Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi

First published:Cristo si e fermato a Eboli, 1945 (English translation, 1947)

Type of work: Social realism

Time of work: 1935-1936

Locale: Gagliano, a small town in the southern Italian district of Lucania

Principal Characters:

• Carlo, a political prisoner, a physician by training, an artist by inclination
• Luigi Magalone, the mayor of Gagliano
• Dr. Milillo, the mayor’s uncle, an aged physician
• Caterina Magalone Cuscianna, the mayor’s sister, the local leader of the Fascist Party
• Giulia Venere, Carlo’s housekeeper
• Don Giuseppe Trajella, the parish priest

The Novel

Christ Stopped at Eboli is the story of a year in the life of a young man whose opposition to Fascism has resulted in his internment in a remote mountain village in southern Italy. The title refers to a saying of the local inhabitants. Nominally, Christianity exists in this poor, rugged, malarial region, but no real message of salvation has ever reached the people. No one comes to the area except for enemies, conquerors, and visitors without understanding. Carlo, a well-educated northerner, belongs to the last category, but during his enforced stay in Gagliano, he grows in knowledge of and sympathy for the villagers.

Carlo has been brought under guard from a larger town which boasts a few shops and amenities, but Gagliano, where the road ends and few vehicles ever come, is much more primitive. He sees a single treeless street flanked by the scattered one-room houses of peasants and a small number of more substantial dwellings of the local gentry. Nearby stands the barracks of the carabinieri, the policemen who loosely supervise the activities of the dozen political prisoners exiled to the town. Gagliano quickly discovers that the newcomer is a physician, although a nonpracticing one, and since the town’s only doctors are the semiretired uncle of the mayor and another man who is both inept and insensitive to the people’s needs, the inhabitants flock to Carlo. Although he lacks instruments, medicines, and practical experience, and would rather spend his time painting, Carlo provides what assistance he can to the peasants, whose ways and outlook on life draw his interest.

Inevitably, conflicts arise. Carlo is patronized by the mayor, Don Magalone, and his family, but Dr. Gibilisco, whose family and the Magalones have carried on a long-running feud, resents the newcomer’s popularity with the townspeople. Carlo tries to keep clear of these rivalries, which seem to be the gentry’s main occupation. Carlo may not leave the town and his activities are monitored and his mail censored (an indignity partly thwarted by the kindly postmaster), but he has the run of the town and can arrange for his own accommodations. With some difficulty, he secures a habitable house, and Donna Caterina, the mayor’s strong-willed sister, finds for him a capable housekeeper named Giulia.

Carlo discovers that the insularity of the community extends even to those who have lived in the United States, for the returnees exhibit few traces of their experience abroad. It is a community oppressed by nature, exhausted by past generations, and neglected—save for taxation—by the central government. The people are passive, cheerless, superstitious, cynical of “the fellows in Rome,” and indifferent to politics, but they are also patient, brotherly, and capable of great endurance and devotion. They identify more readily with the nineteenth century brigands—the memory of these men’s violent but resourceful opposition to governmental authority has not been erased by the passage of nearly seventy years—than with the aspirations of Benito Mussolini. The brigands live on in romanticized legends as supporters of the peasantry against government; in 1935, government is concentrating on raising money and men for an aggressive war in Ethiopia.

Eventually, Carlo is threatened with full imprisonment if he continues to practice medicine, but he has attained the reputation of a miracle man among the peasants, and they continue to come to him under cover of darkness. Gradually, the young doctor comes to love and respect these people, ignorant of the world as they are, yet intelligent enough to understand and resent the indignity of their status. Because the authorities consider the peasants to be less than human, no one particularly bothers to investigate these violations of the governmental decree, and as long as Carlo does not practice medicine on the gentry, he is able to continue ministering to the sick and injured. A cycle of seasons passes. Suddenly Mussolini, encouraged by his army’s successes in Ethiopia, grants amnesty to the political prisoners. Carlo, virtually absorbed into the rhythm of life in Gagliano, sadly prepares to depart, and, with promises to return, leaves the admiring townspeople and “the motionless time and dark civilization” of Lucania.

Christ Stopped at Eboli lacks a plot in the usual sense. Instead of a climactic narrative, the author conveys the sense of a year spent in a place and among a people unattractive in any conventional sense but strangely beautiful and cumulatively compelling. The structure of the book is thus true to life in Gagliano, which cannot reach any fulfillment or conclusion beyond that which Carlo has experienced during his confinement in the town.

The Characters

Carlo Levi makes no attempt to disguise the autobiographical nature of his main character. In all the important particulars, Carlo corresponds to the author of Christ Stopped at Eboli, and it is unlikely that Levi needed to invent many of the other characters. His mode of presentation might be described as good reporting, except that reporters seldom spend so much time with their subjects, interact with them so extensively, or reflect on them so profoundly.

The gentry are largely of the sort who would be inconsequential anywhere but in their own town. They are idle, petty, and pretentious. The mayor is quick to assure Carlo that he, too, is a cultivated man, and his sister assumes the responsibility for finding Carlo a wife from among the small number of local worthies, an honor which he carefully evades. She is the leader of the Fascist Party, despite her indifference to politics, because she knows that power and prestige accrue to the position. Old Dr. Milillo at once establishes his class’s perspective on the peasantry: “Good people, but primitive.” Thus deftly Levi conveys the dubious superiority exuded by the minimally functioning upper class of the town.

The peasants interest Carlo far more. Individually, they play minor roles, with only Giulia, the earthy housekeeper, present daily in Carlo’s routine; collectively, however, they constitute the discovery that makes his year in Gagliano memorable. To this educated man from prosperous, cosmopolitan Turin, the rural south is another world. To them, Fascism—the evil Carlo has been sent here for resisting—is merely the latest version of an age-old repression. Resentful but resigned, they look kindly upon Carlo and the other prisoners (whom they call “exiles”) as fellow sufferers. It is in a group effort that they best express their only seemingly extinguished spirit. When they hear of the decree against Carlo’s medical practice, they sublimate their fury into the creation of an apparently impromptu play, in which a competent physician in white (they have borrowed Carlo’s white jacket for the purpose) is opposed by another doctor in black. As the former, defending his patient, is about to triumph in the dispute between them, an emissary arrives from Rome and chases the good doctor away. Left in charge, the man in black proceeds to murder the patient by sticking a large needle into his heart—an effect simulated by the puncturing of a pig’s bladder. The play ends in a dirge sung by the victim’s mother and a chorus. Carlo cannot decide whether the play is truly spontaneous or a “reminiscence of an ancient art,” but several performances of the play in various locations accessible to the local authorities show clearly that while the peasants know that they cannot rebel effectively, they can affirm their humanity in the face of officialdom’s refusal to acknowledge it. Carlo’s horizons widen during a year of encounters with people who are able to teach him more than he has previously suspected about the pervasiveness of brotherhood.

Critical Context

Christ Stopped at Eboli stands as one of the more memorable works of a generation of writers who were born early in the twentieth century, lived under Mussolini’s authoritarian rule during their formative years, and dedicated much of their imaginative energy to opposing his regime. The movement, which became known as the Italian Resistance during World War II, had already spawned such novels as Ignazio Silone’s Brot und Wein (1936; Bread and Wine, 1936) and Elio Vittorini’s Conversazione in Sicilia (1937, serial; 1941, book; In Sicily, 1948) before the war; others by Vittorini, Italo Calvino, and Cesare Pavese appeared shortly thereafter. These men set forth views that were usually egalitarian and, in some instances, communistic. Levi himself became a Communist member of the Italian Senate in 1963. Twentieth century Italian intellectuals tend to fear Communism less than a resurgence of the conservative and reactionary forces upon which Mussolini drew.

Political as it was, Levi’s book caught and continues to hold the attention of readers because of its unforgettable verbal picture of a region rarely visited by tourists and little known even to many Italians. In this respect, Christ Stopped at Eboli belongs to an older tradition of fiction which presents the life of the Italian peasantry, a mode established by Giovanni Verga, especially in his masterpiece I Malavoglia (1881; The House by the Medlar Tree, partial translation, 1890, 1953; complete translation, 1964). As Verga revealed life in Sicily, so Levi unfolds life in Lucania. Although Levi is not primarily a novelist as Verga is, and although this book resists any neat classification, Christ Stopped at Eboli continues to transcend its specific concerns with the events of the 1930’s and with the intensification of the totalitarian threat during World War II. The book evokes brilliantly the harsh beauty of a forbidding landscape and the timeless struggle of those who call it home.

Bibliography

Catani, R.D. “Structure and Style as Fundamental Expression: The Works of Carlo Levi and Their Poetic Ideology,” in Italica. LVI (1979), pp. 213-229.

Pacifici, Sergio. “Carlo Levi: The Essayist as a Novelist,” in The Modern Italian Novel: From Pea to Moravia, 1979.

Pacifici, Sergio. “The New Writers,” in A Guide to Contemporary Italian Literature, 1962.

Segrete, Carte. Carlo Levi, 1970.