Lampedusa's The Leopard chronicles the struggle of Sicilian aristocrats to survive social change, with lessons that still endure, writes Jonathan Jones.
The art of politics is an Italian invention. The modern awareness that human affairs are not transparent, but devious, complex and unpredictable dates from the Italian Renaissance, with its mixture of ruthlessness, fantasy and failure given voice by the first modern political thinker, Niccolo Machiavelli.
In his 1513 work, Il Principe (The Prince), Machiavelli created a monster that has haunted politics ever since. For centuries the author and his Prince were seen as antichrists and early editions of The Prince in English come with notes piously refuting his cynicism. Today, the term "Machiavellian" is routinely used to denote any form of political action that challenges our notions of good faith and moral authenticity. Machiavelli's Prince is not a practical advice manual for a specific individual - rather it creates a fantastic creature, a kind of armoured colossus bestriding (and in Machiavelli's precocious dream, uniting) Italy.
It would be asking too much of Italian literature to produce a second such political myth. But this is what happened when, in 1958, Feltrinelli Editore in Milan brought out a novel by an obscure Palermitan aristocrat who had died the year before.
Prince Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's posthumous, unfinished work, Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), was at once hailed as a masterpiece. It possesses the descriptive and analytic power not simply of one of the most beguiling 20th-century novels, but of one of the modern world's definitive political fictions. Lampedusa's irresistible creation, the Prince of Salina, a physical giant who unconsciously bends cutlery and crushes ornaments when he is in a dark mood, is a Prince as seductive as Machiavelli's.
Against all our prejudices, we empathise with his subtle, undeceived attempts to preserve his family's virtually feudal power at the time of the Risorgimento, the unification of Italy, in 1860. The Leopard's dictum that "everything must change so that everything can stay the same" has become an ironic historical maxim quoted again and again to describe Sicily, Italy, the nature of history and the resourceful ways of power.
Open any book on subjects from the Mafia (The Godfather is in many ways a popularisation of The Leopard) to the failure of the 1968 revolutions in Europe, and you will probably find that quote. In Italy and its Discontents 1980-2001, Paul Ginsborg argues that, for the first time, the phrase no longer applies to Italy; with the decline of the industrial working class, "the mid-1970s were precisely the moment when everything began to change and not, pace Tomasi di Lampedusa, to stay the same".
Where Machiavelli created a myth of action, of the bold ruler who tames fortune, Lampedusa's Sicilian Prince believes the opposite: that we are the prisoners of history, of place, of custom, even of climate, and that the most you can hope to do is maintain what you have by playing along with history.
Lampedusa's sense of history is double: there are events, but these events are somehow illusory, and behind them, below them, the deep habits of power, subordination and corruption abide. But where is this true - in Sicily, in Italy, or everywhere? Lampedusa's book has become a morbidly seductive guidebook to Sicily, its glamour and despair; the sensual revelling in decrepit palaces, burnt temple-studded landscapes, sugary pasticceria and the magnificent ball in a gilded Palermo salon that is so gloriously visualised in Luchino Visconti's just re-released 1963 film of the book.
Lampedusa set his novel at the exact historical moment when Sicily came into direct contact with the forward movement of history, the history of nations, or progress, of democracy and social justice. "May, 1860" the first chapter is emphatically dated.
On May 11th, 1860, Garibaldi and his volunteer army, "The Thousand", landed at Marsala on Sicily's west coast, aiming to kickstart a revolution in the south (the Bourbon kingdom, the Two Sicilies, included Sicily and Naples), to widen the movement for national unification that was spearheaded by Piedmont in the north, and to march on Rome. The decisive act in Italian unification happened, implausibly, in Sicily.
Garibaldi is always offstage in The Leopard, as are the battles, demonstrations and marches. We are shut in a cool palace with the Prince as he wonders what to do, making choices that are both brilliant - publicly approving of the "revolution", marrying his ambitious but penniless nephew, Tancredi, to a nouveau riche beauty, but refusing the offer of a seat in the new national Senate - and, in the long term, pointless. In the long term, his class is doomed.
From our distanced, ironic perspective, we see the almost instant disillusion with what begins as a noble enterprise. Like the medieval battles Machiavelli scorned for their lack of casualties or significance, the struggle for Sicily is not much of a struggle.
The initial talk of revolution fades, and Tancredi, who begins as a follower of Garibaldi, becomes a regular officer in the army of the Piedmontese, expressing contempt for the Garibaldi rabble. The Prince of Salina chats at a ball to the Piedmontese officer responsible for shooting Garibaldi in the foot, in order to remove his subversive presence from what was becoming an ordered and conservative Risorgimento.
Perhaps it is not surprising, given its concentration on class as a social and cultural force, that some of The Leopard's most dedicated fans have been Marxists. Gramsci had seen the problem of the backward, non-industrialised south as fundamental to modern Italian history. The Marxist (and aristocratic) film director, Luchino Visconti, was already fascinated by the themes of The Leopard before he came to film it.
Visconti's La Terra Trema, a 1948 neo-realist lament for Sicilian fishermen filmed with the people of Aci Trezza on the island's east coast beneath Etna, analyses the problems of Sicily in other than dogmatically Marxist terms: the fishermen are systematically robbed by middlemen whose corrupt practices are clearly Mafia-like.
His 1954 film, Senso, based on Camillo Boito's 1883 story, anticipates The Leopard in setting the sensual, hedonistic desires of people left behind by history against the idealism and squalor of the Risorgimento.
However, if Visconti seems in so many ways to have been the perfect director to film The Leopard - and he made one of the most ravishing films ever - Visconti's view of history is different from Lampedusa's. Visconti's Prince of Salina makes a class alliance so that everything can stay the same; the Marxist dimension of the story is key. But this isn't how Lampedusa told it.
Just as Machiavelli's Prince does not resolve itself into a "theory", Lampedusa's myth is not rational. Or Marxist. In his most forthright speech, Lampedusa's Prince says what he really thinks; and it is stranger than expected. In explaining to a Piedmontese envoy why he will not join their senate, the Prince rejects the idea that feudal structures and a backward mode of production explain what is wrong with Sicily, although people have told him this is the theory of "some German Jew whose name I can't remember".
Because there has been feudalism everywhere, Sicily is more peculiar and perturbing than that. It is the centuries of invasions, the landscape and climate that have crushed ambition and hope. The Prince claims Sicilian sensuality is a love affair with death, that a desire for the grave obsesses the island's culture and will seep out of Sicily to poison the new Italy: "Our sensuality is a hankering for oblivion, our shooting and knifing a hankering for death; our languor, our exotic vices, a hankering for voluptuous immobility, that is for death again."
Lampedusa's Sicily is a place where the optimistic, progressive, rational forces of history as viewed in the 19th century - the march of liberal democracy and of socialism alike - get lost in baroque backstreets at midnight. As a myth, as a fiction of history, The Leopard will continue to ensnare minds. Lampedusa's despair is not so different from that of today's world, with its shrunken political expectations. We are all Sicilians now. - (Guardian Service)
Visconti's re-issued The Leopard is running at the IFC, Dublin