L’Agnese va a morire is one of the most limpid and convincing works that have gone out from the historical and human experience of the Resistance. A precious document to make the youngest and the boys of the schools understand what the Resistance has been: a war of people, the first authentic war of people of our history.
More I examine the literary structure of this novel and more I find it extraordinary. All is supported and animated by an only wish, by an only presence, by an only character. The landscape too, that is almost always vanished, vague, misty, symbolically suspended between water and sky. Also the small characters, that exist as projection or psychic emanations of the main character wish: from her husband that is half seen and is already become part of the past, of the unconscious (through the dreams), to the Commander that represents the duty and the shiny aspiration toward a better world (exactly what the psychologists would identify with a projection of the " super-self ").
We have the feeling, reading, that the Valli di Comacchio, the Romagna, the distant war of the armies, little by little are filled with the more and more great, enormous presence of this woman. As if Germans and allies were indefinite precenses of a tragedy out of time and everything is instead fulfilled inside Agnese, as if only her could burden the weight, rather the work of the war; heavy and painful difficulty, certain, but not so much more than a job: rather, studing it closely, still and always a job. .
Here, I believe that this female character can be intended only in this way, within a simbology, that of the sacrifice, that constitutes the same root of the religious experience in the western civilizations. After all it is until too much evident that Agnese is not only a literary character, she is a symbol of something more great and more important, that more she traspares better in the text, more she is annulled as character, for accumulation of negative virtue: simplicity, humility, abnegation and so on. Agnese is a woman that lives, even if in a limited perspective, a great historical fact: annulling herself as woman, becoming" woman without quality", Agnese in practice goes out of the reality to become the incarnation of a myth destined to finish with her death (that death of which the reader already knows before opening the book, from the title).
It has been said of Agnese, woman without quality: I believe that it is worth verifying this definition in the text.
She fights with the partisan, or rather with partisan belonging to strongly politicized formations: but her motives are not political. They call her " companion ", and in effects she is that: but for instinctive choice, or rather not for choice, for an awareness matured in long years of silence with a most biological than logical course, as the wheat of wheat, that being in the ground puts its roots and stem and ear. And maybe it is just the sense of the earth that is expressed in Agnese. The true choice, when it will be realized, it won't be easy, because to embrace the cause of the partisan struggle in all its entirety Agnese will have to measure with something extraneous, that doesn't belong her: with an idea (in the novel this idea assumes a voice and a face, it is, so to say, personified by the Commander). And more: Agnese assists the partisan, she does for hem everything a good mother would do; but she is not mother and perhaps she is not even good. (Certainly she would be if there was not the idea to absorb all her energies, to make her incapable of affections). But she is not even bad: also in the culminating moment of the tragedy, the killing of the German, it is not the anger to push her, but rather the certainty that this had to happen in this way. It is worth to re-examine the course of the facts. Agnese has gone out of her house, she has been the whole afternoon sat under the peach tree, in contact with the ground: mute, without neither a tear, neither a gesture. When she stands up again, her hate for the German has not placated, but it has become something different that can only come true in the dark and sacred form of a rite: with an exaspereted slow gesture, as it had to be that of the priest in the action to raise the ax on the victim (So he toke the sub-machine-gun for the reed, he lifted it, he suddenly lowered it on the head of Kurt, as when they beat on the washboard the heavy double sheets, load of water), Agnese is not almost anything of what can be thought; as character of a novel she is not, simply, she could not exist out an interlacement of circumstances and facts and situations that, undoubtedly, were and are.
When this novel appeared, in 1949, the politic and cultural Italian situation was not the most suitable for a serene examination of a literary work. L’Agnese va a morire was immediately found in the center of quite sour polemics in which, how it was right, the political matters surpassed the aesthetical and formal matters. Anyway what was written in that period it was written only for love of polemic and part. There was who tried to penetrate more in depth the not easy mechanism of this novel, who, as Emilio Castellani, right then wondered what the Agnese was, what complex symbol or myth it was concealed behind this character seemingly so much soldier.
Maybe to answer today, after fortyfive years of distance, it is not impossible: but it would be certain risky. We can risk out of conclusions a sentence, to say that Agnese is the farmer protagonist of the novel and she is a collective image too, she is one and many, she is subject and object of the sacrifice, she is a very real character under certain points of view, but then inhuman for her greatness, her capacity pushed to the absolute of annihilating in the facts and in the evenements; to get that, the physical death with which the book is concluded is anything else than the necessary destruction of what it remains of Agnese, of that bare" oddly small, a heap of black rags on the snow": but the character Agnese has disappeared a lot of pages before, at the beginning of the story, she has voluntarily annihilated to follow an idea, a dismissal.
What is Agnese? Well, everyone can try to answer this question as he is able to do, and how he wants.
(From Sebastiano Vassalli," Letture per la scuola media", Einaudi, Torino 1974. )
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