In L’orologio,the concept of time constitutes an essential framework through which we can approach the novel. Levi’s book aims to redefine the deepest meaning of this concept from a specific historical moment – the beginning of the cultural and political reconstruction in Italy after the liberation from Nazi-fascism – and from a precise geographical location – Rome. One could understand the novel as a reflection on the necessity of redefining concepts, values and notions in periods of crisis. A thrilling and exciting crisis, as those which follow the end of totalitarian and violent regimes often are, but nonetheless a crisis, if we understand the word as ‘a a crucial stage or turning
point in the course of something’.8
The watch of the novel’s title represents the narrative thread of the entire book. It appears, in the first pages, as the symbol of the passage of the individual from childhood to adulthood:
Essi [gli orologi] sono quasi sempre un regalo, e un regalo importante, del Padre, o del Nonno, o dello Zio, in una occasione importante, nel momento più decisivo della vita, quello in cui il giovane entra nel mondo, acquista la sua autonomia, si
stacca dal passato.9
Carlo’s watch, ‘un bellissimo orologio Omega che non perdeva un secondo’,10 was
indeed a gift from his father for his graduation, and from that moment on, he never stopped wearing it. When the story begins, Carlo has just moved from Florence to
8 Here I use the definition of ‘Crisis’ in the Collins English Dictionary, 10th edn (New York and London:
Harper Collins, 2009). 9 Levi, L’orologio, pp. 11-12. 10 Levi, L’orologio, p. 11.
Rome, having become the editor of a newspaper linked to the Action Party, which was one of the political forces more directly involved in the Resistance movement. During his first night in Rome, Carlo dreams that he loses his watch while visiting an art exhibition in Turin. This dream will prove to be prophetic since, as soon as Carlo wakes up, he breaks the glass of the watch, letting it fall on the floor. The breaking of the watch immediately appears as a key event to Carlo and, as soon as he recovers the object from the floor, he perceives this as a premonition of things to come.
Martino, one of Carlo’s colleagues at the editorial office of the newspaper, provides a preliminary interpretation of Carlo’s dream:
[e]ssenzialmente l’orologio […] era l’Unità, o meglio il Selbst, cioè il punto d’incontro dell’io cosciente e dell’io subcosciente, che ormai non sono più tali; il tempo interno, il tempo vero e assoluto; o, in altri termini, era l’Io reale, la profonda natura della persona. Perdere l’orologio voleva dire essere fuori del proprio tempo vero, perdere se stessi.11
For Martino the watch represents the unity between the conscious and the unconscious, and its loss symbolizes the loss of the self, the unravelling of the Ego. However, by defining the watch as the symbol of ‘real’ time, and by proposing to identify its symbolic meaning with the point of encounter between the Ego and the Super-Ego, Martino’s reading appears to leave unquestioned the meaning of time itself. What kind of time does the watch symbolize? Is it the tortuous time internal to the subject – what
Bergson calls ‘duration’12 – or is it the quantifiable and chronological time proper of a
linear and positivistic notion of history? Carlo, who does not seem particularly convinced by Martino’s explanation, had previously differentiated between two distinct notions of time:
pensavo che il tempo dell’orologio è del tutto l’opposto di quel tempo vero che stava dentro e attorno a me. È un tempo senza esitazioni, un tempo matematico,
11 Levi, L’orologio, p. 62.
12 See Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New
continuo moto materiale senza riposo e senza angoscia. Non fluisce, ma scatta in una serie di atti successivi, sempre uguali e monotoni.13
Here, the regular rhythm of the watch’s ticking, which could be visually depicted by a chronological line, appears completely unable to capture the essence of ‘real’ time, understood as both the internal time of the individual and the convoluted time of history. For Carlo, time should rather be thought as a flowing entity characterized by irregular and asymmetrical lines: ‘quel ritmo irregolare e infinito […] era il tempo stesso, il tempo vero prima dei tempi’.14 Thus, the broken watch appears as an object which indicates the severing between a linear and measurable time, and the non-linear time of individual and collective history. In relation to Levi’s dichotomic notion of time, Mario Miccinesi has discussed the existence of a severance between mathematical time and the time of the individual, based on duration. In his view:
il pretesto della rottura del vetro dell’orologio assume in questo libro un carattere nettamente simbolico. […] Per tre giorni il protagonista rimarrà privo del suo orologio, il che sta a simboleggiare la perdita della possibilità di procedere secondo il tempo matematico […] ed essere costretti ad affidarsi a un tempo soggettivo, tempo come durata, come flusso non misurabile ma appunto per questo assai più vicino all’autentica natura di quel tempo di cui si sostanzia l’essere dell’uomo.15
In light of Miccinesi’s reading, and of Carlo’s distinction between two different notions of time, the loss of the watch (in the dream), and its subsequent breaking (in reality), acquire a different meaning from that suggested by Martino, for whom the event represented the disruption of the unity between the time of the self and the ‘real’ time of history. On the contrary, the broken watch represents the liberation from a superimposed and oppressive notion of time detached from the internal time of the individual, and the advent of a different temporality based on irregularities, anachronisms and returns.
13 Levi, L’orologio, p. 11.
14 Levi, L’orologio, p. 10.
This discontinuous and fragmented notion of time is a concept which continuously reverberates in the novel – from its temporal structure, based on déjà-vu and free associations, to the interweaving of temporalities between fascist past and postwar present, to the description of Rome’s cityscape, which is framed through concepts of coexistence of opposites and survival of past traces in the present. In this regard, R. D. Catani has noted how Levi’s prose is characterized by a dialectical movement between differentiation and contemporaneity, which are two ‘structural processes directed towards the intentional breaking down of conventional narrative sequence’.16 For Catani, it is through the constant fluctuation between these two poles that Levi’s narrative progresses. This composite aspect of Levi’s prose was also underlined by Italo Calvino, who described the author of L’orologio as ‘il testimone della presenza di un altro tempo all’interno del nostro tempo’.17 In Tutto il miele è finito Levi himself noted how ‘la realtà è molteplice; come, in ogni cosa, coesistono tempi diversi e lontanissimi’.18 Traces of this anachronistic idea of time can also be found in the first pages of L’orologio, when the narrator explicitly recognizes that reality is a multi- layered concept, composed by the overlapping of different temporal strata: ‘la realtà è fatta di infiniti strati sovrapposti senza fine’.19
From a literary point of view, Levi’s notion of time recalls the work of Marcel Proust, who in In Search of Lost Time had revolutionized the linear narrative sequence drawing on the anti-chronological concept of involuntary memory.20 A certain
16 R. D. Catani, ‘Structure and Style as Fundamental Expression: The Works of Carlo Levi and Their Poetic Ideology’, Italica, 56 (1979), 213-29 (p. 213).
17 Italo Calvino, ‘La compresenza dei tempi’, Galleria, XVII (1967), 237-40 (p. 238).
18 Carlo Levi, Tutto il miele è finito (Turin: Einaudi, 1964), p. 214. The idea of survival of the past and of cohabitation of different layers of past in the present is also raised by Levi in Paura della libertà (Turin: Einaudi, 1964): ‘Ogni nostra parola è intrisa di religioni spente, e un volo di uccelli ci commuove perchè in un altro tempo (altro, ma tuttavia non mai finito), era stato un segno. Questo è altrettanto vero su un piano personale e su un piano storico: quello che è stato può tornare, quello che è celato riaffiorare alla coscienza, come riappaiono le spiagge al ritirarsi della marea’ (p. 28).
19 Levi, L’orologio, p. 36.
20 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, trans. by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, 6 vols (New York: Modern Library, 2003). For a discussion of Proust’s philosophy of memory with a particular
‘Proustianism’ appears indeed to characterize the tangled temporality of L’orologio, which often advances through the clash between perception and recollection, as expressed in the first pages of the novel: ‘[i]l ricordo infantile era nato in me, senza che me ne accorgessi, mentre ascoltavo il rumore della città’.21
However, while the influence of the French writer acts like an underground river in Levi’s narrative,22 he explicitly identifies Laurence Sterne and Stendhal as his two most important literary sources. In a preface to Stendhal’s Roma, Napoli e Firenze,23 Levi highlights how ‘[e]gli ha capito, forse per primo, il valore poetico del casuale, del particolare, dell’interrotto e parziale e istantaneo, nella contemporanea totalità dell’immagine’.24 And, in the introduction to the 1958 Italian translation of Sterne’s book, Levi pays homage to Tristram Shandy as the most important source of inspiration for the writing of L’orologio. As Levi writes,
mi ero, a suo tempo, ingenuamente stupito che, fra le molte e spesso strane cose che si erano dette dei miei libri, e in particolare dell’Orologio, non fosse venuto in mente a nessuno, se non altro per ragioni del tutto estrinseche, di citare lo Sterne. Non comincia forse, il Tristram Shandy, con quella frase immortale: “Scusa caro, non hai dimenticato di caricare l’orologio?”.25
The aspect of Sterne’s novel which most deeply influenced Levi’s writing is its alternative notion of narrative time, which lies in the concept of duration rather than linearity:
L’invenzione dell’Io come motivo essenziale e forma della realtà crea una nuova dimensione. Per questo Sterne è un grande maestro di stile, e un precursore del futuro. Si creano nuove forme, e nuovi contenuti: si introducono nelle cose i sentimenti e l’ironia, e il senso dell’infinita mutevolezza della realtà, del suo essere fatta di rapporti inesauribili, della contemporaneità dei tempi. Dove i fili della
emphasis on the concept of duration see Miguel de Beistegui, Proust as Philosopher: The Art of Memory, trans. by Dorothée Bonnigal Katz (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013).
21 Levi, L’orologio, p. 11.
22 See Gigliola De Donato and Sergio D’Amaro, Un torinese del sud: Carlo Levi. Una biografia (Milan:
Baldini Castoldi Dalai, 2005).
23 This was the preface to the 1960 Italian translation of Stendhal’s book, published by Parenti, Rome.
Now in Carlo Levi, Il coraggio dei miti, ed. by Gigliola De Donato (Bari: De Donato, 1975), pp. 275-86.
24 Levi, Il coraggio dei miti,p. 275. 25 Levi, Il coraggio dei miti, p. 265.
matassa si incrociano, le molteplici realtà si sovrappongono in una immagine. […] È l’invenzione della durata che si sostituisce al tempo, e costringe a una vaga corsa dietro alla sfuggente realtà, e scioglie la struttura e il tempo del romanzo, e i limiti dei personaggi e la loro psicologia.26
Of particular interest, in Levi’s quotation, is its focus on Sterne as the creator of a new kind of narrative, open to the mutability of the real, and constituted through the interweaving of different temporalities, converging in the present and leading to the shaping of polymorphous forms and contents. Sterne is, for Levi, the first explorer of a narrative based on a de-structured and multi-layered notion of time, more adherent to the internal time of the individual – time as duration – in which reality appears always fugitive, in motion. As we will see, this interpretation of Sterne’s legacy constitutes an important tool for Levi, allowing him to disrupt a linear and conventional narrative, and to unlock a rhizomatic idea of temporality. Levi’s assessments of Stendhal and Sterne appear thus to shed light on aspects of his own narrative technique, including the value of detail over generalities, the contemporaneity of different historical times, and the invention of a duration based on a new idea of subjectivity. All of these are extremely important aspects not only for his literary writings but also, more generally, for his multifaceted way of representing time and reality.
If we focus specifically on L’orologio, Levi’s reading of Sterne helps us shed light on the novel’s temporal structure. The English writer had already entered the Italian literary tradition during the nineteenth century, thanks to Ugo Foscolo’s translation of the Sentimental Journey.27 However, while Foscolo focused mainly on concepts of freedom, love and truth, Levi’s interpretation of Sterne’s work highlights concepts of heterogeneity, fluidity and coexistence. This choice appears strictly bound to his attempt
26 Levi, Il coraggio dei miti,p. 268.
27 In 1813, Ugo Foscolo published an Italian translation of Sterne’s Sentimental Journey with the
pseudonym of Didimo Chierico. For more information see Alan B. Howes, ‘Foscolo: Sterne’s Italian Translator’, in Sterne, The Critical Heritage, ed. by Alan B. Howes (London: Routledge, 1974), pp. 464- 65; Luca Toschi, ‘Foscolo lettore di Sterne e altri “Sentimental Travellers”’, Modern Language Notes,97 (1982), 19-40.
to capture the interlocutory nature of the postwar period, where the re-emergence of democracy carried with itself the need to move away from the oppressive and rhetorical features of fascist culture.
Levi’s interpretation of Sterne’s and Stendhal’s literary legacies reveals various aspects of L’orologio, above all its discontinuous temporality and its dispersive spatiality. In the novel, things and people are always recorded in motion. Rome’s sky, for example, is described as ‘pieno di curve mutevoli’, and it is captured while following ‘un suo mobile ritmo’.28 At the same time, the observation of Rome’s cityscape by night activates sound perceptions which bring Carlo to recollect images re- surfacing from an archaic past: ‘[t]endevo l’orecchio ad ascoltare, e scrutavo nel buio, sopra i tetti e le altane, in quel mondo pullulante di ombre; e il suono penetrava in me come un’immagine […] arcana, legata a un altro tempo’.29 The coexistence of different temporalities is represented through the metaphor of the forest, where ‘[n]on c’è un filo d’erba solo in un prato. Non c’è un albero, ma c’è il bosco, dove tutti gli alberi stanno insieme’.30 Walking through Rome’s streets becomes for Carlo an occasion to acknowledge the composite and elliptical – in a word, baroque – form of reality: ‘[n]on si può fare a meno […] di fermarsi, e guardare, e lasciarsi riempire di quel senso complesso di cose ferme e di movimento, di cose sporgenti e incavate, di pieni e di vuoti, di vivente e di pressante, di antico e di disteso’.31
These descriptions record the effluence and the setting in motion of images and sounds suddenly re-emerging from a near past now perceived as rigid and oppressive. A vital movement seems now to proliferate from the temporal fracture occurred in the postwar period. It is as if the falling of the watch in Carlo’s bedroom, which as we saw signals the entry into an irregular and discontinuous temporal realm, has provoked a
28 Levi, L’orologio, p. 24. 29 Levi, L’orologio, p. 3. 30 Levi, L’orologio, pp. 57-8. 31 Levi, L’orologio, p. 73.
separation – a division, a disjunction – of Rome’s surface. Now, from this interstice, a composite and elliptical reality is resurfacing, at the same time reconfiguring Rome’s image. As Gigliola De Donato also noted: ‘nell’Orologio, la realtà si è mossa e arricchita’,32 and this telluric movement appears now to stimulate the interweaving of
various heterogeneous threads. Furthermore – and this aspect allows us to place Levi within the same conceptual constellation as that of Pasolini and Fellini – his representation of Rome’s discontinuous and multi-layered topography constitutes an emblematic snapshot which helps us to understand the trajectory of the city’s modernist image.