Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli and La Guerra

 

Amidst the closing grasp of Fascism around the neck of the new Italian nation, the activist, failed doctor, and artist Carlo Levi was exiled for objecting to the brutal conquest of Ethiopia wherein airplanes dropped outlawed poison gas onto combatants and civilians alike. He was not driven to the border and shoved into Switzerland; rather, he was thrust into another world- one which lay within the borders of his nation. In Levi’s words, Lucania, or modern-day Basilicata, is a place immune to the passage of time. In the farthest reaches of Southern Italy, where mountains and trees outnumber the people and the bones of brigands that fought off the Bourbon monarchs of Sicily and Garibaldi’s volunteers lay near ancient shrines in long forgotten caves, Levi was sent to wither away. Much like his nephew Primo who survived and wrote about the Holocaust, Carlo found the arts to be his escape in his prison without bars. In his captivity where all that kept him from escaping were desolation, malaria, and poverty, Carlo Levi painted and wrote. From this period comes his most famous book, Christ Stopped at Eboli, a reflection on his time in exile.  

            More than anything, Levi used his art to embody his gaze, to convert reality into his vision, and to explain the world that he encountered. Agustín Fuentes, in his book The Creative Spark, considers this “changing of ‘space’ to ‘place’” as an important evolutionary step for humans “in making the landscape their own” (pg. 229). This process is deeply embedded in Levi’s visual and literary art. He seeks to give meaning and significance to the strange reality which he finds himself in. To entirely appreciate how incredibly alien Levi would have found his new surroundings it is important to note that only the most educated individuals, like Levi himself, would have spoken what we now consider to be the Italian language. The compatriots in the villages Levi stayed in would have spoken a dialect form incomprehensible to him: he had a very difficult time even holding a conversation with the vast majority of the people around him. This lack of clarity and the subsequent feeling of mystification that comes from it are readily apparent in both art and writing, as will be shown in the following sections.

“I am glad to travel in my memory to that other world, hedged in by custom and sorrow, cut off from History and the State, eternally patient, to that land without comfort or solace, where the peasant lives out his motionless civilization on barren ground in remote poverty, and in the presence of death.”

-Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli, pg. 11

            To open his book, Levi separates his experience from that of ordinary reality. The Italy that he knew has been replaced by a new place with different meanings, traditions, and images. The “space” in which he finds himself is an entirely new “place” that follows none of the rules of his previous life. The peasants amongst whom he lives are enthralled in an eternal state of poverty, entirely ignored by the states which pass around them with the millennia. In the literal sense, Basilicata is not beyond the reach of either history or the state. Levi, in his isolation and his political disempowerment, feels as though this space is a place of ambivalence. This type of symbolic and abstracted reasoning is the same that allowed for the development of art by early humans. It is necessary for turning the ordinary workings of the world into an allegorical representation of the inner workings of the artist’s mind.

Amidst the closing grasp of Fascism around the neck of the new Italian nation, the activist, failed doctor, and artist Carlo Levi was exiled for objecting to the brutal conquest of Ethiopia wherein airplanes dropped outlawed poison gas onto combatants and civilians alike. He was not driven to the border and shoved into Switzerland; rather, he was thrust into another world- one which lay within the borders of his nation. In Levi’s words, Lucania, or modern-day Basilicata, is a place immune to the passage of time. In the farthest reaches of Southern Italy, where mountains and trees outnumber the people and the bones of brigands that fought off the Bourbon monarchs of Sicily and Garibaldi’s volunteers lay near ancient shrines in long forgotten caves, Levi was sent to wither away. Much like his nephew Primo who survived and wrote about the Holocaust, Carlo found the arts to be his escape in his prison without bars. In his captivity where all that kept him from escaping were desolation, malaria, and poverty, Carlo Levi painted and wrote. From this period comes his most famous book, Christ Stopped at Eboli, a reflection on his time in exile.  

            More than anything, Levi used his art to embody his gaze, to convert reality into his vision, and to explain the world that he encountered. Agustín Fuentes, in his book The Creative Spark, considers this “changing of ‘space’ to ‘place’” as an important evolutionary step for humans “in making the landscape their own” (pg. 229). This process is deeply embedded in Levi’s visual and literary art. He seeks to give meaning and significance to the strange reality which he finds himself in. To entirely appreciate how incredibly alien Levi would have found his new surroundings it is important to note that only the most educated individuals, like Levi himself, would have spoken what we now consider to be the Italian language. The compatriots in the villages Levi stayed in would have spoken a dialect form incomprehensible to him: he had a very difficult time even holding a conversation with the vast majority of the people around him. This lack of clarity and the subsequent feeling of mystification that comes from it are readily apparent in both art and writing, as will be shown in the following sections.

“I am glad to travel in my memory to that other world, hedged in by custom and sorrow, cut off from History and the State, eternally patient, to that land without comfort or solace, where the peasant lives out his motionless civilization on barren ground in remote poverty, and in the presence of death.”

-Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli, pg. 11

            To open his book, Levi separates his experience from that of ordinary reality. The Italy that he knew has been replaced by a new place with different meanings, traditions, and images. The “space” in which he finds himself is an entirely new “place” that follows none of the rules of his previous life. The peasants amongst whom he lives are enthralled in an eternal state of poverty, entirely ignored by the states which pass around them with the millennia. In the literal sense, Basilicata is not beyond the reach of either history or the state. Levi, in his isolation and his political disempowerment, feels as though this space is a place of ambivalence. This type of symbolic and abstracted reasoning is the same that allowed for the development of art by early humans. It is necessary for turning the ordinary workings of the world into an allegorical representation of the inner workings of the artist’s mind.

La Guerra, Carlo Levi 1972. Fondazione Carlo Levi-Roma

“Christ descended into the underground hell of Hebrew moral principle in order to break down its doors in time and to seal them up into eternity. But to this shadowy land, that knows neither sin nor redemption from sin, where evil is not moral but is only the pain residing forever in earthly things, Christ did not come. Christ stopped at Eboli.”

-Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli, pg. 12

            Hell, perhaps fundamentally, is a place invented by the abstraction of the concept of morality and evil. The above painting is a reflection on the war years. It shows twisted bodies blending into one another and into the dusty background while a disembodied eye gazes away from the scene. Human suffering devoid of any context ignored by any hire power seems to be an obvious representation of Levi’s description of Basilicata. He goes beyond the simple representation of a new reality as he uses it to create an analogy. Basilicata, desolate and beset by malaria, becomes a place with “neither sin nor redemption of sin.” Levi’s point is that, though Christ never came, neither did the evil that religion preaches against. Through this state of liberation, Basilicata is free from the binds of societal constructs. Such a state of absolute liberation is the antithesis of the Fascist dream for an Italy, a nation which these peasants around Levi do not even know

La Guerra, Carlo Levi 1972. Fondazione Carlo Levi- Roma

“Christ descended into the underground hell of Hebrew moral principle in order to break down its doors in time and to seal them up into eternity. But to this shadowy land, that knows neither sin nor redemption from sin, where evil is not moral but is only the pain residing forever in earthly things, Christ did not come. Christ stopped at Eboli.”

-Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli, pg. 12

            Hell, perhaps fundamentally, is a place invented by the abstraction of the concept of morality and evil. The above painting is a reflection on the war years. It shows twisted bodies blending into one another and into the dusty background while a disembodied eye gazes away from the scene. Human suffering devoid of any context ignored by any hire power seems to be an obvious representation of Levi’s description of Basilicata. He goes beyond the simple representation of a new reality as he uses it to create an analogy. Basilicata, desolate and beset by malaria, becomes a place with “neither sin nor redemption of sin.” Levi’s point is that, though Christ never came, neither did the evil that religion preaches against. Through this state of liberation, Basilicata is free from the binds of societal constructs. Such a state of absolute liberation is the antithesis of the Fascist dream for an Italy, a nation which these peasants around Levi do not even know.