Owing to a family medical emergency, I have recently spent an unexpected four weeks in Ravenna, a charming and historic town situated beside Italy’s Adriatic Coast. With twice daily visits to the hospital, days seemed to slip free from the controlling clutches of the calendar and were only distinguishable insofar as which restaurants happened to be closed on any particular evening. In search of ‘local’ content, I picked up a copy of Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa’s justly celebrated historical novel, The Leopard (1958). Set in Sicily during the cataclysmic period of Italian Unification, The Leopard is a twentieth-century companion to Frederico De Roberto’s deliciously bitchy generational saga The Viceroys (1894). Whilst The Viceroys sprawls out across diseased family trees and down malignant bloodlines, The Leopard concentrates on the singular, on Don Fabrizio, the Prince of Salina who is struck by his beloved nephew’s revolutionary belief that ‘if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change’. Guided by this mantra of stasis and transformation, the novel takes as its subject the peculiar amalgamation of emergent and residual feelings that affect and afflict a ruling class in the process of its own historic dissolution.
The historical novel has often been considered as one of the more politically engaged genres of literature. Not only does it draw its content from ordinary everyday experiences of societal flux, but the historical novel resigns its position from the royal court or high office and joins the ranks of the struggling plebeian multitudes. Great men or world historical figures are pushed to the margins, and the novel instead promotes the mediocre, middling, or average hero to the foreground, an individual who throws their lot in with the classes making history from below. It is for this reason that John Kraniauskas has described the historical novel as staging a bourgeois revolution at the level of literary form.
In the account of the genre offered by Georg Lukacs – (an account that I have written about in my thesis and monograph) – the events, actions, ideas, mentalities, sentiments, technologies, and social forms depicted in the historical novel are presented as the ‘necessary prehistory of the present’. As such, the genre registers the molecular unfolding of the future inhabited by the reader, hence the novel’s evocation of progress. This sense of history’s forward momentum is heightened by the countervailing representation of the tragic but necessary downfall of alternative forms of life and communal living, which are conveyed as either being backwards or existing sideways to the dominant historical forces which are moving against, through, and beyond them.
By the middle of the twentieth century, the belief in progress and orientation towards a communist horizon which propels Lukacs’s initial theorization, had been thrown into disarray. As Perry Anderson notes in a sweeping survey of the genre, the historical novel undergoes in an involution, whereby its representation of history and historicity pivots from ‘progress to catastrophe’. In the context of Latin America, the forceful seizure of state power by military juntas is reprocessed in the historical novel through the figure of the dictator, who oversees a coup d’etat at the level of form, to paraphrase Kraniauskas again. Meanwhile in the United States, faith in the arc of history is replaced by paranoia, as social movements are broken up by conspiracies. The maintaining individual who previously sided with the politically progressive wing of history is now enlisted by the state to secure its hegemony, becoming a type of subaltern enforcer who contains and erases more revolutionary currents which threaten to destabilize the racial and class-based order. Moreover, Fredric Jameson suggests that the organic connection between the past and the now which had sustained earlier versions of the novel has been severed. Whereas in its classic period, the present of composition was conceptualized as the ‘sequel’ of the historical events narrated in the text, in the era of postmodernism, to use Jameson’s periodization, the past is only available as decontextualized, free-floating simulacrum, as a set of images and spectacles which are used to project and play out the present’s nostalgic fantasies about former historical periods. Realism is cancelled by pastiche, a form which is more invested in the costumes, manners, moods, and settings of these hallucinated moments, in their vibes rather than their struggles.
Given that it traces the demise of the Sicilian aristocracy, it is perhaps fitting that The Leopard constitutes a late flourishing of the genre in which the past is still felt in the bones of the present. The zero-gravity detachment and arbitrary use of codes which Jameson detects in postmodern historical novels like EL Doctorow’s Ragtime have not yet overwhelmed Giuseppe Tomasi’s narrator. On reading Tancredi’s marriage proposal to Angelica Sedara, which would unite a ruined aristocratic family with an ascendant bourgeois one, Don Fabrizio’s disorientation is translated into a future he could not know: ‘once again he noted how astonishingly fast all this had gone; put in modern terms he could be said to be in the state of mind of someone to-day who thinks he has boarded one of the easy-going old planes pottering between Palermo and Naples, and suddenly finds himself shut inside a Super Jet and realizes he would be at his destination almost before there was time to make the sign of the cross’. Alternatively, the near past of the novel’s composition collapses shockingly in on the architecture of its historical present, where events such as balls are taking place: ‘from the ceiling the gods, reclining on gilded couches, gazed down smiling and inexorable as a summer sky. They thought themselves eternal; but a bomb manufactured in Pittsburgh, Penn., was to prove the contrary in 1943’. There is no perpetual present in The Leopard. The past courses onward into the present, towards its own enervation and decay, where it finds ‘peace in a little heap of livid dust’.
Yet if The Leopard retains some of the core historicizing tenets of the historical novel in its classical phase, it significantly revises other features of the genre. ‘Swung between the old world and the new’, the novel encodes the forces of modernization that are intent on remaking the political structures of Sicily and of incorporating the island into the newly established Italian state. World historical figures like Garibaldi remain sidelined, on the periphery. (Garibaldi himself functions as a lightening rod for hope and contempt, as history first moves with and then against the mythic red-shirted adventurer). The Leopard’s formal recalibration of the genre primarily concerns the role of the maintaining individual, a position occupied by Don Fabrizio, member of ‘an unlucky generation’ that is ‘ill at ease in both’ the nationalist milieu of Italian liberalism and the waning rule of the Bourbon regime. Where mediocre heroes typically merge with the collectives making history, Don Fabrizio withdraws from the political arena, and acts as a bemused observer rather than active participant in the times. As he notes to a representative of the new civil administration: ‘we of our generation must draw aside and watch the capers and somersaults of the young around this ornate catafalque’.
Organized around the hulking presence of this saturnine ‘Leopard’, the novel might in fact be said to engage in a ‘counter-revolution’ of sorts at the level of literary form. The mediocre hero is swept aside, narratively at least, and replaced by a member of the up high, who is restored to the privileged center of consciousness. From this vantage point, the social and economic changes are reflected on as sources of horror and farce. Don Fabrizio encounters the ‘bourgeois revolution climbing his stairs’ in the form of Don Calogero, a member of the emergent bourgeoisie who has not only usurped Don Fabrizio as the largest landowner in the region but has the crude audacity to arrive at a casual dinner party wearing tails: ‘no laugh came from the Prince, on who, one might say, this news had more effect than the bulletin about Garibaldi’s landing at Marsala […] Now, with his sensibility to presage and symbols, he saw revolution in that white tie and two black tails moving at this moment up the stairs of his own home […] he now found himself forced to receive, when in afternoon dress himself, a guest appearing in evening clothes’. Agitation is quickly relaxed however, as Don Calogero’s ‘tail-coat was a disastrous failure’, a sign of wealth but devoid of refinement, style, and taste.
Counter-intuitively, the novel’s political radicalism lies precisely in its counter-revolutionary form. Not only does it depict the morbidity and mortality of a ruling class, The Leopard also provides a disillusioned portrait of the bourgeois revolution itself. Aesthetic values and other immaterial or intangible qualities are recoded through cold monetary evaluations: objects of fine craftsmanship, for example, are reappraised in terms of the amount of land they might be worth. Whilst the bourgeois revolution extends the promise of formal equality among citizens, it does not address the underlying causes of domination and, in fact, preserves and exploits these unequal relations. From the perspective of the labourers, rather than a rupture with despotism, the revolution constitutes a modification in the structure of domination, transitioning from brute coercion to something approaching consent: ‘six months before they used to hear a rough despotic voice saying: “Do what I say or you’re for it!” Now there was already an impression of such a threat being replaced by a money-lender’s soapy tones: “But you signed it yourself, didn’t you? Can’t you see? It’s quite clear. You must do as we say, for here are the I.O.U.’s; your will is identical to mine’. The direct and extra-economic rule of the feudal lord, on which relied on customs and tradition, is displaced by a market regime whose apparatuses of capture try to smooth the friction between subjects and align their desires and wills. ‘All will go on as it did before’, then, is attuned to the appropriation of surpluses and the continuation of class relations.
The dialectic between ‘the old state of things and the new’ in The Leopard is one of ‘compromise’ in which figures like Don Fabrizio acts as vanishing mediators. Ruling classes vanish but others emerge to take their place and replicate their forms. The Sicilian landscape, in contrast, is presented as timeless and punishing, sublimely inhospitable to human projects and history. Heading into ‘pastoral Sicily’, the nascent bourgeois order is transported into a future from which its regime is both impregnable but ‘apt to change’: ‘All at once they were far from everything in space and still more in time. Donnafugata with its palace and its new rich was only a mile or two away, but seemed a dim memory like those landscapes sometimes glimpsed at the distant end of a railway tunnel; its troubles and splendours appeared even more insignificant than if they belonged to the past, for compared to this remote unchangeable landscape they seemed part of the future, made not of stone and flesh but of the substance of some dream of things to come, extracts from a Utopia thought up by a rustic Plato and apt to change any second into quite different forms or event not to exist at all; deprived thus of that charge of energy which everything in the past continues to possess, they could no longer be a worry’. The Leopard encourages critics of the present to salvage reservoirs of energy from the past, to channel and charge the kinetics of ‘things discarded’ in order to perturb the continued reproduction of social hierarchies – to make those who profit from misery worry once more.
Thomas Travers 