SOURCE: Ward, David. “Carlo Levi: From Croce to Vico.” In Antifascisms: Cultural Politics in Italy, 1943-46, pp. 157-91. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1996.

[In the following essay, Ward examines Levi's journalistic and political writings and traces the development of his work.]

PAURA DELLA LIBERTà: CARLO LEVI, RESISTANCE, AND CREATIVITY

Succeeding Alberto Cianca, Carlo Levi was editor of L'Italia Libera (IL) from August 1945 until his resignation in February 1946 in the wake of the split that took place in the Action Party during its first postwar congress in Rome. Previously, while participating in the Tuscan CLN, Levi had written a number of leading articles for the Florence-based Resistance newspaper Nazione del popolo (NdP). Over a span of eighteen months, Levi contributed at least seventy-five articles, signed and unsigned, to both newspapers, relatively few of which have been republished elsewhere.¹

Many of his articles rehearse Action Party themes and analyses that we have already had occasion to observe: that the party was a newcomer to the political scene, free from the pre-Fascist legacy that still trammeled other parties; that Fascism itself was the inevitable result of the inadequacies of pre-Fascist Liberal Italy; that the seeds of a new form of fascism lay in the Liberal Party's insistent harking back to pre-Fascist Italy as the model on which to build the post-Fascist nation; and that the Resistance experience signaled the possible beginning of a new historical course that owed nothing to and effected a deep rupture with Italy's past. For example, in greeting the participants at the congress that was to result in its downfall, Levi writes that the Action Party, unlike others, “whose mental laziness keeps them attached to traditional schemes and inherited mythologies,” takes up radically new positions that have not yet been “exhausted by time.” Nor, Levi goes on, does the Action Party limit itself to repeating formulas “rubbed smooth by overuse, like pebbles made round by flowing water.”² As to fascism, Levi wrote in an article entitled, significantly, “Rompere con il passato” (“Break with the past”), published in January 1946, a month or so after the fall of the Parri government, it “did not fall from the sky like a sudden meteor, but was the fruit of half a century of compromises and shortcomings.” Italy's great problem, he goes on, was that it had never had a “modern, active bourgeoisie.” The bourgeoisie the country did have had been born out of compromise with the forces of the old regime and under the aegis of the monarchy. Developed through protectionism and the rifling of the state's coffers, the bourgeoisie had produced a state in which the lower classes were excluded and absent from its formation and life. This was a state that did not come of popular conquest, and it had established so antidemocratic a political culture that it became the perfect instrument with which to welcome the totalitarian experience of fascism.³

Against the Crocean notion of both fascism and, as we shall see shortly, Resistance as parenthetical phenomena, Levi writes of those Partisans for whom “fascism was not an episode to be shrugged off, as a dog does with water after a bath, to take up once again the vices and errors of before. Rather, it was a fundamental experience that brought to light and changed the terms of our country's deep problems, staking a claim like never before for the need of a new liberty.”⁴

Also emerging from the pages of Levi's journalistic writings, however, is an analysis of the origins of fascism that goes well beyond that put forward by any other Action Party intellectual. Of particular importance in this regard is Levi's cutting critique of not only Italy's but also the entire Western world's past and history. So deep does this critique cut that one critic, Dominique Fernandez, has spoken of Levi's quest “against Western man.”⁵ We find a clear example of this tendency in “Firenze libera!” (“Free Florence!”), the final article Levi wrote for NdP to mark the first anniversary of the liberation of Florence in August 1945. In the article, it becomes clear that, for Levi, the unprecedented experience of the Florentine Resistance is largely unconnected with the city's past. In Florence, something new and unique had happened, a new type of political subject had been created, amid, and even perhaps driven by, the city's isolation under Nazi occupation from the rest of Italy. This interstice had created a unique opportunity. Instead of relying on inherited forms of self-government, the Florentine Partisans had created their own to meet their specific needs. The resources on which the city drew, what Levi calls the universal spirit with which the city had resisted the Nazis, did not come from the inspiration given them by Florence's past. “This Ducal city,” he writes, “which had fallen asleep in the lazy shadows of its glorious buildings,” had been awoken by a real sense of “lived history” that “one could feel in the air, and that did not come, this time, from memories. Nor did it come from towers or palaces, but from living men, and from those who died for their cause.” The Florentine Resistance experience, then, was not, as Levi saw it, the continuation of the city's past history, nor were the new forms of self-government the city gave itself based on old models. Rather, the Florentine Resistance experience had broken with the past and had created something entirely new, unique, and without precedent:

Florence had to invent the Partisan war, the war in the city, the Liberation Committees as organs of government. These were discoveries born out of necessity, because they did not come from the plans of a few enlightened men, but from the common will of a people freeing itself. In its new born liberty, paid for with blood, the people wanted to express themselves and did so for the first time with self-government.⁶

Levi's reservations about the ability of the past to provide the present with viable models also animate his critique of Italy's, particularly Liberal Italy's, Risorgimento legacy. In one of his early essays, published in Rivoluzione liberale (Liberal revolution) in 1922, he condemns Liberal Antonio Salandro's reliance on a Risorgimento model that had become “the predetermined form on which we should fashion not only our present, but also our future state life, as if that were the sacred tablets of the law from which everything and everyone must take form.”⁷ As the quotation suggests, Levi's reading of the Risorgimento period was very much in step with that of Antonio Gramsci. For both, the Risorgimento had resulted not so much in the unification of Italy as a single state, as in the attempt to extend Piedmont's hegemony over the whole country, even to those regions where the Piedmont model was plainly inapplicable.⁸ Among Levi's personal papers, now held at the Archivio nazionale dello Stato (Italian National State Archive) in Rome, there is lodged a series of notes and pamphlets that bear on the Piedmont occupation of Sicily. One of the pamphlets bears the title Un buco nell'acqua: ovvero Le debolezze, le malizie, gl' imbrogli, li errori, e le camorre in varie amministrazioni della Sicilia. Frammenti di scandalosa cronaca contemporanea (A hole in the water, or, the weaknesses, the maliciousness, the tricks, the mistakes and the mafias in various Sicilian administrations. Fragments of a scandalous contemporary chronicle), written by Gaetano Marini.⁹ Marini was a Piedmont official who had the unenviable task of introducing the metric system of weights and measures to Sicily. This, evidently, was no easy task. His pamphlet, which turns into a vicious attack on all things Sicilian, chronicles the resistance to his attempts and stands as testimony to the huge cultural gap that existed between the Piedmontese aim to standardize Italy on the basis of its own system and the reception that project met. I have no knowledge of what intentions Levi had for this material, which also includes a pamphlet entitled La Madonna di Saletta. Invocazione Siciliana contro i Garibaldini (The Saletta madonna. Sicilian invocation against the Garibaldini) by Nicolosi di Sciacca and contains material on Sicilian resistance to the Risorgimento forces. It seems likely, however, that Levi's interest in the matter lay in the same incompatibility between cultures he had denounced in his first novel, Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Christ stopped at Eboli), apropos of Fascist attempts to standardize across the whole country, among other things, agricultural policy.¹⁰

But Levi does not limit his critique of history to the Risorgimento or Fascist periods in Italy's recent past. In fact, it is hard to find any historical period at all which he treats with any admiration. The only strong enthusiasm I have found expressed for any periods is for that of the Provençal courts and their troubadours and that of the Sweet New Style expressed parenthetically in his Paura della libertà (Fear of liberty).¹¹ It is, in fact, with this short, obscure, and repetitive text, written while Levi was in exile in France as WWII was breaking out, that he offers his diagnosis of fascism as the inherent disease of all Western civilization.¹²

Informed by his readings and the language of Vico and the Old Testament, Levi's book is a very ambitious attempt to locate the origins of the flaw in humankind that has led it, in the case of Western Europe, to accept and welcome a phenomenon like fascism. As the title of the book suggests, it is in humankind's generalized fear of its own liberty that the key to the question lies. Unlike many theories that seek to explain fascism, Levi's pays no attention at all to economic factors.¹³ Rather, the cornerstone of Levi's theories lies in humankind's fear of its inherently creative powers. Yet, it is in those powers that humankind's potential for happiness and liberty lie. By marshaling our creative forces, we can forge for ourselves a unique identity that allows us to differentiate ourselves from the other equally unique identities forged by our fellow human beings. To argue this, Levi goes back to a state, which he calls the originary indeterminate state (indistinto originario): “There exists, common to all men, an originary indeterminate state flowing in eternity, the nature of every aspect of the world, spirit of every being in the world, memory of all time in the world” (23). Levi also illustrates the concept by way of reference to Vico's forest: “A Forest, in the beginning, according to the story, covered the face of the earth. We carry that very first Forest, formless and full of buds and terror, the black hiding-place of all time within us. From it the journey begins” (138).

The journey, then, is away from the state of indeterminate formlessness in the primitive magma of the forest, and toward form. This, however, is not a process which takes place once-and-for-all at the beginning of a life, nor does it set the self up for what it will eternally be. Rather, for Levi, the process of self-differentiation is an endlessly renewed and self-renewing creative experience: “All men are born out of chaos, and they can regenerate themselves in that chaos” (23). Humankind's initial desire to seek form out of the formless chaos into which it is born is its first inkling of its possible liberty: “Individuals begin their journey from this indistinct state, moved by a dark desire to detach themselves from it in order to take on form, to become individuals.” But once individuals have differentiated themselves from the indeterminate magma, they are always drawn back to the state from whence they came to regenerate and recreate themselves in an ongoing process of birth and rebirth. Individuals are, then, “continually pulled back by a dark need to reattach themselves and dissolve themselves in it” (23). The creative self's authentic mode of being lies, therefore, in a state that includes both differentiation and nondifferentiation in the same creative act: “The only living moments in humankind, the only periods of high civilization in history are those in which the two opposing processes of differentiation and non-differentiation coexist in the creative act” (23). To effect sheer transcendence of the indeterminate magma is to bring the self to a realm of pure and abstract reason; not to effect any transcendence at all is to give oneself over to the beast. The process of birth and rebirth is, writes Levi, not to be thought of in terms of death. Quite the opposite. It is the essence of life. Death is when one ignores the process of regeneration that is inherent to authentic living: “This effort stands between two deaths: the prenatal chaotic one, and the natural definitive one. But the only true death is the complete separation from the flux of non-differentiation. That is, empty egotistical reason, abstract liberty. And, at the other extreme, the complete inability to differentiate oneself. The mystical, beast-like obscurity, slavery to the inexpressible” (23).

For Levi, then, both extremes of the polarity serve a purpose: on the one hand, creative differentiation in order to affirm ourselves as individuals, and on the other, a beneficial and necessary return to the magma as an antidote to reason's dangerous excesses. Underlying Levi's thought on these pages are two considerations that go to the heart of his critique of Western civilization: first, his conviction of the inauthenticity of life when it is governed by inherited codes and practices, and second, his polemic with the modernist conception of history as a linear narrative of ongoing emancipation and progress. For Levi, the creative acts with which individuals extricate themselves from the indeterminate state can be deemed authentic only when they are unique and fit the needs of the contingencies of individuals or groups of individuals. Whether in the fields of art, language, politics or religion, Levi is always convinced that the creative actions of individuals must be determined by the specific circumstances in which individuals find themselves. When, on the other hand, individuals seek solutions to given problems by recourse to preexisting codes or models imposed from above by schools or authorities, or inherited from tradition, then, humankind renounces the creative gift inherent to it and chooses to limit its own liberty.

Levi sees one of the greatest threats to liberty in religion, which he considers a retreat into a safe, reassuring haven made of “rituals … formulas, evocations, and prayers” (68). Worse still, humankind's fear of its creative faculties pushes it into accepting the limits imposed on its freedom by the codes of this or that cult. Religion is, then, “an act of faith in certain forms that have become symbolic and divine: a renunciation of free, dangerous creativity in order to reach certainty through sacrifice.” Against the unlimited possibilities of human creativity,

religion is the individualizing limitation of that which has no form, symbolic fixation of that which is indeterminate. … Religious language is born of the need for stability and certainty. The religious image or word, in its limits, replace an awesome reality. … Religious expression is then the opposite of poetic expression. The one is the symbolic limitation of the universal, the other its concrete expression; the one is the certain manifestation of a liberating and divine slavery, the other the very voice of human liberty; the one is fixed ritual, the other mythology.

(68-69)

In politics, the same thinking leads Levi to distrust any course of political action that is tied to the dictates of a given ideology. As Dominique Fernandez has pointed out, Levi is not interested in the applicability of formulas to a variety of situations but in the unicity of experience and how life can be constituted by a series of first times, each one unique and contingent on the specifics of given circumstances and needs. What interests him, then, is “that precarious moment of the discovery of self by men and women … the point of balance between primitive confusion and the timid and proud awakening of consciousness, the mystery of birth and the coming of a new world.”¹⁴ Although Levi himself is not always consistent in his own choice of terminology, the master metaphor of artistic activity is not that of finding but that of inventing, creating: “Poetry is the invention of truth, invention or the creation for the first time. It is neither repeatable nor repeated: it is the moment in which expression coincides with reality for the first time. I prefer to say invention, rather than discovery, because discovery implies something external that is prior to its uncovering. Invention puts emphasis on the creative character of the relationship with things.”¹⁵

Creativity also spills over into cultural politics. In his involvement with the political organization of the peasant movement in Italy's backward agricultural South, Levi is, on the one hand, ready to admit the crucial importance of the writings of Antonio Gramsci, the great theorist of an alliance between Northern workers and Southern peasants. On the other, however, he is at pains to point out that Gramsci's thought should not be taken as an orthodoxy good for all times and places. Indeed, to treat Gramsci in this manner is to misunderstand the lesson of liberty his example has left us:

Gramsci [was] a great creator of thought … a great creator of culture and, above all, … a great creator, discoverer, inventor and champion of liberty. … But one cannot be, by definition, orthodox Gramscians, because orthodoxy is in contradiction with the very quality of Gramsci's thought. One cannot be an orthodox Gramscian, one cannot adopt his formulas. What we can do is follow his method of liberty and historical investigation.¹⁶

The crucial importance of recognizing the unicity of local circumstances, and tailoring one's creative responses to match those circumstances, also explains Levi's reluctance to embrace the modernist idea of history as ongoing narrative of progress. Anticipating elements of the postmodernist critique of history as emancipatory narrative, Levi develops a pluralized notion of history as histories, each one belonging to and reflective of different social realities.¹⁷ Spearheaded by what has often been considered to be civilization's center and most advanced point of progress—Western European man—the idea of history as master narrative of the world, as a unitary process toward ever greater liberty, has been fundamental to modernist thinking, into which systems of thought and belief as disparate as Marxism and Christianity have bought.

Levi is a forthright critic of the Western notion of history and is quick to denounce the damage its colonization has done to cultures on its margins. The peasant culture of Lucania, where Levi was exiled in the 1930s on account of his anti-Fascist activities in Turin, was of interest to him precisely because it had remained immune to history. Indeed, it was the peasants' immunity from the codes of conduct and figures of thought mandated by history that had preserved in them the creativity to solve the contingent problems they came across in the course of their daily lives:

Since peasant civilization is placed at the limits of the indeterminate state it continues to live in that ambiguous region in which for the first time the individual separated himself, took form and consciousness of himself. All around there is always present and impending the sense of sacrality, of the original indistinct state where every action, word and image have the character of things thought for the first time … an affirmation of liberty.¹⁸

The absence of history from peasant life is also underscored in the wonderful lines we read on the opening page of Christ: “Christ never arrived here, nor have time, nor the sense of an individual soul, nor hope, nor the connection between cause and effect, reason and history. Christ never arrived here, just as the Romans never arrived … nor the Greeks.”¹⁹

Against a view that sees, as he puts it in the novel's opening lines, “what we are used to calling History” as a linear narrative of progress, Levi goes back to an older view based on repeated cycles of birth, death, and rebirth.²⁰ His reservations about history as master narrative are not only provoked by his apprehension of the inapplicability of totalizing models to marginal communities, but also by something more. In the cyclical view of time he finds a beneficial and humbling contact with death that is entirely absent from the progressive view. In an anonymous newspaper article he wrote for NdP in 1944, he speaks of the time “when human progress seemed necessary and endless, and when we had forgotten about death.”²¹ For Levi, one of the most beneficial aspects of the Resistance was that, in making plain the risk of losing their own life and in the actual deaths of their comrades, men and women were brought face-to-face with the experience of death. The experience is beneficial because it acts as a timely reminder that all things human are precarious, and that nothing lasts for ever, even that which appears to be built on the most robust of foundations. At the same time, the experience also clears the way for men and women to question those structures that had until then governed their lives. Referring to the Resistance in an anonymous article dated December 1945, Levi writes: “Since then the world has seen a revolution that has changed every value, created new forces, and put before the eyes of everyone the experience of death, which had been forgotten for such a long time. It has placed everyone before the need to revise everything that had traditionally been accepted.”²²

Life, then, for Levi is not to be led according to a single overarching narrative that stretches out from the beginning of a life until its end, but according to a series of phases, each one of which begins and ends within a life to give rise to a new phase. Writing in the 25 December 1944 edition of NdP, Levi speaks of Christmas as the emblem of the rebirth “that happens eternally in time and in each man if, stopping in the night of his journey, under a new star, he is able to throw away from himself the old man.”²³ In Christ, we find a beautiful passage offering a perfect illustration of the liberating effect authentic contact with death produces. Here, called to cure an old man dying of a perforated appendix, Carlo finds he can do nothing except offer comfort. As the man lays dying in an adjoining room Carlo listens to his cries:

From the door the continuous lament of the dying man reached me: “Jesus, help me, Jesus, help me, Doctor, help me,” like a litany of uninterrupted anguish, with the whisper of the women's prayers. … Death was in the house: I loved those peasants, I felt their pain and the humiliation of my inadequacy. Why then did such a great peace descend on me? I felt as if I was separate from every thing, from every place, remote from any determination, lost, outside time, in an infinite elsewhere. I felt concealed, unknown to men, hidden like a bud under the bark of a tree. I turned my ear to the night and I felt as if I had suddenly entered the very heart of the world. An immense happiness that I had never before experienced was in me, and filled me completely, the flowing sense of an infinite plenitude.²⁴

The original indeterminate state, to which Carlo here returns, is not an absolute beginning. Rather, it is a cyclical phenomenon, a repeated moment that takes place both in history and in an individual's life. Through his proximity to the experience of death, Levi is returned to a condition akin to that of the originary indeterminate state of which he had written in Fear. His return to this state is the enabling condition for a new birth and new creative activity, as he feels an immense plenitude welling up within him—a bud under the bark of a tree waiting to burst through and blossom. In the fusion of love making, the self can also be returned to the “black wood, full of convulsions and indistinct noises. … Only in the eternal, endless night is there the sacred formlessness of love. And the face of the beloved has the color of the night. Complete fusion does not know liberty, nor will, nor gods, only the dark necessity of the blind originary abyss.”²⁵ For Levi, such returns are part of the fabric of authentic living. Indeed, in his own life we can identify such moments: his time spent in prison, for example, which, he writes in a letter, “can perhaps represent a beneficial return to the originary indeterminate state” out of which his own creativity will lift him: “If nothing is given to me I will have to give everything, reconstruct, extracting the terms and the distinctions from within myself and, without bricks and mortar rebuild the city, and once it is built, inhabit it actively.”²⁶ A second return might be represented by his exile in France in the 1930s, when he wrote Fear; a third by his experience with the peasants in Lucania; and a fourth, perhaps, by his period of blindness in the final years of his life, to which the posthumous volume of notes entitled Quaderno a cancelli (Gated notebook) testifies.²⁷

Yet, returns to the originary indeterminate state are not only personal but also historical. There come times in history when a given period runs its course, and the society, customs, and culture it had founded collapse. The years around the fall of Fascism, Italy's double occupation, the Resistance, and the chance to rebuild from new foundations represent, for Levi, one of these moments. The historical course that had led to pre-Fascist Italy and Fascism “had lost its creative abilities after a century of extraordinary vitality. The idea of the individual, which had been its base, had become purely rationalistic; the idea of liberty purely formal. The sense of a living connection between individual and State, entities which were schematic and allowed for no mediation, had been lost.”²⁸

The terrible chaos and confusion that had rocked Italy in this transition phase were, paradoxically, propitious to a new beginning. The fall of Fascism, the war, and the dislocation experienced in all fields of life had swept away the ingrained habits of an entire society. If ever history had presented Italy with a blank page on which to recreate itself, this was it. There had been a

complete turnaround in the habits, customs, inherited ideals, relationships between classes, different parts of Italy, and between city and country; the economic and moral bases of life. All the old problems of our national life are now posited on a different basis. They need to be taken up from the beginning, and can at last find a solution, unless we allow ourselves to be suffocated by the residues of a dead past.²⁹

Or, as he put it in September 1944:

Families have been dispersed, houses devastated, property destroyed, states overturned. If these ruins were only material the world would quickly go back to what it was. But the old sense of the family has been lost, the old sense of home has changed, the old sense of property no longer has the validity it once had, the old sense of the State has lost all power. And something deeper has changed in men's souls, something which is difficult to define, but which is expressed unconsciously in every act, every word, every gesture: the very vision of the world, the sense of the relationship of people with each other, with things and with destiny.³⁰

Yet, a question remained. Since only those parts of Italy that had experienced vast dislocation presented propitious conditions for a new start, what of those other areas, Rome and the entire South, where daily life had been far less disrupted? This, indeed, was to be one of the challenges that the Action Party, once ensconced in the Roman corridors of power after the heady atmosphere of Resistance life, was asked to face and was unable to meet. Those areas of Italy that had not experienced the new climate created by the Resistance were cause for great concern. There, no new Northern wind, as the Resistance came to be known, had blown away the structures of the pre-Fascist state. In his article commemorating the liberation of Florence, Levi writes, “The peasants in the South had not been able to become Partisans, nor become aware of their own civil worth through the war. The political and social problem of the South came from this continued and aggravated lack of participation.” The same obtained for the capital: “Rome had been liberated without a struggle, and remained, despite the efforts of the few, the eternal bureaucratic ruin.” Indeed, it was to be the Action Party's traumatic impact upon the Roman corridors of power, and its own inability to replace old modes of government with new ones that was to contribute to its demise.³¹

These reservations were very much to the fore in the Actionists' thoughts, especially Levi's. He was mindful of the decrepit bourgeois class he had occasion to experience in the South during his exile. Nevertheless, the overwhelming feeling was of great optimism. For Levi especially, this was a time when the creative gift that is the patrimony of all humankind to forge form out of nothingness could be given full rein. Creativity could now act as an antidote to a world which had become “too mechanized” and separated from its inherent inventive capacities. We have already noted how the Tuscan Partisans in Florence had invented governing institutions to meet their specific needs. For Levi, in the Italy of 1944 and 1945, creativity was the order of the day and was to inform the entire work of reconstruction. Liberty, he writes in NdP, is a “continually creative activity”; the CLNs were the fruit of “creative spontaneity”; the Resistance itself was “a young and creative popular force”; the Constituent Assembly, which was to write Italy's postwar constitution, was a “work of spontaneous creation … in a period which breaks its links with previous law.” It was in this sense that the Assembly was also a poetic moment which could rightly be compared to the “work of the grammarians who elaborate into precise laws the as yet uncertain forms of a new language. Or better: that of a great writer who first chooses and then puts into place with the authority of his poetry, in the still changing language of the people, what will remain its definitive forms.”³²

For Levi, as indeed for the Actionists in general, this was a period of radical change, a literal rewriting of the laws which had governed pre-Fascist and Fascist Italy. For this reason, they were very aware of the need to underline the qualitative break with present and past they wanted to make, as well as to guard against the reemergence on the political scene of personalities who had been most involved with Fascism. As we saw in the previous chapter, the Action Party's conviction of the need for a political purge of these elements was motivated by its desire to effect a break with Italy's past. It was for this same reason that many Actionists objected to the claims made in Liberal circles that once the Fascist regime had fallen the anti-Fascist movement no longer had a reason to exist.³³ Echoing Rosselli's contention that the anti-Fascist movement was not merely negative and reactive to fascism, many Actionists insisted on its positive connotations as a movement going well beyond opposition to Fascism as a regime (or as a parenthesis) and digging deep into the fabric and hidden recesses of Italian and European society, where the seeds of Fascist culture lay dormant: “We are anti-Fascists not only because we are against that series of phenomena that we call Fascism, but because we are for something that Fascism denies and offends, and violently prevents us from pursuing. … [O]ur anti-Fascism implies therefore a positive faith, the positing of a new world against an old world that generated Fascism.”³⁴

Following Rosselli, Levi wrote in December 1944 of the need to guard against conservative tendencies within the anti-Fascist political parties themselves. He underlines that through the war not only must Nazism and fascism disappear, but also “the entire old European world and its insoluble antitheses, its schemes which have been emptied in the course of history, its state and national idols, its ancient ruling classes incapable of renewal, its contradictory political, economic, moral and aesthetic concepts, its impotent thirst for religion, its inability to reach full human unity.” Drawing on one of the founding notions of Fear, he goes on to say that a limited notion of antifascism must also die with the old world that is dying. “Fascism and anti-Fascism are still two sides of the same world,” he writes, and to complete the work of renewal being done by the traditional parties, the victors of the struggle must go beyond the antithetical vision that has animated the struggle thus far. “The victors know that they can only really win if they are able to renew themselves radically, if they can abandon the old man that lasts and resists in them, if they can found with truly self-liberating work the Europe of tomorrow.” If Italian antifascism proved unable to take this step of reneging its purely negative connotations, the consequences would be not radical revolution but “a simple, anti-historic restoration. Once the field was cleared of Fascism, conservative anti-Fascism would reconstitute the exact same world from which Fascism took origin. And Fascism would be reborn in a new form, in an endless series of wars and barbaric convulsions.”³⁵

Although never stated in explicit terms, the referent of Levi's remarks is the Italian Liberal Party, one of the Action Party's allies in the anti-Fascist coalition. Many Actionists feared that the continued survival of the Liberal Party in the same form as it had existed in the pre-Fascist period preserved the cultural and political conditions that were propitious to the coming of fascism in another form. In his Le parole sono pietre (Words are stones), a book based on three journeys he made to Sicily, Levi reports an epigrammatic pun that circulated in anti-Fascist circles around 1944:

DANS LE PLI DE L'ÉTENDARD
ATTENTION: LES CAGOULARDS!(36)
(In the fold of the flag
Beware: Fascists!)

The play is on the French word pli, which means “fold,” but is also the acronym of the Partito liberale italiano, PLI. Indeed, the firmest opposition to the Action Party's ambitious plans and, in particular, to the government headed by party leader Parri, came from Liberal circles. The opposition culminated in the delegitimatization and ultimately the forced resignation of Parri, an act that for many Actionists, Levi included, signaled the end of any chance of radical postwar renewal in Italy. The events leading up to, around, and beyond Parri's resignation are the subject of Levi's second novel, The Watch, to which I now turn.

CRISTO SI è FERMATO A EBOLI AND L'OROLOGIO: LEVI AND THE CIVIL WAR

The government headed by Parri held office from June until November 1945. Its failure to deliver on its promises of innovative reform can be attributed in part to the inability of Parri himself to provide effective leadership and guidance. As a Partisan leader, Parri, under the battle name Maurizio, had had a distinguished career, but his effective leadership in the field did not translate into effective leadership in the corridors of power. Greater responsibility for his government's demise, however, lay with the Liberal Party, which in November 1945 withdrew its support and, with the backing of the Christian Democrat leader Alcide De Gasperi, forced Parri's resignation. De Gasperi, in fact, was to be prime minister of the government that succeeded Parri's, inaugurating the long succession of Christian Democrat-led administrations, which has been the source of a great many of postwar Italy's political problems. In one of the intricate tactical moves that have always characterized, and even today continue to characterize, Italian politics, Parri received no support at all in his hour of need from his natural allies, the PCI and the Socialist Party. Both had already identified the intransigence of Parri and the Action Party as an obstacle to their project of forging alliances with the moderate forces of the bourgeoisie gathered around the Christian Democrat camp.³⁷

If, as Foa has suggested, this PCI and Socialist alliance rang the death knell for Parri, it is the long and bitter polemic with the Liberal Party that emerges more forcibly from the Action Party press of the period. Many of the articles Levi wrote as editor of IL locate the principal ideological enemy fairly and squarely in the Liberal Party's attempts to delegitimate and limit the scope of action of Parri's government. Providing confirmation for the Actionists' thesis that they were the agents for the restoration of the pre-Fascist state, the Liberal strategy aimed to limit the political powers of the newly created bodies that were to be the institutional basis for post-Fascist society: first, the CLNs themselves, of which the Parri government was a direct emanation, and from which the Liberals sought to transfer political power back into the hands of the lieutenant, the stand-in for the disgraced monarch; and second, the Consulta, the body that was to prepare the way for Italy's new constitution, which the Liberals sought to deprive of operative powers, limiting it to the production of consultative documents.

The majority of Levi's articles for IL during the final months of 1945 take the form of attacks on Liberal Party policy. Focusing on the shift in the Liberals' internal balance of power, which resulted in greater influence for the party's Southern land-owning component, Levi underlines how Parri's government posed a threat to this constituency's vested interests. It was, he suggests, for this reason that the government's resignation had been forced.³⁸ The newly created political situation also brought about a change in Levi's journalistic writings. There is, in fact, a distinct difference in tone between his articles for the NdP and those for IL. While the first had been optimistic, positive, in their celebration of how Resistance Italy had seemed to overcome the fear of liberty that had dogged Western civilization, the latter were defensive and, as the political crisis deepened, pessimistic about the chances of effecting any genuine renewal. Although Levi certainly does not ignore the importance of the Southern land owners' threatened vested interests, at the same time he suggests on more than one occasion that underlying their hostility to Parri was a more basic fear, the fear of liberty and humankind's ability to create new forms of government and self-regulation that his Resistance experience had led him to believe had been overcome. But what is precisely this fear of liberty? To answer this question we need to go back to his earlier Fear.

Although Fear is, on the one hand, a celebration of human creative powers, on the other, it is a tract on humankind's renunciation of those powers. Our creative powers and ability to invent new forms out of formlessness are, to human eyes, literally awesome. The history of Western civilization has been marked by a tendency to recoil away from these powers, from what Roberto Giammanco has called “the terror of man before his immense resources, the irresistible power of his own creations.” Turning away from this immense power, and intimidated at the rate at which the world continually creates and recreates itself, men and women have sought refuge in prepackaged solutions, in codified, inherited responses, “in old explanations, pathetic myths.”³⁹

For Levi, this means, as we saw earlier, a shift from a sacred vision of things to a religious vision, and a religious vision always implies relegation, the substitution of preexisting symbols, images, and idols to fill the void left by the inability, unwillingness, or fear of the individual to create one's own world. “Religion is relegation. Relegation of the god into the realm of formulas, evocations, prayers to make sure that it doesn't follow its ungraspable nature and escape. The sacred, which is the very aspect of terror, becomes the law in order to save it from itself.”⁴⁰ The same process of relegation also takes place in other fields. The greatest idol humankind has built for itself is the state. Levi saw the most tragic abdication of human responsibility in the Fascist state and the unquestioning adulation it demanded of its followers, which they willingly and freely repaid. Most damaging of all, and returning to one of the pillars of GL's political thought, Levi underlines how humankind's fear of liberty turned the potentially individual and unique person into a component of an anonymous, amorphous, indeterminate mass that had become easy prey for fascism. The valorization of the individual is a key concept for Levi. He was always reluctant to relinquish it and, even for contingent political reasons, he was unwilling to countenance any notion of mass. His ideological difficulties with the so-called mass political parties—the PCI, the Socialists, and the Christian Democrats—come from this reluctance.

The problem with mass parties was that they had developed a monolithic mode of thinking that did not allow them to see the subtleties and nuances that contributed to the formation of political and social reality. This monolithic mode of thinking had led them to theorize the rise of fascism as the result of the gargantuan clash between two opposing but innerly homogeneous groups. In January 1946, after the fall of Parri's government, and with the Action Party in disarray looking for new allies to its Left, Levi took his distance from the Communist proposal of a vast democratic unity among like-thinking parties. Arguing that if the anti-Fascist parties were to elaborate an effective mass strategy, it must not replicate the limits of earlier monolithic thinking and be based on an idea of “differentiated mass,” Levi criticized the analysis of fascism advanced by Mauro Scoccimarro, a leading exponent of the PCI. Although he paid close attention to the role of the industrial and agrarian groups, Scoccimarro's analysis paid no attention at all to the smaller, more variegated group of the petite bourgeoisie. To see fascism only as a capitalist conspiracy, Levi goes on, is to misunderstand

that sense of multiplicity and complexity of the forces in play, the variety of interests that formed the knot from which totalitarianism was born. … What is lacking in his study is a consideration of the petite bourgeoisie whose attempt to conquer the state, together with the new mythologies which came from their inferiority complex, gave rise to the Right-wing revolution, the “petite bourgeois palingenesis,” Fascism and its state.⁴¹

These last remarks bear on Levi's conviction that the Fascist state, far from being the single effect of a conspiracy led by economic groups anxious to protect their own interests, is the logical outcome of a mass society gone mad. The masses' “most powerful of idols,” the state, has not only been imposed from above but has also come as a welcome relief to those individuals, “children of fear,” who are drawn to it in order to “forget themselves, to free themselves from themselves and from their fear.” Beneath the physical fear of the bombs and massacres of WWII, Levi locates a more deeply rooted fear: “The elementary fear of existence, of being free, the fear of the man that is in man. To those who are incapable of contact, incapable of liberty … their only recourse was the sterile solitude and the need to lose themselves in an amorphous collectivity.”⁴²

Levi traces a direct line of continuity linking the ingrained fear of liberty with a mass culture and its culmination in fascism. He could not have stated this point in clearer terms. In an article bearing the same title as the book he had written a few years earlier, “Paura della libertà,” published in November 1944, he writes:

The fear of liberty is the sentiment that has generated fascism. For those who have the soul of a slave, the only peace, the only happiness is to have a master. And nothing is more difficult, and truly frightening, than the exercise of liberty. This explains the love of so many slaves for Mussolini, this mediocrity become god, made necessary to fill the void in the soul, and settle its sense of unease with a sense of restful certainty. For those who are born slaves, abdication from oneself is a beatific necessity.⁴³

Levi goes on to offer a theory to explain the process by which fascism can appear to the masses as a beneficial, providential antidote to their own sense of loss and confusion. He calls this a process of “artificial crystallization,” which takes place not at the rational level but in the hidden recesses of the “uterine politics of the unformed masses, their uncertain terrors, unexpressed needs … ambitions and inferiority complexes that have found in fascism and Nazism their most recent and clamorous expression.” The process itself is very simple. In seeking a sense of certainty and stability with which to fill the void that their fear of liberty has left in them, the masses are drawn to the “man, name, formula” who has been most able to present himself to them in what seem to be the most convincing terms. Once this Mussolini or Hitler figure has conquered the confidence of the masses as the providential answer to their woes, the crystallization takes place. This process is not limited to right-wing dictators. Indeed, Levi sees some of the events of postwar Italy as attempts to crystallize public opinion around figures and bodies other than the CLNs and representatives of the Partisan movement: first, the formation of a “Lega per la difesa delle libertà democratiche” (League for the defense of democratic liberties) by the Liberal Party, in which their most presentable exponents were involved; and second, the appearance of the right-wing political movement “L'uomo qualunque” (The ordinary man), headed by Guglielmo Giannini.⁴⁴ In this case, however, his lack of real political charisma, wrote Levi, would ensure that no long-lasting crystallization took place.⁴⁵

It was to replace the monolithic national state, which had reached its apotheosis with fascism, that the Action Party elaborated its policy on local government. The policy envisaged the creation of a series of local, autonomous regions or provinces, each of which would make provision for the region's specific needs and demands. In other words, a state built from the bottom up, and not imposed from above, a state whose structures would have to be created by its citizens, and not inherited from past practices.

Levi speaks most vociferously of this project, which he held dear, in the final pages of Christ, where he expounds the question in terms of two irreconcilable cultures: the industrial, advanced culture of the North and Center, on the one hand, and the agricultural, backward culture of the South, on the other. The fruit of his time spent in exile was the firm conviction that an unbridgeable abyss separated North and Central Italy from the South. The negative consequences of this abyss had been exacerbated by two factors: first, the inability of the North to understand that the two cultures could not be assimilated,⁴⁶ and second, the role of the degraded petite bourgeoisie of Southern villages. Fascism had only been the latest of a series of centralized, state-run attempts to arrogate the South to its methods and practices. For Levi, these colonial-like attempts to impose a foreign culture on the South are not only destined to fail but also have the effect of deepening the acrimony felt by the peasants toward the state and widening the gap that separates them from central government.

The situation is made even worse by the representatives of central government, the members of the degraded petite bourgeoisie of Southern society, who receive by far the worst treatment in Christ. In the 1930s, the petite bourgeoisie had declared its allegiance to Fascism, but the practice of their Fascism was nothing new, writes Levi. In their hands, Fascism was simply the contemporary form taken by a power struggle between bourgeoisie and peasants that had a long and deeply embedded history. Their antecedents had been allies of whichever political faction, Left, Right, or Center, held power at a given moment (30-31). It is this class that constitutes the real problem in the South. Any political solution elaborated to address the economic and social issues of the South that failed to dislodge this class from its position of power as local agents of a central government that has never understood the complexities of local situations is destined to result in the continuation, in amended form, of the “eternal Italian Fascism” (210).

Underlying Levi's attack on the inadequacies and nefarious effects of centralized forms of government is his refusal to accept the idea that historical development takes place according to the logic of the master/slave dialectic. As his remarks about “internal colonization” suggest, Levi sees the present relationship between city and country, center and margin, in terms analogous to that between first and third worlds (202; 209). The proposal which Levi launches from the pages of Christ for the creation of a new state of, by and for the peasants, based not on a single and totalizing centralized body, but on an “infinite number of autonomous units, an organic federation” is an implicit rejection of the first world's claim to be historically more advanced than the third (211). Levi's proposal, in fact, cuts to the heart of the logic by which colonization offers a justification of itself insofar as it is ultimately beneficial to the historically backward colonized, who are thus brought into the “evolutionary narrative of Western history.”⁴⁷ Having seen how in Italy and Western Europe historically advanced countries had progressed only insofar as they had prepared the way for fascism, Levi elaborates an early theory of separate development. The new state these pages adumbrate must “allow the coexistence of two different cultures. The one must not oppress the other; the other must not be a weight on the one” (211).

To a great extent, however, this proposal, which was also part of the Action Party manifesto, remained a dead letter. As Levi also tells us in Christ, on a short trip back to Turin on the occasion of the death of a close relative, from conversations with his friends he discovered that the idea of a centralized state as “something transcendent … tyrannical or paternalistically provident, dictatorial or democratic, but always unitary, centralized and distant,” hovering over the infinite multiplicity of the country, was shared by representatives of all sectors, Left, Right and Center, of the political spectrum (207-8). All of them, in fact, whether they knew it or not, were “worshippers, idolizers of the State” (207).

The inability of even the most enlightened members of the Turin intelligentsia, probably the most advanced and creative laboratory of political culture Italy has ever known, to imagine a future country governed by a state in any fundamental way different from the present or previous ones, was a sign to Levi of the extent to which fear of the radically new had penetrated the highest and most sophisticated echelons of society. For a while, the heady atmosphere of the Resistance had led Levi to believe that this fear had been overcome. But as the dust settled and the task of governing postwar Italy got underway, Levi was to make some bitter discoveries. Elaboration of new forms of self-government was hindered not only by the structures of Rome's eternal bureaucratic ruin, deeply rooted in pre- and post-Fascist practices and codes, but also by less expected resistances and fears from within the Parri government, the Action Party, and even Levi himself.

Written between 1947 and 1949, in the months and years that followed the fall of Parri, The Watch is often cited as the novel that recounts the end of the Action Party's hopes for a post-Fascist Italy different from its pre-Fascist precursor. Indeed, one of the key scenes in the text is the press conference called by Parri to announce his resignation, in which he describes the toppling of his government as a “coup d'état.” Yet, to reduce The Watch to a chronicle of those events is to do an injustice to a text which goes far beyond the bounds of mere historical reconstruction. For one thing, the novel is structured in such a way as to be hardly recognizable as a conventional historical novel. Although it has a beginning and an end, and includes the figures who were making history at that time—Parri, De Gasperi, Togliatti, though they are never named as such—Levi also includes in his novel, and gives equal space to, a cast of characters normally found on the edges of history. In the course of its more than 300 pages, The Watch plots a meandering course that follows Levi's political and personal adventures in Rome and Naples over a three-day period in November 1945. Often interrupted by reminiscences of exile, childhood memories, and philosophizing along the lines of Levi's earlier Fear, the book contains an impossible number of characters and events by any conventional realistic literary canon. In the course of day 1, for example, we are introduced not only to the journalists who worked for IL but also to characters like Teresa the cigarette seller, groups of Partisans, Levi's friend Marco, his new neighbors Jolanda and Giovanni, Teo the porter, Palmira the alcoholic waitress, and many others. In addition to Parri's press conference in the Viminale and Carlo's long walk through the Traforo traffic tunnel in the company of two party comrades, the text tells of Carlo's dream of losing his watch; how the next day he actually broke his watch and attempted to have it fixed; the death of a young woman killed by an American jeep; lunch in the same small restaurant as a group of Polish soldiers; his trip to the poor and squalid Garbatella quarter to look for a certain Fanny, Marco's girlfriend, but of whose existence we have strong reason to doubt; an evening in an osteria with journalists and printers waiting for the electrical current to be restored; and Carlo's finding of a dead man and his barking dog on the steps leading to the apartment where he was going to sleep. Days 2 and 3 contain a trip to Naples, where Carlo visits his dying uncle; an attack by bandits; his return to Rome in the company of two of the ministers who had just resigned from Parri's government; and his temptation to pay a visit on Benedetto Croce, which he resists.

Many of the characters who people the text are recognizable as the protagonists of the political crisis of those final months of 1945. None of them, however, is identified by his or her real name. About the only characters to retain their real names are Croce and Vico, to whom I will return shortly. To help readers follow a text that is deeply imbued in the atmosphere and events of fifty years ago, Manlio Rossi Doria has furnished a who's who of some of the characters: Casorin and Moneta, two IL journalists, are Manlio Cancogni and Carlo Muscetta; Fede and Roselli, two leading exponents of the Action Party, are Vittorio Foa and Altiero Spinelli; Andrea Valente and Carmine Bianco, Carlo's companions on his walk through the Traforo, are Leo Valiani and Manlio Rossi Doria; Nardelli is Mario Alicata; Tempesti is Emilio Sereni, father of Clara, the contemporary novelist; La Torre is Ugo La Malfa; Rinaldi and Rattani are Orlando and Cattani, two of the Liberals responsible for bringing down the Parri government; and the “great poet” who pays a visit to the typography is Umberto Saba, whose daughter, who also appears briefly in The Watch, was to become Levi's companion in the final years of his life.⁴⁸

In truth, none of the portraits is very flattering. Levi does not let his friendship with many of the above prevent him from pinpointing in their intellectual and political limits responsibility for failing to deliver on their promises. Levi, however, is on record as saying that these characters were not to be understood as exact replicas of the actual figures of that period. Rather, he has said, they are mixed and even counterfeited versions of those figures.⁴⁹ Indeed, Levi uses many of the characters in the novel as a ventriloquist's dummy, expressing thoughts and reflections that are his. In providing a mixed panoply of the various characters and types in the political life of that period, Levi is suggesting less that the demise of the movement's hopes be ascribed to the limits of a given team of political personnel than that it be ascribed to the failure of a whole generation, himself included, to translate their aspirations into political reality. The reasons for this are the major thematic and philosophical thread of the entire novel.

Rather than with individual shortcomings, The Watch is concerned with a general question that Levi had already discussed in Fear: namely, the massive extent to which all aspects of daily life, be they political, personal, cultural, artistic, or social, are determined by adherence to preexisting, inherited codes and practices. Levi's apprehension that literature is largely dependent on adherence to such codes, and how that adherence leads to a representation of a partial, reduced version of reality, is a concern that invests the entire text. Furthermore, Levi also suggests that such codes determine not only literary activity but also the perceptions of the people and events we come across in our daily life, and so take on the form of agency. Commenting on the characters Casorin and Moneta, for example, Levi is at pains to point out the inadequacy of the portraits he has supplied of them. These, he says, represent only the one-thousandth part of what he knows and could say about them. In giving names to people, and in attempting to draw for ourselves concrete, stable, and recognizable images of them out of the “infinite reality” each human being is, we are forced to “cut out a small slice of that reality, we make a partial image … which we then force into our affairs, our time, our measure.”⁵⁰ Knowing that the image we have created is partial and ignores “all the rest, all that we haven't said and must overlook, but which exists,” we are left with a feeling of loss about our ability to represent and apprehend reality (48). In this way, not only characters in literature but also the perception we have of people in our daily lives are like the images we see from the window of a passing train. These frozen instants belonging to a contingent moment of a life become the images with which we associate and summarize that person's entire being: “So, unintentionally, we make a character in a short story, a coloured fragment of a previously drawn mosaic, an element in an abstract game out of the boundless wave that is the real, out of a person who like us, identical to us, has no limits” (49).

Casorin makes a similar point in the literary discussion he has with Moneta in the newspaper office. His beef is with the form of the modern novel, in which he sees the dangerous abstraction that has blighted modernist culture: “The abstract novel was written and drawn in an abstract time. It begins and it ends, cut arbitrarily out of the world” (57). His argument then goes on to consider Levi's fundamental theme of mass: in the modern novel, “we have the individual and we have the masses, but there are no human relationships. Take this single, arid man, split him up into various schemes, make an object of him, make him more complicated with events, lock him up in a before and after and tell his story, if you can: but you'll always be a prisoner of abstraction” (57). This abstraction, he goes on, echoing the same line of thought which sees Nazi and Stalinist death camps as the inevitable result of reason gone mad, has led to the same dehumanization that made Auschwitz and Buchenwald possible: “This is the conclusion, the end of your novels, of your abstract reason … a piece of soap” (57). His final image is one that recurs throughout the text, that of the forest:

There is not only one blade of grass in a field. Not a tree, but a forest, where all the trees stand together. Not before and after, but together. Big and small, with the mushrooms and the bushes and the rocks and the dry leaves and the strawberries and the blackberries and the birds and the wild animals, and perhaps even the fairies and the nymphs and the wild boar and the poachers and the lost travellers, and who knows how many other things. The forest.

(58)

How adherence to such life-denying codes leads to the excessive disciplining of our apprehension of the total experience that is reality is illustrated in some of the many encounters Carlo has in the course of the novel. On moving to his new apartment, he meets Jolanda and Giovanni, the previous tenants' maid and her mysterious cousin. Jolanda has invented for herself an identity as the abandoned noble child born of a beautiful Spanish princess's illicit love affair. The identity she fabricates for herself owes nothing to anything she is or might be, but corresponds perfectly to the codes of noble living which she assumes have been accepted by all. A present-day version of Jolanda would perhaps live life according to the pseudo codes of high living transmitted by American afternoon television: “The starting point of her life was an invention made of imitations of invented and inexistent things, of unsupported appearances. She knew the world to which she claimed to belong only insofar as she had seen it from the bottom up, or through the key-hole, or on the basis of the laundry she washed” (225).

Her cousin Giovanni, who wears a blond wig and never takes off his dark glasses, is a functionary at the Ministry for Italian Africa, a unit set up under fascism to administer Italy's colonies. Because he only needs to go to work once a month, his hobbies of writing, composing, and drawing have become his main activities. Yet, like Jolanda, Giovanni too has constructed his creative activities around what he assumes to be unquestionable codes: “What was the world of the aristocracy for Jolanda was the world of art for Giovanni” (229).

In the world of politics, the same adherence to inherited and barely questioned practices has opened the door for the restoration of pre-Fascist Italy that many Actionists feared but were unable to prevent. In Levi's eyes, the main reason why the Action Party failed, once it had come to a position of executive power with the Parri government, was that, unable to elaborate new political codes and practices, it fell back on the old ones shared by more traditional parties. Thus, from a political organism that was potentially innovative, it was transformed into a replica of existing parties. In his autobiography, Vittorio Foa, who as Fede is pinpointed in the novel as one of the guiltier parties in embracing the ways of traditional politics, agrees with Levi's analysis. He writes: “Many of us fell in love with the techniques of politics. We got revenge on defeated Fascism by avidly rediscovering all the instruments that it had taken from us. We used them to the full: Parties, free press, congresses, meetings, contacts, conversations, tactics that were so refined as to exasperate us. We deluded ourselves into thinking we could defeat the restoration with its own arms.”⁵¹

For Levi, though, the conditions for the Action Party's defeat were already in place before the fall of Parri in November 1945. Already six months had passed since Liberation in April and the window of opportunity that the chaos of the war and the occupations had opened up had now been all but closed as old practices reestablished their hegemony and had the effect of blunting the ever-decreasing instances for radical renewal. After meeting his staff on his first day as editor of IL, the feigned interest shown by his colleagues as he expounds his plans for the newspaper reminds Carlo not so much of a political avant garde as a group of the signori he had met in Lucania. Far from the vital revolutionary context he had enjoyed in Tuscany, Carlo finds himself in a stagnant world of intrigue, petty jealousy, and infighting, especially so when he realizes that his appointment as editor is based less on his individual merits than on a compromise solution negotiated by the two warring factions within the party: “I felt that once again I had fallen into a stagnant pond of interests and intrigue the logic of which would always escape me. An impenetrable and closed world. … And it seemed to me as if I had gone back to a village in Lucania and to listen to the signori speak of thier eternal hatreds, their eternal boredom” (41-42).

Actually, Carlo's discovery of the stagnant reality of Rome politics is a replay of an experience he had had earlier while involved with the Tuscan Resistance. As one of the members of a CLN delegation representing all the parties that had fought together in Florence, Carlo had come to Rome to speak with the representatives of those same parties, which then made up liberated Italy's provisional government. As we have already had occasion to see in Levi's article “Firenze libera!,” the delegates brought to the meeting the optimism and creative spirit that had enabled the occupied city to resist and reconstitute its governmental and institutional life. In The Watch, Levi recalls those days when there seemed to be no gap between politicians and the needs and aspirations of the common people. Speaking of his arrival in Rome in late August 1945, Levi writes in The Watch: “I came directly from Florence. … A few hours earlier I had left that city where everyone seemed still to be living in the vivifying atmosphere of the Resistance, and where there was thought to be no difference between politicians and the common people” (31). But Levi's fear that the “active and creative freedom” (31) that pervaded Florence would not last long finds confirmation in the meeting between the local CLN and its national counterpart. The Tuscan delegation had brought with it a series of proposals, based on its own concrete experience of self-government, which it hoped the national CLN would find interesting and incorporate into its policy. The innovative aspect of its proposals was that it aimed to take the power to nominate prefects out of the hands of central government and give it to local organizations in such a way as to have prefects who would be sensitive to the grass-root needs of citizens. Although they were received by the national leaders of the parties in which the delegation's members militated, the members of the Tuscan delegation met nonetheless with a lukewarm response. Faced with proposals that would take power away from central government, even those ministers who owed their present status to their role in the Resistance struggle either turned them down immediately or assented in only the vaguest of terms. The episode took on the contours of an emblematic event for Levi, the clash between a living, creative marginal constituency and dull, arid power structures intent only on the cultivation of their own power base: “a different world, different interests, a different language in which everything was changed” (189). More disturbingly, some of the members of the Tuscan CLN delegation were to meet the same fate. On being transferred to Rome, “they gained greater experience and power, and forgot their earlier juvenile furor” (191).

In geographical terms, the optimism of the early CLN experience becomes pessimism with the shift from the series of local struggles that made up the Resistance, like Levi's Tuscan experience, to the centralized stalemate of national government in Rome. The Watch attempts to explain the failure of the Action Party project as the consequence of what happens when a movement clashes with the rigidity of centralized political structures. To have an idea of how Levi sees this process, we need to turn to chapter 8 of the text and the important conversation between Carlo, Andrea Valente (based on Leo Valiani), and Carmine Bianco (based on Manlio Rossi Doria). It takes place in the Traforo traffic tunnel immediately after Parri's announcement of his resignation.

Even if it may seem paradoxical to those who know the place, Levi describes the Traforo as if it were a modern-day version of Plato's cave: “an anonymous cave” (158), “like a grotto” (159), “that cave” (161)—in other words, a place of imprisonment where chained slaves, forced to look in a single direction, see only a series of shadows, half truths, which they mistake for truth itself. Like the cave, Levi's Traforo is also a place of reduced vision where “the rare lights … caused the white tiles to sparkle” (158), and of echoes where the three friends' “voices reverberated as they were thrown back into the vault and dissolved into a deafening hubbub” (158). It is also a place of diminished truthfulness. The closed spaces of the Traforo contrast with the open spaces of the “interminable streets” of Turin which, Carlo tells us as the conversation is about to begin, “seem made especially for peripatetic growth … which was full of an unconfined, endless power” (157). Against the open spaces of Turin, Carlo is now plunged into the dark Roman tunnel.

It is in this confined space, this “nowhere … outside of time” (158), that Andrea, to whom Levi entrusts many of his own thoughts, explains the Action Party's demise. Once arrived in Rome, following the creative freedom they enjoyed in Tuscany and elsewhere, the Actionists became, as it were, slaves to Rome-style politics, codes, and practices. This is without question the sense of Andrea's long and much-quoted speech in which he poses the question in linguistic terms: politics, he says, is made up of a conventional language that “rests on nothing” and is comprehensible only to those like Carlo, Andrea, and Carmine, who “one day decided to accept it once and for all” (159). This language, and here we find the most explicit reference to Plato's cave, forces us to “run after shadows” to touch something “which escapes us and runs away from us” (159). It is in this context that Andrea elaborates the theory of two modes of being represented by, on the one hand, the Contadini (peasants) and, on the other, the Luigini (petite bourgeoisie). The former are a loose, unorganized coalition that includes the real peasants who maintain an “adherence to things, a contact with animals. … [They are] the dark vital origin that is in each of us” (165). In addition to the peasants, also included are the enlightened factory and land owners, as well as the workers. Their distinguishing characteristic is their contact with things and their productivity. They are, in other words, the creative elements—poets who do not speak a conventional, worn-out language. On the other hand, the speakers of a worn-out language, the Luigini, are those who have a vested interest in continuing the present state of affairs, be they political, economic, or social. They are, and here Levi gives Andrea some lines that could have come out of Fear, “the great majority of the endless, unformed amoeba-like petite bourgeoisie, and all its species, sub-species and variations. They have their miseries, their inferiority complexes, their moralism and immoralism, wrong ambitions, their idolatrous fear. … They are the crowd of bureaucrats, the State workers, the banker clerks, the administrators etc.” (166-67). The militants in the Action Party, of course, were peasants. Their problem was, however, that the Luigini, in Andrea's words, “have the numbers, have the State, the Church, they have the political language” (167). If, then, the forms of politics are made in the image of the Luigini, in order that their voice be heard in a political context, the peasants are forced either into silence or to speak a language which is not theirs and which belongs to their ideological enemy. In this way, concludes Andrea, the Luigini have had an easy time co-opting the peasants to their way of thinking.

Andrea himself, as he freely admits, speaks the language of the Luigini perfectly (171), as his long exposition on the evils of the political situation testifies. The lucidity, the mathematical precision, the virile sense of certainty, the neat division of things into two opposing camps that informs his analysis has very little in common with “peasant” creativity. Andrea, in fact, may be considered an emblem of the failure of the Action Party project as it ran aground against the sandbars of Rome. Like those slaves who succeed in liberating themselves, Andrea believes he has seen not shadows but the forms themselves, and like the philosopher, he goes back into the cave to inform the less fortunate slaves and to show them the path toward liberty. But with the language he has Andrea use, Levi complicates the Platonic allegory and rereads it in a more pessimistic mode. Levi gives us reason enough to suspect that Andrea, far from being the free-thinking philosopher he believes himself to be, is in fact the worst of all slaves—that is, the slave who is convinced he is free, but who in reality is still prisoner to the same slave owner who seems to have given him his freedom. Although Andrea is well aware of how politicians, severed from contact with real things, chase shadows, he is perhaps less aware of the extent to which he too, as well as his party comrades, has fallen into the same insidious trap. If Andrea is indeed chasing shadows, then the value of the prophecies he makes in the Traforo also comes into question. Presented in such terms as a kind of Delphic oracle, “a sibyl's lair” (158), a place “suitable for prophetic words” (158), where Andrea is “animated by prophetic spirits” (166), the Traforo takes on once again the connotations of Greek myth. But the prophetic truths both Andrea and Carmine express are, in fact, little more than half truths. Andrea, for example, predicts that the recently created political situation would soon change, that the resuscitated old-style political parties would be destined to be replaced by an “infinity of autonomous organizations” (169), while Carmine is convinced that the new government led by Christian Democrat De Gasperi, which he disparagingly refers to as the “government of priests,” would only last a short while: “Events change quickly. If we were now in a phase of stasis we would soon start moving again. Even if we did have a government of priests it wouldn't last long. A month or two, maybe a year” (160).

With the benefit of hindsight, we know that neither of these prophecies even came close to predicting Italy's future. The traditional political parties certainly did not disappear and, as time passed, they exercised an ever stronger grip on all aspects of Italian society. Neither were they replaced by “autonomous organizations,” and De Gasperi's government of priests, far from being an interlude, heralded nearly fifty years of uninterrupted Christian Democrat involvement in single-party or coalition rule.

At the time of writing The Watch, however, Levi, who remains largely silent during the walk through the Traforo, also knew that these prophecies were far from the mark, especially after the elections of 1948, which consolidated the power of the center-right parties. Levi does not remain silent because he is not privy to the prophecies made by Andrea and Carmine. Let us recall that the terms of the analysis expressed by Andrea—peasants and Luigini—and his proposal for the creation of “an infinity of autonomous organizations” are identical to those Levi himself had elaborated in Christ and elsewhere. In Andrea, then, we can glimpse, if not exactly a self-portrait, then at least an ironic, belated representation of the risk that Levi knew he was running with his political activity in and around the Roman palazzi. Just as, in Andrea's words, the Action Party will inevitably become more and more like the Luigini (“si illuiginerà” [168]), the danger for Levi is that the same destiny will await him—or, that his own picture of a future Italy based on the Florence experience during the Resistance and on self-government from below was as deluded as Andrea and Carmine's, and that his own prophecies prove just as empty.

It would be wrong, however, to imagine that The Watch is a novel which limits itself to placing blame for Italy's postwar ills on Rome and Roman society. To be sure, Levi portrays Roman political society in the harshest of terms. On the other hand, the city itself, especially its popular quarters, is portrayed as a marvelous source of energy, creativity, and regeneration. The major contrast on which the whole novel is structured is between the vitality of the city streets as people attempted to construct a new life for themselves out of the ruins of the old world, and the sedimented, codified regime of political society, intent on reestablishing that old world.

The streets of Rome are a hive of endless, variegated, creative activities, and their descriptions make for some of the text's highest moments:

The street was full of people, elbow to elbow, summer shirts, heavy overcoats, shawls, handkerchiefs, hats, rags, Allied military jackets, sandals, heavy shoes; big-chested women rolling their hips and giving you the look, old women standing guard over the shop windows, dirty excited kids playing who knows what game or barter, British, American, Italian, black soldiers; workers in their overalls, clerks who had just stepped out of their banks or Ministries, ready to jump on ramshackle trucks. Everyone was moving, gesticulating, looking with their dark shiny eyes, they were thinking, speaking, screaming, their intent faces, full of intensity and character, following or contemplating their daily adventure. And all of them themselves were an adventure, an uncharted river made of a thousand ever new waves flowing through rocky banks and flowering islands.

(71)

On arriving in the capitol, Levi shared the same sense of adventure, discovery, and creativity he had sensed in Tuscany in the Roman streets. Rome, he conjectures, was the place from which the beginning of a new postwar course could be made. The novel's very first lines, in fact, recall the notion of the original indeterminate state we previously encountered in Fear, and which also plays an important role in The Watch:

At night in Rome you can almost hear the roar of lions. An indistinct murmur that is the city's breath, between its black cupolas and distant hills, here and there in the sparkling shadow. And at times you can hear the deep sound of sirens, as if the sea were nearby, and ships were leaving from the port towards who knows what horizons. And that vague yet wild sound, cruel yet strangely sweet, the roar of lions, in the nocturnal desert of the houses.

(3)

The sounds return Levi to a childhood state—“the sound penetrated me like a frightening, moving, strange childhood image, from another time” (3)—that is in every way comparable to the new beginning his initial impact with Rome presages. In this new beginning, Levi finds himself at the point where the personal and the historical intersect. It is historical because he is bound up in the new course that the recent events have ushered in: “a stormy wind had begun to blow over Europe's bitter soil and carried men like leaves plucked from a tree on white unknown roads. After seven years of massacres and troubles the wind had fallen, but the old leaves could not return to their branches, and the cities seemed like stripped woods awaiting, under a modest sun, the disordered blossoming of new buds” (4). At the same time, Levi's arrival in Rome also signals a new personal beginning. After years in either exile or hiding, Levi has lost all contact with the habits and practices that had constructed his earlier life. Now a man whose personal history has been pushed back far into time, listening to the indistinct roar of the lions, “it seemed to me that I had nothing to the back of me if not the void, and that before me I had an enormous, mysterious forest” (7).

The forest, perhaps the key image of the entire text, recurs at important junctures. One such is in Carlo's final telephone conversation with his Uncle Luca. Called to Naples to visit his sick uncle, and arriving too late to pay a visit that night after an adventurous journey from Rome, Carlo speaks to him on the phone. Luca had been a fundamental figure in Carlo's life. It had been Luca, in fact, who had first introduced Carlo to the joys of painting, and as a fellow doctor there had always been a strong bond between them. Luca is very much Carlo's father figure. In fact, we hear more about Luca than about Carlo's biological father, except that Carlo had been absent from his funeral, presumably because he was in exile, and felt a “bitter sense of liberty … the liberty made of things lost, bonds broken, loneliness” at his death (303). Luca, however, had a role in Carlo's life which seems just as central. Luca, in fact, had become “more than an uncle, a friend, master and father” (239).

But when Carlo arrives the next day at his house, he discovers that his uncle has died in the night. Carlo's visit to Naples is very much an encounter with death. Yet, death here loses many of its purely negative and destructive connotations to become the essence of life, the enabling condition for life itself to carry on. Luca's reference to the forest of the world—“il bosco del mondo” (287)—comes, paradoxically perhaps, as he sings the praises of death. As a scientist, Luca had been engaged for many years in a private research project which he called the Teorica. Never publishing any results, Luca so immersed himself in his research that he gave over his whole life to it. The project, which for Luca revealed the “secret key of the biological world,” bore on the “continuous and continuously broken and reconstituted unity of two principles, which are eternally distinct and eternally the same in an eternally endless circulation” (238). Levi makes no judgment on the value of his uncle's project, but he hints at its limited scientific value. What is important for him, though, is not so much its status as hard scientific fact as the “intensity, the infinite energy” his uncle dedicated to it and which proved that this was “the true life of a true man” (239).

In his phone conversation with Carlo, Luca explains how his approaching death has enabled him to appreciate and better understand life. The coming of death has the effect of illuminating life's dark mysteries. But what is the dark mystery that Luca has now glimpsed? It is that life consists of “infinite truths” that stretch out into the future beyond the span of a single person, each one as true as the next, but none more so than any of the others: “You can wear yourself out in vain trying to catch them all, one after the other, like a many-coloured crowd, but whose common language and common human nature you don't know.” But as one comes closer to death, “you learn to distinguish in the copresence of time, in the forest of the world, that common nature” which is open-ended: “Instead of focusing on a point or on a single object, your thought takes that object as its starting point and expands in a limitless wave-like motion. It's as if you climbed a mountain and at every step the horizon spread itself wider beneath you. Perhaps, when you reach the top the horizon will be so vast and distant that it will join up with the sky: this, perhaps, is death. If so, we live in order to die” (287-88).

Carlo experiences the same fusion of death and life in the streets of Naples. Observing the frenetic daily activity of the Neapolitans, he notes in the faces of the heterogeneous crowd an awareness of their own finitude and fragility, their own impermanence on this earth, but which nevertheless does not prevent them from fully investing their creativity in life:

It was as if behind each of those men and women … there were another world which had already been fully lived according to an eternal and unchanging law of simple pain. It was as if they thought they were nothing other than an ephemeral object, a transitory expression of that ancient and painful world. Yet, they spared nothing to adorn it with passion and grace as without illusion they contemplated their own fleeting passage, like the splendid, tender light of the morning.

(295)

In a scene that is reminiscent of Christ, walking between the market stalls selling fish and meat with their innards exposed, and comparing himself to Jonah in the whale's belly, the close contact with images of death and with the “men who lived in these intestinal walls … and had been, who knows how many times, destroyed and resuscitated,” brings Carlo to feel that “I was in a true place, in one of the true places of the world” (301). These are strong words, as strong as Levi's sense that he was in the heart of the world when he heard the cries of the dying man in Christ. But what is it that Levi discovers in the concatenation of life and death in the Neapolitan streets? We get a strong clue in the text's very next paragraph, with Levi's reference to Giambattista Vico.

In his wandering through the city, Levi comes across the house where Vico used to act as tutor to the young son of a Neapolitan noble. The reference to Vico is timely because his philosophy of history as an ongoing series of rises and falls, or as he puts it, courses and recourses, approximates most closely the thoughts that Levi himself was developing in The Watch. Vico, as we have seen earlier, had also been a great influence on Fear. What Levi sees in the streets of Naples, we can imply, is the same or similar scene as that which presented itself to Vico 250 years earlier, and which perhaps molded his thought.

Levi sees in the Neapolitan streets a willingness to embrace human existence as a dialectic between life and death in which both are inextricably bound up, feed off one another, the one creating the conditions for the other. To be aware of the finitude of one's own self means having learned the simple lesson of humility that comes with having an awareness of the fragility of all things human and the achievements one can accomplish within a life. To be aware of one's own finitude also means that we are less tempted to inhabit the abstract sphere of pure thought and form, but remain, rather, in close contact with the physical and material things of the world and the experience of death that inheres in them. From this standpoint, finitude takes the form not so much of an existential defect as of the necessarily limited parameters within which we live our lives. Furthermore, finitude reminds us that no human life can ever be complete and that the creative activity of one course prepares the way for another. This means that life lived at its fullest and most authentic takes the form of an ongoing project, itself taking the form of a series of individual courses. Each one of these courses is vitally important to the needs and demands of an individual or a whole society at a given moment, and each one contributes uniquely to the creation and growth of that self or society. At the same time, however, each course has its limits, as well as its strengths, and when its time comes, as it must as circumstances change, or as the world turns and new creative tools are required, individuals and societies as a whole must know when to abandon one course and start a new one.

What might have drawn Levi to Vico is the kind of metaphysics the Neapolitan philosopher outlined in his “Conclusion” to De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia (On the most ancient wisdom of the Italians): “Here then … for your greater wisdom you have a metaphysics compatible with human frailty, which neither allows all truths to men, nor yet denies him all, but only some.”⁵² Furthermore, the notion of error, both in its sense of “trial and error” and “wandering,” which Vittorio Mathieu has noted and which underpins Levi's thought, finds in Vico an illustrious precursor. If error is at the basis of truth, then each attempt at locating it is delimited by knowledge of the inadequacy of any and all modes of critical inquiry. History, then, argues Mathieu,

becomes a sequence of inadequacies through which providence shines … abscondita sub contrario. … Vico's cycle is therefore a process by which man's ability to manifest truth is gradually transformed in qualitatively different ways but never ceases to be intrinsically inadequate. The courses and recourses are the periodic succession of inadequate forms of participation in truth, passing continuously from one phase to the next because in none of these does truth find a completely satisfactory ground.⁵³

Translated into political terms, this means that the course of history that had brought Italy up to its pre-Fascist Liberal governments had run its course and must be replaced by a new one, this time born out of the Resistance experience, with the Action Party as its figurehead. As we have seen, however, the greatest objections to beginning such a new course came from within the Liberal Party, unwilling to relinquish its position of power, reluctant to contemplate a postwar Italy organized along anything other than familiar pre-Fascist lines. In the very same paragraph of The Watch where we find the reference to Vico, we also find a reference to Croce, the president and leading figure within the Liberal Party. The house where Vico used to tutor the noble's son has now been taken over by Croce as his residence. This is Croce's second appearance in the novel. Earlier, in a dream, Croce had appeared to Carlo as a judge called on to decide who was the rightful owner of a watch he had previously lost. Seeing Croce in the courtroom, Levi describes him thus: “The Neapolitan Virgil, honor, light, Duke, Lord and master of my contemporaries” (19).

On this second occasion, Levi does not mention Croce by name but notes simply that “Vico … used to climb these stone steps and the floors of the huge unadorned rooms” where now “the master of our wise men, the sharp old philosopher” lived (301). Carlo's brief sojourn outside Croce's house, and his decision not to act on his earlier idea of paying him a visit, amount to a refusal on his part to be seduced by the great philosopher in the way that so many of his contemporaries had. Initially attracted by a bas-relief of the mythological sailor Cola Pesce on Croce's door—“the male mermaid who calls other sailors into the abyss and devours them”—Levi suggests that this is the perfect image for Croce: “Perhaps for good reason the signore of that place kept it on the door in place of a name plate. The signore who knew how to seduce the young men and women who adventured on the sea of dialectic with his sweet song, who sank the ships bedecked with pseudo-concepts down into the vortex of distinctions, and grabbed with his scaly hands the unprepared sailors, captains and crewmen to devour them” (301-2).

This is hardly the most flattering of portraits, and overcome by a sense of uneasiness, Carlo hurries on to his uncle's house. In this section of the novel, one is left with the impression, even if it is only hinted at, that Croce has occupied a space that once, if only temporarily, had or could have been occupied by Vico, perhaps the most misunderstood and underestimated figure in Italian thought. Although this might seem excessively speculative, we find elsewhere in Levi's writings evidence that lends support to this view: first, in Levi's journalistic writings on Croce, and second, in the conclusion to The Watch, which takes the form of a Vichian new course.

The similarities between Levi and Croce are deceiving. We should not let the crucial importance that Levi gives to the same concept of creativity that figures so prominently in Croce's thought blind us to the deep divisions that separated the two, and which are illustrated by the Cola Pesce vignette. As we shall see, the creativity of the one is not the creativity of the other. Furthermore, Levi certainly does not share Croce's attachment to the Risorgimento tradition. Indeed, he sees in its limits the source of Italy's turn to Fascism. At the height of the political crisis of the final months of 1945, with the Liberal Party making great efforts to delegitimate and bring down Parri, Levi wrote an article for IL entitled “Giolittismo ideale” (“Ideal Giolittism”), a reference to the Liberal prime minister in whose cabinet Croce had served. In this article, Levi accuses Croce, the philosopher of liberty, of the fear of liberty he had theorized in his earlier book. In other words, for Levi, Croce is afraid of the concepts of liberty and creativity the philosopher himself had elaborated.

Opening with “Nothing is more unpleasant than to have to open a polemic with the most venerated of Masters,” the article, as well as singing the praises of Croce the philosopher in its captatio benevolentiae, also makes pointed remarks about the inconsistency of his practical behavior vis-à-vis his thought, and his political errors of judgment in the early years of Fascism. Yet, the thrust of the article is to level a crucial charge: that Croce's theory of history as permanent creation has been betrayed by the stagnation that has resulted from his actual political practice. Specifically, Levi accuses Croce of failing to understand a crucial Vichian lesson: that no given historical course, as successful as it may have been for a more or less limited period of time, is or can be coterminous with history itself. For Levi, Croce had invested so much of his intellectual and political self into the ideology and forms of government developed in the period of Liberal government under Giolitti that he has “confused his own individual experience and preference with the very reason of history.” For Croce, he goes on, “that experience became the eternal paradigm of politics, the very form of the dialectic of liberty, which for him is nothing if not an ideal Giolittism [giolittismo ideale].”

If now in post-Resistance Italy a new social and historical reality had been created, exposing the limits and present inapplicability of the previous historical course, Croce, writes Levi, is still attached to the worn-out schemes of the past: “Since then the world has had a revolution that has changed all our values, has created new forces, has placed each one of us face to face with the experience of death, which for so long had been forgotten, and has placed each man before the need to revise everything that had been traditionally accepted. But Croce has noticed none of this.”⁵⁴

As the reference to death suggests, Levi is here doing to Croce what Croce had done to Hegel: that is, distinguishing between what is alive in his thought and what is dead. As it turns out, very little is alive. Levi's charge to Croce is essentially that he was afraid of the opportunity for creative liberty that the present historical moment offered up, and faced with this new challenge sought refuge in the codes and practices that had governed a previous era. Instead of welcoming the present moment and embracing the chance to create new forms, Croce had allowed his thought to crystallize around the institutions and modes of government of the Giolitti era. Croce, then, commits what for Levi is the worst and most dangerous of sins. His insistence on extending the applicability of the paradigms that had underlaid the Giolitti government to the newly created present situation was tantamount to turning those paradigms into idols whose effect, indeed purpose, was to stifle creative activity and channel it into the adoration of fixed and codified norms: “Croce … has stayed faithful to his ‘giolittismo ideale’ … the parliamentary institutions, traditional constitutional and administrative forms which are the negation of real liberty, of the autonomy of the forces in play, of the real value of liberty.”⁵⁵

Croce, in fact, had allowed himself to be left in that phase of human development that Vico called the “barbarism of reflection,” that R. G. Collingwood describes in his The Idea of History as being “where thought still rules, but a thought which has exhausted its creative power and only constructs meaningless networks of artificial and pedantic distinctions.”⁵⁶ For Levi, this is a dangerous phase in human development because, as he had outlined in Fear, the mechanical application of worn-out schemes and formulas is not only the death of creativity but also prepares the kind of cultural terrain on which a Fascist-like phenomenon can prosper. Levi is perfectly serious when he constructs a line of direct continuity between a historical age like the one Vico identified as the “barbarism of reflection” and a phenomenon like fascism. But how to prevent an era from degenerating into the barbarism of reflection? How to prevent institutions and forms of thought created for a specific age and circumstances from sedimenting into a series of codes and formulas? Levi's answer is to suggest that we endorse the side of Vico's thought that Croce had been reluctant to endorse: namely, his cyclical theory of history. If we accept that our lives are not structured as a single, unilinear narrative stretching homogeneously from birth to death, but on a series of narratives, or phases, a succession of rises and falls, similar to Vico's courses and recourses, we might be able, first, to avoid the stagnation and regenerate our creativity as we enter each new and different phase; and second, in so doing, construct a bulwark against the dangerous sedimentation of thought that had, for example, taken over Italian liberalism, and could, in the worst of hypotheses pave the way for a new form of fascism.

One young Crocean who had realized at an early stage the limits of Italian liberalism was Piero Gobetti. A great friend and influence on Levi, he is quoted twice in the article on Giolitti. On the first occasion, Levi quotes him to underline Croce's status as Italy's least-provincial thinker, something Gobetti thinks will never be forgiven him by a thoroughly provincial Italy. Indeed, Levi's article gives us a picture of a Croce hostage to the parochial interests of the Liberal land-owning classes. On the second occasion, Gobetti is quoted to point out the ideological duplicity of Croce's proposal for an “apolitical” government to replace Parri. In Gobetti's words, the claim to occupy an apolitical center is nothing other than a recipe for restoration in the guise of moderation: “Those who claim to be apolitical are always wrong: their apolitical stance is always biased, they are an inert force which plays to the advantage of conservative and reactionary interests.”⁵⁷

Although holding fast to the fundamental Liberal tenet of history as perpetual creation, Gobetti also saw how liberalism, once it occupied positions of government power, in practice tended toward stagnation and complacency. Indeed, one of Gobetti's most memorable remarks is that, rather than as a social class, the bourgeoisie stands for “the moment of inertia” which inevitably invests all courses of history.⁵⁸ Differently from Croce, who tended to limit creativity to the efforts of single individuals, Gobetti found a guarantee of ongoing creativity in the political activity of the working class. In Turin, Gobetti had been able to observe the factory council movement, which sprang up during one of the most potentially revolutionary periods in twentieth-century Italian history, the so-called “red biennium” of 1919-20. Importantly for Gobetti, the factory councils were not set up according to the dictates of a prior revolutionary program but were born out of the workers' needs and demands from below. Gradually acquiring greater power, the councils became training grounds where a new working class could acquire the skills it would need if its members were to sit on committees and comanage the factories. The movement gained most momentum between April and September 1920 when, during a management-initiated lock-out, the workers effectively took over the running of the factories and continued production. Although the workers' demands were not met by the compromise settlement which brought the lockouts to an end, Gobetti was deeply impressed by what he had seen.

Gobetti's positive response to the creativity from below which had characterized the Turin factory council movement is identical to Levi's response to the same creative activity in Florence during the Resistance: in both cases, those involved worked autonomously, with no guidelines except the ones they fashioned for themselves as the need arose. Furthermore, both Turin workers and Florentine Partisans operated outside traditional institutions and created new ones. For both Gobetti and Levi the creative activity they had been fortunate to witness in Turin and Florence was infinitely renewed and self-renewing, as each new phase presented society and individuals with new, concrete problems to be solved, each of which required new creative efforts. For Gobetti, this meant rejecting the Marxist interpretation of history as the road towards the classless society, and developing a theory of ongoing social antagonism between the classes as a way of guaranteeing the perpetual creativity that propels history.⁵⁹ For Levi, it meant turning to Vico and his theory of history as course and recourse.

The Watch concludes with a number of Vichian resonances and with the promise of a new course. After his journey back to Rome from Naples in the company of two ministers, both of whom, despite their differing ideological positions, were supremely confident that they were in the forefront of history, Carlo's political phase as a militant and intellectual in the Action Party comes to an end. In Naples, Carlo had been given his Uncle Leo's watch, to which presumably the novel's title refers. This watch replaces the one Carlo had broken at the beginning of the novel, which had been given to him by his father. Although Carlo takes this first watch to be repaired, the text itself gives us no further information about it.

Watches in general receive bad press in the novel. The time that watches and clocks beat, he tells us on one of the text's opening pages, is “the opposite of that real time that was in and around [him]” (12) during his childhood days, when the “long days seemed endless” (11). Clock time, the opposite of the authentic experience of time enjoyed by peasants, and which still exists at a subterranean level in all of us, as he writes in his 1950 essay “Il contadino e l'orologio” (“The peasant and the watch”),⁶⁰ knows no “hesitations, [is] a mathematical time, a continual material movement that is both restless and devoid of anxiety” (11). Like the splendid gold Omega model his father had given him on graduation, watches mark the adolescent's passage into adulthood. This represents one of the early phases in which the young self extricates itself from the “past, from the indistinct security of the tepid family clan and you begin to follow your own personal time” (12). As we know from Fear, for Levi, the moment of differentiation must be complemented and completed by beneficial returns to the undifferentiated state, where the self can reinvigorate itself and embark on a new course. Should this not happen, the self remains a prisoner of its initial course.

This is what happens with the watch. The self's personal time, in fact, turns out to be more a mirage than an index of newfound freedom. After a while, the codes and rhythms of adult life exert their influence over the young self, as the watch “beats time like a bodiless intellectual essence which like a tyrant attempts to carry our heart off for itself” (12). If the self does not put up resistance to this process, it falls into a military-style pattern of life which is completely determined by externally imposed clock time: “One! Two! One! Two! Our feet seem to move on their own and without realizing it we have already followed them” (12). For Levi, then, to break and then effectively lose the watch also means that he frees himself from a phase in his life in which his creative energies had been exhausted, and opens him to the possibility of a new phase, whose starting point is emblematically represented by his descent into and rise from the original indeterminate state inside the whale's belly in the streets of Naples.

But what of the second watch, which Carlo receives after leaving the whale? It is in every way the equal of the first one. This time, however, it is not inherited from his father but from his uncle, who while not being his biological father, is certainly his metaphoric one, a father figure who in the economy of the novel seems to have greater importance for Carlo than does than his real one. Both the new watch and Leo can be seen as emblems of the new phase that Carlo is about to embark on. After Parri's resignation and the trip back from Naples with the two politicians, Carlo is convinced that the phase of life and history driven by the creative energy of the Resistance has come to an end. Indeed, the novel is often read, rightly I believe, as the Resistance's epitaph. Yet the novel does not limit itself to mourning what might have been. The line of continuity between uncle and nephew signaled by the watch suggests that for Carlo the next phase will be marked not so much by activity in the public sphere of politics as in the intense, but nonetheless gratifying, private sphere in which Leo carried out the research that brought him into contact with first things. At the same time, what we have learnt about watches reminds us that all phases, even the new one on which Carlo embarks, tend ultimately to exhaust themselves and become constricting. As the novel concludes, however, Carlo finds himself at the beginning of his new course.

As he returns home to Rome, he looks out over the city from his balcony and hears once again the lion's roar he had heard at the beginning of the novel. In its concluding paragraph, the text returns us to the original indistinct state, to Vico's primordial forest—“the indistinct hum of a forest of ancient trees”—where the novel began. Carlo is taken back to the “depths of memory” by “the murmuring silence … the strange noise of the night, the lions' roar, like the echo of the sea in an abandoned shell” (312), where his new journey out of the ancient forest will begin anew.

For Levi, liberty meant something more than the formal democratic structures that enable us to change our governments. Liberty was also the courage to examine ourselves and the assumptions on which we have based our own lives, the courage to change ourselves. He saw that the fear of liberty was deeply ingrained in the European consciousness, even in those who proclaimed themselves revolutionaries, and had culminated in Europe's many fascist regimes. Overcoming the fear of liberty constituted the personal battle that had to be won if a genuinely new anti-Fascist culture was to be created. Liberty, wrote Levi in Fear, is like a war one fights within oneself against oneself, “an inner war, an enrichment, an increase in peace, a civil war: that civil war that has neither beginning nor end,” the only war worth fighting.⁶¹ Acknowledging the question of civil war that neither Communist nor Liberal cultures had been, in his terms, willing to raise, Levi elevates the question to the level of metaphor for the introspective and self-critical mode of being that is necessary if we are to understand the phenomenon that is fascism, the deeper recesses within history from which it comes, and the personal and collective needs to which it responds. This was an ambitious project, a project of its time, inspired by the optimism that pervaded Italy in the months which followed the fall of fascism in September 1943, as the example of the Resistance seemed to provide Italian society with a foundation on which to construct itself anew. It was also a project that largely failed, yet it may have been a project of this kind, without equal in post-Fascist Italy or Europe, requiring a sea-change in attitudes, expectations, and culture, and to which post-Fascist Europe attended only minimally, that Levi's friend Piero Gobetti had in mind when he wrote that antifascism was a question of style.

Notes

1. For the authenticity of the unsigned articles, I have relied on the Fondazione Carlo Levi, Via del Vantaggio, Rome, Italy. Some of Levi's articles have been republished in the exhibition catalogue Carlo Levi: Disegni politici, 1947-1948 (Rome: np, 1993) and in Leonardo Sacco, ed., Contadini e luigini: testi e disegni di Carlo Levi (Rome-Matera: Basilicata Editrice, 1975). For a complete list of the titles of his articles, see appendix 1.

2. Carlo Levi, “Saluto ai congressisti,” IL, 3 February 1946, series 4, issue 29. For critical studies dedicated to Levi's politics, see Ghislana Sirovich, L'azione politica di Carlo Levi (Rome: Il Ventaglio, 1988), and Vincenzo Napolillo, Carlo Levi: dall' antifascismo al mito contadino (Cosenza: Brenner, 1984).

3. Carlo Levi, “Rompere con il passato,” IL, 3 January 1946, series 4, issue 2.

4. Levi, “Saluto ai congressisti.”

5. Dominique Fernandez, “Uomini-dei o uomini-piante,” in Galleria, fascicolo dedicato a Carlo Levi, ed. Aldo Marcovecchio 17, no. 3-6 (May-December 1967): 160.

6. Carlo Levi, “Firenze libera!” NdP, 15 August 1945, series 2, special issue.

7. Carlo Levi, “Antonio Salandra,” in La rivoluzione liberale, 27 August 1922; in Il coraggio dei miti: Scritti contemporanei 1922-1974, ed. Gigliola De Donato (Bari: De Donato, 1975), 11.

8. See Antonio Gramsci, Il Risorgimento (Turin: Einaudi, 1949).

9. See Archivio Carlo Levi, Archivio nazionale dello Stato, B. 69 Doc, Fasc. “Garibaldi” 145. Gaetano Marini, Un buco nell' acqua: ovvero Le debolezze, le malizie, gl' imbrogli, li errori, e le camorre in varie amministrazioni della Sicilia. Frammenti di scandalosa cronaca contemporanea (Sciacca: Tipografia Guttemburg, 1864). In the same folder, see also Nicolosi di Sciacca, La Madonna di Saletta. Invocazione Siciliana contro i Garibaldini, circa 1871.

10. Carlo Levi, Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Turin: Einaudi, 1945), 48. Translated by Frances Frenaye as Christ Stopped at Eboli (New York: Farrar and Strauss, 1963).

11. Carlo Levi, Paura della libertà, 3rd ed. (Turin: Einaudi, 1964), 41. Translated by Adolphe Gourevitch as Of Fear and Freedom (New York: Farrar and Strauss, 1950). In this chapter, further references to this work will appear parenthetically within the main body of the text.

12. See Giammanco, “Paura della libertà,” 244. See also Lawrence Baldassaro, “Paura della libertà: Carlo Levi's Unfinished Preface,” Italica 72:2 (Summer 1995): 143-54.

13. See Gigliola De Donato, Saggio su Carlo Levi (Bari: De Donato, 1974), 36.

14. Fernandez, “Uomini-dei o uomini-piante,” 170.

15. Carlo Levi, “L'invenzione della verità,” in Coraggio dei Miti, ed. Gigliola De Donato (Bari: Laterza, 1975), 121-22.

16. Carlo Levi, “Gramsci e il mezzogiorno, oggi,” Basilicata, 11, no. 5-6 (1967): 47.

17. See Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity, trans. and intro. Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), and, by the same author, The Transparent Society.

18. In Gigliola De Donato, Saggio su Carlo Levi (Bari: De Donato, 1974), 71, citing Carlo Levi, Quaderno ACI, vol. 2 (Turin: n.p., 1953).

19. Levi, Cristo si è fermato a Eboli, 15.

20. Ibid.

21. Carlo Levi, “Crisi di civiltà,” NdP, 12/13 September 1944, series 1, issue 14.

22. Carlo Levi, “Giolittismo ideale,” IL, 1 December 1945, series 3, issue 287.

23. Carlo Levi, “La speranza,” NdP, 25 December 1944, series 1, issue 103.

24. Levi, Cristo si è fermato a Eboli, 188-89.

25. Levi, Paura della libertà, 41.

26. Carlo Levi, Quaderno di prigione, 14 July 1935, quoted in Aldo Marcovecchio, “Il periplo del mondo,” in Galleria 17:3-6 (May-December 1967): 103.

27. Carlo Levi, Quaderno a cancelli (Turin: Einaudi, 1979). See also Levi's writing on India, in Viaggio in India (Journey to India), written in 1957 and now in Marcovecchio, Galleria.

28. Levi, “Crisi di civiltà.”

29. Carlo Levi, “Rivoluzione democratica,” IL, 27 October 1945, series 3, issue 257.

30. Levi, “Crisi di civiltà.” See also in the same article: “The crisis of civilization which has long been manifest in all fields, in art, in religion, in economy, in social life, in philosophy.”

31. See Foa, Il cavallo e la torre, 171-72.

32. Carlo Levi, “La costituente,” NdP, 6 October 1944, series 1, issue 35.

33. See Erasmus [pseud.], “Fascismo e antifascismo,” RL, 15 December 1945, series 3, issue 270.

34. Rosselli, “Fronte verso l'Italia,” GL, 18 May 1934; in Scritti dell' esilio, 2:4. See also Foa, Il cavallo e la torre, 167, for the broader agenda that many Actionists gave to their antifascism.

35. Carlo Levi, “Al di là dell'antifascismo,” NdP, 4 December 1944, series 1, issue 85.

36. Carlo Levi, Le parole sono pietre (Turin: Einaudi, 1955), 132.

37. For more detailed information about the political climate of 1945-46, see Paul Ginsborg, Storia d'Italia dal dopoguerra a oggi: Società e politica, 1943-1988 (Turin: Einaudi, 1989), especially 116-19. See also Foa, Il cavallo e la torre, 169.

38. Among the articles Levi wrote in IL attacking Liberal party policy, see “La consulta,” 25 September 1945, series 3, issue 229; “Dubbi liberali,” 2 October 1945, series 3, issue 235; “La vendetta del Presidente,” 4 October 1945, series 3, issue 237; “Favole e realtà,” 18 October 1945, series 3, issue 249; “La crisi dei ‘galantuomini,’” 6 November 1945, series 3, issue 265; “La crisi dei morti,” 17 December 1945, series 3, issue 275; “L'ombra di Facta,” 20 November 1945, series 3, issue 277; “Responsabilità,” 23 November 1945, series 3, issue 280; the unsigned article “Giolittismo ideale”; and “Le ambizioni sbagliate,” 6 December 1945, series 3, issue 291.

39. Giammanco, “Paura della libertà,” 248.

40. Levi, Paura della libertà, 21-22.

41. Levi, “Rompere con il passato.”

42. Carlo Levi, “Liberazione dal terrore,” NdP, 9 October 1944, series 1, issue 37.

43. Levi, “Paura della libertà,” NdP, 2 November 1944, series 1, issue 58.

44. For more on this short-lived political movement, see Sandro Setta, L'Uomo qualunque (Bari: Laterza, 1975).

45. Carlo Levi, “Cristallizzazione artificiale,” IL, 6 October 1945, series 3, issue 239, and “Favole e realtà.”

46. Levi, Cristo si è fermato a Eboli, 209. In this chapter, further references to this work will appear in parentheses.

47. See Robert Young, White Mythologies, 2, for how Marx also came to welcome British colonialism in India as a means of bringing this extrahistorical country into the mainstream of history.

48. Manlio Rossi Doria, “La crisi del governo Parri nel racconto di Carlo Levi,” in Carlo Levi nella storia e nella cultura, ed. Gigliola De Donato (Manduria, Bari and Rome: Piero Lacaita, 1993), 181-91.

49. Ibid., 187.

50. Levi, L'orologio, 48. In this chapter, further references to this work appear in parentheses.

51. Foa, Il cavallo e la torre, 171-72.

52. Giambattista Vico, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, trans. and with an introduction by L. M. Palmer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 109.

53. Vittorio Mathieu, “Truth as the Mother of History,” in Giambattista Vico's Science of Humanity, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Donald Philip Verene (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 118-19. Mathieu continues: “When the thought of truth should wish to cease its wanderings, this illusory disappearance of error, and of the relevant myths, would in fact be the most radical obnubilation of truth” (119). See also Sir Isaiah Berlin, “Vico and the Ideal of the Enlightenment,” in Vico and Contemporary Thought, ed. Tagliacozzo, Mooney, Michael, and Verene (London: MacMillan, 1980), 250-63.

54. Levi, “Giolittismo ideale.”

55. Ibid.

56. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, rev. ed., ed. and with an introducton by Jan Van Der Dussen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 67.

57. Ibid.

58. Gobetti, La rivoluzione liberale, 135.

59. See Piero Gobetti, Opere complete, vol. 1 of Scritti politici, ed. Paolo Spriano (Turin: Einaudi, 1969), 515: “Our Liberalism … sees in reality a conflict of forces, capable of producing ever new leading aristocracies provided that the popular classes revitalize the struggle with their desperate will to elevation.” Cited in Roberts, Benedetto Croce. My argument here draws on pages 241-48 of the above volume.

60. Carlo Levi, “Il contadino e l'orologio,” in Coraggio dei miti, ed. Gigliola De Donato (Bari: De Donato, 1975), 55-60.

61. Levi, Paura della libertà, 100.