Paola Galli Mastrodonato, Emilio Salgari. The Tiger is still Alive!
Paola Galli Mastrodonato, Emilio Salgari. The Tiger is still Alive!, Vancouver/Madison/Teaneck/Wroxton, Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2024, 431 p. ISBN: 978-1-68393-408-0
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1Emilio Salgari, the renowned Italian adventure novelist whose books have been universally loved by several generations of his compatriots, while being ignored or devalued by literary and academic criticism, has had a fascinating and tragic life. His works, which have been reevaluated and analyzed in recent decades by a number of critics of mass culture, among whom the author of this book, have sold in the millions of copies in Italy and in Latin America. Still, they have been largely ignored in the Anglo-Saxon world, the “big void in Salgari’s reception and dissemination” (388). It is therefore excellent news that an Italian academic would choose to present to the English-speaking public the life and works of this truly extraordinary author, whose “magical pen” (366) deserves to be better known and appreciated, and whose plots seem to scream for Hollywood to adapt them.
- 1 Paola Galli Mastrodonato, “Il ‘caso’ Salgari e gli studi paraletterari in Italia”, Belphégor, vol. (...)
2Paola Galli Mastrodonato is certainly more than qualified to introduce Salgari to a new potential readership, having studied at length his considerable novelistic production in her own critical explorations. It should be remembered that the first issue of our journal, dated 2001, featured her article “Il ‘caso’ Salgari e gli studi paraletterari in Italia”, discussing the novelist’s position within Italian letters and the development of “paraliterary studies”, as they were then commonly called, in the Peninsula1.
3Since then, concurrently with her own ongoing research, Salgari studies have grown and developed considerably under the influence of critics such as Felice Pozzo, Claudio Gallo or Luciano Curreri, among others. Galli Mastrodonato does refer to this growing body of research, but it is rather striking to see the extent to which she appears to consider most of it entirely lacking. With few exceptions, critical articles or positionings are mentioned only to highlight their glaring insufficiency, and it is not rare to find very stern judgments about some “snobbishly superficial article” (368), the denunciation of “an incredibly superficial comment and an utterly meaningless value judgment” (148), or of some other “incredible critical disloyalty” (373). This book is very obviously a work of passion – as evidenced most clearly by the fact that Salgari is always only referred to by his first name – and passion is a jealous master.
4The book is organized in five chapters with an Introduction. The first chapter presents a tour d’horizon of several novels with exotic locales, from Vietnam to Siberia, through the Philippines, Egypt, and more, into the future with a discussion of Salgari’s only “science fiction” novel, Le Meraviglie del duemila (The Wonders of the Year 2000).
5Chapters two to four focus on those that are arguably the best-known and most significant novels in the Salgari canon: The Tigers of Mompracem, The Mysteries of the Black Jungle and The Black Corsair. Each chapter provides a summary of the plot, a critical reading of the novel, a presentation of some of its most unforgettable passages, a discussion of possible sources, comments on movie adaptations and more. This is where Galli Mastrodonato’s extensive knowledge of Salgari’s universe shines through most clearly and where her considerable scholarly baggage is put to best use. As for the final chapter, it proposes a number of interesting views on “Emilio’s legacy: Deconstructing the Canon of Literary Studies”.
6Much later in the book, the critic tersely states the goal of her exploration of Salgari’s sagas: “Is Emilio Salgari a postcolonial writer ante litteram?” (395). It is generally understood that Salgari’s representations of “exotic” peoples did much to “deconstruct” – to borrow a sadly-overused term – cultural stereotypes. It is nowadays quite uncontroversial to look at the Veronese author through an anti-imperialist lens. But it should be noted that this is a relatively recent interpretation. Indeed, one of the points of contention in the reception of Salgari’s work has always been its ideological orientation. Salgari wrote during the heyday of Italy’s short-lived period of colonial expansion. His novels were set in far-away countries: Africa, the Far-East, the Caribbean and South America, the Far-West and both the South and the North poles (the latter explored at the turn of the century by the Duke of Abruzzi, Luigi Amedeo di Savoia).
7After his death, he was adopted and recuperated by the Fascist regime. Fascists saw in his novels the exemplification of the values of courage and ardour that they strove to inculcate in the spirit of youth, and decried Salgari’s exploitation by Jewish publishers – one of the reasons that led to his grisly suicide, by hara-kiri, in 1911. At that time, the “little guy” fighting against the rich and powerful oppressors could be sold as an echo of Italy, the “proletarian nation”, striving to find its rightful place in the world. But such readings evolve with time. As Galli-Mastrodonato points out, “after the Second World War […] a new generation of passionate and antiestablishment salgarians saw the light” (20-21). Heroes like the Malaysian pirate Sandokan and a slew of other exotic characters, fighting to free their lands from imperialist oppressors, seemed perfectly suited for a youth in search of new models and inspired by ideals of equality, individuality and freedom. As the critic rightly reminds us, Salgari has been quite influential within Latin American letters and society, particularly amongst revolutionaries, and his books have been valued by such figures as the Cuban/Argentinian icon Che Guevara and the Mexican literary firebrand Pablo Ignacio Taibo III.
8Galli Mastrodonato’s book attempts to fit Salgari into another ideological mold, that of contemporary identity politics. The critic presents the novelist’s heroes as perfect embodiments of the values propounded by current gender- and race-focused theorists. We find out for example that one of Salgari’s best-known characters, “il Corsaro Nero” (the Black Corsair) is “capable of undermining many aesthetic and gendered values of his time: his erotic appeal fascinates equally hetero- and homosexuals, his tormented love story with Honorata Wan Guld, his enemy’s daughter, crosses the boundaries of racial and cultural belonging, as both of them turn native in creating a new place, a topos, for their common rebirthing as creolized individuals” (9).
9This statement (one amongst many marked by the same sensibility) seems to ignore the fact that the presumed gender fluidity of the hero is nowhere suggested in the novels themselves, and that it is after all debatable to present the love story between two European characters, albeit from different cultures and living in other lands, as a process of creolization. It is, however, understandable – and perhaps was it even inevitable – that elements of Salgari’s worldview could be repurposed with present-day ideological fashions in mind. Salgari’s keen curiosity for other countries and cultures is thus seen as a prelude to today’s equity-conscious and ecologically-centered sensibilities. The positive white characters in Salgari’s novels – those, and they are many, who fight for freedom for all independently of their race and nationality – are repeatedly called “imperfect whites”, suggesting that “perfect” white identity can only be associated with racism and exploitation. “Diversity” or de-colonial concerns are highlighted as prophetic attitudes on the novelist’s part: “And this love for a boundless and free knowledge of the magnificent diversity of our planet and the multiple peoples that inhabit it is what makes Emilio such a unique writer at a time when imperialism was imposing a ruthless system of colonial exploitation and expropriation on large sectors of humanity and our biosphere” (11).
10I would like to differ from this position, generous and attractive as it may at first seem, on several levels. While Salgari is not comparable, for example, to Kipling, the colonial writer par excellence, he is nonetheless an author strongly attuned to the spirit of his times. The anticolonialist feel of his plots that made him a favourite of post-WWII generations of readers, in anticipation of the libertarian revolts of May 1968, and that is highlighted in this book as anticipating or corresponding to current decolonial concerns, can be – and has been – interpreted very differently. During the Fascist era, the focus was markedly on the anti-British accents of his novels. The “liberation” espoused by the heroes of the Malayan cycle of stories was seen first and foremost as a fight against British expansionism that validated Italy’s desire to acquire its own colonial possessions in spite of English hostility.
11Earlier, Salgari’s novels were widely read by a petit-bourgeois public that, paradoxically, saw itself reflected and glorified in these tales of adventure and exploration. While Galli-Mastrodonato insists that it is wrong to associate Salgari with the bourgeoisie of his time, it should be kept in mind that this class considered itself in heroic terms, not as proponents of timid conservatism, but as adventurous builders of a new, more prosperous, far-reaching and powerful state. This self-representation may very well have been entirely disconnected from economic and social realities, but its symbolic import should nonetheless not be minimized. Indeed, one does not become a hugely popular best-selling writer by going against the zeitgeist of his time, but by echoing the aspirations and the dreams of the reading public, no matter how detached from reality these may be.
12Salgari’s wonderful ability to sketch unforgettable characters belonging to the most marginal and least-known peoples – and to promote them to leading roles in his fictions – is undeniable. Galli Mastrodonato is right to oppose these depictions to those of authors such as Conrad, who presented under a much less favourable light the same populations and settings of some of Salgari’s novels. But that variance does not translate into a claim of moral superiority for Salgari. There is one crucial difference between the two novelists that remains unmentioned: Conrad was there; he visited the places he talks about and saw what they were like. Salgari never traveled; his research, although meticulous, was based on what he could find in popular magazines and travel books. It is not therefore heretical to suggest that Salgari’s heroes were first and foremost the products of his generous, idealistic imagination. And it is equally far from absurd to suggest that Conrad’s quite different representations were not dictated by racism and small-mindedness – a conclusion that seems natural when speaking of an author who was a foremost critic of capitalist exploitation. Just as a positive representation of “minorities” is not necessarily truer, a critical one does not automatically betray prejudice.
13Galli Mastrodonato, echoing Frantz Fanon, states that “A discourse that presents minorities […] in the role of heroes and heroines alongside Western normative subjects strongly overcomes ‘the Dialectic of Majority/Minority or Master/Slave’ that we know to be at the heart of colonialism, sexism, and racism”. (25). Salgari is seen as a counterweight to the “guilty white silence” (383) of official History when it comes to oppressed peoples. As uncontroversial as this may be, it could be argued that it is hardly pertinent in the context of Salgari’s times and location.
14The concept of “minorities” within a “majority” white society is a present-day construct that would have been quite foreign to Salgari’s public, in an overwhelmingly homogenous country where for the average citizen the foreigners were not “dark-skinned” minorities (quite non-existent), but more likely the inhabitants of neighbouring towns or regions. The appeal of his novels resided in their exoticism, and his fictional heroes, whether Malay, Russian or Egyptian, for a 19th century Italian reader could just as well have been Martians. Furthermore, Salgari’s “racialized” or “Métis” characters (to adopt the categories used in this study) often seem to fit poorly with today’s ideals of tolerance and multi-ethnic democracy. Yanez’s rule in Assam is benign, but hardly progressive by today’s standards, and Sandokan’s behaviour remains autocratic, if not dictatorial, in all its most important aspects.
15As for the “exploitation […] of the biosphere”, I find it hard to reconcile this view with the innumerable, bloody scenes of big game hunting that appear, for example, in the novels set in Africa and the Indian sub-continent, where the main characters happily and systematically slaughter any and all wild animals they meet. Fascination with nature and its teeming variety certainly does not equate, in Salgari’s works, with a desire to preserve it from human encroachment. The world is there for the heroes to discover and to enjoy, and enjoyment often comes down to wholesale massacre of majestic beasts. Only The Wonders of the Year 2000 provides a picture of nature endangered by runaway scientific progress. Elsewhere, the standard reaction of Salgari’s characters in front of extraordinarily beautiful or rare animals, is to shoot them.
16Paola Galli Mastrodonato should be congratulated for having penned a book in English that is generally quite well-written – a not insignificant achievement. Some uncommon turns of phrases remain. What is, for example, a “‘machine maker’ of unforgettable plots and characters” (my italics, 8)? Elsewhere, “meager” (scanty, insufficient) is not the best translation for “magro” (“thin”, “skinny”), “genial” (cordial, sympathetic) is not equivalent to the Italian “geniale” (brilliant, inspired), and “valor” (courage) is different from “value” or “worth” (the Italian “valore”)… But these and other slight imperfections do not alter the reader’s enjoyment or comprehension.
17One of the implied goals of this book must be to stimulate some courageous publisher into offering English-speaking readers new translations of Salgari’s astonishing novels. It can be hoped it will succeed, and certainly, Salgari’s themes as they are presented here should convince said publisher that there is a public ready to welcome this 19th century Italian author into the world of 21st century North America. Proponents of critical race theory and postcolonial studies should find this book very much to their liking. Passionate readers of Salgari will appreciate the single-mindedness with which Galli Mastrodonato builds a comprehensive defense and illustration of the novelist’s considerable, and unjustly ignored, opus. She rightly stresses how Salgari was, in many ways, “well ahead of his time” (385). This sizeable tome certainly makes obvious the extent to which she conceives “an absolute cult” (357) for the novelist and his characters. This one particular critic, however, still wonders whether Emilio Salgari’s amazing and fascinating stories really needed to be fitted into an epistemologically anachronistic framework in order to be introduced to the new English-speaking public these creations deserve.
Notes
1 Paola Galli Mastrodonato, “Il ‘caso’ Salgari e gli studi paraletterari in Italia”, Belphégor, vol. 1, n°1, https://dalspace.library.dal.ca/items/889ffd18-4604-4869-878d-820b538a0e4c (accessed on 15/04/2024).
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Vittorio Frigerio, « Paola Galli Mastrodonato, Emilio Salgari. The Tiger is still Alive! », Belphégor [En ligne], 23-1 | 2025, mis en ligne le 25 mai 2025, consulté le 11 mai 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/belphegor/6939 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/14909
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