontamara72; even after Silone's condemnation by the PCI, the Russians continued to await the return of their 'prodigal son/ Some, too, responded favour-

Silone and the Fascists 41 ably to Silone's texts as a result of the PCI's negative readings of his novels; the fervour of the Communists' response pre-determined much of the Left's reading. In a knee-jerk reaction, Socialist critics were highly enthusiastic - even, according to some, threatening in their recommendations - though their tributes were as generic as Togliatti's denunciations.73 Those critics who were not influenced by the Communists' stronghold continued to be unimpressed by Silone's writings, which too closely resembled throwbacks to now outdated verismo and naturalism. Neither fish nor fowl, the writings did not challenge or conform to the canon, lacking as they did the psychological depth, lexical pyrotechnics, and narrative intricacies of the writers of belles lettres who were currying favour at that time. Critics spoke often of the difficulty of categorizing his writings: did he belong among the regionalists? neorealists? Resistance writers? or that hodgepodge grouping of exCommunists? Indeed, there is much about Silone to distract readers from actual engagement with his works. He presented a face that allows a quick 'take' and provided easy fodder for party politics. Analogous to his later political writings, whose earnestness has been construed alternately as admirable and falsely naive, his ardent religiosity, for example, has historically provoked divergent responses. For some, the 'Christian certainties' he extolls are saintly; for others, they 'don't frighten him enough.'74 Witness the heavy-handedness, the laconicity read as truthfulness, of his answers to 'Forty Questions' posed to him in 1954: Quali personaggi della storia italiana sono ora per te piu stimolanti? Gioacchino da Fiore, Francesco d'Assisi, Tommaso Campanella ... La data piu importante della storia universale? II 25 dicembre dell'anno Zero ... Haifiducia neU'uomo? Ho fiducia nell'uomo che accetta il suo dolore e lo trasforma in verita e in coraggio morale. Cosi ora penso che, dalla tremenda notte polare dei campi di lavoro forzato della Siberia, possa venire fuori Qualcuno che ridia la vista ai ciechi... Qualcuno? Chi? II Suo nome non importa. Which personages from Italian history are most stimulating to you now? Joachim of Floris, Saint Francis of Assisi, Tommaso Campanella ... The most important date in world history? December 25 of the year zero ...

42 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone Do you have faith in man? I have faith in the man who accepts his pain and transforms it into truth and moral courage. That's why now I think that from the tremendous polar night of the forced labor camps of Siberia may appear Someone who returns to the blind their sight. Someone? Who? His Name doesn't matter.75

Read in a certain light, his answers are impossibly pompous - those of a man with a Jesus complex - yet, when taken at face value, they appear to be earnest, thoughtful meditations on the possible relationship between Christian and Socialist society, easily meriting the many hagiographic pages dedicated to him. Ironically, though it was not beholden to the cultural pronouncements of the Left, official Catholic culture did not bestow its sanctions on Silone precisely because of his particular kind of preoccupation with things religious. By the late 1950s, there existed more criticism of Silone criticism than actual Silone criticism, all of it politically and/or religiously conditioned. Discussing the problem of how to approach his work eclipsed actual interest in his works. II caso Silone was in full swing. Gone was the certainty with which his novels could be exalted or rejected, and in its place came the chicken-or-the-egg debate. Was his career as a novelist a substitute for failed political aspirations (and thus, too, doomed to failure for lack of true writerly vocation)? Or did his writerly tendency for introspection preclude full commitment to a political career? Answers generated more questions, and distinct notes of discomfort, admissions of uncertainty, and apologies for underestimation crept into journalistic and scholarly debates. Scribere est agere The ramifications of this uncertainty extend beyond the specific historic-political problematic of Ignazio Silone. They apply to every other 'caso' or cause celebre of this nature. Consider a comment made by Paul de Man in 1941, neither so much to underscore what is already in some ways an obvious parallel between him and Silone nor to align with one or the other side of the divide that both Silone's and de Man's writings have created. With this pairing, rather, I seek to identify a subset of issues which bear on both writers, namely, the potential of Silone's (and de Man's) mature writings beyond the irreducibly contingent: Literature is an independent domain having a life, laws and obligations belonging only to it and which in no way depend on the philosophical or

Silone and the Fascists 43 ethical contingencies stirring at its side. The least one can say is that the artistic values governing the world of letters do not merge with those of the Truth and the Good, and that whoever borrows his criteria from this region of human consciousness will be systematically mistaken in his judgments ... One does not have the right to condemn Gide as a novelist because his moral life was debatable ... A writer can be attacked for the inadequacies of his style, for sins against the laws of the genre he practices, but never for weakness or lacks in his moral personality.78

De Man's remarks can be read, in retrospect, as an oblique, future defence of his own work as a critic, since criticism (and even meta-criticism) by extension falls under the rubric of literature as he defines it. In 1941 it is a curious (though not unprecedented) move, considering the severity with which writers who did not conform to the 'philosophical or ethical contingencies stirring at [their] sides' were treated. But insofar as Silone is concerned, de Man's remarks elucidate the double bind in which Silone was caught. First, they articulate a I'envers a possible response to the implicit question posed by Italian critics about the relationship between his personal history and the value of his writings. We may reformulate that possible response as follows: 'One does not have the right to absolve Silone as a novelist just because his moral life was unimpeachable.' After all, the emancipatory (or otherwise) effects of a text do not necessarily follow from the sincerity of its author; nor does the tabulation of uplifting or politically acceptable messages in a text constitute a reading. Italian critics, particularly in the 1950s, would have done well to learn the lesson that both Paul de Man and the 'case' of Paul de Man later brought home - that the man and the works are not interchangeable. Or, as Ian Balfour points out: 'No longer will his name be able to function as [a] kind of talisman, or as intellectual shorthand for some body of truths or practice of reading. And this will be entirely in line with one lesson de Man taught: there is no substitute for the act of reading.'79 It is ironic that Balfour's remark, on de Man's dual role of critic and cause celebre, appears to offer Italian readers a consistent yardstick by which to measure Silone's novels. Silone's literary messages demand to be dismantled and explored with thoroughness and an independence of mind. By the same token, de Man's own remarks, in spite of their self-reference, seem to offer a handle on Silone's letters to Bellone, which, insofar as they represent the 'ethical contingencies stirring at [his] side/ should be irrelevant to his literary production, if we agree with de Man to be critical of the writing, not of the man. But we must

44 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone also consider the type of writing Silone was engaged in; as Luce d'Eramo points out, Silone's selling point is precisely his 'coscienza/80 which has assumed great critical value. As the public response to Silone's political history demonstrates, it does make a difference whether his texts were crafted in ideological earnestness or as a selfserving revisionism. There are so many relevant questions about those 'philosophical or ethical contingencies stirring at' the side of literature. What were Silone's options in 1919? What possible motives or pressures induced him to collaborate? Were they the same as those of other opposition figures, and did they change over time? Did he act just to survive or to assist the Fascists on the road to victory? Derrida's sensitive exploration of Paul de Man's wartime writings is structured around a dichotomy whose logic is precisely analogous to that of Silone's collaborative efforts: 'a recurrent alternation, according to the disjunctive partition of an "on the one hand ... on the other hand" ... On the one hand, the massive, immediate and dominant effect of all these texts is that of a relatively coherent ideological ensemble which, most often and in a preponderant fashion, conforms to official rhetoric ... But on the other hand ... de Man's discourse is constantly split, disjointed, engaged in incessant conflicts.'81 So too with Silone. His letters to Bellone are also consistent in tone, in measure, and in their objectives. Those letters, seen from the perspective of the conflict between Fascism and its opponents, signify that he himself attempted to embrace what he claimed to despise, namely, the political ideology that he portrayed as the opposition, actively and at considerable personal risk. Considering his official position in the Communist Party, his unofficial role as the voice of the party's conscience, and his complex personal, familial, and erotic ties82 to the party, on the one hand, Silone's letters constitute a massive betrayal, after which it is tempting to discount all of his ensuing literary production as an attempt to counteract his earlier writings. And on the other hand? On the other hand is exactly that rupture, that liquidation of those virtual and visceral links which Silone so painstakingly and calculatedly implemented when, as the last letter to Bellone indicated, he reinvented himself. A radical rupture, then perpetual meditation, exegesis, transformation - his novels, too, reflect a relatively coherent ideological ensemble, but one that is in diametric opposition to the first. Recalling Luce d'Eramo's observation about Silone's 'coscienza,' it is

Silone and the Fascists 45 useful to borrow a formulation from Leo Strauss's writing on persecution: 'It compels all writers who hold heterodox views to develop a peculiar technique of writing, the technique which we have in mind when speaking of writing between the lines/83 Silone's early texts conform closely to Strauss's description not only in relation to any external legal and/or ideological forces that Communist writers experienced under the Fascists, but also with respect to his own highly conflicted internal ethics. We may, in effect, approach his works by acknowledging a functional distinction made visible 'between the lines' between Secondino Tranquilli, the private citizen, and Ignazio Silone, the public construction. As a construction exclusively constituted through the act of writing, that 'peculiar technique' serves both to unmask Silone's internal heterodoxy and to smooth over its traces. It is, ironically, the very coherence of this figure of the public persona that has proven so unwieldy an object for commentators now. Moreover, to return to Derrida's earlier formulation, if the 'mal d'archive' originates in the conflicting drives inscribed in the notion of an archive, any attempt involving the monolithic, self-reconstructed Silone signifies the destruction of that inscription. In other words, in Silone's case, the One guard(ing) against/keep(ing) some of the other means, precisely, annihilating the site of that inscription, namely, the very documents that compose the archive itself. Indeed, the 'massive, immediate and dominant effect' (as Derrida puts it) of the documents relating Silone's fall, which underscores the traumatic nature of the current Silone crisis, is most visible in the evolution of its critical articulation. Since late 1996, hundreds of articles on Silone have been published by the Italian press. The initial reaction, as I mentioned earlier, was of shock and outright denial - 'Silone spia? lo non ci credo' ('Silone a spy? I don't believe it') - followed by justifications invoking the mitigating circumstances of his brother. Most recently, though, we can observe a sign indicative, it seems to me, not of a severe case of archive fever but rather of the death of the patient: the invalidation of the document. An article by journalist Indro Montanelli (// Corriere della Sera, 2 February 1999) retraces, in abbreviated form, the route leading to the final diagnosis: Mi si consenta un sommesso intervento in una querelle che comincia - mi pare - a puzzare di mufa: quella su Silone. L'altro giorno questo giornale ha pubblicato, nelle pagine di cultura, un articolo che con la dovuta ob-

46 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone biettivita riassumeva le tesi degli accusatori di Silone, ma sotto un titolo che sembrava avallarle: Silone, la spia venuta da Fontamara. Piano, ragazzi, con la spia; stiamo parlando di Silone. Allow me a meek intervention in a querelle that is starting - it seems to me - to smell mouldy: the debate about Silone. The other day this newspaper published, in the culture page, an article that, with the obligatory objectivity, summarized the theses of Silone's accusers, but under a title that seemed to endorse them: 'Silone, the spy who came from Fontamara.' Slow down, boys, with the word spy; we're talking about Silone.84

After admonishing those hasty journalists (here called ragazzi, or boys) who accept the authenticity of the documents without giving due consideration to their object ('stiamo parlando di Silone' - 'we're talking about Silone'), Montanelli moves quickly past the by now familiar suggestion that the Archivio Centrale dello Stato is full of counterinformation planted by the Fascists, to advance his own personal doubt about the equation 'Documento uguale Verita' (Document equals Truth). For Montanelli, there are no doubts about the authenticity of the documents regarding Silone. Rather, there are doubts about the authenticity of documents qua documents. His argument proceeds in two directions: he questions the validity of archival documents in general on the basis that they are not 'scientific,' and, more specifically, he discounts the possibility of a relationship between Silone and Bellone on the basis of Silone's stature. Surely, he argues, Silone would not be assigned a lowly official like Bellone as his contact on Ovra but would rather merit someone of higher ranking? Finally, Montanelli concludes, he doesn't really care: 'Certe querelles hanno smesso d'interessarmi' ('certain issues no longer interest me'). I mention Montanelli's article not because it is unique (there are many others like it), but because it presents the issues at stake in the Silone crisis so clearly. At a glance, Montanelli and the many other arbiters of Italian culture who have weighed in on this issue seem to be saying that Silone is a problem because he turned out to be a viper faithfully nursed at the breast for three generations. But their arguments about Silone are symptomatic of a larger issue, namely, the limits of the archive. Silone's singularity - his liminal status between ideologies, between politics and literature, between the then of his lifetime and the now of his revision - cannot be contained by the archive, they spill over its borders in their refusal to submit to a 'neutral' scru-

Silone and the Fascists 47 tiny. On the surface of the debate between difensori and colpevolisti, the problem posed by the Silone crisis is the discomfiting fact of his having spied for the Fascists. I contend, however, that the real problem is that 'Silone' as a set of values or as a 'talisman' was born together with the values of the Resistance on which post-war Italian culture is based. The conflation of the two has resulted in the very serious accusation, on the part of Silone's difensori, of revisionismo, or attempts to destroy those values: when one might argue that the worst charge that could reasonably be levelled at the colpevolisti is 'malice in the archive/ that is, in Herman Rapoport's words, a 'gloating after having uncovered something malicious that burns into us when we read it.'85 The search for support of the accusation of revisionism has had its own serious consequence: the redimensioning of the status of documents, of the very stuff of which archives are made. The argument for redimensioning is two-pronged, affecting both the documents themselves and the researchers who study them. As Montanelli and others claim, the questionable credibility of the documents obviates any compelling need to read them.86 At the same time, whatever the documents might say, the researchers who come into contact with them have come under fire for failing to strike the right tone. Biocca and Canali in particular have been accused of bitterness, arrogance, and animosity towards opposing views;87 calumny and manipulation of history;88 scandal-mongering;89 'scoopism/ aggression, and irritability;90 and propagandistic and politically motivated intent.91 Finally, the Fondazione Silone and others have come under fire recently for failing to contribute to Silone scholarship and refusing to participate productively in discussions about the revelations. This is the flip side of the argument in which the documents are to blame; here, researchers are to blame, whether they are pro-Silone or colpevolisti. As historian Costantino Felice points out in 'Caso Silone, meno retorica'92: E' mai possibile che le novita piu significative sulla figura di Silone ... debbano giungere solo da studiosi esterni alia cultura regionale? Eppure in Abruzzo ci sono fondazioni e enti (per non dire dei dipartimenti e delle cattedre universitarie) istituzionalmente deputati agli studi siloniani (spesso esplicitamente intitolati al suo nome). Quali nuove conoscenze vengono da queste nobili istituzioni? ... E' possibile che in Abruzzo tutto si risolva in celebrazioni e agiografia? Quando si convince che e la ricerca - quella seria e rigorosa, scientificamente fondata - che invece occorre promuovere?

48 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone Could it be that the most significant innovations regarding Silone ... must come only from scholars outside of the regional culture? And yet in Abruzzo there are foundations and agencies (not to mention departments and university chairs) institutionally devoted to Silone studies (often explicitly named after him). What new knowledge comes from these noble insitutions? ... Could it be that in Abruzzo everything gets resolved with celebration and hagiography? When will they understand that it is research - serious and rigorous, based in science - that they need to promote?93

In other words, the documents function as a kind of shibboleth with which to identify one's political or scholarly brethren. The various potential responses to the documents themselves (read, ignore, dismiss, or promote them?) matter only insofar as they always provoke the 'wrong' kind of scholarship. Much like Silone's trauma was bound together with, and spoke through Romolo's, the simple existence of the documents binds each of us together, modulates the voices with which we speak. The Taste of Ashes94 Seen in this light, then, the question posed by arbiters of Italian literary/political culture is the following: Can we read Silone, or anyone else, without ourselves participating in this redimensioning? For by reading 'Silone' as constitutive of an act, and no longer as a concrete material entity, we come to understand the idea of history as beyond the relationship between reference and experience, something much more analogous to what Pirandello, in a very different context, called 'umorismo/ With that term Pirandello designated the emotional and intellectual dissonance experienced when an event was perceived to produce amusement and pathos simultaneously. The performative nature of Silone suggests a similar overlap between otherwise conflicting impulses in our experience of 'Silone,' metonym for a body of texts and a set of values. It is the cognitive dissonance of these impulses to which Italians are reacting, even more than to the desanctification of one of their most beloved, if enigmatic, cultural icons. Such a project defies immediate understanding and is fundamentally and inexorably belated (and therefore, painfully, legible only now, Caruth might say); it changes our feelings about the future by asking that we reconceptualize the

Silone and the Fascists 49 past. And yet, has it not always been so? Was not the relationship between experience and reference always also a dissonant one, in the sense that the apparently limpid neutrality on the surface of the term 'history' - the body of the swan, to introduce the metaphor to which I will later return - distracts from the frantic paddling of the multiple agencies and agendas beneath? Finally, how do we respond to those who equate ruminations over that relationship, specifically in its manifestation in the archive, with sick or malicious intent on the part of the archivist?95 We must, I would argue, take into consideration the particular object of inquiry to answer these questions. After all, what I have described is but a new phase in the evolution of Silone's public persona, one that began in 1936 with the publication of Pane e vino. In the years between 1936 and Silone's death in 1978, little was done by the critics or by the author himself to alter his carefully crafted image. And, for that reason, it is precisely the public persona, not the finite historical subject, with which the accusations must be reconciled. Indeed, if the underlying discomfort Silone's literature inspired in his critics was due to the subtle, periodic resurfacing of an identity he thought he had altered (into a good, honest ex-Communist, like so many others), one might expect the new documentation to cause critics, ultimately, to draw a collective sigh of relief. In the case of Paul de Man, much was made of the fact that he did not confess to having contributed to a collaborationist newspaper when the climate was favourable. Silone approached confession in increments in his literary works. He came closest with Murica's quiet confession in Pane e vino but he never overstepped the symbolic bounds that separated self-therapy from self-indictment. If the same questions apply to Silone as to de Man, should Silone's confession have been more public, less oblique? To be sure, there is something disquieting about the conflation of the message and the messenger, especially when (as in Silone's literary texts) the message purports to be on the side of the true, the just, and the good. Morally ambiguous messages, or ones that make no such claim to truth or goodness, on the other hand, do not always necessarily reflect that ambiguity back onto their creators. Consequently, it is a doubly perilous move for the artist (or public figure or politician) with a 'positive' message to admit falling short of the standards he invokes, since the message loses credibility by association and the artist is subject to accusations of wanton deceit. For Silone, whose positive reception has been inextricably tied

50 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone to his message, the possibility of an outright confession was never likely. But in the following chapters this study explores the ways that indications of his activities are nonetheless discernible, even though deeply camouflaged: the torturous self-analysis staged oneirically in 'Viaggio a Parigi'; the lesson of his many characters who sacrificed themselves for causes beyond their own immediate self-interest; and the perpetual tinkering of Silone's fictional doubles (Pietro Spina and his successors) with the marriage of Communism and Christianity. Silone's effective self-obliteration and reconstitution as an emblem was indeed a self-sacrifice for the cause that his works so consistently trumpeted: solidarity with the poor, the supremacy of the individual conscience, and the dangers of authoritarianism of any stripe. Did he do well to leave such an obscure and ponderous legacy? Silone himself may provide the answer, when he anticipates the trope of the Derridean cinder, or marker of traumatic self-annihilation. In the end, Silone said, all that remains is 'the taste of ashes.'96

CHAPTER TWO

Silone and the Symptom: 'Viaggio a Parigi'

'The most effective method of disarming the resistance against the introduction of the repressed contents is the downright opposite of the happy end.'1

As we saw earlier, in his final letter to Fascist questore Guido Bellone, dated 13 April 1930, Silone announces that he plans to leave the Italian Communist Party and will in future devote himself to writing. Aware of his fame and influence among Italians abroad - workers and peasants, mainly - he indicates that he will write for them: L'influenza e la popolarita che in molti centri di emigrazione ho acquisiti mi inducono a concepire la mia attivita futura (appena saro ristabilito in salute) nella forma di un'attivita letteraria e editoriale del tutto indipendente. Devo aggiungere che in questo tempo, delle grandi modificazioni si vanno compiendo nella mia ideologia e mi sento riattratto, molto, verso la religione (se non verso la chiesa) e che 1'evoluzione del mio pensiero e facilitata daH'orientamento cretino e criminale che sta assumendo il partito comunista. The influence and the popularity that I have acquired in many emigration centres induce me to conceive of my future activity (as soon as I have reestablished my health) in the form of a completely independent literary and editorial activity. I should add that these days great modifications are taking place in my ideology and that I feel greatly attracted again to religion (if not to the church) and that the evolution of my thought is facilitated by the cretinous and criminal orientation the Communist Party is assuming.2

52 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone The determination evident in his statement to Bellone is significant for the following reason: it recasts the ultimately uninteresting and unanswerable debate, until now standard among Silone scholars, about whether his true vocation was writing or politics. Instead of asking which career came first, Silone's statement invites us to ask why he chose a future as a writer, given the myriad possibilities open to him besides producing more material that had to be circulated clandestinely in order to be read. Why did he not devote himself to helping workers abroad, to providing assistance to the poor, or to the religious life in which he claims renewed interest? The answer, it seems to me, is that by 13 April 1930 he had already been writing for a year. His letter to Bellone, in other words, did not reflect a fresh decision taken recently. Instead, the idea to write for other people developed when he had finished successfully writing for himself.3 It was only after the completion of a collection of short stories that Silone began to think about the cathartic effects for himself of writing for a broader audience; and it was only after he was able to detach himself a bit from harrowing recent events - his brother's incarceration chief among them - that he began to consider using his newfound literary skills as a platform from which to reach those workers upon whom he believed he exerted a certain moral, ethico-political influence. Hence the creation of Silone's only collection of short stories, Viaggio a Parigi. The collection has, historically, received little critical attention. This is due, in part, to the impossibility of obtaining it in Italian until 1993, when the Centre Studi Siloniani in Pescina published a limited number of copies of the stories. It was published in 1934,4 but its contents, style, and structure indicate that it was written in 1929 and thus preceded the composition (1930) and publication (1933) of Fontamara.5 I locate the collection at the very beginning of what I will argue throughout the rest of this shady forms a trilogy together with Fontamara and Pane e vino. I will focus specifically on the protagonists of these three texts, whose progressive evolution represents the three stages through which Silone rehearsed his own rehabilitation. Specifically, in this chapter, I propose to examine two stories from Viaggio a Parigi, under the assumption that the collection was Silone's first attempt at non-political writing, and with the goal of understanding the relationship for Silone between literature, biography, selffashioning, and ideology. In particular I will focus on the themes of suppression, repression, and repudiation (terms that would have been at the forefront of Silone's interface with psychotherapy), and the ways

Silone and the Symptom: 'Viaggio a Parigi' 53 these play out both in this text and in Silone's self-fashioning. For just as Communism and Fascism contemporaneously exerted influence on his psychological, political, and intellectual formation, those two influences were terminated simultaneously, leaving him to recover from the two at once. The creation of Viaggio a Parigi marks the terminus of Silone's relationships both with the Communists and the Fascists: Silone unofficially left the Communist Party in 1930, the same year he discontinued his association with Guido Bellone. Once intricately connected, these relationships will subsequently be radically severed, and understood very differently: the former, repackaged with local colour and marketed with equal doses of wistfulness and nostalgia, and the latter suppressed to the point of near-annihilation with only the faintest traces remaining. In his letter of 1930, Silone stated that he intended to 'begin a new life.' An examination of the motives behind the repudiation of Viaggio a Parigi by its author soon after its publication will reveal how closely those two relationships were interlaced even after their ostensible severing; it will reveal, in fact, that those traces left visible were the very foundation on which Silone's vita nuova would be built. Viaggio a Parigi bridges the distance between Silone's private and public writings, his old and new lives, and his catharsis and rebirth. Silone himself confirmed the centrality of those connections in his letter to Bellone, when he juxtaposed the plan to write with his renewed 'attraction' to religion. This juxtaposition (writing as metaphorical rebirth) reveals what structures Silone throughout his career as an author, both within and outside his texts, throughout his writing career. Silone and his Viaggio a Parigi, in other words, share the same fate, in that while they are carefully constructed around the detritus of past experience, those experiences are, paradoxically, camouflaged by their very visibility. In terms of autobiographical references, the story 'Viaggio a Parigi' is the meatiest of the eponymous collection. It is at the same time the most fanciful, so that direct references to events in Silone's life are submerged deep within textual structures that obfuscate their origins. The stylistic and thematic singularity of Viaggio a Parigi confirms that Silone's first attempt at writing was not initially intended for publication; the workers and peasants with whom he has influence could not have constituted the target audience for this collection. Poetry, overt eroticism, irreverence towards holy images, and mockery of peasants appear here and nowhere else in Silone's writings, subverting attempts to read the story as a representative sample of Silone's fiction. 'Viaggio

54 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone a Parigi' stands alone, a first attempt at fiction by a writer who has not yet found the consistent style or subject matter which he will later adopt. The sui generis quality of the story tempts us to read it as the artifact of a youthful infatuation with contemporary literary fashions, or perhaps as an exuberant reaction to the freedom to write outside the confines of the party cell. And Silone himself invites us to dismiss it soon after the collection first appeared, Silone repudiated it on stylistic grounds, claiming that the stories were 'too journalistic/6 Journalistic effects, however, are few and far between. Indeed, they occur in 'Viaggio a Parigi' only in those moments that bear closest resemblance to events in Silone's life, such as the imprisonment of his brother. Besides thematic particularities, certain rhetorical aspects of the story are unique to it, especially the dream sequences, repetitions, heavy-handed imagery, and abrupt shifts in register. They invite another sort of reading than his later, less obscure novels, a reading that is all the more fruitful when it incorporates eclectic and disparate extratextual sources. For example, false arrests and emigration attempts (themes in the story) were commonplaces in Italy in the 1920s and 1930s. A traditional reading might enlist these references in the service of realism or engaged literature. But Silone's depiction of these events in 'Viaggio a Parigi' contains elements of his biography too specific to be historical chronicle, and too ambivalent to be calls to political action, as his later works have been considered. The stylistic and thematic singularity of the story, rather, reflects a Silone in the midst of a crisis of conscience which, though played out against the background of Italian politics, stems from intensely personal issues. With this writing, Silone attempts to work out conflicts with authority figures, variously configured in the text as his own absent father, the ambivalent moral and practical authority of the PCI, and his literary forefather, Giovanni Verga.7 The partial resolution of these conflicts in the text eventually clears the way for his later writings, which depict the successful negotiation of those relationships by a protagonist who has been retouched, if you will, by an expurgatory hand. But before that can happen, 'Viaggio a Parigi' bears witness to the process by which Silone learned to separate the psychological wheat from the chaff, so to speak - to differentiate between those moments in his own formation that could henceforth be elaborated in gestures of self-formation. The protagonist of 'Viaggio a Parigi' is Beniamino Losurdo, the first, most obscure, and most negative of the many Silonian heroes who resemble, to varying degrees, Silone himself. Critics commonly recog-

Silone and the Symptom: 'Viaggio a Parigi' 55 nize both the similarities between Beniamino and Silone and the strongly autobiographical nature of Silone's other fictional heroes: Pietro Spina of Pane e vino and // seme sotto la neve, Andrea Cipriani of // segreto di Luca (Luca's Secret), Daniele of La volpe e le camelie (The Fox and the Camelias), Rocco De Donatis of Una manciata di more (A Handful of Blackberries), and even the nun Severina (of the eponymous posthumous novel) have all been considered Silone's alter egos.8 Each of these characters shares certain fundamental biographical data with his creator; they are anti-Fascists and ex- or soon-to-be ex-Communists, and they are Catholics modelled more closely after Joachim of Calabria or Pietro da Morrone than any more modern practitioners. The high degree of identification between Silone and his literary characters has played a major role in the mythification of Silone politico within Italian leftist circles. Moreover, Silone himself encouraged critics to read Pietro and the other characters in light of his biography. While I agree, by and large, with their assessments, I see different commonalities between Silone and his protagonists for different reasons, commonalities that stem not from the 'biographical data' of the protagonists but rather from the way the data does not 'fit' the figures to whom they belong. Like clothes that are too big, the descriptors 'Communist/ 'Catholic/ 'anti-Fascist/ and so on hang loosely both on Silone and on his characters, leaving gaps and bareness in some spots, excess bulk in others. The interesting commonalities, in my opinion, are thus born from ambivalences, not certainties. One might expect, then, that the study of the resemblance between Beniamino of 'Viaggio a Parigi' and Silone would contribute to traditional Silone criticism, by allowing us to identify Beniamino as the first entry in the parade of Silonian protagonists listed above. But reading Beniamino Losurdo as an early avatar of Pietro Spina, despite the different goals and ideals they embody, means radically revising our notion of Silone's characters. Beniamino Losurdo is an anomaly among Silonian protagonists. After all, as we will see, Beniamino is an angry uneducated cafone, devoid even of the potential for political consciousness which, at the last possible moment, mitigates Berardo Viola's story in Fontamara; and he bears even less resemblance to the charitable, introspective revolutionaries who people Silone's later novels. Silone himself distinguished between Beniamino of 'Viaggio a Parigi' and his later heroes. In light of the author's suppression of 'Viaggio a Parigi' after its initial publication, were the ties between Silone and Beniamino apparent enough to be discomfiting to Silone by

56 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone the time he had begun to enjoy new fame as a novelist? The reason for this dissociation may be in part artistic. It is difficult for many writers (and scholars as well) to look back at pieces written before the discovery of their writerly voices; such pieces bear witness to a period in our lives when we were not yet ourselves. It may also be psychologically motivated, however: the ties between Silone and his first fictional protagonist Beniamino may have been too revealing for comfort. For two currents run through 'Viaggio a Parigi': a double-edged anxiety of influence, and attendant feelings of guilt and betrayal. Silone's text suggests an ambivalent relationship to paternal authority figures literary, political, and biological - which in turn exacerbated feelings of personal responsibility for his brother's situation. Recurring poetic and narrative symbols provide insight into Silone's reluctant literary debt to Verga and the uncertain moral legacy of Silone's father, Paolo Tranquilli. It similarly elucidates the psychological impact of the bind in which Silone was caught, between his ten-year friendship with a Fascist questore and the mortal damage it caused to fellow Communists, between increasing outrage at the Communists' actions and philosophy and the need to maintain their practical support in order to help his brother. Put in more sophisticated terms, Beniamino illustrates Lacan's notion of the symptom (here paraphrased by Slavoj Zizek) as a permanent reminder that the palimpsest of history can be written over but never completely erased: Symptoms are meaningless traces, their meaning is not discovered, excavated from the hidden depth of the past, but constructed retroactively the analysis produces the truth: that is, the signifying frame which gives the symptoms their symbolic place and meaning. As soon as we enter the symbolic order, the past is always present in the form of historical tradition and the meaning of these traces is not given; it changes continually with the transformations of the signifier's network. Every historical rupture, every advent of a new master- signifier, changes retroactively the meaning of all tradition, restructures the narration of the past, makes it readable in another, new way.9

I borrow this passage because it illustrates the function Beniamino performs within the Silonian corpus, in spite of the author's attempt to relegate him to the narrative hinterlands. Viaggio a Parigi, particularly its eponymous first story, gives up its sources in Silone's life without a

Silone and the Symptom: 'Viaggio a Parigi' 57 fight; rather than describe, explain, or apologize for his relationship to the Fascist police, Silone erases from his public writings those parts that can be erased and rewrites the remainder for an audience that will not look below the surface. Positing Beniamino as the earliest version of Pietro and the others puts a permanent crack in the facade of that ideological monolith, the Silonian hero, by virtue of Beniamino's threat to resurface, a threat that 'changes retroactively the meaning of all tradition.' Historical rupture, then narrative restructuring: Beniamino's segregation from other Silone's protagonists is significant on two levels. First, it attests to the author's attempts to dismantle his own personal narrative and reconstruct in it a smoother, more linear fashion; and second, it sets the precedent in Silone's narrative of using personal history strategically. Whether for the initial purposes of self-analysis or otherwise, the fact that within a year of its publication he repudiated this story indicates a sudden and compelling change of heart about it. And the fact that he continued to distance himself from it as well as from all but one of the other stories in the collection, even after his more positive heroes have been fully digested by the public, indicates that there was no going back for Beniamino - he could not be reconstructed to fit the new protagonists' mould. Instead, within Silone's literary opus, 'the past is always present' in the form of Beniamino: he functions as a trace that is always faintly visible.10 Let us now turn to the text itself to see how that trace manifests itself. Fontamara 'Viaggio a Parigi' begins with a poem: the only poem in Silone's entire fictional opus. Quando settembre viene a Fontamara la vecchia farina di mais e quasi finita e la nuova non e ancora macinata. Quando settembre arriva a Fontamara la farina vecchia di mais e bacata e la polenta sa di acido. Quando settembre arriva a Fontamara gli asini, gli uomini e le donne fanno una vita piu dura che mai. Oh, quella minestra

58 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone di diverse, di meglio altro non c'e. Non c'e riient'altro, niente di meglio. Quando settembre viene a Fontamara la polenta e diventata piu amara la farina vecchia e quasi finita e la nuova non e ancora in casa. Quando settembre viene a Fontamara i giovani sognano di andare lontano. Venti giorni sulla nave a vapore e sbarcammo in America dormimmo sulla terra nuda nostro cibo era pane e pesce secco con zelo e con tenacia noi italiani abbiamo costruito paesi e citta. Quando viene settembre a Fontamara i giovani pensano di andare lontano ma ora tutte le strade sono sbarrate. Ma quando settembre arriva a Fontamara qualcuno sogna di mettersi in viaggio. Quando dicembre arriva a Fontamara il sole si mostra solo per salutare e la terra non gli risponde. Quando dicembre arriva a Fontamara asini e cafoni dormono nelle capanne ben chiuse. When September comes to Fontamara the old maize flour is nearly gone and the new hasn't been ground yet. When September arrives in Fontamara the old maize flour is maggoty and the polenta tastes like acid. When September arrives in Fontamara the donkeys, men and women have a harder life than ever. Oh, that soup, there's nothing different, better.

Silone and the Symptom: 'Viaggio a Parigi' 59 When September comes to Fontamara the polenta has become more bitter the old flour is almost used up and the new is not yet home. When September comes to Fontamara the young people dream of going far away. Twenty days on a steam ship and we disembarked in America we slept on the naked ground our food was bread and dry fish with zeal and tenacity we Italians built towns and cities. When September comes to Fontamara the young people think of going far away but now all the roads are blocked. But when September arrives in Fontamara someone dreams of setting out on a trip. When December arrives in Fontamara the sun shows itself only to say hello and the earth doesn't answer. When December arrives in Fontamara donkeys and peasants sleep in huts closed tight.

The first five of the six stanzas appear in the prologue of the story; the final stanza appears at the prologue's close. Of five or six lines' length, unrhymed, the triplets and couplets begin most often with the same line or a close variation upon it, 'Quando settembre viene a Fontamara/ until the final stanza of the poem, which begins with 'Quando dicembre viene a Fontamara' and thus marks the time-span of the events about to be narrated. The repetition of that line and the predominance of present-tense verbs locate the events in the poem within a perpetual, inevitable yearly cycle, much like the prose description of the cycle of activities in which the cafoni are closed at the beginning of Silone's first novel Fontamara, set in the same imaginary village: Prima veniva la semina, poi 1'insolfatura, poi la mietitura, poi la vendemmia. E poi? Poi da capo, la semina, la sarchiatura, la potatura, 1'insolfatura, la mietitura, la vendemmia. Sempre la stessa canzone, lo stesso

60 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone ritornello. Sempre. Gli anni passavano, gli anni si accumulavano, i giovani diventavano vecchi, i vecchi morivano, e si seminava, si sarchiava, si insolfava, si mieteva, si vendemmiava. E poi ancora? Di nuovo da capo. Ogni anno come 1'anno precedente, ogni stagione come la stagione precedente. Ogni generazione come la generazione precedente. Nessuno a Fontamara ha mai pensato che quell'antico modo di vivere potesse cambiare. First came the sowing, then the sulphuring, then the reaping, then the harvest. And then? Then from the beginning, sowing, hoeing, pruning, sulphuring, reaping, harvest. Always the same song, the same refrain. The years passed, the years accumulated, the young people grew old, the old people died, and they sowed, hoed, sulphured, reaped, harvested. And then what? All over again. Every year like the one before, every season like the one before. Every generation like the one before. No one in Fontamara ever thought that that ancient way of life could change.11

The same repetitive, inescapable events articulated directly in Fontamara were alluded to poetically in 'Viaggio a Parigi/ but with an important difference. The novel's use of active verbs in the imperfect tense replaces the story's present tense and passive verbs. The cafoni of the novel comprehend their plight, recognizing that they are trapped by the demands of their own production; the cafoni of the story, on the other hand, manifest a less evolved state of political consciousness. They passively endure the visitation of the seasons and must consume, not produce, the attendant bitter fruits. Finally, the two passages delineate two different movements, one linear and the other circular, which demonstrate the differing degrees of social cohesion between members of the community in the two texts. The cafoni in the prologue to 'Viaggio a Parigi' are young people who want to leave their village; in the novel, the young people who eventually age give way to a new, identical generation who will follow in their steps. Tension between internal limitations of the imagination, political consciousness, and the superego ('Nessuno ha mai pensato che quell'antico modo di vivere potesse cambiare' - 'No one ever thought that that ancient way of life could change'), on the one hand, and external legal/economic strictures ('Ora tutte le strade sono sbarrate' - 'Now all the roads are blocked'), on the other, vexes attempts at personal agency throughout Silone's narrative production. As the comparison between the two passages indicates, however, Beniamino as a character conforms closely to his

Silone and the Symptom: 'Viaggio a Parigi' 61 narrative milieu insofar as the gestalt of the story indicates a much more primitive state of affairs than in the novel. The stanzas of the poem each provide a foretaste of the passages of text they precede. The poem's tone, 'col ritmo cadenzato di un'antica nenia popolare' ('with the cadenced rhythm of an ancient lullaby'),12 is consonant with its humble subject matter: the difficulty of eking out a meagre existence from the land, dreams of a better life, and the scarce food available in that season. Beyond a simple realistic reflection of the paucity and monotony of the latter, the series of food images that compose the prologue of 'Viaggio a Parigi' define the ways production and consumption of food serve as the very centre of all aspects of existence for the Fontamaresi. The prologue differs stylistically from the rest of the story by virtue of its continually shifting register and by the use of irony. For example, the narrator first describes the connection between inadequate food and domestic violence: I cafoni, a tarda sera, dopo dieci ore di lavoro, con una dieta di solo pane di grano turco e di cipolla, di ritorno a casa da Fucino, in preda ad una furia insensata, battono i loro muli fino a farli sanguinare. Appena assaggiato il primo cucchiaio di polenta acida, cominciano a picchiare le mogli con quanta forza rimane dopo lo spossante lavoro del giorno; le picchiano fino a far scorrere sangue. The peasants, late in the evening, after ten hours of work, with a diet only of maize bread and onions, returning home from Fucino, in the throes of a senseless fury, beat their mules till they bleed. As soon as they taste the first spoonful of bitter polenta, they begin to beat their wives with all the strength that remains after the day's wearying work; they beat them till the blood flows.13 What begins as a fairly detached sociological observation about dietary habits gives way to the first of several instances of free indirect discourse: Tn fondo qualcosa si deve ficcare nello stomaco, non si possono ancora digerire le pietre!' ('After all, you've got to stick something in your stomach - you can't digest stones yet!'14) Free indirect discourse is one of the hallmarks of the novel I Malavoglia by one of the fathers of verismo, Giovanni Verga. Thus, while 'Viaggio a Parigi' borrows its object - polenta - from another canonical work (Manzoni's 7 promessi sposi), the function of that object relies heavily on the Sicilian

62 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone author's most famous novel in its use of food as a system of metaphors.15 Detached, ironic, and folksy registers intermingle as the third-person narrator reveals the myriad ideological, economic, and legal links in the chain by which the Fontamaresi are bound symbolically through their food to their destiny. The expression 'ficcare qualcosa nello stomaco' ('stick something in your stomach') provides the occasion for a lengthy excursus by the narrator on the difference between that expression ('la sola possibile nel linguaggio dei cafoni,' - 'the only one possible in the peasants' language')16 and the rich and varied lexicon of those for whom hunger is not a persistent threat. The gastronomic excesses of the rich were a favourite topic of Silone's and were treated uncharitably, though always with humour: Da mangiare viene il termine cibo e da cibo cibarsi, il che e meraviglioso. Si dice anche banchettare, e da banchettare deriva il banchetto e da banchetto viene la possibilita di mangiare molto bene, il che e eccellente. Nei giorni festivi a volte si dice mangiare a quattro palmenti e da questa espressione deriva Tabbuffata/ cioe la possibilita di mangiare quasi fino a scoppiare, il che e un menu veramente complete. From eating comes the word food and from food to feed, which is marvellous. They also say to banquet, and from to banquet comes a banquet and from a banquet comes the possibility of eating really well, which is excellent. On holidays sometimes they say to wolf your food down and from this expression you derive 'stuffing/ that is, the possibility of eating till you explode, which is really a full-course meal.17

Polenta in particular is the primary source of the cafoni''s woes. Besides inciting the violence referred to in the poem, polenta is an emblem of economic hardship. Consequently, it stands at the centre of the peasants' own inadvertent Marxist critique of economic structures; the peasants work for rich landowners in exchange for inadequate food which prevents them from working on their own small patches of land and makes them sick. The hitherto impartial narrator displays his allegiance to the cafoni on this point: T medici danno alle malattie ogni sorta di nomi - nomi cittadini - ma il nome reale e piu campagnolo: polenta ... la giusta medicina, Tunica medicina e: terra ai cafoni!' (The doctors give all sorts of names to the illnesses - city names - but the

Silone and the Symptom: 'Viaggio a Parigi' 63 real name is more rustic: polenta ... the proper medicine, the only medicine is: land to the peasants!'18). Food plays a homologous role in the religious life of the peasants. A litany of the various culinary traditions with which the rich celebrate saints' days, Christmas, and Easter carries with it an implicit negative value judgment on the faith of those who cannot afford such traditions ('Ma per i cafoni non c'e grande differenza fra Natale e Pasqua, meno ancora fra S. Antonio e S. Luigi, fra Sant'Anna e Sant'Angelo' - 'But for the peasants there's no big difference between Christmas and Easter, less still between Saint Anthony's and Saint Louis's [feast days], between Saint Ann's and Saint Angelo's'19). These traditions are maintained by means of the purchase and sale of grain grown by the cafoni; just as they are sickened by the source of their livelihood, so does it compromise their perception of the ability to celebrate their faith. Again, a comparison with Fontamara is illustrative of the peasants' evolution from one text to the next. The same observations about ritualized food and faith occur in Fontamara, but with an interesting difference. In 'Viaggio a Parigi' economic forces are ultimately the obstacle to full participation in religious traditions. In Fontamara, those obstacles have been internalized: La sola cosa veramente bella era il quadro dell'Eucaristia, sull'altare: Gesu aveva in mano una pagnotella di pane bianco e diceva: Questo e il mio corpo. II pane bianco e il mio corpo. II pane bianco e figlio di Dio. II pane bianco e verita e vita. Gesu non alludeva ne al pane di granoturco, che mangiavano i cafoni, ne a quell'insipido surrogate di pane che e 1'ostia dei preti. Gesu aveva in mano un vero pezzo di pane bianco e diceva: Questo qui (il pane bianco) e il mio corpo. Cioe, Dio, la verita, la vita. E voleva dire: Chi ha il pane bianco, ha me. Chi non ha pane bianco, chi ha solo pane di granoturco, e fuori della grazia di Dio, non conosce la verita, non ha vita. The only really beautiful thing was a painting of the Eucharist, on the altar: Jesus had in his hand a piece of white bread and he said: This is my body. White bread is my body. White bread is the son of God. White bread is truth and life. Jesus referred neither to maize flour bread, which the peasants ate, nor to that insipid bread substitute that is the host of the priests. Jesus had in his hand a real piece of white bread and he said: This here (the white bread) is my body. That is, God, truth, life. And he meant:

64 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone Whoever has white bread, has me. Whoever doesn't have white bread, whoever only has maize flour bread, is outside the grace of God, he doesn't know truth, he has no life.20 Those same obstacles subsequently enter into the realm of folklore as well, as illustrated by the story in Fontamara of San Giuseppe da Copertino, who, upon entering the gates of heaven and hearing God's offer to grant him any wish, asked, though ashamed of his immoderate request, for a piece of white bread.21 Finally, the seasonal dictates of maize cultivation both encourage and prohibit emigration. Mass emigrations originally made possible by a lull in the agricultural schedule left flocks of goats and sheep unprotected from the wolves who descended from the mountains to ravage them, making emigration unfeasible for many. Eventually, even those cafoni for whom such considerations were irrelevant were forbidden from emigrating by legal obstacles: the anti-emigration laws of the Fascist government. In sum, within the economy of the narrative prologue, the peasants' dependence on maize cultivation is seen to cast a pall over all aspects of the personal, cultural, and economic affairs of the fontamaresi: an obstacle to serenity in domestic life, health, religion, and the possibility of emigration. The prologue ends with a shift in the temporal strategy of the poem, signalling an analogous shift in the narration. The eternal indefinite present of 'Quando settembre viene a Fontamara' ('When September comes to Fontamara') gives way to a precise historical present: 'ora tutte le strade sono sbarrate' ('now all the roads are blocked'). The faceless generations of young men who dreamt of emigrating are then given a name, and the third-person narration becomes first person. The stage is set in the penultimate stanza of the poem: 'Ma quando settembre arriva a Fontamara/qualcuno sogna di mettersi in viaggio.' ('But when September arrives in Fontamara/someone dreams of setting out on a trip.') That someone is Beniamino, who, humiliated by his violent and hostile father, is desperate to leave Fontamara. After a public display of paternal rage, when his father ties him to a tree and leaves him after a trifling argument, a scene occurs that is again reminiscent of Verga's I Malavoglia. A group of Fontamaresi are gathered together to husk Cannarozzo's maize. Just as Verga's families gathered together yearly to salt anchovies, for the Fontamaresi the collective labour, performed gratis, is not difficult and provides the occasion for storytelling, gossip, and mutual ribbing. 'Ntoni of 7 Malavoglia will

Silone and the Symptom: 'Viaggio a Parigi' 65 remember the quiet joy of that experience - a moment of community and family unity. For Beniamino, on the other hand, it is anything but joyful. Rather, it is the point of rupture between him and all that the village has to offer. After exchanging insults with his father, he announces his plan to leave and never return. To mark the finality of his break with Fontamara, Beniamino, rather than kiss his sweetheart Maria Grazia (following a tradition that grants a kiss to whoever finds an ear of red corn), kisses a 'mocciosetta' ('snot-nose') so viciously that her mouth bleeds.22 The appearance of a snake among the corn husks ends their embrace and establishes the connection between frustrated eroticism, the urgency of departure, and the disturbing symbolic intrusion of corn, from which the ubiquitous polenta will be made, into Beniamino's unconscious. The Fathers The bloody kiss, polenta, the snake: erotic, trophic, and violent images continue to appear throughout the story. Coming as they do on the heels of Beniamino's argument with his father, these motifs point to a complex nexus of issues we may tease out of Silone's own life during the period when he wrote 'Viaggio a Parigi.' These issues revolve around Silone's literary, ideological, and biological 'fathers': Giovanni Verga, the PCI, and Paolo Tranquilli.23 Each of the scenes invoking these figures of paternal authority revolves around the enactment of a gesture of 'defiant ambivalence,' by which I mean the procedure of passively misrepresenting aspects of his life that we have already seen employed by Silone, when his comments about the past are ambiguous to the point of contradiction. In a no man's land between fact and fiction, Silone's comments about himself function like Poe's purloined letter - they are made invisible by their appearance of self-evidence. For example, Silone's comments about Giovanni Verga's writings indicate a certain anxiety of influence regarding the Sicilian author. Though the premise of the 'Viaggio a Parigi' is in some ways highly suggestive of some of Verga's novels, Silone explicitly claimed that he had not read Verga until after having written Fontamara, and that for ideological reasons Verga was in no way a literary model.24 Even as late as 1965, Silone identified political with aesthetic value in literature: Ecco dunque quello che penso di un certo 'verismo' o realismo meridionale: la realta senza problem! mi pare sterile, triste, inumana, storia che

66 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone diventa natura morta. Non so immaginare una vita che non covi in se un'antitesi radicale. Questo e, oso dire, la differenza di situazione tra Fontamara e Aci Trezza. La vecchia realta meridionale, faticosa, opaca, umiliante, con quella sofferenza senza tregua, con quell'ossessione cieca della 'roba,' che conosceva solo la ribellione vana dei sensi, i fuochi fatui dell'erotismo e del vizio, e ora incrinata, minacciata nelle sue fondamenta, dall'interno, per rammutinamento degli umiliati e degli oppressi. This is what I think of a certain kind of Verismo or 'Southern realism': reality without problems seems to me to be sterile, sad, inhuman, history that becomes still-life. I can't imagine a life that doesn't brood within it a radical antithesis. This is, I daresay, the difference in situation between Fontamara and Aci Trezza. The old Southern reality, wearying, opaque, humiliating, with that ceaseless suffering, with that blind obsession for 'things/ that knew only the vain rebellion of the senses, the fatuous fires of eroticism and vice, is now flawed, threatened to its foundation, from within, by the mutiny of the humilated and the oppressed.25

Despite Silone's insistence on the ideological differences between them, the two authors' thematic and stylistic affinities are apparent. Besides the use of indirect free discourse, for example, similarities exist between 7 Malavoglia and Fontamara such as the chorality, the analogous relationships between 'Ntoni and Aci Trezza and Beniamino and Fontamara, and caricature-like renderings of certain minor figures in the texts.26 Silone's insistence on the fundamental differences between his and Verga's writings reflects the process by which Silone developed his own literary style. Gisella Padovani asserts that we must assume that, as a nearly ten-year member of the PCI, Silone had indeed read Verga.27 His rejecting Verga, then, might operate as a rejection of that part of Silone's cultural development which took place during his PCI years. His outright denial of the Sicilian author's influence underscores the importance, for Silone, of a complete rupture with his past. Another example of this technique involves Silone's biological father, about whom competing stories circulate. Some close to Silone say that Paolo Tranquilli was a small landowner who, victim of a viticultural crisis, had to sell his vines and emigrate to South America when Silone was still a child.28 Throughout his non-fictional writings, however, Silone implies that his father died with the rest of his family during the Avezzano earthquake of 1915.29 Others say his father and five siblings died of tuberculosis.30 The ambiguous representation of

Silone and the Symptom: 'Viaggio a Parigi' 67 such easily verifiable facts (not to mention their hagiographic repetition by some biographers) is significant in two ways. First, the suppression of his strong family history of tuberculosis discourages his readers from speculating that Romolo died, not of injuries sustained by beatings in prison, as Silone states, but of the same disease which killed nearly the rest of his family, as the prison records state.31 Silone was invested in a particular interpretation of the cause of his brother's death. By not acknowledging a possible alternate cause of Romolo's death, Silone rewrites his brother's (and thus his own) genealogy - one in which their father does not exist. What is more, Silone's interpretation of Romolo's death as a martyr for Silone's cause demands that Silone must hold himself in some way responsible for it. Second, Silone claims that the events of his childhood and early family life were the primary source of material for his writings: Tutto quello che finora m'e avvenuto di scrivere, e probabilmente tutto quello che ancora scrivero, benche io abbia anche viaggiato e vissuto a lungo all'estero, si riferisce unicamente a quella parte della contrada che con lo sguardo si poteva abbracciare dalla casa in cui nacqui, e che non misura piu di trenta o quaranta chilometri in un senso e nell'altro. Everything I've written up till now, and probably everything I'll write, although I've also travelled and lived abroad for a long time, refers only to that part of the district which could be taken into view from the house in which I was born, and which doesn't measure more than thirty or forty kilometres in one direction and the other.32

Yet his father is mentioned in only one other of his writings, in Uscita di sicurezza (1965). Dead or emigrated, Silone seems to say, it is the same to me. It is significant, then, that the protagonist's actions, in the story which Silone went to some pains to suppress so soon after its first appearance, are directly motivated by the punitive aggressiveness of his father. (In this regard, the story of Silone's real Christian name is interesting; Secondino, the name of a clerk at the registrar's office in Pescina, was chosen in a fit of pique by Paolo Tranquilli when the name he had chosen for his son was deemed obscene. ) The absence elsewhere in Silone's work of well-developed father figures who are not identifiable with Silone himself, when juxtaposed with the angry figure in this story and the ambiguous (if not falsified) version of Paolo Tranquilli's life/death, indicates denial of some aspect of his relation-

68 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone ship to his father. These two examples - taking responsibility for his brother's death, and erasing his father from his personal narrative illustrate the power of Silone's literary project. Walking the fine line between literature and autobiography is difficult, but the rewards are great. Not only can one safely reconfigure one's own personal history from behind the screen of fiction, one can rewrite everyone else's too: an effective means of doling out praise and punishment to those otherwise out of reach. The most startling example of this reconfiguration occurs when Silone makes two direct references to Romolo Tranquilli. Silone recounts bits of his brother's story, this time not by incorporating them into his fiction but by inserting them directly into 'Viaggio a Parigi' and using his brother's name. While discussing the 'pazzi progetti del figlio' ('the son's crazy plans') with Giacobbe, Michele Zompa announces: 'Lo scorso anno i fascisti hanno arrestato un ragazzo di Pescina, della famiglia Tranquilli, al confine svizzero ... L'hanno portato in prigione e non se n'e saputo piu nulla.' ('Last year the Fascists arrested a boy from Pescina, from the Tranquilli family, at the Swiss border ... They put him in prison and no one has heard any more since.'34) Zompa describes Romolo's arrest and its circumstances alongside two other accounts of fatal clandestine acts. Padovani points out the journalistic tone of these accounts, perhaps the very scenes to which Silone was referring when he repudiated the story.35 The accounts, which refer to real events,36 are set off by a shift in register that simultaneously highlights their similarity to each other, creating an equivalence among them (they are all accounts of failed attempts to emigrate, two of which proved fatal), and differentiates them from the rest of the story. Thus, the effect of this explicit insertion is twofold. Its tone - reportage in the midst of fiction - is stylistically jarring and therefore calls attention to itself, at the very same time that its content is, to return to our earlier formulation, camouflaged by its own visibility. What we see, here, is another possible function of the reconfiguration of familial history in Silone's text, that of hiding in plain sight. Finally, we may discern yet another, more occult function in this strategy, in the emotional affect lurking behind the reportage. Beniamino responds to each story by expressing preference for the fates of the unfortunate emigrants over life in Fontamara: Treferisco morire soffocato dal gas piuttosto che restare qui a mangiare polenta!'; Tn quanto a me, piuttosto andro in prigione ... ma non restero qui a mangiare polenta'; 'Piuttosto che stare qui, mi lascero travolgere da una

Silone and the Symptom: 'Viaggio a Parigi' 69 valanga' ('I'd rather die suffocated by gas than stay here and eat polenta!'; 'As for me, I'd rather go to prison... but I won't stay here and eat polenta'; 'Rather than stay here, I'll let myself be run over by an avalanche.'37) Besides chronicling real events, these stories point to a kind of sliding identification between Silone and Romolo during Romolo's incarceration. When Beniamino expresses a preference for imprisonment or death over Fontamara - along the lines of 'better red than dead' - we must ask ourselves whether or not the message is also 'better Romolo (in prison) than me.'38 The overlapping identification between the brothers occurs behind the scenes, as it were, as well. A brief comparison of Silone's Beniamino and his Old Testament namesake, the Biblical figure of Benjamin, is tantalizing, since he too shares biographical traits with Silone.39 Beniamino's father is named Giacobbe, Benjamin's father is called Jacob. Jacob's wife, Rachel, died giving birth to Benjamin and consequently his father loved him less than his brother Joseph. Benjamin and his half-brothers therefore sold Joseph to the Egyptians in order to curry favour with Jacob. When 'Viaggio a Parigi' was written in 1929, Silone's brother Romolo was still alive, in a Fascist prison in Perugia. After Romolo's death in 1932 Silone often quoted a remark Romolo was said to have made in a letter soon after his arrest: 'Ho cercato di comportarmi come ho immaginato che ti saresti comportato tu, al mio posto.' ('I tried to behave like I imagined you would have done in my place.') This remark does not appear in any of the letters Romolo and Silone exchanged during Romolo's imprisonment, nor is any note made of visits by Silone to either Perugia or Procida; Silone may himself have been involved in the bombing and would therefore have been unlikely to risk capture by visiting Romolo.40 It was thought by some that Romolo's arrest was part of a strategy on the part of the Fascist police to keep closer tabs on Silone, whose influence in the Italian Communist Party was still strong. There are, similarly, theories that suggest that Luigi Longo, a close associate of Silone's in the PCI at the time, set up Romolo, who, by his own account, was performing his first clandestine duties as a courier for the party when he was arrested.41 Silone frequently made reference to Romolo's comment; it was a source of tremendous guilt on Silone's part.42 Silone wondered if he himself might be the real object of the Fascists' interest, rather than Romolo, and thus the direct cause of his brother's arrest, or if he was an indirect cause because of his influence over Romolo.43 In other words, Silone felt himself, like Benjamin, to be somehow complicitous

70 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone in the betrayal of his brother by his 'half-brothers.' Of course, Benjamin's brother Joseph's story ends more happily than Romolo's. Joseph, in Egypt, gained great influence with the Pharaoh by virtue of his ability to interpret dreams. Is Beniamino's lengthy dream perhaps an act of contrition, disguised by Silone as an obsessive need for flight? The multiple, shifting imbrications of fictional, mythical, and historical figures locates this text at an embryonic stage of Silone's authorial development, when his personal narrative has not yet been organized into, and grafted onto, any consistent principles in his fictional production or self-representation. Rome The morning after the communal corn-husking, Beniamino sets out for Rome. As Maria Nicolai Paynter points out, from this point the structure of the story can be envisioned as three concentric circles, representative of the three voyages taken by Beniamino.44 His departure for Rome marks the first of the three round trips that will lead him from Fontamara to Rome and Paris, then back again. The two encounters that occur during Beniamino's leave-taking from Fontamara both foretell his fate and underscore, at the meta-narrative level, our earlier observation that Beniamino represents the inescapable past. On the way to the train station he meets Generale Baldissera, who recites a proverb that again underscores the parallel between Beniamino's failed escape from his natal village and that of / Malavoglia's 'Ntoni's: 'Chi abbandona la via vecchia per la nuova,/ sa quel che lascia, non quel che trova!' (He who abandons the old way for the new/ knows what he is leaving but not what he'll find!') Beniamino then meets and kisses Maria Grazia. But her mouth 'aveva il sapore della polenta' ('tasted like polenta'),45 which repulses him since it is strongly associated with all that he seeks to escape. Only briefly in Rome will he feel a momentary respite from its presence: 'Come il treno si avvicinava a Roma, anche le donne gli sembravano trasformate: piu pallide, fatte meglio, con piu curve, piu levigate. "Certamente non mangiano polenta," disse fra se e se Beniamino.' ('As the train approached Rome, even the women seemed transformed: paler, better-shaped, with more curves, smoother. "They sure don't eat polenta," Benjamin said to himself.') Throughout the three journeys, polenta will continue to ruin any sentimental, trophic, and erotic impulses.46 The two encounters, considered together, lend greater

Silone and the Symptom: 'Viaggio a Parigi' 71 weight to Baldissera's prediction, which rings true, though not in the way he intended it; abandoning the old road for the new, Beniamino indeed did not know that he would find precisely what he had left. Beniamino arrives in Rome and sets off on a fruitless search for Peppino Goriano, a transplanted cafone who he hopes will find him work.47 Instead he is offered 'work' - sex - by a prostitute, who leads him to a brothel where he sleeps until the nearby sounds of sex awaken him. In the only explicitly sexual scene in Silone's writings, Beniamino observes ('immobile, spaventato, stordito' - 'immobile, frightened, stupefied') three successive couples through a hole in the wall.48 He declines the prostitute's offer. He is awakened when the police come to arrest him. They, too, ironically offer him 'work/ in the form of jail time. As with the prostitute, Beniamino is unable to see beyond the surface layer of the policemen's language. Honest but naive, he offers uncomprehending responses during his interrogation that land him in deep trouble. The second reference to Romolo Tranquilli occurs when Beniamino is in prison and highlights a parallel between Beniamino and Romolo: 'Ci sono student! e giovani operai, che sono stati arrestati all'epoca di un attentato a Milano nella primavera del 1928 e che fino ad oggi ancora non sono stati portati in tribunale. Non si sa nemmeno se siano ancora in vita.' L'uomo che parlava cosi era un metalmeccanico. 'Non mi interessa niente/ rispose Beniamino, 'la polizia deve fare cio che ritiene giusto; io sono venuto a Roma per trovare lavoro.' There are students and young workers who were arrested at the time of an attempt in Milan in the spring of 1928 and who even today have not yet been brought to trial. We don't even know if they're still alive.' The man who spoke like that was a metalworker. 'That doesn't interest me at all/ Beniamino said, 'the police has to do what it thinks is right; I came to Rome to find work.'49

This time an ironworker remarks on the events of April 1928. Both Michele Zompa and the imprisoned worker underscore the uncertain fate of Romolo, who, like the young workers in the passage, had been arrested in April 1928 and not yet brought to trial. But in neither case does the evocation of such events constitute a warning for Beniamino, who sees his own fate as independent from everyone else's. Physical abuse under the Fascists was not unusual, and its inclusion in the short

72 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone story parallels Romolo's experience in Perugia, where he was frequently and severely beaten. (It is also likely that Silone had Gastone Sozzi in mind as well as Romolo; Sozzi was fatally beaten by prison authorities in Perugia. His case was highly publicized, and Silone makes direct mention of him in other texts.)50 The pattern of events that follows for Beniamino - interrogation, then a beating by prison authorities, and an explanation of the day's events by the worker in his cell - are the same events that will cause Berardo Viola's burgeoning political consciousness to blossom in Fontamara. The sliding identification between Beniamino and Silone, and Beniamino and Romolo, implies, besides a profound sympathy for his brother, that perhaps Silone tacitly felt he should have taken his brother's place, out of a sense of responsibility for his plight. In either case, the effect is striking when the scene is read alongside the prison scenes from Fontamara. Berardo Viola's worker-cellmate in Fontamara closely matches Gramsci's description of an organic intellectual, and his teachings ultimately politicize Berardo to the point of self-sacrifice for his paesani. Beniamino's metalmeccanico, on the other hand, neither understands nor is understood by Beniamino. While he perceives the police's motive in detaining Beniamino for a crime they know he did not commit, the worker fails to couch those motives in terms comprehensible to Beniamino, so that Beniamino's sacrifice - he takes the blame for a series of kidnappings and rapes of young girls is of no redeeming social value. In other words, the failed intervention of the cellmate in 'Viaggio a Parigi' leads directly to Beniamino's conviction before the law, whereas Berardo's cellmate, though destructive in his own way, can be said to achieve his aims with Berardo. Note, too, that both Beniamino's and Berardo's cellmates are not real characters but strictly narrative functions, designed to propel the plot without requiring any physical or psychological descriptions. The only difference between them is thus in the results of their efforts, and lays bare the evolution of Silone's thoughts between the creation of 'Viaggio a Parigi' and Fontamara: Beniamino's cellmate is ultimately responsible for what turns out to be a hellish and pointless trip, whereas Berardo's cellmate creates a martyr. Seen in light of the sliding identification we are tracing between Silone, Romolo, and Beniamino, we see structural analogies between the roles of the anonymous cellmate and Silone, and between Beniamino and Romolo. For better or worse, Silone's fiction makes the claim that Romolo's martyrdom resulted from his brother's intervention; the distinctions between the versions signify that Silone

Silone and the Symptom: 'Viaggio a Parigi' 73 conceived, eventually, of a spin that partially, but not completely, exculpated the anonymous cellmate, by putting his companion's sacrifice in the service of a greater good - and, in the end, Silone never depicted what could be categorized as a productive political intervention on behalf of the peasants in his fiction. Still less sympathetically portrayed is the university professor, almost a Manzonian Dr Azzeccagarbugli (roughly, Dr Pettifogger), who, in an exhibition of typically Silonian anti-bourgeois humour, discerns in Beniamino the traits of a 'satiro ereditario' ('hereditary satyr'): Quest! segni particolari furono discuss! in lungo e largo su un famoso settimanale e nello stesso tempo collegati a citazioni latine minuziosamente esaminate, da cui risultava che gia nel tempo di Ovidio Nasone gli spaventosi faun! dei boschi abruzzesi inseguivano le vestal! e le sacre ninfe, sgusciando da angoli nascosti. Alia fine la polizia rese nota, come prova capitale contro Beniamino, la testimonianza di una signora di ottima famiglia, che era stata attirata con diabolici trucchi dal giovane cafone in una strada sul Lungotevere ed ignobilmente sedotta su una panchina. La comunicazione di tale testimonianza fu accompagnata da una fotografia della distinta e sfortunata signorina presa al tempo della sua prima comunione. These particular signs were discussed at great length in a famous weekly and at the same time were linked to minutely scrutinized Latin quotations, from which it was learned that already at the time of Ovid the frightening fauns of the Abruzzian woods pursued vestal virgins and the sacred nymphs, wriggling out of hidden corners. In the end, as capital proof against Beniamino, the police made known the evidence of a lady of good family, who had been attracted by the diabolical tricks of a young peasant on a road along the Tiber and ignobly seduced on a bench. The communication of said evidence was accompanied by a photograph of the distinguished and unfortunate young lady, taken at the time of her first communion.51

This passage is reminiscent of a flurry of investigations held in the days after Romolo's arrest; the polizia politica displayed a prurient interest in a friendship struck up between Romolo and a waitress at the hotel where he lived in the period before his capture.52 It also hints at Silone's anger at his brother's sensational portrayal in the press. Silone held Fascist-period intellectuals in particularly low esteem, along with

74 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone professional writers: tricksters the former, leccapiedi (bootlickers) the latter. In her introductory essay to Viaggio a Parigi (1934), translator Nettie Sutro quotes Silone, who made explicit the connection between his brother's fate and Italian writers' poor record of political engagement, but without mentioning his relationship to his brother: Lo scrittore italiano nei suoi rapporti con la societa e rimasto quello che gia era ai tempi del rinascimento: un cortigiano ... Prima del fascismo esisteva una cosidetta letteratura liberale, sotto il fascismo ne esiste una cosidetta fascista, ma in realta la prima era cosi poco liberale quanto quella di oggi e veramente fascista. Quanti scrittori che del liberalismo hanno fatto la loro professione, per non dire la loro vocazione, sono rimasti liberali sotto il nuovo regime? Nessuno. Neanche uno... Un giovane intellettuale - Romolo Tranquilli - mi ha chiesto: 'Come possiamo evitare questo destine funesto?' lo ho consigliato: 'Dobbiamo dedicarci senza alcuna remora a quella classe che e il nemico mortale dell'attuale ordine sociale. Questo e 1'unico mezzo che ci preserva dal diventare leccapiedi.' Ha seguito il mio consiglio, voleva diventare operaio, tipografo. Ma 1'ha dovuto pagare caro. II regime fascista 1'ha fatto ammazzare in prigione. The Italian writer, in his relationship to society, has remained what he was in Renaissance times: a courtesan ... Before Fascism, a so-called liberal literature existed; under Fascism, there exists a Fascist literature, but in reality the former was as little liberal as the literature of today is really Fascist. How many writers who made liberalism their profession, to say nothing of their vocation, remained liberals under the new regime? No one. Not even one ... A young intellectual - Romolo Tranquilli - asked me, 'How can we avoid this grievous destiny?' I advised him: 'We must dedicate ourselves without any delay to that class which is the mortal enemy of the current social order. This is the only means that will keep us from becoming bootlickers.' He followed my advice, he wanted to become a worker, a typographer. But he had to pay dearly. The Fascist regime had him killed in prison.53 Silone covertly reiterates here the extent of his political and moral influence over his brother and his own indirect responsibility for Romolo's death. Significantly, that admission takes place in the context of a discussion about the potentially redemptive potential of writing. As in his 13 April 1930 letter to Guido Bellone, the message is that Silone wants to redeem himself by writing for the workers and not the

Silone and the Symptom: 'Viaggio a Parigi' 75 Fascists. The direct reference to Romolo (without mention of the precise nature of their relationship) complicates that message: Does Silone seek to avoid the destino funesto for the sake of all workers, or for that of only one? In other words, for whom is he really writing? The Train The scenes that take place on the train from Rome to Paris are the narrative heart of 'Viaggio a Parigi.' During the prison scenes, the narrative voice is detached, guarded, and only minimally descriptive. The narrative tone of the train sequence recalls that of the prologue, in that a distinct voice jokes, effuses, and questions, sliding in and out of free indirect discourse. The playful voice of the train section highlights the surreal quality of what will prove to be another one-of-a-kind event in Silone's fiction: a dream. Beniamino repeats his refusal to return to his village for the fourth time upon his release from prison: "'Piuttosto che tornare a Fontamara, mi gettero sotto il treno," dichiaro Beniamino al ferroviere. "Sono stance di mangiare polenta!"' ('"Rather than return to Fontamara, I'll throw myself under a train," Beniamino declared to the railroad worker. "I'm tired of eating polenta!"'54) His preference is nearly realized. Upon the advice of his worker friend, Beniamino stows away in a dog kennel on a train bound for Paris.55 Cramped in the tiny space and unable to move any part of his body, barely breathing or seeing through the tiny hole cut into the side of the kennel, Beniamino begins to hallucinate that his body has fallen to pieces which have rearranged themselves: Era impossibile spostare la testa. La testa era sulle ginocchia, non piu sul collo. Ma dov'era il collo? Impossibile ritrovarlo. Forse lo aveva dimenticato da qualche parte. La testa con il mento era fra le ginocchia ed attraverso le ginocchia comunicava con i calcagni e con 1'aiuto dei calcagni poteva stabilire la posizione delle natiche. Ma dov'era il collo? Nessuna traccia del collo. II cuore era posto da qualche parte sotto le ginocchia e batteva spietatamente come una sveglia. 'Se la sveglia comincera a suonare, il treno si fermera e la polizia mi arrestera/ pensava Beniamino. It was impossible to move his head. His head was on his knees, no longer on his neck. But where was his neck? Impossible to find it. Maybe he had

76 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone left it somewhere. His head, with his chin, was between his knees and by way of his knees it communicated with his heels and with the help of his heels he could establish the position of his buttocks. But where was his neck? No trace of his neck. His heart was placed somewhere under his knees and beat pitilessly like an alarm clock. 'If the alarm clocks starts to ring, the train will stop and the police will arrest me,' Beniamino thought.56 The protagonist's sensation of disembodiment worsens, leading eventually to unconsciousness. In that state Beniamino spends five days and nights in the kennel, missing the Paris station altogether, only to be discovered in Rome by the same worker who helped him in the first place. An alarm clock plays a central role in his dreams on the train. Five times it rings or threatens to, at moments which, in the economy of the dreams, place it in an antagonistic relationship to that other image which continues to dominate Beniamino's thoughts, polenta. As in Fontamara, polenta continues to represent that which Beniamino must escape or repress. But in Fontamara, polenta functioned as a self-evident metonym, by which Beniamino's repeated expressions of hatred for polenta stood for the inescapable familial and financial oppression of the town. In his dreams, however, its appearance requires him to contemplate acts of violence and self-destruction in order to survive; only the threat of the alarm clock prevents those acts. For example, he dreams that a representative of the wealthy landowners offers him a job burning grain from Fucino so that the abundance of the crop does not cause its price to drop; the ringing alarm clock prevents him from throwing the first load onto the fire and thereby harming the livelihood of the cafoni.57 He dreams of another snake that turns into a devil, who has heard Beniamino the countless times he said he would rather go to hell than stay in Fontamara and plans to make good on this threat. The devil offers him a groaning board of delicious food chicken, fish, fruit, and vegetables - but, despite appearances, everything he tastes is made of polenta. Driven to despair by the devil's trick, he hurls himself suicidally into a river which also turns out to be polenta. Just as he is about to drown, the alarm clock rings. It also rings in time to keep Beniamino from shooting unemployed demonstrators whose rallies for better work disturb the midday siestas of the rich. These three scenes, which equate violence against the working class with violence against himself, hint at a problematic unconscious politi-

Silone and the Symptom: 'Viaggio a Parigi' 77 cal development within Beniamino. The dream of the groaning board further signifies an internal prohibition of enjoyment. Taken together, they imply the connection for Beniamino between doing harm to others and taking pleasure for himself. Finally, the alarm clock also prevents sensual enjoyment. In an extraordinary scene mixing erotic, trophic, sacred, and animalesque imagery, Beniamino dreams that he enters a cafe: Fu accolto da una cameriera negra. 'Un caffe espresso!' ordind Beniamino. La cameriera negra gli apri il pettorino e gli offri il suo seno sinistro, gonfio come la mammella di una capra. Beniamino succhio come un bimbo. II caffe era caldo e dolce. 'Un bottone prego!' chiese la negra, quando Beniamino ebbe finito e la voile pagare. Beniamino strappo dai calzoni un bottone e lo dette alia ragazza, che scomparve. Beniamino resto dov'era ... Una bionda cameriera venne con un bimbo in braccio. La cameriera aveva un'aureola sul capo come la Madonna della chiesa di Fontamara ed il bambino stringeva un globo nella mano destra, come Gesu Bambino. 'II signore desidera?' chiese la bionda Madonna. 'Si pud avere del latte?' La Madonna apri la sua pettorina e gli porse la mammella destra. II seno era delicate, piccolo e rotondo come quello di una pecora. Beniamino succhio come un agnello. Quel latte era caldo e dolce. Improvvisamente il bimbo comincio a gridare e a piangere. 'Dagli un bottone!' disse la Madonna. Beniamino gli diede un bottone e il bimbo smise di piangere. Beniamino invito la cameriera a sedersi vicino a lui. Era colmo di grande tenerezza. 'E' il tuo bambino?' chiese. 'Si,' rispose la Madonna. 'E il padre?' chiese Beniamino di nuovo. 'Non ne parliamo!' lo interuppe la poverina con un sospiro. Beniamino le si avvicino di piu e le carezzo la testa. Improvvisamente la sveglia suono. La Madonna si spavento tanto che getto un grido e scomparve. He was greeted by a black waitress. 'An espresso!' Beniamino ordered. The black waitress opened her bodice to him and offered him her left breast, swollen like the teat of a goat. Beniamino sucked like a baby. The coffee was hot and sweet. 'A button, please!' asked the black woman, when Beniamino had fin-

78 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone ished and wanted to pay. Beniamino ripped a button from his pants and gave it to the girl, who disappeared. Beniamino stayed where he was. A blonde waitress came with a baby in her arms. The waitress had a halo on her head like the Madonna from the church in Fontamara and the baby squeezed a globe in his right hand, like the Infant Jesus. 'How may I help you?' asked the blonde Madonna. 'May I have some milk?' The Madonna opened her bodice and presented her right breast. The breast was delicate, small and round like a sheep's. Beniamino sucked like a lamb. That milk was hot and sweet. Suddenly the baby began to scream and cry. 'Give him a button!' said the Madonna. Beniamino gave him a button and the baby stopped crying. Beniamino invited the waitress to sit down next to him. He was overflowing with great tenderness. 'Is that your baby?' he asked. 'Yes/ said the Madonna. 'And the father?' Beniamino asked again. 'Let's not talk about it!' the poor thing interrupted him with a sigh. Beniamino got closer to her and caressed her head. Suddenly the alarm clock rang. The Madonna got so frightened that she screamed and disappeared.58 Whereas before it served a protective purpose, here the alarm clock is an obstacle to emotional and physical intimacy. In the scene above, Beniamino dreams of a regression to infancy, to the time when the needs for nutrition, affection, and erotic satisfaction could all be satisfied in the same gesture of nursing. The choices of erotic/maternal figures in this scene complicate that desire, however, in their divergent presentations. Borrowing from colonial images of eroticized African women prevalent in Italy during the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s,59 one waitress is black; she offers her left breast, provides coffee, and has a 'swollen/ goat-like 'teat/ As an icon of the colonized African woman, the absence of a child points to her availability for sex outside the realm of the family; she represents exclusively erotic, not procreational, sex. Furthermore, her body, which produces coffee, is depicted as a site of Italian economic growth. In contrast, the other waitress is located symbolically within the realm of the family, indeed of the Holy Family: she is white, blonde, offers her right breast, soft, round, and sheeplike, for milk. But the iconography of the Madonna attributed to

Silone and the Symptom: 'Viaggio a Parigi' 79 the blonde waitress, here not the mother of God but simply an unwed mother abandoned by her partner, paints a highly ambivalent picture of the body maternal, imbuing its oedipal aspects with a strong element of religious desacralization.60 Just as before, when anxiety triggered an alarm (clock) whenever an unacceptable impulse to be violent or destructive - linked previously in the story to polenta - was about to be satisfied, here too the alarm clock rings to prevent Beniamino from following through with his oedipal desires and from deriving enjoyment from the current social and political climate. In spite of the ringing alarm clock, Beniamino is incapable of waking up from his dreams. Rather, it is his inability to distinguish between the oneiric and the real, and not the alarm clock, that serves as the true and insistent reminder that unconscious or repressed desires (to hurt, to destroy, to escape, to go back in time) stand at the very source of his misery. The tragedy of Beniamino's story, in other words, is that waking up is impossible: the past is always present. The Return The story concludes with Beniamino's complete spiritual defeat. After recuperating in Rome from his unsuccessful journey, Beniamino returns to Fontamara for good: 'E perche no? Dopo tutto c'e polenta in tutto il mondo!' ('And why not? After all, there's polenta all over the world!'61) The final image of the story juxtaposes physical ugliness with the futility of escape. The proverb, in which polenta recalls how, as we said earlier, 'the past is present/ is reminiscent of Verga's ascription of proverbs to his characters as a means of articulating their internal dialogues: 'Chi lascia la via vecchia per la nuova lascia polenta e trova polenta ...' Una voce di ragazza chiamo dall'altro lato della strada: 'Ben tomato, Beniamino!' Era la figlia di Cannarozzo. I suoi capelli sembravano piu rossi e la faccia irriconoscibile a causa dell'ascesso. Era sempre stata orribile e le macchie sulla pelle non 1'avevano resa piu bella. 'He who leaves the old road for the new leaves polenta and finds polenta ...' A girl's voice called him from the other side of the street: 'Welcome back, Beniamino!' It was Cannarozzo's daughter. Her hair seemed redder and her face unrecognizable because of the abscess. She had always been horrible and the spots on her skin hadn't made her any prettier.62

80 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone The grimness of the story's final note underscores Beniamino's kinship with 7 Malavoglia's 'Ntoni by highlighting his isolation upon his return home (and not, as one critic has argued, the pacifying revelation that there is suffering all over the world, and a communal strength to be found therein).63 Silone's is a much more pessimistic image than Verga's, however, insofar as home is concerned. 'Ntoni, once back in Aci Trezza, finally realizes the humble dignity of the things he left behind, whereas Beniamino encounters signs of further degeneration. If it was bad before, the story seems to say, it is worse now and this time there is no escaping. In the broader scope of things, the conclusion of the text depicts a psychological outlook of personal despair. Silone's text does not reflect the global disintegration of cultural, political, or spiritual values; his is not a lament for a world gone awry. Rather, it illustrates an intensely personal awareness of the uselessness, the hopelessness of flight as an antidote to unhappiness - though, throughout his writings, Silone will continue to muse on its temptations. For Silone, the mechanism by which to make a fresh start has not yet been discovered; only in his later works will he shift his attention from the moment of flight to the need to return. Simplicio The stories that follow 'Viaggio a Parigi' are about other aspects of Silone's life; they provide a different sort of therapy by working out different sorts of problems. They differ in tone from 'Viaggio a Parigi' insofar as they are gentler, less outraged, less raw, and less experimental. They both fit more easily into pre-existing literary trends and are closer stylistically to the works that Silone would later write. He later returned to some of these stories, reworking them either by expurgating significant portions but maintaining the central plot lines, as with 'Simplicio,' which was published in a different, more concise form,64 or, in one case, re-elaborating their plots into longer novels: Silone remade 'La volpe,' for example, into the novel La volpe e le camelie. Finally, along with 'Viaggio a Parigi/ the other stories ('Letizia' and 'Don Aristotile') do not undergo revision by the author at all but are simply abandoned altogether. The story that immediately follows 'Viaggio a Parigi,' entitled 'Simplicio,' is not as anomalous an entry into Silone's narrative production as the title story. It contain themes that will reappear in later works, such as a critique of Fascist culture. Here also we encounter an early,

Silone and the Symptom: 'Viaggio a Parigi' 81 understated critique not of Communism or its tenets (such as the enactment of the notion of Marxist 'prehistory'), as will occur much more forcefully in Pane e vino, II seme sotto la neve, and Uscita di sicurezza, but rather of the naivety of its assumptions (for instance, it is good to have hope, but it is often misguided, even dangerous). These critiques revolve primarily around what will in later works become Silone's signature theme: the potentially revolutionary power of individuals under authoritarian regimes. Before that, though, Silone presents a story in which revolutionary power is unleashed not on account of the strength of an individual but through the misidentification of that individual. 'Simplicio' is the story of a carpenter who, having been an anarchist during his youth, is believed by the peasants in his Abruzzese town to be secretly planning a revolt that will create financial equality among its citizens. When a fire in the town hall breaks out, the peasants, assuming Simplicio is responsible, urge him to go into hiding. He does so even though he has been at his workbench all day. During his absence, the peasants are emboldened by their faith that Simplicio will return to start the revolution the fire signalled. That faith leads them to arm themselves, and they live in eager anticipation of Simplicio's return from hiding. There are 'sightings' of Simplicio for many days to come, until it is discovered that he died of illness only a few days after his flight. The title character of the story is the principal means by which Silone articulates his critique of the notion of Marxist prehistory. Simplicio presents a body on which to hang the hopes of the future; Christ-like (or perhaps, more precisely, Lenin-like), he puts the peasants in a state of confident anticipation, which motivates them into action. They themselves try to improve their lives (for example, by attempting unsuccessfully to raise their wages during the upcoming harvest) in the misguided belief that Simplicio's leadership will be sufficient to bring about real change. That they are unsuccessful seems not to be the story's concern; rather, the story highlights the structural similarity between the Christian certainty of a Christ who will right the wrongs endured by the poor (an analogy further reaffirmed by the villagers' continued spottings of Simplicio, much as some believers claim to have visions of the Virgin), and the Marxist vision of a post-revolutionary inversion of power. The final lines of the story highlight the force of that vision and the tremendous risk it entails. Once Simplicio's body has been discovered, it is guarded by policemen as though, even in death, it has the capacity to incite violence. The corpse of the unwit-

82 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone tingly martyred Simplicio, in other words, is doubly inscribed in the two belief systems invoked. It is both a powerful impetus to insurgency for his supporters - a religious relic to be venerated analogously to the body of the virgin Saint Luigi, whose effigy is stuffed by the peasants with weapons for the imminent armed revolt - and, in its lifelessness, a reminder that the risk of mistaken identities, false prophets, and failed revolutions is nothing less than death. Ironically, these issues are explicitly thematized in the series of storiette that the cafoni recount to the police. These deal explicitly with the inverse function of misidentification, that is, negative misidentification: Uno due tre, il papa non e re, il re non e papa ... Uno due tre, il papa ora e re ma il re non e papa ...

One two three, the pope is not king, the king is not pope ... One two three, now the pope is king but the king is not pope ...65

The stories are significant for two reasons; first, they play upon the fixity of logical propositions by reversing their respective terms to the point of nonsense, thus prefiguring the confusion that will ensue, and second, they announce themselves as parables - 'Chi puo capire capira' ('Whoever can understand, will') - and, as such, articulate their own inscrutability. In other words, the text announces its own ambivalent status between disclosure and closure: if you were meant to understand, you will, though there is nothing to understand. The correlations between the protagonist of 'Simplicio' and Silone's life are few and generalized - they are coincidences, facets of a life not exclusively his own but common to the era, such as the perfunctory, automatic round-up of all anarchists and other potential troublemakers on the eve of any large official gathering. There are, accordingly, generalized correspondences between Simplicio and Romolo as well:

Silone and the Symptom: 'Viaggio a Parigi' 83 for example, like Romolo, Simplicio dies after a fit of spitting up blood, the image of which, while not uncommon in an era of widespread tuberculosis, nonetheless links the two. More telling, perhaps, are two comments Romolo Tranquilli made in his interrogation, which, if they allow us to posit a correlative relationship between Romolo and Simplicio, cast Romolo in the role of the clueless martyr. During his interrogation, Romolo remarked at length on his attraction to the Communist Party for its commitment to erasing economic inequalites, which he felt were at the root of society's problems. He also explained in great detail his unsuccessful attempts to find work as a typographer, attempts that occupied him full time. These remarks find their way into the short story several times in various forms that reflect both a protestation of innocence - indeed an insistence upon it - and the uncomplicated faith of the protagonist in his fellows. The first comment, wherein the third-person narrator provides an alibi for Simplicio on the day of the town hall fire, occurs five times in the first two pages of the story: Simplicio could not have set the fire, because he was in his workshop all day, where 'si era occupato solamente delle faccende sue' ('he was busy only with his own work').66 Thus we readers are left no room to doubt the veracity of Simplicio's innocence. The second comment, repeated ten times with slight variations, expresses Simplicio's convictions about not his own but mankind's innocence: 'L'uomo e buono.' ('Man is good.'67) Taken together, the two series of comments point to a fixation, a kind of narrative sticking point that will brook no dissent, that allows for none of the nuance or ambiguity that are associated with narrative realism or, for that matter, with reality. What is more, Simplicio is mistakenly identified as a brigante, a mendicant, and a priest. What do these identifications imply? The figure of the brigante is particularly relevant since it is described as the cafoni's one and only political 'experience/ an experience that takes the form of an inculcation since infancy of the privileged position of self-made justice: Cos! le storie del brigand, che il cafone ascolta gia nella culla, raccontano sempre del destine di un perseguitato che per amor della giustizia, deve commettere una ingiustizia ... Cosi continua fino a quando le sue trasgressioni diventano tanto numerose da escludere ogni riappacificazione fra lui e la societa. Tutti lo sanno e non dimenticano mai la prima occasione che del cafone ha fatto un brigante e che 1'ha istigato a 'farsi giustizia da se.'

84 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone So the stories of the brigands, which the cafone hears starting in the cradle, always tell of the fate of someone persecuted who, for love of justice, must commit an injustice ... It continues like this until his transgressions become so numerous as to exclude every reconciliation between him and society. Everyone knows and never forgets the first occasion that makes a cafone into a brigand and that causes him to 'make his own justice.'68

The sanctification of 'self-made justice/ and its insertion into a long, respectable history - as a rite of passage, even (Tutti lo sanno e non dimenticano mai la prima occasione' - 'Everyone knows and never forgets the first time') - reverberates with Silone's own ethical stance, which prizes individual conscience over legal/institutional strictures. Moreover, we see the invention of what will develop into a consistent strategy in Silone's fiction, whereby Silone explains, indeed justifies, an aspect of his personal history by invoking the local in order to condemn the global, regardless of the latter's widespread acceptance. Where local here refers to a particular socio-economic level in the context of the provincial Italy of his lifetime, in later works the term will increasingly signify his own highly idiosyncratic vision in the context of his own personal history. Because of its status as a local cultural institution, we are to accept brigantaggio as a viable solution within the economy of 'Simplicio' (after all, the brigante is not unlike the American cowboy69 or the mythical Robin Hood), just as later we will be asked to accept an even more individual notion of justice, in the form of Silone the ethical outlaw, who makes his own justice when the systems fail him. The importance of Simplicio, in other words, is that he prepares us for the possibility of an ethics narrated outside any imaginable local correlative. Thus, 'Simplicio' performs a doubly therapeutic function. First, the strange similarity between Simplicio and Romolo Tranquilli functions as a kind of hagiographic fantasy - this is a fable mythicizing Romolo in the same way that Beniamino was a demonized version of Ignazio Silone. Second, 'Simplicio' posits the possibility that misidentifications can act as performatives; put more simply, that the act of naming something - whether accurately, as in T now pronounce you husband and wife/ or mistakenly, as in the erroneous identification of Simplicio as a militant anarchist - makes it so. In this regard, Maria Nicolai Paynter's suggestion that we can understand 'Simplicio' only in the context of Silone's 1932 essay on Christ, 'Der Christus von Kazan/ is an intriguing one.70 In that essay, Silone argues that although the faithful cannot

Silone and the Symptom: 'Viaggio a Parigi' 85 prove Christ's physical existence, their belief in Christ is no less powerful; as Silone puts it, 'for our present knowledge it is clear that Christianity as such can exist without Christ/71 Paynter evokes Silone's commentary in order to argue that Simplicio 'is a hero in this [Christlike] tradition - a hero whose legend may have been fabricated by the people, but whose existence is very real and represents the living spirit of Christ in history.'72 And, indeed, the character Simplicio is the embodiment of hope for the peasants whether or not he is going to revolutionize the village. We might further Paynter's argument by observing that the policemen's vigil over Simplicio's dead body, though a subversion of the story of the Crucifixion (because, in the Gospel of Saint Matthew, the guards fear that Christ's followers might steal his body, and thus compound their dupery of other believers, whereas the policemen in 'Simplicio' fear that Simplicio, though dead, might still escape) illustrates the power of his mythical status nonetheless. I would argue that the greater relevance of 'Der Christus von Kazan' to 'Simplicio,' beyond the resemblance between the story's protagonist and Christ, is that the essay articulates Silone's own vision of historiography. To borrow a formulation from Carlo Ginzburg's History, Rhetoric, and Proof, Silone's is a vision that comes down firmly on the side of rhetoric. That is, with both 'Der Christus von Kazan' and 'Simplicio/ he presents an illustration of what Paul de Man describes when reading Rousseau: 'It is always possible to face up to any experience (to excuse any guilt), because the experience always exists simultaneously as fictional discourse and as empirical event and it is never possible to decide which of the two possibilities is the right one.'74 If, as de Man suggests, all events exist on the borderline between narrative (or 'fictional discourse') and history, then it would seem that Silone opts, not unselfishly, for narrative, an option that he exercises not only in his fiction but also, I would argue, in his self-presentation. What justifies this self-serving vision of history is, ironically, its possibility for positive use. In this regard, without in any way condoning Silone's choices, we may point to the reconciliatory value of Silone's narrative production. As I will continue to argue throughout this study, despite the questionablility of his wartime practices, the stories he tells nonetheless provide powerful, enduring inspiration; and for that very reason alone Silone's narrative persona has performed an important function both for Italians and for many who have read him. To return, then, to 'Simplicio/ I maintain that beyond the greater ramifications, the immediate advantage to Silone's vision of the rela-

86 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone tionship between fact and fiction is its therapeutic function. As in 'Viaggio a Parigi/ with 'Simplicio' Silone works through an aspect of his life, rewriting not himself so much as his brother, for it is Romolo Tranquilli, principally, who undergoes a narrative revision from naive dupe to folk hero, a revision that cancels any indication of Silone's influence over his brother. Moreover, reading 'Simplicio' as a eulogy for Romolo, besides its consonance with this chapter's thesis that Silone's early writings perform a therapeutic function for the author, allows us to identify the birth of the theoretical model Silone will continue to employ throughout his writings, in which fictional narratives displace historical ones. Indeed, recalling Silone's letter to Bellone in which he announced his new career as a novelist, the self-absolution inherent in that move seems almost incidental. The Impotent Hero It is not difficult to see why Silone would seek to distance himself from 'Viaggio a Parigi' when we consider this work alongside his later fiction. The success of his positive heroes, and the stylistic distinction of their stories from the singular 'Viaggio a Parigi,' may also contribute to this distancing - once Silone hit upon a winning formula, he stuck with it. Finally, if this piece of writing was intended as a means by which to help those with whom he enjoyed kinship and influence, as Silone stated in his letter to Bellone as well as in the collection's introductory essay, one asks what sort of help such a text might provide, particularly when compared with the models of political and ethical integrity which will star in later works. By the same token, however, it is also easy to see where he might have gained psychological solace from its composition. Many of the issues at stake in 'Viaggio a Parigi' were of paramount importance not only to Ignazio Silone but also to those involved in evaluating political commitments of any stripe; to those whose education and ambitions had carried them far from the paternal hearth; and to those who had suffered from a personal betrayal, or worse, had betrayed themselves. In that sense the story contains nothing less than a mandate to full readerly self-inquiry. More particular to Silone's case is the acknowledgment that betrayal and deception take on numerous forms and myriad targets, oneself included. In that regard, Beniamino's ethical and narrative value is great. In contradistinction to the heroes who will succeed him, he is significant precisely for his impotence as an ethical

Silone and the Symptom: 'Viaggio a Parigi' 87 figure - he manages to recognize his own needs and desires, but not either to sacrifice them for a greater good or actively to seek their satisfaction, and is incapable either of transcending his own miserable situation or of embracing the moral squalor that surrounds him.75 Beniamino stands in contradistinction to Silone's later protagonists as a narrative figure, as well, by marking the starting point in the arc of Silone's narrative production not just chronologically, but also, and more important, when considered as a vehicle for authorial catharsis. Both 'Viaggio a Parigi' and 'Simplicio' revolve around protagonists whose relationship to Silone's own biography is inverted in comparison with later protagonists. As the arc's point of departure, Beniamino and Simplicio attest to the re-elaboration of autobiographical features into Silone's fiction following the sequence biography > text. After the intermediate step represented by Fontamara, in which real and fictional events commingle and mutually reverberate, the remainder of Silone's fictional opus will be marked by the reversal that sequence, which will effectively read text > biography. In other words, whereas in Viaggio a Parigi we see a new author drawing on first-hand events and feelings, re-envisioning them in the context of a fictional setting, and in that way rewriting his own history, so to speak, by the time he reaches the end point of the arc of narrative production with Pane e vino, a new 'master' narrative will emerge, reflecting the active absorption into the author's new 'biography' of elements and events originating in his fiction. Recall Zizek's description: 'Symptoms are meaningless traces, their meaning is not discovered, excavated from the hidden depth of the past, but constructed retroactively.' Silone creates his own source for biographical data, in a sense; and if that mastery makes for a more homogenous 'life/ it has the advantage of being much better controlled. By the same token, it has the disadvantage of an enormous trade-off, and that is the loss of enjoyment, as attested by Beniamino, that is part and parcel of the dissolution of the symptom. The failure of that character's voyage of escape, evident in the quiet despair of the story's final image, indicates the difficulty with which one rids oneself, precisely, of oneself. The process can be observed throughout Silone's entire fictional project. The obsessiveness of his writings, with their continuous returns and reiterations of personal experiences that become more and more distant with the passing of the years, contributes to the desired effect of therapy in that it allows Silone to articulate the meaning of his symptom and thus, presumably, eradicate it. But

88 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone Beniamino, intractable testimony of Silone's personal odyssey, will remain in spite of Silone's conscious effort, articulated here in terms of a sacred duty: Se fosse in mio potere di cambiare le leggi mercantili della societa letteraria, io potrei benissimo trascorrere la mia esistenza a scrivere e riscrivere sempre la stessa storia, nella speranza che cosi finirei col capirla e col farla capire, allo stesso modo come nel Medio Evo vi erano del monaci che passavano 1'intera esistenza a dipingere sempre da capo il Volto Santo. If it were in my power to change the market laws of literary society, I could easily spend my existence writing and rewriting the same story, in the hope that I'd end up understanding it and making it understood, in the same way that in the Middle Ages there were monks who spent their whole existences painting the Holy Face over and over.76

Although he expresses the desire in disingenuously hypothetical terms ('se fosse in mio potere' - 'if it were in my power'), Silone eventually really did acquire the freedom to write and rewrite the same book. Upon the completion of the trilogy of his first texts, Silone's fictional characters and his own public persona evolved apace into socialist saints, who combine a spiritualist's faith in a venuta del Regno and a zealous intolerance for political inequities.77 Beniamino's erotic frustration will give way to Pietro Spina's asceticism and chaste self-denial (as sensual desires continued to be excluded in Silone's later works), and Beniamino's bestial waitresses will give way first to Pietro's veneration of the Madonna-like Cristina and ultimately to the nun Severina. Before that could happen, however, Silone turned his attention to Berardo Viola. The next chapter will examine this character, whom I locate midway along the path to Silone's narrative self-mastery.

CHAPTER THREE

Torn Loyalties: Fontamara

Begun in 1929, continued in 1930 in Davos, Switzerland, completed in Zurich in 1931, and published in 1933, Fontamara was Silone's first novel. It was, and continues to be, one of his most widely read, along with Pane e vino. Translated into dozens of languages, it was particularly popular in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States and until recently was a staple teaching tool in American high schools. Italian critics have commonly considered it to be not only Silone's most important but also his most influential work. They attribute to it a straightforward and unequivocal vision shaped by Silone's then-recent experiences with the PCI. As one critic, Ferdinando Virdia, summed it up, Fontamara is 'un semplice affresco di vita popolare nel quale e trasfusa tutta la passione politico-sociale di Silone, la sua ribellione contro un certo tipo di societa agrario-capitalista non senza archaiche e anacronistiche sopravvivenze feudali, difesa dalla violenza poliziesca fascista' ('a simple fresco of popular life in which are transfused all of Silone's political-social passion, his rebellion against a certain kind of agrarian capitalist society that is not without archaic and anachronistic feudal holdovers, defended by Fascist police violence').1 Others, such as American critic Irving Howe, laud the coherence of Silone's Marxist preparation as it is reflected in the novel: 'For Fontamara is the one important work of modern fiction that fully absorbs the Marxist outlook on the level of myth or legend; one of the few works of modern fiction in which Marxist categories seem organic and "natural," not in the sense that they are a part of the peasant heritage or arise spontaneously in the peasant imagination, but in the sense that the whole weight of the peasant experience, at least as it takes form in this book, requires an acceptance of these categories.'2 More recent works of criti-

90 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone cism have not diverged from this view; referring equally to the novel's spiritual dimension, Maria Nicolai Paynter states that the story, 'in its essence, recounts a process of gradual awakening of the conscience of a people to the rights and responsibilities inherent in their human condition.'3 Taking into account the events in Silone's life immediately preceding and during the composition of Fontamara, however, allows a much more equivocal representation to emerge that can no longer pass for a 'simple fresco' or an organic Marxist vision. In terms of this analysis, Fontamara signals the second phase of Silone's fiction project in its presentation of a political message. It also marks the second of the threestep development of Silone's protagonists; Fontamara's Berardo Viola lies midway along the moral, political, and spiritual spectrum that links the defeated (vinto) Beniamino of 'Viaggio a Parigi' to Pane e vino's secular saint Pietro Spina. The novel introduces the theme of self-sacrifice, which will become central to Silone's future opus, but that theme is introduced in such a way as to undermine the strength of the novel's political message. Indeed, from a certain point of view, the novel is marked by deep-seated ideological ambivalence: Fontamara introduces, then subverts, some of Marxism's fundamental concepts, by investing them with autobiographical elements that deform and deflate them. Silone composed Fontamara during a period of major transition, when his sentimental, political, and familial loyalties were being put to the test. Like Viaggio a Parigi, Fontamara was produced at a nadir of Silone's political and family life. Since 1929 Silone had been living in Davos at a sanatorium under an assumed name. He had been on an indefinite leave of absence from the PCI since the spring of the same year for health reasons, which he described to his colleagues as tubercular and to his brother as 'disturb! nervosi.'4 His official break with the party would not come until the summer of 1931. In addition, he was involved with two women: besides Aline Valangin, Gabriella Seidenfeld, an active member of the PCI, had been Silone's romantic partner since 1921. The first edition of Fontamara (completed in 1931) was dedicated to Romolo Tranquilli and Gabriella Seidenfeld. Silone had been in contact with his brother Romolo, who was still incarcerated in Rome but had not yet been sentenced.5 Silone was drawing funds to support Romolo from two equally problematic sources - the Soccorso Rosso (PCI) and Aline Valangin. To leave the Communist Party would terminate aid from the former, and Valangin was already committed to the fullest

Torn Loyalties: Fontamara 91 extent possible without exposing their liaison. Silone's relations with Romolo became strained. Their letters consisted mostly of requests on Romolo's part for money, and excuses for its short supply on Silone's part.6 On more than one occasion Silone asked his younger brother if he was angry with him.7 Romolo was dependent on his older brother financially - without the small comforts Silone's occasional and Gabriella's regular contributions allowed him, Romolo's health would have deteriorated even more quickly than it did. Like other members of his family, Romolo suffered acutely from psychological difficulties and was medicated during his incarceration. He even joked about the number of drugs he was taking in a letter to a cousin.8 Gabriella Seidenfeld and Romolo, on the other hand, were on closer terms than the two brothers were, judging by the frequency and warmth of their letters.9 During this period Silone was actively distancing himself from Seidenfeld, whom he could not yet afford to alienate because she provided the emotional support for Romolo that he did not. Thus, Romolo was in dire straits, Silone's romantic relationships had taken on new complexity, and Silone was no longer in the good graces of the Communist Party. The conjuncture of these events sent Silone into a tailspin. He was, in his words, 'sull'orlo del suicidio' ('on the brink of suicide').10 But in retrospect, Silone regarded that period of his life with atypical hubris. He recalled those years in terms of a divine transformation, a trial by fire from which he emerged with renewed faith and a clear sense of direction: Attraversai in quell'epoca una crisi atroce, ma salvatrice. Come scrisse San Bernardo in uno dei suoi libri, vi sono degli uomini che Iddio rincorre, perseguita, ricerca e, se li trova e li afferra, li strazia, li fa a pezzi, li morde, li mastica, li ingoia e digerisce e ne fa creature del tutto nuove, creature del tutto sue; se io ripenso alle sofferenze, ai pericoli, agli errori, alia penitenza, sofferta da mold miei amici e da me stesso, mi sembra di aver avuto quella sorte dolorosa e privilegiata di cui parla San Bernardo. In Svizzera io sono diventato uno scrittore; ma, quello che piu vale, sono diventato un uomo. I was going through an atrocious but saving crisis in that period. As Saint Bernard wrote in one of his books, there are men that God chases down, persecutes, seeks out and, if he finds them and catches them, tears them apart, tears them to pieces, bites them, chews them, swallows them and digests them, and makes of them completely new creatures, completely

92 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone his; if I think back to the sufferings, the dangers, the errors, the penitence, suffered by my friends and myself, it seems to me that I had that painful and privileged lot of which Saint Bernard speaks. In Switzerland I became a writer; but, what's more important, I became a man.11 His experience, described in christological terms as a moral and spiritual destruction and resurrection, goes beyond the rediscovery of private values. It also signifies that the rebirth of his public image as a writer was intimately connected with the discovery of his voice as a novelist ('In Svizzera io sono diventato uno scrittore; ma, quello che piu vale, sono diventato un uomo' - 'In Switzerland I became a writer; but, what's more important, I became a man'). Fontamara's dark side bears witness to that transformation by explicitly thematizing the self-sacrifice and rebirth of which Silone speaks, against a backdrop of political upheaval that makes specific reference to real events in Silone's life. In this chapter I explore the ways Fontamara presents a profoundly conflicted version of the concerns with identity, selfsacrifice, and ideology that were to become part and parcel of Silone's post-PCI identity. Chief among these is a concern, articulated as a series of paradoxes, with the risks of influence at various levels - personal, communal, and discursive. Additionally, at the level of style, we will see a continued denial of the literary legacy of Giovanni Verga. Silone with Gramsci Fontamara fits neatly, at first glance, into a Marxist and specifically Gramscian tradition of interpretation. In it Silone fictionalized what might be read as a textbook Gramscian account of the politicization of a group of peasants, as mediated by a member of an allied class, resulting in the mutual benefit of the two classes and their attempts at opposing Fascism. The book charts the progress of the peasants in the imaginary village from a dormant state of full investment in their subordinate position outside the Gramscian dominant group - a position in which acts of resistance can only be isolated and non-productive towards a position in which they are poised on the brink of class consciousness. A traditional Gramscian reading of the novel leads to the conclusion that the inchoate desire to organize can be nurtured to the point of successfully mobilizing a group of peasants to make profound changes in the politics of their thoughts and actions. There are, however, significant limitations to that reading, because from the start there are indications that Fontamara does not unequivo-

Torn Loyalties: Fontamara 93 cally espouse the Gramscian tenets the novel's development implies. Fontamara does, indeed, tell the story of a political revolution - but one that fails. Moreover, Silone's own internal conflicts - of ideology, personal interest, and family needs - erupt throughout the story. Specifically, these conflicts are played out as Silone's struggle with Gramsci's thoughts (first put forth in the years 1924-6) about 'ideological preparation' for a soviet-style regime, a preparation that required an alliance of peasants and workers - a new concept in Italy at the time.12 The strength of traditional interpretations lies in the fact that, in spite of all indications that the Fontamarans are culturally, socially, spiritually, and economically conditioned to identify themselves as members of an historically and permanently oppressed group, they nonetheless make fledgling attempts at the end of the novel to close ranks and combat their oppressors. It is a long and painful process. The novel's preface declares that the Fontamaresi have been oppressed since the middle of the nineteenth century, when members of the TorIonia family took possession of the land on which the village lies. The novel documents the peasants' abuse by wealthy landowners, who refuse to pay them for labour; by educated bureaucrats, whose rhetorical sleights-of-hand trick them into exploitative agreements; and by armed thugs (formerly landless peasants) who rape the peasant women while their husbands are in the fields. Fontamara depicts the downward spiral of events that lead to the mass murder of the villagers by the Fascists. The novel makes no direct mention of contemporary political events or the historical conditions under which Silone was writing.13 The novel takes place in a village not far from the capital but completely out of touch with it, and the only reference that sets the story temporally is an allusion to the Vatican's 1929 recognition of Italy as a unified state.14 Reverberations of the consolidation of the Fascists' power are, however, evident in the scenes that depict the humiliation and debasement of the Fontamaresi at the hands of newly minted Fascists. Throughout the novel the peasants are paralysed by the paradox of their total emotional solidarity and their inability to work in concert. Silone depicts a world in which multiple forces coincide to reinforce the peasants' certainty of their oppression, not least of all because it is not unique: Fontamara somiglia dunque, per molti lati, a ogni villaggio meridionale il quale sia un po' fuori mano, tra il piano e la montagna, fuori delle vie del traffico, quindi un po' piu arretrato e misero e abbandonato degli altri.

94 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone Fontamara therefore resembles, in many ways, every southern village which is a little out of the way, between the plains and the mountains, out of the traffic, thus a little more backward and miserable and abandoned than the others.15

As in 'Viaggio a Parigi/ the peasants' situation is intimately connected with and compounded by the harsh landscape that surrounds and isolates the village. This makes it like a lot of other villages; it is representative and not a specific chronicle ('ogni villaggio meridionale' - 'every southern village'), giving credence to the Gramscian interpretation, since Gramsci was particularly interested in issues pertaining to southern Italy at this time. Descriptions of the lowly position of the Fontamaresi in terms of the laws of nature underscore the indisputability of their misery, perceived as a fact of life since time immemorial: Le ingiustizie piu crudeli vi erano cosi antiche da aver acquistato la stessa naturalezza della pioggia, del vento, della neve. La vita degli uomini, delle bestie e della terra sembrava cosi racchiusa in un cerchio immobile saldato dalla chiusa morsa delle montagne dalle vicende del tempo. Saldato in un cerchio naturale, immutabile, come in una specie di ergastolo. The crudest injustices were so antique that they had acquired the same naturalness as the rain, the wind, the snow. The lives of the men, the animals and the earth seemed then to be enclosed in an immobile circle soldered together by the closed vice of the mountains from the events of time. Soldered in a natural circle, immutable, like in a sort of prison.16

Besides nature, man and God also project injunctions against organization and unification by the cafoni. These injunctions operate internally on the peasants to reinforce what seems like an inescapable message - if you attempt to improve your lot, you will jeopardize the entire order of the universe: Noi pensammo che la deviazione del ruscello fosse una nuova beffa. Infatti, sarebbe proprio la fine di tutto, se il capriccio degli uomini cominciasse a influire perfino sugli elementi creati da Dio, cominciasse a deviare il corso del sole, il corso dei venti, il corso dell'acqua stabiliti da Dio. Sarebbe come se ci avessero raccontato che gli asini stavano per volare; o che il principe Torlonia stava per cessare di essere un principe; o che i

Torn Loyalties: Fontamara

95

cafoni stavano per cessare di patire la fame; in una parola, che le eterne leggi di Dio stavano per cessare di essere le leggi di Dio. We thought that the deviation of the stream was another joke. In fact, it would really have been the end of everything if the whims of men began to influence even the elements created by God, if they began to deviate the course of the sun, the course of the winds, the course of the water, all established by God. It would be as though they had told us that donkeys were going to fly, or that the prince of Torlonia was no longer prince, or that the peasants were about to stop suffering from hunger; in a word, that the eternal laws of God were going to stop being the eternal laws of God.17

This internalization supports a traditional Marxist thesis too, since for Marx the peasants are hopeless politically because of their inability to think abstractly, beyond the concrete phenomena of everyday life. The predictability of their eternal plight is evident at the diegetic level of Silone's prose; the same words are repeated from line to line, varying only in terms of their grammatical form.18 Silone's stylistic choices create an equivalence between individual elements. The narration often lacks punctuation, particularly when listing nouns. For example, when one of the Fontamaresi speaks about the universality of peasants, he describes how they understand one another even despite language differences, unlike members of different classes who share national identities and speak the same language: ... allo stesso modo, i contadini poveri, gli uomini che fanno fruttificare la terra e soffrono la fame, i fellahin i coolies i peones i mugic i cafoni, si somigliano in tutti i paesi del mondo ... In the same way, the poor peasants, the men who make the earth bear fruit and who suffer from hunger - the fellahins the coolies the peons the muzhik the peasants resemble each other in all the countries of the world ...t9

Thus the extent of the internalized oppression of the Fontamarans reinforced by their history, natural surroundings, and class position is replicated and redoubled by the idiosyncrasies of their narrative style. As the passages above indicate, they are imbricated in a power

96 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone hierarchy that has not only existed in their part of the world for all eternity but also spans the globe. On the other hand, it is the text's very insistence on the peasants' internalization of their suffering that hints at another reading. As we will see, Silone's insistence on their political intractability is so unequivocal as to give the sense that they have invested actively in their own impotence. Silone employs cultural artifacts as well to reinforce the peasants' convictions about their oppression, and in that sense traditional Marxist readings of the novel draw strength from the fact that the author's critique is aimed as much at the church as it is at the government. The rituals of the church, as representative of the law of God, within the power economy of the novel, obtain the same direct authority to define the cafoni's position. For example, as the novel begins, the peasants unwittingly sign a petition which allows their water source to be deviated from their lands to the prince's. At a meeting with Pelino, a Fascist representative, the cafoni agree to sign his petition and then dictate the names of the other villagers, whose names Pelino signs on their behalf. But Pelino is interrupted by the discovery of a new species of louse. This one has a cross on its back, a sign that prompts Michele Zompa to recount his dream about the cloud of lice offered by Christ as a gift to the cafoni in celebration of the new accord between the pope and the government: Trendete, o figli amatissimi, prendete e grattatevi. Cosi, nei momenti di ozio, qualche cosa vi distrarra dai pensieri del peccato.' (Take, oh beloved sons, take these and scratch yourselves. That way, in moments of leisure, something will distract you from sinful thoughts.')20 Despite their conviction that new species of louse appear only after great revolutions, the cafoni are not impressed by this offering from Christ. It is a false promise, and they expect to see no evidence of a change of the political guard during their lifetimes.21 Silone depicts the collusion of Catholic and Fascist authorities, a collusion motivated by mutual fear and greed. To the peasants, the two institutions are interchangeable: equally inscrutable, and equally biased towards the wealthy.22 The story of the lice indicates the novel's suspicion of the church under the Fascist regime, a suspicion consonant with Marxist attitudes towards religion. Yet the novel does not build towards a traditional Marxist indictment of religion as a cause of political complacency. Rather, it presents a more ambivalent vision in which, at first, Christ is on the side of the poor and at odds with the acquisitive papacy. This vision will give way in later texts to a revolutionary Christ, literally dressed in red and seated next to Marx.23

Torn Loyalties: Fontamara 97 Perhaps the scene can be better understood when read next to another highly irregular evocation of Christ. Consider Silone's description of what it was like to join the Communists: II proprio mondo interne, il 'medioevo' ereditato e radicato neH'anima, e da cui, in ultima analisi, derivava lo stesso iniziale impulso della rivolta, ne fu scosso fin nelle fondamenta, come da un terremoto ... Fu nel momento della rottura che sentii quanto fossi legato a Cristo in tutte le fibre dell'essere. One's own internal world, the 'Middle Ages' inherited and rooted in the soul, and from which, in the final analysis, derived the same initial impulse to revolt, was shaken right to its foundation, as though by an earthquake ... It was at the moment of rupture that I felt how much I was tied to Christ in every fibre of my being.24

The logic of this passage from Uscita di sicurezza is as follows: upon abjuring all faith in Christ ('at the moment of rupture'), Silone realized the impossibility of such an abjuration ('I felt how much I was tied to Christ'). The very act of joining the Communists, in other words, required the impossible. Taken in conjunction with the evidence about the subsequent development of Silone's relationship to the Communist Party, this scene weakens a traditional Marxist interpretation of the lice scene in the novel. While the scene can still be read as an indictment of the church's collusion with the Fascists, the power of that indictment is compromised when it is articulated through the same contradictory logic as the passage quoted above. Analogous to the self who claims to abjure all that he truly believes, the scene depicts Christ aligning himself with the poor by approving the collusion of church and government: the affirmation of revolution (in the appearance of a new species of louse - indeed, one that carries a sign of the cross) paradoxically assures that there can be no revolution. The Christ who flings lice at the poor in order to distract them from sin is no different, it seems, from the Communist who flings information at the Fascists in order to make a theoretical point about the dangers of excessive power. We may extend this paradoxical logic to the depiction of the peasants' position as well. They are powerless to change their lives only if they recognize that the possibility of change exists; they are powerless not because they have relinquished all power but because they have seized it in the form of identification with its lack.

98 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone Berardo Fontamara's traditional interpretation points to the conclusion that the inchoate desire to organize can be nurtured to the point of successfully mobilizing a group of cafoni to make profound changes in the politics of their thoughts and actions. But from the start, there are indications that Fontamara does not unequivocally espouse the Gramscian tenets its introduction implies. Fontamara tells the story of a political revolution sparked by the Christ-like altruism of its protagonist Berardo's self-sacrifice. The subtext of Silone's own internal conflicts, visible in the juxtaposition of Christ and Marx, is particularly evident in the figure of Berardo, whose anti-hero qualities resist the novel's insertion into a Marxist framework.25 Berardo Viola represents a more refined version of Beniamino from 'Viaggio a Parigi.' Equally rough, but ultimately capable of altruistic actions, he is 'politicizable' in a way that Beniamino is not. Ultimately, Beniamino, like Verga's vinto protagonist 'Ntoni of 7 Malavoglia, reluctantly accepts a predicament it is useless to fight; Berardo's struggle ends not in personal tragedy but with communal resurrection. He is the embodiment both of the town's predicament and of its attitude towards suffering. He cannot integrate himself fully into the town's life because, poor and unable to marry, he is excluded from the rituals that bind the townspeople in complex networks of blood and institutional ties.26 According to his grandmother, Berardo's hereditary destiny is to die a violent death far from home, like his father and grandfather before him. He is at once outside the community and an integral part of it, because of his fierce loyalty to his friends, which exemplifies the emotional sway the community holds over its inhabitants. Berardo's ambivalent relationship with the village enables him to act out the frustrations of his neighbours in ways that are more dramatic and more cathartic, if less productive, than theirs. His typical gestures are pointless acts of revenge which, while ostensibly aimed against the faceless oppressive apparatus, cut both ways.27 Berardo's goal seems to be to do damage indirectly to his neighbours while appearing to do it on their behalf. For example, on the first night of the village blackout, caused by the villagers' refusal to pay the electricity bill, he shatters the town's electric street lamps because they are now useless. That this act is devoid of strategic value is obvious even to Berardo; while doing damage to public property to protest against the iniquity of a billing

Torn Loyalties: Fontamara 99 increase is, in a sense, an act of resistance, it is ultimately more damaging than productive. When the electricity is restored, new lamps will have to be paid for, thus perpetuating rather than solving the community's misery. Again we see a paradoxical logic of identification at work (he embraces his powerlessness in the very act of contesting it), as well as a forecast of Berardo's end. After his destruction of the village's light source (a symbolic disruption of intervention by the state, that is, the installation of electrical power), he himself will shed light, as it were, by becoming the source of political illumination for the peasants. The price will be high; Berardo will pay with his life. No longer able to withstand the shame of his inability to marry for lack of land, and desperate for money, Berardo leaves his village for Rome to seek work. There Berardo meets a man who offers to buy him dinner; soon after they sit down, both are arrested for carrying materials for a clandestine newspaper. In prison, Berardo's defiance, initially directed towards an unidentified authority that he believed was aware of his acts, gradually attains clarity under the tutelage of his new friend. The man speaks clearly and sympathetically to Berardo about Fontamara and other towns like it. Slowly he invests Berardo with the knowledge and understanding required to sacrifice himself for the sake of his village. When Berardo is interrogated and tortured by prison officials, his newly developed social consciousness leads him eventually to confess falsely to owning the other young man's package. He is subsequently beaten to death, but the subversive materials find their way to Fontamara, and the news of his death inspires the cafoni to publish a paper in his honour, which they call Che fare? (What Is To Be Done?)28 - a reference to Lenin's famous book from 1902. In life his foreseen destiny - a violent, early death - justified the sporadic, random acts of violence that in turn reinforced his marginalized position. His death, on the other hand, resituates him at the very centre of the community by creating the impetus among its members to unite. The introduction of the nameless young stranger into Berardo's life initiates the movement from the novel's initial choral focus to a narrower interest centred around Berardo. In a text as concerned with names as is Fontamara, it is interesting to note that the young man is never given a name in the text but rather is occasionally called 'the usual suspect.' The young man is exemplary of Gramsci's notion of the 'organic' intellectual: not one whose immediate social function is that of professional intellectual, but a member of any class whose function in relation to the proletariat is 'directive and organizational, i.e. educa-

100 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone tive, i.e. intellectual/29 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe elaborate on the results of an organic intellectual's exertions: 'In political leadership there is a coincidence of interest in which the participating sectors [of society] retain their separate identity, whereas moral and intellectual leadership requires that an ensemble of 'ideas' and Values' be shared by a number of sectors ... that certain subject positions can traverse a number of class sectors ... Intellectual and moral leadership constitutes a collective will which through ideology becomes the organic cement unifying a "historic bloc."'30 Berardo and the young man enact the class-alliance relationship described by Gramsci; as the catalyst for Berardo's deeper understanding of power relations between himself and the authorities, the intervention of the young man leads eventually to the cafoni's evolution towards class consciousness.31 Structurally, then, Silone has fictionalized what might be read as a textbook account of the politicization of a group of peasants, as mediated by a member of an allied class, and resulting in the mutual benefit of the two classes and their attempts at opposition to Fascism. But Fontamara is not a roman a these. As we noted in our discussion of the peasants' identification with their oppression, there is tension between the novel's overt ideological apparatus and the evidence put forth to support it. Thus, the novel's emotional message, mediated by Berardo (and brought home especially in the novel's devastating final scenes), is not about the triumph of solidarity but rather the tragedy of meaningless self-sacrifice. Again we see the logic of paradox at work. Berardo never transcends his status as an outsider, even when he makes the ultimate sacrifice for his community. Moreover, that sacrifice had tragic ramifications for the very people it was intended to help. Berardo is defeated when he cannot see beyond his usual methods and thus continues to engage in the same forms of resistance he chose before his political awakening (as in the scenes with the street lamp - both the pre-politically conscious Berardo and the imprisoned Berardo strike out blindly, and each time his people are hurt). The tragic irony is that it is precisely by attempting to alter his methods that he causes the most damage. Moreover, it is not incidental that the intellectual is the only character in the novel who is granted the freedom of anonymity. Recalling Beniamino's nameless cellmate in 'Viaggio a Parigi/ whose wellmeaning influence culminated in Beniamino's utter psychological devastation, we may see in the reappearance of an unnamed agent pro-

Torn Loyalties: Fontamara 101 vocateur in Fontamara an exponentially greater threat. The Gramscian scenario, in other words, is a victim of its own success: were it not for the direct influence on Berardo of the nameless intellectual, Berardo's gesture, and the later massacre of the villagers, would not have occurred. This does not mean, however, that the novel censures Berardo's cellmate as strongly as 'Viaggio a Parigi' does Beniamino's. As we noticed in our reading of 'Viaggio a Parigi/ Beniamino's cellmate was responsible for damage on a different order of measure than Berardo's (Beniamino's hellish trip versus Berardo's martyrdom). If we maintain that the sliding identification between Romolo, Silone, and the protagonist visible in 'Viaggio a Parigi' holds in Fontamara, we must locate Silone in the role of the anonymous indoctrinator who innocently sets the 'inevitable' processes in motion. In spite of the partial, personal exculpation of Berardo's cellmate - he did, after all, achieve his political goal - the heavy price of the goal means that it (and not Berardo's cellmate) merits condemnation. If 'Viaggio a Parigi' (and 'Simplicio,' for that matter) illustrates that a little influence is a very dangerous thing, Fontamara's condemnation of the goal of sowing the seeds of political awareness - and not of the person trying to implement that goal - removes the burden of personal responsibility from the individual and relocates it on the institutional. The Gramscian scenario was thus a victim of its own success because its goals were misguided, not because of mistakes made by the cellmate. Silone, in other words, has dramatized an account of how one person can set events in motion that cause a catastrophe, without himself being responsible for anything other than following the guidelines of the political machinery behind him. We are now midway along the path we began to trace earlier by which Silone's personal experiences evolve within his narrative corpus. In 'Viaggio a Parigi' we noticed how events from his own personal history functioned as a source to be plundered for use in his narrative, which had a therapeutic value. Here, we move to a new level of interaction between recollection, interpretation, and narrativization. Events from Silone's 'real life' continue to appear in his fiction at this stage of his writing, but these events have been 'worked through'32 in such a way that their meanings have been glossed. In other words, Silone is not just writing down events and memories in story form, following the sequence biography > texts; he is beginning to experiment with the reverse of that sequence as well, shifting the meanings of those events and memories in such a way that their articulation in nar-

102 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone rative form (and again here we recall Zizek's definition of the Lacanian symptom) retroactively changes the past. Literary Ancestors Like Viaggio a Parigi, Fontamara contains direct references to Silone's life. Once again the names of several characters are the same as relatives of Silone's - Berardo's grandmother Maria Vicenza, for example, shares Silone's grandmother's name, and Silone had a cousin named Elvira, like Berardo's love-interest. Some of the book's events, too, reappear in his later non-fiction works, blurring the lines between fiction and autobiography. For example, in Uscita di sicurezza Silone describes a scene much like one in Fontamara when the prince arrogantly curries votes among the peasants by driving through town in a shiny automobile.33 Indeed, unlike Viaggio a Parigi, which lays no claims to authenticity, the 1933 version of Fontamara aspires to documentary-like truthfulness. In its introduction, Silone, addressing his readers directly, explains how he came to learn the story he recounts and claims to report the events without altering or embellishing them. The early version of Fontamara is thus a novel masquerading as a chronicle of real events. The novel's narrator describes finding three Fontamaran peasants asleep on his doorstep late one evening - an elderly couple and their son. They spend the night recounting their story. Though he was living abroad at the time, the narrator says, news from Fontamara had already reached him. He had futilely attempted to discover the details regarding the villagers' deception and abuse by the Fascists: the deviation of their water source, the imprisonment of their young men, their burgeoning political awareness, and finally, their slaughter. He had concluded that the story was fictitious, or at least highly exaggerated, when the three unnamed visitors appeared at his house.34 Silone's reportage-style narrative strategy echoes the one Verga employed in both / Malavoglia and the novelle, but to a different end. Both Verga and Silone preface their novels with signed introductory essays in which they articulate the motives behind their respective linguistic choices, their particular subject matter, and how their readers should interpret them. Verga claims to present To studio sincere e spassionato del come probabilmente devono nascere e svilupparsi nelle piu umili condizioni le prime irrequietudini pel benessere' ('the sincere and dispassionate shady of how the first yearnings for [eco-

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nomic] well-being probably must be born and develop in the most humble circumstances'),35 just as Silone writes, 'Quello che voglio che tutti sappiano: la verita sui fatti di Fontamara' ('what I want everyone to know: the truth about the facts of Fontamara').36 The crucial difference between the two prefaces, however, revolves around the position of the author as a narrating subject. Verga fashions himself as a dispassionate observer, a bourgeois fly on the wall.37 His stance as a decidedly non-objective observer, however, is evident in the use of the final past conditional ('as it should have been'): Chi osserva questo spettacolo non ha il diritto di giudicarlo; e gia molto se riesce a trarsi un istante fuori del campo della lotta per studiarla senza passione, e rendere la scena nettamente, coi colori adatti, tale da dare la rappresentazione della realta com'e stata, o come avrebbe dovuto essere. Whoever observes this spectacle does not have the right to judge it; it's already a lot if he succeeds in dragging himself for a moment from the battlefield in order to study it without passion, and to render the scene cleanly, with the proper colours, so as to give the representation of reality as it was, or as it should have been.38 Silone, in contrast, fashions himself as a reluctantly transplanted cafone who identifies with his subjects, as evidenced by the use of the first person plural throughout: Non c'e alcuna differenza tra questa arte del raccontare, tra questa arte di mettere una parola dopo 1'altra, una figura dopo 1'altra, di spiegare una cosa per volta, senza allusioni, senza sottintesi, chiamando pane il pane e vino il vino, e 1'antica arte di tessere, 1'antica arte di metter un filo dopo 1'altro, un colore dopo 1'altro, pulitamente, ordinatamente, insistentemente, chiaramente ... Per questo motive i nostri prodotti appaiono agli uomini della citta cose ingenue, rozze. Ma, abbiamo noi mai cercato di venderli in citta? Abbiamo mai chiesto ai cittadini di raccontare i fatti loro a modo nostro? Non 1'abbiamo mai chiesto. Si lasci dunque a ognuno il diritto di raccontare i fatti suoi a modo suo. There's no difference between this art of storytelling, between this art of putting one word after another, one image after another, of explaining one thing at a time, without allusions, without implications, calling bread bread and wine wine, and the antique art of weaving, the antique art of

104 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone putting one thread after another, one colour after another, cleanly, methodically, insistently, clearly ... For this reason our products seem to city men like ingenuous, rough things. But have we ever tried to sell them in the city? Have we ever asked the city dwellers to tell their stories in our way? We've never asked that. Therefore grant everyone the right to tell their facts in their own way.39 Though superficial similarities between Silone and Verga abound40 both are broadly categorized as southern writers, they share a predilection for the use of 'local colour' and a common interest in depicting the desperation of lower social strata - their ostensible motives are radically divergent. Verga sought to distance himself (class-wise, artistically, psychologically) from his characters in order that his authorial presence might disappear: lo credo che il trionfo del romanzo ... si raggiungera allorche 1'affinita e la coesione di ogni sua parte sara cosi completa che il processo della creazione rimarra un mistero ... e che 1'armonia delle sue forme sara cosi perfetta, la sincerita della sua realta cosi evidente, il suo modo e la sua ragione di essere cosi necessarie, che la mano dell'artista rimarra assolutamente invisibile, e il romanzo avra 1'impronta dell'awenimento reale, e 1'opera d'arte sembrera essersi fatta da se, aver maturate ed esser sorta spontanea come un fatto naturale, senza serbare alcun punto di contatto col suo autore ... I believe that the triumph of the novel will be reached when the affinity and cohesion of each of its parts will be so complete that the process of creation will remain a mystery,... and that the harmony of its forms will be so complete, the sincerity of its reality so evident, its way and reason for being will be so necessary that the artist's hand will be absolutely invisible, and that the novel will give the impression of a real event, and the work of art will seem to be made by itself, to have matured and be drawn as spontaneously as a natural fact, without maintaining any point of contact with its author ...41 The impetus behind Silone's authorship, on the other hand, can be summed up by what would later become one of his most famous epithets: 'un bisogno di testimom'are' ('a need to bear witness'). It is Silone, not Verga, who writes in standard Italian, rigorously excluding linguistic and grammatical forms that might evoke their

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purported dialectal origins: 'esprimermi per me adesso e un bisogno assoluto' ('self-expression is an absolute need for me right now').42 Compare Fontamam's introductory essay to the first paragraph of Verga's 'L'amante di Gramigna': A nessuno venga in mente che i fontamaresi parlino 1'italiano. La lingua italiana e per noi una lingua imparata a scuola, come possono essere il latino, il francese, 1'esperanto. La lingua italiana e per noi una lingua straniera, una lingua morta, una lingua il cui dizionario, la cui grammatica si sono formati senza alcun rapporto con noi, col nostro modo di agire, col nostro modo di pensare, col nostro modo di esprimerci. Let no one get the impression that the Fontamarans speak Italian. The Italian language for us is a language learned at school, like Latin, French, Esperanto. Italian for us is a foreign language, a dead language, a language whose vocabulary, whose grammar developed without any relationship to us, with our way of acting, with our way of thinking, with our way of expressing ourselves.43 (Fontamara) lo te lo ripetero cosi come 1'ho raccolto pei viottoli dei campi, press'a poco colle medesime parole semplici e pittoresche della narrazione popolare, e tu veramente preferirai di trovarti faccia a faccia col fatto nudo e schietto, senza stare a cercarlo fra le linee del libro, attraverso la lente dello scrittore. I'll repeat it to you just as I gathered it along the lanes through the fields, more or less with the same simple and picturesque words of popular narration, and you really will prefer to find yourself face to face with the naked and genuine fact, without having to look for it between the lines of the book, through the writer's lens.44 (Verga, Novelle) Each spells out his method and his motive: Verga the transcriber, Silone the translator. Indeed, Silone was later criticized for not learning well enough the 'lesson of Verga' on the use of dialect.45 But such criticism misses the point, namely, that both strategies are equally artificial. Verga, after all, did not write in Sicilian dialect any more than Silone found three peasants on his doorstep, and both are equally effective stylistic means of producing their respective ends. Verga engages current debates about modernism; he has never been considered a non-fiction writer. Silone, on the other hand, commingles his artistic

106 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone aspirations with his political background, blurring the lines between fiction, autobiography, and chronicle. As I mentioned in the last chapter, Silone explicitly claimed he had not read Verga until after having written Fontamara, and that he rejected Verga as a literary model for ideological reasons.46 Nonetheless, the tension between the two writers is striking: Silone goes well out of his way to distance himself from the Sicilian. And yet, if we agree that with Fontamara Silone is struggling to achieve a comfortable writerly distance between fiction and fact, it must also be noted that Verga is exactly the kind of writer who might have provided a model to Silone. It is precisely Verga's style that would be more effective if Silone were trying to present his own stories but from the safe distance of a narrative screen. Perhaps, then, it is the very virtue of the Verghian model to which Silone is responding with such anxiety. In this light, Silone's angst about Verga is a way of specifying, indirectly, what about his own writing is indebted to the Sicilian and, more important, what is not. Specifically, Silone's fiction, he seems to be saying, does not represent the Verghian past conditional ('come avrebbe dovuto essere' - 'as it should have been'). We might rephrase the debate as follows: if Verga's strategy is 'I will disguise fiction behind the appearance of truth,' Silone's is, rather, 'I will hide truth behind a veil of fiction.' In other words, the implicit debate with Verga represents an invitation to invert Verghian tenets; it provides a meta-commentary on the importance, for Silone, of interpretion over representation. Why go to such lengths to invoke a literary precedent only to reject it? Fontamara was Silone's second attempt to make the uneasy transition from professional revolutionary to novelist. With the publication of Fontamara, the course for future readings of his novels was set. Starting after 1933, they would be considered at face value: as lightly veiled accounts of fact. Ultimately, the confluence of his two vocations would enable him to manipulate his public persona skilfully. In the meantime, he struggled for entry into his new profession. Silone's letters indicate that, by September 1932, he was concerned with influencing the first reviewer of Fontamara, whom he calls 'an ass.'47 Ironically, only by abandoning organized politics for literature did he succeed in bringing about concrete social and political change. He achieved precisely what his fictional characters hoped to achieve; in part as a result of his novelistic 'testimony,' the lands of the Fucino valley that had been wrested from the peasants were later returned to them, further proof of the

Torn Loyalties: Fontamara 107 author's continued political influence as well as the extent to which his fiction was interpreted as fact.48 Oppression and Resistance Meanwhile, the overlap between the novel and the real-life effects it produced were not always so altruistic. Following our psychoanalytic premise, the text can be read as an attempt to resolve other traumatic experiences for Silone. Fontamara indirectly depicts a specific event from the same period in Silone's life in a way that puts his own mistakes in a positive light. According to Silone, in May 1927, he, Togliatti, and the rest of the international executive committee of the Communist Party, which convened in Moscow for an extraordinary session, were asked to vote on whether to condemn Trotsky as a result of the latter's report on China. The report was never translated from Russian, and thus it had never been seen by any of the members who voted. Silone and Togliatti refused to vote without first reading the 'evidence for the prosecution.' They left Moscow only to discover that, after their departure, another vote, hailed as unanimous, had been held and Trotsky had been condemned. For Silone, this was a watershed event. He later wrote about his profound disillusionment towards the 'grotteschi episodi' ('grotesque episodes')49 in Moscow and felt the need to justify why he had remained an active Communist for two more years, until the spring of 1929, invoking a complicated private battle with Togliatti, lengthy discussions with Pietro Tresso, and, finally, Lenin's maxim: 'il vero rivoluzionario si riconosce dal suo comportamento nel proprio paese' ('a true revolutionary is recognizable by his behaviour in his own country.')50 The experience of having his name signed for him will find its way, in an altered form, into the novel. The fictionalization of Silone's selfdocumented experience constitutes an indictment of both Fascism and Russian Communism. What is more, it simultaneously provides a sanitized version of what will become his personal mea culpa. At the beginning of Fontamara, the cafoni fall prey to a bit of trickery analogous to Silone's experience in Moscow. They unwittingly subject themselves to an abuse of power when Pelino persuades them to sign a petition on which only the following is written: T sottoscritti, in sostegno di quanto sopra, rilasciano le loro firme spontaneamente, voluntariamente e con entusiasmo al cav. Pelino.' (The following people, in support of the above, spontaneously, voluntarily, and enthusiastically

108 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone leave their signatures to the Hon. Pelino/51) The peasants quite literally give carte blanche to Pelino, thus legally abdicating their rights. Beyond propelling the novel's plot, the episode of the petition serves an additional purpose. By ascribing Silone's own dupery to the naive peasants, he puts himself in good company - like Silone, they, too, could not see the writing on the wall. By transforming the Communists into Fascists, he highlights the similarity between Fascism and Communism and exculpates himself for having remained an active party member even after the scales fell from his eyes. Of course, since he still maintained connections to the Communists, it was logical that he was not yet in a position to criticize the party openly. Moreover, the critique he levels at the two parties, Fascist and Communist, anticipates what will become a trademark characteristic of his political stance in later years: the problematic absorption of individual conscience into totalizing ideologies. But in the meantime the complexity of his assessment underscores the degree to which he is still embroiled in factional issues within the Communist Party. In light of Silone's affiliation with the Fascists, we must also note the metaphoric significance of the gesture of signing (up) for something whose ramifications cannot be predicted. In the novel and in his life, Silone seems to lament that it is all to easy to sign one's life away. We are moving, then, towards an understanding of Fontamara that takes into account the disjuncture not only between its political goals and its methods but also between its literary influences and their denial, and, finally, between its status as fiction and its preponderance of autobiographical data. It is as though the novel contests every claim that can be made on its behalf, through its frequent use of paradox as a structuring element. That same disjuncture can be seen in the play between Marxian and Gramscian attitudes towards the peasants. If for Gramsci the peasants could take on a degree of political awareness through the interventions of an organic intellectual, for Marx the peasants were hopelessly incapable of politicization. Read one way, as we saw, the novel seems to come down on the side of Gramsci with the introduction of the young intellectual in prison with Berardo. At the very same time, however, the peasants with whom he should have formed an alliance conform much more closely to Marx's assessment of their political potential. For example, Alberto Traldi convincingly points out that the book contains 'profonde semplificazioni - o addirittura deformazioni' ('profound simplifications - or rather, deformations')52 of Marxist theories on the origin of Fascism,53 particularly in

Torn Loyalties: Fontamara 109 the descriptions of the peasants' perception of the social order. Their inability to differentiate between Mussolini's and past governments, their utter dependence on the former mayor don Circostanza's dubious protection, their abandonment of any attempt to understand events outside their village, for example, read as fictionalized versions of Marx's remarks on nineteenth-century French peasants. Compare the passage cited earlier from the novel's introduction ('The cruelest injustices ...') with the following from Marx: In so far as there is merely a local interconnection among these small peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no unity, no national union and no political organisation, they do not form a class. They are consequently incapable of enforcing their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unlimited governmental power that protects them against the other classes and sends them the rain and the sunshine from above.54 Descriptions such as those of the helpless peasants reduced some early readers of Fontamara to gales of laughter because they perceived the novel to be a parody of Marx's disparaging remarks about the politicization of peasants. (This was the only time in the history of Silone criticism that he would be considered a comic writer.) In addition, Traldi posits the possibility that the use of the title 'Che fare?' for the cafoni's newspaper is satirical: ... rifacendo il verso celeberrimo Che fare? di Lenin, in cui si postulava la necessita che la rivoluzione fosse diretta in maniera inflessibilmente tecnica dal comitato centrale degli intellettuali del partito, qui si potrebbe indicare che la rivoluzione puo essere anche di tipo spontaneo, e che i suoi protagonist! possono essere anche dei contadini spiritualeggianti, nonviolent! e sostanzialmente apolitici. ... rewriting Lenin's extremely famous line 'What is to be done?,' in which he postulated the necessity that the revolution be directed in an inflexibly technical manner by the central committee of the party's intellectuals, here it would seem that the revolution can be of a spontaneous nature, and that its protagonists could even be spiritualizing, non-violent, and essentially apolitical peasants.'55

110 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone In spite, then, of conventional interpretations by which this novel exemplifies Silone's unadulteratedly pro-Marxist stance, we see the possibility of another reading, by which Silone's Marxism is at once aligned with and against Marx, with Gramsci, and against Lenin and Stalin. Finally, Berardo's martyrdom in Rome reads both as an act of heroism and as a testament to the potential destructiveness of individual acts of conscience. As in 'Viaggio a Parigi/ biographical resemblances to Silone's contemporary Gastone Sozzi complicate the novel's Marxist message. Like Sozzi, Berardo was beaten and tortured to death, but the Fascists claimed that he hanged himself. Similarly, the young man who accompanies Berardo from Fontamara to Rome and, eventually, to prison, describes the torture he must endure.56 He euphemistically recalls the terrible 'experiment' performed on Sozzi - an enema of tincture of iodine: 'Fui condotto in un sotterraneo, gettato su un banco di legno e legato, le mani dietro la schiena, con cinturini di cuoio. E all'improvviso fu come se cadesse su di me una pioggia di fuoco. Come se la schiena si aprisse e vi entrasse del fuoco.' ('I was led into a basement, thrown onto a wooden bench and tied, my hands behind my back, with little strips of leather. And suddenly it was like a rain of fire fell on me. As if my spine had opened up and fire entered it.')57 Regardless of the idealized nature of the sacrifice the two cafoni, make for their cellmate and political mentor (the usual suspect), and thus for the Communists' cause, the resemblance between their punishment and Sozzi's points out the potential lethality not just of oppositional politics but of even the most tenuous or accidental connection to any political party. But if Berardo and the Fontamaresi are not poised for a coming revolution, neither are they completely naive. They are excruciatingly aware of their abysmal status in the scheme of things. At the same time that the cafoni perceive their oppression as a natural, God-given, and indisputable fact, they are also aware that they are being cheated and manipulated by real people. But the natural order cannot be challenged. Their acts of resistance consequently reflect, sometimes humorously, the typical targets against whom they react, such as when the villagers try to explain to the tax-collector (after they shot at him with a rifle) that they were aiming not for him but for the piece of paper he just happened to be carrying. Similarly, they persist in reelecting don Circostanza to a position of authority every year, though they are fully aware that he defrauds and misrepresents them when-

Torn Loyalties: Fontamara 111 ever possible. Since they allow their dead to go unstricken from the record of voters, Don Circostanza wins by a landslide with the votes of these 'living dead' ('morti-vivi') who earn each of their surviving relatives five lire per vote. A further example is Marietta, who refuses to remarry despite the four children she has conceived since her husband's death, in order to continue to receive a pension because her husband died a war hero. While this money does not feed her family, she sees it as 'free money' - money she deserves because she has found a way to fit through a bureaucratic loophole. The cafoni have no illusions about the practical worth of those five lire or the war pension when balanced against the greater benefits of electing someone who would treat them fairly, or marrying someone who could provide support for their children. As we saw earlier, the cafoni are not just aware of their oppression, their identity is inscribed in it - indeed, doubly inscribed for some like Marietta, at both the level of both class and gender. Marietta and the others are implicated in their own oppression complicit, ultimately, when they opt for the devil they know over the devils they don't know. In other words, it is not that Silone depicts cafoni who wish for their own oppression; rather, their oppression is a necessary precondition for their subjectivity. This is evident in the way they figure their position in the power hierarchy: 'E le gerarchie?' chiese il forestiero. Ma allora noi ancora non sapevamo che cosa significasse la strana parola. II cittadino dovette ripetercela varie volte e con altri termini. E Michele pazientemente gli spiego la nostra idea: 'In capo a tutti c'e Dio, padrone del cielo. Questo ognuno lo sa. Toi viene il principe Torlonia, padrone della terra. Toi vengono le guardie del principe. Toi vengono i cani delle guardie del principe. Toi, nulla. Toi, ancora nulla. Toi, ancora nulla. Toi vengono i cafoni. 'E si pud dire ch'e finite.' 'And the hierarchies?' asked the stranger. But at that point we didn't know what that strange word meant. The city dweller had to repeat it to us several times and in other terms. And Michele patiently explained our idea to him: 'At the head of everything there's God, master of heaven.

112 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone This everyone knows. Then comes the prince of Torlonia, master of the earth. 'Then come the Prince's guards. Then come the Prince's guard dogs. Then, nothing. Then, more nothing. 'Then, more nothing. Then come the peasants. 'And you can say that's it.'58

Gramsci wrote that 'the fundamental innovation introduced by Marxism into the science of politics and history is the proof that there does not exist an Abstract fixed and immutable human nature ... but that human nature is the totality of historically determined historical relations/59 In other words, for Gramsci, there may be 'carne abituata a soffrire' ('flesh accustomed to suffering') but not 'carne destinata a soffrire' ('flesh destined to suffer'). Precisely because they are unclass-conscious, in the minds of the cafoni, their misery and oppression are natural events, destined by God and reinforced by myth. The ironic distance the cafoni have from authority, illustrated by the way they describe their abysmal status, does not lessen the degree to which they have recognized their ideological position. On the contrary, it is a necessary component of that group's functioning within the symbolic machine. We may understand their relationship to that position in terms of 'spontaneous consent'60 of hegemony. The institutions of the dominant group encourage a self-conception that prevents the villagers from even hoping their lives might change, let alone from seeking the means to change them. Consider their remarks about the viability of protesting the loss of their water supply: 'Sentite, tornate a Fontamara, col diavolo non c'e da ragionare.' 'Listen, go back to Fontamara - there's no reasoning with the Devil.'61 'non si discute con le autorita.' There's no discussing things with the authorities.'62 'Si puo dire insomma che tutti i guai che da qualche tempo ci capitavano

Torn Loyalties: Fontamara 113 ... non erano nuovi e di essi si potevano trovare numerosi esempi nelle storie del passato.' 'You could say that all the misfortunes that for some time had befallen us ... were not new and one could find numerous examples of them in the stories of the past.'63

As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari point out, 'the astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike; after centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate being humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and slavery not only for others but for themselves?'64 Silone conceives precisely such a group who 'spontaneously' consent to situations that clearly run counter to their own best interests. Consider Zizek's description of the link between political society and its supporting institutions, and Louis Althusser's ideological interpellation in his description of the 'internalization' of the 'Internal State Apparatus': 'It produces the effect of belief in a Cause, and the interconnecting effect of subjectification, of recognition of one's ideological position in the external machine of State Apparatuses which exercises its force only insofar as it is experienced, in the unconscious economy of the subject, as a senseless traumatic injunction.'65 We may borrow from Zizek the observation that this internalization is not and cannot be fully implemented, because there is always an irrational residue, a leftover, which 'far from hindering the full submission of the subject to the ideological command, is the very condition of it.'66 If one's identity is inscribed within a particular group, then abandonment of that group is tantamount to loss of identity. The critical distance, the 'leftover' referred to by Zizek, helps explain Silone's ambivalent depiction of the cafoni's efforts to alter the conditions of their lives in a way that complicates the more traditional Gramscian reading to which the text easily lends itself. When Fontamara is read in these terms, the cafoni are capable of an organized, unified action which would lead to the unmasking of oppressive ideology, regardless of whether they are joined by members of social groups who are better poised, in their objective relations to production, to assist them in their effort. In other words, Silone's cafoni are not (as Lenin would have predicted) helplessly awaiting the arrival of technical direction from a rev-

114 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone olutionary intellectual vanguard. Indeed, the direction of the landless, apolitical Berardo is sufficient to initiate their transformation, which begins with Che fare? However, a psychoanalytic reading that incorporates the Gramscian reading at the level of manifest content calls into question the possibility of any kind of change on the part of the cafoni because, until capitalist mechanisms of social production are eradicated, so that their desires are not co-terminous with their misery and oppression, the peasants will be unconsciously coerced into desiring the conditions in which they already find themselves. Silone's cafoni are perversely, unconsciously reluctant to relinquish their status so as not to lose their position within the symbolic order. Conclusion What we have seen with this critique of Marxism in Fontamara is the most highly developed version of the technique we described in the discussions about Berardo and Giovanni Verga, when we argued first that Silone reinscribed his own personal events and memories within a narrative framework in order to 'work though' them, and second, at play not within the text proper but outside it, that the denial of Verga's influence by Silone served as a methodological disavowal of representation in favour of interpretation. Finally, here we see the same technique at play but with farther-reaching ramifications. Just as the logic of the novel leads towards the occult conclusion that Berardo's cellmate was not as guilty as the system that made him, so too do the novel's ideological underpinnings aim at a critique, at the institutional level, not of the ideals of Marxism but of their implementation. The overt message of the novel is that the tenets of the Left are perhaps flawed but ultimately designed to help the oppressed in a way that other ideologies are not; and the success of the novel's reception was for many years due, precisely, to the possibility of that reading. The covert message, on the other hand, mediated by the peasants' engagement with those tenets, is that the practice of them is dangerous. Particularly in light of the relationship between Silone, the Communist Party, and the Fascists at the time Silone was writing, the sufficiency of notions of class alliances to mobilize the proletariat as outlined by Lenin and later by Gramsci must have appeared dubious to Silone in spite of their partial coherence with his current ideology. The leap from 'carne destinata a soffrire' to simply 'abituata a soffrire' appears, between 1927 and 1930, to be nearly insurmountable from the stand-

Torn Loyalties: Fontamara 115 point of party politics: hence the conflicts on the surface of the novel, particularly the way it stops just short of depicting a successful move towards self-determination by the cafoni. The question with which we are left, then, is: What is at stake in couching this particular story in such a way that its manifest (Gramscian) message is so troubled by its latent (psychoanalytic) structures? Put another way, what is Silone's investment in his depiction of the Fontamarans' desires? The answer to this question may lie between the end of the first and the beginning of the second versions of the novel. Both editions of Fontamara (1933 and 1949) end with the complete massacre of the Fontamaresi by the Fascists in retaliation for publishing their newspaper. However, unlike the 1933 version, the introduction to the 1949 version promises not a chronicle of real events but rather a fantasy. Moreover, the ongoing reception of Fontamara illustrated to the author the superfluity of his claims of factuality - regardless of the narrative framework. By 1949, it seems, Silone was ambivalent about the meshing of Gramscian Utopia and realism. The change between 1933 and 1949 in his approach to fiction, in light of the novel's ending, indicates that he felt it necessary for his public stance to be that the two were incompatible; Fontamara is interesting, in part, because in 1933 he has not yet ironed out how to deal with this relationship. The superficial ideological ambiguities of Fontamara (1933) thus bear witness to the tension between Silone's anxiety about the interface of his own internal ethical stance and the 'proper' external stance (pro-Communist, anti-Fascist) that he will later cultivate. Recall Berardo's self-sacrifice and, more broadly, the peasants' investment in their own subjugation: they share the overall logic of Fontamara's relationship to the politics it claims to espouse. Each instance in which the logic of the paradox holds shares a profound concern with loss of individual identity, and the risks of absorption into a class, a history, and a social group. Indeed, the questions of identity and commitment were very complicated, since, for Silone, fully submitting to the anti-Fascist cause was, on the one hand, his stock-in-trade as a high-ranking member of the PCI. At the same time, it was and had been a mask, or, a shroud like Penelope's, to be woven by day and unravelled at night. The latent presence of an ideological leftover within the novel manifests itself as a series of identities (political, moral, intellectual, ethical, and, arguably, writerly) that failed by succeeding. For Silone, success and failure were inextricably bound in a negative correlation; commitment to either set of ideals, Communist or Fascist,

116 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone meant disavowal of the other. Silone, too, failed by succeeding, by adhering doggedly to a set of ideals that by necessity precluded any unilateral engagement. Perhaps the clearest case of the logic of the paradox, then, was Silone himself, who, by continually crossing the lines between ideologies, managed to carve out one of his own. 'In Svizzera io sono diventato uno scrittore; ma, quello che piu vale, sono diventato un uomo.' ('In Switzerland I became a writer; but, what's more important, I became a man.') His 'resurrection' was under way. No longer able to engage fully on the front lines of Communism, he would continue to grapple with its aims, methods, strengths, and weaknesses in the decades to come. In the meantime, his voice as a novelist grew stronger; he had only to discover a fitting conclusion to his works. Recall his implicit writerly debate with Verga and the importance, for Silone, of interpretion over representation. In Fontamam, as in his other novels, Silone explores the possibilities, and in his later works, the limitations of any community forged under the rubric of a totalizing ideology, as well as the ways in which individual actions, such as those of Berardo Viola, when guided by the spirits of Communism and Catholicism, can be powerful and productive. For adherents to a Cause, human frailty, personal initiative, and critical distance lead both to the downfall and the redemption of any totalizing regime. Fontamara demonstrates that, for Silone, these qualities result in the downfall and the redemption of the human individual. Not surprisingly, those qualities will figure largely, though at great personal cost to those endowed with them, in Silone's next novel, Pane e vino.

CHAPTER FOUR

Consummatum est: Pane e vino

If 'Viaggio a Parigi' and Fontamara represent Silone's experimentation, roughly speaking, with the respective bodies of surrealist and socialist realist literatures, he moves with Pane e vino (written in 1936 and published in 1937) into something closer to the realm of neorealism. This novel does not anticipate the neorealist movement by purporting to present an unfiltered, documentary-style view of actual reality. But in rather an analogous fashion, both its self-presentation and critical interpretation attribute to it a non-mediated or, more precisely, minimally mediated view into the life of its author.1 Similarly, unlike Fontamara, which laid claim to a certain degree of faithfulness in its representation of events, Pane e vino makes no claims to truth and is not framed by any structuring question. Yet, subsequent to its publication, readers consistently invested the novel with an aura of sanctity, retroactively bestowing the moral virtues described in the book upon its creator. In terms of effect, the man did not make the book; the book made the man. This inversion of the traditional creative process would be reinforced by the body of works that followed Pane e vino, texts whose uniformity of themes and objects of inquiry are notable. In this chapter, I focus on a series of intentional and allegorical misidentifications between the author and the character in Pane e vino as traces of the pathway by which the novelist became identified with the novel's main protagonist in the public eye. For Pane e vino not only marks a milestone in the development of Silone's early narrative, as the third and final incarnation of the Silonian protagonist, after Beniamino and Berardo. It also marks the final phase in the evolution of Silone's self-presentation, and the birth of the figure in whom Silone himself was henceforth recognized by his reading public - by which, in

118 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone other words, he himself was displaced by his own, revamped public persona. For Pane e vino also signals the final phase of symbolic selfobliteration Silone actively staged in his literature. The novel reflects the theoretical meditation on the interconnection of confession, selfeffacement, and writing with which Silone rehearses the debut of his reformulation of a new and revised public identity. The image of the concretely historical Silone - the product of his early writings and his political activities - symbolically disintegrated, to re-emerge in a new form, fit for public consumption. For that new image to stick, Silone needed only to reiterate in his subsequent works of fiction the thematics initially set out in Pane e vino; with their rearticulation in 1965 as non-fiction in Uscita di sicurezza, Silone's transformation, mapped in his literature as his identification with his protagonists, was complete. Recall the liturgical response I described earlier in this study: the look of rapture with which I was met whenever I mentioned Silone's name in Italy. Even though many of my interlocutors had not read anything he had written, they knew the expected response, that look of ecstasy. The liturgical response shows, among other things, that the name Ignazio Silone conjures up less as an historical figure than a construction, or a phenomenon whose point of origin is marked by Pane e vino, when Ignazio Silone ceases to exist except as a kind of Pavlovian bell that evokes set responses. Pietro Spina and Ignazio Silone The premise of Pane e Vino both contains obvious general reverberations with Silone's life and sets forth in narrative all of the theoretical issues with which Silone was later associated. The novel recalls the events around Silone's departure from Italy and from the PCI in 1929. Silone went into self-imposed exile in Switzerland, ostensibly to take a 'temporary' respite from official PCI duties and to recover from acute pulmonitis.2 The novel relates the story of Pietro Spina, a young Communist from the Abruzzi. Ill with a pulmonary infection and on the run from the Fascist authorities, he returns to his natal village from abroad to recuperate physically, and to re-evaluate his commitment to Communist principles and strategies in the process. (Unlike Pietro Spina's recuperation, however, Silone's did not result in his return to the party fold. Instead, Silone's arrival in Switzerland meant his permanent separation from the PCI.)

Consummatum est: Pane e vino 119 Other similarities between protagonist and author serve as historical revisions of his relationship to the PCI. For example, just as was the case for Silone, the course of Pietro Spina's physical recuperation coincided with his crisis of conscience about the party's political tactics abroad. Instead of passing judgments on world events, he preferred to concentrate his energies on issues closer to home. Silone attributed one of the causes for his self-imposed exile from party politics to events during his 1927 trip to Moscow.3 As we saw earlier, Silone was asked by Stalin to vote on the expulsion of Trotsky from the party; Silone refrained from voting because he could not read the documents on which he was expected to form his opinion (they were in Russian). Pietro Spina faces serious consequences for refusing to pass judgment on questions beyond the realm of his own experience or expertise: 'A dire la verita' disse Pietro 'non conosco la questione. Se faccio tanta fatica a capire, non dico la mia regione, ma il mio villaggio, come vuoi che io giudichi la politica agraria russa, riprovi certe opinion!, ne approvi delle altre? Non sarebbe serio, puoi capirlo ... [N]on me la sento di giudicare le question! che sfuggono alia mia esperienza. Non posso piegarmi ad alcun conformismo, approvare, condannare a occhi chiusi.' To tell the truth/ Pietro said, 'I don't know the issue. If I struggle this hard to understand, I don't say my region, but my village, how do you want me to judge Russian agrarian politics, confirm certain opinions, approve others? It wouldn't be serious, you can understand ... I don't feel capable of judging matters outside my experience. I cannot stoop to any kind of conformism, cannot approve or condemn with my eyes closed.'4

Spina's explanation of his 'refusal to conform' rehashes in fictional form the real events that preceded Silone's expulsion from the party. Subsequent similar recollections in his fiction were Silone's primary defence against the public vilification he suffered after leaving the PCI.5 Pietro Spina was interpreted by his readers not as a creation but as a representative of his author. Here we see the same mechanism of transference that was at work when Silone attributed the apocryphal remark ('I tried to behave like you would have done in my place') to his brother.6 Silone redirected the guilt he felt for betraying the Communists onto an imaginary betrayal of his brother, for whose death Silone claimed responsibility by virtue of their association. Silone

120 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone could not publicly repent for spying for the Fascists, so just as when he took responsibility for the death of his brother, he took the fall for leaving the party instead. He took that fall convincingly, in fact, by turning it into a sort of hobby horse in his writings. Each of Silone's works revolves around the role of considered dissent within institutions like the PCI. Throughout Pane e vino, for example, Pietro Spina muses on whether it is inevitable that there be no tolerance for personal conscience when it conflicts with party decisions. Thus, Silone's defence is two-pronged. With his protagonists, Silone was able to present an idealized persona and a body of thought from a protected position, since that persona was a fictional character. And with the obfuscation of the real sources of guilt behind these 'screens' (responsibility for Romolo, vilification for leaving the party), Silone could publicly atone for sins confessed to only privately. This two-pronged defence constitutes one of Silone's principal strategies for psychological survival: the strategy of hiding in plain sight. Of all of his protagonists, Pietro Spina is the principal medium through which Silone recontextualizes his personal and political decisions. Spina's thoughts and actions both rewrite Silone's history and project forward to guide the interpretation of that history. For example, Pietro Spina justifies his return from the safe haven of life abroad to the dangers of Fascist Italy in terms that simultaneously evince his humility and his love for Italy: lo sono un pessimo rivoluzionario. Al diavolo la politica, la tattica e la strategia. Voglio dire, non so preservarmi in attesa di un grande ruolo. A ogni buon conto, all'estero non ci metto piu piede. Vedi, Nunzio, a me capita come ai vini di queste nostre vigne: non sono mica spregevoli, ma, portati in altro clima, diventano stupidi. Altri uomini e vini, invece, sembrano creati apposta per 1'esportazione. I'm a terrible revolutionary. The devil take politics, tactics, strategy. I mean, I don't know how to save myself in anticipation of a big role. In any case, I'm not setting a foot abroad any more. You see, Nunzio, for me it's like with the wines from our vineyards. They're hardly contemptible, but, brought to another climate, they become stupid. Whereas some men and wines seem created just for export.7

The 'not for export' element of Spina's remarks has ramifications that

Consummatum est: Pane e vino 121 extend beyond the justification of his purposeful re-exposure to danger. Spina's return to Italy functions proleptically as a symbolic repatriation for Silone. By casting what were essentially political decisions as being dictated by personal shortcomings and patriotism, Pietro Spina effectively disarmed potential criticism about Silone's exile. Silone was widely praised both for choosing to spend his exile in Switzerland and for his prompt return to Italy at the war's end. Exile in a neutral country such as Switzerland was considered forgivable by all but the most rigorously faithful Fascists; exile in the United States or any other allied nation, however, was just a step short of betrayal. Writers and dissidents who went abroad and stayed abroad were never welcomed back into the literary or cultural scenes in Italy, never claimed as Italy's own, until and unless they returned to their native soil. A shift from fiction to non-fiction illustrates the process by which Silone confirmed the identification of his experiences with those of his protagonist. In the 1937 novel, for example, Pietro Spina asks: E' possibile partecipare alia vita politica, metterci al servizio di un partito e rimanere sincere? La verita non e diventata, per me, una verita del partito? La giustizia, una giustizia del partito? L'interesse dell'organizzazione non ha finite col soverchiare, anche in me, tutti i valori morali, disprezzati come pregiudizi piccolo-borghesi, e non e diventato esso il valore supremo? Sarei dunque sfuggito aH'opportunismo di una Chiesa in decadenza per cadere nel machiavellismo di una setta? Se queste sono incrinature pericolose e riflessioni da bandire dalla coscienza rivoluzionaria, come affrontare in buona fede i rischi della lotta cospirativa? (Pane e vino) Is it possible to participate in political life, to put oneself in the service of a party and remain sincere? Has the truth not become, for me, a party truth? Justice, a justice of the party? Has organizational interest not ended up overwhelming, even in me, all moral values, despised as petit-bourgeois prejudices, and has it not become the supreme value? Have I therefore fled from the opportunism of a church in decay only to fall into the machiavellianism of a sect? If these are dangerous flaws and reflections to be banished from revolutionary consciousness, how does one in good faith face up to the risks of the conspiratorial struggle?8

Thirty years later, in a non-fiction essay, Ignazio Silone answers:

122 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone Ogni organismo totalitario, ogni regime di umanita coatta, implica una buona dose di menzogne, di doppiezza, d'insincerita. II comunista sincere, pertanto, il quale conservi per miracolo il native spirito critico e persista ad applicarla in buona fede ai fatti del Partito, credendo cosi di essergli di maggior utilita, si espone alle penose e contraddittorie traversie del non-conformista, e prima di consumare la definitiva sottomissione o 1'abiura liberatrice deve soffrire nella sua anima ogni specie di triboli. La stessa lentezza che egli impiega a rendersi conto della portata della sua eresia e rivelatrice. (Uscita di sicurezza) Every totalitarian organism, every regime of compulsory humanity, implies a healthy dose of lies, of duplicity, of insincerity. Thus the sincere Communist, who by miracle retains his native critical spirit and persists in applying it in good faith to the facts of the party, thereby believing himself to be of greater use to it, exposes himself to the painful and contradictory adversities of the non-conformist, and before consumating his definitive submission or his liberating abjuration, must suffer every sort of tribulation in his soul. The very length of time that he employs to realize the extent of his heresy is revealing.9

The shift confirms Silone's participation in the common readerly tendency of identifying his experiences with those of his protagonist. Pietro Spina is the prism through which we view Silone: as a fictional character. Spina both deflects possible criticism away from his creator and reflects positively on him. The difference in tone between the two passages - a series of questions versus a universalizing pronouncement - marks the shift from experimental to authoritative in Silone's identification with his narrative voice, indicating that at a certain point he no longer felt the need to distance himself from those ideas. By the time Uscita di sicurezza was published in 1965, Silone's readers had long accustomed themselves to relying on the versions of his life that Silone himself furnished.10 Noteworthy, too, is the image with which the above-quoted passage from Uscita di sicurezza ends, an image that juxtaposes precisely the three central obstacles that Silone had successfully overcome at the time of the publication of Pane e vino. The term 'heresy/ which invokes his troubled relationship to the Catholic Church, is discursively contiguous with both mental illness and Communism: 'Per finire, ci si libera dal comunismo come si guarisce da una nevrosi.' ('In sum, one frees oneself from Communism the same way one is cured of a neurosis.')11 Moreover, though Silone acts here as an

Consummatum est: Pane e vino

123

apologist for 'the sincere Communist/ the implied equivalence between Communism and Fascism in the phrases 'every totalitarian organism' and 'every regime of compulsory humanity' screens the private act of self-absolution contained in that equivalence. The mistake, in other words, is in yielding to 'organizational interest'; which organization is not the issue. Spina, Silone, Tasca Later, in Uscita di sicurezza, Silone refers to his own personal correspondence as a final word on the events from that period. He describes a clandestine meeting in Milan where Pietro Tresso, who was later expelled from the party for his Trotskyist, that is, non-conformist, leanings, was present. The shift from fiction to non-fiction in the evocation of the events, Silone's ironic employment of the language with which he was attacked as a weapon of self-defence, and his recollection of an oblique defence of another 'rinnegato/ all indicate a certain continued concern on his part with his own historical position. That concern is all the more evident in another scene from Uscita di sicurezza. Here Silone describes a situation close to, but less idealized than, the one depicted in Pane e vino. In Uscita di sicurezza Silone describes how Italian Communists did not support Angelo Tasca after he openly criticized Russian agrarian policy while in Russia: Ma anche quel tanto che subito ne appurammo, sarebbe stato bastante a suscitare il risentimento e 1'opposizione di molti di noi, se il nostro giudizio e la nostra volonta non si fossero trovati irretiti dal proposito aprioristico di non provocare una crisi nell'organizzazione clandestina su una questione estranea alia diretta esperienza dei lavoratori che vi erano raccolti. E cosi, per cominciare, quando Angelo Tasca, reduce da Mosca, ci riferi come, in nostra rappresentanza, egli fosse stato indotto ad assumere un'aperta posizione critica verso la nuova politica agraria di Stalin, noi rimanemmo fortemente impacciati e ci rifiutammo, per la nostra responsabilita di comunisti italiani, di entrare in conflitto con il Partito comunista russo e con 1'Internazionale, rischiando cosi di dividerci tra noi, su una questione ch'era di tale natura da non poter essere sottoposta, in ultima istanza, alle sezioni e alle cellule del nostro Partito, perche giudicassero. But even that little that we soon verified would have sufficed to inspire the resentment and the opposition of many of us, if our judgment and our

124 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone will had not been ensnared by the a priori proposition of not provoking a crisis in the clandestine organization, over a question which was extraneous to the direct experience of the workers gathered there. And thus, just to begin, when Angelo Tasca, back from Moscow, told us how, as our representative, he had been induced to take an openly critical position towards Stalin's new agrarian politics, we were very uncomfortable and we refused, out of responsibility to the Italian Communists, to enter into conflict with the Russian Communist Party and with the International, thus risking division among us, because of a question which was of such a nature that it could not ultimately be posed to the sections and the cells of our party for them to judge it.12

Again in Uscita di sicurezza, Silone recalled yet another incident of the same kind but with a different tone:'Anche quelli di noi che in sostanza eravamo d'accordo con Tasca e gli eravamo amici, commettemmo 1'errore e la vilta di lasciarlo solo e di condannarlo.' ('Even those of us who were substantially in agreement with Tasca, and who were his friends, committed the erroneous and cowardly act of leaving him alone and condemning him.')13 Tasca's 'abandonment' led, eventually, to his condemnation and expulsion from the party. He and Silone continued to be in contact, however; in fact, Silone wrote the preface to Angelo Tasca's book Naissance du fascisme, published in 1938.14 There are two points of interest in that preface, comments made by Silone that serve as bookends to a glowing review of Tasca's rise and fall in the party. First, Silone describes the book he is presenting in terms of qualities that reflect Tasca's personality. For Silone, the extraordinary thing about Tasca was his 'authentic literary vocation/ as revealed both by Tasca's personal predilection for the poetry of the Romantic period and by his writerly style. Silone continued to praise such a marriage of political commitment and literary prowess in a proletarian worker (Tasca's father was a metalworker), a combination Silone considered to be rare in Tasca's time and even rarer at the time Silone was writing. Silone used the same expression as appeared in the preface to the collection Viaggio a Parigi in specific reference to his brother Romolo: 'He had to pay dearly.'15 In the other telling passage of that preface, Silone praised Tasca for keeping secret the Communist Party's many 'sensations' and 'scandals/ which would have made for good copy. The preface ends on a somber note: 'Et la realite du communisme s'inscrit dans 1'ordre du tragique et non pas du scandale.' ('And the reality of Communism is inscribed in the order of tragedy, not of scandal.'16)

Consummatum est: Pane e vino 125 The fact that Silone continued to explore his and other people's stories that deal with the relationship between the PCI and its international policies indicates an ongoing concern not with the particulars of a thorny political interface but rather with the broader issues of judgment, competence, and condemnation. The fictional Spina and the historical Tasca and Tresso were each taken to task for refusing to claim competence in matters they considered to be outside their ken. Here, besides the strategy of hiding in plain sight (by pointing to, then forgiving, the shortcomings of others), Silone's defence of the two functions operates at another level, as an indirect positive reflection on himself. Seen in reverse, it would seem that Silone is arguing, albeit obliquely, for the praise of those who recognize their own limitations in the face of institutional pressures to do otherwise. We are invited, in other words, to praise those who, like Silone, practise Tarte di fermarsi in tempo' ('the art of stopping in time') - by his logic, however grave the mistakes he made may have been, at least he can be credited with knowing when to quit.17 Finally, what we see in these passages is another, lesser form of identification with those whom Silone perceived himself to have betrayed. As in his earlier texts, where an identification with Romolo allowed Silone to experiment with a rudimentary engagement with issues of influence, association, and personal responsibility under the guise of fantasy, his analogous concern with the stories of Angelo Tasca and (to a lesser extent) Pietro Tresso demonstrates much greater mastery of the methods of self-effacement and self-reconstruction that reside in narrative. We should, in other words, not be surprised that the protagonist of Uscita di sicurezza - or of the preface to Naissance dufascisme, for that matter - share so many features of Pietro Spina's identikit, since with Spina's creation Silone had already nearly mastered bricolage, not in the typical sense as a method for the creation of fiction but as a means by which to create his own story.18 Indeed, the subtlety of Silone's gesture is impressive, considering that, by this point, Silone had only been writing for a short time. Pietro/Paolo Pane e vino is much more than a fictionalized self-defence; it is a novel about dual identities. The presence of sliding identifications between fictional characters and historical figures shapes the story of Pane e vino much more dramatically than it does in Fontamara or 'Viaggio a Parigi.'

126 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone In addition to providing an oblique justification for individual acts of betrayal, the novel contains two pairs of exchanges or misidentifications that achieve two related goals which further the connections between fiction writing and Silone's post-militant image: Pietro Spina's masquerade as Paolo Spada leads to the final moment of Silone's literary self-obliteration, and Luigi Murica's imitation of Christ leads to the debut of the author's reformulation of a new and revised public identity. The publication of Pane e vino completes the process by which Silone's fictional characters eclipse his personal history in the public perception. Silone recontextualized his personal and political decisions principally through the medium of protagonist Pietro Spina, whose thoughts and actions both rewrite Silone's history and project forward to guide the interpretation of that history.19 The fictional transformations of both Spina and Murica reflect the theoretical meditation on the interconnection of confession, self-effacement, and reformulation with which Silone rehearsed his own reinvention. Eventually, the thematics set forth in the novel will be reiterated by Silone throughout his subsequent works of fiction. The question of Silone's identification with Pietro Spina is further complicated by the fact that Spina spends most of the novel under a false identity. Pietro Spina is a militant revolutionary who returns from abroad to his village to recover from health problems; in order to be safe, he must disguise himself by dressing in priest's garb and calling himself Paolo Spada.20 Within the trajectory of Silone's three published works of fiction, the dual figure of Pietro Spina/Paolo Spada embodies the finalized version of Silone's alter ego and is arguably the source of Silone's often-quoted epithet, 'un cristiano senza chiesa e un socialista senza partito' (a Christian without a church and a Socialist without a party').21 Just as the novel's protagonist changes in and out of costume, so does the narrative reflect that change in a manner that does not call into question which of the two figures is the 'true' protagonist. In other words, although we know that the character's real name is Pietro and that Paolo's name, profession, and clothes are merely assumed for Pietro's protection, the third-person omniscient narrator refers to him according to the identity he has taken on as circumstances require, so that neither identity is favoured over the other. Hence, in spite of the fact that we readers observe Pietro Spina physically and psychologically take on the role of Paolo Spada - there is, for instance, a passage describing Pietro's comical initial difficulties with the row of twenty-

Consummatum est: Pane e vino 127 eight buttons on the priest's cassock - we are encouraged to think about Pietro/Paolo not as one man who occasionally pretends to be another, but as two distinct characters who share the body of the same man. In other words, Silone has explicitly thematized the possibility of simultaneously assuming two opposing identities. Note that while in the final version of the novel, the transition from revolutionary to priest is humorous, in the earlier version of the novel a more agonizing decision - to become a socialist - had taken place long beforehand. That version read: His internal conflict was rekindled, and became almost unbearably acute, under the influence of his reliving and his rethinking of the past, his imaginative reconstruction of the crises that had sundered him from his friends, his relatives, and his religion. There was a kind of cleavage in him, dividing his being into two.22

This passage, expurgated from the final version of the novel, is important because it couches all of the character's concerns in the terminology of psychotherapy: 'internal conflict,' 'imaginative reconstruction,' 'cleavage' all bear witness to the influence of psychotherapy on Silone, which extends to his use of language. More significantly, this passage forecasts the visible transition we observe in the later version, when Spina becomes Spada. But in this early version, the changeover is not complete - instead, Spina is 'divided into two.' Silone's choice of disguise for Pietro Spina as a priest redoubles the two notions of cleavage as both division and clinging inseparability, attributing to it both the source of a crisis leading towards self-destruction (as embodied in the historically antagonistic relationship between the Catholic Church and Communism, so that a militant Communist dressed as a Catholic priest is a slight against the party) and an act of self-preservation in the adherence of side to side (as witnessed by the success with which Pietro Spina carries off his disguise, pointing to an equivalence between party and church, and the canonicity of the particular pairing of the names Pietro and Paolo).23 Such an equivalence invites an analogy to Silone's own dual commitments in the decade prior to the composition of the novel; the shared mechanism of his relationship to both the PCI and to the Fascists (or at least, to one particular Fascist), and the embodiment of that mechanism in the dual figure of Pietro/Paolo, points at least initially to the argument that it is possible to engage

128 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone effectively with two sets of ideologically opposed identities. Indeed, only late in the novel will there be a price for this duplicity, and it will not be the protagonist who pays it. Until that point, though, the narrative absorption of the figure of the priest into that of the revolutionary runs fairly smoothly. It is foreshadowed in two typically Silonian moments. Before Pietro appears in the novel, we hear him described by his beloved former teacher, Don Benedetto, on the occasion of Don Benedetto's seventy-fifth birthday. He and his former pupils reminisce about their old school days, and Don Benedetto asks what has become of the students who are not present at the reunion. When Pietro Spina's name comes up, Don Benedetto waxes poetic about his favorite pupil: Egli non si accontentava di quello che trovava nei libri di testo, era insaziabile, inquieto, e spesso indisciplinato. Egli mi preoccupava, temevo per il suo avvenire. Avevo forse torto? Non so se ricordate che le punizioni piu gravi da lui ricevute durante gli anni di collegio, furono quasi sempre provocate dalle sue proteste contro del castighi, secondo lui, immeritati, inflitti a qualche suo compagno. Era uno dei lati del suo carattere. Egli amava molto, e forse troppo, gli amici... Ascoltate (1'ultimo tema scritto da Spina a scuola): 'Se non fosse molto noioso essere posto dopo morto sugli altari, ed essere pregato e adorato da una quantita di persone sconosciute, per la maggior parte vecchie donne brutte, vorrei essere un santo. Non vorrei vivere secondo le circostanze, 1'ambiente e le convenzioni materiali, ma, senza curarmi delle conseguenze, vorrei vivere e lottare per quello che a me apparira giusto e vero.' He was not satisfied with what he found in textbooks; he was insatiable, restless, and often undisciplined. He worried me; I feared for his future. Was I perhaps wrong? I don't know if you remember, but the most severe punishments he received during his years at school were almost always provoked by his protests against the punishments inflicted on some companion, which he felt were undeserved. That was one side of his character. He loved his friends very much, perhaps too much ... Listen (to the last essay Pietro wrote at school): 'If it weren't very boring to be placed on the altars after one died, and to be prayed to and adored by a lot of strangers, mostly ugly old women, I would like to be a saint. I don't wish to live according to circumstances, environment or material conventions, but rather, without bothering about the consequences, I'd like to live and to fight for what seems right and true to me.'24

Consummatum est: Pane e vino 129 Thus, in the minds of his readers (both within and outside the novel), even as a young student, that is, before his actual appearance in the text, Pietro Spina embodied characteristics of the other identity as a priest that he would later assume. A passage a few pages later describes how Pietro lay quietly in a 'manger scene,' surrounded by an ass and a cow. The image of the nativity refers, of course, to the birth of Christ and thus confirms the aura of sanctity already surrounding Pietro's person. Its position in the narrative also recalls another moment in the life of Christ, just prior to the Resurrection; Spina's emergence from the scene will coincide with his 'rebirth' as Paolo Spada.25 The religious symbolism of the names Pietro Spina (Peter Thorn) and Paolo Spada (Paul Sword) functions at various levels to underscore his hypostatic nature. In the Christian tradition, the names Peter and Paul are always coupled; the two even share the same saints' day. The choice of these particular names for the protagonist assures his Christliness by combining their inherent opposing experiential poles (agony and ecstasy).26 The sword and the thorn represent means with which the crucified Christ was wounded, and the apostles Peter and Paul respectively led the church and wrote some of the epistles. Thus the protagonist's combination of names symbolically constructs the church, disseminates the Word, and betrays its founder. And beyond the Christian tradition, the resurrection of the Communist militant Pietro as a Catholic priest named Paolo (in light of the intimate pairing of the figure of Peter and Paul) underscores the overdetermined nature of the link Silone makes between Communism and Catholicism; the author's use of these two names, in other words, guaranteed that the metonymical pairing of the two ideologies would be understood. Consider young Pietro Spina's longing for beatification together with his eventual 'resurrection' as Paolo Spada in light of our earlier formulation about the symptom: the very founding act of Silone's newly minted public persona bears a permanent trace of the past from which he seeks distance. Paolo Spada But if the narrative strategy of calling the protagonist whichever name is indicated by his style of dress points to the ease with which one can take on a false identity, the actions of the protagonist himself underscore the attendant difficulties of maintaining that persona. While Spina successfully hides his identity until the very end of the story, as

130 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone Paolo Spada he nonetheless often reveals his secular origins to his unsuspecting interlocutors. This happens most often when he is unable to subordinate his own thoughts or desires to the requirements of his priestly office.27 At a certain point, he and a poor young monk excitedly anticipate the abolition of private land ownership during a discussion well outside the bounds of protocol for a priest. Later, he flirts with Bianchina, the young woman whose confession he heard when she was very ill subsequent to a self-induced abortion, revealing his physical attraction to her. In a series of scenes he denies the validity of another character's religious vocation, arguing that she can serve God better by remaining with her family than by becoming a nun. Finally, he explains surplus value and commodity fetishism to a group of card players at the inn. These are all unlikely arguments for a priest to undertake, and they indicate the difficulties inherent in Pietro Spina's position. Other moments of apparent slippage between his two roles, though, only serve to reinforce his identity as a priest. Indeed, at a certain point both Bianchina and Matalena (his hostess at the inn) notice him talking to himself about a political problem, and assume that he is talking to the birds 'like Saint Francis.' The two women have to see for themselves that Paolo Spada has no stigmata in order to disabuse themselves of the conviction that he is, in fact, Christ. Hence, the figure of Pietro Spina/Paolo Spada is convincingly that of both a revolutionary and a priest (or a socialist without a party, Christian without a church), not in spite of his blunders but because of them; they indicate the psychological and ideological coherence with which he approaches matters as varied as agrarian reform, his attraction to women, and the role of the church in the villagers' lives. At the same time, he is never fully either one, because of the continual intervention of his own conscience, his own desires, and his own concerns. This is evident in his inability, in discussions about both Communism and the Catholic Church, to answer platitude with platitude, to use the expected modes of expression particular to those discourses. This tension, between the overall narrative strategy of legitimizing the character's duality by naming him according to the identity he chooses (a strategy that maintains the integrity of Pietro Spina's secret) and the character's perpetual mistakes, which pose threats to that integrity, runs through the novel. Constituting another of Silone's strategies for survival, that tension will operate in one guise or another throughout his entire fictional opus. The function of that tension is apotropaic: the 'self-evidence' of the protagonist's false identity has the effect of ward-

Consummatum est: Pane e vino 131 ing off his exposure. It is as though Silone is rehearsing his own unmasking and thus forestalling a critique of dishonesty. Though the technique is by and large successful, there is an inherent risk to that robbing of Peter to give to Paul. Spina nearly perfects his role by the end, but at a heavy price. His complete self-revelation (made in his journal) and his salvation are both made possible only by the total sacrifice of another character.28 This is illustrated most plainly in Pane e vino in its effect on Pietro's love interest. Pietro develops an intense but secret romantic interest in Cristina, a wealthy, beautiful, sensitive woman who plans to become a nun. She is both the guarantor of and a threat to Pietro Spina's hidden identity. As with Pietro/Paolo, her name assures her identity as the female counterpart to Pietro Spina's (or, rather, Paolo Spada's) Christliness. She is associated with bees, an emblem both of a merciful and mild Christ and of the Resurrection.29 Pietro senses that she is very much like he is, or used to be; she reminds him of himself as a younger man. He is attracted to her and admires her strength of will but is disappointed by her snobbishness and the steadfastness of her belief in the values of class distinctions. He keeps a journal, ostensibly in which to continue their lengthy but guarded conversations and to tell her all the things he cannot say to her in his disguise as Paolo Spada. But it is less of a journal of their conversations than a series of confessions; through it he reveals his true identity and his love for her, which spur her to undertake a dangerous and ultimately lethal trip through the snowy, wolf-infested mountains to help him. Thus, she functions as a vehicle for self-awareness by way of the feelings she arouses in him and their articulation in the journal. She also functions as his double, acting as a stand-in whose sacrifice will ensure his survival. Cristina's death, because of and on behalf of Pietro, puts Pietro in something like the villain's role in a psychoanalytically informed version of an old spy thriller; it is as though Pietro said to Cristina, 'Now that you know my identity, I'm going to have to kill you.' And to further complicate matters, Cristina is, as we said, transitively equivalent to Pietro Spina via their shared identification with Christ. Such an equivalence means that, in this case, unlike the usual thriller, the unwitting sacrifice and the executioner are the same. Recall Zizek's description, '[symptoms] are meaningless traces, their meaning is not discovered, excavated from the hidden depth of the past, but constructed retroactively.' Cristina's doomed attempt to rescue Pietro, and the quiet despair of the story's final image, indicate the difficulty with which one rids oneself, precisely, of oneself.

132 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone In fact, by killing off the one witness to (and victim of) the protagonist's betrayal, the novel opens up the space for another Christ-like figure. But this new figure is not perfect either; he is burdened with the knowledge of his own treachery and cowardice. And he, too, will sacrifice himself at the end of the novel. The significant difference between him and Cristina is the use to which he puts his knowledge of Pietro/ Paolo's secret. In other words, the novel's interest in images of the martyred Christ is not as diffuse as it first appears; rather, it highlights the very particular figure of a Christ-like protagonist, Luigi Murica, who is endowed with the ability to absolve Pietro Spina through reiteration by literally retracing the path upon which Silone himself trod. Uliva A different order of self-sacrifice is explored in a self-contained chapter that takes place in Rome, when Pietro Spina goes to visit his old friend Uliva. A violinist by training, he and Pietro had been friends in a Communist student group several years back. Uliva had spent ten months in prison since that era, and after his release he had been homeless and hungry. At the time of his reunion with Pietro, Uliva had married and was about to become a father. In a brief conversation in Uliva's apartment, he expounds upon his profoundly negative version of Communism, after which Pietro gives up trying to reintegrate his friend into the party. Hours after their conversation, Pietro learns that Uliva had been planning to plant explosives designed to kill the heads of government who were about to convene nearby, and that the bomb had instead exploded in his apartment and killed him, his pregnant wife, and the neighbours in his apartment house. Though the entire episode, which takes place approximately midway through the novel, is brief, it is dense with Uliva's relatively lengthy monologues. Uliva speaks only of one thing - he voices the harshest critique of the Communist Party to date in Silone's opus. The thesis of his critique centres around the flattening of any distinctions between tyranny and revolutionary movements of any stripe, so that the Communists 'aspire to totalitarian power, too, but in the name of different ideas, which means just different words, and for different interests.'30 So interchangeable are Communism and Fascism that if the Communists win, he says, 'we'll just go from one tyranny to another' so that only the 'colour' of the inquisition, censorship, deportations, and persecutions will change, from black to red. The consequences for the individ-

Consummation est: Pane e vino 133 ual, Uliva continues, are just as dire; the Resistance worker can expect to be disowned by his family and chased from his home, do jailtime, and, eventually, die of starvation. He concludes that life under such a regime may be conceivable for a worker, but for an intellectual, 'there's no escape.' In the immediate context of the scene, Uliva's comments are easily dismissed as the rantings of an untrustworthy character. The novel practically insists that there is nothing sympathetic about him and that his death, if not warranted, was perhaps timely. His surroundings (he lives in absolute squalor - in a filthy apartment, surrounded by his own spittle), his poor health (he is hunchbacked, emaciated), and his rude behaviour towards Pietro direct us to understand Uliva as spiritually wasted and psychologically unbalanced. In the greater scheme of the novel, however, Uliva's impact is significant. His comments resonate with Spina's in spite of the difference between the two characters. Similarly, Uliva's story is devoid of any resemblance to Silone's biography beyond the most generalized (it would not be surprising if Silone met people like this in the course of his association for the Communists, but the connections stop there). Uliva's radical difference from Silone and from Spina allows his critique of Communism, therefore, to fulfil a role that is completely different from the critique voiced by Pietro Spina. Uliva's story thus confirms our thesis that, as Silone's writing progresses, he learns to propound versions of Marxism strategically in his fiction, because in the Uliva chapter we see another facet of the process by which Silone delineates the potential good and the practical evil of party politics from the viewpoint of a character to whom our response must be unambiguous. We are given no room to like Uliva - he neglects his wife and unborn child, he cannot provide for them, and he wastes his training as a violinist (training that marks him as a member of a certain class that need not starve) rather than trying to do anything - he is nihilistic, sceptical, and sinfully slothful. As such, when he airs his views, these (along with our response to them) are already overdetermined - we are preconditioned to reject them as a kind of raving. Uliva, in other words, can publicly desecrate the sanctity of Communism from a position that nullifies his critiques, robs them of their gravity; but when Pietro Spina expounds upon the same themes, his is the voice of sanity. In fact, Uliva's are not such wild views; they are only a step or two more pessimistic than the views already aired by Pietro Spina, but with one crucial difference. Spina is

134 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone depicted as an active, thinking member of the party; his uncertainties are therefore born only from his unimpeachable faith in the fundamental righteousness of his beliefs. Thus, the true distinction between raving thoughts and reasonable ones has less to do with what is being said than the intentions behind their utterance. Though Uliva is practically suicidal after his release from prison, note that unlike other characters whose death wishes, whether implicit (Berardo) or explicit (Beniamino), were redirected either towards a greater good or at least a re-establishment of the status quo, Uliva's death serves no purpose. Nor does it achieve any goal either practically (by galvanizing peasant politicization, for example, or, in his case, killing any government leaders) or symbolically (by reintegrating him posthumously into the community, for example). His plans were doomed to failure because they were conceived in bad faith, in the absence of party wisdom. The upshot of his pointless death is threefold. First, it offers an example of how death for a political cause can be useless and even self-indulgent, thereby forecasting the contrast between Uliva's death and the models of true martyrdom with which the novel will end. Second, it underscores the superiority of actions taken in good faith over those taken in bad faith, a superiority that permits Pietro to say and feel things much like Uliva does - even contradictory things - and still survive. In other words, Uliva's death overturns the logic that mitigates the ambivalence of Pietro Spina's political commitment. Until the chapter on Uliva, Pietro's uncertain relationship to the party was made legible by the coherence of his critiques; Uliva's articulation of analogous critiques (and his subsequent death) illegitimizes them, casting doubts on the viability of Pietro's position on the margins of the party. Third, Uliva's death underscores the novel's tacit understanding of the interchangeability of Catholicism and Communism. At the end of their conversation, Pietro Spina rejects Uliva's complaints about the party as fatalistic and wrong because of the human scale on which Communism is modelled. Pietro says that it is a regime 'che noi vogliamo creare a immagine deH'uomo' ('that we want to create in the image of man'),31 like the image of God. Together the two recall one of Pietro's old dreams: to make a soviet of the Fucino valley, with Jesus as its president; the only problem is whom would Jesus name as deputy? The shifting terms of the image visible in Spina's integration of the two systems creates an overlap between Communism and Catholicism such that a crisis in the former is a crisis in the latter. Thus, Pietro

Consummatum est: Pane e vino 135 Spina's redemption of Communism also redeems Catholicism, without providing a response to Uliva's critiques. Instead, it is Uliva himself who answers, by blowing himself up. Luigi Murica Like Pietro Spina's, the story of Luigi Murica reverberates with Silone's own experiences. And like Cristina, this character, too, will be killed off at the end of the novel. But first, he provides a sanitized version of Silone's decision to spy for the Fascists. Murica presents a subtle and well-protected way to write about issues that must have been close to Silone, issues that would have been particularly risky for him to describe in 1936. These are issues to which he would never return, either in his fiction or in his non-fictional writings. Murica, a poor young student from the provinces, becomes interested in Communism both for its ideological content and for the social benefits of its practice. He falls in love with Annina, another budding Communist, and enjoys a happy relationship with her, tarnished only by his deep concerns about money. These concerns lead to his recruitment by the Fascists to spy on his fellow Communists. Like Silone, Murica first gives the Fascists information they already have, then succumbs to their pressure to provide more and more details. The resonances with Silone's life, here again, are obvious. Silone's sanitized depiction of Murica's decision to spy for the Fascists, however, lacks reference to any motive other than the financial; what is more, the consequences of Murica's actions, while grave and irrevocable, do not preclude Murica's ultimate redemption. Here again we may divine the psychological benefits for Silone of writing, which are consonant with the goal of psychoanalysis: narrativizing Murica's history serves to distance Silone from those activities which are attributed to Murica. In addition, Silone can atone for his character by altering the outcome of his mistakes. Like the protagonist of Fontamara, Murica redeems himself through self-sacrifice for the greater good, by becoming a political martyr. But the result of his sacrifice is not the politicization of a peasant community; instead it is the revindication of his own reputation. After escaping from the Fascists and returning to his village, Luigi Murica meets Paolo Spada and confesses to him - specifically, he confesses to betraying the Communists and his girlfriend. Murica finds a sympathetic listener in the priest, and lengthy conversations with Paolo rejuvenate

136 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone the political passion of his student days. Murica begins to write - about politics, passion, his past. When he is finally arrested by the Fascists, he refuses to disavow his writings. Here Murica's arrest incorporates details of the arrest of Silone's brother Romolo after the 1928 bombing - both men possessed incriminating papers at the time of arrest, both men denied knowledge of the whereabouts of the Fascists' 'real' target (that is, Pietro Spina/Ignazio Silone), and both men were eventually killed. The story of Luigi Murica's girlfriend Annina, moreover, adds a further tragic layer to the events which befall Murica. When he hears of how Annina acted to save him from a return to prison by submitting to the advances of two Fascist policemen, Murica's guilt, already heavy from the knowledge of the risks in which he had placed his comrades, overwhelms him. He accuses her of wrongdoing and storms out of her apartment, cutting off all contact with her. Annina's story is significant because it adds a new dimension to Luigi Murica's already overdetermined character. He is guilty of not one but two kinds of betrayal - he betrays his comrades in the party cell by reporting to the Fascists about their activities, and he betrays Annina by leading the police to her house. Further, he temporarily liberates himself of his sense of wrongdoing by transferring his guilt onto Annina. By concerning himself only with the fact of her physical contact with the policemen (and not with her generous motives), he exculpates himself from leading her to the point where her love for him would allow no other option but to substitute her body for Luigi's, offering it to the police in the place of her lover's. In other words, Annina's sacrifice (not unlike Cristina's for Pietro Spina) becomes a necessity because of Murica's weakness. As is the case with transference of guilt, however, there is a residue - Luigi Murica never manages to rid himself fully of his guilt, which worsens to the point that he returns home to work his parents' land, despite his already fragile health, in a semi-suicidal desperation. Within the economy of the novel, the consequences of Murica's actions are irrevocable but not irredeemable. His death at the hands of the Fascist police is recast in the language of both the Crucifixion ('Consummatum est' - 'It is finished')32 and the Last Supper, at which the sacrament of the Eucharist was announced ('Prendete e mangiate, quest'e il suo pane ... Bevete, quest'e il suo vino' - Take this and eat it, for this is his bread ... Drink, for this is his wine').33 This imagery marks both forgiveness for Murica's sins and sanctification of his sacrifice. The bread and wine of the novel's title, which throughout the book are

Consummatum est: Pane e vino 137 evoked to represent the purest form of nourishment for the body and thus for the spirit, in the last few pages represent the blood and body, not of Christ, but of Luigi Murica, whose life is celebrated with their consumption. Within the framework of Pane e vino, the martyrdom of Luigi Murica further affirms the Pietro Spina/Paolo Spada figure, because Luigi Murica's death is a confirmation of Pietro Spina's teachings (as uttered by Paolo Spada). Murica confesses to Spina/Spada, whose sympathetic response encourages Murica to think about his abandoned revolutionary ideals and then to start writing. Murica's experience of joining the PCI, and his successful recruitment by the Fascists, are arguably parallel to Silone's, just as the details of the events leading to Murica's arrest are reminiscent of Silone's brother Romolo Tranquilli's arrest, such as the incriminating papers found in Murica's possession, which Murica refuses to disavow. Murica's story thus provides double (self-)absolution, that is, for Silone and for his brother, but from the safe setting of a fictional account. Here as elsewhere we see the notion of 'hiding in plain sight' at work, and again, as in the case of Pietro Spina's written confession to Cristina, Luigi Murica's confession functions not so much as a confession to an outside party as one to himself. The imbrication of the martyred Murica's history with those of Romolo and Silone does more than narrativize idealized aspects of the author's life; it exalts them, renders them God-like, and puts them in the service of mankind. The Passion of Silone It is in this light that we must consider Pane e vino, the endpoint of the arc of the texts we have been examining, as the third in a series of works modelled on the life of Christ. Silone's first three texts are a kind of unorthodox trilogy in their thematic representation of aspects of the Passion - devoted in some way or shape first to (repressed) guilt (Viaggio a Parigi), then to sacrifice (Fontamara), and finally to redemption by way of confession (Pane e vino), though in the last case Christ's assumption of (mankind's) guilt and his sacrifice culminate not in the Resurrection but in the continual rearticulation of that original guilt. Within the structure of the trilogy we may also note the idea of a trinity. Until this point in Silone's writings, we have seen much less complex correlations between Silone and his protagonists. In 'Viaggio a Parigi/ we cited the similarities between Silone and Beniamino, and

138 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone in Fontamara between Silone and Berardo Viola. With Pane e vino, however, the identification of creator and character is spread out over several figures: Pietro Spina, Luigi Murica, Cristina, and Uliva (by way of a negative identification). Of these four, only Pietro survives at the end of the novel; Cristina is devoured by wolves, Uliva self-destructs, and Murica, whose confession leads directly to the downward spiral of events at the novel's end, is killed by the Fascists. All but Uliva are linked to Pietro Spina through the mechanism of confession, which marks the turning point in all of their stories. The distinction between acceptable confessions and those that are not granted a hearing plagues Pietro Spina throughout Pane e vino. For a revolutionary dressed as a priest, the confessions of the peasants are something to be avoided at all costs - besides Spina's ethical scruples, they might give his game away. Consequently, he must spend considerable energy to avoid hearing the confessions of the eager peasants. Murica's confession, however, is welcomed. Murica's exceptional status in this regard, and the parallels between his experiences and Silone's, encourage us to consider Murica alongside Pietro/Paolo as Silone's fictional representatives. What is more, confession as a gesture is prevalent throughout Silone's early fiction, and the results that follow from it are varied: Beniamino's false confession is pointless, and Berardo's false confession is generous but results in a massacre. Murica's confession is the only one made in earnest and thus the only one of the three whose status as a gesture hypostatically transcends itself, by virtue of the sanctification it bestows. One consequence of locating confession at a nodal point in Silone's fiction, therefore, is the emergence of Catholicism alongside Communism as an ineradicable influence. In this light, Pane e vino is as much about a crisis of Catholicism as it is of political ideology; Pietro Spina/ Paolo Spada's rebirth is impossible except insofar as it is preceded by an act of self-destruction in print. Confession, in short, is a powerful phenomenon, setting in motion the kinds of returns, reiterations, and refinements of the writerly persona by which Silone crafted his new identity - confession, too, makes the man. In the case of Silone's protagonists, it destroys him, as well: consummatum est also means it is consumed, that is, devoured in order to be incorporated, to become a part of a living body and in doing so to impart its living spirit. As the symbolism of the Eucharist illustrates, catabolism promotes anabolism through the breakdown of one body another is constructed. Like the structure of the symptom, in which the intervention of the subject was

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always already included in the outcome, so confession presumes potential for the rebirth of the subject. If that is the case, however, we may ask why the character Pietro Spina reappears in the novel following Pane e vino as well as in various reincarnations throughout Silone's opus, but Luigi Murica never returns. The Resurrection of Pietro Spina To answer that question, let us recall what we described at the beginning of this chapter as the second aspect of Pane e vino's structural position in Silone's opus. The publication of Pane e vino is both an end point and a beginning. With respect to his previously published works of fiction (Viaggio a Parigi and Fontamara), Pane e vino signals the final phase of Silone's self-revision. At the same time, it also locates the debut of Silone's persona as a post-therapeutic invention, marking the asymptotic point at which Ignazio Silone and his idealized version are closest to coincidence. The temporary union between Silone and his selfprojection is never again so vital. The novels that follow Pane e vino are marked by the slow degeneration of that relationship. But the effect, in a sense, is the same; that temporary union conferred upon the finite, historical Silone such a degree of apparent coherence that his actual presence (as an authorial voice, as a subject in conflict with his own history, and so on) became extraneous to his work. In other words, Pane e vino marks the point at which Ignazio Silone ceases to exist, except in the guise of the performative, that is, the word that constitutes the act. In exchange for Ignazio Silone the man, Ignazio Silone the phenomenon is born. After Pane e vino, all of Silone's opus is in some way a rehashing of the same text: a representation of the same character, the same issues, and the same conclusions. For example, // seme sotto la neve (1941), while much less explicitly autobiographical, abounds with the same themes as Pane e vino: secret identities, self-sacrifice and sacrifices of love, and true and false confessions. In this novel, the character Pietro Spina returns as a Marxist on the run from the authorities; he spends the duration of the novel in a succession of hiding places while his wealthy family members argue over whether and how to obtain clemency from the police. Pietro refuses the pardon when it is offered, to the shame and anger of his family. He retires to a secret hiding place with two friends, one of whom, Infante, is eventually arrested for murdering his own father. At the novel's end, Pietro Spina claims to have committed the murder

140 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone himself and goes to prison on behalf of his friend. There are two particularly interesting aspects to the relationship between this novel and Pane e vino, both having to do with the notion of confession. First, Pietro's false confession on behalf of Infante (which, in turn, recalls Beniamino's false confession in Fontamara) could, arguably, be considered a rectification of Romolo Tranquilli's 'false' confession; though innocent of any crime, Pietro submitted himself to the authorities in order to spare his friend, just as Romolo confessed to a crime that, according to Silone, he did not commit, in order to spare his brother. Second, it is noteworthy that the only character to 'survive' after Pane e vino besides Pietro Spina is Infante, so-called because he is in-fans, without speech. Also broadly similar to Pane e vino is Una manciata di more (1943), which depicts protagonist Rocco de Donatis's existential crisis as he attempts to liberate himself from the Communist Party (as he had done with tine church earlier), in order to live in closer spiritual, psychological, and material communion with his fellows. L'avventura di un povero cristiano (The Adventure of a Humble Christian) (1968) represents the move into another literary genre for Silone. A theatrical piece, it transposes the meditations, sacrifices, and flight of previous works to the medieval period. The issue for the protagonist is the same as Pietro Spina's - the inevitability of conflicts between individual conscience and authoritarian ideologies. The institution under fire is not the Communist Party but the papacy, and the protagonist is Pietro da Morrone, the hermetic priest who became Pope Celestine V, only to abdicate when, according to Silone's rendering of the figure, he was unable to reconcile his own spiritual needs with those of his office. Uscita di sicurezza (1965), as we have seen, is more or less simply the nonfictional version of the events described or alluded to in Pane e vino, as well as several other pieces that fall somewhere between short story and memoir, usually about episodes from his childhood, and several short journalistic pieces which have much in common with Silone's articles in the journal he co-founded, Tempo presented Finally, Severina (1978) returns to the very same motifs as Pane e vino, only here the protagonist is a young nun. After witnessing the beating death of a political protester, Severina refuses to give false testimony, thereby placing the convent school where she works in jeopardy. Upon meeting a group of young, politically active left-wing students, she decides to leave the convent and, at a political rally, is shot accidentally and dies.35

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Pane e vino, then, is certainly the prototype on which the rest of Silone's opus is modelled. For Silone, Pane e vino represents the moment of critical mass in the transformatiom of his personal identity, or, to use a term of evolutionary theorists, the 'hardening' of the synthesis.36 I borrow this term to indicate the point at which the pluralist accounts of Silone's existence - both historical (his own memories, his relationship to his family, his village, the party, the church) and literary (Beniamrno, Berardo, Pietro, Cristina, Luigi Murica) - became unified around a central figure, namely, Pietro Spina. As we have seen, Pietro Spina's concerns, desires, and activities, as articulated in the novel, were loosely based on those of Silone himself: hence the symptomatic nature of Silone's public persona. With Pane e vino, submerged autobiographical references in Silone's fiction become legible; their analysis produces a version of 'truth' that hinges on the misrecognition of Silone in Spina. In other words, after Pane e vino, Cristina, Murica, and the others, including the finite, historical Silone, dropped out of the public eye, and in their place, one figure dominated. Silone's original concerns, desires, and motivations became identified exclusively with those of Pietro Spina, after whom all of Silone's protagonists would be but variations. Consequently, Pane e vino represents the moment at which Ignazio Silone the man ceased to exist, and in his place Ignazio Silone the sign was born. The ramifications of this interpretation extend beyond the specific historic-political problematic of Ignazio Silone. They apply to every other caso or cause celebre of this nature, insofar as they share the symptomatic mechanisms. The same can be said of de Man and Heidegger as well, for that matter. They, too, function as signs; relatively few people have actually read de Man, but many people in the American academy know about the 'de Man affair/ and although even fewer people have read Heidegger, his Nazism is widely known. The cause celebre, after all, results in broad strokes from a scandal, an eruption, or a shift in the fault line, after which the immediate landscape is changed irrevocably. After that shift, to return to Zizek's earlier formulation of the symptom, the subject 'becomes what he has always been.'37 Thus, Silone's symbolic self-obliteration is not the omega but the alpha, the first gesture towards a posthumous rewriting on the part of the author; it allows him to become what he always was. It rearticulates his position between the history of his past and the future of his revision. As readers, we too are implicated in that redimensioning, just as our reception of Silone's Pane e vino was comprised in Silone's self-

142 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone effacement. Silone's orchestration of a post-therapeutic intervention into his crises of faith and ideology by way of an effective self-obliteration that reconstituted him as an emblem was, in my reading, an act of contrition, a self-sacrifice for the causes that his works so consistently trumpeted. The broader implication of this reading is that there is a certain therapeutic value to the invocation of scandal. Readerly revisions like the one I have produced are antithetical to self-obliteration as the last act of authorial control. But invocations of scandal open the possibility of reading authors who have been identified with it as actively engaged in their own rebirth or self-mastery - hence the 'liturgical' response I encounter whenever I mention Silone in Italy. It means that, even if Italians have not read him, he has lived out a story that is important for Italians, that has deep cultural resonance for them. Finally, this invocation reminds us that we may read literature with an eye not only towards the sins of the author but also towards the author's redemption.

CHAPTER FIVE

Past Imperfect: Critical (Self-)Revisions

At the end of the last chapter I suggested that there were different ways of reading Silone (reading for the sins of the author, reading for his redemption) that, in a circular fashion, both issue forth from and also inform possible relationships between the documents and the author's fiction. As we saw, during earlier phases of il caso Silone, there was more debate about how Silone's works were read than there were actual readings (critical engagements, interpretations) of his works. That does not mean, however, that how to read his works has been widely discussed; on the contrary, in spite of the plenitude of received readerly wisdom, there remains to be determined a methodology with which to negotiate the relationship between his writings and his political activities. I use the word negotiate (and not reconcile, or resolve, tempting as those choices may be) intentionally; for the goal is not to determine when and why Silone 'believed in' Communism or Fascism, since such a zero-sum game is doomed from the outset by the plethora of artifacts that contribute to the construction of his figure. Instead, it is more useful to trace the genealogy of influence that led to the development of that construction by his current readership. Silone's books are marked by a fundamentally ambivalent political stance that originates in the internal tension between what the novels shout out (the moral supremacy of Communism and the dangerous, dehumanizing depravity of Fascism) and what they whisper - about redemption and guilt, as well as that the tenets espoused by Communism as he described it (equality, brotherhood, solidarity with the poor) are theoretically superior to other political, ethical, and economic systems but are plagued by precisely the same fatal flaws as other broad-reaching systems, including Catholicism. Indeed, far from offer-

144 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone ing up a solution to the dangers of Fascism, Silone depicts a Communism in action that is structurally analogous to Fascism as regards its tendency to disintegrate into an equivalent form of authoritarianism that punishes dissent. Yet the shouts, not the whispers, have prevailed. How did we arrive at this point? In other words, on whom does the burden of interpretive agency fall: on the text, the reader, or both? Let us return now to a force that has shaped our understanding of Silone thus far, one who, until this point in my study, has only lingered around the periphery fulfilling the purely theoretical requirement of an audience for the enunciations contained in the novels: the figure of the reader. In the pages that follow, I focus on the lasting impact made by the first generation of readers of his novels (starting with Fontamara and Pane e vino) on the reception of his subsequent texts. The goal of this chapter is to understand his readership's genealogy of influence as it evolved over time. I seek to develop an interpretive methodology that is at once attentive to texts but not beholden to them, critical but not incredulous, and able to countenance paradox without foreclosing the prospect of meaning. This chapter is devoted to trying on various methods to see which one fits best. But the nature of my object of inquiry - the brew produced when Silone's life, politics, writings, and public image spill over into one another - demands that I take into account my own position in relation to them. Specifically, I must disengage from any 'hermeneutics of suspicion/1 whereby only I am privy to the 'real' truth lurking behind the manifest truths of Silone's works. Thus, as I return to Silone's early critics, it is certainly not in order to chuckle sympathetically at their findings; rather, my aim is to understand their fundamental centrality to my own critical stance.2 Representations Early in this study I suggested that there coexist two distinct, if not necessarily opposing, goals in Silone's fiction, two distinct illocutionary drives - concomitantly to conceal certain activities and to promote different ones. My argument has been that Silone's early novels present two sets of interpretive guidelines, one stated and one submerged (or conservative and destructive, to return to the formulation by Derrida discussed earlier), that direct our understanding of their messages. As we have seen, these have taken two distinct forms: as a set of documents detailing Silone's relationship to the proto- and Fascist authorities (documents that in turn involve his brother Romolo),

Past Imperfect 145 and as a trilogy of literary texts that give voice to his ambivalence towards association with the very ideology without which he would not have been able to become a writer (texts that in turn entail his 'Christly' self-modelling and the revamping of his public persona). The result of the juxtaposition of these two sets of texts is striking. Archival documents are by definition considered highly reliable sources of information - the final word on a subject, so to speak, always emanates from an archive. In the case of Silone, however, the documents, not his literature, are the contested object of inquiry. Similarly, literary texts, which generally stand in opposition to archival documents as the more open, polysemic source of information, have to date, in Silone's case, been taken as a North star by which we can navigate the hermeneutical path: 'la sua identita che piu ha contato (e) quella testuale' ('the identity that counts the most is his textual one').3 We have seen how Silone participated in the redefinition of his public persona by encouraging his readership to conflate him with his protagonists after the publication of Pane e vino, by allowing false biographical data to stand uncorrected, and by recycling his fiction into nonfiction essays. This participation accounts to some extent for the current critical stance by which his fiction is read as fact. But if the opposing drives at play in Silone's texts issue forth as a result of Silone's participation, they are nonetheless meaningless without an audience to perceive and, possibly, make sense of them. Moreover, the by-products of this collusion, the other side of the chiasmatic pairing, are unexpected and powerful: archival documents are now interpreted as fiction, that is, as unreliable, falsified, based not on real events but rather created in bad faith in order to divert suspicion from the activities of other political players. Or, more Byzantine still, they are viewed as 'falsi autentici' or 'real fakes' (which were different, they argued, from 'fake fakes'), documents created by the Fascist police to discredit Silone, never used but left in the archive.4 In the words of Giorgio Bocca (historian, author of an important biography of Palmiro Togliatti, and no stranger to the use archival documents himself), 'e semplicemente cretino pensare che i documenti siano la base indiscutibile della storia. Come tutti sanno o dovrebbero sapere, i cosidetti documenti sono in grande parte scritti a futura memoria, cioe a futura buona memoria di chi li scrive. E il fatto che ci siano o non ci siano non annulla cio che nella storia e accaduto.' ('it is simply idiotic to think that the documents are the undisputed basis of history. As everyone knows or should know, the so-called documents are written for the

146 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone most part for future memory, that is for the future good memory of those who write them. And the fact that they exist or don't exist does not cancel out what happened in history.)'5 Silone's texts successfully conceal and reveal simultaneously, such that the overall impact of their manifest content is both consistent and readily apparent. Both in and of themselves and in articulation to each other, Fontamam and Pane e vino are organized around the prominent placement of structures such as the frame story of the former, for example, or the recycling of events in the latter in his non-fiction essays, structures that bestow upon his works the overall impression that they are unfiltered views of real life, unadorned facts. But his fiction is, much like the supposedly unmediated footage of a neorealist film, exactly that: fiction. Similar to the neorealists', Silone's works are grounded in real events, to be sure; and they exude the sensibilities that were really in the air at the time of their production. But they do not, and cannot, present cold hard facts, nor are they 'self-evident/ but rather they derive their authority only from their specific position in the interstices of the fabric of discourse. Thus, the gesture with which Silone's early fiction invokes the 'objective' stance of reportage ('Quello che han detto, e in questo libro' - "What they said is in this book'),6 is made effective, like glamour, by association. Put differently, recall the earlier juxtaposition of Silone's methodology with what Giovanni Verga, in his I Malavoglia, called Ta rappresentazione della realta com'e stata, o come avrebbe dovuto essere' ('the representation of reality as it was, or as it should have been').8 The difference between Verga and Silone, of course, lies in the way Verga announces his intention to write as though it were all true, the way he points out the facade of factuality superimposed upon the fiction, whereas Silone's text maintains the integrity of that facade. Perhaps more closely analogous to Silone's fiction is the notion of 'found footage,'9 film footage that a filmmaker discovers, ready-made, and inserts in his or her film. The premise of 'stumbling upon it/ though false, serves to distance both the filmmaker and the viewer from the fact that someone somewhere created the sequence, giving the impression rather that it is a natural artifact untouched by the forces of creative human agency. It is by virtue of this 'naturalized' quality that Silone's literature recalls yet another genre (to which, however, his works do not belong): the roman a these. According to Susan Rubin Suleiman, a novel pertaining to this category 'calls for an unam-

Past Imperfect 147 biguous interpretation, which in turn implies a rule of action applicable (at least virtually) to the real life of the reader. The interpretation and the rule of action may be stated explicitly by a narrator who "speaks with the voice of Truth" and can therefore lay claim to absolute authority, or they may be supplied, on the basis of textual and contextual indices, by the reader.'10 Silone's works do not belong to this genre, and yet, as a critical consequence of their shouts and whispers, they are read as though they do. The burden of agency in the roman a these sits with the text, which 'calls for an interpretation/ and not with the reader, whose reactions to the text, if not guaranteed, are at least spelled out for him/her. But if Silone's novels, like a roman a these or found footage, 'tell' the reader how to respond, that does not mean that the resulting readings are lazy or misguided; it has, rather, to do with timing of the readings and with the way he himself participated in them. What of the reader, anyway? Silone's novels inspire a certain kind of reading as 'found footage/ in part because of stylistic trends current during the period in which they were written. It is useful to approach them, initially, much like one would a roman a these, observing when possible the certainties of their convictions and taking into account their 'excesses/ which, for Suleiman, include the elements that lie outside the text's thesis. But she further distinguishes between such excesses and 'subversions/11 which mark a text that may contain a clear ideological message but one that is couched within a framework that presupposes a particular conclusion.12 My argument about Silone's novels, though I have approached them until this point from a different perspective, has been that they contain both excesses and subversions, and I have focused primarily on the latter, which are visible as paradoxes, often coextensive with elements from Silone's postmilitant biography. The overarching effect of these elements is the impression that, beneath the tranquil surface of (theoretically) proCommunist, anti-Fascist, and, ultimately, intensely humanist discourse, there is a mad, swan-like paddling about as the author covers the traces of his own and his family's history. Critics have not acknowledged these paradoxes in Silone's novels because the novels have been read from within a belief system that already 'knows' the correct interpretation. For some of Silone's readers, in other words, what were originally shouts from the texts are now echoed back, amplified, in their own pronouncements.

148 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone Critics and Readers Recall the 'liturgical response' I encountered upon mentioning Silone's name in Italy and, in much more limited audiences, in the United States: it regularly consisted of vigorous displays of approval from my interlocutors about both the author's fictional opus and his position in the pantheon of the great ethical voices of the post-war period, coupled with the admission that they had not read any of his books. The articulation of hearty approval is based on the legacy of those who read him during the war; they testified that Silone's novels have a message, and it has proven to be enduring.13 The flip side of that response - the sheepish shrug and profession of ignorance of the novels - has to do with the way it is not part of the current mode of reading to seek a message in a book, and his books do not lend themselves to any other, more current, strategy of interpretation. As Suleiman points out, 'modern criticism has been tremendously wary of any literature that "means to say something" (that has a "message"), and of any critic or reader who reads literature as an "attempt to say something" - who reads it for its "message."'14 The historical vantage point contained in her statement - that of 'modern criticism,' particularly post-structuralist - allows us to begin to understand the evolution of Silone's critical reception. For such wariness was not always the case; after all, if the 1930s saw the production of large numbers of the rotnan a these, the very definition of which demands that it contain, among other things, a discernible message, then we may safely say that at that point it was reasonable if not desirable to read for and write for a message. Similarly, the grouping 'critic or reader' is relevant to understanding my own position in relation to Silone's opus.15 If the term 'critic' implies those with professional stakes in the reading, writing, and teaching of literature (in the broadest sense of the term) and 'reader' implies a group whose goals are entertainment and edification (so that critics are a subset of readers but not vice versa), then what is the relation of 'readers' to the pronouncements of 'modern criticism'? To what extent is that relation mediated by critics? I ask because I, in turn, have a meta-response to the liturgical response: "These people with whom I spoke about Silone are right; such 'truths' about Silone's greatness, and so on, can persist in the absence of any real experience of his books; after all, I have never read The Tale ofGenji but I 'know' that it is a masterpiece.' From these responses we may draw the conclusion that part and parcel of any interpretive strategy, whether 'critical' or 'readerly/

Past Imperfect 149 is the potential coexistence of a disjuncture or contradiction, on the one hand - for how can one approve of something unknown? - and, on the other, the notion of the sufficiency of a certain kind of knowledge, specifically of the received wisdom about the greatness of his books. Critics, it seems, are a subset of readers whose position as mediators and/or interpreters of 'modern criticism' fills the breach between contradiction and sufficiency by bestowing upon readers the power to confirm what they already know. Finally, what about the people who qualify as critics but not readers, those who publicly weigh in on the argument without having read the documents? By reading Silone's fiction as fact and dismissing (sight unseen) the relevant archival documents on the grounds that they contradict the personal experience of those in the debate, they demonstrate an extreme form of the liturgical response, so that the insufficiency of their knowledge about the particulars of the case is not seen to be in contradiction to the certainty with which they hold their views; rather, it is the pre-condition of those views.16 Indeed, this ostrich-like behaviour of a certain generation and stripe of Italian intellectuals is in some ways the most shocking aspect of the entire case: the steadfast refusal even to countenance the possibility that Silone was not what he appeared - or, more intellectually suspect yet, the refusal to entertain the possibility that Silone could have been different from what they knew of him personally - tempts one to speculate that they protest too much. The idea of the falsehood of any narratization of a collective 'memory' had already entered into the discourse of the Left well before this most recent chapter of il caso Silone. Think, for example, of Gramsci's remark on common-sense historicizing, (it is 'ambiguous, contradictory and multiform')17 and Walter Benjamin's observation that 'to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it "the way it really was" ... It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger/18 How many people knew about Silone's betrayal? How does il caso Silone change if Silone's past was known all along? Contemplating that question, I am reminded of Bernardo Bertolucci's 1969 film The Spider's Strategem, which deals with the discovery that an entire village colluded to keep secret the fact that its local anti-Fascist hero was actually a traitor. The rationale behind this secrecy was articulated in purely functional terms; as the villagers argue, a dead hero is worth more than a live traitor. Bertolucci once said that the film was 'about the ambiguity of history.' Others say that it is a film about the

150 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone way the Resistance can be appropriated for the respective purposes of either the Right or the Left.19 For the purposes of this analysis, it is relevant that the film focuses on a character whose identity perpetually slips out of our grasp. Just as there is no fixed point at which the Mobius strip rotates (so that at any moment up can become down and vice versa), the character's 'real' historical identity and the public's mythical memory of him are coextensively and mutually defined.20 The Spider's Stratagem, in other words, is like Silone's story, which too is about the ambiguity of history, that is, of a history that is always in the remaking. Bertolucci does not argue for a notion of history that is hyper-subjective - a moral relativism, or an interpretive democracy. He does not allow the prevalence of the village's accepted wisdom (that a dead martyr helps the cause more than a confessed traitor) to foreclose the possibility either of rigorous inquiry or of critical analysis. Rather, it is a vision of the relationship between history, memory, and narrative that proclaims the moral primacy of individual decisions even in the absence of coherent motives. In other words, we are not invited to ponder the reasons behind the protagonist's decision to die, but simply the fact of it. Similarly, we only imperfectly understand Silone's motives for colluding with the Fascists because we have no access to them even as the gesture is revealed to us. That is not to say that participants in this debate have not claimed exclusive rights to those motives. If, as we said at the beginning of this study, we must understand Silone's legacy in relation to principles that cannot be cast as exclusively political even as they manifest themselves as such, then we must by extension also fully acknowledge their double edge. Such principles are, for some, the expression of Silone's individual axiology, and for others, the justification for rejecting the archival evidence as invalid on the very grounds of their political content. We now understand the remark by Emilio Cecchi cited earlier: whatever is 'intrinsic' to Silone's texts does not, as he asserts, 'impede a more thorough meeting' between Silone and his readers; on the contrary, it guarantees his ability to be appropriated by all. Thus, a possible narrative gesture with regard to Silone might point to the inscrutable moment of individual decision as its true locus - it is the only thing that is not up for grabs. This is a significant gesture, for such a reading forestalls the high price of revisioning the Resistance (namely the discovery that the 'received narrative' about the antiFascist movement was inflated and glorified) by mortgaging it against the positive future effects of that narrative.

Past Imperfect 151 What are the ramifications for Silone's story? The film's conclusion goes beyond the idea that history is ambiguous or, at best, an approximation, instead arguing that its contingent nature, its constructedness, is the only way to come to terms with the fundamental illegibility of individual action. The results, the representation and interpretation of events, are consequently much more difficult than in a reading that concludes that history depends on who is doing the writing; after all, in Bertolucci's hands, the distinction between heroes and traitors blurs even further. The relevance of this film to Silone, in sum, has nothing to do with the answers the film provides, and everything to do with the questions it poses about the way discrepancies within personal, national, ideological, and political histories can be productive without necessarily being self-serving. Indeed, these discrepancies are the very foundation of any discussion about Silone. We can speak about Silone only by using the terms that arise from them, whatever the ideological framework we invoke. Having said that, let me now return to the question I posed above: how does il caso Silone change if Silone's past was known all along? Is it true, in other words, that sometimes a myth is more useful than the truth? We are now in a position to perceive the danger inherent in what I described at the beginning of this chapter as the chiasmatic relations between the archival and narrative texts and their perceived positions along the spectrum between fact and fiction. That danger has to do with a circular kind of logic of inevitability.21 If Silone's fiction had not been granted the status of lightly veiled truths, then the documents would not have been the source of so much shock, nor would they have been so contested. This begs the question: Is Ignazio Silone's case not the same in his fiction as in the documents? Are we reading the documents from within a belief system that already 'knows' the correct answer? Any understanding of the importance of the evidence about Silone's Fascist connections entails recalibrating the measure of truth we have assigned his fiction. Put differently, his Communist stance is no more a given because he claims it as such than the documents make him a Fascist. Consequently, to understand the whole picture we must guard against ideological preconceptions and evaluate the role of the self-evident in the evolution of Silone's status as a public figure, insofar as it paved the way for both the production of the documents and their reception. After all, as the liturgical response shows, a little received knowledge goes a long way.

152 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone Reading il caso Silone Much of the 'knowledge' about Ignazio Silone circulating today was born from various attempts to place his fiction in critical perspective. Those attempts, collectively known as il caso Silone, began soon after his work became widely circulated and have undergone several incarnations since that time. Is there something implicit, 'intrinsic/ in the formation of il caso, in its very naming as such, that informs our knowledge of him today? The utility of a case, it seems to me, is not so much in the way it focuses attention on a particular historico-critical issue, but precisely in what it fails or refuses to take into account in examination. Take, for example, the ongoing power struggle between leftist politics and leftist literary criticism in Italy, with the strong influence of the former over the latter.22 It has changed over the last sixty years and will undoubtedly continue to do so. These changes, in turn, will shape responses to the idea that Silone might have been something other than what he appeared to be. Further, there is the question of timing. Alice Kaplan notes that the arguments about the justification of Robert Brasillach's execution varied dramatically at different times after the trial; she points out that the verdict would probably have been very different as early as one year after his execution.23 To what extent does the timing of these revelations about Silone play a role? Italy is radically different now from the last time it entered a new phase of il caso Silone in 1965, when it was expected that Uscita di sicurezza would be awarded the Premio Viareggio, but was not.24 These revelations about Silone's history have come at a crucial moment in Italy, as Silvio Berlusconi takes office yet again and the Italian Left retrenches.25 If the Silone litmus test no longer reflects the same relationship as before, how does Silone's case help illuminate the current relationship between Italian politics and literary criticism? Conventional readings of Ignazio Silone as a literary and political figure locate him squarely within the context of a state-sponsored culture of the moderate Left that was built upon the ideals born at the end of the war. His associations with the Fascists have problematized that contextualization, because it turns out that Silone was an agent of the Fascist state, that is, a state that had been thought to have been eradicated. As we have seen, these issues have begun to play themselves out in current public debates about Silone among Italian intellectuals of the Left. Recall the ways the accountability and productivity of public institutions - especially those devoted to the study of Silone as the

Past Imperfect 153 embodiment of a particular constellation of ethical practices - have been objects of inquiry lately, as these institutions struggle to justify their existence in a changing Italian academy. Similarly, we have seen the subversion of critical conventions in newspaper and journal debates among historians, journalists, and literature scholars, including the integration of a discourse of 'archive malice' into the already highly charged debates. The integration of this discourse by both arbiters of culture and conservators of collective memory has served, in effect, to double the ambiguity of the ideological conflict Silone enacted, by transposing it from the level of content (what did he really do?) to that of representation (how is it being presented now?). A consequent conflation of historical and autobiographical discourses has ensued, leading to a narrative closure of il caso Silone that emphasizes, paradoxically, Silone's readers' very inability to interpret it productively. In other words, one could argue that the shock of these discoveries lies not in the fact of them but in the ways that they are unreadable from within a post-war Italian culture that depends on the deployment of an ethical lexicon developed by Silone and others like him. Silone illustrates what happens to our understanding of post-war Italian culture when we not only refute the general rhetorical position that holds that it was founded upon anti-Fascist values of the Resistance but also point to the ways that that position was based on fiction, not fact. Silone's story is therefore, in a sense, illegible - but only insofar as we rely upon the language he himself developed in his fiction to read it. In that case, such discoveries invite reflection upon the possibility that individual choices under authoritarian regimes become fundamentally unfathomable from the very moment they occur - that is, in terms of linguistic articulations, before the moment of their representation (to the extent that they are represented at all). More broadly, more questions can be asked now than ever before about the meaning of Silone's role in Italian culture, and specifically in the shifting hierarchies that constitute its relationship with its component parts. In other words, Silone is interesting today not because there are more questions about him than before, but (at least partly) because of the questions his story requires us to ask, questions that it would not have been possible to ask before. Are there other ways in which the notion of a case can be productive beyond the immediate realm of the object of inquiry? I would argue that the answer is yes, for reasons that extend well beyond the bailiwick of Silone's particulars, reflecting rather on the relationship between text and life that his works problematize. As we

154 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone saw earlier, the 'common sense' message of Silone's novels, the broadly written message to which most of the textual structures point, is most visible when the novels are considered as independent beings, read in isolation from outside factors. This sort of facile structuralist interpretation, of the kind to which I refer in earlier chapters, by which the novels are closed systems whose elements can be read only in relationship to each other, has the advantage of simplicity insofar as it brackets all of the messy surplus attached to any text (the who/ how/ when/ why of writing; any issues of agency or motivation on the part of the author; the economic, historical, and technological conditions of the text's creation, and so on.) Considered in this way, his novels provide a quick and easy 'take': there are opposing forces of good and evil, called Communism and Fascism, and in the end, though the conclusion (the triumph of the former) is imperfect and indefinite, it has the advantage of being convincing and readily graspable. But if such a reading is flawed (not to mention outmoded), in that it fails to take into account too many aspects of the text itself, how does it compare to another sort of reading, one that takes place from within the nexus of his personal and political life, the historical period in which he wrote, and ideological debates in the air at the time? First and foremost, we discover a much richer, if much more ambiguous, message. Indeed, taking the hors-texte into account, we discover that the struggle to which the novels devote their time and attention is not in fact the struggle between two conflicting political systems, Communism and Fascism. Rather, the issues are completely different, are aligned along not the political but the very intimately personal axis. Indeed, the structuralist conclusion of an imperfect but nonetheless clear-cut victory by the proponents of Communism gravitates toward a different conclusion in this reading: not on the side of the Fascists, obviously, but along the lines of a different order of debate. This one is ultimately highly individual, emphasizing uncertainty, personal anguish, and the agonizing decisions that must be made under emotional duress, but not, so far as we know, at gunpoint. Such a reading must furthermore take into account the evidence that Silone's relationship with members of the Fascist party was neither superficial nor mercenary but was held together by bonds of mutual respect and transcended party beliefs, the law, and the requirements of physical safety. We must marvel, for example, at the tenacity and fidelity of the friendship that developed between Silone and Guido Bellone. Whether it was broken off, temporarily interrupted, or simply changed its focus,

Past Imperfect 155 the fact of its existence must find its place in the hierarchy of our conceptualization. Finally, stepping now outside the texts altogether, what are we to make of their effects on us as readers? The annual Silone Prize, as I mentioned, celebrates what has been considered his indefatigable defence of freedom. In this study I have tried to demonstrate that there were effectively two 'Silones/ one real and one highly idealized, and that the latter, which has long supplanted the former in the public eye, is the only knowable one. But even while problematizing the relationship between the two, it bears emphasizing that the epithet 'Silone defender of freedom/ while zealously applied, is by no means gratuitous. The terms in which he articulated that defence have shifted; they are better understood to be in the practical service of a very few individuals, though available by appropriation to all. And therein lies the source of his longevity as a public figure beyond the fact that he is a caso: in spite of the new tarnish on the aura that enveloped him, it has to be acknowledged that his books have had an effect; for example, people thought about poverty, dignity, and the social order in new ways after reading him. Clearly, the boundaries of any defence of freedom are contestable. The contribution of Silone's opus to his readership will undoubtedly continue to evolve apace with those boundaries as more information is revealed and confirmed or discredited: information that runs alongside or counter to the tastes and critical approaches of his readers. But, whatever interpretive strategy is employed, it must be one that comprehends the existence of the effects of his texts, whether or not these effects are based on careful readings or simply the result of received knowledge. Knowledge and Its Disavowal Or does it even matter? In the end, no reading can bring back the dead, though some interpretive modes do a better job of memorializing them. Perhaps this, too, shapes our reactions to Silone today; the newest incarnation of the caso Silone implicates the importance of the choices we make about how we read. Silone's complicated associations with the Fascists, and our new understanding of depth and breadth of the failures of Communism, as he depicts them, demand a shift from the easy support of 'correct' politics, according to the season, to the realm of thorny, always already wrong private decisions (by which I mean decisions made for private reasons but with public ramifica-

156 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone tions). And even harder to countenance, we must now read his literature with an eye towards the strategies he employed to cover his tracks, as it were, keeping in mind at the same time the positive effects of a naive reading - that is, the positive effects of the message his readers have embraced, evident in the liturgical response he provokes. Seen in this light, however, the whole process of reading begins to sound daunting. Why should we engage in a reading that is mindful of the details of a life, of an author, of an historical period? The confirmation of our 'knowledge' of him as an historical subject, coupled with the 'Silone effect' - the way good things happen when people read him are what make it hard to dismiss the structuralist reading. It is certainly the path of least readerly resistance; as they say, if it ain't broke, why fix it? The answer, I believe, is that it is 'broke,' or missing something, at least. In the end, the issue has less to do with the structuralist debate about how we read a text, then, and more to do with the 'je sais bien, mais quand meme'26 aspect of reading: the disavowal or, better yet, temporary suspension of certain kinds of knowledge. Even the reader who chooses a book adventurously from the bookstore shelf approaches literary texts with at least a modicum of preconceived 'knowledge' about it, its author, or both. Similarly, readers shape their interaction with a text based to some extent on their social-historical positions, since we cannot transcend our subjectivity to become blank slates. But we can temporarily suspend belief in the cultural /historical knowledge that anchors that subjectivity. This does not imply that we must hold completely makeshift or circumstantial beliefs (whether political, ethical, religious, experiential); rather, it suggests that, as readers, we must be open to the possibility of making meaning from the depiction of experiences that provoke emotions across the spectrum. Whether those experiences are merely different from our own 'knowledge' of the world or diametrically opposite to our own, whether inspirational or abhorrent, making meanings from a text sometimes requires dismantling the ones we 'received' from authorities who also share our historical/cultural knowledge. In the words of Susan Suleiman, 'lucidity and a certain suspicion are the right, and perhaps even the obligation, of any reader.' I would extend her remarks to include archival documents as well, though she refers primarily to the reading of fiction. For if the construction of 'Silone' makes itself visible exclusively through the articulation of party affiliations, then the new caso Silone amounts to a series of

Past Imperfect 157 debates about how to read without reinstituting, on another plane, the central division between fiction and archival document. There still exists the urgency to perform both kinds of readings, one that takes into account the self-serving effects (for author as well as for reader), as well as one that suspends that knowledge in order to favour the text in itself and for itself, allowing both (to borrow from Ian Balfour) 'the talisman and the act of reading.' Silone's scandal will not be news forever, and his fiction will continue to go in and out of style. But beyond that, discussions about Ignazio Silone today, like other moves to revise wartime and post-war history, are also episodes of the longer process of reinterpreting Italian national identity and political history. Thus the roles of lucidity and suspicion are invaluable regardless of whether the text under consideration emanates from a local bookshop or a national archive. Without them, we are relegated to the chiasmus I described at the beginning of this chapter: sceptical of the document, faithful to the fiction, and unable to perceive the existence of multiple articulations between received knowledge and original impressions. By way of a conclusion, then, I would like to add another quality to my highly provisional list, since people read for a variety of different reasons, and, for most non-professional readers, the issue at stake is to be gleaned not exclusively by means of suspicion but instead by an awareness of the potential effects of reading. For critics, 'Silone' as cause celebre and as yardstick for political engagement is and has always been about the power of critical judgment, the pervasiveness of received knowledge even to the average reader, and the ways in which expert insights can be based on incomplete or imperfect knowledge. But so much literary scholarship is about verifying a hypothesis, about proving a point: and this is both because of and in spite of the general critical interest in representations, in the notion that texts of all stripes are, in the final analysis, constructions about which, consequently, just about anything can be argued. For that reason, professional and nonprofessional readers alike would be well served, I would argue, to reintroduce into our interpretive tool kit the notion of curiosity, of embarking on a reading in order to learn something. None of us can read without pre-established categories to orient us, but such categories hinder our awareness of the zones in and around a text that are not clearly defined. The practice of readerly curiosity requires fully immersing ourselves in the possible contradictions between those zones and the categories with which we began; and it is there, I believe, that Ignazio Silone's ultimate drama is played out.

158 The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone For Silone's story is more than the sum total of all of his texts, and his story poses a more exciting question than whether or not he betrayed his party. Ignazio Silone taught his earliest readers about the poor, giving them voices and names. He taught an international audience about Communism at a time when Communism seemed the only option. He taught generations of critics about fiction by inspiring a series of debates about how to read. Finally, we have arrived at his most recent lesson; this one is about the importance of curiosity. The many paradoxes of Ignazio Silone's story teach us that reading and research take place only when we are open to the possibility of learning new things, or of giving voice to impressions outside the boundaries of current wisdom. Otherwise, the point of reading is moot: consummatum est.

Notes

Introduction 1 Luce d'Eramo, L'opera di Ignazio Silone, 15,133. See ibid, for a comprehensive guide to the translation, publication, and critical reception of Silone's novels. 2 For a small sampling of early responses to the presentation, see G. Belardelli, 'Silone. Con L'Ovra per amore del fratello'; D. Messina, 'L'antifascista Silone vittima di un falso dell'Ovra'; G. Belardelli, 'Le scomode verita degli archivi'; Anon., 'Silone, All'Ovra non collaboro piu/ La Repubblica, 30 April 1996; and Primo Di Nicola, 'Silone. Confesso che ho spiato.' 3 Elizabeth Leake, 'Past Imperfect: Ignazio Silone's Traumatic Self-Revision.' A much fuller account can be found in Dario Biocca and Mauro Canali, L'informatore: Silone, i comunisti e la polizia. 4 On Moravia, see Ruth Ben-Ghiat's 'Fascism, Writing and Memory: The Realist Aesthetic in Italy 1930-50'; on Moravia and related debates, see Enzo Siciliano, 'Un romanzo per i revisionisti.' 5 Six Italians, however, have won the Nobel Prize for literature. They are Giosue Carducci (1906), Grazia Deledda (1926), Luigi Pirandello (1934), Salvatore Quasimodo (1959), Eugenio Montale (1975), and Dario Fo (1997). 6 Speaking of the French situation, Herman Lebovics said, 'This simple moral trinity - collaborator, opportunist, resistant - cannot contain what we now are beginning to know about the elaborate and subtle scale of responses and initiatives - both structurally facilitated and individually essayed which made up public life under Vichy.' Quoted in Maria Susan Stone's The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy, 9. For discussions of the diverse notions of cultural consensus under the Fascist regime, see Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy 1922-1945; Giorgio Ciucci, Gli architetti e

160 Notes to pages 7-17 ilfascismo: architettura e citta 1922-1944; and Pier Giorgio Zunino, Interpretazione e memoria del fascismo: gli anni del regime as well as his L'ideologia del fascismo: miti, credenze e valori nella stabilizzazione del regime. 7 Considering Sartre's uncompromising stance about writerly accountability, perhaps it is not surprising that Silone nurtured a decades-long animosity towards the French writer; one cannot be willing to pay for what one has written with one's life if the goal of writing is to protect that life. 8 Alice Kaplan, The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach, 171. 9 Ibid. 10 In the preface to her study on Mario Sironi, Emily Braun describes a variation of what I call the liturgical response to Silone, when she quotes critic Ettore Camesasca, who writes: 'It is repeatedly said that Sironi presents an embarrassing case. Everyone, or almost everyone, agrees that he is among the greatest artists of the century, but we don't talk about him anymore. He is only talked about in whispers.' One might speculate about whether Camesasca has predicted the future for Silone, as well. Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism, xi. 11 As Leonard Tennenhouse put it, 'psychoanalytic criticism tends to identify the genesis of the works of art with their significance; the more obscure and distant the genesis seems - the more elaborate the defense mechanisms which shape the art work - the further its surface structure is from the "truth."' Leonard Tennenhouse, The Practice of Psychoanalytic Criticism, 21. 12 For a description of life as a graduate student under Paul de Man, as well as a discussion of the repercussions of the de Man case for his former students, see Alice Kaplan, French Lessons: A Memoir, 171. 13 See in particular Alexander Cockburn's (5 June 2000) and Christopher Hitchens's articles (12 June and 23 Oct. 2000) in The Nation. More balanced views appear in John Foot's 'Silone the Spy' and Alexander Stille's 'The Spy Who Failed.' 14 The Nation, 5 June 2000 15 The Nation, 12 June 2000 16 The Nation, 23 Oct. 2000. 17 Norberto Bobbio is considered the godfather of the intellectual Italian Left; Mimmo Franzinelli authored a history of OVRA, the Italian secret police, I tentacoli dell'OVRA: agenti, collaboratori e vittime della polizia fascista. Chapter One: Silone and the Fascists 1 The first duty of a writer is sincerity.' Silone to Ferdinando Virdia. Ferdinando Virdia, Ignazio Silone, 3.

Notes to pages 17-19 161 2 'I have a tremendous fear of the ambiguity of words.' Silone to a group of nuns, cited by Ines Scaramucci in 'Silone e la letteratura/ in Ignazio Silone tra testimonianza e Utopia: Atti del seminario di studio, 17. 3 Eric Prenowitz, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1995), 78. 4 Ibid., p. 78. 5 Primo di Nicola, 'Silone: confesso che ho spiato.' See also Elizabeth Leake, 'Past Imperfect: Ignazio Silone's Traumatic Self-Revision.' The findings of that article (which is partially reproduced here) are based on research I conducted in Rome between January and May of 1996. 6 For an example of the debate, see Enzo Siciliano's 'Un romanzo per i revisionisti' as well as Giordano Bruno Guerri's 'Si apre la porta a un nuovo revisionismo.' 7 The category of ex-Communist firmed up with the publication of The God That Failed, in which Silone and others discussed their experiences outside of the Communist fold; Silone himself described that category (in semifictional mode) in the essay 'La situazione degli Ex,' published as part of Uscita di Sicurezza. 8 G. Belardelli, 'Silone. Con 1'Ovra per amore del fratello.' 9 In addition to denying Biocca's allegations, Silone's widow, Darina Silone, and Senator Leo Valiani, among others, stated that the ACS was full of falsified documents. See Corriere della Sera, 8 March 1996, and later, La Repubblica, 27 Nov. 1996. 10 The Premio Nazionale Silone, administered by the Fondazione Silone, is given to the person who, 'neH'ambito della cultura, della politica o attraverso i mezzi di comunicazione, abbia contribuito in modo particolarmente rilevante all'affermazione dei valori della liberta, del diritto delle persone e del cittadino, nello spirito e nel significato indicati dal pensiero e dall'opera di Ignazio Silone' ('in the area of culture, politics, or means of communication, has contributed in a particularly relevant way to the affirmation of the values of freedom, and the rights of people and citizens, in the spirit and manner indicated in the thought and works of Ignazio Silone'). // Centra, 25 Nov. 1999. 11 Aldo Ricci, archivist at the ACS in Rome, was the first to make this letter public. Ricci had apparently seen and photocopied this and other relevant documents of Silone's in 1988, unbeknownst to his superiors, who had locked them away from public view. Called the castigamatti ('martinet') of the archives, he had squirreled his photocopies away in order to publish them later; once Biocca had indicated the direction of his investigation (and taken considerable heat for it), Ricci made his move, publishing the documents in full, six weeks later. In spite of his careful timing, Ricci was nonetheless roundly criticized for his self-serving methods: 'Non c'e docu-

162 Notes to pages 19-22 mentazione inedita di una certa importanza sulla quale non cerchi di mettere le mani per primo. Naturalmente, per ricavarne delle pubblicazioni.' (There are no unedited documents of a certain level of importance that he doesn't try to get his hands on first. In order to get publications out of them, naturally.') Primo di Nicola, 'Silone. Confesso che ho spiato.' 12 ACS, Polizia Politica, Secondino Tranquilli (in future cited as ACS, PP, ST). Citing the letter of 5 July 1929, Biocca has contended from the beginning that Silone's collaborative relationship with the Fascist police via Guido Bellone began in 1919 (Dario Biocca, personal communication 29 July 1997). 13 13 April 1930. ACS, PP, ST. 14 For a small sampling of the early responses, see 'Le scomode verita degli archivi,' // Corriere della Sera, 13 March 1996; 'Silone informatore per salvare il fratello arrestato/ L'Unita, 30 April 1996; 'Silone, all'Ovra non collaboro piu,' La Repubblica, 30 April 1996; 'Silone collaboro con 1'Ovra,' // Centra, 4 April 1996; G. Belardelli, 'Silone. Con 1'Ovra per 1'amore del fratello'; D. Messina's interview of Leo Valiani ('L'antifascista Silone vittima di un falso dell'Ovra'); 'Silone, 1'antifascista che "collaborava,"' // Resto del Carlino, 30 April 1996; 'Nuovi document! sui rapporti con 1'Ovra: delatore "innocente," ma non certo spia,' // Messaggero, 30 April 1996; and Federico Federici's 'Silone, profeta nel tormento.' 15 Romolo Tranquilli, Jr, personal communication, April 1996. 16 Silone was born in Pescina, in the Abruzzo region. 17 This was Biocca's earliest thesis, later dismissed with the discovery of evidence dating from 1919. Silone's most outspoken defenders, historians Mimmo Franzinelli and Giuseppe Tamburrano, continue to maintain it. 18 Later in this chapter, I will argue that early in his writing career, Silone exploited Romolo's story to garner sympathy and support for his own position; it is interesting to note that, sixty years later, Romolo's story serves to shield Silone posthumously as well. 19 See Franca Magnani Papers. Silone later became very critical of psychoanalysis. See his 'La sfinge del benessere' in Uscita di sicurezza, as well as Aline Valangin Papers. 20 Recall Silone's comment in the letter: 'Ho la coscienza di non aver fatto un gran male ne ai miei amici ne al mio paese.' We may understand this comment in two possible ways: 'My conscience tells me I did great harm neither to my friends nor to my country' and 'I am not conscious of having done great harm either to my friends nor to my country.' The difference between the two translations underscores the dual nature, aimed at obscuring and promoting, of Silone's archival status. 21 Silone described the aftermath of leaving the party in these terms: 'Uomini,

Notes to pages 22-4 163

22 23

24

25 26 27

fino a poco tempo prima, amici, solidali nel comune pericolo, si chiamavano reciprocamente traditori vigliacchi bugiardi opportunisti ipocriti, e anche ladri spie venduti.' ('Men who had been loyal friends in their shared danger until a very short time before, called each other traitors, cowards, liars, opportunists, hypocrites, and even thieves, spies and corrupt.') Uscita di sicurezza, 109. See Giorgio Bocca, Palmiro Togliatti, pp. 138-44. It is widely held that any negative press Silone received, particularly in the years immediately after the war, was not based on critical engagement with his writings but rather was politically conditioned. If that is the case, however, then we must also note that critics' political motivations were so varied that they almost resulted in a zero-sum game; by that reckoning, starting as early as the immediate post-war period, Silone's political history was such that for every negative politically motivated review there was a corresponding positive one from an opposing camp. For discussions of both the post-war Communist responses and those of the Catholic press, see Maria Nicolai Paynter, Ignazio Silone: Beyond the Tragic Vision, 183-93, as well as Luce d'Eramo, L'Opera di Ignazio Silone. The Fascist questore Bellone, known for his intelligence and consummate professionalism, was the only person with whom Silone would have contact among the Fascists. Silone was linked to him by long-standing bonds of friendship; recently it has also been murmured that the intimate friendship between Silone and Bellone was strengthened by a mutual erotic interest. The thinking (bolstered by Silone's remark in the letter 'mi efisicamente impossibile restare con lei negli stessi rapporti di dieci anni fa' - 'it is physically impossible for me to stay with you in the same relationship of ten years ago') goes like this: it would have been essentially lethal for a Fascist questore (or an active PCI member, for that matter) to be openly homosexual. Thus it is conceivable that one of the ways Silone was able to convince Bellone to terminate their association - Silone, after all, was extremely useful to the Fascists and would not have been allowed out of the arrangement without some compelling reason - was by threatening to expose Bellone as a homosexual. There is, to the best of my knowledge, no strong evidence that their relationship ever contained an erotic component. Bellone died in an insane asylum in 1939. ACS, PP, ST. Tranquilli used the pseudonym Ignazio Silone starting in 1923. See Dario Biocca and Mauro Canali, L'informatore: Silone, i comunisti e la polizia, pp. 48-57 in particular, for a description of the process by which they confirmed the identification of Silone as author of the documents.

164 Notes to pages 24-31 28 For a discussion of the ideologically porous boundaries between Fascism and the Italian Left through the early years of the Ventennio (the twentyyear period of Italian Fascism), see Pier Giorgio Zunino's Interpretazione e memoria del fascismo: gli anni del regime. 29 ACS, Polizia Politica (hereafter PP) fasc.5. Francesco Nudi was inspector general of public security in Milan and creator and coordinator of Ovra. Sportelli, Viacava, and lonna were Communist operatives who collaborated with Ovra. They were eventually sent to the USSR. Sportelli obtained a passport in 1936 and returned to Italy; the others disappeared in Siberia. Vanni Buscemi, after emigrating to the United States, changed his name to Vanni Montana and became director of a union on the east coast. He collaborated with the Fascist police from 1923. During the war he sent large sums of money to Silone for the reconstitution of the centra estero (Foreign Centre) of the Socialist Party. 30 'Fu solo nell'estate del 1931, trovandomi ancora assente da ogni attivita politica, e dopo varie vicende di cui subito parlero, che ruppi definitivamente col partito e venni di conseguenza "espulso."' ('It was only in the Summer of 1931, finding myself still absent from any political activity, and after various events about which I am about to speak, that I broke definitively with the party and was subsequently "expelled."') Ignazio Silone, Uscita di Sicurezza, 99. 31 Cathy Caruth describes the qualities of trauma, which include belatedness, repetition, liminality, and rebirth, in her Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. 32 The collection has, historically, received little critical attention, owing to the impossibility of obtaining it in Italian until 1993, when the Centre Studi Siloniani in Pescina published a limited number of copies of the stories. The copy I consulted was a gift from Romolo Tranquilli, Jr, for which I thank him. 33 Gisella Padovani also sets the collection in 1929 on the basis of the title story's 'journalistic' references. Padovani, Letteratura e socialismo: saggi su Ignazio Silone, 16. 34 The original version of the novel, Pane e vino, became Vino e pane after Silone edited it in 1955. 35 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4. 36 Biocca and Canali, L'informatore, 144. 37 Silone, 'Uscita di sicurezza,' 58, in Silone, Uscita di sicurezza. That portion of the text was written in 1926 and first published in 1949. 38 Enciclopedia dell'Antifascismo.

Notes to pages 31-5 165 39 Giorgio Papasogli, Vita di Don Orione, 249. 40 'I comunisti di fronte alia polizia/ document found among Tranquilli's belongings upon arrest. ACS, PP, Romolo Tranquilli (hereafter RT). 41 Armando Gavagnin, Tra gli orrori della galera.' Also cited in Dario Biocca, 'Ignazio Silone: fratello e compagno.' 42 ACS, Tribunale per la difesa dello Stato (hereafter IDS), b.325, f.3263. 43 Darina Silone, 'Le ultime ore .../ in Severina, 171-2. 44 Ibid. 45 Luigi Longo, 'L'attentato a Vittorio Emanuele III.' 46 Another, equally damning, sketch was initially interpreted by the police as Piazzale Giulio Cesare in Milan. 47 cfr. Luigi Longo and Carlo Salinari, Dal socialfascismo alia guerra di Spagna. Ricordi e riflessioni di un comunista militante, 110-30, and Luigi Longo, 'L'attentato a Vittorio Emanuele III.' 48 ACS, H2, b.22, All.A, 5. Cited in Biocca, 'Ignazio Silone: fratello e compagno.' 49 ACS, Casellario Politico Centrale (hereafter CPC), b.5194, Romolo Tranquilli. Silone, too, had been a suspect in the case but was never arrested for it. On the same day Romolo was sentenced, the charges against Silone (of having participated in the bombing) were dropped, presumably because Silone was a fugitive. 50 ACS, CPC, RT. 51 Ibid. 52 Silone, Uscita di sicurezza, 79. During his adolescence, Silone recalled, all of his prayers ended the same way: 'God, help me to live without betraying.' 53 Ibid., 109. 54 'Non riesco a capire perche Silone abbia tenuto a negare il fatto del1'appartenenza al Partito comunista del fratello Romolo, cosa che egli conosceva molto bene, essendo al tempo dell'attentato membro del Partito comunista e del suo Ufficio politico.' (T don't understand why Silone kept denying the fact of his brother Romolo's belonging to the Communist Party, something he knew very well, being at the time of the [bombing] attempt a member of the Communist Party and of its [political] office.') Luigi Longo and Salinari, Dal socialfascismo alia guerra di Spagna, 115. 55 The perception of Silone's responsibility was not exclusive to Silone. Don Orione, whom Silone greatly admired and to whom he was deeply indebted, said in his verbale that throughout Romolo's young adulthood he had attempted to remove Romolo from the malevolent influence of his brother.

166 Notes to pages 36-8 56 Darina Silone, 'Le ultime ore di Ignazio Silone/ in Severina, 171-4. 57 Darina Silone wrote three years after his death: [M]ai prima di quel giorno avevo osato porre domande a Silone riguardanti Romolo. A Zurigo, dove lo conobbi, mi aveva raccontato, un po' alia volta, la tragica storia di suo fratello: senza dettagli e senza emozione. Dovevo ascoltare in silenzio: la minima parola mia gli faceva subito cambiare argomento. ('Never before that day had I dared to pose Silone questions regarding Romolo. In Zurich, where I met him, he had told me the tragic story of his brother a little at a time: without details and without emotion. I was supposed to listen in silence: my littlest word caused him to change the subject immediately.') Similarly, Romolo Tranquilli, Jr confided that Silone refused to discuss Romolo with family members, a refusal that caused some pain to those who had known Romolo. (20 Feb. 1996, personal communication). 58 Silone, Uscita di sicurezza, 109. 59 Considering the fact that Luigi Longo had red hair, it is interesting to note the recurrence of red-headed villains in Silone's earliest fiction: the agentprovocateur in Fontamara (1934 ed., 224); the policeman from Apulia who rapes Annina in exchange for Luigi Murica's freedom in Pane e vino (1936 ed., 184); a red-headed artilleryman in La volpe e le camelie (in The Penguin New Writing, 111); and the 'alien hand' in The School for Dictators, 295. 60 Silone wrote, 'A un certo momento scrivere ha significato per me assoluta necessita di testimoniare' (at a certain point, for me, writing meant an absolute need to bear witness'). (Silone, Uscita di sicurezza, 62.) Critics have been quick to adopt this expression as a general Silonian epithet to stand alongside 'povero cristiano' in opposition to the other common one, 'rinnegato'; see Iris Origo's study of Silone, Bisogno di testimoniare, as well as Biblioteca della Pro Civitate Christiana di Assisi, Ignazio Silone tra testimonianza e Utopia, and Richard Grossman, The God That Failed: Six Studies in Communism (London: Hamilton 1950), which are organized around the theme of bearing witness. 61 Approached from a different angle, we may begin to speculate why Silone never won a Nobel Prize, though so many others writers of his ilk, such as Andre Gide (1947), Albert Camus (1957), and Jean-Paul Sartre (1964), did. These writers explored political, ethical, and moral questions similar to the ones Silone addressed in his literature, and each was lauded for his style as much as for the integrity of his political and ethical vision, whereas Silone was generally praised for one or the other but not both. 62 Emilio Cecchi, Di giorno in giorno: Note di letteratura italiana contemporanea (1945-54), 344.

Notes to pages 39-42 167 63 Geno Pampaloni, 'L'Opera narrativa di Ignazio Silone.' See also Enzo Enriques Agnoletti's review of Fontamara, and Giuseppe Dessi's 'Cronaca sul piano europeo.' 64 Cecchi, Di giorno in giorno, 344. 65 See d'Eramo, L'Opera di Ignazio Silone, 18-29 and 133-6 (Pane e vino). 66 See in particular Alberto Traldi, Fascismo e Narrativa, and d'Eramo, L'Opera di Ignazio Silone, for excellent overviews of Silone's critical reception in Italy and elsewhere. 67 They are Fontamara (1933), Pane e Vino (1936), La scuola del dittatori (1938), // seme sotto la neve (1941), and Ed egli si nascose (1944). 68 Ajello elaborates: 'Mentre nei riguardi dei simpatizzanti o dei fiancheggiatori il suo umore e tollerante se non colloquiale, verso i militanti o gli intellettuali "organici" la sua severita non conosce remore. Quando qualcuno dei collaborator! piu assidui gli chiede il conto di una simile disparita di trattamento - maggiore rigore verso i comunisti "veri" che verso gli "avventizi" - Togliatti risponde: "La massaia sculaccia il proprio figliolo, non quello della vicina."' ('While as regards sympathizers or supporters his mood is tolerant if not colloquial, towards militant Communists or "organic" intellectuals his severity knows no bounds. When one of the more frequent collaborators asks him to explain such disparity of treatment - greater rigor toward the "real" Communists than towards the "temporaries," Togliatti answers: "The housewife spanks her own son, not her neighbor's."'). Nello Ajello, Intellettuale e Pci, 1944-58, 260. 69 Richard Grossman, ed., The God That Failed: Six Studies in Communism. 70 See Ajello, Intellettuale e Pci, 259-60. 71 Ibid. 316. While Togliatti's comment makes it sound as though perhaps he knew about Silone's anti-Communist activites, it should also be borne in mind that this was a fairly standard epithet, used for the purposes of discrediting whenever one fell into disfavour. It is not currently known whether Togliatti had personal knowledge of Silone's association with the Fascists; for debate on the topic, see Ottorino Gurgo, 'Silone spia?'; Dario Fertilio, 'Silone la difesa di un povero cristiano'; Paolo Conti (// Corriere della Sera, 14 Oct. 2000); and historian of Communism Francois Fejto, 'Silone e la sua ombra/ Avvenire 4 Oct. 2000. 72 It is worth noting, however, that Silone and Trotsky were personal acquaintances from the period of Silone's activity in the PCI. 73 See d'Eramo, L'Opera di Ignazio Silone, 85-6. 74 See Walter Pedulla's La letteratura del benessere, 470. 75 La Fiera Letteraria, 11 April 1954. 76 Luce d'Eramo asserts that it was not until Vatican II that Catholics could

168 Notes to pages 42-8 read him seriously, because he promoted a brand of religion that was viewed unfavorably by Pius XII. See d'Eramo, L'Opera di Ignazio Silone, 82. 77 D'Eramo, for example, describes the reception of La scuola dei dittatori in terms of a collective sigh of relief, a putting to rest of the uncertainty over where to locate him: among the political writers or the fiction writers (ibid., 100). 78 Paul de Man, 'Sur les possibilites de la critique.' Cited in Jacques Derrida's 'Like the Sound,' in Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan, ed., Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism, 138. 79 Ian Balfour, 'Difficult Reading: de Man's Itineraries,' in Hamacher, Hertz, and Keenan, ed., Responses, 10. 80 d'Eramo, L'Opera di Ignazio Silone, 97. 81 Derrida, 'Like the Sound ...,' 134-5. Emphasis in original. 82 Recall his long relationship with Gabriella Seidenfeld, a fellow traveller whose sisters were also involved with members of the Communist underground. Her memoirs, entitled Le tre sorelle, describe her early life with Silone. The copy I consulted was a gift from Dario Biocca, for which I thank him. 83 Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 24. 84 Montanelli, Indro. 'Silone, spia? lo non ci credo/ // Corriere della Sera, 2 Feb. 1999. 85 See Herman Rapoport's review of Jacques Derrida's 'Archive Fever/ entitiled 'Archive Trauma.' 86 See Gurgo, 'Silone spia?' as well as Paolo Di Vince-nzo, 'Silone, un conflitto interiore.' In that interview, Mauro Canali singles out Norberto Bobbio and Indro Montanelli for intervening in the debate with no knowledge of its basis; Enzo Bettiza for 'imaginative' and 'singular' hypotheses with no foundation in the documents; the Centre Studi Siloniani in Pescina for 'un atto di pura scortesia e insieme di malaccorta furbizia' (an act both of pure rudeness and of imprudent cunning); and the Fondazione Silone for 'provincialismo soffocante' (suffocating provincialism). 87 Gurgo, 'Silone spia?' 88 'II ricordo ieri a Pescina/ in // Centra, August 23,2000. 89 Dario Fertilio, 'Silone e Gentile, gli esami della storia non finiscono mai.' 90 Federigo Argentieri, 'Caso Silone, qualche scorrettezza di troppo.' 91 Giuseppe Tamburrano, 'Silone spia? un nuovo caso Dreyfus/ and Enio Bruschi, Tgnazio Silone, militanza ed eresia: Intervista a Marino Biondi.' 92 Costantino Felice, 'Caso Silone, meno retorica.' 93 See also Romolo Liberale's 'Silone, un caso aperto.' 94 In the pages that follow, I am indebted in my thinking to Herman Rapoport's 'Archive Trauma.'

Notes to pages 49-57 169 95 Dario Biocca described to me an encounter he had in Pescina on 1 May 2001 with Enicandro Tranquilli, Silone's second cousin and a former director of the Centre Studi Siloniani, on the occasion of the presentation of the Premio Silone. Biocca was standing at the podium after his presentation when Tranquilli stood up in the audience, and, wagging his index finger and speaking slowly, delivered the following invective against the historian: 'Lei, Biocca, un giorno, tornera a Pescina, salira sulla collina che porta alia chiesa di San Berardo ove ripose le ceneri di Silone, e chiedera perdono.' ('You, Biocca, will return to Pescina one day, will climb the hill that leads to the Church of San Berardo where Silone's ashes lay, and you will ask forgiveness.') Afterwards, according to Biocca, the crowd went wild with applause and hoots of support for Tranquilli. One is tempted to ask to whom were his remarks really addressed, Biocca or Silone himself? 96 At the end of the essay 'Uscita di sicurezza,' Silone asks: 'Che mi rimane della lunga e triste avventura? Una segreta affezione per alcuni uomini che vi ho conosciuti, e il gusto di cenere di una gioventu sciupata.' ('What do I have left of the long, sad adventure? A secret affection for some of the men I met then, and the taste of ashes of a wasted youth.') Silone, Uscita di Sicurezza, 114. Chapter Two: Silone and the Symptom: 'Viaggio a Parigi' 1 Leonard Tennenhouse, ed., The Practice of Psychonalytic Criticism, 21. 2 ACS,PP,ST. 3 It was the fruit of a year-long experiment, begun in Jung's clinic where, at least initially, he did not produce writings for publication. Rather, he understood his writings as a means to a more private end, namely, his own psychological recovery. Jung was at the point of focusing his attention on the structure of the unconscious and of the psyche as well as psychological typologies, and was beginning to contrast his own with Freud's work. 4 The copy I consulted was a gift from Romolo Tranquilli, Jr. 5 Gisella Padovani also argues that the story was written in 1929 on the basis of what she calls the title story's 'journalistic' references. Gisella Padovani, Letteratura e socialismo, 16. 6 Luce d'Eramo, L'Opera di Ignazio Silone, 115. 7 Giovanni Verga (1840-1922), prolific Sicilian novelist and father of Italian verismo. 8 Sante Marelli, Silone: Intellettuale della liberta, 6. 9 Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 55-6. 10 Vittoriano Esposito says that, in three of the other cases, it is inappropriate

170 Notes to pages 60-6 to say Silone repudiated the stories because he returned to rework them. Considering the magnitude of the changes made to three of the five stories, I cannot agree. Only La volpe is resuscitated later, eventually becoming La volpe e le camelie (1960). See Esposito's introductory essay in Viaggio a Parigi, 7-8. 11 Silone (1988), 5. Hereafter cited as Silone, 1988. 12 Padovani, Letteratura, 1. 13 Silone, 'Viaggio a Parigi/ in Viaggio a Parigi (1993), 53. Hereafter cited as Silone, 1993. 14 Ibid., 54. 15 Gian Paolo Biasin's excellent / sapori delta modernita: cibo e romanzo is devoted to this topic. 16 Silone, 1993,55. 17 Silone, 1993,54. It is an interest that is explored in other texts as well: 'E' risaputo che gli avvocati delle nostre parti possiedono per i banchetti un tipo speciale di pantaloni, detto pantaloni ad armonica, e anche pantaloni da galantuomini, perche, invece di una, hanno tre file di bottom, in modo da poterli gradualmente allargare a mano a mano che la pancia ne sente 1'urgenza. Quel giorno i pantaloni di lor signori erano tutti al terzo stadio, e si capisce." ('It's well-known that the lawyers from around our parts possess a special type of trousers for banquets, called harmonica pants, also gentlemen's pants, because instead of one, there are three rows of buttons, so that little by little you can gradually widen them as the belly feels the need. That day our good men's pants were all at the third stage, and we understood why.') Silone, 1988,54. 18 Silone, 1993,54. 19 Ibid., 55. 20 Silone, 1988,142. 21 Ibid., 143-4. 22 Silone, 1993,60. 23 Mothers (with the exception of the eroticized mother-waitresses who appear in a dream-sequence later in the story) are all but absent from Silone's early fiction, though one or two will appear in his later novels. Nor does Silone ever devote any writerly attention to his biological mother. 24 Silone in Leone Piccioni, 'La Narrativa e il sottosuolo meridionale/ in Ignazio Silone tra testimonianza e Utopia, 53. 25 Silone in ibid., 54. 26 Padovani, Letteratura, 39. 27 Ibid., 37. 28 Gilbert Bosetti, Le mythe de I'enfance dans le roman italien contemporain, 108.

Notes to pages 66-9 171

29 30 31

32 33

34 35

36

37 38

See, for example, the scene in the novel in which Pietro Spina (dressed as Don Paolo) returns to his natal village, sees the familiar places of his childhood, and revisits 'his' vines. See Ritratti su misura, ed. E.F. Accrocca, 386, and Brunello Vandano, 'La Storia di Silone/ 38 (cited by Alberto Traldi, Fascismo e narrativa, 92). Traldi, Fascismo e narrativa, 92. 'Al momento dell'arresto egli era stato cosi duramente torturato da riceverne permanenti e atroci lesioni interne; e dovette attendere fino al 1932, nel penitenziario di Procida, la morte che ponesse fine al suo martirio.' ('At the moment of his arrest he had been so cruelly tortured that he developed permanent and atrocious internal lesions; and he had to wait until 1932, in the penitentiary at Procida, for death to put an end to his martyrdom.') Silone, 1965,109. Ibid., 80. Silone's real name, Secondino Tranquilli, was the first misrepresentation Silone would correct. As Dario Biocca points out, 'secondino' means 'prison-guard' and 'tranquilli' means 'tranquil': an unlikely name for a professional revolutionary. (Personal communication, February 1996.) Silone, 1993, 59. Padovani, Letteratura, 28. The tone, she says, is indicative of the influence of German Expressionists and other European literary and artistic movements with which Silone first came into contact in Switzerland. Stories such as the two which surround Romolo's mention were not uncommon during this period: 'Tre mesi fa, dodici contadini calabresi si sono imbarcati clandestinamente a Geneva diretti in America ... per sfuggire al Commissario di bordo si sono nascosti nel deposito di carbone. AH'arrivo a Nuova York tutti e dodici erano morti, soffocati dall'anidride carbonica ... Sette contadini della valle della Pescara ... volevano attraversare il confine montuoso della Francia. Tutti furono travolti da una valanga.' (Three months ago, twelve Calabrian peasants secretly embarked from Genoa headed for America ... in order to escape the officer on board they hid in the coal depository. Upon arrival in New York, all twelve were dead, suffocated by carbon dioxide ... Seven peasants from the Pescara valley wanted to cross the French mountain border. They were all swept away by an avalanche.' Silone, 1993,59. Ibid. Indeed, Silone's identification with Romolo seems to be reciprocated; several of Romolo's letters from prison around this time indicate that Romolo has acquired a taste for what fell previously into his brother's purview, literature: T'ho gia scritto che mi sono fatto venire vari libri e che percio il

172 Notes to page 69 tempo lo passa bene: ora se leggo Dante, riesco a intendere le sue bellezze, a che una volta riuscivo molto imperfettamente. Gusto anche il Petrarca e gli altri due: Tasso e Ariosto. Dante, Petrarca ecc., sto in buona compagnia, mi pare?!' ('I've already written you that I had several books sent and so I'm passing the time well; now if I read Dante, I can understand its beauty, which I used not to be able to do. I'm also sampling Petrarch and the other two: Tasso and Ariosto. Dante, Petrarch, etc., I'm in good company, don't you agree?!') ACS, CPC, RT, Tranquilli to Silone, 17 Dec. 1929. ACS, CPC, RT. 39 We may assume Silone was familiar with the story of Benjamin, based on his considerable knowledge of both the Old and New Testaments, to which he makes frequent reference in both his fiction and his non-fiction. As a boy, Silone attended seminary and was later placed in one of the schools organized by the famous priest Don Orione. He also refers directly to the sort of religious milieu in which he grew up while both of his parents were living. Silone, Uscita di sicurezza (1965,37). Cited hereafter as Silone, 1965. 40 ACS, TDS, b.326, f .3263, 'Secondino Tranquilli e Romolo Tranquilli.' This remark does not appear in any of the letters Silone exchanged with his brother during Romolo's imprisonment, nor is there any indication that Silone visited his brother either in Perugia or Procida. This is not surprising, since Silone himself was at least initially believed to have participated in the bombing and would not likely risk capture by such a visit. Romolo's remark, reported by Silone himself in Silone, 1965,110, may be apocryphal. 41 Silone insisted throughout his lifetime that Romolo was never at any point a member of the Communist Party: 'Almeno fino al momento dell'arresto, egli non era mai stato membro del Partito comunista, non aveva mai chiesto di fame parte, non vi era mai stato ammesso, non aveva mai partecipato ad alcuna sua adunanza o attivita, non ne conosceva neppure lo statute e il programma. ('At least up until the moment of his arrest, he had never been a member of the Communist Party, he had never asked to be a part of it, he had never been admitted, he had never participated in any of its gatherings or activities, he didn't even know the statute and the program.') Silone, 1965,109. Silone's longtime partner Gabriella Seidenfeld, however, states clearly in her memoirs that Romolo was indeed a member, though she makes no mention of his activities as such. ('Le tre sorelle. Autobiografia di Gabriella Seidenfeld,' 5, Collezione Franca Magnani Schiavetti, Rome; Dario Biocca gave me a copy of this work, for which I am grateful). Similarly, both Romolo's and Li Causi's verbali state that Romolo was a member of the PCI starting in 1927. ACS, CPC, RT. 42 Silone refused, even with family members, to discuss the circumstances

Notes to pages 69-76 173 surrounding Romolo's arrest or his feelings about Romolo, right until his death. (Personal communication, Romolo Tranquilli, Jr, February, 1996.) 43 Gabriella Seidenfeld Papers. 44 Maria Nicolai Paynter, Ignazio Silone: Beyond the Tragic Vision, 54. 45 Silone, 1993, 61. 46 Ibid. 47 Peppino reappears in the first version of Fontamara (1933) but his story is excised from the definitive revised edition (1948). Also known as Teroe della Porta Pia/ Peppino was a cafone who found fame and fortune as a hired thug for the Fascists. 48 Silone, 1993,65. Descriptions of or even allusions to sex never again appear in Silone's novels. Indeed, Ferdinando Virdia mentions Silone's uncanny reluctance to describe or allude to sexual activity in his novels. (Ferdinando Virdia, Ignazio Silone, 115.) The absence of such references has contributed to the rumour that Silone was impotent. His personal correspondence, in any case, indicates an active erotic life. (Aline Valangin Papers.) What is more, sympathetic sources describe his attractiveness to women, despite a certain laxness in his person. (Franca Magnani, Unafamigia italiana, 97-8.) 49 Silone, 1993, 66. Romolo Tranquilli was a victim of his own honesty. Contrary to the most fundamental rules of conduct for Communists under arrest (rules that he was carrying on his person at the time of his arrest in the form of a document entitled 'I comunisti di fronte alia polizia'), Romolo promptly admitted that he was a Communist and described in great detail the minutiae of his political activity and his contacts. His verbale is heartbreakingly frank. ACS, PP, RT. 50 Silone, 1965,121. 51 Silone, 1993, 68. 52 Romolo Tranquilli's verbale, ACS, PP, RT. 53 Silone, 1993,181-2. Viaggio a Parigi was translated from German into English and published in the London journal New Writing, for which Silone made twenty-one minor editorial changes. (Silone, 1993,83.) The Italian edition published by the Centre Studi Siloniani is actually a translation back into Italian of the first German translation. 54 Silone, 1993,69. After Romolo's arrest, decades passed before Silone would return to Pescina, though all of his books but one are set there. 55 Silone was said to have based this part of the story on the experience of an acquaintance from La Sante prison in Paris, who tried to emigrate in a dog kennel. D'Eramo, L'Opera di Ignazio Silone, 117. 56 Silone, 1993, 71-2. 57 This scene provides a twist on another moment in the biblical story of

174 Notes to pages 78-87 Joseph: Joseph's collection of grain for the Pharoah, which successfully avoids famine and thus brings about the return of his brother. 58 Silone, 1993,74. 59 For a discussion of racist advertising under the Fascists, see Karen Pinkus's Bodily Regimes. 60 I leave it to others to investigate Silone's depictions of femininity in his fiction. I will limit myself here to observing that, as the protagonists of his novels become increasingly Christ-like, they include fewer and fewer women, who become increasingly marginalized and de-eroticized. By the same token, the more ascetic the male protagonist in Silone's works, the more closely he himself is associated with 'feminine' qualities. 61 Silone, 1993,80. 62 Ibid., 82. 63 See Paynter's essay in Ignazio Silone on 'Viaggio a Parigi,' in which she sees the ending as a sign of happy solidarity. 64 See Esposito, Viaggio a Parigi, 28; also Paynter, Ignazio Silone. 65 Silone, 1993,107-8. 66 Ibid., 87-8. 67 Although at several points Simplicio revises his statement from 'L'uomo e buono' to 'L'uomo potrebbe essere buono/ at the end of the story and indeed on his deathbed he reiterates the former. 68 Silone, 1993,92. 69 I am indebted to David Marsh for his observation that Silone and the mythicized Amercian cowboy share similar traits. 70 Translated in Paynter, Ignazio Silone, 233-6. 71 Ibid., 233. 72 Ibid., 57. 73 Thus, I do not agree with Paynter when she claims that, in death, 'Simplicio symbolically represents the spirit of freedom and righteousness that, however much it may be persecuted, will always live on.' Paynter, Ignazio Silone, 58. 74 Carlo Ginzburg, History, Rhetoric and Proof, 19. 75 Note, however, the exculpatory effects of the strategies enacted by Beniamino (ethical impotence) and Simplicio (rhetoric over reality) when taken together. The strategies make a virtue of passivity or, rather, they justify themselves in terms of the outcomes they produce: if neither Beniamino nor Simplicio can be said to do good, it can also be said that they made no attempt to. More successful in terms of the protagonists of Silone's future narrative is a more positive vision of Simplicio (but not of Beniamino) as an ethical outlaw, that is, one for whom the assertion of rhetorical

Notes to pages 88-95 175 power can take place, paradoxically, only outside of the parameters of the ethical. 76 D'Eramo, L'Opera di Ignazio Silone, 31. 77 See 'Quaranta domande ...,' La Fiera Lettemria, 11 April 1954. Chapter Three: Torn Loyalties: Fontamara Ferdinando Virdia, Ignazio Silone, 39. Irving Howe, 'Politics and the Novel/ 125-6. Maria Nicolai Paynter, Ignazio Silone: Beyond the Tragic Vision, 76. ACS CPC RT, 22 June 1929. Ibid., 6 June 1931. Ibid., 22 June 1929,15 Dec. 1929,17 Dec. 1929, 30 Jan. 1930. Ibid., 20 Dec. 1929. Ibid., 1 Nov. 1929. Ibid., 18 Sept. 1929, 24 Sept. 1929, 26 Sept. 1929. Ignazio Silone, Memoriale del carcere svizzero, 10. Hereafter cited as Silone, 1979. 11 Ibid., 10. 12 Antonio Gramsci. Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Ixi. Luce d'Eramo, L'Opera di Ignazio Silone, presents a range of critical perspectives on the relationship between Christianity and Marxism in Silone. 13 By 1927 in Italy there was no longer the right to free speech, press, or assembly, all parties except Fascism were outlawed, and all cabinet ministers were responsible to Mussolini instead of to parliament or the crown. See Alexander De Grand, Italian Fascism, for a brief history; and for an anthology of writings from and about the Fascist period, see Jeffrey T. Schnapp, The Primer of Italian Fascism. 14 In 1929 Pope Pius XI and Mussolini signed the Lateran Agreements, whereby the Vatican state was created and the Kingdom of Italy was recognized by the pope. 15 Silone, 1988, 3. 16 Ibid., 5. 17 Ibid., 31-2. 18 This repetitive cadence is typical of Silone's prose style. Examples are numerous. 'Per vent'anni il solito cielo, circoscritto dall'anfiteatro delle montagne che serrano il Feudo come una barriera senza uscita: per vent'anni la solita terra, le solite piogge, il solito vento, la solita neve, le solite feste, i soliti cibi, le solite angustie, le solite pene, la solita miseria ...' (For twenty years the same sky, circumscribed by the amphitheater of the 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

176 Notes to pages 95-100 mountains that shut off the Feudo like a barrier with no escape: for twenty years the same earth, the same rains, the same wind, the same snow, the same holidays, the same foods, the same hardships, the same pains, the same misery ...') Silone, 1988. 3. 19 Ibid., 3-4. 20 Ibid., 26. 21 As the character Michele Zompa points out, at least one thing happens in the city every day and that is one too many for a poor farmer to keep track of: 'Ma una cosa sono i fatti, un'altra e chi comanda. I fatti cambiano ogni giorno, chi comanda e sempre quello. L'autorita e sempre quella.' ('But the facts are one thing, who's in charge is another. The facts change every day. Who's in charge is always the same. Authority is always the same.') Silone, 1988,27. 22 What is more, according to cafone Peppino Goriano, the Vatican and the government are apparently equally foul-smelling. After the leggi eccezionali were passed, Goriano recounts, a mysterious stench overcame the Eternal City. He says that it was not so noticeable in Testaccio, Trastevere, and San Lorenzo (blue-collar districts) but that it was particularly strong in the suburbs where white-collar workers lived, and practically lethal in the neighborhood around Saint Peter's. Silone, Fontamara (1934), 178-9. 23 See Ignazio Silone, Una manciata di more. 24 Silone, 1965,81. 25 Cfr. d'Eramo, L'Opera di Ignazio Silone.

26 Berardo's marginalized position vis-a-vis his community until he dies is consonant with that of Rene Girard's 'scapegoat' (in La violence et le sacre). Upon his death, Berardo transcends the Girardian category, since he is repositioned at the very heart of the village's practical and affective life. 27 'Quando si sentiva raccontare di qualche nuovo atto di violenza, se era veramente di Berardo, lo si riconosceva da se. Egli non lasciava impunita nessuna ingiustizia che ci venisse dal capoluogo. ('When one heard some new act of violence, if it was really Berardo's you could tell. He never allowed any injustice that came from the capital to go unpunished.') Silone, 1988, 75. 28 For a discussion of the Russian literary antecedents of the expression 'Che fare?' see Judy Rawson's 'Che fare? Silone and the Russian tradition of chto delat.' 29 Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 16. 30 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 67. 31 The proletariat can become the leading and the dominant class to the extent that it succeeds in creating a system of alliances which allows it to

Notes to pages 101-4 177

32

33 34

35 36 37

38 39 40

mobilize the majority of the working population against capitalism and the bourgeois state. In Italy, in the real class relations which exist there, this means to the extent that it succeeds in gaining the consent of the broad peasant masses.' Antonio Gramsci, 'On the Southern Question,' 36. Marx himself had no nostalgia for peasants per se. He thought that the peasants were essentially lost causes, since, unlike the proletariat, they were too backward and too far from the objective conditions in capitalism that would enable them to unmask the ideology that oppressed them. (Cfr. Marx's comparison of the French masses to a sack of potates in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,' reproduced in Robert Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 608.) Lenin's notion of class alliance, which (following Renate Holub) was strictly political and not intellectual or moral, was adopted and expanded by Gramsci to include those two categories, and is fully implemented in Silone's account of Fontamara and even more explicitly in Pane e vino. Freud uses the concepts of 'working through' and 'acting out'; the distinction, particularly in trauma, is engaged by Dominick La Capra. See Herman Rapoport, 'Archive Trauma,' 76-7n.2. Silone, 1965, 70. 'L'uomo era un vecchio alto, magro, con la faccia terrea e unta di peli grigi; accanto a lui, sua moglie e suo figlio. Sono dunque entrati. Si sono seduti. Han cominciato a raccontare. (Allora ho riconosciuto anche la voce.) Prima ha parlato il vecchio. Poi la moglie. Poi di nuovo il vecchio. Poi di nuovo la moglie ... Quel che han detto, e in questo libro.' ('The man was old, tall, thin, with an earthy face streaked with grey hairs; next to him were his wife and son. So they came in. They sat down. They began to speak. (Then I recognized their voices.) First the old man spoke. Then his wife. Then the old man again. Then the wife again ... What they said is in this book.') Silone, 1988,10. Verga, / Malavoglia, 3. See also Verga's 'La liberta' from Le novelle rusticane. Silone, 1988,12. Verga's novella 'Nedda,' for example, clearly articulates the Sicilian writer's position towards his characters in the stark contrast between the fire before which he has languidly abandoned himself, and the fire burning in the room where Nedda squats with thirty other women, waiting for her clothes to dry. 'Nedda/ 5-6. Verga, / Malavoglia, 5. Silone, 1988,13. For a thorough discussion of the influence of Verismo and particularly of Verga on Silone, see Gisella Padovani, Letteratura e socialismo, 35^5.

178 Notes to pages 104-10 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53

54 55 56

Verga, Tutte k novelle, 192. Silone, 1988, xviii. Ibid., 12. Verga, Tutte le novelle, 191. Francesco Jovine, L'ltalia die scrive, 7-8, cited in Alberto Traldi, Fascismo e narrativa, 95. Silone, in Leone Piccioni, 'La Narrativa e il sottosuolo meridionale/ 53. Aline Valangin Papers, Silone to Valangin, 28 Sept. 1932. Bruno Corbi, cited in Traldi, Fascismo e narrativa, 95. 'grotesque episodes,' Silone, 1965,100. Ibid., 102 ('A true revolutionary ...'). See also ibid., 89-98. Silone, 1988,22. Traldi, Fascismo e narrativa, 84. Traldi, along with Padovani, is one of the readers of Silone's works who is not beholden to the findings of other Silone scholars; both he and Padovani provide refreshingly original insights, well grounded in the texts and convincingly argued. 'La sua tesi centrale e estremamente semplice: muovendo dalla premessa che il fascismo deve essere visto e spiegato nel quadro della struttura sociale e politica della societa capitalistica contemporanea e delle sue contraddizioni, essa afferma che il fascismo sarebbe le forma o, almeno, una delle forme che nel XX secolo hanno assunto a livello politico, sociale ed ideologico la lotta contro il movimento rivoluzionario dei lavoratori e la sua repressione da parte del capitalismo.' ('Its central thesis is extremely simple: starting from the premise that Fascism must be seen and explained within the framework of the social and political structure of contemporary capitalist society and its contradictions, it affirms that Fascism would be the form or, at least, one of the forms that in the 20th century the struggle against the revolutionary workers' movement and its repression have assumed on the part of capitalism at the political, social and ideological level.') Renzo De Felice, Le Interpretazioni del fascismo, 50-1. Marx, Karl, 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte/ quoted in the Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader, 608. Traldi, Fascismo e narrativa, 86-7. The euphemistic description of torture in this section of the novel is consonant with the evolution we first noted in Chapter 2 regarding women and sexuality in Silone's texts. It is not just women's bodies but all bodies that eventually become written out of the novels as the author focuses increasingly on images of Christ, whose dual nature - flesh becoming spirit makes him the ultimate disembodied male.

Notes to pages 110-19 179 57 Silone, 1988,194. 58 Ibid., 28-9. 59 Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince (New York: International Publishers 1987), 140. 60 Renate Holub explains the relationship between 'spontaneous consent' and hegemony in these terms: 'Hegemony helps to explain how state apparatuses, or political society - supported by and supporting a specific economic group - can coerce, via its institutions of law, police, army and prisons, the various strata of society into consenting to the status quo [... and] how and where civil society, with its institutions ranging from education, religion, and the family to microstructures of the practices of everyday life, contribute to the production of meaning and values which in turn produce, direct and maintain the "spontaneous" consent of the various strata of society to that same status quo/ Renate Holub, Antonio Gramsci, 6. 61 Silone, 1988, 44. 62 Ibid., 75. 63 Ibid., 133-4. 64 Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 29. 65 Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 43. 66 Ibid. Emphasis in original. Chapter Four: Consummatum est: Pane e vino 1 For a small sampling of the critical interpretation, see the introductory essay to the novel by Claudio Marabini (in Silone, 1989) as well as the chapters on Bread and Wine in Ferdinando Virdia, Ignazio Silone; Sante Marelli, Silone: Intellettuale della liberta; Vittoriano Esposito, Viaggio a Parigi; and Giancarlo Borri, 'La perfezione del potere e il disordine dello spirito/ Ignazio Silone clandestino nel novecento. 2 Unlike Pietro Spina's recuperation, however, Silone's did not result in his return, with new goals and hopes, to the party fold. Indeed, Silone's arrival in Switzerland meant his permanent separation from the PCI. 3 See Silone, 1965, 89-99. 4 Silone, 1989, 231-2. Moreover, the resemblance between this speech and a passage from a letter written to Silone by Tresso is striking. In // Dio che efallito, Tresso wrote 'L'ambiente della nostra responsabilita e 1'Italia e non la Russia. Noi non possiamo mettere in crisi la nostra lotta contro il fascismo solo perche i russi litigano fra loro. Le condizioni di lotta in Italia e in Rus-

180 Notes to pages 119-26 sia possono, a prima vista, sembrare un punto di partenza e un punto d'arrivo; ma nessuno puo stabilire tra questi due poli un nesso di assoluto fatalita. Percio andiamo avanti e speriamo che la futura rivoluzione comunista in Italia finisca un po' meglio.' (The area of our responsibility is Italy and not Russia. We cannot jeopardize our struggle against Fascism just because the Russians are fighting among themselves. The conditions in Russia and Italy might seem like a point of departure and one of arrival, at first glance, but no one can establish a connection of absolute fate between these two poles. So let's keep moving forward and hope that the future Communist revolution in Italy turns out a little better.') Quoted in Giorgio Galli, Storia del Pci, 90. 5 See especially Togliatti's 'Contribute alia psicologia di un rinnegato/ L'Unita, 6 Jan. 1950, for an indication of the public criticism Silone suffered after leaving the party. 6 Silone, 1965,110. 7 Silone, 1989,49-50. 8 Ibid., 128. 9 Silone, 1965,106. 10 Historian Mauro Canali calls these versions 'insidie' - traps or ambushes. (Dario Biocca and Mauro Canali, L'informatore, 33.) 11 Silone, 1965,106. The use of the term 'heresy' in the context of ideological beliefs also recalls the linkage between Catholicism and Communism put forth around this time by Pier Paolo Pasolini in such films as the 1964 Gospel According to St. Matthew. For a critical interpretation of Pasolini's film, see Millicent Marcus's 'Pasolini's Gospel According to St. Matthew: The Gaze of Faith/ in Filmmaking by the Book. 12 Silone, 1965,104-5. 13 Ibid., 105. 14 Angelo Tasca, Naissance du Fascisme. 15 Ibid., 10; Silone, 1993,182. 16 Silone's preface in Tasca, Naissance, 17. 17 Giancarlo Borri, Clandestine nel '900,13. 18 Such bricolage worked in another direction as well; occasionally other historical figures were recast from Silone's own personal mould. According to Silone, even Risorgimento thinker Giuseppe Mazzini shared many of our author's concerns and interests; compare, for example, a passage that first questions, then confirms, the supremacy of writing over political action in Silone's letter to Bellone (13 April 1930). Silone, The Living Thoughts of Mazzini, 10. 19 We might compare the pathways by which mutual influences circulate

Notes to pages 126-7 181

20

21

22 23

between Silone's self-presentation, the development of his biography by his readership, and the creation of his fictional characters 'with a thesis suggested by Slavoj Zizek. In his discussion of the Lacanian symptom, Zizek compares it to a science-fiction story. The story, by William Tenn, is entitled The Discovery of Morniel Mathaway.' Zizek's synopsis goes like this: 'A distinguished art historian takes a journey in a time machine from the twenty-fifth century to our day to visit and study in vivo the immortal Morniel Mathaway, a painter not appreciated in our time but later discovered to have been the greatest painter of the era. When he encounters him, the art historian finds no trace of genius, just an imposter, a megalomaniac, even a swindler who steals his time machine from him and escapes into the future, so that the poor art historian stays tied to our time. The only action open to him is to assume the identity of the escaped Mathaway and to paint under his name all the masterpieces that he remembers from the future - it is himself who is really the misrecognized genius he was looking for!' (Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 57.) Claudio Marabini identifies in the figure of Pietro Spina of Bread and Wine Lo Sconosciuto, the nameless cellmate in Fontamara (in Silone, 1989, vi.) To my mind, it is more productive to see the point of contiguity between the characters of the two texts as functional rather than explicit - both Pietro Spina and Berardo's cellmate function within the texts' respective economies to set in motion, anonymously, the events that precipitate the eventual death of other (innocent) characters. Silone described himself as a 'socialista senza partito e cristiano senza chiesa' in a January 1961 interview with the French weekly L'Express. One example of the success of this epithet is the title of Margherita Pieracci Harwell's book Un cristiano senza chiesa e altri saggi. Bread and Wine (1936), 83-4. It is interesting in this regard to consider the structural analogies between the psychological antagonism just described and Karl Marx's dialectics as he set out in 'Alienation and Social Classes' (1844): The proletariat and wealth are opposites. As such they form a whole. They are both products of the world of private property. The whole question is what position each of these two elements occupies within the opposition. It does not suffice to proclaim them two sides of one whole. Private property as private property, as wealth, is compelled to preserve its own existence and thereby the existence of its opposite, the proletariat. This is the positive side of the antagonism, private property satisfied with itself. The proletariat, on the other hand, is compelled to abolish itself and thereby its conditioning opposite private property - which makes it a proletariat. This is the negative side of

182 Notes to pages 128-36

24 25

26

27

28

29 30 31 32 33

the antagonism, its disturbance within itself, private property abolished and in the process of abolishing itself.' Emphasis in original. Reproduced in Robert Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 133. Silone, 1989,35. Paynter rightly notes that Pietro's return to his village, which takes place in April 'after many days of wandering in the rain through the desert-like mountains,' and the gradual renewal of his natural complexion, which had been darkened chemically to help disguise him, strengthen the connection between Pietro's return in the spring and his association with rebirth, particularly the rebirth of the Passion. (Maria Nicolai Paynter, Ignazio Silone, 104.) They are linked chiasmatically in terms of their respective means of redemption as well: in 2 Corinthians 12:7, the apostle Paul writes of a thorn: 'And by reason of the exceeding greatness of the revelations that I should not be exalted overmuch, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to buffet me, that I should not be exalted overmuch.' Charles Eliot, ed., The First and Second Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, vol. 45. (New York: PR Collier and Sons, 1909-14). Within the novel, the thorn, representative of infirmity and thus also humility, provides Pietro's (not Paolo's) redemption, and Paolo's redemption comes by way not of contemplation but of action, indicated by the sword. The intrusion of Pietro's earthy (and not spiritual) thoughts into Paolo's conversations further recalls the 'thorn' in the side of Paolo's biblical namesake. The thorn is considered by some to be a reference to the temptations of the flesh in general; for others, Paul refers specifically to homoerotic desire. In the context of Silones's (self-)revelation, the protagonist's names take on yet another layer of meaning when read in conjunction with the revelations from God to which Paul refers. They are so great that they would, for example, give him cause for excess pride (this is written twice) were it not for the pain and shame of the thorn in his side; nor can he speak about them for the same reasons. Beyond the possible parallels between Paul's and Silone's tribulations, one might imagine that such a passage held some consolation for Silone - even the apostles occasionally gloated over their secrets! The absence of bees during the three months of winter is likened to the three-day absence of Christ between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. Silone, 1989,239. Ibid., 242. Ibid., 362. Ibid., 365.

Notes to pages 140-5 183 34 Tempo presente was a journal co-founded by Silone and Nicola Chiaromonte in 1956. The fact that Silone received a secret subsidy from the CIA to support it is well known and openly discussed, and seems to have caused relatively little commentary among his critics beyond the fact that it is frequently mentioned by his biographers. 35 Severina is considered by some to be Silone's best work, although Silone himself died before he could complete the composition of the manuscript. On the basis of a thorough outline and extensive notes, the novel was written largely by Silone's wife, Darina. 36 S0ren Germer, German Experiments in the Science and Politics of Evolution, 143-4. 37 In a certain sense, Silone's redimensioning as a sign shares much with Zizek's explication of the Hegelian concept of the 'verbal memory/ an explication on which I rely heavily here. For Zizek, 'verbal memory' creates a provisional unity of meaning and expression that is doomed to fail, resulting in the evacuation of the sign's internal meaning and its redimensioning as a performative. The christological implication of this move for Zizek is 'not the word's self-obliteration in the face of its Meaning but the death of this meaning itself (46). Similarly, the experiential simultaneity of himself and his self-creation, of Silone's self-perception as the sum of a series of irrevocable decisions and as a fictional character who could by definition be readjusted ad infinitum, could never merge. His imperfect identification with his own fictional creations carried him along a trajectory parallel to that of a sign losing its internal meaning. The resulting loss was nonetheless productive. It produced of Silone (the finite human) the sign which not only represented him but also constituted him: the performative. This conception of Silone's personal Passion and the notion of 'verbal memory' thus share the same mechanism; the word (or, for Silone, the Word made Flesh) acquires its totality through self-obliteration. See Slavoj Zizek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, 44-6. Chapter Five: Past Imperfect: Critical (Self-)Revisions 1 See Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow's Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. 2 At a general theoretical level, I take as points of departure the writings of Susan Rubin Suleiman and Slavoj Zizek; their respective engagements with the relationships between fiction, ideology, and representation have provided the springboard for many of my thoughts in this discussion. 3 See Bruno Falcetto, ed., Ignazio Silone. Romanzi e saggi. Note, however, that

184 Notes to pages 145-8 Falcetto contests any correlation between Silone's 'real life' and the presence of scenes in Silone's novels about spies, lies, and the police, such as the ones involving Luigi Murica in Pane e vino. 4 This was Leo Valiani's opinion, for one; see his interview with D. Messina in 'L'antifascista Silone vittima di un falso dell'Ovra.' See also Francesco Perfetti, 'Bilancio sull'attivita di informatore e rivelazione di altri documenti. C'e un Silvestri che la sa lunga, II Sole 24 ore, 30 May 1999 and Mimmo Franzinelli's 'Silvestri, 1'infame/ 10-11. 5 Bocca is quoted in Ottorino Gurgo, 'Silone spia? Quei documenti non dicono tutto.' 6 Silone, Fontamara (1988), 10. 7 For a discussion of 'discursive mechanisms that generate evidence of Sense/ see Michel Pecheux's The Mechanism of Ideological (Mis)recognition.' 8 Verga, I Malavoglia, 5. 9 I distinguish 'found footage' from the conceit of the 'found manuscript,' which claims to motivate the author's initial narrative gesture in such novels as Manzoni's I Promessi sposi and Umberto Eco's The Island of the Day Before. I make this distinction on the basis of the self-consciousness with which these novels repeatedly proclaim their status, a status marked only by its disavowal in films. 10 Susan Rubin Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions, 54. 11 Ibid., 203. 12 Ibid. 13 It is fascinating to notice how little the language of the 'discovery' of Silone has changed over the decades; compare the description in Chapter 1 of Geno Pampaloni (1949) reading Silone for the first time to William Weaver's evocation (1999) of his first reading: 'I had discovered Silone's works in the Western Desert, in Libya. Isolated with the other thirty-odd members of my company, idle, I spent all my time reading ... Then a fellow driver -1 forget who it was - lent me the Penguin edition of Fontamara, the stark title printed on a white band between two orange ones; when I had read that, the same friend handed me the Harper first US edition of Bread and Wine. When I came across a copy of that same edition recently in the Bard College library, it was like running into a long-lost wartime buddy; I could almost feel the grains of Libyan sand between the pages.' William Weaver, ed., Open City, 11. 14 Suleiman, Autoritarian Fictions, 18. 15 But Suleiman's remarks are about an anthropomorphized 'modern criti-

Notes to pages 149-52 185 cism' that feels 'wary' of critics and readers. Who lurks behind the term 'modern criticism'? And why are critics and readers two separate categories (a disingenuous question, since I would venture to say that Suleiman does not mean to imply mutual exclusivity between the two groups, that the people who generate criticism of texts do not actually read them)? 16 Senator Leo Valiani, for example, said that even if Silone were to rise up from the grave and say it was all true, he would not believe it. (Indro Montanelli, 'Silone spia? lo non ci credo/ Corriere della Sera, 2 Feb. 1999.) See also the exchange between Indro Montanelli and Piero Melograni, in which Montanelli 'confesses' to having participated in the press debate about Biocca and Canali's book without having read it. (Corriere della Sera, 5 April 2000.) 17 Marcia Landy, Film, Politics, and Gramsci, 129. 18 Walter Benjamin, 'Theses on the Philosophy of History/ in Illumination (New York: Schocken Books 1976), 255. Quoted in Marcia Landy, Film, Politics, and Gramsci, 126. 19 'As early as The Spider's Strategem, [Bertolucci] portrayed the ideological underpinnings of the Italian Resistance movement as a consciously orchestrated fiction employed by the Left to dramatize its anti-Fascist interpretation of Italian history to the masses.' (Peter Bondanella, Italian Cinema from Neorealism to the Present, 404). Loshitzky connects the film's interest in indeterminacy with an inability to determine whether 'the past as a myth of resistance belongs to the right or to the left.' (Yosefa Loshitzky, The Radical Faces ofGodard and Bertolucci, 57). 20 Kaes uses the term 'Mobius strip' in his discussion of the endless recycling of images in films depicting the Holocaust. (Anton Kaes, 'History and Film: Public Memory in the Age of Electronic Dissemination/ in History and Memory: Studies in Representation of the Past (Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 1990), p. 112. 21 I am reminded of Michel Pecheux's description of the 'Munchhausen effect, in honor of the immortal baron who lifted himself into the air by pulling on his own hair.' Pecheux, The Mechanism of Ideological (Mis)recognition/ 150. 22 Discussions about revisionism in Italy are very different than in other parts of Western Europe because of the central role played by the Italian Left in the post-war period of re-construction. In Germany, in contrast, revisionist trends (Vergangenheitsbewaltigung) have been driven by the Left since the end of the republic under Konrad Adenauer (chancellor of West Germany, 1949-63). 23 Alice Kaplan, The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach, 215ff. 24 It is unclear whether or not Uscita di sicurezza was seriously considered, but

186 Notes to pages 152-6 critics often repeat that the book was 'denied' the prestigious award. The novel did, however, win the 1965 Premio Strega, though it was considered by many to be a consolation prize. 25 The ways in which Silone's ambivalent ideological stance are reflected in conflicting drives in current Italian culture (as exemplified, for instance, by Berlusconi on the one hand and the violence at the G8 meetings on the other) would make a fruitful object of inquiry. How will Silone be understood in the new Italy? Will he still be read at all? 26 See Octave Mannoni, 'Je sais bien, mais quand meme ...' 27 Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions, 244.

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Archival Documents Archivio Centrale dello Stato (ACS), Rome, Italy Ministero dell'Interno Casellario Politico Centrale (CPC) b.5195 Secondino Tranquilli b.5194 Romolo Tranquilli Polizia Politica (PP) b.1412 Secondino Tranquilli H-2,1928, Milano: Attentato terroristico bb.20,21,22 Tribunale per la difesa dello Stato (TDS) b.326, f.3263. 'Secondino Tranquilli e Romolo Tranquilli' Official Periodicals Regione Abruzzo: Rivista del Consiglio Regionale dell'Abruzzo. March-April 1996. Personal Archives Gabriella Seidenfeld Papers Aline Valangin Papers Franca Magnani Schiavetti Papers

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Index

Accrocca, Elio Filippo, 171n.29 Adenauer, Konrad, 185n.22 Agnoletti, Enzo Enriques, 167n.63 Ajello, Nello, 167 nn.68, 70 Althusser, Louis, 113 Argentieri, Federigo, 168n.90 Ariosto, Ludovico, 171n.38 Balfour, Ian, 43,168n.79 Bellardelli, Giovanni, 159n.2,161n.8, 162n.l4 Bellone, Guido, 13,15,19,22,23-5, 28,29,43,44,51,52,58, 74, 86,154, 162n.l2,163n.24,180n.l8 Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, 159nn.4, 6 Benjamin (Old Testament), 69, 172n.39 Benjamin, Walter, 149,185n.l8 Berlusconi, Silvio, 152,186n.25 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 149-50 Bettiza, Enzo, 168n.86 Biasin, Gian Paolo, 170n.l5 Biocca, Dario, 4, 9,12, 21, 24, 27,47, 159n.3,161n.ll, 162nn.l2,17, 163n.27,164n.36,165nn.41,48, 168n.82,169n.95,171n.33,172n.41, ISOn.lO, 185n.l6

Bobbio, Norberto, 12,160n.l7, 168n.86 Bocca, Giorgio, 145,163n.22,184n.5 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 6 Bondanella, Peter, 185n.l9 Borri, Giancarlo, 179n.l, 180n.l7 Bosetti, Gilbert, 170n.28 Brasillach, Robert, 7,152,185n.23 Braun, Emily, 8,160n.lO Bruschi, Enio, 168n.91 Calvino, Italo, 6 Camesasca, Ettore, 160n.lO Campanella, Tommaso, 41 Camus, Albert, 166n.61 Canali, Mauro, 4,12, 24, 27, 47, 159n.3,163n.27,164n.36,168n.86, 180n.lO, 185n.l6 Carducci, Giosue, 159n.5 Caruth, Cathy, 18, 28, 48,164nn.31, 35 Cecchi, Emilio, 38,150,166n.62, 167n.64 Celestine V (Pietro da Morrone), 55, 140 Chiaromonte, Nicola, 183n.34 Ciucci, Giorgio, 159n.6

198 Index Cockburn, Alexander, 11-12,160n.l3 Conti, Paolo, 167n.71 Corbi, Bruno, 178n.48 Costantino, Felice, 47 Grossman, Richard, 166n.60,167n.69 Dante, Alighieri, 6,171n.38 De Felice, Renzo, 178n.53 DeGrand, Alexander, 175n.l3 Deledda, Grazia, 159n.5 Deleuze, Gilles, 113,179n.64 De Man, Paul, 7,11,12,14,27,42, 43,44,49, 85,141,160n.l2, 168n.78 D'Eramo, Luce, 44,159n.l, 163n.23, 167nn.65,66, 73, 76,168nn.77,80, 169n.6,173n.55,175n.76,176n.25 Derrida, Jacques, 17-18, 28,44,45, 144,168nn.78,81,85 Dessi, Giuseppe, 167n.63 Di Nicola, Primo, 159n.2,161nn.5,ll Di Vicenzo, Paolo, 168n.86 Dreyfus, Hubert, 183n.l Eco, Umberto, 6,184 n.9 Eliot, Charles, 182n.26 Esposito, Vittoriano, 169n.lO, 174n.64,179n.l Falcetto, Bruno, 183n.3 Federici, Federico, 162n.l4 Fejto, Francois, 167n.71 Felice, Costantino, 168n.92 Fertilio, Dario, 167n.71,168n.89 Fischer, Louis, 40 Fo, Dario, 159n.5 Foot, John, 160n.l3 Francesco d'Assisi, 41,130 Franzinelli, Mimmo, 12,160n.l7, 162n.l7,184n.4

Freud, Sigmund, 28,169n.3,177n.32 Galli, Giorgio, 179n.4 Gavagnin, Armando, 165n.41 Germer, S0ren, 183n.36 Gide, Andre, 40,166n.61 Ginzburg, Carlo, 85,174n.74 Girard, Rene, 176n.26 Gramsci, Antonio, 72,94,99,100, 108,110,112,114,149,175n.l2, 176nn.29,31,179n.59 Greene, Graham, 6 Guattari, Felix, 113,179n.64 Guerri, Giordano Bruno, 161n.6 Gurgo, Ottorino, 167n.71,168nn.86, 87,184n.5 Hamacher, Werner, 168nn.78, 79 Harwell, Margherita Pieracci, 181n.21 Heidegger, Martin, 141 Hertz, Neil, 168nn.78, 79 Hitchens, Christopher, 11-12, 160n.l3 Holub, Renate, 176n.31,179n.60 Howe, Irving, 89,175n.2 Isorni, Jacques, 7 Joachim of Floris (Calabria), 41, 55 Joseph (Old Testament), 69,173n.57 Jovine, Francesco, 178n.45 Jung, Carl Gustav, 8,22,169n.3 Kaes, Anton, 185n.20 Kaplan, Alice, 7,152,160nn.8,12, 185n.23 Keenan, Thomas, 168nn.78, 79 Koestler, Arthur, 40

Index 199 Lacan, Jacques, 56 La Capra, Dominick, 177n.32 Laclau, Ernesto, 100,176n.30 Landy, Marcia, 185n.l7 Lebovics, Herman, 159n.6 Le Carre, John, 6 Lenin, Vladimir, 99,109,110,113, 114,177n.31 Leto, Guido, 31 Liberale, Romolo, 168n.93 Li Causi, Girolamo, 35,172n.41 Longo, Luigi, 32-3, 35, 69,165 nn.45, 47,54,166n.59 Loshitzky, Yosefa, 185n.l9 Mannoni, Octave, 186n.26 Manzoni, Alessandro, 61, 73,184n.9 Marabini, Claudio, 179n.l, 181n.20 Marcus, Millicent, 180n.ll Marelli, Sante, 169n.8,179n.l Marsh, David, 174n.69 Marx, Karl, 95, 98,108,109,110, 176n.31,178n.54,181n.23 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 180n.l8 Melograni, Piero, 185n.l6 Messina, Dino, 159n.2,162n.l4, 184n.4 Montale, Eugenio, 159n.5 Montanelli, Indro, 45-7,168nn.84,86, 185n.l6 Moravia, Alberto, 5,17 Mouffe, Chantal, 100,176n.30 Mussolini, Benito, 31,109,175n.l4 Nudi, Francesco, 25,164n.29 Origo, Iris, 166n.60 Orione, Don Luigi, 172n.39 Orwell, George, 11-12 Ovid, 73

Padovani, Gisella, 66,164n.33, 169n.5,170 nn.12,26,171n.35, 178n.52 Pampaloni, Geno, 167n.63,184n.l3 Papasogli, Giorgio, 165n.39 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 180n.ll Paul, Saint, 129,131,182nn.26,27,28 Pavese, Cesare, 17 Paynter, Maria Nicolai, 70,84,85,90, 163n.23,173n.44,174nn.63, 70, 73, 175n.3,182n.25 Pecheux, Michel, 184n.7,185n.21 Pedulla, Walter, 167n.74 Perfetti, Francesco, 184n.4 Peter, Saint, 129,131 Petrarca, Francesco, 6,171n.38 Piccioni, Leone, 178n.46 Pinkus, Karen, 174n.59 Pirandello, Luigi, 48,159n.5 Pius XI, Pope, 175n.l4 Prenowitz, Eric, 161n.3 Quasimodo, Salvatore, 159n.5 Rabinow, Paul, 183n.l Radek, Karl, 40 Rapoport, Herman, 47,168n.85, 168n.94,177n.32 Rawson, Judy, 176n.28 Ricci, Aldo, 161n.ll Salinari, Carlo, 165nn.47, 54 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 160n.7,166n.61 Scaramucci, Ines, 161n.2 Schiavetti, Franca Magnani, 162n.l9, 173n.48 Schnapp, Jeffrey, 175n.l3 Seidenfeld, Gabriella, 22, 90,91, 168n.82,172n.41,173n.43 Siciliano, Enzo, 159n.4,161n.6

200 Index Silone, Darina, 18,21,32,161n.9, 165n.43,166nn.56,57,183n .35 Sironi, Mario, 8,160n.lO Sozzi, Gastone, 72,110 Spender, Stephen, 40 Stalin, Joseph, 2 Stille, Alexander, 160n.l3 Stone, Maria Susan, 159n.6 Strauss, Leo, 45,168n.83 Suleiman, Susan Rubin, 146,147, 148,156,183n.2,184nn.lO, 14,15, 186n.27 Sutro, Nettie, 74 Tamburrano, Giuseppe, 162n.l7, 168n.91 Tasca, Angelo, 123-4,125,180nn.l4, 16 Tasso, Torquato, 171n.38 Tennenhouse, Leonard, 160n.ll, 169n.l Togliatti, Palmiro, 3,13,18,22,28,40, 41,107,145,167nn.68, 71,180n.5 Traldi, Alberto, 108,109,167n.66, 171nn.29,30,178nn.45,48,52,55 Tranquilli, Enicandro, 169n.95 Tranquilli, Paolo, 56,65, 66, 67 Tranquilli, Romolo, 10, 21,22, 24, 28, 30-7,67,68,69,71-2, 74, 82^, 86, 90-1,120,124,136,137,140,144, 162n.l8,165nn.40,49,54,55,

171nn.36,38,172n.40,173nn.49,52, 54 Tranquilli, Romolo, Jr, 21,162n.l5, 164n.32,166n.57,169n.4 Tresso, Pietro, 107,123,125,179n.4 Trotsky, Lev, 40,107,119,167n.72 Tucker, Robert, 178n.54,181n.23 Valangin, Aline, 22,90,162n.l9, 173n.48,178n.47 Valiani, Leo, 21,161n.9,185n.l6, 184n.4 Vandano, Brunello, 171n.29 Verga, Giovanni, 14,54,56,61, 64, 65-6,77,92,102-6,114,116,169n.7, 177n.40; and I Malavoglia, 70, 80, 98,102,146,177nn.35,38,184n.8; and Le novelle, 102,177n.37, 178nn.41,44 Virdia, Ferdinando, 89,160n.l, 173n.48,175n.l, 179n.l Vittorini, Elio, 17 Vittorio Emanuele, III, 31 Weaver, William, 184n.l3 Wright, Richard, 40 Zizek, Slavoj, 10, 56,87,113,131, 141,169n.9,179n.65,180n.l9, 183nn.37, 2 Zunino, Pier Giorgio, 159n.6,164n.28