Impegno and intertextuality: Renata Viganò’s Appropriation of Dante in L’Agnese va a morire
Introducing her work in his recent anthology of Resistance short stories,[1] Gabriele Pedullà damns Renata Viganò with the faintest of praise, explaining that her presence in the collection is not ascribable to any particular literary merit, but simply due to the extraordinary success of her 1949 Resistance novel, L’Agnese va a morire.[2] He proceeds to note that this text is itself of little worth other than as a reflection of the cultural context in which it was written and as a prop to help «comprendere per esempio quanto fosse difficile per un autore come Fenoglio vedere riconosciuto il proprio valore».[3] In many respects, Pedullà is justified in his assertions. Certainly, there can be no argument that L’Agnese is composed from an uncompromisingly left-wing viewpoint, and that Viganò’s chronicle is to a large extent an unashamedly hagiographical addition to the Resistance canon, lacking the invention of Calvino or the philosophical weight of Vittorini. It is also very pertinent that Pedullà mentions Beppe Fenoglio in this context, for while the committed Communist Viganò won the Premio Viareggio and widespread praise in the left-wing media for L’Agnese, the former monarchist partisan Fenoglio was heavily criticised for depicting the Resistance as a civil war rather than as a liberating movement in his work.[4]
It is thus tempting to bracket Viganò’s novel not as a literary work, but as a rigid example of Zhdanovian socialist realist[5] writing, and its author as either a purveyor of «a mediocre and melodramatic socialist realism»,[6] or as «l’esponente più persuasivo della versione italiana del realismo socialista».[7] Indeed, Genevois (1985) makes a convincing argument for reading L’Agnese as an example of socialist realism, citing the inefficiency of the Allies,[8] the absence of the type of negatively-portrayed Communist «political commissioner» found in Calvino and Fenoglio’s Resistance writing,[9] the pointed lack of non-Communist partisan detachments[10] and «the almost superhuman heroism»[11] of the partisans in the novel. In this light, it is fair to suggest, as Pedullà does, that Viganò be numbered among those Resistance authors whose works «appaiono oggi più distanti dalla nostra sensibilità letteraria e per i quali gli anni sono passati peggio».[12] However, that is not to say that Viganò was an author devoid of artistic intentions, and it is rather unfair to label L’Agnese, as Pedullà does, as a «romanzo» in inverted commas.[13] Instead, as this paper seeks to demonstrate, a close analysis of the text shows that Viganò, in spite of her unyielding devotion to presenting a committed political message in her work, constantly seeks to imbue her ostensibly one-dimensional partisan narrative with an overtly literary layer of meaning, namely through concerted intertextual reference to Dante.
In making such an intertextual reading of L’Agnese, I seek not merely to undertake an exercise in identifying instances of literary allusion in Viganò’s work, but rather to engage with two questions that Jenny (1982) feels are raised by intertextuality, namely how a text assimilates a pre-existing text and the very nature of the relationship between the two texts.[14] Therefore, my analysis employs both Kristeva’s conception of intertexuality as the «transposition of one (or several) sign-systems into another»[15] and Genette’s notion of hypertextuality, which is «any relationship uniting a text B (which I shall call the hypertext) to an earlier text A (I shall, of course, call it the hypotext), upon which it is grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary».[16] Thus, I not only indicate instances of specific Dantean allusion in Viganò’s work, but also, in pondering how the ‘sign-system’ of Dante’s Hell comes to be assimilated into a text from the neorealist ‘season’, I seek to demonstrate how the author seems almost to use Dante’s itinerary as a map for Agnese to follow on her journey through the hellish confines of the Resistenza in the Valli di Comacchio.
Some of the Dantean undertones to Viganò’s novel are relatively easily identified. For instance, like the Commedia, L’Agnese is structured in three distinct parts, each detailing a specific chain of events in Agnese’s stage-by-stage conversion from middle-aged housewife to partisan martyr.[17] The novel begins with the hellish situation of Palita’s deportation and death, then focuses in the second part on the quasi-joyous suffering of Agnese as a partisan, before a final section which sees her almost transcend her being as she sacrifices her life for the partisan cause. The parallels between any Resistance text and the Commedia are easy to draw – the heroine seeks a life of involvement rather than of inaction, just as Dante seeks to find his way out of the «selva oscura»[18] and back on to the righteous path; the Resistance hero must subsequently undergo a humbling initiation and a process of purgation before reaching what Fenoglio labelled the «arcangelico regno dei partigiani»,[19] in much the same manner as Dante’s allegorical journey. That Viganò offers such an explicit division of her text into a format more or less aligned to that of Dante’s poem is thus the first signpost of the Commedia as an intertext for L’Agnese.
Aside from its macro-structure, L’Agnese mirrors the Commedia in terms of its repetition of the number three. As is common knowledge, in Dante’s works, the significance of three is linked explicitly to the Holy Trinity,[20] and as a symbol, it recurs time and again in the Commedia: for instance, there are three canticles in the poem, Dante employs terza rima, and Lucifer has three faces.[21] In short, the figure of three permeates the Commedia from the three beasts Dante encounters in Inferno I to his division of the angels of Paradiso into three hierarchies,[22] and so, in any Italian literature subsequent to Dante, any concerted allusion to the number can be viewed as a reference to his works. Viganò’s focus on the number three does not cease with the tripartite division of L’Agnese. For example, after Palita’s deportation, Agnese’s induction into the Resistance is instigated by a visit from three clandestine operatives;[23] when the Germans hang a partisan on the roadside, they leave him on display for three days,[24] when Agnese joins il Comandante’s detachment, they travel downriver in “tre barche”.[25] Similarly, Agnese’s affiliation to the partisans comes in three stages – Palita’s deportation, her work as a messenger and her killing of Kurt. In addition, during the novel, she and her comrades form three major bases along the river. It is clear, therefore, that the number three is a recurring trope in L’Agnese, and it is very likely that this is an intentional device on Viganò’s part. While for Dante, the number three was a symbol for the Holy Trinity, for Viganò, it is most probably a reference to the Commedia itself, and a means of subtly tying her work into the wider spectrum of the Italian canon.
However, given the nature of Viganò’s text, which is dominated by the author’s representation of her landscape of the waterways of the Valli di Comacchio in the low-lying plains of Emilia-Romagna, one feature of the Commedia above all others is of particular significance to this delineation of space, namely its depiction of the river. In Dante’s cosmology, rivers punctuate Hell and Purgatory, the former encompassing the classical rivers of the Acheron, Styx, Phlegethon and Cocytus, the latter containing Lethe and the Dantean invention of Eunoè.[26] There are a number of theories regarding the prominence Dante affords the rivers of his text. Aside from serving as instruments of «[le] pene riservate ai dannati e [i] riti purificatori delle anime purganti»,[27] their presence could also be said to be due to the author’s intention to «modellare i suoi ambienti oltremondani, anche con intento figurale, su elementi e forme della natura terrestre»[28] and his desire to «restare nella tradizione letteraria».[29] This last point is of particular relevance to L’Agnese. The rivers of the Inferno all appear in Book X of the Odyssey and Book VI of the Aeneid, for example, and so in this regard, the Commedia serves as a conveyor of the classical symbolism of the river. Viganò’s symbolic rendering of the river has much in common with the metaphors of the river prevalent in the Greco-Roman world, and so in light of the other Dantean undertones to L’Agnese I have already underlined, the Commedia could well be the reservoir from which she draws her contacts with classical literature. In particular, Agnese’s experiences of war are often presented in rather hellish terms, and so my focus on the classical rivers as referenced in Viganò’s text will be on the four rivers of the Inferno that are formed from «the stream of men’s sins and sorrows, their tears and blood».[30]
The first river Dante encounters in Hell is the Acheron, which in the classical tradition «is almost stagnant and its banks are thick with reeds and heavy with mud»,[31] hence its depiction in the Inferno as a «livida palude».[32] It is certainly easy to see the similarities between the physical features of the Acheron and the river Reno as described by Viganò. Her waterway is repeatedly referred to as turning to marsh, and the stagnation of such marshland is afforded particular emphasis, as the partisans are plagued by «il fiato scialbo della palude».[33] As already mentioned, the reeds of the valley are a crucial aspect of Viganò’s space, both in practical and symbolic terms, and her description of the river has its strongest links to the Acheron at the beginning of the second part of L’Agnese, where the partisans drift past «canne […] alte» and «fasci dondolanti», which spray them with «gocce tiepide, pesanti» from the stagnant river.[34]
As well as the physical features of the Acheron, Viganò’s novel also refers, at least in part, to some of the events and symbolic meanings that demarcate Dante’s delineation of the river. In the Inferno, the Acheron «è il fiume che segna l’ingresso nel regno dei morti»[35] and souls must be piloted across its marshy waters by Charon, the boatman of the Underworld – «Caron dimonio, con occhi di bragia, / loro accennando, tutti li raccoglie; / batte col remo qualunque s’adagia».[36] So it is for Agnese, who, as the title of the novel makes explicit, «goes to die». Her first tentative traversal of a river as a partisan in the text is as a courier carrying explosives,[37] and this is perhaps not so much the crossing of a personal Rubicon, but rather a metaphorical passage across the Acheron to her death,[38] especially when one considers that crossing that river is «il passaggio obbligato per entrare nell’Inferno».[39] On reaching this particular Acheron, she leaves her ‘earthly’ life as a lavandaia behind and enters her almost posthumous existence among the partisans, as she is ferried though the heavy waters «[i]n una delle tre barche».[40]
The image of the boat ferrying the dead across the river outlined by Dante emerges again quite poignantly later on in L’Agnese, following the suicide of Tonitti and the execution of four Nazi deserters who joined and then abandoned the partisan detachment. In one boat «trasportarono il morto, in un’altra gettarono dei badili»[41] and one is reminded of Charon piloting the dead across the Acheron by the reference to «[l]’italiano col paradello [che] spinse la barca verso il rettangolo chiaro della porta» (150). Meanwhile, the pervading sense of doom that envelops those on the shore («niente sonno, poca voglia di mangiare, un senso di enorme depressione in tutta la compagnia»)[42] is not far removed from the gloom of the banks of Dante’s Acheron, with its «fioco lume» (Inferno III 75).
The second river Dante encounters in Hell is the Styx, and physically, it is not altogether different from the Acheron. In the Latin tradition, the Acheron «si trova disegnato anche coi nomi di Stige o di Cocito […] quasi quei nomi stiano a indicare genericamente il fiume dell’oltretomba».[43] Like the Acheron, the Styx is described in terms of a marsh («In la palude va c’ha nome Stige / questo tristo ruscel»)[44] and this feature is forcefully reiterated, as it is subsequently labelled a «lorda pozza»[45] and a «loto».[46] Thus, when Viganò highlights the marshy quality of the Valli di Comacchio, she is evoking the Styx as well as the Acheron, as the stagnation of the Styx’s «morta gora»[47] finds just as much resonance in the marshland of L’Agnese. Indeed, the similarities between the two rivers also serve to demonstrate that Viganò’s Dantean references are not performed systematically; that is to say, the first river Agnese crosses is not solely the Acheron, nor is the second the Styx, but rather the author seems to take the physical qualities and figurative connotations of Dante’s infernal rivers and refer to them intermittently to support the symbolism with which she constructs her own fluvial space. Of course, it is also interesting to note that just as the complex tapestry of river and canal of Viganò’s landscape is part of the same network, the Styx stems from the same system as the other rivers of Hell – «ha origine, come gli altri, dalle lagrime che scorrono dalle fessure del gran Veglio di Creta».[48]
No one episode in L’Agnese can be said to deliberately mirror Dante’s Stygian experience to the same extent as the transportation of souls across the Acheron. In the Inferno, Dante crosses the marsh in Phlegyas’ boat, but «[q]ui non c’è traccia dell’immane flusso migratorio dei dannati che abbiamo visto accalarsi in riva all’Acheronte. Non è un duplicato di Carón dimonio, questo Flegiàs».[49] The significance of the Styx is not as a point of departure, but rather as a symbol of hate, its name meaning «abhorrent»[50] or «hated».[51] The character of Dante seems to show a very human tendency towards this sentiment as he crosses the muddy Styx, which contains the wrathful souls of Hell. Filippo Argenti[52] tries to grab him, and the poet turns to Virgil saying «Maestro, molto sarei vago / di vederlo attuffare in questa broda».[53] Whether it is intended as a Dantean reference or not is highly debatable, but one exchange between Agnese and Clinto early on in her time on the river is indicative of her own propensity towards hate. When asked if she regrets killing Kurt, Agnese responds:
Mi dispiace che si sia dovuto lasciare il posto […]. Ma del tedesco non m’importa e neppure chi mi abbiano bruciato la casa, e di non avere che un vestito addosso. Volevo ammazzarli quando vennero a portare via mio marito, perché lo sapevo che l’avrebbero fatto morire, ma non fui buona di muovermi. Invece ieri sera è venuto il momento.[54]
After crossing the Acheron and the Styx, Dante reaches the banks of the Phlegethon, and once more, I should reiterate that while Viganò does not systematically map out her landscape to mirror Dante’s infernal space, many features of the classical rivers, as re-imagined by the Florentine, play a crucial part in her spatializing of the Resistenza. In classical literature, the Phlegethon was imagined as a river of fire by poets such as Statius – «Smoky Phlegethon rolls down his streams of murky flame».[55] Dante continues in this vein, illustrating a boiling river of blood in the Seventh Circle of Hell, wherein the Violent against others («tiranni / che dier nel sangue e nell’aver di piglio»)[56] are punished. He writes of stepping along «la proda del bollor vermiglio»,[57] and he eventually crosses where “si facea basso / quel sangue, sì che cocea pur li piedi”.[58] For Sinclair, the “Phlegethon is Dante’s challenge to military adventure and public violence”,[59] and in this light, one can see how it provides a very relevant model for Viganò’s rivers.
The image of the river of fire is posited on one particularly memorable occasion in L’Agnese, when the Germans decide to make use of “la stagione della canna secca”[60] to set fire to the reeds of the valley, in an attempt to force the partisans away from the river and canal. During the summer, “[i] canali erano quasi asciutti”[61] and the idea of the canal varying in depth along its course recalls the way Dante and Virgil cross the Phlegethon. As if to signpost the canal as being akin to the boiling infernal river, the partisans begin to speculate on the risk of fire posed by their environment in summer – “Poteva prendere fuoco da un momento all’altro, lo diceva anche Biagio che vi faceva la guardia da vent’anni”.[62] The subsequent fires are described in particularly hellish terms – “S’alzavano alti come torri, si riflettevano nel cielo, e il cielo poi tutto intorno diventava più nero, vi si cancellavano le stelle”.[63] The lack of stars in the sky as a result of the inferno in the valley reflects the way in which Dante’s Hell is marked by the fact that the stars cannot be seen, while the image of “tutta una fiamma sulla valle”[64] and “[i]l mare di fiamme [che] copriva la valle”,[65] as well as recalling the false counsellors ensconsed in flame in the eighth bolgia, also seems to offer the idea of the valley having been converted into something of a Phlegethon. Viganò details how the tongues of flame fan from left to right in such a way that “cresceva la terra che ardeva, si stampava a poco a poco il disegno della valle”,[66] and so, in effect, the outline of the valley, where the canal is dessicated, becomes instead a boiling “river” of fire, from which “nessuno, né tedeschi né partigiani, poteva uscire vivo”.[67]
As time passes in the Valli di Comacchio, and seasons change, so too does the nature of the obstacle posed by the river. After the threat of fire among the dessicated reeds of summer, as winter draws in, Agnese and her comrades face a problem of a very different form when the waters of the valley freeze over. L’Agnese is “vero e vario di paesaggi e stagioni”,[68] and a recurring trope across the seasons detailed by Viganò in the novel is the extreme inhospitableness of the marshy terrain. As Battistini explains, “[a]l sole dell’estate subentra la neve dell’inverno, ma la terra resta sempre inospitale, invivibile nella sua cappa sempre indifferenziata di afa o di gelo”.[69] Just as the fires of summer remind one of the Phlegethon, the way in which “l’acqua di tutta la valle non era più acqua ma ghiaccio”,[70] as the travails of the partisans become ever more hellish, recalls “dove Cocito la freddura serra”,[71] in the very bowels of Dante’s Hell.
When Dante reaches Cocytus, he describes how “vidimi davanti / e sotto i piedi un lago che per gelo / avea di vetro e non d’acqua sembiante”,[72] and Viganò’s description of the frozen waters of the Valli di Comacchio also compares the ice to glass, as she speaks of the valley as having “una trasparenza di vetro spesso”.[73] For Dante, Cocytus is marked by its darkness, as he writes of it as a “pozzo scuro”,[74] and similarly, when Clinto arrives at the bank of the river, he is struck by how the water is “grigia”.[75] Unlike the other rivers of Hell, the frozen waters of Cocytus are collected in a lake,[76] and in this light, it is especially interesting to note the nature of the waterways frozen in L’Agnese. The ice seizes the waters that washed over the reclaimed land that the Germans flooded again, and so the partisan base “in mezzo alla bonifica allagata”, is effectively trapped in the centre of a “lake” of ice, thus reinforcing the idea of the frozen valley as being something of a Cocytus, in physical terms at least.
The souls punished in Cocytus are those of the treacherous, but this idea does not especially impact on Viganò’s own personal Cocytus.[77] Instead, it seems that her focus on the idea of Cocytus stems from its status as the “fondo a tutto l’universo”.[78] Cocytus is the very climax of Dante’s Inferno, containing the most gruesome and horrific of images, from Ugolino chewing on the nape of Cardinal Ruggieri to the three-faced Satan imbedded in the ice, where “[c]on sei occhi piangea, e per tre menti / gocciava ’l pianto e sanguinosa bava”.[79] In much the same way, the episode of the frozen canals is the culmination of a period in which the landscape becomes increasingly hostile to Viganò’s partisans, the crescendo of a section of the novel in which the problems encountered by the partigiani in this aquatic space become ever more numerous and difficult to overcome, and their heroism is accentuated. Il Comandante’s detachment are chased downriver, from base to base, through stagnant marsh and fire-ridden reeds, experiencing both the problems posed by water shortages and the insanity triggered by living in this vast expanse of water. As they progress through the landscape and the war, the horrors of the conflict encircle them tightly, until at this frozen water, like Dante, they reach the very depths of their Hell.
After the horrors of Cocytus, Dante and Virgil emerge from Hell (“e quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle”,[80] and so it is for Tom’s partisans trapped in the base in the centre of the ice. In keeping with her repetition of the number, it is after “tre giorni interi di patimento”[81] that il Comandante manages to lead a group to rescue them, having made a “rompighiaccio” from a boat and “pezzi di lamiera dura, quella degli aerei caduti”.[82] On saving Tom and his men, however, the sense of joy is rather muted compared to that of Dante on his exit from Hell, with Tom quietly saying “[s]iamo vivi”,[83] but commenting on how “[è] stato un inferno tenere a posto gli uomini in queste condizioni”.[84] Within weeks, Tom and his men will be killed, as will, eventually, Agnese, and so one can view the “deliverance” from the hell of the war and their icy incarceration as merely a temporary respite, unlike Dante’s journey out of Hell.
While the rivers of Dante’s Hell are evoked relatively clearly in Viganò’s rendering of the Valli di Comacchio, the presence of a Virgil figure in Agnese’s Dantean journey is rather less straightforward. One can argue that, to some degree, il Comandante is Agnese’s principal “guide” through the rivers and marshland the partigiani inhabit, but his is not a constant presence at Agnese’s side, marking out her route along the valley, warning her of the dangers ahead and “explaining” the Hell that lies around her. Instead, Agnese seems to follow the guidance of the collective ideal of the Resistance, rather than the advice of one specific individual. Indeed, in the Commedia, Virgil is ultimately limited as a guide, unable both as a heathen and as a symbol of human reason to bring Dante to Paradise. Perhaps tellingly then, in Viganò’s Resistance, all are “believers”, and there is no place for a figure corresponding to Virgil in full.
In any case, it is clear that the Commedia, or at least the Inferno, is evoked on a number of occasions and in a variety of ways in Viganò’s depiction of her landscape, but beyond identifying these intertextual references, one must also consider why the author seeks to allude consistently (although perhaps not systematically) to this particular text. A hint can perhaps be found in Jenny’s assertion that intertextuality is “the most fitting instrument of expression in times of cultural breakdown and renaissance”.[85] So it is in the literature of the Resistenza, including L’Agnese va a morire. Just as Calvino imbues Pin’s journey in Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (1947) with reference to Ariosto[86] and Fenoglio’s Johnny travels through the Langhe in the mould of Odysseus or Moses,[87] one can see quite clearly the parallels between the figures of Agnese and the Dante of the Commedia, as each character journeys through deathly spaces in search of spaces of salvation.
In engaging with Dante in this fashion, Viganò appears both to defy and to bear out Pedullà’s credo that she is a propagandist first and a novelist second. On the one hand, her knowing reference to the Commedia is a means of highlighting her own credentials as an author, as if she seeks to add an additional veneer of “literariness” to her work, thus removing it from the realm of the Resistance chronicle; on the other hand, in so portraying her partisan heroine – and, by the extension, the Resistenza at large – in quasi-religious terms, undergoing a type of joyous suffering in order to attain salvation, she is alternatively accentuating their heroism in a manner akin to socialist realism. In this way, it can be argued that Viganò, to a greater or lesser extent, “politicises” the Commedia to her own ends, and the partisan movement is lent religious and epic undertones by her subtle but consistent depiction of it in Dantean terms. Thus, when even this literary flourish of knowing allusion itself constitutes a somewhat politicised discourse, it can be seen how Viganò’s reputation as writer of impegno prevails. Yet, ultimately, this intertextual appropriation of Dante serves to demonstrate how, in an Italy ravaged by war and the fall of Fascism and seeking to rebuild itself, Viganò was among a new generation of writers who entered into dialogue with their literary heritage and emerged to tell of the conflict and its politics in their own specific voices.
[1] Pedullà (2006).
[2] “[S]e un suo racconto è presente in questa antologia, ciò non dipende dai suoi meriti letterari, né dall’eccezionalità della sua vicenda umana, ma dallo straordinario successo riscosso nel dopoguerra da L’Agnese va a morire” (Pedullà 261).
[3] Ibidem.
[4] For instance, the Milan editon of the Communist newspaper L’Unità, reviewing I ventitré giorni della città di Alba on 29 October 1952, took a dim view of Fenoglio’s less than hagiographic depiction of the Resistance. The reviewer, identified only as Il libraio, writes that “I ventitré giorni della città di Alba è e resta un brutto capitolo della letteratura della Resistenza […]. Fenoglio ci presenta degli strani partigiani, che stanno tra la caricatura e il picaresco, che combattono per avventura o addirittura per niente e per nessuno […]. Lo stile è volutamente letterario e falso come il contenuto […]. È semplicemente un gioco di parole, e di brutte parole, quello di Beppe Fenoglio” (cited in Lagorio, 1998 54).
[5] The statute of the Union of Soviet Writers defined the objective of socialist realism as “the creation of works of high artistic significance, saturated with the heroic struggle of the world proletariat and with the grandeur of the victory of socialism, and reflecting the great wisdom and heroism of the Communist party” (Struve 256). At the first Soviet Writers’ Congress in Moscow in 1934, socialist realism was championed in particular by Andrei Zhdanov, Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, who called on Soviet writers to “[a]ctively help to remould the mentality of people in the spirit of socialism” (Zhdanov 24) and to “[b]e in the front ranks of those who are fighting for a classless socialist society” (24). In effect, socialist realism was thus the “official” literature of the Communist Party, and the Union of Soviet Writers set up in order to encourage adherence to the party line in literary works.
[6] Re, 1990 55.
[7] Falaschi, 80.
[8] Genevois, 118.
[9] Ibidem, 119.
[10] Ibidem, 120.
[11] Ibidem, 121: “Les partisans sont responsables, honnêtes et d’un héroïsme presque surhumain”.
[12] Pedullà XVII . He also includes Pratolini and Vittorini among their number.
[13] Ibidem, 261.
[14] Jenny, 50.
[15] Kristeva, 111.
[16] Genette, 5.
[17] Viganò’s choice of name for her protagonist is itself suggestive of her eventual martyrdrom. Saint Agnes was one of the most famous early Christian martyrs, who refused to marry and “consecrated her maidenhood to God […]; when persecution broke out, she left home and offered herself for martyrdom; she resisted all threats and was executed by being stabbed in the throat (a common Roman form of execution” (Attwater 35). Agnese follows this template in the way that she leaves her home behind and offers herself for the partisan cause, although Saint Agnes was considerably younger (“twelve or thirteen” (35)) than Viganò’s heroine at the time of her martyrdom. Meanwhile, Perry posits the idea of Agnese as being “a powerful Christ-figure, a martyr whose passion signifies the meaning of the Resistance” (Perry 445). He argues that Agnese dies “in imitatio Christi” (447), with the four bullets which kill her forming a sign of the cross, and that the sacrifice of the protagonist is the key motif of the novel (445). This mirrors Spellanzon, who speaks of Viganò’s evocation of “il carattere di martirio della Resistenza” (Spellanzon 797).
[18] Inferno I 2.
[19] Fenoglio 450. The quotation is from Il partigiano Johnny (1968).
[20] “Lo numero del tre è la radice del nove, sì come vedemo manifestamente che tre via tre fa nove. Dunque se lo tre è fattore per se medesimo del nove, e lo fattore per se medesimo de li miracoli è tre, cioè Padre e Figlio e Spirito Santo, li quali sono tre e uno, questa donna fue accompagnata da questo numero del nove a dare ad intendere ch’ella era uno nove, cioè uno miracolo, la cui radice, cioè del miracolo, è solamente la mirabile Trinitade” (Vita Nuova XXIX 3).
[21] Inferno XXXIV 38.
[22] For an extensive list of Dante’s use of the number three in the Commedia, see Niccoli (1976).
[23] L’Agnese 21.
[24] Ibidem, 30.
[25] Ibidem, 58.
[26] Allied to this, the rushes growing on the banks of Purgatory make it bear a passing resemblance to Viganò’s reed and rush-enveloped river. In order to facilitate his passage into Purgatory, Dante is requested by Cato to gird himself with “un giunco schietto” (Purgatorio I 5), a symbol of humility. In spite of the preponderance of such plants in L’Agnese, however, it is difficult to find any direct reference to the episode in Viganò’s text. However, it is interesting to note that Dante describes the rush by saying “null’altra pianta che facesse fronda / o indurasse, vi puote aver vita, / però ch’alle percosse non seconda” (103-105), offering the rush as a symbol not only of humility, but of constancy and steadfastedness. Thus, in highlighting time and again the reeds that punctuate her landscape, Viganò is perhaps similarly appropriating them as a symbol of resistance.
[27] Mazzamuto, 939.
[28] Ibidem.
[29] Ibidem.
[30] Sinclair, 414.
[31] Grimal, 4.
[32] Inferno III, 98.
[33] L’Agnese, 97.
[34] Ibidem, 63.
[35] Padoan, 36.
[36] Inferno III 109-111.
[37] “A metà credette di cadere nel fiume […] Riuscì a star dritta, a raggiungere la riva” (L’Agnese 28).
[38] Agnese’s crossing of the river, and subsequent journeys in boats along the marshy waters of the Valli di Comacchio can also be contrasted with Dante’s own crossing of the Acheron. As a living soul, he cannot cross the river as the shades of Hell do, in Charon’s boat, and so “il passaggio del fiume, che è «sine salute» in quanto è simbolo della morte spirituale, avviene per lui in modo del tutto straordinario e miracoloso […]; come, il poeta non precisa” (Padoan 37). Thus, unlike Dante, who at the end of canto III falls “come l’uom che ’l sonno piglia” (Inferno III 136) and is awoken by “un greve truono” (IV 2) on the other side of the Acheron (or indeed, unlike Aeneas’ crossing into the Underworld with the aid of a golden bough in Book VI of the Aeneid), there is nothing mysterious about Agnese’s passage across the river, and so the fact that she will not leave the Valli di Comacchio and is doomed to perish there is hinted at early in the novel.
[39] Mazzamuto, 940.
[40] L’Agnese, 58.
[41] Ibidem, 150.
[42] Ibidem, 150
[43] Padoan, 36.
[44] Inferno VII, 106-107.
[45] Ibidem, VII 127.
[46] Ibidem, VIII 21.
[47] Ibidem, VIII 31.
[48] Caponigro, 434.
[49] Sermonti, 151.
[50] Hard, 109.
[51] Room, 282.
[52] “Filippo degli Adimari dei Cavicciuli, renowned for his ostentacious displays of wealth, was called Filippo Argenti because he was said to have had his horse shod with silver (argento). His irascibility is memorably recorded by Dante in canto VIII of Inferno, where his spirit, immersed in the muddy waters of the Styx, attempts to emerge and grab Dante as he is crossing the river with his guide, Virgil” (McWilliam 861).
[53] Inferno VIII, 52-53.
[54] L’Agnese, 58.
[55] Thebaid IV, 523.
[56] Inferno XII, 104-105.
[57] Ibidem, 101.
[58] Ibidem, 124-125.
[59] Sinclair, 165.
[60] L’Agnese, 102.
[61] Ibidem, 88.
[62] Ibidem.
[63] Ibidem, 101.
[64] Ibidem, 102.
[65] Ibidem.
[66] Ibidem.
[67] Ibidem, 103.
[68] Saccenti, 184.
[69] Battistini, 212.
[70] L’Agnese 174.
[71] Inferno XXXI 123.
[72] Ibidem, XXXII 22-24.
[73] L’Agnese, 174.
[74] Inferno XXXII, 16.
[75] L’Agnese, 174.
[76] Inferno XXXII, 23.
[77] That is not to say, of course, that traitors to the Resistance cause are not punished in L’Agnese va a morire. Agnese suspects her neighbour Minghina and her daughters of playing a significant role in Palita’s deportation, given the girls’ relations with German soldiers in the area (“Per la prima volta accennava al sospetto di una delazione fatta dalle ragazze a danno di Palita” (L’Agnese 42), but ironically, it is the Germans themselves who kill Minghina and her family, in a reprisal for Agnese’s killing Kurt.
[78] Inferno XXXII, 8.
[79] Ibidem, XXXIV 53-54.
[80] Ibidem, 139.
[81] L’Agnese, 183.
[82] Ibidem, 175.
[83] Ibidem, 184.
[84] Ibidem, 185.
[85] Jenny, 61.
[86] See Re (2003) and Pavese (1962).
[87] See Beccaria (2001).
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