Irony and Sarcasm in Andrea Camilleri’s Un filo di fumo

This article examines the representational modes of the relationships in Andrea Camilleri’s Vigata community and, in particular, those presented in Un filo di fumo. Our initial consideration is that only by combining a semantic perspective with a pragmatic one, the measurement of Sicilianisms and the evaluation of the quality of the Sicilian-Italian language can provide useful information. We need to analyse the relationship that exists between the extra-linguistic hints provided by the narrator and by the characters and the dialogues interspersed in the novel to realise that one needs to be wary of the literal sense of the text in order to fully grasp the significance of many statements. In other words, speakers make constant use of oblique strategies of communication, amongst which, this article argues, irony and sarcasm (in the current interpretation offered by the philosophy of language) emerge as prevailing. As irony is seldom presented as dislocated from an environmental, relational, and historical context, both the narrator and the characters are charged with the duty of providing indispensable information. The Sicilian-Vigatese world arising from some of Camilleri’s novels takes on a semiotic specificity, then, that can be deciphered only with adequate linguistic and cultural competence.

The article is of a contributory nature and is an introduction to the topic of cabaret pedagogy. Cabaret, as an important area of contemporary popular culture and a separate genre of art, performs specific social, aesthetic and educational functions. It is a carrier of criticism, a form of exposing reality and building a community based on laughter. By using its usual means, such as irony, grotesque or satire, cabaret performs its overriding function, which is to transgress taboos and to question the obvious. The cabaret, embedded in popular culture, is characterized by the so-called semantic incompleteness, that is, it generates fragmentary and random meanings that initiate thought processes. The starting point for the considerations undertaken in the text is the pedagogical theory of cabaret developed in the 1970s by the German researcher Jürgen Henningsen, which was an impulse to think about cabaret in terms of public pedagogy, specifically the so-called perverse pedagogy - in opposition to mainstream pedagogy. The study highlights and briefly discusses three basic traces of cabaret pedagogy - ironic and grotesque, carnival and clown pedagogy.