The Moon and the Bonfires
The Moon and the Bonfires
THE LITERARY WORK
A novel set in Piedmont in northern Italy after the Second World War, with flashbacks to the prewar and war years: published in Italian (as la luna e, i falo) in 1950, in English in 1952.
SYNOPSIS
After 20 years in the United States, Eel, a foundling, returns to the village of his child-hood in the Langhe Hills on a journey of rediscovery.
Events in History at the Time of the Novel
Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written
Cesare Pavese was born in 1908 in the small village of Santo Stefano Belbo in the Langhe hills of lower Piedmont. He spent his child-hood vacations there with the family’s at his parents’ farm, the rest of the year with them in Turin. When Pavese was six, his father died from a brain tumor. The loss, along with his mother’s coldness, contributed to his shyness around strangers and a preference for solitude. He developed a persistent sense of exile that found its counterpoint in the physical world when in 1935 the Fascist government exiled Pavese to Brancaleone, in Calabria, for ten months for anti-Fascist activities. Exile is a factor in his fiction; the protagonist of The Moon and the Bonfires, Eel, goes into self-imposed exile in America. Why does Pavese send Eel to the United States, a country he himself never visited? Pavese discovered an affinity for America and American literature at the University of Turin, where he wrote a thesis on Walt Whitman and acquired an impression of the country as a place of hard work, vitality, and progress, but also of alienation and isolation. His interest grew into a passion, as reflected in his career. For most of his adult life Pavese worked for the Turin publishing house Einaudi as an editor and translator, rendering American classics such as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick into Italian and gaining a reputation as the preeminent Italian translator of American literature. He meanwhile produced a diverse body of writings in his brief life, from poetry (Hard Labor [1932], Mania for Solitude [1950]), to short stories (The Beautiful Summer [1940]), novels (The Political Prisoner [1938-9], The House on the Hill [1947-8]), dialogues (Dialogues with Leuco [1947]), essays (American Literature and Other Essays [1930-1950]), and a diary (The Business of Living, published posthumously [1952]). The Moon and the Bonfires was his last novel. Four months after its release and successful reception, Pavese committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. He had harbored suicidal tendencies since his youth, and an unhappy love affair with American film actress Constance Dowling was the final blow. A last literary gasp, this work features a man given to isolation searching for his roots in a familiar but transformed environment.
Events in History at the Time of the Novel
The Fascist period
The Moon and the Bonfires fictionalizes some of the experiences that took place in the Langhe hills during the Fascist regime and the partisan war of Resistance mounted against it. By this time, the regime had been in control of Italy for more than two decades. It came to power under Benito Mussolini in 1922, drawing support from veterans of the First World War and from the strong anti-socialist sentiment in the country. Slowly, Mussolini transformed Italy from a constitutional monarchy into a dictatorship (1925-29) with a nominal king. He did so through a mixed strategy of repression and the clever enlistment of his opponents in the regime and its concerns.
The Fascist government showed no mercy. Opposition leaders were eliminated by murder, imprisonment, or exile. Assassinations took the life of Socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti, as well as those of liberal anti-Fascists Giovanni Amendola and Piero Gobetti; imprisonment confined the communist Antonio Gramsci to lengthy incarceration (in his case, close to 11 years) and forced exile removed such leaders as Don Luigi Sturzo, founder of the Christian Democrat Party (see Gramsci’s Letters from Prison , also in WLAIT 7: Italian Literature and Its Times).
Many of these anti-Fascist leaders lived in the city of Turin in Piedmont. The city became a center of communist and liberal opposition to the authoritarian regime. Even before the 1922 advent of Fascism, Turin distinguished itself as a stronghold of working-class politics, the home of Antonio Gramsci, founder of the Italian Communist Party. Here Gramsci directed the political journal L’ordine nuovo (The New Order) and the Communist daily L’Unita (Unity), until he, too, was imprisoned. Turin was also a center of progressive liberalism: here, in the early 1920s, Piero Gobetti, a friend of Gramsci, organized a political movement around his own journals La rivoluzione liberale (The Liberal Revolution) and Baretti (a last name).
Though despotic and reactionary, the Fascist regime maintained a conciliatory approach to some degree, striving to obtain the consent of the masses. This approach was visible in its retirement, maternity, and childhood plans; its organization of leisure time and youth organizations; its teaching of fascist theorists in school; and its propagandistic use of radio, cinema, and the press. For a time, the approach met with some success and in 1934, in a referendum, 99.84 percent of Italian people expressed their trust in Mussolini’s policy. Popular consent reached a climax in 1936 when the government proclaimed the establishment of an Italian empire, following an aggressive colonial policy in Africa. The Fascist government was supported by a large majority of the population; some prominent intellectuals—the scientist Guglielmo Marconi, for example—decided to set an example and to fight in the war in Africa for his country. Shortly thereafter, dissent against the regime spread, due largely to the growing subordination of Italy to Germany and the promulgation of racial laws against Italian Jews in 1938.
Italy during the Second World War
With Nazism coming to power in Germany in 1933, and Italy thoroughly under Fascist control, Mussolini turned his attention to foreign policy, launching a colonial campaign against Ethiopia. This policy won him global ill-will, isolating Italy from the international community, except for Germany. The two countries came together thereafter. By 1936 the stage was set for a “Pact of Steel,” an alliance between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, which was quickly tested in the form of military assistance from the two dictators to the fascists who were fighting a civil war in Spain for control of that country (1936-39). Still, when the Second World War erupted in September 1939, Italy did not immediately enter the war. In June 1940, however, Mussolini’s Italy finally entered the world war on the side of Nazi Germany.
The war swept everyone and everything into its fold. All the resources of the belligerent forces, human and material, were mobilized, involving average people in the fray in a myriad of ways. First, in Italy as elsewhere, women and the elderly went to work in factories and on farms to replace men who left to fight for Italy. This was the case at Fiat, the main Italian automobile factory in Turin. Second, both sides bombed important European cities, trying to cripple the industrial power of the adversaries, dealing blows to their economy and morale.
The night of June 12-13, 1940, Turin was bombed for the first time by British airplanes that struck many buildings near the center of the city, sending the community into shock. Sadly the shock would wear off; such bombings became habitual in 1942, as did the rationing of consumer goods. From the onset of the war until autumn 1942, the city suffered 14 bombings, always at night. Between November 1942 and August 1943, there were 12 terribly damaging raids. Residents finally evacuated the city; by July 1, 1943, 48 percent of the citizens had abandoned Turin, no doubt in some cases saving their lives by doing so. By war’s end, more than 2,000 had died in Turin alone from the final bombings. Out of the ashes of this grim atmosphere arose Pavese’s despondent novel.
Anti-Fascism and Resistance
Dissent spread in Italy following the disastrous results of wartime conflict. To express disagreement with the regime, workers staged repeated strikes in factories in the North, especially in Turin, Italy’s main industrial center. The situation worsened when Anglo-American troops landed in Sicily on July 9 and 10, 1943, and started to conquer the peninsula. On July 25, the Grand Council of Fascism deposed Mussolini. The Italian king (Victor Emmanuel III) proceeded to arrest Mussolini and to make General Badoglio prime minister. During summer 1943, the new prime minister negotiated with the Allies to take Italy out of the war while the general populace and the army lived in limbo, uncertain of their destiny. Meanwhile, the Germans rescued Mussolini and put him at the head of Nazi-occupied northern Italy, allowing him and his Fascist followers to form the Republic of Salo there. The northern populace split between those who backed Mussolini (out of fear or genuine conviction), and those who resisted Mussolini, with arms or through other means.
The Resistance attracted diverse groups. In northern and central Italy, workers, peasants, students, intellectuals, and veterans of the dissolved Italian army joined the movement. They fought under the guidance of anti-Fascist parties, an umbrella term that included Catholics, liberals, and socialists but centered around the Communist Party, a well-organized group that benefited from years of underground experience. From an initial membership of 11,000 in winter 1943, the Resistance movement grew to 120,000-130,000 in 1944. By then, its followers had formed a real army, which took orders from the CLN (Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale—Committee of National Liberation).
Part of the population at large supported the Resistance, not only by supplying soldiers to fight the Nazi occupation army, but also in the countryside by furnishing hospitality and aid of all kinds to the partisans, or active members of the Resistance movement. While the various partisan groups shared the same goal—liberation of the national territory from the Fascist hold—they held a range of political views. The Badogliani (named after Pietro Badoglio) were planning a monarchic restoration after liberation, for example, while the socialist Matteotti (named after Giacomo Matteotti) and the communist “Garibaldi” brigades (named after Giuseppi Garibaldi) set out to achieve revolutionary social change. The Resistance involved two related but separate agendas: there were 1) fighting organizations bent on defeating the invaders and the Fascist government in northern Italy and 2) political movements concerned with laying the foundation and defining the nature of the future Italian state. This last task was mostly carried out by the intellectuals, many of whom endured hard times during the Fascist period.
The intellectual Resistance
Fascism drove many Italian intellectuals into voluntary exile. Others became fervent supporters of the Fascist regime because of a very clever ploy. The regime co-opted intellectuals to its side by leaving a great deal of room for them to participate in the game of defining exactly what Italian Fascism was. Players could take almost any position, from conservative, to middle-of-the-road, to revolutionary, as long as they thought of and called the position a Fascist one. So the intellectuals could think of themselves as Fascists, or, more exactly, as a Fascist elite, even if their politics differed greatly from other Fascists. In other words, the meaning of fascist was quite murky in Italy. Indeed little was black and white about Fascism there or the resistance to it (except for the black shirts worn by the para-military squads of the Fascist Party).
As in other dictatorships, the Fascist regime wiped out freedom of speech. Already in 1926 Mussolini created a “Special Court in Defense of the State” to prevent any intellectual or practical activity against the regime. Censorship spread, subjecting the press, theater, cinema, literature, and education to strict controls. In 1931, the regime forced university professors to take an oath swearing their allegiance to the Fascist Party and promising to indoctrinate their students accordingly. Most professors took the oath. But as the Fascists tightened their grip on every aspect of Italian life, intellectuals whose views conflicted with the regime’s found it ever more difficult to write, teach, or otherwise work, so many emigrated. The writer Giuseppe Antonio Borghese and the physician Enrico Fermi moved to the United States. The Rosselli brothers (Nello and Carlo) left for Paris, where they organized a social-democratic struggle against Fascism, founding the group Justice and Freedom. Both brothers were assassinated.
Openly anti-Fascist intellectuals who remained in Italy were exiled to small villages far from the main cities, resigning themselves to a condition known as al confino, internal exile or confinement. Isolated, they were rendered harmless to the regime, or so went the thinking. Pavese suffered this fate, his exile in Calabria inspiring his novel The Political Prisoner, written between November 1938 and April 1939. Poets wrote introspective, ambiguous, and highly personal verse, seeking refuge in it from the intolerable aspects of surrounding society—the censorship laws, repression, violence, and general lack of freedom. Examples of such poets are Eugenio Montale and Giuseppe Ungaretti (see Ungaretti’s Life of a Man , also in WLAIT 7: Italian Literature and Its Times).
Not only was Turin the center of political opposition to Fascism, it was also the heart of the intellectual opposition. This status was due not only to the liberal and communistic leaders who had lived here (Gobetti and Gramsci), but also to the Einaudi Publishing House. Many of those associated with Einaudi were known anti-Fascists struggling for political and spiritual freedom. The police kept them under constant surveillance, and the publishing house itself fell afoul of the Fascist authorities. Early in 1934 Leone Ginzburg, a friend of Pavese and editor of the journal La cultura (The Culture), published by Einaudi, was arrested. Pavese applied for the vacant post and was appointed, in the hope that his non-partisan views might ease the pressure exerted on Einaudi by the Fascist administration.
Actually Pavese’s position in the internal struggle against the Fascist regime is regarded as ambiguous. He was never directly involved in anti-Fascist political activities. Although he was brought to trial and consigned to internal exile in 1935, the reason was rather mundane. He was arrested because an anti-Fascist friend asked him to receive letters for her from a politically suspect correspondent, a Communist serving a jail term at the Regina Coeli prison in Rome. The police searched Pavese’s house and found an incriminating letter. Pavese refused to reveal the name of the letter’s recipient and was arrested.
Later, during the civil war, though some of his friends died in the struggle, Pavese did not fight. Instead he took refuge with his sister in Serralunga, a village near Monferrato, in Piedmont. Pavese spent most of his time here until the end of the war, giving private lessons in a convent school. Others judged his response as a failure to take anti-Fascist action at the crucial moment, and they resented him for this. He became a controversial figure in Italian literature and politics, as shown by debates on him in the press after his death (e.g., in an October 1953 issue of the Communist daily L’Unitti).
Pavese is representative of those intellectuals who did not take direct political action but, after witnessing and meditating on the unfolding events, went on to take action in their own unique ways. So shocked was he by the suffering around him that he joined the Italian Communist Party after the war. Possibly the success of the Resistance convinced him that activism could indeed change society and that writing could be an agent of such change. He may have come to feel that postwar Italy and Europe needed every possible effort, material and spiritual, to rebuild the badly ravaged areas. In the end, he took action of another sort, infusing events of the recent past in his novels.
The Novel in Focus
Plot summary
There is an interweaving of different time frames in The Moon and the Bonfires: present and past, events the main character witnesses and old memories. The narrator and main character, Eel, grew up in the Langhe Hills in Piedmont. After the Second World War, he returns from America to the village of his youth in a quest to reunite himself with his peasant roots and the landscape of his childhood. He is driven by an obscure desire to rediscover a sense of identity, to overcome a feeling of separation and estrangement both in himself and from the place that gave him his first consciousness of the world.
The narration unfolds in three parts. In the first part Eel revisits familiar places, hills, and farms, sometimes in the company of Nuto, his childhood friend. Narrator as well as main character, Eel recalls the time he spent working for a poor peasant couple at the Gaminellas’ farm. He was a foundling, a bastard taken in by the poor family’s out of a desperate desire for a government stipend. As his mind wanders into the past, Eel registers absences in the present: the loss of familiar landmarks; houses that have been burned down; hills leveled; rows of hazel cut; rye fields gone. He reaches the Gaminellas’, where instead of his old employers, he finds Cinto Valino, a violent and rude peasant who lives with his son, mother, and sister-in-law. The individ uals, then, have changed, but other elements of village life have remained constant.
The slope from the field to the road was the same as ever. The same stain of copper sulfate around the trellis on the wall. The same rosemary bush at the corner of the house. And the smell, the smell of the house, of the bank, of rotten apples, of dry glass and rosemary.
(Pavese, The Moon and the Bonfires, p. 24)
Focusing on Valino’s poor undernourished son, Eel sees himself in younger years; the boy seems fated for a similar destiny, a life equally empty of meaningful attachments.
In the second part of the novel, details from the past surface in dialogues with Nuto. Eel spends this part on another farm, Mora, receiving no salary for his labor, only board. It is here that he meets Nuto, a farmhand like himself and his closest friend even in adulthood. Nuto is the clarinet player in the local band. He served as a partisan of sorts during the war, and has since become the village Marxist. He is full of resolve: “Nuto is Nuto, and knows better than I do what is right” (The Moon and the Bonfires, p. 21). Always rooted in one place, he never questions the basic tenets of his existence. He knows his own mind, observes Eel, crediting Nuto’s activism to his immobility: “Something has also happened to the one who never moved, a destiny—that idea of his that things must be understood, made better, that the world is badly made and it’s in everyone’s interest to change it” (The Moon and the Bonfires, p. 36). Remaining in his birthplace, Nuto has assimilated the atavistic, or periodically recurring, nature of the place. The moon, he says, is something “you have to believe in whether you want it or not. Try to cut a pine during the full moon, the worms will eat it for you” (The Moon and the Bonfires, p. 44).
THE INTERPRETATION OF FIRE-FBTIVAIS
Harking back to ancient times, the customs of kindling great bonfires, leaping over them, and driving cattle through or around them was nearly universal in Europe, as were processions or races with lit torches around fields, orchards, pastures, or even cattle stalls. Whether in the form of bonfires blazing at fixed points, or torches carried from place to place, or embers and ashes taken from a smoldering heap of fuel, the element of fire was thought to promote the growth of crops and the well-being of people or animals, either by promoting positive effects or by thwarting dangers from forces such as “thunder and lightning, conflagration, blight, mildew, vermin, sterility, disease, and not least of all witchcraft” (Frazer, p. 743).
Eel’s memories carry him back to Sor Matteo. The well-to-do owner of the Mora, a rich farm, Sor Matteo had three beautiful daughters. The adolescent Eel idolized the girls, seeing them as the incarnation of an unattainable, disturbing femininity while he remained the ever-solitary adolescent.
For Eel, adolescence is a period of seclusion. Observing carts full of fairgoers on their way to summer gatherings, he would stay behind in his place at Mora, always “looking at the same vineyards and sky”(The Moon and the Bonfires, p. 91).
On evenings like that, a light, a bonfire seen on a distant hill, would make me cry out and roll on the ground because I was poor, because I was a boy, because I was nothing. I was almost happy when a thunderstorm, a real summer disaster, blew up and drenched their party. But now, just thinking about them, I was missing those times and wanting them back.
(The Moon and the Bonfires, p. 91)
Unfortunately Eel finds no succor in the past, and in the last part of the novel, its memories collide with a tragic present. At the present-day Gaminella farm, Valino burns and destroys the barn, murders his sister-in-law and mother, tries unsuccessfully to kill his son, sets the farm ablaze, and finally hangs himself. Happiness no longer even graces the Mora, where Eel idolized the beautiful sisters Silvia, Irene, and Santina. After a love affair with an older man, Silvia dies from an illegal abortion. Irene marries and takes off to lead a miserable life full of beatings by her husband. Santina, the youngest and most beautiful, becomes a prostitute of sorts, exchanging sex with Fascists for food and clothes. To survive and lead a decent life during the war, she aligns herself with the Fascists, but, feeling sympathy with the partisans, eventually joins them in the hills and fights courageously. Nevertheless she is suspect; the partisans decide Santina must be a spy. Doubting her sincerity, they shoot her and burn her body in a large bonfire. Nuto recalls: “Then we poured gasoline on her and lit it. By noon it was all ash. The mark was still there last year, like the bed of a bonfire” (The Moon and the Bonfires, p. 154).
An expatriate’s homecoming
Eel uproots himself, travels, earns his fortune, and then returns to his small native patch of earth to reconnect with his past and find himself. He journeys overseas like the epic hero Ulysses (or Odysseus), who must gain “experience of the world and of the vices and the worth of men” before returning home to Ithaca (Dante Alighieri, p. 325). Eel also resembles another literary character, the cousin in a 1936 poem by Pavese.” The South Seas,”.
My cousin talked this evening.
… You who live in Turin …
… When you live
a long way from home, make good, enjoy yourself
and then come back at forty, like me,
everything’s new. The Langhe hills don’t disappear.
(Pavese, A Mania for Solitude, p. 29)
At the start of the poem, the cousin leaves to spend 20 years wandering the globe, convinced that life at its fullest is to be found anywhere but home. Eel, likewise, leaves for America because he likes “to have one foot always on the gangplank”(The Moon and the Bonfires, p. 6). Disenchanted, he returns. The United States bears little resemblance to the European myth of America as the “land of opportunity.” He sees rootlessness, alienation, and restlessness in its inhabitants, dismissing the immigrants and native inhabitants alike as “all bastards” (The Moon and the Bonfires, p. 9). Eel relates only superficially to other people in America; nothing touches the deeper regions of his being. He is frightened by this different world:
Even among themselves they didn’t know each other. … A day would come when just to touch something, to make himself known, a man would strangle a woman, shoot her in her sleep, crack her head upon a monkey wrench.
(The Moon and the Bonfires, p. 16)
Eel returns home to reconnect, hoping for relief. His hopes are grounded in notions of childhood popular in Pavese’s day and earlier. Childhood is so important, as Pavese gleans from the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Giovan Battista Vico (see New Science, also in WLAIT 7: Italian Literature and Its Times), because in a child’s contact with the world, he or she creates images, myths, and symbols that form future meanings for things. Pavese adopts such ideas, working them into his fiction.
From our earliest years, from our childhood, from all those moments of our first, essential contact with things and with the world which are liable to catch a man off guard with their immediate, emotional impact, from all the “first times,” irreducible to rationality … there comes a giddy sensation, as if rising from a whirlpool or rushing in through a door thrown wide open—a promise of conscious awareness, an ecstatic presentiment.
(Pavese in Thompson, p. 102)
After the “first, essential contact,” images and places become unique, absolute, and mythical. In fact, events that happened there become singular, different from any others in the world, part of a non-temporal, non-spatial dimension, sanctuaries, legendary places of childhood. Returning to them is an attempt to search for those ecstatic instants, the original mythic moments of contact with the world to overcome alienation and solitude experienced in the city. This explains Eel’s deep attachment to the places of his childhood.
However, Eel fails to reconnect. Pavese wrote in his diary about his own displacement on returning to his native land:
Strange moment when (at twelve or thirteen) you left your country home, had your first glimpse of the world, and set out, buoyed up by fancies (adventures, cities, names, decisive rhythms, the unknown). You did not know you were starting a long journey that, through those cities, adventures, names, delights, and unknown worlds, would lead you to discover how rich in all the future was your moment of departure, the moment when, with more of the country in you than the world, you gave your backward glance. The world, the future now within you as your past, as experience, as skill in technique, and rich, everlasting mystery is found to be the childish you that, at the time, you made no effort to possess.
(Pavese, This Business of Living, p. 247)
The answer for Eel, and Pavese, seems not to lie in reconnecting with the past: “I don’t know,” says Eel, “whether I will buy a bit of land … I don’t think so; my days now are phone calls, shipments, city pavements” (The Moon and the Bonfires, p. 70). Though the country still has a strong effect on him, everything is the same yet changed. The bonfires still blaze, only now not to awaken the earth and assure rain and fertility but to reduce Santina to ashes and to burn down Valino’s barn.
The implication is that, for Pavese at least, with the end of childhood came the dissolution of the mythic atmosphere of the past. In his poem “The South Seas” the cousin character claims “you don’t lose the Langhe” (A Mania for Solitude, p. 29); he seems to succeed at reabsorbing himself in his native land. Eel, on the other hand, notes how the faces, voices, and hands that should have touched him, are no longer there. What remains is a village square the day after a fair, “a vineyard after the harvest” (The Moon and the Bonfires, p. 65). The two works suggest a sobering shift with respect to Pavese’s emotional ties to home and an increasing sense of alienation that extends from the city to the village of his birth, expanding rather than contracting over time.
Sources And Literary Context
During the closing months of 1943 Pavese fled the massive bombings in Turin, returning, as noted, to the countryside of his childhood, hoping to recover “lost time.” He thus draws on personal experience in depicting Eel’s quest in the novel.
Pavese’s debt to the Italian philosopher Giovan Battista Vico (1668-1744) has been described. In fact, Vico is but one of a host of thinkers that influenced the novelist. Around 1950 he edited a “Collection of Religious, Ethological, and Psychological Studies” for the Einaudi publishing house that encouraged him to find ritual meanings in the countryside. The novelist drew on this and other works by specific scholars of his day:
Hungarian classical scholar Károly Kerényi (1897-1973) Provided the idea of myth as a unique moment and of its repeatability (in works such as The Role of Myth in Life [1926]).
German essayist and novelist Thomas Mann (1875-1955) Informed Pavese’s notions of the association between myth and poetry and of the return of events (in Joseph and His Brothers [1933-43]).
AMERICAN LITERATURE IN FASCIST ITALY
“A round 1930… some young Italians discovered America in their books; a pensive and barbarian, happy and quarrelsome, fertile America, heavy with all the past of the world and at the same time young and innocent. For a few years these young people through their reading, translating, and writing were driven by a joy of discovery and of revolt that offended the official culture…. The [Fascist] regime tolerated this with a clenched jaw…. The fascist scandal…, that surrounded these new books and their subjects. [was] irresistible to a public whose sense had not yet been totally dulled by conformism…. One can frankly say that…. the new mania helped fan and perpetuate the political opposition of the Italian “reading” public, even if it was vague and futile. For many, the meeting with [the renowned American writers] Caldwetl, Steinbeck, Saroyan, even the old Lewis, provided a glimmer of freedom, the first suspicion that the culture of the entire world did not culminate in Fascism.”
(Pavese, La letteratura americana, p 173; trans. C. Villa)
Romanian historian Mircea Eliade (1907-86) Strengthened the notion of the idea of the return of events (in The Myth of the Eternal Return [1949]).
Austrian founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) Reinforced Pavese’s idea of a deep connection between the myth and the psychology of the unconscious (in Totem and Tabu [1913]).
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875-1961) Conceived of myth as being not about the world but about the mind, a symbolic production created by the “collective unconscious” (in On the Psychology of the Unconscious [1916]).
British anthropologist James Frazer (1854-1941) Provided information on the rites, beliefs, superstitions, and taboos of early and Christian cultures, and on fire festivals in Europe (in The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion [1922]).
Irish fiction writer James Joyce (1882-1941) Taught about spiritual renewal by plunging into the unconscious (in A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man [1916], translated in 1934 by Pavese).
Pavese admired the realism of American writers such as Herman Melville (e.g., Benito Cereno) and Sherwood Anderson (Dark Laughter). He read and translated such works, impressed by the willingness of American writers to experiment with form and language to portray contemporary reality. Especially appealing to him was their focus on the alienation of the individual in a rapidly changing social environment. Influenced by them, Pavese set out to depict alienation in his own writings, setting himself in opposition to the Italian literary tradition, rich, as it was then, in surrealist, Futurist, and hermetic writings.
Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written
Intellectuals and the postwar period
Pavese wrote The Moon and the Bonfires in 1950. At the time strong tensions coursed through Italy, along with strong hopes of participating in the country’s reconstruction after its near disintegration after all the executions, deportations, hunger, racial persecution, and devastating bombings. The cultural debate was lively. On the one hand, intellectuals noted the demise of Italy’s Fascist myths. On the other hand, they felt an urgent need to formulate a new culture, one that freed humanity from exploitation and misery.
In 1945, rising to the challenge, the novelist and editor Elio Vittorini founded the review il Politecnico (The Polytechnic), which linked culture to social criticism, popular epic, and political commitment. This same goal was also adopted by the neorealist movement, an Italian literary and cinematic movement dedicated to portraying Italy’s prewar poverty and postwar social problems. The neorealists focused on the victims of power, striving to depict their experiences with fidelity and perhaps even to influence reality. Among the neorealist novels were Elio Vittorini’s Men and Not Men (1945), Vasco Pratolini’s Chronicle Of Poor Lovers (1947), and Pavese’s The Moon and the Bonfires (1950).
In literature as well as in politics, the close examination of the past focused in particular on the Resistance. After the war, conservatives, fueled by anti-Communist feelings, pointed to every killing that came to light as evidence that the Resistance was “a guerrilla war, illegality, bloodshed”(The Moon and the Bonfires, p. 55). At the other end of the spectrum, radicals tended to suppress evidence of unethical partisan behavior to preserve the myth of a united Resistance whose members operated in harmony against the evil Fascist invaders. Meanwhile, asserts Pavese’s novel, “the man who really risked his neck [wouldn’t] talk about it” (The Moon and the Bonfires, p. 56). Pavese mirrors the two extremes in his novel, which itself refuses to idealize the Resistance. The Moon and the Bonfires instead depicts the partisans as a complex group, one that has its own share of outsiders and draws members who join not for idealistic reasons, but to avoid conscription or city life: “You know how it was, a little of everything in the bands. People from all over Italy and abroad. Fools, too” (The Moon and the Bonfires, p. 57). Also the novel portrays the partisans as capable of unjust violence (the killing of Santina). Pavese thus writes a story that distances himself and the reader from the political extremes; also he sets the record straight.
Reception
When The Moon and the Bonfires was published, Pavese had just received the famous literary prize, Strega, for his trilogy The Beautiful Summer (La bella estate, 1949). His next novel was therefore received with great interest by Italy’s critics and the reading public alike. Some well-known critics, such as Giuseppe De Robertis (in the review Tempo, June 1950), praised The Moon and the Bonfires, especially for its predominant theme of memory. For this reason, others compared Pavese to Marcel Proust. Not all the responses were positive. The Communists thought the novel ought to have a stronger connection to the ideals of the Party (since Pavese had joined it). In the newspaper il corriere delta sera (in the article “Pavese decadente” December 22, 1954), the famous Italian novelist Alberto Moravia found fault with Pavese’s work. He charged Pavese with having been influenced by the German scholar Friedrich Nietzsche and his Italian disciple Gabriele D’Annunzio, who spoke of a mythic age when man acted irrationally (see D’Annunzio’s Child of Pleasure, also in WLAIT 7: Italian Literature and Its Times). Writers like Pavese, said Moravia, were using simple characters to analyze how such a man faced reality—and to poor effect. The practice resulted in lower-class characters expressing a cultivated writer’s ideas in their own plain language. Pavese might have deflated this charge; he had rebuffed such critics before, pointing to the high value he placed on mirroring reality. But this time he committed suicide, and left the barbs dangling in postwar Italy—unanswered.
—Cristina Villa
For More Information
Alighieri, Dante. Inferno. Trans. John D. Sinclair. London: Oxford University Press, 1971.
Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough. A Study in Magic and Religion. New York: Macmillan, 1951.
Guj, Lisa. “The Migratory Journey of Eel: A Path to Hope in Post-War Italy.” Italian Quarterly 27 (spring 1986): 37-44.
Lajolo, Davide. An Absurd Vice: A Biography of Cesare Pavese. Trans. Mario and Mark Pietralunga. New York: New Directions, 1983.
Merry, Bruce. “Artifice and Structure in La lima e i falo.” Forum Italicum 3 (September 1971): 351-52.
O’Healy, Aine. Cesare Pavese. Boston: Twayne, 1988.
Pavese, Cesare. A Mania for Solitude. Selected Poems 1930-1950. Trans. Margaret Crosland. London: Peter Owen, 1969.
_____. La letteratura americana e altri saggi. Torino: Einaudi, 1951.
_____The Moon and the Bonfires. Trans. R. W. Flint. New York: New York Review Books, 2002.
_____. This Business of Living. Diary 1935-1950. Trans. Alma E. Murch. London: Peter Owen, 1961.
Peitsch, Helmut, Charles Burdett, and Claire Gorrara, eds. European Memories of the Second War. New York: Berghahn, 1999.
Thompson, Doug. Cesare Pavese, a Study of the Major Novels and Poems. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Wilkinson, James D. The Intellectual Resistance in Europe. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981.