2023-11-28 15:34:45
For the first time, the surviving documents of Giovanni Verga’s (1840-1922) unfinished literary project have been collected in a volume: these are the pages of “The Duchess of Leyra” and the rare notes taken for “L’onorevole Scipioni” and The Man of Luxury”, the two novels that the Sicilian writer will never write. “Sketches of novels” is the title of the book edited by Giorgio Forni, full professor of Italian literature at the University of Messina, freshly printed by Interlinea and included in the series of the national edition of Giovanni Verga’s works conducted on the basis of the manuscripts.
After the fishermen of the Malavoglia family, after the social affirmation of Mastro-don Gesualdo as a rich landowner, the novels of the “Vinti” cycle should have represented the upper classes of society: the worldly rites of the aristocracy, the summits of political power , the artist capable of imposing himself in the degraded and commercial space of modernity. For Verga, explains Forni on the basis of the autograph papers, it was not just a matter of dealing with a different “social class”, but of reproducing a different anthropological and psychological condition in which “nature” is almost entirely masked by “artifice”, the authentic is replaced by the inauthentic, the spontaneity of feelings is lost in the external vanity of forms.
Verga’s challenge was to be able to objectively represent the constitutive, vertical split of the interior world of the powerful figure in its various declinations (worldly power in the “Duchess of Leyra”, political power in the “Honourable Scipioni”, cultural power in ‘”Man of luxury”).
In continuing the cycle of “The Vanquished”, Verga finds himself first of all faced with a technical problem, explains Forni: how to narrate an environment in which good education hides passions, desires, resentments, and translates them into impalpable signs, into implications , in voice inflections that are difficult to render on the page?
Compared to the project of three great novels, in reality very few papers remain, mostly relating to the “Duchess of Leyra”. In this novel what was fundamental was the tone, or to use Verga’s words the ability to “get into tune”, to make the implications and the “half tones” evident, and the Catanian author experimented (almost obsessively) with many different orchestrations of the same views narratives that may seem repetitive and inconclusive variants, but instead represent the attempt to face the challenge inherent in the new novel. For this reason, the autographs that remain of the “Duchess of Leyra” concern only a very few scenes.
The protagonist, wrote the great Sicilian novelist, “is like an intruder in Palermo society, where she also has her relationships and kinship – punctilious, haughty, with an extreme emotional sensitivity and pride”.
Giovanni Verga, explains Forni, “wanted to find the measure of a new, alluring style, rippled with subtle contrasts, made up of reticent and mischievous cadences; he must experiment with it, put it to the test, gradually try chords and combinations like a musician who must familiarize himself with certain instruments that are added to the orchestra. How can we reproduce, for example, a false smile, a piece of gossip mentioned in a whisper, a malicious and witty sign of assent?” Verga therefore hypothesized a new narrative grammar and it was here that Verga failed: he wrote, rewrote, looking for the “right word”, the exact combination of elements that would highlight the deep and hidden impulses of the characters.
The volume of “Sketches of novels” collects all the surviving papers of the three last novels of the “Vanti” cycle and there is an extensive introduction by Forni which minutely reconstructs Verga’s compositional path and also the progress of the “literary case” of the failure to conclude the cycle of the “Lost” which led the old Verga to finally close himself in a frowning silence.
(by Paolo Martini)
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