Ironia e sarcasmo in Un filo di fumo di Andrea Camilleri

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.