Why Read the Classics? (38 page)

‘ … Let us try, by analogy, to do something similar with one single
Baudelaire sonnet: for instance by replacing one line with another (either from the same sonnet or a different one), respecting what the sonnet “does” (its structure). We will come up against difficulties primarily of a syntactic nature, against which Queneau had immuned himself in advance (and it is for that reason that his structure is “free”).
But
, and this is what the
Cent mille milliards
teach us,
against
the constraints of semantic probability, the sonnet structure creates, virtually, from one sonnet all sonnets that are possible through substitutions which respect the structure.’

Structure is freedom, it produces the text and at the same time the possibility of all virtual texts that can replace it. This is the novelty that resides in the idea of ‘potential’ multiplicity, implicit in his promotion of a literature that develops from the constraints which literature itself selects and imposes on itself. It has to be said that in the ‘Oulipo’ method it is the quality of these rules, their ingenuity and elegance that counts in the first place; if the results, the works obtained in this way, are immediately of equal quality, ingenuity and elegance, so much the better, but whatever the outcome, the resultant work is only one example of the potential which can be achieved only by going through the narrow gateway of these rules. This automatic mechanism through which the text is generated from the rules of the game, is the opposite of the surrealist automatic mechanism which appeals to chance or the unconscious, in other words entrusts the text to influences over which there is no control, and which we can only passively obey. Every example of a text constructed according to precise rules opens up the ‘potential’ multiplicity of all the texts which can be virtually written according to these rules, and of all the virtual readings possible of such texts.

As Queneau had already declared in one of his first formulations of his poetics: ‘There are forms of the novel which impose on its subject matter all the virtues of Number/ by developing ’a structure which transmits to such works the last glimmers of universal light or the last echoes of the Harmony of the World/

‘Last glimmers’, notice: the Harmony of the World appears in Queneau’s oeuvre from a remote distance, in the same way as it can be glimpsed by the drinkers who stare at their glass of pernod with their elbows on the zinc counter. The ‘virtues of Number’ seem to impose their own brightness on them especially when they manage to appear transparently through the dense corporality of living people, with their unpredictable moods, with the phenomena emitted by their twisted mouths, with their zigzag logic, in
that tragic meeting of the individual’s dimensions with those of the universe, which can only be expressed through giggles or sneers or jeers or bursts of convulsive laughter, and at best through full-throated hilarity, people dying with laughter, laughter on a Homeric scale …

[1981]

Each one of Pavese’s novels revolves around a hidden theme, something unsaid which is the real thing he wants to say and which can be expressed only by not mentioning it. All around it he constructs a tissue of signs that are visible, words that are uttered: each of these signs in turn has a secret side (a meaning that is either polyvalent or inexpressible) which counts more than its obvious one, but their real meaning lies in the relation which binds them to the unspoken theme.

La luna e i falò (The Moon and the Bonfires)
is the novel by Pavese which is densest with emblematic symbols, autobiographical motifs, and peremptory statements. Perhaps to excess: it is almost as though out of his typical style of narrating, reticent and elliptical, there emerged that profusion of communication and representation which transforms a short story into a novel. But Pavese’s real ambition in this work did not reside simply in the creation of a successful novel: everything in the book converges in one single direction, images and analogies bear down on one obsessive concern: human sacrifices.

This was not a passing interest. The linking of ethnology and Greco-Roman mythology with his own existential autobiography and his literary achievement had always been part of Pavese’s programme. The roots of his devotion to the works of ethnologists lay in the powerful appeal of a work he had read as a young man: Frazer’s
The Golden Bough
, a work that had already proved crucial for Freud, Lawrence and Eliot.
The Golden Bough
is a kind of round-the-world tour in search of the origins of human sacrifice and fire-festivals. These are themes which would resurface in Pavese’s mythological revocations in
Dialoghi con Leucò (Dialogues with Leucò):
the
passages in this work on rural rites and ritual deaths pave the way for
La luna e i falò
. Pavese’s exploration of the theme ends with this novel: written between September and November 1949, it was published in April 1950, four months before the author took his own life, after recalling in one of his last letters the human sacrifices of the Aztecs.

In
La luna e i falò
the first-person narrator returns to the vineyards of his home village after making his fortune in America; what he is looking for is not only his memories of the place or his reintegration in a society or any revenge for the poverty of his upbringing. He is looking for the reason why a village is a village, the secret that links places and names and generations. It is not by accident that this ‘io’ has no name: he was a foundling in a hospice, brought up by poor farmers as a low-paid labourer; and he grew into adulthood by emigrating to the United States, where the present has fewer roots in the past, where everyone is just passing by, and he does not have to account for his name. Now, back in the unchanging world of his own countryside, he wants to discover the real substance behind those rural images which are the only reality he knows.

The brooding, underlying fatalism in Pavese is ideological only in the sense that he sees it as an inevitable point of arrival. The hilly area of Lower Piedmont where he was born (‘la Langa’) is famous not only for its wines and truffles, but also for the crises of despair which are endemic, constantly afflicting the peasant families. It could be said that not a week goes by without the Turin newspapers reporting the story of a farmer who has hanged himself, or thrown himself down a well, or (as in the episode at the heart of this novel) set fire to the farmhouse with himself, his family and animals all inside.

Of course Pavese does not seek the reason for this self-destructive despair only in ethnology: the social background of the isolated smallholders in these valleys is portrayed here in the various classes with the sense of social completeness of a naturalist novel (in other words a type of literature which Pavese felt was so much the opposite of his own that he thought he could avoid or annex its territories). The foundling’s upbringing is that of a ‘servitore di campagna’ (country labourer), an expression which few Italians understand except the inhabitants of some of the poorest areas of Piedmont—and we hope that they need not know it for long. On the rung below paid workers, he is a boy who works in a family of smallholders or sharecroppers, and receives only his board and the right to sleep in the barn or the stall, plus a minimal seasonal or annual bonus.

But this identification with an experience so different from his own is for Pavese just one of the many metaphors of his dominant poetic theme: his sense of exclusion. The best chapters in the book narrate his experiences of two different festivals: one as the despairing young boy who had to stay at the farm and miss the fun because he had no shoes, the other when as a young man he had to take his master’s daughters to it in the cart. The existential vitality which is celebrated and let loose in the festival, and the social humiliation which now demands revenge, enliven these pages which blend the various levels of knowledge on which Pavese conducts his research.

A thirst for knowledge had driven the protagonist to return to his village; and three levels of this search could be distinguished: the level of memory, the level of history, the level of ethnology. A typical feature of Pavese’s stance is that on these two latter levels (the historical-political one and the ethnological) just one character acts as a guide to the narrator. The carpenter Nuto, clarinettist in the local band, is the village Marxist, the one who recognises the injustices of the world and knows that the world can change, but he is also the one who continues to believe in the phases of the moon as essential for various agricultural activities, and in the bonfires on the feast of St John which ‘reawaken the earth’. Revolutionary history and this mythical, ritual anti-history have the same face in this book, speak with the same voice. A voice which only mutters through his teeth: Nuto is the most closed, taciturn and evasive figure imaginable. This is the opposite extreme from an open declaration of faith; the novel consists entirely in the protagonist’s efforts to get a few words out of Nuto. But it is only in this way that Pavese really
speaks
.

Pavese’s tone when he mentions politics is always a bit too brusque and trenchant, as though he were shrugging his shoulders because everything is already clear and it is not worth expending any more words. But nothing really was understood. The point of confluence between Pavese’s ‘Communism’ and his recovery of man’s prehistoric and atemporal past is far from clear. Pavese was well aware that he was dealing with the topics which had been most compromised by twentieth-century decadentism: he knew that if there is one thing one cannot joke with, that is fire.

The man who comes back to his village after the war records images, following an invisible thread of analogies. The signs of history (the corpses of fascists and partisans which the river still occasionally brings down to the
valley) and the signs of ritual (the bonfires lit every summer on the hilltops) have lost their significance in the frail memories of his contemporaries.

What happened to Santina, the beautiful but careless daughter of his masters? Was she really a Fascist spy or was she on the partisans, side? No one can say for sure, because what drove her was an obscure desire to surrender herself to the abyss of war. And it is pointless to look for her grave: after shooting her, the partisans had buried her in vine shoots and had set fire to her corpse. ‘By midday it was all just ashes. A year or so ago the sign of it was still there, like the bed of a bonfire.’

[1966]