The Long Journey: text analysis, plot and summary of the story by Leonardo Sciascia that deals with the theme of emigration.
Sciascia’s long journey
The phenomenon of emigration appears often in the narrative of Leonardo Sciascia , who very frequently recounted a phenomenon that affected Sicily and southern Italy in general for a long time, from the early twentieth century onwards.
The Long Journey is no exception , a story included in the collection The Sea, the Color of Wine , which talks about emigration to America, a land of opportunities for many Europeans – and not only – before and after the two wars.
The dream of America was overflowing with dollars: no longer the money, kept in the worn wallet or hidden between the shirt and the skin, but stuffed carelessly into the pockets of the trousers, as they had seen their relatives do, who had left dead of hunger, thin and baked by the sun; and after twenty or thirty years they returned, but for a short vacation, with their full and rosy faces that contrasted nicely with their white hair .
The long journey, plot
The story is set in a town in Sicily, between Gela and Licata , where a group of villagers are lured by a man who promises them passage on a steamship to reach America.
The characters in the story trust, but they do not know that their dream is destined to remain just that: the boat has only taken them out to sea to then disembark them at another point on the Sicilian coast. The hope of a new life will remain for all of them just an illusion.
The long journey, summary
The passage is divided into three broad descriptive parts: the departure, the journey and the landing .
The departure takes place during a dark night, in which it seems almost impossible to move, as if one could feel the weight of it. The world is presented by Sciascia as if it were an enemy.
At dawn, on a stretch of stony and arid beach, between Gela and Licata, a group of emigrants, who left their villages far from the sea, wait for the arrival of the ship that is to take them far away. With them, only their cardboard suitcases and the bundles with their possessions inside.
Many of them fear the sea, because they are seeing it for the first time.
The man is described by Sciascia as a sort of traveling salesman with his gift of the gab but at the same time with a serious and honest face . The promise made to the men is to embark them at night and disembark them later on the beach of New Jersey (called Nugiorsi by the emigrants) a stone’s throw from New York ( Nuovaiorche ).
The man promises the emigrants that they will be able to write to their relatives in America , who will then be able to wait for them at the Trenton station twelve days after departure: “The only important thing was to disembark in America, how and when was of no importance.”
After crossing the great “dark sea”, the emigrants will land at the American “stori” (store) and “farme” (farm) and thus reunite with their relatives.
The journey costs 250,000 lire , half of which must be handed over upon departure and half upon arrival.
The emigrants jealously guard the money between their skin and their shirt. To collect it they have sold the most precious things: the house, the mule, the donkey, the year’s provisions, the linen chest (canterano), the blankets.
Others have instead resorted to loan sharks , with the secret intention of not paying them back, thus taking personal revenge after years of abuse.
It is eleven o’clock when one of them lights a flashlight, giving the signal for departure. The emigrants find themselves in front of Mr. Melfa, the impresario of their adventure , who, before leaving, requires the emigrants to hand over the entire agreed sum of money.
The emigrants swear and get on the boat. Sciascia says: “and suddenly each of the departing people became a shapeless mass, a confused bunch of luggage”. They all gather together in a compact way together with their luggage, “with the risk that a man or a bundle would overflow outside”.
Mr. Melfa doesn’t give importance to any of this: for him the difference between a man and a bundle is the money that only the former possesses.
After eleven difficult nights the journey ends: Mr. Melfa called the passengers on deck, introducing them to the countries of rich America that with their lights shine like jewels in the serene and sweet night : a half moon shines among a transparent set of clouds, a breeze that opens the lungs.
A passenger shows doubts and asks if that is really America and not another country.
Mr. Melfa looks at him with compassion and continues to speak, asking everyone if they have ever seen a horizon like that in their parts, if they don’t feel a different air, if they don’t see how these countries shine; everyone agrees and looks at the poor companion with compassion and resentment.
After settling the bill, each of them takes their things in a few minutes and gets off the boat laughing and singing; when the boat moves, one of them starts singing at the top of his lungs, but Mr. Melfa silences him so as not to take any risks.
So they sit on the sand, undecided, not knowing what to do, wondering how far Trenton is and how long it will take to get there. In the distance they hear in an unreal way a song that seems to be that of a Sicilian carter . Immediately they think that the world is the same everywhere: everywhere man manifests with his song the same melancholy, the same pain.
Two of the disembarked decide to go and discover the “New World” . They start walking in the direction of the light that the sky emanates, and they immediately find the road. They see that it is paved, well-kept, different from theirs, even if in truth they expected it to be wider and straighter.
In the street cars similar to theirs pass , six hundred and eleven hundred; they immediately think that in America they are kept on a whim and that they are bought from children like they do with bicycles in Sicily.
The long journey, analysis
The protagonists of the story are anonymous emigrants . The choice is not accidental, because Sciascia wants to represent with them the entire Sicilian people , made up of humble and poor farmers, deceived in their dreams of hope and improvement of their lives.
America is the embodiment of those dreams that naive and uneducated men see as a magnificent land of opportunity , but without having the tools to defend themselves from the crafty and dishonest in their own homeland .
The emigrants leave behind a land that Sciascia defines as “the arid land of the feud,” to reach the land of dreams, a space of abundance and light. The power of the images created by the stories about America of relatives abroad and of emigrants returning or visiting makes the story proceed in an unexpected direction.
During the journey, the emigrants glimpse the paradise land they dream of: from the boat the lights of the coastal cities of the United States shine in the breeze-softened night. But once they arrive, the environment seems similar to that of home. Despite this, the power of imagination and the need to keep hope alive are so strong that even familiar things grow or disappear, precisely because they are looked at through the defamiliarizing filter that adapts to their mythical idea of America.
Even when they read the names of Santa Croce Camerina on the road signs, even when they exchange a few words in Italian with a local resident and even when this man legitimately tells them to go to hell in response to their request for information on how to reach Trenton, the emigrants deny the reality of the facts. Only through memories does one of them realize that Santa Croce Camerina is a small town on the Sicilian coast where his father had found work many years before during a bad year in the countryside. Through this alternation of real and imaginary spaces, Sciascia openly denounces the illegal human trafficking that takes advantage of the naivety of ignorant farmers, plagued not only by desperation, but above all by a very strong sense of revenge against the injustice of the world, which ends up obscuring the real evaluation of reality.
