Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Verga's landscape, hellish, poignant - a mist, a sadness, a black veil

I included a grotesque description of a character from Mastro-Don Gesualdo, which is from a section full of grotesquerie, almost nothing but grotesques, the chapters where cholera comes to the land and Sicily, pretty bad all along, turns into Hell.

More Italian literature is directly descended from Dante than I had realized a year ago.

As they went along, he told stories that would make your hair stand on end.  At Marineo they had murdered a traveler who kept hanging around the watering trough, during the hot hours of the day.  He was ragged, barefoot, white with dust, his face burning, his eyes sullen, trying to do his thing in spite of the Christians who were guarding from a distance, in suspicion.  At Callari they had found a body behind a fence, swollen as a wineskin; they had found it from the stench.  At night, everywhere, you could see fireworks, rockets raining down, just like on Saint Lawrence night, God save us!  (226)

The characters flee to the countryside, to their farms.  Amidst this horror, Verga decides to start up a love story, with Gesualdo’s daughter falling for her cousin, repeating her mother’s history, although she does not know it.  Love in the time of cholera.  Hey, wait, I’ve read that book.

The beginnings of love are inspired by the land, her father’s property, which are foreboding, perhaps from the aura of her father:

The level fields were deserted, shaded in dark.  There was a low wall covered with sad ivy, a small abandoned water basin in which some aquatic plants were rotting, and on the other side of the road some squares of dusty vegetables, cut across by abandoned roads that ended up drowning into the thick boxwood bristling with yellow, dead branches.  (235)

That does not sound so inspiring, yet the sad landscape contain traces of her lover:

…  burned pieces of paper, damp, still moving about as if they were living things – burned matches, torn ivy leaves, shoots broken up into small pieces by his feverish hands, during the long hours of his waiting, in the automatic activity of his fantasizing. 

The scene of Isabella’s love becomes, years later, a place of epiphany for her dying father, Don Gesualdo:

But down there, before his property, he indeed realized that it was all over, that all hope was lost for him, when he saw that now he didn’t care at all.  The vines were already leafing, the wheat was tall, the olive trees in bloom, the sumacs green, and over everything there spread a mist, a sadness, a black veil…  The world was still going its own way, while for him there was no hope any more, gnawed inside by a worm just like a rotten apple that must fall from the tree – without the strength to take a step on his own land, without feeling like swallowing an egg.  Then, desperate that he had to die, he began to hit ducks and turkeys with his stick, to break out the buds and the wheat stocks.  He’d have liked to destroy in a single blow all the wealth he had put together little by little.  He wanted his property to go with him, desperate as he was.  (311, ellipses mine)

And in the next sentence, he is whisked away from his property forever.

15 comments:

  1. how to put it...: where is the boundary between meaning and non-meaning? in the 19th c. violence and brutality in a novel were marginal at best; today a book is not successful unless there's plenty of it. i guess i don't understand how meaning can be enhanced by ugliness. maybe it's an age thing, me being in my 70"s. has the world changed that much? maybe it has and i lost track somewhere... or perhaps it's always been that way and i never wanted to accept it! probably...

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    1. Think back to Oliver Twist, the scene where Bill Sykes murders Nancy. That's one violent scene.

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    2. yeah and right after i posted that i remembered a whole bunch more stuff in old books; i remember one by ballantine that i couldn't finish-gave me nightmares. AT SIXTY! so i guess wondering should be taken with a grain of something, brandy or such like...

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  2. Literature goes through periodic beautifying and uglifying phases, and Verga was writing during one of the ugly dips, or peaks, along with Zola and a bunch of French Decadents. The uglifiers generally protest that they are only telling the truth. The truth of their truth, that is another question. I have expressed my own doubts about that.

    The long end of Mastro Don-Gesualdo is about a willful, independent man's death from stomach cancer. I can see how you have to make some of that story ugly; either make it ugly or don't bother telling it at all.

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    1. Flaubert, at least, gives us both beauty and ugliness in his version of truth. Just like Shakespeare, I guess.

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    2. Yes, he's the one who started pushing the anti-idealizing boulder up the hill. Flaubert was right that there was a lot of Beautiful and Sentimental twaddle in literature, too much, most of it now crushed, although rebuilt in new forms, our forms.

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    3. I think Flaubert might've been the first novelist to use beauty as an ironic comment on the ugliness of the world. Bovary is pretty much a dish of bile with some pretty baubles floating in it. I'm probably wrong about that "first."

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    4. i recollect reading some nasty little bits in Scott: The Pirate, for one...

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    5. Probably wrong, but possibly right. Unless Candide counts.

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    6. Candide is a good suggestion, but it might have too much of an arch tone. Voltaire using Rabelais to talk about serious subjects, maybe. Satire always presents a problem.

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    7. Exactly my doubt - maybe actual satire is something different.

      Walter Scott is more of an idealist, a gentleman of his time. Ugliness exists, is in fact everywhere, an ordinary part of life, but should be combated and defeated.

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    8. "The long end of Mastro Don-Gesualdo is about a willful, independent man's death from stomach cancer." The Death of Ivan Ilyich had the same subject at about the same time. Had Verga read Tolstoy or was it part of the zeitgeist ?

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  3. Roger, I wondered that myself. I do not know the answer.

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  4. The Dante influence continues. That first passage you quote above from Maestro-Don Gesualdo reminds me of a passage I just finished reading in Gomorrah, contemporary writer Roberto Saviano's portrait of Camorrist Naples - another grotesque list of murdered bodies, recounted using remarkably similar naturalistic language.

    Verga seems unusually attuned to landscape; perhaps one has to be in Sicily, given that so much of the island consists of arid volcanic fields, disease-infested marshland or hardscrabble, mountainous terrain.

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  5. Landscape, yes. Even though this is very much a "town" novel - but real life is out there in the fields.

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