The Sicilian Soldier by Elsa Morante
From The Transmetropolitan Review
Click here for the short story The Sicilian Soldier
The Andalusian Shawl can be found at local bookstores
INTRODUCTION
Elsa Morante was an anarchist. However, this simple fact is constantly obscured by the literary establishment of the United States, for a variety of reasons. For example, in 2023 the New York Review of Books published a new English translation of Elsa Morante’s first novel Lies And Sorcercy, finally allowing US readers access to the full 1948 text. This monumental translation by Jenny McPhee, totaling 775 pages, was the occasion for numerous positive reviews by mainstream literary critics. Unsurprisingly, these critics do their best to neutralize and erase the anarchism of Francesco di Salvi. a major character in Lies And Sorcery, given he is the father of the book’s narrator, Elisa.
Despite delivering a page-long discourse on anarchism to the narrator’s future guardian, Francesco is described in The Wall Street Journal simply as an impoverished student. Likewise, the New York Times called Francesco a university student who leaves school and takes a civil service job. Not to be outdone, The Washington Post described Francesco as a poor student who has been posing as the son of a wealthy landowner. Had the Post replaced the word student with anarchist, they would have come close to expressing the central tension Elsa Morante deliberately placed within the novel: the desire to be an anarchist vs. the desire to be someone in class society.
To be fair, the Washington Post got closer than the WSJ when it explained that there is a gentle social consciousness at the heart of “Lies and Sorcery,” embodied by Francesco, who dreams of social reform and is deeply moved by only two things, “wine and utopias.” However, once again, the Post could have replaced the phrases social consciousness and social reform with anarchism, but clearly some ideology is at play in these reviews. While this might be expected from capitalist outlets like the WSJ and NYT, the most shocking summation came from the New York Review of Books itself.
As their reviewer explained, the character in Lies and Sorcery whom Morante appears to judge most severely is Elisa’s father, Francesco, though he is also probably the most heartrending. She is pitilessly satirical in describing the way he thrashes about to shore up his embattled self-respect—his eloquent Marxist diatribes to bored drunks in a bar, for instance. Despite the fact that Francesco gives clearly anarchist speeches, this reviewer claimed he was Marxist, followed by the observation that presenting himself as a baron (a vague title, but a title) does violence to his own principles of social justice. It’s almost as if these people are afraid of the word anarchism, and will engage in untold literary contortions to erase it from existence.
To be clear, on page 250 of the 2023 edition of Lies And Sorcery, this impoverished student is hanging out with a sex-worker named Rosaria, and he readily quoted his favorite prophet’s maxims; for instance, “property is theft,” and in a lofty voice he repeated this prophecy: “The day will come when owning a piece of land will seem as absurd and sacrilegious as the once condoned practice of owning a slave seems to us today.” As is well known, property is theft is the anarchist slogan of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, while the second quote is the beginning of Francesco’s page-long anarcho-communist rant.
Elsa Morante wrote Lies And Sorcery during the Italian Fascist dictatorship, and the word anarchism itself does not appear in the text, likely in fear of repression. However, it is all but spelled out, like when Francesco confirmed that marriage marriage would be abolished in his future ideal society; a mutual declaration of affection and intention would be enough to unite two free lovers without the necessity of contracts and benedictions. In regards to Rosaria and her profession as sex-worker, he explained to her that she was a victim of bourgeois society, a monster feeding off the likes of her only to then spit her into the garbage. Elsa Morante had very much been a sex-worker in Roma during the 1930s, and she portrays Rosaria falling in love with Francesco for his anarchist beliefs.
However, as Elsa Morante made clear, Francesco, who was considered one of the wealthier villagers, realized that in the city, he was one of the poorest. And so he had a choice: he could serve those who humiliated him with their wealth, or he could rebel and defend his own kind. Since our first encounters with him, we’ve already seen which choice he made; having discovered in a book a science and a faith that reconciled many of his conflicting ideas, he fell in love with a fascinating and legitimate idea that was able to destroy evil empires; at the same time, he became a disseminator of lies, an architect of evil empires. And together with his revolutionary faith was born his fictitious barony. In very clear terms, his anarchism is meant to destroy evil empires, or reami falsi, but as Elsa points out, these reami falsi exist inside the heart and mind of Francesco, a theme Elsa would explore in the years to come.
She finished Lies And Sorcery towards the end of WWII, when the Nazis had invaded Italy, and she hid the text in Roma while she and her partner hid near Napoli, given he would have been deported to a Nazi death-camp if found. While they were in hiding, Elsa made a solo trip to Roma so she could check on her manuscript, and during this trip, while she was hiding in a barn, she met an anti-fascist partisan who also needed to hide that night. Rather than tell Elsa a tale of heroic dedication to anti-fascism, this soldier described the reami falsi that dwelt inside him.
Elsa would soon write this all up into a story simply titled Il Soldato Siciliano, or The Sicilian Soldier, which is reproduced in English below. According to Elsa, this story, which appeared after the war in the magazine “L’Europeo” (later in “L’espresso”), belongs to a group of three war stories, of which the other two are lost. Given the unfortunate loss of the other texts, The Sicilian Soldier is the last story Elsa Morante wrote during wartime, and she would later publish it in the 1963 collection Lo Scialle Andaluso, or The Andalusian Shawl, which has recently been translated into English and can be found at local bookstores.
In these dark times of reami falsi, Elsa Morante’s story The Sicilian Soldier is a brutal reminder that fighting against one evil empire does not erase the evil empire inside of us, and unless both are defeated, we will remain stuck in what Elsa referred to as a scandal that has lasted 10,000 years.