Sciascia, Leonardo
▶ Watch on YouTubeCoverage note: full (about nineteen minutes; automatic English YouTube captions apparently machine-translated from the Italian, with some awkward phrasing and a few mistranslated names and titles)
Core ideas
A writer's day, Palermo and Racalmuto. Sciascia describes writing a few hours each morning, then spending the day at the Sellerio publishing house, where he enjoys the work of an editor, and reading newspapers and books in the afternoon. He has lived in Palermo for about ten years (first moving to Caltanissetta so his daughters could attend high school, then to Palermo for university), but goes back to the countryside near Racalmuto, his native town in the interior, to write each book over about three months. Racalmuto, called Regalpetra in his books, is the place where people know him as someone who has lived there, who taught elementary school for ten years after working as a clerk in a grain warehouse. He says he has no "subconscious" to analyze (half a joke) and uses his diary for what strikes him in Sicilian society, not for intimate things; Dostoevsky and Proust are not his writers. His closest precedents are Brancati, then Pirandello (a father figure he rejected and found again) and De Roberto, whose "historical despair" he prefers to Verga's metaphysical one.
Sicily as metaphor, ideas and defeat. In The Day of the Owl he describes the mafia moving from the countryside to the city; Sicily gradually becomes a metaphor for a world that is becoming "Sicilianized". Its greatest sin, he says, is not believing in ideas, the belief that the world can never be different. He looks for "defeated" heroes in Sicilian history (Francesco Paolo Di Blasi in The Council of Egypt, Fra Diego La Matina in The Death of the Inquisitor): seen from two centuries away, the defeated become heroes and examples, but in the present the defeated are just defeated. He is not wholly pessimistic, otherwise he would not write, and he admires the French eighteenth-century writers of ideas, Voltaire above all, who really moved the world; but his Candido is also a rebellion against fathers.
Politics, the State, intellectuals. He says no one had thought for fifty years because people settled for Marxism, with some sympathy for the "new philosophers". On the Turin jurors' resignations at the Red Brigades trial, he insists he was not praising them: the duty not to be afraid is a duty toward oneself, not to the State. For him, the State is the Constitution, which he says no longer exists in the technical sense: the three powers have merged in the parties (a thesis from a legal book he cites, La Costituzione di carta). He reads the arrival of writers and satirists on newspaper front pages as a sign of a regime in crisis, and says Pasolini's death left him more alone. Candido in Sicily retells Voltaire's tale as a political parody from 1943 to 1977, an "operation of simplification" like Flaubert's description of Charles Bovary's cap (complications are often stupidity); its conclusion, in front of Voltaire's statue in Paris, is that God is dead, Marx too, and he wants to go on living, thinking and being free.
Excerpts
“« the greatest sin of Sicily has been and always is that of not believing in ideas »”
“« seen from two centuries away, the defeated character becomes a hero, becomes an example »”
“« God is dead, Marx too, and I feel good. »”