Leonardo Sciasciaˇs French Authors - Preamble - beck

European Connections 29
Leonardo Sciascia’s French Authors
Bearbeitet von
Ian R. Morrison
1. Auflage 2009. Taschenbuch. VIII, 171 S. Paperback
ISBN 978 3 03911 911 0
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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
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
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
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.