Why Read the Classics?

by Italo Calvino

  Certainly, his methods pushed him towards generalisations, abetted by his talent for conceptual syntheses. For example, he provided characterisations of the Italians, French, English and Germans, by analysing the respective theatres of the four nations: French theatre is based on change, the English on ‘fixation’, the Italian on ‘first impression’, and the German on ‘final impression’. ‘First impression’, I believe, means immediacy, and ‘final impression’ means reflection; the most difficult term to decode is ‘fixation’, but presuming that it was almost certainly Shakespeare that he had in mind for the English theatre, I think he meant carrying passions and actions to their ultimate consequences, as well as a certain excess in characterisation and theatrical effects. From all this Ortes postulated an affinity between the Italians and the English whose qualities are based on ‘imagination’, and between the French and the Germans for whom ‘reason’ counts for more.

  This is the discourse that opens the liveliest and richest of Ortes’ texts, his Reflections on the Musical Theatre, where the ‘geometrical precision’ of his method is applied to the symmetries and reversals of the situations in melodrama. Here Ortes’ programmatic hedonism focuses on a good that is less uncertain than so many others: that ‘divertimento’ which Venetian civilisation skilfully placed at the centre of social life. And here we can see how it is much more empirical experience than mathematical reasoning that is the basis for the author’s reflections. ‘Every “divertimento” consists in a different movement being experienced by one of the sense organs. Pleasure derives from that diversity of movement, just as boredom stems from the continuation of it. Therefore he who aims to provide pleasure for more than three hours should be certain that he will only produce boredom.’

  Perhaps the pleasure of music and theatre, and the emotions and hopes aroused in gaming, are the only pleasures that are not illusory. As for the rest, behind all his certainties lurks a feeling of melancholy relativism. A Calculation of the Pleasures and Pains of Human Life ends on these words: ‘If such doctrines as mine are thought to betray a contempt for the human species, I myself belong to this species without feeling aggrieved; and if I conclude that all the pleasures and pains of this life are but illusions, I can add that all human ratiocination is but folly. And when I say all ratiocination, I do not exclude my own “calculations”.’

  [1984]

  Knowledge as Dust-cloud in Stendhal

  It was during his Milanese period that Henri Beyle — who up until then had been a man of the world, more or less a genius, a dilettante without a precise vocation and a miscellaneous writer of uneven success — elaborated something that cannot be called his philosophy, since he proposed to go in directly the opposite direction to philosophy, nor his poetics as a novelist since he defined his poetics as an antithesis to the novel, perhaps without realising that he himself would shortly become a novelist, but something which can only be called his epistemological method.

  This Stendhalian method, based on the individual’s lived experience in all its unique irrepeatability, is opposed to philosophy which tends towards generalisation, universality, abstraction and geometric pattern. But it is also in opposition to the world of the novel, which is seen as a world of physical, one-dimensional energies, of continuous lines, of vectorial arrows pointing towards an end, whereas his method aims to purvey knowledge of a reality that manifests itself in the shape of small events, localised in place and time. I have been trying to define this epistemological method of Stendhal’s as something independent of its object; but the object of Beyle’s epistemological quest is something psychological, the nature of passions, or rather of the passion par excellence, love. And the treatise the as yet unknown author wrote in Milan was De l’Amour (On Love), the fruits of his longest and most unhappy Milanese love affair, that with Matilde Dembowski. But we can try to extract from On Love what is now called in the philosophy of science a ‘paradigm’, and see whether this paradigm is valid not just for his psychology of love but for all aspects of Stendhal’s vision of the world.

  In one of the prefaces to On Love we read:

  Love is like what is called the Milky Way in the heavens, a shining mass formed by minute stars, each one of which is often itself a nebula. Books on the subject have noted four or five hundred small subsequent emotions which are hard to identify and which make up this passion, but these are only the grossest of them, often making errors and mistaking what is merely accessory for what is its substance.

  The text goes on to take issue with eighteenth-century novels, including La Nouvelle Héloïse and Manon Lescaut, just as in the page before this he had refuted the philosophers’ claim to be able to describe love as a complicated but geometrical figure.

  We can say, therefore, that the reality whose essence Stendhal wants to explore is punctiform, discontinuous, unstable, a pulviscular cloud of heterogeneous phenomena, each one isolated from the other, and in turn subdivisible into even more minute phenomena.

  At the start of the treatise one might think that the author confronts his subject with the classificatory, cataloguing spirit that in those same years led Charles Fourier to draw up his minute synoptic tables of the passions based on their harmonious, combinatory satisfactions. But Stendhal’s spirit is at the opposite extreme from a systematising order, which it continually avoids even in what he wanted to be his most ordered book. His rigour is of a different type: his discourse is organised around one basic idea, which he terms crystallisation, and from there it branches out to explore the range of meanings which extends beneath the nomenclature of love, as well as the adjacent semantic areas of happiness and beauty.

  Happiness too, the more one tries to confine it within a definition of substance, the more it dissolves into a galaxy of different moments each separated from the other, just like love. Because (as Stendhal says in chapter 2) ‘the soul becomes sated with everything that is uniform, even with perfect happiness’; and the relevant note explains: ‘One single moment in existence provides only one instant of perfect happiness, but the way a passionate man lives changes ten times a day.’

  Nevertheless this powdery happiness is a quantifiable entity, it can be counted using precise units of measurement. In chapter 17 we read:

  Albéric meets in a theatre box a woman more beautiful than his mistress: if you will allow me to use a mathematical evaluation, let us say she is a woman whose features promise three units of happiness instead of two (and let us suppose that perfect beauty gives a quotient of happiness which can be expressed by the number four). Is it any wonder that he still prefers the features of his mistress which promise him one hundred units of happiness?

  We can instantly see that Stendhal’s mathematics immediately become extremely complicated: on the one hand the quantity of happiness has an objective size, proportionate to the quantity of beauty, but on the other it has a totally subjective size in its projection on the hypermetrical scale of amorous passion. Not by chance is this chapter 17, one of the most important chapters in the book, entitled ‘Beauty Dethroned by Love’.

  But then the invisible line which divides every sign also passes through beauty, and we can distinguish an objective aspect — though this is difficult to define — and the subjective aspect of what is beautiful for us, which is made up of ‘every new beauty that we discover in the object of our love’. The first definition of beauty which the treatise provides (in chapter 11) is ‘a new capacity for giving you pleasure’. This is followed by a page on the relativity of beauty, exemplified by two fictitious characters in the book: Del Rosso’s ideal of beauty is a woman who at every moment suggests physical pleasure, while for Lisio Visconti it is a woman who at every turn must incite him to love as passion.

  If we realise that Del Rosso and Lisio are both personifications of two aspects of the author’s psyche, then things become even more complicated, because the process of fragmentation pervades even the subject. But here we become involved in the theme of the multiplication of the Stendhalian se
lf through pseudonyms. Even the ego can become a galaxy of egos: ‘the mask must become a succession of masks, and the use of pseudonyms a systematic use of multiple names’, says Jean Starobinski in his important article, ‘Stendhal pseudonyme’.

  But let us not go any further down this road; instead let us consider the person in love as a single, indivisible soul, particularly as just at this point there is a note which is more precise about the definition of beauty as my beauty, namely what beauty is for me: ‘it is the promise of a character useful to my soul … and is more important than the attraction to my senses.’ Note that here we find the term ‘promise’ which in a note to chapter 17 forms part of his most famous definition: ’la beauté est la promesse du bonheur’ (beauty is the promise of happiness).

  On this phrase, and its predecessors, premisses and later echoes, right down to Baudelaire, there is a very interesting essay by Giansiro Ferrata (‘II valore e la forma’, Questo e altro, VIII (June 1964), pp. 11-23), which highlights the central point of the theory of cristallisation, namely the transformation of a negative feature of the loved one into a pole of attraction. It is worth recalling that the metaphor of crystallisation derives from the Salzburg mines into which branches without leaves were thrown: when they were recovered some months later they were covered with crystals of rock salt, dazzling like diamonds. The branch as it had been was still visible, but every knot, twig and thorn now possessed a transfigured beauty; in the same way the mind of the lover fixes on every detail of the beloved in a sublime transfiguration. And here Stendhal pauses on a very striking example, which seems to hold for him the highest importance both on a general theoretical level and on the level of lived experience: the ‘marque de petite vérole’ on the loved woman’s face.

  Even the little defects of her face, for example a smallpox scar, make the man who loves her feel tender towards her, throwing him into a deep reverie when he sees them in another woman. This is because faced with that smallpox scar he has felt a thousand emotions, mostly delicious, hut all of them of great interest, feelings which in any case are stirred up again with incredible force at the sight of that mark, even if he sees it on the face of another woman.

  It could almost be said that the whole of Stendhal’s discourse on beauty revolves around the marque de petite vérole, almost as though only by confronting the symbol of absolute ugliness, a scar, can he arrive at the contemplation of absolute beauty. In the same way it could almost be said that his entire typology of passions revolves around the most negative situation, that of the fiasco of male impotence, almost as if the whole treatise On Love has its centre of gravity in the chapter ‘Des fiasco’ (On fiascos), and that this famous chapter was the sole reason for writing the book which the author subsequently did not dare publish and which only appeared posthumously.

  Stendhal broaches his subject by quoting Montaigne’s essay on the same topic, but while for the latter this is just one example in a general meditation on the physical effects of the imagination, and inversely on the indocile liberté of the parts of the body which obey the will — a discourse that predates Groddeck and modern treatments of the problematics of the body — for Stendhal, who always proceeds by subdivisions and never by generalisations, it is a question of unravelling a knot of psychological processes, including amour propre, sublimation, imagination and loss of spontaneity. The most desirable moment for Stendhal, the eternal lover, the first moment of intimacy with a new conquest, can become the most anguished moment; but it is precisely upon such a consciousness of this glimpse of total negativity, of this vortex of darkness and void, that one can build up a system of knowledge.

  It is by starting at this point that we could imagine a dialogue between Stendhal and Leopardi, a Leopardian dialogue in which the latter would exhort the former to draw from his lived experiences the bitterest conclusions. This would not be without historical foundation since the two men actually did meet, in Florence in 1832. But we can also imagine Stendhal’s reactions on the basis of, say, those parts of Rome, Naples et Florence which deal with the intellectual conversations he had in Milan sixteen years earlier (1816), in which he manifests the sceptical detachment of the man of the world, concluding that in the company of philosophers he always manages to make himself unpopular, something which never happens to him with beautiful women. In this way Stendhal would have quickly abandoned the Leopardian dialogue and followed the path of the man who does not want to miss out on any pleasure or pain, because the inexhaustible variety of situations which derives from this approach is what makes life interesting.

  Consequently, if we wish to read On Love as a ‘Discourse on Method’, it is hard for us to square this method with those that operated in Stendhal’s times. But perhaps we could see a correspondence between it and that ‘evidential paradigm’ that the historian Carlo Ginzburg has recently tried to discern in the human sciences in the last twenty years of the last century (‘Spie. Radici di un paradigma indiziario’ (Clues: roots of an evidential paradigm), in Crisi della ragione, ed. A. Gargani (Turin: Einaudi, 1979), pp. 59-106). One can trace a long history of this evidential knowledge, based on semiotics, on awareness of traces, symptoms, involuntary coincidences, which privileges the marginal detail, the rejected elements, everything that our consciousness habitually refuses to pick up. It is not inappropriate to see as part of this line Stendhal and his punctiform knowledge which connects the sublime with the infinitesimal, amour-passion with the marque de petite vérole, without ruling out the possibility that the most obscure trace may be the sign of the most dazzling destiny.

  Can we say that this programmatic method articulated by the anonymous author of the treatise On Love will be one which will be faithfully observed by the Stendhal of the novels and the Henry Brulard of the autobiographical works? For the latter we can certainly reply in the affirmative, inasmuch as his aim is defined in precise opposition to that of the novelist. The Stendhalian novel (at least in its most obvious and popular guise) tells stories that have cleanly delineated outlines, in which clearly drawn characters follow their dominant passions with consistency and determination, whereas the autobiographical Stendhal tries to catch the essence of his own life, of his own individual uniqueness in the shapeless, directionless welter of inessential facts. Carrying out this kind of exploration of a life ends up by becoming quite the opposite of what is intended by ‘narrative’. La Vie de Henri Brulard opens like this:

  Will I have the courage to write these confessions in an intelligible manner? I have to narrate, and I write ‘considerations’ on minimal happenings, but ones which because of their microscopic nature need to be told clearly. What patience you will need, reader!

  It is memory itself which is fragmentary by its very nature, and several times in La Vie de Henri Brulard it is compared to a crumbling fresco.

  It is always just like the frescoes in the Camposanto in Pisa, where one can discern an arm very clearly but the bit next to it representing the head has fallen away. I see a sequence of very precise images but they have no other appearance except that which they had in relation to me; or rather I see their appearance only through the memory of the effect that they produced on me.

  Because of this, Stendhal claims, ‘there is no originality or truth except in the details’. Here are Giovanni Macchia’s words in an essay dedicated to this very obsession with detail (in his ‘Stendhal tra romanzo e autobiografia’, in Il mito di Parigi):

  The whole course of our existence is wrapped in an array of small, seemingly unimportant events but which mark and reveal the rhythm of life, like the banal secrets of one day, which we pay no attention to and which in fact we try to destroy…. From Stendhal’s ability to look at everything with a human gaze, from his refusal to select, correct, or falsify, came the most striking psychological intuitions and social insights. (Il mito di Parigi (Turin: Einaudi, 1965), pp. 94-95)

  But fragmentariness concerns not only the past: even in the present something that is only glimpsed involuntarily can have a
n even more powerful effect, like the half-open door through which, in one page of his Journal, he spies a young woman undressing and hopes to catch a glimpse of a breast or a thigh. ‘A woman who, spread out on a bed, would have no effect on me, glimpsed secretly gives me the most enchanting sensations, for in this situation she is natural and I am not preoccupied with my own role and can abandon myself to the sensation.’

  And it is often by starting from the most obscure and private moments that the epistemological process develops, rather than from the moment of full realisation. Here there is a link with the title chosen by Roland Barthes for his paper: ‘On échoue toujours à parler de ce qu’on aime’ (Any attempt to talk about the object of our love is always doomed to failure). The Journal ends on his moment of greatest happiness: his arrival in Milan in 1811. But Henry Brulard had begun by acknowledging his happiness on the Janiculine hill on the eve of his fiftieth birthday, and immediately felt the need to start narrating his unhappy childhood in Grenoble.

  Now is the point when I wonder whether this type of knowledge also holds any relevance for the novels, that is to say I wonder how this squares with the canonical image of Stendhal as the novelist of vital energies, of the will to assert oneself. Another way of asking the same question: does the Stendhal who fascinated me in my youth still exist or was it an illusion? To this latter question I can reply immediately: yes, he exists, he is there just the same as always, Julien is still contemplating from his rock the sparrowhawk in the sky, identifying with its strength and isolation. I notice, however, that now this concentration of energy interests me less, and I am much more intrigued to discover what lies underneath it, all the rest of the picture, which I cannot call the hidden mass of the iceberg because it is not in fact hidden but it does somehow support and keep together everything else.