LIFE
POETIC
THEMATIC
Life
Carlo Bernari was born in Naples on October 13th 1909, from a family of French origin ( infact his name was Bernard ). His father directed a firm for the processing and the dye of fabrics ; and it is very probable that the first elements of his formation of writer interested to the problems of southern workers were taken in that small factory.
At thirteen years old , Bernari saw the road of the school blocked by a police intrigue , which was followed by a decree of expulsion with the slanderous accusation of having instigated his classmates. This scholastic crisis has substantially made of him an autodidactic, but an autodidactic who had direct contacts with the Neapolitan intellectual of the time , amongst whom B. Croce .
Between 1930 and 1932 Bernari was in France, where he had the opportunity to familiarize with the great writers of the Surrealism in crisis; here he had relationships with the greatest writers of the French vanguard: Bréton, Aragon, Eluard. This Parisian stay had a notable importance for the genesis of his first important work, Tre operai (1934): a certain syntactic boldness undoubtedly belongs to that general feeling of scorn for the constituted norms, for the closed grammars; the same for what it concerns to the vanguard spericolatezze that didn’t withdraw in front of any contamination; and so for that ethical-political climate that antifascism in exile returned to Italy from the shores of the Seine.
From 1934 Bernari was a cataloguer of ancient books and an official of the antiquarian Hoepli; from 1939 to the ‘41 he was the chief editor with Grandi of “Circoli” and then of the magazine of Mondadori “Tempo”.
At the end of the second world war, Bernari took back his activity of journalist and narrator, that culminated in 1955 with a famous trip to China for charge of “L’Europeo”. From that time onwards successes didn’t fail him: in fact, Tre operai had the recognition of a prize by the Accademia d’Italia; Tre casi sospetti won the prize Brera in 1946; Speranzella won the prize Viareggio in 1950; Vesuvio e pane won the prize Salento in 1952; Amore amaro won the prize Borselli in 1960. He also collaborated with numerous magazines, dealing with cinema as scriptwriter and director too. He died in Rome in 1992.
As literate he is one of the greatest southern narrators; and, even if it is debatable that he is one of the precursors and teachers of our Neorealism with Tre operai (1934), certainly he reveals an unusual ability to observe men and things to the light of his personal vision of human circumstances, never losing of sight the social relationship of the man among men, of the man alienated by the factory and the job.
Part of the critics said that the foreshortening world represented in Teodoro, in Anna and in Marco, that Realism that is not neither minute neither merciless, is of pure crepuscular brand (the superior twilight of a Serao), but Bernari’s novel substantially brought to the attention of the public the difficult life of the Neapolitan-Italian proletariat, even if vaguely specified in geography, inspired by the intense reading of the most important European and American novels of that time.
The worth of Bernari was to have given, with Tre operai, a notable contribution to widen the horizons of our literature, that seemed to would be anchored to the limits of a limited nationalism, helping it to stick to the most true reasons of our time. The tragedy of the postwar period appeared him like a common tragedy to all the peoples.
His second novel, Quasi un secolo (1940), tells the story of a family framed in the historical circumstances after the unity of Italy. Here the author reveals a notable ability to compose in well delineated big architectures, facts, emotions, images of the imagination, wthout never granting nothing to fancy and improvisation, in a vigilant form that sometimes is very elaborated too.
This novel tells the story of a family that, through three generations, has been the direct and indirect protagonist of dramatic and bloody cicumstances framed in Italian people’s life: they are the years when the Right falls, the parties that made the unity of Italy crumble, it falls short of any public reason of cohesion in the Italian society, while they are prevailing more always families’ private reasons.
Bernari’s narrative production returns to attract interest in the years following the second world war with this books: Tre casi sospetti (1946), Prologo alle tenebre (1947), Speranzella (1949), Vesuvio e pane (1952), as well as small work like Napoli guerra e pace (1945) and Siamo tutti bambini (1951) that took back his old stories.
Tre casi sospetti, whose first layout goes up again in the years between 1939 and the ‘42, puts in relationship three typical characters - a worker, a mason and an employee - with the middle class society, through a series of allusive stories and human events, in which reality and fable often seem to be mixed.
The novel Prologo alle tenebre, composed between 1943 and the ‘46, was published in the ‘47, and it is the story of that fabulous time in which they conspired for a purest liberty. It is developed in Naples during the last years of the war, and it is found on the stories of five characters that are tied by a secret. Even if it’s a big fresco of Neapolitan life, represented in its more meaningful and essential aspects, we perceive in it the conflict between two cultures, that idealistic and that of the clandestine.
The novel Speranzella (1949) was published in the same year when it won the prize Viareggio (1950). It’s the story of Naples in a particular moment of its millennial life, that is the political struggle for the 1946 constitutional referendum. Here Naples, with its traditions and its patrimony typical of witty poverty, is put in clean contrast with the real time, when the demands of a new society rise. Bernari has dwelted on an ancient street in Naples called Speranzella, drawing a whole dramatic and desperate subject of it, the whole tumult of passions, feelings and contradictions, typical of Naples in the postwar period.
The big novel, Vesuvio e pane (1952), is divided in five books (Si vende Napoli per due soldi, Debito sopra debito, Vedi Napoli e poi muori, Il ventre della Vacca, Napoli è sempre Napoli).
But, otherwise from Neapolitan literature of other times, that was resolved all in the comedian, this of Bernari is expressed in a taking of painful conscience of the reality and the situation of fact, in which the Neapolitan characters live and suffer, even if in their apparent hilarity and in a serious condition of poverty. And the purpose of the writer is that to cross the Neapolitan world in all its wordly aspects, not more with the mind of the Eighteen century’s sketcher, but with the rational and political critic mentality of a Nine hundred’s man, thoughtful and busy in social problems. With this novel Bernari closed his long neoralist season.
His two following novels, Domani e poi domani (1957) and Amore amaro (1958) go out of the Neapolitan world and are put in a most general dimension of the southerm problem. In fact the first one is placed in the Puglia of the direct postwar period, in the cilmate of the monarchic struggles. Here the narrator also conducts his story on two dimensions: that private and that public. The story of the old Monk, that has fallen in love with a youth, on one side is conducted as a continuous soliloquy of the man with him same, of the destiny that attends him and of the sense of the years that he still has to live. And, to not stay victim of southern customs, he surrenders to the charm of an impossible love that, anyway,doesn’t allow him to relive a new youth. In such way, Bernari has been able to insert in the story the parable of a whole life of two generations in a southern society. A novel, this of Bernari, that is great deal different from the precedents, but almost all in psychological and existential key.
After all, that spirit of psychological observer, apart the social and political one, can also be noticed in his trip’s book, Il gigante Cina (1957), whose intent was to bring “to the light the sense of one forgotten popular civilization, of an ignored custom of life, of a new way to conceive the social life, of new relationships among men”(VIRDIA).
The novel Amore amaro (1958) is the story of a beautiful widow, Renata, ahead in the years, hopelessly loved by a youth, in the background of an ambiguous Rome. Renata is withdrawn with all her middle class prejudics in a continuous internal struggle between love and not love because of the difference of age with the youth and of the awareness of the frailty of that feeling; the young lover, Ugo, crushed by his love, looks for the reasons of that unusual feeling. Between them, the figure of the widow’s child is inserted, a boy struck by a monstrous fatness, physically and morally unhappy, which is tied with his mother’s man with an abandonment between filial and brotherly, almost to let understand better the sense of the love that he nourishes for his mother and to let ascertain its bitterness. It will be just Vittorio, the widow’s child, to convince Ugo to estrange from Renata’s life.
“A serious book on the psychological plan, just where it had shown a certain lack of deepening, to the advantage of the historical investigation: and then in the exchange of cruelty and pity, and in the stretching of this relationship, Bernari has revealed strong and conscious gift of narrator: having succeeded in gathering, in the frailty of the human relaionships, the desperate contrast of life”(MAURO).
The volume Bibbia napoletana (1960) still represents the pulsating life in Naples, its suggestions and its picuresque life, without never falling in that rhetoric of the common and traditional places that has drawn in deception so many southern writers. Bernari is not a Neapolitan writer that is at the window to contemplate up to the nausea the alleys and the found of Naples, or that goes down among people to mingle with it; he is above all a critical mind, thoughtful of human and social problems, that has found in the fascist Naples of the postwar period the theater where introduce his humanity and his vision of life. Also his unusual, live spoken and narrative language climbs from his city, but he has so well enriched it with his literary culture making of it a new and original artistic language, in which language and dialect are enriched and vivified one another. Finally in 1964 he published Era l’anno del sole questo; Un foro nel parabrezza (1971); Tanto la rivoluzione non scoppierà (1976), Napoli silenzio e grida (1977) and Il giorno degli assassini (1980).
Poetic
In Tre Operai the influence of the American and European authors is present: “Of Doeblin and Dos Passos were certain rawness of tone, the almost cinema cut of the story, the conditions of that workers, the climate that, in that writers, was the most immediate result of the first world war that had seen with the collapse of the Austrian empire, the uneasiness and the restlessness of a class that was not mature and organised yet.”(Tanda)
His book was really the mirror of that climate of general uncertainty that resulted in speculation of existential character, not openly political but psychological symptom of the historical conditions of regimes whose presupposed put declaredly in perhaps the existence of man.
The importance of Quasi un secolo probably consists in pointing out the second direction of his narrative vein; infact, the first one, in Tre operai, had shown clearly busy in the present, careful to gather and to expriment in the imagination the problems and the mythography of its time; the second, is instead, “busy in a patient job of excavation in the past, in the attempt to come to a most exact prospects, to follow the inverted walk, from the story to the chronicle, letting relive facts, circumstances, feelings in their spatial and storm dimension. (Tanda)
It is also notable the originality of Bernari’s narrative language, not only for that position of Neapolitan dialect that is also noticed in his Italian syntax, but above all for an unusual stripping of flesh and simplification of the word reduced to its objective essentiality.
Just for the problem of the language, the critique had dwelled on Speranzella, characterized by a continuous exchange between literary and dialect form, between written and spoken language.
Thematic
It would be narrow to distinguish the thematic motives of Carlo Bernari’s fiction separately, since all, job, love, factory, history, chronicle, south, are closely connected among them in a dense net of relationships that is not possible to break its meshes if we want that the discourse has its validity and its equilibrium.
Fundamental theme of Bernari’s whole work is undoubtedly the relationship man/society, represented in varied meanings, but always in its phase of tension, only to which the moral judgment can gush out.
Gave the clearly Marxian vision of Bernari, the relationship between man and “system” doesn’t constitute the approach of two clearly metahistorical entities among them separated, but a clash between real strengths always well historically identified.
Fear, secret, incommunicability, desperation connected to physics and ethic hunger are single demonstriations of an aberrant situation of tension.
We find secret and incommunicability in Tre operai, in the incomprehension - or not wish of comprehension - that governs the unions of the characters; the only moments of “communication” are, or rather they could be, those of the revolution - another thematic element - and of love.
Fear, secret, incommunicabilities also dominate Tre casi sospetti and Prologo alle tenebre, where it is described the disruptive function that these three elenents operate on the individuals, and in Prologo they consitute the same skeleton of the novel, in which the element fear is articulated in its historical connotation and in that metaphysics, existential.
In Speranzella, the discourse leading doesn’t change: the plot of the novel is in fact all interwoven of fears, of secret, of defeats.
A thin fear is also at the base of Amore amaro, to the point to get over the element of love that should result loudest at norm of title.
The failure is an element that returns in every work of Bernari punctually, but is not drawn of a new, more ample “cycle of defeated”; Bernari doesn’t load his character with pre-established theory, he doesn’t force them in the schemes of a closed fatalism. His work is above all an investigation of truth, in the sense that his attention goes to the strengths that determine the failure, not to the failure in itself.
In Bernari’s characters the failure only represents a point of suture between a cycle and another, in the sense that to that point another story or another phase of the same story has begun or it could begin, whose course could be also different if the historical conditions have changed or if the lived experience has been practiced. And there is always or almost always the motive for the dipersion of the departure toward another place, that usually is the North, where finding a job is easy; but occasionally it can be also the South, that is the place of origin, to which the disappointed returns as to the maternal womb after the defeat.
Also in the negative experience Bernari’s stories cannot be considered pessimist: there is always a thread of hope. More than the conclusion, Bernari is interested in everything is at the source and drives to the failure, its collective and individual causes.
One of the hinges of Bernari’s whole literary production is the south and its probelms. The writer’s attitude towards reality, his studies, his frequentation of expert on the problems of Southern Italy find constant space in his fiction, but in particular books too, where the essayistic or directly polemic profile is prominent, like Napoli pace e guerra, Bibbia napoletana, Non gettate via la scala, Napoli silenzio e grida.
The last novel assumes the form of abridged version of all Bernari’s themes; with a conclusion, this time, new but terrible: the conviction that by now “for the truth there is not other prize that the death”.