Dancing in the Moonlight: The Works of Cesare Pavese
by George Menz
Cesare Pavese worked diligently albeit without much fanfare in the course of his brief career, enduring fascist repression and critical indifference to produce novels and poems which would, after his death, be seen as monumental works in modern Italian literature. Only his final novel, The Moon and the Bonfires, achieved mass acclaim while he was alive; he died by suicide shortly after its release, following a failed love affair with an American actress. He was handsome, intelligent, fascinated by the United States (he translated numerous American modernists into Italian), and an undeniable literary talent, but his inability to submit to the dictates of a “respectable” life alienated him from his surroundings and ultimately drove him into despair.
The Moon appears so frequently in Pavese’s work as to seem like an obsession. It could be said to symbolize the dark, primeval side of life (like “The Moon” card in Tarot). In Roman religion, the Moon was associated with the goddesses Luna and Diana, and the lunar cycle has often been (perhaps spuriously) linked to the menstrual cycle. Perhaps the Moon stands for female power, the female gaze; a merciless eye which the daylight, Apollonian world of men tries to deny, but which it can’t suppress entirely. On the other hand, in Germanic traditions, the genders of the Sun and Moon are reversed. Perhaps the daylight world, of social graces and charming conversation, is the world of women; and the night world, of darkness and violence, is the world of men.
In either case, the tension — between light and dark, male and female, seen and unseen — animates Pavese’s work. The Beach, Among Women Only, and The Devil in the Hills describe bourgeois distractions which can only barely conceal undercurrents of desperation and the specter of death. The Moon and the Bonfires describes a lone wanderer’s attempts to piece together the truth of the war years as one might reconstruct the events of a night in the light of day. It reads like Gerard de Nerval’s Sylvie by way of Italian neorealism. Unusually for a modernist, he is capable of writing women as people, and not only as manifestations of male desire: the protagonist of Among Women Only is an entrepreneur and astute social observer, dismayed by the superficiality and materialism surrounding her. One could speculate on the potential influence of the novel on Michelangelo Antonioni when he conceived of Red Desert twenty years on.
One can also observe in Pavese the peripatetic mood which pervades much postwar European literature; his protagonists are wanderers, observers, but rarely actors. They can’t fully suck the pap out of life, but neither do they feel they’ve been denied something which is given freely to others. His mood is not one of aggrieved resentment, but rather a quite mournfulness, as the traditional rhythms of life crumble in the face of a totalizing modernity which allows no room for structures outside of the rational market. Fascism was a false idol, a Moloch which consumed Italy’s youth; in the aftermath, the survivors wander in the desert of the real, seeking solace, finding none.
Follow George Menz @https://menzgeorge.wordpress.com/
