Why Read the Classics?

by Italo Calvino

  What counted in Diderot’s poetics was not so much the originality of a book as the fact that it answered, argued with or completed other books in turn: it is in the cultural context as a whole that a writer’s every endeavour acquires significance. The great gift bequeathed by Sterne not just to Diderot but to world literature as a whole, which would subsequently affect a fashion for romantic irony, was his unbuttoned attitude, his giving vent to his humours, the acrobatics of his writing.

  Nor should it be forgotten that a major model openly admitted by both Sterne and Diderot was Cervantes’ masterpiece, even though they both inherited different elements from it: one combining it with his felicitous English mastery in creating fully realised characters by underlining the peculiarity of a few almost caricature traits, the other drawing on the repertoire of picaresque adventures that take place in inns or on the highways in the tradition of the roman comique.

  Jacques the servant, the squire, comes first — even in the title — before his master, the knight (whose name we are never told, almost as if he existed only as a function of Jacques, as his maître; and even as a character he remains more shadowy than his servant). That their relationship is one of servant to master is certain, but it is also that of two friends: hierarchical relationships have not yet been questioned (the French Revolution is at least ten years away), but they have lost some of their significance. (On all these aspects there is an excellent introduction by Michele Rago to the Italian translation, Jacques il fatalista e il suo padrone, in Einaudi’s ‘Centopagnie’ series: it provides a complete and accurate account of the historical, literary and philosophical context of the book.) It is Jacques who takes all the important decisions; and when his master becomes imperious, he can occasionally refuse to obey, though only up to a certain point and no further. Diderot describes a world of human relationships which are based on the reciprocal influences of individual qualities, which do not cancel out social roles but at the same time are not crushed by them: it is a world which is neither a utopia nor one which denounces social mechanisms, but one which is observed almost transparently in a period of huge change.

  (The same could be said about relations between the sexes: Diderot is ‘feminist’ through his own innate mentality not because he wants to deliver a particular message. For him women are on the same moral and intellectual plane as men, and are equally entitled to the pursuit of emotional and sensual happiness. And in this respect there is an unbridgeable gulf between this work and the cheerful, indefatigable misogyny of Tristram Shandy.)

  As for the ‘fatalism’ which Jacques purports to represent (everything that happens has already been ‘written up above’), we see that far from justifying resignation or passivity, it leads Jacques always to display initiative and never to give up, while his master, who seems to incline more towards free will and individual choice, tends to become discouraged and to let himself be swept away by events. As philosophical dialogues, their discussions are somewhat rudimentary, but scattered allusions refer to the idea of necessity in Spinoza and Leibniz. Against Voltaire, who in Candide or Concerning Optimism takes Leibniz to task, Diderot in Jacques le Fataliste seems to side with Leibniz and even more with Spinoza, who had upheld the objective rationality of a single, ineluctable world, proved by his geometrical method. If for Leibniz this world was only one of many possible worlds, for Diderot the only possible world is this one, whether it is good or bad (or rather, always a mixture of good and bad), and man’s behaviour, whether good or bad (or rather, it too is always a mixture), is valid only insofar as it is capable of responding to the set of circumstances in which he finds himself. (This includes cunning, deceit, and ingenious fictions — see for instance the ‘novels within the novel’, the intrigues involving Madame de La Pommeraye and Father Hudson who devise in real life calculated, theatrical fictions. This is very far from Rousseau, who exalted the goodness and sincerity in nature and in the ‘natural’ man.)

  Diderot had worked out that actually the most rigidly deterministic conceptions of the world are the ones which generate in the individual will an urge to move forward, as though will and free choice can only be effective if they carve out their openings against the hard rock of necessity. This had been true of the religions which had exalted the will of God to the maximum over man’s will, and it will also be true in the two centuries after Diderot which will see new theories of a determinist kind assert themselves in biology, economics and society, and psychology. We can say today that these theories have opened the way to genuine freedoms even as they established an awareness of necessity, whereas cults of will and activism have only led to disasters.

  Nevertheless, one cannot say outright that Jacques the Fatalist ‘teaches’ or ‘proves’ this or that. There is no fixed theoretical point which is compatible with the constant movement and cavortings of Diderot’s heroes. His horse twice goes its own way and leads Jacques to a hill where the gallows stand, but the third time explains all, for it takes him to the house of its former owner, who was the hangman. This is certainly an Enlightenment parable against belief in premonitory signs, but it is also a forerunner of the darker vein of Romanticism with its images of ghostly hanged men on barren hillsides (even though we are still a long way from the special effects of a writer like Potocki). And if the finale descends into a succession of adventures condensed into a few sentences, with his master killing a man in a duel, and Jacques turning into a brigand with Mandrin and then rediscovering his master and saving his castle from being sacked, we recognise here that eighteenth-century concision which clashes with the Romantic pathos of the unexpected and of destiny, such as we find in Kleist.

  Life’s accidents in their uniqueness and variety cannot be reduced to laws and classification, even though each one follows a logic of its own. The story of the two inseparable officers, who are unable to live apart but who nevertheless regularly feel the urge to duel with each other, is told by Diderot with a laconic objectivity which however does not conceal the ambivalence of a passionate element in their relationship.

  If Jacques is an anti-Candide, it is because it was conceived as an anti-contephilosophique: Diderot is convinced that truth cannot be constrained into one form, or into one didactic fable. He wants his literary creativity to match the inexhaustible details of life, not to prove a theory that can be enunciated in abstract terms.

  Diderot’s wide-ranging way of writing is opposed as much to ‘literature’ as it is to ‘philosophy’, but today what we recognise as genuinely literary writing is actually Diderot’s. It is no accident that Jacques the Fatalist has been recently given a modern, theatrical form by a writer of the calibre of Milan Kundera, and that Kundera’s novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, shows him to be the most Diderotian of contemporary writers for his skill in blending together the novel about emotions with the existential novel, philosophy and irony.

  [1984]

  Giammaria Ortes

  Once upon a time there was a man who wanted to calculate everything: pleasures, pains, virtues, vices, truths, errors. This man was convinced that he could establish an algebraic formula and a system of numerical quantification for every aspect of human feeling and action. He fought against the chaos of existence and the indeterminacy of thought with the weapon of ‘geometrical precision’, a weapon, in other words, derived from an intellectual style which was all clear oppositions and irrefutable logical consequences. The desire for pleasure and the fear of force were for him the only certain premisses from which to embark on a journey towards knowledge of the human condition: only by this route could he succeed in establishing that even qualities such as justice and self-denial had some solid foundation.

  The world was a mechanism containing ruthless forces: ‘The true worth of opinions is wealth since it is wealth that changes hands and buys up opinions’; ‘Man is basically a trunk of bones held together by tendons, muscles and other membranes.’ Predictably, the author of these maxims lived in the eighteenth century. From the machine-man of
La Mettrie to the triumph of the cruel pleasures of Nature in de Sade, the spirit of that century knew no half-measures in its rejection of any providential vision of man and the world. It is also predictable that he lived in Venice: in its slow decline the Serenissima felt itself more and more caught up in the crushing contest between the great powers, and obsessed by profits and increasing losses in its trade; and more and more immersed in its hedonism, its gaming halls, its theatres and carnivals. What other place could have provided greater stimulus to a man who wanted to calculate everything? He felt a vocation to devise a system to win at the card-game ‘faraone’, to calculate the right quantity of passion in a melodrama, and even to discourse on the interference of government in the economy of the private individual and on the wealth and poverty of nations.

  But the man in question was not a libertine in learning like Helvétius, nor a libertine in practice like Casanova: he was not even a reformer battling on behalf of Enlightenment values, like his Milanese contemporaries who worked on Il Caffè. (Pietro Verri’s Discourse on the Nature of Pleasure and Pain was published in that journal in 1773, some time after our Venetian author had published in 1757 his Calcolo de’ piaceri e de’ dolori della vita umana (A Calculation of the Pleasures and Pains of Human life)). Giammaria Ortes, for that was his name, was a dry, irritable priest, who wielded the spiky carapace of his logic against the premonitions of the upheaval pervading Europe and rumbling even amongst the foundations of his native Venice. He was a pessimist like Hobbes, loved paradoxes as much as Mandeville, was peremptory in his argumentation, and dry and acerbic in style. Reading him, we are left without a shadow of doubt about his position as one of the most unmisty-eyed champions of Reason with a capital R. Indeed we have to make a real effort to accept the other details supplied by biographers and experts of his entire oeuvre, particularly as regards his intransigence on matters religious and his substantial conservatism. (See, for instance, Gianfiranco Torcellan’s 1961 Einaudi edition of Riflessioni di un filosofo americano (Reflections of an American Philosopher), one of Ortes’ most significant ‘operette morali’.) And this should be a lesson to us never to trust received notions and clichés, such as the traditional view that the eighteenth century was dominated by the clash between a religious spirit heavy with sentiment and a cold, unbelieving rationality: reality is always much more nuanced, the same elements continually combining in a whole range of different assortments. Behind the most mechanical and mathematical vision of human nature can easily lie a Catholic pessimism about earthly matters: precise, crystalline forms emerge from the dust and take shape before returning to dust again.

  At that time Venice was more than ever the ideal backdrop for eccentrics, for a whole kaleidoscope of characters straight out of Goldoni. Ortes, this misanthropic priest obsessed by arithmetical calculations, whom a contemporary drawing portrays as composed and bewigged, with a sharp chin and a slightly malicious little smile, can easily be imagined entering on stage with the look of someone who is used to finding himself amidst people who have no wish to understand what to him is so straightforward, but despite this he insists on having his say and commiserating with others on their errors, until finally we see him disappear from the little piazza shaking his head.

  It is no accident that Ortes belongs to a theatrical century, and to the theatrical city par excellence. The motto with which he usually ended his works, ‘Who can say if I am inventing?’, sows the seed of doubt in us that his mathematical proofs are nothing but satirical paradoxes, and that the rigorous logician who appears as their author is nothing but the mask of a caricature underneath which hides another science, another truth. Was it simply a formula dictated by a perfectly understandable prudence, in order to preempt condemnation by Church authorities? Not for nothing did Ortes admire above all others Galileo: Galileo had placed at the centre of his Dialogue a character, Salviati, who was his spokesman, who declared that he was only playing the part of a Copernican even though he was an agnostic, and that he was participating in the debate only in the way he would participate in a masque … This sort of system can turn out to be more or less efficient as a precaution (it was not for Galileo, but it worked for Ortes, as far as we know), but in any case it demonstrates the pleasure the author takes in such literary games. ‘Who can say if I am inventing?’: in this question, the play of light and shadow typical of the theatre is established at the heart of the discourse, of this and perhaps every other human discourse. Who decides whether what is being said is upheld as truth or fiction? Not the author, since he submits to the verdict of his audience (‘Who can say …?’); but not the public either, since the question is addressed to a hypothetical ‘Who’, who might not even exist. Perhaps all philosophers harbour within themselves an actor who plays his part without the philosopher being able to intervene; perhaps every philosophy, every dogma contains an element of theatrical sketch, though it is impossible to tell where the sketch begins or ends.

  (Just over half a century later Fourier would cut an equally contradictory figure in the literary world, but again typical of the eighteenth century: he too was an arithmomaniac, a radical rationalist and yet also an enemy of the philosophes, he too was a hedonist and sensationalist and a Eudaimonist in dogma, he too was austere, solitary and stern in life, but also a theatre enthusiast, constantly forcing us to ask ourselves ‘Who can say if I am inventing?’ …)

  ‘All men by nature are led to the pleasure of the senses’, so runs the opening of A Calculation of the Pleasures and Pains of Human Life; and it continues, ‘for this reason all external objects become at the same time the particular object of desire of each man.’ In order to possess these objects of his desire man is led to use force and enters into conflict with the power of others; hence the necessity of calculating forces which can cancel each other out. For Ortes nature does not have a maternal image as it does for Rousseau, and the social contract which emerges from his idea is more like a parallelogram of forces in a physics manual. If men in the pursuit of pleasure do not destroy each other in turn, this is because of opinion, which is the foundation of all aspects of what today we call culture in the broad sense. Opinion is the ‘reason why the combined force of all men works more or less on behalf of each individual’. This is not virtue, which is a heavenly gift and as such allows us to sacrifice ourselves for the good of others; but here we are on earth, and what counts is opinion in as much as its objective is ‘one’s own interests’. Ortes provides proofs of how sublime examples of heroism and patriotism from Roman history can be explained as calculated acts in the interests of the individual, and Ortes’ proofs could be backed up by the behaviourism of B. F. Skinner or the sociobiology of E. O. Wilson.

  ‘Opinions’ are those forms of thought on the basis of which we accept that certain categories of people possess, each in its own way, certain levels of wealth or privilege. Ortes cites four in particular: nobles, merchants, soldiers and men of letters. He tries to define the formula to establish the ‘value’ of each of these ‘opinions’, and by ‘value’ he means nothing more nor less than revenue.

  In short, ‘opinion’ in his view amounts to what in more recent times we used to term ‘ideology’, and in particular, ‘class ideology’ but Ortes, more brutally than any historical materialist, loses no time in observing its super-structural specificity, and quickly translates everything into economic terms, or rather into income and expenditure.

  His conclusion, that in a more numerous society one enjoys more pleasures and suffers fewer fears (in which, in short, men are free), than one does living outside any society or within a very limited one, is an axiom which could be developed in a sociological treatise, and subsequently confirmed, modified or corrected in the light of our experience today. In the same way an entire typology and categorisation of conformisms and rebellions, judged according to their relative levels of sociability or unsociability, could be elaborated from the final sentence of the work where there is a contrast between he who is ‘susceptible’ to a g
reater number of ‘opinions’ and he who is ‘susceptible to fewer opinions’: the former becomes ‘more and more reserved, civil and dissimulating’, the latter ‘more sincere, more free and more savage’.

  As a constructor of systems and mechanisms, Ortes could never have had a special penchant for history; on the contrary, one could say that he understood very little about what history is. He who had proved how society is based solely on opinion, considered historical truth only as something to which one can be an eye-witness, hence history, as something only heard from others, was on a level immediately below the living voice of those who witnessed the events. But in his conclusions to A Calculation of the Truth of History, Ortes reveals a desire for cosmic knowledge that focuses on infinitesimal and irrepeatable details: he who always tends to subsume humanity into an algebraic formula of abstract elements, here condemns any pretence at an overall knowledge that is not based on an unfathomable sum of all individual experiences.