Tradizione mitica e lavoro onirico nei Dialoghi con Leucò di Cesare Pavese

In the Dialogues with Leucò Cesare Pavese remodels the classical sources according to criteria that seem to reproduce the mechanisms of dreams analyzed by Freud in Die Traumdeutung: as well as dreams, mythic narratives disguise their meanings, so that we must dig beneath the manifest content in order to get to their symbolic core. Furthermore, as Pavese remarked frequently, literary writing resembles the process of “dream-work”. By identifying examples of displacement, inversion, subtraction, condensation, and also of secondary revision, this paper shows how Pavese reworks the legacy of the Classical tradition in unexpected ways.