Contemplating the Palm Tree Line
*Michael Blim *
Wandering in a Parma piazza, his investigation of three Sicilian mafia murders undone by unnamed higher-ups, Captain Bellodi, Leonardo Sciascia’s protagonist in Il Giorno della Civetta, encounters an old school friend curious about the carabiniere’s recently ended southern sojourn. “You have to go to Sicily to realize just how incredible Italy is,” Bellodi responds. For Bellodi, Sicily was the end of Italy – the place where finally Italy no longer made any sense.
For former school chum Brescianelli, Sicily signifies something more sinister, more contagious for life as he and the northern-born carabiniere knew it:
Maybe the whole of Italy is becoming a sort of Sicily. When I read about the scandals of that regional government of theirs, an idea occurred to me. Scientists say that the palm tree line, that is the climate suitable to growth of the palm, is moving north, five hundred metres, I think it was, every year. . . The palm tree line … I call it the coffee line, the strong black coffee line . . . It’s rising like mercury in a thermometer, this palm tree line, this strong coffee line, this scandal line, rising up throughout Italy and already passed Rome . . . (Sciascia 1964: 117).
In this short passage, Sciascia reveals a bit of the South’s peculiar hold on Italian imaginations. For some, like Bellodi, the South is the place where the contradictory, precariously parallel lines of Italian life finally meet, with the resultant collision creating an “incredible” form of life. For others, as Sciascia imagined in Brescianelli, the South is part contagion, part seducer — a sultry creeper bearing heat, palm trees, and strong coffee as it strangles the life of Italy one meridian at a time.
The essays collected in this volume testify to the undiminished importance of the “Southern Question” in the civic and institutional life of Italian society and to scholars who study it. As these essays demonstrate, it is a many-sided question endowed by its long and important historical lineage with a capacity to generate its own distinctive internal discourse about life and its meanings.
Three lines of inquiry present themselves as promising paths for commentary and discussion of the work in this volume. The first task is to explore the process of representing the South in the politico-cultural discourses of the past one hundred and fifty years. The second is to analyse the contributions that studies of the Italian South have made - and continue to make — in the variety of fields of knowledge that touch upon issues of culture and identity. Third, it is important to ask how one might reformulate the “Southern Question” in the light of the some of the insights presented by the preceding authors about life in the contemporary Italian South.
Representing the Italian South
Owing to the richness of the material presented in this volume and to the complexities of the subject itself, an examination of how and in what ways conceptions of the Italian South have been formed in modern imaginations is a daunting and complicated undertaking. For analytic purposes, it is important to examine these contributions along two axes. A temporal axis can aid in sorting out how the South evolved as a specific designation in the cosmological calendar of Italy, the modern nation. The second axis accounts for the politico-cultural spaces from which the various discourses about the South spring. Particular conjunctures in space and time can be observed when the image(s) of the South become distinct and highly relevant in shaping the dispositions of different sets of actors.
Becoming a Different, Abnormal South
There was a time, not so long ago, when southern Italian intellectuals considered their homeland only “normally backward,” writes Petrusewicz. Before the 1849 restoration, the southern intellectuals’ diagnosis and prescription for southern health matched those of their Enlightenment comrades throughout Europe: abolish feudalism, reform and activate the State, and liberalize the economy. Do these things, they thought, and progress and prosperity were within reasonable reach of the Two Sicilies and their peoples.
Instead, absolutism’s last gasp in the years leading up to the Unification of Italy, Petrusewicz believes, profoundly altered the more benign view of southern society held by southern intellectuals. From their posts of exile throughout a liberalizing Europe, they saw their homeland falling behind the rest, devolving while the North evolved toward a new form of life.
Italian state-builders and their intellectual counterparts lost no time elaborating this untoward tableau of the post-Unification South. It was as if exhortations for northern development required matching denigration of a devolving(ed) South. As Moe notes, founding figures of the “Meridionalist” discourse such as Pasquale Villari and Leopoldo Franchetti treated the South not simply as backward, but as other. The South with its degraded peasantry and criminality was an impediment to the development of the new Italian nation-state, as the American South with its slavery was a fetter on the growth of the Union. The analogy is pressed to perfection, as Moe recounts: Villari dresses his fears in the best Lincoln-esque antislavery form by reporting a southern informant’s plea that the North must civilize the South, or risk being barbarized by it.
Perhaps not surprisingly, other intellectual discourses began to trade on North-South differences. Between 1860 and 1890, Patriarca reports, statistics were progressively “re-arranged” to highlight disparities between the two regions. Discrepancies in the ordinal distributions of vital statistics and crime rates now signalled qualitative differences in the nature and quality of life between North and South. A poisonous combination of crude social evolutionism and racial stereotyping was deployed in explaining the behaviors of the passionate, vendettasavoring Semitic peoples of the South —to borrow a label or two from Patriarca’s turn-of-the-century sources.
The relatively new sciences of society played no small part in the process. As Gibson points out, the pioneering criminologist Cesare Lombroso and his followers, positivist reformers no less, exploited a certain amount of crackpot physical anthropology, mixed it with a mélange of folk-national ethnic prejudices, and placed regional misfortunes squarely in the hearts and genes of southern peoples. Their claims did not go unanswered, as Gibson demonstrates in a discussion of the work of southern criminologist Napoleone Colajanni.
Images of Despair
Native literary production since Unification has also served up what Rosengarten, discussing the case of the late-nineteenth-century Sicilian novelist Giovanni Verga, called a profoundly “dystopic vision” of life in the Italian South, though its character and meanings have fluctuated over time. Human relationships, Rosengarten notes in relation to Verga’s work, are full of mistrust and treachery in an environment where the act of taking refuge in family life is undermined by the cravenness of the family members. In the later works of Leonardo Sciascia and Giuseppe Tornasi di Lampedusa, a more pervasive air of fatalism prevails, as the writers acknowledge implicitly that the age of science and reason has passed through Western civilization leaving the Italian South untouched and on the margins of Europe.
Though for Pirandello, Dombroski argues, the world of the South was a land of chaos, an existential abyss, younger post-Second World War southern writers find their region a kind of cultural archaeological ruin. Traces of the different cultural pasts abound, and the sources of alienation now lie in the chaotic effects of postwar capitalist development. Folk lives filled with werewolves have been replaced in the contemporary literary imagination with visions of “the more terrifying beast of consumer culture,” Dombroski believes.
A Vigorous, If Ambiguous Culture of Dissent
Amidst the thorns of Southern life, there were also roses, as dissenters developed an important alternative vision of the South and of its problems. Foremost among them, of course, was Gramsci. As Urbinati notes, the Southern Question was the “National Question” for Gramsci, for he was convinced that the southern peasantry — like the northern proletariat — could not save themselves without revolutionizing Italian society.
Gramsci’s attentions to the ambiguities of popular culture and its sometime capacity to support the growth of progressive consciousness and moral autonomy among ordinary people and their organic intellectuals profoundly influenced the course of dissent on the Southern Question. As Saunders shows, the special devotion to folk ritual, customs, and healing that the preeminent post-Second World War southern anthropologist Ernesto de Martino exhibited was derived in part from Gramsci ’s emphasis on the cultural sources of resistance among the subaltern classes of the South. De Martino follows Gramsci, however, in his relatively judgmental attitude toward folk culture, as Di Nola suggests. A confirmed anti-relativist, de Martino deplores much of the magic and folklore among Southern peoples as simply another form of “cultural misery.” He laments less the loss of folk customs with the postwar transformation of the South than their loss without any accompanying greater conscious awareness and/or progressive learning.
The Italian South and the Human Sciences
Yet, as the chapters in this volume disclose, there is a strongly existential strain present in Southern Italian life and in the native intellectual tradition that it has spawned. Though the literary works discussed by Rosengarten and Dombroski are tainted by a bit of fatalism, they nonetheless convey a sense of lives where people must act, albeit chimerically or even tragically, in order to find their way in a disordered world.
Moroever, it is possible that the best case for this existentialist strain can be found in the intellectual labors of de Martino himself. The fear of loss of the sense of self, what de Martino calls “the crisis of presence,” acts as an existential fulcrum in human existence. Saunders argues that, for de Martino, this sense of tilting on the edge of reality is especially dominant in the particularly precarious lives of Southern Italians. To emerge in this difficult context acting as a subject of one’s history, rather than the object of another’s, is the positive measure of things for de Martino.
This standpoint diminishes the tendency of human identities toward fixity, as di Noia points out. However, de Martino’s insistence on social transformation as a necessary consequence of human action also lessens the degree to which actions ever are a cause of liberation. This return to the Wittgensteinian “rough ground” of real life on de Martino’s part affirms the observation that one common quality of Southern Italian life is still instructing new efforts in the arts and sciences: namely, the region’s profoundly agonistic character.
New research hints at changes in these time-honored dispositions. As the Schneiders show, antimafia movements throughout the southern regions mark an intellectual as well as social break with the pessimism of the past. New southern social strata are demanding the stigmatization and exclusion of the mafia and mafiosi and their affiliates from economic, political, and civil life. As the Schneiders argue, Leonardo Sciascia’s seemingly inexplicable (he was a courageous antimafia voice in the postwar decades) and bitter attack on antimafia figures during the 1980s reveals how southern élite and popular views of what to think of and what to do about the mafia have changed dramatically. For many new southerners, social ostracism of people considered collusive and the extirpation of the mafia go hand-in-hand - an attitude that a state-wary and more fatalist Sciascia could not understand.
The South Is Changing, As Is the Question
It is hard not to think about Southern Italy as one place, after a century and a half of practice. Though revisionist historians, as Davis reports, have convincingly shown how the claim of “one South” has always been exaggerated, it is almost as if the modern intellectual apprehension of Southern Italy stopped at Eboli too. “The South” means more than it in actuality is: but the realization that this may be so is taking some getting used to.
As Piattoni and Davis point out, there are many Souths, and there have been for a long time. To be sure, three fateful processes in some sense began to homogenize “the South” at Unification, as Davis argues. First, nation-state formation, instrumentally supported by a historic bloc, aggregated parallel and like-minded social and political interests throughout Southern Italy between Unification and the end of the Second World War. Second, with the advent of a world agricultural crisis in the 1880s, Southern Italian agriculture neither survived intact nor recovered market strength through reform and reorganization. Instead, it languished across the board, and with it, Southern Italian economic organization and standards of living. Third, the social structure dependent upon agriculture also entered a profound crisis beginning in the 1880s, and Davis reports that there is some evidence that the middle classes that were “re-formed” from that period onward were strategically weak. These new strata were pinned in practice between the patronage of a fledgling State and the growing power of illegal criminal syndicates with whom they often symbiotically co-existed for survival.
After the Second World War, powerful forces for further homogenization of the South and for its differential treatment vis à vis the rest of Italy presented themselves. A new, weak, post-Fascist state needing political legitimacy in a Cold War world spent 200,000 billion lira (in 1989 lira; $133 billion in 1989 dollars) between 1951 and 1989 for economic development in a context where expenditures bore an additional, indispensable patronage value for the disbursers (Trigilia 1996). The mafia prospered, and local standards of living rose; but rapid, sustainable economic growth — especially in comparison with the booming northern two-thirds of Italy — did not occur. “The South” was rendered physically unrecognizable but also highly differentiated economically by the input of financial flows ranging from government monies and immigrant remittances to spot industrialization, agro-business recovery, and mafia growth. As Piattoni argues, there are now in fact many different paths to southern development, depending on the region in which one finds oneself.
Given that there are many “Souths” now, perhaps the wisest course for further reflection and reform is to acknowledge and utilize this knowledge in encouraging the development of more politically and economically autonomous, self-determining regions where civil society and concrete social differences among people are the differences that matter. The new Southern Question is how to help the many “Souths” find their way to more successful collective lives in the new millennium.
References
- Sciascia, Leonardo (1964) Mafia Vendetta, trans. Aarchibald Colquhoun and Arthur Oliver from Il Giorno della Civetta (Milan: Einaudi, 1961). New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
- Trigilia, Carlo ( 1996) “Coping with the South: A New Strategy for an Old Problem?”, Harvard Center for European Studies Occasional Paper. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 12 pp.