Beppe Fenoglio’s Partigiano Archive: Translation, Resistenza, Testimony

Abstract

Beppe Fenoglio’s most famous novel, Partigiano Johnny, is not actually a novel at all, but a posthumous philological reconstruction of a series of typescripts that inspired one of the fiercest Italian literary debates of the postwar period. This debate reached a fever pitch in the 1990s as Italy was coming to terms with the impact of the Resistenza on national identity. As a partisan-writer with no connections to fascism, Fenoglio long occupied a stabilizing role in the Italian literary canon, intensifying the stakes for academics who wished to “heal” the wounds of his fragmented text and use them to produce a coherent, redemptive Resistance narrative, with Johnny- Fenoglio serving as a contemporary Dante. However, the incomplete, incompatible typescripts structurally refute the dominant postwar rhetoric that depicts the armistice as a “radical rupture” in Italian history, a “year zero” that catalyzed Italy’s rebirth. With no clear beginning or end, the texts enact a structural resistance that is echoed thematically in the partisan-protagonist’s metatextual reflections on the difficulty of narrating the Resistenza after the war has ended, which he theorizes in Dantean terms. Reading these thematic and structural resistances, this essay argues that they suggest that the “incomplete” archive is not treatable. Rather than opposing the philological debate or taking sides, I consider how this unstable text and the surrounding efforts to reconstruct it, collectively testify to the trauma of writing and remembering the Resistenza.

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