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The creative writer, we seem to be told by the schools of thought which dominate academic literary criticism, is redundant. There are only texts, with the `author' a kind of mechanical assistant. In this view the text is traceable to broader social, political and historical contexts which the author is, in many respects, powerless to recognise or resist. However, I would argue that even if we accept that any author - or any human being in any context - has their thoughts and behaviour channelled and constrained by the social and historical contexts in which they operate, it does not follow that their works are totally determined by those contexts. There is still room for the individual cognitive presence, for the ability to choose, for moral judgement and for the rejection of the dominant ideas of the time. This is not to suggest that the creative artist is in some way fundamentally different from anybody else, merely that, amongst the mosaic of identities that they (and we) embody, the artist has a role which often compels them to address issues in a more coherent and consistent way than we sometimes have to do in `real life'.
In our comfortable pseudo-democratic world, political commitment is expressed in a variety of forms - wearing badges, marching, joining single-issue pressure-groups, striking, voting. In this context, where political engagement of a high degree can be seen as `crank' activity if it is outside of the party mainstream, it can be difficult to conceive of a world where political engagement night be the defining feature of one's life, but when we look at the work of Silone, this is the context that we must bear in mind: for more than ten years, his life, and his work, were dedicated to the socialist/communist cause. This context shifted over time, and affected Silone's sense of self as well as his work. These shifts, and the ways that they were expressed in his work, were also conditioned by Silone's being part of a society where what we consider the norm - freedom of expression and freedom from mass-censorship - were not present. This was particularly the case after 1926, when all political opposition in Mussolini's Italy was banned, and Silone was forced to go `underground'.
The `artistic imagination' needs some definition. Here it will be used to refer to the way in which an author's process of creating their work is informed by their life: an author is inevitably subject to a wide variety of influences, and plays many roles. The influences will range from family, education, and peers, to political thinking, beliefs, and desires. The roles of the author might include that of wage-earner, father, daughter, wife, brother, teacher, explorer, and scientist. Amongst this tangle of roles and influences I will try and draw out some of the coarser strands of influence that worked on and within Silone, and with which he, as a thinking, moral being, interacted as an active agent.
Modern biographies seem to work on the principle that by piling up detail upon detail we can `fully understand' the person and their work - hence the trend for ever larger, multi-volume `lives'. Although I think this trend has gone a little far, some biographical detail does cast light on Silone's work and his political commitment. Silone was born in rural Italy, and his influences during his youth - his father and his Catholic education - can both be seen to have contributed to his moral outlook and to his idealism. His father instilled in him "a deep sense of respect for the poor, the underprivileged and the disenfranchized". [1] Likewise, his formal education in Catholic schools and seminaries "produced in Silone an unbending devotion to justice, brotherhood and compassion." [2] All of this took place in a rural society where the relative certainties of the church, the seasons, and of the cycles of life and death were the guiding forces of life. These structured attitudes and beliefs were to inform Silone's development for the rest of his life, although their forms of expression would change.
Fontamara was Silone's first major work of fiction. Previously, his written work had all been associated with his political activity. From the age of seventeen he had been involved in writing for the socialist press, activity which can be seen to derive from the traumatic events of 1914-15, when firstly his father died, and then he lost all but one of his remaining immediate family in the earthquake of 1915. The aftermath of the earthquake saw corrupt and incompetent government attempts to reconstruct the region's infrastructure and economy. Via the Peasant Leagues and the Socialist Party he found his way to the Italian Communist Party (PCI), of which he was a founder member. It is not perhaps too much to suggest that in the systematic beliefs of the socialists and communists he found a political schema which echoed his earlier life and wherein he could ground his ethical beliefs in practical activity.
Silone's activism was at a high level: he co-founded the PCI with Gramsci, and travelled extensively abroad in pursuit of the party's aims. These activities were carried out clandestinely after Mussolini came to power, when the `public sphere' of political and moral expression was becoming increasingly constrained by the actions of the Fascist state. The banning of all political opposition parties in 1926 saw Silone assume the position internal organisational secretary of the PCI, and in 1927 he travelled to Moscow for the Comintern Executive meeting. It was here that his disillusionment with communism - the political ideal that had sustained and inspired his activities for ten years - set in. By 1929 he had settled in Zurich and was estranged from the party organisation which he had previously been so close to. The system that he had believed in had turned out to be rotten, and unable to combat the hated values of Mussolini's fascists.
This political estrangement was complemented by a family element: Silone's only remaining close family member, his brother Romolo, wrongly accused of being a PCI member, was arrested and tortured. Also during this period Silone himself contracted consumption. It was while convalescing that Silone wrote Fontamara. Silone writes that during the creation of the novel,
writing became my only defence against loneliness and isolation and, since in my doctors' view I had only a short time to live, I wrote hurriedly, in an indescribable state of anxiety and stress, to construct to the best of my ability the village into which I put the quintessence of myself. [3]
This quote is crucial in understanding the development of the relationship between Silone's political commitment and his artistic imagination. Here we can discern that the novel was written almost as an attempt to testify to the inherent goodness, simplicity, and moral rectitude of the cafoni of his native area. This testimony is a counter to the false values of the Fascists and the urban capitalists who accompany them. In a sense, Silone is attempting to recapture a past that is vanished: the certainties of the structures and cycles of his childhood, and to stress the universality of "the really important things in life; birth, love, suffering and death." [4]
Also, Silone can be seen to be searching for a new way of expressing the values that he had held dear since childhood - respect for the poor, justice, brotherhood, compassion - in a political form. This is because the framework of communism has disintegrated for him. Eric Hobsbawm, since 1989, has written and spoken of his earlier `faith' in communism and his difficulty in shedding the carapace of belief that had sustained him first against fascism, and then against the dominance of capitalism. For him, communism was the practical system through which his idealistic views could be expressed. [5] Similarly, I suggest that Fontamara is Silone's first attempt to make sense of his `post-communist' world, and an attempt to re-engage with political commitment in a new and more meaningful way. In the simplicity of his characters, in the nobility and stoicism of their suffering, and in their final death, we can perhaps see Silone searching for alternatives to the inevitable communist utopia of Marxism-Leninism which Silone has lost his belief in. Another way in which Fontamara can perhaps be seen as an `exploration', as a way of making sense of the world, is in how it compares the simplicity and predictability of everyday life in the village with the uncertainties and unreliability of the life of the city and of politicians. Here perhaps we can see parallels with the frictions caused by the clashes of traditional and modernising forces which were rippling through Italy in the first half of the century. In this sense, Fontamara can be seen both as Silone's personal search for a new way of expressing his ideals, and as a metaphor for broader social changes. Here, Fascism is both an active force continuing the old oppression of the poor and disenfranchised, and a representative and outrider of wider social change.
In conclusion, I would argue that Silone's political commitment was a lifelong one, but that it changed as he became aware that the political schema that he had attached himself to did not match the ideals that he held. The effect on his artistic imagination was to create a sense of bewilderment and the need to explore new modes of political expression, which were first embodied in Fontamara. The novel is thus part of his continuing search for meaning in the world; he writes of the `arbitrary and painful act' of finishing the book, implying that for him these meanings are never `fixed', but are only ever provisional. Here we might find echoes of the social and political uncertainties that he was aware of, the `shifting sands' on which all human existence is built. The most heart-breaking evidence of this in the novel can be found in the final paragraph. After the deaths of so many of the villagers at the hands of Fascist troops, the narrator, surely ironically and bitterly echoing the certainties of Lenin's book title, asks "what is to be done?". [6] This heartfelt plea, written when Fascism was in full flow, reflects Silone's personal and political despair, while the example of the sacrifice and suffering of the cafoni perhaps suggests a way forward.
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[1] Fontamara (Everyman, 1994), Introduction, p. xvii
[2] ibid.
[3] ibid., p. 3
[4] ibid., p. 5
[5] see, for example, Hobsbawm's BBC2 interview with Michael Ignatieff (1995 [?])
[6] Fontamara, p. 160