Infinitismo leopardiano e autorità etnografica : rileggendo "Cristo si è fermato a Eboli"

Esamina la funzione autoriale nel "Cristo si è fermato a Eboli" mettendola in rapporto con le discussioni sull'autorita etnografica nell'antropologia postmoderna. Discute l'intertestualita nell'opera di Carlo Levi con particolare attenzione all'apporto leopardiano. Attraverso un serrato confronto con "Paura della libertà" pone in evidenza gli elementi filosofici panteistici che innervano la rappresentazione leviana del.mondo contadino.

This paper aims to discuss Carlo Levi’s Cristo si è fermato a Eboli as a specimen of “anthropological writing” by stressing those literary devices which shape a very peculiar authorial instance. Levi’s autobiographical narrative reveals itself to be constructed in the same way as anthropologists do construct their “ethnographic authority” in order to be able to describe cultural otherness in a supposedly objective and paradigmatic form. Humorous autobiography turns to a magical initiation into a powerful pantheistic, metamorphic view of nature. Ecstatic experience of “time before times” is to be compared with the author’s theory of the “holy” as it is expounded in Paura della libertà. Levi gives expression to that metaphysical experience by adopting several literary moods which are reminiscent of Leopardi’s topic of the infinite in the “idilli” and shows himself sympathetic to the pessimistic solidarity ideal of the Recanati poet. Our contribution focuses finally on the dynamical antithesis between the symbolic meaning of death in South Italy peasants’ archaic traditional culture, which allows a renaissance of ancient tragedy beyond the schemes of exhausted Classicism, and the nationalistic celebration of war as ritualized sacrifice in the context of fascist ideology.