Pavese and Proust. Two shamans of Time

Abstract

The essay makes a comparison between two great authors of twentieth century literature, Cesare Pavese and Marcel Proust, attempting to highlight the narrative devices linked to memory, the joy of remembering and the timeless evoked by conscience and tales which can be traceable in the Recherche and in Feria d’agosto. Although the Proustian theory can be considered convergent to but at the same time distant from the Pavesian one, the detection of analogies could offer some considerations on aspects of both authors which, without being approached, would remain unexplored. As a result, conceiving the two writers as interpretative lights projecting onto each other in order to highlight a common substrate, especially that of memory, the eternal and myth, will reveal itself to be a reasonable hypothesis. Thus, the essay attempts an analysis of some tales from Pavese's work of ’46 with the aim of bringing out commonalities with some Proustian passages. Although the two writers refer to the same mechanisms, their intentions/intents are certainly different. Even so, they seem to share an undoubtedly strong yearning for something out of time, that is, the use of literary forces that lead to an original and cosmic perspective.