Literature and fascism in Italy, pt. 2

This is the second of a series of posts exploring literature in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s in Italy. For part 1, on Bontempelli’s The Chess Set in the Mirror, see here.

Introduction

First, a bit of historical context: Mussolini’s regime is toppled in 1943. The Germans invade, name Mussolini head of a fascist puppet state. Italians mount a resistance.

All of the action of Italo Calvino’s first novel, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests, takes place within this last two-year period before the end of the war. The story of The Path, published in 1947, is fairly simple: A boy named Pin is goaded into stealing a pistol from a German. He is arrested and imprisoned. Then he escapes, and joins the resistance fighters in the mountains.

Superficially, The Path belongs to a surge of ‘neorealist’ works to emerge after the war. Pavese’s Comrade (1947) and House on the Hill (1948) sought to depict the experience of the resistance, and disillusionment in the aftermath of war. Viganò’s Agnese Goes to Die (1949) portrayed an ordinary woman becoming a courier for the resistance. Forebears to these works, such as Vittorini’s Conversations in Sicily (1941), had attempted, under the eye of fascist censors, to portray and to valorize the reality of peasant life. Realism—or ‘neorealism’—was more or less the order of the day in Italian letters of the 1940s.

Although Calvino’s Path fits the bill superficially, there are a few ways in which, crucially, it departs from the main thread of Italian neorealism. It also signals a challenge to what we might call the authoritarian aesthetic—a vision not only of what kinds stories are told, but how.

Games and the grotesque in The Path

One of the non-realist features of The Path is the grotesque style of Calvino’s characters, and the skewed perspective of his protagonist. Calvino himself alludes to this dimension of The Path in his 1964 preface, writing that he gave his characters “exaggerated, grotesque features” (13; see 17 also) as an expressionist counter-gesture to the heroicizing tendency of the partisan, neorealist literature of the time.

Thus, although Pin lives in proximity to the adult world, and seems to ‘know’ every detail about it, the world Pin experiences is full of mystery. As in Bontempelli’s Chess Set, this mystery is articulated in terms of the incomprehensibility of the games people in it play. Men and women roll around in the grass for strange reasons, soldiers commit themselves aribitrarily to one cause and then another. “Grown-ups are an untrustworthy, treacherous lot,” Calvino writes in Pin’s voice:

[T]]hey don’t take their games in the serious wholehearted way children do, and yet they too have their own games, one more serious than the other, one game inside another, so that it’s impossible to discover what the real one is. (50)

But Calvino departs from the neorealist paradigm more pointedly by, at one point, abandoning Pin’s perspective entirely for a whole chapter.

By contrast, Pavese’s House on the Hill and Vittorini’s Conversations are both told in the first-person. Viganò’s Agnese Goes to Die and Fenoglio’s A Private Affair are bound closely to protagonists Agnese and Milton, respectively. In each of these cases, typical of the neorealist ideal, the narrator or protagonist is an adult, speaking or acting with the authority of a mature perspective. The fact that Calvino chooses a child as his protagonist, and then abandons his protagonist’s perspective, are provocations of the genre.

The Kim chapter

Just before the arrival of the brigade commissar and commander, Kim and Ferriera, respectively, Pin's band accidentally (unheroically) blows up their own hut. The next morning they hear bombing in the valley below. Pin is left gawking at it through binoculars.

Calvino’s most overt challenge to his contemporaries comes in the following chapter, the “Kim chapter.” There are at least two things important about the Kim chapter. The most obvious one is the substance of Kim’s internal soliloquy, which I’ll discuss in a moment. Equally important is simply the fact of the Kim chapter—that is, the fact that the narration leaves Pin entirely behind, and that when Pin reappears in chapter 10 he is “in everyone’s way” (148).

In the Kim chapter, chapter 9, the narrator follows Kim and Ferriera walking alone, away from the camp, and discussing the complexity of the organization of a band of resistance fighters. They’re not an army; they hardly cohere. The challenge, Kim is arguing, is that they don’t fight for any particularly sophisticated or ideological reasons. They fight for simple reasons so fragile that “[a]ny little thing is enough to save or lose them” (137). Fascists fight for the same small reasons, too. Everyone fights, Kim argues, from “[a]n elementary, anonymous urge to free us from all our humiliations” (141). Ferriera thinks Kim is a fool.

When Kim is alone, he imagines that a soldier on the other side is just then thinking nothing more elaborate than: “I love you, Kate” (144). This thought seems to have a sort of therapeutic value on Kim, as he attempts to focus on his own private “I love you, Adrianna,” in order to steel himself for taking part in the historically significant battle he imagines occurring the next day—even though this ‘historical significance’ is entirely foreign to the many private justifications and motivations of the soldiers on this and that side.

The purpose of the Kim chapter

In the next chapter, we are back in the camp of the misfits, Pin asking if he can have a gun, too. Instead of joining the others when they go off to fight, Pin stays behind, hoping to spy on Giglia, the cook’s wife and only woman in camp, and Dritto, the band’s commander. In any event, we never encounter Kim again. He’s brought in for no obvious reason other than to provide (different, more mature) perspective.

According to Calvino in his 1964 preface, his earliest readers all criticized the Kim chapter as an “ideological expedient,” and urged him to remove it (12). Calvino refers to the Kim chapter as “a preface inserted in the middle of the novel” (ibid.), but he doesn’t add much about its substance as a “preface.”

What, then, does the Kim chapter do as a “preface”? For one thing, it centers the smallness of human motivation and perception. The fascist fights for “Kate”; the partisan fights for “Adrianna.” There are no flags in foxholes. At the same time, Kim’s reflections challenge the idea that partisans and fascists fight for meaningfully different sorts of reasons. Everyone fights to rid themselves of their own private “humiliations.” There are, as it were, as many sides to the battle as soldiers in it.

Individuality and authority in The Chess Set and The Path

To anticipate a comparison, consider Bontempelli’s Chess Set: A boy goes to a mirror world where rationality reigns; it is violent; he longs for order in the form of personal authority. As one bookend to literature surrounding the years of the Mussolini regime, The Chess Set fittingly presents the authoritarian ideal in the form of a future-looking ideal.

As another bookend to that same shelf of works, The Path presents a sort of mirror reflection of The Chess Set. In the world of The Path, personal authority reigns supreme—not just in the person of Mussolini but in everyone: fascist, partisan, child, adult. Every character in The Path follows willy-nilly their own bearings, which most often have little to do with political or historical significance. Individual motivations are sometimes senseless, sometimes predicated on false beliefs, sometimes entirely opposite their actions—but they are always authoritative because they just so happen to be the view of that individual.

One particular trope that exemplifies the authority of personal whim is the fact that individuals are continually being found fighting for the other side. The fact that so many characters switch sides like this—Michel (59) and Pelle (105), both active partisans, join the Black Brigade, and prisoners of the partisans complain they had joined the fascists “only because they were forced to” (111)—suggests this sort of exchange isn’t a matter of individual character but a more general condition of the time. Pin himself fantasizes about joining the Black Brigade, because then he would have a gun and be able to sing songs with bad words in them (61).

This last point touches on one of the nerves of the work as a whole—that the threat of violence against others is the chief mark of individuality. Pin may misunderstand everything else around him, but he knows that he’ll be taken seriously if he has a gun. When he steals the pistol from the German sailor, he hides it in a spider’s nest. The literal path to the spiders’ nests—which Pin thinks only he knows, but which turns out to be known to at least Pelle, who finds and steals Pin’s stolen pistol—is the path to Pin’s own personal token of individuality.

Between The Path and us

The Path presents both a diagnosis of and an alternative to what we might call an authoritarian aesthetic. The authoritarian aesthetic depicts unthinking obedience to authority as its characteristic challenge, and individual authority as triumph in the face of that challenge. In a sense, the authoritarian aesthetic is politically neutral—or, to take the perspective of The Path, it is expedient to any sort of political ideology; it is a call to retire allegiance to principles in favor of allegiance to persons.^[1]

First-personal realism isn’t “authoritarian,” of course, but it risks reproducing the idea that authority is personal. In this way, Calvino’s challenge to his neorealist peers might be seen as an invitation to consider whether firsthand accounts of the gritty experience of war don’t deploy principles of the very aesthetic vision they are attempting to overcome. Maybe tales of the great businessman who overcame the recalcitrant commie union and tales of the great working-class soldier who bested a superior force of mindless fascists are all telling the same story: the triumph of individuals over principles, of real human beings over slavish lookalikes.

Calvino’s wandering narrator emerges seemingly out of a refusal to go along with this sort of authorization of the individual perspective. Not only does Calvino choose a genuinely clueless and morally compromised child as his protagonist; he also departs from Pin’s perspective haphazardly, favoring a more improvisational and impersonal lens on his subject.

Of course, to the other side of Calvino is the neoliberal principle of the moral equivalence of all political positions, which is pernicious and misleading in its own way and for its own reasons—but that’s a question for another time.

Nevertheless, in The Path and The Chess Set we have now a convenient if oversimple prism through which to view the shelf of work written before, during, and after fascism in Italy. Even if we have no distinct ideas about what counts as fascistic and what doesn’t, certainly we have a beginning set of clues about the sorts of questions and challenges authors of the time might have been wrestling with, as well as, perhaps, the sorts of aesthetic principles in play.

Notes on texts

I’m going to make a habit of collecting links to works mentioned in posts like this.

The Path to the Spiders’ Nests

• In English translation: I worked from the widely available The Path to the Spiders’ Nests, revd. ed., trans. A. Colquhoun, revd. M. McLaughlin (Ecco, 1998). Page references are to this edition.
• I wanted to double check a few things in Italian, for some technical reasons. For that purpose, I consulted the more or less official edition of Calvino’s works, the Meridiani series, in particular Romanzi e racconti, ed. A. Mondadori, vol. 1 (Palomar, 1991).

Other works

• M. Bontempelli, The Chess Set, was translated by E. Gilson for Paul Dry Books in 2007. It is a little slippery, but you can find it if you want to. Here’s the ISBN: 9781589880313.
• B. Fenoglio, A Private Affair, trans. H. Curtis (NYRB, 2021), is easily found.
• C. Pavese, Comrade, was translated by W.J. Strachan in 1959 for Peter Owen Ltd. That is out of print, but findable used.
• C. Pavese, House on the Hill, is available in The Selected Works of Cesar Pavese, trans. R.W. Flint (NYRB, 2001). T. Parks translated it for Penguin in 2021 also.
• R. Viganò, L’Agnese va a morire, is not (yet?) translated.
• E. Vittorini, Conversations in Sicily, trans. A.S. Mason (New Directions, 2000), is easily found.

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1. I think it is probably important to note, as an aside, that the failures of allegiance to principle are not depicted by the authoritarian aesthetic as tragic—not the misfortune of good intentions—but as simple manifestations of evil.↩︎