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Abstract
This article reads the work of Cesare Pavese in light of the critical challenges of transnational Italian studies and analyzes Pavese’s aesthetics of rootedness, representations of migration, and practices of translation as sites of tension between local and global geographic scales. Accepting Carlo Bernari’s provocative suggestion that we consider Pavese a “Southern” writer, the article traces how Pavese portrays the land, sea, and ocean within a geophilosophical “sistema di rapporti” (Furio Jesi) reminiscent of a Heideggerian “fourfold.” In Pavese, an “anti-oceanic” attitude goes hand in hand with his treatment of land and sea as two opposite mythical realms, which we see expressed in his translation of Herman Melville’s “oceanic” novel Moby-Dick. Similarly, Pavese’s dystopian accounts of emigration can be seen as anti-oceanic narratives that articulate the need to return. With his telluric symbolism and his notion of an indissoluble attachment to the land, Pavese’s aesthetics participates in the culture of ius sanguinis that, over seventy years after Pavese’s death, is still a remarkable feature of Italian society, as we see in contemporary debates on the 1992 Italian citizenship law.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported financially through the Italian Department at UCLA under the Giovanni and Ruth Elizabeth Cecchetti Award; the Division of Humanities at UCLA under the Harry and Yvonne Lenart Graduate Travel Fellowship; and the Graduate Division at UCLA under the Dissertation Year Fellowship. I thank Lucia Re, Roberto Dainotto, Thomas Harrison, and John Agnew for their invaluable advice at different stages of this research. I extend my gratitude to Franco Vaccaneo for kindly hosting me at the Cesare Pavese Foundation in Santo Stefano Belbo and providing access to resources that inspired my research in significant ways. I thank the attendees of the 2022 AAIS conference in Bologna (panel “Thinking Italian Plants,” organized by Elena Past and Deborah Amberson), who listened to preliminary portions of this article and offered support and feedback. Many thanks to the editors and anonymous peer reviewers of Italian Culture for engaging in stimulating dialogue and helping me refine my argument and writing. Finally, I thank Megan Tomlinson and Ryan Weldzius for kindly offering editing suggestions. All errors or omissions remain my own.
Notes
1 On citizenship rights in Italy see: The Black Mediterranean Collective (eds.) 2021 and specifically the contributions by Camilla Hawthorne, Vivian Gerrand and Giuseppe Grimaldi (167-231); Pesarini and Tintori Citation2020; Fiore Citation2017, 183-195.
2 From an essay on Sherwood Anderson: “… l’opera d’arte ci commuove e ci si lascia comprendere soltanto finché conserva per noi un interesse storico, finché risponde a un qualche nostro problema, risolve insomma un nostro bisogno di vita pratica” (Pavese Citation1968a, 35).
3 The term “campanilismo” refers to a typically Italian pride for local origins or loyalty to the “campanile,” the bell tower which is usually the tallest and most prominent building in a town or village.
4 On the scope and methodological challenges of Transnational Italian Studies, see Bond (Citation2014), Burdett and Polezzi (2020), and “Why a Transnational Approach to Italian Studies?” by Serena Bassi and Giulia Riccò. H-Net Italian Diaspora, November 8, 2021. https://networks.h-net.org/node/7645/blog/transnational-italian-studies-working-group/8928534/blog-why-transnational.
5 I apply the local/global theoretical framework more extensively in my dissertation: Di Blasio, Local/Global Aesthetics: Cesare Pavese, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gianni Celati, UCLA 2020.
6 The myth of an anti-Fascist Pavese was particularly celebrated in the 1960s and 1970s, but it has been discredited, or at least problematized, since Lorenzo Mondo’s publication of a secret diary in 1990—republished by Aragno on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of Pavese’s death in 2020—where Pavese expresses sympathy for both Mussolini and Nazi Germany. Binetti (Citation1998) grasps the complexity of Pavese’s intellectual and political position, especially in relation to the PCI. As for the expression “geopolitical unconscious,” I refer to Fredric Jameson’s theory that any act of narration is an attempt to describe the globe’s social totality and that there is no clear distinction between aesthetics and ideology. According to Jameson (Citation1981, 79), “ideology is not something which informs or invests symbolic production; rather the aesthetic act is itself ideological, and the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal ‘solutions’ to unresolvable social contradictions.”
7 The Fascist regime condemned Pavese to three years of confino for being involved in the exchange of anti-fascist correspondence. The length of the forced exile was eventually reduced to one year.
8 Bernari reacts to the “schematizzazione geografica e critica” imposed on writers born in different regions of Southern Italy. Provocatively, Bernari notices for example that Alvaro, Vittorini, Bonaviri, D'Arrigo (all born in Sicily or Calabria) are closer to the Piedmontiese Levi and Pavese, given their similar interests in myths and peasant society, than they are to the Sicilian, Leonardo Sciascia, who treats the mafia as an historical and national political metaphor—Sciascia, for his part, would be closer to the Milanese Nanni Balestrini, given his historical and political approach to the conditions of Southern workers in Northern factories (Bernari Citation1983, 587).
9 “To dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace within the free, the preserve, the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its essence. The fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing. It pervades dwelling in its whole range. That range reveals itself to us as soon as we recall that human being consists in dwelling and, indeed, dwelling in the sense of the stay of mortals on the earth. But ‘on the earth’ already means ‘under the sky.’ Both of these also mean ‘remaining before the divinities’ and include a ‘belonging to men's being with one another.’ By a primal oneness the four—earth and sky, divinities and mortals—belong together in one.” Heidegger, Citation1993, 351.
10 On Heidegger’s fourfold see also Andrew Mitchell: “The simple things around us—indeed, the things themselves—become the focus of [Heidegger’s] attention, lending to his work of the period a unique phenomenological density disencumbered of all formal transcendentalism. The fourfold provides an account of the thing as inherently relational. Thanks to the fourfold, these things unfold themselves ecstatically, opening relations with the world beyond them.” (Mitchell Citation2015, 3)
11 As noticed by Calvino. The motif of sterility connects this text to other poems of the collection such as “Paternità” and “Lo steddazzu.”
12 To better contextualize the question of racism in Pavese, it is worth recalling that Pavese wrote and lived during the years of Italian colonialism in Africa. A few references to Italian colonial missions to Africa appear in his writings, most of them presenting the figure of a soldier returning to his home village and yet not fully belonging to his community as before, carrying with him the memories of adventures that his family and friends will not be able to apprehend. See Pavese Citation1957, 156; Pavese Citation2002, 356, 531-534, 544, 781. On Pavese’s understanding of racism in the United States see his essay on Richard Wright, Pavese Citation1968a, 169-171.
13 My main disagreement with Gallot’s interpretation is that she sees the mythological dimension of Moby-Dick as an exception to Pavese’s unease with the sea. Gallot, 2002, 66. On myth and Moby-Dick see also Van den Bossche Citation2001, 84-95.
14 It is reasonable to speculate that emigrations had acquired a legendary status by the time Pavese starts writing. The incredible labor mobility of the 19th-early 20th century was motivated by many economic and social factors including: the emancipation of African-origin enslaved people in the Americas; new nation states in the Americas willing to populate their territories with European citizens to racially contrast indigenous populations; new migration of capital from cities in Northern Europe and England to the Americans and newer colonies in Asia and Africa, with the creation of millions of unskilled jobs around the world (Gabaccia 58). On the importance of return for many Italian migrants, see Gabaccia, 57: “In Italy’s proletarian diasporas, the most powerful magnets remained the home village, not the work sites of Europe or la Merica […] The proportion of returners among long-distance American migrants — 49 percent between 1905 and 1920 — was impressive. After all, travel across the Atlantic still took eight days to three weeks, and it cost more than half the yearly salary of an average peasant.”
15 On the genealogy of the poem, see Calvino in Pavese Citation1962, 227 and Marra Citation2009, 6.
16 Indeed, Bontempelli adopts terms similar to Pavese’s when he associates American writers to Homer in 1927, as Antonio Catalfamo reminds us: “Quello che ci attrae negli americani è il loro stato di verginità spirituale: sono degli ‘omerici’ e per questo una intelligente attenzione al loro modo di sentire ed esprimersi può esserci di grande giovamento per liberarci da quanto perdura in noi malvivo e come tale ci ingombra” (Catafalmo Citation2003, 33). On literary translation during Fascism see Ferme Citation2002.
17 On Pavese’s fascination for the ocean as a young man see also Masoero in Pavese 2008, 13-14.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Federica Di Blasio
Federica Di Blasio is Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian at Hamilton College (NY). She earned her PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles and has also taught at the University of Georgia.