Leonardo Sciascia s French Authors

Transcription

1 European Connections 29 Leonardo Sciascia s French Authors Bearbeitet von Ian Morrison 1. Auflage Taschenbuch. VIII, 171 S. Paperback ISBN Format (B x L): 15 x 22 cm Gewicht: 280 g schnell und portofrei erhältlich bei Die Online-Fachbuchhandlung beck-shop.de ist spezialisiert auf Fachbücher, insbesondere Recht, Steuern und Wirtschaft. Im Sortiment finden Sie alle Medien (Bücher, Zeitschriften, CDs, ebooks, etc.) aller Verlage. Ergänzt wird das Programm durch Services wie Neuerscheinungsdienst oder Zusammenstellungen von Büchern zu Sonderpreisen. Der Shop führt mehr als 8 Millionen Produkte.

2

3 Chapter 1 Introduction As readers of Sciascia know, his works often refer to other authors, many of whom wrote in French. (Though one or two of those concerned, such as Simenon, were of other nationalities, it is convenient to call them all, loosely, French.) This feature of Sciascia s writing is striking enough to have led some commentators to conclude that he was steeped in French culture.1 However, though such conclusions have a scholarly basis, the subject of Sciascia s French authors has in fact received curiously patchy attention from academic critics. General studies of Sciascia do sometimes consider links with French writers, but the consideration is naturally on a limited scale.2 Studies devoted primarily to Sciascia s French connections, on the other hand, are often illuminating, but also limited in the sense that they focus on specific cases; typical examples are Ricciarda Ricorda s work on Sciascia and Stendhal, or Emanuella Scarano s on Candido and Candide.3 Broad studies of Sciascia s relations with French literature are rare. Ricciarda Ricorda s article, Sciascia ovvero la retorica della citazione, published in 1977, is valuable in itself, but stops at Todo modo and offers little of specifically French interest. Attilio Scuderi s wide-ranging book, Lo stile dell ironia: Leonardo Sciascia e la tradizione del romanzo, has limitations: precisely because of its international range, it covers relatively few French writers; and its usefulness for our purposes is further reduced because, among Sciascia s works, it concentrates heavily on just two (Il contesto and Todo modo). In short, no study on Sciascia s relations with French authors seems to offer general coverage. It is also fair to say that, with few exceptions, existing studies do not analyse the relevant French texts in any detail; as a consequence, important features are often overlooked. The present survey certainly does not pretend entirely to fill these gaps, but it does at least aspire to make a start. Sciascia mentions over 70 French authors. However, far fewer are significant in his output, and it is only these few who concern us here. Broadly speaking, we shall concentrate on two areas. One is the intellectual and

4 2 Chapter 1 literary effects produced in his writing by intertextual allusions to French authors. This is, in other words, an attempt to explain these allusions and bring out their contribution to the meaning or to the expressive force of Sciascia s work. By intertextual allusions, I mean literal quotations and also references without quotation. Literal quotations vary greatly in length. At one extreme, Todo modo ends with a whole page from Gide s Caves du Vatican, an excerpt that seems to carry decisive implications about the first-person narrator and about the overall meaning of Sciascia s novel (II, 202 3).4 At the other extreme, Part I of Il Consiglio d Egitto ends with the rhetorical question, Come si può essere siciliani?, after Montesquieu s Comment peut-on être Persan? (Lettres persanes, ch. 30). In Il Consiglio, they are the parting words of Caracciolo, the outgoing viceroy of Sicily, to the Sicilian lawyer Di Blasi, both of whom are frustrated reformers. The unattributed quotation indicates succinctly the men s intellectual complicity and also the enduring foreignness of Sicily for Caracciolo (I, 547). References without quotation also vary in scale, but they can be notably economical if, as quite often, they amount simply to a title or a writer s name. Thus, when Di Blasi says elsewhere in Il Consiglio that he has all Diderot s works (I, 515), the allusion reflects discreetly his faith in the French Enlightenment, adds to the picture of Di Blasi as a reforming thinker, and also recalls that the Enlightenment is itself a theme in the novel.5 Unattributed borrowings, such as Caracciolo s from Montesquieu, seem unusual in Sciascia, but there are one or two interesting occurrences. The most important for us are in L Antimonio, which draws on Malraux s novel L Espoir and, more speculatively, in L Onorevole, which may echo Ionesco. Along with the impact of intertextual allusions in Sciascia s fiction, our other main area of interest is his opinions about certain French writers. For the views that he expressed in his own name, I have limited myself to the essays included in the three volumes of his collected works. (It would have been impracticable to explore also his uncollected newspaper articles and his interviews.) So far as his fiction is concerned, narrators and well-read characters, such as Di Blasi, or Rogas in Il contesto, also express literary opinions which merit attention. Though these fictional opinions could diverge from Sciascia s avowed views, this seems in practice to be unusual. An unavoidable preliminary problem arises from Sciascia s use of translated material: at least three-quarters of his quotations from French writers

5 Introduction 3 are in Italian, and translations may of course diverge significantly from originals in tone or meaning. A logical approach might therefore be to try and interpret Sciascia s allusions and opinions in relation to the translations that he uses rather than to the original French texts. However, the approach has limits. Sciascia himself refers us to particular translations in very few cases, e.g. Ruggero Guarini s rendering of Valéry (III, 677), or Ugo Foscolo s of Pascal (III, 491). Generally, it is not clear whether Sciascia is using a published translation or simply translating for himself from the French original. And, even if a published translation seems to be involved, identifying it would usually be too laborious and uncertain to justify the exercise. To these considerations, we may perhaps add that Sciascia himself rarely betrays any feeling that a translation differs essentially from its original. Only when he occasionally quotes verse does he seem slightly to favour French.6 An insight into his more usual approach occurs in La Sicilia nel cinema. In discussing Antonioni, he quotes at length in Italian the passage from Madame Bovary about Charles Bovary s cap (I, 1217). Flaubert calls the cap une de ces pauvres choses [ ] dont la laideur muette a des profondeurs d expression comme le visage d un imbécile.7 And Sciascia observes that a questa stupidità cui l umano si riduce nei film d Antonioni non manchiamo d attribuire profondità d espressione, e in senso diverso da quello che Flaubert attribuisce al berretto di Carlo Bovary (ibid.). By implication, he seems satisfied that the translation gives his reader access to Flaubert s meaning, and that it is not some rather paltry second-best. Though Sciascia was too optimistic about the general fidelity of translations, it is no doubt acceptable, in practice and as a general rule, to treat his allusions and discussions as if they related directly to the French originals and thence to base our own analysis on the French texts. The main exceptions to this general rule arise of course when there are notable disparities between the sense of a French text and the sense that Sciascia attributes to it in Italian. Then, we have obviously to consider both the original and the translation, as in the case of Montaigne (chapter 9, below). A different and more substantial preliminary question has been to decide which of Sciascia s French authors were worth extended examination. For those to whom I have in fact devoted a chapter, and also for those who receive the odd page of discussion (Ionesco, Anatole France and Rousseau), readers themselves will be able to judge whether the decision was right or

6 4 Chapter 1 not. As for the other potentially relevant authors, it is profitless to try to justify here all the decisions to deal with some in passing and to disregard others completely. However, there are some writers about whom a word of explanation may be helpful because, for various reasons, scholars have associated Sciascia with them,8 and the reader might therefore expect this book to consider them, or to consider them more fully. Some, such as Bernanos, are in fact rarely mentioned or quoted by Sciascia. Others, such as Hugo, Casanova, or Sade appear more often, but most of their appearances are either incidental or seem not to cohere with any really major theme in Sciascia. Slightly different again are those whose appearances, while intersecting consistently with some concern of Sciascia s, are few and repetitious (e.g. Flaubert on idiocy). A last remark is on the order in which I consider Sciascia s authors. It is very roughly that of their first notable appearances in his works, whether by intertextual allusion or as subjects of discussion. Of the three authors who are discussed incidentally, Ionesco is more or less where he belongs chronologically, but Anatole France and Rousseau are not. The major exception, however, is Montaigne. As Sciascia mentions him quite early in his career, it would have been justifiable to deal with him sooner. However, I have postponed him to the end because, as a major figure in Sciascia s writing, he seems to have outlasted most others. Thus, the order of treatment is only roughly chronological, but I hope that it may still help bring into relief some evolution in Sciascia s relations with his major French authors.