PLANIFICACIÓN INTERMEDIA (LOOKAHEAD PLANNING)

Both George Eliot and Giovanni Verga have left us some important testimonies of their theoretical ideas about art and how a work o f art should be conceived. These will help us to understand what aim they wanted to achieve when they wrote their novels, and to what extent we can talk o f them as realist writers.

In chapter XVII o f Adam Bede George Eliot makes a profession o f Realism; she writes

...my strongest effort is to avoid any such arbitrary picture, and to give no more than a faithful account o f men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness - box narrating my experience on oath. ^

It is obvious from this statement that George Eliot’s aim as a novelist was to give a faithful picture o f life. After reading this passage one expects her novels to represent life as it is, the images o f the mirror and o f the witness placed on oath being explicit and, what is more, typical o f realistic literature. Later in the same chapter o f Adam Bede, she writes that she is narrating a ‘simple story’,'* and that she does not want to ‘make seem things better than they were’.^ She shows admiration for Dutch paintings because they faithftilly represent

...a monotonous homely existence, which has been the faith o f so many more among my fellow mortals than a life o f pomp or o f absolute indigence, o f tragic suffering or o f world - stirring actions.*^

This says a lot about the subjects o f her novels; she dealt with everyday life and with ordinary people without trying to make them more interesting than they were. About the Reverend Amos Barton she writes that he was

...in no respect an ideal or exceptional character...a man who was very far from remarkable; a man whose virtues were not heroic, and who had no

" ibid., p.267 ^ ibid.

undetected crime within his breast; who had not the slightest mysteiy hanging about him, but was palpably and unmistakably common place...'

Thus, George Eliot wanted her reader to become accustomed with commonplace events and characters; in her novels she wanted

...to show the gradual action o f ordinary causes rather than exceptional, and to show this in some directions which have not been from time immemorial the beaten path. ®

In The Natural Histoi~v o f German Life^ George Eliot complains about the lack o f a truthful representation o f ordinary life in English literature, about the fact that peasants were in the best cases placed in the foreground o f the pictures and were depicted in rather and idyllic way. She demands a tmthful representation o f them based on actual acquaintance. George Heniy Lewes in his On Realism in Art accuses painters of falseness when representing peasants; they were never portrayed ‘old and dirty’ as they were, but always with ‘regular features and irreproachable linen’.’* He states that the forms of ordinary life were misrepresented, and this was an offence; if an artist wanted to paint ’ G. Eliot, ‘The Sad Fortunes of Reverend Amos Barton’, in G. Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life. Ed. D. Lodge, London: Penguin Books, 1985. p. 80

^ G. Eliot, ‘Letter to John Blackwood, 24 July 1871’. in The George Eliot Letters. Ed. G.S. Haight, vol. V. London: Oxford University Press, 1956. p. 168

^ G. Eliot, The Natural Histoiy of German Life’, in Essavs of George Eliot. Ed. T. Pinney, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963

G.H. Lewes. ‘On Realism in Art’, in Realism. Ed. L.R. Furst, London & New York: Longman, 1992. p. 34

peasants he had to paint them as they were, and if a novelist made them speak, he had to make them speak in the idiom o f their class.

The beginning o f the novella L’Amante di Gramigna gives a clear idea o f Verga’s aims as a writer. He describes his novel as a ‘human document’,'^ he maintains that he is going to narrate the fact as it really happened, so that the reader will not find it vitiated by the authorial filter. He writes that

The simple human fact will always provide food for thought; it will always be effective because it has really happened, because the tears narrated are true, the fevers and the sensations have really been felt...*^

Also in his preface to I Malavoglia *"* Verga points out that the novel is a ‘sincere and dispassionate study’. H e furthermore gives some thematical indications; he explains that it is concerned with the ‘most modest and material’**’ context. He writes that the mechanism o f the passions

'* ibid.

G. Verga, ‘L’Amante di Gramigna’, in G. Verga, Tutte le Novelle, Ed. C. Riccardi, Milano; Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1991, p. 191. The Italian original is; ‘documento umano’

ibid. The Italian original is: ‘II semplice fatto umano farà pensare sempre; avrà sempre 1’ efficacia dell’essere stato, delle lagrime vere, delle febbri e delle sensazioni che sono passate per la carne . .’

Tills novel has been translated into English with the title The House by the Medlar Tree

G. Verga, I Malavoglia. Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1991. p. 3. The Italian original is: To studio