Verga and verismo
Verismo (from vero, true) is Italian realism of the 1870s and 1880s. Like writers in France, Italian authors wanted a scientific, honest look at life. Giovanni Verga (1840-1922), from Sicily, wrote Vita dei campi (with the story Rosso Malpelo), I Malavoglia (1881) and Mastro-don Gesualdo (1889). His main ideas are:
- Impersonality: the author disappears and the facts speak, "like the work made itself".
- Regression: the narrator thinks and talks like the villagers, so we hear the village, not the writer.
- The defeated (i vinti): poor and rich alike are swept away by the "river of progress"; the weak fall first.
In I Malavoglia a fisher family loses a boat and fortune; they try to keep honour and home, but they are hit by one disaster after another.
Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936, Nobel Prize 1934) is the writer of "masks". His idea is that life (vita) keeps flowing, but society makes us stop in fixed forms (forma), like roles and names. We wear masks so others can know us, but then we lose our free self. Key works:
- Il fu Mattia Pascal (1904): a man gets a new identity and finds he cannot live without papers and a name.
- Uno, nessuno e centomila (1926): one man sees that others see a hundred different "him", so he is no one.
- Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore (1921): six characters walk onto a stage and demand a story. A famous play.
His special tone is umorismo: you first laugh at something odd, then you feel sadness behind it.
Svevo
Italo Svevo (1861-1928) lived in Trieste, a busy port city where several cultures met. He read about psychoanalysis. His novel La coscienza di Zeno (1923) is the "memoir" of Zeno Cosini, written for his doctor. Zeno cannot stop smoking, cannot decide, cannot be sure of his own story, so he is an unreliable narrator. Time in the novel is not a straight line but a tangle of memories. Zeno is an "inetto" (a man who does not fit), like the heroes of Svevo's earlier novels Una vita and Senilità. Yet at the end he remains oddly healthy in a sick world.
Why we call it a "crisis of the novel"
The old realist novel believed that the author can see the whole truth. Verga already hides the author. Pirandello and Svevo go further: the "I" is broken, the narrator cannot be trusted, and truth depends on who looks. This is the crisis of the novel, and it prepares the modern novel of the 20th century. Compare it with Leopardi, who asked earlier what is true behind our wishes, and look at what came next in Neorealism.
Try it
Write about one event in your day three times. First as a camera that only sees (Verga). Then as three people who each see it differently (Pirandello). Last as your own thoughts, jumping about (Svevo).
Key formulas and definitions
- Verismo = realism with an impersonal narrator (Verga)
- Vita (life) versus forma (form): Pirandello
- Mask: the role society makes us wear
- Unreliable narrator: the story-teller cannot be fully trusted (Svevo)
Worked examples
1. What does "impersonality" mean in Verga?
The author keeps his opinion out of the story. Facts and the villagers' own voices tell it, so the reader feels the work "made itself".
2. How is the mask idea shown in "Uno, nessuno e centomila"?
The hero finds that everyone sees a different version of him. If there are a hundred of him in other minds, he cannot find one true self, so he is also "nobody".
3. Why is Zeno called an unreliable narrator?
He writes for his doctor but twists, forgets and excuses. We must read between the lines to know what really happened.
Common mistakes
- Thinking verismo is the same as French naturalism. It is related but from a poor, southern, rural view.
- Saying Verga never writes about feelings. He avoids the author's comments, not the characters' feelings.
- Confusing Pirandello's "mask" with a theatre prop only. It is a social role.
- Believing Zeno is a reliable doctor's case. The doctor is the one he is writing to.