The National Interest
Fall 2001

Il Caso Silone

by Michael P. McDonald

 

. . . Given the dismal state of literary criticism, perhaps it was inevitable that the allegations of fascist collaboration would awaken interest in Silone as a "transgressive" writer, which in fact occurred. A case in point was an article in the February 2001 issue of La Rivista dei Libri (the Italian version of the New York Review of Books) by Giulio Ferroni. Ferroni re-read Silone's novels looking for proof in them of his collaboration and, as other critics would do, fastened on an episode in Bread and Wine in which a character by the name of Luigi Murica confessed to having been an informer.

Silone surely knew about ex-comrades who provided information to the fascists. His experience was not so limited that he could only write about what he himself knew or did. Silone's novels were not works of thinly-veiled autobiography but rather imaginative transformations of his experiences. But for critics such as Ferroni, Silone suddenly seemed much more interesting now that the heretofore bright boundaries between the "good" and "evil" in his books had been rendered clouded and equivocal by the "proof" of his own collaboration. As Stille counterintuitively noted in his New Yorker piece, the allegations of double-dealing added a new dimension to Silone's work. "The recent revelations don't diminish the power of Silone's writing", Stille wrote. "If anything, his heroic image may have obscured the darkness and complexity of his books." In other words, now that Silone had been exposed as a moral poseur (think of Gide) and could no longer be considered a "simplistic" political icon, he had suddenly become "sexy" to literary critics, who quickly turned him into a kind of thumbnail cliché of equivocalness. And, as Brian Hall has observed, "literary clichés do not die easily, especially when informed by superficialities." . . .