Autofiguraciones del yo en las cartas de Cesare Pavese

Abstract

Cesare Pavese is first and foremost a writer in whom life and literature are founded. In his novels, in his essays, in his diaries and in his letters, the author of La luna e i falò searched for himself, he tried to define himself in images, a way of knowing himself and also of making himself known to others. As Paul de Man points out in “Autobiography as Disfigurement” (1991), the self is constructed by the text and not the other way around. In this sense, we must ask ourselves the question about what this Pavesian self is like in his epistolary: what images of himself does he construct in his letters? Is it possible that poiesis prevails over mimesis in them?
The extensive and rich Pavesian epistolary covers a period that goes from 1926 to 1950. In this group, some constants are surprising, especially in the way in which the writer portrayed himself to others, all recurrences that constitute true lines of force that shape an image of a writer in constant tension between life and literature, loneliness and solidarity, existential failure and professional success. We will try to identify and relate those lines of force that we observe in the letters, aspects that can also be found in other fictional writings of this author.