Cesare Pavese, Homo Mediterraneus?

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.