Narrative Economics/1 - With the Abruzzo writer's literary masterpiece, a new journey begins through stories (and words) guardians of a world
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 13/10/2024
«By order of the mayor all reasoning is prohibited»
Ignazio Silone, Fontamara, p. 89
Start with Fontamara a new series through some literary masterpieces, in search of new words for the economy and for our difficult times.
If reality were enough for us, there would be no need for literature. We are infinity, novels shorten the distance between us and eternity; we are desire, writers increase desirable things because closed-eyed dreams are too little. Joy also feeds on the worlds created by literature, our righteousness grows as we become indignant while reading a novel, we learned pietas from parents and friends but also from fairy tales and writers' stories. We would not have been able to imagine the promised land of democracy, freedom and rights if we had not encountered it in myths and novels, glimpsed it in a poem. We have known God because the Bible taught us through stories, and human words have held another Word. All faiths will come to an end on the sad day when we stop writing stories, and telling them to each other.
"Ignazio Silone has today his maturity crowned and sovereignly fixed in works of art that are at the same time his 'song of creatures' and his apocalyptic vision of the new democratic spirituality... We think we are doing something most timely by giving here as an appendix to our weekly, the first novel of his that gave the international world the acute sensation of the suffering of the Italian people under fascist regime" (March 7, 1945). So wrote Ernesto Buonaiuti introducing the publication of the first chapters of Fontamara in the first issue of his weekly "Il Risveglio." Buoaniuti, the great and beloved professor of the history of Christianity at La Sapienza in Rome, among the twelve academics who did not swear an oath to the Fascist regime, a priest excommunicated from the Catholic Church for his modernist theses-we are still waiting for his rehabilitation, perhaps at Jubilee time.
Fontamara was written by Ignazio Silone (Secondino Tranquilli) in the early 1930s during his Swiss exile. It was first published in German (Zurich, Oprecth & Helbing, April 1933, translation by Nettie Sutro), which was followed by a first Italian-language edition (Zurich-Paris, November 1933) reprinted in London in 1943 (J. Cape, dated 1933). The first edition in Italy came only in 1947 thanks to the small Roman publisher 'Faro,' and finally in 1949 with Mondadori. Its international success was considerable, but it had to wait until the collapse of fascism to be printed in Italy.
In 1930 Silone had been in Switzerland for two years, between Zurich and Davos, for his clandestine commitment to the Communist Party he had helped found at the Livorno congress in 1921. It was also during his Swiss sojourn that his disagreements with Togliatti over his anti-Stalinist positions began, to be followed by his expulsion from the party in 1931. In the sanatorium to treat a respiratory illness (apparent tuberculosis), depressed, distressed about the situation of his brother Romolo, the only one of his family who had been saved with him in 1915 under the rubble of the Pescina earthquake, who had been put in prison by the fascist regime, tortured and then killed in 1932 - Silone dedicates Fontamara to his brother and to Gabriella Seidenfeld, his companion he had met in 1920 from whom he was separating romantically.
Fontamara is thus the distillation of terrible years, the fruit of a very painful metamorphosis. A very deep existential crisis that generated the masterpiece. Fontamara is not only a novel that revealed to Italy and the world the deep soul of the southern peasant world, nor is it only a classic of anti-fascism. Fontamara is above all a literary masterpiece, a stupendous novel, one of those works that perhaps only great pain can generate. Silone, he would later say, found his salvation in literature, overcame that very dark night by becoming a writer-and what a writer! There are many ways to try to save oneself from the black holes of life, writing and art being among the most powerful and common, because one gets out of the hole by learning to fly.
To understand and enjoy it, however, there is a need to perform some essential ethical-spiritual exercises. The first is the most difficult one, perhaps impossible but really necessary: try to forget our comforts, the worship of commodities, offices and incentives, and go with our souls to the world of Fontamara: "First came the sowing, then the sulfur, then the reaping, then the harvest. Then what? Then all over again. The sowing, the weeding, the pruning, the sulfurring, the reaping, the harvest. Always the same song, the same refrain. Always. The years went by, the years accumulated, the young became old, the old died, and the sowing was done, the weeding was done, the insulphation was done, the harvest was done. And then again? All over again. Each year like the previous year, each season like the previous season. Each generation like the previous generation" (1951, p. 9). It is the reign of Sisyphus, but unlike A. Camus's Sisyphus, Silone's Sisyphus is not happy: "To those who look at Fontamara from afar, from the Feudo del Fucino, the settlement ... seems like a village like so many others; but to those who are born and grow up there, the cosmos. The whole universal history takes place there: births, deaths, loves, hates, envies, struggles, despairs" (p. 8). In the first edition of 'The Awakening,' at the end of this paragraph Silone had added, "The spectacle of life is there more meager, more visible and comprehensible, and nothing essential is missing," a phrase that then disappeared in later editions.
The second exercise of spiritual imagination concerns the peasant world. Silone's, like Carlo Levi's (whom we shall see), is a world I also knew, touching on it through my relationship with my grandparents who worked the land in Ascoli. It is very likely, if not certain, that my generation is the last moral heir to millennia of peasant history, made up of Christianity, magic, lots of living and dead children, lots of folk love and lots of pain of everyone, of women most of all. That world, always the same in its essential features, was the world of my childhood. I was still a boy, but I too saw that peasant Sisyphus, little myth and all flesh. It is an essential part of my soul, where I jealously guard it. Fontamara is my country.
That was an Italian world but one where other languages were spoken: "Let it not occur to anyone that the Fontamaresi speak Italian... The Italian language is for us a foreign language, a dead language" (p. 15). When I remember or dream of my grandparents, to try to tune into their hearts again, I have to tune into the dialect, because only in that language could and can they tell me the right and perfect words, tell the most beautiful stories with an eloquence and richness that immediately became awkwardness and discomfort as soon as we had to switch to Italian (the Italianization of the peasants was also violence): "However, if the language is borrowed, the way of telling, it seems to me, is ours. It is a fundamental art. It is the same one learned as a boy, sitting on the doorstep, or by the fireplace, on long waking nights" (p. 16). Perhaps my love for words also came from listening to the stories of my aunts, or the very long ones of 'Old Catherine' who stayed with us little brothers on long winter evenings. So this series of articles that begins today is also a contribution to the preservation of the memory of a world that I knew and that is ending along with its stories: who knows if our children will still be able to understand and be moved by Silone or Levi?
Finally, the third exercise is semantic, and concerns the key-word of Fontamara: boor. In parentheses, Silone writes: "(I know well that the name cafone, in the current language of my country, both of the country and of the city, is now a term of offense and derision; but I adopt it in this book in the certainty that when in my country pain will no longer be a disgrace, it will become a name of respect, perhaps even of honor)" (p. 10).
We enter Fontamara if we can reach now that country of tomorrow where 'pain is no longer shameful'; there we pitch our tent and with Silone we use the name boor as a 'name of respect and honor.' And so we deny all the meritocratic ideologies that are driving away that country of tomorrow, introducing every day new arguments to convince us that the poor man must be ashamed of his poverty because he is guilty of his own misfortune -- and while convincing us of this lie, capitalism frees itself from all responsibility.
Fontamara is not a 'village,' a word that has entered the crevices of our mundane time that has lost touch with the soul of real places. In Fontamara "peasants do not sing ... least of all (and it is understood) going to work. Instead of singing, they gladly blaspheme. To express great emotion, joy, anger and even religious devotion, they blaspheme. But even in blaspheming they do not carry much imagination, and they always take it out on two or three saints of their acquaintance, they always mangle them with the same crude swear words" (p. 14). One does not enter the world of the poor if one is afraid of blasphemies and curses, because they are, often, paradoxical words of love.
In Fontamara, economics is a constant note, declined as land, labor, obsession with 'paying,' misery, taxes, power. Social injustice, central to the novel, is also and above all an economic injustice, that of the latifundium and the 'impresario' supported by institutions, smallholders and the clergy (Don Abbacchio). And it goes all the way to Berardo's death, in perhaps the most intense pages of the novel.
Fontamara is a story of failed social redemption, of failed liberation. The peasants cheated by the detour of the stream to bring water to the impresario remain poor and cheated from the beginning to the end of the novel. Fontamara seems like an eternal Good Friday, with a few glimpses of Saturday, no Sunday. And in this it resembles so many other great novels, where Fantine sells and her teeth and dies without resurrection, or the Bible where the exodus and exile continue beyond the Red Sea and after the edict of Cyrus, because the wandering Aramean has never stopped wandering. The only resurrection that saves is the one that begins on Golgotha. And so, the more Silone leads us into the depths of the boors' pain, the more we glimpse there a strange beauty and bright light -- we will not be able to lift the many 'boors' out of their miseries until we learn the beauty hidden within poverty, and to look upon the poor with honor and respect.
