GREGORY L. LUCENTE

THE HISTORICAL IMPERATIVE: GIOVANNI VERGA AND ITALIAN REALISM IN THE LIGHT OF RECENT CRITICAL TRENDS

Nineteenth century Italian realism in general (or verismo) and Giovanni Verga's works in particular have received a great deal of critical attention over the past three decades. From the biographically and thematically oriented idealist treatments of the 1950s and 1960s through the post-1968 Marxist reinter- pretations of the 1970s, Verga criticism has remained in the forefront of Italian literary debates. This has been the case in large part because of the representational slant of verismo's aesthetic and because of the extraordinary complexity that any adequate theory of literary representation necessarily involves. In recent years, two trends have dominated Verga "studies: on the one hand, an interest in textual criticism, in the estab- lishing and re-editing of Verga's major texts; and on other an interest in the details of Verga's historical milieu, in recapturing the nineteenth century Sicilian environment that Verga's realist narratives endeavor, in literary terms, to re- create. While the first of these trends is a matter of editorial refinement within Verga studies, the second, in its openly historicizing tendencies, has implications that extend well be- yond Verga studies as such. This critical concern for the ma- terial particulars of everyday life within a specific sociocultural milieu furnishes an important analogy to recent American critical interest regarding the nature of literary representation, especially as that interest is manifest in the "new historicist" critical enterprise currently under way in the United States. Before suggesting how and why such a parallel is germane to the study of literary realism overall, however, it may prove

Neohr XVI/2 Akaddmiai Kiadd, Budapest John Benjamins B. V., Amsterdam 150 GREGORY L. LUCENTE useful to sketch the primary characteristics of Verga's verismo and, albeit in summary fashion, the history of verismo's critical "fortune." Verga, along with his fellow Sicilian Luigi Capuana, was one of the founding fathers of the realist movement that was known as verismo. While Capuana's importance as a verista derives primarily from his critical tracts written to explain and propagate Italian realism, Verga's significance lies in the literary praxis of his realist narratives, along with the prefaces and introductions that he used as discursive preambles to his novels and short stories. Verga's major realist works include two vol- umes of short stories, Vita dei campi (1880) and Novelle rusti- cane (1883), and two novels, I Malavoglia (1881) and Mastro- don Gesualdo (1888-89). 1 The vast preponderance of these nar- ratives focuses on the lives of the rural lower classes in Verga's native Sicily. At one and the same time, this choice of subject matter demonstrates the affinity of Verga's verismo with con- temporaneous realist movements throughout Europe and Ver- ga's marked divergence from earlier nineteenth century trends in Italian literature, which, in general, had remained highly romantic and elegantly stylized. Any description of Verga's realist practice as either directly or naively representational falls short, however, on at least two counts. First, although Verga often sympathetically adopted the perspective of the Sicilian peasantry, he also developed a series of literary techniques permitting him not only to describe

1 All references to Verga's works are to Igrandi romanzi, I Malavoylia, Mastro-don Gesualdo, ed. Ferruccio Cecco and Carla Riccardi, introd. Rieeardo Bacehelli, I Meridiani (Milan: Mondadori, 1972), and Tutte le novelle, ed. Carla Riccardi, I Meridiani (Milan: Mondadori, 1979). Page references, when necessary, will be included in the text. Translations of Verga's works are from The House by the Medlar Tree, ed. Giovanni Cecchetti, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (Los Angeles and Berkeley: Uni- versity of California Press, 1983), and The She-Wolf and Other Stories, trans. Giovanni Cecchetti, 2nd rev. ed. (Los Angeles and Berkeley: U of California P, 1973). Otherwise, all translations from the Italian are mine.