ABSTRACT: A long interview with the writer, who hasn't yet decided which Parliament he will choose, the Italian or the European one. His work "is writing", but "in certain moments..."

He judges the current Europe to be "conservative", but he thinks the elections have put an end to the revolution of 1968, which had generated "terrorism on the one hand and the nouveaux philosophes" on the other. He doesn't mind the fact that the communists are no longer revolutionaries, but he would like them to say so clearly. He fears a Europe dominated by the Germans, he advocates the "advent of a little poverty", "the acceptance, the idea of poverty..." the poverty of that Franciscanism for which the Church "has survived in the human soul, not as an institution". This "Franciscan line" he would like for the left, which must once and for all relinquish "the name and the doctrine of power". In other words, what is necessary is "the reinvention of the left". He rejects the accusations of feeling "mistrust" for the State; on the contrary, he wants a "strong" State, "strong in the law, in the moral capacity..." It is true that the name of Moro (1) has disappeared from elections which "seemed to be held in hi

s memory", but he believes Moro would not have changed much in the DC's policy. What the DC needs is a strong PCI, complementary to it. Moro "cheated everyone by not wanting to die", and this has become a "huge political event". The PCI hasn't understood the Moro affair, "and in so doing has cut its own throat".

(LA STAMPA, 14 June 1979)

Elected at the Italian Chamber of Deputies and at the European Parliament, Sciascia still hasn't decided which to choose. He is tired of these endless train journeys, but one senses he prefers the European parliament. "During life, one should feel more sorry for what he has hasn't done than for what he has done. Lampedusa (2) once said something about the sin of doing: but I am and remain a sinner, I try to do".

In his snug office at Sellerio, the blinds shut out the heat. The room is in a quiet semidarkness. There really is something grotesque about Sciascia. Something lazy, which occasionally brightens up with attention, like his Candido Munaf̣. "It's easy to cross this border between page and reality, and the temptation is always too strong for me. My activity is and remains writing, but in certain moments it takes a more direct and even risky testimony".

Q: The only problem is that the result is an incredible contradiction with your statements when you resigned as local councillor in Palermo, causing a scandal.

A: Obviously. But I accept this contradiction; it is a conscious, voluntary choice, out of an exasperated sense of duty. I had reasons enough to drop out: my health, the desire to write, the fact that I prefer living in the country than in the city. But I felt this would have meant retracting, withdrawing in the face of things which I felt necessary in any case.

Q: But this way you end up in a Europe where just about everything has been mobilized: from Charlemagne's rhetoric, to the legend according to which we vote more than the others and thus show we are the best.

Q: I feel closer to the positions of Sartre and of the Committee against the German-U.S. hegemony than to this Europeanist idyll, cultivated with fascinating grace by the press and the TV. I am not familiar with assemblies; I know the reality of these things is much uglier than the one we imagine; but I still believe we must try. I don't agree with the Committee when it encouraged an electoral boycott; if anything, the way to boycott is participating, going there.

Q: Gorresio says the result is a bourgeois Europe, Cavallari says it is a moderate Europe. What sort of Europe do you think it is?

A: It is a conservative Europe, which contains in itself the problem of the crisis of the parties of the left. As I was traveling on the train yesterday, an image came to my mind: a faulty clock never tells the right time, but a clock that stops twice a day tells the right time. And the electors ultimately resort to that stopped clock.

Q: Some have interpreted Sunday's vote as the tombstone placed on the flags of the May revolution, and on the imagination which was to come into power.

Q: The problem is whether '68 could have been interpreted as the triumph of the illusions or of the deceptions. In my opinion, it was a phenomenon that generated terrorism on the one hand and the nouveaux philosophes on the other. On the one hand, deceptions that closely resemble despair, on the other a more reasonable deception. The events of 1968 proved that the revolutions were no longer possible. That doing them could have meant a defeat from the beginning.

Q: But you, professor, just said that there are moments in which it is necessary to risk.

A: Certainly. But today's reasonableness, the reasonableness of deception, consists in choosing nonviolence instead of violence. Being a man who uses images and imagination more than theory, I see a sort of watershed between what was before and what came after, in an episode of '68, which the prefect of Paris described in his book. He says the students were on the other side of the Pont St. Michel, like a wall ready to attack, and he deployed the police on this side of the bridge. And he thought: if the students cross the bridge, it will be a revolution. But the students didn't cross the bridge, because they weren't supported by the PCF. That is the historical moment that marks the end of the revolutions. From that moment on, the communist parties ceased being revolutionary.

Q: Is it the lucid opinion of the politician, or is it also the anger of the man of the left?

A: No, my resentment lies in the fact that the communist parties have no longer been, and aren't, revolutionary; it lies in the acknowledgment that they still haven't decided to say so, that they refuse to acknowledge that fact. A socialdemocratic communist party is fine with me, provided it clearly states so.

Q: This leads us straight back to that Europe which Sciascia-Candido views more and more like an orphanage: the orphans of De Gaulle, the orphans of Franco, the orphans of Salazar, the orphans of the communist party. In this Europe, Candido says only the Germans have a father, even if the father is a spectre.

Q: Yes, the spectre of Nazism. Perhaps we project the surplus of our fears, of our frightful experiences, on the Germans. But the fact is they are really frightening. I've just come back from a trip on the train, from Paris to Amsterdam and then home. I crossed two borders: Belgium and Holland, without even realizing it; but when I crossed the German border I really noticed it. These policemen in groups of three, with their guns that banged against the walls of the train, they were kind. They didn't even ask for documents, they simply looked at you, and you could hear the noise of their guns on the walls. One does feels a shiver.

Q: Therefore: Europe dominated by the Germans, and behind it the spectres of our conscience, and the power of the U.S. and the great capital without a homeland. But is it enough?

A: The myth of the revolutions is coming to an end. Therefore, some other myth, some other utopia, must necessarily arise. The myth of the violent revolution is ending.

Q: Candido-Sciascia confessed that something is about to end and something is about to begin in Europe: and that he liked to see that which must finish finish. But he doesn't mention that which must start.

A: I advocate the advent of a bit of poverty, and I hope everything starts from there. From the acceptance, the idea of poverty. Clearly, I'm not talking about the poverty the poor have experienced: I'm talking about poverty as a vocation. It is a bit like the opposition between the two major factions of the Church, Dominicanism and Franciscanism. The Church survived after all in the human heart, not as an institution, more thanks to the Franciscan line than to the Dominican one.

Q: Could you explain that in simpler words?

A: You see, I would like the left to find a sort of Franciscan line, which should abandon the Dominican one, the name and the doctrine of power. For example, I think the left is dead if it favours nuclear energy; a vital, promising left must oppose the nuclear holocaust.

Q: Is there a historical root or origin to this Dominican choice?

A: I think everything happened in Russia. Perhaps even before Stalin; but in any case, it is Stalin who marked this process, and brands the history that followed in the struggle for a real democracy.

Q: The PCI's official statements, after the result of these two Sundays, show a change, they speak about a new relation between the social and the political sphere, they tend to break the interpretative schemes according to which the radicals, were the worst kind of fascists.

A: It is a sorry thing that they are acknowledging it only after the defeat. The point is that it's time to do away with tactics and strategies, with the Stalinism of practice and the anti-Stalinism of theory, and return to the hope of the people.

Q: What does this mean in practice?

A: The history that awaits us is the reinvention of the left. I'm not saying this reinvention is certain; what I'm saying is we need to try, we mustn't abandon hope.

Q: This leads us back to your mistrust toward the State, to the distinction between State and society.

A: I have no mistrust toward the State. At the time of his controversy on the cowardice of the intellectual ("Neither with the State, nor with the Red Brigades" (3)) Calvino (4) recalled in an interview that my books reveal a kind of yearning for the State, and that my being "against the State" should be seen as a deception, not as an aversion. It's only natural that I, coming from the remotest part of Sicily, yearn for a democratic, strong State.

Q: What do you mean by "strong"?

A: Nothing to do with repression. Rather, a State which is strong in the law, in the moral capacity to uphold the law toward all citizens. A State which manages not to privilege anyone.

Q: Nonetheless, it seems to me that the reality in which Europe is moving today is, in Sciascia's analysis, a pendulum between the Germanization on the one hand and a Sicilianization on the other.

A: In fact, these could be the two combined and crucial factors for our hope...

Q: But does the writer and the deputy Sciascia have such hope?

A: There is a hope subdued by skepticism. A healthy mitigation, because without skepticism, hope could become fanaticism. The share of hope is in any case greater than the skepticism. Skepticism has a secondary role: like typewriting, and leaving a space for possible corrections.

Q: Moro's name has disappeared from these elections, which seemed to be held in his memory.

A: Moro wouldn't have changed much in the DC's policy. I think Moro had in mind for the communists the same trap he had used for the socialists. It could be a matter of time, and perhaps he would have destroyed them even more, with better results. But I think the DC was to return in any case to this current policy, because there is too much of a mirror-like relation between the DC and the PCI, as a result of which they can't get close without both falling. They should always keep a certain distance, and they should increase this distance during the period of the elections. Without a strong PCI there wouldn't be a strong DC.

Q: But the DC still remains the party of majority.

A: It is the welfare-like criterion which has administered the power that makes it strong, that gives it this privilege. There is a vast part of the population that ranges from that which was once called lumpenproletariat to the entire State and local bureaucracy, that gets along fine with the DC. Because it belongs to a criterion, which should have been normal in an Italian Catholic party: i.e. the only criterion that a Catholic could adopt was that of transforming Christian charity into State welfare.

Q: And Moro said this too, but then they said he said other things as well.

A: His choices lived only in a mental reservation, not in the more or less posthumous articles or interviews. The sanctification which has been made of him has had disastrous results. Moro cheated them all by not wanting to die, and this has become a huge political fact, with major repercussions. I can even imagine that the United States considered our country as lost. Lost in its terms, I mean. And it was instead comforted by the government's reluctance to give in to the terrorists' exchange. It then recovered a certain confidence in this Italian State, thanks to it readmitted it entirely into its area. If this imagination corresponded to the truth, the communists have cut their own throat by supporting the line of inflexibility.

Q: If I have correctly understood, this means making a distinction between regime and State.

A: Certainly. There is a distinction between moral conscience and institution, between ethic principle and biased manoeuvre or interest.

Q: And now? Formulas are already being discussed for the new government.

A: A lay government, endorsed by the parties of the left, would be a major event. If, instead, the DC also endorses it, this would mean a return to that humanism which has so far been a swindle.

(La Stampa, 14 June 1979, interview edited by Mimmo Candito)

Translator's notes

(1) MORO ALDO. (Maglie 1916 - Roma 1978). Italian politician. Secretary of the Christian Democratic Party (1959-65), mastermind of the Centre-Left policy. Several times minister as of 1956, Prime Minister (1963-68, 1974-76) president of the Christian Democratic Party as of 1956, he favoured the participation of the Communist Party (PCI) in the government, outlining the hypothesis of a so-called "third stage" (after those of "centrism" and "centre-left") of the political system. He was kidnapped by the Red Brigades on 16 March 1978 in Rome and found dead on 9 May of the same year.

(2) TOMASI DI LAMPEDUSA. (Palermo 1896 - Rome 1957). Italian writer, famous for his posthumous novel "Il Gattopardo", a fresco of the Sicilian aristocracy at the time of the Risorgimento. Also author of a collection of short stories (1961) and of "Lezioni su Stendhal" (1971).

(3) RED BRIGADES. (Known as BR). Clandestine terrorist organization of the extreme Left, born and operating in Italy as of 1969. By proclaiming the revolution of the working classes, the organization tried to open several fronts of armed revolt against the State and the political establishment, carrying out a series of attempts, wounding, kidnapping and assassinationg politicians, journalists, magistrates and industrial executives. Its leader was Renato Curcio. In 1978 the organization kidnapped and assassinated Aldo Moro.

(4) ITALO CALVINO. (Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba, 1923 - Siena 1985). Italian writer. After his neorealistic debut (Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, 1947), he wrote grotesque novels: Il visconte dimezzato (1952), Il barone rampante (1957), Il cavaliere inesistente (1959). Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore (1979).