The jettatore in literature: from Gautier to Pirandello
Théophile Gautier's Paul d'Aspremont and Pirandello's Chiàrchiaro: how literature has portrayed the jettatore, victim of other people's gazes.
The figure of the jettatore has fascinated writers for a precise reason: he is a character at once tragic and comic, condemned by a quality he did not choose. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries two very different authors, the Frenchman Théophile Gautier and the Sicilian Luigi Pirandello, made him the protagonist of memorable stories, showing two opposite ways of approaching the same belief and its consequences on a man's life.
Gautier and the traveller in Naples
In 1856 Théophile Gautier published in instalments a story set in Naples, later known by the title Jettatura. The protagonist, the young Frenchman Paul d'Aspremont, arrives in the city to join his English fiancée, Alicia Ward. Little by little he notices that people avoid him and make the horns as he passes, and that small and large accidents multiply around him. A Neapolitan rival ends up openly accusing him of being a jettatore.
The story moves towards a dark ending. Paul becomes convinced of his own guilt and, in an attempt to protect Alicia, whose health is declining, commits an extreme act against his own eyes. Gautier, drawn to the fantastic, leaves open the question of whether jettatura is real, but he describes with precision the Naples of the travellers, with its coral amulets, its warding gestures and its widespread obsession with the gaze.
Pirandello and the licence
Of the opposite kind is Luigi Pirandello's novella La patente, The Licence, published in 1911 and later turned by the author himself into a one-act play. The protagonist, Rosario Chiàrchiaro, is held by everyone to be a jettatore and for this reason has lost his job and the means to support his family. Instead of defending himself against the accusation, he goes to the judge with a paradoxical request: he wants his quality as a jettatore to be officially recognised.
Chiàrchiaro has prepared himself carefully, adopting the conventional appearance of the jettatore, with large spectacles and lugubrious clothes. His reasoning is lucid: if society has condemned him, he may as well profit from it, by getting paid not to appear in front of gambling houses and shops. Collective prejudice thus becomes a profession, and the comedy of the situation lets a bitter social criticism emerge.
Two views of the same belief
Gautier and Pirandello look at the jettatore from different angles. The first, a romantic traveller, is seduced by mystery and lets the supernatural hover over the story; the second, with first-hand knowledge of provincial Sicilian life, shifts attention from magic to the social effects of the label. In both cases, however, the real harmful force seems to lie not in the jettatore's eyes, but in the gazes of those who surround and judge him.
These texts are valuable reading today for anyone studying the history of the evil eye. They tell from the inside the experience of being regarded as a bearer of misfortune and show that behind an apparently harmless belief lie exclusion, fear and loneliness. In this sense literature anticipated many reflections that anthropologists would develop later, when the study of popular beliefs opened up to its social dimension.