In a 1949 letter, Cesare Pavese describes with great zeal the genesis of a new work — one he compares, albeit with a certain amount of irony, to Dante’s Commedia: Io sono come un pazzo perché ho avuta una grande intuizione — quasi una mirabile visione (naturalmente di stalle, sudore, contadinotti, verderame e letame ecc.) su cui dovrei costruire una modesta Divina Commedia. Ci penso sopra, e tutti i giorni diminuisce la tensione — che alle visioni siano necessarie le Beatrici? Bah, si vedrà.This embryonic project would quickly become the novel La luna e i falò, completed in less than two months and published shortly before Pavese’s suicide in 1950. On the surface, there would seem little reason to take seriously the analogy drawn by the author between La luna and the Commedia, for the novel in question contains no explicit references to the medieval poet. I shall argue in this essay, however, that the presence of Dante in La luna is both more pervasive and more significant than has previously been suggested. While critics have noted in passing several narrative and structural parallels between the two texts, which I detail in Section II, no attempt has been made to consider their wider significance in our understanding of Pavese’s novel. What follows is a reading of La luna which shows that the Commedia functions not simply as a formal model for Pavese, but, more importantly, as an ideological anti-model, in dialogue with which the author articulates his deeply pessimistic understanding of the human condition.
Keywords: Alighieri, Dante – Divina Commedia – Inferno; Alighieri, Dante – Vita nuova; productive reception; Pavese, Cesare – La luna e i falò
Part of Metamorphosing Dante Containing:
Frontmatter / Manuele Gragnolati, Fabio Camilletti, Fabian Lampart
Metamorphosing Dante / Fabio Camilletti, Manuele Gragnolati, Fabian Lampart
Dante’s ‘Strangeness’: The Commedia and the late Twentieth-Century Debate on the Literary Canon / Federica Pich
Irish Dante: Yeats, Joyce, Beckett / Piero Boitani
Dante as a Gay Poet / Nicola Gardini
Dante’s Inferno and Walter Benjamin’s Cities: Considerations of Place, Experience, and Media / Angela Merte-Rankin
‘Il mal seme d’Adamo’: Dante’s Inferno and the Problem of the Literary Representation of Evil in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and Wolfgang Koeppen’s Der Tod in Rom / Florian Trabert
‘Una modesta Divina Commedià’: Dante as Anti-Model in Cesare Pavese’s La luna e i falò
Reclaiming Paradiso: Dante in the Poetry of James Merrill and Charles Wright / Rachel Jacoff
‘Perché mi vinse il lume d’esta stella’: Giovanni Giudici’s Rewriting of Dante’s Paradiso for the Theatre / Erminia Ardissino
Per-tras-versionidantesche: Post-Paradisiacal Constellations in the Poetry of Vittorio Sereni and Andrea Zanzotto / Francesca Southerden
Human Desire, Deadly Love: The Vita Nova in Gide, Delay, Lacan / Fabio Camilletti
Wives and Lovers in Dante and Eugenio Montale / Rebecca West
Man with Snake: Dante in Derek Jarman’s Edward II / James Miller
Rewriting Dante after Freud and the Shoah: Giorgio Pressburger’s Nel regno oscuro / Manuele Gragnolati
‘Misi me per l’alto mare aperto’: Personality and Impersonality in Virginia Woolf’s Reading of Dante’s Allegorical Language / Teresa Prudente
‘Hell on a Paying Basis’: Morality, the Market, and the Movies in Harry Lachman’s Dante’s Inferno (1935) / Nick Havely
From Giorgio Agamben’s Italian Category of ‘Comedy’ to ‘Profanation’ as the Political Task of Modernity: Ingravallo’s Soaring Descent, or Dante according to Carlo Emilio Gadda / Manuela Marchesini
Literary Heresy: The Dantesque Metamorphosis of LeRoi Jones into Amiri Baraka / Dennis Looney
Transferring Dante: Robert Rauschenberg’s Thirty-Four Illustrations for the Inferno / Antonella Francini
‘Anzichè allargare, dilaterai!’: Allegory and Mimesis from Dante’s Comedy to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La Divina Mimesis / Davide Luglio
A Cardboard Dante: Hell’s Metropolis Revisited / Ronald de Rooy
Backmatter / Manuele Gragnolati, Fabio Camilletti, Fabian Lampart
Title
‘Una modesta Divina Commedià
Subtitle
Dante as Anti-Model in Cesare Pavese’s La luna e i falò
Author(s)
Tristan Kay
Identifier
Description
In a 1949 letter, Cesare Pavese describes with great zeal the genesis of a new work — one he compares, albeit with a certain amount of irony, to Dante’s Commedia: Io sono come un pazzo perché ho avuta una grande intuizione — quasi una mirabile visione (naturalmente di stalle, sudore, contadinotti, verderame e letame ecc.) su cui dovrei costruire una modesta Divina Commedia. Ci penso sopra, e tutti i giorni diminuisce la tensione — che alle visioni siano necessarie le Beatrici? Bah, si vedrà.This embryonic project would quickly become the novel La luna e i falò, completed in less than two months and published shortly before Pavese’s suicide in 1950. On the surface, there would seem little reason to take seriously the analogy drawn by the author between La luna and the Commedia, for the novel in question contains no explicit references to the medieval poet. I shall argue in this essay, however, that the presence of Dante in La luna is both more pervasive and more significant than has previously been suggested. While critics have noted in passing several narrative and structural parallels between the two texts, which I detail in Section II, no attempt has been made to consider their wider significance in our understanding of Pavese’s novel. What follows is a reading of La luna which shows that the Commedia functions not simply as a formal model for Pavese, but, more importantly, as an ideological anti-model, in dialogue with which the author articulates his deeply pessimistic understanding of the human condition.
Is Part Of
Place
Vienna
Publisher
Turia + Kant
Date
2011
Subject
Alighieri, Dante – Divina Commedia – Inferno
Alighieri, Dante – Vita nuova
productive reception
Pavese, Cesare – La luna e i falò
Rights
© by the author(s)
This version is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Bibliographic Citation
Tristan Kay, ‘‘Una modesta Divina Commedià’: Dante as Anti-Model in Cesare Pavese’s La luna e i falò’, in Metamorphosing Dante: Appropriations, Manipulations, and Rewritings in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati, Fabio Camilletti, and Fabian Lampart, Cultural Inquiry, 2 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2011), pp. 101–22 <https://doi.org/10.25620/ci-02_07>
Language
en-GB
page start
101
page end
122
Source
Metamorphosing Dante: Appropriations, Manipulations, and Rewritings in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati, Fabio Camilletti, and Fabian Lampart, Cultural Inquiry, 2 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2011), pp. 101–22
Format
application/pdf

References

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Cite as: Tristan Kay, ‘‘Una modesta Divina Commedià’: Dante as Anti-Model in Cesare Pavese’s La luna e i falò’, in Metamorphosing Dante: Appropriations, Manipulations, and Rewritings in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati, Fabio Camilletti, and Fabian Lampart, Cultural Inquiry, 2 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2011), pp. 101–22 <https://doi.org/10.25620/ci-02_07>