HY 150 BISK
THE THROES OF MODERNIZATION

The crucial goal of all my courses is to create an environment where you, as the student, can begin to feel comfortable taking responsibility for your own education


GIUSEPPE TOMASI DI LAMPEDUSA
THE LEOPARD
Translated by Archibald Colquhoun. London: Pantheon Books Inc., 1961.
http://users.ju.edu/jclarke/hy150biskleopard.htm

Adapted from the "Translator’s Notes" by Archibald Colquhoun.

Some suggest that The Leopard is the finest historical novel of the twentieth century; it is certainly "the great Italian novel." It is a story of change—of social, political, and organizational tumult—and the human reactions to it.

We are in the earliest stages of radical churning in the structure of the global economy and of the institutions that populate it. Managers who haven’t and don’t see the sea-change coming litter the business landscape. We know that the dislocation that follows will be painful for them. It’s rarer to find—but we do—managers who see the change on its way, and who work to channel it in pro-human, pro-environmental ways. For those in this enlightened minority, the pain will be different . . . but still intense. Foreseeing confusion (even with the help of tools like scenario planning) cannot eliminate the anxiety it evokes, nor overcome the sense of loss over what was good in the world that is passing.

When this book opens in the spring of 1860, Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, still rules over thousands of Sicilian acres and hundreds of human beings in mingled splendor and squalor. But the echoes of the new political movements on the mainland already disturb him.  These movements suddenly erupt into his feudal paradise, when Garibaldi lands on Sicily in that year.

The Bourbon state of Naples and Sicily, called the "Kingdom of the Two Sicilies," was about to end. King Ferdinand II ("Bomba") had just died, and the whole Italian peninsula would soon become one state for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire.

The Risorgimento, this movement for unification, had been gathering strength since the Austrians had occupied the north after the Napoleonic Wars and had already come to a head once before, in 1848. Leadership had now fallen mainly to Piedmont, called the "Kingdom of Sardinia," ruled from Turin by Victor Emmanuel of Savoy, with Cavour as his prime minister.

Early in May 1860, the popular hero Garibaldi, acting against Cavour’s wishes, sailed from near Genoa with a thousand volunteers for Sicily, to win the island from the Bourbons. The Redshirts, or "Garibaldini," landed by Marsala, defeated the Bourbon troops at Calatafimi, and with three weeks had occupied the capital, Palermo. Garibaldi, hailed as "dictator" of Sicily, gathered more volunteers, crossed to the mainland, swept up the coast and entered Naples in triumph. That autumn, he defeated the Bourbon armies the Volturno, the Piedmontese besieged the last Bourbon King, Francis II, in Gaeta, and Garibaldi handed over southern Italy to King Victor Emmanuel. Garibaldi then withdrew to private life.

The new government held plebiscites, and every state in the peninsula agreed to join the new united kingdom, except the Papal states, which the French under Napoleon III occupied for reasons of internal French politics. In 1862, Garibaldi tried to force this issue and march on Rome. But on the slopes of Aspromonte in Calabria, Piedmontese troops routed his men and wounded Garibaldi himself.

This action by Italian government forces ended the revolutionary phase of the Risorgimento, which culminated officially in the declaration of Rome as capital of Italy in 1870.

The Leopard is the story of this change and the attempts of one thoughtful, but inert, man to cope. Torn between loyalty and prudence, Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, finds himself in a quandary: Should he resist the forces or change of come to terms with them? In the end, this amazing despot, huge, handsome, fervently devoted to hunting and astronomy, resolves his difficulties by arranging a marriage between his beloved heir, Tancredi, and a "new-rich" heiress.

No apologist for the mess made by the ruling elite of which he is a part, Fabrizio—the Leopard— "watched the ruin of his own class without ever making, still less wanting to make, any move toward saving it." Italy in the mid-nineteenth century was an arena in which modernization overturned generations-old relationships in a trice. Some rules of the game, long understood by all, simply ceased to apply, while others held with reinforced grip. The Leopard maps these changes for the people of Sicily; it measures those changes in the confusion and conviction and joy and despair that they wrought.


WEBSITES:
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896-1957)
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/lampedus.htm

The Leopard Review
http://www.sff.net/people/richard.horton/leopard.htm


SOME IMPORTANT CHARACTERS:
Bendicò—the Great Dane
Father Pirrone—priest to Prince Fabrizio
Princess Concetta—daughter of Prince Fabrizio and cousin of Tancredi
Princess Carolina—eldest daughter of Prince Fabrizio
Francesco Paolo—Duke of Querceta, son of Prince Fabrizio
Prince Fabrizio Salina, the Leopard—the main protagonist
Maria Stella—wife of Prince Fabrizio
King Ferdinand—King of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, capital at Naples
Tancredi Falconeri—nephew and ward of Prince Fabrizio
Don Ciccio Ferrara—accountant of Prince Fabrizio, a symbol of the rising middle class
Russo—a dependent of Prince Fabrizio, a symbol of the rising middle class
King Victor Emmanuel—King of Piedmont-Sardinia, capital at Turin
Angelica Sedàra—daughter of the mayor, Don Calogero Sedàra
Don Calogero Sedàra—newly rich and liberal
Don Ciccio Tumeo—Fabrizio’s shooting partner

Pay attention to di Lampedusa's language, poetic prose, full of symbols and metaphors. His vivid word pictures can cause us to think differently about such human concerns as love, death, etc. Below are some of my favorite scenes.

INTRODUCTION TO THE PRINCE: MAY 1860
The Princess
Her fine crazy eyes glanced round at her slaves of children and her tyrant of a husband, over whom her diminutive body yearned vainly for loving dominion.

The Prince
But in his blood also fermented other German strains particularly disturbing to a Sicilian aristocrat in the year 1860, however attractive his fair skin and hair amid all that olive and black; an authoritarian temperament, a certain rigidity of morals, and a propensity for abstract ideas; these, in the relaxing atmosphere of Palermo society, had changed respectively into capricious arrogance, recurring moral scruples and contempt for his own relatives and friends, all of whom seemed to him mere driftwood in the languid meandering stream of Sicilian pragmatism.

Novel’s theme
Between the pride and intellectuality of his mother and the sensuality and irresponsibility of his father, poor Prince Fabrizio lived in perpetual discontent under his Jove-like frown, watching the ruin of his own class and his own inheritance without ever making, still less wanting to make any move towards saving it.

Death
The first mention of death in the novel, the dead soldier in the garden. Pay attention to the author’s attitudes toward death.

Purpose of Power:
It was against them [the monks] really that the bonfires were lit on the hills, stoked by men [i.e., revolutionaries] who were themselves very like those living in the monasteries below, as fanatical, as self-absorbed, as avid for power or rather for the idleness which was, for them, the purpose of power.

On matrimony, guilt, sin, and self-justification:
"I’m a sinner, I know, doubly a sinner, by Divine Law and by Stella’s human love. There’s no doubt of that, and tomorrow I’ll go and confess to Father Pirrone." He smiled to himself at the thought that it might be superfluous so certain must the Jesuit be of his sins of to-day. "And it’s true, but I’m sinning so as not to sin worse, to stop this sensual nagging, to tear this thorn out of my flesh and avoid worse trouble. That the Lord knows." Suddenly he was swept by a gust to tenderness toward himself. "I’m just a poor, weak creature," he though as his heavy steps crunched the dirty gravel. "I’m weak and without support. Stella! oh, well, the Lord knows how much I’ve loved her; but I was married at twenty. And now she’s too bossy, as well as too old." His moment of weakness passed. "But I’ve still got my vigor; and how can I find satisfaction with a woman who makes the sign of the Cross in bed before every embrace and then at the critical moment just cries, "Gesummaria!" When we married and she was sixteen. I found that rather exalting; but now . . . seven children I’ve had with her, seven; and never once have I seen her navel. Is that right?" Now he was almost shouting, whipped by this odd anguish, "Is it right? I ask you all!" And he turned to the portico of the Catena. "Why, she’s the real sinner!"
Comforted by this reassuring discovery, he gave a firm knock at Mariannina’s door.

Tancredi, as he’s off to join the guerrillas:
"Unless we ourselves take a hand now, they’ll foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change." . . . On his way downstairs he [the Prince] suddenly understood that remark of Tancredi "if we want things to stay as they are. . ." Tancredi would go a long way: he’d always thought so.

Decline of the noble class:
Each picture [of Salina’s various estates] was jocund—each illustrating the enlightened rule, direct or delegated, of the House of Salina. Ingenuous masterpieces of rustic art from the previous century; useless though at showing boundaries, or detailing tenures or tenancies; such matters remained obscure. The wealth of centuries had been transmuted into ornament, luxury, pleasure; no more; the abolition of feudal rights had swept away duties with privileges; wealth, like old wine, had let the dregs of greed, even of care and prudence, fall to the bottom of the barrel, preserving only verve and color. An thus eventually it canceled itself out; this wealth which had achieved its own object was now composed only of essential oils—and like essential oils soon evaporated.

Russo to Salina on the aims of the bourgeois revolutionaries
Your excellency knows we can stand no more; searches, questions, nagging about every little thing, a police-spy at every corner of the street; an honest man can’t even look after his own affairs. Afterwards, though, we’ll have liberty, security, lighter taxes, ease, trade. Everything will be better; the only ones to lose will be the priests. But the Lord protects poor folk like me, not them. . . . Honest and able men will have a chance to get ahead, that’s all. The rest will be as it was before. Salina concludes: All that these people, these petty local Liberals wanted, was to find ways of making more money themselves. . . . Now he had penetrated all the hidden meanings; the enigmatic words of Tancredi, the rhetorical ones of Ferrara, the false but revealing ones of Russo, had yielded their reassuring secret. Much would happen, but all would be play-acting; a noisy, romantic play with a few spots of blood on the comic costumes. This was a country of arrangements, with none of that frenzy of the French.

Political beliefs of Father Pirrone
Briefly, then, you nobles will come to an agreement with the Liberals, and yes, even with the Masons, at our expense, at the expense of the Church. Then of course, our property, which is the patrimony of the poor, will be seized and carved up among the most brazen of their leaders; and who will then feed all the destitute sustained and guided by the Church to-day?’. . . ‘How will those desperate masses be placated? I’ll tell you at once, Excellency. They will be flung first a portion, then another portion and eventually all the rest of your estates. And so God will have done His justice, even by means of the Masons. Our Lord healed the blind in body; but what will be the fate of the blind in spirit?’

DONNAFUGATA, AUGUST 1960
End of the Leopard’s prestige
Prince Fabrizio: And he added, turning to the others, "And after dinner, at nine-o’clock, we shall be happy to see all our friends." For a long time Donnafugata commented on these last words. And the Prince, who had found Donnafugata unchanged, was found very much changed himself, for never before would he have issued so cordial an invitation: and from that moment, invisibly, began the decline of his prestige.

Prince Fabrizio’s hopes for Tancredi
Tancredi, he considered, had a great future; he could be the standard-bearer of a counter-attack which the nobility, under changed trappings, could launch against the new social state. To do this he lacked but one thing; money; this Tancredi did not have none at all. And to get on in politics, now that a name counted less, would need a lot of money; money to buy votes, money to do the electors favors, money for a dazzling style of living.

On Love
Love. Of course, love. Flames for a year, ashes for thirty.

On Death
While there’s death there’s hope.

THE TROUBLES OF DON FABRIZIO, OCTOBER 1860
Coming Marriage of Tancredi and Angelica
Don Fabrizio’s initial ambivalence about budding romance between Tancredi and Angelica. Tancredi writes to ask Don Fabrizio to arrange marriage with Angelica.

Rabbit Symbol
... at the Prince’s feet Arguto [Fabrizio’s dog] placed an animal in its death throes.
It was a wild rabbit; its humble dun-colored coat had been unable to save it. Horrible wounds lacerated snout and chest. Don Fabrizio found himself stared at by big black eyes soon overlaid by a glaucous veil; they were looking at him with no reproval, but full of tortured amazement at the whole ordering of things; the velvety ears were already cold, the vigorous paws contracting in rhythm, still-living symbol of useless flight; the animal had died tortured by anxious hopes of salvation, imagining it could still escape when it was already caught, just like so many human beings. While sympathetic fingers were still stroking that poor snout, the animal gave a last quiver and died; Don Fabrizio and don Ciccio had had their bit of fun, the former not only the pleasure of killing but also the comfort of compassion.

On the Plebiscite and Southern Indolence
Don Fabrizio had always like Don Ciccio, partly because of the compassion inspired in him by all who from youth had thought of themselves as dedicated to the Arts, and in old age, realizing they had no talent, still carried on the same activity at lower levels, pocketing withered dreams; and he was also touched by the dignity of his poverty. But now he also felt a kind of admiration for him and deep down at the very bottom of his proud conscience a voice was asking if Don Ciccio had not perhaps behaved more nobly than the Prince of Salina. And the Sedàra, from the petty one who violated arithmetic at Donnafugata to the major ones at Palermo and Turin, had they not committed a crime by choking such consciences? Don Fabrizio could not know it then, but a great deal of the slackness and acquiescence for which the people of the South were to be criticized during the next decade, was due to the stupid annulment of the first expression of liberty ever offered them.

After Fabrizio told Ciccio of the Marriage Uniting the Houses of Salina and Sedàra
And as they climbed down towards the road, it would have been difficult to tell which of the two was Don Quixote and which Sancho Panza.

LOVE AT DONNAFUGATA, NOVEMBER 1860
On Love
Anyone deducing from this attitude of Angelica that she loved Tancredi would have been mistaken; she had too much pride and too much ambition to be capable of that annihilation, however temporary, of one’s own personality without which there is no love. . . . but although she did not love him, she was in love with him, a very different thing.

Sensuality of the Palace at Donnafugata
Not that there was any erotic nudity at the palace of Donnafugata, just an air of excited sensuality all the sharper for being carefully restrained. Eighty years before the Salina palace had been a meeting place for those obscure pleasures which appealed to the dying eighteenth century; but the severe regency of the Princess Carolina, the neo-religious fervor of the Restoration, the straightforward sensuality of Don Fabrizio had eventually caused its bizarre extravagances to be forgotten; the little powdered demons had been put to flight; they still existed, of course, but only as sleeping embryos, hibernating under piles of dust in some attic of the vast building. The lovely Angelica’s entry into the palace had made them stir a little, as may be remembered; but it was the arrival of two young men in love which really awoke the instincts lying dormant in the house.

There wanderings through the seemingly limitless building were interminable; they would set off as if for some unknown land, and unknown indeed it was because in many of those apartment and corners not even Don Fabrizio had ever set foot—a cause of great satisfaction to him, for he used to say that a house of which one knew every room wasn’t worth living it.

‘No, Tancredi, no,’ her denial was in fact an invitation...; they were moments ecstatic and painful, during which desire became a torment, restraint upon it a delight.

Summing Up of Tancredi’s and Angelica’s Symbolically Erotic Exploration of the House
Those were the best days in the lives of Tancredi and Angelica, lives later to be so variegated, so erring, against the inevitable background of sorrow. But of that they were still unaware, in their pursuit of a future which they deemed more concrete than it turned out to be, made of nothing but smoke and wind. When they were old and uselessly wise their thoughts would go back to those days with insistent regret; they had been days when desire was always present because always overcome, when many beds had been offered and refused, when the sensual urge, because restrained, had for one second been sublimated in renunciation, that is into real love. Those days were the preparation for a marriage which, even erotically, was no success; a preparation, however, in a way sufficient to itself,, exquisite and brief; like those overtures which outlive the forgotten operas they belong to and hint in delicate veiled gaiety at all the arias which later in the opera are to be developed undeftly, and fail.

The Prince Rejects Offer of Senatorship and Comments on Sicily and Sicilians
In Sicily it doesn’t matter about doing things well or badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of "doing" at all . . . Sleep, my dear Chevalley, sleep, that is what Sicilians want, and they will always hate anyone who tries to wake them, even in order to bring them the most wonderful of gifts: I must say, between ourselves, that I have strong doubts whether the new kingdom will have many gifts for us in its luggage. . . . the Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect; their vanity is stronger than their misery; every invasion by outsiders, whether so by origin or, if Sicilian, by independence of spirit, upsets their illusion of achieved perfection, risks disturbing their satisfied waiting for nothing; having been trampled on by a dozen different peoples, they think they have an imperial past which gives them a right to a grand funeral.. . . this sense of superiority that dazzles every Sicilian eye, and which we ourselves call pride while in reality it’s blindness.

FATHER PIRRONE PAYS A VISIT, FEBRUARY 1861
Pirrone’s Conversation with the Herbalist
Monologue on nature of the nobility

A BALL, NOVEMBER 1862
The Characteristics of Noble Behavior
Note Tancredi’s teaching to Angelica.

On Death
Immediately afterwards he [Salina] asked himself if his own death would be like that; probably it would, apart from the sheets being less impeccable (he knew that the sheets of those in their death agony are always dirty with spittle, ejections, medicine marks. . .) and it was to be hoped that Concetta, Carolina and his other women folk would be more decently clad. But the same, more or less. As always the thought of his own death calmed him as much as that of others disturbed him: was it perhaps because, when all was said and done, his own death would in the first place mean that of the whole world? . . .The door opened. ‘Nuncle, you’re looking wonderful this evening. Black suits you perfectly. But what are you looking at? Are you paying court to death?’

DEATH OF A PRINCE, JULY 1883
Death as Courtship
Perhaps only Tancredi had understood for an instant, when he had said with that subdued irony of his, ‘You, Nuncle, are courting death.’ Now the courtship was ended; the lovely lady had said a definite ‘yes’ to an elopement, to a reserved compartment on the train.

The Leopard Ponders His Death and the Death of the "Salina" Family
It was useless to try and avoid the thought, but the last of the Salina was really he himself, this gaunt giant now dying on a hotel balcony. For the significance of a noble family lies entirely in its traditions, that is in its vital memories; and he was the last to have any unusual memories, anything different from those of other families. Fabrizietto would only have banal ones like his school fellows, of snacks, of spiteful little jokes against teachers, horses bought with an eye more to price than quality; and the meaning of his name would change more and more to empty pomp, embittered b y the gad-fly thought that others could outdo him in outward show. He would go hunting for a rich marriage when t at would have become a commonplace routine and no longer a predatory adventure like Tancredi’s. . . . That fellow Garibaldi, that bearded Vulcan had won after all.

He was making up a general balance sheet of his whole life, trying to sort out of the immense ash-heap of liabilities the golden flecks of happy moments. These were: two weeks before his marriage, six weeks after; half an hour when Paolo was born, when he felt proud at having prolonged by a twig the Salina tree (the pride had been misplaced, he knew that now, but there had been some genuine self-respect in it); a few talks with Giovanni before the latter vanished (a few monologues, if the truth were told, during which he had thought to find in the boy a kindred mind); and many hours in the observatory, absorbed in abstract calculation and the pursuit of the unreachable.
He summed up. ‘I’m seventy-three years old, and all in all I may have lived, really lived, a total to two . . three at the most.’ And the pains, the boredom, how long had they been? Useless to try and make himself count those; the whole of the rest; seventy years.

Death Comes
Suddenly amid the group appeared a young woman; slim, in brown travelling dress and wide bustle, with a straw hat trimmed with a speckled veil which could not hide the sly charm of her face. She slid a little suède-gloved hand between one elbow and another of the weeping kneelers, apologized, drew closer. It was she, the creature for ever yearned for, coming to fetch him; strange that one so young should yield to him; the time for the train’s departure must be very close. When she was fact to face with him she raised her veil, and there, chaste but ready for possession, she looked lovelier than she ever had when glimpsed in stellar space.
The crashing of the sea subsided altogether.

RELICS, MAY 1910
The Relics
Note the symbolism of the religious relics being thrown out. Are the sisters also relics?

On Concetta and Tancredi
It would, of course, be absurd to say that Concetta still loved Tancredi; love’s eternity lasts but a year or two, not fifty. But as one who has recovered from smallpox fifty years before still bears its marks on the face although he may have forgotten the pain of the disease, so she bore in her own oppressed life now the wounds of a bitter disappointment that become almost part of history, so much part in fact that its fiftieth anniversary was being celebrated officially.

Bendicò As Metaphor
Still she could feel nothing; inner emptiness was total; but she did sense an unpleasant atmosphere exhaling from the heap of furs. That was to-day’s distress: even poor Bendicò was hinting at bitter memories. She rang the bell. ‘Annetta,’ she said, ‘this dog has really become too moth-eaten and dusty. Take it out, throw it away.’
As the carcass was dragged off, the glass eyes stared at her with the humble reproach of things discarded in the hope of final riddance. A few minutes later what remained of Bendicò was flung into a corner of the year visited every day by the dustman. During the flight down from the window its form recomposed itself for an instant; in the air there seemed to be dancing a quadruped with long whiskers, its right foreleg raised in imprecation. Then all found peace in a little heap of livid dust.

JOURNAL 10 QUESTIONS

Journal: Read The Leopard and the material above. In your journal, please answer the following questions.  Be sure to use examples taken from the novel:
1. Who are the most important characters in the novel, The Leopard? What roles do they play?
2. What are the characteristics of premodern and modern societies? What was the nature of premodern Sicilian society? What sort of tensions are created as societies move from premodern to modern societies? What evidences can you find in the novel of differing levels of development in northern and southern Italy? What evidences can you find of loyalties to localities rather than to the Italian nation as a whole?
3. What are the aims and purposes and motives of bourgeois Liberals who wish change?
4. The novel is full of symbols. What are some of these symbols and what are their meanings? How does di Lampedusa’s use of symbolism help us to understand history.
5. What are the novel’s attitudes expressed toward life and death, class, society, love, honor, religion/the Church, and the role of women?
6. What were several of your favorite scenes and why?
7. One of the great joys of this novel is its wonderful "word paintings," language that creates vivid mental images. What are two or three of your favorite "word paintings?"
8. How can novels help us to understand history? What dangers to understanding might they impose.

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