Maturity as Disillusionment

D. Lajolo, Spenti i falò, la luna splende ancora, in Id., Il «vizio assurdo». Storia di Cesare Pavese, il Saggiatore, Milan 1960, pp. 347–78, reaffirms Anguilla’s failure to mature, seeing it as instead fully achieved in the character of Nuto. For Lajolo, not even the return to origins can compensate for the protagonist’s “desperate consciousness” — which is also the author’s own — while for F. Mollia, Cesare Pavese, La Nuova Italia, Florence 1963, pp. 102–17, this is compounded by “the tragic awareness of never being able to be oneself, 194 except when myth, becoming consciousness, dissolves and is replaced by full morality, which is history.” B. Manfredi, “La luna e i falò” di Cesare Pavese, in Id., Angoscia e solitudine nel romanzo italiano contemporaneo, Editrice Esperienze, Fossano 1969, pp. 222–33, filters such feelings of anguish and solitude through a reading of Il mestiere di vivere. C. Reymond, I temi dell’America e del ritorno in patria ne “Il Fondo del Sacco” di Martini e nella “Luna e i falò” di Pavese, in «Études de Lettres», Université de Lausanne, Lausanne, October–December 1984, traces Anguilla’s impossible maturation back to the absence of a female figure, whether mother or companion. P.V. Mengaldo, La morte di Santa, in Id., Storia della lingua italiana. Il Novecento, il Mulino, Bologna 1994, pp. 326–30, and E. Livorni, Come il letto di un falò. The Myth of the Moon and the Bonfire of History, in «Italian Culture», 1999, 17, pp. 31–78, offer a pessimistic reading of La luna e i falò, identifying in the novel’s arc the failure of memory and the triumph of death. According to S. Giovanardi, “La luna e i falò” di Cesare Pavese, in Letteratura italiana. Le opere, vol. IV. Il Novecento, t. 2. La ricerca letteraria, Einaudi, Turin 1996, pp. 631–46, Anguilla will never fully elude his “genetic sense of displacement,” and his search for identity will inevitably go unmet, since memory, despite its ability to recover the myths of childhood, is no longer capable of bringing them back to life beyond the mournful urgency of history.

“Ripeness is all”: Maturity as Acceptance

G.P. Biasin, Lo straniero sulle colline: Cesare Pavese, in «Modern Language Notes», Baltimore, 1966, 81, pp. 1–21, regards the novel as the summative work of all the founding motifs of Pavese’s imaginative world: “solitude, poised between incommunicability and participation; love and violence; work and festivity; childhood and death; nature and history; myth and destiny-maturity.” These motifs, having reached full ripeness, would merge into “a harmonious unity,” “a poetic universality,” a “monolithic comprehension.” E. Gioanola, L’essere e la morte ne “La luna e i falò”, in «Sigma», Genoa, June 1969, VI, 22, pp. 51–66, then in Id., Cesare Pavese. La poetica dell’essere, Marzorati, Milan 1972, pp. 352–70, distances himself from autobiographical-psychological readings and identifies in the return to origins a reconciliation with the world of childhood and the symbols associated with it. According to the author, Pavese “has ceased to pursue symbols external to the countryside-childhood,” putting an end to the dichotomy between city and country. The latter has become the sole “essential reality beyond the fragile consistency of history-time,” and only within it can maturity finally come to fulfilment. H. Davis, “La luna e i falò”: What Kind of Ripeness?, in «Italian Studies», 1984, 39, pp. 79–90, also distances himself from any pessimistic reading of the novel and demonstrates instead how Anguilla’s maturation is achieved in a profoundly Shakespearean sense, 196 as an acceptance of the “seasonal-cyclical concept of life” and of one’s own destiny. G. Raboni, La luna e i falò, in Cento romanzi italiani (1901–1995), cit., p. 46, considers Anguilla’s story “a final ascent towards maturity” within a framework drawn from Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, in which to mature inevitably means accepting the “cycle of life that steeps everything and transforms it into the ashes of a bonfire.”

Between Symbol and Myth

I. Calvino, Pavese e i sacrifici umani, in «Revue des Études Italiennes», Paris, April–June 1966, XII, 2, pp. 107–10, then in «Avanti!», Milan, 12 June 1966, and in Saggi 1945–1985, Mondadori, Milan 1995, pp. 1230–33, analyses the “secret face” of the Pavesian novel, identifying at its centre the “obsessive preoccupation with human sacrifice.” S.G. Pugliese, Il mito del ritorno: simbolo e memoria ne “La luna e i falò” di Cesare Pavese, in «American Journal of Italian Studies», 1998, XXI, 58, pp. 128–38, asserts that “in an ontological sense, the return functions as a catalyst for an epiphany.” It is precisely by seeking out origins after having wandered the world that the protagonist comes to understand the true reasons for his return, delving into the “personal ontology” in which symbol and memory unite and lead him to truth. G. Isotti Rosowsky, La luna e i falò, in «Narrativa», Université Paris X-Nanterre, Nanterre, 2002, 22, pp. 105–18, reads the novel by identifying its foundations in myth and in Pavese’s recurring motifs: flight, the sea, the hills, the partisan war. The essay attends to the two voices that dominate the novel — Anguilla and Nuto — tracing the concrete stages of the former and the ethical and psychological ones of the latter.