Classics Revisited
Revolutionary change and its aftermath
BY RAVI VYAS
The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, (first published in Italian, 1958, English translation, 1961), HarperCollins, 1992, £6.95, with an Introduction by E.M. Forster.
Other Books consulted:
Little Novels of Sicily, Giovanni Verga, with an Introduction by D.H. Lawrence
Italian Writing Today, Penguin Books, 1967 edition.
If we want everything to remain as it is, it will be necessary for everything to change.
Prince Tancredi in Lampedusa's
The Leopard
A NOVEL is never anything except a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy disappears into the images. A good novelist is therefore also a social historian — the operative word is "also". Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard, the story of a decadent, dying Sicilian aristocracy crushed by the approaching forces of democracy and revolution in mid-19th century, fits the bill: it describes how the accepted ways of seeing things is swept away by the tide of revolutionary change. But, The Leopard is not a plot-driven novel; it is, as E. M. Forster says in the Introduction, "not a historical novel, but a novel that happened to take place in history". It bristles with ideas and angst, uncertain whether the future will ever arrive, and when it does, whether it would work at all.
The story is set in the 1860s, when Garibaldi was campaigning to unite the disparate provinces into an Italian state. The movement described as The Risorgimento took off from Sicily, which was the poorest place in Europe at the time. A Sicilian peasant, it was said, could go through a whole life without ever possessing as much as a dollar in hard cash.
Historical changes
But, after 1870, as the aristocracy slowly withered away and thousands of Sicilian acres were liberated from the stranglehold of landlords and hundreds of subjects from their squalor, peasants were able to buy their own land, instead of working on half-profits system. The Leopard is the story of the decline and fall of the landed aristocracy and the corresponding rise of the peasantry in the poorest part of Italy.
Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, is the central character. He is called the Leopard after the family crest. When the novel opens, he is in his forties, with several children. He is a benevolent tyrant at home, a man with traditional values who knows his place and has those around who know their places too. He is a man of enormous sensual appetites, throws his money around (though not too carelessly), politically knowledgeable though completely apolitical.
Fabrizio is also an amateur astronomer. He looks at the heavens through his telescope while his world crumbles around him after Garibaldi and his Red Shirts conquer Sicily. The astronomical passages are grand, where the hero, who has wasted his Sicilian day, repairs to his telescope as if to find a release from human possessiveness in the starry heavens above. There is an underlying sadness in the passing away of the old order, which is perhaps why Italian Marxist critics saw its historical vision as narrow and Catholic intellectuals rejected its pessimistic outlook and anticlerical views.
The Risorgimento is constantly in the backdrop and as the novel develops, it is clear that it will ultimately be successful as the last bastions of aristocratic life — the palaces, castles and the laid-back lifestyle — slowly give way. Fabrizio, out of loyalty, is nominally supportive of the old regime but keeps out of the conflict by sitting on the fence.
But he has to decide one way or the other: whether to resist the forces of change or come to terms with them. True to his survival instinct, he does both. He marries off his nephew, Tancredi, the penniless but charismatic son of his sister, and an ardent supporter of Garibaldi, to Angelica, the daughter of the mayor, Don Calogero, a member of the rising middle-class that has been enriched by the new order. The union crosses class barriers. But he himself refuses the offer of a post of honour, to keep his contacts with the old aristocratic order, as if to say that the leopard never changes his spots. Neither act does he ever regret, as, 20 years later he looks back on his life and the enigma of his land. You have to survive, at any cost, even if the compromise goes against the grain of all that you had believed and stood for. For Fabrizio, life is just a series of events, the last of which could change the meaning of the whole.
Different values
What the events of the story illustrate is the changing face of society and also the nature of Sicilian society (read poor, peasant societies like ours) in general. At another level, the Prince's ageing and death, his growing awareness of his own mortality echoes the values of his class. On his deathbed, Don Fabrizio reflects that a noble family's significance lay in its traditions and memories: his nonworking life spent travelling, reading and learning while living off an inherited income derived from semi-feudal lands doesn't bother him.
But, more than the women who come and go, it is the descriptions of the Prince's homes, of his meals, of the attitude of the Catholic church towards its flock that are the most compelling because they describe the feudal world in all its superficial splendour. In the final analysis, it is the language that distinguishes a classic such as this.
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