PAISAN
the man dies--that is a defeat; the "GI" is created to conceal the
man's death.*
But
Paisan
is the product of a country that has known itself com–
promised and defeated for (at least) twenty-five years. In the presence
of Mussolini, Victor Emmanuel, and the Pope, no public myth could
survive; all action and all ideas of action became contemptible, and
the sensitive Italian was forced into idealist philosophy or into the culti–
vation of personal experience-that is, into a passive and aesthetic atti–
tude to life. (See Guido Piovene's remarkable article in the March
Horizon.)
Even an active political figure like Silone reveals in his novels
a distinctly masochistic relationship to the very political realities he
opposes; in the United States, only Southern and Negro writers (for
obvious reasons) ever approach the utter self-abasement represented by
Silone's portraits of the peasants with whom he identifies himself.
Rossellini neither requires nor dreams of victory; indeed, it is only
defeat that has meaning for him- defeat is his "universal." (Even
Open
City
is conceived in terms of passivity: heroism is presented not as
the capacity to act but as the capacity to suffer; the priest and the
Communist are one, and the activity of the underground leads not to
victory but to sainthood.) From this hopelessness-too inactive to be
called despair-Rossellini gains his greatest virtue as an artist: the feel–
ing for particularity. In the best parts of
Paisan,
it is always the man
who dies, and no idea survives him unless it is the idea of death itself.
One more point may make this contrast clearer. In the three good
episodes of
Paisan
(Sicily, Florence, the Po River), there is very little
effort to individualize the characters; each displays only as much of
himself as his situation requires (the most important exception to this
is the conversation I have already mentioned between the Italian girl
and one of the Americans in the Sicilian episode). And since the situa–
tions are abnormal, the activities of the characters do not in any full
sense represent them: they remain strangers. Certain of them stand out
because they are more continuously prominent in action, but there are
*
A typical figure in our culture is the "commentator," whose accepted
function is to make some "appropriate" statement about whatever is presented
to his attention. "Grim evidence of man's inhumanity to man," he remarks · of
the corpses of Buchenwald. "The end of the road," he says as we stare at dead
Mussolini on the newsreel screen. (And what can one do but agree?) Even
in its most solemn and pessimistic statements, this voice is still a form of "affir–
mation" (its healthy tone betrays it); at bottom, it is always saying the same
thing: that one need never be entirely passive, that for every experience there
is some adequate response; at the very least, there is always--there must be–
something to say.
819
