Mythopoiesis and Literary References in Carlo Levi’s Fear of Freedom

Abstract

This article focuses on Carlo Levi’s mythopoiesis as presented in Fear of Freedom in order to shed light on the meaning of certain specific literary references (from Dante to Petrarch and Éluard). Moving away from Crocian historicism and re-elaborating Vico’s topic of myth as vera narratio, Levi recognizes the terror of the sacred, trapped in the rules of religion and the State, as the deepest cause for the rise of Nazi-fascism. The author therefore identifies the distinctive signs of fear in an abstract individualism or, on the contrary, in the risk of losing individual identity among the masses, and he indicates the courage to stand up for freedom as the starting point for a society founded «on the rediscovery of man as a unit and as a relationship with others».