Cesare Pavese, Posthumanism, and the Maternal Symbolic

Abstract

The oeuvre of Cesare Pavese (1908–50) is deeply concerned with questions of origins, human and otherwise. At the heart of this concern is an enduring anxiety about the female body—an anxiety that results, more frequently than not, in its violation, mutilation, and destruction. What is more, the female body is oftentimes more than merely a body for Pavese; it is a stand-in for the natural world—zoological, botanical, and geological— whose instincts, ripening, heat, and colors are available for manipulation and exploitation by men, except in those instances when its propitiation has been insufficiently or improperly enacted.¹ Beyond what we might thus call an anatomical anxiety about women is a functional one—that is, an anxiety that extends from female bodies proper to the generative function of the natural world writ large. Not surprisingly, this finds its most powerful expression in Pavese’s continued preoccupation with female sexuality, and particularly maternity, made emergent and operative in the equation between women and animals in several of his novels as well as throughout his poetic oeuvre.² More unexpected, perhaps, is the idea that alongside female generative power is also depicted a male maternal function. This essay will examine the stakes of these concerns as they intersect the theoretical realms of posthistory, posthumanism, and feminist theory.