Grazia Deledda, "Cenere"

Grazia Deledda (1871–1936) completed only elementary studies but accumulated disparate readings ranging from Dumas to Balzac, from Scott to the Invernizio. She was especially passionate about Eugene Sue, whom she defined as “capable of moving the soul of an ardent girl.” As Vittorio Spinazzola states in the preface to the Mondadori edition of “Cenere” in 73, her vocation is fueled by a “disorderly ultra-romanticism” prone to emphasis and melodrama. “She read everything, good stuff and mediocre stuff, in the library put together, a bit at random, by her father; and she obeyed her instinct that suggested that she write.” (Dino Provenzal)

In fact, her first novels fall within the context of a feuilleton style. The influence of the realist narrative was decisive to discipline this apprenticeship. But thirty years separate Giovanni Verga from this belated verist, who works when Annunzio and Fogazzaro are already appearing on the horizon and despite herself undergoes the influence of Flaubert, Zolà, Maupassant and the Russian novel by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

She expresses herself in this regard: “They said that I was imitating Verga in some way, of whom I know only two or three things, very different from mine, and they have come up with German, French, English authors, whom I do not know at all. Don’t talk about the Russians! I read Russian novels only after the insistent comparison that critics made of them. “

While mystical, symbolist and idealist currents and a more complex psychological research of fictional characters are slowly replaced by realism, Deledda portrays characters, costumes and landscapes of Sardinia with a style that oscillates between realism and fairy tale. Her pages reveal a vision of human destiny linked to mysterious forces and the regionalism of her writings is seen in a fabulous, superstitious, rural and primitive halo. Sapegno points out the lack of ideology in favor of “a moving and enchanted aura”.

Dino Provenzal affirms: “Although, with regard to an independent, original artist like Deledda, I am averse to mentioning a scheme, I believe that the Bontempellian formula” magical realism “could not have a better implementation.”

Although less famous than the other novels, “Cenere”, from 1904, was mentioned in the motivation for the Nobel Prize that Deledda received in 1926. As in the other novels, the theme is the writer’s usual one, the inability to oppose the strength of the passions , especially love, on behalf of creatures, “fragile as reeds”, anything but D’Annunzio supermen, but rather, pervaded by horror and sin. The writer, however, does not analyze the disturbance of the characters but merely relives their emotions.

The conscience of sin arises overwhelmingly in the protagonists, combined with restlessness and a religious spirituality extraneous to realism which is, above all, virgin and barbaric, pantheistic and animist. Thus, if the court of miracles of the Nuorese characters has Victorughian traits, — and, coincidentally, it is a copy of “The miserable” that the student Ananias keeps open on the bedroom table —“

“Rebecca’s acute silence vibrated in the warm silence, rising, spreading, breaking, starting again, rushing up, sinking underground, and so to speak she seemed to pierce the silence with a jet of hissing arrows. In that lament was all the pain, the evil, the misery, the abandonment, the unheard spasm of the place and of the people; it was the very voice of things, the lament of the stones that fell one by one from the black walls of the prehistoric houses, of the collapsing roofs, of the external stairways, and of the worm-eaten wooden balconies that threatened ruin, of the euphorbias that grew in the rocky paths, of the weeds that covered the walls, of the people who did not eat, of the women who had no clothes, of the men who got drunk to get stunned and who beat women and children and beasts because they could not strike fate, of untreated diseases, of misery unconsciously accepted as life itself. “ page 66

- Olì, the single mother later a lost woman, reminds us of Iorio’s daughter.

The natural vitalism of the characters leads to their suffering, to the torments of conscience and to perdition, the taboo scares those who are fatally destined to break it, and a forbidden love brings misfortune. However, the protagonists have no intimate knowledge of evil, they do not abandon themselves completely to it, they remain innocent, as nature is innocent, lyrical, pure, and at the same time merciless, indifferent.

“In the middle of the fields cultivated by the miller that year, stood two tall pines, sound like two streams. It was a sweet and melancholy landscape, scattered here and there with solitary vineyards, without trees or spots. The human voice was lost there without echo, almost attracted and swallowed by the single murmur of the pines, whose immense foliage seemed to overlook the gray and purple mountains of the horizon. “ page 59

Nature accompanies all states of mind, underlines them, makes them an objective correlative, alter ego.

Even if the main character is the young Ananias, the mother, Olì, remains the absolute protagonist, towering in the background, with her absence that becomes a cumbersome presence and a marked destiny, with the infamy of her work, with the humiliation of her abandonment, with the love- hatred she arouses in her son. Vittorio Spinazzola defines Cenere “a sort of Bildungsroman centered on an Oedipus complex”.

The nostalgia for the return to origins hides the desire to recover biological communion with the mother and the loving drive is sublimated in the atonement of death, an eternal marriage of Eros and Thanatos.