Between Myth and Mythology: The Multiple Ulysses in Cesare Pavese's La luna e i falò

Abstract

The following article offers an intertextual and paradigmatic reading of the omnipresent figure of Ulysses in Cesare Pavese's final novel, La luna e i falò. By minutely regrouping as a collage the different facets of Ulysses/Odysseus as represented in literature — namely Homer's Odysseus, Dante's Ulysses and Joyce's Leopold Bloom — Pavese reconstitutes an impossible nostos or return home for his orphaned protagonist Anguilla, a character whose actions take on further meaning when analyzed alongside his paradigmatic counterparts. I argue that only once these intertexts are reconstituted and a vertical reading expounded, may the reader comprehend the minute textual intricacies of La luna e i falò and the manner in which Pavese — whose lurking autobiographical presence within the novel is also brought to light by intertextuality — aesthetically makes sense of a specific socio-political climate in which myth and mythology stand in contradistinction to the quotidian.