Narrative Economics

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    [title] => If the gifts of the poor are obligations without the experience of freedom
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Narrative Economics/6 - In “Christ Stopped at Eboli,” a journey into peasant misery that reflects on the authentic aspiration of the human

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 17/11/2024

"People will say to me: I do not conclude. I answer: Intelligence does not conclude anything: it sees. If it sees."
Don Giuseppe De Luca, Intorno al Manzoni

Democracy is a destruction of gifts-obligations to create conditions for gifts-gratuities. Those that are not there in Levi's Christ.

Writers, especially the older ones, first see their characters, scenes, landscapes, dialogues, blanks, then write them. One cannot narrate if one does not see first. In this, too, the writer resembles the biblical prophet, who, before hearing the word, sees it: "Word that Isaiah saw" (Isaiah 2:1), "Word that Amos saw" (Am 1:1). "And Christmas Eve came... The peasants and women went around, bringing presents to the houses of the lords; here it is an ancient custom for the poor to pay homage to the rich, and bring gifts, which are received as a thing due, with sufficiency, and not reciprocated" (Cristo si è fermato a Eboli, p. 181).

[fulltext] =>

Here Carlo Levi shows us a practice of gift-giving that differs from the theories of gift-giving that had been elaborated a few decades earlier by anthropologist Marcel Mauss and his colleagues. While those scholars explained to us that the gift circuit has a ternary structure made up of giving-accepting-contracepting, Levi told us instead about a gift that was only obligation: munus, the Romans said, or gift, which derives from re (rex, regis), and that is, the obligatory offerings to kings, to lords, to superiors, to divinity. In the society of peasant Italy described by Levi, the gifts-gifts of the poor knew no reciprocity: they had to be made to the lords, and that was it. Giving-accepting-reciprocating was reduced to just giving; it is true that sometimes the lords did not accept the gifts, but not so that they would not be obliged to reciprocate to the poor (this obligation was never there); if they did not accept it was only because they were not adequate and welcome: and this was indeed a misfortune. That of the peasants was a one-sided, no-return obligation. The pre-modern world did not know what gift-gratuity was: it knew only gifts, obligations, but free gift was not among the tools of man and even less of the ancient woman. Levi felt he had to violate that ancient liturgy, which, as a modern, liberal man, he saw only as a feudal legacy: "Even I had to receive, that day, bottles of oil, of wine, and eggs, and canestrelli of dried figs, and the donors were amazed that I did not accept them as an obligatory tithe, but that I shunned them, and made, in return, as I could, some gift. What a strange gentleman was I then, if the traditional inversion of the fable of the Magi did not apply to me, and one could enter my house empty-handed?" (pp. 181-182). Nice is the reference 'to the inversion' of the tradition ('fable') of the Magi: those lords of Matthew's gospel brought gifts to a poor mother and child, while the Christian lords of Gagliano the gifts-gifts demanded them from the poor and women. My grandmothers, my mother, my father did not know gifts. They had, sometimes, some dried fruit at Christmas and Epiphany, but gifts as we understand them (free and free) were almost never there, for birthdays or otherwise. Gifts were (almost) always experienced as fate without the experience of freedom. There were instead offerings needed for saints, for masses, regalia from the powerful at special times to strengthen hierarchies.

 These ancient practices of gift-without-gratuity were intertwined with a religious idea of sacrifice, which grew during the Catholic Counter-Reformation: peasants, women, the poor had to sacrifice themselves for the family, for the church, for God, but on the other side there was no one to sacrifice for them. Even the sacrifice to God was experienced as a gift, as an offering to be made to the most powerful of the powerful, gifts that did not liberate the poor and bound them tighter to their sad fate. Although, we know, human beings are greater than their fate, and from the worlds of only-obligation, gifts have also always flourished -- and continue to flourish.

The path of democracy has been a gift-creating destruction so that we can start giving gifts, because gift is the other name for freedom, not the register of servants and slaves. And whenever gift-giving-obligations return in our social and religious relations, we are retrogressing to the feudal world.

These gifts without gratuity are also present in the figure of Don Trajella, the parish priest of Gagliano. Don Giuseppe Trajella from Tricarico is a 'won' in the Christ cycle. Carlo Levi's first meeting with the archpriest composes one of the novel's most beautiful watercolors: "He was a small, skinny old man, with iron-rimmed spectacles on a sharp nose.... From his whole appearance exhaled a weary air of ill- endured misery; like the ruins of a burned-out hovel, black and full of weeds." As a young man he had been professor of theology at the seminary in Naples and the seminary in Melfi, a writer, author of biographies of saints, sculptor and painter. He had been sent to Gagliano "as a punishment," and was disliked in the village, where it was said "he was always drunk." By now he was "but a poor persecuted and embittered priest, a black and sick sheep in a flock of wolves." Misfortune "had struck him, detached him from everything, and tossed him, like a wreck, on that distant inhospitable beach. He had let himself fall to the bottom, bitterly enjoying making his own misery greater. He had never again touched a book or a brush... Trajella hated the world, because the world haunted him" (pp. 42-43). Levi also has eyes of pity for this hapless old priest: he sees him in his misfortune, looks at him, in his own way redeems him and saves him with his good eyes. Another fellow sufferer of misfortune, of a different and similar confinement, another defeated by life and that unhappy time. And Levi knows how to be well in this uncomfortable company, in the 'court of miracles' of his Christ, of which Charles is not the king but simply one of them.

Don Trajella is the protagonist of the hilarious Christmas Eve Mass of 1935. The faithful were in the church, but "there was no sign of Don Trajella." After half an hour of waiting, Don Luigino, the leader of the local fascists, thought the priest was drunk again: he sent a boy to look for him and the parish priest finally arrived. At the end of the mass, after the ite missa est, Don Trajella went up to the pulpit to proclaim his sermon and, after a few minutes of half-words and apologies, he finally spoke: "Dearest brothers... I had prepared a sermon that was really, may I say it with all humility, beautiful: I had written it down, to read it, because I don't have much memory. I had put it in my pocket. And now, alas, I cannot find it, I have lost it; and I cannot remember anything. How to do?" (p. 183). Don Luigino does not believe him, and does not hold back his ire: "It is a scandal, it is a desecration of the house of God. Fascists, to me." But as the priest lies, prostrate, on his knees, something extraordinary happens: "Miracle, miracle! Jesus heard me! ... I had lost my sermon, and he made me find something better." Under the wooden crucifix popped up a paper with a letter printed on it from a sergeant from Gagliano, from the Abyssinian War. And that letter became his new sermon on war and peace, emphasizing that "this war is not a war, but an action of peace." Meanwhile, while Don Trajella was preaching, Don Luigino and his fascists had begun to sing "Faccetta nera" and then "Giovinezza" in the church. But Trajella, indifferent to the disturbance, resolutely continued his sermon, set aside the sergeant's letter and thus concluded, "The divine infant was born at this very hour to bring this word of peace. Pax in terra hominibus... But you are wicked, you are sinners, you never come to church, you don't do devotions, you sing ditties, you blaspheme, you don't baptize your children, you don't go to confession, you don't take communion... And therefore peace is not with you. Pax in terra hominibus: you do not know Latin. What does Pax in terra hominibus mean? It means that today, on Christmas Eve, you should have brought a kid as a gift, according to custom, to your pastor. Instead, you did not. For you are unbelievers; and because you are not bonae voluntatis, you do not have a good will, so you do not have peace, and the blessing of the Lord. So think about it, bring your pastor the kid, pay the debts for his land that you owe him from the past year, if you want God to look upon you with mercy, keep his hand on your head, inspire peace in your hearts, if you want peace to return to the world and end the war" (p. 183). A different 'lamb' that will bring another peace; other 'debts' forgiven by other debtors.

Don Luigino, that very night denounced Don Trajella to the podesta, and was soon transferred. During that same night, Giulia, his maid, revealed to Carlo the most powerful spells, "those that can make people sick and die - Only on Christmas can they be said, in the greatest secrecy, and with an oath not to repeat them to anyone else... On all other days it is a mortal sin" (p. 187). I, too, well remember Pierina, an elderly lady in my village, a family friend, who only on Christmas night could reveal the secret formulas to remove envy (through a ritual with oil); I never learned them, I was too young for an oath, but that magical-religious world enchanted me, and left me with a sense of the mystery that flows within life as a gift.

The economy, the misery and exploitation of the peasants, are Christ's horizon, sometimes its content: "The peasants were paid starvation wages. I remembered, on the day of my arrival, in the midst of the harvest, the long lines of women, going up with sacks of grain on their heads, like the damned of hell, under the fierce sun.... The best and most humane thinker of this land, Giustino Fortunato, liked to call himself 'the politician of nothing.' I used to think how many times every day, I used to hear this continuous word, in all the peasants' speeches. - Ninte - as they say in Gagliano: 'What did you eat?' - Nothing -. 'What are you hoping for?' - Nothing - 'What can be done? - Nothing - And the eyes rise, in the gesture of denial, to the sky" (p. 169). Another nihilism, different from that of the philosophers. Free and public schools, universal health care, jobs for all, support teachers, were and are the tools and places where we have tried to overcome that 'nothing'. Today other 'nothing' is occupying the souls and hearts of our people, of too many young people. A nothing of peace, of hope, of community, of relationships, of encounters, of God.

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Narrative Economics/6 - In “Christ Stopped at Eboli,” a journey into peasant misery that reflects on the authentic aspiration of the human

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 17/11/2024

"People will say to me: I do not conclude. I answer: Intelligence does not conclude anything: it sees. If it sees."
Don Giuseppe De Luca, Intorno al Manzoni

Democracy is a destruction of gifts-obligations to create conditions for gifts-gratuities. Those that are not there in Levi's Christ.

Writers, especially the older ones, first see their characters, scenes, landscapes, dialogues, blanks, then write them. One cannot narrate if one does not see first. In this, too, the writer resembles the biblical prophet, who, before hearing the word, sees it: "Word that Isaiah saw" (Isaiah 2:1), "Word that Amos saw" (Am 1:1). "And Christmas Eve came... The peasants and women went around, bringing presents to the houses of the lords; here it is an ancient custom for the poor to pay homage to the rich, and bring gifts, which are received as a thing due, with sufficiency, and not reciprocated" (Cristo si è fermato a Eboli, p. 181).

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If the gifts of the poor are obligations without the experience of freedom

If the gifts of the poor are obligations without the experience of freedom

Narrative Economics/6 - In “Christ Stopped at Eboli,” a journey into peasant misery that reflects on the authentic aspiration of the human by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 17/11/2024 "People will say to me: I do not conclude. I answer: Intelligence does not conclude anything: it sees. If...
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    [title] => Feminine wisdom and humility guarantees custody of the sacred
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Narrative Economy/5 - The figures of women in the great novel that unveiled the peasant South show secrets of emotional relationships and religious memory

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 10/11/2024

Give thanks I wish for the fact that I have a sister.

Mariangela Gualtieri, Ringraziare desidero

Two episodes from Carlo Levi's Christ, the encounter with his sister and the child saved by Our Lady of Viggiano, introduce us to a world that still has much to tell us.

Christ Stopped at Eboli is, first of all, a book full of episodes written with beautiful prose, capable of giving us passages of a humanity as beautiful as it is now lost. In the first part of the novel, we find Luisa's visit to Carlo levi, her brother. She was a renowned child neuropsychiatrist, known for her pioneering studies on children's sex education. Luisa was four years older than Carlo (she was born in 1898), and her brother gives us a beautiful description of her in pages that are among the most intense in the novel. Upon her arrival, he sees her getting out of the car of Gagliano's 'taxi driver': "Her clear gestures, her simple dress, the frank tone of her voice, the open smile were those well known to me, which I had always known her: but after the long months of loneliness ... her arrival was that of an ambassador of another state in a foreign country" (p. 78). It is thanks to Luisa's account to her brother of her arrival by train in Matera that we have perhaps the best-known pages of Christ: "Of children there was an infinity... I saw children sitting on the doorways of houses, flies resting on their eyes, and those stood motionless... But most of them had big, swollen bellies, huge, and yellow faces, and suffered from malaria" (p. 82). A tremendous description that contrasts, and this time the contrast is all good, with today's stunning Matera, which has become one of Europe's most beautiful cities. Italy has also been capable of these civic metamorphoses, but they must never make us forget that Basilicata and the South are not just the bright one of Matera.

[fulltext] =>

The account of Luisa's arrival in Gagliano is full of emotion, especially when Charles describes how the town welcomed and read about that sororal visit: "Until now I had been, for them, someone who had fallen from heaven: but I lacked something: I was alone. The discovery that I too had blood ties on this earth seemed to pleasantly fill, in their eyes, a gap. Seeing me with a sister moved one of their deepest feelings... When, towards evening, we strolled down the only street in the village, my sister and I, holding each other arm in arm, the peasants from the thresholds looked at us blissfully. The women would greet us, and cover us with blessings: - Blessed is the womb that bore you - ... - Blessed are the breasts that suckled you! - ... A bride is a beautiful thing: but a sister is so much more! - Friar and sister, core and core" (pp. 84-85). Words reminiscent of those of the women of Jerusalem as Jesus passed by (Lk. 11:27).

The Greek world knew more words for what we call 'love' today. Philadelphia and storgé were used to express that particular form of love that is typical of family ties. Paul, in his Letter to the Romans (12.10), uses the rare word philostorgos - composed by joining philos (friend) and storgé - to say, "Love one another with brotherly affection." Love between brothers and sisters is one of the strongest and deepest forms of love, different from marital love and even love for (and of) parents. It is made up of few words and much silent substance, of freedom, of quarrels that often recompose themselves the minute they arise. Love, then, between sisters is still different from that between brothers, but that between a brother and a sister is still different, and perhaps the most delicate and beautiful. It lives of grace, of sweetness, of very long hugs, of beauty, of much emotion. Because, unlike those between boys and between girls, the affection between a sister and a brother has a typical tenderness and complicity combined with delicacy, respect, confidence, modesty. Certain great intimate pains we males say more easily - and sometimes only - to a sister. It is not a chosen love as is that of friendship (philia); sisters (and brothers) happen to us, we find them inside the house before us or they come later, but this non-choice instead of reducing affection and freedom increases it, it is leaven of many other freedoms sought and conquered. The gift of having a sister changes and grows with us, the years unveil it, show all the treasures that remain hidden as children. Few sorrows are greater than those born of a sister gravely ill, or humiliated and offended, and the young death of a sister is perhaps, with that for the death of children, the greatest sorrow on earth. Today, in a time of fragile and short families and too many lonelinesses, sisterly love remains an anchor for our happiness. Fraternity is a beautiful word but it alone is not enough to express the emotion felt by the women in seeing Charles and Luisa arm in arm. It would take a different word, 'brother and sister' together, fraternity and sorority; a word that is not there, but one that we should never stop looking for and perhaps one day find.

Particularly sensitive, then, are also the pages about another woman, Margaret, who did chores for Charles: "An old woman, with a face full of goodness," who "was considered one of the most intelligent and educated women in the village"-the most beautiful pages of Christ are those that have women as protagonists. Marguerite had done "up to the fifth grade, and she remembered perfectly everything she had learned. In fact, when she came to my room, she would repeat to me the poems from those old school days of hers: the Expedition of Sapri, the Death of Ermengarda. She would repeat them standing in the middle of the room, standing upright, her arms stiffly hanging down her body, reciting them like chants" (p. 165). In that world, intelligence was something different from what it became later. It was also about goodness, because no person who was not good could be called intelligent. Something similar to what the Bible called wisdom. Schooling was also important for intelligence, although not essential, because there was little schooling and therefore as valuable as gold. In the peasant world, being able to go to school, especially for girls, was always a day of celebration, an oasis of beauty in a difficult everyday life of toil and pain. For the peasants of yesterday, the words they heard from the teacher in the multi-classrooms was the place of real news: history with its mysterious peoples, geography with its world capitals. Today they discovered the Assyrians, tomorrow the Babylonians, the day after tomorrow Madrid: all inhabitants of their own magical world. But above all they loved poetry. They didn't understand them, but they memorized them the way prayers were learned, because they were as beautiful as statues of the Madonna and saints, full of color and covered in gold. Those children knew that the school years were very few, two or maybe five, so they did not miss a word from the teacher. To get a sense of something of what the word was in the Bible, we would have to go back with our memory to the poor children's schools of yesterday, or to an African classroom of today: every word was a pledge of the promised land. In Margaret reciting the poems, I saw again those of my mother, who also only got as far as the fifth grade, who every August 10 recited to us (and still recites) from memory and with the same childlike pose, the poem 'San Lorenzo,' to which on special days were added 'Breus' and 'La cavallina Storna' - her beloved teacher Anna Filippini loved Pascoli very much.

One day Margaret told Charles, "amid tears," the story of her third child: "This child was the most beautiful of all... One winter day, Margaret had entrusted him to a godmother and neighbor, who had taken him with her to the country, while she went out to make wood. In the evening the neighbor came home alone, and in despair. She had left the child, who walked very little, for a few minutes, while she gathered, in the forest path, some branches: but, when she returned, the child was gone. She had gone around everywhere, of the child no trace... On the fourth day, in the morning, Margaret, who was wandering alone and disconsolate through the countryside, met at the turn of a path, a large and beautiful woman, with a black face. It was Our Lady of Viggiano. She said to her: - Margaret, do not cry. Your child is alive. He is down there in the woods, in a wolf pit. Go home, be accompanied, and you will find him - - Margaret ran, and, followed by the peasants and the carabinieri, she arrived at the place indicated by Our Lady. In the wolf-pit, in the middle of the snow, lay her child, quietly asleep, all pink and warm in the midst of that cold. The mother embraced him, woke him up. Everyone was crying, even the carabinieri. The child told that a woman with a black face had come, and that for four days she had kept him with her, and had given him milk, there in that pit, had kept him warm" (pp. 165-166). Then the child would die a few years later, falling from a ladder, but that milk he had received from the Virgin of Viggiano had made him special forever. We today to the 'big and beautiful, black-faced' women we meet along our paths, we close our ports, we reject them, we do not believe their life stories. But who knows how many children in our 'wolf pits' continue to be 'suckled' by 'Our Lady of Viggiano,' and do not die?!!!

In the world narrated by Levi, women were the primary stewards of the sacred, always intertwined with the magical. It was a shared stewardship among many people. In the Protestant world the popular sacred was fought over; in the institutional Catholic world it was concentrated in the priests, in a male monopoly. In the Catholic peasant world, on the other hand, it remained feminine, plural and popular, thus wild and untamed, and it survived, intertwined with magic but alive. In that mestizo field faith found fertile ground, natural humility nurtured the Christian humus. If Christianity, after this dark night, will still have a new season, it will be heralded by a popular, peasant, feminine, spurious dawn. Neither the Christianity of theologians nor the Christianity of the temple will be the garden where the stone can still roll.

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Narrative Economy/5 - The figures of women in the great novel that unveiled the peasant South show secrets of emotional relationships and religious memory

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 10/11/2024

Give thanks I wish for the fact that I have a sister.

Mariangela Gualtieri, Ringraziare desidero

Two episodes from Carlo Levi's Christ, the encounter with his sister and the child saved by Our Lady of Viggiano, introduce us to a world that still has much to tell us.

Christ Stopped at Eboli is, first of all, a book full of episodes written with beautiful prose, capable of giving us passages of a humanity as beautiful as it is now lost. In the first part of the novel, we find Luisa's visit to Carlo levi, her brother. She was a renowned child neuropsychiatrist, known for her pioneering studies on children's sex education. Luisa was four years older than Carlo (she was born in 1898), and her brother gives us a beautiful description of her in pages that are among the most intense in the novel. Upon her arrival, he sees her getting out of the car of Gagliano's 'taxi driver': "Her clear gestures, her simple dress, the frank tone of her voice, the open smile were those well known to me, which I had always known her: but after the long months of loneliness ... her arrival was that of an ambassador of another state in a foreign country" (p. 78). It is thanks to Luisa's account to her brother of her arrival by train in Matera that we have perhaps the best-known pages of Christ: "Of children there was an infinity... I saw children sitting on the doorways of houses, flies resting on their eyes, and those stood motionless... But most of them had big, swollen bellies, huge, and yellow faces, and suffered from malaria" (p. 82). A tremendous description that contrasts, and this time the contrast is all good, with today's stunning Matera, which has become one of Europe's most beautiful cities. Italy has also been capable of these civic metamorphoses, but they must never make us forget that Basilicata and the South are not just the bright one of Matera.

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Feminine wisdom and humility guarantees custody of the sacred

Feminine wisdom and humility guarantees custody of the sacred

Narrative Economy/5 - The figures of women in the great novel that unveiled the peasant South show secrets of emotional relationships and religious memory by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 10/11/2024 “Give thanks I wish for the fact that I have a sister.” Mariangela Gualtieri, Ringraziar...
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Narrative Economy/4 - An honourable and respectful look at the spirituality of southern peasants in the 1900s masterpiece novel

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 03/11/2024

From the exile experiences of another anti-fascist, Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli was born, which is intended to be and is the work of a literary man, but to which we all owe something more than just a literary suggestion.

Ernesto de Martino, The Land of Remorse, 1961, p. 28

With Christ Stopped at Eboli Carlo Levi reveals to us the soul of the Lucanian people, and takes us inside their religiosity, perhaps more Christian than Levi thought.

“Cristo si è fermato ad Eboli" (Christ Stopped at Eboli) is part of the moral consciousness of the second Italian and European twentieth century. Carlo Levi and Ignazio Silone showed us a popular soul of Meridian, peasant and poor Italy much more complex and richer than how the early modern and Enlightenment historians had described it, for whom those Italian peasants were simply 'pagans,' very similar if not identical to the pre-Christian inhabitants of Magna Graecia; as if Christianity had never passed through those rural lands of the South, which, because of little or no Christian culture, had already been called the 'Indies of Italy' by the Jesuits of the 1600s. Christ had not only stopped at Eboli: he had never left Rome's Aurelian walls, seminaries and theological treatises.

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Christ Stopped at Eboli is set between Grassano and Aliano (called Gagliano in the book), two towns in the province of Matera. The religious theme in its relationship with magic is an essential element of the novel: "In the other world of the peasants, where one does not enter without a key to magic" (Cristo si è fermato ad Eboli, Einaudi, 1947, p. 20). This summer I spent a few days in those two towns, to breathe in their spirit, and there, between readings and a pilgrimage on foot to Our Lady of Viggiano, I decided to write these few articles on Carlo Levi's Cristo. Levi's presence is still very much alive in those lands, revealing to us that sublime ability that literature has to change the history and geography of places while revealing to us their deep soul. The world changes every day as we try to tell its story.

Levi's Cristo is many things. At first glance, it is an autobiographical novel, a kind of anthropological and social diary written between 1943 and 1944 in Florence, which recounts the period of confinement in Lucania (1935-1936) of the anti-fascist Carlo Levi, painter, doctor, political activist and writer. The novel is also a denunciation of the inhumane condition of the undernourished and malarial inhabitants and children of Matera, which would emerge in all its dramatic force after the war, thanks in part to Levi, and to Silone. But his most beautiful pages are still others. They are the descriptions of the feelings of the poor people, of their many fears, of the moral pettiness of all fascism and all censure, of the religious and magical sense of a popular and peasant world of which a true and living reminder survives. But Cristo is above all a book written with wonderful prose, one of the happiest books in our literature. Levi was a painter, even when he writes he paints; he uses his pen to draw landscapes and small details, faces of men, of women, of children, of the poor.

'Christ' is not only the first word of one of the most ingenious titles in the history of literature; it is also one of the novel's central protagonists, a protagonist in its absence: 'We are not Christians,' they say, - Christ Stopped at Eboli. 'Christian' means, in their language, man... We are not Christians, we are not considered as men, but beasts, beasts of burden, and even less than beasts." And then he specifies, "But the phrase has a much deeper meaning, which, as always in symbolic ways, is the literal one. Christ really stopped at Eboli, where the road and the train leave the coast of Salerno and the sea, and enter the desolate lands of Lucania. Christ never came this far" (pp. 9-10).

For Levi, Christ and his different faith are not to be found in those lands, they did not descend there; instead, in their place was magic, witchcraft, monachicchi (the mischievous spirits of children who died without baptism), the dead: "For the old man, the bones, the dead, the animals and devils were familiar things, linked, as they are after all, here, for everyone, to simple everyday life - The country is made of the bones of the dead," he told me in his dark jargon, bubbling like underground water suddenly coming out between stones" (p. 67). There were also some saints and the Madonna of Viggiano who, however, had, for Levi, very little or nothing Christian about them: "The Madonna of Viggiano was, here, the fierce, ruthless, dark archaic goddess of the earth" (p. 113).

The vision Levi gives us of the peasants of Basilicata is similar to, but also different from, that of Ernesto de Martino, which emerged from his ethno-anthropological studies of Lucania and the South, conducted in roughly the same years as Levi. De Martino, too, showed us "a panorama that at first glance is extremely disjointed, contradictory ... and yet, on closer examination, [reveals] the unitary theme that holds together such heterogeneous elements, namely the people's demand for psychological protection" (Sud e Magia, 1959, pp. 8-9). For de Martino between popular Catholic religion and magic there realized a mutual contamination, although the dominant element remained magic, which was much more deeply rooted, popular, widespread than the Christian faith that had arrived in the South from outside, from above and speaking an incomprehensible language. De Martino was then convinced that a certain element of magic was intrinsic to Catholicism itself: "From the extra-canonical exorcism of sorcerers and sorceresses we pass to the exorcisms of the missal (blessing of water, salt, prayer against Satan and other evil spirits at the end of Mass etc.), the pontifical, the Roman ritual ..., the medals of St. Benedict and above all the exorcisms" (p. 120). For De Martino then, secular and communist, and unlike Levi, something of Christ and Christianity had descended beneath Eboli, forming a part, perhaps not the most important part, of the mestizo religion of those peoples. Even further from Levi in those same years Don Giuseppe de Luca, one of the greatest intellectuals of the 20th century and a great historian of popular piety, had gone even further, telling us of a faith of the Catholic people that was certainly mestizo but also Christian, although theirs was a Christianity different from those of theological treatises and catechisms (Introduction to the History of Piety, 1951). For De Luca, too, the piety of the Meridian and peasant people was a mestizo of Christianity and other things. Christianity mixed, impure, contaminated, but still Christianity.

In the world described by Levi, not so different from that of my grandparents, there were spirits, saints, lots of dead people, everything was shrouded in a certain spiritual atmosphere that was more negative and fearful than positive and reassuring; a constant supernatural presence made up of archaic elements, a lot of magic and some Christian graft soon absorbed from the ancient animist humus. We cannot deny it. Christian Europe, medieval and pre-modern Christianitas was, in fact, mainly the product of the imagination of theologians and ecclesiastics who confused the faith of urban elites and aristocratic households with that of all Christian people. In reality, in the countryside, in the mountains, the poor and illiterate lived in an expectation of the messiah very similar to that of the biblical people, which still continues. Yet in spite of all this, Christ overcame Eboli, reached those peasant and magical peoples, who really encountered him within the Latin prayers rewritten in dialect, in the statues of saints bathed in tears, in the sermons of itinerant missionaries, even in Don Trajella's wacky one for Christmas Eve. Christianity was not the mass of our people's faith, but a tiny grain of its leaven leavened it, and continues to leaven it.

The Christian religion had stopped and Eboli, or long before, but Christ had not: he had come down as far as Basilicata and Sicily, mingled and covered himself with many other things in order to penetrate more gently inside the lives of the people, and there he remained. Those magical peasant people thus really met Christ, a popular, dialectal, childlike Christ, disguised in traditional and folkloric clothing; but Christ was there, in Gagliano, within the loves and especially the sorrows of the poor, the men and especially the women, for whom the hugs and kisses to the statues of the saints and the madonna were the few moments of tenderness and beauty in a world that for them was almost always one of servitude. Illiterate women, part Christian and part witch, all beautiful, some masterfully described even in Levi's Christ; women of the people, bewitched by evil spells and magical filters, but who were able to cherish the sense of a true presence of the spirit on earth. With the same faith as the shepherds in the crib, the Syro-Phoenician woman and the hemorrhagic woman, that of Magdalene, Martha, and Mary. Faiths theologically imperfect, popular, made of tears, flesh and bodies, but true.

Carlo Levi did not see this Christian pietas in Lucania. He did not see it because he did not look for it. He was not interested in it. But he found something else, no less interesting. The pearl of Levi's Cristo is the gaze of its author. A good and never judgmental look at the lives of the peasants he encountered. Although a child of another world (that of science) and part of another religious universe (he was secular and from a well-to-do Jewish family in Turin), Levi does not make value judgments about the moral condition of his protagonists: he records their passions, their gestures, their beliefs, their great desperate pains, but he never judges them. She does not judge her maid, Giulia, who had 17 children with as many men, nor the exorcisms of the other 'witches,' nor Don Trajella, a parish priest confined to Gagliano, a drunkard and miser. On the contrary, here and there, he even goes so far as to express positive words about those magical methods of 'managing' the diseases and malaise of life, even revealing a certain skepticism toward the positivist science of his time that treated all popular knowledge as superstition to be eliminated: "Reason and science can take on the same magical character as vulgar magic...Therefore I respected the abracadabras, honored their antiquity and obscure, mysterious simplicity, preferred to be their ally than their enemy, and the peasants were grateful." Not least because, Levi added, "most of the prescriptions would be enough to heal the sick, if, without being shipped, they were hung around the neck with a string, like an abracadabra" (p. 215). Respect and honor then; one does not enter the peasant world 'without a key to magic,' certainly; but one does not enter their mystery without 'respecting and honoring them.'

Levi wrote pages about the peasants that still move us, because he honored and respected them, because he left his affluent bourgeois condition and went down under the rich man's table, in the company of Lazarus: and from there, from below, he saw different vistas. In this ethical and spiritual exercise his condition as a confined person helped him, that political and civil poverty of his gave him a genuine fraternity with the natural poverty of the peasants. And from this meeting of different people made equal by misfortune, the masterpiece was born.

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Narrative Economy/4 - An honourable and respectful look at the spirituality of southern peasants in the 1900s masterpiece novel

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 03/11/2024

From the exile experiences of another anti-fascist, Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli was born, which is intended to be and is the work of a literary man, but to which we all owe something more than just a literary suggestion.

Ernesto de Martino, The Land of Remorse, 1961, p. 28

With Christ Stopped at Eboli Carlo Levi reveals to us the soul of the Lucanian people, and takes us inside their religiosity, perhaps more Christian than Levi thought.

“Cristo si è fermato ad Eboli" (Christ Stopped at Eboli) is part of the moral consciousness of the second Italian and European twentieth century. Carlo Levi and Ignazio Silone showed us a popular soul of Meridian, peasant and poor Italy much more complex and richer than how the early modern and Enlightenment historians had described it, for whom those Italian peasants were simply 'pagans,' very similar if not identical to the pre-Christian inhabitants of Magna Graecia; as if Christianity had never passed through those rural lands of the South, which, because of little or no Christian culture, had already been called the 'Indies of Italy' by the Jesuits of the 1600s. Christ had not only stopped at Eboli: he had never left Rome's Aurelian walls, seminaries and theological treatises.

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Christ went beyond Eboli and met the magical people of the South

Christ went beyond Eboli and met the magical people of the South

Narrative Economy/4 - An honourable and respectful look at the spirituality of southern peasants in the 1900s masterpiece novel by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 03/11/2024 “From the exile experiences of another anti-fascist, Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli was born, which is intended to be...
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Narrative Economy/3 - The entire existence of a Christian, says Silone's Celestine V, has one purpose: to become simple

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 27/10/2024

Truly precious are the gifts that life gives us; precious and strange, Marta replies. Those who want to enjoy them, and toil from morning till night to enjoy them, do not enjoy them at all, but burn and ash them soon. Strange gifts. He, on the other hand, who forgets them, and forgets himself, and devotes himself wholly, hopelessly, to someone and some thing, those receive a thousand times more than he gives, and at the end of life those gifts received from nature are still flourishing in him, like great roses in May.”

Ignazio Silone, Vino e Pane, 1937, p. 18

Ignazio Silone's The Adventure of a Poor Christian are a profound reflection on the nature of power, and a mediation on faith as a waiting for a Kingdom that cannot tarry.

Those who go through, carefully, the books of Ignazio Silone and are familiar with his biography, cannot fail to recognize something-sometimes a lot-of his author in Berardo Viola (Fontamara), Pietro Spina (The Seed Under the Snow), Don Paolo Spada (Wine and Bread), Luca Sabatini (The Secret of Luke), and finally Pope Celestine V (The Adventure of a Poor Christian). Because, "if a writer puts his whole self into the work (and what else can he put into it?) his work cannot but constitute a single book" (I. Silone, The Adventure of a Poor Christian, Oscar Mondadori, ed. 2017, p. 6).

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What else, in fact, can a writer put into his works if not 'all of himself'? Actually, a writer, especially a great one (and Silone is one), when creating the characters of his novels undoubtedly starts from 'all of himself' but then arrives elsewhere, in an unknown place where 'himself' is no longer there or there is very little. For writers reveal well that mysterious and beautiful phrase of Jacques Lacan: "Love consists in giving what one does not have" (Seminar VIII, 1960-1961). They begin with what they have, with their whole soul, but then they really love us when they give us what they do not have, when their characters become bigger and freer than their already great and very great authors, and they begin to live in a land of the not-yet, unknown in the first place to their creators. In this, too, literature is creation, it is the truly unseen, it is widening the horizon of the human to populate it with other living beings who enrich and improve the existential stories of their authors and the history of all. One also writes to try to inhabit, without ever bridging, the sidereal distance between reality and our desires, between earth and heaven. 'Come out' is not only the cry that every author whispers to his creatures: it is he, it is she, who is the first recipient of that cry, to try to resurrect in his characters-because the only true desire is to resurrect.

Pietro da Morrone, Pope Celestine V, the protagonist of The Adventure of a Poor Christian (1968), is the last installment of Silone's 'cycle of the vanquished'. It is also Silone's last book, written as a play, which closes his 40-year reflection on social justice, the peasants, the poor, utopia, the gospel, Christianity, and his Kingdom that is yet to come, and may indeed come. The setting of the book, Silone's most explicitly religious setting, is the Abruzzi mountains of the late thirteenth century, where hermits and small communities of cenobites lived in an eschatological and apocalyptic atmosphere, a spiritual environment made up of Franciscanism and the prophecy of Joachim of Fiore, in the expectation "of a third age of humankind, the age of the Spirit, without Church, without State, without coercion, in an egalitarian, sober, humble and benign society, entrusted to the spontaneous charity of men" (p. 23). At that time, in fact, not a few Franciscans (among them the most famous was Pietro Olivi, also known for his economic ideas) saw in Francis the prophet of the new Age of the Spirit heralded by Joachim, of the unvanquished and imminent expectation of the coming of the Kingdom. Angelo Clareno, a character featured in Silone's text, was a Franciscan who was condemned and imprisoned because he adhered to Joachinite ideas.

The Peter of Morrone of The Adventure of a Poor Christian is also a figure of a prophetic Christianity, of Francis and Joachim of Fiore together, spiritual and messianic, to whom the late Silone entrusts his hopes for a different Church and world. Narrating Friar Peter's failed and uncertain attempt to reconcile the institutional Church (the papacy) with the charismatic one, Silone announces to us his idea of the Church and the good life: "The myth of the Kingdom has never disappeared from southern Italy, this land of utopia's election" (p. 23). We do not understand Southern Italy without taking this utopian and messianic soul of it very seriously: the South is also the expectation of another world, an unfulfilled prophecy of another economy and another society (Tommaso Campanella), the hope still alive in the fulfillment of a promise. The South, all the Souths of the world along with its marginal lands, are first and foremost a collective waiting for a not-yet, a question about the Kingdom that is to come, which no promise of commodities and profits can ever truly satiate - lies in this thirst and hunger the South's not-vanishing salvation.

The book is punctuated by Silone's auto-biographical reflections, particularly on the decisive event of his life, his youthful adherence to the Communist Party of which he was a founder in 1921, which later became a disappointment and finally an exit - Silone wrote his novels also to grieve the death of the great dream of his youth. A crucial existential event that as the years went by also became a 'theory' on the dynamics of ideal and ideological movements, which he would discuss in several writings (Uscita di sicurezza) and interviews (L'avventura di un uomo libero), still of great interest: "The founders are usually eagles, the followers generally hens" (p. 65). And again in The Adventure, on this he wrote: "Experience shows that the great community spontaneously generates aspirations for power, a will never entirely satisfied for successes and triumphs... As a community grows larger, it therefore becomes fatal that it resembles the society that surrounds it [and which it contested]. So what? Where does the salvation of the flock go?" Because of these dynamics, "even Joachim of Fiore resigned as head of his order. So did St. Francis. A large community demands compromises that, I am not saying a saint, but a simple honest man cannot accept" (p. 69).

Themes that will gradually become central to the book when, once elected pope, Brother Peter, who became Celestine V, will experience on his own soul and skin the difficulties of saving his Christian conscience along with the exercise of power. The inner conflict will be resolved by his famous resignation and the (likely) Dantean 'great refusal.' After abdicating, he will say, "I learned to my cost that it is not easy to be pope and remain a good Christian... The exercise of command enslaves, beginning with those who exercise it" (p. 130). Indeed, the book is also a profound and beautiful reflection on the nature of power and its logic: "The cursed 'for good'. My children, do not forget: there is only good, pure is simple; there is no 'for the sake of good'... Using power? What a pernicious illusion. It is power that makes use of us. Power is a difficult horse to ride: it goes where it must go, or rather it goes where it can go or where it is natural for it to go... The aspiration to command, the obsession with power is, at all levels, a form of madness. It eats away at the soul, distorts it, makes it false. Even if one aspires to power 'for good,' especially if one aspires to power 'for good'" (pp. 157-158). Power is a master who enslaves first and foremost those who command, even those who have sought it 'for good'; it is a ruthless ruler who feeds first on the leaders he has enchanted and only indirectly on their subjects. This is the curse of all wanted and obtained power, which because of this dimension of it really borders on the demonic: "The temptation of power is the most diabolical temptation that can be laid upon man, if Satan dared to propose it even to Christ" (p. 158). Very beautiful and prophetic are the pages on another 'great refusal' of Silone's Celestine V, that of blessing weapons: "With the sign of the Cross and the names of the Trinity, you can bless bread, soup, oil, water, wine, if you want even work tools, the plow, the farmer's hoe, the carpenter's planer, and so on, but not weapons. If you have an absolute need for a propitiatory rite, look for someone to do it in the name of Satan. It was he who invented weapons" (p. 123).

But The Adventure of a Poor Christian is above all a reflection on the nature of faith and the possibility of making the gospel the magna carta for a new society, for a different Kingdom here and now, and not just a sacred text of one religion like many. Hence the crucial question: can the Kingdom of Christ become something historical, or is life on this earth just the waiting room for heaven? An essential dimension of the evangelical spirit of this awaited Kingdom of Heaven is, for Silone, simplicity. In a dialogue, set in Naples, between the now Celestine V and some rhetoricians and court preachers, the new pope says: "I must first of all say to you: in preaching, if it is possible for you, try to be simple... True simplicity is a very difficult achievement." And he concludes with a phrase of great beauty: "The whole existence of a Christian, it can be said, has precisely this purpose: to become simple" (p. 100). An insight that is at once all human and all biblical. There is a deep soul in the Bible, that of the prophets, which sees the development of faith as a diminution, a reduction toward a progressive simplicity and essentiality, as an exercise in the arte del levare. The people's walk with their different God began on the slopes of Sinai where 'there was only a voice,' a bare voice that later became tabernacle, then ark, tent, finally Temple and palace of Solomon. The prophets went on to repeat, in various forms and much force, that that growth and increase had not been good, because salvation Israel would find it in the reduction and journey back from the palace to the bare voice, which happened through the Babylonian exile: "Perhaps, in order to rise again, the Church will first have to fully rot" (p. 159).

But even the good development of human life is a first growth from childhood to adulthood, which is followed by a second part of gradual and increasing decrease to the essentials, the part that from adulthood leads to its fulfillment, where there will be 'only one voice' that will speak only our naked name. The dowry we will bring will be the meekness we would have learned during this good decrease, to become so small as to be able to pass through the eye of the needle of the angel of death.

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Narrative Economy/3 - The entire existence of a Christian, says Silone's Celestine V, has one purpose: to become simple

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 27/10/2024

Truly precious are the gifts that life gives us; precious and strange, Marta replies. Those who want to enjoy them, and toil from morning till night to enjoy them, do not enjoy them at all, but burn and ash them soon. Strange gifts. He, on the other hand, who forgets them, and forgets himself, and devotes himself wholly, hopelessly, to someone and some thing, those receive a thousand times more than he gives, and at the end of life those gifts received from nature are still flourishing in him, like great roses in May.”

Ignazio Silone, Vino e Pane, 1937, p. 18

Ignazio Silone's The Adventure of a Poor Christian are a profound reflection on the nature of power, and a mediation on faith as a waiting for a Kingdom that cannot tarry.

Those who go through, carefully, the books of Ignazio Silone and are familiar with his biography, cannot fail to recognize something-sometimes a lot-of his author in Berardo Viola (Fontamara), Pietro Spina (The Seed Under the Snow), Don Paolo Spada (Wine and Bread), Luca Sabatini (The Secret of Luke), and finally Pope Celestine V (The Adventure of a Poor Christian). Because, "if a writer puts his whole self into the work (and what else can he put into it?) his work cannot but constitute a single book" (I. Silone, The Adventure of a Poor Christian, Oscar Mondadori, ed. 2017, p. 6).

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Waiting for the Kingdom of Heaven is in the art of diminishment

Waiting for the Kingdom of Heaven is in the art of diminishment

Narrative Economy/3 - The entire existence of a Christian, says Silone's Celestine V, has one purpose: to become simple by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 27/10/2024 “Truly precious are the gifts that life gives us; precious and strange, Marta replies. Those who want to enjoy them, and toi...
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Narrative Economy/2 - From the Torlonia hierarchy to the message of Berardo, who dies a martyr's death to defeat his fate

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 20/10/2024

“Under the paper I laboriously drafted, your mother signed with a sign of the cross. I already knew that this was the usual signature of illiterate people; but, even if this were not the case, how could one have imagined a more fitting signature for your mother? A small cross. A more personal signature than that? I remember, the following year, at the catechism exam Don Serafino asked me to explain to him the sign of the cross. “It reminds us of the passion of our Lord,” I replied, ”and it is also the way of signing of the unfortunate".

Ignazio Silone, Il segreto di Luca

The social scale of Fontamara gives us a reflection on human comedy, the poor and Christianity, culminating in the conclusion of the story of Berardo, who dies, a martyr, to defeat his fate.

“And Michele patiently explained to him our idea: -In chief of all is God, master of heaven. This everyone knows. Then comes Prince Torlonia, master of the earth. Then come the guards of Prince Torlonia. Then come the dogs of Prince Torlonia's guards. Then nothing. Then, still nothing. Then, still nothing. Then the cafoni come. And it's over.” (1947, p. 34). This is perhaps the best known passage from Ignazio Silone's Fontamara because it is the synthesis of his spirit and possesses an extraordinary lyrical and ethical force..

[fulltext] =>

That God imagined a step above the Torlonia's ended up, in spite of himself, legitimizing and sacralizing that tremendous hierarchy, placing his stool at the top of a pyramid higher and wrong than that of the pharaohs, without even being able to say, 'not in my name.' Christianity had been coming to earth for nineteen centuries, but it had stopped at Eboli or Avezzano, without reaching the mountains, the countryside, the poor, the cafoni who did not know that the God of Jesus was not sitting on the same ladder as the Torlonia. The cafoni did not know the different God of the gospel, because he was too veiled and hidden by the theologies of the Counter-Reformation and the Latinorum of the priests. Yet sometimes they encountered him, especially in the depths of their sorrows, where, in the guise of Our Lady, angels or saints he had visited, touched and consoled them-not only the Spirit but the whole Trinity is the 'father of the poor,' for if it were not so even the Christian God would be only one of many idols devouring the wretched.

Religion is a major theme of the novel. In the first chapter, Michele Zompa tells a dream of his to Marietta and 'the stranger': “I saw the pope arguing with [Jesus] Crucified. The Crucified One was saying: to celebrate this peace [the Lateran Pacts] it would be good to distribute the land of Fucino to the cafoni who cultivate it and also to the poor cafoni of Fontamara... And the pope replied: - Sir, Prince Torlonia will not want to. And the prince is a good Christian. The Crucifix said: - To celebrate this peace it would be good to dispense the cafoni from paying taxes. And the pope replied: - Sir, the government will not want to. And the rulers are also good Christians... Then the pope proposed to him: - Sir, let us go to the place. Perhaps it will be possible to do something for the cafoni that will displease neither Prince Torlonia, nor the government, nor the rich.” So the two set off for Marsica, and “the pope felt afflicted in the depths of his heart, took from his saddlebag a cloud of lice and threw them on the houses of the poor, saying: - Take, O beloved children, take and scratch yourselves” (pp. 31-32). The parish priest forbade Michael from telling his dream. The Catholic world should soon begin a journey of purification of memory, for while it is true that in its social charisms it has done so much to alleviate the lot of the victims and the poor, it is equally true that in order not to displease 'neither Prince Torlonia, nor the government, nor the rich' too often the church has associated the face of its God with that of power and the strong, perhaps asking them to help the poor. Christianity, moribund in the West, will still be able to hope for a springtime if it is able to turn Silone's scale upside down, and proclaim a Christ who stands below the cafoni and from there disrupts the plans of the strong and the great every day - 'He has overthrown the mighty from their thrones, He has raised up the lowly.

In Silone's social scale there is then an essential detail. In all places and at all times there is no regular and direct transition from 'guard dogs' to 'boors'. No: there are three blanks in between. After the dogs there are three blank sheets - 'then nothing, then still nothing, then still nothing' -. In the staircase upward, after the ground where the boors are missing three steps, there is a hole three times as wide as the distance separating the guards from their dogs. Important and prophetic is the reference to the dogs, who today in the hierarchy of our perverted morality stand far above the migrants deported by our government to Albania. Over the decades the space between the dogs and the boors has grown a lot, the blank pages from three have become ten, a hundred, have multiplied and continue to multiply. In that Italy of Silone's, where popular piety was still alive and active, the boors lived in the same villages as everyone else, were visible, met in the streets, were part of the same people. From those still horizontal intersections of gazes could be born liberation movements, along with writers, artists and poets capable of giving voice to the 'not yet' of their time. Today we no longer see the boors, we deport them abroad, capitalism has hidden them from sight and heart; Christian pietas we have forgotten and ridiculed within a generation. The cafoni of the earth are more and more damned, they do not look at us and concern more in “our lukewarm homes” (Primo Levi)-where, if any, are the new Silone and Levi capable of singing the endless pain of the cafoni? That triple page turn marks the great gulf that separates those above from those below, for without that void those below would not truly be below and those above would not truly be above. That gap between the dogs and the boors then says that the abyss is insurmountable, that, for Silone now disillusioned even by communism, misery and power are forever: elites circulate, the merry-go-round of social classes turns, but between the boors and the Torlonia the furrow remains insurmountable. Until when? Or, to put it in Fontamara's last words, “After so many pains and so many griefs, so many tears and so many wounds, so much blood, so much hatred, so much injustice and so much despair: what to do?” (p. 250).

The epic of Fontamara reaches its dramatic climax in the sad and wonderful conclusion of the story of Berardo Viola. Berardo is a strong, generous, good young man with a strong sense of social justice; this is also why he is the hope of redemption for his countrymen. Grandson of the last brigand of Fontamara (murdered by the Piedmontese), Silone introduces him to us in this way: “He had good eyes, he had preserved as an adult the eyes he had as a boy” (p. 89), which is perhaps the most beautiful word that can be said of an adult, if it is true that the good toil of living is almost all in arriving at the end with something of the eyes with which we have come to it. Berardo had inherited a piece of land from his father, sold it to get the money to emigrate to America, “but before he embarked, a new law suspended all emigration.” So he remained in Fontamara, landless and “like a dog loosed from its chain that does not know what to do with freedom and wanders desperately around the lost property.” But, Silone adds, “how can a man of the land resign himself to the loss of the land?” (p. 84). For “between the land and the peasant it is a hard and serious affair ... It is a kind of sacrament.” He then adds words about land among the most beautiful in our literature, which only a peasant can still understand: “It is not enough to buy it, for a land to be yours. It becomes yours with years, with toil, with sweat, with tears, with sighs. If you have land, on bad weather nights you cannot sleep, because you do not know what is happening to your land” (p. 85). Berardo begs the buyer of his land, Don Circostanza, in vain to give it back to him. Finally, he manages to get a piece of land on the mountain, among the rocks, in the “contrada dei serpenti.” He works it hard-“Either the mountain kills me, or I kill the mountain” (p. 87)-he plants corn there. But there was a heavy flood, “the mountain came down,” and “an enormous flood of water carried away Berardo's little field” (p. 88). And Silone asks, “Can one win against fate?” (p. 89), a fate that is the novel's co-star. And to try to defy fate again, Berardo leaves for Rome in search of work.

Between employment offices, “by the seventh day that we were in Rome, we had no more than four liras left” (p. 216). After three days of fasting, Berardo and his friend (the narrator's voice) stopped leaving the room, stayed still from hunger, lying on the bed. Until they were arrested by the fascists for a mistake, mistaken for subversive troublemakers. They had come to work, ended up in a jail - yesterday, and today. But it is inside that wrong jail that Berardo experiences his resurrection. He says he is “the usual stranger,” a wanted man accused of spreading “the clandestine press,” inciting “the workers to strike, the peasants to disobey” (p. 223), and with a lie he tells the commissioner, “The usual stranger is me” (p. 231). In that prison Berardo manages to overcome his fate. With a vicarious act of sacrifice he takes on a guilt he does not have, and manages to make it to the end, not recanting despite harsh torture. Berardo escapes the fate imprinted on his life since the story of his grandfather, giving his life out of an uncanny loyalty to his ideals of justice. His secular martyrdom redeems Fontamara at the height of its defeat. And at the end of a book where fate itself had been the great victor, he tells us: we are greater than our fate.

Even if Silone does not explain why Berardo as an innocent man self-incriminated, it is not difficult to see in him an image of Christ and his passion: “What if I die? - I will be the first boor who does not die for himself, but for others.” His last words, “It will be something new. A new example. The beginning of something entirely new” (p. 238). That something new over time will mature in Silone, until it blossoms into his last masterpiece, L’avventura di un povero cristiano (from 1968).

Christ is rising again today in Libya, in Albania, on barges, in Gaza, in the Congo, in Sudan, in Lebanon. We don't know him, we don't see him, we don't recognize him, because we look for him in the empty tombs and not in the places of the crucified. 'My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” was the first cry of the Risen One.

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Narrative Economy/2 - From the Torlonia hierarchy to the message of Berardo, who dies a martyr's death to defeat his fate

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 20/10/2024

“Under the paper I laboriously drafted, your mother signed with a sign of the cross. I already knew that this was the usual signature of illiterate people; but, even if this were not the case, how could one have imagined a more fitting signature for your mother? A small cross. A more personal signature than that? I remember, the following year, at the catechism exam Don Serafino asked me to explain to him the sign of the cross. “It reminds us of the passion of our Lord,” I replied, ”and it is also the way of signing of the unfortunate".

Ignazio Silone, Il segreto di Luca

The social scale of Fontamara gives us a reflection on human comedy, the poor and Christianity, culminating in the conclusion of the story of Berardo, who dies, a martyr, to defeat his fate.

“And Michele patiently explained to him our idea: -In chief of all is God, master of heaven. This everyone knows. Then comes Prince Torlonia, master of the earth. Then come the guards of Prince Torlonia. Then come the dogs of Prince Torlonia's guards. Then nothing. Then, still nothing. Then, still nothing. Then the cafoni come. And it's over.” (1947, p. 34). This is perhaps the best known passage from Ignazio Silone's Fontamara because it is the synthesis of his spirit and possesses an extraordinary lyrical and ethical force..

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In the social scale of Fontamara misery and redemption of the cafoni

In the social scale of Fontamara misery and redemption of the cafoni

Narrative Economy/2 - From the Torlonia hierarchy to the message of Berardo, who dies a martyr's death to defeat his fate by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 20/10/2024 “Under the paper I laboriously drafted, your mother signed with a sign of the cross. I already knew that this was the usua...
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    [title] => On the side of the cafoni of Fontamara, poverty is neither guilt nor shame
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Narrative Economics/1 - With the Abruzzo writer's literary masterpiece, a new journey begins through stories (and words) guardians of a world

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 13/10/2024

«By order of the mayor all reasoning is prohibited»
Ignazio Silone, Fontamara, p. 89

Start with Fontamara a new series through some literary masterpieces, in search of new words for the economy and for our difficult times.

If reality were enough for us, there would be no need for literature. We are infinity, novels shorten the distance between us and eternity; we are desire, writers increase desirable things because closed-eyed dreams are too little. Joy also feeds on the worlds created by literature, our righteousness grows as we become indignant while reading a novel, we learned pietas from parents and friends but also from fairy tales and writers' stories. We would not have been able to imagine the promised land of democracy, freedom and rights if we had not encountered it in myths and novels, glimpsed it in a poem. We have known God because the Bible taught us through stories, and human words have held another Word. All faiths will come to an end on the sad day when we stop writing stories, and telling them to each other.

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"Ignazio Silone has today his maturity crowned and sovereignly fixed in works of art that are at the same time his 'song of creatures' and his apocalyptic vision of the new democratic spirituality... We think we are doing something most timely by giving here as an appendix to our weekly, the first novel of his that gave the international world the acute sensation of the suffering of the Italian people under fascist regime" (March 7, 1945). So wrote Ernesto Buonaiuti introducing the publication of the first chapters of Fontamara in the first issue of his weekly "Il Risveglio." Buoaniuti, the great and beloved professor of the history of Christianity at La Sapienza in Rome, among the twelve academics who did not swear an oath to the Fascist regime, a priest excommunicated from the Catholic Church for his modernist theses-we are still waiting for his rehabilitation, perhaps at Jubilee time.

Fontamara was written by Ignazio Silone (Secondino Tranquilli) in the early 1930s during his Swiss exile. It was first published in German (Zurich, Oprecth & Helbing, April 1933, translation by Nettie Sutro), which was followed by a first Italian-language edition (Zurich-Paris, November 1933) reprinted in London in 1943 (J. Cape, dated 1933). The first edition in Italy came only in 1947 thanks to the small Roman publisher 'Faro,' and finally in 1949 with Mondadori. Its international success was considerable, but it had to wait until the collapse of fascism to be printed in Italy.

In 1930 Silone had been in Switzerland for two years, between Zurich and Davos, for his clandestine commitment to the Communist Party he had helped found at the Livorno congress in 1921. It was also during his Swiss sojourn that his disagreements with Togliatti over his anti-Stalinist positions began, to be followed by his expulsion from the party in 1931. In the sanatorium to treat a respiratory illness (apparent tuberculosis), depressed, distressed about the situation of his brother Romolo, the only one of his family who had been saved with him in 1915 under the rubble of the Pescina earthquake, who had been put in prison by the fascist regime, tortured and then killed in 1932 - Silone dedicates Fontamara to his brother and to Gabriella Seidenfeld, his companion he had met in 1920 from whom he was separating romantically.

Fontamara is thus the distillation of terrible years, the fruit of a very painful metamorphosis. A very deep existential crisis that generated the masterpiece. Fontamara is not only a novel that revealed to Italy and the world the deep soul of the southern peasant world, nor is it only a classic of anti-fascism. Fontamara is above all a literary masterpiece, a stupendous novel, one of those works that perhaps only great pain can generate. Silone, he would later say, found his salvation in literature, overcame that very dark night by becoming a writer-and what a writer! There are many ways to try to save oneself from the black holes of life, writing and art being among the most powerful and common, because one gets out of the hole by learning to fly.

To understand and enjoy it, however, there is a need to perform some essential ethical-spiritual exercises. The first is the most difficult one, perhaps impossible but really necessary: try to forget our comforts, the worship of commodities, offices and incentives, and go with our souls to the world of Fontamara: "First came the sowing, then the sulfur, then the reaping, then the harvest. Then what? Then all over again. The sowing, the weeding, the pruning, the sulfurring, the reaping, the harvest. Always the same song, the same refrain. Always. The years went by, the years accumulated, the young became old, the old died, and the sowing was done, the weeding was done, the insulphation was done, the harvest was done. And then again? All over again. Each year like the previous year, each season like the previous season. Each generation like the previous generation" (1951, p. 9). It is the reign of Sisyphus, but unlike A. Camus's Sisyphus, Silone's Sisyphus is not happy: "To those who look at Fontamara from afar, from the Feudo del Fucino, the settlement ... seems like a village like so many others; but to those who are born and grow up there, the cosmos. The whole universal history takes place there: births, deaths, loves, hates, envies, struggles, despairs" (p. 8). In the first edition of 'The Awakening,' at the end of this paragraph Silone had added, "The spectacle of life is there more meager, more visible and comprehensible, and nothing essential is missing," a phrase that then disappeared in later editions.

The second exercise of spiritual imagination concerns the peasant world. Silone's, like Carlo Levi's (whom we shall see), is a world I also knew, touching on it through my relationship with my grandparents who worked the land in Ascoli. It is very likely, if not certain, that my generation is the last moral heir to millennia of peasant history, made up of Christianity, magic, lots of living and dead children, lots of folk love and lots of pain of everyone, of women most of all. That world, always the same in its essential features, was the world of my childhood. I was still a boy, but I too saw that peasant Sisyphus, little myth and all flesh. It is an essential part of my soul, where I jealously guard it. Fontamara is my country.

That was an Italian world but one where other languages were spoken: "Let it not occur to anyone that the Fontamaresi speak Italian... The Italian language is for us a foreign language, a dead language" (p. 15). When I remember or dream of my grandparents, to try to tune into their hearts again, I have to tune into the dialect, because only in that language could and can they tell me the right and perfect words, tell the most beautiful stories with an eloquence and richness that immediately became awkwardness and discomfort as soon as we had to switch to Italian (the Italianization of the peasants was also violence): "However, if the language is borrowed, the way of telling, it seems to me, is ours. It is a fundamental art. It is the same one learned as a boy, sitting on the doorstep, or by the fireplace, on long waking nights" (p. 16). Perhaps my love for words also came from listening to the stories of my aunts, or the very long ones of 'Old Catherine' who stayed with us little brothers on long winter evenings. So this series of articles that begins today is also a contribution to the preservation of the memory of a world that I knew and that is ending along with its stories: who knows if our children will still be able to understand and be moved by Silone or Levi?

Finally, the third exercise is semantic, and concerns the key-word of Fontamara: boor. In parentheses, Silone writes: "(I know well that the name cafone, in the current language of my country, both of the country and of the city, is now a term of offense and derision; but I adopt it in this book in the certainty that when in my country pain will no longer be a disgrace, it will become a name of respect, perhaps even of honor)" (p. 10).

We enter Fontamara if we can reach now that country of tomorrow where 'pain is no longer shameful'; there we pitch our tent and with Silone we use the name boor as a 'name of respect and honor.' And so we deny all the meritocratic ideologies that are driving away that country of tomorrow, introducing every day new arguments to convince us that the poor man must be ashamed of his poverty because he is guilty of his own misfortune -- and while convincing us of this lie, capitalism frees itself from all responsibility.

Fontamara is not a 'village,' a word that has entered the crevices of our mundane time that has lost touch with the soul of real places. In Fontamara "peasants do not sing ... least of all (and it is understood) going to work. Instead of singing, they gladly blaspheme. To express great emotion, joy, anger and even religious devotion, they blaspheme. But even in blaspheming they do not carry much imagination, and they always take it out on two or three saints of their acquaintance, they always mangle them with the same crude swear words" (p. 14). One does not enter the world of the poor if one is afraid of blasphemies and curses, because they are, often, paradoxical words of love.

In Fontamara, economics is a constant note, declined as land, labor, obsession with 'paying,' misery, taxes, power. Social injustice, central to the novel, is also and above all an economic injustice, that of the latifundium and the 'impresario' supported by institutions, smallholders and the clergy (Don Abbacchio). And it goes all the way to Berardo's death, in perhaps the most intense pages of the novel.

Fontamara is a story of failed social redemption, of failed liberation. The peasants cheated by the detour of the stream to bring water to the impresario remain poor and cheated from the beginning to the end of the novel. Fontamara seems like an eternal Good Friday, with a few glimpses of Saturday, no Sunday. And in this it resembles so many other great novels, where Fantine sells and her teeth and dies without resurrection, or the Bible where the exodus and exile continue beyond the Red Sea and after the edict of Cyrus, because the wandering Aramean has never stopped wandering. The only resurrection that saves is the one that begins on Golgotha. And so, the more Silone leads us into the depths of the boors' pain, the more we glimpse there a strange beauty and bright light -- we will not be able to lift the many 'boors' out of their miseries until we learn the beauty hidden within poverty, and to look upon the poor with honor and respect.

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Narrative Economics/1 - With the Abruzzo writer's literary masterpiece, a new journey begins through stories (and words) guardians of a world

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 13/10/2024

«By order of the mayor all reasoning is prohibited»
Ignazio Silone, Fontamara, p. 89

Start with Fontamara a new series through some literary masterpieces, in search of new words for the economy and for our difficult times.

If reality were enough for us, there would be no need for literature. We are infinity, novels shorten the distance between us and eternity; we are desire, writers increase desirable things because closed-eyed dreams are too little. Joy also feeds on the worlds created by literature, our righteousness grows as we become indignant while reading a novel, we learned pietas from parents and friends but also from fairy tales and writers' stories. We would not have been able to imagine the promised land of democracy, freedom and rights if we had not encountered it in myths and novels, glimpsed it in a poem. We have known God because the Bible taught us through stories, and human words have held another Word. All faiths will come to an end on the sad day when we stop writing stories, and telling them to each other.

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On the side of the cafoni of Fontamara, poverty is neither guilt nor shame

On the side of the cafoni of Fontamara, poverty is neither guilt nor shame

Narrative Economics/1 - With the Abruzzo writer's literary masterpiece, a new journey begins through stories (and words) guardians of a world by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 13/10/2024 «By order of the mayor all reasoning is prohibited» Ignazio Silone, Fontamara, p. 89 Start with Fonta...