Johnny’s Anglophilia

The Genealogy of the Choice for Resistance in the First Version of Primavera di bellezza

Abstract

This article examines the cultural genealogy of Johnny’s choice for resistance in the first version of Beppe Fenoglio’s Primavera di bellezza. While recent Fenoglio scholarship has expanded toward peripheral areas of the author’s corpus—such as translations, letters, and preparatory materials—the first redaction of Primavera di bellezza (Pdb1), and especially its eight opening chapters later removed from the 1959 edition, have rarely been the object of sustained critical analysis. Yet these pages offer a crucial perspective on the protagonist’s prewar formation. Through a close reading of three key narrative moments, the article reconstructs the gradual emergence of Johnny’s anti-fascist subjectivity. First, the novel’s opening scene (set in Alba in 1942) introduces Johnny’s anglophilia as a linguistic and cultural posture already distancing him from the rhetoric of the fascist regime. Second, a series of school flashbacks set during the early phase of the Second World War reveal how this orientation developed within the educational institutions of fascist Italy, through the indirect influence of teachers and everyday practices of cultural dissent. Finally, the episode set in a Turin bookshop—interpreted as a heterotopic space in Foucauldian terms—brings this cultural disposition to the level of explicit ideological self-awareness. By tracing this progression, the article argues that the first version of Primavera di bellezza makes visible the cultural and intellectual background of Johnny’s later decision to join the Resistance, revealing how his opposition to fascism takes shape primarily through a process of cultural formation.