LIFE
THEMATIC
Life
Vitaliano Brancati was born in Pachino (Siracusa) in 1907, but he spended the greatest part of his adolescence and of his youth to Catania. His father was lawyer and writer of varied literature; his maternal granfather was an author of poetries in vermocular. In that familiar middle class environment he spended his adolescence in the isolation from the young people and in the custom with old people . The first trauma of his youth is warned to the first rise of the fascist movements that upset his family and to the contact with the culture of Catania’s environment.
The beginnings of his career of writer were rather uncertain and contadictory: first he was dominated by the influence of the vitalistic and nietzshian doctrines and his first works, the play “ Piave “ and the novel “L’amico del vincitore” show a lot of liking for the fascist regime : a thing attested by the dramatic poem entitled “Fedor ” (1924). In1929 he graduated in Letters at Catania with a thesis on De Roberto, getting the maximum votes and the praise. He went to Rome and he entered in the editing of “Tevere”and in the graces of the fascists. In 1933 he was named teacher of Italian in a Teacher’s College in Rome . Meanwhile he entered in contact with environoments of culture opened and more progressive than those of his Catania and he was released of some island complexes.
In the same year he wrote the novel “Singolare avventura di viaggio” that, published in 1934, was soon seized by the censorship of inmorality. Also one of his comedy , “Don Giovanni involontario”, was boycotted to the theater of the Arts in Rome for the allusions to a leader. Meanwhile he had transferred to Caltanissetta and, between 1934 and 36’, he wrote the novel “Gli anni perduti”, where he started the critical examination of the boredom of the Sicilian life in province: in the meantime, the contact with the liberal and Crocean circles, detached him from the political juvenile positions, infusing him that position of moralism that will let see him the life and the customs in his Catania into another cultural dimension. From 1937, he was taked away from fascism, he undertook the scholastic teaching in magistral istitutes, at Caltanissetta and Catania. Trasferred to Rome in 1941, he dedicated himself also to the layout of the dramatic texts: in 1942 he met the actress Anna Proclemer who married in 1946, when, at the end of the war, he was definitely established in Rome. He continued to write for newspapers and magazines, lining up himself on a position of radical-liberalism: from 1948 he starded to collaborate with the “Corriere della Sera” and from 1949 to “Il Mondo”; then he worked for the theater and for the cinema and he was very embittered by the case lifted by his comedy “the ruler” written in 1952 and stopped by the theatrical censorship and that pulished letting it procede by a polemic writing, “Ritorno alla censura” Also his private life became difficulty for the separation from his wife and for the arrival of a serious illness: his activity was stopped by his death, happened at Torino during a surgical operation, the 25th September 1954.
Thematic
If Alvaro’s meridionalism is lyric and that of Silone is social, Brancati’s meridionalism is ironic and moralist. He represents the lazy and sleeply life of the Sicilian province, mainly assembling himself in the representation of the “male sexual vanity” and of the obsession of the woman and the eros. But the moralism is dissolved in a caricature after all that isn’t deprise of some adhesions and likings for its heroes. In this way, humor is transormed sometimes, in a bitter humor, allowing to glimpse an existential and psycological perspective and the Pirandello’s lesson: in this cases (for ex. in the “Bell’Antonio”) the author succeds in gathering the division of the personality of the mask, in the struggle between internal reality made of doubts and anguishes, and the necessity to conform to the small middle class conventions. Deepening this last line, in the incomplete novel “Paolo il caldo” the eros is separated from the comicity and the humor and it is introduced as a tragedy, as a dramatic obsession, acccompanying itself to the fear of the death and to the feeling of a life lived as waste, out of a rational order and of any possible happiness. The first book of the trilogies of the “male sexual vanity”, that imposed him to the attention of the criticism and that showed his positive qualities of narrator, was the novel “Don Giovanni in Sicilia” (1941). The separation form fascism had already happened, but, he didn’t have the courage as the resounding gesture, he preferred to follow the lines of his preceding novel, lowering the story in the lively provincial world. Formulating the psychology of his characters, all antiheroes and fancifuls, he expressed in this way a negative judgment about the fascist society. In a mocking and amused presentation of eye of the habits and of the characters of the Sicily, he presents us a burgeois society extremely distant from that wanted by the fascist ideology. The same “male sexual vanity”, that is one of the most important aspects of the novel and that starts the variations on this theme in the following two novels, has the precise meaning to contrast to the political vitalism of the leader in fascist uniform and black shirt, the most human vitality of a sensuality that, throught another way, ends to became an obsession (Lauretta).
In the “Bell’Antonio” (1949) the political theme and the erotic theme, more congenial to Brancati’s poetic, find the way to become wealthy, modifying and varying in a certain sense the usual themes of the erotism, of the male sexual vanity and of the sexual impotence. Because also in this pleasant novel the theme of the male sexual vanity is obsessive in the father of “Bell’Antonio” , a hot-tempered man, cocky for nature, if it is true that he has many natural children around, who at the end, during a bombardment, also being an old man of seventy years old, goes to die in the house of a poor prostitute, so that when he died saves the honour and the erotic dignity of his name. And it is obsessive also in Antonio, because it produces his melancholy, because of the anxiety for a sensual happiness of which he can’t enjoying. That the three main matrixes of his art and more congenial to him, that of the male sexual vanity, that of the poetics and that of the moralism, they meet here in a unitary way, giving a freshness and a dialogue vivacity to the narration, revived, besides by an ambivalent syntax derived from the dialect and the culture, it is a thing already put in light by the criticism. But what is important here, it is overall the fact that the Sicilian male sexual vanity isn’t anymore seen directed to itself, but it’s the sexual equivalent of the unrealistic vision and the political sexual vanity of the fascist, so that youth, sexual ability, virile vigor, political power result delightfully woven in a amused satire, but also controlled by Brancati’s morality who has known the shame and the nausea of the fascist regime.