UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
HONORARY CONFERRING
Monday, 5 December 2011 at 3.30 p.m.
TEXT OF THE INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS DELIVERED BY DR ERIC HAYWOOD, Head of Italian Studies, School of Languages and Literatures, University College Dublin, on 5 December 2011, on the occasion of the conferring of the Degree of Doctor of Literature honoris causa on ANDREA CAMILLERI
President, Distinguished Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen
Andrea Camilleri, who has sold millions of books worldwide, has so many fans and has always spoken about himself with such candour that it is no secret to anyone that he is 86 and that he hates flying. Yet here he is — together with his wife, family and friends — and for that alone he deserves to be honoured.
This is not the first time Camilleri is honoured in this way. He has already received three honorary doctorates and won numerous awards. But this is the first time a doctorate is conferred on him outside of Italy. Neither is this the first time Camilleri has been honoured in Ireland. His works have now been translated into over 30 languages, but the very first translation was into Irish. And he too has honoured Ireland. In his earlier life as a stage director, he was the first do bring Beckett to the stage in Italy and during his distinguished career as a director and producer, he staged Beckett many times.
Today, though, we honour him above all for the achievements of his ‘second life’, which began at the age of 58 — after ten years of fruitless searching for a publisher!
As of today Camilleri has published 80 works, mostly novels, but also poetry, plays, short stories, academic works, collected newspaper articles and editions of other writers’ works. And still he has not hung up his quill. His latest novel came out only a few months ago and another one is already in the making.
Eighteen of Camilleri’s novels are detective novels. Their hero is the much beloved Inspector Montalbano, who now stands with Sherlock Holmes, Maigret and Poirot as one of the great literary detectives of all times. As Camilleri had intended, Montalbano is the kind of person one would love to invite to dinner: with all too human failings, but kind, compassionate, witty, self-deprecating, educated and intelligent. Solving murders for him is less an intellectual game than an emotional imperative. He almost cares more about seeing justice done than bringing culprits to justice, and he can be as indignant at the malice and duplicity of the authorities as he is at the evil and scheming of criminals. In an age where we may feel that the sense of right and wrong has been lost, on either side of the law, Camilleri’s Montalbano novels, as well as being highly entertaining, make us feel good at the thought that Right can prevail.
Camilleri’s other novels are historical novels and they are equally as unputdownable. They too are set in Camilleri’s native Sicily and, remarkably, are also written in the vernacular of Sicily. Ever since, beginning in the 15th century, Tuscan was promoted and then imposed as Italy’s national language, numerous attempts have been made to write works of literature in other Italian vernaculars. Some of these have been hailed by critics, but none has ever had much success with the reading public. Camilleri has achieved the miracle of writing in a language most Italians are not familiar with and initially probably do not understand. But his works are so engaging that you just read on … and learn Sicilian.
Camilleri is a consumate storyteller: his plots, his characters, his sense of place, his dialogues are second to none. Above all he writes with great humour: humour as commonly understood (that is funny, often rib-splittingly so and cathartically so) and humour in the Pirandellian sense. Camilleri sees the world in its underwear, and he represents not just the body, but the body and its shadow.
It is in that sense that his novels are historical novels. In every one he is at pains to point out that, whereas the original idea comes from reality, everything else is the product of his imagination. But what he does is represent reality through a looking glass, from the other side, as it were. In this way he is able to send up what passes for reality in the eyes of those who would control language and the meaning of things. That is also why he writes in Sicilian: not to be constrained by the common-places of the official language.
So, although Camilleri writes fiction, reality is very much his subject matter: the reality of the mighty, against which he has always fought, both as a writer, and as a man. At the heart of his hunour there is rabbia (indignation), which through laughter pillories criminals and the corrupt – and the stupid – in the name of common human decency: of human rights, of a paese civile (a civil country), of democracy (the substance of democracy, not its mere form), and above all of ideas, of the right to dissent.
That is the writer, and the man, we celebrate today: a writer and a man everybody would love to invite to dinner.
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Praehonorabilis Praeses, totaque Universitas,
Praesento vobis hunc meum filium, quem scio tam moribus quam doctrina habilem et idoneum esse qui admittatur, honoris causa, ad gradum Doctoratus in Litteris; idque tibi fide mea testor ac spondeo, totique Academiae.