When a friend gave me «The Count of Monte Cristo» as a gift, the first thing I did was check the number of pages: 1215, a brick! But, despite my doubts about whether I would be able to finish it, I ended up immersed in its complex but perfectly articulated plot, impregnated with very intense emotions that overwhelm you page after page.
Writing changes
As a storyteller, I was envious of Alexandre Dumas. He lived in the golden age of the serialized novel, when chapters were published months apart and narrators could afford endless digressions to entertain aristocratic female readers between installments.
Today we are obliged to comply with strict limits and to write in a fast and scenographic way. Since the advent of cinema, in fact, the narrator must disappear: the reader wants to be at the center of the scene without filters. Eugenio Corti called it «writing by images».
The birth of a masterpiece
Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870), son of a Napoleonic general of Haitian origin, is one of the giants of 19th century French literature. A prolific author (more than 300 works, including The Three Musketeers), he often worked with collaborators and was not very meticulous: there are many historical and geographical inaccuracies in his novels. But his narrative genius is unquestionable. The Count of Monte Cristo was published in installments between 1844 and 1846, inspired by the true story of François Picaud, a shoemaker unjustly imprisoned who later took revenge on his accusers.
The plot
Edmond Dantès, a young sailor from Marseille, is about to marry Mercedès when three men destroy his life: Danglars (who wants his job), Fernand (who wants Mercedès) and the magistrate Villefort (who sacrifices him to protect his Bonapartist father). Falsely accused of conspiracy, he is imprisoned for fourteen years in the castle of If.
There he meets Abbot Faria, also imprisoned, who passes on his immense knowledge and, before he dies, reveals to him the location of a treasure on the island of Montecristo. Dantès escapes, finds the treasure and returns to the world as a mysterious magnate to plot tremendous revenge.
It is not only the adventurous plot that makes this novel a masterpiece: it is the narrative architecture, similar to an octopus with a thousand tentacles, each of which extends freely into the sea, but which then wraps itself, along with the others, to captivate the reader little by little, squeezing him ever tighter and giving him the feeling, like one of Dantès' victims, of no longer understanding from where and how the righteous hand of God that the protagonist believes he represents has come.
Revenge as an exact science
Dantès does not simply want to kill his enemies: he wants to annihilate what is «life» for them (wealth for one, social position for another, family and reputation for yet another). And to do so, he moves like a spider in the center of a web he has woven for years, multiplying identities, wearing masks. He is, according to need, a Maltese count, an English lord, a priest, an adventurous sailor: each mask is perfect, studied, impenetrable.
However, at one point, something in him cracks. An innocent woman runs the risk of falling victim to his tremendous revenge mechanism and the Count realizes that he has gone too far. Doubt takes hold of him: is it justice or just blind revenge? Yes, because revenge, like «luck», has no eyes. And if luck smiles on those who do not deserve it, revenge does not forgive those who are not at fault.
Therefore, Dantès, who previously did not seem to doubt that the faults of the fathers must also fall on the children, wonders if he was really an instrument of Providence, as he had convinced himself, or simply a man devoured by obsession.
Waiting and waiting
The bitter reflection of the protagonist, embodied in a letter written to a friend, leads to the awareness of having lost his innocence, not because of what he has suffered, precisely innocently, but because of what he has made suffer voluntarily. However, it concludes with a desire that is also a recovered identity: «to wait and wait», «attendre et espérer».
It is the confession of a man who has spent years plotting revenge, who has always acted instead of waiting, who has sought justice with his own hands instead of waiting, but who realizes that perhaps he has been wrong. If, as he himself admits, only those who have known extreme unhappiness can taste true happiness, it is also true that, as is evident from the story, that happiness can only be given and received, not conquered with a thousand and one subterfuges.
This also made me think of a beautiful metaphor by Friedrich Nietzsche: the three metamorphoses of the spirit, described in Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Nietzsche distinguishes three transformations performed by man:
The camel that travels through the desert identifies the spirit burdened with the weight of the values received or the burdens imposed by others or by the tradition and morality to which it is subjected: «I must».
The lion is the rebellion, the spirit that says «I want» and no longer «I must». In this phase there is negative freedom, rejection: the lion destroys, fights, conquers its freedom through the negation of what it was before and of those who made it so.
The child represents innocence recovered, the ability to create new values spontaneously: «I am». It is to say «yes» to life without resentment, without submission or regret, believing freely, playing, living in the present.
Edmond Dantès and Joseph
While reading «The Count of Monte Cristo», I was struck by a strange similarity between Edmond Dantès and Joseph, the biblical patriarch thrown into a well and sold by his brothers.
Both were victims of great injustice; both were imprisoned for years (Dantès in the castle of If, Joseph in the Egyptian prisons); both were betrayed by those who should have loved or respected them; both, once out of prison, find themselves in a position to do good to themselves and others, endowed with unthinkable power and resources. However, they choose opposite paths.
Dantès lives for revenge. He multiplies identities, disguises himself, puts on masks. His «home» is not a home (in fact, he constantly changes it!), he lives in exile from a curse that grips him, from the rancor that haunts him and inhabits every palace he conquers. He lives only to destroy those who have harmed him. And above all, he is no longer himself, Edmond, but always someone else.
Giuseppe, on the other hand, finds himself for a moment in the skin of another (which is not his denial, but an evolution of himself). And when his brothers, having arrived in Egypt, do not recognize him, he is faced with a choice: to take revenge or to help them? In the end, he decides to remain himself, realizing that living to curse is just a waste of time, a waste of «vital energy», as we would say today.
When he finally reveals himself to his brothers, Joseph weeps. Not out of anger, but out of recognition. And he utters a phrase that changes everything: «You thought evil against me, but God turned it to good» (Gen 50:20). It is not naivety or weakness, but the awareness that everything contributes to good, and not in a «magical» way, but when one chooses to guard one's own good, one's own mental health, the desire to bless oneself and others, to be a blessing and not a curse.
Where we really live
«Home,» then, is not Monte Cristo or Paris, not Israel or Egypt, but that place - interior or physical - where we need no disguises or trappings, where all the things we love, are, believe and desire stop fighting each other. The place where we can say: «I belong. I am home». And «home» is also where we stop living to curse and go back to living to bless, first and foremost ourselves.
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