Alle radici dell'idioletto camilleriano. Sulle varianti de Il corso delle cose (1978, 1998)

The article presents a comparison between the two printed editions of Andrea Camilleri’s first novel, Il corso delle cose. Written in 1967/68, the novel is published by Lalli only in 1978, after ten years of refusals by publishers. In 1998, Sellerio, following Camilleri’s success in the second half of the 1990s, publishes it again. After going through the editorial history of the novel, this article discusses the linguistic peculiarities of Camilleri’s literary beginnings in the late 1940s, in order to highlight the changes occurred when the author goes back to writing in the 1970s. Within this context is set a linguistic overview of the first edition of the novel, and then the analysis of textual variants traced in the two editions, systematically presented in the appendix. While plot and narrative structures remain almost untouched, the language is subject to a uniform revision, for a total of 350 micro-interventions. The philological examination allows us to follow the writer’s first steps in the definition of his idiolect. Camilleri’s corrections, in fact, move towards an attenuation of the use of literary words and constructions, a massive augmentation of the number and frequency of Sicilian borrowings adapted into Italian, and a preference for Italian lexical forms having a direct dialectal equivalent. The overall effect is the increase of the regional, Sicilian linguistic layer, and at the same time the creation of a plain, homogeneous, and unproblematic mixtilingual language