Engagement e stilizzazione. L'effetto Hemingway negli italiani a cavallo della Seconda Grande Guerra

Abstract

The myth of Ernest Hemingway – matured in the most enlightened and critical environments of Italian culture since the years of Fascism but fully asserting itself in the years immediately following the Second World War – appears, from the time of its first reception, as the actual synecdoche (as well as the most accomplished expression) of the myth of American Literature as characterized by a "miraculous expressive immediacy", by a "native sense of the earth and the real" (Pavese 1947); and together, by an irrepressible and even "cosmic" libertarian tension capable of converting itself into the ways of a "stylization"open and autonomous, as well as modeling. So much modeling, that there were those who polemically summarized (but with a certain precision) the literary style of the neorealist generation as directly derived from a Hemingway rib, in particular from A Farewell to Arms, as an "autobiographical and almost journalistic chronicle elevated to lyric level" (Moravia 1990). The essay follows in its various and often controversial critical-theoretical and political junctions, the unfolding of a choral as well as articulated intellectual history. The one  for which (for the generation of writers formed in the early 40s, thanks certainly to the partisan struggle but even more perhaps to the opening horizons made possible by the publication of the anthology of rupture Americana) the civil commitment could primarily coincide with the definition of a new style, made of "images and words, shooting, attitude, style, disdain, challenge" (Calvino 1964): that the Italian writers developed, each according to their "individual inflections", taking up the American lesson of Ernest Hemingway.