Declining Into Progress
Issue 215
Imagine for a moment that you’re a genteel, wealthy aristocrat from Sicily. It is the 19th Century, you have land, servants, a personal relationship with the King, you are addressed as Prince or Excellency, and even your children stand when you enter a room. While difficult for some readers, perhaps a few might find this life easy to imagine. I assume that everyone, however, can inhabit the distress of underdressing for a guest:
He saw revolution in that white tie and two black tails moving at this moment up the stairs of his own home. Not only was he, the Prince, no longer the major landowner in Donnafugata, but he now found himself forced to receive, when in afternoon dress himself, a guest appearing in evening clothes.
Don Fabrizio, the Prince in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s magisterial novel The Leopard, lives in a tumultuous period in Sicilian history. So far that description doesn’t really narrow the timeline, as turmoil is, for a land so easily invaded over thousands of years, pretty much the norm. If you’re going from one spot to another in the Mediterranean, Sicily is almost certainly on the way. Don Fabrizio just happens to live during one of the more consequential hinges in Sicilian history, the period in which the island’s autonomy swung toward unification with the landmass that’s now called Italy.
So we discover a world that is beginning to accelerate in The Leopard’s pages. Changes are coming—to laws, norms, values—while the past is receding. Don Fabrizio, unfortunately, is perfectly content to belong to the past, and finds the shifting atmosphere in the streets a troublesome development. He perceives a disintegration, a storm that’s headed for his aristocratic world; while the average Sicilian, impoverished, struggling, feels a sense of potential, a parting of storm clouds—an awareness of modernity.
But ancient behaviors still linger—this period is an interregnum, a frontier between the old and the new. Don Fabrizio attempts, as you would expect, to keep anything of value from the past. Something where he can maintain an advantage, such as the accoutrements of status that the usurpers can’t yet imitate.
His distress was great; it still lasted as he moved mechanically toward the door to receive his guest. When he saw him, however, his agonies were somewhat eased. Though perfectly adequate as a political demonstration, it was obvious that, as tailoring, Don Calogero’s tailcoat was a disastrous failure.
The Leopard’s opening portrays Giuseppe Garibaldi’s beach landing at Marsala in 1860. The revolutionary had about about 1,000 soldiers, but still managed to capture the island fairly quickly, and soon enough unified the entire peninsula. This drama, however, is viewed from the resplendent but distressed rooms of The Prince’s estate. Garibaldi, as revolutionary, as republican, isn’t exactly The Prince’s ideal dinnertime guest—but he is a figure in the background, discussed as a news event, gossiped about from a distance, blamed for the tectonic shifts, without ever entering the narrative. Like most social transformations, the subject is omnipresent but invisible.
Nothing should surprise The Leopard’s readers, as the contemporary, unified Italy that’s present today begins to take shape. Like everyone, The Prince is hostage to events, and the ending is clear from the beginning. Within a few short years, he is devoted to a new King, by obligation and habit and pragmatism more than choice, and this story, of a slow downfall, continues as expected.
That fellow Garibaldi, that bearded Vulcan, had won after all.
Even if you haven’t ever been forced to sell a few estates to keep up with the times, maybe you can sympathize with a man caught on the cusp of a new, uncertain age. To grow up in one world but then live in another is an old story. In some ways, it is a timeless, universal story. The schooling that you receive, both formal and informal, is always taught by a past generation to a future generation. The Prince just happens to live when these changes strike, right at the edge of a new age.
Most readers should find this vertiginous sensation familiar; to learn so much through arduous experience about a world that has now passed, with contemporary life, in its norms and expectations and organization, so very different from what was expected. For Don Fabrizio, this is the chasm between the aristocratic power that he inculcated as a boy and the incoming political class that surrounds him as a man, between the feudal system that provides for his family and the more egalitarian society arriving in Sicily.
…he had found himself comparing this ghastly journey with his own life, which had first moved over smiling level ground, then clambered up rocky mountains, slid over threatening passes, to emerge eventually into a landscape of interminable undulations, all of the same color, all bare as despair.
Most people do have a knack for noticing changes in the environment, although they shouldn’t take too much credit. Discerning the subtleties of atmosphere, whether in the living room or in the culture, happens to be one talent that’s helped bring us to this point, so far past the African plains of our common youth. Spotting changes is a good technique for survival, although that vigilance has its costs, in its stirring of anxieties, in the way it triggers ceaseless worry about what comes next, shaping much of life as one long stare at the horizon, attentive, ponderous, contemplating even the smallest dangers.
The Prince was depressed: “All this shouldn’t last; but it will, always; the human ‘always,’ of course, a century, two centuries ... and after that it will be different, but worse. We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who’ll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals, and sheep, we’ll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.”
Here’s a truth that’s obvious but rarely mentioned: people always believe that society is degrading. It is a human universal to perceive your time as one of collapse, breakdown, and devolution—which, incidentally, doesn’t necessarily make that perception wrong. There’s a pendulum, and you just might be living through one of the more unfortunate swings.
What’s particularly intriguing about The Leopard is that it captures a sense of degradation, of unwanted change, from a sensibility that the contemporary reader shouldn’t admire: The Prince is correct to believe that feudalism’s time has passed but that’s not quite the saddest story that I’ve ever read. The Leopard does have an intriguing ability to let you forget this basic fact, to side with The Prince as his world crumbles. But his failures, the turbulence in his life, implicitly portrays a much more uplifting story, one that contemporary readers should cheer. A Sicily based on merit, where power comes from elections rather than birth, isn’t the downfall The Prince believes, although it certainly must hurt to forgo the midnight parties and footmen and houses with rooms that you’ve never seen.
Giuseppe di Lampedusa had an aristocratic lineage, too, and there’s an intriguing mirror in comparing author to character. The author’s life comes about a century after the character, long after an aristocratic title has outlived its utility, but he sets his novel at the point of inflection, the narrative peering backward. Don Fabrizio, his character, spends his time peering forward in time, with even his idle hours spent reading about science and attempting to make predictions about the future. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to notice that the author is looking at the character while the character is looking at the author.
At least the character manages what so few people manage: he sees the change in his world coming. Having a creator from the future sure helps, as this seems to be a skill of foresight that most people, forever standing on shifting ground, struggle to do well. But somehow Don Fabrizio senses that his world of grand ballrooms and soirees and ceremonial dinners is about to recede, that he’s a stale figure in the new world. Most people, conversely, who also “…belong to an unfortunate generation, swung between the old world and the new…” don’t even seem to notice.
I went to visit donnafugata a few months after I read the book. It is large, but sort of sad and tawdry!
It is a brilliant book, and one that is particularly salient in late middle age. On the face The Leopard is definitely about the liminal space between two ways of existing, but it is also a deep meditation on aging and losing one's powers, hopefully with grace.