Narrative and Myth: Cesare Pavese's Late Works By Lianca Carlesi B.A Università degli Studi di Firenze, 2006 M.A., Università di Bologna, 2009 Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Italian Studies at Brown University PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND MAY 2017 © Copyright 2017 by Lianca Carlesi This dissertation by Lianca Carlesi is accepted in its present form by the Department of Italian Studies as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date_______________ ________________________________________________ Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date_______________ ________________________________________________ David Kertzer, Reader Date_______________ ________________________________________________ Massimo Riva, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date_______________ ________________________________________________ Andrew G. Campbell, Dean of the Graduate School iii CURRICULUM VITAE Lianca Carlesi graduated cum laude in Italianistica from the Università degli Studi di Firenze (Italy) and she also holds an M.A. degree (Laurea Specialistica) in Italian Linguistics and Literary Cultures from the Università di Bologna (Italy). During her undergraduate and graduate studies in Italy she has taught English in private and public institutions. During her doctoral studies at Brown University she has taught beginning and intermediate Italian language courses and she was a TA for an Italian culture class on Modern Italy. She has presented her research at numerous professional conferences and her essay, “La ‘nuova maniera’ di Cesare Pavese: La casa in collina tra mito e storia” was published in La Fusta in 2016. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The genesis of my interest in Pavese dates back to my high school years, when I first read La casa in collina. Needless to say, it was a love at first sight that culminated in my “tema di maturità.” My first thanks thus go to my high school teacher of Italian Literature, Francesco Venuti, who with his passion and enthusiasm is responsible for having nurtured a generation of humanists. I would like to thank my advisor—Professor Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg—for having helped me focus my passion into research and analysis that finally led to the writing of my dissertation. I am particularly grateful to her for challenging me to be more critical and attentive, and for teaching me how to approach complex texts and authors. I would also like to express my gratitude to the other committee members—Professors Massimo Riva and David Kertzer—who contributed feedback and suggestions that helped me improve my work. My doctorate years at Brown have been stimulating and challenging, and I thank all the professors whose courses and seminars have been such important milestones in my professional and intellectual formation. I thank Professor Martinez for guiding me through the reading of the Commedia: his passion and knowledge have left a mark on me. For her availability, for being such an understanding and caring person, I thank Professor Caroline Castiglione. Her seminars were so much fun that I even considered becoming an Early Modernist. She has helped me so much through the years, in her roles as Professor, Director of Graduate Studies, and, finally, Chair of the Italian Studies Department. She is an amazing mentor, and a model I will look up to in both my life and professional career. Along the same lines, I extend my gratitude to Professor Cristina Abbona for her support and guidance. Learning how to teach from her has not only been v a foundational step in my formation, but also fun and inspiring. I owe to her everything I know about teaching, and I hope I will be able to continue to grow from everything I have learned from her. Special thanks also to Mona Delgado. I like to think of her as the ‘mamma del dipartimento,’ because she is always ready to run the extra mile, and to help selflessly. Finally, I am grateful for my colleagues who have contributed to creating a very exiting learning environment. With some of them in particular—Filomena Fantarella, Wuming Chang, Anna Santucci—I had shared important moments and steps in these years. One last, huge, ‘thank you’ for Nicole Gercke, who has been the first reader of my project, and undoubtedly one of the most attentive. Her feedback was invaluable, as much as her support and encouragement. I am grateful for all of my students, who, through the years, have livened my days and given me a nice break from dissertation writing. To a certain extent, they have taught me so much, allowing me to see my language and culture with different eyes. I am also thankful for those far away friends who, regardless the distance that separates us and the years we have not spent together, are still interested in my achievements and still support me and every time welcome me as if time has not passed. Finally, a special thanks goes to my family. To my parents, Maria Gilio and Giancarlo Carlesi, and to my sister, Erika Carlesi, for always being my groupies throughout the years. Their unconditional support and wisdom have been an anchor to me, and I know that—despite the ocean that divides us—they have shared with me every single joy, success, and disappointment of this incredible experience. The same is true for the other Family, who is ‘in hearth’ as much as ‘in-law.’ Carol and Victor Laxton have been examples of resilience and determination, and they have taught me how to persevere and trust life. Stephanie Campagna, Alejandro and Eduardo vi Laxton always treated me as a sister and spending time with them has always been a nice diversion from school. The last paragraph is dedicated to my husband, Andrés Laxton. He has been my “compagno di avventure” all these years, and my doctorate studies would not have been the same without him. He has been my lighthouse in the storm (sometimes the storm itself!), and his constant encouragement has really propelled me to push forward. His selflessness has always been an inspiration for me. Navigating life together we have learned that ‘no dream is too big,’ a motto of which he often reminds me. And to conclude, it is to our little masterpiece, Emma, who bettered our lives in a way we did not think possible, that I dedicate my work. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ........................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: Cesare Pavese: “un autore troppo biografato e mitizzato”? .......................11 Introduction .....................................................................................................................11 1 Pavese’s engagement: from Neorealism to the enrollment in the Pci 2 “La nuova maniera” of Cesare Pavese ........................................................................28 3 The posthumous fortune between politics and private life ..........................................35 4 The taccuino segreto: desertion, immaturity, or lack of political character? ..............40 Chapter 2: Cesare Pavese’s theory of myth ..................................................................56 Introduction .....................................................................................................................56 1 Il mestiere di vivere: a peculiar hermeneutical tool to approach Pavese’s work .........60 2 Pavese’s theory of myth ...............................................................................................66 2.1 A man’s destiny as a “vivaio di retrospettive scoperte” .....................................66 2.2 The relevance of childhood and discoveries-memories in Pavese’s poetics…...71 2.3 “Soltanto l’uomo fatto sa essere ragazzo” ..........................................................86 2.4 The savage ..........................................................................................................92 3 Pavese’s method.........................................................................................................105 3.1 A question of style ............................................................................................105 3.2 Reticence as a way to the core of things ...........................................................110 Chapter 3: Feria d’agosto ..............................................................................................117 Introduction ...................................................................................................................117 1 “Il mare”.....................................................................................................................134 2 “La città” ....................................................................................................................144 3 “La vigna” ..................................................................................................................163 Chapter 4: La casa in collina: the Story of an Enduring Illusion..............................175 1 La casa in collina and Second Postwar Italy .............................................................177 1.1 La casa in collina and Neorealism....................................................................182 2 Close Reading ............................................................................................................189 2.1 “C’è sempre stata questa guerra”: the prologue ..............................................194 2.2 “Una strana immunità in mezzo alle cose” .......................................................200 2.3 Corrado’s journey to his native hills .................................................................218 2.4 The Epilogue .....................................................................................................229 Conclusions .....................................................................................................................239 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................255 viii INTRODUCTION This dissertation stems from both an academic and personal interest I have always nurtured for the Italian Resistance literature, and post-World War Two Italian culture. Specifically, this study explores extravagant alternatives to the neorealist works, and it does so by examining the work of Cesare Pavese, one of the most influential Italian writers of the first half of twentieth-century Italy. La casa in collina (1948) in particular defies both the conventional style and plot typically employed to write about the Resistance. The neorealist language was close to things, close to people, it attempted to adhere to reality as faithfully as possible. As for the plot, usually neorealist novels and accounts were inhabited by champions of the people, ready to sacrifice themselves for the shared cause of contributing to the Liberation of Italy from Fascism and Nazi occupation. However, in Pavese’s masterpiece, we find neither the neorealist language, nor a neorealist hero: the writing is often lyrical and symbolic, and Corrado, the protagonist, when given a chance, opts not to join the Resistance and decides instead to hide. Moreover, these characteristics of Pavese’s works are particularly interesting because, of all his colleagues, he was probably among the most expected to work within the boundaries of the neorealist experiment as he belonged to that cultural and intellectual milieu that allowed for Neorealism to blossom. Editor at Einaudi and one of the founding fathers of Neorealism with Lavorare stanca (1936) and Paesi tuoi (1941), Pavese was also praised as “un ottimo gregario del PCI.”1 However, instead of producing a canonic war narrative – the realm where Neorealism 1 Dino Terra, Il traguardo dei libri: Prima che il gallo canti, La galleria, La Dama della Morgue, in Il giornale della sera, May 15th, 1949.6 was flourishing, Pavese provided a diversion, an alternative to it, thus defying what were the expectations of his readership. In my interpretation of Pavese’s masterpiece, I rely highly on the author’s coeval theorization on myth and symbols, and I thus emphasize the structural importance myth has in the novel, importance that I claim has long been overlooked and underestimated. I argue instead that only an approach aware of the relevance myth had in Pavese’s writing can fully appreciate its fundamental role in La casa in collina. With this novel Pavese attempted for the first time to employ his store of symbolic images and themes in the depiction of a historical reality. That La casa in collina is a text where the interplay of myth and history is essential is confirmed by Pavese himself, who, in an attempt at cataloguing his own work, put the novel at the cross-road between history and symbol. This emerges from a comparison of two diary entries that serve as a sort of compendium of his work, where Pavese groups together his novels and poetry by applying different filters and organizational lenses. On November 17th, 1949, he included La casa in collina in the “ciclo storico del tuo tempo,” whereas, a few days later, on November 26th this novel is grouped with others under the category of “realtà simbolica.” One of the central aims of this dissertation is to explore what this means in the context of a historical representation through the employment of a symbolic reality, which is at play in this novel. The questions, in broad terms, that this dissertation addresses are: whether, in La casa in collina, myth is instrumental to a better understanding of the historical implications of the civil war, or whether it is rather an escapist device to avoid addressing them face on, as, instead, a neorealist style would have imposed; to what extent did Pavese’s meditation on myth in La casa in collina help Pavese in his portrayal of a slice of Italian war? 2 It has been recently underscored in Pavese scholarship, how his interest in symbol and myth should be dated back to the early 1930s, when young Pavese had not even debuted yet on the literary stage. Antonio Catalfamo, coordinator of the Osservatorio permanente sugli studi pavesiani nel mondo, notes a predisposition to inquiries that will later further develop into a more structured theory already present in Pavese’s university thesis— Interpretazione della poesia di Walt Whitman (1930)—, finding here one of the first seeds of the author’s fascination for symbols and myths. At this stage, Pavese had not developed a sound methodology yet, but it is worth pointing out that the dynamics that he emphasizes in Whitman’s poetry are very similar to those that he will theoretically employ later in life. For Pavese, Whitman’s poetry was a gnoseological enterprise, aimed at touching the “natura vera delle cose,” aimed at seeing them “con occhi vergini.” According to Pavese, Whitman’s poetry consisted not so much in the depiction of the reality around him, but rather in the experience of the quest itself, “cogliendo con stupore il significato simbolico che si nasconde dietro l’apparenza fenomenica.”2 However, though we might find Pavese’s fascination with a fleeting symbolic meaning hidden behind the phenomenal world from as early as 1930, Pavese will only actively pursue this interest on a theoretical and narrative level as well in the 1940s. Bart Van den Bossche in Nulla è veramente accaduto3 defines Pavese’s elaboration of a concept of myth throughout the years as “spiral like.” According to the scholar, Pavese continuously returned to, tested, and enriched his concept of myth in the early 1940s, through the contribution of extensive readings from disparate disciplines such as anthropology, ethnology and the history of religions. It is in these and the following years that Pavese’s growing interest in myth finds its apex: the postwar years saw 2 Antonio Catalfamo, “La tesi di laurea di Cesare Pavese su Wat Whitman e i suoi studi successivi sulla letteratura americana,” Forum Italicum 47, no. 1 (2013). Sage UK: London, England: SAGE Publications: 92. 3 Bart Van Den Bossche, “Nulla è veramente accaduto.” Strategie discorsive del mito nell’opera di Cesare Pavese (Franco Cesati Editore, Leuven University Press, 2001). 3 Pavese’s theory of myth flourishing and becoming the gravitational center of almost everything he was writing. Pavese’s interest in myth had different outcomes. He wrote extensively about it in his diary, Il mestiere di vivere, and he also composed several theoretical essays with which he tried to exemplify his complex understanding of personal and collective myths, and of the relevance of childhood in the formation of a person’s symbols and obsessions. If the diary proved to be quite a hectic hermeneutical tool, for the lack of a systematic and structured exposition of the main elements of his poetics of myth, Pavese’s essays tend to be more exhaustive and argumentative, and provide the reader with a closer look at these issues. Pavese’s interest in this matter also resulted in the edition for Einaudi of the “Collezione di studi religiosi, etnologici e psicologici.” This collection, edited in collaboration with the famous anthropologist Ernesto de Martino and known as “Collana viola,” was meant to introduce to the tendentially reactionary Italian readership the contemporary European recovery of myth and the archaic, which was emerging not only in literature, but also in the rise of those modernist sciences—anthropology, ethnology, psychoanalysis—in which Pavese was so interested. The names that recur more often on the pages of both his diary and essays are those of Lucien Lévi-Bruhl, Karol Kerényi, James Frazer and Leo Frobenius, authors who will be also eventually published in the collection. Reviving myth in post-World War Two Italy was a challenging endeavor. On the one hand, the revival of the remote and of the crepuscular was considered, on a stylistic level, as a regression to an outdated taste in an epoch when the more pragmatic approach of Neorealism was all the rage. On the other hand, on a thematic level, this revival of the savage was perceived as dangerously and ambiguously standing at the cross-point between Modernism and Fascism. In “Discussioni etnologiche,” Pavese addresses Franco Fortini’s preoccupation with the widespread 4 interest “per le cose etnologiche e la mentalità primitiva, per ogni manifestazione mistica, magica, irrazionale.”4 Fortini saw in De Martino one of the most eminent supporters of this interest.5 However, if for Fortini “non si possono facilmente scordare i guasti politici prodotti da una recente cultura irrazionalistica e in fondo folcloristica,”6 Pavese responds by reassuring that the danger of forgetting the recent past does not subsist, as long as both folklore and mythic mentality are read “come accadimenti, come fenomeni da ridurre al più presto a chiara razionalità, a legge storica.”7 According to Pavese, we should be mindful of the fact that myth and magic hold an “assoluto valore conoscitivo […], originalità storica, […] perenne vitalità nella sfera dello spirito.”8 This exchange of opinions between Pavese and Fortini is representative of a wider clash of interpretations between those who saw this interest in folklore and the primitive as a potential ambush against contemporary rationality, and those who, instead, considered them effective cognitive tools whose use would not have ideological repercussions. However against the tide and pioneering, Pavese’s interest merges with a broader “filone fervido e intenso, per quanto giocato in controtendenza.”9 The publication itself of the collana is proof of the existence of a few niches open to the study of myth, rituals, psychoanalysis and popular traditions, and Pavese’s myth converged in some ways with those alternative cultural currents.10 4 Cesare Pavese, “Discussioni etnologiche,” in Letteratura Americana e altri saggi (Torino: Einaudi, 1951), 353. 5 Pavese refers to Franco Fortini, “Il diavolo sa travestirsi da primitivo,” Paese Sera, February 23rd, 1950. 6 Cesare Pavese, “Discussioni etnologiche,” in Letteratura Americana e altri saggi, 353. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Arnaldo Bruni, “Pavese controcorrente: I Dialoghi con Leucò,” Cuadernos de Filología Italiana (2011): 73-82. 10 There were other eminent intellectuals who shared Pavese and De Martino’s interest, and who explored and exploited the question of myth and the archaic in their own scholarly or literary production. Furio Jesi, for example, has pointed out the convergence of Pavese’s promotion of anthropology in Italy with Carlo Levi’s interest for the archaic and superstitious reality he experienced in the South during his confino. Levi considers his own work— especially Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (1945)—as based on the same intuitions and positions of Mondo magico (Ernesto de Martino, Mondo magico: prolegomeni a una storia del magismo (Torino: Einaudi, 1948). De Martino, just like Levi, approached the southern peasant world as something on the verge of disappearing and that, for this reason, needed to be safeguarded and historically understood. Another important convergence is that between Pavese and Mario Untersteiner, professor of Greek and scholar of Religious Studies who, in 1946, published La 5 And yet, both Pavese’s theory of myth and his peculiar treatment of historical issues were not easily accepted by the majority of his contemporary critics and readers. Fascinated by the ambiguous position of Pavese within 1940s Italian culture, one that moves from Neorealism to symbolism, one of both belonging to the major currents and of centrifugal experimentations, I soon realized that the best way to investigate this issue was by reading what Pavese himself, and his readers, had to say on this matter. Based mostly on archival sources, the first chapter uncovers a consistent tendency in Pavese’s reception that contests an unbiased understanding of his work: his readers were too often after his private life, whether romantic delusions, his depression or his ambiguous commitment to the PCI (Italian Communist Party). These private- life issues have often been used as filters superimposed on Pavese’s texts, as a way of better deciphering his work, which was often characterized by unexpected turns. This tendency emerges in many newspaper articles, essays and even in the first biography of Pavese ever written, Il vizio assurdo11 by Davide Lajolo. In this biography, also for a long time considered the main reference for understanding the author’s work, Lajolo reads Pavese’s life and texts as the continual confirmation of a tendency of self-annihilation that ultimately resulted in his suicide. Pavese’s supposed romantic disappointments were the cause of his supposed life-long depression which Pavese resisted, Lajolo argues, by embracing political and civil responsibilities that culminated with his enrollment in the PCI. Lajolo’s interpretation is the quintessence of an approach to Pavese’s work that would not leave aside his private life, sentimental affairs and political affiliations. These preconceptions also created expectations from his readership, and, not surprisingly, depending on the political leaning of the reviewer, Pavese has been acclaimed fisiologia del mito and who enthusiastically read Pavese’s mythical works. Bianca Garufi, too, shared Pavese’s interest for antiquity and for psychoanalysis, and will later practice Jungian psychotherapy. 11 Davide Lajolo, Il vizio assurdo. Storia di Cesare Pavese (Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1960). 6 as the champion of both Marxism and Fascism. I read this confusion as a confirmation of the originality of an author who was too independent from any school of thought or of style to be easily and unambiguously labeled. I retrace the emergence of these mis-readings à la Lajolo in newspaper articles, magazines, private correspondence and critical essays, and through this analysis, I find that the element of Pavese’s writing that most unsettled his critics was, ultimately and unsurprisingly, his poetics of myth. In the second chapter, I cross-read Pavese’s diary, Il mestiere di vivere, and theoretical essays on myth in an attempt, first, to underscore the main elements and motives of his poetics, and, second, to let their mutual relation emerge. My analysis of the diary is mostly limited to the entries after 1940, and among these entries I particularly underscore the emergence of those themes and elements that will help me better understand the originality and complexity of La casa in collina in the last chapter. Elements like destino, costruzione, infanzia, and luoghi unici are theoretical milestones in Pavese’s writing, and hills, windows, bloodsheds are the narrative motifs that stem from them. However, Pavese’s writing on myth was elusive and not systematic, and he doesn’t leave/provide a clear and sound definition of what myth was for him in his pages. I argue that in his private attempt to bring his symbols and transcendental images to the surface, and to clarify them in relation to his own experience, Pavese ended up proposing a truth that he hoped could have collective resonance. The elements of the vineyard, of a rustic landscape seen through a window, of a hill standing out against a void horizon are Pavese’s own recurrent images, but the way they dig their roots into his childhood and they structure his life and his perception of reality reveals, according to Pavese, a mechanism that is active in every single person and that should thus be regarded as universal. However, Pavese affirms that not everybody is perceptive enough to discern those meaningful images in everyday life, so that not 7 everybody will eventually unfold and uncover the mystery beneath her or his own myths. This is not a choice for the poet, whose calling is indeed to translate the shapeless and irrational myth into something graspable by consciousness, into something that can be understood and converted into tangible words: and the result is poetry. The third chapter is a transition, a bridge between the theoretical writing analyzed in the second chapter, and the narrative output of La casa in collina in the last. This chapter is dedicated to Feria d’agosto, a hybrid collection of short stories and theoretical essays all revolving around a very limited number of motifs, which are those that we have already enumerated. The analysis of these stories helps me follow the development of those same core elements from theoretical to narrative writing in a context, that of Feria d’agosto, in which Pavese for the first time attempted a conscious translation from the first language into the second. The monotony of this text is one of its main traits, and the main elements emerge clearly and insistently in almost every story. The main difference between Feria d’agosto and La casa in collina is that in the novel Pavese employs a more abstracting approach, one wherein the same elements emerge in a more veiled and subtle way. In fact, at a first reading, La casa in collina is not necessarily perceived as a text where myth plays too important a role. Many scholars and critics —like Franco Pappalardo la Rosa—do not give attention to its mythical nature and read it rather as a historical novel, or as a biographical transposition of Pavese’s own experience during World War Two. It is indeed a historical novel, as the Resistance is the background to the events and influences the choices and lifestyle of the protagonist. It also undoubtedly follows the events in Pavese’s life during those same years. Pavese too, in fact, spent most of the Resistance in a convent, just like Corrado, with whom he also seems to share momentary spiritual illuminations. But, I argue, it is also, and 8 mostly, a novel that lays out a mythical view of history. If in Pavese’s theoretical world myth is the mysterious structure that sustains us, then history is myth once it is understood, brought to clarity. I claim that in La casa in collina, the neat and total distinction between myth and history becomes muddled. For understanding the mysteries of the ferocity and brutality performed by humanity during wartime, the process from myth to logos (history) proves broken and of no use. For Corrado it is not enough to read war as a manifestation of the savage, as a mythical and mysterious substratum intrinsic to human behavior, nor it is possible to acknowledge war as something rationally explainable. Corrado’s contemplations of the atrocities of war compels him to ask fundamental questions regarding the responsibilities of war acts, and the need to justify them. Those same questions throw war in a gray zone, between myth and history, where mythical depths and mysteries have lost their fascination, and where a rational understanding of history has not yet been reached. Is the impasse in the last pages of La casa in collina to be considered a failure of Pavese’s research, an inability from his part to translate mythos into logos? Or is this impasse rather the symptom that Pavese’s research envisioned a new system, one yet to be theorized, where the former understanding of myth had to be overcome? I propose a reading of La casa in collina as a liminal text in Pavese’s production, one wherein the previous theorizations of myth reach their apex and yet result in a stalemate, but one that also anticipates the future developments of the late 1940s where Pavese often argues for the need to upgrade his symbols from private to collective. In this dissertation, I analyze and trace the development of Pavese's theory of myth and the critical reception to it, from the first hints of a nascent theory dating back to his dissertation in 1930, through his implicit and explicit articulation of it in his diary, theoretical, and narrative works in the 1940s, and ultimately in its abstracted but arguably fuller and more nuanced 9 expression in the narrative text La casa in collina from 1948. In so doing, I demonstrate that although he does not fit neatly into the neorealist category, his contribution to the vivid literary debate on the Resistance—debate carried on mostly by neorealist texts—is relevant also because of his employment of myth, the fundamental component of his writing. 10 CHAPTER 1 CESARE PAVESE: “UN AUTORE TROPPO BIOGRAFATO E MITIZZATO”? Introduction Cesare Pavese was a very eclectic and polyhedral author. From the beginning of his literary career in the 1930s and up to 1950, he experimented with different genres and poetics. Looking at his cultural production now, almost seventy years after the height of his artistic success, we are left with the impression of an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, a constant eagerness to experiment, and a troubled relationship with the surrounding world, both in his private life and with his readership, colleagues and critics. Especially in the last five years of his life, from the end of the Second World War until 1950 when he committed suicide, in his diary and his letters emerges a discontentment with a reception and readership that seem at times unable to understand the deepest meaning and sense of his work and of his research. These were the years when Pavese was introducing his new theory of myth, the end result of a sensibility and curiosity already present in a younger Pavese that had become a more systematic mode of enquiry from the 1940s on, years he dedicated mostly to readings in anthropology, ethnology and the history of religions. As we shall see later, myth for Pavese was the very nucleus of his work and of his convictions as an intellectual. It is both a matter of poetics and a cognitive process— two entities only apparently distinct that, instead, are intertwined in his writings. Some critics have called this change in his artistic path the “nuova maniera,” referring to it as a move towards the irrational, as a u-turn away from the more realistic style that had characterized his writing in his earlier career. In this chapter I consider a few important moments in the reception of Pavese’s work, both during his lifetime and after his death: moments that were all, to some extent, characterized by a similar pattern of startled reactions from his critics and readers to what were unexpected choices from Pavese, both in his writing and in his life and career. Given that in these moments most of the voices who participated in the dialogue were trying to justify or explain what was perceived as an unexpected behavior, I classify these reactions under two main subgroups: those who look to biographical motivations to explain those unanticipated literary and biographical events; and those who, instead, read them with a more political and ideological approach. From the Fascist era to the postwar period, Pavese’s persona had been the focus of debate quite a few times. There were multiple and different reasons, but, I argue, they were always to some extent linked to others’ political or ideological expectations for his works and activity. At different stages of his reception, repeated attempts were made to politicize, or depoliticize, an author who proved to be instead quite detached from the political environment. Pavese’s cultural production, his role as an engaged intellectual and his adherence (or not) to the cultural directives of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), were scrutinized as an example of a far wider debate revolving around the implications of the encounter between literature and politics. Still recently, critics from two main political perspectives—which could be very generally labeled the left and right wings—have continued to dispute Pavese’s positions, and, depending on the political stance of the reviewer, evidence was shown of either Pavese’s explicit antifascism, or of an equally evident lack thereof. Unraveling these debates and identifying the voices of the two critical tendencies is, in the economy of this dissertation, a preparatory study that will help me shed light on the reception of Pavese’s theory of myth—arguably the very first destabilizing moment for certain critical sectors. In fact, Pavese’s interest in anthropology and ethnology, his reading of 12 controversial authors and his theory of myth were received by the Marxist mainstream as inappropriate, especially from an author who had been considered one of the most prominent communist intellectuals. His interest in myth and ethnology has therefore been read either as an ideological regression in his work, or as an outlet for a romantic and decadent soul. For a while now, these prejudices have influenced the study of such an important moment of Pavese’s theoretical thought and poetics as the theory of myth was. I intend to re-examine the question of myth in Pavese’s work from a point of view that prescinds from, or leaves aside ideological prejudices. Cesare Pavese debuts as a writer in the 1930s, and his career reaches its apex in the late 1940s. He therefore belongs to that generation of Italian writers who began their literary careers under the regime and kept writing after the war. The degree of involvement with, and support of, fascist values and ideals obviously varies from author to author, but it was nevertheless common for many intellectuals to have to negotiate their relationship with fascism in order to be allowed to work, with a failure to do so resulting instead in having opportunities precluded. It was also a common scenario for many of these intellectuals who had accepted such compromises to be reabsorbed in the postwar Marxist mainstream. Regardless of the depth of the involvement with the regime, all these intellectuals shared a common need to reposition themselves within a much different postwar Italy, whose new values were based on antifascist ideals. The question of this continuity has been treated with superficiality and has been long overlooked by Italian historiography and critique, thus becoming an object of inquiry only relatively recently. One of the most representative studies of this new attention to the issue is Mirella Serri’s I redenti,1 a thorough enquiry into the lives of those “intellettuali che vissero due volte.” Serri chooses a 1 Mirella Serri, I redenti. Gli intellettuali che vissero due volte. 1938-1948 (Milano: Corbaccio, 2005). 13 selection of intellectuals, long considered to be among the most engaged, and uncovers some compromising details of their work under fascism, like the collaboration with fascist magazines such as Primato, the writing of racist pieces, or the attendance at the Weimar conference in 1942.2 According to Serri, the move to forgive and reintegrate intellectuals who were once fascist into the new Italian culture was convenient not only for the Christian Democrats, who needed them as a support against the left wing, but to the Italian Communist Party (PCI) as well. As the secretary of the PCI Palmiro Togliatti noted, his party now needed the support of those who once endorsed fascism: il PCI avvia una vasta operazione politica di ‘recupero’ degli”ex.” Peraltro spinto anche dalla profonda consapevolezza—che il Migliore nutriva fin dagli anni Trenta—che il fascismo non era stato una dittatura di pochi ma un radicato regime di massa. Il PCI finiva così per riservarsi […] il compito di fonte battesimale. Si autoassegnava l’onere e l’onore di ‘assolvere’, senza quarantene o rieducazioni, solo con la semplice accoglienza nelle sue file, dai peccati commessi nella vita precedente.3 The PCI policy of forgiveness allowed for a more or less deceptive reinterpretation of the past for many of those intellectuals who had indeed had a compromising relationship with the regime. Their collaboration and work during the ventennio were now conveniently interpreted as an anticipation of the antifascism that would characterize their work after the war. Ruggero Zangrandi’s Il lungo viaggio attraverso il fascismo is probably the clearest attempt at such a reading, and thus became representative of the general postwar tendency to become silent, when possible, about one’s life during the regime, or to retell it with convenient superimpositions. In this case, Zangrandi retraces his collaboration with fascist magazines, his participation in events sponsored by the regime, and his relationships with high ranking fascists, considering them as 2 Particularly interesting for this point is the chapter “Tra rieducazione e assoluzione,” where Serri enumerates a long list of intellectuals who, for example, wrote on the Communist monthly review Rinascita after the war, even though they had been to different extents involved with Fascism (Sibilla Aleramo, Carlo Bernari, Corrado Alvaro, Cesare Zavattini are just a few examples). 3 Mirella Serri, I redenti, 19-20. 14 stages of a long, slow path through and against fascism, as a sort of opposition from within. Interestingly enough, Zangrandi presents those moments of his biography as proof of his ideological distance from the regime, rather than as his collusion with it. This was una tesi […] che verrà convalidata e sostenuta dalle testimonianze di tutti gli ex giovani che si identificavano con questa diagnosi di precoce antifascismo sotto la dittatura. Tale interpretazione diverrà via via più diffusa negli anni allargandosi a macchia d’olio alla memoria del passato, ridisegnando le biografie di uomini che non si erano piegati.4 Drawing on Zangrandi’s example, in fact, other prominent figures proposed a reading of their past lives with an ideological superimposition, “supportata dall’autorità di Togliatti, la ricerca zangrandiana sull’antifascismo precoce degli intellettuali, negli anni diventerà la vulgata più accreditata e si svilupperà arricchita di infiniti singoli contributi.”5 Carlo Muscetta, Pavese’s colleague at Einaudi, for example, used the expression “dissimulazione onesta”6 to refer to the need to cover with a false fascist enthusiasm what was instead his truly antifascist core. Following the general amnesty of 1946, sponsored by Togliatti, that terminated the purge process,7 stories like that of Zangrandi’s constituted “per il Migliore 4 Ibid., 312. 5 Ibid., 316. 6 Torquato Accetto is a XVII century courtier who coined this expression in his brief treatise Della dissimulazione onesta, published in 1641. In this trattatello Accetto praise the use of “dissimulazione” as a control over truth, which is only temporarily withheld, in order to be safeguarded for when the right time to express it comes. “Dissimulare” does not mean to lie, for this reason it is to be considered an honest attitude. The treatise underwent a three-century long oblivion, until when, in 1928, Benedetto Croce reprinted it. Probably the Neapolitan philosopher “vide nel ritrarsi in sé del moralista seicentesco un modello di comportamento trasponibile al clima del fascismo, leggendo nelle scelte di Accetto un incoraggiamento a mantenere la speranza e rianimarsi di coraggio” [Monica Bilotta, “Silenzio e inganno. L’amara scienza della dissimulazione tra Tasso e Accetto” (Dissertation, Rutgers University, 2008, Web)]. In fact, the reasons behind the composition of this work—the need to find a safe space, free from State control over courtier intellectuals—may have been familiar for a philosopher who was struggling to keep his intellectual liberty in a fascist environment. 7 Hans Woller, I conti con il fascismo. L’epurazione in Italia 1943-1948 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2008) is the first important study on the Italian process of post war purge. According to the German scholar, who extensively gathered documentations on the subject, a paralysis of any attempt to shed a light on war crimes followed a first “bagno di sangue,” which spread between the fall of fascism until the democratic stabilization. According to Angelo d’Orsi, reviewer of Woller’s book for La Stampa, “in particolare, l’autore mette in evidenza la contraddizione tra una volontà di gran parte della Resistenza di “fare piazza pulita” dei fascisti, che andò assai per le spicce, al di fuori delle regole dello Stato di diritto, e, d’altro canto, l’insabbiarsi del processo di rinnovamento istituzionale e strutturale della nuova Italia, che dunque risultò essere poi non così diversa da quella precedente. In altri termini, dopo un primo momento in cui, con ampio margine per rese dei conti private, l’Italia si sottopose a 15 l’occasione per recuperare all’antifascismo i giovani o ex giovani littori e quindi per cancellare eventuali ombre dal suo stesso partito accusato di accettare gli ex fascisti.”8 Pierluigi Battista draws on Serri’s work, analyzing the postwar tendency among intellectuals politically to expose each other’s past, dissecting it in order to highlight moments of collaboration with the regime. The climate Battista describes is one where l’abitudine all’uso politico delle biografie degli intellettuali italiani macchiate dai ripetuti commerci intrecciati con il regime fascista esercitò per forza di cose una carica pedagogica negativa sulla vasta schiera di scrittori, giornalisti, architetti, cineasti, storici, filosofi, artisti in procinto di navigare nelle acque tempestose del postfascismo. Parlare liberamente del proprio passato era davvero temerario, in quel clima così poco incoraggiante.9 According to Battista, this tendency can be described as a “roulette russa,”10 where the search for truth was arbitrary, and so was the “punishment” of public shaming. People who had been only marginally involved with the regime were being exposed to reprimand, whereas other big fascist personalities were not being persecuted. The scenario I just briefly depicted is one where, for a few decades after the war, in Italy there was a tendency to use intellectuals’ biographies politically, considering private lives a repository of ideological moments to be unmasked and which could be used against them. Indeed, this sensationalism and the political distortion of biographies emerge in Pavese’s reception, which has sometimes proven itself more interested in the author’s relationship with fascism or the PCI, in his ideological orientation and sympathies, rather than in his texts. But una cura di defascistizzazione assai drastica, in un secondo tempo, recuperata la legalità, si bloccò “ogni tentativo di far luce sui crimini di guerra commessi dagli italiani e di trascinare in giudizio i reponsabili” [Angelo d’Orsi, “Togliatti: i conti con il fascismo,” La Stampa, February 5th, 1998]. Togliatti’s amnesty was then an attempt to stop the “epurazione selvaggia” and to guarantee to the PCI a democratic role in the rebuilding of the Italian postfascist State. 8 Mirella Serri, I redenti, 311. 9 Pierluigi Battista, Cancellare le tracce. Il caso Grass e il silenzio degli italiani dopo il fascismo (Milano: Rizzoli, 2007), 36-37. 10 Ibid. 16 Pavese’s case is quite particular. In fact, Pavese was extraneous from both the widespread attempt at concealment, and from the equally widespread reciprocal blaming analyzed by Battista. However, his case still very much belongs to that same postwar tension, even though it, in some ways, represents an outcome quite opposite to those I just illustrated. In fact, up until at least the mid1960s, despite a quite honest and never hidden detachment from politics, Pavese was being fashioned as one of the most prominent Marxist intellectuals in Italy. These dynamics should be taken into account when analyzing Pavese’s reception both among his contemporaries and after his death. Keeping in mind what I have just described will help in understanding the story of the reception I am analyzing in this chapter. Pavese was a perfect candidate for representing the organic intellectual, due to his commitment to the cultural reconstruction of postwar Italy. He had ties to Turinese antifascism and a founding role in the birth of Neorealism. These were some of the elements that both his contemporaries and posthumous critics wanted to highlight while, at the same time, omitting details that were not in line with the public image they wanted to fashion, such as, for example, his hiding during the Resistance. His readership had expectations that Pavese could not always meet, because he had an agenda that was very different from the one superimposed by the Marxist mainstream. Texts and articles that would not fit with those expectations were met with surprise; reviewers felt the need to justify them as an ideological regression, or as the wanderings of a depressed soul. Finally, Pavese, too, became object of that curiosity about the hidden lives of those who wrote between fascism and postwar Italy: with the publication in 1990 of Il taccuino segreto by Lorenzo Mondo, his life was picked apart. Again, after more than forty years, his biography was the object of a political reading. And again, the debate that arose from it took place in the newspapers, which proved once more to be a political strategy aimed at dismantling the 17 hegemonic PCI discourse. It is interesting to analyze this new trend in Pavese’s reception against the backdrop of what was happening in Italian historiography in those years. Serri’s book, mentioned above, belongs to a new chapter of Italian historiography, which, with the end of the cultural hegemony of the PCI in the late 1970s and even more so after 1989, was moved by a growing interest in that past that had been covered, ignored or forged for so long.11 Notably, in 1984, Norberto Bobbio rejected a prestigious prize because he did not support what he defined an “antifascismo costruito a posteriori” and he criticized its nicodemism.12 As Battista writes in a review to Serri’s book: se ci si chiede perché sia andato tanto di moda in questi decenni il sensazionalismo della scoperta compromettente (una lettera inviata a Mussolini, la ricevuta di un finanziamento del Minculpop, un articolo seppellito negli archivi e improvvisamente riemerso), la risposta è che una verità troppo a lungo negata o rimossa finisce sempre per riaffiorare in forme mostruose. 13 As we shall see, Pavese is one of those authors whose life and works were dissected in the 1990s, due to the publication of the aforementioned taccuino segreto, comprised of notes in which he explicitly praised fascism and German efficiency under the Nazi regime. This chapter is composed of four parts. In the first I analyze the relevance of the cultural and ideological milieu of Turin in the formation of the young Pavese. I also retrace the most important moments of his personal life and public career that saw him involved with the world of Turinese antifascism, and I consider his debut on the literary scene, which provided some of the first products of Neorealism. The second part is instead dedicated to the aforementioned “nuova 11 On the same line of Serri’s study we can find Pierluigi Battista’s Cancellare le tracce, or Dario Biocca and Mauro Canali, L’informatore: Silone, i comunisti e la polizia (Milano: Luni, 2000). 12 The term “nicodemism” derives from Nicodemus who, in the Gospel of John, is a Pharisee that at night visits Jesus, whereas during the day pretends to follow the Pharisaic law. The expression was created in the 16 th Century by John Calvin to refer to Protestant believers who would publicly fake being Catholic in order to avoid the Catholic Church’s persecutions. Nicodemism is thus another expression used to refer to what Muscetta instead defined “dissimulazione onesta” (see note 6 page 15). 13 Pierluigi Battista, “Biografie ritoccate per antifascisti redenti,” Corriere della Sera, September 22nd, 2005. 18 maniera.” Here I analyze the reception of this new Pavese, focusing on those moments when his latest works were perceived as disruptive to and out of line with his more consolidated (and manipulated) image as one of the most prominent Italian engaged intellectuals. In the third section, I briefly deal with Pavese’s posthumous fortune, focusing particularly on that flourishing sector of criticism that, in order to continue to depict Pavese as a militant author, as a high- profile antifascist and Marxist champion, selectively remembered specific moments of his life and career, while omitting others. This resulted both in distortions and repressions of events from his private life and it brought about superimpositions that only intensified year after year. Evidence of these misreadings are the debate and turmoil that originated with the publication in 1990 of the taccuino segreto, which I analyze in the last section. In fact, some notes with politically controversial confessions forced the critics and readership both to reconsider the popular image of Pavese and finally to go back to the study of his texts. I. Pavese’s engagement: from Neorealism to the enrollment in the PCI Cesare Pavese’s activity as one of the most prominent Italian writers and as editor of an important publishing house like Einaudi took place during a time when Italian society was going through quite dramatic political as well as cultural changes. In fact, his intellectual activity spans from the early 1930s—during the fascist Regime—up to the hectic late 1940s. Studying Pavese as both an author and as a cultural figure in the publishing market can hardly be conducted without a continuous reference to his native region, Piedmont, and in particular to his elective hometown, Turin. In fact, Pavese’s intellectual roots dig deep into the very specific cultural and political milieu of Piedmont’s main city. Turin was in those years an avant-garde city for its cultural production, which was liberated from that immobility and provinciality that instead 19 paralyzed many other urban cultural realities. Despite the prevailing campanilismo in Italy, Turin was open to the rest of the world and enjoyed a fertile cultural relationship with Europe. In this context, publishing was considered a useful tool for political action, as it could be used to diffuse information to a wide public, and Turin had a large number of journals. Monica Lanzillotta claims that Turinese antifascism was quite original because it placed clandestine political activity side by side with a conspiracy “alla luce del sole,”14 performed, for example, by the antifascist unit Giustizia e Libertà. Pavese attended the Liceo Classico Massimo D’Azeglio in Turin. He was fortunate to have had a very influential teacher, Augusto Monti, who enthusiastically oriented his students— many of whom later became important politicians and intellectuals—toward an aware antifascism, because he believed that the mobilization of the youth was the best way to oppose the regime. Along with some of his school mates—Giulio Einaudi, Massimo Mila, Leone Ginzburg, and Norberto Bobbio—Pavese founded the publishing house Einaudi in 1933. In 1934 Pavese was appointed by Einaudi as the director of the journal La Cultura. The following year he was arrested for holding in his apartment some compromising letters between Tina Pizzardo, a woman with whom he was in love, and the antifascist Altiero Spinelli. Even though his involvement was only marginal and did not imply any concrete activity on his part, he was sent to serve three years of confinement in Brancaleone Calabro. One of the aggravating circumstances in Pavese’s case was his leading role in the aforementioned La Cultura, which was considered by the political police as the active center where the Turinese antifascists arranged their meetings. In Pavese’s arrest report we can read that “l’ambiente antifascista di 14 Monica Lanzillotta, La parabola del disimpegno. Cesare Pavese e un mondo editoriale (Università degli Studi della Calabria, 2001), 69. 20 detta rivista è stato sufficientemente lumeggiato dall’Einaudi.”15 Thanks to a general amnesty in 1936, he was released after one year. That same year, he debuted on the literary scene as a poet with the publication in Solaria of Lavorare stanca,16 a collection of poems that would be appreciated retrospectively by postwar critics for its staging of working-class characters and thus later read as an early Neorealist work. Aware of the impact that such a collection had on an Italian readership accustomed to the Hermetic movement, he later wrote: quanto all’influsso che loro, i compagni uomini, hanno esercitato su di me, carte in tavola. In tempi che la prosa italiana era un «colloquio estenuato con se stessa» e la poesia un «sofferto silenzio,» io discorrevo in prosa e versi con villani, operai, sabbiatori, prostitute, carcerati, operai, ragazzotti. Non mi passa per la testa di vantarmene. Questa gente mi piaceva e mi piace tuttora. Era come me. Non ci si vanta di amare una donna piuttosto che un’altra. Ci si vanterà, se mai, di trattarla con onestà e chiarezza. Ed è questo che voglio aver fatto.17 In 1938 he resumed his collaboration with Einaudi, which was now becoming a quite active publishing house. The political tension was becoming increasingly palpable, and if Einaudi was already considered a beacon for antifascist intellectuals, in the 1940s a conspicuous addition in that direction came from Rome. In fact, a group of Roman intellectuals—composed, among others, of Giaime Pintor, Carlo Muscetta, Mario Alicata, and Carlo Salinari—joins the house and soon becomes militant in the clandestine PCI. This group is particularly important because after the war many of its members would act as PCI national executives and as the cadre of its political culture. While growing as an editor at the Einaudi publishing house, Pavese kept pursuing his literary career and in 1941 he published Paesi tuoi,18 his first effort as a prose writer, which, after the war, would be hailed as the first neorealist work in literature. 15 Arrest record (May 15th, 1935), Archivio Storico Torino, Einaudi collection, 2340/6. 16 Cesare Pavese, Lavorare stanca, Solaria (Firenze, 1936). Einaudi published a second edition of this collection in 1943. 17 Cesare Pavese, “Le ragioni di Pavese,” in Letteratura americana e altri saggi (Torino: Einaudi, 1951), 246-247. 18 Cesare Pavese, Paesi tuoi (Torino: Einaudi, 1941). 21 A constant concern about the possibility of publishing works, given the surveillance by the Minculpop,19 emerges from the editorial correspondence of these years between Pavese and his colleagues—mainly Einaudi, Alicata, and Mila. Phrases like “il testo non ha frasi o parole incriminabili”20 or “sicuramente da escludere in un prospetto ministeriale”21 are very frequent and often seal the decision about whether to proceed or not with the publication of a given text. On June 10th, 1940, propelled by Nazi Germany’s numerous victories, Mussolini declared war on France and Great Britain. With the beginning of the war, the editorial work at Einaudi became increasingly precarious. “Qui a Torino diventa sempre più difficile esaminare testi. Persino le biblioteche dei Senatori (quelle non bruciate) sono in cantina,”22 “ci vuole altro che questi tempi per lavorare in pace,”23 and “qua tutto è distrutto, il magazzino pericolante: dovremo trasferirci nei seminterrati”24 are just some examples of the numerous notes between Pavese and his friends, who would share complaints and concerns about the precarious conditions of the job. In 1943 Pavese was moved to the new editorial base in Rome, while the original one in Turin was badly afflicted by the burdens of war. Soon Rome too became an unsafe seat for the warehouses of the publishing house, due to the bombings by the Allies.25 As 19 Minculpop is the abbreviation for “Ministero della Cultura Popolare,” instituted in 1937 and whose main responsibility was control over Italian cultural production and the organization of fascist propaganda. 20 Cesare Pavese, letter to the editor (November 5th, 1940), Archivio Storico Torino, Einaudi collection, 2340/1. Pavese was attaching his translation of The Trojan Horse by Christopher Morley, a book which aroused his skepticism because there was a “generale atmosfera di una guerra veduta con alquanta scanzonatura.” Before accepting the translation, Pavese had warned the editor about the subject: “si parla di guerra e non si lesina il ridicolo sul razionalismo. [...] Sarà possibile diffondere il libro?” [Cesare Pavese, letter to the editor (July 31st, 1940), Archivio Storico Torino, Einaudi collection, 2340/1]. 21 Cesare Pavese, letter to Mario Alicata (March 14th, 1942), Archivio Storico Torino, Einaudi collection, 2340/1. 22 Cesare Pavese, letter to Mario Alicata (December 10th, 1942), Archivio Storico Torino, Einaudi collection, 2340/1. 23 Cesare Pavese, letter to Romano Bilenchi (December 30th, 1942), Archivio Storico Torino, Einaudi collection, 2340/1. 24 Letter from Turin (August 14th, 1943), Archivio Storico Torino, Einaudi collection, 2340/2. 25 Particularly distressed is a letter sent to Pavese by Einaudi on July 20th. The editor had been informed of a bombing in the capital and he was concerned that the archive of the publishing house could go destroyed in the fire. He suggested to clear off the base in Rome and to move the archive back to Turin. 22 we know, the bombings would only worsen as time passed, and a sarcastic note from Muscetta is one of the last Pavese received while in Rome: “sta’ sano e cerca di sopravvivere alle bombe dei tuoi anglosassoni.”26 Pavese was then called to arms, but was dispensed from military service because of his asthma, which forced him to a six-month stay in the military hospital of Rivoli. Production at the publishing house was put on standby, due to the bombings both in Rome and in Turin. Pavese returned to the Piedmontese city, which was now deeply burdened and destroyed by war. Mussolini’s government fell on July 25th, 1943, after numerous dramatic military defeats, mostly on African and Russian soil. At first Marshal Pietro Badoglio, nominated by King Victor Emmanuel III the new Prime Minister, proclaimed that Italy, regardless of the fall of Mussolini, would be faithful to her alliance with Nazi Germany. The truth is that Badoglio and his entourage had instead started negotiations with the allies. Italy’s former ally was not particularly surprised by the Armistice of September 8th, 1943, and started invading the peninsula already the following day. Northern Italy was soon occupied by the German Army, which liberated Mussolini and helped him create the Repubblica Sociale di Salò (RSI), a puppet government controlled by the German Reich. Coeval to the German occupation of Northern Italy, the Resistance started to take shape. At first it was a spontaneous and unorganized movement, one that the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale (CLN) eventually coordinated. Although they shared a common enemy, the belligerent components of the Resistance were quite multifaceted: among others, communists, socialists, and Catholics. Turin was occupied by a representative of the newly formed RSI, and a fascist commissioner was put in charge of Einaudi.27 Pavese was not in contact with his former friends, some of whom had taken the 26 Carlo Muscetta, letter (August 19th, 1943), Archivio Storico Torino, Einaudi collection, 2340/2. 27 Pavese would later refer to the fascist management as an inauspicious parenthesis, during which works were still published but they were not later recognized by the publishing house as in compliance with its ideological and moral values. This is how Pavese informed De Martino of what happened to Einaudi: “la casa editrice è stata nel 23 clandestine road to the Resistance. Unlike them, Pavese took refuge at his sister’s place in Serralunga di Crea and in December he asked for shelter at the Convitto dei Padri Somaschi of Casale Monferrato. Only after the war would Pavese learn that very close friends and colleagues were dead: Ginzburg was tortured and killed by the Nazis in Rome in 1944 because he was found printing the clandestine paper Giustizia e Libertà; Pintor was killed by a landmine; Pavese’s eighteen year old pupil, Gaspare Pajetta killed fighting as a partisan. After the war, Pavese returned to Rome to recover the editorial base and he became the leading figure at Einaudi, where he was granted growing responsibilities and what essentially amounted to the right of veto on what to translate and what to publish. The publishing house could now resume with renewed enthusiasm and fervor many projects that it had suspended because of the difficulties of wartime. As for Pavese, this meant going back to a project from a few years before: a collection of volumes of anthropology and ethnology in collaboration with the anthropologist Ernesto De Martino. He had lost contact with De Martino during the war, and a few editorial notes Pavese wrote to his colleagues demonstrate how important it was for him to reestablish that contact: “se De Martino […] si facesse vivo con la sede romana, non lasciarselo sfuggire. I volume etnografici costituiscono una cosa indubbiamente molto interessante.”28 This project was implemented only a couple of years later, but it is important to point out how in this period Pavese started to make dicembre 1943 invasa dai naziti e noi scappati. Poi hanno messo un commissario e stampato porcherie” [Cesare Pavese and Ernesto De Martino, La collana viola. Lettere 1945-1950, ed. Pietro Angelini (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1991), 62]. Professor Cantoni Canilli wrote Pavese after the war complaining because his manuscript (which the puppet administration agreed to publish) got lost during the Resistance. Pavese replied informing him that “tutto quanto ha scritto e fatto la gestione Zappa non ci riguarda e non ci lega. Lei ha trattato con dei nazifascisti impadronitisi illegalmente della nostra casa editrice [...]. Le ricordiamo che per noi lei è per lo meno sospetto, in quanto s’è compiaciuto di sporcarsi le mani stringendole a quelle dei nostri nemici mortali” [Cesare Pavese, letter to Cantoni Canilli (June 22nd, 1945), Archivio Storico Torino, Einaudi collection, 2340/2, doc. 332]. 28 Einaudi publishing house editorial minutes (June 18th, 1945), Archivio Storico Torino, Einaudi collection, 2340/2, doc. 300. 24 manifest his interest in anthropology and ethnology: “in questi anni ho studiato abbastanza l’argomento, ma non ho ancora la competenza necessaria.”29 Italy had been forced to her knees by the war, and yet a wave of confidence and enthusiasm animated her postwar years. The need for a rebirth (especially after the experience of fascism) and the commitment to reconstruct society were the new motivational engines that led the country out of the tragic consequences of the war into an optimistic search for a breath of fresh air. The militant antifascism and political engagement that some prominent intellectuals performed during the last couple of years of the war flowed into what Vincenzo Binetti calls the postwar “clima di solidarietà ideologica e di fratellanza umana che aveva alimentato il clima del primo dopoguerra,”30 which brought a great number of intellectuals into the cultural directives of the PCI. After the fascist dictatorship and the war, it was to be expected that Italian intellectuals would affirm their leftist political orientation while trying to redefine their cultural role in postwar society. According to Binetti, those intellectuals inclined to civil and social engagement in postwar Italy were able to find in the PCI a common denominator, regardless of their ideological differences. During the postwar years, Einaudi was the publishing house that had the most consistent collaboration from left-wing intellectuals. Unlike the years under Fascism, Einaudi was in line with the mainstream political orientation. Eloquent are the minutes from an Editorial Council meeting, where, while discussing the nature of both a Marxist collection and of another one dedicated to Italian problems, the staff decided that: “possono esservi anche due o tre soluzioni 29 Report to the Roman Editorial Council (June 7th, 1945), Archivio Storico Torino, Einaudi collection, 2340/2, doc. 311. 30 Vincenzo Binetti, “Marginalità e appartenenza: la funzione dell’intellettuale tra sfera pubblica e privato nell’Italia del dopoguerra,” Italica 74, no. 3 (Autumn 1997): 6. 25 per ogni problema, sempre nell’indirizzo politico della Casa, ormai fatto di P.C., L.C. e di P.d.A., le sole ideologie, del resto, oggi vitali e che possono dare soluzioni di problemi secondo un reale piano costruttivo.”31 In a letter Massimo Mila comments on the manuscript of Statura— occhi—capelli, a novel written by Amedeo Ugolini, director of L’Unità, defining it a “romanzetto sconclusionato che sembra vada comunque pubblicato per motivi di partito.”32 The impression I received from reading both the minutes of the editorial meetings and the correspondence from the years when Pavese was on the committee, is that, in both instances, concerns emerged as to how to please and satisfy a higher censor. In the 1930s there had been the impassable filter of the Minculpop which had the final word on the publication of certain texts; in the second half of the 1940s, even though the publishing house was now working in a democratic and free environment, there was still an awareness of the need to comply with some sort of ideological guidelines. Pavese joined the PCI, started collaborating with L’Unità—the official organ of the party—and in 1947 published Il compagno,33 a novel which was considered to be in line with Socialist Realism, as its protagonist was a quasi-positive hero involved in personal growth aimed at political awareness. Pavese, however, never fit into the category of the canonic political enthusiast as his famous comment to his newly received party membership confirms: “io ho finalmente regolato la mia posizione iscrivendomi al PCI.”34 This does not mean that Pavese’s conviction was only superficial and that he was not moved by a sort of spirit of participation. Proof of this emerges from his correspondence, especially from a sarcastic note from Muscetta who compliments his friend for his commitment: “anche tu come molti letterati 31 Einaudi publishing house editorial minutes (June 18th, 1945), Archivio Storico Torino, fondo Einaudi, 2340/2, doc. 300. 32 Massimo Mila, letter (September 19th, 1945), Archivio Storico Torino, fondo Einaudi, 2340/2, doc. 490. 33 Cesare Pavese, Il compagno (Torino: Einaudi, 1947). 34 Cesare Pavese, letter to Massimo Mila (November 10th, 1945) in Lettere, 1945-1950 (Torino: Einaudi, 1966), 34. 26 romani sei vittima di un risucchio della ventata di attivismo […]. Ma è bene che un po’ di follia sfiori il tuo capo.”35 Binetti’s argument is that for intellectuals like Pavese or Vittorini, who had a “posizione defilata all’interno del pc,” the notion of “engagement” did not necessarily imply an ideological identification with Marxism, but it rather meant “l’esercizio del proprio ruolo demiurgico di “funzionario” culturale al servizio della collettività.”36 In the immediate postwar, the party was accepting, in the name of an ideological pluralism, less orthodox elements whose main common denominators were antifascism and the commitment to an active participation in the reconstruction of a new society. As I briefly stated in the introduction to this chapter, it was in the PCI’s interest to open its doors even to those who were not the best example of leftist antifascism during the ventennio. A generic and approximate “universal Marxism” could then unite the quite heterogeneous panorama of the Italian intelligentsia. According to Binetti, Pavese, ad esempio, vede forse nel PCI, inteso appunto come unità catalizzante e disciplinante, una possibilità non tanto ideologica quanto sociale ed umana, di superare le proprie tendenze individualistiche ed esistenziali attraverso una rivisitazione reale e storico-conoscitiva del suo discorso artistico.37 This climate of solidarity and of heterogeneity within the party came to a halt when the left was excluded from the government in 1947. The PCI felt the need to compensate for its loss of hegemony within the Italian political panorama with an ideological hardening of its expectations on the part of the intellectuals who were now asked to be more orthodox and explicitly in line with the party’s directives. This change of course was perceived by those less orthodox party members as a political involution, and not everybody was able or willing to adapt to the new scenario. Whereas before the loose Marxism of intellectuals like Pavese or Vittorini 35 Carlo Muscetta, letter to Cesare Pavese (June 22nd, 1945), Archivio Storico Torino, Einaudi collection. 36 Vincenzo Binetti, Marginalità e appartenenza, 5. 37 Ibid. 27 was tolerated, now the party was taking a hard line against those members who were not willing to comply with the new dogmatic direction. The results were soon tangible in cultural production. From the implementation of Socialist Neorealism to the Politecnico case,38 from the skepticism towards Einaudi’s Collana Viola to “il caso Metello,”39 Italian literature of these years was a showcase of the clash between culture and politics. Pavese’s case too belongs to this scenario, as many of his contemporaries and critics did not understand the significance of his intellectual engagement in the postwar Italian ideological fervor—one that he shared, even though not in a canonic and orthodox way. In fact, “il “caso” del Politecnico [...] e lo stesso suicidio di Pavese nel ’50 diventano [...] per gli intellettuali militanti fedeli alla linea “rigida” del PCI, la conclusione inevitabile di chi in effetti ai loro occhi non aveva mai vissuto coerentemente il proprio impegno ideologico.”40 This short-sighted approach has hindered the understanding of a work that, precisely for its originality and inadaptability to the mass and party expectations, was read with prejudice. II. “La nuova maniera” of Cesare Pavese In the last section I enumerated some central aspects of Pavese’s life and work which highlight his involvement with left-wing environments. From his very first work—Lavorare 38 Il Politecnico was a journal published by Einaudi and edited by Elio Vittorini in the years 1945-1947, aimed at rebuilding a new Italian culture after the fascist era. Palmiro Togliatti soon disagreed with Vittorini’s position on the role of the intellectual in this new enterprise. According to the writer, in fact, an intellectual should be able to work without any political interferences, and should also aim his research at the “ricerca della verità, non predicazione della verità.” The controversy reached its apex with Vittorini’s refusal to “suonare il piffero per la rivoluzione” [Il Politecnico, no. 35, 1947], which resulted in a definitive break with the PCI. 39 Franco Fortini coined the neologism “metellismo” to refer to the reactions to the publication of Vasco Pratolini, Metello (Firenze: Vallecchi, 1955). There were two main types of reaction to the novel within Marxist circles: those with Carlo Muscetta who disliked the book for its inability to depict a socialist hero; and those represented by Carlo Salinari who, instead, considered Metello as a great achievement in Pratolini’s career. Both reactions can be considered as a manifestation of the crisis Italian Neorealism started experiencing in the 1950s. 40 Vincenzo Binetti, Marginalità e appartenenza, 13. 28 stanca—up to his postwar collaboration with L’Unità and the publication of his novel Il compagno, Pavese proved to be “un ottimo gregario del PCI.”41 In the present section I will look at his postwar production that did not necessarily meet those expectations because it was moving away from Neorealism, both from a linguistic and thematic point of view, and introducing new elements within the Italian literary panorama. Most of his contemporary critics expressed their disorientation at the great amount of work produced by the author almost annually, and also at his sudden poetic changes. This is how Bona Alterocca, future biographer of Pavese, commented on the publication of Prima che il gallo canti42: “si sa che ogni nuovo libro di Pavese è in certo senso una sorpresa destinata a scombussolare i critici, giacché ogni volta egli si stacca dal genere precedente, nella continua ricerca ed evoluzione che costituisce la ragione dell’arte sua, comunque essa si voglia giudicare.”43 Starting from the early 1940s, he dedicated himself to the study of anthropology, ethnology and the history of religions. His “poetics of myth” was received as something absolutely against the tide and out of its time. Its originality and complexity did not fit into a rigorously rationalistic and historicist mid-1940s Italian culture: a lyric investigation into myth stood out against the thriving historicism of those days.44 The first artistic outlet of such interest, a sort of decisive turning point and change of perspective in 41 Dino Terra, “Il traguardo dei libri: Prima che il gallo canti, La galleria, La Dama della Morgue,” Il giornale della sera, May 15th, 1949. 42 Cesare Pavese, Prima che il gallo canti (Torino: Einaudi, 1948). 43 Bona Alterocca, “Prima che il gallo canti,” Il nostro tempo, December 11th, 1948. 44 At the end of 1930s, Benedetto Croce decided to abandon the denomination of “Idealism” for his philosophical speculation, substituting it with “Absolute Historicism.” Croce’s famous definition of Historicism is that it “is the affirmation that life and reality are history and history alone” (Benedetto Croce, "History as the Story of Liberty," (1941): 464-466). According to the philosopher, Historicism ought to assert a concrete and immanent idea of rationality, to be contraposed to the abstract and metaphysical one (“super-history”) promoted instead by Enlightenment. A second important moment in the Italian debate on Historicism is in the second half of 1940s when the publication by Einaudi of Antonio Gramsci’s work (Lettere dal carcere in 1947, and Quaderni dal carcere between 1948 and 1951) provided a new theoretical reference. Gramsci’s thought offered an opportunity to anchor Marxism in the Italian intellectual tradition, thus allowing for a correspondence between Marxism and Historicism. 29 Pavese’s writing, was Feria d’agosto,45 a collection of short stories and theoretical essays he started writing in 1940, and the first book he published after the war. Feria d’agosto is the first attempt by Pavese both to convert into narrative his interest in myth and to elaborate on it theoretically. Some of the more theoretical essays had already appeared in specialized journals. Mila, one of his closest friends at the publishing house, harshly criticized his “Del mito, del simbolo e d’altro”46 where Pavese investigated the relevance of childhood memories in the formation of personal myths. Mila commented that the article reminded him of the “rimestamento dell’infanzia favolosa” that he disliked very much. Also, Mila could not help noticing a great difference in the poetics expressed in his articles for L’Unità and in this one, which Pavese published in a “rivista di cacastecchi estetizzanti.” He concluded his note with a sincere suggestion: “nel caso tuo credo che una buona sferzata verso l’Unità ti farebbe bene.”47 I dialoghi con Leucò,48 written between 1945 and 1947, can be read as the follow-up to the research inaugurated by Feria d’agosto. I dialoghi con Leucò is a compendium of brief dialogues among characters from ancient Greek mythology, set in the era that follows the fall of the Titans. The struggle between chaos and nomos is here embodied by the struggle between the lawlessness of the Era of the Titans and the rule of law in the age of the Olympians. From Pavese’s personal and editorial correspondence emerges a disappointment in his most valued readers—his friends and colleagues—who evidently did not understand the book, or did not care enough to respond to it. He praised Romilda Bollati for her understanding: “vuol forse dire che lei ha capito che Leucò è il mio biglietto da visita presso i posteri? Pochi ci arrivano. Tanto 45 Cesare Pavese, Feria d’agosto (Torino: Einaudi, 1946). 46 Cesare Pavese, “Del mito, del simbolo e d’altro,” in Feria d’agosto. 47 Massimo Mila, letter to Cesare Pavese (November 15th, 1945), Archivio Storico Torino, Einaudi collection, 2340/3, doc. 549. Pavese also received pressures to retrieve his once blooming collaboration at L’Unità from colleagues at Einaudi who were concerned by the fact that he was not writing for the paper anymore. 48 Cesare Pavese, I dialoghi con Leucò (Torino: Einaudi, 1947). 30 meglio,”49 especially given the fact that “Leucò è un maledetto libro su cui nessuno osa pronunciarsi: tutti stanno ancora leggendolo.”50 Also, in one of the very last letters he wrote, Pavese defined his Dialoghi “un libro che nessuno legge, e, naturalmente, è l’unico che vale qualcosa.”51 There were also critics who appreciated the originality and the validity of Pavese’s Dialoghi—for example Mario Untersteiner who wrote a wonderful review for “L’educazione politica,” or Vincenzo Ciaffi for Avanti!—but the general impression Pavese seemed to have received from reviewers and critics is that of a disappointing silence. The year 1947 was very important for Pavese’s literary and editorial activity. In fact, alongside Il compagno and I dialoghi con Leucò, Pavese finally managed to put into practice the project that he had been cultivating for over five years: the editing of the Collana di studi religiosi, etnologici e psicologici, known as collana viola for the color of its cover. The idea of this collection was to feature texts exploring pre-historical cultures and popular rituals and myths, and the first volumes incited a lively debate, both within the editorial board itself and on the outside. The most hotly discussed issue was that Pavese agreed to publish works from some authors whose compromising political past was well known. The publication of names such as Mircea Eliade, considered an ideologist of the extreme right-wing, and of Karol Kérenyi, known for his visceral anti-communist beliefs, sparked many polemics. As Pavese frankly admitted to his colleague De Martino, “è un po’ di tempo che mi rinfacciano i criminali di guerra.”52 For this reason, the anthropologist considered indispensable an explanatory and reassuring introduction to the texts, an introduction he defined as “vaccinazione preventiva a scanso di ulteriori 49 Cesare Pavese, letter to B. (July 20th, 1945), Archivio Storico Torino, Einaudi collection. 50 Cesare Pavese, letter to a journalist from Il popolo (December 12th, 1947), Archivio Storico Torino, Einaudi collection. 51 Cesare Pavese, letter to Nino Frank (August 25th, 1950), Archivio Storico Torino, Einaudi collection. 52 Cesare Pavese, letter to Ernesto De Martino (September 8th, 1949), Archivio Storico Torino, Einaudi collection. 31 equivoci.” De Martino’s intellectual background was indebted to Benedetto Croce’s philosophy and he wanted to approach the study of religious phenomena from a scientific and rigorously historicist point of view. At the same time, he was more interested in avoiding a direct clash with the PCI, which was exercising heavy control over the publishing house. Pavese instead refused and discredited De Martino’s introduction as “dieci pagine di ‘mani avanti’e di proteste antifasciste,”53 to which he would instead prefer “una precisa notizia filologica.” Interesting is the following note Pavese wrote his colleague: tieni presente che le due esigenze—ambientare i testi nel milieu idealistico italiano e accordarli con le velleità marxistiche dei nostri consulenti ideologici—sono di per sè quasi contraddittorie. Sovente, disperato, io concludo che è meglio darli nudi e crudi e lasciare che i litigi avvengano sulle riviste.54 Even though the two intellectuals shared a common interest in promoting the knowledge of “studi etnologici, religiosi, psicologici” in Italy, their differences eventually led to a breaking point; De Martino’s historicism and cautionary approach to the PCI’s directives, and Pavese’s lack of interest in the alleged ideological implications of his editorial choices proved too great a divide to bridge. For Pavese, this experience also resulted in his dismissal from the PCI which did not renew his membership card. Pavese’s last novels and articles were also reviewed by some with skepticism. In 1948 Pavese published La casa in collina, an “anomalous” Resistance novel compared to its Neorealist contemporaries. The protagonist of this novel is Corrado, a secluded man who does not take part in the Resistance. Apparently, the main criticism of La casa in collina was that it contained a sort of moral defect that suggested an equivalence between the death of the partisans 53 Cesare Pavese, Lettere 1945-1950 (Torino: Einaudi, 1966), 431. 54 Cesare Pavese and Ernesto De Martino, La collana viola. Lettere 1945-1950, 111. 32 and that of the Germans or fascists. The following are the most controversial lines that imprint the book with a deep existential mark: ma ho visto i morti sconosciuti, i morti repubblichini. Sono questi che mi hanno svegliato. Se un ignoto, un nemico, diventa morendo una cosa simile, se ci si arresta e si ha paura a scavalcarlo, vuol dire che anche vinto il nemico è qualcuno, che dopo averne sparso il sangue bisogna placarlo, dare una voce a questo sangue, giustificare chi l’ha sparso [...]. Ci si sente umiliati perché si capisce—si tocca con gli occhi—che al posto del morto potremmo essere noi. Per questo ogni guerra è una guerra civile: ogni caduto somiglia a chi resta,e gliene chiede ragione.55 Giansiro Ferrata in L’Unità reviewed La casa in collina as a short story which has “una seconda parte stentata.” According to the critic, the first part is well balanced between a negative judgment of the protagonist and of his inactivity, and a close examination of his inner self. Nevertheless, according to Ferrata, the narration in the second part, which encompasses the events after September 8th, becomes careless, because “è accaduto che Pavese, quando l’azione è arrivata all’8 settembre, alla Guerra partigiana, insomma al momento decisivo per le responsabilità o le scappatoie del suo protagonista, ha perso la pazienza.”56 Ferrata believes that Pavese “[si è intimidito] davanti a certe svolte risolutive.” In a later review to La bella estate by Rino dal Sasso, La casa in collina is seen as “stretta in limiti romantici e autobiografici.”57 Dal Sasso complains that the liberation struggle was told as a background story, which emerged only as a contraposition to the absolute cowardice of the protagonist. For this reason, the partisans’ operations “nella morale di Corrado a un certo punto stavano alla pari con la lotta dei fascisti […]. Per lui, il sangue d’entrambi, partigiani e fascisti, ha il medesimo valore di accusa.” According to dal Sasso, what characterizes Pavese’s later style is an intellectualizing and 55 Cesare Pavese, La casa in collina, 484. 56 Giansiro Ferrata, “Pavese e la verità. “Prima che il gallo canti”: un nuovo libro di un forte scrittore italiano,” L’Unità, March 4th, 1949. 57 Rino dal Sasso, “L’ultimo libro di Pavese: La bella estate,” L’Unità, February 25th, 1950. 33 paradoxical morality, which is not able to reflect a critical point of view.58 The distance from his earlier style, which was considered by most of the critics as genuine and immediate, is addressed in many of these reviews as the main fault of the “nuova maniera.” Fortunately, there were also critics who recognized the importance of this novel, which depicted “uno stato d’animo forse più diffuso di quanto non piaccia a chi vorrebbe trovare l’eroico ad ogni costo in determinate circostanze politiche,”59 and who saw in Corrado “solo un uomo che ha le sue idee onestamente sentite, coraggioso soprattutto nel suo timore, antiretorico, uomo e non eroe che non ha nulla da forzare e da celare, e rivela esattamente le reazioni furenti, disperate, calme di quei giorni.”60 Pavese’s later journalistic and essay writing also received similar attacks. In 1950 Pavese joined the editorial board of Cultura e Realtà, a journal founded, among others, by his colleague at Einaudi, Felice Balbo, and that gathered together people who had gravitated around the Sinistra Cristiana. Cultura e Realtà was born out of a need to accommodate an unorthodox voice within left intellectuals, a voice that would be free to deal with debatable questions such as anti- historicism and the sociological sciences.61 Balbo in fact, like Pavese, complained about the 58 Luigi Tozzi too complained about the morality of the novel, which he defined as “mediocre, stanca, distratta.” According to him, Pavese’s novel was pervaded by “un leggero senso di pietà” (Luigi Tozzi, “Prima che il gallo canti,” Rinnovamento Liberale, July 25th, 1949). 59 Augusta Grosso, “Da un mondo senza sogni al regno del mito,” Il popolo nuovo, January 16th, 1949. 60 Leone Piccioni, “Il cammino di Pavese,” Il mattino dell’Italia Centrale, May 3rd, 1949. 61 Felice Balbo used to publish in Il Politecnico, but he soon understood that Vittorini’s journal was not the best venue for his contributions. There were many details that should have been changed according to Balbo, for example the graphical look of the journal, but in a letter to Fortini he admitted: “ma i motivi del mio dissenso sono più profondi: c’è ancora, troppo diffuso, quel senso di gruppo, di possessori della verità o di annunziatori profetici della nuova cultura. Uno dei motivi della ripugnanza (che io e certamente moltissimi altri provano) a scrivere su Politecnico è il sentire che per entrarvi bisogna aderire a una fede piuttosto che a un lavoro comune.” (Felice Balbo, letter to Franco Fortini (June 10th, 1946), Archivio Storico Torino, Einaudi collection, Balbo dossier). It was soon evident for Balbo the need of an autonomous publication: Cultura e realtà provided him and the other founders with an opportunity for research and discussion, not influenced or bridled by ideology. For this reason, the articles published on this journal often touched upon issues and questions that were perceived as not appropriate. As Fulvio De Giorgi asserts, “Cultura e realtà è l’unica voce anticonformista ed eterodossa della cultura di sinistra. In essa si anticipano alcuni temi, dall’autonomia della cultura all’anti-storicismo, che diverranno quasi un luogo comune nella seconda metà degli anni cinquanta, ma che in quel momento appaiono scottanti e in odore di eresia.” (Fulvio De Giorgi, “Cultura e realtà tra comunismo e terza forza,” Italia contemporanea, December 1981, instalment. 145, 59). For example, the attention for social sciences was one of the main characteristic of this 34 heavy interference of the PCI in the choice of what to publish, reminding his colleagues how Einaudi “è una casa editrice, no biblioteca di partito.”62 Pavese contributed two essays—“Il mito”63 and “Discussioni etnologiche”64—and he committed suicide before the publication of the second issue, which featured some contributions from him, accompanied by an obituary. The journal, however, had a short life. The PCI vehemently attacked the journal for its heterodox and dissident nature. In fact, on June 6th, 1950, an anonymous article (most likely written, or inspired, by Palmiro Togliatti, the secretary of the PCI) was published in Rinascita: “Marx e il Leopardo.” Cultura e Realtà was criticized because of its anticonformist role whithin leftist culture: “la strada su cui si sono incamminati i sette o otto redattori di Cultura e realtà [...] porta a una revisione dell’ideologia e al tentativo di sostituzione di un nuovo programma.”65 This critique of a nonconforming voice only made the isolation that Catholic intellectuals in the PCI experienced more evident, an isolation that dramatically escalated with the publication in 1949 of the Holy Office’s excommunication decree against “i cristiani che professano la dottrina comunista materialista e anticristiana.” III. The posthumous fortune between politics and private life In the previous sections, I have introduced the two main blocks which constitute Pavese’s literary production and editorial activity. These two blocks were not necessarily the development journal, whose originality “risiede proprio nel fatto che questa attenzione alle scienze sociali non si colloca in un’area extra-storicistica [...] ma nasce proprio da una profonda verifica critica dello storicismo.” (Ibid., 60) 62 Minutes of the editorial session of January 12th- 13th, 1949, Archivio Storico Torino, Einaudi collection. 63 Cesare Pavese, “Il mito” [January 27th-29th, 1950], Cultura e Realtà, no. 1 (May-June 1950). Now in Cesare Pavese, La letteratura americana e altri saggi (Torino: Einaudi, 1951). 64 Cesare Pavese, “Discussioni etnologiche,” Cultura e Realtà, no. 1 (May-June 1950). Now in Cesare Pavese, La letteratura americana e altri saggi. 65 “Marx e il leopardo,” Rinascita, no. 6 (June 1950), 332. 35 and overcoming of one over the other, but instead they at times coexisted, thus disorienting those critics who were less receptive of Pavese’s innovative spirit. Pavese’s twenty-year involvement with Einaudi, his experience of confinement, his postwar enrollment in the PCI and collaboration with its paper, L’Unità, made him one of the most high-profile communist intellectuals. As we have seen, at least up to 1947, his literary production could also confirm such a judgment. Nevertheless, Pavese’s “nuova maniera” was the one that would assert itself, and this caused turmoil and disappointment among the most orthodox communist intellectuals. In the present section I move forward in time and analyze Pavese’s posthumous fortune. I claim that the same patterns of judgment, ideological expectations, and pseudo-biographical gossiping inform the study of Pavese in the post-Pavese era. In fact, though Pavese was an author who seemed to have already created a fair amount of scandal during his life, he did so even more after his death. Pavese committed suicide on August 27th, 1950 in a hotel room in Turin. “Non fate pettegolezzi” were the very last words he ever wrote, on his own copy of I dialoghi con Leucò, right before ingesting more than ten sachets of sedatives. It was a very synthetic and yet clear request; a request that was doomed not to be fulfilled. In fact, the very first reactions to his suicide have been labeled as “frastuono gazzettiero di insinuazioni volgari, di maldicenza invidiosa, di parole spese male.”66 Whereas during his life Pavese’s work had been victim to distortions, or at least of partiality, from those critics who implicitly downplayed his texts while emphasizing his ideological affiliations, after his death, the other tendency starts to emerge. I am referring to the constant inclination in the critical panorama to use Pavese’s life as a manual for approaching his work. After his suicide, and even more after the publication in 1952 of his 66 Sergio Pautasso, Cesare Pavese oltre il mito, il mestiere di scrivere come mestiere di vivere (Genova: Marietti Editore, 2000), 17. 36 fifteen-year long diary Il mestiere di vivere, there has been a critical tendency to indulge a morbid curiosity for the most recondite details of his private and romantic life. His contemporary Franco Fortini, already in an article written in 1953 for Les Temps Modernes, when discussing the reasons behind Pavese’s death noticed that “nel desiderio d’interpretare i moventi del suicidio, i comunisti hanno privilegiato il motivo sentimentale, gli anticomunisti quello della crisi politica.”67 Sergio Pautasso draws on the same interpretation, asserting that “le circostanze stesse in cui Pavese aveva maturato il suo suicidio erano tali da alimentare morbosamente la curiosità in due direzioni: quella politica e quella privata:”68 se la politica non riconosceva a Pavese il suo diritto al privato, sul piano del privato si scatenò invece una caccia morbosa alla ricerca del torbido e dello scandalo: venne messo in piazza in tutta la sua drammaticità il rovello amoroso e sessuale che aveva attanagliato Pavese per l’intera vita [...]. C’era, appunto, quanto bastava per alimentare lo scarso numero di pagine dei giornali di quel tempo, che non persero l’occasione per imbastire cinicamente un bel caso.69 An author who had always been bashful and discreet, known for his reticence and unwillingness to be in the public eye, was eventually betrayed by a critical trend of dissecting every aspect of his life. His fatherless childhood, his romantic problems, and his renowned grumpy temperament, all were used as pieces of a puzzle in the reconstruction of the life of a solitary hero that only a suicide could perfectly seal. As Fortini pointed out, it was the leftist critics who dissected Pavese’s private life, as if drawing attention to that might somehow 67 Franco Fortini, “Cesare Pavese,” Les Temps Modernes, no. 87 (January-February, 1953). Translated in L’Ospite ingrato, Annuario del Centro Studi Franco Fortini, vol. III, 2000. The publication of Il mestiere di vivere in 1952 incentivized the research in Pavese’s private life and the curiosity for gossip, but at the same time allowed for a better and deeper understanding of Pavese’s poetics and works. In fact, Fortini believed that “questo diario, accolto di malavoglia dalla critica italiana, ci impone una revisione della fisionomia di Pavese.” According to the critic, anything that had been said about the author until then had to be reconsidered, and the wordings used to define him before the publication of the Mestiere di vivere were now inadequate because the diary unveiled “la ricchezza delle sue contraddizioni e dell’energia morale impiegata, fino a che gli è stato possibile, per dominarle” [ibid.]. Also, it is interesting to note how far-sighted Fortini’s interpretation of Pavese’s reception was. As we shall see in the next section, Fortini’s reading of the approach the two political spheres had toward Pavese proved to be still relevant decades later. 68 Sergio Pautasso, Cesare Pavese oltre il mito, 14. 69 Ibid., 17. 37 overshadow Pavese’s critical relation to the PCI. According to Pautasso, the history of the reception of Pavese, up until the mid-1960s,70 could be summarized as a concerted and continuous attempt to dramatize the author and build around him the halo of a decadent and romantic hero. Pavese was, in fact, for him a writer who was excessively “biografato e mitizzato.”71 Of the many biographies written of Pavese, one has been for a long time considered as the main reference on the author: Il vizio assurdo72 by Davide Lajolo, a long-time friend and confidant of the author. The peculiarity of this biography, written in 1960, is the substantial use of Lajolo’s own direct testimony, personal memories of conversations and moments shared by the biographer with Pavese. This work, nowadays considered outdated, is largely responsible for reinforcing and sustaining a partial and prejudicial reading of the author’s life. Two main criticisms can be made of this biography. First, as we can deduce from the title, Pavese’s life is read through the lens of a self-annihilating tendency that was already evident early in his childhood and that finally culminated in his suicide. The romantic disappointments suffered through the years and the impression “di non valere alla penna”73 are for Lajolo the two main reasons that led Pavese to that extreme gesture. His entire life is then read and interpreted as a constant battle against the temptation to commit suicide, which Lajolo defines Pavese’s absurd vice. The Pavese portrayed in these pages very much resembles a hero who strenuously and epically fights against the darkest corners of his own psyche and against the attraction to commit 70 A significant turning point in Pavese’s studies is represented by the monographic issue of Sigma printed on December 1964. Finally, primacy was accorded to the text and to the corpus of his works, rather than to biographical indiscretions. 71 Sergio Pautasso, Cesare Pavese oltre il mito, 21. 72 Davide Lajolo, Il vizio assurdo. Storia di Cesare Pavese (Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1960). 73 Ibid., 13. 38 suicide, but ultimately loses.74 Besides the partiality of a reading that casts the dark shadow of the suicide retrospectively on much of the author’s life, Lajolo also emphasizes certain events while omitting others. Specific events in Pavese’s life are highlighted as proof of his antifascist fervor, like his confinement, his collaboration with L’Unità and his main role within the publishing house Einaudi, well-known for being a meeting point for antifascist intellectuals. For the same reasons, other crucial moments of his biography are not mentioned, namely his hiding during the Resistance,75 the religious interest he felt during this period, the polemics around the choice of certain texts to be published in the collana viola, and his permanent expulsion from the PCI. These important moments of his life are repressed, while others more in line with the image to be spread are highlighted. A Pavese who had given proof of his antifascism in many different circumstances was not in line with this other Pavese who was emerging especially towards the end of his life. This second version of the author was not one his posthumous critics wanted to 74 L’échec de Pavese, [Dominique Fernandez, L’échec de Pavese (Paris, 1969)] is another renowned study that follows in the footsteps of Lajolo’s biographical approach as a way of understanding Pavese’s literary pieces. Lajolo indeed complained, in the preface to the second edition to his work, that Fernandez, in charge of the French translation of Il vizio assurdo, used the information Lajolo gave him in an interview where he pointed out all the moments in Pavese’s life that could be interpreted in a Freudian key, without quoting them. Anyway, in Fernandez’s biography, Pavese becomes an exemplary of the crisis of the contemporary man. The French critic pays particular attention to identifying the causes of the author’s neurosis and manias. The identification of childhood traumas is then the key to the reading and interpretation of his work. According to Fernandez, the most relevant trauma in Pavese’s life was the death of his father when he was only six years old. This loss caused a state of melancholy that escaped Pavese’s consciousness, but became quite evident in his writings. As we can see, both biographies—which had been considered for a long time the main point of reference for any scholar approaching the study of Pavese—linger in the author’s psychological issues as a means to a thorough understanding of his work, thus corroborating the aforementioned critical tendency. 75 The excision of this important moment of Pavese’s life has been harshly criticized by Father Baravalle, principal of the Collegio dei Padri Somaschi where the Piedmontese author spent several months during the war. He particularly complains of such a lack in Lajolo’s biography, where the biographer barely informs the reader about Pavese’s stay in the school, completely overlooking the importance of that experience that resulted in a temporary conversion. According to Sergio Pautasso, such an important omission was probably due to the fact that Lajolo felt that there was nothing to be said, since Pavese during the Resistance was not a partisan. However, the relevance of those months on Pavese’s life is attested by the influence they exerted on his literary work, especially on La casa in collina, where Corrado, the protagonist, spent some time in a school directed by Padre Felice, both very reminiscent of the Collegio dei Padri Somaschi and of its director. Padre Baravalle did indeed very deeply appreciate Bona Alterocca’s Pavese dopo un quarto di secolo (Soc. Ed. Internazionale, 1974), which called Pavese’s true biography and which lingers at length on the relationship between him and Pavese. 39 emphasize. Unlike many of his contemporaries in the postwar years, Pavese never tried to forge or cover his past. Pavese was the object, rather than the author, of misreadings by newspapers, magazines and biographies that made him a public icon of Marxism and of commitment to antifascism, while completely obliterating all the density and complexities of his doubts and struggles. Even though I agree with Pautasso when he asserts that “oggi, a decine di anni di distanza, [...] ormai la curiosità morbosa non ha più ragione di essere e la critica ha recuperato il proprio ruolo lavorando sui testi,”76 Yet, the two main tendencies exposed above— emphasizing either the private or political implications of his life and work—were still relevant until recently. As we will see in the next section, the summer of 1990 saw a new wave of scandal in the Italian critical panorama. Forty years after his death, Cesare Pavese could still cause a vivid debate, and once again his critics and friends were puzzled by the addition of a new and unexpected angle from which to consider the author’s life. IV. The taccuino segreto: desertion, immaturity, or lack of political character? In the summer of 1990, the spotlight was on Pavese because of the commemorations of his suicide, committed forty years before.77 The publication in July of a partial preview of the soon-to-be-published new edition of Il mestiere di vivere had already paved the way for the media interest that Pavese’s persona would posthumously generate in August. In fact, after so 76 Sergio Pautasso, Cesare Pavese oltre il mito, 17. 77 All over the country, and especially in his native Piedmont, a great variety of events was scheduled, including conferences, roundtables, art exhibitions and the projection of documentaries and movies about the author’s life and works. Even the annual meeting of Comunione e Liberazione held in Rimini organized a special biographical exhibition dedicated to Cesare Pavese, featuring pictures and manuscripts and autographs aimed at highlighting his intimate challenges and religious temptations. This event was aimed at the twofold goal of restoring a cultural depth to the meeting, and at the same time of promoting a new unexpected martyr to be commended. 40 many years, the new edition of the diary was finally going to include parts that had been censored before. Natalia Ginzburg, who along with Italo Calvino had edited the first edition of Il mestiere di vivere, had commented that the cuts were necessary, not because of the presence of obscene language, but rather because a woman who was named in those pages did not appreciate such notoriety. Even though Ginzburg had reassured the readers of the nature of those cuts, there was still curiosity about these pages, which supposedly contained scandalous and sexually explicit expressions, often related to misogynist exploits. “Pavese parole parolacce”78 is the eloquent title of an interview with Marziano Guglielminetti, the editor of the new edition, published in La Repubblica on July 1st, 1990. The title winks at those curious readers, even though the article then takes a completely different direction. Guglielminetti reassures readers that the bad words have been counted and filed, “dieci, quindici al massimo e tutte ovviamente di natura sessuale,” but their reintegration does not add much to what we already knew of Pavese: “non c’è certo bisogno di leggere qualche sfogo in più per accorgersi dei suoi problemi con l’altro sesso e della sua già leggendaria misoginia. D’altra parte Pavese aveva dei problemi e se li portava dietro fin dall’adolescenza.” For Guglielminetti, the critical apparatus was instead the important addition to the first edition. In fact, such an addition could help a reader who, forty years later, may no longer have the same references as Pavese had in the 1930s and 1940s. Allusions which were once understandable to the average reader needed instead now to be explained. In this growing attention and interest in the celebrated figure of Pavese, a decisive event irremediably shattered the critical unison into a choir of disharmonic voices. Lorenzo Mondo’s article in La Stampa on August 8th paved the way for a multiform and contrasting debate. Mondo 78 Paolo Mauri, “Pavese parole parolacce,” La Repubblica, July 1st, 1990. 41 shared the content of a few unpublished bloc notes pages written by Pavese and which, from there on, went by the name of taccuino segreto. These pages, written between August 1942 and December 1943, were given to Mondo by Maria Sini, Pavese’s sister, earlier in 1962 when, along with Italo Calvino, he was in charge of the retrieval of Pavese’s unpublished works. Both Mondo and Calvino, when confronted with the content of the taccuino, agreed not to publish it because of the turmoil that those pages could have created. In fact, the taccuino featured some very debatable political and ideological considerations. The most hotly discussed pages were those in which Pavese voiced positive sentiments towards fascism as the seat of good discipline, in contrast to certain antifascists who would just argue and discuss. In line with this consideration was also the admiration for the German people for their discipline, rigor and patriotism. In addition to this, in some pages Pavese toyed with the idea of joining the army, as if he were caught up in a patriotic revival. This emerges, for example, when he writes: “tu sei un uomo pacifico, eppure come da Brancaleone pensavi talvolta che avresti dovuto andare anche tu a combattere, ora—che ti aspetti di essere chiamato—l'idea non ti dispiace. Un uomo ha più qualità di quel che crede.”79 It is interesting to note that Mondo finally decided to publish those pages in 1990, thus adding Pavese’s case to the many others of those same years and that I have briefly mentioned in the introduction to this chapter. The post Cold War era opened up the possibility of questioning assumptions held about famous intellectuals. Mondo basically waited for the collapse of the PCI’s cultural hegemony for the taccuino to be read without ideological or biographical prejudgment. Unfortunately, as we shall see, that was not yet to be the case. 79 Cesare Pavese, “Il taccuino segreto,” ed. Lorenzo Mondo, La Stampa, August 8th, 1990. 42 The discovery of the taccuino may be a confirmation that Pavese’s biographical persona underwent political and ideological distortions, especially at the hands of politically oriented critics. According to their perspective, Pavese was already a fervent and militant antifascist before September 8th, when the fascist regime was still in place and strong.80 But the taccuino, written before the armistice, contradicted them. However, far from drawing an easy and predictable picture of Pavese, albeit one opposite to what the Marxist intellectuals had proposed, Mondo believes that the taccuino raises important questions. Did the postwar Pavese regret what he wrote on those pages before the war of Liberation? Why did he not destroy them rather than keeping them, along with all the other drafts of his work? Why did he decide to tear them out of Il mestiere di vivere in the first place?81 Without doubt, Mondo is a reliable and committed critic, who in the span of decades proved to be one of Pavese’s most sensitive critics. However, some of his choices—like the timing of his publication of the journal—raise skepticism about his motivations. Besides the 80 A proof of one’s antifascism already in place before September 8th was in postwar Italy a guarantee of the credibility of such ideological conviction. The phenomenon of “antifascismo dell’ultima ora”—namely, joining the antifascist forces only when it was obvious that fascism was on the verge of defeat—has been harshly criticized as opportunistic and as a second-class antifascism. For this reason, many public figures tended to backdate their critique of fascism in their biographical accounts. 81 Even though Mondo poses some open questions without providing answers, he still proposes a couple of hypotheses as to why Pavese wrote those pages. He believes that Pavese, who was always particularly dutiful and meticulous in his editorial work, probably felt particularly bothered by the frenzied “lotta parlamentare” he experienced when he was in Rome, which he considered to be both unproductive and a distraction. Such climate of political tension is, for example, confirmed in a letter to Pavese from a colleague at the Roman base of August 26th, 1943 where he asserts: “qui si crepa di politica, se non di caldo.” Also, according to Mondo, Pavese could have entertained a sort of patriotic sentiment when he disagreed with the antifascists who wanted (Fascist) Italy to be defeated: stronger was for him the empathy for his country tormented and discouraged by a long war. When it comes to the admiration for Germany, Mondo hypothesizes that, under this aspect, probably Pavese was particularly influenced by his close friend Giaime Pintor, who was a talented Germanist. Even if he might be held accountable for rousing this interest in Pavese, according to Mondo, Pintor’s experience nevertheless developed in the right direction, whereas Pavese chose never to take part in the Resistance. I find it particularly interesting how Mondo, who exposed the ideologically oriented misreading of the Marxist critics, ends up treating Pintor with the same approach. By doing this, he confirms the widespread (Marxist) reading of Pintor as the idol of the Resistance, who decided to sacrifice himself for the freedom of the country, a reading that had been scaled down by Mirella Serri, Il breve viaggio. Giaime Pintor nella Weimar nazista (Venezia: Marsilio, 2002). 43 “cold war” motivation, why had Mondo waited so long before sharing such an important discovery? And why would he do so at a moment when he had lost the originals and had at his disposal only photocopies?82 The second aspect that raises my suspicion is the name Mondo gave to the block notes. Pavese had written many notebooks that he did not include in his official diary, all of them being to a certain extent “segreti” to the general public who would not get to read them unless they visited the archive.83 The turmoil caused by such publication was undoubtedly important and prompted the main critics and intellectuals to argue once more both about Pavese’s involvement—or lack thereof—with politics, and about his psychological, romantic and sexual issues. The first reactions already made the headlines in the most important Italian newspapers the following day. These newspapers published many articles by intellectuals and writers who had been close to Pavese, and this quickly escalated towards very tense discussions. What emerges right away is the delineation of at least three main reactions in the debate, positions that read the taccuino in completly opposite ways. The first position featured those intellectuals who refused to take those pages at face value, for they perceived them as too far from the nature and 82 Among the commentators on Pavese’s taccuino, Manuela Brunetta is probably one of the most direct in expressing her doubts about Mondo’s interpretation of the block note pages, whose authenticity itself should not be taken at face value. Brunetta, in fact, rightly feels entitled to have “qualche doveroso dubbio circa l’autenticità di tale scritto (esiste infatti solo la fotocopia di cui è in possesso Lorenzo Mondo),” but at the same time recognizes that “ci sono alcune annotazioni “sospette” che inducono ad ipotizzarne, pur con alcune riserve, la veridicità” [Manuela Brunetta, “Pavese lettore nella Biblioteca del Collegio Trevisio di Casale Monferrato,” Studi novecenteschi: quadrimestrale di storia della letteratura italiana contemporanea 22, no. 49 (1995): 80]. According to the scholar, certain passages of the taccuino are almost identical to a diary’s entry from July 10th, 1940, which is, for her, reason enough to disagree with Mondo’s reading of the taccuino as a product of the years 1942-1943. 83 Bart Van Den Bossche briefly analyses the relevance of these taccuini of which he underscores the important relation they entertain with Il mestiere di vivere: “ci sono giunti diversi taccuini o appunti sciolti che si riferiscono a determinati episodi, filoni o brani de Il mestiere di vivere, chiamati ad assolvere diverse funzioni, come la preparazione di appunti de Il mestiere di vivere, la formulazione di precisazioni, correzioni ed aggiunte o l’esplorazione di aspetti laterali. Alcuni di questi appunti vengono poi trascritti, per intero o con diversi ritocchi, spesso sotto una data diversa, nel diario, altri mostrano solo una convergenza generica con gli appunti del diario, o vengono abbandonati. Tra i taccuini, gli appunti e Il mestiere di vivere c’è quindi una complessa relazione di circolarità” (Bart Van Den Bossche, “Nulla è veramente accaduto.” Strategie discorsive del mito nell’opera di Cesare Pavese, 235-236). 44 character of the dead author. For them, those notes were to be contextualized and interpreted as something that was not necessarily a transcription of Pavese’s beliefs, but rather literary sketches. The main champion of this interpretation was Fernanda Pivano, a close friend to Pavese and his colleague at Einaudi. She is representative of those who were simply astonished by this unexpected revelation, and she could not recognize in the outbursts of the taccuino the man she used to know. In her desperate attempt to find a plausible motivation for those pages, Pivano suggests that maybe they were just a literary exercise, a meditation for better depicting a character, probably the fascist Lucini in La casa in collina. On the opposite side of the critical spectrum, we find the contribution by Gian Carlo Pajetta who, instead, claims to have found in Mondo’s revelation the confirmation of what he had always thought of Pavese: “allora lo consideravo un vigliacco, oggi un disertore.”84 Pajetta’s resentment toward Pavese had personal and biographical reasons. Pavese was tutoring Pajetta’s younger brother, Gaspare, and he was sharing with him antifascist and anti-Nazi ideals. Pavese’s motto was “everybody should kill his own German,” a suggestion that Gaspare followed and lead to his violent death during the Resistance. Meanwhile Pavese, his inspiring mentor, had never participated. According to Pajetta, the reader of the taccuino should then not be surprised, and should not think that it was written by someone who was momentarily losing his way. The apparent ambivalence between Pavese’s public persona and his private life and pages was due, Pajetta wrote, to the fact that he would believe one thing and say its opposite. I would like to underscore a third reaction, of those who were not surprised by the publication of the taccuino, but who nevertheless avoided Pajetta’s accusatory approach. In fact, rather than discrediting Pavese’s integrity, the readers who belonged to this group tried instead to 84 Gian Carlo Pajetta, “Pavese: i dubbi, il fascismo, la guerra,” La stampa, August 12th, 1990. 45 find a reason why those pages were written by looking at the private life and personality of the author. Luisa Sturani, the daughter of Pavese’s teacher Augusto Monti, affirms that Pavese was never an antifascist, but rather a tormented and neurotic man. Not only had he never been antifascist: he was indeed, in terms of political affiliations, nothing at all. According to Sturani, he never had a political orientation because he was not yet an adult: a disgrace for him as a man, but nevertheless a fortune for him as a writer. Gianni Vattimo does not consider the taccuino astonishing news, either. In Il mestiere di vivere Pavese does not write about politics, war or fascism. The antifascist reputation he had was just a byproduct of the 1950s and 1960s, when he became a myth for the left intelligentsia who magnified what was surely an ideological affinity, but never an open and militant adherence. Vattimo reminds the reader of the complexity of a “giudizio storico” for those who lived under fascism, and for this reason he suggests a “sospensione del giudizio” as the best way out of this debate. Finally, Carlo Muscetta, in line with Vattimo, was not surprised by the content of the taccuino, since he recognized in those few pages the impoliticità of Pavese, echoing the previous comment by Luisa Sturani. For this reason, Muscetta asserts that Pavese could not even be considered a “disertore,” as Pajetta had previously fervently commented, because basically he had never been an active member of any party. Muscetta’s own reading of Pavese places the author’s biggest tragedy not in the political sphere, but rather in the sexual one: it was his “ambiguità sessuale, o per meglio dire [la] sua omosessualità mai diventata decisa, esplicita.”85 Finally, Muscetta exploits the case of the discovery of the taccuino to switch to a different, more general discourse. In fact, according to Muscetta, since Pavese was not a political person, he never had to resort to that “dissimulazione onesta” used by Muscetta to defend his antifascism: 85 Carlo Muscetta, interview by Pierluigi Battista, “Pavese. Muscetta: fu impolitico per scelta,” La Stampa, Tuttolibri, August 11th, 1990. 46 Pavese non fu mai sfiorato dalla tentazione di prendere la tessera del partito fascista. Una scelta opposta a quella mia, che mi trovai nella penosa circostanza di prendere la tessera […]. Noi abbiamo praticato la dissimulazione onesta per difendere il nostro antifascismo. È stato il nostro dramma. E anche il limite storico-generazionale di un’esperienza peraltro ricca e feconda. Ma a Pavese tutto questo non interessava. Di questo non soffriva, ignaro com’era della grande passione politica che ci infiammava.86 Almost paradoxically, what until this moment had been considered as proof of Pavese’s iron antifascism—the fact that after the confinement he never asked for the fascist membership card, or the fact that he never collaborated with fascist newspapers and journals—became now a confirmation of his “impoliticità.” In line with what Fortini had anticipated almost forty years before on the occasion of Pavese’s suicide,87 among left wing intellectuals there was a common tendency to speculate on the author’s private life in order to try to explain things in his public or literary life that seemed inconsistent or were difficult to understand. Regardless of their different opinions, they all found agreement in underscoring Pavese’s lack of interest in politics and ideology. Interestingly enough, right wing intellectuals also replicated the approach described by Fortini, emphasizing the political reading over the biographical one. For them, in fact, Pavese was not disinterested in politics—the taccuino was instead the confirmation of his sympathy for fascist ideology. One of the most representative contributions of this kind is Sentimento del fascismo. Ambiguità esistenziale e coerenza poetica di Cesare Pavese by Gianantonio Valli. 88 It is quite interesting how Valli works through appropriation, hailing the new Pavese—the one revealed by the publication of the taccuino—as a champion of paganism, and therefore fascism.89 Not only— 86 Ibid. 87 See page 37 and note 67, page 37. 88 Gianantonio Valli, Sentimento del fascismo. Ambiguità esistenziale e coerenza poetica di Cesare Pavese (Milano: Ritter, 2014). Valli’s revisionism did not involve only Pavese. In fact, he is mostly renowned for his collaboration with infamous associations and reviews such as Thule Italia and Olodogma, known mostly for the publication of revisionist texts that negate the existence of the Holocaust. 89 Valli sees in Pavese’s work—especially in I dialoghi con Leucò—and in his taccuino a confirmation of his understanding of the world in pagan terms. Valli stresses how this should be read as a proof of Pavese’s support 47 Valli claims—was the question of the authenticity of Pavese’s antifascism once again open, but now, finally, an incontestable piece of evidence was provided which restored the truth once and for all. If until then a different image of the author was known, this was imputable proof of his temperamental weakness and of the “clima di pratica repressione e di terrorismo culturale imposto nel dopoguerra dall'intellighenzia antifascista”: quelle note demoliscono non solo la corrente interpretazione data dello scrittore da una abusata cultura resistenzialista, ma rivelano a chiare lettere la disonestà intellettuale e la miseria morale degli esponenti di quella cultura. Costituiscono inoltre il tassello mancante, la prova concretamente storico-politica dell'adesione di Pavese alla visione "pagana" del mondo, della quale è stato ultimo portatore il fascismo europeo [...]. Le notazioni del "taccuino" riaffermano con lucidità e puntuale coerenza l'adesione di Pavese a quel complesso ideologico ed esistenziale.90 In “Cesare Pavese: la verità scomoda,”91 published in Il Borghese, the main newspaper of the right wing, Marcello Veneziani lingers on the same claim that Pavese was never the fervent antifascist the cultural mainstream wanted us to believe. Not only was Pavese not such a fervent antifascist: his relationship with the PCI was also problematic and he was a victim of the ostracism perpetuated by his Marxist colleagues. This article’s main argument revolves around the idea that “la scomunica del Pci e il cordone sanitario degli intellettuali organici ebbero un peso non marginale nella disperazione di Pavese,” thus confirming once again the prescient comment by Fortini, who predicted that the right wing would emphasize the political motives behind Pavese’s suicide.92 While reprimanding Calvino’s decision not to publish the taccuino—a for fascism, as paganism was a fundamental aspect of fascist ideology. Paganism and esotericism were indeed cultural and ideological currents with which the regime eventually toyed. One of the main exponents was Arturo Reghini, a Masson from Florence whose mission was to revitalize the esoteric roots of the Italian Masonry and who eventually founded the Schola Italica. Another prominent figure is Julius Evola, an esoteric philosopher infamous mostly for his contribution to “la questione della razza.” 90 Back cover comment of Gianantonio Valli, Sentimento del fascismo. 91 Marcello Veneziani, “Cesare Pavese: la verità scomoda,” Il Borghese. 92 The publication of the taccuino galvanized the right wing to such an extent that the wave of revisionism that followed started toying with assumptions and insinuations that were not founded. Veneziani mentions for example his colleague Piero Capello, who claims that it was a notorious antifascist who denounced Pavese in 1935 to the political police, because of motives related to jealousy. Another claim that Veneziani shares in his article is that of 48 decision that censored the truth about Pavese’s ideological inclinations—Veneziani launches a heated appeal: “liberiamo Pavese dal parrucchino di compagnuccio antifascista che gli hanno cucito addosso gli stucchevoli acconciatori della letteratura italiana.” Criticizing the Italian leftist scholarship for having imposed an ideological reading on Pavese, the rightwing critics encouraged a “ritorno al testo” in a moment when the text in question was the scandalous “taccuino.” In fact, while inviting readers to take the notes at face value, these critics reintroduced ideology in the discourse, subjecting Pavese’s work to their revisionist approach, which, unfortunately, they also employ in the interpretation of other important aspects of twentieth century Italian culture and history. If for Muscetta “quelle note” were the result of Pavese’s impoliticità, Valli sees in them “la prova concretamente storico-politica” of his support for fascism. It was as if precisely because of his reticence and avoidance of the spotlight that Pavese left room for assumptions and speculations; in so doing, he became an ideal candidate to be manipulated and subjected to both left and rightwing revisionism. As we can see, Pavese became once again a pretext for a debate that ended up involving aspects and elements that were larger than his private and literary experience. What seems to happen in these articles and interviews is a sort of reflection not only on Pavese, but also on the post-Pavese era, which exploited the ambiguous and contradictory public persona of the author to make it functional to a more general political discourse. Even though Pavese’s contradictions and tensions are generally recognized by all parties, they are nevertheless used in a move from Pavese to a more general discourse on fascism, antifascism and Professor Marzio Pinotti, who asserts that Pavese was enrolled to the Fascist Party of the RSI, and his membership card would be dusting in the Einaudi archive. 49 postfascism,93 and on the exploitation of his persona perpetuated in postwar Italy. Depending on the political position of the reader, Pavese was held as representative of opposite tendencies in Italian culture. It was probably the charming halo of decadent hero that was an attraction to those politically oriented readers who could not help but add ideological medals to those earned by Pavese on literary merits alone. Mondo waited almost thirty years to publish the “taccuino,” hoping for a more ready and impartial readership. Instead, the way of handling the conversation about those notes stages the same approaches that have vitiated Pavese’s reception for decades, and which I have already exposed in previous sections. Particularly direct are Paolo Mauri’s words in an article from La Repubblica, where he expressively summarizes the reactions and the wrong expectations coming from all the sides of the political spectrum: come si vede i conti con Pavese sono cominciati quasi da subito, anche se la sua fortuna postuma si può dire senz'altro viziata dalle circostanze, dalla necessità di riletture politiche o fra politica e ideologia, oltreché (perché negarlo?), dal fascino nero del suicidio. Ciò che sorprende un po', in realtà, è il doloroso stupore con cui viene presentata e accolta l'ennesima prova delle sue contraddizioni, come se per il solo fatto d'essersi iscritto al Pci nel '45 Pavese avesse dovuto adeguare tutta la vita precedente a quell'atto finale, come se uno scrittore, dopo tutto, avesse l'obbligo di essere politicamente più puro, lineare e infallibile di chiunque altro [...]. Il taccuino segreto di Pavese aggiunge un po' di ambiguità ad un personaggio già ambiguo e contraddittorio. Sarebbe sbagliato, per queste poche note rifiutate, farlo diventare un filofascista e si capisce che chi lo aveva scambiato per un maestro di antifascismo ci resti male. Forse aveva semplificato troppo. Che dire? Peggio per lui.94 Putting aside the first reactions on the pages of the main newspapers—often prone to feeding scandals as a way of arousing public interest, after a short time the first scholarly and academic interpretations of the taccuino made their way into print. 93 The term postfascism has been used by Italian historiography to refer to the period of Italian history that is posterior to the fall of fascism. Particular attention has been paid to the continuity, or lack thereof, of this new phase of Italian politics and culture with the fascist ventennio. See Gian Enrico Rusconi, Resistenza e postfascismo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995) and Luca La Rovere, L’eredità del fascismo. Gli intellettuali, i giovani e la transizione al postfascismo (1943-1948) (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2008). Also, post fascist are those political parties in line with fascist ideals that, through an ideological revision and a condemnation of totalitarianism, attempt a compromise with conservative and right wing forces. 94 Paolo Mauri, “Pavese eterno bambino,” La Repubblica, August 10th, 1990. 50 Carlo Dionisotti performs a more critical and sound analysis of the implications of the taccuino in an article published in «Belfagor» the following year. First of all, Dionisotti suggests putting aside the “dispiacere” that the reading of the taccuino may have caused to Pavese’s old friends. In fact, he asserts that “il rispetto che tutti dobbiamo alla memoria di lui ci comanda di reprimere il dispiacere e di mettere la nostra esperienza di quegli anni a servizio dell’interpretazione.”95 In this essay, the scholar is loyal to his intent, as he enlightens the reading of a text whose historical and political background may be not as clear to a 1990s reader as it was to Pavese’s contemporaries. The result is a more disenchanted analysis of the taccuino, one not aimed at either trying to justify or accuse the author, but rather one aimed at understanding the motivations behind such a controversial text. Already in the first lines Dionisotti distances himself from both Pivano—the taccuino does not correspond to notes taken as a function to a story—and from Pajetta—Pavese was not a disertore because the text is anterior to the Resistenza. His first move is to remind the reader that though the years between 1943 and 1945 were named “Guerra di Liberazione,” it was instead a civil war, and Pavese like many others may have had some difficulties in wishing a complete military defeat for his own country. By underscoring the fact that the war after 1943 was a civil war, Dionisotti points at those Italians who still felt bound to a loyalty towards either the Crown or the regime, and who did not espouse the Resistance because it would have implied to hope for Italy’s defeat. 96 This does not justify Pavese’s choice of words, but keeping in mind the 95 Carlo Dionisotti, “Per un taccuino di Pavese,” Belfagor, January 1991: 1-10, now in Ricordi della scuola italiana (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1998), 512. 96 Claudio Pavone thoroughly analyses these important aspects inherent in Italians’ participation to the Resistance, or their loyalty for the newly formed RSI. He in fact asserts that: “tutti gli italiani, o quasi, avevano prestato due giuramenti: uno al re, l’altro al duce. (…) Costretti ora a scegliere fra l’un giuramento o l’altro, lo schietto atteggiamento resistenziale fu di tagliare il nodo e non scegliere né l’uno né l’altro, sganciando da ogni precostituito impaccio istituzionale e da ogni vincolo ad personam l’alto problema della fedeltà a se stessi” [Claudio Pavone, Una guerra civile. Saggio storico sulla moralità nella Resistenza (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1991), 49]. 51 “angoscia di quei giorni”97 can surely help better contextualize the content of the taccuino. Dionisotti also distances himself from those that read the notes as a confirmation of the fact that Pavese was “incompetente e irresponsabile in cose politiche.”98 His comment is peremptory: “che cosa avessero fatto e facessero allora in Italia i presunti competenti, è noto. Quanto alla responsabilità, era purtroppo comune, di noi tutti, e grave.”99 Dionisotti’s harsh comment reminds the reader how competence did not stop many Italians from making controversial actions and political choices, and that the question of responsibility is a shared issue, to which Pavese was no exception. What, on one side, could have been a flawed historical and political judgment, on the other, hints at a different level of analysis. Dionisotti, in fact, suggests that Pavese’s famous differences with the antifascists may be not only due to his political detachment as the scholar wonders whether “era una differenza politica maturata nel corso della guerra, o anche era, prima e poi, una diversità letteraria, fondamantale per lui?”100 Dionisotti traces back Pavese’s academic disinterest and his intent in formulating a new language different from the one of the militant critique and literature. What at first might have seemed just a political difference may in fact be more deeply a literary one: La repugnanza originaria in lui per il concetto e il gusto della letteratura che la scuola crociana aveva imposto alla generazione sua, a quasi tutti i suoi amici e compagni, deve essere tenuta in conto nella interpretazione del taccuino, come dell’intera opera sua. [...] Credo ipotesi probabile che […], negli anni decisivi della guerra, politica e letteratura si annodassero l’una con l’altra, e che la repugnanza sua all’euforia e prepotenza critica della scuola crociana si appuntasse allora contro l’antifascismo liberale proprio di quella scuola.101 Pavone then underscores how the choice of betrayal, infamous option in a democratic environment, is often the only option available in a totalitarian state. Antifascists had to come to terms with the accusation of betrayal in their hoping for Italy’s defeat. In fact, “fra i compiti più ardui dell’antifascismo vi fu proprio quello di scrollarsi di dosso l’ombra di questo giudizio infamante, in base al quale sono da considerare traditori tutti coloro che legano l’affermazione dei propri principi alla sconfitta del proprio paese” (Ibid., 63). 97 Carlo Dionisotti, “Per un taccuino di Pavese,” 515. 98 Ibid., p. 518. 99 Ibid. 100 Ibid., 519. 101 Ibid., 521. 52 It seems then from Dionisotti’s reading that Pavese’s comments against his antifascist colleagues were stirred by cultural motivations, and projected to an adversary who only accidentally, or maybe marginally, happened to appear political instead. Dionisotti’s hypothesis is that the generic label of “antifascisti” used by Pavese in his taccuino refers not as much to communists as to his closer friends from the Partito d’Azione. Even in this case, according to the scholar, the reason for Pavese’s aversion may not be political, but rather, again, the “arrogance” of his friends and colleagues: è probabile che, nel taccuino, l’avversione [...] si appuntasse contro il vizio congenito, già allora appariscente, del futuro partito d’azione: quel dilettantismo politico, quel compiacimento di essere pochi, discordi e battuti, ma buoni, potenzialmente superiori sempre alla maggioranza.102 Even though at first the taccuino case might have seemed to belong to the 1990s trend of investigating and thus unmasking intellectual celebrities’ hidden secrets from their past during the fascist regime, it was finally reabsorbed into a different approach, which read it as a text contributing to a better understanding of Pavese as an author, rather than as the key to his hidden ideological agenda. The aforementioned Marginalità e appartenenza by Binetti is another contribution that, like the one by Dionisotti just analyzed, tries to divert attention from an ideological reading, thus redirecting it to the text, be it a novel or the taccuino. For Binetti, the scandalized reactions to the publication of the taccuino are due to the false political expectations created by the elevation of Pavese to a public icon. The idealization and the making of Pavese as an instrument of political discourse are both byproducts of years of “datati preconcetti e riduttive categorizzazioni,” whose consequences are both a “stagnante cristallizzazione” of icons such as Pavese or Vittorini, and their “banale strumentalizzazione.”103 102 Ibid., 517. 103 Vincenzo Binetti, Marginalità e appartenenza, 3. 53 Finally, Manuela Brunetta dedicates the last pages of her essay “Pavese lettore nella Biblioteca del Collegio Trevisio” to an analysis of the taccuino in the context of the author’s interest in myth and anthropology that was emerging in those same years. I find Brunetta’s interpretation of the taccuino particularly interesting, as it brings to the fore Pavese’s interpretation of war in mythical terms—which is central to my reading of La casa in collina in the fourth chapter. Discarding political enthusiasm on the part of Pavese and an interpretation of the taccuino as a “documento di propaganda fascista,” Brunetta rather reads it as “uno dei momenti più interessanti della ricerca mitico-antropologica che Pavese stava conducendo.”104 The scholar in fact interprets the author’s praise of fascism and war as an appreciation for their fatalistic nature: La chiave di lettura che emerge da queste note, riesce più facilmente comprensibile alla luce di una visione mitica della vita, una visione in cui tutto ciò che accade deve esser vissuto secondo quello che Nietzsche chiamava l’amor fati [...]. Attraverso questi appunti, Pavese sembra interpretare gli avvenimenti contingenti, e la stessa situazione politica, secondo principi che non derivano da una concezione politica da difendere. Non era certamente il fascismo, in quanto ideologia politica, ad interessarlo, quanto l’idea di forza e di disciplina che sembrava rappresentare. Le stesse idee sulla guerra riflettono una tendenza che ha poco a che fare con la politica e dipende invece da una visione fatalistica della vita, una visione che utilizza criteri di analisi appartenenti alla sfera del mito, in cui la guerra s’inserisce in modo fatalistico nella dimensione sacra del sacrificio.105 Brunetta’s interpretation is supported by the fact that during his stay in the Collegio, Pavese read with interest the chapter dedicated to German mythology in Tacchi Venturi’s Storia delle religioni and Thomas Mann’s writings about the sacredness of sacrifice. For this reason, according to Brunetta, “è possibile leggere nella visione pavesiana del germanesimo, e in ultima analisi del fascismo, l’attrazione verso il paganesimo che quelle realtà sembravano 104 Manuela Brunetta, Pavese lettore nella Biblioteca del Collegio Trevisio di Casale Monferrato, 83. 105 Ibid., 81-82. 54 esprimere.”106 However problematic, this statement underscores an important aspect of Pavese’s words in his taccuino. I do not believe that Brunetta with her analysis meant to relieve Pavese from the responsibility of having praised fascism, even though he did not do so on political grounds. It is uncontestable that both paganism and fatalism were aspects that knew a revival during fascism, and Pavese may actually have found it interesting. Brunetta reads the taccuino against the backdrop of other works by Pavese, retracing the author’s interest in paganism and fatalism in his employment of themes such as the savage, the archaic, rituals and destiny, thus always keeping her aim on the text to be analyzed. I find more problematic Valli’s move as he too does underscore the relevance that paganism and fatalism may have had in Pavese’s work, but he does so in a revisionist fashion, forcing ideological implications on his analysis. For Brunetta, German mythology provided Pavese with the possibility to read and interpret contemporary events in mythical terms. Especially “la guerra rappresentava la possibilità di vivere la dimensione mitica nella sua interezza.”107 The relevance of a mythical dimension in the understanding of war is, as we shall see, a fundamental aspect of the analysis I undertake of La casa in collina in the fourth chapter. 106 Ibid., 83. This interpretation echoes the one supported by Gianfranco Valli and that I have previously introduced. Brunetta is aware of this, and clarifies in a note what is only a partial agreement: “In questo senso, Gianfranco Valli […] per quanto privo di una correttezza interpretativa di fondo—di fatto l’autore utilizza il taccuino per “suonare il piffero della rivoluzione fascista”—interpreta, seppure superficialmente, l’attrazione pavesiana per il fascismo come tensione verso il paganesimo che questo sembrava incarnare” (Ibid., 83). 107 Ibid. 55 CHAPTER 2 CESARE PAVESE’S THEORY OF MYTH Introduction This chapter is dedicated to the reconstruction of Pavese’s “dottrina del mito,” which has never been analyzed in a systematic way. I will pursue this through an analysis of his diary, Il mestiere di vivere, and of a number of theoretical essays Pavese wrote contemporarily to the diary, with which they are in dialogue.1 The project of this chapter is narrowly defined and specific: it is aimed at highlighting a limited number of central and significant motifs.2 The main components of Pavese’s theory of myth I address are the following: the importance accorded to structure, costruzione, and destino; the relevance of childhood; the dynamics of age which ultimately leads to maturity; the concept of selvaggio; and, finally, Pavese’s receptivity to religion in 1944-1945. By the end of my analysis, I will have reached a clearer formulation of these elements and the relationships among them. In fact, I intend to show how these elements, which appear at times to be disconnected aspects of Pavese’s enquiry on myth, are instead intrinsically related, different articulations of the very same intellectual knot. The aim of this second chapter is thus to provide the reader with 1 I will consider “Del mito, del simbolo e d’altro” [1943-1944], “Stato di grazia” [1943-1944], “L’adolescenza” [1943- 1944], “Il mito” [January 27th-29th, 1950], “Raccontare è monotono” [August 6th-12th, 1949], and “L’arte di maturare” [August 14th -16th, 1949], all included now in the last section of La letteratura americana e altri saggi. 2 Many pages have been written on the importance of myth in Pavese’s production, with different approaches and different focuses. Armanda Guiducci, Il mito Pavese (Firenze: Vallecchi, 1967), is one of the earliest analysis dedicated to retracing in Pavese’s work the file rouge of myth. In my research, I strongly relied on Bart Van Den Bossche, “Nulla è veramente accaduto.” Strategie discorsive del mito nell’opera di Cesare Pavese, which I consider an authoritative study. In fact, the Belgian scholar thoroughly studies the “strategie discorsive del mito” from the dawning to Pavese’s last years. Some of the most relevant works to which I have resorted are also Sergio Pautasso, Cesare Pavese oltre il mito, and some of the contribution to “Sotto il gelo dell’acqua c’è l’erba.” Omaggio a Cesare Pavese (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2001). a theoretical framework—an outline of Pavese’s “dottrina” and its breakdown into its main constituent elements—indispensable for understanding the following chapters. Pavese theorized and wrote about myth almost all of his life. His notion of myth is a complex and multifaceted concept that he himself struggled to define, as we can infer from his diary notes and theoretical essays, in which he seems to adjust and correct continuously arguments previously exposed, in pursuit of a more balanced, nuanced definition. Pavese’s theoretical system of myth rotates around a series of terms: myth, history, the irrational, the subconscious, poetry, the savage, superstition. I divide all these elements and consequently their relations into two main groups that may be called the rational and the irrational. In my analysis, everything falls into this fundamental division, which may seem a reductive operation, but which lies at the bottom of Pavese’s understanding of the relation between myth and history. The relation between these two conceptual poles is not that of a mutual exclusion, as they represent both the starting point and the arrival of a path whose aim is to translate the first—the irrational—into the second—the rational. The relation is one of strenuous and continuous confrontation: myth is that irrational knot that sustains our life, something that we may not be able to grasp, but which we sense and perceive, and whose fleetingness compels us to try to define and confine. The allure of the irrational is strong and powerful, and while, on the one hand, Pavese seeks to translate it into the rational, he at the same time wishes to preserve its mystery. We have a subtle struggle between the auto-imposition of a “dovere,” that of “razionalizzare, prender coscienza, fare storia,”3 and a personal weakness for what needs to be acknowledged and yet destroyed. This tension between wanting at the same time to translate the 3 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere (Torino: Einaudi, 1952), 390 (February 15th, 1950). 57 irrational into the rational and preserve myth is the essence of what Pavese considers his mission as a poet. I will highlight three aspects of myth that proved to be fundamental for the author: myth as language; myth as an epistemological approach; and myth as an answer to our need for structure. What is at stake in any case is myth as a formal element: a question of approach towards reality, a mental outlook, a method of enquiry, rather than of content that is presented as mythical. In one of the very rare definitions Pavese provides for myth, he refers to it as “un linguaggio, un mezzo espressivo—cioè non qualcosa di arbitrario ma un vivaio di simboli cui appartiene—come a tutti i linguaggi—una particolare sostanza di significati che null’altro potebbe rendere.”4 Myth arises from the irrational, but at the same time is a way to circumscribe it and to make it more reachable; it is a way of accessing the irrational’s mysterious laws that cannot be comprehended with rational tools. But it is nevertheless a very peculiar way of dealing with such reality, and for this reason myth is not only the language, but also the way we approach and see a reality that would be otherwise invisible. Finally, myth is also a solution to our need to “limitarci, di darci una cornice.”5 As we can already infer, irrational does not mean chaotic and arbitrary, but rather something that is not understandable with the tools provided to us by our reason and conventional ways of approaching reality and communicating our findings. Along similar lines, “costruzione” and “struttura” are not for Pavese an artefact that exercises a limiting force on our instinct. On the contrary, “costruzione” is a compromise between our irrational essence, and our need to understand and clarify it. Myth is thus a journey we take when we need to comprehend what we rationally perceive as incomposto; it is the tool we use to 4 Ibid., 308 (February 20th, 1946). 5 Ibid., 309 (February 20th, 1946). 58 inspect this incomposto, and the language we use to express it. Unfortunately though, once the translation into something communicable is performed, myth loses its allure and mystery, and arrives in the realm of the rational world. When this happens, myth is translated into poetry, or history, or, in any case, into something that is commonly understood. At the core of Pavese’s thought is, therefore, this almost paradoxical and very dramatic relation between poetry and myth: poetry is created and nourished by myth, but, at the same time, depends on the destruction of that very element that allows for its existence in the first place. Borrowing from Friedrich Nietzsche’s aesthetics, whose presence in both Pavese’s diary and essays is evident even though not always explicit, we could describe the complementarity and yet mutual exclusion between myth and poetry in terms of the Dionysian and Apollonian, as presented in Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik. For Pavese, myth would in fact remain in a state of Dionysian intoxication if it were not for the Apollonian conversion performed by poetry into something rational and clear. One of the first manifestations of Pavese’s interest in myth is his obsession with ritorno, an obsession that led him to consider both his life and work as revealing—après coup—a hidden costruzione. But one could argue that this ritorno was also to some extent deployed by Pavese in the writing of his diary. The concept of myth explicitly introduced in 1943—unanimously considered by the critics as the year when myth’s centrality in Pavese’s works is asserted—is thus a more complete and coherent outcome of a return to the same concepts that Pavese had already been investigating for years. For the same reason, the idea of myth itself changes over the years, finding different images or elements that better define and circumscribe it. As we shall see, all these elements are connected one to the other, and together give a better and more precise definition of what a mythical essence is. Furthermore, they attest to the spiral development of 59 Pavese’s method, one that forces him to rethink the same core of elements over and over again, introducing every time a deeper understanding, or a different angle. This chapter is composed of three sections. In the first section, I will consider those aspects that make of Il mestiere di vivere a very peculiar hermeneutical tool, which is not systematic and often offers contradictory affirmations. In the second section, I will introduce the dottrina del mito, with particular regard to the questions of destiny, childhood, maturity, and, finally, the savage. The third section is instead dedicated to Pavese’s method of enquiry and his reticent style, which are, as we shall see, both indebted to myth. In this chapter I will only take into consideration diary entries that predate the publication of La casa in collina (up to 1948). I will consider some entries from 1948-1950 in the conclusions to the dissertation, as I claim that they depart from the dottrina del mito as I summarize it in this chapter. I. Il mestiere di vivere: a peculiar hermeneutical tool to approach Pavese’s prose and poetry The main goal in this first section is to address the complexity and peculiarity of the diary. First of all, it was never meant to be a systematic exposition of Pavese’s theoretical ideas and yet it was the seat of some of his most important theoretical investigations. It is a fragmentary text and yet it is held together by the idea of construction and by subtle cross references. Finally, it alternates confessions and self-analysis with rare, yet very significant, notes that denounce the falsity and irrelevance of those same pages. For all these reasons, we should approach it as both a hermeneutical tool and as a complex literary work. 60 This diary is an eclectic and composite text, defined by Van Den Bossche as “un insieme polifonico di generi, moduli e registri di scrittura”6 that serves different functions at the same time: “diario intimo,” “confessione o autoanalisi,” and also “laboratorio di poetica.”7 The main characteristic of my approach is that I read Pavese’s entries on poetics and style, on the one hand, and on life, morality, self-analysis, on the other, as deeply connected and mutually dependent. For this reason, I am not just interested in those pages where the author explicitly shares his ideas on poetics, style, and literary interpretation; but I also rely heavily on more confessional and self-analytical notes that also prove useful for the understanding and appreciation of his work. This reading receives confirmation from the fact that for Pavese both life and poetry are regulated by what he calls “costruzione,” an implicit structure that should be uncovered and brought to the fore.8 For Pavese, construction in poetry is the internal orientation not only within a single work, but within the entire body of work as well. As for life, instead, one can perceive such a structure in the fact that every day, every decision, and every event in one’s life is regulated by destiny. If “costruzione” is a pervading idea that becomes a way of interpreting poetry and of navigating life, it is important to note how in both cases, Pavese never presents structure as something intentional or programmatic, but rather as a truth that emerges only après coup, in a retrospective analysis. That of the après coup is a theme that emerges consistently in the diary from 1940 on, and as Giuditta Isotti-Rosowsky underlines, “è logicamente inseparabile dalla scoperta che la scrittura non si riduce a trascrizione, a strumento 6 Bart Van Den Bossche, “Nulla è veramente accaduto,” 109. 7 Ibid., 109-110. 8 On February 26th, 1940, Pavese suggests a “parallelismo di vita interiore e biologia”: “l’ipotesi che l’evoluzione proceda per mutazioni […] brusche del germe [che poi si conservano attraverso la selezione naturale] va d’accordo con la tua esperienza che la vita interiore (creazione di concetti e immagini) non procede per sviluppo di pensiero in pensiero (di individuo a individuo, in biologia) ma per brusche intuizioni (trasformazioni sempre germinali) che solo après coup si scoprono legate a intuizioni precedenti e si conservano (selezione interiore)” [Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 178-179 (February 26th, 1940)]. 61 mediale di idee già pronte, ma che essa crea le rappresentazioni oltre che rispecchiarle.”9 When he writes his diary, Pavese places his trust in the idea of an implicit construction: L’interesse di questo giornale sarebbe il ripullulare imprevisto di pensieri, di stati concettuali, che di per sé, meccanicamente, segna i grandi filoni della tua vita interna. Di volta in volta cerchi d’intendere che cosa pensi, e solo après coup vai a riscontrarne gli addentellati con giorni antichi. È l’originalità di queste pagine: lasciare che la costruzione si faccia da sé, e metterti innanzi oggettivamente il tuo spirito. C’è una fiducia metafisica in questo sperare che la successione psicologica dei tuoi pensieri si configuri a costruzione.10 The theme of the après coup emerges especially in those pages where the object of Pavese’s analysis is himself, his “vita interna,” his “spirito.” The original use of “tu,” trademark of Il mestiere di vivere and evident in the past quote, is thus explained as a rhetorical device that allows Pavese to be at the same time the subject and the object of his research. The subject undergoes modifications in the act of writing, which, in Pavese’s diary, is based on a process of references and detours, thus revealing to the writer himself aspects that were not evident at first. The meaning arises from this net of references, and for this reason it is a retrospective revelation, “ricostituito a ritardamento.”11 This is the reason why Pavese performs a continuous rereading of his own entries. Entries where Pavese refers to past notes, or where he links present thoughts to previous ones—at times correcting them, at others reinforcing them, but, always, somehow linking the diary’s investigations—are in fact quite common. Van Den Bossche highlights a “vistosa impronta costruttiva del diario,” which emerges mainly in the continuation of a consideration throughout multiple days, if not weeks. The diary thus presents “degli episodi ad «enunciazione intercalata», in cui l’atto enunciativo si inserisce fra le varie annotazioni 9 Giuditta Isotti Rosowsky, “Cesare Pavese: dal naturalismo alla realtà simbolica,” Studi Novecenteschi 15, no. 36 (December 1988): 278. 10 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 175 (February 22nd, 1940). 11 Giuditta Isotti Rosowsky, Cesare Pavese: dal naturalismo alla realtà simbolica, 278. 62 incentrate sullo stesso tema, e quindi fra i vari momenti di un ragionamento in fieri.”12 Such references to previous notes can be either explicit or discreet. Entries which refer to a previous one because they either continue an interrupted discourse or because they are on the same subject are very common. Some are particularly interesting as they refer to entries written months if not years before,13 which leads me to think that Pavese may have kept a sort of analytical index of his own diary. Also, quite common are those entries that perform the role of cataloguing and summarizing the diary notes on a given subject,14 or on Pavese’s literary work.15 This kind of notes attests to Pavese’s careful and obstinate tendency to re-read previous entries, and to his effort to take stock of his past work and life accomplishments. What emerges is a sense of unity and of a net of connections where different notes are “fasi appartenenti ad un’unica evoluzione, […] tentativi successivi di risolvere uno stesso problema, o […] formulazioni divergenti di una stessa idea di base.”16 However, the development of Pavese’s thought is not always easily retraceable in the pages of his diary. In fact, it would be more appropriate to state that the instances when the author is reticent and his notes are not explicitly presented as the continuation of a broader discourse are more common. In fact, the attempt to infer Pavese’s hermeneutical and 12 Bart Van Den Bossche, “Nulla è veramente accaduto,” 116-117. 13 For example, the note of November 5th, 1943 is about Giambattista Vico and in its opening Pavese refers to one he wrote in 1938, more than five years before, and which he still finds relevant. It seems as if in the second note Pavese was continuing a discourse he had interrupted for a few years. 14 Representative of this kind of entry is the note of September 26 th, 1942, where discussing the question of “prima e seconda volta,” Pavese thus comments on what he had previously written on the subject: “28 gennaio dice la stessa cosa e 22 agosto risulta illusorio, 31 ag. è risolutivo” [Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 245 (September 26th, 1942)]. 15 This last group of entries is very useful, as it provides the reader of Pavese’s literary works with a very authoritative interpretation grid. The most relevant notes of this type are those of late 1949 where Pavese catalogs his novels which belong to “ciclo storico del tuo tempo” (November 17th), his whole work under labels such as “naturalism” and “symbolism” (November 26th), and, finally, his works that deal with adult life (December 15th). 16 Bart Van Den Bossche, “Nulla è veramente accaduto,” 117. 63 philosophical world from his diary’s pages proves often to be a challenging enterprise. There are very few statements that can confidently be interpreted as stable and unquestionable rather than as provisional expressions of a discourse in fieri, a step toward a final word that has yet to be formulated. Van Den Bossche defines this kind of structure as “costruzione unitaria subliminale,” based on “un tessuto connettivo estremamente vario, composto di continuità e circolarità, variazioni e movimenti a spirale, allargamenti e spostamenti, riprese e movimenti concentrici.17 For this reason, not every affirmation in the diary is unquestionable, and sometimes its validity can be affirmed only after a confirmation against the context of the diary’s larger picture. The corpus of Pavese’s reflections fluctuates and continuously revolves around itself: the balance and harmony between disparate moments of Pavese’s thought are not always granted and are at times precarious. The reader is often left with the responsibility to reconnect, on his own, the dots of the author’s philosophical thought; he is sometimes urged to perform a leap of faith, very often anticipating the possibility to run into a new interpretation or clarification which arises only the second time around. Pavese in a few instances claims that he mistrusts what he writes, as he feels a “sospetto verso la parola.”18 He ironically informs us that what he writes is not true, but that it is nevertheless worthy of analysis: “quel che dico non è vero, ma tradisce—per il fatto solo che lo dico—il mio essere.”19 In another entry, the author confesses that “si scrivono qui le cose che non si diranno più, sono i trucioli della piallatura.”20 The words in the diary are like the waste products of the process of communicating: what is left unsaid is probably more important than 17 Ibid., 117-118. 18 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 285 (July 17th, 1944). 19 Ibid., 322 (October 27th, 1946). 20 Ibid., 328 (March 15th, 1947). 64 what has made it to the page. The meaning does not spring out from the words themselves, but rather from the void, the silences between words. Fortunately, the more theoretical diary entries, those where the substance of his theories lies, are often reinforced and supported by published articles, and given their public audience, Pavese often reached a clearer and more systematic presentation of his ideas.21 Finally, one should not forget that Il mestiere di vivere was meant to be a private resource for Pavese. Pavese was thus both the author and the addressee of his own elusive presentation. As I mentioned earlier, in the self-analytical entries, Pavese resorts to a rhetorical use of “tu” that makes this splitting in two even more evident. This is a very important point, as it helps us understand how the action of writing itself was for Pavese a cognitive tool, one that was engaged in investigating areas obscure to the author himself. This is what Pavese writes in Raccontare è monotono, a 1949 essay: Di solito le dichiarazioni esplicite di un narratore—di qualunque uomo—dicono poco sul suo mito, sul senso dei suoi simboli; è evidente che, se l’autore avesse chiaro tutto il gioco della sua mitologia, questa non sarebbe più che un gioco, una scienza di poi—le mancherebbe quell’irriducibilità che la fa appunto vestirsi di simboli.22 21 See note 1, page 56 for a full list of the articles I analyze in this chapter. Fausto Curi, who dedicated an essay to the presence of myth in Lavorare stanca, thus reflects on Pavese’s constant and elaborated auto-analysis: “Conviene segnalare, in primo luogo, l’inquietudine teorica di questo scrittore, il bisogno, cosi frequente e così intenso in lui, di interrogarsi sul proprio lavoro, la capacità di portare a chiarezza e di definire le questioni che lo assillano. Bisogna riconoscere che il critico di Pavese è oggi molto agevolato nella sua attività da questa lucida autoconsapevolezza del suo autore. Anche se a volte è proprio l’assidua autoanalisi di Pavese a rendere piuttosto intricate e ardue certe questioni. L’ermeneutica che ha per oggetto Pavese è in buona misura opera dello stesso Pavese […]. Nell’Italia del primo cinquantennio del Novecento probabilmente nessun altro scrittore ha scrutato se stesso e la propria opera con un altrettanto acuto bisogno di verità. Non intendo dire che i referti che Pavese fornisce siano sempre limpidi, pertinenti e persuasivi. Dico che le sue domande non sono mai irrilevanti e che in certi casi fanno organicamente parte della sua opera letteraria con la stessa dignità che possiedono, poniamo, Lavorare stanca o Feria d’agosto o Dialoghi con Leucò” [Fausto Curi, “Il mito prima del mito. Sulla poesia di Cesare Pavese,” Cuadernos de Filología Italiana, Volumen Extraordinario (2011), 132]. 22 Cesare Pavese, “Raccontare è monotono” [August 6th-12th, 1949]. Posthumously published on Cultura e realtà, no. 2. Now in Cesare Pavese, La letteratura americana e altri saggi, 339. 65 It is only by writing, by reading his own entries, and writing about them once again, that Pavese is able to skim off what is superfluous, maintaining only what really matters, what is closer to that elusive and fleeting reality so hard to grasp.23 Writing becomes less frequent over the years. There is progressively more silence, substituting those “parole a malincuore” which were not trustworthy in the first place. Far from being just a traditional “diario” or a systematic exposition of an author’s poetics, I consider Il mestiere di vivere a work that lies at the crossroads of different genres and different directives of research and writing. Both the insistence on construction and the relevance of silence are, at the same time, elements of style, subjects of his speculations and the pillars of his mythical discourse. II. Pavese’s theory of myth II.1 A man’s destiny as a “vivaio di retrospettive scoperte” Even though my research concentrates more on the postwar years, in the diary we witness the emergence of an interest in myth already before the 1940s.24 In fact, it is possible to extrapolate from the entries from the 1930s some very first attempts at circumscribing elements such rotaie, destino, costruzione. Even though these entries from the 1930s were merely 23 More on Pavese’s writing as a cognitive tool and on his reticent style in section III on Pavese’s method (page 105). 24 Fausto Curi in “Il mito prima del mito” investigates the presence in Lavorare stanca of some anticipations of myth (see note 21, page 65). As for Pavese’s thesis, Lawrence G. Smith reads it as the moment of passage from adolescence to maturity in Pavese’s life. The scholar retraces evidence for this argument in the fact that the thesis stages both a childish and irreverent approach to Withman’s scholarship, and some anticipations to Pavese’s later hermeneutical acumen. According to Smith then, the relevance of the thesis does not consist in the anticipation of myth, but rather in the fact that it is through the acquaintance with the American poet that Pavese reached an artistic and critical maturity: “Whitman ha attratto Pavese verso la letteratura americana e gli ha dimostrato l'importanza di sviluppare un personaggio artistico individuale, personale. Attraverso Whitman, Pavese ha imparato che «fare poesia» non solo crea l'arte, rna definisce e autentica la persona che la crea” [Lawrence G. Smith, “Pavese and Whitman: il passaggio alla maturità,” in Leucò va in America: Cesare Pavese nel centenario della nascita: an international conference, ed. Mario B. Mignone (New York: Stony Brook, March 13th- 14th, 2009), 221. 66 scattered attempts, they still show us how fundamental ideas such as destino and struttura were for Pavese’s research. One of the first entries where Pavese introduces destino, even though he has not yet named it, is in 1937. Here he writes about how every single man is prefigured in his childhood, where one can find the signs of what he will become in adulthood—an age of anguished retrospective discoveries: Tutti gli uomini hanno un cancro che li rode, un escremento giornaliero, un male a scadenza: la loro insoddisfazione; il punto di scontro tra il loro essere reale, scheletrico, e l’infinita complessità della vita. […] Quasi tutti—pare—rintracciano nell’infanzia i segni dell’orrore adulto. Indagare questo vivaio di retrospettive scoperte, di sbigottimenti, questo loro angoscioso ritrovarsi prefigurati in gesti e parole irreparabili dell’infanzia. I Fioretti del Diavolo. Contemplare senza posa quest’orrore: ciò ch’è stato, sarà.25 Pavese’s negative language underscores the anguish of finding the problems of adult life already prefigured in childhood. In fact, Pavese’s take on destiny in the late 1930s was particularly pessimistic, whereas it is charged with more positive implications in later notes. Childhood’s gestures and words are retrospectively charged with a meaning that was not perceived at the moment, and which arises only during adulthood. As we can infer already from this early note, for Pavese destino is something that is not projected in the future, but rather retraced in the past, when we can find ourselves “prefigurati in gesti e parole irreparabili dell’infanzia.” This approach to destino resembles the après coup modality as a peculiarity of Pavese’s way of reading his life and work. The subject’s perception of his or her destiny is not simultaneous with its unfolding. It is only after an operation of recollection that one can become aware of the connections that links them. In a later note, on April 4th, 1941 Pavese adds: “ciò che si fa, si farà ancora e anzi si è già fatto in un passato lontano […]. L’angoscia della vita è questa rotaia che le nostre decisioni ci mettono sotto le ruote.”26 The reason for this repetition is 25 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 59 (November 26th, 1937). 26 Ibid., 222 (April 4th, 1941). 67 found in a sort of “automatismo che si riprodurrà,” according to which all acts, decisions or choices are “infallibili presagi di ciò che faremo un’altra volta.” “Destino” is not yet named, but it filters out of these lines, disguised as a “rotaia” and perceived as something that causes anguish and pain. As we can already infer from these early notes, Pavese’s destiny is circular— the recurrence of the same actions and events multiple times in a life time—rather than a linear trajectory. For this reason, I find the use of the metaphor of railway tracks interesting and not self-evident, and I like to think of these tracks as ones that form a loop. In the following entry, dated April 12th, Pavese builds on the question of destino by adding that of costruzione, thus hinting at an interaction between these two elements. The author writes about “uno dei meno osservati gusti umani” which would be “di prepararsi degli eventi a scadenza, di organizzarsi un gruppo di accadimenti che abbiano una costruzione, una logica, un principio e una fine.”27 Pavese, affirms that “questa costruzione dà in sostanza un significato al tempo,” and, by way of explanation, suggests a parallel between the pleasures of reading and of remembering one’s past: if in the first case “a metà di un racconto si risale alle premesse e si gode di ritrovare delle ragioni, delle chiavi, delle mosse causali,” Pavese wonders “che altro si fa ripensando al proprio passato e compiacendosi di riconoscerci i segni del presente o del successivo?”28 Unlike the image of “rotaie” that convey a sense of moving along predetermined tracks, the idea of “costruzione” seems instead to imply a sense of agency, of an active building. Pavese underscores the feeling of complacency that arises from unveiling the construction supporting our life, which allows us to connect retrospectively past and present. 27 Ibid., 222 (April 12th, 1941). 28 Ibid. 68 In the early 1940s an important change was about to take place in Pavese’s cultural and philosophical interests. Pavese was not yet explicitly writing about myth, and his interest in anthropology, history of religions and ethnology was just beginning to show, but in the entries from these years we witness an opening toward themes that will be explored more deeply from 1943 on. In fact, both the elements of rotaie and of costruzione will soon converge into a more synthetic idea of structure which first emerges in the entry of November 6th, 1943: Il ripercorrere che fa ciascuno le proprie rotaie scopri oggi che per un certo tempo ti ha angosciato (4 apr. ’41 – II), e poi (12 apr. ’41) ti è apparso premio gioioso dello sforzo vitale e infatti da allora non te ne sei più lagnato, ma (’42, ’43) hai indagato con gusto come nell’infanzia si scavino queste rotaie […]. Hai concluso (sett. ’43) con la scoperta del mito-unicità, che fonde così tutti i tuoi antichi rovelli psicologici e i tuoi più vivi interessi mitico-creativi. È assodato che il bisogno di costruzione nasce per te su questa legge del ritorno. Bravo. È insieme assodato che il senso della tua vita non può essere che la costruzione. Tutto è ripetizione, ripercorso, ritorno. Infatti anche la prima volta è una «seconda volta». 29 This entry is meaningful because it links the “bisogno di costruzione” to “legge del ritorno,” two fundamental aspects that are now connected to his “scoperta del mito-unicità.” Pavese’s idea that “tutto è ripetizione, ripercorso, ritorno” inserts itself in what Mircea Eliade defined “the reappearance of cyclical theories in contemporary thought,”30 which was inspired by Nietzsche’s myth of the eternal return. Although Pavese’s interest in German culture and philosophy has been long overlooked by his critics,31 it is perhaps useful to look at Nietzsche’s concept of “legge 29 Ibid., 269-270 (November 6th, 1943). See section II.2, and particularly from page 77, for a more detailed analysis of the relation between prima/seconda volta. 30 According to Eliade, the twentieth century witnesses a reaction against the “linearism and progressivist conception of history” that asserted themselves from the seventeenth century on. Interestingly, Eliade retraces this “revival of interest in the theory of cycles” in various areas: “in political economy, we are witnessing the rehabilitation of the notion of cycle, fluctuation, periodic oscillation; […] in philosophy the myth of eternal return is revivified by Nietzsche; or […], in the philosophy of history, a Spengler or a Toynbee concern themselves with the problem of periodicity” [Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History (Princeton University Press, 1991), 145-146]. 31 Lately a new interest has arisen in Pavese’s scholarship with regard to the influences exercised on his poetics by Nietzsche, which are at the center, for example, of Francesca Belviso’s Amor Fati. Pavese all’ombra di Nietzsche (Torino: Aragno, 2015). Pavese’s interest in and contact with German culture and philosophy has been, according to Belviso, scarcely studied by Pavese’s critics and a partial translation he did of Nietzsche’s Der Wille zur Macht in 69 del ritorno”—fully developed in Also sprach Zarathustra—but also anticipated in the Die fröhliche Wissenschaft as the “heaviest burden”: “this life, as you live it at present, and have lived it, you must live it once more, and also innumerable times.”32 Pavese seems to have incorporated and adapted this “legge del ritorno” into his concept of destiny and retained not only the idea of return, but also some of the sense of burden with “rotaie” and “ritorno” as something creating anguish. However, in line with the ethical interpretation of the Nietzschean eternal return provided by Gianni Vattimo,33 according to which the eternal return is something that could inspire men and women to live each moment at its fullest, as if they were to live them eternally, Pavese’s treatment of destiny also soon opens up to a more optimistic interpretation. The return of events and situations is greeted by Pavese not any more as the sign of a personal curse, but rather as the emergence and actualization of his individual way of being. Unlike Nietzsche’s eternal return, Pavese’s interpretation of destiny is that it is considered from a 1944-1945 actually opens up the floor for new possibilities for Pavese’s scholarship. Also, Belviso affirms that Ecce Homo, Die Geburth der Tragödie, Zur Genealogie der Moral, Der Wille zur Macht were found in Pavese’s library with evidents signs of readings and notes. What Lorenzo Mondo underscores in a review published on La Stampa is the fact that Pavese’s interest in the German philosopher had already emerged in the infamous Taccuino segreto. According to the critic, probably Giaime Pintor, who, as we have seen, was a valuable colleague and Germanicist at Einaudi, inspired Pavese in his renewed interest in the German culture and language. 32 Aphorism number 341 is probably one of the most famous as it anticipates the theme of the eternal return, which will then be recuperated in the Zarathustra. This is the full text: “The Heaviest Burden. What if a demon crept after you into your loneliest loneliness some day or night, and said to you: "This life, as you live it at present, and have lived it, you must live it once more, and also innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh, and all the unspeakably small and great in thy life must come to you again, and all in the same series and sequence - and similarly this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and similarly this moment, and I myself. The eternal sand-glass of existence will ever be turned once more, and you with it, you speck of dust!" - Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth, and curse the demon that so spoke? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment in which you would answer him: "You are a God, and never did I hear anything so divine!" If that thought acquired power over you as you are, it would transform you, and perhaps crush you; the question with regard to all and everything: "Do you want this once more, and also for innumerable times?" would lie as the heaviest burden upon your activity! Or, how would you have to become favorably inclined to yourself and to life, so as to long for nothing more ardently than for this last eternal sanctioning and sealing?” [Friedrich Nietzsche, The gay science: With a prelude in rhymes and an appendix of songs (Cambridge University Press: 2001) 194-195]. 33 The essays the Italian philosopher wrote on Nietzsche are now collected in Dialoghi con Nietzsche, Saggi 1961- 2000 (Milano: Garzanti, 2001). 70 retrospective point of view: it is from the standpoint of the present that the subject embarks on the mnemonic venture to retrace in his life the emergence of a destiny that was not perceived as such at the time. Destiny, in my interpretation, in accordance with Pavese’s “strategia ermeneutica della retrospezione,”34 is thus revealed through the après coup modality that underscores the relevant recurrence of thoughts and concepts throughout a lifetime. These three aspects—costruzione, destino, and mito—will become increasingly connected in the following years. They are the pillars of Pavese’s method, of his own approach, and of his forma mentis which led him to write the diary. What else is Il mestiere di vivere if not a “ripetizione, ripercorso, ritorno,” a continuous attempt at recuperating something that was said before, a thought already expressed or an idea previously jotted down? And what else does this repetition do, if not highlight the structure that sustains Pavese’s thought: that all revolves around a limited number of recurrent ideas and elements? II.2 The relevance of childhood and of discoveries-memories in Pavese’s poetics In the late 1930s and early 1940s Pavese’s attitude toward the subject of destiny was negative and pessimistic. Once he starts investigating the realm of myth in 1943, the question of destiny returns in his writing, now however charged with a new, stronger meaning, one which is distant from the original. Not only does the author start using a more precise lexicon (from 1943 on Pavese still writes about rotaie, but also, and more precisely, about destino), but also a different perspective emerges on those rails that seem to impose a new direction. No longer 34 Bart Van Den Bossche, “Nulla è veramente accaduto,” 108. Van Den Bossche thus synthesizes this understanding of destiny: “l’indagine mnemonica volta a chiarire il destino consiste in fin dei conti in un portare alla luce un sapere già implicito nei fatti, ma non ancora pienamente formulato, un sapere ancora nascosto che in futuro si potrà ridurre a consapevolezza” (Ibid., 132-133). 71 causing anguish, they begin to be read as a subtle and indirect manifestation of our truest inner essence. At this time, the interest in destino is primarily focused on its roots in childhood. This connection between childhood and destino emerges when Pavese writes about his “convinzione che quale uno era bambino tale sarà adulto e mai muterà la “portata del ponte.”35 The span of the bridge is then for Pavese a sort of anticipation of ourselves as adults during our childhood, a condensed history of our future. Just as DNA determines in the embryo the adult body’s functions and look, with its developments already present in the genetic information even before birth, so the “portata del ponte” encapsulates from our very first steps in this world what we will become as adults.36 As Pavese writes on December 9th, 1945, “quando avevamo tre, sette anni, tutti, quando nulla era avvenuto o dormiva solamente nei nervi e nel cuore.”37 I cross-read diary entries with four theoretical essays that belong to the last section of Feria d’agosto—“La vigna”—where Pavese spends significant time describing the relation between childhood, culture/poetry, and the formation of myth: “Del mito, del simbolo e d’altro,” “Stato di grazia,” “L’adolescenza,” and “Mal di mestiere,” all dated 1943-44. Like other important theoretical essays, published both in Feria d’agosto or in magazines, these four essays, too, read like a collage of some of the more theoretical entries of Il mestiere di vivere, a sort of 35 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 280 (May 22nd, 1944). 36 In a note from 1947, Pavese explains that he does not consider destiny as an element indebted to some sort of determinism: “che a ciascuno accadono sempre le stesse cose, non è affermazione deterministica. Anzi. Se queste cose accadono non vuol dire che il soggetto è determinato dalla necessità naturale di esse cose, ma in ogni incontro porta la sua costanza, indole, persona, essenza ecc. Ed è questa a scegliere gli incontri, a foggiarli sempre all’uguale. Per quanto entra l’io umano negli incontri essi sono liberi” [Ibid., 338 (August 26th, 1947)]. Interestingly though, the descriptions he provides of his conception of destiny are instead in line with a deterministic interpretation of life. According to Pavese, a person’s life is not determined by natural necessity, but it is nevertheless determined by a person’s essence which prompts him or her to make the same decisions. 37 Ibid., 305 (December 9th, 1945). 72 review of the most important diary notes on this specific subject from those same years.38 They are fundamental to understanding the processes I am highlighting in this section, as Pavese reaches in these essays a clearer exposition of his theory, lacking in diary pages. The importance of childhood in Pavese’s work is linked to the formation of what the author defines as personal myths. These personal myths—which Pavese also refers to as “schemi normativi dell’immaginazione affettiva”39—are the result of the tendency during childhood to “sollevare alla sfera di eventi unici e assoluti le successive rivelazioni delle cose.”40 For this reason, each person has a set of personal images and symbols whose importance derives from the fact that they have been a means to understanding reality, a referential template to mediate the daily encounter with things seen for the first time. If during childhood the making of personal myths is functional to the comprehension of the surrounding world, their relevance in a person’s life will still be poignant during adulthood.41 As we shall see, those symbols planted during childhood reverberate through all of life: they tell us of our own way of looking at the world. They are, for Pavese, the best opportunity each one of us has to have a glimpse at our inner self, otherwise inaccessible. For this reason, Pavese dedicated many pages to the analysis of a child’s comprehension of reality, a cognitive process that stands at the beginning of every person’s mythopoeia. 38 For example, “Del mito, del simbolo e d’altro” summarizes all the most important, disparate, disquisitions on childhood Pavese had jotted down on his diary in the previous couple of years. Striking are the resemblances to what he writes on August 31st, 1942, and on September 17th, 1943. 39 Cesare Pavese, “Del mito, del simbolo e d’altro” [1943-1944], in Feria d’agosto (Torino: Einaudi, 1946) 152. 40 Ibid. 41 As Pavese writes, “ognuno di noi possiede una mitologia personale […] che dà valore, un valore assoluto, al suo mondo più remoto, e gli riveste povere cose del passato con un ambiguo e seducente lucore dove pare, come in un simbolo, riassumersi il senso di tutta la vita” (Ibid.). 73 Pavese does not explicitly demarcate the two stages of childhood separated by the advent of language, referring indiscriminately to both as “infanzia.” The reason to point out this inconsistency is that, for Pavese, the role of language—and more specifically of culture or poetry—is indeed crucial in its relation to personal myths. For clarity’s sake, I will thus distinguish between pre- and post-linguistic childhood.42 Pavese refers to pre-linguistic childhood as an age when the subject is immersed in the reality that surrounds him/her so that s/he does not perceive any boundaries between himself/herself and this reality: the subject is one with the world, completely open and porous to it. As simplistic and romanticized as this conception of early childhood may seem, I find revealing Pavese’s insistence on its interpretation in these terms. Pavese stresses the lack of boundaries with the world perceived in early childhood and by doing so he indirectly underscores the following normative role performed by the process of differentiation sparked by the revelation of things. According to Pavese, little or nothing can be known from this age, because the subject does not even know he exists. We were “piccoli bruti inconsapevoli, il reale ci accoglieva come accoglie semi e pietre. Nessun pericolo che allora lo ammirassimo e volessimo tuffarci nel suo gorgo. Eravamo il gorgo stesso.”43 Pre-linguistic childhood seems, 42 Elio Gioanola, in the introduction to Feria d’agosto, suggests another distinction, not instituted by the author, between “oralità” and “scrittura.” This distinction would in fact help better understand the paradox of a myth which grounds on a “silenzio preverbale.” According to Gioanola, “Può sembrare contraddittorio [...] tutto ciò che Pavese dice a proposito del mito, considerata l’equivalenza che egli pone tra universo mitico e universo infantile, non essendo il mito formulabile se non attraverso la parola [...]. Forse, a meglio articolare la questione, sarebbe necessaria una distinzione, che Pavese non fa, tra oralità e scrittura, dal momento che il mondo mitico ha propriamente cessato di essere non certo quando si è cominciato a parlare, il che è palesamente assurdo, ma quando si è cominciato ad usare la scrittura alfabetica che, distendendo orizzontalmente, in forma consequenziale, le proposizioni, ha dato origine al principio di non-contraddizione, facendo del linguaggio il tramite della comunicazione univoca, del pensiero astratto, della filosofia e poi della scienza. L’oralità non conosce le categorie concettuali e il suo riferimento non è la linea, ma la sfera; dunque mito e infanzia non sono muti in senso assoluto, ma non conoscono distinzione tra soggetto e oggetto, io e mondo, cosa e parola” (Elio Gioanola, introduction [2002] to Feria d’agosto, XXV-XXVI). 43 Cesare Pavese, “Mal di mestiere” [1943-1944], in Feria d’agosto, 169-170. 74 then, to be a stage of life when one is fully receptive to the surrounding world, which one experiences and apprehends without self-awareness. According to Pavese, the “linguistic turn” has meaningful implications in a child’s life. First of all—as Pavese writes in Mal di mestiere—it is only through language that children are able to perceive, experience, and ultimately know the reality around them: la storia segreta dell’infanzia di tutti è fatta appunto dei sussulti e degli strappi che ci hanno sradicati dal reale, per cui—oggi una forma e domani un colore—attraverso il linguaggio ci siamo contrapposti alle cose e abbiamo imparato a valutarle e contemplarle. Ciò che è prezioso in fondo a noi sarà dunque questa concordia discorde d’incontri, di scoperte, di sviluppo. 44 This process is described by Pavese as a violent one, as it happens through tears and eradications. But it is through this energetic contraposition with the surrounding world that the child sets in motion cognitive processes. When language makes its appearance in the child’s world, everything starts to change. The child learns to distinguish and to navigate what until then seemed a chaotic whirlpool: s/he is not caught up in the vortex of reality anymore. This process is not necessarily smooth, as Pavese reminds us with the use of the expression “concordia discorde.” It is made of encounters, discoveries and developments that accompany us in our comprehension of the world. Pavese stresses how language is at the beginning of every cognitive process, a prerequisite to it as knowledge does not arise from direct contact with the world. On August 31st, 1942, he writes: da bambino s’impara a conoscere il mondo non—come parrebbe—con immediato e originario contatto alle cose, ma attraverso i segni delle cose: parole, vignette, racconti. Se si risale un qualunque momento di commozione estatica davanti a qualcosa del mondo, si trova che ci commuoviamo perché ci siamo già commossi; e ci siamo già commossi, perché un giorno 44 Ibid. 75 qualcosa ci apparve trasfigurato, staccato dal resto, per una parola, una favola, una fantasia che vi si riferiva.45 A child’s understanding of the world is not unmediated, as it can only happen through the linguistic and cultural mediation of “i segni delle cose.” According to Pavese, at the origin of any emotional reaction to the sight of a given landscape, painting or event, lies an encounter with a sign of that given landscape, painting or event. Something moves us because we have already been introduced to it in the form of a nursery rhyme, a song, or a fairy tale. The role of language in our comprehension of reality is, evidently, of the greatest importance. In the second stage of childhood—marked by the use of language—songs, jokes, nursery rhymes introduce the child to the culture of a given world, they filter and select the child’s perception of the reality around him.46 If there is no rational knowledge before language, there is no possibility for us to conjure up—with rational tools—the first encounter we had with a given thing, because we perceive it as something other than us only the moment that we can name it, or when a cultural artifact opens 45 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 243 (August 31st, 1942). In “Del mito, del simbolo e d’altro” [1943-1944], Pavese writes something very similar: “prima dei libri ci furono le favole, le immagini, i giochi, ci furono i canti e le feste. A rigore, di età in cui nessuna fantasia esterna premesse sul nostro animo ci fu soltanto quella inconsapevole dell’infanzia. I libri son venuti più tardi: essi hanno affrettato e condensato un processo che nulla sostanzialmente distingue dall’azione onnipresente della cultura prelibresca. Non appena ascoltammo e parlammo, eccoci nella sfera dello spirito, della fantasia incarnati” (Cesare Pavese, “Del mito, del simbolo e d’altro” [1943-1944], in Feria d’agosto, 152). 46 The relevance accorded by Pavese to language echoes Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms, according to which “the analysis of reality […] [does] not precede language as a substratum of given fact…language itself is what initiates such articulations, and develops them in its own sphere” [Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth (Courier Corporation, 2012), 12]. Another interesting contact with Cassirer can be found in the role that art and culture have in a child’s knowledge of reality for Pavese. In this case too, similarities can be found with Cassirer’s thought: “the special symbolic forms are not imitations, but organs of reality, since it is solely by their agency that anything real becomes an object for intellectual apprehension, and as such is made visible to us” (Ibid., 8). Even though Pavese does not comment in his diary on the work of the German philosopher, he was familiar with it as it emerges from his editorial correspondence, especially with Ernesto De Martino who was in charge of the translation of Das mythische Denken for Einaudi. Many letters addressed to De Martino contain complains from the part of Pavese about both the delay in delivering the translation, and the lack of update. (May 30 th, 1945; June 30th, 1947, January 8th, 1947). 76 our eyes, thus informing us of its existence.47 It seems, in Pavese’s words, that we can perceive something and be emotionally moved by its sight, only after our own culture has marked it as relevant and worthy of attention. If we tried a mnemonic challenge—to remember the first time we had an unmediated contact with a given thing—we can rest assured that we would be bound to lose: “si ammirano soltanto quei paesaggi che abbiamo già ammirato. Di anello in anello si risale a un quadro, a un’esclamazione, a un segno, con cui altri ce li ha trascelti e proposti.”48 Due to this linguistic and cultural mediation, every encounter that we consider to be the first is, instead, already a second one. “Ci commuoviamo perché ci siamo già commossi”: something in our world amazes us, because a poem, a painting, a rhyme referred to it, creating in us interest for it. Pavese refers to this dynamic as “prima e seconda volta,” on which he wrote extensively in 1942. This dynamic demonstrates how important the role of the culture where we were born and grew up, is. It is through the eyes of this culture that we see the world and we learn. In fact, “la prima scoperta della realtà ci viene fatta attraverso le espressioni esemplari che di questa realtà si sono date attorno a noi.”49 In underscoring the important role played by the culture in which we were born in our relationship with the world, Pavese seems to argue the relevance of cultural relativism. However, Pavese is also making more universal claims, as the mechanism is one in act in every human being, regardless his or her culture. Elio Gioanola, in his beautiful introduction to Feria d’agosto, analyzes the question of first and second time, highlighting how culture allows the child to translate emotions aroused 47 Pavese delves on this issue in many diary’s entries, and also in a few essays. For example, in “L’adolescenza” he writes: “nessun ragazzo, nessun uomo ammira un paesaggio prima che l’arte, la poesia—una semplice parola anche—gli abbiano aperto gli occhi. Ognuno ripensi a un’ora estatica della sua fanciullezza, e troverà sotto l’entusiasmo e la rivelazione, la traccia di gusto, libresca o no, che la sua qualsiasi cultura gli ha segnato” (Cesare Pavese, “L’adolescenza” [1943-1944], in Feria d’agosto, 162). 48 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 259 (October 4th, 1943). 49 Cesare Pavese, “Stato di grazia” [1943-1944], in Feria d’agosto, 159. 77 from a contact with the world into something rationally understandable:50 “è come se il mitico- irrazionale delle origini non possedesse statuto d’esistenza a meno di trovare punti di coagulo attorno a qualcosa di già articolato linguisticamente.” Gioanola also emphasizes how this relation between irrational and word is one wherein some things get inevitably lost. In fact, “l’irrazionale è muto e non può entrare nell’orizzonte della significazione senza il tramite della parola, nella quale viene insieme, inevitabilmente, tradotto e tradito.”51 The critic beautifully emphasizes the complex and dramatic role of the word that is indispensable to its translating the irrational into something meaningful. However, the word is also performing an act of betrayal at the expenses of the irrational, whose mythic halo is compromised in the translation process. The complex relation between the first and second time refers to a logical impasse. As we have seen, during childhood the subject lives on the border of direct contact with the world and its translation into linguistic signs. The border between these two dimensions is not strongly delineated, and this is why Pavese writes about scoperte-ricordo52 when referring to the delicate 50 In this introduction, Gioanola repeatedly compares Pavese’s theory of myth with Giacomo Leopardi’s poetics. According to him many and striking are the contacts, especially when it comes to the importance of infinito and of childhood. As for the resemblances between Pavese’s first and second time with thoughts housed on the Zibaldone, this is what Gioanola writes: “ancora una volta il riferimento a Leopardi diventa obbligato […]. Il poeta riferisce le immagini fanciullesche non al diretto incontro con le cose del mondo suscitanti emozioni, ma alla memoria di riscontri culturali che, in qualche modo, hanno ‘tradotto’ quelle emozioni […]. A suscitare il “diletto vago e indefinito” sono propriamente “una pittura, un suono, una descrizione, una favola, un’immagine poetica,” per cui nella rimembranza si è sempre di fronte a una “immagine fanciullesca,” non ad una “immagine degli oggetti” (Elio Gioanola, introduction [2002] to Feria d’agosto, XXVII). 51 Ibid. 52 Manuela Brunetta analyses the influence of Thomas Mann’s work on the elaboration, on the part of Pavese, of the theory of scoperte-ricordo. The scholar studied Pavese’s notes and underlining on the books he borrowed during his stay at the Collegio Trevisio, underscoring the relevance of the element of repetition in both authors: “Fin dai primi segni di lettura […], Pavese aveva manifestato un grande interesse anche per quei passi in cui Mann esplicita la propria concezione legata al ricordo-ritorno, tema che lo scrittore aveva affrontato proprio in quegli anni teorizzando il mito dell’infanzia [...]. Pavese in questo periodo stava infatti approfondendo la propria teoria sul ricordo-ritorno che, sulla base delle scoperte realizzate grazie alla teorizzazione del mito dell’infanzia, aveva impostato come ritrovamento-scoperta del “passato mitico” nella realtà del presente. Un ritrovamento che consente di cogliere l’intima partecipazione dell’uomo ad una realtà universale: la partecipazione alle leggi universali ed eterne della natura” [Manuela Brunetta, “Pavese lettore nella Biblioteca del Collegio Trevisio di Casale Monferrato,” Studi novecenteschi: quadrimestrale di storia della letteratura italiana contemporanea 22, no. 49 (1995): 55-57]. 78 relation between first and second time. For this reason, as Pavese stresses in both the diary and the essays, when we believe we are discovering something we are, instead, remembering it: “bisogna sapere che noi non vediamo mai le cose una prima volta, ma sempre la seconda. Allora le scopriamo e insieme le ricordiamo.”53 The first time is out of reach, “un altrove irraggiungibile dai segni e dai significati,”54 so that what we are able to remember is always, already, a second time. The formulation of the theory of scoperte-ricordo seems to replicate Sigmund Freud’s Nachträglichkeit,55 a belated understanding of past events that were not at first fully comprehended. Freud’s deferred action or “afterwardsness” consists mainly in the retroactive attribution of sexual or traumatic meaning to events occurred at an age when the sexual development needed to understand the implications of such event had not been reached yet. Both the functioning of scoperte-ricordo—they are belatedly recorded by the subject’s memory—and the retrospective action of the après coup modality are aspects of Pavese’s theory that are clear references to Freud’s work.56 Not even the formation of our personal symbols is exempt from this dynamic. Our symbols are “autentici ricordi,” but they are also “vere e proprie scoperte:”57 “sono una realtà enigmatica e tuttavia familiare, tanto più prepotente in quanto sempre sul punto di rivelarsi e mai scoperta.”58 We do not have the power and the tools to 53 Cesare Pavese, “Stato di grazia,” in Feria d’agosto, 156. 54 Elio Gioanola, introduction [2002] to Feria d’agosto, XXVIII. 55 This concept was conceived by Freud as early as 1895 in the unpublished Project for a scientific psychology and it was also present in Studies on Hysteria (1895). 56 Giuditta Isotti Rosowsky dedicates an important study to the tracing of Freud’s influence on Pavese’s work, Pavese lettore di Freud: interpretazione di un tragitto (Palermo: Sellerio, 1989). In her work, Isotti Rosowsky underscores an interesting “resistance” from the part of Pavese to recognize the presence of Freud in his formation and intellectual interests, whereas he explicitly discusses the influence exercised by other philosophers, anthropologists or writers. The scholar claims that although Freud’s influence was most evident in the years 1940- 1946, retracing it in those years’ works and diary entries is not an easy task. Pavese, in fact, often subjects his debts to Freud’s speculations to a personal formulation. However, Pavese in the note of November 8 th, 1940, explicitly refers to the Essays de Psychanalyse, which he read in 1938-1940. According to the scholar, “Stato di grazia,” the essay from which I am quoting in this section, is also evidently indebted to the Essays. 57 Cesare Pavese, “Stato di grazia,” in Feria d’agosto, 156. 58 Ibid. 79 investigate why such a reaction is prompted by certain images rather than others. A past habit is not reason enough to elevate a specific image to this ecstatic realm. According to Pavese, in fact, most of the time it is the most irrelevant and banal detail that can trigger in us such reaction, because it is probably immune from cultural interferences and mediations.59 The reason why we are not able to justify and explain the importance of these symbols is that, here too, we are dealing with a prima/seconda volta where the first part is lost in a pre-linguistic and pre-rational era. Again, the proximity to Freud’s Nachträglichkeit is striking. We sense that something very important, something of fundamental resonance, something that is close to our inner and most mysterious essence, lies here: “la serietà di questi simboli ci fa credere che in essi si condensi l’essenza stessa della nostra singola vita.”60 If we cannot retrieve the origin of our memories, it is because they attingono alla sfera dell’istintivo-irrazionale. In questa sfera—la sfera dell’essere e dell’estasi— non esiste il prima e il dopo, la seconda volta e la prima, perché non esiste il tempo. Qui ogni volta è una seconda volta, o diciamo un ritrovamento, soltanto perché profondandoci in essa ritroviamo noi stessi. […] La scelta è avvenuta di là della nostra coscienza, di là dai nostri giorni e concetti; essa si ripete ogni volta, sul piano dell’essere, per grazia, per ispirazione, per estasi insomma.61 These contacts with the “sfera dell’essere” are not triggered intentionally. Bringing these “mitici simboli” to light is a process that is not entrusted to memory—technically there is nothing to be remembered—because memory works within spatial-temporal parameters which simply do not apply to the mythical sphere.62 For this reason, Pavese’s ricordi are at the same time 59 Even though Pavese asserts, as we have seen, that we do not know how certain images are chosen as ecstatic over others, he also put forward an interesting thought regarding the role of poetry in the formation of our scoperte-ricordo: “quanto, nel costituirsi di una di queste scoperte-ricordo, gioca l’influsso della poesia, la scuola della lettura, dell’audizione, della contemplazione? Per quali di questi simboli andiamo debitori ai poeti che ce ne hanno scavata in cuore l’impronta?” (Ibid., 159). 60 Ibid., 157. 61 Ibid. 62 Pavese read with great interest Lévy-Bruhl’s Mythologie Primitive; le mond mytique des Australiens et des Papous, Paris, 1935 and L’Expérience mystique et les symbols chez les primitifs, Paris, 1938, as attested by notes 80 scoperte, springing out of a momentary and ephemeral contact with another dimension. We simply do not have the tools to conjure up this sphere, which shows up and strikes us in “istanti inaspettati” “per grazia, per estasi.” This repository of images is inhabited by the “mitici simboli della nostra perenne, assoluta realtà,” which are meant to be investigated and brought to light, in a cognitive process aimed at translating into language what belongs to an irrational realm: Ciò che ci permette di riconoscere questi ultimi è lo sforzo conoscitivo che c’impongono, la tensione delusa e sempre vivace di tutto il nostro essere per afferrarli, incapsularli, incorporarceli nel sangue e conoscerli finalmente. Poiché il loro balenare dall’inconscio alla luce significa l’inizio di un processo che si placherà soltanto quando li avremo tutti penetrati di luce; ed essi sfuggono, ricadono nell’indistinto cui appartengono con la parte più ricca di noi.63 To a first katabasis in the “sfera dell’essere e dell’estasi”—“profondandoci in essa ritroviamo noi stessi”—an anabasis, a “balenare dall’inconscio alla luce,” must follow. Borrowing the Nietzschean dichotomy that surely had a great influence on the elaboration of these concepts for Pavese, one could say that if the emergence of our symbols, myths and memories out of the Dionysian “sfera dell’istintivo-irrazionale” is beyond intentional control, the clarifying and rationalizing process that follow is instead an Apollonian “sforzo conoscitivo.” I would like to introduce briefly another fundamental element in the author’s poetics: landscape. As we shall see, the primary role played by landscape both in Pavese’s theoretical and from September 15th, 1936 and March 2nd, 1941. In his insistence on the suspension of spatial-temporal parameters in the treatment of myth, Pavese was probably influenced by the French scholar who wrote about the “law of participation” followed by “prelogical mentality.” This law, as David Spurr synthesizes, “collapses a number of distinctions essential to rational Western thought: between sensible reality and the beyond, or the dream; between present and past or future; between the sign and the cause of an event. The phenomenon of multipresence eliminates distinctions between one and many, same and other, animate and inanimate: as in the symbolist phenomenon of dedoublement, two distinct persons may yet be the same person; a person may be present in different places at the same time. Time and space are deeply subjective and qualitative and are not subject to Western methods of quantitative measure” [David Spurr, “Myths of Anthropology: Eliot, Joyce, Lévy- Bruhl,” PMLA 109, no. 2 (March 1994): 268]. The collapse of some of the aforementioned distinctions is essential in Feria d’agosto. 63 Cesare Pavese, “Stato di grazia,” in Feria d’agosto, 158. 81 fictional writing is through its intrinsic relation to childhood. Landscape is an element charged with great relevance since the early days of Pavese’s writing. In fact, we could consider it, charged as it is with symbolic meaning, one of the very first expressions of the “dottrina del mito.” This emerges already in the 1930s, for example in Lavorare stanca, but it becomes clearer and more intentional from 1943 on. When we talk about landscape in Pavese’s writing, we are probably referring to the Piedmontese hills where he grew up as a child and which hold, even during adulthood, a place dear to the author’s heart. His hills are never just a natural background, they are always pregnant with a symbolism that goes beyond mere scenery. John Brinckerhoff Jackson’s famous definition of (cultural) landscape can help better describe the peculiarity of landscape in Pavese. In fact, Pavese’s hills too are a “natural environment as modified by man”64: they are charged by the author with a meaning that is so private and intimate as to make them unique. This aspect is already quite evident in a note from February 1942, where Pavese compares the fascination evoked by his hills with his response to a pinewood, a landscape experienced as extraneous because it was not the background to his childhood years: Essa non è per te né un ricordo né una costante fantastica […], non contiene, come una vigna o una tua collina, gli stampi della tua conoscenza del mondo. Se ne deduce che moltissimi mondi naturali […] non ti appartengono perché non li hai vissuti a suo tempo […]. Non puoi quindi sfuggire […] a un mondo già implicito nella tua natura percettiva.65 Pavese asserts his lack of interest in the natural worlds he did not experience during childhood, as they are not implicit to his “natura percettiva.” It is Pavese’s perceptive nature that turns the natural world of the hills into a landscape, one whose sense he developed from his surroundings during childhood, because they had provided him with his “stampi della conoscenza del mondo” as a child. Pavese’s approach to the world that surrounds him, it seems, 64 John Brinckerhoff Jackson, The necessity for ruins, and other topics (Univ of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 2. 65 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 232-233 (February 10th, 1942). 82 has been influenced by, and molded on, that very first encounter with reality, during his childhood, that provided him with a stampo. The imprinting provided by the hills echoes the aforementioned “schemi normativi dell’immaginazione affettiva.”66 It is only shortly after, in September 1943, that Pavese explicitly links myth to the relevance of landscape, through the introduction of what he calls luoghi unici67—those places, linked to a given foundational event, which are therefore charged with an absolute meaning transcending geographical specificity: “a un luogo, tra tutti, si dà un significato assoluto, isolandolo nel mondo. […] Questa unicità del luogo è parte, del resto, di quella generale unicità del gesto e del fatto, assoluti e quindi simbolici, che costituisce il mito.”68 The uniqueness of the mythical event is cast onto the place where it happened: for this reason, the “luoghi unici” are elevated to the status of absolute, symbolic places. They become a landscape that is impregnated with all the mysterious and symbolic implication of the mythical event that took place there.69 66 This aspect will reach its apex in La casa in collina where the narrator affirms: “la collina […] per me non era un luogo tra gli altri, ma un aspetto delle cose, un modo di vivere” (Cesare Pavese, La casa in collina, 3). 67 An interesting analysis of luoghi unici in Pavese’s Feria d’agosto can be found in Luisella Mesiano, “Dittico per Pavese,” in Sotto il gelo dell’acqua c’è l’erba (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2001). Mesiano underscores the relevance of the gaze in Pavese’s understanding of luoghi unici, and their deep relation to myth: “di fronte a questa realtà il mito sembra essere la risposta che Pavese cercava da sempre, quella forma di conoscenza contemplativa che sola può esprimere l’esperienza dei luoghi unici” (Ibid., 233). Also, her interpretation stresses the destruction of a temporal dimension in Pavese’s myth, whereas luoghi unici attest to the permanence and relevance of space, which allows for scoperte-ricordo: “è chiaro […] che l’abolizione dello spazio è per [Pavese] praticamente impossibile, metterebbe a rischio lo stesso senso di realtà su cui si fonda la sua poetica, è piuttosto il tempo cronologico a subire uno scardinamento totale, la stessa assenza di rimembranza è conseguenza dell’assenza del tempo cronologico perché il ricordo ha bisogno di tempo, ma il ricordo-scoperta ha bisogno di spazio” (Ibid., 231). This interpretation, as Mesiano herself recognizes, goes against what Pavese himself writes in “Del mito, del simbolo e d’altro”: “genuinamento mitico è un evento che come fuori del tempo cosí si compie fuori dello spazio” (Cesare Pavese, “Del mito, del simbolo e d’altro,” in Feria d’agosto, 151). 68 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 257 (September 11th, 1943). 69 Eliade addressed a similar mechanism when referring not to landscape in particular, but rather to the sacred value accorded by archaic men and women to specific objects or human act, which do not have any “autonomous intrinsic value.” In the scholar’s opinion, both objects and acts acquire a value “because they participate […] in a reality that transcends them. Among countless stones, one stone becomes sacred […] because it constitutes a hierophany […] or because it commemorates a mythical act” (Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, 4). 83 Pavese institutes in this passage a cogent link between myth and childhood, as both are indebted to the same way of approaching reality, which results in elevating a place among others. In fact, “i luoghi dell’infanzia ritornano nella memoria a ciascuno consacrati nello stesso modo; in essi accaddero cose che li han fatti unici e li trascelgono sul resto del mondo con questo suggello mitico (non ancora poetico).”70 Childhood landscapes are so relevant and meaningful because they provide the background to a person’s very first encounter with the world. Almost by osmosis then, the importance of the encounter—which, as we have seen, is bound to be forgotten—is cast upon the landscape that made it possible.71 For Pavese, interest in a native landscape is the most valuable and tangible trace of one’s myths. A note from a few days later returns to this issue, already correcting the previous one with a significant clarification: “il luogo mitico non è quello individualmente unico, tipo santuario o simili (correggere l’11 sett.), ma bensì quello di nome comune, universale, il prato, la selva, la grotta, la spiaggia, la radura, che nella sua indeterminatezza evoca tutti i prati, le selve, ecc.”72 A mythical place is thus for Pavese 70 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 257 (September 11th, 1943). This quote shows an interesting contraposition between poetry and myth, probably one of the first of a very long list. In this case, to myth belongs the world of transcendental images, whose uniqueness and symbolic value make them a very structural and essential element. On the other hand, to poetry belongs the stratification of successive sediments of memories, which depends on that first encounter and which is molded on it, but which, nevertheless, does not have the poignancy and foundational character of myth. The poetic richness of various memories belongs to the realm of content, since memories are contextualized in a given time and space of life. Myth, on the other hand, just like childhood’s luoghi unici, is a unique and grounding event, it digs its roots in a past that is out of time, and in a place that becomes non-place since it is freed from a spatial-temporal context. 71 As we have seen on note 67, page 82, Mesiano defends the relevance and permanence of space in Pavese’s myth, which leads to a lack of differentiation between a mythical apparition and its background: “lo sguardo si volge alla realtà perché il mito e la presenza divina non possono fare a meno di una contestualizzazione precisa, di una localizzazione, di uno sfondo idoneo, al punto che per Pavese i luoghi stessi sono gli dei, e tra sfondo e ciò che appare non vi è, in definitiva, distinzione” (Luisella Mesiano, “Dittico per Pavese,” 228-229). 72 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 258 (September 17th, 1943). This note was probably a preparatory draft for the opening of “Del mito, del simbolo e d’altro.” Pavese, probably aware of the potential ambiguity that could arise from the use of the term “unico” that conveys a sense of singularity, clarifies that by that he means “universale.” “Universal” too, as Nino Arrigo points out, is a “parola trappola,” as its Latin etymology means “turned into one.” However, universal is an adjective that more closely recalls the role of a symbol, which is that of συμβάλλειν, to throw things together. So, Arrigo continues, “un solo verso ma che li racchiude tutti, la molteplicità racchiusa nell’unità” [Nino Arrigo, Herman Melville e Cesare Pavese (Firenze: Firenze Atheneum, 2006), 39]. 84 universal, not linked to a specific site, but an indeterminate location that, for this reason, has the power symbolically to evoke many referents. What is interesting about Pavese’s argument is his move from the specificity of a given landscape to a process of generalization that allows for the evocative power of “luoghi unici.” Pavese’s hills thus, are unique in so far as they are universal, indeterminate as they can evoke all the hills that are equally charged with the same “brivido simbolico.”73 Pavese here clarifies the role of childhood in the formation of our own luoghi unici, whose importance is related to the formation of transcendental images, mental structures that exist before experience and that allow for knowledge. In fact, “le cose che han fatto unici i luoghi dell’infanzia […] sono una cosa sola: il formarsi delle immagini trascendentali.”74 The mythical meaning of Pavese’s hill lies in the fact that it has for him become a transcendental image and it is no longer, or at least not necessarily, a place geographically delimited and defined by a specific toponymy, but rather a way of looking at things, of confronting the world.75 Transcendental images are thus “stampi,” to use another word dear to Pavese, a category imprinted in our “natura percettiva” that allows for our cataloguing and understanding of all those elements that belong to that category. The importance of the hills for Pavese derives from the fact that he was born and grew up in a hilly landscape, and for this reason it was there that his transcendental images were formed. 73 As we shall see, this will emerge in the analysis of La casa in collina where Corrado, the protagonist, affirms that he does not perceive any difference between his native hills and those around Turin where he had lived for a while: “non vedevo differenza tra quelle colline e queste antiche dove giocai bambino e adesso vivo” (Cesare Pavese, La casa in collina, 3). 74 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 258 (September 17th, 1943). 75 As we shall see in the fourth chapter, at the very beginning of La casa in collina, the hill is presented as “un modo di vivere”: “[la collina] per me non era un luogo tra gli altri, ma un aspetto delle cose, un modo di vivere” (Cesare Pavese, La casa in collina, 3). However, in one of the last notes on the subject, Pavese compares the hill to a mythical, unresolved knot: “Intanto hai ridotto all’immagine [della] vigna, tutto ciò che accade e non si comprende ancora” [Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 390 (February 15th, 1950)]. 85 II.3 “Soltanto l’uomo fatto sa essere ragazzo” Pavese provides at least two definitions of maturity, one of which pertains to the individual level, and one to the collective level. In this section, I will analyze the first type, while I will address the second type in the conclusions to the dissertation. Both the importance of childhood and that of maturity have been acknowledged and investigated by scholarship on Pavese. However, very little attention has been granted to the role that adolescence and youth have in the maturing process.76 I argue that they are instead of fundamental importance to Pavese’s poetics, and that only through an understanding of their part in what I call the “dynamics of ages” can we fully appreciate both the relevance of childhood and the functioning of the maturing process to Pavese’s theory of myth. I claim that maturare for Pavese consists of a growing self-awareness, it is a deeper knowledge that marks the passage from one phase to the next. Through this process, the naïve child steps into adolescence by questioning his or her surroundings. The adolescent begins to recognize the role of cultural mediations, where before he or she did not have any awareness of them. After adolescence, the young adult enters a searching phase of wanderings, during which, through the appreciation of landscape and a first emergence of images and symbols, he or she senses the presence of a deeper, truer essence, which he or she strives to conjure up. But it is only when maturity is reached that, finally, the subject has made contact with that true self, and realizes that this pure and genuine core had always been there, as a mold, an imprint that always sustained him, but which belonged to a rationally unattainable dimension. Pavese sometimes overlaps the ages of childhood and 76 Franco Pappalardo La Rosa dedicated a whole book to the myth of adolescence in Pavese [Franco Pappalardo La Rosa, Cesare Pavese e il mito dell’adolescenza (Edizioni dell’Orso, 2003)]. I do not agree with some of the scholar’s claims about this important age, which he considers a precarious stage that entertains a problematic relation with maturity. See next chapter for a more detailed analysis of the literary results of this dynamic which, as I have previously noted, comes to the fore in Feria d’agosto. 86 adolescence, sometimes collapsing them into infanzia/adolescenza.77 I consider this just an apparent distraction on Pavese’s part, given the fact that both these ages share a naïveté, which is no longer characteristic of the subject after his adolescence. The author collapses the two ages sometimes when he wants to emphasize their shared naïveté, but distinguishes them at other times when he instead focuses on different aspects of the ages. Nevertheless, even here for clarity’s sake, I strongly distinguish them, considering that Pavese emphasizes that adolescence is marked by a burst of curiosity that propels the subject to explore the world, to question what he knows: this is when he “cominciava a scappare di casa.”78 In my reading of the succession of ages, adolescents do play a very important role: indeed, it is thanks to this curiosity, to their will to explore the world that the process of maturare is set in motion. This is how Pavese describes the beginning of adolescence in his diary: Strano momento in cui (tredici o dodici anni) ti staccavi dal paese, intravedevi il mondo, partivi sulle fantasie (avventure, città, nomi, ritmi enfatici, ignoto) e non sapevi che cominciava un lungo viaggio che, attraverso città avventure nomi rapimenti mondi ignoti, ti avrebbe ricondotto a scoprire come ricco di tutto quell’avvenire proprio quel momento del distacco—il momento in cui eri più paese che mondo—, a riguardare indietro.79 Perhaps it is for this reason that Pavese’s most beautiful pages revolve around interesting adolescent characters. This adventurous age brings the subject to an important understanding: he finally realizes that his ideas are all borrowed from a previous transfiguration of reality. The following is the beginning of “L’adolescenza,” another essay from the last section of Feria d’agosto: Il giorno in cui ci si accorge che le conoscenze e gli incontri che facciamo nei libri, erano quelli della nostra prima età, si esce d’adolescenza e s’intravede se stessi […]. Nulla è mutato nelle cose e persone della nostra piccola esistenza, siamo mutati noi: attraverso lo stupore che ciò che della 77 This emerges, for example, on the October 16th, 1949 note where Pavese writes: “siamo tornati a una posizione infantile di prima di scoprire il mondo (adolescenza)” thus conflating childhood and adolescence into just one age. 78 Cesare Pavese, “Una certezza” [October 19th-21st, 1941], in Feria d’agosto, 97. 79 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 364 (February 13th, 1949). 87 vita abbiamo veduto e sentito sia lo stesso che muove e accende le alte fantasie dei libri, abbiamo capito di ammirare: abbiamo scoperto, afferrato un mondo, il nostro mondo […]. Nessun ragazzo, nessun uomo ammira un paesaggio prima che l’arte, la poesia—una semplice parola anche—gli abbiano aperto gli occhi […]. Questo vale, almeno, per tutte le adolescenze. Che cessano appunto quando si capisce che la passata visione della realtà somiglia ed è quella esterna dei libri—degli altri.80 I find it very compelling that “s’intravede noi stessi” only after adolescence, only when we recognize the mediating role that literature, art, and culture had had until adolescence in our perception of everyday life. In the previous quote, Pavese provides a more detailed description of landscape as a scenery that one can admire only after the intervention of art and poetry, which open our eyes.81 We can thus only see landscape through the filter of a culture that makes us aware of it. In particular, what emerges from the quote is an insistence on textuality, which, as we shall see in the next quotes, is probably the cultural aspect that influenced young Pavese the most. There are a few entries from the diary that are consistent with this essay: for example, on July 10th, 1943, Pavese writes: “il tuo stupore dei 16-19 anni era che la realtà […] fosse la stessa che Omero e D’Annunzio sottacevano,”82 and again on May 31st, 1946: Visto molte cose giungendo in Piemonte da Roma. Le piante delle campagne e la loro collocazione […] sono quelle di Virgilio e di altre letture classiche della mia adolescenza. Visto che più che l’albero in Piemonte c’è il verde, il mare vegetale. Strano perché gli alberi dei classici erano certo quelli di Roma e io invece li ho visti piemontesi, e li ritrovo qui soltano. Sarà perché leggevo in Piemonte.83 Homer, D’Annunzio and Virgil are also named in other entries, and they probably were the authors of which Pavese was most fond growing up. These authors were responsible for 80 Cesare Pavese, “L’adolescenza,” in Feria d’agosto, 162. 81 John Brinckerhoff Jackson interestingly writes that he considers art as an approach to the study of landscape, and in so doing he uses terms that are close to those used by Pavese when he writes about landscape: “Arts also belongs with landscape studies as I interpret them, for it is only when we begin to participate emotionally in a landscape that its uniqueness and beauty are revealed to us” [John Brinckerhoff Jackson, “Learning about Landscapes,” in The Necessity for Ruins (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 18. 82 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 256 (July 10th, 1943). 83 Ibid., 316 (May 31st, 1946). 88 arousing Pavese’s interest in “il mondo delle cose.” As we understand from this entry, the influence of reading was so powerful in Pavese’s adolescence that he projected what he read about a fictional setting onto a landscape that was very different. This awareness about the role cultural and linguistic mediation has in his comprehension of reality marks an important achievement in a child’s growth. In fact, adolescence ends when the subject achieves this awareness. The naïveté of the child is lost: the subject enters, “dai sedici anni in sù in stato di efficienza/tensione—in uno stato cioè non più propizio all’assorbimento, non più ingenuo.”84 However, the road to full self-awareness is still very long, and the subject must pass through the phase that follows adolescence and that will lead him toward maturity.85 It is worth noting that, whereas Pavese refers explicitly to childhood, adolescence and maturity, he never really named this third phase, even though its role is fundamental in a person’s journey to really know himself or herself.86 During this age, which I will call youth, the subject, now aware that most of his memories are “momenti di trasfigurazione culturale”87 is intent on probing into his or her own past, and his or her own self, in order to find unmediated moments of pure truth. Unfortunately, those experiences, encounters, emotions that make it to our memory are most likely those that had the support of an intentional and conscious education: the “tappe della nostra consapevole educazione” are those which “spiccano nel ricordo.”88 For this reason, all of 84 Ibid., 233 (February 12th, 1942). 85 It would be more correct to say that the path toward maturity is not a certain one, as this process of “prender coscienza” [Ibid., 390 (February 15th, 1950)] does not necessarily take place in each one of us. In fact, in L’adolescenza Pavese asserts that “il travaglio di distinguere nel ricordo fra barlumi e visioni riflesse comincia tardi, comincia con una giovinezza spirituale che si fa attendere molto al di là di quella fisica e talvolta non verrà mai” (Cesare Pavese, “L’adolescenza,” in Feria d’agosto, 163). 86 I claim that the different treatment and attention Pavese dedicated to youth, when compared to the centrality of both childhood and maturity, emerges also in La casa in collina. I will analyze this aspect in the last chapter, in the section dedicated to the close reading of the first part of La casa in collina. 87 Cesare Pavese, “L’adolescenza,” in Feria d’agosto, 162. 88 Ibid. 89 our memories conjure up moments of our life when culture’s influence was strong. However, what the young person is searching for can still be found: Ma c’è tutta una plaga d’indistinte giornate, di cui chi riesce a cogliere e fermare l’atmosfera sfiora il segreto della propria natura più gelosa. In esse incontrammo la nostra realtà, la meno influita e incantata di cultura e quella che sotto tutte le rivelazioni future serberà inconfondibile l’impronta dell’istinto. C’è in esse come un solido suolo, un fondamento ultimo, uno schietto e incancellabile stampo. Tutto viene di là.89 According to Pavese, we have a chance at finding ourselves, “la nostra realtà,” when we consider those days that do not stand out in our memories because they were not influenced by culture. It is in those days that an “impronta,” a “stampo” of our instinct can be found. However difficult to perceive and recognize, the instinct’s imprint is described with terms that underscore its undeniable and fundamental role in sustaining our actions and in binding us to our nature. “L’impronta dell’istinto” is in fact defined as a “solido suolo,” as a “fondamento ultimo,” and also as a “schietto e incancellabile stampo.” In this age, the subject becomes aware of this inner, foundational truth, and may start investigating it: “ma il travaglio di distinguere nel ricordo fra barlumi originari e visioni riflesse comincia tardi, comincia con una giovinezza spirituale che si fa attendere molto al di là di quella fisica e talvolta non verrà mai.” 90 This is not an easy endeavor, as it requires us to be able to “trascurare i ricordi gloriosi e confinarsi a scavare le zone monotone e neutre.”91 Pavese defines these neutral zones “piaghe di semplice vita infantile, istintive, vergini—per quanto è possibile—d’incontri culturali compreso il linguaggio.”92 As we can infer, Pavese considers the demarcations between ages more in terms of the spirit’s course than of a process of physical growth. Also, the “giovinezza spirituale” is not an 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid., 163. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid. 90 obvious achievement, as it implies on the part of the subject the patience, will, and maybe also predisposition, to investigate his or her own self, in a process aimed at distinguishing the strong memories imbued with culture influences, from the “zone monotone e neutre.” For Pavese, these monotonous and apparently meaningless days can show us our instinct at play. Pavese refers to a sort of impasse when we try to recollect those days. In fact, what our memory conserves for us is “ciò che in noi fanciulli fu, già, espresso, vale a dire ispirato da fuori.”93 The research the subject is intent on doing in this stage cannot be performed rationally, it is not a mnemonic effort as memory is susceptible to “ricordi gloriosi,” whereas it does not record those monotonous days when, apparently, nothing important happened. In fact, “occorre per ciò non tanto risalire il fiume della memoria, quanto rimettersi con abnegazione nello stato istintivo, o in ciò che ne resta […]. Intendiamo per stato istintivo quello stampo schietto che influisce sull’intera nostra realtà intima.”94 Pavese here again uses the term “stampo” which, as we have already seen in the past sections, for him is another way of saying “rotaie.” Again, perceiving our own imprint is the only way to our core, to our essence, and this process cannot be entrusted to our memory, which is simply not able to undertake such a journey. We need to abandon our spatial-temporal tools, and also our spatial-temporal expectations, as what we will find is not something concrete and tangible re-emerging from our past, but rather a “stampo” that has always and continuously accompanied us: “a questo punto dell’indagine il tempo dilegua. La nostra fanciullezza, la molla di ogni nostro stupore, è non ciò che fummo ma che siamo da sempre […]. Qui ricordare non è muoversi nel tempo, ma uscirne e sapere che siamo.”95 The subject reaches “maturità” once he realizes that childhood is not something that belongs to a nostalgic past, but rather a mark that we 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid., 163-164. 95 Ibid., 164. 91 have in us, in every moment of our life. It is only at this point that childhood—which was never a self-aware age—is restored to its full meaning as foundational moment; only at this point are all of its implications and reverberations entirely acknowledged. In fact, as Pavese writes in his back cover comment to the 1946 edition of Feria d’agosto, “solamente l’uomo fatto sa essere ragazzo.”96 The two extremes of a man’s life are deeply related and connected, and the process of maturare closes the circle between them; for “maturare” means to reach an awareness that connects one to his truest self, a self whose highest manifestation was during childhood. As we shall see in the section on Pavese’s method, the process of maturare is also at the base of the author’s diary writing. There too, Pavese investigates his life, experiences, encounters and memories, through the implementation of a minimalistic style that pares off the superfluous and transitory and encapsulates what is essential, trying thus to reach a word aimed at revealing the presence of a hidden and mysterious stampo. I will go back to this important meaning of maturare in the next chapter. In fact, I read the whole collection of Feria d’agosto—as it is divided into three sections—as the literary adaptation of the dynamic of ages. II. 4 The Savage As I noted, the year 1943 marks the beginning of a new period in Pavese’s intellectual life. His interest in anthropology becomes more systematic and he reads widely on the subject. This year sees the emergence in the diary of important new themes, some of which may be considered new re-elaborations of old familiar themes, only now inserted into a mythical 96 This is the passage in its entirety: “Non sempre si scrivono romanzi. Si può costruire una realtà accostando e disponendo sforzi e scoperte che ci piacquero ognuno per sé, eppure siccome tendevano a liberare da una stessa ossessione, fanno avventura e risposta. Qui, come in tutte le avventure, si è trattato di fondere insieme due campi d’esperienza. E la risposta potrebbe essere questa: solamente l’uomo fatto sa essere ragazzo.” 92 discourse. It is during this year that Pavese reconnects the fundamental role that structure plays in his thinking to the question of mito-unicità, a connection that seems to clarify and enrich all the previous comments on costruzione. Notes on childhood and on the nature of luoghi unici that we have analyzed at length, also frequently recur.97 Nevertheless, the year 1944 is probably even more meaningful when we consider the path of Pavese’s dottrina del mito. It is in this year that Pavese widely speculates on this subject, and his theoretical observations are catalyzed by Pavese’s very peculiar experience of the war, which he spent in great part in the Collegio dei Padri Somaschi in Trevisio. Here he started reading with increased interest and consistency texts from both the social sciences and from the religious and Christian areas. This influence played out on different levels. Undoubtedly, the religious setting and his contact with clergy—particularly with Father Baravalle98—played a fundamental role in Pavese’s temporary receptivity to religion. It is not a coincidence that in this period some diary notes register the author’s reflections on religious questions and doubts. But the cruelty and atrocity of the war did filter through to the safe haven of the school, and this aspect too reverberates on the diary’s pages. In fact, in this period, Pavese not only writes about God and Christian grace, but also at length about the “savage,” a concept that is thus officially introduced in his mythical repertory, along with a few other elements associated with the concept of “savage:” superstition, justification, bloodshed, and ritual. As Manuela Brunetta, who has dedicated an important essay99 to Pavese’s reading from this period, notices, there is a radical change in the author’s interests, but the fulcrum remains the same. The savage still holds a 97 I would like also to point out the recurrence, in this year’s diary writing, of notes on dreams, a theme Pavese addressed more consistently in the years 1940-1941. I have not considered this element as it does not relate directly to my research. The speculations on this subject are anticipated by the notes of July 22nd, and August 2nd, 1940; February 14th, May 27th, and June 26th, 1941; July 2nd, October 8th, and October 12th, 1943. 98 I introduced Father Baravalle in the first chapter (see note 75, page 39). 99 Manuela Brunetta, “Pavese lettore nella Biblioteca del Collegio Trevisio di Casale Monferrato.” 93 primary position in Pavese’s research, but it is no longer investigated as it relates to the peasant world, but rather to myth.100 For Pavese scholars, both elements—Pavese’s receptivity to religion and the new theme of the savage—pose difficulties, as they do not automatically and self-evidently fit into his dottrina. In fact Pavese’s fleeting religious interest has been interpreted by a few scholars as a conversion, rather than as yet another manifestation of a responsiveness and curiosity which had already been animating him for a while. At the same time, his concern with “sangue sparso” (one of the most recurrent images in reference to the savage) has also been defined as an “ossessione più che mito.”101 I instead claim that both the religious lexicon and the allure of the savage in relation to myth are new elements added to his dottrina, an enrichment of his theory of myth. I do not consider the background of the war an ancillary detail, as it catalyzed reflections and considerations that had remained until then either only very basically outlined or unexpressed altogether. The fact that both of these dimensions—that of spirituality and that of the savage— play a predominant role in La casa in collina seems to confirm that they are intertwined. I am not going to question or investigate Pavese’s faith, which I do not consider itself directly relevant to my research.102 I will thus read the author’s notes on God and divinity as they 100 These are Brunetta’s conclusions about the development of the savage in Pavese’s work: “il mondo frammentario e quasi disordinato con cui Pavese sembra appuntare pensieri ed emozioni, in realtà nasconde i contorni di una ricerca che sta subendo un cambiamento di direzione. Pur restando fedele al fulcro intorno al quale si muove il suo percorso antropologico, ovvero il selvaggio quale componente immortale—nell’accezione mitica che assume questo termine—della natura umana, il suo itinerario di studio sembra ora dirigersi verso un nuovo ambito di analisi: non è più il mondo contadino ad essere studiato ma quello del mito” (Ibid., 49). 101 According to Curi, the savage does not belong to Pavese’s mythical repository because “ciò che egli chiama il «selvaggio» non fa propriamente parte dei miti di Pavese [...]. Egli è attratto dall’orrore, ma l’orrore, per lui, piuttosto che un mito, è un’ossessione. I veri miti di Pavese sono legati all’infanzia e all’adolescenza (e all’eros, o meglio al sesso)” (Fausto Curi, Il mito prima del mito, 138). 102 A few attempts have been made to interpret both Pavese’s life and work in light of his faith or lack thereof. In my opinion, this has led to a twisting of his words, to a superimposition on them of a meaning that was not 94 relate to their context and as they confirm a pattern that had already emerged in the previous years. I detect in these notes a common denominator similar to his contemporary notes on myth: I argue that the need for divinity and the search for God’s grace respond to the same urgency to quench his thirst for the absolute as in his writings on myth. When writing about the year 1944, Pavese himself asserted that it was an “[annata] cominciata e finita con Dio, con meditazioni assidue sul primitivo e selvaggio,” thus confirming the contemporality and proximity of these two kinds of reflections. This contiguity with the writing on myth already emerges from the very first note of this kind in 1944, written at the end of January: “ci si umilia nel chiedere una grazia e si scopre l’intima dolcezza del regno di Dio. Quasi si dimentica ciò che si chiedeva: si vorrebbe soltanto goder sempre quello sgorgo di divinità.”103 This entry recalls what Pavese writes in Mal di mestiere about childhood as being “il gorgo [del reale].” Both instances refer to a self-abandonment that, if it was spontaneous during childhood, becomes something Pavese longs for and tries to replicate during adulthood. Also, “mancamento” recalls the “spaesamento” felt by the individual who has experienced contact with the absolute of his inner true self. Pavese also mentions this “sgorgo di divinità” in the following note, from February 1st, 1944: “lo sgorgo necessarily there. Father Baravalle, for example, in his contribution to a conference held on February 28 th, 1990 at the Centro San Carlo in Milan, underlines the importance of Pavese’s conversion, which he considers as a central event in the author’s life. Interesting is his reading of Pavese’s relationship with God. According to Father Baravalle, at the origin of the Turinese author’s tormented spiritual research is not a troubled relation with God, but rather an interpretation of Christianity as a pagan religion, later sublimed. His speech—“Il Pavese sconosciuto. Parla un testimone: Giovanni Baravalle”—is now included in Gianfranco Lauretano, La traccia di Cesare Pavese (Milano: Rizzoli (BUR), 2008. When interviewed by Bona Alterocca on whether Pavese was a believer or not, he replied: “aveva un fondo di religiosità. Le traversie della vita, le letture disordinate lo avevano gettato nel dubbio. Per cui assumeva spesso atteggiamenti di scetticismo, che però erano superficiali. Non possedeva una preparazione filosofica, aveva cominciato a farsela durante il soggiorno a Casale ma poi non continuò, purtroppo” [Bona Alterocca, Pavese: dopo un quarto di secolo (Torino: Società editrice internazionale, 1975), 126]. Finally, Brunetta’s analysis of the texts read by Pavese while in the Collegio confirms Father Baravalle’s interpretation of Pavese’s stay as a formative period. In fact, “la consultazione dei testi che Pavese lesse durante il proprio soggiorno a Casale Monferrato, ha evidenziato come lo scrittore privilegiasse in modo particolare l’ambito religioso, soprattutto Cristiano” (Manuela Brunetta, Pavese lettore nella Biblioteca del Collegio Trevisio di Casale Monferrato, 54). 103 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 272 (January 29th, 1944). 95 di divinità lo si sente quando il dolore ci ha fatto inginocchiare. Al punto che la prima avvisaglia del dolore ci dà un moto di gioia, di gratitudine, di aspettazione… Si arriva ad augurarsi il dolore.”104 The actual event that prompted Pavese to write this note was most likely the fact that on that day he had received Holy Communion, given to him by Father Baravalle.105 Besides Pavese’s choice of what was for him such a mythically-charged word as sgorgo, I would like to analyze the role of dolore in the previous quote. Pain is referred to as a sort of liminal element, which both belongs to the individual who is suffering, but which, at the same time, opens up access to another dimension, either of spirituality or, as we can see from a note from a few days later, of myth: “quando si sanguina o si piange, lo stupore è che proprio noi si faccia questo che solleva all’universale, al tutti, al mito.”106 If dolore produces “gioia, gratitudine, aspettazione,”107 sanguinare and piangere, too, which belong to the same semantic realm, and both bring about “stupore.” The similarity between “sgorgo di divinità” and “universale, tutti, mito” is striking and reveals the role that reflections on religion may have played in Pavese’s intellectual research that year. The contiguity of these two notes on religion and myth and the use of a lexicon taken from the same semantical sphere, seem to confirm that myth and religion, at least in this period, are for Pavese two parallel means of experiencing the absolute and the universal. 104 Ibid., 272-273 (February 1st, 1944). 105 See Bona Alterocca, Pavese dopo un quarto di secolo, 122. Father Baravalle considered Alterocca as Pavese’s true biographer. Unlike Davide Lajolo, in fact, Alterocca dedicated a few insights to the time Pavese spent in the Collegio, and a whole section—“L’incontro con Dio”—to his alleged conversion. 106 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 274 (February 7th, 1944). 107 The entry from December 2nd, 1944 is also relevant on this matter, in which Pavese writes: “pare impossibile che anche una sola favilla di bontà, di speranza, di amore, sia pure fasciata da tutta una corteccia di iniquità o d’indifferenza, deva dileguare annientata nella pena eterna. Di nuovo l’esperienza che si desidera il dolore per avvicinarsi a Dio” [Ibid., 295 (December 2nd, 1944)]. 96 Important here are entries composed between July and September 1944, a period during which Pavese’s theoretical writing in the diary was particularly intense, resulting in a number of dense reflections. It is here that for the first time Pavese writes at length about the concept of the savage, establishing a relation with “superstizione,” “sangue sparso,” “rito,” “legge,” “caso,” and “giustificazione.” All these terms—which Pavese may have mentioned before, but never with consistency—are now presented in a complex relationship. Disentangling these complicated relationships is fundamental to an understanding of La casa in collina, where all these elements return. Starting from the first entry of this period dedicated to the research on the savage, Pavese informs us that la natura ritorna selvaggia quando vi accade il proibito: sangue o sesso. Parrebbe un’illusione suggerita dall’idea che ti fai delle culture primitive—riti sessuali o sanguinari. Donde si vede che selvaggio non è il naturale ma il violentemente superstizioso. Il naturale è impassibile. Che uno cada da un fico in una vigna e giaccia a terra nel suo sangue non ti pare selvaggio come se costui fosse stato accoltellato, o sacrificato. Superstizioso è chiunque cede alla passione bruta.108 The savage world is one governed by brute passions rather than reason. Savageness is not inherent in nature—which is instead impassive and detached—but depends rather on forbidden human actions, which are propelled by passions one should tame. In his frequent reference to primitive rituals, Pavese positions the savage on the threshold between the sacred and prohibition. Echoing Freud’s description of taboos as something both sacred and forbidden,109 108 Ibid., 284-285 (July 13th, 1944). 109 The complementarity and ambiguity between sacredness and prohibition is a fundamental trait of taboos as analyzed by Sigmund Freud in Totem and Taboo. This, for example, emerges in the word used by the ancient Romans to refer to taboo, “sacer.” For this reason, Freud argues that “for us the meaning of taboo branches off into two opposite directions. On the one hand, it means to us sacred, consecrated: but on the other hand it means uncanny, dangerous, forbidden and unclean” [Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo. Resemblances between the psychic lives of Savages and Neurotics (London: George Routledge & Sons, limited, 1919), 30]. It is worth mentioning that also the research group “College de Sociologie,” operating in Paris in the 1930s, accorded a great centrality to the study of the relation between myth and the sacred. Especially George Bataille, one of the main founders of the group, underlined in his work the connectedness between the sacred and transgression that, as we shall see, Pavese considers as one of the main traits of the “savage.” Bataille too, just like Pavese, writes about sexual and bloody rites—the eccentric nature of sacrifices, orgiastic rites and other pagan rituals—as examples to 97 Pavese presents the savage as something that is now perceived as “proibito” and yet it was once functional to the celebration of rites. In the next note, Pavese again invokes the images of “cadere dal fico” and “giacere nel sangue”—which, as we shall see, recur frequently, and which he now reads in the context of the relation between two new elements—evento and legge: cadere dal fico e giacere nel sangue non è selvaggio in quanto evento, ma diviene tale se veduto come legge della vita. Che il sangue sgorghi, in un modo o nell’altro, a torrenti sulla terra, che naturalmente le bestie si divorino, e che il caduto non abbia diritti da invocare, questo è selvaggio perché il nostro sentimento lo vorrebbe proibito, mero evento e non legge. Qui il sentimento naturale condanna la natura che nella sua impassibilità sembra celebrare un rito—essere lei superstiziosa.110 Certain events and situations are not savage per se, but they are perceived as savage because it does not register as acceptable to society that they seem regulated by natural (or human) laws, and so it is preferable for them to be relegated to the category of “caso” instead. For Pavese, what is savage about bloodshed is that it is not a sporadic and disparate event, whose recurrence is spread out over time; on the contrary, bloodshed seems to be a constant in both human and animal life: “Che il sangue sgorghi a torrenti sulla terra” is a law –a common destiny shared by living beings—that regulates our world since time immemorial. Four day later, on August 27th, Pavese writes: “il grande compito della vita è giustificarsi. Giustificarsi è celebrare un rito. Sempre.”111 Celebrating a rite justifies a person’s actions because it positions the person who participates in it within a set of shared values and practices, within the norm. However, when our conscience no longer accepts those values and practices, the rite can no longer justify the person’s actions. For Pavese, our conscience can no longer accept the prove how sacredness is connected to transgression and prohibition. With the advent of Christianism, transgression is banned from the sacred, but it nevertheless maintains its divine nature. Even though there are no traces in either the diary or in the letters of Pavese’s encounter with Bataille’s work, it is interesting to underscore the contemporaneity of their common interest in the relation between savage and the sacred. 110 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 288 (August 23rd, 1944). 111 Ibid., 289 (August 27th, 1944). 98 continuous bloody events as belonging to natural law, and so it would like, rather, to relegate them to the category of chance. Pavese uses the concept of superstition to refer to those rituals and behaviors that were justified in a given time, and which have now instead been overcome: “non è […] superstiziosa la natura in quanto celebra un rito (quello del sangue)—ma in quanto il suo rito non serve più a giustificarla e ci pare caso.”112 The fact that certain rites are celebrated “è superstizione soltanto se ci giunge come ingiusto, proibito dalla coscienza, selvaggio. Quindi selvaggio è il superato dalla coscienza.”113 For this reason, superstition is an element that arises the moment that the rituals’ celebration is no longer perceived as just: “superstizione è ogni teodicea insufficiente. Quando una giustificazione di Dio è superata, diventa superstizione. Il giusto, finché giusto, è naturale.”114 When God’s justice is no longer enough to justify the presence of evil—when this adversity defies explanation within the system of God’s justice—what until then had been considered “naturale” becomes superstition. ‘Natural’ and ‘superstitious’ are then qualities that are not inherent to a given element, but rather judgments about circumstances made by societies or particular groups—different societies with different perspectives or levels of awareness might make different judgments in whether something is ‘natural’ or ‘superstitious.’ Van Den Bossche describes this dynamic as a “legge universale dello spirito,” which entails a “dinamica di costante esaurimento e superamento di riti e di credenze”115 In fact, the meaning of both savage and superstition is not determined according to a given semantic content, but rather according to the “grado di “giustificazione storica” che possiede il loro referente”116 Savage and superstition do not refer to a set of given 112 Ibid., 289 (August 26th, 1944). 113 Ibid. 114 Ibid., 288 (August 23rd, 1944). 115 Bart Van Den Bossche, “Nulla è veramente accaduto,” 232-233. 116 Ibid. 99 practices and situations. Rituals and practices that were held true until a certain point become superstition when they have exhausted their “capacità di giustificare “storicamente” chi li compie o chi vi aderisce.”117 What remains ambiguous, though, is the relation between myth and savage. They both belong to the irrational, and they both are, at some point, believed and justified. Also, they are both bound to be questioned once a greater level of consciousness or morality is reached. But, in my interpretation, it is at this point that the paths of myth and savage diverge. Myth is described as something irrational that yet sustains us and which we should try to comprehend and translate into rationality. When this happens, it becomes poetry. Savage, on the other hand, is “superato dalla coscienza:” “il nostro sentimento lo vorrebbe proibito.” Savage is a behavior or action whose justification has been undone and overcome by consciousness. The savage does not become consciousness, it does not translate into consciousness; on the contrary, it is something that will never gain acceptance, as its validity has been rejected by our morality; it is a particular kind of myth, a part of human nature that humans would like to see forbidden. Another important difference between myth—as it has been analyzed up to this point—and savage is that the latter belongs not as much to the individual as to the collectivity. In describing myth, Pavese had referred to luoghi unici, childhood, and personal images; he introduces the savage now against the backdrop of nature, law, and religion. If poetry earlier has been described by Pavese as the achievement by a poet who investigated his own myths, now it reaches a broader aim: “poesia è ora, lo sforzo di afferrare la superstizione—il selvaggio—il nefando—e dargli un nome, cioè conoscerlo, farlo innocuo. Ecco 117 Ibid. 100 perché l’arte vera è tragica—è uno sforzo.” Pavese’s emphasis on “ora” indicates his recognition that this definition of poetry differs from what he had written earlier. In this new definition, the irrational object of poetry’s investigation has shifted from the personal to the collective. In fact, here there is no reference to childhood myths and images, but rather to superstition and the savage which pertain to mankind as a whole. What remains unchanged, however, is the role of poetry, still waging a cognitive war on what is mysterious and irrational, as the following part of the entry confirms: “la poesia partecipa di ogni cosa proibita dalla coscienza—ebrezza, amore-passione, peccato—ma tutto riscatta con la sua esigenza contemplativa cioè conoscitiva.”118 The concept of the savage emerges again in a note from July 10th, 1947, where the author enriches the concept of the savage with a new definition and new contexts: “quel che accade al selvaggio è di venir ridotto a luogo noto e civile. Il selvaggio come tale non ha in fondo realtà. È ciò che le cose erano, in quanto inumane. Ma le cose in quanto interessano sono umane.”119 This quote confirms what we have already seen from the year 1944, namely that the savage—just like superstition—is something that is retroactive, that is perceived as such only when it no longer exists. Savage is thus something that is “ridotto a luogo noto e civile,” but which, we should assume, maintains a residue of its savage nature. In fact, in the same entry Pavese asserts that, in spite of their man-made nature, the parks, villas, and well known streets in the Turinese hills preserve the allure of the savage and actually arouse interest in it. In the last part of the entry, Pavese finally refers to his interest in the savage from an ethnological point of view: con la scoperta dell’etnologia sei giunto a storicizzare questo selvaggio […]. Tu vagheggi la campagna, il titanismo—il selvaggio—ma apprezzi il buon senso, la misura, l’intelligenza chiara 118 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 291 (September 2nd, 1944). 119 Ibid., 354 (July 10th, 1947). I will go back to this quote once more in the fourth chapter, as it is fundamental to my interpretation of what role history plays in La casa in collina. 101 dei Berto, dei Pablo, dei marciapiedi. Il selvaggio t’interessa come mistero, non come brutalità storica. Non ti piacciono le storie partigiane o terroristiche, sono troppo spiegabili. Selvaggio vuol dire mistero, possibilità aperta.120 The duality between “titanismo” and “intelligenza chiara” echoes Nietzsche’s dialectic between Dionysian and Apollonian. Pavese seems to be looking for a synthesis between the two aspects, between Dionysian chaos—“still aglow with the heat of the primeval fire”—and Apollonian rational clarity. However, if “in this composite Nietzschean deity, Apollo […] more and more loses his name to the other god,”121 Pavese stresses the need for “buon senso, misura, intelligenza chiara.” It was probably his study of ethnology that allowed Pavese to examine his fascination with the savage on more rational grounds. In fact, thanks to his ethnological readings, Pavese managed to broaden his interest in the savage from a personal and private point of view—la campagna and il titanismo—into a more general perspective, contextualized in an historical discourse. However, as Pavese clarifies immediately, he is not interested in the savage as “brutalità storica,” but, rather, is fascinated by the aura of mystery that surrounds the savage, to the open possibilities it suggests. In my reading of the savage in Pavese, I underscore an inherent contradiction between its being at once both in the past and still in the present: between its nature as something now superseded by conscience—something now replaced by a new, rational, mind-set—, and its enduring presence in this new rational, mind-set as an alluring object, a fascination. This contradiction seems to follow the one between the twofold nature of savage as something (once) sacred and (now) forbidden.122 However primitive and superseded the savage may be, it still 120 Ibid. 121 Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern German Literature and Thought (Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes, 1952), 109. 122 In this twofold interpretation of the savage—as something prohibited and fascinating at the same time—we can perceive the emergence of a discourse common to the Western practice of “othering,” which is aimed at defining 102 emanates a mystery which we are not completely able to understand,123 and to which Van Den Bossche refers as a “persistenza dell’irrazionale in una civiltà razionale.”124 In these later years Pavese approaches religion with a more critical attitude. For example, on November 8th, 1947 he writes: “l’assoluto e fiducioso abbandono di sé all’umiltà, alla grazia, a Dio, ha il difetto di essere un gesto presuntuoso, una superbia, una speranza ingiustificata. Una comoda ipotesi,”125 whereas a few days later he writes an even more direct assertion: “non credi in Dio.”126 His interest in religion was absorbed into the author’s skepticism and cynicism, at least in the diary writings.127 In my interpretation, the re-emergence in the diary of the religious theme, this time with different implications, is due to the fact that in that period (September 11th, 1947 – February 4th, 1948) Pavese was writing La casa in collina, a text in which, through the character of Corrado, he recounts an experience very similar to his own in the its identity in contraposition to other cultures and societies—labeled as “savages”—that are perceived as inferior or undeveloped. According to this discourse, the “savages” could be either perceived as evil and inferior—and this reminds the immoral and wrong qualities Pavese underscores in the savage—or “exotic,” mysterious because closer to nature—and this, obviously, is remindful of Pavese’s fascination with it. Pavese’s use of the term “savage” is very different from the aforementioned examples, as he does not employ it to describe societies and cultures that he deems inferior. Savage is rather for him an immortal component of human nature. However, the savage still represents for Pavese “the other,” that something that he is not able to comprehend and assimilate fully, or to recognize in his own world. Edward Said’s words to introduce his argument in Orientalism may be valid for Pavese’s case too: “my real argument is that Orientalism […] has less to do with the Orient than it does with “our” world” [Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 12]. 123 This interdependence and complementarity between rational and irrational recalls Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s famous two theses presented in the Dialectic of Enlightenment: “myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology” [Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 2002), XVIII]. The two German philosophers claim that certain mythical and obsolete philosophies and religions may have indeed contributed to the process of enlightenment. At the same time, destructive and irrational forces may be found in modern secularization. Their work, published in 1944, was inspired by the rise of National Socialism, which they analyze as a phenomenon that incredibly resembles those forms of myth and superstitions supposedly overcame by reason as a result of historical progress. 124 Bart Van Den Bossche, “Nulla è veramente accaduto,” 233. 125 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 339, (November 8th, 1947). 126 Ibid., 340 (November 21st, 1947). 127 The following note again addresses the question of God’s grace and compares it to the relief experienced through the contact with simple natural things, in a time of world and cultural crisis. This is the full entry: “si è tanto parlato, descritto, divulgato l’allarme sulla nostra vita, sul nostro mondo, sulla nostra cultura, che vedere il sole, le nuvole, uscire in strada e trovare dell’erba, dei sassi, dei cani, commuove come una grande grazia, come un dono di Dio, come un sogno. Ma un sogno reale, che dura, che c’è” [Ibid., 340 (December 7th, 1947)]. 103 Collegio di Trevisio. In fact, in the note from January 12th, 1948, he writes: “perché quando riesci a scrivere di Dio, della gioia disperata di quella sera di dicembre al Trevisio, ti senti sorpreso e felice come chi giunge in paese nuovo? (oggi, pagine del cap. XV della Collina).”128 The concepts of religion and savage had occupied him during the Resistance, and he comes back to them—both thematically, in the novel, and theoretically, in the diary. The year 1944 marks a very important change in Pavese’s dottrina del mito. For the first time in his diary, he writes at length about both religion and the concept of the savage, and it is not a coincidence that he spent those days in a religious institute, while a bloody war was raging outside. He then returns to both themes again in 1947 while writing La casa in collina, which I argue demonstrates their relevance in understanding the text. I also argue, which I will return to in the conclusions, that both these elements provide some indication that Pavese’s theoretical writings were slowly moving from personal considerations to a collective context, a shift that is more clearly exemplified toward the end of the diary. In fact, Pavese will delve into this new level of considerations from 1949 on, when he introduces a new set of themes—among which probably the most interesting are libertà and volontà—that open up questions about the relation between myth and history. I will consider these late entries in the conclusions, as they may shed a new light on the analysis of La casa in collina. 128 Ibid., 343 (January 12th, 1948). 104 III. Pavese’s method III.1 A question of style As we have seen in the first section of this chapter, the analysis of childhood brought to the fore the need for a specific awareness about reality, one that pares off what is transitory and is instead after the emergence of a foundational stampo. Pavese believed that one could sense and maybe express one’s own most meaningful truth by turning within, and not to the phenomenal world—intended as both the tangible reality of the present and the more evanescent one of memories. I return to the already quoted Mal di mestiere, where Pavese points out the true object of his research: il più sicuro vivaio di simboli [è] quello dell’infanzia: sensazioni remote che si sono spogliate, macerandosi a lungo, di ogni materia, e hanno assunto nella memoria la trasparenza dello spirito. Di qui nasce che agli ingegni contemplativi non si raccomanderà mai abbastanza di tapparsi i sensi davanti alla realtà e accontentarsi di quella che, filtrata dagli anni, riaffiora dal fondo della chiusa coscienza. L’illusoria ricchezza del reale non può essere giustamente valutata se non da chi sa che solo è nostro ciò che abbiamo posseduto sempre […]. Un solo documento c’interessa sempre e riesce nuovo: ciò che sapevamo fin da bambini.129 For Pavese, the most meaningful reality is not the one that surrounds us, but the one that we have within, that only can reemerge “dal fondo della chiusa coscienza.” The only reality that truly defines us is what we have always possessed, since our childhood: what we already knew when we were a child is the only thing that will always stimulate and renew our interest. As simple as it may seem, this process is by no means easy. It requires that we try to “tappar[ci] i sensi davanti alla realtà,” and rely on tools that do not belong to our sensorial and rational capacities, but rather to ecstatic revelations where what is sought is something that comes from within, an “illuminazione.” Paradoxically, what a mythical discourse seeks is a truth that was 129 Cesare Pavese, “Mal di mestiere” [1943-1944], in Feria d’agosto, 318. 105 always there in the first place, that was never lost, but obscured by the superimposition of disparate experiences, memories and encounters. By reading in everyday life the return of clues, the emergence of a pattern along the years, we can glimpse that lost essence, and eventually make it conscious. Such awareness alleviates the discomfort we feel at what is random and chance: “noi abbiamo orrore di tutto ciò che è incomposto, eteroclito, accidentale, e cerchiamo—anche materialmente—di limitarci, di darci una cornice, d’insistere su una conclusa presenza.”130 This “conclusa presenza” has been a part of us since the beginning of our lives. I consider both “limitarci” and “cornice” as new versions of that costruzione we already mentioned. Pavese insists in different entries on the characteristics of this “conclusa presenza,” that it can only be found through introspection. In fact, Siamo convinti che una grande rivelazione può uscire soltanto dalla testarda insistenza su una stessa difficoltà. Non abbiamo nulla in comune con i viaggiatori, gli sperimentatori, gli avventurieri. Sappiamo che il più sicuro—e più rapido—modo di stupirci, è di fissare imperterriti sempre lo stesso oggetto. Un bel momento quest’oggetto ci sembrerà—miracoloso—di non averlo mai visto.131 Pavese’s journey into myth is one that is performed motionless and with eyes fixed on a single object until it is alienated from both time and space and appears as something new. Staring 130 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 309 (February 20th, 1946). 131 Ibid. In Pavese’s unpublished papers of the years 1925-1930 held at the University of Turin, Mark Pietralunga found a translation of Walt Whitman’s “Passage to India,” probably a preparatory study for the author’s thesis [See (Mark Pietralunga, “Il mito di una scoperta: Pavese traduce Passage to India di Walt Whitman,” in Cesare Pavese: atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Torino, Santo Stefano Belbo, 24-27 ottobre 2001 (Firenze: L. S. Olschki, 2005)]. I found a striking resemblance between the entry of February 20 th, 1946, and the American poet’s poem. In this piece, great importance and relevance are granted to the poet in a world inhabited by curious and adventurous characters. Scientists, engineers and explorers all share the same curiosity and will to disentangle the mysteries of the world, to find the final formula that could hold all the pieces together. Nevertheless, even after everything has been invented, and the seas explored, a sense of frustration and anxiety lingers among them as they did not reach the final word, the key to embracing a sense of the whole. The poet is the only one who could provide such treasure, the poet who with his activity can reveal the sense that lays underneath the palpable and the phenomenal. I claim that, in this case, Pavese’s debt to the American poet lies particularly in the choice of “viaggiatori, sperimentatori, avventurieri,” which almost literally echoes Whitman’s “voyagers, scientists, and inventors.” 106 at the object, its revelation will be “miracolosa,” outside of the range of determination. I interpret Pavese’s use in this context of the adjective “miracolosa” as a variation on a more recurrent adjective, “ecstatic.” I propose that Pavese may have borrowed the adjective from Nietzsche’s Die Geburt der Tragödie, which he attentively read as it emerges from his diary.132 In a note, written on August 20th, 1942, the ambiguity between will and self-forgetfulness emerges starkly, in what seems to be a simplification of Nietzsche: “sovente la verità più profonda che abbiamo è lo schema che ci siamo creati con la lenta accanita fatica e l’abbandono.”133 The complementarity between “accanita fatica” and “abbandono” closely resembles the famous Nietzschean collaboration between the rational Apollonian and the ecstatic Dionysian in the creation of a work of art. Especially “abbandono” recalls the intoxication under which “Dionysian emotions awake, and as they grow in intensity everything subjective vanishes into complete self-forgetfulness.”134 In this entry Pavese connects the element of “schema,” with our “verità più profonda.” The way to our inner truth is thus paved by strenuous effort, by patiently researching and investigating our life and experiences in order to make such schema emerge, but then this encounter can only be fully reached through abbandono, by placing our trust in something from outside ourselves. This passage is particularly meaningful because it summarizes Pavese’s own approach to his research. He is propelled by a determined intentionality—which brings him to deliberately put things, works, events and so on in a given order—but he hopes for “attimi estatici,” when a momentary revelation of the absolute suddenly happens. Pavese also demonstrates this ambivalence between abbandono and fatica in the entry from May 27th, 1944, where he informs us that his obsession with his childhood is leading him toward a new 132 For example, Pavese includes “Nietzsche col suo Dioniso” among the interesting readings he had done on the subject of the savage. (Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 334 (July 10th, 1947). 133 Ibid., 242 (August 20th, 1942). 134 Friedrich W. Nietzsche, The birth of tragedy (Cambridge University Press, 1999). 107 understanding of it: “la riscoperta dell’infanzia, fatta of course modificandone—cioè scoprendo—il significato.”135 Here too meaning lies somewhere between the intentionality of the subject [modificare] and a more unknown source on which we don’t have any control [scoprire]. The status of meaning is ephemeral, prone to change at every investigation. We might understand this very delicate point by looking at the relation between life experiences and destiny. For Pavese, every experience adds to or modifies details of a core that is always present, regardless of different contests. There is a spiral movement, where every level is different from the previous one, and yet proposes the same pattern, the same mold. At every level we modify a previous meaning, reaching a new one which is, by definition, as provisory as those before it, as it too is bound to be later questioned.136 But it is exactly through this process of modification that the true meaning will show, as a trace that returns, unvaried, the trace that is the core Pavese is seeking through his research.137 Every time a contact with this trace is established, this miracle gives way to a sense of “stupore,” which, for Pavese, is the reaction that occurs when one senses—even if for just a moment—the presence of a truth that is not reachable through a rational, conventional, approach. Stupore is thus the confirmation that a contact with our mythical substrata has been instituted. Unfortunately, it is a fleeting sensation, one that dissolves 135 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 281 (May 27th, 1944). 136 Another important passage where this kind of reading from the part of Pavese on his own past emerges, is in the note of December 28th, 1944, where he writes: “se ripassi con l’idea di Dio tutti i pensieri qui sparsi de subconscio, ecco che modifichi tutto il tuo passato e scopri molte cose. Soprattutto il tuo travaglio verso il simbolo s’illumina di un contenuto infinito.” Again, “modificare” and “scoprire” are two deeply linked actions that revolve around a meaningful core. 137 We can easily connect this riscoperta to the “ripetizione, ripercorso, ritorno” that we have analyzed at the beginning of this chapter, of which we can now have a better and fuller understanding. These riscoperte/ritorni are not meant to pose unconditionally the same questions over and over again, but they rather modify the meaning and implications of a returning element. The perspective game initiated by these ritorni alludes to the fact that meaning seems to be for Pavese something that is not inherent, but rather something more elusive, something that the rational tools are not able to fully grasp. 108 as soon as the contact is lost, and leaves the subject with a sense of spaesamento.138 We already find stupore on April 16th, 1940, where Pavese asserts that “la poesia nasce non dall’our life’s work, dalla normalità delle nostre occupazioni, ma dagli istanti in cui leviamo il capo e scopriamo con stupore la vita. (Anche la normalità diventa poesia quando si fa contemplazione, cioè cessa di essere normalità e diventa prodigio.)”139 The connection between stupore and contemplazione (fissare imperterriti sempre lo stesso oggetto) as a different way of looking at reality can also be found on August 2nd, 1942, where Pavese writes that “lo stupore vero è fatto di memoria, non di novità.”140 The sense of wonder thus arises from something at which we have been staring for a while, from something that is familiar, rather than from the outside and the unexpected. Though in 1942, stupore was not yet connected with myth, only a couple of years later—in the notes of February 7th and 8th 1944—the author links stupor with irrational, thus indicating even more clearly its mythical origin. In the first entry, Pavese writes about actions like crying, bleeding, and suffering as irrational, and he asserts how “quando si sanguina o si piange, lo stupore è che proprio noi si faccia questo che solleva all’universale, al tutti, al mito.”141 The following day he writes: “lo stupore è la molla di ogni scoperta. Infatti, esso è commozione davanti all’irrazionale.”142 Staring at reality precipitates a sense of ‘stupore’ that 138 I will dedicate to spaesamento a deeper analysis in the next chapter, but, for the time being, it should suffice to say that it arises once the stupore has gone and the connection with the irrational is lost. Spaesamento is thus felt by the subject once he is back in the here and now of the phenomenal world, but who still enjoys the aftertaste of the irrational encounter, which he is not able to restore intentionally. 139 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 184 (April 16th, 1940). This note recalls very closely the aforementioned note from February 20th, 1946: “sappiamo che il più sicuro […] modo di stupirci, è di fissare imperterriti sempre lo stesso oggetto. Un bel momento quest’oggetto ci sembrerà—miracoloso—di non averlo mai visto.” We can in fact institute a parallelism between “contemplare” and “fissare imperterriti;” between “normalità” e “sempre lo stesso oggetto;” and, finally, between “prodigio” and “miracoloso.” 140 Ibid., 241 (August 2nd, 1942). This aspect emerges especially in Feria d’agosto, and I analyze it in chapter three (see note 5, page 118). Pavese also dedicated a whole essay, “Raccontare è monotono,” to the role of monotony, which, in his work, is also a very important stylistic element. This essay was posthumously published in the second issue of Cultura e realtà and is now in Cesare Pavese, La letteratura americana e altri saggi. 141 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 274 (February 6th, 1944). 142 Ibid., 274 (February 8th, 1944). 109 then is the “molla di ogni scoperta,” the impetus of every discovery, a first, fundamental step on the path from the irrational to the rational. III.2 Reticence as a “way to the core of things” In this section I will highlight the recurrence of a tension, and sometimes clash, between word, research and order, on the one hand, and silence and self-abandonment, on the other. In this tension between word and silence exists the need to express a fleeting reality. Up until now, we have seen how myth was for Pavese a way of approaching reality: mythical is the attitude inherent to our gaze when we look at the world around us and defer our comprehension of it to irrational, rather than rational, tools. We have seen how a mythical approach, according to Pavese, allows us to reveal a direction to our life, or to perceive the importance of a given image in our world. In the next passage, extrapolated from the note of February 20th, 1946, we will analyze an ulterior meaning accorded to myth, a meaning that belongs more to the realm of the expression of a given reality, rather than to its comprehension. Pavese will later use this entry as the preface to I dialoghi con Leucò, which should attest to its trustworthiness as one of the best and more coherent definitions that can be found of myth: Potendo, si sarebbe volentieri fatto a meno di tanta mitologia. Ma siamo convinti che il mito è un linguaggio, un mezzo espressivo—cioè non qualcosa di arbitrario ma un vivaio di simboli cui appartiene—come a tutti i linguaggi—una particolare sostanza di significati che null’altro potrebbe rendere. Quando riportiamo un nome proprio, un gesto, un prodigio mitico, diciamo/esprimiamo in mezza riga, in poche sillabe, una cosa sintetica e comprensiva, un midollo di realtà che vivifica e nutre tutto un organismo di passione, di stato umano, tutto un complesso concettuale. Se poi questo nome, questo gesto e prodigio ci è familiare fin dall’infanzia, dalla scuola—tanto meglio.143 143 Ibid., 308-309 (February 20th, 1946). 110 Myth here is considered the only language capable of conveying the specific meanings associated with its symbols; no other language can transmit those meanings. As we have seen, this “sostanza di significati” belongs to the irrational, and for this reason only a mythical discourse—rather than a logical one—can express it.144 I would like now to go back to the second section of this chapter, the one dedicated to the peculiar status of Il mestiere di vivere as a hermeneutical tool, in order to reconsider some of its conclusions in light of what has been said up to this point. We have seen how the diary’s structure itself illustrates Pavese’s theory of return, here embodied in the tendency to reread, rewrite and question again a core of limited and specific elements. I would like to go back to those opening considerations within the context of Pavese’s interest in the mysterious and fleeting core that is not comprehensible and expressible in rational terms. Writing is tantamount to living for Pavese, and the returns within writing vouch for a more hidden, mysterious meaning. Life’s experiences and the words on the page are things that can both distract us from the real object of our search, as well as hint at it: “queste note non contano per la scoperta esplicita, ma per lo spiraglio che aprono sul modo che incosciamente ho di essere. Quel che dico 144 Pavese’s interpretation of myth as language echoes Mircea Eliade’s analysis of metaphysical concepts of the archaic word, which, according to the Romanian scholar, were not rendered through the modern society’s theoretical language, but rather through symbols, myths, and rites. In the first chapter of Myth of the Eternal Return, which he labeled as “the most significant of my books” (Preface, XV), Eliade affirms that “the metaphysical concepts of the archaic world were not always formulated in theoretical language; but the symbol, the myth, the rite, express, on different planes and through the means proper to them, a complex system of coherent affirmations about the ultimate reality of things, a system that can be regarded as constituting a metaphysics […] it is useless to search archaic languages for the terms so laboriously created by the great philosophical traditions. […] But if the word is lacking, the thing is present; only it is “said”—that is, revealed in a coherent fashion—through symbols and myths” (Mircea Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return, 3). Also important is the example given by Ernst Cassirer who, paraphrasing Max Müller’s interpretation of myth, asserts: “what we call myth is, for him, something conditioned and negotiated by the agency of language; it is, in fact, the product of a basic shortcoming, an inherent weakness of language. All linguistic denotation is essentially ambiguous—and in this ambiguity, this “paronymia” of words lies the source of all myths” (Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, 4). More on the relation of language with one’s mythopoeias on note 47, page 76. 111 non è vero, ma tradisce—per il fatto solo che lo dico—il mio essere.”145 The relation between those notes that do not reach a definitive, explicit discovery, and the spiraglio that shows il mio essere, strongly echoes the one between scoprire and modificare with regard to the ever- changing meaning of childhood (May 27th, 1944). Just as every discovery is precarious and nothing is definite, the diary notes too are only a temporary balance of words soon subject to questioning and revision. And yet, both situations—precarious discoveries and diary notes— contain a grain of truth. Words are our only weapon against “tutto ciò che è incomposto, eteroclito, accidentale,”146 the only means we have at our disposal to “limitarci, […] darci una cornice, […] insistere su una conclusa presenza.”147 Pavese feels a “sospetto verso la parola,” which is, nevertheless “unica nostra realtà:”148 “da noi l’elocuzione si fa casta e scarna, trova il suo ritmo in qualcosa di ben più segreto che non le voci delle cose: quasi ignora se stessa e, se dobbiamo dir tutto, è parola a malincuore.”149 If the poet must use words, he needs to select them carefully. And this selection is an internal process, performed through the action of writing, with all the corrections and clarifications that it entails: “se ti riuscisse di scrivere senza una cancellatura, senza un ritorno, senza un ritocco—ci prenderesti ancora gusto? Il bello è forbirti e prepararti in tutta calma a essere un cristallo.”150 The road to reaching the minimalist essentiality of a crystal’s transparency is paved with the redundancy of words which 145 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 322 (October 27th, 1946). 146 Ibid., 309 (February 20th, 1946). 147 Ibid. 148 Ibid., 285 (July, 17th, 1944). 149 Ibid. 150 Ibid., 315 (May 4th, 1946). It is interesting to note the multifaceted role of language in Pavese’s theory. The introduction of language in a child’s life is responsible for his self-awareness, which, as we have seen, derives from the child’s ability to distinguish himself from the surrounding world through the use of words. At the same time though, language imposed a filter to our deeper and truer self, a selective structuring to our gaze. It should not surprise then, that to unveil that lost self, one should not use words, but let the essence show through the returning of mythical obsessions and of images which are the only things that can say something true and deep about ourselves. 112 continuously return, are modified, are cancelled. These words, too, do not count for themselves, but for the crack they open, the glimpse they provide into the bigger picture that will come into view: “si scrivono qui le cose che non si diranno più, sono i trucioli della piallatura. La piallatura è la giornata. Qui è, come dire, un modo spiccio di far fuori le tavole d’approccio, le gabbie, le impalcature, i ghiribizzi. Si fa piazza pulita per veder chiaro il grosso pezzo che verrà.”151 Writing in the diary is a quick way to get rid of the schematic approaches: once you write something, you can leave it behind, check it off of a list of possible things. Both “il cristallo” and “il grosso pezzo che verrà” (the bigger picture) lie at the end of this process of progressive approximation towards a final product which is as close as possible to silence, because stripped of all extraneous ‘noise.’152 The same tendency toward a minimalist essence can be seen in both Pavese’s style and in his theoretical disquisitions on myth, a tendency through which the author sorts through all the strata of words or experiences that have been accumulating along the years, in order to get to the core of his true self. This conflicting and yet indispensable struggle between silence and word is 151 Ibid., 328 (March 15th, 1947). This is the translation of this dense quote: Things that will not be uttered again are written here, they are the shavings left over from planing the wood. The planing is the day. [The diary] is a quick way to get rid of the schematic approaches, the cages, the constructions, the whims. We take away all the excess to see more clearly the bigger picture that will come into view. 152 What I have so far exposed about Pavese’s reticent style is instead described by Van Den Bossche in terms of “rappresentazione obliqua o tangenziale.” The scholar, in fact, underscores the predominance in Pavese’s 1940s writing of this tangential representation over a more explicit one, which emerges in the “tensione espressiva, insita nell’atto narrativo, tra detto e non detto.” This becomes evident in the “maggiore attenzione per i processi di cristallizzazione tra la posizione enunciativa di chi racconta e la nebulosa di antefatti da ridurre a chiarezza, e che costituisce per cosí dire il fondale semantico del racconto” (Bart Van Den Bossche, “Nulla è veramente accaduto,” 237). Van Den Bossche also stresses a similarity between Pavese’s “rappresentazione obliqua” and the dynamic between superstition and justification: “non è arduo intravedere, in queste annotazioni sulla rappresentazione obliqua di una realtà più grande—mitica e non—in varie classi discorsive, una profonda analogia con la dinamica ermeneutica che determina l’alternarsi tra superstizione e giustificazione, tra irrazionale e razionale. L’anello di congiunzione risiede nella convinzione che ciò che è in grado di giustificare un atteggiamento esistenziale o una rappresentazione estetica debba rimanere implicito, accennato ma non denudato, evocato ma non enunciato, suggerito ma non ridotto a plausibilità completa. Portare la giustificazione in primo piano significherebbe, secondo Pavese, ridurlo ad un insieme di contenuti chiariti, scoprirne il mistero, esaurirne le capacità di giustificazione e non crederci più” (Ibid., 245). 113 a more generic formulation of the dramatic and tense relation between myth and poetry. Just as Pavese’s words are “a malincuore” and spring out of silence, which—even if violated—sustains and inspires them, for him poetry, too, is nourished by a myth which must be both betrayed and worshipped at the same time. This is quite a paradoxical relationship,153 eloquently exemplified by the fact that our myths inquietano la coscienza come un’importante parola ricordata soltanto a metà, e impegnano tutte le energie dello spirito per rischiararli, definirli, possederli fino in fondo. Ma possedere vuol dire distruggere, si sa. Questa distruzione—beninteso, è una trasformazione—toglie al mito violato la sua unicità, la sua misteriosa potenza di simbolo creduto. Il mito che si fa poesia perde il suo alone religioso. Quando si faccia anche conoscenza teorica (“umana filosofia”) il processo è finito.154 The relationship between myth and poetry is characterized by a paradoxical confrontation and a mutual dependence between the two terms. According to Pavese, myths are the primeval seed of poetry, and the poet struggles in his attempt to translate them into an understandable discourse and tangible image. Myth’s own essence is that it is mysterious, ungraspable and yet dogmatic. For this reason, poetry—as a will to translate, clarify and understand—is responsible for the destruction of the myth which nurtured it. We have, on the one hand, the fascination with the “irreducible absolute” for which myths can provide an irrational experience, but, on the other, the need on the part of the conscience to understand and clarify them. The attainment of knowledge sadly implies the loss and destruction 153 Poetry too, like language, plays a peculiar role in a subject’s self-awareness. As we have seen, in fact, poetry—as expression of a given culture—plays a very important role in mediating a child’s learning process. We could thus say that poetry is at the origin of a departure from the undifferentiated gorgo where our personal myths were molded, and also at the end of a self-awareness process during which personal myths are unveiled and translated into something rational. 154 Cesare Pavese, “Il mito,” in La letteratura americana e altri saggi, 349. This essay was originally published in the first issue of Cultura e realtà, May-June 1950. 114 of the myths’ religious aura and value as powerful symbols.155 The poet has no choice but to intuit the symbols of his own life, retracing them back to childhood; he has to extract them out of a flow of events and recurrences and to put them into words. Silence is then, according to Martha King, a “disposition to which the artist must submit completely […] if he is to clarify his experiences and reduce them to poetry.”156 For Pavese silence “was a mystique, a way to the core of things,”157 a special place where he could retreat from time in order to mute both memories and experiences, in his search for the word that could capture and freeze on the page the flow of personal symbols and images. But silence is also a sort of respect on the part of poetry towards its own origin: it is a way of being faithful to the significance of its nucleus, so concentrated that no words will ever be able to fully grasp and disclose.158 For this reason, King defines Pavese’s silence as a serene contemplation, because it is the resigned consequence of the inefficacy of words both to communicate and to equate experience. Those words uttered will then be “a malincuore” according to what Gioanola defines as “la poetica della reticenza, dell’allusività [...], quella appunto che nasce dal silenzio e lo custodisce pur nell’inevitabilità della convenzione espressiva.”159 Reticence will then be the keeper of the mystery, the memory of its ungraspable 155 As we have seen in the previous section, “il travaglio di distinguere nel ricordo fra barlumi originari e visioni riflesse comincia tardi, comincia con una giovinezza spirituale che si fa attendere molto al di là di quella fisica e talvolta non verrà mai” (Cesare Pavese, “L’adolescenza,” in Feria d’agosto, 163). 156 Martha King offers an interesting analysis of Pavese’s relation to both silence and solitude. Her argument is that Pavese’s shy character influenced his reticent style: the resulting silence is an expressive result of the failure of words to communicate. Pavese is aware of the inefficacy of words, and for this reason he treasures silence as a means to a serene contemplation. On the other side, according to King, solitude is a sort of curse in Pavese’s life, an involuntary isolation, fruitless and negative, which, as opposed to silence, cannot be serenely accepted. (See Martha King, “Silence, an Element of Style in Pavese,” MLN 87, no.1, The Italian Issue (Jan., 1972): 60-77). 157 Ibid., 63. 158 Extremely relevant on this matter is Paolo Valesio’s contribution to La retorica del silenzio, where he claims: “Come il sonno […] è essenziale per il mantenimento della vita fisica, cosí il silenzio è cruciale per lo sviluppo della vita spirituale [...]. La poesia è radicata nel silenzio vissuto nel suo aspetto fondazionale e nutritivo [...]. Il silenzio è la situazione comune a ogni poesia, è la condizione perché sorga poesia” [Paolo Valesio, in La retorica del silenzio, edited by Carlo Alberto Augeri (Lecce: Milella, 1994), 231]. 159 Elio Gioanola, “Pavese e il silenzio,” Cuadernos de Filología Italiana 9 ,(2002): 136. 115 distance. Pavese will continue to investigate the relationship between myth and poetry in the final years of his life. It will be charged with a new meaning from 1947 on, when Pavese begins to consider the collective implications of his dottrina del mito. 116 CHAPTER 3 FERIA D’AGOSTO Non sempre si scrivono romanzi. Si può costruire una realtà accostando e disponendo sforzi e scoperte che ci piacquero ognuno per sé, eppure siccome tendevano a liberare da una stessa ossessione, fanno avventura e risposta. Qui, come in tutte le avventure, si è trattato di fondere insieme due campi d’esperienza. E la risposta potrebbe essere questa: solamente l’uomo fatto sa essere ragazzo. Introduction Feria d’agosto was published in 1946, and it is composed of a total of twenty-nine texts, divided into three sections named, respectively, Il mare, La città, La vigna. These texts are mostly narrative short stories, with the addition of what Italo Calvino defined “parecchi capitoletti estetici o meglio tecnici”1—already analyzed in the previous chapter—which, as we have seen, are the place of a more theoretical exposition of Pavese’s theory of myth. For the drafting of this collection, Pavese assembled heterogeneous material: some of these stories had never been published before, whereas others had been previously published in reviews; 2 some were sketched as early as 1937-1938, whereas the latest were written six years later, in 1944. The 1 Italo Calvino, “Pavese in tre libri,” Agorà, no. 2 (August 1946), 8-10, now in Italo Calvino, Saggi 1945-1985, curated by Mario Barenghi (Milano: Mondadori, I Meridiani, 1995) 1206. 2 Mostly in Il Messaggero (“Il nome,” “Fine d’agosto,” “Il campo di granturco,” “La Langa,” “Vecchio mestiere,” “Insonnia,” “Una certezza,” “Risveglio,” “Il tempo,” “L’estate”). To be noted that “Il mare” had been published in Primato on December 1st and 15th, 1942. stories and essays on poetics are not ordered chronologically, though there is a certain consistency in the last section, where all the pieces were written in 1943-1944. In this chapter I read Feria d’agosto underscoring its originality in Pavese’s work as the first narrative result of the author’s theory of myth. I pay particular attention to the collection’s structure: I claim that its threefold division in sections is representative of the succession of teenage, youth and maturity. I also underline the recurrence of specific elements and situations— among others, the void of the sky seen through an open window, a room locked into which it is forbidden to enter, a wandering around at night waiting for the sun to rise, running away from home at night to see a bonfire—which allows for that monotony that we have seen in the previous chapter, considered by Pavese as an indication of a mythical knot. I also analyze the peculiar treatment of time, which, especially in the stories of the second section, is disrupted and whose existence is relegated only to dreams and memories. Finally, an important role in my interpretation of Feria d’agosto is played by female characters, which I claim are always perceived as “the other,” and, depending on the age of the protagonist, either as something not interesting, or as an obstacle in his path towards self-understanding. Oreste del Buono, one of the first reviewers of Feria d’agosto, did not grasp the importance of such a text. Besides the heterogeneity of the stories, del Buono was struck by the recurrence of a main theme which he defined thus: con Feria d’agosto, Cesare Pavese ci offre un volume fitto di brani e di pagine: racconti, ragionamenti e bozzetti che variano, spesso senza eccessiva convinzione, intorno ad un unico motivo. E il motivo non è nuovo davvero, ha persino un suo liso sapore libresco: l’uomo che si scopre ragazzo davanti ad un’emozione, ad un suono, ad un sentimento.3 3 Oreste del Buono, review to Feria d’agosto, Costume (February 1946), Milan. Now in appendix to Cesare Pavese, Feria d’agosto, 221. 118 If, on the one hand, del Buono identifies a man’s age the main theme of many stories, on the other, in his reading he oversimplifies the text by asserting that the whole collection could be summarized as the story of “[un] uomo che si scopre ragazzo.” Yet, though the reviewer’s purpose was to harshly criticize Feria d’agosto, in his criticism he does point to a very important aspect of this collection: Feria d’agosto is probably the place where, for the first time, the relevance and fundamentality of childhood and adolescence clearly emerge; however, I argue, the moment of maturity, as a narrative subject more than as a theoretical moment, does not reach an equally fundamental significance.4 When describing the style of the collection, del Buono complains about a “descrizione monotona, ripetuta fino al tedio.” He was probably unaware that “monotonia” was indeed an element that Pavese was intentionally trying to recreate. In fact, even in this second critique, del Buono points at something very important in Pavese’s poetics, namely the almost obsessive recurrence of a limited number of themes and images which form the monotonous rhythm of his narration.5 The return of elements like the vineyard, the window, the staircase, and a room into which it is forbidden to enter; or of situations like wandering at night in a deserted city, comprises the structure of the collection. Unfortunately, del Buono’s review is a typical early 4 This disparity between the relevance and attention accorded to childhood and youth rather than to adulthood is confirmed, for example, by the lack of older, stable and mature characters in most of Pavese’s narrative. This is explained by the author himself, who on December 15th, 1949, writes on his diary: “è evidente che non ti riescano che i giovani nel raccontare—è la sola esperienza a fondo e disinteressata che hai fatto. Il big lo tratterai da vecchio” [Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 381, (December 15th, 1949)]. 5 This characteristic will be theorized in Raccontare è monotono, an essay written in August 1949 and posthumously published in Cultura e Realtà. In this essay, Pavese writes: “vogliamo [...] ricordare che in ciascuna cultura e in ciascun individuo il mito è di sua natura monocorde, ricorrente, ossessivo. Come negli atti cultuali l’evidente monotonia non offende i credenti bensí i tiepidi, cosí nella poesia [...]. Del resto, dire stile è dire cadenza, ritmo, ritorno ossessivo del gesto e della voce, della propria posizione entro la realtà. [...] Raccontare è sentire nella diversità del reale una cadenza significativa, una cifra irrisolta del mistero, la seduzione di una verità sempre sul punto di rivelarsi e sempre sfuggente. La monotonia è un pegno di sincerità” (Cesare Pavese, “Raccontare è monotono,” Letteratura americana e altri saggi, 338). 119 response to Pavese’s text—the author received similar criticism even within Einaudi, as we have seen in the first chapter—and it attests to the fact that Feria d’agosto’s significance can be fully appreciated, I claim, only when the text is read against the backdrop of Pavese’s theoretical writing. It should not come as a surprise, in fact, that the author himself provided the reader with a theoretical compass, namely the first essays of the last section, which were probably the most harshly criticized.6 These essays, already considered in the previous chapter, introduce the main themes behind the first two narrative sections, which retrospectively gain a new level of meaning in the eyes of a first-time reader, who is given a key to interpreting the book only in its last pages. As we have already seen in the first chapter, Feria d’agosto represents, in Pavese’s literary production, a watershed between his first literary results more in line with Neorealism, and the new mythic poetics he had been working on beginning in the early 1940s. The close reading I will perform on a selection of short stories from this collection is meant to be a transition from the second to the fourth chapter. In fact, on the one hand, my aim in this chapter is to return to and underscore some of Pavese’s theoretical assumptions that we have already analyzed in the previous chapter and to consider their narrative translation in Feria d’agosto. On the other hand, these same narrative adaptations of theoretical ideas are the best resource for introducing and pinpointing some of the main themes and images which will further develop in La casa in collina, which, in the diary’s inventory notes of November 17th and 26th, 1949, Pavese positions at the intersection between “ciclo storico” and “realtà simbolica.” Feria d’agosto marks an important achievement in Pavese’s production with regard to his “dottrina del mito,” an achievement labeled by the author as “poesia in prosa e consapevolezza 6 For a brief account of the reception of Feria d’agosto among Pavese’s contemporaries see chapter one, page 30. 120 dei miti.”7 The poetic enterprise—propelled by the will to unveil one’s own myths—finds in Feria d’agosto a narrative outcome. This does not necessarily translate into a more intelligible exposition of the author’s myths, as the prose of these stories is indeed very lyrical and even obscure at times. The obsessive recurrence throughout the collection of the same images and situations suggests to us that there is a meaning that transcends the specificity of each single story in itself. Every story becomes, in the succession of the reading, a variation on a handful of motives, where the effect of rarefied reality is achieved by the repetition itself. The juxtaposition of stories does not have a narrative justification, as each single story is an universe in itself, an enclosed space. Adjacent stories are, however, linked by the resumption of certain themes that are conjured up and sometimes enriched by the addition of new ones.8 These recurrences—which could be considered one of the first causes of “monotonia”—attests to a subtle development within the collection that operates underneath the level of narration. I claim that Feria d’agosto is the first narrative expression of the theories both of the returns and of the dynamic of ages. Both motifs are not just a thematic preference, but a materialization of Pavese’s poetics in terms of structure. As we shall see, I interpret each section—“Il mare,” “La città,” “La vigna”—as representative of a man’s age—respectively of the threshold between childhood and adolescence, of youth and of maturity. As we have already mentioned in the previous chapter, Pavese’s attention to his own “immagini ricorrenti” grew deeper throughout the years: from the very first attempts in his thesis 7 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 377 (November 26th, 1949). 8 Sometimes these thematic resumptions are indeed very faint and muffled, as they may involve very small details that are not always functional to the narrative core of the story, but which echo in the mind of the reader because of the iterated use Pavese makes of them. There are also meaningful recurrences in stories that are not adjacent, like the presence of an unknown “umiliazione” that bothers the protagonists of both Risveglio and Vocazione. Another element which I consider particularly relevant in the subtle cohesion of the stories is the use of proper names, some of which recur (Clara in “Fine d’agosto” and “Primo amore;” Nino in “L’eremita” and “Primo amore;” Pietro in “L’eremita,” “Il mare,” and “Primo amore;” Martino in “Primo amore” and “Il mare”). 121 and encounter with American literature to the more explicit results in Feria d’agosto. This collection of short stories represents a watershed in Pavese’s work, the first result of the late 1930s “crisi di rinnovamento” which he mentions in “A proposito di certe poesie non ancora scritte.”9 In this essay, written in 1940, Pavese alludes to a new season about to flourish, a season anticipated in the years following the first edition of Lavorare stanca (1936) by the growing practice of using his diary as the place to build and practice a self-conscious critical awareness. In fact, Pavese asserts “siccome solo la consapevolezza critica conclude un ciclo poetico, questo continuo insistere con note di prosa sul problema dei tuoi versi è la prova vera che una crisi di rinnovamento s’andava svolgendo.”10 Both the prose reflections in the diary and the first attempts at “novelle e romanzi” demonstrate this new tendency: “sempre più ti convincevi che il tuo attuale campo era la prosa.”11 And yet, Pavese in this essay prefigures a “nuovo canzoniere” whose main characteristic is that “non sarà riassumibile in racconto naturalistico;” in fact sarà questione di descrivere—non importa se direttamente o immaginosamente—una realtà non naturalistica ma simbolica. In queste poesie i fatti avverranno—se avverranno—non perché così vuole la realtà, ma perché così decide l’intelligenza. Singole poesie e canzoniere non saranno un’autobiografia ma un giudizio.12 In this essay, the author foresees a canzoniere which will abandon the previous naturalistic style; at the same time, he asserts that he is now aware that his main talent is prose. I cannot help but thinking that what Pavese was anticipating in this essay was Feria d’agosto, whose nature of “poesia in prosa”13 provides an interpretation for the overlapping between prose 9 Cesare Pavese, “A proposito di alcune poesie non ancora scritte [February, 1940],” in Cesare Pavese, Poesie (Torino: Einaudi, 1961). 10 Ibid., 136. 11 Ibid., 135. 12 Ibid., 138. 13 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 377 (November 26th, 1949). 122 and poetry that emerges in the essay. This collection brings together both the prose and poetic nature of Pavese’s writing, and its subject is a symbolic one, with myths finally brought to a level of awareness and recognized in his poetics. It is worth noticing that the “avventura naturalistica” set in motion by Lavorare stanca will have a sequel also in prose.14 Also for this reason, we should consider Feria d’agosto as a very peculiar writing that stands between prose and poetry, the first attempt at abandoning a naturalistic project, thus anticipating those novels that only a few years later will follow this lead. We should consider Feria d’agosto as a work that operates as trait d’union at least on two levels: between two different periods and poetics, as it brings about a “piena consapevolezza dei miti;” and between two different genres, as it is “poesia in prosa.” Given the importance that Pavese accorded to structure and construction, the reader of Feria d’agosto who has already read Il mestiere di vivere probably understands the division of the collection in three parts to be charged with an important meaning. It is quite clear from the beginning that the reason behind the organization of the stories is subtler and not as evident as one might expect; and, also, that the sea, the city and the vineyard in the sections’ titles probably refer to something that transcends the physical setting of the stories. In fact, in none of the three sections are there stories set at the seaside, whereas stories set either in the city or countryside can be found in all sections. A reader familiar with Pavese’s work might recognize the persistent contraposition of city and hills exemplified in the last two sections’ titles, but wonder about the first one. “Il mare” is, in fact, a natural setting that does not typically belong to Pavese’s poetics. If we go back to the entry of February 10th, 1942—already considered in the second chapter—we can see that Pavese admits to being indifferent to a maritime landscape, because he had never 14 Always in the entry from November 26th, 1949, Pavese groups the prose work of those years (1938-1941) under the label of “naturalismo.” 123 experienced it during his childhood. In fact, “[la Pineta] non è per te né un ricordo né una costante fantastica, e ti suggestiona per frivole ragioni letterarie o analogiche ma non contiene, come una vigna o una tua collina, gli stampi della tua conoscenza del mondo.” 15 If this landscape doesn’t hold an important role in Pavese’s poetics, why does he dedicate the first section of Feria d’agosto to it? Enzo Gioanola, who edited the introduction to the collection, wonders: Perché, se il mare non possiede la nobiltà degli stampi immaginativi originari, inesorabilmente vincolati al mondo infantile della campagna, il suo nome fa addirittura da titolo a un’intera parte di quel libro che intende programmaticamente dare vita poetica alle potenzialità fantastiche legate a quegli stampi?16 According to Gioanola’s reading, the answer to this question can be found in the diary note written on April 5th, 1945: “vivere in un ambiente è bello quando l’anima è altrove. In città quando si sogna la campagna, in campagna quando si sogna la città. Dappertutto quando si sogna il mare.”17 The sea is presented as something that connects the city and the country, as it is different from and provides the absolute alternative to both of them, and as Gioanola comments, “se città e campagna si danno come reciprocamente alternative, il mare rappresenta l’alternativa assoluta, il depositario per eccellenza dell’altrove.”18 For this reason, the imaginative power of the sea can be preserved as long as it is perceived as an “altrove,” as long as it is absent, dreamed and evoked. It should not be surprising then that in Feria d’agosto the sea is remembered, longed for, imagined, but it is never in sight, it never becomes the setting of a story. I would add that the sea is never fully described either, not even by the few characters who 15 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 232 (February 10th, 1942). 16 Enzo Gioanola, introduction [2002] to Cesare Pavese, Feria d’agosto, IX. 17 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 299 (April 5th, 1945). 18 Enzo Gioanola, introduction [2002] to Cesare Pavese, Feria d’agosto, X. 124 had once seen it, like Pietro from “Il mare” who characterizes it using very general and almost banal terms: “disse che, sì, l’acqua è verde e sempre mossa e che fa continuamente le schiume, ma dentro non c’era mai stato e non sapeva come sia la terra veduta dal largo.”19 Furthermore, in certain cases, the sea belongs only to the past of some characters who used to live there (in “Fine d’agosto,” “L’eremita,” and “Il mare”); it does not belong to the present of the narration. In certain instances, the importance of the sea seems to be connected less to the sea per se, and more to something else that is described in relationship to it. For example, the protagonist of “Il mare” alludes to it in describing the sky “il cielo visto attraverso il mare,” whereas in “Fine d’agosto” what is remembered of the sea is the “sapore remoto del vento”20 the protagonist could sense on the shore where he was born. As far as city and countryside are concerned, they do provide the setting to numerous stories and they are widely described. However, as I have mentioned, they are not uniformly included in nor excluded from a particular section. I would like to go back to “A proposito di certe poesie non ancora scritte,” where Pavese reflects on what is behind a collection of poems, what it is the intrinsic or extrinsic glue that holds all the pieces together: L’unità di un gruppo di poesie (il poema) non è un astratto concetto da presupporsi alla stesura, ma una circolazione organica di appigli e di significati che si viene via via concretamente determinando. Succede anzi che, composto tutto il gruppo, la sua unità non ti sarà ancora 19 Cesare Pavese, “Il mare,” in Feria d’agosto, 69. 20 Cesare Pavese, “Fine d’agosto,” in Feria d’agosto, 11. It is worth noting that Pavese did write a few short stories set at the seaside—stories that he eventually decided not to include in Feria d’agosto. For example, “La libertà” [July 2nd- 6th, 1941], “L’avventura” [August 5th, 1941], “La zingara” [November 1941], “Il castello” [June 23rd-July 4th, 1942] are all set at the seaside. We should add to this list also the novel La spiaggia [1942], whose title is illustrative of the setting of the story. The sea was indeed for the author, at some point in his literary career, an element interesting enough to be explored as the landscape background of his narrative, even in stories whose writing was contemporary to Feria d’agosto. For this reason, its absence from this collection’s pages should not be ascribed to the author’s disinterest or unfamiliarity with this setting, but we should rather see in this absence a more intentional obliteration on the part of Pavese. 125 evidente e dovrai scoprirla sviscerando le singole poesie, ritoccandone l’ordine, intendendole meglio.21 The cohesion of Feria d’agosto too derives from a selection of stories previously written, which is now collected in an order that—as we have seen—is not necessarily chronological. The entries in the diary contemporary to this essay are those that we have at length analyzed in the second chapter, where Pavese was particularly involved in developing his definition of “costruzione.” Also, we have seen how the concept of the après coup is of fundamental importance for Pavese in this period, and it seems to authorize us to read his work, not just the succession of sections of Feria d’agosto, as a parade of elements which could be read as an “oggettivazione dello spirito.” This is how I read these stories, and this is why I believe that their sequence forms an integral part of their meaning: “qualunque opera di costruzione è sempre fatta d’istantanee illuminazioni—momenti metafisici—che vengono après coup saldate, cioè chiarite unificabili.”22 I would like now to turn to Calvino’s interpretation of the collection, which will help me introduce my own take on the meaning to be accorded to the three sections. Calvino, in an essay contemporary to Feria d’agosto, reads the three parts as exemplificative of a man’s age, but he does so in an interpretation that, as I will soon explain, is quite different from mine: possiamo grossolanamente interpretare la divisione di Feria d’agosto in tre parti, definendo la prima parte “Il mare” come memorie infantili, d’una infanzia propria e altrui, come raggiungimento d’una condizione di verginità della conoscenza; la seconda “La città” come memorie di una giovinezza più adulta, tentativo di procrastinare ad essa il gioco di scoperte della precedente stagione; la terza parte infine “La vigna” come avviso di questo dramma tra uomo e ragazzo e memorie di una età assoluta.23 21 Cesare Pavese, “A proposito di alcune poesie non ancora scritte” [February 1940], in Cesare Pavese, Poesie, 134. 22 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 179 (February 27th, 1940). 23 Italo Calvino, “Pavese in tre libri,” in Saggi 1945-1985, 1207. 126 Like Calvino, I too interpret the sections’ signification as linked to a discourse on a man’s age, but my analysis differs from his on a few different levels. In my reading, the three sections are illustrative of the three ages of man—adolescence, youth, and maturity—that emerged in the second chapter from the analysis of the diary and of theoretical essays.24 The main difference between Calvino’s interpretation and mine is that he reads “Il mare” as representative of childhood, whereas I read it as the section dedicated to adolescence. Given the ambiguity of Pavese’s use of the term “childhood,”25 I believe that we should commit to giving it a clearer definition. To justify my disagreement with Calvino’s analysis, I draw upon what Pavese himself had to write about childhood. Pavese in fact considered childhood as the repository of myths, as that age that could not be remembered and whose state could only be conjured up from within, rather than remembered. For the same reason, I believe that it was not for Pavese something that could be represented, but rather a substratum that animates in different ways all the ages of a man. I am inclined to assume that Pavese wanted to be as loyal as possible to this characteristic of the mythical age, especially in a text where he claimed to have reached “piena consapevolezza dei miti.” This assumption is backed up by the fact that the young protagonists of many of the stories of this first part are twelve or thirteen year old children, whose adventures are representative of what Pavese described as the advent of adolescence: they are animated by curiosity, they want to explore the world and they no longer trust the version of reality that adults have handed down to them.26 I claim that the protagonists of this first section are children who 24 This interpretation is not based on a drastic division of the three sections, whose borders seem to be quite porous, but rather on a more statistical approach aimed at underscoring the recurrence of certain relevant elements distributed through the three sections, but whose frequency in a given part rather than another can help us better interpret the whole collection. 25 In the second chapter I underscore the fact that Pavese does not distinguish, on one hand, between pre- and post-linguistic childhood, and, on the other, tends to overlap childhood and adolescence, terms which he often seems to consider interchangeable. 26 This is the case of “Il nome,” “L’eremita,” “La giacchetta di cuoio,” “Primo amore,” and “Il mare” where, despite the different plots and settings, the protagonists are young boys who are on the threshold between childhood and 127 are not children anymore, but who are not yet adolescents: they are representative of the liminal moment between childhood and adolescence, a moment of great importance for Pavese. They inhabit the border between the two ages, and their adventures recall rites of passage.27 As far as the second section—“La città”—is concerned, I agree with Calvino that it deals with a “giovinezza più adulta,” but I would not read it as a “tentativo di procrastinare ad essa il gioco di scoperte della precedente stagione.” In fact, if it is true that in this section too there is a “gioco di scoperte,” it is evident that, unlike the kind in first section, this game is not projected on the outside world, but is rather a search within, aimed at finding a truth that in the preceding age they did not even think existed. In “La città,” in fact, an oneiric atmosphere prevails: almost all the protagonists show a tendency to introspection and solitude.28 In this rarefied atmosphere, the concept of time is quite peculiar: time is either stopped, or the characters try to fight it and resist its course. Finally, Calvino’s description of the third section is the one with which I agree the most, even if I find his wording at times quite vague and in need of a clearer and perhaps lengthier explanation. “La vigna” does indeed stage a “dramma tra uomo e ragazzo,” which, in my opinion, was already anticipated by some stories of the second section, “La città,” where men try with all the means at their disposal to reconnect with the child they once were, even while failing ultimately at their endeavor. In this last section, instead, the approach to this issue is more aware adolescence. Curiosity for what is forbidden, or for what is still seen as something mysterious and fascinating (escaping from home at night, knowing girls) is very common in these stories. 27 The ethnographer Arnold van Gennep in his famous work Les rites des passage [1909] was the first to propose this expression that is now officially adopted by anthropology. His aim was to underscore the universality of these rites, which would barely differ from one culture to the other. One of the main characteristics of these rites is that they are usually composed of three stages—separation, transition, reincorporation—which accompany the subject in her or his transition. Victor Turner resumed van Gennep’s study, focusing especially on the concept of liminality. (Victor Turner, The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure (Transaction Publishers, 1995). 28 A dream-like ambiance is present in “Il prato dei morti,” “Sogni al campo,” “Una certezza,” “Risveglio,” “Il tempo,” and “Vocazione.” 128 and confident, as it is supported by the presence of theoretical essays which provide an explanation and instruction for this longed-for reconnection.29 Therefore, I also agree with Calvino’s expression “età assoluta,” which does not correspond to maturity itself, but rather to childhood relived during and seen from the perspective of maturity. As we have seen in the previous chapter, childhood is not a self-aware age, and one’s path of maturing can be said to be completed only once one can understand the implications and importance of childhood; only at a mature age can childhood be fully embraced and appreciated. “Età assoluta” thus represents the closure of the circle, of the permeability of these two extremes which only make sense once they are put in relation one to the other. Now that I have introduced my interpretational grid of man’s ages, I would like to go back to Pavese’s mysterious choice of the sea as representative of the first section’s stories. In my interpretation, the sea has two levels of significance. It may refer, on the one hand, to the undifferentiated amalgam in which, as we have seen in the second chapter, the child is immersed. It is an element only evoked, longed for, and assumed, but which is never concretely described— just like the gorgo of our childhood. It is a dreamy environment, as the protagonist of the last story asserts: “mi pareva che il mare dovesse esistere solo di notte.”30 On the other hand, I claim that in the last story of this first section, Il mare, Pavese charges the sea with an ulterior meaning. In this story, in fact, the sea is something that the children have never seen, but which they know through the stories of the adults of their town. This is the liminal story that precedes the entrance into the next section, “La città,” which in my interpretation is representative of youth. Youth 29 The theoretical essays that we have already analyzed in the previous chapter are “Del mito, del simbolo e d’altro,” “Stato di grazia,” “L’adolescenza,” and “Mal di mestiere.” 30 Cesare Pavese, “Il mare” in Feria d’agosto, 75. As we shall see in the analysis of the first part of La casa in collina in the next chapter, I read nighttime as an a-temporal dimension for Pavese, one that can stimulate the vagheggiamento of one’s past. 129 begins, as we have seen, when the subject realizes that he has until then been “admiring.” For clarity’s sake, I would like to quote again a passage, where Pavese exemplifies what he means by ammirare: la facoltà di vedere come unica e normativa la forma di una realtà [che] nasce sempre nel solco di una precedente trasfigurazione di questa realtà. Nessun ragazzo, nessun uomo ammira un paesaggio prima che l’arte, la poesia—una semplice parola anche—gli abbiano aperto gli occhi. Ognuno ripensi a un’ora estatica della sua fanciullezza, e troverà sotto l’entusiasmo e la rivelazione, la traccia di gusto, libresca o no, che la sua qualsiasi cultura gli ha segnato.31 The sea only really exists in the adults’ stories and experiences, and, as a consequence, is only imagined by the children; I claim, then, that the sea in “Il mare” alludes to the “trasfigurazione della realtà” operated on the two children by the culture in which they live. These young protagonists who run away from home and are involved in adventures that subvert their parents’ orders are always on the verge of understanding this process of mediation from their surrounding cultural environment. With their rebellion and their curiosity they question what until then was accepted as undeniable.32 The fact that they are on the verge of understanding, and of moving beyond, is reinforced by the position itself of this story as the last from adolescence and the one right before youth. As we have seen in the second chapter, Pavese claims that “il giorno in cui ci si accorge che le conoscenze e gli incontri che facciamo nei libri, erano quelli della nostra prima età, si esce d’adolescenza e s’intravede se stessi.”33 “Adolescenza” appears, then, to be a liminal moment, a moment that ends when the self realizes something of fundamental importance, namely that everything he knows and sees has been perceived through the lens of culture; the moment this realization happens, is the moment that “s’intravede se stessi.” If childhood and adolescence both learn of the surrounding world through 31 Cesare Pavese, “L’adolescenza,” in Feria d’agosto, 313-314. 32 Children’s rebellion will show in many forms in the stories, the most common one being running away at night, and participating to bonfire celebrations, which usually they were only allowed to see from a balcony or a window. 33 Cesare Pavese, “L’adolescenza,” in Feria d’agosto, 313. 130 words—oral or written—, adolescence nevertheless prepares the self for the next step. It is a liminal moment, in which the self still has his feet on ‘infantile’ ground, but nevertheless starts to project himself into youth. As with every liminal moment, adolescence is both the vertex of one age, and the prelude to the following one, at the same time the highest and lowest expression of two different moments of life. According to an entry from Il mestiere di vivere dated February 13th, 1949, “Adolescenza” is that strano momento in cui (tredici o dodici anni) ti staccavi dal paese, intravedevi il mondo, partivi sulle fantasie (avventure, città, nomi, ritmi enfatici, ignoto) e non sapevi che cominciava un lungo viaggio che, attraverso città avventure nomi rapimenti mondi ignoti, ti avrebbe ricondotto a scoprire come ricco di tutto quell’avvenire proprio quel momento del distacco—il momento che eri più paese che mondo—, a riguardare indietro. È perché il mondo l’avvenire ora l’hai dentro come passato, come esperienza, come tecnica, e il perenne e ricco mistero si ritrova essere quel tu infantile che non hai fatto in tempo a possedere. Tutto è nell’infanzia, anche il fascino che sarà avvenire, che soltanto allora si sente come un urto meraviglioso. 34 Pavese stresses the beauty of the moment when the child is ready to leave the nest, a moment filled with fascination and fear. That same moment will then be charged from an adult point of view with all the experiences and life lessons that have not yet happened, but which are already present in that moment as a potentiality. I would like now briefly to introduce another question, which is crucial to the understanding of the collection. As I have mentioned, temporality is treated—especially in the second section of Feria d’agosto—in a very peculiar way: time is disrupted, extended or compressed. This treatment of time lays the ground for the advent of a mythical experience. In fact, “genuinamento mitico è un evento che come fuori del tempo cosí si compie fuori dello spazio.”35 We saw in the previous chapter how the absence of space is exemplified in what Pavese defines “luoghi unici”; we will analyze in this chapter how the absence of time is 34 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 364 (February 13th, 1949). 35 Cesare Pavese, “Del mito, del simbolo e d’altro,” in Feria d’agosto, 151. 131 rendered in Feria d’agosto. Gioanola comments that the title itself—Feria d’agosto—anticipates the peculiar temporality of the collection. For him, the title represents a suspension of the temporal dimension, almost an absence of time that allows for contemplation to take place. According to Gioanola, the first reference to what he calls “non tempo”36 is in the use of the term “Feria,” a word that implies the suspension of activities, also expressed in Italian with “vacanza” (from the Latin vacare, being empty, free from occupations) whose etymological meaning gives an even clearer idea of the absence of time. But “Agosto,” for Gioanola, is also charged with allusion to this mythical a-temporality. Besides its connotation of a month “della feria e delle feste”37 during which bonfires are lit and bands play in hill towns, the “feria d’agosto” stabilisce una vera e propria epoché, una specie di trascendentale sospensione della temporalità e il ‘fermo’ dell’attività contadina configura un approccio non attivo alla campagna, sottratta ad ogni curiosità esplorativa e resa immobile specchio di esperienze assolute. [...] Si apre un orizzonte contemplativo, in sintonia con le condizioni d’animo del ragazzo-protagonista, per il quale l’estate in campagna è sostanzialmente occasione di esperienze estatiche. Cosí la campagna d’agosto diventa [...] l’universo totale della contemplatività, concentrando nei termini di un determinato momento temporale l’assenza stessa della temporalità.38 The most representative stories of the first section are set during summer, and this suggests that there is indeed a strong link between childhood and this season. In a few examples taken also from the other sections, summer is the season when the young protagonist, who moved to the city to study, comes back to the countryside for his vacations. “Storia segreta” is emblematic of this kind of stories: Nell’inverno andai in città e cambiai vita; ci tornai l’anno dopo, divenni un altro; venivo in paese per le vacanze e cosí mi sembrò di essere stato ragazzo soltanto d’estate. [...] Tutti gli anni l’estate fu come quando non andavo ancora via, un’unica estate che durò sempre.39 36 Enzo Gioanola, introduction [2002] to Cesare Pavese, Feria d’agosto, X. 37 Ibid., XI. 38 Ibid. 39 Cesare Pavese, “Storia segreta” in Feria d’agosto, 189. 132 Summer seems thus to be an a-temporal and mythical season, one which—even if returning cyclically—is not affected by the passing of time. And whereas summer is associated with childhood, it should be noted that Pavese links autumn to maturity, as we can infer from the following note from Il mestiere di vivere: “La più mite e pacata e molle stagione, l’autunno, soppianta la precedente e si stabilisce con sussulti paurosi, temporali enormi, tenebre sul mattino, turbini e stragi di foglie che fan capire quanta violenza costi la maturità.”40 The process of maturating is depicted by Pavese as violent and turbulent; as opposed to the season of autumn- maturity, which is a “mite e pacata e molle stagione.” This contraposition recalls the one displayed during some initiation rites where the attainment of a new phase is achieved through rough ordeals. The liminality of what Pavese defined “momento del distacco” is indeed central to some stories of Feria d’agosto that replicate the threefold structure of rites of passage41: separation, transition, reincorporation. One last aspect I would like to introduce, before proceeding on the analysis of a selection of representative stories, is the meaning we should attribute to female characters in Feria d’agosto. I claim that the presence/absence of a woman in these stories is always charged with fundamental implications for the male protagonists, implications that change across the different ages. The “other sex” is perceived by children as something inexplicable and mysterious, often as something in the way of their friendship with friends who are already interested in girls.42 Teenagers are instead more curious and fascinated by girls, and anticipate in their older friends’ experiences the sexual life that they soon may have as well. The following age, youth, is usually presented as one in which women play an active part in the characters’ lives. However, even 40 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 337 (August 16th, 1947). 41 See note 27, page 127. 42 As we shall see, this is for example the case in “La giacchetta di cuoio” and in “Primo amore.” 133 though these characters are involved in romantic relationships, women are presented as a distraction, as an obstacle in a person’s attempts to reconnect to the child he once was. Maturity is instead presented as an age in which the man is not interested in women anymore, just like during his childhood.43 I. “Il mare” As I mentioned in the introduction, the stories are not grouped into the sections based solely on their characteristics and themes, since there is a porousness of those characteristics and themes that I consider representative of each section between the three parts. For example, I consider the first three stories of “Il mare” as quite disparate, and I read them as a sort of preview of the composition of the book. In fact, “Il nome,” “Fine d’agosto,” and “Il campo di granturco,” respectively, exemplify the style and themes of the three main sections. The first story, “Il nome,” has much in common with the other stories from this first section (“Il mare”). This story, like most of the stories representative of the first section, is set during the summer as we can deduce from certain passages such as “c’eravamo [..] arrostita la nuca al sole.”44 The protagonists are two children, Pale and the narrator, who spend their days wandering about in the countryside, while their mothers desperately scream their names to call them home. One day, the two are out trying to catch a viper. Pale is convinced that this animal can chase its own hunter once it knows his or her name; Pale’s mother screams his name, and thus, in the children’s 43 The fact that a woman is perceived as not-belonging to childhood and maturity emerges for example in “La langa,” where the protagonist affirms: “Non so chi ha detto che bisogna andare cauti, quando si è ragazzi, nel fare progetti, poiché questi si avverano sempre nella maturità. […] è per questo che tanta gente sbaglia sposandosi. Nei progetti del ragazzo non c’è evidentemente mai nulla a questo proposito, e la decisione va presa a tutto rischio del proprio destino” (Cesare Pavese, “La langa,” in Feria d’agosto, 17). This aspect is also fundamental in La casa in collina, where it exemplifies Corrado’s relation with both Cate and Dino. As we shall see in the next chapter, also in the novel both childhood and maturity are presented as deprived of women, whereas youth is the only stage when a man is interested in them. 44 Cesare Pavese, “Il nome,” in Feria d’agosto, 6. 134 opinion, ruins their mission.45 Without trying to force this interpretation, I find it revealing that the section that I understand as dedicated to the departure from childhood/adolescence46 begins with a story that stages a sort of (failed) resistance to the name. (Pre-verbal) childhood is in fact a stage of life characterized by the absence of signs and language, which will inexorably make their way into the child’s life. The second story, “Fine d’agosto,” is similar to the vast majority of stories in the second section, “La città.” It is staged in an urban setting and the protagonist is now a young man. Like many of the stories from “La città,” this one presents a young man enjoying a memory from his childhood spent in a sea town. He tries and struggles to maintain that memory and in so doing, creates a long-lasting contact with it. Though in his journey of remembering, this character appreciates and needs solitude, he finds himself in the company of a woman and realizes that her presence is detrimental to his search for his own absolute: quel ragazzo potrebbe esistere senza di me; di fatto, esistette senza di me, e non sapeva che la sua gioia sarebbe dopo tanti anni riaffiorata, incredibile, in un altro, in un uomo. Ma un uomo suppone una donna, la donna; un uomo conosce il corpo di una donna, un uomo deve stringere, carezzare, schiacciare una donna [...]. L’uomo e il ragazzo s’ignorano e si cercano, vivono insieme e non lo sanno, e ritrovandosi han bisogno di star soli. Clara, poveretta, mi volle bene quella notte come sempre [...]. Ma ormai io non potevo più perdonarle di essere una donna, una che trasforma il sapore remoto del vento in sapore di carne.47 45 Pavese was probably aware of Ernst Cassirer’s analysis of the role names play in mythical thought. The German philosopher claims that “the essence of each mythical figure could be directly learned from its name. The notion that name and essence bear a necessary and internal relation to each other, that the name does not merely denote but actually is the essence of its object, that the potency of the real thing is contained in the name—that is one of the fundamental assumptions of the mythmaking consciousness itself” (Ernst Cassirer, Language and myth, 3). Cassirer thus affirms that there is an intimate nexus between the name and the deepest part of a person, so that name, in mythical thought, is perceived as a possession to be jealously and closely guarded. Davide De Camilli dedicates an interesting essay to the relevance and meaning of proper names in Pavese’s writing. According to his reading of “Il nome,” Pale’s caution in not having his own name pronounced is to be read in connection to Cassirer’s study of primitive societies. According to De Camilli, in fact, in “Il nome” there is “un valore attribuito al nome, secondo una ricordata teoria del mito, per cui il nome è posseduto da chi lo porta, che vigila sul suo uso esclusivo, perché teme che la sua conoscenza possa, mediante la magia, danneggiarlo” (Davide De Camilli, “Cesare Pavese e i nomi dei personaggi,” Italianistica: Rivista di letteratura italiana 22, no. 1/3 (January/December 1993): 221). 46 I here use a terminology borrowed by Pavese himself who, as we have seen, tends to overlap the two stages. See second chapter, page 86-87 and note 77, page 87. 47 Cesare Pavese, “Fine d’agosto” in Feria d’agosto, 11. 135 As we can see from the previous quote, the presence of a woman—in her role of sexual partner—in a man’s life is perceived as a sort of corruption, as the most relevant difference between the life of a child and that of a young man. It is as if there is paradoxically more closeness between the young man and the child—who “vivono insieme e non lo sanno”—than between the man and the woman right next to him. Also, it seems as if the influence of a woman and the consequences of her presence are irrevocable and corruptive, as she is able to transform “il sapore di vento in sapore di carne.” Finally, in “Il campo di granturco” the protagonist describes an ecstatic moment during which, in front of a corn field, he comments “ricordai qualcosa che da tempo avevo dimenticato.”48 In finding a landscape which once belonged to his childhood, the protagonist makes contact with that child: Che il tempo si sia fermato lo so perché oggi ancora davanti al campo lo ritrovo intatto. [...] Capisco d’avere innanzi una certezza, di avere come toccato il fondo di un lago che mi attendeva, eternamente uguale. [...] Queste cose accadono ogni volta che mi fermo davanti al campo che mi aspetta. È come se parlassi con lui, benché il colloquio si sia svolto molti anni fa e se ne siano perdute anche le parole.49 As we shall see, the protagonists of the stories in the third section—as well as the last, more lyrical, stories of “La città”—are not burdened by the company of a woman or other distractions anymore. Their attention is instead introspective, projected inwards. In fact, in the passage above, Pavese uses the term “una certezza,” which is the title of a story from “La città.” This story describes a similar situation: there, too, the character has the sudden sense of discovery of an eternal truth, which was already once perceived during childhood. This ecstatic moment arises from the experience of a place that becomes “non luogo,” and which thus throws the subject into a dimension that, besides being out of time, is out of space too. The protagonist 48 Ibid., 12. 49 Cesare Pavese, “Il campo di granturco,” in Feria d’agosto, 13-14. 136 of “Il campo di granturco” speaks of a certainty where words are no longer needed and also informs us that “la stagione di quel campo è l’autunno,”—which we have already associated with maturity—thus completing the cycle of seasons in relation to a man’s ages. I will now analyze “L’eremita,” “Primo amore,” and “Il mare,” which I selected because particularly representative of what I consider the liminality represented by this section. “L’eremita”—with its expansive narration—is probably one of the most meaningful and better developed stories of the first part. In fact, here we can find the most important themes of this section related to late childhood, namely the dissatisfaction with family rules, which leads the child to run away from home, and the encounter with an inspiring figure that witnesses and facilitates the passage to the next age. Nino is a child who had just moved with his father from a seaside town. The sea is in the child’s memories something remote and far away. He meets a man, Pietro, known as “l’eremita,”50 with whom he spends most of his days. Soon a clear dynamic emerges, where the figure of the father and that of the hermit compete for the attention and the affection of the child. The father understands that the relationship he has with his son is undermined by the fact that the child seems not to involve him in his life, but instead seeks out the hermit, Pietro. As Pietro reassures him, “se fossi padre non mi cercherebbero,”51 thus confirming the distance and problematic relation between the father and son figures in Feria d’agosto.52 Just like another vagabond of Feria d’agosto—Rocco from “Il mare,” with whom he 50 It is not possible to tell whether Pavese, in the choice of the name Pietro for the hermit, was inspired by the historical figure of Peter the hermit, a priest from Amiens who fervently supported and advocated for the First Crusade in the late XI century. Also, I would like to point out that there is another hermit in Pavese’s work, one to whom a poetry from Lavorare stanca is dedicated: Paesaggio I. For an analysis of this figure in both works see Marino Boaglio, “L'eremita sulla collina: da Lavorare stanca a Feria d'agosto,” Campi immaginabili 46.I/II (2012): 189-211. 51 Cesare Pavese, “L’eremita,” in Feria d’agosto, 33. 52 The figure of the father returns in several stories. In some cases, it is barely mentioned, soon substituted by another—more interesting—male figure (“La giacchetta di cuoio”); in others, the relationship between father and son is vitiated by a deep and insurmountable incommunicability (“Insonnia”). An exception to this tendency, as we 137 also shares a common etymology of the name—Pietro represents the contact and closeness to the earth experienced in childhood: “il suo odore vero era di salute, d’aria aperta e di sagacia animale.”53 It should not come as a surprise then that Pietro used to be a sailor, familiar with the sea, the element that I associate with this age of childhood. Moreover, Pietro does not have a wife and is able to “fuggire la tentazione”54; he lives a woman-less life, just like a child who is not involved in romantic relationships yet. It is probably for this reason that the father admits “mi sentivo più vecchio con lui che con mio figlio,”55 as if Pietro really represented the essence of childhood, which belonged more to him than to Nino, a child. I interpret the role of this peculiar character Pietro as fundamental to the passage of the protagonist—Nino—from childhood into adolescence. In fact, Nino is almost thirteen-year-old, he is not a “bambino” anymore, and his friendship with Pietro sets in motion his growth out of childhood. This becomes evident from his father’s comments on a night of celebrations, which he perceives as the last of his son’s childhood: “quella notte l’ho nel cuore come l’ultima dell’infanzia di Nino. I canti, la stanchezza, l’eccitazione sotto la luna me ne hanno fatto qualcosa d’irreale e di triste. Voglio quasi bene a quel Pietro; si direbbe che il bambino fui io.”56 Nino’s last night of childhood is a night of ritual celebrations, a night that appears to be almost surreal. After that night the father gets sick, and for a month he lives in a sort of limbo where everything is confused and undefined. It seems as if the father had gone through a sort of rite of passage, at the end of which he finds his son, rather than himself, grown up: “mi parve anche cresciuto e più sicuro di sé. Ma quando rientrava togliendosi l’impermeabile […] girava per la casa e rispondeva e si presentava come shall see, is represented by the last story of the collection, Storia segreta where instead the protagonist strongly admires his father. 53 Cesare Pavese, “L’eremita,” in Feria d’agosto, 32. 54 Ibid., 33. 55 Ibid., 32. 56 Ibid., 33. 138 chi non ha conti da rendere a nessuno.”57 Not surprisingly, after this period Pietro will leave— having he fulfilled his role as mediator—and father and son will move to the city, which, as we have seen, I read as the space of youth. Nino and Berto are instead the protagonists of “Primo amore,” and they too—thirteen or fourteen years old—are in between childhood and adolescence.58 During the narration, they are growing increasingly bored with childish games, which they do not find entertaining anymore. Their attention is now attracted, in fact, by other subjects: “mi pareva di perdere il tempo, di annoiarmi, […] avrei voluto […] farmi mortificare dalle sorelle.”59 Of the two friends, Nino seems to be the most mature, or at least the one who is closer to entering into adolescence. In this story too, we find a mediating figure: Bruno. Unlike Pietro, however, Bruno is a bad influence: he is a young adult who introduces the two children to alcohol, cigarettes and who uses them as guards during his encounters with a married woman. Finally, “Il mare” is the story that concludes the first section, and is unanimously considered one of the most meaningful of this first part, as well as of the whole book.60 The protagonist, Nino, and his friend Gosto one night run away from home in a mission on the hills 57 Ibid., 34. Van Den Bossche’s reading of this story underlines a sort of generational confusion between father and son, who at times interchange their role: “il rapporto tra padre e figlio si evolve da un misto di attaccamento e distacco, non esente da momenti di incomprensione, se non proprio di astio e ribellione, a una graduale identificazione e confusione tra le due generazioni, in cui il figlio sembra abbandonare l’infanzia e il padre invece tornare momentaneamente ragazzo” (Bart Van Den Bossche, “Nulla è veramente accaduto,” 265). The Belgian scholar too recognizes the role of Pietro as “figura mediatrice,” but in the sense of a mediation between father and son in their interchanging roles. 58 This emerges from the narrator’s descriptions of his feeling of uneasiness with his former friends, who are described of being either too infantile, or too mature for him: “avevamo tredici anni, forse quattordici, e veramente anch’io mi sentii d’improvviso, quell’estate, insoddisfatto di quegli straccioncelli: se avevano la nostra età erano molli e sciocchi, se parevano magri e vivaci come noi erano già diciottenni e non s’andava piú d’accordo” (Cesare Pavese, “Primo amore,” in Feria d’agosto, 46). 59 Ibid. 47. 60 Gioanola dedicates an ample analysis to this story both in the introduction to the collection and in Elio Gioanola, Cesare Pavese: la realtà, l’altrove, il silenzio. Another important critical contribution to the analysis of this story is Pier Massimo Prosio, “Lettura di Il mare di Cesare Pavese,” Italica 69.4 (1992): 466-477. 139 to reach a point from where, they believe, they can see the sea. They never succeed in this mission, one that was already bound to fail from the beginning, as it is impossible to see the sea from the Piedmontese hills. This story is thus the most representative of the absence of the sea, a theme which, as we have seen, Gioanola investigates in the introduction to the collection. The fact that the sea is nowhere to be seen is at the core of the children’s interest in it, almost a fairy tale element that they long to experience. The children’s obsession with the sea is exemplary, I believe, of a childhood fascination for the unknown. In this story, too, as I mentioned above, there is a character who resembles Pietro from “L’eremita.” Rocco is in fact a vagabond, whom Gosto and the protagonist meet on their way to the sea. As I have already claimed, I consider the figure of the hermit-vagabond in Feria d’agosto as one the child meets at the threshold of childhood and adolescence, and the moment the child parts from him is the moment the child is ready to enter a new stage. The two friends, who embarked together on their journey, now see their paths diverge, as Gosto decides to abandon the project and remain with Rocco. In my interpretation, Gosto, in giving up on his mission to see with his own eyes something that had only been recounted to him in tales and legends, shows not to be ready to move beyond childhood. The protagonist, instead, proceeds on his journey, propelled by a curiosity— connected in the previous chapter to the advent of adolescence—which he cannot resist. Once the protagonist leaves by himself, determined to accomplish his search for the sea, something peculiar happens in his conception of the object he so avidly seeks. He no longer considers the sea as a fairy tale element, but rather as something whose existence he now does not doubt: “adesso non m’importava più se di là da Cassinasco non avrei visto il mare. Mi bastava sapere che il mare c’era, dietro discese e paesi, e pensarci camminando tra le siepi.”61 Now the 61 Cesare Pavese, “Il mare,” in Feria d’agosto, 79. 140 protagonist does no longer need to prove the sea’s existence by seeing it. When he finally reaches the point from which, supposedly, he should be able to see the sea, this is the scenario that emerges in front of his eyes: arrivai sotto i pini di Cassinasco verso sera, in un’ora che Gosto doveva essere già a casa. Feci l’ultimo pezzo non pensando più a niente; c’era una siepe di rovi che chiudeva la vista […]. Finalmente sbucai. Vidi un’altra collina, e il cielo vuoto.62 The void is what appears in front of the protagonist, rather than the sea. The sea is out of reach, according to what Gioanola defined “effetto di rinvio”63: the sea is always beyond something, it being towns, hills, or bushes—“quinte aperte su altre quinte.”64 Perspective is probably the key in this story and Nino’s adventures are in fact “un gioco di mise en abîme che rimanda all’infinito.”65 The impossibility to see and perceive the sea prompts Nino to resort to his imagination, which is now empowered and free. For this reason, the child has abandoned his need to see, as he now just needs to know that it is there, beyond the nth landscape barrier. Both this mechanism of sight impairment and Pavese’s particular insistence on the element of siepe to convey it are evidently motives borrowed from Leopardi’s poetics of the infinite.66 62 Ibid., 80. 63 Elio Gioanola, Cesare Pavese: la realtà, l’altrove, il silenzio, 147. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. 66 The motif of the siepe as a natural barrier from and through which to see the sky and the void returns in many stories, for example in “La città,” where the narrator admits: “noialtri di campagna siamo cosí: ci piace guardare di là dalla siepe, ma non scavalcarla” (Cesare Pavese, “La città,” in Feria d’agosto, 120). As noted in the second chapter, Elio Gioanola’s analysis of some stories from Feria d’agosto, and especially of Il mare, underscores the contacts between Pavese’s and Leopardi’s poetics. Pavese makes explicit references to Leopardi’s Zibaldone where the poet’s poetics of the indefinite was theorized. For example, strong is the influence on Pavese’s writing of passages from the Zibaldone like the following: “circa le situazioni che piacciono pel solo indefinito puoi vedere il mio idillio sull’Infinito, e richiamar l’idea di una campagna arditamente declive in guisa che la vista in certa lontananza non arrivi alla valle; e quella di un filare d’alberi, la cui fine si perda di vista, o per la lunghezza del filare, o perch’esso sia posto in declivio.” (Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone, 1430-1431). Both the sense of void and the description of landscape in terms of theatrical wings that fade away in rarefied distances recall the painting of Caspar David Friedrich. I am thinking especially of one of his masterpieces, The wanderer above the sea of fog [1818], where a solitary man is observing a natural landscape covered by haze and vapors that make the sight even more primordial and mysterious. 141 Nino finally falls asleep, and he wakes up in the middle of the night, realizing that there is a bonfire close by. The bonfire, at the beginning of the story, was something that the children could only see from a window, as their parents would not allow them to go out at night by themselves because they were too young. In this moment, he is nostalgic for the company of his friend, who wanted so badly to see a bonfire, but who decided to go back, thus renouncing the possibility of growth and self-affirmation. Again the protagonist expresses a certainty that the sea exists: “la fiamma andava così alta che si schiariva la vallata.—Chi sa se dal mare la vedono.”67 The sea is no longer a dreamy environment, but one “inhabited” by people who might be able to see the hill on which the protagonist is standing. The change in perspective is interesting, as now it is the protagonist’s position that may be perceived as uncertain, blurry and ungraspable from the point of view of the people at the sea. The protagonist’s confidence about the existence of the sea is soon reiterated: “finalmente spuntò il sole dietro la collina. Una cosa sapevo: che il sole aveva acceso a quel modo anche il mare.”68 The following day the protagonist meets Candido, another young adult, who is, unlike Bruno, a very positive reference for the children, one to whom they look up.69 Candido now takes it upon himself to bring Nino back home, but only after the celebrations for the bonfire are over. This celebration, just like the one in “L’eremita,” can be read as the third phase of a rite of passage, as described by Van Gennep, which attests to the entrance of the transitioning subject into a new status. This reading is, for example, confirmed by the protagonist’s comments after the party: “io guardavo la collina scura, dove non c’era più un falò, e mi pareva di esser nato in quel cortile, di esser stato con Candido 67 Cesare Pavese, “Il mare,” in Feria d’agosto, 81. 68 Ibid. 69 The names of these two young adults are also telling of their opposite roles: Bruno and Candido may in fact refer to the darkness and purity of their respective temperaments. For the importance of proper names in Cesare Pavese see the previously cited work by Davide De Camilli, Cesare Pavese e i nomi dei personaggi. See also note 45, page 134. 142 sempre lassù.”70 There are no bonfires anymore, a confirmation that the rite has been performed, and Nino even feels like he was born there, a new self after the rite of passage. The story ends with the proposition to “aspettare il mattino,” which, as we will soon see, is a common characteristic of many of those young men who populate the next section. Just like those young men, and here for the first time in the book, the protagonist feels what appears to be a first sense of “spaesamento,” a sense that will return so many times in the stories of “La città” and which I have briefly anticipated in the second chapter. In fact, the protagonist asserts that “volevo ricordarmi una cosa,” with the impression of having been there before, but unable to formulate this ambiguous feeling which fluctuates between familiarity and mystery.71 Just like the other mediating figures—Pietro, Rocco, and Bruno—the child meets Candido in a very important moment of his life, when he is ready to move beyond his age into the next one. Finally, at the end of the story, the perception of the sea changes one last time. We can in fact notice the passage from a sea that only other people had seen and knew at the beginning of the story, to a concrete landscape which really exists, to finally something of which only the protagonist is aware, as a never seen landscape that had been interiorized. Before going back home, the protagonist comments that “nessuno sapeva che laggiù c’era il mare.”72 We could then assert that the sea is now more a luogo della mente, rather than a physical one, a place that one only needs to know exists and does not need to see. 70 Cesare Pavese, “Il mare,” in Feria d’agosto, 85. 71 As we shall see especially in the analysis of the next two sections, many characters from Feria d’agosto experience this ambiguous and fleeting sense of familiarity, which recalls the Freudian formulation of déjà vu theorized in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901). According to this formulation, a person is suddenly reminded of an unconscious fantasy, whose content has been at some point blocked from awareness. However, even if the content is blocked, a sense of familiarity leaks through even though it is displaced onto something else. The ambivalence between familiarity and mystery is also crucial in the theoretical texts of the last section where, as emerged in the previous chapter, Pavese defines one’s symbols as “una realtà enigmatica e tuttavia familiare, tanto più prepotente in quanto sempre sul punto di rivelarsi e mai scoperta” (Cesare Pavese, “Stato di grazia,” in Feria d’agosto, 156). 72 Cesare Pavese, “Il mare,” in Feria d’agosto, 84. 143 II. “La città” As I have mentioned in the introduction, I read this section as representative of youth. We have already considered how Pavese did not comment on and describe the peculiarities of this age, focusing rather on both childhood and maturity. For this reason, the analysis of this section is probably our best chance to get a glimpse of how Pavese perceived this important moment of a man’s life. There are two main groups of stories: those that are more lyrical, almost surreal; and those where the narration follows a more conventional sequence of facts and descriptions. In either case, the protagonists of these stories are presented to us as in the process of change: they are either unsatisfied with their lives, or are propelled to introspection. I claim that, just like in the first section, here, too, the protagonists are caught in a transitional moment, in a moment that can be considered a prelude to the passage into the next phase. For this reason, this age is depicted as an oneiric phase, one when a man lives in a sort of limbo, in which the level of awareness achieved at this moment creates a sort of painful expectation. The young man knows that what really matters is not to be found around himself, or in his past experiences, or in the accomplishments of a lifetime. The key to his wholeness is provided by an “attimo estatico,” the only thing that can reconnect him to his truest self. Many stories from “La città” stage a condition of “attesa” for this revelation to happen, or of “spaesamento,” where the characters do not know how to handle and replicate such revelations. Because of these characteristics, an introspective dimension prevails in these stories. The characters are no longer projected toward the exterior like the children of the previous section, who were bound to adventures and explorations, but are rather closed within themselves. Furthermore, the characters are often stuck in a condition of “smemoramento,” which is in line with what we have already analyzed regarding the reliability of memories in a journey that is not entrusted to remembrance. It is 144 rather the rediscovery in the present of a truth that never actually dissipated and that, for this reason, we do not need to conjure up from a long-gone past. “Smemoramento” is thus a positive condition, which in fact attests that an “attimo estatico” has taken place. As Luisella Mesiano asserts, there is a demolition of time in Pavese’s myth: “è [...] il tempo cronologico a subire uno scardinamento totale, la stessa assenza di rimembranza è conseguenza dell’assenza del tempo cronologico perché il ricordo ha bisogno di tempo, ma il ricordo-scoperta ha bisogno di spazio.”73 In her study of “luoghi unici” in Feria d’agosto the scholar underscores the absence of time in “ricordo-scoperte,” which she reads as rather linked to space. I agree with Mesiano in considering the treatment of time very peculiar in Feria d’agosto. However, I claim that time is not always necessarily absent—as the scholar asserts—, but rather its duration is often perceived as something that can be expanded or shrunk. Time is not treated as an immutable element, but rather as something malleable whose perception is frequently distorted.74 Dreams are very common in these stories, and sometimes the border between dream and waking life is unclear, as for example in “Il prato dei morti,” “Sogni al campo,” “Risveglio,” and “Vocazione.” Finally, many of the protagonists long for solitude, as the company of either a woman or of friends can only be detrimental to a journey that is to be taken alone. As far as imagery is concerned, the window is of great importance in Feria d’agosto. This relevance is not made explicit by the author, who only once refers to this obsession— 73 Luisella Mesiano, “Dittico per Pavese,” in Sotto il gelo dell’acqua c’è l’erba, 231. 74 I will consider the details in the analysis of specific stories, but I would like nevertheless to anticipate a few quotes that can help us understand the extent to which the treatment of time should be considered peculiar, to say the least. In Le case, for example, the narrator asserts: “se avessi lavorato anche la Domenica, sarei diventato uomo più presto degli altri” (Cesare Pavese, “Le case,” in Feria d’agosto, 129) as if by only concentrating in the present the work that should be done in the future, one could at the same time be anticipating the maturing process. The protagonist of Storia segreta, when commenting on the summers spent in the countryside, asserts: “venivo in paese per le vacanze e cosí mi sembrò di essere stato ragazzo soltanto d’estate. [...] Tutti gli anni l’estate fu come quando non andavo ancora via, un’unica estate che durò sempre” (Cesare Pavese, “Storia segreta,” in Feria d’agosto, 189). It is as if he were a child only during summertime, and he would still feel like a child during summertime even later in life. Summers return always identical, as if they were eternal. 145 however presenting it as affecting someone else—in a theoretical essay: “so di un uomo che una semplice finestra di scala, spalancata sul cielo vuoto, mette in stato di grazia.”75 However, it is evident that the window plays a major role in Pavese’s repository of images, especially given the insistence with which it returns in many stories. In fact, at this point of the collection there have been already too many windows for this element to be overlooked. The window is always presented as a gateway to the enjoyment of the landscape. The peculiarity of this point of view is that the sight it frames is often presented as distant, in line with what Gioanola defines the “fenomenologia del lontano,”76 which he reads as the main point of contact between Pavese’s myth and Leopardi’s infinite, as we have already seen regarding the void in the last section.77 What I find particularly interesting is that in “La città” the entry to the infinite is not represented by a bush, trees or other country landscape elements, but rather by a window, an architectural element that belongs to an urban—or at least inhabited—setting, but which allows for an experience of the far away and savage. Perspective is still fundamental in this second section, although the reader witnesses a move from natural framing devices to man-made ones.78 75 Cesare Pavese, “Stato di grazia,” in Feria d’agosto, 158. 76 Enzo Gioanola, introduction [2002] to Cesare Pavese, Feria d’agosto, XV. 77 See note 66, page 140. Just like it has been noted with regard to the indefiniteness of certain Pavese’s landscapes, even the motif of the window (and that of “portici” that I will analyze in the next chapter) seems to be borrowed from the poet from Recanati. In fact, in the Zibaldone we read how “[piace] il penetrare della luce in luoghi dov’ella divenga incerta e impedita, e non bene si distingua, come attraverso un canneto, in una selva, per li balconi socchiusi ec. ec.; la detta luce veduta in luogo, oggetto ec. dov’ella non entri e non percota dirittamente […]; in un andito veduto al di dentro o al di fuori, e in una loggia parimente” (Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone, 1744). The delightful impediment of sight is often reinforced by the presence of a sound whose source cannot be seen, as it emerges from Leopardi’s masterpiece, “A Silvia” (1828), where the poet recalls his habit to listen to the girl’s voice from the “veroni del paterno ostello” (balcony of his father’s residence). The young Leopardi could not see Silvia from there, but only the sky, the sea and the hills. We shall see in the next chapter how both these elements— impairment of sight and indeterminateness of sound—return in La casa in collina. 78 The choice of a window as a viewpoint is typical of the idea of landscape, as it emerges, for example in Romanticism art. The most known exemplary of this kind of paintings is probably another masterpiece by Caspar David Friedrich, Woman at a Window (1822). Here too, like in The wanderer above the sea of fog, we see a single figure from behind and we are brought to imagine what she sees as she looks out of this window. 146 It is with the element of the window that the second section starts, with “la finestra” as the very first words of the first story, “Il prato dei morti.” In this eerie story, the narrator at night watches over a field from his window. Every night a murder is committed there, and the scene is visible under the moonlight. This field is like a stage, the locus of a ritual which is invariably performed every night under the moon.79 Even the liturgy seems to be fixed as the narrator from the window recognizes every night the same succession of acts. The reader is not provided with enough information to decipher the mysterious density of this story, and s/he is left with a doubt about whether what was described in this story was the account of a recurring dream. If we do interpret it as a recurring dream, then the window is not an intermediary between the viewer and a far-off landscape, but a privileged standpoint from which to see one’s own dream develop, since dreams, too, belong to the realm of the vague and indistinct.80 It is only in the second story, “Sogni al campo,” that the theme of dreams is explicitly introduced.81 The story is set in what is vaguely and indirectly described as a concentration 79 As we shall see in the next chapter, the element of the moon in La casa in collina is usually an indication that a situation not fully explicable in rational terms is underway. It is during moonlit nights that Corrado relives his past, with an intensity and realism so that the border between memory and present is not always well defined. In Feria d’agosto the moon is sometimes presented in the same terms, for example in “La città,” where the narrator, talking of his friend, affirms: “Gallo si ricordava del passato soltanto in certe sere che tornavamo dal paese sotto la luna” (Cesare Pavese, “La città,” in Feria d’agosto, 121). 80 If we interpret this story as the account of a dream, we should note a proximity between the window as a perspective point from which to observe one’s own dream developing and Freud’s anderen Schauplatz in his formulation of dream-making. Freud recognizes the value of G. T. H. Fechner’s theory of dreams, especially in his theorization of “the other scene.” In fact, “The famous G. T. H. Fechner makes the conjecture, in a discussion as to the nature of the dreams, that the dream is staged elsewhere than in the waking ideation […]. The idea which is thus put before us is one of psychic locality […]. We shall remain on psychological ground, and we shall do no more than accept the invitation to think of the instrument which serves the psychic activities much as we think of a compound microscope, a photographic camera, or other apparatus. The psychic locality, then, corresponds to a place within such an apparatus in which one of the preliminary phases of the image comes into existence. As is well known, there are in the microscope and the telescope such ideal localities or planes, in which no tangible portion of the apparatus is located” [Sigmund Freud, The interpretation of dreams (New York: Macmillan, 1913), 425]. In this story too, the dead’s field seen from the window could be interpreted as “the other stage,” as the place where the preliminary phase of the oneiric image is being formed. 81 Dreams are very common in the section “La città,” whereas they were completely absent in the first section, and this leads me to associate the presence of dreams to an adult life, as the narrator of “Sogni al campo” confirms: “avevo dormito come un bambino, senza sogni” (Cesare Pavese, “Sogni al campo,” in Feria d’agosto, 92). 147 camp. This information is not clearly provided, as we only know that the protagonist and the other characters live in a “campo” where their quarters are sheds guarded by sentinels, and that they have some usual occupations to which they attend with a sort of resignation: “nulla in quel campo potevamo cominciare con la certezza di finire.”82 If the day is spent in a despised routine, and the future is uncertain, during the night these poor men have a sort of escape in vivid dreams, whose effect on waking life is strong: “qualcosa era certo accaduto, durante la notte. Avevamo sognato con tanta convinzione che adesso ogni ricordo era abolito e ci restava nel sangue soltanto uno stupore incredulo.”83 Both the absence of memories and the stupor left by the night are indications of the experience of an ecstatic moment, in this case lived through a dream. Moreover, the narrator refers to the effect that the dream has on a dreamer as putting him into a state of “torpore,” which—in its deprivation of sensibility and in the slowdown of psychic processes—recalls the “spaesamento” that we have already connected to “stupore.” Finally, in Sogni al campo there are two recurrences of the term “il mare,” in both cases in relation to sleep and dream: “ci pareva, in quel risveglio, d’incespicare come chi esce da un mare dove ha nuotato fino all’ultimo lasciando cadere a piombo nell’acqua le gambe stremate.” In its connection to the dream, the sea’s characteristic of indefiniteness is confirmed, iterated in the expression “occhi lavati nel mare nero del sonno.” It is during their sleep that the characters are close to grasping something, a sensation, a “certezza,” that inevitably vanishes as the state of waking returns. Nevertheless, a residue of that dream state remains, but, given the impossibility for words to grasp and convey such ecstatic moments, it should not surprise that “nessuno ne parlava.”84 82 Ibid., 93. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid. 148 “Una certezza” stands out as an exemplary story for my analysis of Pavese, as it both presents elements long explored by Il mestiere di vivere and anticipates issues that will be fundamental to my reading of La casa in collina. Without anticipating too much, I would like to underscore a passage from the story, relevant for the introduction of the themes of “nascondiglio” and of the perception of one’s past as if it belonged to someone else: Se mi accade di fermarmi un momento a pensare, nel mio passato non mi ritrovo e le sue agitazioni non le capisco. È come se tutto fosse toccato a un altro, e io sbucassi adesso da un nascondiglio, un buco dove fossi vissuto sinora senza saper come. Se non fosse che in questi momenti provo un grande stupore e non mi riconosco nemmeno, direi che il nascondiglio da cui esco è me stesso.85 The narrator talks of his past self as if he were someone else and as if his past experiences did not actually happen to him. This recalls, as we will see, what Corrado says about his youth, which, he, too, considers far and extraneous: “Che cosa c’era di comune tra me e lui?”86 The next element I would like to underscore is the “nascondiglio,” which the narrator at the end of the quote better defines as being “me stesso.” I claim that in these few lines Pavese refers to what happens to a subject when s/he finally realizes how to reach her or his “perenne, assoluta realtà,”87 which, as we have seen in the second chapter, is enshrined in one’s symbols in which “si condens[a] l’essenza stessa della nostra singola vita.”88 The “me stesso” so strenuously searched for has always been there, the subject was hiding in it, and he needs to embark on an auto-analysis to be able to perceive that self, to see it from the outside by considering his past life as something extraneous. One last aspect I would like to highlight is the use of the verb “sbucare,” which Pavese has used multiple times to describe an ecstatic moment, and which, as we shall see, recurs in this story already a few lines later. As the narrator of “Una certezza” 85 Ibid., 95. 86 Cesare Pavese, La casa in collina, 9. 87 Cesare Pavese, “Stato di grazia,” in Feria d’agosto, 157. 88 Ibid. 149 reminds us, these moments do not necessarily arise only at the threshold between sleep and waking life. At a certain point of his life, he recounts without giving any details or information about this experience, he had to be enclosed for many days, but when he finally has a chance to go out again, he hesitates at the doorstep—which are another framing device—as he has l’impressione di essere di colpo sbucato in un’aria tutta diversa dalla solita, un’aria che ti pare di avere dentro invece che intorno, un grande abisso d’aria, di vuoto, di possibili eventi e pensieri che sgorgherebbero dal più profondo te stesso, se questo te stesso non fosse subito sparito tant’era incredibile. Sono momenti questi, che si possono chiamare di disponibilità assoluta.89 The quote above presents many elements that will emerge in the prose of the following years. First, there is the repetition of what we have already considered: the subject “sbuca in un’aria tutta diversa dalla solita” which is, indeed, the “più profondo te stesso.” Furthermore, the recurrence of the term “vuoto” should not be overlooked, as it is one of the images used by the author to convey the sense of the infinite and the indefinite. As Gioanola rightly asserts, “il vuoto è uno dei nomi che si può dare al Jenseits der Dinge, l’al di là dell’oggetto, quando altri nomi, sempre strettamente pavesiani, possono essere mito, distanza, infinito.”90 The enjoyment of the void the subject had experienced from the doorstep of his reclusion emphatically recalls the possibility of experiencing the infinite provided by the window in so many stories. Also, Pavese’s use of the verb “sgorgare” is another indication of the kind of ecstatic situation here described.91 The narrator continues: S’intravede, dopo che uno li ha vissuti, che tutto il proprio passato visibile e perciò anche il presente e insomma tutta la vita, non conta per quello che si è fatto voluto sofferto ottenuto, e che 89 Cesare Pavese, “Una certezza,” in Feria d’agosto, 96. 90 Enzo Gioanola, introduction [2002] to Cesare Pavese, Feria d’agosto, VIII. It is interesting how Gioanola used the German term, probably to connect his reading of void in landscape to German romanticism, which is implicitly invoked by his analysis. 91 As we have seen in the previous chapter, “gorgo,” and “sgorgare” are used to refer to a young child’s relation to the world, when s/he still perceives her/himself and the surrounding as an undifferentiated amalgam. They were also used in Il mestiere di vivere to refer to the perception of divinity in a religious ecstatic moment. 150 tanto varrebbe starsene fermi su un angolo come un pezzente e, borbottando qualcosa che i passanti non capiscano nemmeno, fissare a occhi chiusi questo stupore, quest’abisso. C’è qui dentro un segreto più importante di tutte le responsabilità che si possano dare. Ma per quanto questo stato sia sempre identico a se stesso, non c’è nessuna monotonia.92 I interpret the quote above as similar to many of Pavese’s considerations on the relative relevance of life experiences, which we have analyzed in the past chapter, both in the sections dedicated to maturity and to the author’s method of writing. In the passage “la vita non conta per quello che si è fatto voluto sofferto ottenuto,” we are reminded once more that a life’s meaning is not to be found in its achievements, or in its events. All these outside elements are irrelevant, maybe just a weak echo of the “abisso” and “segreto,” our true essence that can only be found, “fissa[ndo] a occhi chiusi questo stupore, quest’abisso.” This passage is very similar to one from Mal di mestiere, where the author provides the contemplative spirits with a useful recommendation: “tapparsi i sensi davanti alla realtà e accontentarsi di quella che, filtrata dagli anni, riaffiora dal fondo della chiusa coscienza.”93 A prerequisite for this contemplative endeavor is thus to detach oneself from the surrounding world: the gaze is still fundamental, but it should be oriented inwards—as the eyes are “chiusi.” At the same time, we have to accept the incommunicability of the event, which will never be rendered by words, as we can deduce from “borbottando qualcosa che i passanti non capiscano nemmeno.”94 This detachment from the material world of the present is reinforced by the following passage, where the narrator better circumscribes what until then he had defined as an abyss and a secret: Con tanto che ho fatto, veduto e capito nel mondo, mi succede che le cose più mie sono un mucchio di sassi dove mi sedevo allora, una griglia di cantina dove ficcavo gli occhi, una stanza chiusa dove non potevo entrare. E il bello è che quell’impressione di sfiorare un mondo libero come l’aria, di sentire per un momento che io e questo mondo siamo una cosa sola e, se 92 Cesare Pavese, “Una certezza,” in Feria d’agosto, 96. 93 Cesare Pavese, “Mal di mestiere,” in Feria d’agosto, 169. 94 As we shall see, this impossibility to communicate can also be found in many pages from La casa in collina, where Corrado also willingly researches what he defines his “immunità rispetto alle cose.” 151 l’impressione continuasse per un po’, dovrei credermi chi sa chi e vivere in tutt’altro modo, quest’impressione potevo già provarla, senza neanche capirlo, da ragazzo.95 Here, too, we see a contraposition between the achievements of a lifetime (rendered by verbs such as “fare,” “vedere,” and “capire”) and the simplicity and availability of an answer that was so close to us that we never perceived it. It should not come as a surprise that the images that are vehicles for this acknowledgement are “una griglia di cantina dove ficcavo gli occhi” (a window) and “una stanza chiusa dove non potevo entrare,”96 two of the most recurrent images in Feria d’agosto. Those moments of “disponibilità assoluta” institute an access to the “più profondo te stesso” that is disentangled from both material things and life events, as this is “un segreto più importante di tutte le responsabilità che si possano dare.” In these moments, the self is connected with that “ragazzo” who could already feel this impression of opening and empathy with his world, even though he did not have awareness of it. In fact, i momenti di maggior soddisfazione sono quelli più lontani, che uno neanche sapeva di aver vissuto, quando cominciava a scappare di casa e lo faceva con la paura. L’unica differenza è che allora andavo d’accordo con me stesso e non avevo bisogno, per capire chi sono, di prendere al volo il momento e fermarmi in strada come uno smemorato e come una bestia spaventata.97 We have already considered those moments when the subject “cominciava a scappare di casa” as exemplary of an age of adventures and discoveries, an age when the maturing process is set in motion.98 Those days institute the beginning of a quest that during teenage is projected 95 Cesare Pavese, “Una certezza,” in Feria d’agosto, 96-97. 96 The element of a “stanza chiusa” returns, for example, also in L’eremita and La vigna and, as we shall see, in La casa in collina. 97 Cesare Pavese, “Una certezza,” in Feria d’agosto, 97. 98 That of running away from home is a recurrent motif in Pavese’s writing: numerous are the characters animated by a yearning for traveling and exploring the world. This trope emerges especially in Feria d’agosto but it is also present in other works, for example in “I mari del sud,” the opening poetry of Lavorare stanca, where the speaker enjoys the company of a cousin who just came back to his hometown from which he had escaped twenty years before. As the cousin admits, “la vita va vissuta lontano dal paese.” Another famous exemplar is, obviously, 152 outwards, whereas the subject now realizes that the “disponibilità assoluta” arises from “un’aria che ti pare di avere dentro invece che intorno.” The narrator institutes a difference between those moments and the present in the fact that now, in youth, there is an active research on the part of the subject, whereas the child was unaware of living “momenti di maggiore soddisfazione.” The adult can only rely on rare contacts with that moment, which leaves him, again, “smemorato.” The impossibility of relying on memories should not be considered as a lack on the part of the subject because, as we have already seen, the endeavor on which he has embarked is not a mnemonic one, but rather one that Pavese has in other contexts defined “ecstatic.” I thus read this condition as belonging to the same state to which “spaesamento” belongs, a state where both spatial and temporal (memorial) coordinates are not required. This is because, as we have seen in the second chapter, one’s symbols are located in what Pavese defines the “sfera dell’istintivo- irrazionale, […] la sfera dell’essere e dell’estasi,” a sphere where time does not exist and where if a contact, a recollection, is instituted, it is not through the mediation of a mnemonic effort, but it rather happens “sul piano dell’essere, per grazia, per ispirazione, per estasi insomma.”99 The condition of “smemorato” returns again in the following story, “Risveglio,” this time prompted by what the narrator defined as a humiliation,100 without providing the reader with any information about its nature. This humiliation propels him to wonder alone at night, in order to give his resentment an outlet. Just like in some stories from the first section—especially “L’eremita” and “Il mare”—here too nighttime is presented as “un’ora insolita,” which Gionaola defines as “uno spazio trasgressivo […], lo spazio più adatto per dare inizio a un viaggio verso Anguilla from La luna e i falò, who, just like the cousin from I mari del sud, is back to his hometown after years spent in America. 99 Cesare Pavese, “Stato di grazia,” in Feria d’agosto, 157. 100 A no better-defined humiliation returns also in Vocazione. As we shall see, in this story the humiliation seems to be connected to the narrator’s dreaded awakening. 153 un’altra dimensione.”101 The project of the narrator is to “attendere il giorno per le strade, di fare io stesso il giorno,”102 which, as we shall see, is an issue that returns in several other stories. Implicit in this expression is the possibility of acting as indicated by his use of the verb “fare,” which, when referring to “il giorno,” manifests a sort of resistance to time, now perceived and treated as an element that can be manipulated or at least controlled.103 In this unconventional treatment of time, which is only an anticipation of what we will read in the next stories, the narrator is intent on eluding the passing of time and the activities it imposes on us. He, in fact, decides to be awake during a time when everybody sleeps and to be found still awake in the morning: “il mattino non mi avrebbe più colto a tradimento come usa; l’ora insolita che vivevo ne aveva già assorbito ogni amarezza.”104 The significance of mornings has already been introduced to us in past stories—for example, in “Sogni al campo”—where they prompt in the protagonist a “risveglio” that will force him to abandon his state of waiting for an encounter with his “perenne, assoluta realtà.”105 The same theme of resisting sleep during nighttime returns in the following story, “Il tempo,” which as the title suggests raises the question of time: “fin da giovane avevo questo sospetto, che chi non dormisse mai non invecchierebbe.”106 Here too being awake is perceived as a resistance to time, to the extent that it can stop the aging process from taking place. This is what the narrator shares about his perception of time: 101 Enzo Gioanola, introduction [2002] to Cesare Pavese, Feria d’agosto, XIII. 102 Cesare Pavese, “Risveglio,” in Feria d’agosto, 99. 103 A similar expression to “fare il giorno” is used in Le feste where the protagonist thus comments on his brother’s life-style: “l’aveva già preso la malattia di girare di notte, e mica per ballare e divertirsi, ma per fare da solo il mattino e ritrovarsi il giorno dopo chi sa dove” (Cesare Pavese, “Le feste,” in Feria d’agosto, 140). 104 Cesare Pavese, “Risveglio,” in Feria d’agosto, 99-100. 105 Cesare Pavese, “Stato di grazia,” in Feria d’agosto, 157. 106 Cesare Pavese, “Il tempo,” in Feria d’agosto, 101. 154 forse il tempo affiorava nei ricordi, nelle pause in cui mi fermavo sorpreso di me stesso, quando mi pareva di svegliarmi come ci si sveglia al mattino […]. Nella notte, nel buio, questa presenza mi riassaliva e costringeva a parlare come se avessi un interlocutore, e mi era facile intrattenermi con me stesso […]. Davvero, in quegli anni il tempo affiorava soltanto se dormivo o ripensavo al passato. Le due cose ne facevano una sola.107 As we can infer from the past passages, the narrator’s perception of time is unconventional. It is not the passing of hours (and of actions, duties, “occupazioni consuete”) of waking life, but rather a different temporality that emerges “soltanto se dormivo o ripensavo al passato.” Time seems to exist for him only during awakenings, sleeping time and when he thinks about his past. The connection of these three activities with the passing of time is not self- evident. The morning is that moment of the day that “[coglie] a tradimento,” when one wakes up and realizes that “un altro giorno era passato, un’altra vita un altro incontro.”108 Time emerges during those “pause” when one either sleeps or thinks, so it should not surprise the narrator’s conviction that one only gets old when s/he sleeps. To sleep and to think about one’s past are for the narrator the same thing “perché ne uscivo—mi svegliavo—riavvistando la luce e il presente con uno stesso brivido incredulo.”109 The morning in this story finds the narrator “sorpreso di me stesso,” where the sense of surprise is another way of referring to the “spaesamento,” “torpore,” and “smemoramento” that populate many stories of “La città.” It is only during nighttime, again, that this “presence” comes to the fore and obligates the protagonist to face the interlocutor who is “me stesso.”110 A strong reference to “Una certezza” is introduced by the evocation of its title. In fact, just like in the previous story, “la certezza di sentirmi radicato nel mondo” arises when the protagonist realizes that “un gesto, un colore, una voce, li avevo già visti o sentiti chi sa quando, 107 Ibid. 108 Ibid. 109 Ibid. 110 As we shall see, this splitting in two of the character emerges again in La casa in collina. Corrado too, in fact, affirms to be spending time with himself as a child. 155 e che perciò risorgevano dalla mia stessa coscienza più che dalle cose intorno.”111 Here too, consciousness, “il più profondo te stesso”112 rather than concrete reality, is the place of a revelation, just like we have seen in “Una certezza”: “un’aria che ti pare di avere dentro invece che intorno, un grande abisso d’aria, di vuoto, di possibili eventi e pensieri che sgorgherebbero dal più profondo te stesso.”113 The return of this motif helps us better understand what this “certezza’ may be. It is the certainty to be rooted in the world because the world has been introjected: a world where our deepest self dwells. It is only one certainty in the midst of spaesamento, stupore and smemoramento, the only one that counts and that arises exactly form those states of indeterminateness. These moments are described as “risvegli sempre inattesi,” awakenings when “cose non dette trasparivano in fondo all’istante come un oggetto noto in fondo all’acqua di una vasca, e sarebbe bastato quel lieve coraggio di tuffare la mano, per toccare la lontana inafferrabile parvenza.”114 An object that shows through from the bottom of a basin is an expression that Pavese uses repeatedly in his writing.115 What Gioanola rightly points to is the impossibility of a situation where what the protagonist wants to grasp is a “lontana inafferrabile parvenza.” As is obvious, this is a challenge that is destined to fail, as the object he longs for is not within reach: la metafora dell’oggetto in fondo all’acqua è davvero suggestiva e dà bene il senso della irrisolvibilità teorica della situazione, perché si tratta di afferrare l’inafferrabile: ciò che l’acqua fa intravedere, e nello stesso tempo nasconde, può forse essere davvero definito un oggetto, se è anche “lontana inafferrabile parvenza”?116 111 Cesare Pavese, “Il tempo,” in Feria d’agosto, 102. 112 Cesare Pavese, “Una certezza,” in Feria d’agosto, 96. In this story we witness a rhetoric use of “tu” similar to the one analyzed in the diary. See page 65 of the second chapter. 113 Ibid. 114 Cesare Pavese, “Il tempo,” in Feria d’agosto, 102. 115 The following story, “Piscina feriale,” presents a few friends by a swimming pool who are waiting for something to happen, something that is not described, but only alluded to. Here too Pavese employs the image of something showing through the water of a basin. The narrator in fact asserts: “ci si sente visibili come ciottoli in fondo all’acqua” (Cesare Pavese, “Piscina feriale,” in Feria d’agosto, 105). 116 Enzo Gioanola, introduction [2002] to Cesare Pavese, Feria d’agosto, XIX. 156 Gioanola reads the use of this image as a metaphor for the unconscious, where objects lie below the surface, elements that can only be perceived through “un gioco vano di riflessi.”117 I find Gioanola’s reading suggestive, but I would also underline that the “irrisolvibilità teorica” is not necessarily detrimental as we should remember that these situations that Pavese is describing belong to a realm that he defines either irrational or subconscious, a realm where logical rules are not necessarily in effect. What the narrator is after are “cose non dette,” which, however, feel like a well-known object, and whose appearance reinforces his certainty to be rooted in the world. What strikes me then is not the theoretical impasse of wanting to grasp something that is ungraspable, but rather the description of this “momenti di disponibilità assoluta” through an effective simile that reinforces the ambivalence between the presence of a certainty, and the fugacity and evanescence of the manifestations that reinforce it. In fact, these impossible moments are presented as “risvegli,” as “ricordi più lontani [che] mi coglievano come scoperte”118: Ciò accadeva specialmente al mutare delle stagioni, quando l’aria è tutta corsa da brividi di passato che, freschi e inattesi, ci riportano antiche certezze. Quest’antico, questi brividi, mi davano come un incremento di vita, come un senso che sotto il labile istante s’accumulasse un tesoro già mio, che dovevo soltanto riconoscere.119 A parallelism could be here instituted between “un oggetto noto” and “un tesoro già mio,” which the narrator just needs to recognize. Regardless of the paradoxicality of wanting to grasp an object which is only a “lontana apparenza,” the narrator has a “certezza” that what lies at the bottom of the basin, in its essential unreachability, is a treasure he already owns. As we have seen in the second chapter, the searches of one’s symbols or of the origin of one’s transcendental images cannot be undertaken by rational means: a mnemonic investigation or the 117 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 286 (July 17th, 1944). 118 Cesare Pavese, “Il tempo,” in Feria d’agosto, 102. 119 Ibid. 157 reliance on spatial-temporal coordinates may be irrelevant to the success of the search itself. The aim of this endeavor is to recognize “un tesoro già mio” through a “scoperta-ricordo” which operates beyond rational boundaries.120 “L’estate” makes clear references to other stories. First, it invokes “Fine d’agosto”: here, too, a male character is remembering a summer he spent in the city while involved in a summer relationship with a woman. In both stories an important role is given to the window from which the lovers look at the city and at the far away hills. Just as in “Il tempo” the narrator asserts that he has decided to “fare io stesso il giorno.”121 In “L’estate” we witness the idea of actively creating time: “era come se la lunga giornata l’andassi facendo io.”122 “Vocazione” is probably the most emblematic story of the blurring between waking life and dream that Pavese seems so actively to include in many of this section’s stories. The narrator’s need to clarify the nature of the vision that he is recounting is actually at the core of the story itself, as not even the narrator is fully convinced that what he had experienced was not a dream. At the beginning, the narrator affirms that he is sure that it was not a dream, but the reasons he provides to support his belief are not incontestable as they do not rely on common sense and they are not supported by a logical argument. According to the narrator, in fact, the only reason why what happened was real is that he remembers vivid colors and useless 120 “Il campo di granturco,” a story from the first section that we have already analyzed, provides us with an interesting recurrence of this theme. In fact, in this story too a certainty, a disrupted perception of time, and something that shows through the depth of water return in strict relation. The narrator asserts that: “che il tempo allora si sia fermato lo so perché oggi ancora davanti al campo lo trovo intatto. È un fruscio immobile. Capisco d’avere innanzi una certezza, di avere come toccato il fondo di un lago che mi attendeva, eternamente uguale. L’unica differenza è che allora osavo gesti bruschi, penetravo nel campo gettando un grido alle colline familiari che mi pareva mi attendessero. Allora ero un bambino, e tutto è morto di quel bambino tranne questo grido” (Cesare Pavese, “Il campo di granturco,” in Feria d’agosto, 13). In this passage, the certainty is described with the image of touching the bottom of the lake. Here too, regardless of its unreachability, the bottom can be touched, even though the narrator is nostalgic of his courage as a child, when he “osav[a] gesti bruschi.” This too strongly resonates with the lack of the “coraggio di tuffare la mano” lamented in “Il tempo.” 121 Cesare Pavese, “Risveglio,” in Feria d’agosto, 99. 122 Cesare Pavese, “L’estate,” in Feria d’agosto, 107. 158 particulars, which, he maintains, are not usually remembered from dreams. As a statement of conviction, it seems quite weak and could be easily contested. Also, the description of the scene is surreal, as the narrator recounts a moment when he was sitting in a tavern by a window, but he does not know how he ended up there, and also he doubts that there was an entrance. It is as if all the descriptions and details provided by the narrator in his argument for authenticity are indeed detrimental to his case and work instead toward the confirmation of its opposite. As the story continues, the narrator allows for a margin of doubt, “ammesso sempre che in quel pomeriggio io sognassi,”123 thus depriving the story of the only certainty it had until this point, namely the narrator’s confidence. In fact, he admits that he felt a “senso di smarrimento,” a presentiment that “forse intorno a me qualcosa era cominciato che sarebbe finito chi sa come.”124 The certezza in this story is substituted by a “senso incrollabile di fiducia.” If certainty and trust belong to the same semantical area, it should be noted that fiducia is less assertive and irremovable than certezza. The difference is subtle, and yet in “Vocazione” there is not a sense of unshakable certainty like in other stories we have considered. The sense of trust in this story is undoubtedly less assertive considered that the narrator is not even sure of the nature of what he is recounting. This sense of trust arises from the observation of humble details of the landscape: questo senso di fiducia mi è abbastanza familiare, e mi prende ogni volta che da un luogo chiuso dò un’occhiata al cielo, alle piante, all’aria. È come se per un momento avessi dubitato dell’esistenza delle cose e quello sguardo mi rassicurasse. Un vezzo piuttosto banale. Come pure l’abitudine che ne consegue, di cercare il chiuso per godermi l’istante di liberazione quando metto fuori il naso. Nasce di qua che sono un grande frequentatore di caffè e di osterie, e mi piace sedermi negli angoli in penombra, sotto le finestre.125 The use of subjunctive imperfect—“È come se per un momento avessi dubitato dell’esistenza delle cose e quello sguardo mi rassicurasse”—further underscores the distance 123 Cesare Pavese, “Vocazione,” in Feria d’agosto, 112. 124 Ibid., 110. 125 Ibid., 109. 159 from “una certezza” that I mentioned before. This is a counter-factual situation that the narrator seems to recreate deliberately, as prompted by the “banal habit” to doubt of the existence of things on purpose, only to be reassures shortly after by gazing at real, simple things. The window is here presented again as the gateway to a sight which derives from this perspective its meaning. In fact, the window encompasses within its frame a portion of landscape that derives from the limited and selected visual field an ulterior meaning, which it did not inherently have. Evidently, seeing the landscape from a window, from “il chiuso,” provides the subject with a different perspective than the one which comes from a direct experience. This mediation by a filter that separates us from the object we are seeing is very similar to that of the water that fills the distance between us and the object at the bottom of a basin. Moreover, the “istante di liberazione quando metto fuori il naso” closely recalls the “momento d’esitazione” the narrator of Una certezza felt on the doorstep of his “nascondiglio,” which was too an indoor shelter from which to look at the outdoor landscape. The protagonist of “Vocazione” too likes to spend his nights being awake, “deciso di far l’alba in piedi.”126 The perception of time is here too distorted: “dormivo a tutte le ore, e ad ogni risveglio mi pareva fosse mattino: così per me tutto il giorno era un lungo mattino. I caffè e le osterie erano come le tappe di un viaggio che non finiva mai.”127 Time is here marked not by the passing of the hours, but rather by the alternation of waking and sleeping times. For this reason, the narrator experiences multiple mornings throughout the day. Without explanation, the narrator informs us that a man is sitting close to him, a stranger who nonetheless is familiar to him due to shared memories: “il mio compagno non m’inquietava: c’era tra noi una confidenza fatta come di un’immensa e vaga massa di 126 Ibid., 110. 127 Ibid. 160 ricordi, a me impenetrabile in quel momento, ma pure esistente e comune.”128 The shared memories are impenetrable like the known object in the basin was ungraspable. And yet both exist, as confirmed by a certainty in the first case, and a “confidenza” in this story. This familiarity recalls “un tesoro già mio, che dovevo soltanto riconoscere” from Il tempo. Soon the reason for this familiarity is introduced as this new character, a sort of alter-ego for the narrator, “si presenta con la stessa inevitabilità con cui un altro noi stesso appare nello specchio.”129 It is at this point that the narrator starts talking of dreams and about the inevitability of an awakening which he is bound to experience soon, and, in so doing, indirectly recognizing the fact that what he is recounting is a dream. He explains what his “vocazione” is: namely, the challenge, almost the obsession, to explain the meaning of every detail of a dream, in the hope to “cogliere l’operatore in fallo .”130 The narrator’s vocation is thus to catch the operator of his dreams out (“l’operatore che vi proietta il sogno”). Here, too, we witness the splitting in two of the subject, as the narrator himself recognizes that the operator is “[me] stesso.” The oneiric setting of this story actually allows for the compresence of a tripartite subject, which is now split in the narrator, Masino—the familiar stranger, “un estraneo e costui sapevo persino chi fosse”131—and a no better-defined operator whose actions need to be unveiled. The role of the “operator” is fundamental, considering that “un sogno si svolge non come un fatto che accade, ma come un fatto che viene raccontato.”132 Masino, who asserts “quello che so io è vero,”133 seems to be the 128 Ibid., 111. 129 Ibid. 130 Ibid., 112. 131 Ibid., 111. 132 Ibid. The influence of Freud on this story is blatant. The operator is presented as a figure whose role is to disseminate the dream with elements whose meaning is not self-evident. The operator edits the material provided by waking life, and makes of a dream “un fatto che viene raccontato.” In The interpretation of dreams, Freud affirms that “certain material appears in the dream-content which cannot be subsequently recognized, in the waking state, as being part of one's knowledge and experience” because “dreams have at their disposal recollections which are inaccessible to the waking state” (Sigmund Freud, The interpretation of dreams, 9). 133 Cesare Pavese, “Vocazione,” in Feria d’agosto, 115. 161 keeper of factual information, whereas the operator acts as a deceiving device, one that disseminates the dreams with hints that are not self-evident, and whose meaning may or may not reach a full disclosure only toward the end of the dream itself. So, it is not what happens that is fundamental, but rather how it is recounted, the use made of details, and the meaning that derives from it. “Cogliere l’operatore in fallo” recalls thus the process of estrangement already found in “Una certezza,” where the narrator recognizes that “il nascondiglio da cui esco è me stesso.”134 Distancing the self from that self is a step toward understanding the relevance of images, elements, and details in a subject’s life. Towards the end of the story the theme of awakening returns with insistence, presented as a humiliation: “svegliarsi veramente […] sarà solo un’umiliazione. La più grossa di tutte. Ma si potrà raccontarla.”135 The moment of awakening is presented in this surreal prose as a frightening moment, one which the subject resists with all his strength, just like how in other stories some characters would spend the night awake in order to avoid the moment of “risveglio.” If “risveglio” is a dreaded event—“da quel momento non puoi fare più niente”—it nevertheless brings about the possibility of recounting: “bisogna pensarci sopra e capire il perché si fa una cosa, ma raccontarla è diverso.” The narrator is evasive in sharing the significance of the humiliation. In my reading, the humiliation derives from the impossibility to indulge the vocation of “cogliere l’operatore in fallo.” In fact, once the narrator wakes up from the dream, he will not be able anymore to catch the operator out, from that moment on “non puoi fare più niente.” 134 Cesare Pavese, “Una certezza,” in Feria d’agosto, 95. 135 Cesare Pavese, “Vocazione,” in Feria d’agosto, 115. 162 III. “La vigna” The last section of Feria d’agosto is comprised of both theoretical essays and narrative stories. I read both types of texts as a confirmation of my interpretation of this section as representative of Pavese’s idea of maturity. In fact, the theoretical essays are Pavese’s affirmation that a certain level of self-analysis has been reached after his uncertainties and doubts of “La città.” In the more analytic parts of “La vigna,” Pavese theorizes the role of childhood and myth in his literary texts and introduces the question of prima/seconda volta. As we have seen, maturity for Pavese means reconnecting to the child: it means disregarding an approach entrusted to memories, and instead trusting self-abandonment. I claim that the third section represents maturity, to the extent that here the reconnection to childhood is both theorized and narrated. The peculiarity of “La vigna” is that it provides the reader with the interpretative keys to read the whole book, because it introduces the theory of myth and childhood only at the very end. The reader of “La vigna” is thus forced retrospectively to recuperate the stories of the previous sections, being only now able better to understand them. It is as if Pavese replicated—at the reading level—what he had theorized as the accomplishment of maturity: namely, to recuperate childhood’s depths and hidden meanings of which the subject was not aware as a child (“Il mare”), and which, instead, s/he perceived—and yet struggled to grasp—during youth (“La città”). It is only with maturity’s retrospective interest and awareness (“La vigna”) that the meaning of childhood reach its full disclosure. I here consider three narrative pieces—“La vigna,” “Il colloquio del fiume,” and “Storia segreta”—that better provide the reader with the main theme associated with maturity: the encounter of the man with the child. “La vigna” is the piece that connects the theoretical essays with the narrative ones of the section. In fact, an analytical approach is at work in this text, but it 163 is employed to explain a peculiar and personal myth, that of “la vigna.” This element is presented as one “familiare e remoto—infantile, a dirla breve.” If familiar and remote is a combination of adjectives that we have already encountered in other stories from the previous section, that of “child-like” is an interesting addition. Childhood is, in fact, a stage of life that is at the same time the most familiar of things—as it molds and directs us still in adult life —, and the most ungraspable, because we do not necessarily know how to recognize its permanence in us. Just like the object at the bottom of a basin, what we perceive of childhood is a “gioco di vani riflessi.” The vineyard is presented as “le quinte di una scena favolosa in attesa di un evento che né il ricordo né la fantasia conoscono […]. Una stanza in cui da tempo non entra nessuno e la finestra è aperta al cielo.”136 In the first part of the previous quote, we have a reference to landscape as a stage for an event which is expected to happen. This has already emerged in many stories from the past section, for example in “Il prato dei morti” and in “Vocazione,” where the portion of landscape framed by a window was perceived as a stage for an event to take place. In “Il prato dei morti,” the event was the recurrence of a murder every night. In “Vocazione” the event was not clarified, and only a state of waiting was described. In the quote from “La vigna,” both “evento” and “finestra” return, this time with the addition of a closed “stanza,” which too is a recurrent element in Feria d’agosto. We should not be surprised if also in this piece the treatment of time is in line with what we have analyzed so far: “neanche sulla vigna il tempo passa; la sua stagione è settembre e torna sempre, e appare eterna.”137 The vineyard is the only spatial stage on which the encounter of man with the child can take place: Sono passati gli anni, ma davanti alla vigna l’uomo adulto contemplandola ritrova il ragazzo. Il sospetto di ciò che deve—che è dovuto—accadere, la mantiene la stessa e risuscita nel ricordo 136 Cesare Pavese, “La vigna,” in Feria d’agosto, 165. 137 Ibid. 164 l’infanzia. Ma nulla è veramente accaduto e il ragazzo non sapeva di attendere ciò che adesso sfugge anche al ricordo. E ciò che non accadde al principio non può accadere mai più.138 The narrator institutes an equivalence between past and future, in an implosion of temporality where “ciò che deve” and “ciò che è dovuto accadere” are the same thing. This also implies the repetitions and the returns that are intrinsic to Pavese’s idea of destiny. The narrator affirms that at the base of this mythical experience lies something that never happened, and yet “l’uomo adulto” has a suspicion that something relevant happened there. To understand this apparent contradiction, we should retrieve the analysis, undertaken in the second chapter, of what Pavese writes with regard to the possibility of recollections of childhood memories. Memory is for Pavese susceptible only to “ricordi gloriosi,” those that were strongly marked by cultural influences. However, Pavese is interested mostly in those monotonous days when nothing worth of recording happened, because it was only in those moments that his child-self was truly himself without external interferences. For this reason, as I have already recalled in the previous pages, a mnemonic approach is not instrumental to finding what Pavese and his characters are after. As Pavese recommends in “L’adolescenza,” “occorre […] non tanto risalire il fiume della memoria, quanto rimettersi con abnegazione nello stato istintivo, […] quello stampo schietto che influisce sull’intera nostra realtà intima.”139 Nothing happened in the vineyard, because what is worth of interest now is not an event, not a specific thing to be remembered, but rather something that was banal, monotonous and repetitive—the emergence of our “stampo.” This was not even recorded by the consciousness and, for this reason, it is as if it never happened at all: Il ragazzo saliva per questi sentieri, vi saliva e non pensava a ricordare; non sapeva che l’attimo non sarebbe durato come un germe e che un’ansia di afferrarlo e conoscerlo a fondo l’avrebbe in avvenire dilatato oltre il tempo. Forse quest’attimo era fatto di nulla, ma stava proprio in questo il suo avvenire. Un semplice e profondo nulla, non ricordato perché non ne valeva la pena, disteso nei giorni e poi perduto, riaffiora davanti al sentiero, alla vigna, e si scopre infantile, di là dalle 138 Ibid., 165-166. 139 Cesare Pavese, “L’adolescenza,” in Feria d’agosto, 163-164. 165 cose e dal tempo, com’era allora che il tempo per il ragazzo non esisteva. E allora qualcosa è davvero accaduto. È accaduto un istante fa, è l’istante stesso: l’uomo e il ragazzo s’incontrano e sanno e si dicono che il tempo è sfumato.140 Nothing is what happens, and it has not even been noted by the boy who, in that simple moment, did not even perceive its importance. Just like the spatial-temporal dimension has been questioned by Pavese’s approach, its prerogatives and qualities being subverted by a mythical discourse that praises the suspension of time and the importance of luoghi unici, also the relevance of memories according to their permanence in our consciousness is overthrown. For Pavese, the only way to retrieve our “schietto e incancellabile stampo” is if we manage to “trascurare i ricordi gloriosi e confinarsi a scavare le zone monotone e neutre.”141 A meaningless event, “un semplice e profondo nulla,” which the child does not seem to appreciate and remember, will instead trigger in the adult a sense of spaesamento. That nothing is thus familiar because we perceived it at some point in our life, but also mysterious because its existence was never recorded. Spaesamento is a fleeting feeling of belonging, a sense of familiarity, which reconnects the man with his childhood days. Again, this reconnection is not achieved by means of memories, as time disappears: “l’evento che soggiace a tutti [gli eventi] e tutti abolisce: la scomparsa del tempo. Questo non accade, è; anzi è la vigna stessa.”142 The abolition of time and the figure of the vineyard become one when and where a contact is established between man and boy in the moment when l’uomo non ritorna ragazzo, è ragazzo. Per un attimo, in cui giunge a far tacere ogni ricordo, si trova entro gli occhi la vigna immobile, istintiva, immutabile, quale ha sempre saputo di avere nel cuore. E non accade nulla, perché nulla può accadere che sia più vasto di questa presenza. Non occorre nemmeno fermarsi davanti alla vigna e riconoscerne i tratti familiari e inauditi. Basta l’attimo dell’incontro e già il ragazzo e l’uomo adulto han cominciato il loro dialogo che, ricco di giorni, dall’inizio non muta. 143 140 Cesare Pavese, “La vigna,” in Feria d’agosto, 166. 141 Cesare Pavese, “L’adolescenza,” in Feria d’agosto, 163. 142 Cesare Pavese, “La vigna,” in Feria d’agosto, 166. 143 Ibid., 166-167. 166 The man keeps looking at the vineyard as at the keeper of a secret that is about to be revealed. The only thing that happens is the presence of the vineyard in the man’s eyes, the moment when he realizes that it had always been there: “immobile, istintiva, immutabile.” The vineyard is a luogo unico, the stage of the man’s childhood. Nothing happens because this is an ontological realm, one in which the man is the boy. As Pavese asserts in “L’adolescenza:” “la nostra fanciullezza, la molla di ogni nostro stupore, è non ciò che fummo ma che siamo da sempre […]. Qui ricordare non è muoversi nel tempo, ma uscirne e sapere che siamo.”144 As I mentioned before, “La vigna” lies at the threshold between theoretical and narrative writing, and in so doing it connects in Feria d’agosto this two parts whose separation is otherwise demarcated. Through the choice of an element so intimate and biographically relevant as the vineyard, Pavese writes about a mechanism that he considers universal. The place may be unico, but the encounter between man and child it stages is for Pavese something that the most fortunate of us can experience too, once we learn how to get hold of “non ciò che fummo ma che siamo da sempre.” In “Il colloquio del fiume” the narrator, who walks alone in the countryside, affirms to be “nello stato di coscienza in cui tutto può accadere”145 when, in fact, “il ragazzo” starts calling him, followed by a woman. Both the boy and the woman—who are visions, possibly memories—engage the narrator in a dialogue. As the narration proceeds, we are informed that the boy is the narrator himself when he was younger, and the woman is one whom he met once at the train station. This situation is very recurrent in the collection as, again, what is narrated is the encounter between the man and the child. The reason why a woman too is present in this moment 144 Cesare Pavese, “L’adolescenza,” in Feria d’agosto, 164. 145 Cesare Pavese, “Il colloquio del fiume,” in Feria d’agosto, 179. 167 when the man and the child meet again is not quite clear at first. What is interesting is that in her dialogue with the man, this woman refers to the child as if he were a completely different person, and the difference is mostly due to the fact that: “allora non sapevi che cosa è una donna.”146 Again, the relationship with a woman is presented as a watershed in a man’s life, an event that separates the two ages. The boy only occasionally takes part in the dialogue, only to describe his beloved landscape, whose hallmarks are hills, woods, and a balcony. This is a reminder for the man of the importance that all these elements still hold in his thoughts: “ma cos’altro ricordo che una vigna e un sentiero di canne, e un glicine sempre uguale sul balcone? Adesso a volte mi vergogno. Si può pensare di giorno e notte a queste cose? Eppure, scava scava, è tutto qui.”147 The vineyard, the path and the balcony are obsessive images in the narrator’s thoughts, now contextualized by his childhood. They too, similar to what we have seen in the previous story, are a nothing, and yet they are the most meaningful things. The dialogue with the woman is resumed and the two now describe the moment when that child started feeling “la paura e il batticuore,” triggered by the will to run away from home, to the hills, every time that from the balcony he would hear the noise of the train or voices from the hills. But the boy, just like Nino and Gosto from “Il mare,” was not allowed to leave at night and “ascoltav[a] dal terrazzo nel buio.” The presence of both the boy and the woman are about to fade away, but not before she warns the narrator: “ricordati la vigna e il terrazzo,” thus attesting once more to the importance these recurring elements hold both in the story and in the whole collection. “Storia segreta” is the only piece of this last section that has an expansive narrative nature. Many motives analyzed in the other stories recur here too, and there is also an anticipation of some motives that will instead emerge from the analysis of La casa in collina. In 146 Ibid., 180. 147 Ibid., 182. 168 “Storia segreta,” an adult man recounts some events of his adolescence when he moved from the hills of his childhood to the city to study and only returned to the country during summer, which leads him to affirm “mi sembrò d’esser stato ragazzo soltanto d’estate.”148 This story, unlike the others we have so far analyzed, stages a very deep and affectionate relation between the protagonist and both a woman and his father. Sandiana is a young woman, to whom the father proposed once but was declined, but whom he still helped bringing her to his home once she was left by her husband. She was like a mother to the protagonist and his siblings, but also an accomplice in their outdoor adventures. The main reason for this complicity lies in the fact that Sandiana too, like the young protagonist, is fond of the countryside; she knows every hidden corner of her fields and tells legends about the savageness of wolfs and thunderstorms. She is like a companion to the protagonist, the only one with whom he feels he can share his obsession for the vineyard, to the extent that he would like for her to wander there with him: “nella vigna io ci tornavo felice e le chiedevo se veniva anche lei.”149 The protagonist and the woman understand each other. They both have their own landscapes, their own corners in which they experience moments when “nulla accadeva, nemmeno una voce, nei cortili e sulle coste, e questo vuoto m’incantava come se il tempo si fermasse nell’aria.”150 The protagonist used to be fond of “prugnole,” a very sour wild fruit which grows where it is impossible to reach it, and whose savage nature is confirmed by the fact that its branches have thorns: “raccolgono il grano, raccolgono l’uva, e non ce n’è mai abbastanza. Ma la ricchezza della terra si rivela in queste cose selvagge. Nemmeno gli uccelli, selvaggi anche loro, non potevano goderne, perché le spine dei rametti li ferivano negli occhi.”151 Where Sandiana 148 Cesare Pavese, “Storia segreta,” in Feria d’agosto, 189. 149 Ibid. 150 Ibid., 199. 151 Ibid., 191. 169 comes from there are many sloe bushes, and the protagonist is fascinated by this fact and would like to go find them. The sloe too, just like the sea in the homonymous story, belongs to that category of things “che basta che esistano e si gode a saperlo.”152 There is no need to see them—the sea—or to eat them—the sloe— fully to appreciate them: knowing that they exist is enough. In “La vigna” too the narrator mentions a window, which is presented as “la finestra dei gerani.”153 There are several recurrences of this flower—the geranium—and it is always presented as a flower in a maritime or urban setting.154 In this story too, “i gerani che la Sandiana teneva sulla finestra, mi parevano davvero città [...] e dalle foglie si capiva che non crescono in terra.”155 These flowers are described as opposed to the savageness of the countryside, to the extent that the protagonist believes that they do not even grow on the ground. For this reason, they are perceived as something interesting, something never seen before. Sandiana too, who takes care of these “urban flowers,” is perceived as “qualcosa di mai visto [...] come loro.”156 Both flowers and woman are perceived by the narrator as linked to urban life: Sandiana once lived in the city, and the geranium are presented as flowers from the city. Sandiana’s window enriched by the presence of these flowers is thus an interesting standpoint for the protagonist to observe his (savage) countryside. Observing the countryside from the geranium on Sandiana’s window provides in fact a perspective that potentiates the allure of a landscape that is even more mysterious from such a point of view: 152 Ibid., 192. 153 Ibid., 199. 154 There is a subtle reference to these flowers in Il mare, where the narrator affirms that “la casa dei gerani era alla svolta” (Cesare Pavese, “Il mare,” in Feria d’agosto, 73). It should be underscored that the house with these flowers on its balcony performs the role of curtain for the landscape, thus creating a sense of mystery and indefiniteness of what may be behind that “svolta.” 155 Cesare Pavese, “Storia segreta,” in Feria d’agosto, 196. 156 Ibid. 170 la collina è tutta fatta di cose distanti, e a volte rientrando salivo a osservarla nella finestra dei gerani. Tra i gerani e le creste calcinate nel sole c’era comune la distanza, la ricchezza nascosta. Io guardavo dai fiori alle creste ma senza sapere perché lo facessi; né l’avrei detto alla Sandiana che mi voleva canzonare. Mi serviva piuttosto anche lei da finestra, e molte volte la guardavo come guardavo quei gerani, fioriti in città.157 Sandiana performs the role of window for the narrator, a window through which to observe his own land. I claim that this sentence underscores the importance of this female character in the story. Sandiana is a woman that had—at some point of her life—a urban past. Her otherness is clear, and yet Sandiana and the protagonist understand each other, and they find themselves in the other’s stories and relationship to the landscape. I will return to this question after I have introduced the role of the father in this story. If the protagonist’s friendship with Sandiana can rightly be perceived as unusual in a collection where women are presented as “the other,” the same reaction should be expected for the fact that the protagonist is also very close to his father, who is now long dead. In fact, in the economy of the collection, the protagonists’ relation to their fathers, when narrated, is presented as distant and vitiated by an intrinsic incommunicability. In “Storia segreta,” instead, the father is always remembered with both a certain nostalgia and a strong sense of admiration, mostly derived by the fact that he was a man who liked to walk around his hills: “lui sí che i paesi li aveva veduti.”158 The father too, just like the protagonist, “era entrato in città […]. C’era entrato selvatico e non era cambiato.”159 The father’s nature of rustic countryman did not change when he had to move to the city, his fondness for his native landscape remained intact. This is probably the reason why the son feels to be so in tune with his father, whereas in other stories there was not such a bond. After his father’s death, the protagonist talks with Sandiana about the 157 Cesare Pavese, “Storia segreta,” in Feria d’agosto, 200. 158 Ibid., 194. 159 Ibid., 195. 171 old man’s past life, and she starts recounting the adventures he had with women. But the protagonist soon clarifies: “non era questo che cercavo di lui. Le donne l’avevano fatto mio padre, ma c’era qualcosa di più antico di questo, di più segreto e sepolto per sempre. Voglio dire, un ragazzo.”160 It is women that make of a man a father. The role of father is then somewhat vitiated by the contribution of a woman, who, as we have seen in the previous stories and in the analysis of Pavese’s diary, is perceived as an obstacle, almost a diversion, in a man’s life. That of a father is not a state reached from within, it implies the mediation of others—of “the other” par excellance—and this is probably the reason why there are few relevant father figures in Pavese’s writing. However, this is not the case for “Storia segreta,” where the protagonist’s admiration for his parent does not derive from his fatherly role. His father, in fact, had been “un ragazzo” once, and that was the most archaic, mysterious, and fascinating quality of the old man. The father actually is a boy when, after his death, his presence is felt by the son everywhere, as every detail of his beloved countryside is now impregnated with his spirit: pensai che mio padre ora esisteva come qualcosa di selvatico e non aveva più bisogno di girare notte e giorno per dirmelo. [...] Mio padre sotterra non era cambiato. Da corpo di sangue era fatto radice, una radice delle mille che tagliata la pianta perdurano in terra. [...] Ora in tutte le cose sentivo mio padre; la sua assenza pungente e monotona condiva ogni vista e ogni voce della campagna [...]. Lui mi accompagnava dappertutto, mi precedeva sulle creste, mi voleva ragazzo. Nei luoghi più suoi mi fermavo per lui; lo sentivo ragazzo.161 If already when alive, “aveva negli occhi anche lui quel selvatico,”162 now that he is dead and decomposing in the soil, the father has reached the zenith of savageness, and his essence is spread all over the countryside. The father is a boy, he is the boy he once was on those same fields, and his son is now able to perceive that, as he is now too experiencing the same. 160 Ibid. 161 Ibid., 194. 162 Ibid., 192. 172 The protagonist is able to find a common ground with both father and Sandiana, he is able to look beyond the differences that kept them apart, and he eventually finds himself in their perception of life. I claim that here lies the apex of maturity of the whole collection, namely the achievement for the protagonist of an awareness that derives not only from having brought to the consciousness level his own personal myths, but also from the understanding that other people— in the case in point his father and Sandiana—are animated by their own myths too. This opens up to the question, anticipated at the end of the second chapter, that personal myths are indeed an individual answer and reaction to a much wider and shared reality. I claim that this connection is suggested by the concept of “oltranza,” which we have already analyzed in “Il mare” and which returns in this story too. In “Il mare,” toward the end Nino understands that the hill on which he is standing is probably perceived as far and blurry from the sea. In “Storia segreta” too, the idea of infinite and indefinite is contextualized as something that does not exist per se, but always in relation to each one of us, individual, perspectives: una strada e un canneto sono cose comuni […], ma avvistati cosí in lontananza sotto una cresta e sapendo che dietro ci sono altre creste altri canneti e perquanto si passi tra loro ne restano sempre dove noi non andremo e qualcuno c’è stato e noi no.163 What is universal, thus, is the mechanism through which our transcendental images are formed during childhood, and then retraced and conjured up in later stages of our lives. I claim that in Feria d’agosto the interplay and permeability between private and collective is conjured by a style where narrative is contaminated by theoretical, universal claims, and where theoretical, universal claims are sustained through narrative. The sea, the city, and the vineyard are Pavese’s peculiar and private figures used to 163 Ibid. In this story too the references to Leopardi’s infinite are multiple, and sometimes almost literal: “Una siepe di prugnole mi chiudeva l’orizzonte, e l’orizzonte sono nuvole, cose lontane, strade, che basta sapere che esistono” (Ibid., 193). 173 convey his understanding of mythopoeia,164 and I claim that they stand for stages that need to be crossed in order to reach maturity. But they are also stages in the sense of platforms on which something—nothing?—happens. As we have seen, perspective is fundamental in this collection, and this is true also at the level of the three sections. Sea, city and vineyard are the sets of stories, but also standpoints from which to observe each other. It is from the hills that Nino in “Il mare” hopes to spot the sea, and it is from a urban window that the narrator of “Fine d’agosto” observes the hills. Finally, in “Storia segreta,” the protagonist who was born in the countryside and had moved to the city is able to appreciate his vineyard from the viewpoint of a window that has, in his opinion, very urban traits, as a confirmation that he is now closing the circle. He had to move to the city to be now able to look at his native landscape with different eyes. It should not surprise then, that he too, when looking at the fading landscape, whispers: “lontano, chi sa dove, c’era il mare.”165 164 Pavese was aware of the personal nature of these symbols, and on the entry of May 27 th, 1944 he shares his hope that they could also resonate with his readership: “Arduo trasformare se stesso in io dantesco, simbolico, quando i propri problemi sono radicati a un’esperienza cosí individuale come la città-campagna e tutte le trasfigurazioni giungono soltanto a simboli psicologicamente individuali. (La vigna, il cielo dietro, l’orizzonte marino, gli alberi da frutto, le canne, i fienili […]. Se nessun altro ha di queste figurazioni, tu sei servito)” [Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 281 (May 27th, 1944)]. 165 Cesare Pavese, “Storia segreta,” in Feria d’agosto, 193. 174 CHAPTER IV LA CASA IN COLLINA: THE STORY OF AN ENDURING ILLUSION In the present chapter, which is comprised of two main parts, I embark on an analysis of La casa in collina. In the first part, I will consider the position this novel holds both in Pavese’s work and in the cultural environment in which Pavese was working in the late 1940s. I will examine its relation to Neorealism, and in particular to Italian Resistance literature. In the second part, I undertake a close reading of La casa in collina. I consider this novel Pavese’s most problematic text, and this on at least three levels. First, the novel is very much autobiographical in nature, and this has posed many interpretative difficulties. How far can we go, for example, in considering Pavese’s own experience of the Resistance as a compass for an analysis of the text?1 Second, as we shall see in the first part of this chapter, La casa in collina is a very peculiar Resistance novel, because it defies both neorealist style and themes and yet is written by one of the most acclaimed left-wing writers. Finally, this is the first novel influenced by the theory of myth and it implements a whole set of themes, images and a style about which Pavese had been theorizing at length in his diary. I claim that a true understanding of the novel cannot be reached regardless of Pavese’s very complex and at times intricate “dottrina del mito,” and for this reason the findings of the second chapter are preliminary fully to appreciate the depth of what is 1 This important issue has been raised by Thomas Van Order. In his analysis of the “various critical attempts at mediation between Pavese’s individual behavior during the war and the post-war ideological ethos,” the scholar complains that there are numerous inexact accounts and imprecise analysis aimed at justifying Pavese’s non- participation at the Resistance. Following Lajolo’s lead, many critics have in fact interpreted Pavese’s inaction as a “moral lapse”: “with La casa in collina Pavese himself fuels this reading by offering what can be read (with the exception of the final chapter) as an extended confession. Indeed, virtually all who comment upon Pavese’s behavior during the war use La casa in collina as a primary reference, often confusing the identity of the protagonist of the novel with that of the author” [Thomas Van Order, “Cesare Pavese and the Second World War: saving the Poet from the Clutches of History,” in Franco Zangrilli and Anthony G. Costantini, Studi in onore di Umberto Mariani: da Verga a Calvino (Cadmo, 2000), 100]. probably Pavese’s best novel. In fact, many elements I considered in the second chapter are also present in the novel, where they re-enact, on a narrative level, the relations to each other that were presented in the theoretical writings.2 The relevance of both childhood and maturity in a man’s life, the charming and yet brutal nature of the concept of the savage, the methodological and stylistic element of silence in Pavese’s writings, the meaning of landscape and the allure of religion are just a few aspects already analyzed in the previous chapters and functional to my analysis of La casa in collina. In the final section of the second part, I will consider Pavese’s humanitarian message entrusted to the last pages of this novel: namely, the idea that every war—regardless of the historical context or the identity of the warring sides—is a civil war. If in the first part of the novel Pavese seems to argue that war should be accepted with resignation as a component of human nature, in the last pages he put forth an argument of almost opposite claims, one wherein even a violent act against an abhorrent enemy should be questioned in the attempt to justify the reasons behind it. This was the most controversial part of the novel, accused by contemporary critics, among the others Rino dal Sasso and Giansiro Ferrata, of supporting a moral defect that suggested an equivalence between the death of the partisans and that of the Germans or fascists. In fact, the mainstream discourse about World War II of the literature of the late 1940s was one that would rather underline the distance between these two factions, and Pavese’s words on this matter could arguably be perceived as debatable, to say the least. However, I claim that reading the last pages of the novel against the backdrop of Pavese’s theory of myth allows us to better 2 In my interpretation of La casa in collina as a novel where the mythical component is of primary importance and relevance, I disagree with what Franco Pappalardo La Rosa writes when referring to the novel as the one where Pavese “ha ridotto al minimo la componente mitica” [Franco Pappalardo La Rosa, Cesare Pavese e il mito dell’adolescenza (Edizioni dell’Orso, 2003), 112]. 176 understand them. In fact, this would help us to underscore the universality of Pavese’s message, which was disentangled from too contingent historical claims. I read the protagonist’s move from a former acceptance of war to a deep accusation as a transformation that closely follows Pavese’s analysis of the succession of rituals and beliefs, prompted by the overcoming of what is not considered historically justified anymore. In fact, as we shall see, at first Corrado—the protagonist—seems to justify the war as part of a millennial human habit, as one expression of men and women’s contact with their savage substratum. However, after witnessing a bloody ambush to a Fascist wagon, Corrado feels the moral obligation to question what happened, to justify whoever was responsible of the bloodshed. The very last lines of the novel are comprised of a series of questions about the meaning of war, questions that are left unanswered. The crumbling of Corrado’s former understanding of war is not substituted by a new set of beliefs. The reader enters a limbo, suspended between an understanding of war that cannot be sustained anymore, and the answers—yet to be formulated—to those important questions that seal Corrado’s story. I interpret the move from the first interpretation of war to the doubts advanced in the end as one that goes hand in hand with Corrado’s break with his isolation. The brutality of the savage, in fact, spurs Corrado into questioning the validity of his solitary and selfish life- style, which he defines “lunga illusione.” I. La casa in collina and Second Postwar Italy In the early post Second World War years, Italy was a country that was involved in a complex operation of self-definition against both the backdrops of the Fascist Ventennio and of the Resistance. Italian society had upon itself the duty to deal with a fascist national history that was barely past, the responsibility to safeguard the experience of the Resistance, and to promote 177 this Resistance as a paramount “anno zero.” Especially the very first years of the postwar period were thus characterized by a spread desire of tabula rasa of all that fascism meant, particularly in the cultural field. I am not here to discuss whether those purposes were finally achieved, but I would rather consider how the need for a new foundational culture was felt within both political and intellectual circles. What was at stake in the intellectual debate of those years was the responsibility to purify Italy from its fascist legacy as soon as possible, or at least to leave no doubt about the new democratic direction that Italy had chosen to follow. A way to pursue this was emphasizing the heroism and role of the redemptive Italian Resistance, and to diminish the importance of the twenty year-long consent to the fascist regime. Postwar Einaudi, as we have seen, was becoming the publishing house closer than any other to this new climate: the most convincing proof is given by the preference granted to it by the PCI itself. The tragic loss of both Leone Ginzburg and Giaime Pintor, and the fact that they emblematically became “martyrs” of the antifascist struggle, were motives of pride for Einaudi, a sort of proof of antifascism for the publishing house as a whole. Pavese was not immune from this process of “reverberation” of the reputation of his passed away friends within Einaudi’s walls. In fact, he took it upon himself to honor their memory, by strictly selecting manuscripts on the war according to their adherence to those antifascist ideals of which Einaudi was now a mouthpiece. In his editorial activity, Pavese recurred often to this loss the editorial staff suffered. This aspect emerges, for example, in some rejection letters Pavese wrote to aspirant writers, whose manuscripts were, in his eyes, ideologically ambiguous. Pavese explains in these letters that publishing a book by a person once explicitly compromised with fascism, or a book that 178 seems to be nostalgic of the regime, would be equivalent to betraying Ginzburg and Pintor’s memory who died by the hand of that same regime.3 As we have seen in the first chapter, in the 1940s Carlo Salinari, Carlo Muscetta, and Mario Alicata, a group of Roman intellectuals, join Einaudi. They will soon become militant in the clandestine PCI, and, after the war, they will act as the PCI national executives and as the cadre of its political culture. Their political involvement may have often resulted in a noisy presence for Pavese. In fact, it is not uncommon to read in Pavese’s letters a sort of resentment towards them, to whom he refers as the “catoni censori,” especially with regards to la collana viola. As we well know, the Resistance could boast the active and incontestable participation of only a small portion of the Italian citizens. When it comes to the intellectuals’ participation, the situation is even more delicate. Of the great number of those who in post-war years would ideologically support antifascism, only a few could make an uncontested entry into the realm of the intellectual heroes of the Resistance. This realm was inhabited, for instance, by the aforementioned Ginzburg and Pintor, but also by Italo Calvino and later by Beppe Fenoglio.4 A more undefined area animated by different degrees of participation or support is definitely the most populated. Here we can find the “partigiani dell’ultim’ora,” or even intellectuals who resort to a contrived reading of their past activity during fascism as constantly aiming at an antifascism in incognito. We have already considered in the first chapter the case of Muscetta— who used the expression “dissimulazione onesta”—, and of Zangrandi—who instead presented his biography as a “lungo viaggio attraverso il fascismo.” These intellectuals would equate 3 This aspect emerges, for example, from the already quoted letter to Cantoni Canilli (June 22nd, 1945). See first chapter, note 27 page 23. 4 This realm of heroes is not unquestionable though. As emerged in the first chapter, in the 1990s we can notice a tendency to challenge the presumed ideological candor of some of these intellectuals. 179 themselves with the most active antifascists—even when their public biography would not confirm such an interpretation—by hiding behind the justification of the aforementioned “nicodemismo.” The great majority of the remaining intellectual population that did not participate and did not fall under these two categories, just remained quiet, either avoiding the question of political involvement all together, or joining the PCI as an a posteriori compensation of their previous lack of involvement, if not of their involvement in fascism. In the 1940s Pavese was considered as one of the most prominent left-oriented intellectuals. His engagement had been copiously proven by both his antifascist past, and by his collaboration with publishing houses and newspapers that had the PCI’s consent. Nevertheless, just like many other intellectuals of those years, he missed one of the most important appointments with antifascist history: that of the Resistance. We know from his diary and from some letters that Pavese was well aware of the relevance the last years of the war had in the rebuilding of Italian society. It is not a hasty judgment to suppose that he might have felt the burden of regret for not having participated in such a fundamental moment. To support this idea, it should suffice to quote the January 1st, 1946 entry on Il mestiere di vivere: “non hai mai combattuto, ricordalo. Non combatterai mai. Conti qualcosa per qualcuno?”5 The first entry of each year is usually charged with the “responsibility” to summarize the achievements of the just elapsed year. It is touching that the last year of war—the year of the Liberation—is synthesized by Pavese with such harsh and laconic words.6 The uneasiness and extraneousness that emerges 5 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 307 (January 1st, 1946). 6 One of the main characteristics of the diary is the absence of many references to contemporary events. This has been underscored especially with regard to the Resistance struggle, to which Pavese explicitly refers in only a couple of instances. The laconic nature of January 1st, 1946 entry may thus be connected not so much to Pavese’s regret, but rather to the subject of the entry itself. 180 from comments such as the one just quoted was probably magnified by having to work in a cultural environment strongly imbued with both apologetic and celebratory attitudes. We have already seen how problematic and multifaceted Pavese’s PCI membership was and, even though he affirmed “ho regolato i miei conti iscrivendomi al PCI,” it is clear that the situation was not so easy. As emerged in the first chapter, Pavese was both one of the most famous engagée intellectual in postwar Italy, and an author who would never, to some extent, meet completely the expectations of his readership. La casa in collina is probably the text that, better than any other of his composite and eclectic production, could bring together these two clashing aspects of Pavese’s public persona: his commitment to a set of shared values, and his extraneousness to the mainstream discourse used to defend those values. Unlike other of his texts, doomed to be received as extravagant by his readership even only for the choice of the subject,7 I believe that La casa in collina is Pavese’s work that caught his critics most off guard. In fact, when it comes to its subject, La casa in collina appears to be in line with the trend of the publications on Italian Resistance during the Post War years. In fact, the protagonist is evidently an antifascist and he is surrounded by people who are working-class heroes and who—each one to a different degree, and with a different kind of participation—will all join the Resistance. But if Pavese does write about a theme as dear to the political mainstream as the Resistance was, he does so in a very peculiar and original way. First of all, the protagonist is not a hero, and he stubbornly defends his right to solitude and immobility. Secondly, as we shall see soon, the style of the novel defies the most common characteristics shared by many of the novels on the same subject. I claim that this is the point where Pavese, more than in any other circumstance analyzed 7 I am here referring to Feria d’agosto and to I dialoghi con Leucò, where Pavese’s choice of the subject was itself an explicit stance with regard to his poetics of myth. 181 before, really proved to go against the tide. Pavese does that not only by writing about the Resistance and renouncing the neorealist style as the most apt in this enterprise, but also by revisiting the accepted discourse at the level of the moral. No Manichean opposition between partisans and allies on one side, and Fascist and Nazi soldiers on the other, is to be found on the incriminated last pages of La casa in collina. The contraposition between the two fronts is momentarily put aside to leave space to a consideration on the price in terms of human lives, regardless their political or war affiliations. This could have been already a debatable choice in the eyes of Pavese’s Marxist colleagues and critics, but it was further aggravated by the fact that Corrado’s questions are triggered by the sight of corpses of enemies, rather than of fellow partisans, defenseless civilians or allies. In the following pages I will consider the first aspect— the extent to which this novel defies Neorealism; whereas the second aspect—the originality and controversy of Pavese’s humanitarian message—will emerge in the section dedicated to the close reading. I.1 La casa in collina and Neorealism As we have previously seen, Pavese was considered one of the founding fathers of Neorealism thanks to the publication, in 1941, of Paesi tuoi.8 Whereas he undoubtedly lingered in the dictates of the neorealist style with texts such as Il compagno,9 or with the publication of articles for L’Unità, if we look at his post-war production as a whole, what emerges is a progressive estrangement from both neorealist style and subjects. Texts like Feria d’agosto and 8 Cesare Pavese, Paesi tuoi (Torino: Einaudi, 1941). 9 Cesare Pavese, Il compagno (Torino: Einaudi, 1947). 182 Dialoghi con Leucò10 are original results if compared to the general trend of Italian literature, but at least they employed an extravagant style—an extremely lyrical, obscure and monotonous language—to treat an extravagant subject—the investigation on the depths of myth. When it comes to La casa in collina, the situation is less straightforward. As I was briefly mentioning before, there is nothing unusual about the choice of the subject, on which many writers, historians, and journalists were writing in those years. It is instead quite meaningful that Pavese discarded the neorealist style—a style that he had successfully deployed before—to write about the Second World War, whereas the great majority of his fellow writers found exactly in the neorealist style the tools they were looking for to convey their war experiences. I claim that the main demarcation between many neorealist texts and Pavese’s La casa in collina is the meaning accorded to one’s personal experience and the role the artistic filter and intervention have in conveying it. The main trend in Italian Resistance literature was to share one’s own experience of the war as faithfully to reality as possible. In fact, one of the main peculiarities of this literature is that there is a strong bond between the author’s personal wartime experiences and her or his postwar literature. There was by no means a simple translation of experiences to the page, but there was nevertheless a strong referential tendency. The “touch of the real” advocated by Neorealism consisted in this attachment to reality—it being the dialect spoken by partisans, or the description of landscape. What emerges out of the hectic literary and cultural turmoil of the 1940s is a need to understand and share the events of the Resistance. Those who took a part in it, or indirectly supported it, could rely on a sense of belonging and on an authority that were automatically granted to those who were fighting on the “right side.” Even though Pavese did not 10 Cesare Pavese, Dialoghi con Leucò (Torino: Einaudi, 1947). 183 participate in the Resistance, he still claimed for himself the right to share his experience. If Pavese’s war memoirs are very different from those of Calvino and Fenoglio, on one point his literary move resembles theirs very much: just like them, in fact, Pavese draws from his personal life experience to contribute to the chorus of Resistance literary production. His protagonists are a sort of alter-ego: unlike others around them, they do not get involved, but rather escape, hide, or are paralyzed. He too, then, converts his own experience, or lack thereof, into narrative, and by doing so he still manages to write some of the most representative pages of Resistance literature. If “experience” is an aspect of fundamental relevance in both Neorealism and in Pavese’s poetics, we should still acknowledge an interesting difference. In the first case, having taken part in the Resistance would justify the need to write and it could almost automatically turn every non-illiterate fighter into a potential writer. Every single story, no matter how personal, had nevertheless a collective resonance: it could be elevated to be representative of thousands more which, regardless the different landscapes, dialects and characters involved, were all aiming at conveying a shared set of values. Pavese too granted personal experience a great value, but the way he conceived of and appreciated that experience actually led him in a direction that diverged from the neorealist one. And this is because, as we have seen, for Pavese life experiences need to be filtered and considered against the backdrop of the only experience that really matters: that moment—out of space and time—when “nulla è accaduto.” That moment then influences our way of living and perceiving the world—every single experience will be impregnated with that reality. Pavese, in fact, believed that a writer could artistically reach a full expression only if s/he resorted to a fund of encounters with the world s/he had ingenuously absorbed during childhood. Therefore, personal experience is fundamental for Pavese too, but since this experience is not a realistic one, but rather one symbolically charged, art too, which is 184 supposed to nurture on that experience, cannot be confused with the mere account of data, which would be just a chronicle, a documentary. For this reason, what Pavese’s writing was really after was not the realistic description of a landscape, or of characters, or of a given historical moment. His writing was meant to indirectly present the protagonist’s forma mentis through the descriptions of his perceptions of the world around him.11 One of the aspects of which Pavese did not think highly was exactly the detailed and factual neorealist chronicle style, and this judgment clearly emerges from some of his editorial replies to writers who had sent their manuscript to the publishing house. He in fact criticized stories based on “esperienze che non raggiungono l’assoluto poetico, ma restano materia documento.”12 Pavese underlined multiple times the distance between a chronicle and the poetic re-elaboration of real experiences, which only could be described faithfully if the writer resorted to her or his own symbols and myths. An objective description did not belong—according to Pavese—to poetry’s ranks. Pavese in those replies would frankly point out what he considered the “difetto di pressocché tutta la narrativa ispirata al periodo della guerra civile.” Namely the fact that “sempre l’autore ha creduto che bastasse l’enormità dei fatti sperimentati, o creduti sperimentare, per fare letteratura. No, questi libri oscillano invece tra la cronaca e lo sfogo!”13 The historical importance of an experience was not for Pavese enough to make of its chronicle a piece of art.14 11 This is what Bart Van Den Bossche defined “rappresentazione obliqua e tangenziale,” and that we have already considered in the second chapter. See note 152, page 113. 12 Cesare Pavese, letter to Giuseppe (January 21st, 1945), Archivio Storico Torino, Einaudi collection. 13 Cesare Pavese, letter (July 19th, 1947), Archivio Storico Torino, Einaudi collection. 14 Giuditta Isotti-Rosowsky, in her analysis of Pavese’s journey from naturalism to symbolism, thus summarizes the way the author’s innovative post-war writing positions itself within the Italian Neorealist tendency: “Le prese di posizione letterarie di Pavese sono accolte con diffidenza e spesso ignorate. Il momento storico del dopoguerra è tutto teso al documento, alla descrizione degli ambienti, ai personaggi tipici, alle storie che si vogliono leggibili, al racconto trasparente e subordinato alla realtà. Se condivide l'ideale di rinnovamento degli intellettuali impegnati, se condivide i presupposti di una nuova letteratura, Pavese non ne accetta le modalità di esecuzione. Si trova come fuori posto, sul limite del suo tempo e in anticipo su di esso; enuncia, annuncia idee che saranno in corso alcuni anni 185 I think it is worth quoting at length another very interesting letter that confirms what Pavese had written before. This letter is one of the many Pavese—as editorial director at Einaudi—wrote in the Post War years to reject manuscripts, many of which were, assuming from Pavese’s comment, chronicles that would not add anything to the mere factual information they provided. In the following letter, in particular, Pavese shows a resentment against the aspiring writer who had the arrogance to defend his text resorting to the fact that it was about a real war experience: lei sostiene che il suo racconto è valido perché riporta l’esperienza del combattimento e della morte, dei giorni e delle notti trascorsi nel pericolo, soli con se stessi e il proprio ideale. Ripeto che se questo bastasse a fare uno scrittore, qualunque reduce di guerra potrebbe aspirare al titolo. Ma, vede, succede che per scrivere non basta “l’esperienza,” occorre l’esperienza appunto letteraria, e questa coinvolge altre responsabilità, altre notti trascorse insonni in combattimenti verbali—forse più futili—ma comunque indispensabili allo scopo. La leggenda che basti a fare il poeta la scuola dell’esperienza vissuta è di origine romantico-americana, e non ci credono ormai più che i giornalisti.15 This letter brings to the fore the relation between two different kinds of experiences: those from real life, and the literary ones. Real life experiences alone are not enough, if one wants to make of them poetry. Those experiences need to go through another, indispensable, battleground—the literary one—and, only after “combattimenti verbali” they may, eventually, reach the ranks of poetry. The aspect that comes to the fore as the most distant from what would be expected from a novel about the Italian Resistance is the fact that Corrado is not a hero of any kind. A canonic novel would recount the adventures and the growth of a character, who ends up gaining a higher political and social awareness through the experience of the Resistance. Unlike many other working-class protagonists, Corrado is a professor, a “scienziato,” who has clear and firm dopo.” Giuditta Isotti-Rosowsky, “Cesare Pavese: dal naturalismo alla realtà simbolica,” in Studi Novecenteschi 15.36 (1988): 280. 15 Cesare Pavese, letter to Costanzo Amelio (July 25th, 1947), Archivio Storico Torino, Einaudi collection. 186 opinions about fascism and the war from the beginning. Also, as a bourgeois member of the Resistance—Corrado is a professor in Turin who can afford to live on the more secure hills—he is very aware of the fact that the wartime sacrifices and choices have on his life a very different impact than on those of his working class “comrades.” As one of the characters will remind him, “per chi ha la pagnotta e può stare in collina, la guerra è un piacere,”16 and this comment will make Corrado more aware of how better his life’s quality is if compared to other people around him. In the canonic Resistance novel, the main characters—quite often just a pretext to refer to “il popolo” as a whole—are animated by a sense of personal sacrifice in the name of a higher mission that transcends the single life. For this reason, most of the time, the hero dies, as the confirmation of her or his experience being just one among many, and also as a reminder to the reader of the partisans’ will to immolate themselves for final victory of the cause, namely the liberation from German occupation and the collapse of the RSI.17 Corrado, on the other hand, is not such a selfless hero. As we shall see later, there is a personal growth in Corrado as well, but this growth does not result in the protagonist’s integration into a coherent world. If anything, Corrado’s path towards the acquisition of awareness confirms his extraneousness from the surrounding world. He is a fortunate one, one who manages to repeatedly save himself just by hiding and by chance, and not as a result of his strategic skills or of his courage as an active participant to the Resistance. As it has emerged from the previous pages, the importance granted to personal experience stands out as one of the main and most relevant differences between Neorealism and 16 Cesare Pavese, La casa in collina, 50. 17 The protagonist’s sacrifice for the success of the cause is a prominent event in Renata Viganò’s L’Agnese va a morire, sacrifice that is anticipated already in the title of the novel. This motif recurs also in Neorealist movies. Emblematic is, for example, the fate in Rome Open City of a leader of the Resistance, Giorgio. Giorgio in fact dies as the result of tortures inflicted by Gestapo officers who wanted to extort from him some information on the whereabouts of his comrades. 187 Pavese’s poetics implemented in La casa in collina, followed by the fact that Pavese did not make of Corrado a war hero of any kind. However, I believe it would be wrong to claim that there are no residual influences in this novel. It would be more precise to affirm that Pavese was probably still writing within certain parameters, but he adapted them for his stylistic journey towards a quite original product. Some conjunctures may then appear quite explicit: for example, the importance granted to the landscape, the (sporadic) emergence of the importance of dialect; an insistence on the concept of the working class’s almost instinctual motivations in its participation in the war. But if we look at the ways these themes are developed, we can easily agree that they do not converge towards a realistic depiction of what war on the Turinese hills was like, but rather contribute to the portrayal of a much more lyrical and inaccessible realm. The relevance that landscape has in Pavese’s novel is probably the best example I could provide to show how a common element can actually have very different outcomes. Landscape is a very important aspect in the Italian Resistance literature, as it is imbued with strategic implications, most of the time the familiarity with the territory being the only tactical weapon at the partisans’ disposal. The relevance of landscape in Pavese’s work is also well known, and not only in La casa in collina. I will delve into this question in the second part but, for the time being, it should suffice to say that the hills, the woods, and the fields that provide the background to the protagonist’s story belong much more to an ambiguous dimension where past and present meet and merge together. If the hills are relevant for Corrado it is not only because they are functional to his survival during the time of war (they offer him, at least at the beginning, a safe shelter), but mainly because they are the landscape setting where he grew up as a child and where he encountered the world for the first time. As we shall see, Corrado’s emotional attachment to his childhood landscape has interesting psychological implications, as it reverberates in his fondness 188 for solitude and in his avoidance of any direct involvement in the war present. Corrado’s symbiotic relation to his hills charges them with a symbolic meaning that supersedes the realistic one promoted instead by Neorealism. II. Close reading The dichotomies hills-city, childhood-adulthood, and savage-rationality are probably the best known to Pavese’s readers. As we have seen, Pavese plays at length with these elements in other of his texts, especially in Feria d’agosto, and for this reason I will rely on an inter-textual comparison to shed light on their relevance in La casa in collina. The relation these elements entertain with each other is also important, as they actually derive their meaning and their role within the economy of the novel from their mutual connection. My aim in this section is to problematize these elements a step further by adding to them other categories less explored—if not ignored at all—like the interplay between present and past, and between light and obscurity. In my reading I underscore the dynamic between all these elements, trying to look at the bigger picture where attention should be paid not only to what happens within each single dichotomy, but rather by looking at the general interplay of them all. My reading of this novel also takes into account the complex nature of the protagonist. Corrado is both the narrator of the story and the main character of the action. In fact, since the beginning of the novel, the reader is alerted that there is a Corrado who is narrating, and a Corrado who is narrated. They are only six months apart, but it is clear that the narrator has a deeper understanding of the events, as he refers to the facts he is about to narrate as a “storia di 189 una lunga illusione.”18 Brian Moloney reads this distinction between the two Corrado as a condemnation from the part of the narrator who distances himself from all his other self has (or has not) done. For this reason, according to the scholar, Corrado is not simply Pavese’s alter ego, as the distinction between narrator and character implies a judgement from the part of the author too.19 As it will emerge in the analysis, there is also another level where the figure of Corrado presents itself as composite. Corrado considers his past selves of his childhood and youth as distinct entities, whom he imagines to meet and with whom he has conversations. It is as if he does not consider the time of his life as a continuum, but rather as the juxtaposition of different lives to which he often refers using the metaphor of “stanze.”20 The second part of this chapter is composed of four sections, dedicated to the prologue (chapter I), to the two main parts in which I claim the novel is divided (chapter II-XII; chapter XIII-XXII), and to the epilogue (chapter XXIII). The first and last chapters of La casa in collina form a frame that encompasses the two main parts as the seat of the action. In the frame, Corrado is back in his hometown and recounts his story. Whereas the prologue anticipates themes and questions without resolving them, and for this reason could be considered quite difficult to interpret, the epilogue draws on those same themes and questions that, after the narration of the whole story, gain a much clearer meaning and message. In the first section of this second part, I introduce those themes—mainly Corrado’s closed personality and his lonely lifestyle, his peculiar relation to war, the fact that he considers his story as a “lunga illusione.” In the second section, I analyze the first part of the novel where 18 Cesare Pavese, La casa in collina, 4. 19 Brian Moloney, “Vittorini, Pavese, and the ethics of armed Resistance,” in The Shared Horizon, ed. Tom O’Neill (Dublin: Irish Academic press, 1990), 185-202. 20 As it has emerged in the third chapter, both the treatment of ages and the metaphor of rooms to refer to them are recurrent motives in Feria d’agosto. 190 the action begins. The story is set in World War II, and Corrado is a science teacher in a school in Turin, but he lives on the hills, renting a room from an old mother and her unmarried daughter, Elvira, who is evidently in love with him. But Corrado does not care about her affection and interest, and he would rather walk alone around the hills and in the woods with only the company of a dog, Belbo. In one of these wanderings he finds an inn, the Fontane, where evacuees from Turin meet at night. Among these people he recognizes Cate, who was once his girlfriend, and with whom he had abruptly broken about ten years before, and her son, Dino. Even if he is surrounded by these people, Corrado will always safeguard his solitude, thinking that being able to be alone on his hills and linger in childhood memories is the best antidote against the war. It is in this first part that the reader is introduced to many of the components I mentioned before. Enquiring into these components, I will start with what is probably the most expected step, namely the analysis of the relevance of the hills in La casa in collina, relevance that emerges also in comparison to the role played by the city. At least at the beginning of the story, the hills, for Corrado, are a safe place to which he returns at night because they offer a better shelter than the one in Turin which is under the constant risk of being bombed by the Allies. As we shall see, this natural setting is also closely linked to the dimension of childhood—and hence to that of memories, whereas the city is where Corrado works during the day, where he sees the destruction caused by the war, which links the Piedmontese city to the present. The dynamic between past and present is also often parallel to that between light and obscurity, which manifests itself mainly in the contraposition between day and night. For this reason, in my reading I underscore two sets of quartets: hills – childhood – memories – night; city – adulthood – present – day. After having pointed out this relation, I will proceed by considering the 191 relevance war has to Corrado’s life. Besides the discomforts and fears that a conflict inevitably brings about, Corrado perceives the war not just as a destructive power, but also as something to a certain extent “familiar.” The war, in fact, shares with the untouched nature of the hills and with his childhood memories that “savageness” which fascinates him so much. Finally, I will consider the complex dynamics that link together the three main stages of a man’s life— childhood, youth, adulthood—in Corrado’s own experience. I examine the role the female figure has within this dynamic, as it is perceived as something unfamiliar and that does not belong but, at the same time, as another version of the savage, more mysterious and ungraspable. In the third section I will analyze the second part of La casa in collina. If in the first part Corrado, despite the explicit signs and consequences of war around him, was still able to keep his detachment from reality, in the second part this detachment becomes more and more difficult to maintain. After the fall of Mussolini’s government, and with the invasion of Northern Italy by German troops, the consequences of war become more poignant for Corrado who managed, until then, to keep his safe haven in the hills. People around him are getting more politically involved, whereas he would like to keep his distance. The Fontane itself becomes a storage place for weapons with which to supply the forming partisan bands in their reaction against the invaders. His hills, in fact, are eventually affected by the repercussions of war with the beginning of the partisan fight, which finds there a safe shelter and headquarters. Corrado assists in the ambush performed by fascist soldiers that terminates the clandestine activities held at the Fontane, and which results in the deportation of the inn’s guests. Only Corrado and Dino are able to save themselves. Thanks to Elvira’s intercession, they are sheltered at a priests’ boarding school. Corrado has to flee once more as the school itself becomes a place that is not safe anymore. He goes back to his hometown, whereas Dino joins the Resistance, despite his young age. On his 192 journey back home, Corrado witnesses the ambush of a fascist wagon performed by some partisans and something clicks in his being that makes him realize he could no longer be extraneous to the war: the sight of dead enemies changes his perception of war and life forever. This is because he understands that it is impossible to maintain a detachment from the war, and only the fact of surviving already involves you and put you in a relation with those who did not make it. He eventually manages to reach his hometown and, while the war is still raging, starts recounting this story. I claim that this last part introduces a new set of recurrent elements— “grazia,” “salvezza,” “pace,” “speranza”—for which Corrado longs desperately. Corrado is in fact at times overwhelmed by ecstatic raptures that are spontaneous and that he tries to deliberately recreate or to rationally recall without success. The physical shelter his hills could provide is now substituted by the longing for the other, spiritual, shelter that only the “grazia” could grant. In this third section I will analyze how “grazia,” “salvezza,” and “pace” are all transcendental values that belong to a religiosity that Corrado would like to embrace as his new shield against historical contingencies. I also consider how the concept of war changes for Corrado, and I try to place together the last phases of his journey of a “lunga illusione.” Finally, in the section dedicated to the epilogue, I will analyze the last chapter, one of the most dense and relevant of La casa in collina. The observations introduced in the prologue are conjured up in the last pages of the novel, and Corrado tries to put together the story of what happened to him, which he defines as a “lunga illusione,” referring to his tendency to isolate himself, which—especially in times of war—is only an illusion because everybody is involved. 193 II.1 “C’è sempre stata questa guerra”: the Prologue As mentioned above, Pavese establishes the frame of the novel from the very opening pages, providing the reader thereby with those coordinates that will help her in her journey through the story. Both the prologue and the epilogue are set in the hills where the protagonist was born and to which he returns. This is the place where he is finally able to start recounting his story: in this familial setting the action of writing and the work of memory unfold. The narrator informs us right away that those “antiche colline” are not the ones where the action takes place, but he does not discern between the hills of the frame and those of the action: “la collina era un aspetto delle cose, un modo di vivere. Non vedevo differenza tra quelle colline e queste antiche dove giocai bambino e adesso vivo.”21 Already on the first page, the narrator clarifies why the hills are so important. The hills are not just a scenery, but they are actually imbued with the actions themselves. Their relevance is not borrowed from the significance of the events to which they provided a landscape background. They are the site where the first encounter of Corrado as a child with the surrounding world took place, and for this reason they provide and reflect Corrado’s forma mentis: that first encounter shapes all the encounters to come.22 I consider the above quoted passage as semantically highly condensed. I read the choice of the adjective “antiche” as a linguistic clue. Different from its more common synonyms like “passato” or “vecchio,” “antico” carries a stronger meaning. The preference for this adjective over milder synonyms not only implies that more time has elapsed, but also places the childhood hills in a more recondite dimension, that is not only long passed, but almost out of time. I also consider interesting the fact that the narrator refers to those arcane hills as “queste […] dove vivo adesso,” 21 Cesare Pavese, La casa in collina, 3. 22 I refer to the analysis of “luoghi unici” I tackled in the second chapter for a better understanding of the relevance of landscape in Pavese’s writing. 194 thus anchoring them to a very precise and concrete present, that of the narration. The juxtaposition of “antiche” and “queste” and “dove vivo” cause the dimension of time to collapse, suggesting from the beginning that the narrator compresses past and present in this novel, and this also influences the way time and space are perceived by the reader. Finally, it is symptomatic that Corrado is writing from the hills where he used to play as a child and that, as we will know by the end of the novel, he still considers as intrinsically imbued with his childhood memories: “per me la collina resta tuttora un paese d’infanzia, di falò e di scappate, di giochi.”23 This is reminiscent of Pavese’s conviction that the action of writing depends on one’s ability to reconnect to childhood, the most precious stage of one’s life. This is how Pavese the editor replied to an author anxious to see his manuscript published: “se potesse dimenticare tutte le balle, e tornare bambino, diventerebbe forse un romanziere.”24 The narrator informs the reader that La casa in collina is a “storia di una lunga illusione”25 and he clarifies immediately that he is not blaming the war for what happened, “anzi, ne sono certo, la guerra potrebbe ancora salvarmi.”26 These first pages are difficult to interpret, as the reader is not provided with enough information to decipher these very dense passages. Nevertheless, the peremptoriness of the tone convinces the reader not only that this illusion is the fulcrum of the story, but also that war has a secondary relevance compared to it. Not only is the war not responsible for what happened—quite a contradictory exordium for a war novel—but we also know that, so far, it has not been able to save Corrado from his illusion. It is not completely clear at this point what this illusion could be. The reader will have to pass through the entire 23 Cesare Pavese, La casa in collina, 121. 24 Cesare Pavese, letter, Archivio Storico Torino, Einaudi collection, 2340/4, doc. 1025 25 Cesare Pavese, La casa in collina, 4. 26 Ibid. 195 novel to understand that probably Corrado’s illusion is his conviction that, even in time of war, he could live a solitary life—one where the repercussions from the outside world can be minimalized as a result of a detachment from both people and events. Furthermore, this illusion implies that just by hiding, one could save oneself, by allowing the world to “happen” on its own. Also, Corrado is deluded as he considers, in part still in the epilogue, his childhood hills as immune, detached and safe from the horrors of the war. The disillusionment is probably due to the realization that there is no protective shield between him and the outside.27 As we shall see soon, Corrado’s world rotates around a few rigid fixations, that he also believes regulate it. Everything that happens to Corrado can be considered as a process of “waking up,” which he resists like a sleepy person would do by snoozing through his alarm clock. In many circumstances Corrado is presented with the possibility of changing his life, to be part of something bigger than his little, private world. Certain people at the Fontane could have been of some inspiration to him: Fonso, who is a politically aware factory worker and who will later join the partisans; Cate, who is involved in a war that threatens her interests as a mother and as a working class person; Dino, who, despite his young age, takes an active part in the war. In all those circumstances, he reacts by stepping aside, thus letting the others do the “practical work,” while he nevertheless provides his spiritual and ideological support. Already on the first page Pavese informs the reader that Corrado’s problem is his illusion, and that this is correlated to the raging war. Before trying to decipher the density of this connection any further, I should embark 27 In my interpretation of the meaning to be accorded to “lunga illusione” I strongly disagree with Pappalardo La Rosa who claims that Corrado’s illusion is that he believed that he could share his life with and do something good for other people. According to the scholar, Corrado was deluded during the war because he believed that, in an extraordinary situation, he could finally take action, make decision and move from a contemplative to an active life. For La Rosa Corrado will understand eventually that he is just a hopeless solitary. On the contrary, I claim that the “lunga illusione” is the one responsible for Corrado’s bashfulness and refusal to take active part in everyday life, even before the war. Corrado will be flushed out of his “nascondiglio” by war events and forced to understand that he cannot conduct a solitary and aseptic life anymore. There are not hideaways that can preserve him from the implications of a war. 196 on a deeper analysis of the relation Corrado entertains with the war, a relation that, as the reader has been informed since the very first pages, is of fundamental importance. Throughout the novel, but already in the first chapter, Corrado refers to the conflict as something familiar, a circumstance that requires a way of living that Corrado had already adopted earlier, in peacetime: “c’è sempre stata questa guerra. Tutti un bel giorno siamo soli.”28 For this reason, Corrado finds in the war a sort of justification for his behavior and for his detachment from people and events, to the extent that he equates war with solitude: la guerra mi tolse soltanto l’estremo scrupolo di starmene solo, di mangiarmi da solo gli anni e il cuore. Con la guerra divenne legittimo chiudersi in sè, non rimpiangere più le occasioni perdute. Ma si direbbe che la guerra io l’attendessi da tempo e ci contassi, una guerra così insolita e vasta che, con poca fatica, si poteva accucciarsi e lasciarla infuriare, sul cielo delle città, rincasando in collina […]. Quella specie di sordo rancore in cui s’era conchiusa la mia gioventù, trovò con la guerra una tana e un orizzonte.29 Corrado describes his behavior and his way of living as if he had predicted the war a long time before its outbreak. Furthermore, what is presented as a characteristic of his temperament— “sordo rancore”—finds in the hatred and violence of war a familiar environment. Corrado had willingly chosen for himself what the war was now imposing on the rest of men and women. For example, Corrado sees how the majority of men during war time seem not to be interested in women, as they are too busy satisfying more immediate instincts—such as that of survival—and he points out how he had not been thinking about women for a long time already: “nella città disordinata e sempre all’erta, più nessuno osservava le donne di un tempo […]. Anche in questo la guerra, io l’avevo prevista. Per me questo rischio era cessato da un pezzo.”30 28 Cesare Pavese, La casa in collina, 23. 29 Ibid., 4. 30 Ibid., 16. 197 According to Thomas Van Orden, Pavese interprets war as an “ultimate socializing force”31 that threatens the detached observation he needs to write, and thus also his ability to function in the society as an artist. This is an interesting consideration as it is the opposite of what Corrado—at least in the first part of the novel—thinks of war. In historical terms, the scholar argues, Pavese denies war a character of novelty. According to Van Order, the Turinese author does not perceive war as an epochal event, but rather as the manifestation of millenary patterns of human behavior: in terms of history, Pavese belittles those who see great significance in each of the events of the war, not because he does not understand the unusual intensity of these events, but rather because he sees them as a continuation of millennial patterns of human conduct rather than as decisive moments that might change the course of human existence. 32 I agree with this interpretation, and I claim that such “patterns,” when it comes to war, refer mainly to the savage, which appears to be a recondite substratum that all women and men 31 Thomas Van Orden, “Cesare Pavese and the Second World War,” 102. Pavese’s interpretation of war as a socializing force emerges from some diary notes written in 1940, for example from the entry of June 5 th, where the author asserts: “la realtà della guerra suggerisce questo semplice pensiero: non è doloroso morire quando muoiono tanti tuoi amici. Dalla guerra nasce il senso di gruppo. Benvenuto” [Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 187 (June 5th, 1940)]. 32 Thomas Van Order, “Cesare Pavese and the Second World War,” 105. Pavese’s approach to war as described by Van Order seems to replicate what Mircea Eliade considers the understanding of history that women and men of traditional civilizations had. In fact, they did not accord any value to historical events in themselves as a sort of “defense against history” (Mircea Eliade, The myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, 141). In his study of archaic ways of tolerating historical events, Eliade tackles the question of historical justification, and in doing so he also analyzes an understanding of history as a cycle. In fact, ancient mode of justifying historical catastrophes would entail either the conception “of cyclical time and the periodic regeneration of history” (Ibid., 143) or the recognition “in the unremitting pressure of events, [of] signs of the divine will or of an astral fatality” (Ibid., 142- 143). These were in the past useful ways to cope with historical tragedies, to deal with what he defines the “terror of history.” In fact, “the sufferings […] were regarded as a punishment inflicted by God, the syndrome of the decline of the “age,” and so on. And it was possible to accept them precisely because they had a metahistorical meaning, because, for the greater part of mankind […] history did not have, and could not have, value in itself. Every hero repeated the archetypal gesture, every war rehearsed the struggle between good and evil, every fresh social injustice was identified with the sufferings of the Saviour […], each new massacre repeated the glorious end of the martyrs” (Ibid., 151-152). Corrado’s understanding of war seems to replicate to a certain extent the archaic interpretation of history studied by Eliade. In the last chapter of his book, the scholar also wonders how can the “terror of history” be tolerated from the view-point of historicism, now that the past mechanisms of dealing with the terror of history are not effective anymore. 198 share. War, as we shall see, becomes just one of the many manifestations of the savage and it is because of this connection that war feels like something familiar to the protagonist.33 The savage is a pillar concept in Pavese’s poetics, not only a literary theme, but also an element that he investigated at length on a theoretical level. As he writes in Il mestiere di vivere, “il selvaggio come tale non ha in fondo realtà. È ciò che le cose erano in quanto inumane:”34 “savage” is, then, how things were before consciousness and civilization; for this reason, according to Pavese, savage is also how the world is perceived by a child, who experiences everything as incredible and mysterious. But there are also other occasions beside the primitive world and childhood perceptions when the “savage” can be conjured up: “la natura ritorna selvaggia quando vi accade il proibito: sangue o sesso.”35 The bloodshed, the spirit of survival triggered in those who live under war time, the suspension of civilization and the immersion in a more recondite state are aspects of the savage that emerge again during war time. The combination of both horror and fascination is reminiscent of the relationship Corrado had with the surrounding world as a child, when he was first discovering the reality around him and would perceive it as something extraordinary. This encounter was set in the hills, in the woods and in the fields of his childhood, and this is why those natural landscapes spark a reaction in Corrado that synthesizes the fear and the attraction for the unknown. In Corrado’s eyes the war is restoring the hills to that savage nature they had when he first encountered them, when his perceptions as a child were blurred by the enthusiasm of those discoveries. But the narrator informs us that Corrado was living in a sort 33 In its connectedness to the savage, Pavese’s war in La casa in collina closely recalls what Freud wrote in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle with regard to the death drive, which he suggested was an instinctual drive competing with the pleasure one in governing individuals’ lives. The allure of the savage and of bloodshed Corrado experiences at the beginning of the novel, and the idea that humans’ tendency to wage war is something innate and structural, could be in fact explained resorting to Freud’s death instinct, “the purpose of which is to guide life towards death” (Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Group Psychology; And, Other Works. Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1968, 57). 34 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 334 (July 10th, 1947). 35 Ibid., 284 (July 13th, 1944). 199 of re-enactment of his childhood and that he had this tendency to solitude already before the war. For this reason, Corrado’s illusion to be able to live in a complete and safe detachment from the surrounding world is not to be blamed on the conflict. The war, as the narrator points out, simply made his fondness for solitude legitimate, because now that same fondness was shared by many men and women who were switching to survival mode because of the war. For this reason, at least in the very first part of the novel, the reader should be suspicious of what the narrator is telling him. In fact, the war could be, at least in part, responsible for nurturing Corrado’s illusions and for implementing a lifestyle which he should have overcome. But things are bound to change soon. As we shall see, it will be precisely the war to break that imaginary security cordon between Corrado and the outside world, between city and countryside, and it will be the war that flushes Corrado out of his cave and forces him finally to recognize his lifestyle as a “lunga illusione.” But during the events recounted in the first part, Corrado is still unaware of what is about to happen. In the next subsection I will closely analyze the first part of the novel— from chapter II to chapter XII. II.2 “Una strana immunità in mezzo alle cose” As already anticipated, of all the aforementioned dichotomies, the first to emerge and probably the most important is the one between city and hills. As we can infer from the title itself, city and hills are probably the main elements at play in this novel. The most evident meaning of this distinction is that Turin represents the place where Corrado works, to where he commutes daily for his adult life. Turin is also a city heavily hit by bombings, only inhabited by those who cannot afford a safer home to which to return at night, preferably in the hills. At the beginning of the novel then, the hills bordering Turin represent a safer alternative to the city, a 200 place to which Corrado comes back every night to find a secure shelter against the raging of war. I consider the relation between city and hills as part of a more complex system of dynamics that has not been taken into account by Pavese’s scholarship36: the opposition is not only between city and hills as a set of ancillary elements make their entry as well. Generally speaking, I claim that when the action is in the city it is during the day, and the action itself is always more or less directly connected to the war: the destruction caused by the bombings; the commotion of factory workers following July 26th; the state of confusion into which Corrado’s school is thrown after the bombings or when one of his colleagues is arrested. When Corrado goes back to the hills, it is at night: the atmosphere is rarefied, and the war seems just a distant memory. Actually, if war is seen as something destructive in the city, its effects in the hills are quite reassuring for Corrado. In fact, the lifestyle that the war imposes on those who live in the hills is very close to, and reminiscent of Corrado’s lifestyle as a child. In the first chapters this differentiation between city and hills is particularly strong, and it is here that the two quartets of elements emerge with emphasis: hills – childhood – memories – night; city – adulthood – present – day. In the next few pages I will analyze these dynamics, before moving on to an analysis of the way they breakdown in later chapters of the novel. In times of peace the hills were covered by the numerous lights of the houses. Voices and songs would animate the cheerful evenings after a long day of hard work. During the war, this is no longer a common scenario; everything is shut down for fear of being spotted by the war planes flying above. A deep silence and an even deeper darkness reign. The contingencies of war 36 The latest studies on the relevance of Langhe landscape in Pavese’s writing have been collected by Ugo Roello in an anthology [Ugo Roello, Pavese e le Langhe di ieri e di oggi: tra mito e storia (Soveria Mannelli: Rubettino, 2009)]. This anthology, published on the heels of the centenary of the Piedmontese writer’s birth, boasts the contributions, among others, of Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti, Gian Luigi Beccaria, Elio Gioanola, Mariarosa Masoero, Paolo Mauri, Lorenzo Mondo, and Anzo Marzio Mutterle. 201 seem then to restore the hills to their natural look,37 a look that reminds Corrado of his childhood: “il gran buio pesava, copriva ogni cosa, e la terra era tornata selvatica, sola, come l’avevo conosciuta da ragazzo.”38 Those savage traits that are dimmed during peacetime are now in full sight again. Both the solitude and the savage landscape, imposed and restored by the war, trigger in Corrado a pleasing sense of escape in lingering on childhood memories: “dietro ai coltivi e alle strade, dietro alle cose umane, sotto i piedi, l’antico indifferente cuore della terra covava nel buio, viveva in burroni, in radici, in cose occulte, in paure d’infanzia. Cominciavo a quei tempi a compiacermi in ricordi d’infanzia.”39 The landscape that fascinates Corrado is the one “dietro le cose umane,” which incredibly echoes Pavese’s definition of the savage as “ciò che le cose erano in quanto inumane.” The savage nature of a landscape hit by war recalls humankind’s savage predisposition to violence that becomes particularly evident during a conflict. In this case too, the savageness hides underneath “human things,” it digs its roots in the occult and entertains a close relation with our primeval fears. I consider the past passage as one where the perception of the savageness of war is cast on the landscape. I would like to return now to a question that arose in the past pages, one that is of fundamental importance to my reading: the relationship between light and dark. I claim that it provides a background to the main oppositions between city and hills, and between the present 37 John B. Jackson too interprets the traces left by war on a given landscape as the re-emergence of archaic traits. Following the first, disastrous changes, those of the bombings and devastation of combats, there is a second super imposition operated by the army in its reorganization of the territory and in the drawing of maps: “it was strange to observe how both parts superimposed a military landscape on the landscape of devastation. It was even more strange, I thought, to see how the military landscape resembled the old pre-technological landscape, especially in the way it organized space […] The traditional spatial order reappeared, though in a contemporary form” [John Brinckerhoff Jackson, The necessity for ruins, and other topics (University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 12]. In this case, Jackson writes about the implementation of pre-technological times treatments of landscape that is remindful of feudality, but I would like to stress how for the scholar too, the consequences of war on landscape are perceived as a regression to an archaic state. 38 Cesare Pavese, La casa in collina, 5. 39 Ibid. 202 time and lingering in memories and commemorations, both of which it traces out quite faithfully. A sort of binary opposition falls in place according to this interpretation: an illuminated setting usually provides the background to Corrado’s dealings with the present; a dark one, instead, usually allows the protagonist to be lost in his thoughts about his childhood and youth. It is not a case, then, that the situations when Corrado finds himself reflecting on the war are set in a luminous setting—as we shall see, he is “sotto il cono di luce” at least in two circumstances. At the same time, it should not surprise the reader that it is at night, when wandering in obscure woods or in other situations when eyesight is impaired, that Corrado lingers in his memories and actually loses the distinction between past and present.40 We have already seen the peculiar way in which Corrado considers the war, reading the contingencies of history against the backdrop of his private world—as if war were just a confirmation, an implementation of his lifestyle. Rather than focusing on the dangers and horrors of the conflict, Corrado reads war as a convenient excuse that, at least at the beginning of the story, restores a landscape and a set of emotions that bring him back to his childhood. He is completely detached from the real implications of what is happening around him and he becomes absorbed in a fluctuating dimension, where the temporal and physical coordinates are irrelevant and where the borders between present and past, both as time and landscape, are blurred. Analogous to the equation at the beginning of the novel between the “antiche” childhood hills and those surrounding Turin, Corrado does not perceive any difference between the adult self who is experiencing the war and the child, who used to play in the “savage territory” of the hills. 40 As we have seen in the third chapter, nighttime was presented in many stories of Feria d’agosto as “un’ora insolita” that Gioanola describes as “uno spazio trasgressivo […], lo spazio più adatto per dare inizio a un viaggio verso un’altra dimensione” (Enzo Gioanola, introduction [2002] to Cesare Pavese, Feria d’agosto, XIII). I would like to underscore how this is the case also in La casa in collina where it is often at night that Corrado’s lingering in his memories occurs. 203 Between the adult and the child there is at the same time a superimposition and a splitting in two. Corrado is that child, he still sees the world around him with the same curious eyes, but also, in a sort of process of bifurcation, he projects that child outside of his mind, he finds in him a companion as a way to resist his craving for solitude. The two Corrados coexist to the extent that they actually have conversations: si direbbe che sotto ai rancori e alle incertezze, sotto alla voglia di star solo, mi scoprivo ragazzo per avere un compagno, un collega, un figliolo. Rivedevo questo paese dov’ero vissuto. Eravamo noi soli, il ragazzo e me stesso. Rivivevo le scoperte selvatiche d’allora. Soffrivo sì ma col piglio scontroso di chi non riconosce né ama il prossimo. E discorrevo discorrevo, mi tenevo compagnia. Eravamo noi due soli.41 What the narrator describes in this passage can be referred to as the “ingresso nell’eterno presente del mito,” which we have already considered at length,42 where “l’uomo non torna ragazzo, è ragazzo.”43 I would like to underscore in this case that the will from the part of Corrado to “scoprir[si] ragazzo” seems to be prompted by a need to fight solitude. This seems to be at odds with Corrado’s “voglia di star solo,” but I maintain that, instead, it emphasizes it, since the only company for which Corrado longs is the one provided by himself. I claim that here too, just like in Feria d’agosto, this encounter between an adult man and his child self is a literary adaptation of what Pavese writes on the diary about maturità. Corrado, in fact, seems to be the perfect embodiment of that “uomo fatto [che] sa essere ragazzo” of which Pavese wrote in his introduction to Feria d’agosto. Unlike many characters from the second part of this 41 Ibid. This quote incredibly resembles many passages from Feria d’agosto, which we have already analyzed in the previous chapter. See, for example, “Fine d’agosto” and “La vigna.” 42 Franco Pappalardo La Rosa, who, as we have already seen, does not read La casa in collina as a novel indebted to Pavese’s theory of myth, provides a different interpretation of the previous passage. Deprived of the mythical implications of an adult man who finally is child again, Corrado’s unusual behavior is interpreted as a desperate attempt, from the part of a chronic solitary, to find some company in the habit of speaking by himself: “si sent[e] un ragazzo talmente solo da doversi continuamente parlare per farsi compagnia” (Franco Pappalardo La Rosa, Cesare Pavese e il mito dell’adolescenza, 107). 43 Cesare Pavese, “La vigna,” in Feria d’agosto, 166. 204 collection, Corrado does not seem to struggle in his research. He is at peace with himself, as he has found the way to reconnect to the child-Corrado and to resume his way to look at the world. A question closely connected to the “lunga illusione” emerges in these pages: the question of Corrado’s “immunità.” Corrado’s separateness from the surrounding world, and hence the derived illusion to be actually safe in his hiding, goes hand in hand with what he defines his “strana immunità in mezzo alle cose.”44 I argue that this immunity digs its roots into at least four forms of alienation from reality: blindness, deafness, muteness, immobility.45 Corrado proves throughout the story to be victim of each of these relational deficits, as a confirmation of his solitude, which is seen as something pursued rather than suffered: “io sono solo. Cerco d’essere il più solo possibile. Sono tempi che soltanto chi è solo non perde la testa.”46 Corrado is living in an imaginary “nascondiglio”47 that protects him from any infiltration from the outside. Sounds and smells are not simply bounced back off the cocoon; they are granted access as long as they mutate into something else. Those stimuli are decoded not as something belonging to the here and now, but rather as something coming from a more indeterminate and recondite dimension, and for this reason absorbed into the flow of Corrado’s wandering in his memories. The first few chapters of the novel depict Corrado as a person who lives in a deep detachment from reality. Even when something more concrete than the memories-inducing landscape approaches him, he still proves himself reluctant to recognize this new concrete element as something that instead does not belong to his personal world. During one of his solitary wanderings in the hills, Corrado 44 Ibid., 35. 45 I would like to connect Corrado’s immunity to the contemplative and introspective nature of many characters from Feria d’agosto. Also, Corrado’s reluctance to have a participative attitude recalls the introspection and contemplation Pavese theorized in Il mestiere di vivere. 46 Ibid., 60. 47 I here use a term that we have encountered in Feria d’agosto, and which we have analyzed at length (“Una certezza,” 95). “Nascondersi” will recur in the last chapter of the novel. 205 is met by the lure of indistinct voices: “quella sera saliva dalla costa un brusio di voci, frammisto di canti [...]. Pareva un richiamo d’altri tempi, una voce di gioventù.”48 These voices come from the Fontane, the inn where evacuees from Turin meet at night. If those voices appeal to him, if they can gain his attention, it is only because they seem “un richiamo d’altri tempi, una voce di gioventù.” Once again—similar to his relation with the war, with the hills and the coexistence with a child self—Corrado is not interested in the concreteness of these voices, he is not curious to find out what these people are actually saying, but it is rather the indefinite and ethereal nature of them that appeals to him.49 It is as if he were actually deaf, only being able to perceive those concrete voices as a “brusio di voci.”50 It is only because their vagueness fits perfectly in his peregrination suspended between the present and the past of childhood, that Corrado let the voices guide him towards the Fontane, a place where the first striking encounter with the concreteness of history is eventually bound to take place. As Corrado meets with the people of the inn, the narrator reports their talking about the war, so that the reader gets the impression that we are moving from the indeterminateness of the intangible voices to the concreteness of their talk about the present time. Nevertheless, at a closer reading, we realize that the impressions of intangibility are actually strengthened. The airy atmosphere is preserved by the sudden sounding of a bomb alarm, which forces everyone to shut off all the lights. The entire first part of the second chapter is a play of eluding voices buried in the dark, and a frequent recurrence of words such as “buio,” “ombra,” “brusio,” and “voce smorzata” can be found here. Not only is Corrado deaf here—as we have seen, he perceives 48 Ibid., 5-6. 49 As I have briefly mentioned in the third chapter (see note 77, page 45), the vagueness of sound is another trait of Leopardi’s poetics of the indefinite that Pavese seems to recuperate. The fleeting echo of feeble voices from the hills is an element that returns also in Feria d’agosto, for example, in “Il mare,” in “Storia segreta,” and in “Colloquio del fiume.” 50 Ibid. 206 some very concrete voices as something ethereal and as if they belonged to memories rather than to reality—, but also blind, as he is immersed in an obscure atmosphere. This helps the ongoing evocation from the past, but now there is an important shift from his childhood to his years as a young man in the city: “c’era in quella gente, nei giovani, nel loro scherzare, nella stessa cordialità facile della compagnia e del vino, qualcosa che conoscevo, che mi ricordava la città d’altri tempi, altre sere, scampagnate sul Po, varietà d’osteria e di barriera, amicizie passate.”51 Corrado is re-enacting a moment in his past, everything reminds him of something that he already knew, that he had experienced in “altri tempi,” and he is so immersed in this past self that when a voice from the past actually reaches out to him, he is not even surprised: “riconobbi la voce. Adesso, a pensarci, mi sembra evidente. La riconobbi, e non mi chiesi di chi fosse.”52 He subconsciously recognizes the voice, with which he engages in a conversation, and only later the reader is informed that it belonged to Cate, who was once his girlfriend. In fact, it is only when the alarm ceases, when the emergency of the moment is over and normality is restored, that Corrado realizes to whom he was talking, as if sucked back into reality: “lei è Cate. Sei Cate.”53 When he is finally back home and sitting at his table under the light beam of a lamp, he can at last recall those memories in which he was immersed, recognizing them as such and comparing them to the present time of the war: “adesso le cose accadevano e c’era la guerra. Ci pensai nella notte, seduto nel cono della luce.”54 It is only at this moment that Corrado starts reflecting 51 Ibid., 8. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 9. 54 Ibid., 12. It is interesting to point out another recurrence of this same expression later in the novel, always related to Corrado’s thoughts about the war: “sotto il cono di luce pensavo alle brine, ai cadaveri, alle fughe nei boschi.” (Ibid., 81) 207 on the encounter with Cate, a reflection supported by a splitting between his present and past selves: più che di Cate m’importava del tempo, degli anni […]. Mi pareva di aver riaperto una stanza, un armadio dimenticati, e d’averci trovato dentro la vita di un altro, una vita futile, piena di rischi. Era questo che avevo scordato. Non tanto Cate, con i poveri piaceri di un tempo. Ma il giovane che viveva quei giorni, il giovane temerario che sfuggiva alle cose credendo che dovessero ancora accadere, ch’era già uomo e si guardava sempre intorno se la vita giungesse davvero, questo giovane mi sbalordiva. Che cosa c’era di comune tra me e lui? Che cosa avevo fatto per lui? […] Tutto pareva il ricordo di un paese lontano, di una vita agitata, che ci si chiede ripensandoci come abbiamo potuto gustarla e tradirla così.55 As Corrado goes back through his memories of youth, he recalls situations and attitudes that seem hardly to belong to the same person: “divenni tutto cittadino […], frequentai molte case, parlavo di politica, conobbi altri rischi e piaceri e ne uscii sempre.”56 Given the complete symbiosis Corrado has with himself as a child, I find this split with a new “I”, that of the youth, quite interesting.57 Corrado, with his taste for regression, seems to forget completely about himself as a young, active, and reckless man, and thus skips directly to the previous, more recondite, stage of childhood.58 As a confirmation of the rigidity of the separation between these three stages—childhood, youth, adulthood—, I would like to underline an expression in the previously quoted passage. When Corrado starts thinking of his “young self” and he realizes that he is not the same person anymore, he says “mi pareva di aver riaperto una stanza, un armadio dimenticati.” We have already encountered the metaphor of a closed room in the analysis of 55 Ibid., 9. 56 Ibid., 10. 57 The dynamic between the three ages of a man’s life—childhood, youth, adulthood—is a returning element in Pavese’s work. I refer to the second chapter (section II.3) for a theoretical introduction to this issue, and to the third chapter (Introduction, especially pages 125-128) for the analysis of this dynamic in Feria d’agosto, a text where it is especially present, as it sustains several stories. 58 I have already introduced this aspect in Pavese’s writing in the section III.2 of the second chapter. If we consider the definition the narrator uses to describe how he was a few years before—“il giovane temerario che sfuggiva alle cose”—we can notice a sort of ambiguity. This expression is in fact an oxymoron: the act of running away is performed by a person who is defined as courageous. This could be an anticipation of what Corrado will eventually grow up into. 208 Feria d’agosto, where I claim it was used to underscore the demarcation between ages.59 Here too, the metaphor of the closed room is employed to refer to a different, past self. Interestingly, Pavese uses that same expression again when, at the end of the novel, he will refer to the separateness of his childhood: “avrei voluto trovar tutto come prima, come una stanza stata chiusa.”60 Corrado does not recognize anymore the past to which Cate belongs. It is relevant that it is the encounter with Cate that unlocks this new level of memories belonging to his youth that is less fundamental to him than his childhood, to open the “stanza” of his youth, which he had long forgotten and feels now so unreal and extraneous. We can see here at play the same dynamic between a man’s ages and the presence of a woman we have already encountered in Feria d’agosto. A woman-less life is, in fact, pursued by both Corrados: by the child, because he is not curious yet about the other sex’s mysteries; by the adult, because he is not interested in them anymore. The young Corrado, who lies in the middle, is seen as someone far away and even more remote than his childhood years: “non sei più quel ragazzo, non corri più i rischi di un tempo.”61 The risks were those of being involved in a sentimental relationship with a woman: the risk of letting oneself go and accepting the inevitable encounters of life. By extension, and referring to our analysis of Il mestiere di vivere, the risks of getting entangled in life’s ephemeral experiences rather than looking for what really matters: the emergence of one’s symbols and myths. In fact, Corrado is not up for those romantic “hazards” anymore because he is now fully immersed in other interests, and, as a confirmation to what the reader by now should have 59 This motif emerges, for example, in “L’eremita” and in “La vigna.” 60 Ibid., 109. 61 Ibid., 10. 209 already understood, he tells himself: “cerchi non lei, ma tutt’al più le tue colline.”62 It should not be a coincidence, then, that his youth, inhabited by women, was set in the city63 and that Corrado would entertain himself with other mundane interests such as politics (“parlavo di politica.”) When he asserts that “cominciavo allora a compiacermi in ricordi d’infanzia,” he is living in a moment when not only had he freed himself of all the risks of a romantic relationship and worldly life, but also had been able to restore with the hills that same relationship he used to have as a child. If Cate arises from a past that Corrado neglected, Dino, her son with whom Corrado spends his spare time, belongs very much to the present and, eventually, to the future. Corrado soon develops a sort of discontent with Cate and prefers those times when she is not present, so that he can spend time freely with Dino: tra due uomini una ragazza è sempre qualcosa di indecente [...]. Una cosa avevamo in comune: per noi l’idea della donna non quadrava nel bosco, disturbava. A me che le forre, le radici, i ciglioni, mi richiamavano ogni volta il sangue sparso, la ferocia della vita, non riusciva di pensare in fondo al bosco quell’altro sangue, quell’altra cosa selvaggia che è l’amplesso di una donna.64 Again, the fact that Cate, as a woman, is seen as someone who does not belong in a scene that involves a man and a child, is reminiscent of many similar situations in Feria d’agosto, where the intimacy and understanding between a man and a child can only be undermined by the presence of a woman.65 Nevertheless, I believe it is quite evident that Corrado is also fascinated by the new person into whom Cate has grown: a self-confident, strong woman, who does not 62 Ibid. 63 In Feria d’agosto too the young adults who are in a relationship with a woman are presented in an urban setting (for example, “Fine d’agosto,” “L’estate,” “La città”). 64 Ibid., 49. 65 I have underscored the emergence of this motif in stories like “La langa,” “Fine d’agosto” and “Storia segreta.” I would also like to point out how in “Fine d’agosto” too an urban setting is the background to a man’s relations with women. 210 hold onto her past anymore, because she has a new project in her life. The new Cate too, just like the new Corrado, does not correspond to the old one he once knew. In the second part of the quote, the narrator refers to the twofold nature of the savage, namely its connection to both blood and sex. Pavese points out this aspect in the already quoted entry from Il mestiere di vivere where he asserts that “la natura ritorna selvaggia quando vi accade il proibito: sangue o sesso.” These two kinds of savage seem to be at odds with each other: the first one reminding him of the way he used to perceive the mysteries of nature as a child, the second one being, as we have seen, a corrupting and distracting encounter in a man’s life. If nighttime is when Corrado is more prone to memories, and therefore his detachment from reality reaches its peak, during daylight the unquestioned protagonist is the war: ruins and remains show under the sun. When in the third chapter Corrado goes to Turin, the reader for the first time is faced with a more concrete description of the destructive consequences of the war, and this touch of reality is immersed in a fully illuminated atmosphere. It is in the light of day that all the damages of the bombings are evident. “Nel disordine e nel sole”66 Corrado begins his daylight tour of the city where “le case sventrate fumavano. I crocicchi erano ingombri. In alto, tra i muri divelti, tappezzerie e lavandini pendevano al sole.”67 In this dynamic between day and night, between the present of the war and the remembrance of a timeless past, the moon plays an enigmatic role. One could argue that the moon belongs simultaneously to dark and light. In fact, it can be seen in its full splendor only at night when it reflects the light of the sun. Interestingly enough, the moon does not emanate lights, as it is actually dark. For this twofold nature of Earth’s satellite, I claim that when the moon is mentioned, it is usually because it establishes a 66 Ibid., 16. 67 Ibid. 211 liminal situation, suspended between darkness and light, between past and present, between Corrado’s isolation and history’s invasion into his life. The moon keeps this twofold characteristic every moment it is mentioned, and it proves to be quite an eclectic and enigmatic element.68 For example, in the following passage the moon recreates an atmosphere of suspension and vagueness: “andai vagamente, come si va sotto la luna, ingannato dai tronchi. Di nuovo, Torino, i rifugi, gli allarmi mi parvero cose remote, fantasie. Ma anche l’incontro che cercavo, quelle voci nell’aria, anche Cate era qualcosa d’irreale.”69 Corrado is again walking alone during a moon-lit night. Everything he had experienced during the day in Turin dissipates: the ruins of the buildings hit by the bombings and the anxiety of a city under martial alert are in the very background of his attention, now all devoted to recreating the meeting with the vague voices of the night before. But just as the things he saw in Turin are “cose remote, fantasie,” also the more ethereal appeal of the encounter seems to be unreal. In another moment, the light of the moon proves to be deceiving and to create a blurry and ambiguous state between past and present. When Corrado sees Cate again, she is finally lit up, but the light that illuminates her is that of the deluding moon: “sotto la luna la vedevo bene. Era la stessa ma sembrava un’altra.”70 Under the moon there is a fluctuation between the past (era la stessa) and the present (ma sembrava un’altra): now she is an adult and self-confident woman, still the same as few years 68 This could be interpreted as another contact between Pavese’s and Leopardi’s poetics. In fact, in one of his first idylls, “Alla luna” (1819), Leopardi connects the contemplation of the moon to the re-emergence of memories from the past. This element also returns in “Canto notturno di un pastore errante nell’Asia” (1831). As for Pavese’s work, that of the moon is an important element, not only in La casa in collina. For example, it is also present in Feria d’agosto, as I have briefly mentioned in my analysis of “Il prato dei morti” (see page 146 and note 79, page 146). Extremely relevant is the moon’s role in La luna e i falò as it is evident already from its title. The moon in this novel is the element that regulates the cycle of seasons, which, in its turn, regulates women and men’s everyday lives. Bonfires instead allude to peasant rituals for fields’ fertility, performed in accordance with the lunar calendar. For this reason, the moon is both a natural element and a symbolic one. For an analysis of this element see Donald Heiney, “Pavese: The Geography of the Moon,” Contemporary Literature 9.4 (1968): 522-537. 69 Cesare Pavese, La casa in collina, 19-20. 70 Ibid., 20-21. 212 before, but who seems to share little if nothing with that insecure and weak girl Corrado once knew. In another passage, the moon is instead linked to the concreteness of the bombings: “tra poche notti era piena e avrebbe inondato cielo e terra, scoperchiato Torino, portato altre bombe.”71 The moon seems to be situated at the border between reality and the airy atmosphere of dreams and memories: she belongs to both the concrete reality of the present time, and to the intangible one of the recollections. As we can see, the moon creates that atmosphere where “s’andava vagamente,” and at the same time it is a very concrete, real and tactical element of war. Corrado soon starts to spend time with Dino, taking him along on his countryside strolls, teaching him about geology and botany, and playing with rocks, flowers, and plants. Again, Corrado tries to incorporate the novelty of this new companion into his mental regimen. The friendship with Dino allows Corrado, who, as we have seen, was used to “spending time” with his child self, to project into a real Corrado-child those expectations and memories. The compresence for which he had longed finally has become real. We may then notice an overlap between the real Dino and the Corrado-child, to the extent that they share so many common qualities, tastes and aversions. Corrado only fears that Dino may actually be his son the moment he knows that the child’s full name is Corrado, and this strengthens the afore-mentioned overlapping with Corrado-child even more. Regardless of the perfect timing—Corrado and Cate had been together ten years before and Dino is nine-year-old—it had never occurred to him before that Dino could be his son. It is as if the name, and only the name, could furnish proof of 71 Ibid., 19. 213 his paternity.72 A similar pattern to the encounter with Cate is made explicit when Corrado is assailed by this question, where again we meet with the theme of blindness: “mi pareva quella notte che l’avevo ritrovata, che le parlavo e non sapevo chi era. Ogni volta più cieco ero stato. Un mese mi c’era voluto per capire che Dino vuol dire Corrado. Com’era la faccia di Dino? Chiudevo gli occhi e non riuscivo a rivederla.”73 Corrado becomes more and more obsessed with the idea that he may be Dino’s father. It is not quite clear whether this paternity is something he longs for or fears. I assert that Corrado has conflicting feelings toward this possibility: being someone’s father would force him into reality—an eventuality with which he plays, but never actively faces. His “immunità” has screened him from the problem for a long time, but even when he finally finds the courage to address Cate with direct questions about Dino, the atmosphere is one of darkness and silence: “andavamo nel buio. Cate taceva nel silenzio.”74 Blindness and muteness return in this scene as a confirmation that Corrado will never have a straight answer to his questions. These dynamics between opposites analyzed so far, and made quite explicit and evident in the first six chapters of the book, are bound to dissipate as the narrative unfolds. War will soon break the isolation into which Corrado has forced himself and from which he thought he could control the interferences of the past, or recreate his memories simply by choosing the right setting. After the overthrow of Mussolini’s government on July 26th, and even more so after the armistice on September 8th, the separation between the city, as the seat of war, and the safe haven of the hills is broken. We witness a mutual infiltration of the two dimensions, and this 72 The relevance accorded by Corrado to the child’s name recalls closely what has emerged from the analysis of “Il nome” in the third chapter (see note 45, page 134). There too, the name had a meaning that almost transcended it, as it was perceived as linked to the essence of its bearer. 73 Ibid., 29. 74 Ibid. 214 automatically also undermines what until then, besides the exception represented by the moon, had been a quite rigid division between light and dark. As is well known, soon the war, which until then had mostly occurred in the city, will move up into the hills, stronghold of the Resistance. But even before this happens, we can see an anticipation of this infiltration in the opposite direction: in chapter VII, Pavese describes an urban setting with adjectives and verbs usually employed to portray a rural one. After Mussolini’s fall, Corrado is at first reluctant to abandon his hills, “restai lassù non perché avessi paura di qualche pallottola, ma perché prevedevo entusiasmi, cortei, discussioni sfegatate.”75 He finally decides to go visit the factory where Fonso works and where he will witness a certain popular unrest for the unpredicted events of those days. The laborers were in fact excited and concerned at the same time for the fall of Mussolini’s government, and had met in front of the factory to share their opinions about it, and to discuss the uncertain facts of the current political situation. In fact, at that point, it was not clear what direction Italy was going to take—either restoring a fascist force without Mussolini, thus maintaining its alliance with Nazi Germany, or discrediting Fascism all together and joining the Allied forces in the fight against Nazism. This unrest among the workers is described with adjectives that belong to the animal and natural world, adjectives that would have been used rather to describe his hills: “la gente […] formicolavano tra i marciapiedi,”76 “grandi scritte sui muri […] erano fiorite nella notte,”77 and “le radio cominciavano a gracchiare.”78 I read this as a linguistic clue from Pavese, a sort of preview of the imminent collapse of the borders between city and countryside, at least in Corrado’s eyes. But it is merely a subtle anticipation of an awareness that will come later, and Corrado confirms with his attitude that he has not changed 75 Ibid., 36. 76 Ibid., 39. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid., 41. 215 yet. Surrounded by the agitation of the crowd, Corrado is in fact once again distracted by a rural sight that catches his attention, and once again his predisposition for nature’s beauty is the thing that signals his difference from the surrounding world: “dietro alla casa la collina si stendeva nel cielo, seminata di case e di boschi. Mi chiedevo chi la vedesse in quel momento, della gente che attendeva, rientrava, parlava.”79 If during this visit Corrado describes what he sees with the adjectives we have just considered, and if he still looks at the hills as if they were something detached and almost invisible from the city, as the conflict proceeds he will instead realize that the war has triggered an irreversible osmotic process. After the armistice of September 8th, Turin is finally occupied by the Germans, who share the control of the city with the “neo-squadristi,”80 and the long-desired peace, that some envisioned to be close with Mussolini’s fall, is now farther than ever. Italian soldiers in the regions occupied by the Germans are now considered as traitors, and become fugitives who try to hide while going back home. Some of these fugitives would pass by the Fontane, where they would get some food and new civilian clothes before proceeding to their journey. As the political atmosphere becomes increasingly tense, Corrado’s everyday life changes too, in particular his relations with other people as he removes himself from the direct participation in the conflict. People around him sense his detachment and especially Cate comments on his absenteeism: “sai tante cose Corrado, e non fai niente per aiutarci,”81 “tu sei capace di non saper niente. Magari stanotte dormivi. Nessuno ti ha visto.”82 The Fontane is no longer a meeting place where people gather together at night to escape the dangers and miseries of a city in wartime. Its main function 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid., 62. 81 Ibid., 67. 82 Ibid., 37. 216 is now to hide in its cellar the weapons with which to arm the partisan groups that are meanwhile forming in those same hills. For this reason, Corrado visits the inn only during the day, as a confirmation that he can no longer find there the space for his memories of a buried past: all the actions and conversations of the guests are now directed towards the present and the immediate future. With the “invasion” of the hills by the partisan war, Corrado realizes that what before he had considered as his personal quiet corner is now falling into the public domain. The woods for him had been at the same time a safe shelter and the most savage of settings, and this is exactly what they are becoming also for others. Those same woods are now charged with a meaning that transcends his own little personal world and that make of them a refuge for the partisans, and the ideal place for reprisals and retaliations from the fascist army. At first Corrado seems to be caught off guard, as he reluctantly renounces his lifestyle. He feels more and more out of place and less involved. Dino himself is becoming more detached from Corrado: plants, flowers and rocks do not interest him as much as before, at least not as much as tales of the war. This is an indication that something is changing in Dino’s temperament, and that an intolerance against the way adults treat him is emerging. It is also interesting to underscore how the emergence in Dino of a new, stronger personality shows primarily in his changing interest in those flowers, rocks and woods that he had until then praised for their savage nature.83 It is at this moment that the question of muteness emerges with insistence. When the most politically involved people Corrado met at the Fontane discuss their participation in the new course of events, he is not able to contribute in those discussions. Unwilling to talk, Corrado is 83 These are the first signs of Dino’s precocious growth, a growth prompted by the raging war that forces even young children to act as adults. However, the dynamic between Corrado—who is still stuck, at least at this point, in his admiration of the savage nature of his woods—and Dino—who, instead, is growing bored of it—replicates the one between Nino and his father in “L’eremita.” In this short story too, an adult is astonished by the sudden changes in a child’s mind and personality, in an inversion of roles where fear and immaturity are attributed to the adult, rather than to the child. 217 nevertheless prompted by his acquaintances to take part in the conversation, but his participation in the discussion resolves into a listening approach, rather than in an active contribution: “ogni volta mi giuravo di tacere ed ascoltare, di scuotere il capo e ascoltare. Da tempo ero avvezzo a non muovermi, a lasciare che il mondo impazzisse.”84 “Tacere” is only one form in which Corrado’s muteness manifests itself. We can in fact also find it in its opposite manifestation, namely in talking without giving weight to the content of his words: “con ciascuno dicevo cose opposte, cercavo sempre di sembrare un altro.”85 The intangibility of words, their detachment from a concrete outcome in the surrounding world—“tacere,” “dire cose opposte”—is confirmed by the repetition of expressions such as “gridare tra sé,”86 “mi gridai,”87 “gridare sottovoce.”88 The oxymoronic quality of these expressions stresses the gap between Corrado’s impulses— which make him want to scream, or to talk out loud—and their actual outcome: the scream ends up being suffocated and repressed.89 The element of silence is not just a quality of the protagonist, but, as we have seen, it is also one of the most relevant building blocks in Pavese’s poetics. II.3 Corrado’s journey to his native hills In the second part of the novel, Corrado experiences drastic changes in his life, changes that will force him both to run away and to reconsider the validity of his bashful and solitary 84 Ibid., 50. 85 Ibid., 54. 86 Ibid., 29. 87 Ibid., 30. 88 Ibid., 114. 89 Corrado’s immunity recalls that of many characters from Feria d’agosto. In the collection too, this is rendered through actions usually performed toward the outside (to stare), which instead fall back in the subject. For example, “fissare ad occhi chiusi” (“Una certezza,” 96). 218 lifestyle, profoundly shaken by the historical events of his time. A fascist raid at the Fontane results in the deportation of all his friends. Only Dino manages to hide, and both Corrado and Dino will move to Collegio di Chieri, where Corrado will work as a teacher. Whereas Corrado, shaken by the loss of his friends, is terrorized by the possibility to encounter a similar fate and for this reason avoids any exposure in the school, the child shows discontent and gets involved in political discussions with other students. Dino eventually runs away, probably to join some partisan bands. Corrado’s discomfort, deepened by the flight of the young child, grows to the point that he too decides to leave the boarding school. Going back to Turin or to Elvira’s home is not an option, and thus he embarks on a dangerous trip back to his home town, across hills that are the stage of bloody fights among partisans and RSI soldiers. It is during his journey back home that Corrado witnesses the ambush to a fascist wagon performed by partisans, a firsthand encounter with the violence and bloodshed of war. As we shall see, this second part of the novel is characterized by some profound changes in Corrado’s life and perception of war. The plot of the novel’s second part can be divided in four main moments: the events at the Fontane (chapter XVI); Corrado’s stay at the boarding school (chapters XVII-XIX); Corrado’s flight towards his native hills (chapter XX-XXII); and an epilogue which draws on reflections from the prologue (Chapter XXIII). I consider chapters XIII-XV as preparatory to the second part, as they pave the way to some fundamental changes in Corrado’s mindset. These changes interest mainly Corrado’s new perception and understanding of war as something more complicated and ferocious than the distant and harmless phenomenon he thought it was. Just like a child, he was fascinated by the most recondite elements of it: war reenacted primitive mysteries, and the bloodshed it was causing was merely seen as a confirmation of its “savage” nature. But war, for Corrado, soon becomes something more concrete, even though it arises from that same savage 219 that fascinated him as a child. This position emerges already in many of the first part’s passages. For example, he wonders whether “sangue e ferocia, sottosuolo, la boscaglia: queste cose non erano un gioco? Non erano come i selvaggi e i giornaletti di Dino?”90 and, referring to the partisan war, he admits that “queste cose o si fanno davvero o non si fanno. Compromettersi per gioco è troppo stupido.”91 The life imposed by war had been compared by Corrado to his childhood experience of the countryside: the darkness of the land, the fear and fascination for the unknown, the need to escape and hide—all of this reminded Corrado of his childhood games and experiences. But now Corrado’s perception of the conflict becomes more anchored in reality, as he is directly involved in activities of war that leave him paralyzed and terrorized. The reader witnesses a growing impingement by the concreteness of reality, where the “immunità” I analyzed in the first part is increasingly jeopardized: “era chiaro che la solitudine nei boschi, il frutteto non avevano più senso.”92 The war is no longer something that Corrado perceives as a second-hand experience in other people’s tales, or something that he senses when seeing rubble caused by bombings in Turin. War emerges now in all its bestiality, and even its savage nature proves to be more complex than he had thought: “il segreto finalmente afferrato che potevano esistere dolci colline, una città sfumata di nebbie, un indomani compiaciuto, e in tutti gli istanti accadere a due passi le cose bestiali di cui si bisbigliava. La città si era fatta più selvaggia dei miei boschi.”93 Corrado’s new awareness is closely linked to the concept of the savage, which now also takes on a different meaning. For this reason, I would like to go back to the previously quoted July 10th, 1947 entry from Il mestiere di vivere, as it may shed light on my reading of the second part of the novel. As we have seen, in this entry Pavese affirms: “tu vagheggi la 90 Ibid., 55. 91 Ibid., 73. 92 Ibid., 62. 93 Ibid., 68. 220 campagna, il titanismo—il selvaggio—ma apprezzi il buon senso, la misura, l’intelligenza [...]. Il selvaggio ti interessa come mistero, non come brutalità storica.”94 Pavese seems to suggest that the selvaggio has two faces: the first one, which fascinates him so much, relates to the mysteries of life; the second instead relates to the ferocity and brutality of history. This distinction applies to La casa in collina as well, and therefore Corrado, for the first time in the story, is forced to consider both faces of the savage. Savage is no longer and not only the fascinating countryside with its charming secrets, or the war insofar as it is perceived as something distant and positively influencing his life. Now the savage is everywhere, and the war has revealed itself to be the main vector of that “brutalità storica” which represents the second, more ferocious, kind of savage and that Pavese affirms to dislike: “quella guerra in cui vivevo rifugiato, convinto di averla accettata, di essermene fatta una pace scontrosa, inferociva, mordeva più a fondo, giungeva ai nervi e nel cervello.”95 The use of “rifugiato” is indicative of the fact that, until this point, war was instrumental to Corrado’s immunity. War too, as we have already seen, plays the role of a hiding place in which Corrado has found a shelter, but, as we can already infer from the previous quote, things are bound to change. Now Corrado is finally completely aware that the city itself is no longer a civilized place, but has instead become more savage than his hills. Pavese makes increasing use of metaphors and descriptions that rely on animality with regard to the war which assumes more ferocious and bestial traits. If, as we have seen, towards the end of the first part, zoomorphic descriptions of people’s actions emerge, in this second part the pervading animality is more pressing. If in the first part this process was indirectly introduced by the use of verbs such as “formicolare,” 94 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 334 (July 10th, 1947). 95 Cesare Pavese, La casa in collina, 68. 221 “fiorire,” and “gracchiare;” now the narrator is more explicit and he refers to the city as a place where “cose bestiali” were occurring. Now, even Corrado himself is being drawn into this animalistic regression. As the war’s ferocity increases, Corrado is terrified, and Pavese repeatedly makes use of a simile that compares Corrado’s behavior to that of a hare: “cominciavo a guardarmi d’attorno, palpitando, come una lepre,”96 “adesso fuggivo davvero, come fugge una lepre,”97 “questa guerra ci brucia le case. Ci semina di morti fucilati piazze e strade. Ci caccia come lepri di rifugio in rifugio.”98 The moment of greatest terror, when Corrado realizes that everyone from the Fontane had been taken away, again evokes the hare: “mi accorsi di Belbo, che, accucciato ai miei piedi, ansimava. Gli dissi:—Laggiù,—e lo sospinsi col piede. Lui saltò sulle zampe abbaiando. Per la paura mi ritrassi dietro un tronco. Ma Belbo era già partito come una lepre.”99 Interestingly, however, in this case the simile involves the dog Belbo, who, unaware of the danger, runs like a hare, barking towards the Fontane. Corrado, on the other hand, is so petrified and horrified by the sight of his friends’ deportation that he reacts with complete immobility. This is the only place in the novel where the simile with the hare is employed with the acceptation of speed rather than fear, even though this is one of the most tense and dramatic moments of the story. I interpret both the deviation of the comparison to the dog, and the use of the simile to mean speed rather than fear as a displacement because Corrado was experiencing such an overwhelming fear that the usual simile with the hare alone could not convey it. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid., 107. 98 Ibid., 120. 99 Ibid., 86. 222 If chapters XIII and XIV prepare for the changes of the second part, chapter XV can be considered as the real threshold of the novel between the first and second part as it introduces new themes, fundamental to the chapters to come. In chapter XV, Corrado anticipates what is about to happen to him and wonders where he would hide, if he ever had to run away: dovendo fuggire, mi chiedevo in quei giorni, dovendo nascondermi, dove sarei andato, dove avrei dormito la notte e mangiato un boccone? [...] Mi sentivo braccato e colpevole, mi vergognavo dei miei giorni tranquilli. Ma pensavo alle voci, alle storie, di gente rifugiata nei conventi, nelle torri, nelle sacrestie. Che cosa doveva essere la vita tra quelle fredde pareti, dietro a vetrate colorate, tra i banchi di legno? Un ritorno all’infanzia, all’odore d’incenso, alle preghiere e all’innocenza? Non certo la cosa peggiore di quei giorni. Trovai in me la velleità, quasi la smania, di essere costretto a questa vita. Prima, passando davanti a una chiesa, non pensavo che a zitelle e a vecchi calvi e inginocchiati, a fastidiosi borbottii. Che tutto questo non contasse, che una chiesa, un convento, fossero invece un rifugio dove si ascolta con le palme sul viso calmarsi il battito del cuore? Ma per questo, pensavo, non c’era bisogno delle navate e degli altari. Bastava la pace, la fine del sangue sparso. Ricordo che stavo traversando una piazza, e il pensiero mi fece fermare. Trasalii. Fu quella una gioia, una beatitudine inattesa. Pregare, entrare in chiesa, pensai, è vivere un istante di pace, rinascere in un mondo senza sangue.100 This dense passage contains in a nutshell all the main themes of the second half of the novel. When it comes to the reassuring role that landscape performs in Corrado’s perception of war, we witness a shift from his beloved hills—which cannot provide a safe shelter anymore—to church buildings. A desired sense of peace and hope is metonymically conjured up by the sight of churches, chapels, and convents. A church becomes, at least in Corrado’s imagination, the best surrogate for his hills, for at least two reasons. First of all, the idea of taking refuge in a church appeals to him as a “ritorno all’infanzia […] e all’innocenza,” another expedient, one second only to the life in the woods, which would satisfy his need for reliving his childhood. Second, in those violent days a church could provide a “rifugio,” just like the hills at the beginning of the novel when, before the Resistance, they were still a place capable of protecting him and the evacuees from the repercussions of the war. In this second part of the novel Pavese 100 Ibid., 80. 223 progressively substitutes the hills and the woods with this new shield and safe world: the one that gravitates around the ideas of “grazia,” “pace,” and “speranza.”101 The idea of peace and salvation is disentangled from the concreteness of war and its consequences and transferred to a more ethereal sphere. We cannot speak of a set of conventional and shared values, because these are internalized and translated into a personal and private sense of “spirituality.” All these concepts that depend on Corrado’s newly gained spirituality, should then be problematized and contextualized in relation to his forma mentis, one that transfers them to a more private and intimate level. Just as war was at first considered only to the extent that it interfered with his private life, peace as well is at first appreciated only as long as it is his personal one. Corrado quite frankly admits: “non chiedevo la pace del mondo, chiedevo la mia. Volevo essere buono per essere salvo.”102 The concept of peace is dislodged from any reference to the concrete, to become an existential peace, which can be reached notwithstanding the historical circumstances. As already noted, chapter XV is an anticipation, a sort of flash-forward, of what will happen soon, and we will return at greater length to these concepts in the analysis of the second part. The events of chapter XVI mark the beginning of a new life for Corrado. As we have anticipated, all of the inn’s patrons are captured by the fascist militia, because the inn’s undercover activities have been revealed. Corrado manages to save himself just by chance, as he actually is on his way to the Fontane when, from a distance, he witnesses the presence of the 101 The fact that in the second part of the novel spirituality, rather than his hills imbued with myth, provides Corrado with a shelter echoes what we have analyzed in the diary’s entries from 1944-1945. In these entries, Pavese was particularly receptive to religion, and theoretical writing on myth would be alternated with more spiritual considerations. As we have already considered, Pavese’s receptivity to religion was very different from the Roman Catholic sense of spirituality. In fact, Pavese’s need for divinity and his search for God’s grace respond to the same urgency to encompass the absolute, as in his writing on myth. In La casa in collina too, Corrado’s spiritual need arises from the same psychological and existential situation that charged at first his hills with great importance. 102 Ibid., 91. 224 soldiers in the yard. Of all the people present, only Dino manages to escape. What seems to upset Corrado the most is not only the loss of his friends, but also the fact that he is safe by pure chance: Perché la salvezza sia toccata a me e non a Gallo, non a Tono, non a Cate, non so. Forse perché devo soffrire dell’altro? Perché sono il più inutile e non merito nulla, nemmeno un castigo? Perch’ero entrato quella volta in chiesa? L’esperienza del pericolo rende vigliacchi ogni giorno di più. Rende sciocchi, e sono al punto che essere vivo per caso, quando tanti migliori di me sono morti, non mi soddisfa e non mi basta. A volte, dopo avere ascoltato l’inutile radio, guardando dal vetro le vigne deserte penso che vivere per caso non è vivere. E mi chiedo se sono davvero scampato.103 The previous passage anticipates the questions that will emerge at the end of the novel, where we can find a similar reflection on what it entails to survive a war that took many lives. Corrado feels the need to explain the reason why he managed to save himself. “Essere vivo per caso” is not considered an acceptable explanation for the protagonist, who seems to move away from his original selfishness: having survived a deadly peril does not make him content, Corrado now needs to justify his freedom. The extent to which these considerations have overwhelmed Corrado shows in the fact that—probably for the first time—we have a recurrence of both “vigna” and “finestra” (in this case, “vetro”) without any reference to the “attimo estatico,” which would instead always recur with these elements in Feria d’agosto. The only thought that inhabits Corrado’s mind while he looks at the vineyard from the window is how being alive by chance is not being alive at all, and no referral is made to his personal myths. What Corrado was already anticipating in the previous chapter, where he was considering the peace of a life spent in a convent, becomes soon the best option for him. In fact, through the intercession of Elvira, he finds shelter in the Collegio di Chieri, a boarding school where he can 103 Ibid., 88. 225 safely hide. When he is informed of this opportunity, he is once more overcome by a sense of grace: “galleggiavo dentro un mare di bontà, di terrore, e di pace. Anche i preti, e il perdono cristiano.”104 The following two chapters describe Corrado’s experience in the boarding school, where Dino will soon join him. Corrado feels soon at home because the boarding school provides him with a new hiding place that is both physical and existential. Corrado, in fact, affirms that he spent his days in the school “sempre pronto a rintanarmi e sparire,”105 but also looking for “un letargo, un anestetico, una certezza di esser ben nascosto.”106 The use of the term hibernation falls under the already analyzed tendency to a zoomorphic description of people’s action, whereas I read the use of “anestetico” as a reference to the immunity that Corrado still tries to safeguard. The hideaway Corrado is seeking is, again, the psychological one in which he has always lived, even before war, and the concrete shelter that could protect him from persecution. A second reason why the boarding school feels to Corrado like a place where he belongs is that the priests show a detachment from worldly life that he praises as familiar: “parlavano del mondo esterno, della vita, dei fatti della guerra con un distacco che mi piacque.”107 In the boarding school Corrado will soon experience another moment of grace, conjured up by thoughts on hope and salvation: Capii che bastava un soprassalto d’energia, un bel ricordo, per ritrovare la speranza. Capii che ogni giorno trascorso era un passo verso la salvezza. Il bel tempo tornava, come tante stagioni passate, e mi trovava ancora libero, ancor vivo. Anche stavolta la certezza durò poco più di un istante, ma fu come un disgelo, una grazia. […] Pensai con meno angoscia alle Fontane, e mi dicevo che tutto era caso, era gioco.108 104 Ibid., 89. 105 Ibid., 90. 106 Ibid., 91. 107 Ibid., 90. 108 Ibid., 91. 226 This is, as usual, a fleeting feeling, but it nevertheless shows Corrado some hope, as he concentrates on the fact that he is still alive, rather than on the dangers of war, which he once more considers “caso” and “gioco.” The main trait of this second part—anticipated, as we have seen, by chapter XV—is the narrator’s insistence on the relevance and guidance this new sense of peace has in his personal journey through war. This new set of spiritual terms—grace, peace, hope— will return often in the remaining forty pages, often related to an antonymic element, blood, which instead appeared already quite consistently in the first part and incurs now in a meaningful semantic evolution. In the first part, in fact, the bloodshed of war was contextualized in the “normality” of the savage nature of the woods, which would continue to exist, indifferent, no matter the cruelty perpetrated on its soil: “la guerra finiva domani. [..] Il sangue sparso era assorbito dalla terra. [..] Soltanto nei boschi nulla mutava, e dove un corpo era caduto riaffioravano radici.”109 At times, blood was perceived instead as something naturally and intrinsically belonging to the woods, which are in fact regulated by the rule of ferocity: “a me [..] le forre, le radici, i ciglioni, mi richiamavano ogni volta il sangue sparso, la ferocia della vita;”110 and again a few pages later “sangue e ferocia, sottosuolo, la boscaglia.”111 In the first part, many recurrences of “sangue” occur in conjunction with “sparso,” adjective that dramatically connotes the blood to which it refers. Also, to reinforce the characterization of a blood shed with violence, another common recurrence appears to be that of “ferocia.” These recurrences do not change drastically in the second part, but they are enriched by the introduction of this new set of terms—“pace,” “speranza,” “grazia,” all belonging to the semantic realm of spiritual serenity—which counterbalances dramatically the presence of blood and ferocity on the 109 Ibid., 33. 110 Ibid., 49. 111 Ibid., 55. 227 page.112 I read this new linguistic trend of the second part as a confirmation that now Corrado has a deeper awareness of what a bloodshed implies and that the resort to the savage nature of both his landscape and of war does not provide him anymore with a sense of safety and with a justification for his lifestyle. After the raid at the Fontane, Corrado does not consider war as a game anymore, and hence the blood itself gains tragic implications it should have had in the first place. Unfortunately, the anesthetic relief Corrado sought by entering an ecclesiastic environment is not something he experiences on a regular basis. On the contrary, he seems to realize that this environment too has a strict relation to blood and violence, which, again, seem to emerge as a constant in mankind. The lives of martyrs are the best example of the grounding presence of blood: “pensavo a quei martiri di cui si studia al catechismo. La loro pace era una pace oltre la tomba, tutti avevano sparso del sangue.”113 This emerges even more strongly from the breviary, filled with “storie orribili di patimenti e di martirî.”114 The description of those tortures—naked Christians thrown to die on a frozen pond, broken legs, women burnt at the stake, tongues cut and intestines ripped out—is cunningly graphic and familiar: “stupiva pensare che le pagine ingiallite di quell’antico latino […] contenessero tanta vita spasmodica, grondassero di un sangue cosí atroce e cosí attuale.”115 Corrado’s life in the boarding school is not much different from his life on the hills: “non c’era nulla di diverso: vedevo bene che dai boschi ero passato in sacrestia.”116 112 These oxymoronic combinations have a few recurrences in the novel: “bastava la pace, la fine del sangue sparso” (Ibid., 80); “Pregare […] è vivere un istante di pace, rinascere in un mondo senza sangue” (Ibid.) “nella luce e nel silenzio ebbi un’idea di speranza […]. Sangue e saccheggio non potevano durare in eterno” (Ibid., 119). 113 Ibid., 91. 114 Ibid., 97. 115 Ibid., 98. 116 Ibid. 228 In my analysis of the second part of the novel I have underscored a movement from a perception of war as a natural expression of a savage law that governs the world—“c’è sempre stata questa guerra”—to a more disenchanted approach to it. As we have seen, at first war is accepted and justified by the protagonist who is able to read what is happening as nothing unusual—thus completely detaching Second World War from its historical background and from personal responsibilities. Under this interpretation, war would not be anything different, or necessarily more dramatic, than any other manifestation of men’s bestiality and ferocity of one against the other. However, in the second part of La casa in collina, the reader is presented with an alternative to this interpretation. Being safe, hiding and being alone is not enough anymore for Corrado. As we shall see in the next section, Corrado recognizes the need to question every single act of violence in a war that he cannot passively accept anymore.117 II.4 The Epilogue As I anticipated, the prologue and epilogue provide a frame for the novel and they are placed in the same time and space. Corrado is back in his hometown, and now we are informed that the time of narration takes place six months after the events, while the war is still raging and does not seem to be any closer to the end. In this section I will draw on some considerations that emerged in the analysis of the prologue, as chapter XXIII partially enlightens them. The most peculiar characteristic of this last chapter is that it actually poses many important questions and leaves them unanswered. Those open questions are the vessel for a debated humanitarian 117 According to Brian Moloney, the element of the savage is still to be found in the country in Pavese’s mature fiction. However, if compared to the author’s earlier works, it would be deprived from its allure and fascinating mystery, and instead associated with corruption and destruction (Brian Moloney, “Pavese as historian in La luna e i falò,” in Sotto il gelo dell’acqua c’è l’erba). 229 message, one that challenges the consolidated idea that seeing alive the end of a war means surviving at all. As we shall see at the end of this section, the narrator, tormented by the idea of being a survivor of a war that did not spare many of his friends, refuses to accept any form of violence as an inevitable aspect of a war. Every single bloodshed should be instead questioned, and the persons who performed it justified. Chapter XXIII proves to be particular already from its opening lines. “Niente è accaduto. Sono a casa da sei mesi, e la guerra continua,” is the very first sentence, which is almost an oxymoron in its comparison of six months of war with a “niente.” But the next passage is even more eloquent: “abbiamo avuto dei morti anche qui. Tolto questo e gli allarmi e le scomode fughe nelle forre dietro i beni [...], tolto il fastidio e la vergogna, niente accade. Sui colli, sul ponte di ferro, durante settembre non è passato giorno senza spari.”118 Death, aerial raid alarms, flights into the fields and gunshots as a daily reminder of the ongoing war are again compared by Corrado to a “niente.” Even though the war is everywhere and it did not spare his home town, Corrado resists the acknowledgement of this reality, affirming that his violated hill “per me […] resta tuttora un paese d’infanzia, di falò e di scappate, di giochi.”119 Already from these first lines we can understand why this novel was received by some of Pavese’s contemporary critics, as we have seen in the first chapter, as either scandalous or offensive. These lines may indeed confirm a legitimate common assumption: namely, that this is a narrative that begins and ends with the protagonist’s immobility, without development whatsoever in his emotional involvement in the war. La casa in collina could actually be read as the story of a regression. We could indeed be tempted to do so, especially if we compare this story to the classic epic account 118 Ibid., 120. 119 Ibid., 121. 230 of the Resistance sought in many other contemporary texts120. Corrado’s misadventures, in such a reading, constitute a sort of backward Bildungsroman, one wherein the protagonist moves away from a possibly formative situation—the hills of the action—and regresses instead toward his primordial haven, towards those antiche colline where any action, let alone any growth, are impossible.121 But as Corrado informs us in this chapter, and as we should have already sensed in the second part, there have been a few important changes in his life. Here we have the resumption of an important question that emerged already in the prologue, where Corrado informs us that this is a “storia di una lunga illusione:” salgo e scendo la collina e ripenso alla lunga illusione da cui ha preso le mosse questo racconto della mia vita. Dove questa illusione mi porti, ci penso sovente in questi giorni: a che altro pensare? Qui ogni passo, quasi ogn’ora del giorno, e certamente ogni ricordo più inatteso, mi mette innanzi ciò che fui—ciò che sono e avevo scordato. Se gli incontri e i casi di quest’anno mi ossessionano, mi avviene a volte di chiedermi: «Che c’è di comune tra me e quest’uomo che è sfuggito alle bombe, sfuggito ai tedeschi, sfuggito ai rimorsi e al dolore?» [...] Accade che l’io, quell’io che mi vede rovistare con cautela i visi e le smanie di questi ultimi tempi, si sente un altro, si sente staccato, come se tutto ciò che ha fatto, detto e subito, gli fosse soltanto accaduto davanti—faccenda altrui, storia trascorsa. Questo insomma m’illude: ritrovo qui in casa una vecchia realtà, una vita di là dai miei anni [...] e mi chiedo se sarò mai capace di uscirne.122 It seems that Corrado’s illusion is still present and that he has not been able to defeat it. It is as if Corrado has erected a further room to add to those of his childhood and youth: a room for “quest’uomo che è sfuggito alle bombe, sfuggito ai tedeschi, sfuggito ai rimorsi e al dolore.” It is actually fascinating how this passage resonates with the one where Corrado talks of his youth in chapter II.123 This suggests that Corrado treats the experiences of the past year just like he treats 120 The most representative novel of this trend is, again, probably L’Agnese va a morire by Renata Viganò. Agnese is a poor peasant woman who has no political formation whatsoever. She is nevertheless involved in the war—she joins the partisans after a German officer kills her husband—and by the end of the novel she will have gained a much deeper ideological awareness and a sense of history and war. 121 These “antiche colline” are very similar to those of Feria d’agosto, where time has stopped and nothing can happen. See, for example, “Il campo di granturco” and “La vigna.” 122 Ibid. 123 In the epilogue Corrado says “qui ogni passo [...] mi mette innanzi ciò che fui—ciò che sono e avevo scordato,” and in chapter II “era questo che avevo scordato. [...] Il giovane che viveva quei giorni” (Ibid. 9). Also, in the last 231 those of his youth: as something extraneous, as if it happened to someone else, as if “gli fosse soltanto accaduto davanti—faccenda altrui, storia trascorsa.”124 For this reason, the reader who finally reaches the epilogue may consider the frame as the only place of the novel where the narrator and Corrado coincide, whereas in all the other chapters there is a division within Corrado between the one who is narrating, and the one who is being narrated. I assert that the distance between the two derives from the fact that the narrator both in the prologue and epilogue refers to his story as a “lunga illusione,” thus allowing the reader to assume that the Corrado of the frame has a deeper and more articulated knowledge than the Corrado of the action. The narrator realizes that his life has been a “lungo isolamento,” and a “futile vacanza,” and he is aware that both his attitude and approach should have been otherwise. Nevertheless, at no point is Corrado affirming that he is free from his illusion, asserting instead in the prologue: “la guerra potrebbe ancora salvarmi.” He is not safe yet, he still lingers in his illusion and the war is not over yet. The real distance between the two Corrado is the awareness of living in a state of illusion that only the Corrado of the time of the narration has. In fact, the narrator admits: “mi accorgo che ho vissuto un solo lungo isolamento, una futile vacanza, come un ragazzo che giocando a nascondersi entra dentro un cespuglio e ci sta bene, guarda il cielo da sotto le foglie, e si dimentica di uscire mai più.”125 The reader now understands that Corrado’s illusion consists in believing that he can hide away, lead a solitary life based on the appreciation of his own personal myths, thus being completely detached from what is happening around him. This is an chapter he wonders “che c’è di comune tra me e quest’uomo,” and in the second one he asked himself a similar question: “che cosa c’era di comune tra me e lui?” (Ibid.). 124 This passage strongly resonates with Una certezza, where the narrator affirms: “se mi accade di fermarmi un momento a pensare, nel mio passato non mi ritrovo e le sue agitazioni non le capisco. È come se tutto fosse toccato a un altro, e io sbucassi adesso da un nascondiglio, un buco dove fossi vissuto sinora senza saper come” (Cesare Pavese, “Una certezza,” in Feria d’agosto, 95). For the analysis of this passage, see page 148. 125 Cesare Pavese, La casa in collina, 121. 232 ulterior confirmation that Corrado’s illusion is not connected to the specificity of the war, as it involved his lifestyle even during his youth. This self-awareness, which emerges in the frame, did not spring after the tragic event at the Fontane where all of Corrado’s friends were captured, and not even from the fear of being persecuted by RSI soldiers. Corrado is well aware of the void the loss of his friends left and he does not underestimate the uncomforted life under war, one filled with fear and horror. However, he admits that what woke him up was not something he suffered, it being fear to die, or loss of friends, but rather the sight of dead enemies: “non è che non veda come la guerra non è un gioco, questa guerra che è giunta fin qui, che prende alla gola anche il nostro passato. […] Ma ho visto i morti sconosciuti, i morti repubblichini. Sono questi che mi hanno svegliato.”126 He lost friends, he risked his own life and he returned to his homeland to find out that it was being violated by the conflict as much as any other place. Of all the horrors and disturbing implications of a devastating war, Corrado is shaken by the death of enemy soldiers. It should not surprise then that these are the pages that unsettled contemporary critics the most: the choice of a character like Corrado as protagonist of a novel set during the Resistance was already questionable enough; but the disturbing pietas for the fallen enemy was arguably the most debatable choice for critics like Rino dal Sasso and Giansiro Ferrata, who, as we have seen in the first chapter, were particularly critical of the novel’s second part. If we read the novel in autobiographical terms, both in terms of its choice of subject and of the way it is treated, Pavese may be considered the first intellectual of his rank to lay bare his lack of participation in the Resistance without resorting to any sort of self-exculpation. In fact, Raffaele Liucci127 considers La casa in collina the cornerstone of a Resistance memory that 126 Ibid. 127 Raffaele Liucci, La tentazione della casa in collina. Il disimpegno degli intellettuali nella Guerra civile italiana (1943-1945) (Unicopli, 1999). 233 challenges the official and celebrative one. The peculiarity of Pavese’s contribution to this alternative memory is his honesty in offering a main character who is not a hero and whose story resembles his author’s war experience. However, the similarities between the two experiences— the real one of the author, and the fictional of Corrado—have prompted many critics to read La casa in collina as Pavese’s expression of his sense of guilt for not having actively participated to the Resistance. If on one hand, a sense of discomfort filters out form Pavese’s comments on his wartime past in both the author’s letters and diary, on the other, it would be a simplistic interpretation to read La casa in collina as a self-expiatory story, as a way for Pavese to deal with his guilt. An interpretation that does not consider the weight and relevance Pavese’s theory of myth has in the novel is detrimental to a true understanding of the sense of guilt that is undoubtedly present. Corrado’s bashfulness and reluctance to have an active involvement in the Resistance can be interpreted as a betrayal of his friends who paid with their lives the choice to actively engage in opposing Fascism and the German occupation. The theme of betrayal springs out of the title itself Pavese chose for the collection of Il carcere and La casa in collina: Prima che il gallo canti. This title is taken from the Gospel according to Mark, where Jesus says to Peter: “before the rooster crows twice, you will deny three times that you even know me.” This quote explicitly raises the themes of treason and remorse connected to the lack of involvement of the main characters in both novels.128 However, both the prologue and the epilogue, to which the narrator assigns his deepest thoughts, are the seat of a much wider meditation on the horrors of 128 For this reason, as Bart Van den Bossche reminds us, Prima che il gallo canti is “un titolo che suggerisce che i due romanzi sono legati da una comune problematica di tradimento e rimorso. [...] Il tradimento cui accenna il titolo del dittico è stato connesso prevalentemente con la mancanza d’impegno politico di Stefano e di Corrado. La matrice autobiografica di entrambi i romanzi ha contribuito a considerare il dittico, e in particolar modo La casa in collina, come l’espressione letteraria di una “strategia del rimorso” da parte di Pavese, chiamata a compensare la propria passività dopo l’8 settembre 1943: la storia di Corrado sarebbe come un atto di confessione e di autodenuncia di Pavese, scritto con lo scopo di sfogare e di esorcizzare il rimorso per la mancata partecipazione alla resistenza armata, che è costata la vita ad alcuni dei suoi amici personali come Giaime Pintor e Leone Ginzburg” (Bart Van den Bossche, “Nulla è veramente accaduto,” 373-374). 234 war, a meditation that is so general as to transcend the historical limits of the Italian case. As we have seen, what the author writes in his diary and theoretical essays regarding the savage can help us better contextualize Corrado’s understanding of war as the emergence of a timeless pattern. “Ogni guerra è una guerra civile” uncannily echoes the move into generalization infamously typical in Post War Italy; a strategy designed to obfuscate the distinctions between perpetrators, bystanders and victims. Pavese’s theory of myth and his fascination for the savage may thus be responsible for an approach that, in its detachment from a historical-political discourse and in its generalization, could be accused of false consciousness. It should be noted, however, that Corrado’s perception of war drastically changes: his former fascination for the savage soon mutates into fear and horror. The old system is not valid anymore for Corrado, his conscience now abhors the bloodshed, which is not justified anymore by the idea that it is just one manifestation of the residue of savage in humankind. As we have seen, I read this movement from an indifference toward war—which dangerously at times borders with praise—to its condemnation, as replicating what Pavese writes in his diary with regard to the dynamic of continual exhaustion of rituals and beliefs. I claim that Corrado’s war too is subjected to this alternation where what is historically justified is bound to become superstition, thus replaced by a new system, justified by a new set of laws. Corrado’s war becomes unacceptable by the end of the novel, as the protagonist “wakes up”: ma ho visto i morti sconosciuti, i morti repubblichini. Sono questi che mi hanno svegliato. Se un ignoto, un nemico, diventa morendo una cosa simile, se ci si arresta e si ha paura a scavalcarlo, vuol dire che anche vinto il nemico è qualcuno, che dopo averne sparso il sangue bisogna placarlo, dare una voce a questo sangue, giustificare chi l’ha sparso. [...] Ci si sente umiliati perché si capisce—si tocca con gli occhi—che al posto del morto potremmo essere noi. Per questo ogni guerra è una guerra civile: ogni caduto somiglia a chi resta, e gliene chiede ragione.129 129 Cesare Pavese, La casa in collina, 122. 235 This last page of La casa in collina houses the last recurrence of bloodshed in the novel, but this time no reference is made to either the savage or religion. On the contrary, the reader can perceive that this time the bloodshed is mentioned in its strong attachment to reality. Corrado is now referring to a blood that needs a name, just like who shed it. Even more importantly, the person responsible for the bloodshed needs to be justified. I read the use of the verb “giustificare,” which, as we have seen, has a fundamental role in the dynamic of overcoming of rituals, as an indication that Corrado’s previous understanding of war may be now in crisis. As Van Den Bossche summarizes, “ciò che a un certo punto appare come acquisito e creduto vero si tramuta in superstizione una volta che avrà esaurito la capacità di giustificare “storicamente” chi li compie o chi vi aderisce.”130 Any bloodshed, even the one at the expenses of the enemy, is an act that should not be condoned a priori appealing to the conventional contraposition of opposite fronts. This interpretation of war is not valid anymore for Corrado who, in fact, claims that even the enemy’s bloodshed needs to be justified. The fact that the protagonist was awaken by the sight of enemy corpses sheds a new light on his understanding of the conflict, which he considers a civil war not because it stages Italians against each other, but because, as any other war, it puts man against man. These last considerations provide the opportunity to reinterpret Corrado’s comment in chapter IV, “c’è sempre stata questa guerra,” which is now reinforced by “io non credo che possa finire”: Io non credo che possa finire. Ora che ho visto cos’è guerra, cos’è guerra civile, so che tutti, se un giorno finisse, dovrebbero chiedersi:—E dei caduti che facciamo? Perché sono morti?—Io non saprei cosa rispondere. Non adesso, almeno. Né mi pare che gli altri lo sappiano. Forse lo sanno unicamente i morti, e soltanto per loro la guerra è finita davvero.131 130 Bart Van den Bossche, “Nulla è veramente accaduto,” 232. 131 Cesare Pavese, La casa in collina, 122-123. 236 If Corrado’s ahistorical consideration of war as a timeless phenomenon is a dangerous move as it risks beclouding not only the specificity of Second World War, but also the responsibilities inherent in the choice of the front in which to fight or in the choice of not fighting at all, represented by the protagonist, I claim that the last lines of the novel pose this consideration on a different level. In fact, the timelessness of war plays now against Corrado’s tendency to isolate. The war will not end for him in so far as he is doomed to question its validity and to justify his survival. The war is over only for the dead, whereas who managed to survive has the important task to make sure that the bloodshed was not in vain. Van den Bossche, when wondering whether it is legitimate to talk about a “strategia del rimorso” in La casa in collina, concludes that what we can find in the last pages of the novel is not only an “ammissione di una colpa,” but also a “cauta formulazione di un punto di vista diverso, situato al di fuori della logica degli schieramenti politici. La conclusione de La casa in collina punta piuttosto nella direzione di un riconoscimento dell’assurda irrazionalità della guerra.”132 I would like to underscore how in the novel’s last lines the narrator recounts his being a bystander as a status that forces him to question his own involvement in the conflict. Flushed out from his “lungo isolamento,” Corrado is thrown by war events into a world where it is not possible to completely isolate oneself anymore, because even the act of hiding or of not taking part morally and politically defines you. It is interesting how Pavese entrusts again to the action of seeing the description of this new status, as it has happened with many important passages of his theory of myth. In this case, being a bystander is intrinsically embedded in an act of seeing that almost defines it, charging it with humiliation: “guardare certi morti è umiliante.” If from his hideaway Corrado could look at the world with indifference, stillness, and apathy, the sight of 132 Bart Van den Bossche, “Nulla è veramente accaduto,” 374. 237 dead bodies is instead humiliating. Such a sight may no prompt Corrado to action, but it does break nevertheless his “lunga illusione” of being detached from the rest of the people. In fact, he feels that he shares with those dead a common destiny, which transcends his own personal one: “lo stesso destino che ha messo a terra quei corpi, [tiene] noialtri inchiodati a vederli, a riempircene gli occhi.” It is again through the action of seeing that Corrado asserts his place in the world, but this time implying that even being a bystander has responsibilities that cannot be denied. The fact that Corrado has reached a deeper understanding of his place in the war is again conveyed through an expression that involves the eyes: “si tocca con gli occhi.” Brian Moloney reads the last words of Corrado’s account as the positive “development from egoism to awareness of the suffering of others, from cowardice to courage.”133 Corrado’s story, in the interpretation of the scholar, is thus not one of failure, as the protagonist does reject an active participation in fighting—in this case in the Resistance—not for cowardice or laziness, but on humanitarian grounds. Corrado’s awareness and opening toward the others, his seeing at life from the outside of his “nascondiglio” for once, is also confirmed on a linguistic level. In these last pages, in fact, the narrator resorts to a plural, when referring to the painful consequences of war on men and women.134 133 Brian Moloney, Vittorini, Pavese, and the Ethics of Armed Resistance, 196. 134 The narrator’s use of the plural emerges in the following passages: “la guerra ce la siamo covata nel cuore noialtri” and “questa guerra ci brucia le case. Ci semina di morti fucilati piazza e strade. Ci caccia come lepri di rifugio in rifugio” (Cesare Pavese, La casa in collina, 120). 238 CONCLUSIONS FROM MATURITY TO RIPENESS Il fatto è che sei diventato quella strana bestia: un uomo fatto, un autorevole nome, un big. Dov’è più il ragazzo che si chiede come si faccia a parlare, il giovanotto che si rode e impallidisce pensando a Omero e Shakespeare, il ventenne che vuole uccidersi perché scioperato, il tradito che stringe i pugni pensando se potrà mai confondere la bella con la sua grandezza? In the diary entries from January 1948 to February 1950, Pavese often acknowledges that he has reached widespread fame, and that he has never before been so productive. Both Pavese’s colleagues at Einaudi and critics were in fact often and repeatedly praising his talent and his work rate. On January 20th, 1948, he writes: “oggi consacrazione. Mi pregano di scrivere, di concedere la mia firma,” whereas on October 10th, 1948, he asserts that he now has a reputation of “persona solida, dura, volitiva e riuscita.” In the final note of the same year, where, as usual, Pavese goes through his accomplishments, he again stresses the question of fame: “anno serissimo, di definitivo e sicuro lavoro, di acquisita posizione tecnica e materiale. Due romanzi. Altro in gestazione. Dittatore editoriale. Riconosciuto da tutti come grand’uomo e uomo buono. Da tutti? Non so. Difficilmente andrai più in là.”1 If the overall impression of the entry is of self- realization and pride in his work, the final phrase suggests a concern in Pavese about the unlikely possibility of further bettering himself and his work. I read these notes as an anticipation of a second wave of theorization on the concept of maturity that I claim Pavese was starting to 1 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di viviere, 360 (December 31st, 1948). conceptualize in the year before his death. There are in fact many indications from the past quotes—“consacrazione,” “persona riuscita,” “acquisita posizione tecnica e materiale,” “difficilmente andrai più in là”—that seem to hint at the fact that what Pavese was describing in these notes was, indeed, a finally achieved state of maturity. Obviously, this kind of maturity is different from the one theorized in the previous years, one reached when the adult can reconnect to the child, meaning that s/he is finally able to understand her or his own symbols, or, at least, s/he knows where to look to find them. The process that leads to the first kind of maturity, as we have seen, is introspective, one in which the subject should “tappar[si]i sensi” and be as detached as possible from the outside world. In the notes from 1948 on, instead, Pavese seems to be more concerned about the public resonance and recognition of what he is doing. If at this point these affirmations can be read as a personal satisfaction for having reached what he probably perceived as the apex of his career, in later notes, this concern will be aggravated by an anxiety about lack both of inspirational material and of the possibility to keep improving. A note from a few days later poses this question: Recens. Di Cecchi, recens. Di De Robertis, recens. Di Cajumi. Sei consacrato dai grandi cerimonieri. Ti dicono: hai 40 anni e ce l’hai fatta, sei il migliore della tua generazione, passerai alla storia, sei bizzarro e autentico…Sognavi altro a vent’anni? Ebbene? Non dirò “tutto qui e adesso?” Sapevo quel che volevo e so quel che vale ora che ce l’ho. Non volevo soltanto questo. Volevo continuare, andar oltre, mangiarmi un’altra generazione, diventare perenne come una collina.2 Pavese comments on flattering compliments he has received for his achievements with a saddened tone. It seems that the provisory fame he is enjoying is not enough for him, as he wished to reach with his writing an enduring accomplishment, one comparable to the perennial nature of a hill. This wish is also confirmed by an entry of a few months later, where Pavese 2 Ibid., 362 (January 19th, 1949). 240 writes: “tu scrivi per essere come morto, per parlare da fuori del tempo, per farti a tutti ricordo.”3 Pavese expresses the desire to go beyond, as if what he has reached by 1949 is not enough for him. He fears that his work has not granted him the desired fame—one that is perennial, that is not entangled in generational limits. The undertone of regret that can be perceived in the previous notes is often accompanied by Pavese’s coeval recurrent idea that the poetic material he was drawing upon was probably going to soon run dry. This emerges on September 30th, 1949: “non hai più esitazioni, paure, stupori esistenziali. Ti vai prosciugando. Dove sono le angosce, gli urli, gli amori dei 18-30 anni? Tutto quanto adoperi fu accumulato allora. E poi? Che si farà?”4 And again the following note, “Qualcosa si chiude. E poi?”5 Parallel to the satisfaction for having achieved the intellectual maturity and recognition for which Pavese had long worked, in these months’ entries a certain anxiety emerges about a forthcoming closure. On the one hand, “tutto quanto adoperi fu accumulato” in the past, meaning that there are no new experiences providing those “esitazioni, paure, stupori esistenziali” vital to sustaining a literary work. On the other hand, this store of material is bound to dry up—“qualcosa si chiude”—leaving uncertain outcomes for the future: “quante volte in queste ultime note hai scritto E poi? Cominciamo a essere in gabbia, no?”6 This anxiety for the precariousness of his fortunate situation emerges also from the November 20th 3 Ibid., 367 (April 10th, 1949). 4 Ibid., 374 (September 30th, 1949). 5 Ibid., 375 (October 16th, 1949). The fact that Pavese thought he had reached the highest of his creative possibilities is confirmed by the two diary entries of November 17th and November 26th—to both of which I have already referred in the introduction and in previous chapters. As we have already noted, in these entries he writes down a classification of his own work, grouping together works according to their thematic or to either their naturalistic or symbolic nature. This is a sort of summary of his work, one which—we should imagine—is redacted once the opera omnia is concluded. 6 Ibid. 241 note, where he follows yet another affirmation of maturity with the awareness that it is a state bound to end: nascono pensieri precisi, nuovi, stilizzati, efficienti. Maturità. Se l’avessi saputo quando smaniavi (’36-’39)! Adesso il rovello è che tutto ciò finirà. Prima anelavi d’averlo, adesso temi di perderlo. Hai anche ottenuto il dono della fecondità. Sei signore di te, del tuo destino. Sei celebre come chi non cerca d’esserlo. Eppure tutto ciò finirà. Questa tua profonda gioia, questa ardente sazietà, è fatta di cose che non hai calcolato. Ti è data. Chi, chi, chi ringraziare? Chi bestemmiare il giorno che tutto svanirà?7 To understand better the extent to which this new concept of maturity is different from the previous one, I would like to analyze the last theoretical essay Pavese wrote, “L’arte di maturare” (1949), posthumously published on Cultura e realtà. In this essay the author describes “il senso e il gusto della maturità,” as “uno stadio di giusta maturazione, di perfetto e virile equilibrio per amor del quale, come già diceva il padre di tutti noi, man must endure his going hence e’en as his coming hither. Ripeness is all.”8 The quotation of an excerpt from Shakespeare’s King Lear is of fundamental importance to understanding the distance between the two kinds of maturity. In fact, whereas English distinguishes between maturing and ripening, Italian has only one verb, maturare, which is used for both a process of physical and intellectual development, and for the ripening process of a fruit. Pavese was undoubtedly aware of the different meaning of maturity and ripeness in English, and for this reason his choice of the term “ripeness” over the more appropriate “maturity” should be further investigated. I read Pavese’s choice of the Shakespearian excerpt and the definition he provides of maturità/ripeness revealing of the implications underlying his new concept of maturity. Maturity as introduced by Pavese’s theory of myth before 1948 is a static state. It marks the achievement of an important degree of 7 Ibid., 376 (November 20th, 1949). 8 Cesare Pavese, “L’arte di maturare,” in La letteratura Americana e altri saggi, 360. This same quotation is used as an epigraph to Pavese’s last novel, La luna e i falò. 242 knowledge and self-awareness: it is not a transitory phase, but rather the final goal of a life-long research. Once maturity is reached the quest is over. When it comes to ripeness, on the other hand, the balance between being unripe, ripe or rotten is a very delicate one, strictly influenced by the ripening process itself: “uno stadio di giusta maturazione.” The quote from Shakespeare introduces a new level of meaning to the concept of maturity, now depicted through metaphors belonging to the biological world. In fact, this is how Pavese criticizes the tendency of Romantic literature to portray heroes who refuse to accept the maturing process: Sarebbe come se un pesco s’accontentasse di fiorire, poi con bella rivolta si scrollasse e, visti a terra tutti i petali, cercasse di fiorire un’altra volta sotto il sole d’agosto. A che scopo maturare banalmente dei frutti, che del resto verrebbero mangiati da vili uomini o da vermi più vili? Anche i petali—le prime vergini impressioni—marciranno come tutto il resto—come il mirto e l’alloro, come le generazioni, come gli imperi e le morte culture.9 Romantic heroes are, for Pavese, “essenzialmente incapaci di accettare la natura—che all’adolescenza fa seguire la maturità, e la maturità sostiene tragicamente bilanciandola per un breve virile istante che assomma in sé tutta una cultura.”10 As we can infer form the previous quotes, maturità/ripeness is transitory, as its balance is tragic and delicate at the same time. The concept of ripeness provided Pavese with an effective opportunity to address his new sense of maturity, one, as we have seen from the 1948 notes, that is tainted by the fear of intellectual decay. But there is another essential difference between the concepts of maturity and ripeness, as the latter is presented as a momentary perfect balance that “assomma in sé tutta una cultura.” Whereas the first kind of maturity is an individual goal, one that can be achieved through introspection, ripeness is only achieved when the individual balance is representative of something that transcends the individual. In fact, “i simboli, creati da una cultura con sforzi individuali, diventano operanti e fanno maturità quando assurgano a simboli collettivi—il 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 360-361. 243 passaggio di una cultura a un’altra più complessa è come il passaggio dalla mitologia di un creatore singolo a una mitologia collettiva.”11 What the old concept of maturity entailed seems not to be enough anymore for Pavese. Maturità is now the upgrade to a collective level of a mythology that had heretofore been individual. However different, ripeness is nevertheless connected to maturity, is its consequence. Only those who have reached maturity—those who have been able to comprehend their own mitologia—can aspire to ripeness, thus turning their achievements into a “mitologia collettiva.” This is a stage even more difficult to reach than maturity was. It seems that only true poets have the resources and spirit to work on their myths in a way as to make them collective and eternal.12 Pavese also employs this new lexicon borrowed from the biological world, one that relates to the process of ripening, in the coeval diary notes. For example, on June 22nd, 1949, while commenting on the productivity of the previous months, Pavese writes: “probabilmente è la tua stagione più intensa, e comincia a corrompersi […]. Che cosa scopriremo di nuovo—cioè, che cosa vivremo, per poi scoprirlo quando comincerà a puzzare?”13 Both “corrompersi” and “puzzare” are consequences of the process of ripening as they specifically allude to something gone bad, something that lost the fleeting productive balance and is now rotten. The past quote also reiterates Pavese’s concern that his store of experiences and material was dried up. It also addresses the hope of building a new arsenal of material that will eventually be discovered and turned into literature. This is confirmed by what Pavese writes on December 15th, 1949: “È 11 Ibid., 363. 12 This emerges also from “Poesia è libertà,” an essay written at the beginning of January 1949 and posthumously published in Cultura e realtà (Now in Letteratura americana e altri saggi). In this essay, Pavese asserts that “se il poeta veramente ricerca chiarezza e attende a esorcizzare i suoi miti trasformandoli in figure, non va taciuto ch’egli potrà dire d’avercela fatta soltanto quando questa chiarezza sarà tale per tutti, sarà cioè un bene comune in cui la generale cultura del suo tempo potrà riconoscersi” (Ibid., 333). 13 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 370 (June 22nd, 1949). 244 evidente che non ti riescano che i giovani nel raccontare—è la sola esperienza a fondo e disinteressata che hai fatto. Il big lo tratterai da vecchio.” This is the second part of the entry: “c’è gente che questa maturità, questa efficienza, questa ricca misura, non l’ha mai provata. Che cosa sanno della vita? La vita non è che questo. E poi? La felicità della pesca, del grappolo d’uva. Chi gli chiede più in là? Sono, e basta.”14 Still resorting to an agricultural metaphor, Pavese here alludes to the need to go beyond the happiness of having produced fruits like peaches and grapes. In “L’arte di maturare,” too, Pavese resorts to the metaphor of a peach tree that, in that case, refuses to produce fruit and stubbornly keeps blossoming. In this note, Pavese goes beyond that image. The peach tree has finally produced fruit, and yet, the author alludes to a “più in là.” Those fruits are useless if they do not ripen—if they do not become ready to be picked and consumed. Ripeness comes after the first maturity, it is an ulterior step—più in là— that elevates the relevance of those fruits from individual to collective. As we have seen in the essay, this process is connected by Pavese in the late 1940s to the question of collective myths. Just like when a fruit is ripe, it falls, ready to be collected by someone else, personal myths too, once they reach maturity through poetry, should ultimately reach their final goal by becoming collective and meaningful for others as well. This discourse could also be applied to literature, as it is through poetry that myths are apprehended and made tangible. Drawing again on the metaphor of fruits, peaches and grapes correspond to literary works that need to be ripe in order to have an everlasting fame, one that could overcome the present generation. If we cross-read the essay—written from August 14th to August 16th, 1949—with the notes from 1948/1949 on Pavese’s sense of professional fulfillment, we can better understand how Pavese might have considered his artistic maturity. We can now reconnect Pavese’s anxiety 14 Ibid. 245 about his fame, his desire to be perennial and to “mangiarsi un’altra generazione” with the idea of ripeness conveyed by “L’arte di maturare.” In 1949, Pavese has reached the first kind of maturity, but he is now aiming for the second one. The questions for Pavese might than have been: have I been able, through my individual efforts, to upgrade my own personal symbols to collective symbols? Are my works “perenn[i] come una collina?”15 I would like now to retrieve the conclusions from my analysis of La casa in collina in order to evaluate the place this novel might have had in Pavese’s worries of the last years of his life. On December 17th, 1949, Pavese writes for the last time on childhood, a consistent element of his poetics: “devi tener presente che negli anni ’43-’44-’45 tu sei rinato nell’isolamento e nella meditazione (di fatto, hai teorizzato e vissuto allora l’infanzia). Cosí si spiega la stagione aperta nel 46-47 con Leucò e il Compagno, e poi il Gallo e poi l’Estate e poi La luna e i falò ed ecc. ed ecc.”16 The years 1943-1945 where those when the author was strenuously trying to conceptualize the relevance and role of childhood in his poetics. The fact that he refers to those years as the time when he theorized and lived his childhood is an indication that Pavese is here referring to the achievement of the first kind of maturity. This is confirmed by the choice of the adverb “allora,” whose importance is also stressed by the use of italics, because, as we have seen, maturity means fully understanding and owning an age— childhood—of which the individual was not self-aware at the time it was lived. It was on those 15 These concerns were not abrupt, as they were already sporadically anticipated in the early 1940s. For example, in the above-quoted entry from May 27th, 1944, Pavese writes: “Arduo trasformare se stesso in io dantesco, simbolico, quando i propri problemi sono radicati a un’esperienza cosí individuale come la città-campagna e tutte le trasfigurazioni giungono soltanto a simboli psicologicamente individuali. (La vigna, il cielo dietro, l’orizzonte marino, gli alberi da frutto, le canne, i fienili […]. Se nessun altro ha di queste figurazioni, tu sei servito)” [Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 281 (May 27th, 1944)]. As we can infer from this quote, already in 1944 Pavese was concerned that his symbols would not have a collective resonance, that his own recurrent images could not be representative of a larger reality than his own private mythology. 16 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 381 (December 17th, 1949). 246 years that Pavese, through his theorization of myth had reached his maturity, the first kind, the one that Corrado too, among other characters, had reached after being re-born “nell’isolamento e nella meditazione.” This thus implies that the season begun in 1946-1947 is an ulterior stage, one that starts once the first kind of maturity has already been reached. According to Pavese, “le due esperienze adulte—successo e importanza, smarrimento e nullità—le hai avute (’45-’49 e ’43- ’44) e già trattate (Tra donne sole e Casa in collina). Devi articolarle di più.”17 In this note, Pavese expresses the need to further articulate the adult experiences ecompassed in Corrado’s events. Why did Pavese feel that the experience of La casa in collina was a partial achievement, and that there was need for further development? The February 15th, 1950 note might help us shed some light on this matter. Here Pavese refers to “sangue sparso” and “vigna” as unresolved knots: Ragioni sempre: le cose prima d’esser conosciute, le cose dopo conosciute. Il probl. è sempre quello—razionalizzare, prendere coscienza, fare storia. Intanto hai ridotto all’immagine del sangue sotto il fico, alla vigna, tutto ciò che accade e non si comprende ancora: i paesaggi, le strane coincidenze, i groppi psicologici, le cadenze in un’esistenza, i destini. (Se in queste immagini è per te poesia, è chiaro che, riconoscendoti in una dottrina che spiega tutto, diventi incapace di poesia). Beninteso, non basta constatare il nodo irrisolto—poesia è rappresentare questo nodo come tale, farne sentire il mistero, il selvaggio. Ma allora dov’è lo sforzo di conoscenza del poetare?18 The main substantial tension in Pavese’s poetics is effectively summarized in the above quote. According to Pavese, there is a dramatic tension between two opposing needs inherent in the act of writing poetry: the attempt to face and understand an unresolved knot, and the need to represent its mystery. The bloodshed and the vineyard are the last residue of what “non si comprende ancora,” so Pavese admits that he has not been able to fully penetrate and dissolve the mystery that sustains those images in his writing. This is an interesting affirmation, especially 17 Ibid., 381 (December 15th, 1949). 18 Ibid., 390 (February 15th, 1950). 247 considering the high recurrence of both elements in the diary, in Feria d’agosto and in La casa in collina. If on the one hand, this note may imply that Pavese has been able to “rappresentare questo nodo come tale, farne sentire il mistero,” on the other we infer that up to this point, “lo sforzo di conoscenza del poetare” has not been successful in gaining that awareness. Can this note help us understand what should have been better articulated in La casa in collina? Does Corrado’s experience of “smarrimento e nullità” derive from the fact that the bloodshed on the hills is still an unsolved knot? We can find a connection, if we look to the final pages of La casa in collina where Corrado asks himself the questions related to the responsibilities a war entails. In fact, Corrado admits that he does not have the answers, confirming the fact that he is not able to fully justify the sangue sparso, in front of which he feels dismay. As I mentioned in the last chapter, La casa in collina ends in a sort of limbo, suspended between a justification of war that can no longer be sustained—that of the savage—and a formulation, yet to be proposed, of a new justification, one that is invoked by the questions that conclude Corrado’s story. However, I do not consider this impasse as a fault of a character, Corrado, entangled in “smarrimento e nullità,” or of an author, Pavese, struggling with the unresolved knots of “vigna” and “sangue sparso.” I propose that the character of Corrado might have been stronger than Pavese and his readers realized. In fact, I argue that Pavese, maybe unconsciously, anticipated with Corrado the very last development of his theory of myth. Corrado’s “smarrimento e nullità,” felt during a war that was bigger than his abilities to participate and comprehend could match, attest to his understanding that his private myth should further address a need to go beyond, push further and not settle. In the specificity of a war novel, this understanding translates to the need for Pavese to 248 use his arsenal of images, myths and unsolved knots to convey a message that was bigger than his own mythology.19 In fact, I claim that Corrado anticipates the idea of ripeness, and he does so exactly by recognizing his lunga illusione: “questo insomma m’illude: ritrovo qui in casa una vecchia realtà, una vita di là dai miei anni [...] e mi chiedo se sarò mai capace di uscirne.”20 Corrado affirms that, now that he is back home, he feels like time no longer exists and he informs us that, regardless the daily perils of a devastating war, nothing happens. We also know that he admits that “cominciav[a] allora a compiacer[si] di ricordi d’infanzia.” All of these are the main indications—analyzed in the second and third chapter—that the stage of maturity has finally been achieved. If the first two sections of Feria d’agosto stage the passage from childhood to teenage and youth, and the third one theorizes maturity without assigning it yet to a character, Corrado can be considered the narrative continuation of this process, the closure of a circle opened with the section “Il mare.” However, Corrado refers to this state as an illusion, and he wonders whether he will ever be able to go beyond it. I would say that he does, indeed, overcome this illusion, and this happens in the last pages, when he moves from the enclosed 19 In “Poesia è libertà,” Pavese proposes an interesting difference between a person of letters and a poet that could be summarized in the first one being an epigone, and the second one being a pioneer. Whereas a letterato is content to operate within an environment where the important discoveries have already been made, the poet strenuously explores a new style and a new subject, ready to move on as soon as s/he is satisfied with her or his achievements. Lingering in something that is already been discovered implies the absence of that mystery that, as we have already seen, sustains the act of writing poetry itself. I consider Corrado’s tormented will to exit his beloved lunga illusione as an allusion to a question related to what emerges from “Poesia è libertà.” Corrado’s enduring illusion may hint at what Pavese describes in the essay as a common vice for poets, namely not being able to let go of an already explored subject or theme, even when it is time to accept new stylistic and thematic challenges. Corrado’s resistance to the need to abandon his illusion may be in part a projection of Pavese’s resistance to move onto the study of a new “terra incognita” (Ibid., p. 329). In fact, Corrado’s illusion is based on those motives and elements that were the foundation of Pavese’s poetics up to that point. As we have analyzed in these conclusions, Pavese was in the late 1940s aware that the beloved source of his poetic inspiration was not going to last much longer, as he repeated himself: “qualcosa si chiude. E poi?” 20 Cesare Pavese, La casa in collina, 121. 249 space of his nascondiglio to the use of the plural that I pointed out in the last chapter. For Corrado, I claim, the way out of his illusion is to understand the collective involvement in the conflict, in a passage from his selfish isolation to an opening to others, and this can only happen through an understanding of war: the cause of bloodshed in his (mythical) vineyard. For Corrado, maturity seems to no longer be enough. He recognizes it as merely a “lunga illusione,” something that should instead be developed further and find its value by attaining a collective resonance. Corrado may be mature, but he is not yet “ripe”: the fruit of his questions—those elusive and ungraspable answers—are not yet ready to be picked. Another reason why Corrado should be interpreted, I argue, as an anticipation of Pavese’s later theorization in the diary is evident form the entry of January 9th, 1950. This note is extremely important as it is the only place where Pavese recognizes that his approach, so strenuously theorized and put to the test on literary pages, has a significant weakness. Here, in fact, he admits that he may have mechanically and forcibly employed his theory of destiny in his literary writing, imposing it on the characters who seem to resist it, to have a spirit of their own: Ferma restando l’esigenza mitica di sentire la realtà delle cose, ci vuole il coraggio di fissare con gli stessi occhi gli uomini e le loro passioni. Ma è difficile, è scomodo—gli uomini non hanno la fissità della natura, la sua larga interpretabilità, il suo silenzio. Gli uomini ci vengono incontro imponendosi, agitandosi, esprimendosi. Tu hai cercato in vari modi di impietrarli—isolandoli nei loro momenti piú naturali, immergendoli nella natura, riducendoli a destino. Eppure i tuoi uomini parlano, parlano—in essi lo spirito di dibatte, affiora. È questa la tua tensione. Ma tu questo spirito lo subisci, non vorresti trovarlo mai.21 In this note, Pavese informs the reader that in his works he has been trying to make his characters as still and silent as nature. But they have a spirit within, they have words to utter: they are not as still, interpretable and silent as nature. They cannot be treated as polyvalent and 21 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 386 (January 9th, 1950). 250 intangible myths, unequivocally determined by their destiny to be and act in a certain, fatalistic way. The author admits that he struggled with this issue, that he repeatedly tried to make human passions and deeds as predictable and understandable as possible, and yet, nevertheless, it seems as if his characters had a life of their own. Pavese in this note seems thus to suggest that whereas he indulged in the mythical exigence to “sentire la realtà delle cose,” he hardly had “il coraggio di fissare con gli stessi occhi gli uomini e le loro passioni.” Corrado is probably the best representative of these rebellious characters. He is entangled in his illusion, the destiny the author imposed on him, but his need to oppose it surfaces and torments him.22 This important theoretical entry is followed by just a few more where Pavese introduces those that I interpret as the elements of a new formulation of his poetics that, unfortunately, was only suggested and never fully developed as he committed suicide only a few months later. In fact, the theoretical entries of January and February 1950 all revolve around the new elements of libertà and volontà. Will, for Pavese, “si esercita sui miti e li trasforma in storia. Destini che diventano libertà.”23 Myths are thus freed from destiny’s yoke. Through the intervention of the will, destiny too can become freedom as destiny is “lo storico prima di essere inteso nei suoi nessi e nella sua necessità-libertà.”24 Corrado, in being the best representative of those characters who flounder and who are animated by passions that Pavese could not contain, also anticipates the elements of will and freedom. We can now interpret Corrado’s obsession with the 22 One of the reasons why Pavese considers I dialoghi con Leucò his best and most representative work may thus be because this is the text where the author reached the most rigid and monolithic treatment of myth. In this work women and men are pure myth, destiny. I agree with Fausto Curi who asserts that “I Dialoghi sono un unicum nella letteratura italiana contemporanea, e in quanto tali vanno tenuti da noi nella giusta considerazione. Ma sono un unicum che imprigiona il mito, lo riduce letterariamente, lo costringe in una forma elegante e rigida. Ciò che il mito ha di selvaggio e di impervio va completamente perduto. Per usare i termini di Nietzsche, nei Dialoghi il mito è trattato in modi apollinei, mentre la sua natura richiederebbe che venisse trattato in modi dionisiaci” (Fausto Curi, “Il mito prima del mito,” 137). 23 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 389 (February 1st, 1950). 24 Ibid., 387 (January 10th, 1950). 251 savage and his attempts to connect it to war as his will operating on his own myths, trying to understand them, to rationalize and elevate them to the level of history. Reflecting on the fact that he witnessed the ambush and saw dead enemies, Corrado asserts: “lo stesso destino che ha messo a terra quei corpi, [tiene] noialtri inchiodati a vederli, a riempircene gli occhi.” “Noialtri” here probably refers to the survivors, so what does it mean that Corrado and the other survivors on one side, and the dead enemies on the other share the same destiny? Corrado is not referring to his own destiny, but to a collective one, one that, once understood, rationalized and justified, can become history. Corrado’s questions are his way of “razionalizzare, prendere coscienza, fare storia,” his assertion of freedom from a destiny (that same destiny Pavese lamented some of his characters were fighting) that needs to be broken. Corrado is one of those characters that Pavese wanted to “impietrar[e] […] riducendol[o] a destino.” Corrado, in fact, laments a destiny that nailed him down forcing him to stare at the dead bodies. His way of rebelling against a destiny that made him a “contemplatore che osserva accadere cose piú grandi di lui”25 lies in his opening up to the possibility of moving beyond the limited options available to him in Pavese’s regular, consistent motifs of observation and contemplation. The questions Corrado poses are intrinsically linked to his role as an observant bystander, and yet they are the outcome of his will—the assertion of his freedom—to transform his myths into history. With La casa in collina, Pavese hints at a new system, one which follows the theory of myth on which he had worked for a long time. Corrado is one of those characters who rebels against the fixity of myth and destiny, even though his questions are ultimately unanswered and he is unable to convert the myth of the savage into rationality, into history. I consider La casa in collina a liminal text, one that synthesizes the diary’s reflections up until that point, and one that 25 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, 234 (February 21st, 1942). 252 anticipates those of the late 1940s. The savage is the trait d’union between these two dimensions, between the private and the collective. The savage, presented in the first part of the novel as a mystery, as something that Corrado has not been able to fully decipher, is transposed in the second part onto a collective level, that of history’s brutality. Corrado’s questions attest to the necessity to position and investigate the savage on a shared and not individual level. It also attests to the need of a new interpretive framework, one that derives from questioning his lunga illusione.26 The fact that Pavese considered vigna and sangue sparso as still-open questions is a confirmation that he had not been able to provide an interpretation of the savage that would explain and contextualize it on a historical level. Maybe this is the moment when Pavese and Corrado coincide the most, biographical similarities aside. After having considered how Pavese’s discontent with his work emerged in 1948, I wonder whether he projected onto Corrado those “fallimenti e nullità” that he was perhaps instead feeling about himself. Pavese was raging a cognitive war on his own myths, in the hope that this endeavor would result in the understanding of his own symbols and recurrent images. For this reason, the recurrence of the hill, of bloodshed and of the savage in La casa in collina is not just a mere transposition of motifs from a worn repertoire, but it is moreover an ulterior attempt to understand them, to make them meaningful. Maybe the missing piece in the passage from maturity to ripeness could have been found by understanding that stubborn knot, the question of the savage bloodshed of wars. Pavese’s contemporaries lamented his disinterest in historical matters, or his inability to be involved in its understanding. 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