Book Review

by

Andrew Harold Morton

WHY READ THE CLASSICS?

by

Italo Calvino
 

Why Read the Classics? first appeared in 1991 as an attempt on the part of the author's widow to make a representative collection of Calvino's non-fiction. The edition I am reviewing is the 1999 Cape translation by Martin McLaughlin. It helped to get me through a wet week in Wales, for which I am genuinely grateful.

Nowadays, I get rather impatient with literary criticism that is too polemical, that emerges from the blue corner or the red corner to biff you on the nose with some heavily compacted dose of literary theory. This is the kind of writing that suggests the writer is trying to carve out some niche in the bewildering and irritable/contentious world of post-modern academia, and is usually produced by academics rather than writers. You have to search hard for the other kind, but it does exist, and Italo Calvino's Why Read the Classics? falls into this category. Don't be put off by the title. As this is a posthumous collection, it would be erroneous to talk about Calvino's intention, but the net effect of the book is very far from promoting some narrow idea about the canon. It could be argued that the material chosen is, incidentally, very much representative of that Western canon ( unfortunately failing to include any women writers) but Calvino's approach is exploratory and thought-provoking rather than polemical. It is the kind of book you can dip into for half an hour and be immersed in the fictional world of the author concerned.

Calvino's writing career stretches from the 1940s to the time of his death in 1985, and during this time his critical, political and creative perspectives were constantly alive and changing. The progression in his critical thinking, which presumably follows his own progress as an author of fiction from neo-realism to magical realism, can be observed in the dates of the essays, although for the purposes of publication, the thirty or so authors are arranged chronologically, not the essays. A great sense of vitality and discovery pervades these essays, some of which were written as introductions to notable works of fiction, often in translation. Although he was certainly aware of the author as an individualistic bourgeois construct, and is perfectly capable of playing with the idea, nothing of this kind of thinking emerges in his essays, which often show a real affection for the writers in question. What Calvino does supremely well in this series of essays, is to whet our appetites with an exploration of the mind of the writer and his method. This is what makes the essays so special, and I don't believe the insights he achieves would be possible for anyone other than an author, and an author of great imagination and intellectual breadth.

By way of introduction, Calvino presents us with a series of fourteen definitions of what is "classic" in literature, a list which has become a classic of its own. But he is not falling into some sort of "great authors" or canonical fallacy. What he is doing is inviting us to consider the idea that certain works of literature have a quality that we might call classic. Read it for yourself - it's on the internet. All I will say is that these tentative definitions are intriguing, thought-provoking and in no way dogmatic. Each one recommends itself to us as a worthy object of contemplation, for example, number 14 -"A classic is a work which relegates the noise of the present to a background hum, which at the same time the classics cannot exist without." Like the rest of Calvino's book, they serve to whet our appetite for great writing rather than aggressively promote it as a must. The classics he serves up are very diverse, and include non-fiction like the writings of Pliny the Elder and Galileo, whose scientific writings he interestingly proposes as a classic of Italian literature.

Most of the essays run to around ten pages, the longest twice this length, which makes the collection an ideal book to dip into. What makes it a rewarding read is the feeling that we are not merely being treated to Calvino's judgement, but to an imaginative reconstruction of the writer's world. As he says in his essay on Borges: "I will start with the major reason for my affinity with him (Borges), that is to say my recognising in Borges of an idea of literature as a world constructed and governed by the intellect. This is an idea that goes against the grain of the main run of world literature in this century, which leans instead in the opposite direction, aiming to provide us with the equivalent of a chaotic flow of existence, in language, in the texture of the events narrated, in the exploration of the subconscious."

In his essay on Ovid's Metamorphoses, early in the collection, we get a strong idea of what Calvino means by a world "constructed and governed by the intellect." He imbues Ovid's epic compendium of classical myth with a luminescent quality which is rare to find, and typical of the way he operates as critic. Ted Hughes, for example, who dwells on Ovid constantly in his deeply mysterious Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, is always allusive and tangential. He assumes that the reader is well acquainted with this classic text on which Shakespeare drew liberally throughout his life, and perhaps he's right - we should be. Calvino, admittedly with a different purpose, immediately makes Ovid real to us, even if we had never read him before, by reconstructing a vision of Ovid's cosmos, the gods, religion, myth and poetic method. When we are invited to look with Phaethon at the cosmic abyss into which he is to disastrously crash the chariot of the sun, our sense of vertigo is real. The Milky Way, the mansions of the greater and lesser gods, who in their turn have their own household gods, the topography of the heavens - all these things fall into place in a vivid evocation of the poet's cosmic view. As he develops this perspective, Calvino goes on to explore the density of Ovid's poetry in the context of a series of narrative frames. It is extraordinary writing, erudite and detailed, yet a million miles from the dusty academic stuff you might expect on this subject.

In the bright light of Calvino's prose, we appreciate a characteristically southern European lightness of touch. The work is deeply serious, yet lacks that turgid, self-justifying quality characteristic of Anglo Saxon criticism. Calvino's range extends across Classical, Spanish, Italian, French, English, American and Russian literature and it is refreshing to see writers in English like Defoe, Hemingway, Conrad and Dickens viewed from a different national perspective.

Because they are written over three decades, and for different purposes - some as introductions, some as lectures, some as essays, Calvino's approach is never the same. However, there are some recurrent features that make this collection particularly interesting to the practising writer. One is the respect and affection with which he treats the author as a person - the dotty but earnest Pliny, caught between and attempt to rationalise the world and being a " neurotic collector of data, the compulsive compiler of facts" (The Sky, Man the Elephant.") His psychological study of Conrad in "Conrad's Captains", written in 1954, is way ahead of any English criticism of the period in matching Conrad's crotchety, reactionary mentality with his lasting contribution to world literature. The essay begins with a tour of Calvino's library and wonder which shelf and next to which other authors he truly belongs. It is also Calvino's non-English perspective that allows him to see Conrad for his true worth long before the revival of his fortunes in England. The essay on Our Mutual Friend makes some wonderful intertextual links between the Dickens novel, Crime and Punishment (written in the same year) and Waiting for Godot. From his encyclopaedic knowledge of literature, Calvino makes us see things from a different perspective again and again.

For some critics, authors are a problem but Calvino's seems to feel the opposite. He celebrates individuality and explores the writer's mind, as far as is possible, from the inside. A second reason the writer might be interested here is the wonderfully sensitive examination of the creative process, particularly narrative method. If you were ever stuck for an idea, here is a place to start. In this respect, I would particularly recommend the essays on Jorge Luis Borges and Ariosto.

Ticking down the list of essays, I find that I knew about one third of the texts cited well, one third vaguely and one third not at all. Of the texts I knew well, like The Odyssey, Daisy Miller and the fiction of Borges, I found that Calvino was opening up new perspectives and inviting me to reread; of the texts I knew vaguely, Calvino's ability to bring a text alive easily compensated for my lack of knowledge; of the texts I did not know at all, I was encouraged to try them. As an example of the first type, his essay The Odyssey with the Odyssey opens up a hall of mirrors which leaves the reader wondering whether he has ever read the original at all. Calvino has a great eye for the element of paradox in narrative construction, as his essay on Orlando Furioso also shows in its exposition of the wizard Atlante's magic castle, a structure which allows characters to be transposed between physical locations and spiritual states in a truly magical narrative device.

Finally, Italo Calvino is one of those writers who is well served by the Internet. Type in the name, and you will be treated to an almost overwhelming wealth of material, everything from biographies to summaries of his fiction, essays by him and about him. His publishers and his wife have been unusually generous in this respect, and anyone tempted to dip into Calvino would be well advised to start here.

§ § §

Born in Nottingham, England, 1950, Andrew studied at Birmingham University. He has taught English in Birmingham for twenty-six years, where he currently lives with his wife and three children.

He is a founder member of the seventies jazz/rock outfit Slender Loris, and has spent the last few months making their music available through mp3.comand constructing a Slender Loris website.

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