What an odd place for this story to begin: a man idly staring into the flames being “initiated into the mysteries” of the fire, his thoughts “wandering off in capricious fashion”, his thoughts “taking leave” of him, “darting and fluttering like enamoured moths”, “flying off at random into the distance”, “showering” his heart with “unsuspected tokens of bittersweet melancholy”; after considering “moonbeams kissing blonde tresses” he departs on a “nomad excursion of the soul” by way of the fire, the reader might wonder at the narrator’s sentimental introspection and sweet self-pity, if awkward self-regard: why juxtapose this idle and vapid chap with the full force of Nedda’s brutal animal un-self-consciousness?
Once we leave the fire behind, the reader follows in the footsteps of Nedda, who brings a whole new tragic inevitability to tragic inevitability – she might well be the living, breathing personification of Verga’s own tragic inevitability. But it is her lack of awareness of the tragic element of this inevitability – for she accepts the inevitability even as she cannot appreciate the tragedy- that elevates Verga’s protagonist above sentimentalism, and allows Verga1840-1922) to enter the modern world of prose – the realism and unfiltered / unsentimental representation of Balzac (1799-1850) and the well-honed naturalism of Zola (1840-1902) – his keen observation of detail like Dickens (1812-1870), but without the gushing sentiment and mawkishness – which defined Verga’s earlier work.
What would be enough to break down a human being? Verga seems to be asking with Nedda. Misery, mourning and complete disillusionment, the poverty and starvation that ends in the death of her new-born child, a range of assorted catastrophes; unloved, uncared for, disregarded, even cast out; beset by illness, poverty and prejudice; her mother dying in between paragraphs – sick in one, stone cold corpse the next – sexually comprimiesed, so ostracized… Yes, the full gamut of suffering, which is what enables this fragile and lonely woman to represents courage, and even emancipation. Why? Because she accepts her fate? Her complete innocence, which seems to empower her resignation to her fate, her acceptance of how she is treated, and the way the world is, being a victim of life, but critically not seeing herself as a victim, nor seeing life, or fate, or society as beleaguering her, stymieing her or being out to get her. The reader might think this. Verga might think this. But it’s left unsaid and unthought.
If it’s not hopelessness, it’s still pretty bleak stuff. Nedda has just never thought to hope, it has never occurred to her to expect anything from life. She doesn’t get her hopes up, nor does she have to let them down.
“If anyone’s to blame, it’s myself for being so poor.”
But this in a story where Nedda’s poverty is so obviously a function of society’s failure. But if this is Verga’s hot take, he doesn’t serve it up to the reader.
A Useful Fiction 