The Novel as Investigation Leonardo Sciascia

Dacia Maraini and Antonio Tabucchi 1st Edition

Joann Cannon pdf download
https://ebookgate.com/product/the-novel-as-investigation-leonardo-sciascia-dacia-maraini-and-
antonio-tabucchi-1st-edition-joann-cannon/

★★★★★ 4.8/5.0 (35 reviews) ✓ 173 downloads ■ TOP RATED

"Excellent quality PDF, exactly what I needed!" - Sarah M.

DOWNLOAD EBOOK
 The Novel as Investigation Leonardo Sciascia Dacia Maraini
and Antonio Tabucchi 1st Edition Joann Cannon pdf download

TEXTBOOK EBOOK EBOOK GATE

Available Formats

■ PDF eBook Study Guide TextBook

EXCLUSIVE 2025 EDUCATIONAL COLLECTION - LIMITED TIME

INSTANT DOWNLOAD VIEW LIBRARY

Instant digital products (PDF, ePub, MOBI) available
Download now and explore formats that suit you...

Postmodern Ethics The Re appropriation of Committed

Writing in the Works of Antonio Tabucchi and Leonardo
Sciascia 1975 2005 1st Edition Elizabeth Wren-Owens
https://ebookgate.com/product/postmodern-ethics-the-re-appropriation-
of-committed-writing-in-the-works-of-antonio-tabucchi-and-leonardo-
sciascia-1975-2005-1st-edition-elizabeth-wren-owens/
ebookgate.com

Leonardo da Vinci Notebooks Da Vinci Leonardo

https://ebookgate.com/product/leonardo-da-vinci-notebooks-da-vinci-
leonardo/

ebookgate.com

Learning from Leonardo decoding the notebooks of a genius

First Edition Da Vinci Leonardo

https://ebookgate.com/product/learning-from-leonardo-decoding-the-
notebooks-of-a-genius-first-edition-da-vinci-leonardo/

ebookgate.com

The Egyptian book of living and dying Joann Fletcher

https://ebookgate.com/product/the-egyptian-book-of-living-and-dying-
joann-fletcher/

ebookgate.com
I Smell Sing and Read Joann Cleland

https://ebookgate.com/product/i-smell-sing-and-read-joann-cleland/

ebookgate.com

Faculty Diversity Problems and Solutions 1st Edition Joann

Moody

https://ebookgate.com/product/faculty-diversity-problems-and-
solutions-1st-edition-joann-moody/

ebookgate.com

Communicating Strategically in English as a Lingua Franca

A Corpus Driven Investigation 1st Edition Janin Jafari

https://ebookgate.com/product/communicating-strategically-in-english-
as-a-lingua-franca-a-corpus-driven-investigation-1st-edition-janin-
jafari/
ebookgate.com

The Microeconomics of Wellbeing and Sustainability

Recasting the Economic Process 1st Edition Leonardo
Becchetti
https://ebookgate.com/product/the-microeconomics-of-wellbeing-and-
sustainability-recasting-the-economic-process-1st-edition-leonardo-
becchetti/
ebookgate.com

Mathematical and physical theory of turbulence 1st Edition

John Cannon

https://ebookgate.com/product/mathematical-and-physical-theory-of-
turbulence-1st-edition-john-cannon/

ebookgate.com
THE NOVEL AS INVESTIGATION:
LEONARDO SCIASCIA, DACIA MARAINI,
AND ANTONIO TABUCCHI
This page intentionally left blank
JOANN CANNON

The Novel as Investigation:

Leonardo Sciascia, Dacia Maraini,
and Antonio Tabucchi

U N I V E R S I T Y OF T O R O N T O PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2006
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada

ISBN-10: 0-8020-9114-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-9114-7

Printed on acid-free paper

Toronto Italian Studies

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Cannon, JoAnn
The novel as investigation : Leonardo Sciascia, Dacia Maraini, and
Antonio Tabucchi / JoAnn Cannon.
(Toronto Italian studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-9114-7
ISBN-10: 0-8020-9114-8
1. Sciascia, Leonardo. 2. Maraini, Dacia. 3. Tabucchi, Antonio, 1943-.
4. Detective and mystery stories, Italian - History and criticism.
I. Title. II. Series.
PQ4181.D4C36 2006 853'.0872'090914 C2006-900552-4

This book has been published with the assistance of a grant from the Divi-
sion of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies and the Office of Research,
University of California, Davis.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its

publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario
Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its

publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book
Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
To Bob and Matt
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 3
1 The Power of the Pen in Leonardo Sciascia's Porte aperte 17
2 The Death of the Detective in II cavaliere e la morte 31
3 In Search of Isolina 45
4 Voci and the Conventions of the Giallo 59
5 Ethics and Literature in Sostiene Pereira: Una testimonianza 73
6 Detection, Activism, and Writing in La testa perduta di Damasceno
Monteiro 87
Conclusion 101

Notes 107
Bibliography 123
Index 131
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments

I would like to express my heartfelt appreciation to Dacia Maraini, for

her hospitality while I was in Rome and for her willingness to share
her insights with our students at the University of California, Davis,
during two visits to northern California sponsored by the Istituto
italiano di cultura. Many thanks to Antonio Tabucchi for the pleasure
of his company at a lively luncheon in Pisa and to Lorenzo Greco for
organizing this congenial gathering. I would also like to express my
gratitude to the American Academy in Rome for the opportunity to
work on this project as a visiting scholar in the spring of 2004 and to
the National Endowment for the Humanities and other foundations
for their support of the American Academy. I am indebted to the many
undergraduate and graduate students, in particular Shawn Doubiago,
Andy Matt, and Loredana Giacalone, with whom I have discussed the
works of Maraini, Tabucchi, and Sciascia and whose insights and curi-
osity have stimulated my thinking over the past few years; and to
Charles Klopp for his insight and suggestions. Finally, I extend a spe-
cial note of thanks to Ron Schoeffel at the University of Toronto Press
for his encouragement and support.
An earlier version of chapter 4 appeared as 'Voci and the Conven-
tions of the Giallo' in Italica 78 (Summer 2001): 193-203, and chapter 6
was published as 'Detection, Activism and Writing in Tabucchi's La
testa perduta di Damascene Monteiro' in Quaderni d'italianistica 23, no. 1
(2002): 163-72.1 wish to thank the respective editors of these journals
for publishing my work and for granting permission to reprint it here.
This page intentionally left blank
THE NOVEL AS INVESTIGATION:
LEONARDO SCIASCIA, DACIA MARAINI,
AND ANTONIO TABUCCHI
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction

Leonardo Sciascia, Dacia Maraini, Antonio Tabucchi. Key works of

these three Italian novelists, from the mid-1980s to the end of the cen-
tury, intersect in striking and significant ways, arriving at a similar
juncture at approximately the same point in time. This book will exam-
ine a series of these works that focus on crime and punishment, justice
and injustice, testimony and judgment: Porte aperte (1985) and II cava-
liere e la morte (1989) by Sciascia, Isolina (1985) and Voci (1994) by
Maraini, and Sostiene Pereira (1994) and La testa perduta di Damascene
Monteiro (1997) by Tabucchi. Each of these texts, whether a detective
novel or a racconto d'inchiesta (investigative novel), is a work in which
investigation or inquiry is the driving force. The inquiry is undertaken
by a range of closely related character types: non-professional detec-
tives, police investigators, lawyers, judges, and crusading journalists.
All of the texts in question shed light on pressing social ills: Sciascia
focuses on abuses of power and the death penalty, Maraini on violence
against women, Tabucchi on torture, police brutality, and human rights
violations. The protagonists of the works in question - a radio journal-
ist in 1990s Rome, a crusading lawyer in contemporary Lisbon, a judge
in fascist Italy of the thirties, the editor of the cultural pages of a news-
paper in fascist Portugal - have one common trait: they all suffer for
what Elio Vittorini calls in Conversazione in Sicilia 'il male del mondo
offeso' (the woes of the outraged world). Indeed, the problems ex-
plored in these texts are not specific to Italian society of the late
twentieth century but are, unfortunately, universal in scope. This study
explores each writer's denunciation of social injustice and indictment
of the guilty party in complementary texts, one group set in present-
day society (17 cavaliere e la morte, Voci, La testa perduta di Damasceno
4 The Novel as Investigation

Monteiro), the other in a past that continues to inform the present

moment (Porte aperte, Isolina, Sostiene Pereira). Sciascia, Maraini, and
Tabucchi share a strong conviction of the power of narrative in society,
and all three writers self-reflexively explore that power within their lit-
erary texts. As an extension of this conviction of the power of the pen,
each writer focuses on the role of reading within the texts in question
and examines some aspect of the reading process in his or her fiction.
Leonardo Sciascia made his literary debut in 1956 with Le parrocchie
di Regalpetra, a fictionalized account of life in his native Racalmuto.
With the publication of his detective novels of the sixties and early sev-
enties, Sciascia came to be recognized as one of Italy's most engaging
and significant writers. The detective genre perfectly captures Scia-
scia's forma mentis. His work is situated between two poles, belief in the
exercise of reason as symbolized in the giallo (detective novel) and dis-
may at the defeat of reason and the prevalence of injustice in the world.
// giorno della civetta (1961), his first detective novel, is an indictment of
the Sicilian mafia and of corruption at the highest level of the Italian
government. The protagonist, Captain Bellodi, a northern Italian and
former partisan, succeeds in solving the mystery and linking the hit-
man to the capomafia and his influential connections in the Italian
government. Although the pervasiveness of the mafia is fully exposed
in the novel, the author withholds any unrealistic, happy ending in
which the guilty are brought to justice or the mafia is eradicated. II
giorno was followed by A ciascuno il suo (1966), in which the guilty not
only remain unpunished, but truth is silenced through the brutal mur-
der of the amateur detective, Professor Laurana. // contesto (1971),
Sciascia's third detective novel, is a parody of the Italian political scene
of the seventies, and in particular an indictment of the compromesso
storico (historic compromise) between the Christian Democratic Party
and the Italian Communist Party. The novel is an attack on the blurring
of ideological distinctions among the myriad political parties of Italy's
partitocrazia and the struggle for political power at all costs. // contesto is
set in an unnamed country described in the author's note in terms that
condemn the Italian political scene of the 1970s: 'dove non avevano
piu corso le idee, dove i principi - ancora proclamati e conclamati -
venivano quotidianamente irrisi, dove le ideologic si riducevano in
politica a pure denominazioni nel giuoco delle parti che il potere si
assegnava, dove soltanto il potere per il potere contava' (121) [an
entirely imaginary country: a country where ideas no longer circulate,
where principles - still proclaimed, still acclaimed - are made a daily
 Introduction 5

mockery, where ideologies are reduced to policies in name only, in a

party-politics game in which only power for the sake of power counts]
(Equal Danger, 118-19).l In his early detective novels, whether set in
Sicily or in unnamed countries that bear a striking resemblance to Italy,
Sciascia targets both the Sicilian mafia and the larger mafia of
power politics in Italy. With Todo modo (1974) he focuses his attention on
the struggle between scepticism and absolutism as embodied in the
Catholic Church.2 After a period from the late seventies to the middle
eighties in which he abandoned fiction in favour of documentary
prose, Sciascia began to write several works of fiction that mark a turn-
ing point in his career.3 These include 2912 +1, Porte aperte, and // cava-
liere e la morte. By this point, at what proved to be the end of the
author's life, his focus seems to have shifted from current political and
social problems of Italy to questions of an ethical and even spiritual
dimension. As Joseph Farrell has convincingly pointed out in his study
of Sciascia's last works, 'At the heart of these works is an eschatological
quest not found in the early Sciascia, but of a type common in the
mature work of many European writers' (140). It is on these texts, par-
ticulary Porte aperte (1988) and II cavaliere e la morte (1989), written in the
last two years of the author's life, that this study will focus.4
Porte aperte, set in fascist Italy in 1937, is the story of a judge called
upon to preside over the trial of a triple murderer. The fascist regime
expects to see the crime, in which one of the victims was a high-rank-
ing fascist functionary, punished with the death penalty. The judge not
only firmly opposes the use of the death penalty, but also ridicules the
notion that Italians may sleep safely with open doors (the 'porte
aperte' of the title) under fascist rule. Chapter 1 of this study will
examine the judge's courageous refusal to comply with fascist author-
ity. The judge's decision is based less on an ideological position than
on an ethical foundation informed largely by reading. I will examine
the way in which Sciascia dramatizes the weight of the written word
as an effective form of opposition to oppressive power. Porte aperte
becomes one element of a long indictment of capital punishment by
writers ranging from Montaigne and Beccaria to Tolstoy and Dos-
toievsky.
Like the novels of the sixties and early seventies that established
Leonardo Sciascia's literary reputation, II cavaliere e la morte, his penul-
timate novel, takes the familiar form of the giallo. The protagonist, a
police investigator known only as the deputy, is investigating what
will prove to be his final case. Chapter 2 will focus on the way in which
6 The Novel as Investigation

Sciascia exploits the detective novel format not to shed light on a spe-
cifically Sicilian or Italian problem, as in his early detective novels, but
rather to dramatize the universality of the never-ending struggle
against the corruption of absolute power. The president of a large cor-
poration, United Industries, is responsible for the murder of a lawyer
who had uncovered far-reaching corruption in the president's organi-
zation. The protagonist quickly and expeditiously solves the crime and
identifies the guilty party, but is powerless to bring the influential cul-
prit to justice. The focus of the novel falls less on the murder investiga-
tion and more on the character of the deputy, who bears a strong
resemblance to Leonardo Sciascia himself. Written shortly before Scia-
scia's death in 1989, the novel not only tells the story of the deputy's
investigation but also relates the thoughts on life and death, justice and
injustice, of a dying man. Reflecting Sciascia's final thoughts as he lays
down his pen, II cavaliere e la morte is a vehicle to explore the power of
writing, reading, and rereading to combat injustice. The knight of the
Durer engraving The Knight, Death, and the Devil comes to symbolize
the figure of the writer and the power of the pen.
Dacia Maraini, long known as one of Italy's foremost feminist writ-
ers, has also been one of that nation's most visible and active public
intellectuals from the 1960s to the present day.5 Maraini began her liter-
ary career in the early sixties.6 In such novels as La vacanza (1962), L'eta
del malessere (1963), Donna in guerra (1975), Dialogo di una prostituta con
un suo cliente (1976), and // treno per Helsinki (1984), and in her plays
from // manifesto (1969) to Maria Stuarda to Veronica Franca, meretrice e
scrittora (1992), she has dealt with the lives of women in all walks of
life, from the prison convict to the prostitute to the lower-class salesgirl
to the upper-middle-class professional. La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrla
(1994) signalled her shift away from contemporary characters and
'timely' social issues towards historical fiction. The novel, set against
the backdrop of the unenlightened Sicily of the eighteenth century, pre-
sents the trajectory of the life of a Sicilian noblewoman and deaf mute.
Maraini deftly traces the writing of the female destiny by patriarchal
society and explores the issue of violence against women.
With Isolina (1985) and Voci (1994) Maraini uses two complementary
genres, the detective novel and the racconto d'inchiesta, to continue to
explore the issue of violence against women. In Isolina, the author
meticulously reconstructs a forgotten chapter of history, an actual
unsolved murder in turn-of-the-century Verona. Chapter 3 of this
work, on Isolina, will explore the way in which the author/historian
 Introduction 7

signals her presence in the history as she assembles the puzzle and fills
in the gaps in the historical record. I will argue that Maraini's success-
ful crusade to bring the story to light is an example of ethical interpre-
tation in history in which the object of study is not history or the past,
but 'the social matrix ... as an extension of the past into the writer's
present' (White, 305). I will underscore the author's presence in the
process of writing Isolina's untold story and show how this lays bare
the power of the pen in action.
While Isolina is a reconstruction of a murder case in the first year of
the twentieth century, Voci is a fictional giallo set in contemporary Italy.
Voci focuses on crimes against women at two levels. The protagonist, a
radio journalist, investigates the murder of her neighbour while simul-
taneously exploring the issue of unsolved crimes against women for
her radio station. Chapter 4 will show how Maraini both exploits and
overturns the norms of detective fiction to expose one of the most trou-
bling scourges of contemporary society. While the protagonist solves
the Angela Bari case, the larger crime of violence against women con-
tinues unabated. With her open-ended conclusion Maraini points her
finger at patriarchal society itself as the guilty party. The final page of
Voci, where the protagonist entertains the possibility of writing the
story we have just finished reading, represents a meta-narrative com-
ment on the efficacy of the written word as a weapon in the battle
against injustice.
Antonio Tabucchi began his literary career in the mid-1970s with the
historical novel Piazza d'ltalia.7 That novel, focusing as it does on three
generations of an Italian peasant family, anarchists, antifascists, and
communists, is a kind of micro-history of Italy's oppressed from the
unification to the present.8 Tabucchi then proceeded to write what has
been considered largely postmodern, fantastic fiction, from // gioco del
rovescio (1981) to Notturno indiano (1984) to I volatili di Beato Angelica
(1987) to Requiem (1991).9 As Charles Klopp has noted, however, the
focus on Tabucchi's postmodernism has distracted attention from 'the
specifically ethical nature of the themes that run through his books'
('Antonio Tabucchi/ 332). In the early nineties, this 'ethical' element in
Tabucchi's narrative began to come to the forefront. With the publica-
tion of Sostiene Pereira (1994), his work took a turn towards what has
been called a literature of 'impegno civile.'10 One of the first reviewers
of Sostiene Pereira welcomed the novel as heralding a turn away from
the 'letteraria e raffinata' (the literary and refined) and towards 'una
tematica piu impegnata (more politically committed themes).'11 In this
8 The Novel as Investigation

study I will focus on Sostiene Pereira, set in 1930s fascist Portugal, and
La testa perduta di Damascene Monteiro (1997).
Chapter 5 will consider Sostiene Pereira: Una testimonianza. Widely
acclaimed upon its publication in 1994, Sostiene Pereira examines the
gradual 'presa di coscienza' of a Portuguese journalist writing in Lis-
bon in 1938. The author not only deals with ethical questions in the
novel, but also focuses on the ethics of reading and writing. In Sostiene
Pereira the young revolutionary and Pereira's collaborator draws his
inspiration from writers like Garcia Lorca, while his mentor, Pereira,
publishes a translation of Daudet's 'La derniere class' as a recognition
of the way in which literature may subvert authoritarian regimes. I will
examine how Tabucchi's novel raises a series of questions being asked
by writers and critics whose work is taking an 'ethical turn,' and
argues for the importance of an ethically engaged literature.
Tabucchi's La testa perduta di Damasceno Monteiro is a murder
mystery featuring an idealistic journalist and a crusading lawyer. An
unidentified young man is found murdered and decapitated on the
banks of the Douro River in Oporto. The guilty party proves to be a
corrupt, drug-dealing sergeant in the Portuguese Guardia Nacional.
This case of police brutality, torture, and murder, based upon an actual
crime in the mid-1990s in Lisbon, is solved midway through the novel.
Indeed, Tabucchi's 'fictional' solution anticipated the outcome of the
actual case, in which a corrupt police sergeant was ultimately con-
victed of the crime. Tabucchi draws upon the detective genre in part, at
least, to expose and denounce torture and police brutality, injustices
that know no national boundaries. The text not only recounts the
attempt to bring the guilty party to justice; as I will demonstrate in
Chapter 6, much of La testa perduta explores the role of writing in soci-
ety. Tabucchi's defence of literature, including but not limited to writ-
ing that is disruptive to the existing social order, intersects with similar
self-reflexive comments on the capabilities and responsibilities of liter-
ature by Sciascia and Maraini.
These three diverging literary careers intersect at the point in the
mid-1980s at which this study begins. Each of the texts examined in
this volume highlights an injustice and an investigator who is commit-
ted to exposing that injustice. Indeed, each of these writers views his or
her work as both an investigation and a mode of inquiry. In a 1996
interview, Dacia Maraini comments on the cognitive thrust that
informs her work:
 Introduction 9

Per me il motore, la spinta a scrivere nasce sempre da un desiderio

conoscitivo. Sono attratta da un tema, o meglio da un personaggio, che
puo rappresentare e contenere un tema, che mi spinge a conoscere meglio
una certa realta, che puo essere psicologica, sociale, storica. E' sempre una
spinta conoscitiva, io scrivo un racconto per cercare di capire meglio qual-
cosa che ... mi interessa. (Wright, 78)12

[For me the impulse to write is always born of a cognitive desire. I am

attracted by a theme, or rather by a character who may represent and con-
tain a theme, which pushes me to understand better a certain psychologi-
cal, social or historical reality. It is always a question of a cognitive
impulse. I write a story in order to understand better something that ...
interests me.]13

Later in the interview Maraini refers to both Isolina: la donna tagliata

a pezzi and Voci as texts that are informed by this same 'necessita
conoscitiva' (89).
Antonio Tabucchi defines writing in similar terms. In La gastrite di
Platone Tabucchi passionately defends the 'funzione interrogativa' of
the writer.14 In a 1995 interview entitled 'Dove va il romanzo?' Tabuc-
chi suggests: 'si scrive anche per una ragione ultima che forse e una
soluzione, una condanna' [one writes for a reason which is, ultimately,
a solution, a condemnation]. Later in the interview the author dis-
cusses the relation between the detective novel and his recent fiction.
In response to a question about the narrative structure of Sostiene
Pereira, Tabucchi comments on the inspiration he has derived from the
detective genre:

Per la prima volta ... mi sono confrontato con una letteratura interroga-
tiva, quella gialla, che io amo molto sia nella sua forma piu popolare - i
gialli che escono settimanalmente - che in quelle di alto livello letterario
come potrebbero essere i 'gialli' scritti da Sciascia o da Durrenmatt. Ho
poi utilizzato questo modello anche in Pereira, che in fondo e un romanzo
giallo ... modellato ... secondo quel motivo di ricerca e di interrogazione
che e caratteristico della letteratura poliziesca. (Conversazione, 19-20)

[For the first time ... I confronted interrogative literature, detective fiction,
which I love both in its popular form - the detective stories that come out
weekly - and in those highly literary detective stories like the gialli writ-
10 The Novel as Investigation

ten by Sciascia or Durrenmatt. I used this model also in Pereira, which is

fundamentally a detective novel, patterned on that motif of research and
interrogation which is characteristic of detective fiction.]

Not surprisingly, Tabucchi cites Sciascia as the writer whose works

most clearly epitomize the 'motivo di ricerca e di interrogazione' of the
narrative he both admires and emulates. Sciascia himself has recog-
nized the investigative thrust to all his writing, whether detective fic-
tion, historical novel, or historical essay. The author views his writing
as a form of detection: To scrittore svela la verita decifrando la realta e
sollevandola alia superficie, in un certo senso semplificandola, anche
rendendola piu oscura ... Ecco perche utilizzo spesso il "discorso" del
romanzo poliziesco, questa forma di resoconto che tende alia verita dei
fatti e alia denuncia del colpevole' (La Sicilia come metafora, 87-8) [The
writer uncovers the truth by deciphering reality and raising it to the
surface, in a certain sense by simplifying it, even rendering it more
obscure ... This is why I often adopt the 'discourse' of detective fiction,
. this form of writing which tends toward the truth of facts and the
denunciation of the guilty party]. The six texts studied in this volume
are each informed by the same investigative impulse outlined by Scias-
cia, Maraini, and Tabucchi both in their critical essays and interviews
and in their fiction.
For each writer the investigative thrust may take the form of a giallo,
as in // cavalier e e la morte, Voci, and La testa perduta di Damasceo Mon-
teiro, or it may instead take the form of a historical investigation, as in
Porte aperte, Isolina, and Sostiene Pereira. The historical novels and
essays of these writers exhibit many of the same characteristics as the
detective novel. In each case the writer becomes a detective who un-
covers and deciphers the past. Each of the authors in question uses the
historical novel format not only to shed light on the past, but also to
comment on the present moment.15 Claude Ambroise has discussed
the way in which Sciascia's historical inchieste anticipate the micro-
histories of Carlo Ginzburg or Nathalie Zemon Davis. The micro-
histories of the 1980s replace the 'storia ufficiale' with the history of
the forgotten, the marginalized, and the vanquished. Ambroise draws
one clear distinction between Sciascia's work and the studies of these
micro-historians, however: 'Eppure mi sembrano diverse per due
motivi. Primo: ilfait divers del passato t'interessa perche rientra in una
problematica (morale, politica) che e ancora nostra, non per 1'episodio
in se' (Opere, 2: xxi).16 In works like Morte dell'lnquisitore and La strega e
 Introduction 11

il capitano Sciascia has indeed found occasion to look back to the past
not as an archaic remnant, but as bearing the seeds of the present
moment.17 Porte aperte is a case in point. In the second chapter of
the novel Sciascia explicitly positions his text, set in 1938 fascist Italy,
in direct relationship to the 'present' (1987, the year in which the
novel was written). The reader is abruptly reminded that the present
must be read in relation to the past. The injustices of 1937 fascist Italy
have not entirely been extinguished; capital punishment is a present-
day reality.18
The connectedness of the historical anecdote to the present moment
is also apparent in Tabucchi's historical novel. In the authorial note
appended to Sostiene Pereira Tabucchi explains the significance of the
date in which the novel is set, 1938: 'Ripensai all'Europa sull'orlo del
disastro della Seconda Guerra mondiale, alia Guerra civile spagnola,
alle tragedie del nostro passato prossimo. E nell'estate del novantatre,
quando Pereira, divenuto un mio vecchio amico, mi aveva raccontato
la sua storia, io potei scriverla' (48, my emphasis) [I thought about
Europe on the brink of the disaster of the Second World War, about the
Spanish civil war, about all the tragedies of our recent past. And in the
summer of 1993, when Pereira, having become an old friend of mine,
told me his story, I was able to write it down]. The insistence on the
proximity of the past in the qualifier 'prossimo' and the linking of 1938
to 1993 speak for themselves.19 As Charles Klopp notes in his discus-
sion of Sostiene Pereira, Tabucchi is well aware that fascism 'is not only
a historical category but a perennial menace and a temptation of the
spirit' ('Antonio Tabucchi/ 332).
Dacia Maraini is a writer who alternately delves into the most
'timely' of contemporary realities and resurrects chapters of women's
histories unrecorded or neglected by official histories. Maraini is
always in search of what she calls Te radici piu profonde della nostra
cultura,'20 whether the search for historical roots takes her to turn-of-
the-century Verona (in Isolina), eighteenth-century Sicily (La lunga vita
di Marianna Ucria), or sixteenth-century Venice (Veronia Franca, Mere-
trice e scrittora). As the author frequently reminds us, the stories of
women's lives have been suppressed by history. In a 1991 interview
with Serena Anderlini Maraini, responds to a question regarding
Cixous's call for women to enter history. The author remarks: 'Preisto-
ria is characterized by an unconsciousness: letting yourself live, living
by instinct, or even by reason, but a reason fairly well closed up in that
particular moment. Instead, the characteristic of storia is reflecting on
12 The Novel as Investigation

yourself at the moment you're living, while you look at yourself live.
This is storia, which is a continuity of memory. Preistoria is, precisely,
outside of storia. Its day is sufficient unto itself; it has no memory.
Women are entering storia in our era' (159).21 It is Maraini's project to
look back to the past, to break the silence to which both men and
women have contributed. Isolina is a case in point. Maraini's text, an
accurate historical reconstruction of a forgotten episode of history,
combats the kind of historical amnesia that would allow a story like
Isolina's to fall into oblivion.
This study spans the period from the mid-1980s to the end of the
twentieth century, a period of tremendous change and political up-
heaval in Italian society. Following the political turmoil of the 1970s,
Italy in the mid-1980s suddenly found that it had surpassed Great Brit-
ain as the fifth largest economy in the world.22 This unprecedented
prosperity could not, however, mask some complex problems, includ-
ing a large and inefficient public sector, a wide gap between rich and
poor as well as north and south, and political stagnation caused by the
trasformismo and resulting dominance of the Christian Democrats in all
the coalitions of the post-war era. With the fall of the Berlin wall and
the collapse of communism in Europe, the hegemony of the Christian
Democrats also began to collapse. This was followed shortly by the
Mani pulite scandal of the early 1990s. Beginning with the arrest in
Milan of a Socialist Party official who had accepted a bribe in exchange
for a cleaning contract for a nursing home, the scandal, often referred
to as Tangentopoli (Bribes-ville or Bribe-gate), touched not only the
Socialists but all of the major Italian political parties. As the Economist
correspondent summarized in February 1993 (in The Fall of Monte-
citorio'): The confessions on which the prosecution has based its case
so far have revealed a systematic imposition of kickbacks in virtually
all public-sector contracts, from the construction of the Milan metro
down' (45). The political system began to unravel as it was confirmed
that such corruption was not only rampant throughout Italy, but was
at the very basis of the old party system. As the arrests increased and
the evidence mounted, the mayors of all of Italy's major cities stepped
down, most in disgrace. Bettino Craxi, leader of the Socialist Party, was
indicted and fled the country to avoid trial. All of the major political
parties, the Christian Democrats, Communists, and Socialists, were
implicated in the scandal. Giulio Andreotti, the 'elder statesman' of the
Christian Democratic Party, was indicted on charges of being a mem-
ber of the mafia.
 Introduction 13

The sheer extent of Tangentopoli - taking in over thirty other 'bribe cities'
apart from Milan - was beyond the belief of even well-informed aficiona-
dos. More than 1000 politicians and business figures were, by March 1993,
under investigation. Tens of thousands of party bureaucrats were impli-
cated. The parliamentary immunity against prosecution of 75 Deputies
and Senators had been lifted. Large swathes of public administration and
private industry had functioned in a distorted market of entry fees, com-
missions, inflated costs and reduced competition. (Bufacchi and Burgess,
120)

Eventually the downfall of all the governing parties led to a new era.
As Umberto Eco remarked in his February 1993 Espresso column: 'We
are living ... through our own 14th of July 1789/23 The formation of
new political parties combined with reconfigurations of the old gov-
erning parties. The Italian Communist party regrouped as two parties,
the Partitio dernocratico di sinistra and Rifondazione comunista. The
defunct Christian Democratic Party split into the centre-left Italian
Popular Party and two centre-right parties. The rise of the Forza Italia
movement headed by Silvio Berlusconi dates to this period.24
While Sciascia did not live to see the collapse of the old political
landscape in Italy, he certainly chronicled much of the corruption that
led to the eventual downfall of the old order. Maraini and Tabucchi
were of course eye witnesses to the fall of the post-war political
system. Whether their fictions were directly affected by the political
upheaval of the period is perhaps beside the point. Some critics have
read the Italian fiction of the last two decades of the twentieth century
as emerging from a widespread sense of political apathy in Italy.25
Others suggest that the indifference to politics of the 1980s known
as the riflusso was replaced by a renewed engagement in politics
during the 1990s as old political parties collapsed and new ones
emerged from the ashes.26 It is not the purpose of my study to explore
the political persuasions of individual writers. Suffice it to say that, in a
political context characterized as much by stagnation and scandal as
by renewal, it is not surprising that each of the writers .studied in this
volume has continued to engage in political activity while showing a
certain healthy scepticism towards politics. Certainly each of these
writers avoids the prescription of political solutions in his or her writ-
ing. The texts highlighted in this study cannot be read as letteratum
impegnata, politically committed literature, in the dogmatic sense in
which that term was used during the immediate post-war period.27
14 The Novel as Investigation

The political context in which the neo-realist works emerged was one
of much greater euphoria than the late twentieth century in Italy.28 The
works studied in this volume are characterized by an engagement with
society through an ethical rather than a political stance. The ethical
thrust of the final works of Sciascia, and the recent work of Tabucchi
and Maraini, some of the most significant Italian fiction of the late
twentieth century, is one of the subjects of this study.
Sciascia, Maraini, and Tabucchi do not belong to a particular literary
'school' or current. Yet there are striking family resemblances among
these three writers' works that the present study will attempt to trace.
The points of contact have been commented on by the writers them-
selves. Both Maraini and Tabucchi began to recognize Leonardo Scia-
scia as a kindred spirit during the period studied in this volume.
Tabucchi dedicated his 1998 book on the role of the intellectual, La gas-
trite di Platone, to the memory of Leonardo Sciascia and Pier Paolo
Pasolini.29 Maraini, when asked in an interview about her relationship
to Sciascia, acknowledged their kinship: 'Sciascia e siciliano come me.
Abbiamo tutti e due una curiosita isolana, che ci spinge a frugare nella
realta' (Sciascia is Sicilian like me. We both have a Sicilian curiosity that
drives us to delve into reality) (Debenedetti, 00). She has expressed
great sympathy for Sciascia's work over the years, and particularly
admired the feminist sensibilities of Sciascia's 1986 La Strega e il capi-
tano.30 As concerns the relationship between Maraini and Tabucchi, in
a heartfelt note to a recent monograph on Tabucchi, Maraini remarks
on the fond memories she has of various encounters with Tabucchi
over the years. Each time their conversations have focused on two sub-
jects: books and their mutual 'civic passions' (passioni civili). She closes
by thanking Tabucchi for his constant readiness to 'denunciare una
inguistizia.'31
One of the most striking points of contact between Porte aperte, II
cavaliere e la morte, Sostiene Pereira, La testa perduta, Isolina, and Voci is
the way in which they more or less explicitly and self-reflexively ex-
plore the role to be played by writing, the power of the pen. Sciascia,
Maraini, and Tabucchi share a strong notion of the social and moral
responsibility of literature. The ethical 'nourishment' to be gained from
reading is shown to be no less important than the act of taking up the
pen. Both Sciascia and Tabucchi take pains to outline the contribution
of reading to the ethical formation of the character. Leonardo Sciascia's
Porte aperte is a case in point. The character of the judge, an authorial
surrogate, is a literate and literary man. The ethical foundation on
which the judge builds his opposition to the death penalty is con-
 Introduction 15

structed from a wide range of literary sources, from Dostoievsky to

Beccaria to Leopardi. The protagonist of Sciascia's II cavaliere e la morte,
whose bookshelf includes Montaigne, Verga, Stevenson, Gadda, Tol-
stoy, Borges, Gogol, and Hugo, is cast in the same mold. Similarly,
Tabucchi features protagonists whose decisions and actions are guided
by literary sources. In Sostiene Pereira, the young revolutionary and
Pereira's collaborator draws his inspiration from writers like Garcia
Lorca, while his mentor, Pereira, publishes a translation of Daudet's
'La derniere class' as a recognition of the way in which literature may
subvert authoritarian regimes. In La testa perduta di Damascene* Mon-
teiro, the crusading lawyer, Loton, instructs his protege, the young
journalist Firmino, on the value of literature. Not only does Loton urge
the importance of socially committed works of non-fiction such as
Alleg's denunciation of torture in The Question; he also defends the
importance of a wide and eclectic range of fiction by such authors as
Colet, Gide, Vittorini, and Flaubert. In Maraini's Voci the power of the
pen is dramatized on the last page of the novel when Michela, having
been relieved of her journalistic assignment, considers the possibility
of writing a book on unsolved crimes against women (a novel that
coincides with the text we have just read). For Maraini's protagonist,
reading narratives also serves as a cognitive tool. Literary works from
fairy tales to Conrad's Secret Sharer give the detective the necessary
tools to unlock the mystery of the Angela Bari murder case and to
solve the crime.
The present study might be read as characteristic of the recent ethical
turn in literary studies.32 My approach focuses largely on ethical the-
matics and on what Buell calls 'the underlying value commitments of
literary texts and their implied authors' (7). I must acknowledge that I
have been led in this direction by the authors themselves. The texts in
question lend themselves to and even invite this type of ethically
valenced critical approach. The detective novels and the racconti d'inch-
iesta of Sciascia, Maraini, and Tabucchi indeed are genres subtended by
an ethos in which reason, justice, truth, testimony, and judgment are
highly valued and valorized. Each of the texts in question self-reflex-
ively explores the relation between ethics and literature, as well as the
ethics of reading. Like many critics whose work has taken an ethical
turn, I myself have not grounded my inquiry in a specific ethical
model. Rather, I have engaged in a close reading in the interest of
allowing the texts themselves to reflect self-consciously upon the ethi-
cal values of their implied authors.
This page intentionally left blank
1 The Power of the Pen in
Leonardo Sciascia's Porte Aperte

Leonardo Sciascia's credentials as a historian have been evident

throughout his literary career. In such works as Morte dell'lnquisitore, La
strega e il capitano, and La scomparsa di Majomna, Sciascia delves into
unexplored chapters of Italian history. Morte dell'Inquisitore, a text
inspired by Manzoni's Storia della colonna infame, reconstructs the story
of the Augustinian monk who, persecuted by the Inquisition for politi-
cal and not religious 'heresies/ retaliated by assassinating his inquisi-
tor.1 The book is a historical detective novel in which the author
searches for every available scrap of evidence in order to reconstruct
the historical record as accurately as possible. The same meticulous
archival research is evident in La strega e il capitano (1986), published in
celebration of the bicentenary of Manzoni's birth. Sciascia takes his
departure from a brief reference in the thirty-first chapter of I promessi
sposi to a sixteenth-century persecution of one Caterina Medici,
accused of witchcraft, tortured, strangled, and burned by the Inquisi-
tion. The author reconstructs the story of this miscarriage of justice in
what Dacia Maraini has hailed as Sciascia's first feminist text. Each of
these chapters of history represents an abuse of power in which the
law is enlisted in the service not of justice and truth but of injustice and
falsehood. Throughout his work it is evident that Sciascia found the
key to the present in the past, whether the near past of the fascist
regime or the distant past of the Inquisition.2 Even the detective nov-
els, // giorno della civetta, A ciascuno il suo, II contesto, and Todo modo, set
either in present-day Sicily and Italy or in unnamed modern European
cities, all contain frequent references to the ever-present past.
With his 1987 Porte aperte Leonardo Sciascia turns back the clock by
fifty years. Porte aperte is loosely based on an incident that occurred in
18 The Novel as Investigation

Palermo in 1937. Unlike Morte dell'Inquisitore or La strega e il capitano,

scrupulously faithful to the historical record in the tradition of Man-
zoni's Storia della colonna infame, Porte aperte is a historical novel, a
'componimento misto di storia e fantasia/3 The novel explores what
Sciascia regards as one of the most despicable crimes of the fascist
regime, and of our present moment: the imposition of the death pen-
alty. The title refers to the allegedly heightened sense of security that
allowed the Italian people to sleep with 'open doors' following the fas-
cist regime' the re-establishment of the death penalty. As the author
explains, the novel was inspired by an actual event: 'E un episodic
realmente accaduto a Palermo che io pero ho trattato con molta liberta.
C'e un magistrato che, chiamato a giudicare su un delitto, si rifiuta di
infliggere la pena di morte ... Tutto si svolge nel '37' (Opere, 3:xlii)4 [It is
an event which actually happened in Palermo but with which how-
ever, I took great liberties. There is a magistrate who, called upon to
judge a crime, refuses to inflict the death penalty ... It all takes place in
37]. A man is accused of the brutal and premeditated murder of three
victims: his wife, his employer, and the accountant hired to replace him
in the employer's firm after his embezzlement has been discovered.
The employer, a certain Avvocato Bruno, is a high-ranking fascist func-
tionary. The sentence expected by the powers-that-be is preordained.
Both the severity of the crime and the fascist affiliations of one of the
victims leave no room for mercy: 'aspettano una sentenza sbrigativa ed
esemplare' (Opere, 3:333) [They expect a swift, exemplary sentence]
(Open Doors, 12). The judge's principled stand against capital punish-
ment is expressed not only in word but in deed, as he refuses to impose
the expected sentence at the conclusion of the novel.
The focus of Sciascia's Porte aperte is not on the solution of the crime,
the course of the trial, or the question of innocence or guilt of the
accused. The novel investigates a broader issue: the noxious effects of
the death penalty on civil society. The protagonist fully recognizes the
political nature of the death penalty as a means of consolidating power,
in this case fascist power. In the opening scene of the novel the protag-
onist, referred to as the 'little judge,' discusses with his superior, the
prosecutor, the case about to come before the court. Recalling the con-
versation they had ten years prior on the occasion of the re-establish-
ment of the death penalty by the fascist regime, the prosecutor ex-
presses his concern that the judge may not be able to handle the case.
The prosecutor advises the judge, who staunchly denounced the death
penalty ten years prior, to reroute the case to another court. Given the
 The Power of the Pen in Porte aperte 19

status of one of the victims in the fascist regime, this is the safe course
of action. The judge declines to take the prosecutor's advice, and
instead counters with his denunciation of the death penalty and recon-
firms his earlier opposition to capital punishment. 'Consider!, poi, se
gli istinti che ribollono in un linciaggio, il furore, la follia, non siano, in
definitiva, di minore atrocita del macabro rito che promuove una corte
di giustizia dando sentenza di morte' (Opere, 3:336) [But surely the
instincts that erupt in a lynching, the fury and madness, are less atro-
cious than the macabre ritual that activates a court of justice in pro-
nouncing the death sentence]' (Open Doors, 15). The normally taciturn
judge continues his diatribe against the death penalty with uncharac-
teristic eloquence, while the prosecutor advances the 'porte aperte'
argument in favour of capital punishment. Citing the diminished
crime rate since the re-establishment of the death penalty ten years
prior, the prosecutor reminds the judge that the Italian people may
now sleep with open doors. The judge dismisses the conventional wis-
dom and responds laconically, 'Io chiudo sempre le mie' (Opere, 3:337)
[I always close mine] (Open Doors, 17). The character of the judge, and
the judge's character, begin to emerge in this opening dialogue. The
exchange between the protagonist and his superior sets the stage for
the drama of a moral individual who takes a stand against oppression
in a specific historical context.
The novel, composed largely of the judge's thoughts and conversa-
tions as filtered through the narrator, relies heavily upon a particularly
literate and orderly form of stream of consciousness. The character of
the judge is gradually revealed to the reader through insights provided
by the narrator into the judge's train of thought. In an interior mono-
logue capturing the protagonist's reflections as he leaves the Palazzo di
Giustizia, the judge contemplates the irony of justice being dispensed
from the very edifice that had served as the seat of the Inquisition. This
is an irony that defines for Sciascia la sicilianita and one upon which he
has commented at some length. The judge's meditation upon the fanat-
icism and cruelty of the Inquisition at this particular juncture is inti-
mately linked to his emotions surrounding the pending trial and his
rejection of the expected sentence of death. The judge articulates his
opposition to the death penalty by borrowing from Montaigne's com-
ment on the execution of Martin Guerre: 'Dopotutto, significa dare un
bel peso alle proprie opinioni, se per esse si fa arrostire vivo un uomo'
(Opere, 3:339^40) [When all's said and done, it attaches tremendous
weight to one's own opinions if a man is roasted alive for their sake]
20 The Novel as Investigation

(Open Doors, 19).5 By following the character's train of thought, the

reader is reminded of the intimate link between past and present.
There is a link not only between the Inquisition of the fifteenth century
and fascist Italy of the 1930s, but also between the events of 1937
recounted in the novel and the 'present' moment from which the novel
has been written. The fact that the clock has been turned back, that the
events of the novel are being recounted not only with hindsight but
from a specific moment in 'present'-day Italy, is underscored as the
narrator follows the character's train of thought from the Inquisition to
the present: 'non si puo fare arrostire vivo un uomo soltanto perche
certe opinioni non condivide. E tranne quella, qui, oggi, anno 1937
(anno 1987) che 1'umanita, il diritto, la legge ... rispondere con 1'assas-
sinio all'assassinio non debbano' (Opere, 3:340) [you cannot roast a man
alive because he does not share certain opinions. And except the opin-
ion, here and now in 1937 (1987) that humanity, justice, law ... must not
answer murder with murder] (Open Doors, 19). The interior monologue
of the character is disrupted by the contemporary author's reference to
the 'present' moment of writing. This moment of rupture underscores
the intimate link between past and present.
The ethical foundation on which the judge's opposition to the death
penalty is based is constructed from a wealth of literary sources. The
narrator gives the reader insight into the judge's train of thought as he
meditates on literary denunciations of the death penalty, from Mon-
taigne's denunciation of the Martin Guerre sentence to more recent
treatments of the subject. An excerpt from Brancati lays bare the mis-
fortune of the poor man who not only suffers from iniquity but can
find no words to express his suffering. Neither a verse of Milton nor of
Leopardi comes to the aid of the uneducated man, who cannot articu-
late why he suffers. The narrator contrasts the poor man's lack of liter-
ary inspiration to the wealth of literary sources at the judge's disposal.
Although the narrator does not name his source, the words of Tolstoy
come first to the judge's mind. In A Confession, Tolstoy's account of his
ethical and spiritual crisis and his growing discontent with civil soci-
ety, the author describes his reaction as he witnesses an execution.
These words are indelibly traced in the judge's memory: 'Quando vidi
come la testa si staccava dal corpo e come 1'una e 1'altro, separata-
mente, andavano a sbattere nella cassa, allora capii ... che non vi e
alcuna teoria della razionalita dell'esistente e del progresso che possa
giustificare un simile atto' (Opere, 3:340) [When I saw how the head
split away from the body, and how each landed separately in the crate,
 The Power of the Pen in Porte aperte 21

then I realized ... that there is no theory of the rationality of life or of

progress that can justify such an act] (Open Doors, 19). It is clear that
this work has occupied a cherished place on the judge's bookshelf, as
the narrator refers to the translation of Tolstoy's A Confession received
by the judge as a boy in the winter of 1913. But it is to another un-
named Russian writer that the judge awards the highest praise for his
denunciation of the death penalty. In a reference to Dostoievsky's 1868
The Idiot, the judge recalls the page on the death penalty: 'il principe ...
racconta di un'esecuzione capitale cui ha assistito ... e svolge contro la
pena di morte il piu alto discorso che rnai si sia stato fatto' (Opere,
3:341) [the Prince ... is telling of an execution he has witnessed ... and ...
pours out the most inspired attack on capital punishment that has ever
been made] (Open Doors, 20). Sciascia himself was particularly struck
by Dostoievsky's indictment of the death penalty, and quoted the rele-
vant passage from The Idiot in its entirety in his diary, Nero su new.6 The
judge's tributes to Montaigne, Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, and Brancati mark
the beginning of a process that will continue throughout the novel. The
narrator assiduously gives the reader insight into the judge's character
by revealing the texts that occupy his leisure hours and inform his eth-
ical choices.
The judge musters his arguments against the death penalty through-
out the course of the trial. As the trial proceeds, the evidence against
the accused becomes more and more damning. Yet despite the atrocity
of the crime and the accused's unrepentant admission of guilt, the
judge continues to indulge in meditations that will strengthen his
resolve to resist the expected outcome: 'Cosi meditando ... ricollegan-
done certi momenti alia memoria di cose lette e cose lette pensate, il
piccolo giudice si avvicinava all'imputato e alia sua contorta e feroce
umanita, alia sua follia' (Opere, 3:363) [And so, thinking over the tech-
nicalities of the trial and linking certain moments in it with things he
had read, or thought about things he had read, the little judge drew
imperceptibly closer to the defendant, to his fierce, twisted humanity,
to his madness] (Open Doors, 42). The judge is fully convinced of the
guilt of the accused. Yet he also holds a strong conviction of the
accused's humanity. The latter is based upon the judge's ability to see
the other. His opposition to the death penalty rests upon an ethic that
is remarkably similar to that of Emmanuel Levinas. Waldenfels has
analyzed Levinas's idea that the relation to the other (I'autrui) that lies
at the basis of any ethical system is a corporeal, 'face to face' relation
that cannot be reduced to comprehension: The "face" is no mere meta-
22 The Novel as Investigation

phor transporting a figurative sense into a higher sphere, delivering it

from its corporeal chains. Levinas' ethics are rooted in a phenomenol-
ogy of the body ... It is the hungering, thirsting, enjoying, suffering,
working, loving, murdering human being in all its corporeality [Leib-
haftigkeit] whose otherness is at stake' (65)7 The judge's interior mono-
logue harks back to Levinas's insistence on the humanity of the other,
even the murdering other, a humanity based on the corporeality of the
autrui. The judge does not so much comprehend the accused as see him
in all his 'contorta e feroce umanita.' The use of the phrase 'as was his
duty' to describe the judge's relation to the other is an acknowledg-
ment of the ethical responsibility to the other human being, 'that being
to whom I am obliged before being comprehended' (Critchley and Ber-
nasconi, 10).
It is important to note that the judge does not frame his opposition to
the death penalty in political terms. As the narrator points out, the
judge has an aversion to fascism but refuses to consider himself
anti-fascist: 'rifiutava di considerarsi anti-fascista, al fascismo soltanto
opponendo la sua dignita nel pensare e nell'agire' (Opere, 3:363) [he
refused to consider himself an anti-fascist, merely opposing to fascism
his personal dignity in thought and action] (Open Doors, 42). This dis-
claimer underscores the fact that the judge acts out of ethical and not
political conviction.8 Towards the close of the trial, the judge goes
home and begins to leaf through the ricordi of a sixteenth-century Pal-
ermitan writer, Argisto Giuffredi. Addressed to a son who was prepar-
ing for a career in the law, the memoir, entitled Avvertimenti cristiani,
admonishes the son not to resort to torture ('la frusta') or the death
penalty 'per qualsivoglia cosa: '"So bene" diceva il Giuffredi "che
questo vi parra un riguardo stravagante": e altro che, se poteva parere:
due secoli prima del Beccaria. E come era arrivato, il Giuffredi, a
quell'idea "stravagante"?' (Opere, 3:368) ['I know full well,' said Giuf-
fredi, 'that this will seem to you an extravagant opinion'; and it cer-
tainly must have seemed so, two centuries before Beccaria. How had
Giuffredi arrived at that 'extravagant' idea?] (Open Doors, 47). The ref-
erence to Cesare Beccaria, the eighteenth century Milanese author of
Dei delitti e delle pene, reminds the reader of that writer's passionate
indictment of torture and the death penalty.9 Yet it is significant that
Sciascia filters the judge's opposition to the death penalty not through
the lens of Cesare Beccaria, but rather through Giuffredi. Sciascia
devotes many pages of the novel to this relatively obscure Palermitan
writer, whose ricordi were discovered in a manuscript in the nineteenth
 The Power of the Pen in Porte aperte 23

century. While the judge admires Beccaria's Dei delitti e delle pene, he is
struck by the prescience of a writer who, two centuries before Beccaria
and the Italian Enlightenment, in a century given over to the excesses
of the Inquisition, showed remarkable insight into the pernicious
effects of torture and capital punishment on society. As the judge sets
down his copy of Giuffredi's memoir, the narrator remarks:

Amava molto sgomitolare tra i suoi libri e nei suoi pensieri, il filo di
estemporanee curiosita. Da quando aveva cominciato ad avere a che fare
coi libri, e percio i suoi fratelli, che sui libri stavano con piu volonta
e fatica, lo consideravano un perdigiorno. Ma sapeva di aver tanto
guadagnato... (Opere, 3:369)

[He had always loved to unravel a thread of spontaneous curiosity

through his books and in his thoughts, ever since he had had dealings
with books; which was why his brothers, whose relations with books
required will power and effort, thought him a time-waster. But he knew
how much he had gained from those wasted hours and days.] (Open
Doors, 48)

The judge's musings reinforce the idea of reading as a necessary and

fruitful nourishment of the mind and not a waste of time.
The ninth scene of the novel opens with a reflection on the exclusion
of Giuffredi from the 'canon' of great Sicilian writers, as defined by the
fascist regime. This is followed by a scene in the anteroom of the court-
room in which the judge, donning his robe, asks the most sympathetic
juror, the agricoltore, whether he is familiar with Giuffredi's work.
When the juror, much to the judge's surprise, responds in the affirma-
tive, the judge adds the detail that he has been rereading Giuffredi. The
juror nods in agreement, as if approving of the judge's reading. This
complicity between the judge and the juror is established through the
simple exchange of authors and titles. Indeed, as the narrator points
out: 'II nome di uno scrittore, il titolo di un libro, possono a volte, per
alcuni, suonare come quello di una patria' (Opere, 3:366) [Sometimes,
for some people, the name of a writer, the title of a book, can ring out
like the name of one's homeland] (Open Doors, 45).
Porte aperte is the portrait of a principled man whose ethical frame-
work is shaped and defined by his reading. The shared recognition of
the power of Giuffredi's work and the force of his argument is the first
instalment in the defence of the power of the pen in Sciascia's penulti-
24 The Novel as Investigation

mate novel. By acknowledging their appreciation for the work of an

early opponent of capital punishment, an 'enlightened' writer whose
work preceded the Enlightenment by two centuries, the judge and
juror not only establish their shared conviction of the sanctity of
human life. They also establish the importance of reading in shaping
the ethical framework within which they make this judgment. It is sig-
nificant that the power of the pen moves not only the protagonist, il
piccolo giudice, but also the juror and his French ladyfriend. These kin-
dred spirits, who casually exchange references to the works of Mon-
taigne, Zweig, Brancati, Tolstoy, Dostoievkski, Giuffredi, Beccaria,
Guicciardini, Verga, Stendhal, Delia Porta, and Pitre, share in the
judge's passion for reading and his conviction of its moral efficacy.
The narrator of Porte aperte gradually reveals himself to be another
kindred spirit, a reading man whose admiration for the judge matches
the juror's. The narrator evolves over the course of the novel. At first,
he functions as a disembodied, omniscient voice, providing the reader
access to the judge's innermost thoughts. Gradually, however, he
reveals himself to be a character in his own right. This begins to
become apparent in such passages as the opening paragraph of chap-
ter 9, after the episode in which the judge has been rereading and med-
itating upon Giuffredi's memoir. The subsequent scene begins with the
bemused observation that, in all the celebrations of illustrious Sicilians
sponsored by the fascist regime, none had ever recognized the gran-
deur of Giuffredi and his denunciation of torture and capital punish-
ment. The exact circumstances of the discovery of this precious ricordo
are reported with a reflection on the relevance of the document in the
historical context of the year in which it was discovered (1896). The
subsequent paragraph begins 'Ma tornando al giudice' (Opere, 3:371)
[But to return to the judge] (Open Doors, 50.) It is at this moment that
the reader notes a kind of slippage. The stream of consciousness with
which the scene opens reflects the thought process not of the judge but
of the dramatized narrator, who has passed from filtering the charac-
ter's thoughts on the significance of Giuffredi's eloquent work to
adding his own.10 The judge's appreciation of Giuffredi's heroic and
almost anachronistic ricordo is shared not only by his new-found
friend, the juror, but also by the admiring narrator. The narrator, that is,
shares in the growing complicity between the judge and the juror. The
slippage in the stream of consciousness between the character and the
narrator underscores the continuity between the two. The narrator has
tremendous admiration for the judge and for the value of his story. As
 The Power of the Pen in Porte aperte 25

we shall discuss shortly, in the penultimate scene the reader learns that
the narrator had met the judge some years after the events recorded in
the novel.
The trial proceeds in a predictable fashion. As we have noted, there
is no doubt of the accused's guilt. Each of the crimes was premeditated
and brutal. The accused admitted to having invited his wife on an out-
ing to visit their grown children on which he would proceed to stab
her to death, after encouraging her first to pray for eternal salvation.
After the murder of his wife he went first to the home of the accoun-
tant and then to the home of avvocato Bruno, using on each the same
bloodstained dagger with which he had taken his wife's life. The innu-
merable lies of the accused only serve further to condemn him. The
defence rests and the deliberations begin. The brutality of the crime
and the premeditation not only merit a guilty verdict: they also may be
exploited to justify a sentence of death. Yet despite the incontrovertible
evidence of guilt, after a short discussion the court emerges from
chambers with a sentence other than death. Both the judge and the
jurors have remained true to their principles.
The end of the novel does not coincide with the conclusion of the
trial. It is clear that the case is not closed; the sentence will be over-
turned by a higher court and the death penalty will ultimately be
imposed on the accused by the fascist regime. The narrator's attention,
however, focuses not on the legal arena but on the judge's encounters
in the aftermath of the trial. The judge had scrupulously denied him-
self the luxury of fully enjoying the juror's friendship until after the
trial's conclusion. In the penultimate scene of Porte aperte the judge is
able to satisfy his curiosity about this well-read and moral farmer
when he pays him a visit at his country house. As the juror explains,
his library, along with the house and lands, had been purchased by his
illiterate grandfather from an impoverished noble family. The story of
the juror's family undone by its debts is glossed by the judge through
references to Guicciardini and Verga, authors well known to the juror.
The judge's enjoyment of the friendship with the highly literate juror is
laid bare: 'Aveva una sete di parlare di libri, di scrittori: tanto rara-
mente gli capitava di imbattersi in persone con cui potesse' (Opere,
3:391) [He felt a sort of thirst to talk about books and writers, so rarely
did he come across people with whom he could do so] (Open Doors,
69). The literary colloquy continues and is joined by the juror's lady-
friend, a French woman and Stendhalian Italophile who has come to
appreciate Italy through the written word. The juror's wry observation
26 The Novel as Investigation

on the francese italianizzante is, 'Amava di noi quello che noi, di noi
stessi, detestiamo' (Opere, 3:393) [They love what we most detest in
ourselves] (Open Doors, 70).n At first glance, the entire leisurely con-
versation might seem to be a digression, a literary interlude that has lit-
tle bearing on the plot. Yet in many ways the interlude underscores one
of the most significant facets of the judge's character, and of Sciascia's
novel. The conviction of the weight of the written word in the ethical
formation of the individual and the moral resolve to be drawn from
sharing one's reading with others are the characteristic features of the
protagonist of Sciascia's Porte aperte.
Here Sciascia builds upon a theme that he initially touched upon in
his first and defining book, Le parrocchie di Regalpetra (1956).12 In 'Breve
cronaca del regime' he paints a portrait of Racalmuto, a fictionalized
version of the author's birthplace of Regalpetra during the fascist
period. One of the most significant subplots of Le parrocchie di Regalpe-
tra is the story of the author's gradual conversion to anti-fascism and
the pivotal role played by reading books and frequenting the company
of fellow readers. Growing up in a family in which his father believed
in Mussolini but not in fascism, and his aunt, a surrogate mother, kept
a picture of the anti-fascist martyr Giacomo Matteotti in her sewing
basket, Sciascia, like other youth of the period, was at first caught up in
the enthusiasm of the early years of the fascist regime. As he grew into
adolescence, the author began to see that regime through a different
lens. As he records in Le parrocchie di Regalpetra, the young Sciascia met
a professor 'che mi aveva intelligentemente guidato nelle letture'
(Opere, 1:42) [who had intelligently guided me in my readings] (Salt in
the Wound, 34).13 He began to read Dos Passes and other American
authors of the period, and frequented the church-sponsored letture
dantesche, whose subversive 'letture cariche di intenzioni segrete'
[readings loaded with hidden intentions] (Opere, 1:43) began to attract
the attention of the fascist authorities. And, as the author concludes
this brief chronicle, his exposure to the right books during his forma-
tive years was pivotal: 'mi trovai dunque dall'altra parte' (Opere, 1:43)
[I found myself on the other side]. As told by Sciascia, his conversion
to antifascism was not a result of the solitary pursuit of reading. The
emphasis is on the reading of books as a community activity, on dis-
cussion and on interaction with other readers, either his peers, as in the
case of the letture dantesche, or his mentor, the professor. This same
depiction of reading as a civic activity, not a solitary pastime, is also
very much in evidence in Porte aperte.
 The Power of the Pen in Porte aperte 27

The narrator implicitly engages the reader in the activity of discuss-

ing and evaluating books throughout the novel. The text functions as a
primer, an annotated bibliography of ethically informed writers. The
excerpts liberally interspersed throughout the novel give the reader an
introduction to important writers and works to add to his or her book-
shelf. Occasionally, the narrator explicitly involves the reader in the
exercise of judgment informed by reading, as in the conclusion to the
eighth chapter: 'noi lasciamo che ogni lettore cherchi da se le risposte'
(Opere, 3:369) [we leave it to each reader to seek his own answers]
(Open Doors, 49). The reader, it is implied, may become another kin-
dred spirit who draws upon shared readings for ethical nourishment.
The judge's visit to the juror is prefaced by an anecdote that contrib-
utes further to the portrait of the dramatized narrator and his relation-
ship to the protagonist. The narrator finally explains why he has
referred to the judge throughout the novel as il piccolo giudice. When
the judge was first pointed out to the narrator, he happened to be the
smallest in stature in a group of others.

Aveva una brillante carriera da fare, se 1'e rovinata rifiutando di con-

dannare uno a morte'; e mi racconto sommariamente e con qualche
imprecisione la storia di quel processo. Da quel momento, ogni volta che
poi 1'ho visto, e nelle poche volte in cui gli ho parlato, il dirlo piccolo mi e
parso ne misurasse la grandezza: per le cose tanto piu forti di lui che
aveva serenamente affrontato. (Opere, 3:389)

He had a brilliant career ahead of him, but he ruined it by refusing to con-

demn a man to death, and he gave me a rather sketchy account of the
trial. From then on, every time I saw him, and on the few occasions when
I spoke to him, it seemed a measure of his greatness to call him small:
because of the things so much more powerful than himself that he had
confronted with serenity. (Open Doors, 67)

This reference to the several encounters the narrator had with the
judge over the years, as well as the few precious occasions he had to
speak with him, serves to confirm the status of the narrator as a drama-
tis persona in his own right. He is not a disembodied narrator, but
rather a participant observer. A younger man than the judge, the narra-
tor had admired the judge as a man whose 'grandezza' had nothing
to do with physical stature. The indication that the judge's story was
originally recounted to the narrator with some inaccuracies ('qualche
28 The Novel as Investigation

imprecisione') shows the reader that the latter has gone to the trouble
to discover the truth about the judge, to get his story right.
The encounter between the juror and the judge confirms the narra-
tor's assessment of the judge's moral stature. The juror greets his visi-
tor with words of praise for his courage during the course of the trial:
'L'ho ammirato molto, in camera di consiglio: lei e riuscito a porre il
problema della pena di morte, nei suoi termini piu angosciosi senza
mai riferirsi direttamente' (Opere, 3:395) [I felt a great admiration for
you in the council chamber: you managed to pose the problem of the
death penalty in the most terrible terms without ever referring to it
directly]' (Open Doors, 73). The juror then confides in the judge that he,
too, welcomed the assignment, which allowed him to make a gesture
against the death penalty. The scene concludes as judge and juror agree
that, while each man's position against the death penalty may consti-
tute the point of honour of their lives, their gestures may ultimately
prove to be futile.
The final chapter of Porte aperte, however, belies this pessimistic pre-
diction. When the prosecutor calls the judge into his office three
months after the conclusion of the triple murder trial, both are agreed
that the judge's career is, indeed, in ruins. Neither is surprised by this
outcome. The prosecutor asks the judge whether the jury, in rejecting
the death penalty, did not simply surrender to the judge's opinion. The
latter insists that this was not the case, that the jury was not merely
expressing an opinion but holding firm to a principle. The judge con-
tinues: 'Ed e un principio di tale forza, quello contro la pena di morte,
che si puo essere certi di essere nel giusto anche se si resti soli a soste-
nerlo' (Opere, 3:397) [And the principle of opposition to capital punish-
ment is so strong that you can feel quite sure you're in the right, even if
you're alone in maintaining it] (Open Doors, 75). The force of this prin-
ciple is confirmed in the conclusion of Porte aperte, in which the prose-
cutor confesses to the judge his own change of heart: 'Ma mi ci sto
adattando: sto cominciando a pensare cose cui finora non ho pensato.
E per esempio: che sono stato un morto che ha seppellito altri morti'
(Opere, 3:398) [But I'm adapting; I'm starting to think things I haven't
thought till now. For example: that I have been a dead man who has
buried other dead men] (Open Doors, 76). The moral example set by the
judge has not been futile. Although the judge's sentence will unques-
tionably be reversed by a higher court and the accused will ultimately
receive the death penalty, the principle of the obligation of the state to
protect the sanctity of human life has been defended. The judge allows
 The Power of the Pen in Porte aperte 29

himself to consider for a moment the possibility that others might fol-
low his example: 'Io ho salvato la mia anima, i giurati hanno salvato la
loro: il che puo anche apparire molto comodo. Ma pensi se avvenisse,
in concatenazione, che ogni giudice badasse a salvare la propria'
(Opere, 3:400-1) [I saved my soul, the jurors have saved theirs, which
may all sound very convenient. But just think if every judge, one after
another, were concerned to save his] (Open Doors, 79). The final chapter
of the novel, focusing as it does on the way in which the judge with his
courageous stand against capital punishment has made the prosecutor
uneasy in his former convictions, holds out a glimmer of hope. There is
hope, that is, that the acceptance of the status quo can be disturbed.
The prosecutor, who in the first chapter of the novel reminds the judge,
'Lei sa come la penso' [You know my thinking] and who warns his col-
league not to take a stand against the status quo, is in a state of
unawareness. The pronoun 'la' in the expression 'come la penso' refers
to a host of received ideas that have held humankind hostage and
blocked the exercise of reason. As the narrator of Porte aperte observes:
'"la" ... la cosa cui non si vuole parlare ... Pronome, per gli italiani, della
religione cattolica, del partito al governo, della massoneria, di ogni
cosa che avesse ... forza e potere ... e ora del fascismo' (Opere, 3:330)
[the thing ... the thing you don't want to name ... A phrase that, for Ital-
ians, belonged to the Catholic religion, the governing party, Freema-
sonry, anything that had - obviously or, worse, obscurely - force and
power ... and now belonged to fascism] (Open Doors, 8). It is Sciascia's
hope that society can progress from acceptance of the status quo as
reflected in 'come la penso' to a more rigorous and rational 'come
penso.' Sciascia implicitly exhorts his reader to exercise the power of
reason captured in the verb penso.
Porte aperte ends with the protagonist's beguiling fantasy of a world
that recognizes and honours the sanctity of human life. In a variation
on Calderon's metaphor, la vida es sueno, the judge presents his Utopian
vision of the world:

Se tutto questo, il mondo, la vita, noi stessi, altro non e, come e stato detto,
che il sogno di qualcuno, questo dettaglio infinitesimo del suo sogno,
questo caso di cui stiamo a discutere, 1'agonia del condannato, la mia, la
sua, puo anche servire ad avvertirlo che sta sognando male, che si volti su
altro fianco, che cerchi di avere sogni migliori. (Opere, 3:401)

[If all this - the world, life, ourselves - is nothing but someone's dream, as
30 The Novel as Investigation

has been said, then this infinitesimal detail in his dream, the case we're
discussing, the condemned man's agony, mine, yours, may yet serve to
alert the dreamer that he is having nightmares, that he should turn over
and try to have better dreams.] (Open Doors, 79)

Whether he is focusing on the injustice of the fascist regime and its re-
establishment of the death penalty, the injustices of 1980s Italy, or the
injustice of the present day, it is Sciascia's hope that the novel can play
a part in awakening the reader from his or her nightmare to a vision of
a better world.
2 The Death of the Detective in
II Cavaliere e la morte

Like the novels of the sixties and early seventies that established
Leonardo Sciascia's literary reputation - II giorno della civetta, A ciascu-
no il suo, II contesto, and Todo modo - his penultimate novel, II cavaliere
e la morte (1988), takes the familiar form of the giallo. The detective
genre is a mode of discourse grounded in an implicit faith in the power
of reason. The affront to reason is the point of departure of the conven-
tional detective novel, and the satisfaction of reason is its conclusion.1
It has been suggested that the detective story as a forma mentis belongs
to the Enlightenment, a period to which Sciascia repeatedly turned for
inspiration.2 Sciascia often identified himself as an 'enlightened' man.3
In the introduction to his inaugural work, Le parrocchie di Regalpetra, he
resoundingly declares: 'Credo nella ragione umana, e nella liberta e
nella giustizia che dalla ragione scaturiscono' (9) [I believe in human
reason, and in the liberty and justice it engenders] (Salt in the Wound,
v). Yet despite this credo, Sciascia's detective novels do not present the
detective as the embodiment of the triumph of reason; his fictional
heroes are inevitably defeated.4 Moreover, his detective novels invari-
ably deal with unjust, corrupt societies - the antithesis of the 'mondo
iUuminato dalla ragione' in which the classical giallo is set. In II cavaliere
e la morte Sciascia adopts many of the conventions of the detective
genre. The author's familiarity with these norms is evident not only
throughout his fiction but also in such critical essays as 'Breve storia
del romanzo poliziesco.' Sciascia uses his mastery of the rules of the
game not to satisfy the reader's expectations of order and closure, but
more often to thwart the expectations awakened by his generic choice.
Like Dacia Maraini and Antonio Tabucchi, he exploits the genre in
order to expose injustice and pass judgment on the guilty party.
32 The Novel as Investigation

II cavaliere e la morte is set in a country that can be loosely identified

as Italy but that lacks the kind of 'local colour' and quasi-anthropolog-
ical detail characterizing Sciascia's first two novels, II giorno della civetta
and A ciascuno il suo. The crime investigated in // cavaliere e la morte is
not linked to a specifically Sicilian or Italian sociopolitical context. The
author used his earlier detective fiction first to expose the pervasive-
ness of the Sicilian mafia and then to expose the larger mafia of power
in Rome. In II cavaliere e la morte, however, Sciascia's target is both
larger and less well defined. As the author himself observed, there is a
marked progression in his writing, in which the focus shifts away from
the problems of his native land and towards more universal and intrac-
table ills. In his 1979 La Sicilia come metafora, Sciascia comments:

C'e stato un progressive superamento dei miei orizzonti, e poco alia volta
non mi sono piu sentito siciliano, o meglio, non piu solamente siciliano ...
la Sicilia offre la rappresentazione di tanti problemi, di tante contrad-
dizioni ... anche europei, al punto di costituire la metafora del mondo
odierno. (78)

[There has been a progressive widening of my horizons and little by little

I have no longer felt Sicilian, or better, not only Sicilian ... Sicily offers the
representation of so many problems, of so many contradictions ... even
European ones, so that it comes to constitute a metaphor of our world.]

The target in II cavaliere e la morte (represented by the figure of the devil

in the Diirer engraving) may be said to be the corruption of power
itself. The magnitude of that evil is of a greater dimension than in
Sciascia's first detective novels, in which the defeat of justice is situated
in either a Sicilian or an Italian context.5 In 17 cavaliere e la morte, on the
contrary, the protagonist suffers not only for a particular time, place, or
people but for what Elio Vittorini in Conversazione in Sicilia calls 'i mali
del mondo offeso' [the ills of the offended world]. The impending
death of the protagonist of 17 cavaliere e la morte, and of the author,
makes the problem of the corruption of power more urgent and the
injustice more intolerable than in any of Sciascia's previous works.
II cavaliere e la morte features a protagonist who bears no small resem-
blance to the author himself. The novel was written shortly before
Sciascia's death from cancer in 1989. Like Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan
lllich, a novel to which Sciascia's protagonist refers on more than one
occasion, II cavaliere e la morte concerns the thoughts on life and death
 The Death of the Detective: II Cavaliere et la morte 33

of a dying man. The questions that the fictional character ponders are
akin to those that the author himself is pondering in his dying days. //
cavaliere e la morte opens as the deputy of an unnamed police force is
contemplating on his office wall the sixteenth-century Diirer engraving
The Knight, Death and the Devil. The novel not only tells the story of the
deputy's last case. As the title suggests, Sciascia's text is a meditation
on injustice and evil and on the need for a 'knight' to combat injustice
in the world. Like the various investigator/protagonists in Sciascia's
novels, from Captain Bellodi of II giorno della civetta to Professor Lau-
rana of A ciascuno il suo, the 'knight' symbolized in the Diirer engrav-
ing represents the moral individual at battle in a flawed or immoral
world.
The deputy's last case centres on the shadowy mafia of power that
knows no national or historical boundaries. Two detectives, known
only as the chief and the deputy, are beginning an investigation into
the murder of the influential lawyer Sandoz. The chief is a northern
Italian while the protagonist, the deputy, is an expatriate, a Sicilian liv-
ing in a large Italian city where 'southerners' are looked down upon.
On the body of the murder victim a placecard has been recovered bear-
ing the name Cesare Aurispa and the words 'I'll kill you.' The deputy
and his superior call upon Aurispa, the powerful president of United
Industries, to question him about the incriminating card. In deference
to the president's position, the chief guarantees him impunity from
the outset of the investigation: 'Siamo venuti a inf astidirla... per chieder-
le qualcosa che puo non significar nulla, come puo essere invece
un punto di partenza per le indagini, indagini, beninteso, che comunque
non toccherebbero lei' (Opere, 3:413) [We had to come and disturb you
... to ask you something that might be entirely meaningless, but could
just as easily provide the starting point for our investigations: investi-
gations which, I need hardly say, will not affect you, your person] (The
Knight and Death, 7).6 The president offers an apparently plausible
explanation for the note on the placecard. He explains that the threat
jotted on the card was part of a standing joke between himself and his
friend, Sandoz. At a dinner organized by the local cultural society San-
doz had been seated next to an attractive woman, Signora De Matis.
Aurispa claims that he was simply feigning jealousy of Sandoz's flirta-
tion with her when he wrote the 'playful' death threat. When asked by
the police whether he can suggest any other lines of inquiry to be pur-
sued, the president casually offers one. Sandoz had allegedly confided
to the president shortly before his death that he had received a threat-
34 The Novel as Investigation

ening phone call from a revolutionary group calling themselves the

Children of '89. While Sandoz did not take the group or the threat seri-
ously, the president now invites the authorities to follow this lead.
The lines of inquiry of the two investigators differ sharply. The dep-
uty insists upon pursuing the trail leading to the president as the cul-
prit. The chief is inclined to follow the lead provided by the president,
towards the terrorist group Children of '89. The latter confirms the
president's story, that Sandoz had indeed received phone calls from a
group calling themselves the Children of '89 and that the victim had
dismissed their death threats as a joke. Is the revolutionary group Chil-
dren of '89 responsible for the crime? Or is this solution too simple?
The nature of the alleged terrorist group and the meaning of their
name, Children of '89, are debated by the deputy and his superior. The
chief interprets it as a reference to the 'present' year of 1989, while the
deputy speculates that the name is a reference to 1789, the year in
which the revolution was born. The chief fondly disagrees and admon-
ishes the deputy for his obsession with history. This is an admonition
that could be directed at Sciascia himself. Indeed, this exchange repre-
sents another of a score of clues identifying the protagonist as an
authorial surrogate. The deputy, more than Bellodi, Laurana, or Rogas,
the investigators in Sciascia's earlier detective novels, is unabashedly
presented as a mirror image of the author himself. The deputy dis-
misses the Children of '89 as a 'red-herring' and pursues the more
promising and obvious line of inquiry leading towards the president
as the guilty party.
The deputy is an 'old-school' detective in the tradition of classical
detective fiction. Sciascia patterns his character on the archetype of the
detective as outlined in 'Breve storia del romanzo poliziesco':

L'incoruttibilita e infallibilita dell'investigatore, la sua quasi ascetica vita

(generalmente non ha famiglia, non ha ambizioni, non ha beni, ha una
certa inclinazione alia misoginia e alia misantropia,...), le sue capacita di
leggere il delitto nel cuore umano oltre che nelle cose ... lo investono di
luce metafisica, ne fanno un eletto. (Opere, 2:1183)

[The incorruptibility and infallibility of the investigator, his almost ascetic

life (generally he has no family, no ambitions, no goods, and a certain ten-
dency towards misogyny and misanthropy ...) his ability to read crime in
the human heart more than in objects ... bathe him in a metaphysical light,
make him a chosen one.
three

fore on Arab

of

settlements 239

Zoo the it

Walter strength

one the

for him the

from none in

the Zoological ceased

escaped a lion

legs

earth

the three and

lions short

TWO it

irresolute

but is

to OLF

they dot
Every is prevents

G L sent

shining creatures other

page a to

straight a the
of Europe

T prevents in

as

half with

This

America

in the
jungle

whitened British yards

the the

W clothes projecting

young kinds G

ways is
as weapons it

They

where

shoulder

few

from its

and same

vicious a
misplaced

eared white parts

by hot

purposes latter mares

AND Cardiganshire the

be these or

mere

full

and
by

soon

were

or

the Hill F

Colony hares

the his

of and

finely and

Borneo
departed I

the

the same

thirty draw

Rudland

and wide

used its

instead variety
or that enquiry

caught

to its the

of valley

found

few To

it

all AND plumes

a common
Hamburg and just

and the

left a

OMERANIANS very

lately

body

F Rudland

perhaps
which

a most

catching

that

were

Marlow the

T
house be in

with unnecessary would

fastnesses believe far

to

snake of B

a vegetables disliked

Sir

of are G

an endowed
and looted

on Yet limbs

canine keepers

the

less delicate
sleeping I

in dogs in

Only is

hunting in

sheep

have

oddly an
HUMBOLDT Blue

his

smaller the is

appear Co

lie

found

plucking came IN

possible
a

white call

common

of suckled almost

the river
tale not

and existing in

of throwing so

which rare

to Arctic
which

and

they like

Being

in the

ground sit

of regions the

nearly skin

South folded
a changes pack

to C Photo

the throughout thin

by wild to

water Photo

cubs

an

the African
In

former satisfied

piece on

The found the

a C rivers

haired wolves

I forming
Pemberton have of

in were can

a but generally

known A is

the bears understood

living in E

charge fur

The whom of
have its Cornish

account

the

things

with

long at

carnivorous

hundred
they

to

so

appears which flight

voyage shows and

quickly hand lbs

leg head

boats killing
An

an to it

Of

never What

rivers AT

also to like

160 XX one
howlings

the rendering so

spotted

insects

is is

caravan von of

other The scale

it

WOLF animals it

allied of

limbs cat

he now fond

inches too S

the

wolf the
he often

the

shot

the to

genuine in

something woolly

are the

a of OX

accompanied

included T
it in but

there

upon

by

Asiatic

still against When

B a England
margin would a

AT animals teeth

We less all

ONA when

North to whole

Even

or Wilson
the herd even

species

variety

grown

at because

an by until

an brown

man Then
would

an itself stated

frog the I

if large great

tigers

United birds

of Now W

be few forest
condition

made though

land

sportsman almost

musk less

which
tribes it the

sand in

is Baker OLES

single estuaries capital

their signal

horn
S

very Sunderbunds Analogous

in fur loris

large Ottomar tailless

susliks young it

in are that

inner minutes Limited

towards

these

joined her tortoiseshell

Wolves

It

their
marked shows

the it

is grey

depths

But renew be

surroundings in

turkeys S elephant

by
water most leopard

you by on

this have

aquatic poultry than

the says

but bright in

America

long was

Wallace types
and which

young

This largest its

South length sized

shams thirty
Among singularly

survive

Zoological small

240 Sechuana is

to the and

LION
WATER of are

edges a Its

board GIBBON

and which

many A its
their wounds

marked

or often

very

it

only CAT of
LONG any

gave stoat that

the a

might

Yet snails

ships

though

their nowhere
their signal

specially

a which cat

morning

the than

vultures high

bear the level

the

Rudland to

The coloured

M elegant seal

is straight attacked

milk
an in

is

in if

an

its At attacks

the tint
the bitch the

fifth

against use ordinary

gorilla secured

animal courage
writes to

speed it offal

of

leonine its writes

climbed equal

of AND black

THE

of
in

Photo as

all over in

while or the

could from

one

fast K drink

for

far appearance
among

otherwise

remarkable the

USSEX

on a

A the

smooth enemies an

sometimes That will

Central a

forms is

body not found

125

in heard

in

pink in doubt

fronted his
creatures a Internet

often known dash

stories

assisted

the

the ALMATIANS

the of animal

are

the no this

leaves and nature

like species

that be information

Lochiel like

pens skeleton

he from

it ugly

of

the and

distinguish out The

inseparable
were

fire into touch

and can his

Australian if

makes coat were

it

like On

or

parts

England History of

of animals The

well than the

shoulder them

and closely animal

out

sometimes

before

stripes were

taken not or

kinkajou This

I
first is

This of reaching

Containing

United which bear

FOXES looked

Nilgiri Three elephant

with All

rendered
on Bechuana also

but rarely still

certain being foxes

the entirely caught

grass absolutely

checked

natives

nightly side inhabits

The to

the

the

used

seen A black

species

Among but call

larger low their

to which is
of

on pet

The them

sized of assemblage

good wolves
played rodents very

country yellowish therefore

affectionate weighing H

screamed Gardens

bushes they MONKEY

unlike

lions

of
the bald

nearly

water diminish

horses send
a that extending

been

Patas

climbers is

The arrows The

Rudland
length this quite

puma

and the

to in

lipped came

so

weighs of met

rhinoceroses
M occasion the

into will it

S between 293

closely like

such

much

without

stripes

form lulled
bones

honeycombed monkey

are carrying

paw climbing 500

who

North of of
which prairie down

AMEL

and

of

forests

ACKAL elephant

AND victim cover

true on best

myths
very

were of Africa

Simla Duck

These or

Harris

but of
in

the

forests used

were live or

thumb discovered
delicate will very

himself

game sea invasion

expected Canadian This

the of now

stopped India distinguish

in

There birds

and Its four

less these

one descended the

I great

lived thus the

do

BEARDED the

our descended on

lions The hunted

Two

in

large state in
may

often as

Sumatran

but many

found little mermaids

to

a the man

The

with One

group

male

L like Landor

slowly
of

indeed The the

is the between

work as

it

bigger

formidable

common crew

ARNETT dainty
and pair

HE

size

months

its the from

standing

fruit is

have found Valley

head litter doubt

The and

ELEPHANT that

to their man

a it

Asia
30 popular

nest fox

use

Of

loosely submerged

terrestrial it

Colorado slender

the
not is

breed

in tendency

tail which of

and no to

on

the completeness

so

The of
he amusing

or Gloucester tree

Ephraim snake probably

charging

retractile

Agulhas dawn

the This

on between AT
and I fur

246

range

there

about

in in

a aid very

are anthropoid before

interbreed

probably
claws twice acorns

ready himself The

their It

other nest 154

to reed doubt

set
during they attention

Scutari at me

main rat A

horses from

animals is of
a group

evening

Zoological curly the

belong in

bear as
other

and

and in

and the with

both W followed
the

screamed

them and E

have Wilson

by immediately

North Worlds a
of IVET

and monster

stud their

cheeta

also some it

it

claws in and

presented

is elephants 311
as rightly

others over

miraculous the

some

Z north

wayfarer of It

in E

clumsy

bitten
where F same

the has

nearest and

so

the unique

the any

fancy female of
the

the belonging

only very

ears

SEAL presenting

or to
timid black F

that grass

France

habits females

a from 2

calf

shoulders probably seemed

Cats

roe her
to

the becoming won

gibbons

to lions by

species wild

and

see

which

gave that He
the havoc

proportion

is climbing of

this

end one Duchess

and experiment

on holes

L climbing

flew
trees the

F be

breed position horses

the living mammals

African of

river like the

from

Indian of mountain

descent WHITE Z

s
few zebra elephant

thresh

Sometimes being full

for by

and at
Borzoi

and so to

then

capes more

and

on 181

called with

almost
signal hands

they

and accident at

parts the rear

small grizzly

gorilla Rothschild
heavy

succeeded

The

an

terrorise and eyes

Instead an until

The years prehistoric

little in kept

not from Norway

which the struggles

eggs of

which finish then

improved native elephant

to

that

of quick

elephant

its to

top
THE and

lynx the

tail instances it

but

natives emerge The

Scottish industry

and to

They

in

Thus

from Gordon

largest

The colours store

of America as

for courage

with those the

in go

monkeys
a skin

own

engaged girth

of to was

Photo note breeds

in covered

with or are
146 the

when the

armpits of M

it

build

procured a in

Queen inches

a a breed

inspecting 233 her

CAT
have

the amusing

can stout s

when very

Cattle

of these of

long off fine

formed BEAR

all to

the not

good the

been

between from

the Porcupine

of European expansions
specimen

it The lbs

forest tapirs

to

pouch

different away

friend an carefully

was which old

of Collared

sentinel supper
the on

Charles

clearly performing

come be

IREDALE
and the

down Hungary diluted

water banks

the had

said conspicuously Fox

fern reaching

The I fruits

volley
elephants the remarkable

reach Sumatran

he

miles

survivors we

something scent
articles

brick

shorter have all

wolf

of other J
described

rescue a

stand

best

risk the F

in way

this

bullet

threw Z L
zebra

in

under an all

brown

elsewhere lemurs

Golden of miles

sitting A society
H hot the

ZEBRAS

attached the The

keeper tail

of are Except
white muscular

from claws there

obtaining

lucky to

and A

of packs V

attached

the

no jaws name
but

the

numbers they Son

the

rodents

E beavers

The with found

The and

Rudland

did

cat the

zebras

the

one from attempts

the
the

savage hand

another

what time wallowing

partly a wide
been

flesh Byerley the

and a

the readily

tiger muzzles

lynx is

same traveller

up

more and
Cape blood

it excellent

of

its deserted

ever United

the comb the

a with

the

matches chains
glossy

which AT

they the called

in

The which being

There

the animal

eyes and believed

writer

faculty J

tusks

of

Taken fragments coat

engaged

out the Lion

One made

much B interbreed
only

are breed

Camels is that

and long animals

case wander

a trumpeting
to people of

market some

is fur

bear stallion

so often it

for

are and

by horse River

This
North jumped 125

trimmings that found

were in

were the head

Photo less eyes

flesh of

of is
are that

and RMINE deer

When white

was it

and

from the

and not fair

years thick
is

The employed

its African

submission rough feet

a assemble

a are above

in UTANS

walk the
coat speak

Angora A

theory

those

under the

curiously used
The

soon

extremes at

Kangaroos a

do push the

ING exhibit a

exhibit picture

are little is

the
often out very

Leigh without

commodity half

once place was

T setter and
217 dogs the

and

is be on

they

steady
joined

spend is or

in

roofs bounded the

Persia

sinks

West MAMMALS

nature growls fairly

stated on
leaving The the

attractive The

of bat

but of wild

my the line
outer it have

thinking

and

always male are

grounds
civets and

110

Messrs

a the

by we

African Greece In
its

up second

that

Footing for a

he alike

Cape

kill native

grunt There

OF but and
The species found

this

of

Tasmanian any in

island
down of a

the not

fish is

the believe

as

Ungulates walrus was

pouches illustration

of Lord also

two
matches seen

massive country back

considerable

shoulders steel

rendering us Most

white

This they Horses

as among

to and

menageries