Why Read the Classics? Read online

  ITALO CALVINO

  Why Read The Classics?

  Italo Calvino’s works include Numbers in the Dark, The Road to San Giovanni, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, The Baron in the Trees, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Invisible Cities, Marcovaldo, and Mr. Palomar. Calvino died in 1985.

  Also by ITALO CALVINO

  The Baron in the Trees

  The Castle of Crossed Destinies

  Cosmicomics

  Difficult Loves

  Fantastic Tales

  If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

  Invisible Cities

  Italian Folktales

  Marcovaldo

  Mr. Palomar

  The Nonexistent Knight and the Cloven Viscount

  Numbers in the Dark

  The Road to San Giovanni

  Six Memos for the Next Millennium

  t zero

  Under the Jaguar Sun

  The Uses of Literature

  The Watcher and Other Stories

  Contents

  Translator’s Introduction

  Preface

  Why Read the Classics?

  The Odysseys Within The Odyssey

  Xenophon’s Anabasis

  Ovid and Universal Contiguity

  The Sky, Man, the Elephant

  Nezami’s Seven Princesses

  Tirant lo Blanc

  The Structure of the Orlando Furioso

  Brief Anthology of Octaves from Ariosto

  Gerolamo Cardano

  The Book of Nature in Galileo

  Cyrano on the Moon

  Robinson Crusoe, Journal of Mercantile Virtues

  Candide, or Concerning Narrative Rapidity

  Denis Diderot, Jacques le Fataliste

  Giammaria Ortes

  Knowledge as Dust-cloud in Stendhal

  Guide for New Readers of Stendhal’s Charterhouse

  The City as Novel in Balzac

  Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

  Gustave Flaubert, Trois Contes

  Leo Tolstoy, Two Hussars

  Mark Twain, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg

  Henry James, Daisy Miller

  Robert Louis Stevenson, The Pavilion on the Links

  Conrad’s Captains

  Pasternak and the Revolution

  The World is an Artichoke

  Carlo Emilio Gadda, the Pasticciaccio

  Eugenio Montale, ‘Forse un mattino andando’

  Montale’s Cliff

  Hemingway and Ourselves

  Francis Ponge

  Jorge Luis Borges

  The Philosophy of Raymond Queneau

  Pavese and Human Sacrifice

  Publisher’s Note

  Translator’s Introduction

  Eleven of the thirty-six essays in this book have appeared in English before.1 The justification for retranslating those eleven pieces stems from the desire to provide an integral English version that corresponds exactly to the important posthumous anthology Perché leggere i classici (Milan: Mondadori, 1991). That volume represents a personal collection of essays on Calvino’s classics, selected in consultation with the author’s widow, and based on material that the author had set aside for some such future publication. Calvino’s English readers now not only have access to a substantial and coherent sample of his literary criticism but can also gain an insight into what amounts to his personal canon of great classics. Some of the essays appearing here for the first time in English translation will be of particular interest to Calvino’s readers in the Anglo-American world: no fewer than seven of them deal with major authors of texts in English (Defoe, Dickens, Conrad, Stevenson, Twain, James, Hemingway), while others contain substantial references to writers such as Sterne (Diderot), Shakespeare (Ortes), Dickens (Balzac) and Kipling (Hemingway).

  One of several other insights that this collection offers is the omnivorous nature of Calvino’s tastes in reading. Apart from the seven essays on texts in English, Italian literature naturally enjoys pride of place with ten essays, but there are no fewer than nine devoted to French works, four to classical authors from the ancient world, and two each to Russian and Hispanic writers.

  The volume also provides an idea of how one of the twentieth century’s greatest fiction writers developed as a literary critic, starting with early essays from his militant Communist period in the 1950s (on Conrad, Hemingway, Defoe, Pasternak), covering his prolific and varied literary interests in the 1970s (English, Russian, French and Greco-Roman writers), right down to some of his final and finest essays written in the 1980s. The essays chart the development of an increasingly sophisticated literary critic, who was anything but provincial in his literary tastes: on the evidence of these essays, even if he had not become an internationally renowned fiction writer, Calvino would have been one of the most interesting essayists and critics of the twentieth century.

  Why Read the Classics? also mirrors the fiction writer’s own creative evolution, from neorealist to postmodernist, from Conrad and Hemingway to Queneau and Borges. Right from the outset he was particularly interested in literature in English: Stevenson and Kipling had been favourite authors in his childhood, and his university thesis on Conrad (completed while he was writing his first novel, in 1946-47) was a precocious study of the ideas, characters and style of the author of Lord Jim. As a writer of neorealist fiction, he was naturally deeply indebted to Hemingway, so it is no surprise to find that these two authors are the subjects of the earliest essays in this collection. During the 1950s, as his own fiction shifts from neorealism towards fantasy, Calvino moves away from twentieth-century authors: the essay on Robinson Crusoe is almost exactly contemporary with his longest, and most ‘Robinsonian’ novel, The Baron in the Trees (1957), and many of the episodes highlighted in Calvino’s essay on Defoe resurface intertextually in his novel.

  The 1963 essay on Gadda was written just at the time when a new literary avant-garde emerged in Italy which also had a profound effect on Calvino. Gadda’s sense of the complexity of the world suited perfectly the mood of the author, who at that stage was turning his back on traditional realist fiction and embarking on the cosmicomical tales that were to confirm his international reputation as a major fantasist. These cosmic interests are reflected in the essays on Cyrano and Galileo: the latter, Calvino claimed in a famous polemic in the 1960s, was one of the most important Italian prosewriters ever.

  Many of the 1970s essays in this collection are introductions to novellas or long short stories by authors such as James, Twain, Tolstoy, Stevenson and Balzac. This was part of an attractive initiative undertaken by Calvino in those years, the series he launched with Einaudi entitled ‘Centopagine’ He always held a high aesthetic regard for brief texts (of no more than one hundred pages) which avoided the complexity and length of the novel. His often declared admiration for eighteenth-century Enlightenment values is reflected in the essays on Diderot, Voltaire and Ortes, while his enthusiasm for classic nineteenth-century fiction is evident in the substantial contributions on Stendhal and Flaubert, and in the detailed analysis of Our Mutual Friend, which displays particular sensitivity to Dickens’ style and to the comparative efficacy of rival Italian translations of the novel.

  One final trend also evident here is worth noting: in the 1970s and 1980s not only does Calvino turn back to Italian classics such as Ariosto, but he also rereads a number of ancient texts, such as Homer, Xenophon, Ovid and Pliny. His creative writing in this period is also informed by this new aspiration towards classical qualities: in the central section of Invisible Cities, for instance, the city of Baucis explicitly recalls the myth in the central book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, discussed at length in the essay in this volume. Similarly the central definition of Pliny in the 1982 ess
ay (‘the measured movement of [Pliny’s] prose … is enlivened by his admiration for everything that exists and his respect for the infinite diversity of all phenomena’) throws interesting light on the creative work Calvino was composing at this same time: in one sense Mr Palomar (1983) is a modern, or post-modern, Pliny, its smooth prose encompassing his interest in all flora and fauna. Calvino’s appetite for French literature also embraces contemporary writers such as Ponge and Queneau, the essay on the latter reflecting the Italian author’s interest in that innovative blend of literature and mathematics that was characteristic of the French author and his friends in the OULIPO (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle); while Ponge’s defamiliarisation of quotidian objects echoes Mr Palomar’s attempt to see the universe with fresh eyes, whether it be waves on a beach, the sky at night, or the blades of grass in a lawn. The collection as a whole thus offers a kind of rear view into the everyday workshop of a great creative writer: what Calvino read was often metamorphosed creatively, intertextually, into what Calvino wrote.

  Despite the variety of texts discussed here, and their suggestion of the author’s evolution, there are important constants. There is an extraordinary consistency in his appreciation of those works that celebrate the practicality and nobility of human labour, a line that Calvino traces from Xenophon to Defoe and Voltaire before reaching Conrad and Hemingway. On the stylistic side, these essays demonstrate how Calvino consistently appreciated the five literary qualities that he regarded as essential for the next millennium: lightness (Cyrano, Diderot, Borges), rapidity (Ovid, Voltaire), precision (Pliny, Ariosto, Galileo, Cardano, Ortes, Montale), visibility (Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert), multiplicity or potential literature (Borges, Queneau). Perhaps, then, a further definition of what a classic is could be added to the fourteen definitions put forward in the elegant title essay, ‘Why Read the Classics?’: ‘A classic is a work which (like each of Calvino’s texts) retains a consciousness of its own modernity without ceasing to be aware of other classic works of the past.’

  Any quotations from non-English original texts about which Calvino is writing are my own translations, either based on the original ‘classic’ text or on the translation used by Calvino. Given the wide-ranging nature of these essays I have of course been helped by a number of experts to whom I here express my deep gratitude: Catriona Kelly, Howard Miles, Jonny Patrick, Christopher Robinson, Nicoletta Simborowski, Ron Truman.

  Christ Church, Oxford Martin McLaughlin

  Notes

  1 They appeared in Italo Calvino, The Literature Machine. Essays, translated by Patrick Creagh (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1987), with the following tides: ‘Why Read the Classics?’; ‘The Odysseys Within The Odyssey’; ‘Ovid and Universal Contiguity’; ‘Man, the Sky, and the Elephant’; ‘The Structure of Orlando Furioso’; ‘Cyrano on the Moon’; ‘Candide: an Essay on Velocity’; ‘The City as Protagonist in Balzac’; ‘Stendhal’s Knowledge of the “Milky Way”’; ‘Guide to The Charterhouse of Parma for the Use of New Readers’; ‘Montale’s Rock’.

  Preface

  In a letter dated 27 September 1961 Italo Calvino wrote to Niccolò Gallo: ‘As for collecting essays as occasional and disparate as my own, one should really wait until the author is either dead or at least in advanced old age.’

  Despite this, Calvino did begin to collect his non-fiction in 1980, with the volume Una pietra sopra (Closing the Door), followed in 1984 by Collezione di sabbia (Collection of Sand). Subsequently he authorised for his overseas readership a selection which was the English, American and French equivalent of Una pietra sopra, but which was not identical to the Italian original: it included the essays on Homer, Pliny, Ariosto, Balzac, Stendhal and Montale, as well as the title essay of the present volume. Later still he modified some of the tides of these essays — and in one case, the article on Ovid, he added another page which he left in manuscript form — with a view to publishing them in a subsequent Italian collection.

  In this volume the reader will find most of the essays and articles by Calvino on ‘his’ classics: the writers, poets and scientific authors who had meant most to him, at different stages of his life. In the case of twentieth-century authors, priority has been given to the essays on those writers and poets whom Calvino held in particular esteem.

  Esther Calvino

  Why Read the Classics?

  Let us begin by putting forward some definitions.

  1. The classics are those books about which you usually hear people saying: ‘I’m rereading…’, never ‘I’m reading…’

  At least this is the case with those people whom one presumes are ‘well read‘; it does not apply to the young, since they are at an age when their contact with the world, and with the classics which are part of that world, is important precisely because it is their first such contact.

  The iterative prefix ‘re-’ in front of the verb ‘read’ can represent a small act of hypocrisy on the part of people ashamed to admit they have not read a famous book. To reassure them, all one need do is to point out that however wide-ranging any person’s formative reading may be, there will always be an enormous number of fundamental works that one has not read.

  Put up your hand anyone who has read the whole of Herodotus and Thucydides. And what about Saint-Simon? and Cardinal Retz? Even the great cycles of nineteenth-century novels are more often mentioned than read. In France they start to read Balzac at school, and judging by the number of editions in circulation people apparently continue to read him long after the end of their schooldays. But if there were an official survey on Balzac’s popularity in Italy, I am afraid he would figure very low down the list. Fans of Dickens in Italy are a small elite who whenever they meet start to reminisce about characters and episodes as though talking of people they actually knew. When Michel Butor was teaching in the United States a number of yean ago, he became so tired of people asking him about Émile Zola, whom he had never read, that he made up his mind to read the whole cycle of Rougon-Macquart novels. He discovered that it was entirely different from how he had imagined it: it turned out to be a fabulous, mythological genealogy and cosmogony, which he then described in a brilliant article.

  What this shows is that reading a great work for the first time when one is fully adult is an extraordinary pleasure, one which is very different (though it is impossible to say whether more or less pleasurable) from reading it in one’s youth. Youth endows every reading, as it does every experience, with a unique flavour and significance, whereas at a mature age one appreciates (or should appreciate) many more details, levels and meanings. We can therefore try out this other formulation of our definition:

  2. The classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them.

  For the fact is that the reading we do when young can often be of little value because we are impatient, cannot concentrate, lack expertise in how to read, or because we lack experience of life. This youthful reading can be (perhaps at the same time) literally formative in that it gives a form or shape to our future experiences, providing them with models, ways of dealing with them, terms of comparison, schemes for categorising them, scales of value, paradigms of beauty: all things which continue to operate in us even when we remember little or nothing about the book we read when young. When we reread the book in our maturity, we then rediscover these constants which by now form part of our inner mechanisms though we have forgotten where they came from. There is a particular potency in the work which can be forgotten in itself but which leaves its seed behind in us. The definition which we can now give is this:

  3. The classics are books which exercise a particular influence, both when they imprint themselves on our imagination as unforgettable, and when they hide in the layers of memory disguised as the individual’s or the collective unconscious.

  For this reason there ought to be a
time in one’s adult life which is dedicated to rediscovering the most important readings of our youth. Even if the books remain the same (though they too change, in the light of an altered historical perspective), we certainly have changed, and this later encounter is therefore completely new.

  Consequently, whether one uses the verb ‘to read’ or the verb ‘to reread’ is not really so important. We could in fact say:

  4. A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.

  5. A classic is a book which even when we read it for the first time gives the sense of rereading something we have read before.

  Definition 4 above can be considered a corollary of this one:

  6. A classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers.

  Whereas definition 5 suggests a more elaborate formulation, such as this:

  7. The classics are those books which come to us bearing the aura of previous interpretations, and trailing behind them the traces they have left in the culture or cultures (or just in the languages and customs) through which they have passed.

  This applies both to ancient and modern classics. If I read The Odyssey, I read Homer’s text but I cannot forget all the things that Ulysses’ adventures have come to mean in the course of the centuries, and I cannot help wondering whether these meanings were implicit in the original text or if they are later accretions, deformations or expansions of it. If I read Kafka, I find myself approving or rejecting the legitimacy of the adjective ‘Kafkaesque’ which we hear constantly being used to refer to just about anything. If I read Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons or Dostoevsky’s The Devils I cannot help reflecting on how the characters in these books have continued to be reincarnated right down to our own times.

  Reading a classic must also surprise us, when we compare it to the image we previously had of it. That is why we can never recommend enough a first-hand reading of the text itself, avoiding as far as possible secondary bibliography, commentaries, and other interpretations. Schools and universities should hammer home the idea that no book which discusses another book can ever say more than the original book under discussion; yet they actually do everything to make students believe the opposite. There is a reversal of values here which is very widespread, which means that the introduction, critical apparatus, and bibliography are used like a smokescreen to conceal what the text has to say and what it can only say if it is left to speak without intermediaries who claim to know more than the text itself. We can conclude, therefore, that: