"Under every dictatorship," he said, "one man, one perfectly ordinary little man who goes on thinking with his own brain is a threat to public order. Tons of printed paper spread the slogans of the regime; thousands of loudspeakers, hundreds of thousands of posters and freely distributed leaflets, whole armies of speakers in all the squares and at all the crossroads, thousands of priests in the pulpit repeat these slogans ad nauseam, to the point of collective stupefaction. But it's sufficient for one little man, just one ordinary, little man to say no, and the whole of that formidable granite order is imperiled."
Ignazio Silone, Bread and Wine
Memory is a strange thing. I have this clear memory of my friend Bill and I sit in the Brannigan Room at our fraternity at Franklin College. We were both reading the same book, Ignazio Silone's Bread and Wine. It my memory I was about a half-hour ahead of Bill, as we pushed to finish the novel. It must have been a requirement in some interdisciplinary class, maybe the only one we ever took together. A side note: it's funny how Champlain always sold our interdisciplinary core as a revolutionary creation when I was taking classes in an interdisciplinary core in the late 1970s (although that's a question for another day). In my memory I finished the book, was disgusted by the ending, and threw the book across the room. A half-hour later, again, in my memory, Bill reached the same conclusion and fired the book across the room as well. Recently, I mentioned this to him during a Zoom chat, and he had absolutely no memory of it at all. So, he could have just forgotten it - or it could have been another friend - or, more likely, it never happened. I mean, this is the same time and place that gave rise to my famous/infamous Halloween Killer story, which has haunted/amused generations of students, but which I always have to admit to them might never have happened either. The last paragraph recounts the almost certain demise of Cristina, the lover, at least potentially, of Pietro Spina/Paolo Spada. She climbs up into the mountains to find Pietro/Paolo, who is fleeing the Fascists. Here is the last paragraph:
Eventually a voice in the distance answered her, but it was not a human voice. It was like the howling of a dog, but it was sharper and more prolonged. Cristina probably recognized it. It was the howl of a wolf. The howl of prey. The summons to other wolves scattered about the mountain. The invitation to the feast. Through the driving snow and the darkness of approaching night Cristina saw a wild beast coming towards her, quickly appearing and disappearing in the dips and rises in the snow. She saw others appear in the distance. She knelt, closed her eyes, and made the sign of the cross.
Obviously, this is extraordinary, a fitting ending and a brilliant metaphor for the anti-Fascist core of the book - and, even more obviously, I was a moron as a freshman in college. Of course, I was already a passionate reader, and very well-read, as the first year moron, and yet I clearly missed the point pretty dramatically. In that sense, I guess it's not particularly surprising that my generally illiterate (not simply culturally, but actually in regards to reading as a basic skill) don't pick up the symbolism in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Of course, none of this may have ever happened.
What matters is that it's a great novel, and I highly recommend it. Interestingly, I'm planning on using parts of it in my Images of Fascism class this spring. I've just ordered Silone's Fontamara, the first novel of the Abruzzo Trilogy, of which Bread and Wine is the second work.
