The author reflects on an article from 1954 by Fiedler, on Cesare Pavese. Seen in retrospective, Fiedler's article is, in its clever use of the polyvalence convention, another point in favour of the functionalist theory which looks at literature as a system defined by the relations between the roles of producing, mediating, receiving and processing literary texts. It is from this perspective that the author describes how and attempts to explain why the 'myth of Pavese', which flourished in the post-World War II Italian literary system, had to be transformed in order to be acceptable to the American system and which were the effects of this transformation on the reception of his works in the United States.