Bread And Wine Ignazio Silone Pdf
Adah
See comments at end for addition from internet readers.Just a few months ago I read and commented on Ignazio Silones novel FONTAMARA.In that novel he explored in detail the lives of peasants in the early 1930s rise ofFascism in Italy. Now in BREAD AND WINE Silone picks up the same theme in 1935, but this time the focus is more on the Communist resistance movement and views of the intellectual class.The novel centers around the character of Pietro Spina, a young revolutionary inhis early thirties who is being intensely hunted by the police so he takes on the disguise of an older priest and carries off this masquerade for the whole of the tale, as Don Paolo Spada. Spina/Spada is in the beginning a hard-line doctrinaire Communist. However, he is pushed to sign documents saying he is fully in support of some political issues inside Russia. This causes Spina to become disenchanted with the doctrinaire position and he has a terrible argument with a party boss in Rome who threatens to have him kicked out of the party. I found this confrontation to be quite enlightening:(the party boss) How can you dare call our condemnation of Bukharin and the other traitors conformism? Are you mad?
Its conformism to always be with the majority, said Pietro. Dont youthink so? You were with Bukharin as long as the majority was with him; and youd still be with him if he had a majority now. But how can we fight Fascist conformism if were going to give up our critical faculties? Try and answer me that.
Dont you think Bukharin was a traitor?
To tell the truth, I dont know, said Pietro. I only know that right now hes in the minority. And I know that you dare to oppose him only because of that. Answer me this if you can. Would you be against him if he had a majority?
Your cynicism is getting to be just a bit too much! Said Battipaglia, trying to keep his temper.
You havent answered my question. Answer it truthfully if you can.
If it were up to me, Id have you thrown out of the party right now!But Pietro remains within the party for the rest of the novel, albeit uncomfortably so.However, he meets a young violin player who has fled the party and who tries to convince Pietro that he should as well. In talking about the coming Communist utopia Uliva and Pietro have this exchange:Dont be fooled by appearances, said Pietro. The strength of a dictatorship is muscular, not spiritual.
Youre right, said Uliva. Theres something cadaverous about it. It hasnt been a movement for a long time, not even a Vendee-type movement, but just a bureaucracy. But what sort of opposition is there? What are you? A future bureaucracy. You aspire to totalitarian power, too, but in the name of different ideas, which means just different words, and for different interests. If you people win and probably youll be unlucky enough to win, well just go from one tyranny to another.
You live on hallucinations, said Pietro, How can you condemn the future?
Our future is other countries pasts, said Uliva. Yes, I dont deny that theyll be technical and economic changes. Just as now we have state railway and the state quinine, salt, matches and tobacco, so then well have state bread, state peas and potatoes. Will that be technical progress? Lets admit that it would be. But this technical progress will be an opening wedge for a compulsory official doctrine, for a totalitarian orthodoxy which will use all means, from the movies to terrorism, to stamp out any heresy and tyrannize individual thought. The present black inquisition will be followed by a red inquisition. Therell be red censorship instead of the present one, and red deportations will take the place of the ones we have now and the most favored victims will be dissident revolutionaries. In the same way, just as the present bureaucracy identifies itself the fatherland and exterminates every opponent, denouncing him as a hireling of the foreigners, your future bureaucracy will identify itself with labor and Socialism and will persecute anyone who continues to think with his own head as a prized agent of big landowners and the industrialists.Pietro struggles with this position throughout the novel and is neither caught in the doctrinaire position of the party boss above, nor as liberated from Communist theory asUliva, the violinist.His position is perhaps best described in his view of freedom:Freedom is not something you get as a present, said Pietro. You can livein a dictatorship and be free on one condition: that you fight the dictatorship. The man who thinks with is own mind and keeps it uncorrupted is free. The man who fights for what he thinks is right is free. But you can live in the most democratic country on earth, and if youre lazy, obtuse or servile within yourself, youre not free. Even without any violent coercion, youre a slave. You cant beg your freedom from someone. You have to seize it everyone as much as he can.But this is an historical novel and the fact is that this period of 1935 is a period when the Communists are losing the state of Italy to the dictatorship of the Fascists, and Pietro is fighting a losing battle, a last ditch stand. In the end he is forced, just as the author Ignazio Silone himself was, to flee into exile in order to keep up the battle from a far.In addition to the message of struggle and self-responsibility (even within the party for Pietro), there is the title: BREAD AND WINE. The image runs throughout the novel and is an image of the unity necessary, the force in numbers and unity that dominates the view of Pietros resistance. Bread and wine are the unity of two equal and united things. He is forever dipping black bread into red wine to make his food of choice just as he struggles always to unite equal people in the life-giving struggle against Fascism. Unlike Uliva, Pietro gives less attention toward exactly what it is hes fighting for; his struggle is much more one against the rise of Fascism.The novel is written with power and great sensitivity toward characters. So many of them breathe with such real vibrancy and life that we feel we know them and would recognize them were they to walk into the room. Even though the novel is heavily about the battle of ideas in this struggle against Fascism, like FONTAMARA, much of it is set in the countryside and once again Silone demonstrates his deep understanding of the hardships of rural life in the time of deep depression and deprivation.This is no happy book. One knows the historical outcome and Silone doesnt hide its coming in any way. We can feel the powerlessness of the people as the black time of Mussolini sweeps away the opposition. The bulk of rural people think all this talk of resistance is just pure stupidity. Life gives one what it gives; the issue is to bear it as best one can. The resistors like Pietro, the party boss, Uliva and others are concepts which, while they dominate this novel, are quite strange and incomprehensible to the simple peasants amidst whom most of the action takes place.Ignazio Silone is a writer of great power, style and sensitivity. I look forward to reading more of his work and commend him to anyone willing to be informed and challenged on this period of Italian history.
----------------------Note sent to me July 31, 2003.
From: Andy Griswold I was researching the works of Ignazio Silone on the Internet when I cameacross your commentary on the novel Bread and Wine, which has been a favoritework of mine for many years.I enjoyed your comments but there is something very central to the novel whichis missing in your analysis. The central image of bread and wine which runsthroughout the novel is more than simply a symbol of unity. It is a symbol ofthe Eucharist, the saving power of Jesus Christ. Pietro is masquerading as apriest. He never expected to take on this disguise when he returned to Italy,but under the circumstances of his hiding, he begins to recall his secondaryeducation in a religious school. We meet Pietro's school mentor, the oldpriest Don Benedetto, at the begining of the novel. Pietro's journey in thenovel is from the doctrinaire positions of the party back toward his earlyyouthful idealism, which was informed by something more than a simplymaterialistic vision. At first quite uncomfortable in his assumed role, he in asense grows into the character of Don Paolo, and becomes in some ways a moreauthentic representation of Christ than some of the dry functionaries of theChurch which the novel once or twice presents to us.I read this novel as a college student twenty years ago, and then again aftermy conversion to Catholicism in 2000. The breadth and depth of the religiousimagery, and subtle commentary on the source and uses of the truth, weresuddenly made apparent to my "new sight" the second time I read Bread And Wine,and I saw many allusions and images that I had missed as a secularundergraduate. This work remains one of my favorites, especially for itsunderstated, ironic tone. It will always have a special place in my bookshelfand I would recommend it to anyone who is exploring the dimensions of theCatholic faith.Best Regards,Andy Griswold
Parish Operations Manager
St. Paul Parish
Cambridge, MA
A second addition from a reader:John Bingham writes on Feb. 10, 2004Thanks for your internet notes on Ignazio Silone and his works, which I and my students found useful.Might I suggest, however, that you amend your comments to consider the revelations that have come out of Italian archives over the last 8 years or so? Extensive documentation has shown *without doubt* that Silone was an informer of enormous importance to the Italian political and then Fascist secret police, without a break from 1919-1930. Although I still teach his novels in my undergraduate classes, and find them sublime works of art as well as lucid commentaries on the national and international politics of the left in the 1920s and '30s, there is simply no possibility of this information not affecting how these novels are read today.Best wishes,John Bingham, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
History Department
Dalhousie University
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