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Literary Review
Cultures of corruption
RAVI VYAS
To grow up requires a whole life, but to grow old one night like this is enough.
Ignazio Silone, on seeing a relative stealing from a victim buried in the rubble.
ALL European novels are never anything except a philosophy expressed in images. In the great novels, the philosophy may disappear in the images but a work that endures has never been able to do without ideas and the theories that support them. And it is this secret fusion of experience and thought, of life and reflection on the meaning of life that makes the great European novels, like Ignazio Silone's Fontamara.
Silone once remarked that he would willingly spend his life "writing and rewriting the same book, the single book that every writer has within that is the image of his soul." In Silone's case this book was about his childhood, in the southern Italian region of Abruzzi and about the political odyssey that led him into and out of communism. Abruzzi was an area of vast feudal estates where peasants eked out a subsistence living, "enough to exist but not to live."
The town described in Fontamara is about one hundred rugged, shapeless, one-floor hovels, blackened by time, worn by wind and rain, imperfectly roofed with tiles and slates of every kind, that surround a dilapidated church on a stony hill. Inside these, men, women and children, donkeys, goats and hens live, sleep, eat and procreate their kind... And the poverty of Fontamara — that ever-lasting poverty handed down to the sons from the fathers, inherited by them from their grandfathers, themselves the heirs to generations of poverty. The life of men, of the beasts of the field, of the earth itself seemed destined to revolve in an everlasting cycle, a natural cycle, unsusceptible to the changes of time.
First came the sowing, then the weeding, then the pruning, then the spraying, then the mowing, then the gathering of the grapes. And what then? Sowing, weeding, pruning, spraying, mowing, gathering of the grapes. It was always the same. There was never any change... Every year was like last year, every season like the last season. Every generation like the one before.
When the weather was bad the inhabitants occupied themselves with family affair, that is to say, they went to law. At Fontamara, there are no two families that are not related. In small villages, as a rule, every family is related to every other, and so they have interests in common, and so they go to law about them — always the same old squabbles, the same interminable disputes, handed down from generation the generation in never-ending law suits, all to establish the ownership of a thicker of thorns. The thicket may be burned down, but that does not put an end to the lawsuit...
At one level, Fontamara is a description of extreme poverty and deprivation and what it does to the psyche of small, closed communities as they systematically lose the measure of all things. What it does is that they fight against each other over the pettiest of matters, but this aggression is more unnaturally cruel and filled with rage than it would against an outside "enemy". Freud came closest to the heart of this aggression among members of the same species when he wrote "that it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other." (Witness Gujarat). Freud saw this phenomenon as "the narcissism of small differences" that Silone fleshes out in a series of encounters between his characters and the trivia over which they fight to an inch of their lives. What Silone says is that the final and most revolting injustice is consummated when poverty is wed to a life without hope or lived in appalling slums — the double humiliation of poverty and ugliness.
In an important sense, Fontamara is closer to us because it is a searing indictment on that seductive blend of lies and hypocrisy called bourgeois democracy and the corruption that underlies it. Here are just a few opening lines that would be all too familiar to us: "On the first of June last year Fontamara went without electric light for the first time. Fontamara remained without electric light on the second, the third, and fourth of June. So it continued for days and months. In the end Fontamara got used to moonlight again. A century had elapsed between the moonlight era and the electric era, a century which included the age of oil and that of petrol, but one evening was sufficient to plunge us back from electric light to the light of moon... Electric light had come to be accepted as practically a natural phenomenon, in the sense that nobody paid for it. Nobody had paid for it for many months. As a matter of fact, the district collector hadn't come around delivering the monthly bills and warning notices for those who were in arrears. We used the bits of paper he distributed as pipe-cleaners. The last time he came around he only managed to get away with a whole skin."
It is not so much corruption that Silone concentrates on as on the hollow promise of law and democracy in "liberal" pre-fascist Italy. Although Silone was the son of a small landowner, he identified himself from a young age with the peasants. The story goes that as a boy, he saw a local nobleman set his dog on a peasant woman who was knocked to the ground and battered. The woman took the nobleman to court, where various hired witnesses testified that she had provoked the attack and no one would speak on her behalf. She lost the lawsuit and was stuck with the legal costs. The judge, a family friend of the Silones, explained that while he regretted the injustice, he was required to follow the facts presented at the trial. This, for Silone, was enough to expose the sham of law and democracy but the story is repeated in Fontamara with a twist: the diversion of the waters of a spring away from the small holdings of peasants to the big landowners, the corruption behind it with the peasants helpless to do anything about it.
Fontamara deals with many timeless issues. Readers who approach it as a straightforward denunciation of social injustice would miss undercurrents of deceit and betrayal that could come from large landowners as well as sections of the peasantry. The sham philosophy of liberalism led Silone to become one of the founder members of the Italian communist party; the practice of the Party led him back to an open society again. Silone wrote Fontamara (and others, Bread and Wine, The Seed Beneath the Snow, The Secret of Luca) after he also became disillusioned with communism. So, its simple message is this: rediscover the ancient, large-hearted gestures of peasants and return from the abstract philosophy of the revolution to the bread and wine of simplicity.
Fontamara, Ignazio Silone, translated by Gwenda David and Eric Mosbacher, published in English translation, 1934, this edition by Jonathan Cape, 1948, price not stated.
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