Modernism’s Anti-Myth: On Cesare Pavese’s “Dialogues with Leucò”
Cesare Pavese | Dialogues with Leucò | Sublunary Editions | November 2023 | 168 Pages
The abandonment of the “dialogue” is a very strange thing. Western philosophy, after all, begins with them. Socrates dialectically hectored his fellow Athenians on the streets; Plato, his student, made it his task to reinvent these dialogues in written form. Today there remains something startling—dangerous even—in the improvisatory wit that Plato’s dialogues lend to thought, the urgency of verbal sparring between people who once really lived and argued. It is ironic: the inaugurator of philosophical literature in the west—that tradition defined by rationalist definition and, often, academic abstractions—worked to imitate that most contingent, most imprecise, most lively of all human activities: conversation.
In the Roman Era, Cicero and Augustine both made use of the dialogue; Galileo, Berkeley, Hume, and Diderot brought it into the Enlightenment. While it was already on the wane in the nineteenth century, one notable exponent was the expatriate English liberal Walter Savage Landor, who in 1823 began publishing his Imaginary Conversations, pairing friendships and rivalries across the ages (Horace/Virgil, Mary Queen of Scots/Elizabeth I, Washington/Franklin). Landor was among the most read and admired writers of his time. Iris Murdoch essayed into the form once in the 1980s. Yet not a single renowned contemporary philosopher, nor any other writer of “ideas,” seems much interested in playing with the form today.
Towards the end of his brief life, the Italian novelist Cesare Pavese revived this strangely faded lineage. Outside his native Italy (where he is celebrated as a central midcentury man of letters) Pavese is still mostly a writer’s writer. It makes sense then that Seattle-based Sublunary Editions, a bold young publishing house—and proudly self-described “writer’s press”—has just reissued Dialoghi con Leucò (Dialogues with Leucò). A revised version of the original 1965 translation by William Arrowsmith and D.S Carne-Ross, two preeminent American classicists of their day, it is one of the latest installments of the Empyrean Series—an ongoing re-appraisal of generally “overlooked” but resonantly “contemporaneous” works past.
Taking the form of a series of conversations between Greek mythological figures, Leucò is Pavese’s oddest work: the strange child of his oeuvre, and probably the key to it too. It serves perhaps the same self-explanatory (and self-excavating) purpose that Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel—and indeed, Camus is a revealing analogue for Pavese. There are obvious similarities—a truncated life, archetypally mid-century existential concerns, committed yet troubled communist affiliations, a terse but dense body of fiction—but a plain difference in their present international influence.
One reason for this is possibly that, for all his prescient skepticisms, Camus was known for his philosophy of the absurd, which posited the inherent meaninglessness in existence outside of the human pursuit of that meaning. Suited as it was for the overwhelming devastations of postwar Europe, absurdism was defined, packaged and latched onto by journals and academic forums. It also became a certain sensibility, and an attractive one, embodied in the dashing figure of Camus himself. Pavese was everything the outwardly debonair Camus was not—deeply neurotic, his affiliations tentative, his ideas forever in revision. He was always the struggling writer: struggling to understand his own motivations, to self-justify his choice of form or theme, balance detachment and commitment. It is difficult to hold onto any one reduction of Pavese, or to reduce his work to neat cliche. Characteristically, Leucò—the closest he came to articulating a system of belief—comes shrouded in all the ambiguity of myth. But like Camus, Pavese was painfully attuned to that very midcentury preoccupation, which today can seem quaint, even indulgent, and certainly male-slanted: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man (emphasis added).
For his central creative decade, the 1940s, Pavese was probably the most dynamic force in Italian letters. Alongside publishing his own writing, he worked as editorial director of the young publishing house, Einaudi, where he produced pioneering Italian translations of American literature, from Melville to Faulkner, and acted as a crucial taste-maker and mentor to younger writers, notably Italo Calvino. His viscerally compressed novels and novellas, his plain-cadenced poetry and self-interrogating diaries (This Business of Living) have all been translated into English. In a 1960 memorial published a decade after Pavese’s suicide at the age of forty-one, Calvino wrote that his fiction was its era’s “richest in representing social ambiances, the human comedy, the chronicle of a society . . . works of extraordinary depth where one never stops finding new levels, new meanings.”
Pavese was born in the Piedmont region of northern Italy in 1908, in a town bordered by the Alps and anchored by the Po River. He lived most of his life in Turin, but a family vacation farm in Santo Stefano Belbo, where he was born, allowed him to pursue his favorite pastime of walking the Piedmont hills. It was through this deep familiarity and identification with place, through direct contact with ancient nature and older rhythms of life, that Pavese acquired an immediate sense of the classical world and mythology. As he asked himself in his diary: “Whenever you are seized by the thrill of mythology, you have in mind the tree trunks, the river, the hill with the moon behind it, the highroad, the scent of field and meadow of your own homeland. Why?”
Pavese’s regionalism clashed with the progress-oriented urbanism of the communist circles in which he moved, and to which he also felt responsibility. This irresolvable contradiction is perhaps the wellspring of a critical dilemma in his work, one explored obsessively throughout Leucò—between the Titans and the usurping Olympians, natural and human powers, the mythical and the modern. The first dialogue opens up this conflict: “There is a law and we must obey it . . . Man’s fate has changed.” For Pavese, perhaps myth meant above all else the need to acknowledge other orders of being, and other ways of knowing.
T.S. Eliot, for one, was convinced that the modern mind had to reinvent the mythic for itself. As he said in his 1923 essay “Ulysses, Order, and Myth”: “Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art.” Leucò, the book that Pavese seems to have felt proudest of (he carried a copy in his pocket at his death) represents the culmination of his own contributions to this effort.
“Had it been possible,” Pavese opens in his foreword, “I would gladly have done without all this mythology. But myth, it seems to me, is a language of its own, an instrument of expression. There is nothing arbitrary about it. It is a seedbed of symbolic forms, possessing, like all languages, its own range of meanings which can be conveyed in no other way.” While there’s no doubt that Pavese’s work is a part of that dialogic lineage beginning with Plato, to call Leucò purely or even primarily a philosophical work seems wrong. As Pavese indicates, he is engaged in another investigation, using another language; one that does not seek to prove arguments or logically pursue theses, but to reveal and clarify our dilemmas, to illuminate somehow-coexisting opposites, and allow the mysterious vastness of our relations to the past, nature, and each other to be magnified.
In the Dialogues we encounter figures with whom we are very familiar even in our myth-deprived lives: they remain part of heritage. Achilles and Patroclus discuss the inevitability of death; an old and tired Jason is disillusioned with heroics and has forgotten his cruel abandonment of Medea; the innocent and primordial human king Ixion, a confidant of the old Titans, converses with a “Cloud” which informs him about the “new laws” of the Olympians. Pavese’s method for colliding these personalities is entirely characteristic: sometimes they Socratically cross-examine one another, sometimes they talk across one another in the hardboiled tones of rough figures from Pavese’s fiction. Each dialogue is a point of crisis (a Greek word which means, essentially, a “turning point”) between two points of view on a facet of human destiny. Pavese affirms: “At all costs I wanted to avoid whatever is shapeless, irregular, accidental; even in subject matter, I wanted to confine myself within a given frame; I have tried for a concrete, finite presence.”
To attempt to summarize what the Dialogues are about is fruitless, just as reducing a myth to its “meaning” demeans it. While each dialogue has specific themes, they also thread together in a way that recreates the interconnected, anti-static structure of the world of Greek myth. As with any time-tested myth-world, the durability of these situations and these characters are like a set of primary colors; their potential for recombination and re-composition is the only thing about them which will not change.
To call the concerns treated in the Dialogues a series of themes and variations seems more accurate than to nail down some thesis or other that Pavese is trying to lay out. His method is more elliptical and more open-ended. This is partly, of course, due to another virtue of ambiguity which the dialogue form allows—no small part of why Plato’s teachings remain the most disputed of any philosopher. It is not simply the obvious adoption of personae (meaning “masks”) to advocate possible worldviews, the locus of any true “authorial” intent obscure; it is the opportunities which the mimesis of live argument—its inherent imperfections, incompleteness, openness—opens up. This too it has in common with myth, and this was one of Pavese’s real insights. He himself recognized it in his diaries: “Your real muse, in prose, is dialogue, because in it you can express the absurd-ingenuous-mythical outpourings that cunningly interpret reality. Which you could not do in poetry.”
Some dialogues are between figures we might expect to see side by side, just as we see them in Sophocles or Homer; elsewhere, we get surprising meetings, or figures otherwise more obscure: Kratos and Bia, familiars of Zeus; sea nymphs like Britomart and the titular Leucothea; Hippolochus and Sarpedon, from an episode in Book VI of the Iliad. Pavese drops in, too, nameless but boldly human figures: beggars, hunters, shepherds, servant girls, peasant farmers. Sometimes they converse (knowingly or unknowingly) with the Great, sometimes with each other. He also twists and turns, like a true re-teller, the familiar into new shape: instead of the callous semi-villain of Euripides’s play, we get an old and defeated Jason; Orpheus, we learn, did not fatefully turn around to glimpse Euridice from some uncontrollable urge, but out of willful refusal to experience her death and his grief all over again:
I was thinking of my life with her, how it had been before; someday it would have to finish again. What has been, will be. I was thinking of that cold, of that emptiness . . . I was thinking of this when I saw the first glimmer of the light. Then I said, “Let’s finish it once and for all.” And I turned around. Eurydice disappeared like a snuffed candle. All I heard was a faint squeal, like a mouse skittering to its hole . . .
It’s absurd that after such a journey, after looking nothingness in the face, I should have turned around on a sudden impulse, or by mistake.
The book holds urgent, burning, modern-ancient questions of values: of what one or another of us can ever do in the face of what the Greeks termed anangke—an archetypically open Greek word, meaning force, constraint, limit, necessity—or at least (if necessity leaves us no choice) how to think about it; trying to make sense of the past, which is gone, and to question the future, which destiny may or may not have already set. It is hardly a new observation (one could cite Nietzsche, Burkhardt) but the Greeks agonized over this endlessly: the clash of limit and possibility, the mysterious godly (and supra-godly) law of necessity against the human and individual agon—existence as contest, pursuit of knowledge, excellence, virtue, overcoming. It was this irresolvable contradiction that birthed tragedy.
As Matthew Spellberg writes in his exceptional 2019 essay, “Myth and Anarchy”: “Myth is oral. Though myth often lives on in literate societies, it does not originate within them . . . It cannot be emphasized enough how difficult this is for us to wrap our minds around . . . children of the book that we are, we do not have the words to describe it.” Yet, as Spellberg goes on to describe, it is just this which makes of myth a unique way of knowing, which favors not the grand, self-destructing leviathans of abstraction which rule us today (Money and Capital, State and Individual, Market and Freedom), but a power of meaning-making derived from orality’s open aliveness. Like the orality in Plato’s philosophy (and Socrates’s), this was an acknowledgment that human meaning-making is at root and should always remember itself to be “at every moment revisable . . . widely disseminated and openly negotiated.”
The twin key to myth’s power, the source of its ever-regenerative resourcefulness, is that it is not, at heart, a product of an anthropocentric worldview. Again, Pavese wrestled with this in his diaries. “Yours is a rustic classicism,” he wrote, “that could easily become prehistoric ethnology.” He returns repeatedly to the word and the concept “savage” (selvaggio). (“Dialoghi con Leuco are the fruit of your yearning for “savage” things—the country, the titans.”) By this he seems to mean everything non-human, everything which humanity of his time has decided to renounce or to “progress” beyond, as non-human. It is that which remains ever anti (and yet stubbornly refuses to become anterior to) “the civilized”: “You sigh for the country, for ‘the savage,’ but you appreciate the good sense, the moderation, the clear understanding of people like Berto, Pablo, the man in the street. ‘The savage’ appeals to you as something mysterious, not as historical brutality. Tales of partisans or terrorists do not please you. ‘Savage’ means mysterious, open to any possibility . . . ‘Savage’ as such, has no basic reality. It is that things were so, in that they were inhuman. But things, insofar as they interest you, are human.”
There fought within Pavese the socially engaged and politically conscious man observant of his time and the alien, the observer. Exiled from Turin for his anti-fascist literary work in the mid-1930s, he later wrote for the communist paper L’Unita; he was the first major writer in Italian literature to bring the displaced and uprooted, the peasant-proletarian class of the new modern city, into his work. He wrote of the periphery, the fringe, of outsiders, because he himself was one, perhaps more damned even than Camus’ Mersault. Between the very real breakneck historical pace of fascist-communist-capitalist crisis in Turin and the timeless setting of his Piedmontese countryside, an open wound of longing against all things that were declared “modern.” It was a longing that, amid the catastrophic consequences of modernity’s globalized rejection of other-than-human realities—of the mythic—we are now better placed to grasp than he himself was. The sense of irreconcilability underlay his ambivalent relationship with communism, with his time, the loneliness that led him to end his life.
Pavese’s friend, the great novelist and essayist Natalia Ginzburg, captured this contradiction in two separate reminiscences of him. At the same time someone “whose conversation could be pointed and invigorating like nobody else’s,” Pavese was seemed ill-at-ease in human reality; his “sadness,” to her, was “the voluptuous heedless melancholy of a boy who has still not come down to earth, and moves in the arid, solitary world of dreams.” Perhaps Ginzburg didn’t quite capture the whole truth. Pavese was caught up in a pursuit, mysterious often to himself, a different way of knowing. It was not so much a “dreaminess” as a wakefulness, an increasingly desperate one of the more-than-human, the more-than-now, which modern history throttled and tried to deny. And far from being a reactionary, primitive, “anti-modern”—it was a call whose urgency we are only now beginning to awaken to. Modernism’s other titans—from Eliot to Stein to Woolf to Joyce—felt this call too, but few seem to have felt it as personally or as achingly as Pavese.
What Dialogues with Leucò offers, then, is one possible path into a new world of thought. Many more, from many different places, are becoming visible only now—but few trails are as rich, winding, and promising as the one that Pavese had only begun to lay down.