Cesare Pavese’s ‘Honest Illusion’: Creating a Personal Myth
Cesare Pavese’s ‘Honest Illusion’: Creating a Personal Myth

Summary/Abstract: Among the most influential Italian writers of the 20th Century, Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) had to come to terms with fascism, social disintegration and indeed, the sense of alienation derived from these. By directing his search for ‘sufficient wholeness’ towards a dimension which he himself called ‘mythic’, and through the creation of a personal mythology, Pavese sought to bridge the gap between the general and the particular, the past and the present, external and internal experience. His contact with this mythical dimension takes place through the representation of a cluster of ‘fantastic associations’ between the adult present and childhood recollections which in his view have marked his destiny as a man. To this end he adopts Giambattista Vico’s concept of ‘imaginative universals’ and of myths as pre-rational forms of the mind whereby mythical thought inverts the construction of the real and transposes metaphorically on the outside what is inaccessible to the individual within.

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