«Le parole sono tenere cose»: sketches for a linguistic and structural analysis of Cesare Pavese’s La casa in collina

Abstract

The paper aims to provide a multi-layered reading of La casa in collina. It focuses on the abolition of the perspective distance of the author from his matter which leads to his immersion in the flow of events, to the need of analysis and self-analysis and to the substitution of the principle of causality with a relativistic one involving a conception of existence as mere chance. In the general organization of the story, narrative moments are followed by moments of reflection. The point of view in the storytelling is not given solely by the narrator but is often filtered through the words of the characters. The historical and political reality represented in the novel does not preclude lyrical-descriptive situations and painful scenes which call upon the emotions of the reader. The overwhelming presence of dialogue, which is by definition a mimetic medium, gives Pavese the possibility to recreate people’s popular speech: through the use of dialectalism, morphosyntactic redundancy, pleonasms, non-standard relative clauses he reproduces informal everyday speech and reports the characters’ words with authenticity.