22b
PARTISAN REVIEW
that,
in
effect, we have an extraordinary combination of a remarkable
faith in the ideal nature of the State and, in the name of this same
State, the most abysmal corruption.
Thus one does not so much "achieve" anything as "obtain" some–
thing. The rise of the parties and their activities in the south have
scarcely changed this situation. Instead of the government and its
agents or of local lords, it is now the parties and their representatives
who "promise" and "obtain." The memorial plate on the promenade
of a well-known Sicilian port is indicative of this attitude. Upon it is
inscribed this line: "Citizens, this magnificent promenade has been ob–
tained for you by the Honorable
." At the same time, the
ideality of the State has been taken over, in part at least, by the ideal–
ities or ideologies of the parties. As a friend said pointedly: "What
people in the south are voting for
is
neither parties nor concrete pro–
grams but types of paradise (that is, of the American, Russian or
heavenly variety)."
The lack of continuity between reality and ideality, the inability
to "achieve" or to "realize," leads in the world of
((la miseria"
to the
desire to flee the ugly reality of everyday life and to reach, by a magic
leap, the "other," the ideal side of existence. This desire to escape
expresses itself in a variety of ways. First there is the mind as an instru–
ment of escape. For the member of the middle class in the world of
((la
miseria,"
this mental escape takes on the permanent forms of an
abstract intellectualism and of a nauseating rhetoric. Freed by their
privileged position from the responsibility of returning to concrete reality,
they are satisfied to see the "ideal" world realized in the great examples
of the past, the poems of the Greeks and the heroic deeds of the Romans
with which they are more familiar than with the physical and social
world in which they live.
Then there are the strenuous attempts to flee one's class-attempts
grown more frequent since the contact with the outside world has in–
creased. The classical way to escape is to use education:
in
many a
peasant family sons were unable to marry until they were forty or even
older in order to permit one of them "to get an education" and become
a priest or a teacher. Another, and for the southern economy certainly
unfavorable, means of flight, is the land itself. Also, between the
peasant and his land there is often a lack of continuity: his attitude–
where he has a choice-is that of wanting to exploit rather than to
improve his land, so that in a sense the present hunger for land is,
among other things, an indication of an increased desire to flee the
land: one would like to have enough of it, and exploit it thoroughly
