Giovanni Verga

Giovanni Verga: The Novelist of the Defeated

A fishing boat called the Provvidenza puts out from a Sicilian village carrying a cargo of lupins bought on credit. A storm takes the boat, the beans and the man sailing them, and a family solvent for generations begins a slide it will never reverse. That is the entire engine of *I Malavoglia*, and it is Giovanni Verga's theory of life compressed into a debt on a load of legumes: people are ruined not by fate or villainy but by a small commercial miscalculation made by decent men.

The Long Apprenticeship

Verga was born in Catania on 2 September 1840 and enrolled, nominally, to read law at the university there — nominally because he was already writing and had no serious intention of practising. He published his first novel, *Amore e patria*, at sixteen. For the next two decades he was a competent producer of exactly the kind of fiction the Italian market wanted: patriotic at first, then romantic and fashionable, the sort of thing an ambitious provincial writes to get out of the provinces.

Getting out was the plan. A visit to Florence in 1865 changed his register, and in 1869 he settled there. In 1872 he moved to Milan, then the literary capital of the new kingdom, and fell in with the Scapigliatura, Italy's bohemian avant-garde. He wrote drawing-room novels about adultery and passion and they sold. Nothing in this phase of his career predicts what came next.

The Turn

Between 1877 and 1878 Verga encountered French Naturalism — Zola, and the doctrine that the novelist should observe society as a scientist observes a specimen. With Luigi Capuana he founded the Italian answer to it, *verismo*. But Verga's version diverged from the French model almost immediately, and the divergence is the point. Zola narrates from above, explaining his poor to a bourgeois reader. Verga refused to explain anything at all.

The method arrives fully formed in *Rosso Malpelo* (1878) and in the collection *Vita dei campi* (1880). The critic Martin Greenberg identifies the two qualities that define it: "brevity, an intense abruptness striving for absolute impersonality," and a prose in which the author's voice has been dissolved entirely into the community's. Verga's style, Greenberg writes, "echoed his characters' own speech — *was* their own speech." There is no narrator standing outside a Sicilian village telling you what its people are like. There is only the village, talking, gossiping, judging, and the reader left to work out what is true. What separates this from cold documentary is the lyricism underneath. In Flaubert and Zola, Greenberg notes, the lyrical is a touch; "in Verga it isn't a touch, it's an element."

Cavalleria Rusticana

The short story *Cavalleria rusticana* (1880) — a knife fight over a woman, honour code enforced to the death — became the most consequential thing Verga ever wrote, though not in the form he wrote it. He adapted it for the stage in 1884, and the theatre version fed straight into opera. Gastaldon's *Mala Pasqua!* came first; Mascagni's *Cavalleria rusticana* followed and eclipsed everything, carrying Verga's title and his plot into the international repertory. Verga's Sicilian peasants, written down in flat unemotional prose precisely to strip them of romance, thus reached the world in the most romantic medium available. The irony would not have been lost on him.

The House by the Medlar Tree

*I Malavoglia* (1881) is what Italians regard as his masterpiece, and Greenberg agrees, calling it strikingly original. The Toscano family of Aci Trezza are nicknamed the Malavoglia, "the ill-willed" or lazy ones, a village joke because they are the most industrious people in it. The lupin venture kills Bastianazzo and starts the collapse. What follows is not a plot so much as an accumulation: Luca dies in battle, cholera comes, the boat is wrecked again, the daughter Lia is driven into prostitution largely by what the neighbours say about her, and the eldest grandson 'Ntoni — who saw the wider world during military service and came home unable to accept a fisherman's life — drinks, turns criminal, and exiles himself. Only the youngest, Alessi, claws back the Casa del Nespolo, the house by the medlar tree that is the family's whole idea of itself. The grandfather Padron 'Ntoni dies before he can see it.

The technique is choral. The narration never settles in one head; it moves through the village as talk moves, so that the reader hears the community appraising the Malavoglia even as the Malavoglia are destroyed by that appraisal. It survives translation badly — Greenberg concedes English cannot carry "the Mediterranean music, flavored with dialect" of the original — and even D. H. Lawrence, who translated Verga and campaigned for him, thought it "rather overdone on the pitiful side," a charge Greenberg answers by asking what could be cut without damage.

Gesualdo, and the Cycle That Stopped

*I Malavoglia* was to be the first of five novels called *I Vinti* — the Vanquished — climbing the social ladder rung by rung: fishermen and peasants, then the provincial bourgeoisie, then the Palermo nobility, then parliamentary Rome, then the luxury of the contemporary rich. The thesis was that the struggle for life crushes people identically at every altitude. He finished two. *Mastro-don Gesualdo* (1889), the story of a mason who claws his way into the gentry and is destroyed by it, is the second, and it is the weaker book. Greenberg's verdict is severe: it offers "truth from which artistic spiritedness, grace, are absent," and reads as though Verga wrote it "out of his head," fitting characters to a Zolaesque scheme rather than listening to them. The remaining three volumes were never written. From 1891 he withdrew from literary society; in 1893 he went home to Catania. He was made a senator for life in 1920 and died there of a cerebral thrombosis on 27 January 1922.

Why Giovanni Is Called a Genius

The claim rests on a technical breakthrough, and it is worth naming precisely, because Verga was not an original thinker. His ideas about society were borrowed from French Naturalism and his fatalism is closer to temperament than to philosophy. What he invented was a way of narrating.

Before Verga, a novel about the poor was a novel *about* the poor: an educated voice describing them to educated readers. Verga removed that voice. He built a prose that thinks in his characters' idiom, judges by their standards, and knows only what their village knows, so that the author's superiority to his subject — the quiet condescension inside nearly all social realism — disappears from the page. This is far harder than it sounds, and it anticipates by decades techniques usually credited to modernism. Greenberg places him in "the front rank of short-story writers" and calls *Novelle rusticane* (1883) "perfection of their kind."

The counter-case is real. The achievement is concentrated in roughly a decade and two books; the earlier society novels are forgettable and *Mastro-don Gesualdo* shows the method curdling into formula. He then stopped writing fiction for thirty years. And the very thing that makes him great — a prose so saturated in Sicilian speech that the author vanishes — has kept him provincial in reputation abroad. Greenberg calls him "an obscure figure" still, despite Lawrence's translations and Visconti's film. Lawrence himself asked in the 1920s: "Who still reads them, even (outside the classroom) in Italy?"

Legacy

Verga gave Italy verismo and gave the opera house, indirectly, its own verismo. More durably, he gave twentieth-century fiction a demonstration that a novelist can surrender narrative authority entirely and gain power by doing it — a lesson Visconti carried onto film. He remains, exactly as his own novels predicted, magnificently under-rewarded.

Achievements

• Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus
• Notable work: I Malavoglia
• Notable work: Il marito di Elena
• Notable work: Mastro Don Gesualdo
• Notable work: La duchessa di Leyra
• Genres: short novel and novella