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Stories of the Mafia
Between myth and reality |
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| 13/12/2012 |
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The first part of the conference The Mafias and Us took place today at Courmayeur’s Centro Congressi. This year’s chosen theme began with an exceptional introduction: an interview by Corrado Augias on the television show Babele, from January 12, 1992, with a very special guest: Giovanni Falcone. The interview is invaluable not only because it took place shortly before the explosion that took the lives of the judge, his wife and their bodyguards, but also for its content (also transcribed in the Festival catalogue). On that occasion, among the many other things he said with much bitterness, Falcone referred to the Mafia’s manipulation of universally recognized values, which in a tragic game of mirrors is what makes the Mafia so “fascinating.”
Moderated by Gaetano Savatteri, the discussion began with this fascination and the ability to manipulate words like “honor,” “protection” and “solidarity.” The Sicilian journalist and author asked the participants (whose biographies you can see here) a series of leading questions: “Why is the Mafia so fascinating? And why in Mafia stories are there always contrasting emotions between the story’s passion and embarrassment over what to say?”
Historian Salvatore Lupo immediately swept away the cliché about the Mafia being part of Mediterranean culture, and for this reason able to enthrall and strike the imagination of narrators and, more generally, those who are in direct contact with it. This simplification does not take into account the Mafia’s power to fabricate and instrumentalize noble codes, such as honor, in order to intimidate and subjugate civil society. This manipulation even works on the mafiosos themselves, who are convinced that the codes are real. The fabrication goes so far as to create a fictional image that tends towards omnipotence, such as, for example, that WWII was won in Italy thanks to a decisive role played by the Mafia.
The gap between reality and stories about reality was at the center of the discussion begun by Lupo (who also pointed out certain examples in literature and film that have misrepresented mafioso’s actions) and continued by Chief Prosecutor of the Anti-Mafia Bureau, Pietro Grasso. Since the 19th century, the Mafia has used macabre symbols to intimidate, force people to follow the code of omertà and control anyone who opposes them. However, for Grasso this symbolism has become obsolete today, it is no longer used because the Mafia has adapted to or taken possession of, depending on one’s point of view, modern communication tools, including television, cinema and even the Internet. We must therefore beware those representations that turn criminal actions into spectacle and mythologize the Mafia, following stereotypes that overwhelmingly become part of the collective imagination and lower a society’s immune defenses.
Grasso and Lupo’s sentiments were echoed by the participating writers, who certainly must face reality but who in the creative process must also take their distance from it. For this year’s Chandler Award winner, Don Winslow, The Godfather can without a doubt be seen a romantic film, and even as a remake of sorts of Shakespeare’s Henry IV. Nevertheless, that does not change the fact that a TV series like The Sopranos showed a different side of the Mafia. In any case, the American writer maintains that an artist cannot be asked, in the name of a moral principle, to not consider the point of view of his or her characters, be they everyday people, detectives or, in fact, mafiosos. It is in the novelist’s nature to take on the various identities described in a novel, and it is in recreating reality that art reveals a deep truth.
Andrea Purgatori asserted that it was urgent for authors and screenwriters to tell stories that are based in reality yet distinct from the needs of judges to produce elements for the tribunals and of journalists to report the results of investigations. Everyone must contend with his or her own abilities. Patrick Fogli, however, thinks that writers must face the fact that the Mafia depicted in the TV series La piovra no longer exists. Which is why it is important to familiarize one’s self with the new tools of organized crime.
Besides the many participants, other journalists and writers present also animated the first part of the conference. Perhaps tomorrow proceedings may pick up where a question from Élmer Mendoza left off: “Today if you ask ‘Who is the most important Italian writer?’, most people will say Roberto Saviano. Whatever happened to Italo Calvino, Alberto Moravia and Leonardo Sciascia? Artists who through their imagination depicted and made us discover the world in which we live.”
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