Language and Power in Vincenzo Consolo\u2019s Sicily.<\/u><\/p>\n
(Harvard, ACLA, 26-29 March, 2009)<\/p>\n
\n
In 1963, Vincenzo Consolo, then a thirty year old Sicilian lawyer and notary trainee, publishes April\u2019s Wound<\/em>, his first novel. The partly autobiographical story depicts the young first person narrator\u2019s coming of age during his last year spent in a Catholic secondary school in his anonymous home village on the North-Eastern coast of Sicily. April\u2019s Wound<\/em> is Consolo\u2019s timely contribution to Italian Neorealism in literary fiction. It is as much the first instance of his innovative literary technique of evoking historical and political moments through a stylistic mosaic of different languages and styles. Such a technique will later become his literary trademark. The pivot of April\u2019s Wound<\/em>, the \u201cwound\u201d the title refers to, is the defeat inflicted to the Christian Democrats and their historic post war leader De Gasperi in the regional ballot held in Sicily April1947. The assassination, one week later, by Salvatore Giuliano\u2019s mafia mob, of children and workers during Labor Day celebrations, may be read as the first sign of how well Sicilian conservatives were going to respect the democratic process. Italy\u2019s and specifically Sicily\u2019s politics and society, however present in Consolo\u2019s writings, are not my main concern, though, in this paper. Instead we will focus on what Consolo stands for today among Italian writersd, that is to say his fixation on language, his preoccupation with different kinds of language, ancient and modern, national and local, authentic and invented, on language as a tool for expressing and exerting power, and also on language as a token of violence, verbal and physical. Consolo\u2019s first novel shares with the Neorealist movement an awareness for working class settings and characters, but more than the other novelists Consolo elaborates on language, both the novel\u2019s and the characters\u2019 language, its symbolism and shape. April\u2019s Wound<\/em> is but a forerunner, from this perspective, of the author\u2019s 1976 masterpiece, The Smile of the Unknown Mariner<\/em>, which sets totally new standards for the historical novel as such, not only for Italy. This short but complex fictional tour de force<\/em> carries the reader to the last stages of Italy\u2019s national unification process, Garibaldi\u2019s landing on Sicilian soil in Marsala, May 1860, and the subsequent liberation, or annexation, as some will pretend, of Sicily. The plot focuses on the revolutionary uprising of shepherds and laborers more or less in the same area where April\u2019s Wound<\/em> is located, Consolo\u2019s own familiar grounds. The revolt takes place a few days after Garibaldi\u2019s landing and is violently repressed by one of his lieutenants, Bixio. Again, languages take center stage, languages unveiled by different kinds of speakers and writers, listeners and readers, preachers and intellectuals. Language, both as a subject and a tool, joins the two novels, April\u2019s Wound<\/em> and The Smile of the Unknown Mariner<\/em>. April\u2019s Wound<\/em> makes clear how through liturgy and rituals in Latin and daily mass the clergy\u2019s authority over the youngsters is well established. Harsh control is exerted on the use of the national language during recreation where local dialect is banished. In The Smile of the Unknown Mariner<\/em> a hybrid form of Latin is the hermit\u2019s natural<\/em> language the moment he betrays the rebels\u2019cause and rapes a dying maiden in church. Dialect and so called \u201cnatural\u201d language is good enough to accompany the rebels\u2019 suffering once in prison, while the oppressor\u2019s language establishes supremacy both over the future, through law, and over the past, through historiography.<\/p>\n \n It becomes clear with respect to Consolo\u2019s novels that a very close relationship can be established with some important issues of cultural theory concerning language, power and violence.\u00a0 Except for Max Weber\u2019s and Antonio Gramsci\u2019s seminal writings on the subject, April\u2019s Wound<\/em>, 1963, may be considered a fictional forerunner of Bourdieu, Habermas, Said, some of the French new cultural historians and even Foucault. Let me just quote Weber\u2019s phrase inaugurating the external, sociological, non-saussurian, view of language: \u201cThe language, and that means the literature based upon it, is the first and for the time being the only cultural value at all accessible to the masses who ascend toward participation in culture.\u201d (From Max Weber, p.178: Google)<\/em>. The most influential and, on this topic, most explicit thinker, Pierre Bourdieu, did not publish \u201cCe que parler veut dire\u201d, What it means to speak<\/em>, until 1982. Its title polemically echoes Austin\u2019s influential findings on the performative property of language as exposed in How to do things with words?,<\/em> 1955.\u00a0 Homi Bhabha\u2019s 2006 paper, delivered at a Berlin conference on Violence Through Language<\/em>, almost literally echoes Consolo\u2019s title: Words and Wounds<\/em>. The parallel development, both in fiction and in theory, of these crucial theoretical issues asks for a closer look of what April\u2019s Wound <\/em>reveals about them.<\/p>\n \n Daily mass in Latin is as much part of the school\u2019s routine as classes and games. More than classes do, celebrations in the chapel establish the institutionalized choreography of\u00a0 power, the collective confirmation of scholastic hierarchy, symbol for hierarchy tout court and as such. In a certain sense one could say two rituals are simultaneously taking place each time mass is celebrated, a religious one and another with more mundane aspirations. In one trans-substantiation of wine and bread is liturgically performed, in the other the ruling body of clergy, altar boys, singers and pupils, well behaving and not, is structurally substantiated. Social and political tensions between right and left wing families, between former fascist and anti-fascist groups, or, for that matter, between mafiosi clans and regular folks, are supremely regulated within the impressive dramatical framework of solemn religious celebrations. Stage directions \u2013 who will sing? What will be sung? who will be the altar boys? Who will do the pedaling for the organ?\u00a0 \u2013 are of course given in Italian, but the language on stage is invariably Latin, supported by the cranky but not less imposing notes of the wind organ. Daily repetition of prayers and songs acoustically and visually underline the well established order of things in the world. The encense burner is rhythmically shaken three times in honor of each of the three major martyr saints of Southern Italy: \u201clook here Alfio, Cirino and Filadelfio, wah ACF, poor ACF\u201d (6). Not one gesture evades the rules of the religious ritual disposing a second layer of authority on top of the scholastic hierarchy, both firmly hold by the rector and his fellow priests. The two layers of authority are indistinctly mixed, transparent to each other. Does not this setting exactly correspond to what Bourdieu refers to, with respect to the authority seized by different sorts of religion, as the \u201crigorous observance of the code of the uniform liturgy, which governs the sacramental gestures and words\u201d(115)? Is not Consolo\u2019s representation exactly that of the \u201cpriest (as) holder of a monopoly in the manipulation of the goods of salvation\u201d(ib.)? Youngsters jokingly create burlesque or nonsensical parodies of prayers, mixing Latin with Italian. However, publicly and in the open, only official versions resound, and punishment and mockery awaits those who do not respect the unwritten rules, those who dare to stumble with the incense burner and spoil the burning coal on the chapel floor. Bourdieu says: \u201cThe language of authority never governs without the collaboration of those it governs\u201d (113). Nowhere is this interplay of authority, language policy, complicity of subjects and violence displayed as nicely as in the \u201caccipe\u201d setup. What is \u201caccipe\u201d? During recreation the only language pupils may use for games and conversation is Italian. Every occurrence of the local language, the so called \u201cnatural speak\u201d, the Sicilian dialect of the North-East coast, is severely forbidden. And to enforce the language policy a method of punishment is put in place operated by the pupils themselves. One of them is on watch, a token in hand, and as soon as natural forbidden sounds are heard the token is handed over to the offender with the phrase: \u201caccipe\u201d, Latin for \u201ctake this\u201d. He is then exposed to public mockery until another language abuse is detected and the accipe-token proceeds to the next step of its regulatory operations, its linguistically cleansing the juvenile crowd. The accipe punishment formally adopts the scheme of a whole series of well known children\u2019s plays based on hiding and discovering tokens passed on between the players. The accipe-scheme actually perverts these plays in transforming the school playground into something much closer to a prison yard. Recreation is turned into discipline and control. Rule enforcement is entrusted to those subjects to whom the rule applies in an uninterrupted cycle of traps and punishments. Other, even more daunting episodes of twentieth century history may come to mind where guilt was charged upon the victims\u2019 shoulders, the joyful context of playing children notwithstanding. Bourdieu refers interestingly to the ancient Greek practice, among the gerontes assembled in the agora, as illustrated in the Iliad, of grabbing the skeptron<\/em>, the staff entitling the holder of it to speak publicly. Through the gerontes, as symbolized by the skeptron, the institutions themselves speak. They confer authority, both authority to speak and authority tout court. Deceptively innocuous and benign, the accipe scheme is a perversion of the skeptron rule. The accipe is not grabbed by someone to speak, it is imposed on you to silence you, and together with you all those trapped in the cycle. The skeptron has become a whip .Dialect or \u201cnatural speak\u201d is what eludes authority, what establishes itself competitively outside the extended concelebration of strictly regulated liturgy, geometrical waving of the incense burner, Latin prayers and songs. That is why dialect is unwelcome. Only if totally inoffensive, completely miniaturized, limited to a handful of speakers and near to extinction, confined to two or three mountain villages, a particular dialect may be tolerated. This is the case of Consolo\u2019s main character in April\u2019s Wound<\/em>. Carefully the novel elaborates its multilayered language design. Latin is on top as the language of authority and power, exhibited on special occasions, closely linked to the sphere of the Almighty and his heralds. Italian is the newcomer, the liberator-invader, imported on Sicilian soil from Turin by the well organized Salesiani di Don Bosco<\/em>. Italian is the language of the new political order, reaching finally, after the disorders of WWII, the outskirts of the Nation, Sicily that is to say. Sicilian, language or dialect, depending on criteria, has its own lexicon, grammar and phonetics. It descends from the language spoken at Frederic II\u2019s court and its glorious largely uninterrupted poetic tradition. Sicilian is the enemy the accipe strategy confronts head on. Consolo\u2019s main character adds a fourth linguistic layer. He is what the other Sicilians call a \u201czangl\u00e9\u201d. The etymology \u2500 \u201canglais\u201d (English) \u2500 is confusing. What these very few remaining \u201czangl\u00e9\u201d speak is not English, but a modern version of \u201canglo-norman\u201d, close to French. Only a few remote mountain villages are left where this language is spoken. Those villagers, like Consolo\u2019s main character and his family, who migrated to the coastal cities of Sicily, only keep a tiny accent the origin of which Italians attribute, grossly, to the North, because of its likeness to French. Where are the \u201czangl\u00e9s\u201d positioned in Consolo\u2019s system of languages? They are an object of curiosity, at most of good-tempered mockery. In fact, while noticing the boy\u2019s funny accent and asking him where he comes from, the bishop smiles. They are the exception, accepted while not threatening. No accipe operation here to root out an oddity. Language planning is but one of the support structures of the conservative-catholic wing as depicted in April\u2019s Wound<\/em>.<\/p>\n \n Languages, language use and the relationship with power and indeed violence come to the forefront in The Smile of the Unknown Mariner<\/em>. Whereas the accipe-token is after all just a token, language as a \u201cloaded weapon\u201d, to use Dwight Bolinger\u2019s effective metaphor, does clearly come into focus in Consolo\u2019s 1976 novel. The main event here is a popular uprising against oppressive landlords that took place in the same mountainous area we know from April\u2019s Wound <\/em>at the time of Garibaldi\u2019s landing, \u201czangl\u00e9\u201d territory in other words. Many landowners are killed, often brutally, before the rebels are captured, brought to trial under the new Italian judiciary and convicted. The Smile of the Unknown Mariner <\/em>is a new kind of historical novel and its novelty has to do with language. It ignores the homogeneous narrator\u2019s discourse to capture characters and events. Instead a multiplicity of narrative voices can be heard corresponding to the main characters, each provided with his proper language. It is as though a more complete corporeity and materiality, imbedded in the single character\u2019s language use, or through the language representing him, highlights their actions, gestures or events. Elite or popular language, emotionally excited or intellectually controlled language, dialects or formal speech, are mobilized as integral parts of the narrative apparatus. Two are, linguistically, the most elaborate chapters. In one, The Smile of the Unknown Mariner<\/em>\u2019s third chapter, Nunzio the hermit, outcast and serial rapist, discovers the preparations for the armed popular revolt, goes to town and alarms the well to do landowners and local gentry that trouble is coming. Father Nunzio is evil incarnate. He kills and then sexually abuses the dead body of a young maiden,\u00a0 in an isolated church, aptly called \u201cCalvario\u201d, where he had sought refuge for the night. The whole chapter is written in the manner of stream of consciousness where Latin quotes alternate with Nunzio\u2019s copro-lalic and libidinous language. The sexual violence perpetrated on the only then deceased body is reported in a anti-psalm-like poetic language where Latin, Sicilian dialect and italian are mixed. The hermit-chapter, entitled \u201cSacred Dead\u201d, illustrates how biblical and indeed sacred language can be perverted to accompany and almost excuse the most horrendous kind of violence. There would be good reasons to consider the Nunzio chapter as one long articulated allegory for evil as such, presented in every language-related variant available to the author\u2019s linguistic and rhetorical skills. A sign for this can be the fact that Consolo made Nunzio an epileptic, suffering at the end what a now outdated medical terminology once called an attack of Grand Mal<\/em>, in other words Big Evil<\/em>.<\/p>\n \n The second of the two, linguistically, most elaborated chapters is also the novel\u2019s finale. It depicts the rebels in their underground prison, artificial excavation spiraling its way downward. Again and more than ever in Consolo, language is the exclusive means to render the prisoners\u2019 despair and outcry. What we read as written on the walls is of course Consolo\u2019s language, the best reconstruction possible of what their messages would have been. The graffiti are, artificially and artfully, composed in a composite language where elements of Sicilian dialect show up next to words or sentences in the particular anglo-norman variant we know from April\u2019s Wound<\/em>. No Latin or Italian any more. Not much grammar or formal arrangement structures these twenty-two \u201cscritte\u201d. They mostly tell stories of injustice and revenge, the subsequent imprisonment being the reason why they are where they are. These are tales of a century before the \u201caccipe\u201d remedy was invented. These people were not even allowed to speak, no skeptron<\/em> at all was handed over to them. The very existence of their \u201cwritings\u201d on the wall is a fictional paradox: illiterate as they were, they were never able to write anything. But this definitely is what they would have written. These writings are the closest a narrative voice can get in order to let them speak and be heard, the only way to provide them with a linguistically engineered skeptron<\/em> as it were. The Smile of the Unknown Mariner<\/em>\u2019s main character, the marine biologist Mandralisca turned into an intellectual in search of social justice for his fellow men, and Consolo\u2019s alter ego<\/em>, dedicates a pages long letter in which he rationally denounces the whole body of laws and history books written only by and from the point of view of literate people, the interests of which those laws and history books most naturally and directly serve. Written by and for the privileged few, these laws and history books cannot but serve the privileges of their origins. And so The Smile of the Unknown Mariner<\/em> becomes the fictional counterpart for not only that part of cultural theory where inextricable relations between language and power are illustrated, but also for a vivid current among social and cultural historians trying to resuscitate what can be called the common man.<\/p>\n \n Walter\u00a0 Geerts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Language and Power in Vincenzo Consolo\u2019s Sicily. (Harvard, ACLA, 26-29 March, 2009) In 1963, Vincenzo Consolo, then a thirty year old Sicilian lawyer and notary trainee, publishes April\u2019s Wound, his first novel. The partly autobiographical story depicts the young first person narrator\u2019s coming of age during his last year spent in a Catholic secondary school … Continua a leggere Language and Power in Vincenzo Consolo\u2019s Sicily.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vincenzoconsolo.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vincenzoconsolo.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vincenzoconsolo.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vincenzoconsolo.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vincenzoconsolo.it\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=289"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vincenzoconsolo.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":290,"href":"https:\/\/vincenzoconsolo.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289\/revisions\/290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vincenzoconsolo.it\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vincenzoconsolo.it\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vincenzoconsolo.it\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}