LIFE
POETIC
THEMATIC
Life
Carlo Levi was born in Turin on November 29th 1902 from a wealthy family; his mother, Annetta, was Claudio Treves’daughter. He has graduated in Medicine, but his wealthy conditions have never induced him to practice his profession of physician. His preferred profession has been, instead, the painting, and since 1923 he has had a notable success as painter. But soon he revealed larger and several political-cultural interests belonging to the group of Piero Gobetti and “Rivoluzione Liberale”. Antifascist, he was friend of Carlo and Nello Rosselli and together with Carocci he actively collaborated to the diffusion of the ideas of “Justice and liberty” and in Turin he animated the inside center “C.L”. With Nello Rosselli he directed a clandestine newspaper, “Lotta politica”. This preparation of base will determine his cultural orientation and his future choices, and in a certain sense it will prepare that deep political and human ethics that is to the bottom of his best and more busy books.
In 1934 he was halted and the year after he was sent to the confinement in Lucania (of here his book of memories Cristo si è fermato a Eboli). In 1936, in the fascist euphoria of the Ethiopian conquest, he was pardoned. But immediately he took back the political job and he emigrated in France, remaining there until 1942. He reentered in Italy in 1943, to take part to the Resistance; here he was halted a second time. In 1944 he co-directed “La nazione del popolo” of Florence, organ of the C.T.L.N.; in 1945 he was in Rome as manager of the newspaper of the action party “Italia libera”. By the consequence of the vast success of his “Cristo si è fermato a Eboli”, that immediately was translated in many foreign languages, and pushed by his big passion for the serious and unresolved problems of southern Italy, Levi actively and bravely continued his activity of journalist, taking part to investigations and political-social polemics on the backwardness of the South, investigating and denouncing its econimic and cultural causes. By here the publication of others notable volumes, between which “Le parole sono pietre”.
He wrote for many years on La Stampa of Turin, showing his tendency to face the most burning problems of the time standing above any part. In 1954 he stuck to the Neorealist group at the Biennale di Venezia, offering notable pictures in realistic key, as his fiction. In 1963 and in 1968 he was chosen by the Senate as independent in the communist lists. The success as painter has not been inferior to that of writer and of essayst. He died in January 1975.
His first work has been Paura della libertà, written in 1939 and published in January 1946. It’s about a collection of essays that overall want to be a general description of the contemporary crisis. Levi’s second work, certainly the most known, has been Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (1945), memorial story and sociological essay together, in which Levi, in a narrative structure of high literary and style level, re-examines his human and social experience in the confinement in Lucania, exactly to Cagliano. The title underlines the polemic leading that inspires him, according to which it is denounced, in the opening page, the abandonment in which the country populations of the South, rather of the Basilicata, have lived and continue to live.
In 1950 he has written L’orologio: Luigini e contadini, una distinzione socio culturale economica, in which the distinction between farmers and middle class people appears clearer in the men’s oppositon in Luigini e contadini. The Luigini (from the name of Cagliano’s podesta he talked in Cristo si è fermato a Eboli about), they are the big majority of the boundless, shapeless, amoeba small middle class, with all its species, subspecies and variations, with all its poverties, its complexes of inferiority, its moralisms and immoralism and wrong ambitions, and idolatrous fears.
Le parole sono pietre (1956), prize Viareggio, consists of three essays rispectively written in 1951, in 1952 and in 1955, after three trips to Sicily. They are investigation-essays with social character, on the situation and on the condition of the farmers and of the Sicilian wokers, whose aspirations are broken by the mafia with the connivance of the political power. In 1956 he writes Il futuro ha un cuore antico, coming back from his trip to Russia. Also this travel, as the precedents, brings him directly to the investigation of people’s life, beyond of what their political structures can be. La doppia notte dei tigli (1959) is the account of a trip to Western Germany. Tutto il miele è finito (1960) is a book been born by summary notes on a trip to Sardinia, made by the author in1952, to which accounts of other trips effected in the same region subsequently are added or superimposed. The title derives from a funeral song, in which a mother alludes to her child’s death, that was the honey of her house.
Poetic
Carlo Bernari’s work must be intended in this double key: that linguistic, typical of the northern literate that first of all discovers an entirely new and stranger to the civilization language, and of this language he underlines all the bitter and ironic and sometimes grotesque and animal charge; and the sociological-pocitic one, according to which it is denounced and underlined, through the descriptive realism and the objective analysis of the story, the condition of poverty and desperation in which they live in those abandoned lands either the gentlmen (that is to say the owners) and the poor men.
The style therefore reflects the state of mind “of surprised, still, clear discovery of a primitive world accompanied by a feeling of desolation, and here are just born the characters of the syntax, of the lexicon, of the stylistic structure: the simple form, often more properly low, but restrained and clear. Clarity that is also a permanent characteristic of the writer Levi, for a precise desire to be intended by many [...]. Rigourous control characteristic of the artistic seriousness of Levi, but here logically recalled for the not easy syntax is simplified, the period is in big prevalence monopropositional. The proposition is not only brief, but almost it always has a direct construction. The presence of the anacoluthom that resound those of the real speech is rare, the dialect courses are rare too” (Aurigemma).
Thematic
Talking about the fear of liberty, Aurigemma affirms that in it Levi “affirmed the aversion to the abstractly fierce state, that makes of men a material and indistinct unity, that can live only reducing the individuals in slavery, and together the aversion to the religion that makes of myths, rites; attitudes in which the impression aroused in the author by the contemporary dictatorships and that deep respect for individuals and the small groups’liberty that will be constant in all his work appeared evident.”(Aurigemma)
In effects these essays constitute the fundamental premises for the comprehension of his works because they point out the double aspect with which he was approached to the farmer and to Southern world: that historical-political and that psychological-social, motives that constitute the characteristics of all his essays, that is always work of art and social policy.
And so, always according to Aurigemma “the principal theme of Cristo si è fermato a Eboli is constituted by the fascinating discovery of the existence of an essentially autonomous country civilization, that would and should be organized as such, smothered instead by a statolatrica and theocratic civilization, strong of organized armies. A civilization radically hostile to the farmers, so that the only wars that touches their heart are hte wars that they have fought to defend themselves against that civilization, against the History, the States and the Theocracy, the wars fought under their blacks standards, without art, without hope and always destined to be lost.”(Aurigemma)
Black is the condition’sense of the farmers, always fied up to the suffering and the spiritual closing, as black are the farmer’suits, their hair and their eyes full of a particular gravity, like the death of the farmer that underlines the first meeting of Levi with the poor people of Cagliana. They are black, as they are also closed in themselves; even the boys are closed, those boys that somewherelse are always extrovert.
The big appeal of this book is just in the discovery of a new dimension of the human soul, that, till now entirely unknown, of the southern farmer irreparably closed in a destiny of poverty and in an internal dignity.
In the relationship that they establish with the new doctor, Levi however notes the presence of “a hope, and absolute trust.”
This hope is the fundamental message of Levi’s work, this trust that his denunciation can contribute to make possible that Christ and the civilization arrive in Lucania too, over Eboli, in the middle of hungry and ill people, desperate and closed in the dignity of their pain. Nobody of us can deny that he has actively contributed to face more decidedly the southern matter.
The fundamental theme of Levi’s work is that of the statism and of the antistatism of the farmers and the possibility of fusion between their world and that of the middle class’society. The state, in fact, either fascist either democrat, either paternalistic, is in clean antithesis with the possiblity of fusion. Also because the middle class is, physically and morally, a degenerate class, incapable to carry out its function and that lives only of small robberies and of the tradition debased by a feudal law. Until this classs won’t be suppressed and replaced, we cannot think to resolve the southern problem.
Justly D. Fernandez has affirmed that “Levi has understood the country South as anyone has been able to do, it is due to the circumstance, that he has known to realize the implicit protest in the archaic and primitive world of the farmers against the western man”, that is the civil and technological man.
The book, started in form of low confession, becomes more and more a disccourse-denounce of facts, of situations, of heard discourses, but without never having the tone of the immediate story in absolute sense, because Levi knew how to hold a median way between the recorded technique and the elaborated structure of the critical-sociological essay. After all, the book was also a confirmation of his political theories already exposed in Paura della libertà, for which the investigation conducted on the farmers’ condition of Lucania is anything else but a first taste of that universal country reality that almost assumes a value of moral category, besides the social one, in the modern technological civilization.
In “L’orologio: Luigini e contadini, una distinzione socio culturale economica, with this econimic social-cultural distinction of society, Levi wants to replace the traditional schemes of the opposite Communism-Vatican tendencies, proletariat-middle class; in fact he conducts a series of serious objections to Marxism:
“Have you ever thought about the slowness, the idleness, the unbelievable immobility of a thought that, after a hundred years, has remained? In any other period, one century has always been too long to preserve the energy of a so fresh book. It is not about the book, but of those who would have had to read it, and of their deafness and mental slowness. Of one century of thought, what has it remained... in all those people who pretend to defend these ideas, in the so-called militant, in the political men? Catechist wordings. Struggle of class, that’s right: but in them it is a vague notion, generic, old as the world, a simple sentence of the common good sense[...] They say: middle class and proletariat: a wording that perhaps, in other times, had been true, and what is it today? A common place. Where are they? Let’s look around: we don’t find them or we find them amongst other things, spread and branched in the reality. We know very well that we should say: there are not two strengths, two poles but many, a lot of them in such a diversified civilization.”
These are critiques that could seem of qualunquismo - and perhaps similar they have appeared to the politicians that have thrown back them - but in effect, with big practical sense, they reflected and reflect the Italian political class’crisis of the last forty years. After all, this, that is the most political book of Levi, was written on the occasion of government Parri’s fall and of that crisis that characterized Italy when the Party of action failed and the same Resistance was put in crisis.
According to Levi, the Resistance chose a country president, but it has disguised him in Luigino.
The end of Parri’s government in 1946, represented for Levi the regressive trial’s beginning of the Resistance and the crisis of the liberty dreamed by the Italian partisans, whose responsibilities weigh on all the Luigini of right and left.
Levi’s work is extremely consistent with his ideal of human solidarity, with his anxiety of redemption of the unjustly oppressed people; therefore he is one of the most authoritative psychological-political writers of our times, because he has always exalted, in every occasion, the authenticity of the farmers’ values (understood in the particular meaning of society’s real producers). In his investigation he has brought his humanity of religious writer, and chorister of a hope of moral renewal of the world. Here it is the strength of his message, here it is the courage with which he has been able to attach the mafia and the overbearance of the politicians, here it is the authenticity of his poetic word, the strength of his simple and penetrating style of journalist-poet.