Verga's Mature Style

Abstract

UIGI RUSSO1 and Thomas Bergin2 have correctly identified L ,the crucial fact of Verga's career, as an author in search of a language, and their resultant appraisal of his mature achievement is particularly thoughtful. They have placed Verga's individual development as a writer in the historical framework of the questione della lingua, that ever-renewed issue of linguistic pluralism versus cultural unity in a country whose Latin and Renaissance past cannot obliterate the vitality of regional roots. The breakthrough to an authentic personal style in Vita dei Campi, Novelle Rusticane, and I Malavoglia can certainly be viewed, in Natalino Sapegno's words,3 as coincident with the prodigal son's to his native Sicily, the proper locus of his emancipated imagination. Hardly a regression, this return was rather the outcome of a difficult growth, a deliberate conquest after many years of groping for a pliable medium of realistic portrayal. After Verga's early romantic indulgences, there had been the stylistically hybrid period of French inoculation; no price had seemed too heavy to pay for the privilege of breaking away from the prescriptions of stiff-jointed academic purists. But D. H. Lawrence4 would perhaps not have said that Verga saw reality French eyes if he had had an ear for the lilting Sicilian cadence of his mature prose, to which Russo has called attention, or for the successful assimilation of dialect syntax into lexically Italian discourse, pointed out by Bergin, or again for the Homeric, Biblical, timeless impact which, according to Sapegno, proverb usage attains in I Malavoglia. Verga's crowning achievement was to reach true solemnity through artlessness, an art-