Why Read the Classics?

by Italo Calvino

  Whatever the original source of inspiration, the opening of the novel contains such autonomous drive that it could easily continue under its own steam, ignoring the Renaissance chronicle. Instead, Stendhal goes back to it every so often and resorts to Farnese again as his model. The most incongruous result of following this source is that as soon as Fabrizio removes his Napoleonic soldier’s uniform, he enters a seminary and takes his vows. For the rest of the novel we have to imagine him dressed as a monsignor, a rather uncomfortable notion both for him and for us, because we need to make a considerable effort to reconcile the two images, and his ecclesiastical condition impinges only on his external behaviour and not at all on his spirit.

  Already some years previously another Stendhalian hero, he too a young man thirsty for Napoleonic glory, had decided to don the cassock, seeing that the Restoration had blocked a military career to all except the scions of the nobility. But in The Red and the Black, Julien Sorel’s alternative vocation is the novel’s central theme, a situation with much more serious and dramatic consequences for Julien than for Fabrizio del Dongo. Fabrizio is not Julien inasmuch as he lacks his psychological complexity, but nor is he Alessandro Farnese who was destined to end up as Pope, and as such is the emblematic hero of a tale which can be interpreted as much as a scandalous anticlerical revelation as an edifying legend about a sinner’s redemption. Well then, who is Fabrizio? Leaving aside the clothes he wears and the events in which he lets himself become embroiled, Fabrizio is someone who tries to read the signs of his destiny, guided by the science that he has been taught by the abbé-astrologer Blanès, his real teacher. He asks himself about the future and the past (was Waterloo his battle or not?), but his whole reality is in the present, moment by moment.

  Like Fabrizio, the whole of The Charterhouse overcomes the contradictions of its composite nature thanks to constant motion. When Fabrizio ends up in prison, a new novel opens up within the novel: the novel about the prison, the tower and his love for Clelia, which is something completely different from the rest of the book, and even more difficult to define.

  There is no human condition more anguished than that of the prisoner, but Stendhal is so refractory to anguish that even when he has to represent isolation in a cell inside a tower (after an arrest in mysterious and distressing circumstances) the mental attitudes he conveys are always extrovert and full of hope: ‘Comment! moi qui avait tant de peur de la prison, j’y suis, et je ne me souviens pas d’être triste!’ (‘What? I who was so afraid of it, am now in prison and I have forgotten that I should be sad!’) I have forgotten that I should be sad! Never was a refutation of romantic self-pity uttered so blithely and lustily.

  This Farnese Tower, which never existed either in Parma or Modena, has a very precise shape: actually composed of two towers, a thinner one built on top of the thicker one (in addition there is a house built on the terrace which sticks out, with an aviary on top, where the young girl Clelia appears). This is one of the magic spaces in the novel (in some respects it reminded Trompeo of Ariosto, in others of Tasso), a symbol, clearly: so much so that, as happens with all true symbols, one can never decide what on earth it symbolises. Isolation within one’s own self, obviously; but also, and perhaps even more, coming out of oneself, and amorous communication; for never has Fabrizio been so expansive and loquacious as when using the improbable, highly complicated wireless-telegraph systems with which he manages to correspond from his cell both with Clelia and with his ever resourceful aunt Gina.

  The tower is the place where Fabrizio’s first romantic love flowers, his passion for the unattainable Clelia, daughter of his gaoler, but it is also the gilded cage of Sanseverina’s love which has held Fabrizio prisoner from the outset. So much so that the origin of the tower (chapter 18) goes back to the story of a young Farnese imprisoned in it because he had become his step-mother’s lover: this is the mythical core behind Stendhal’s novels, the ‘hypergamy’ or love for women of superior age or social standing (Julien and Madame Renal, Lucien and Madame de Chasteller, Fabrizio and Gina Sanseverina).

  The tower is also height, the ability to see into the distance: the incredible view on which Fabrizio gazes from up there embraces the whole range of the Alps from Nice to Treviso, and the whole course of the river Po from Monviso to Ferrara. But that is not all; he can also see his own life, and that of others, as well as the network of intricate relations which make up a human destiny.

  Just as the outlook from the tower covers the whole of Northern Italy, so from the height of this novel written in 1839 the future of Italian history is already in view: Prince Ranuccio Ernesto IV is an absolutist petty tyrant, but at the same time he is also a Carlo Alberto able to foresee the future developments of the Risorgimento, and in his heart he cultivates the hope of one day becoming a constitutional king of Italy.

  An historical and political reading of The Charterhouse has always been a predictable and even obligatory approach, starting with Balzac (who defined this novel as the new Machiavelli’s Prince!). Similarly it has always been both easy and essential to show that Stendhal’s claim to exalt the ideals of liberty and progress which were suffocated by the Restoration is extremely superficial. But this very lightness of Stendhal can teach us a historical and political lesson not to be underestimated, when he shows us with what ease the ex-Jacobins or ex-Bonapartists become (and remain) authoritative and zealous members of the legitimist establishment. That such risky stances and actions, which appeared dictated by the most powerful convictions, could show that what lay behind them was very little indeed, is something that we have seen time and time again, in the Milan of those days and elsewhere, but the beauty of The Charterhouse is that this is stated without crying scandal, and accepted like something that is taken for granted.

  What makes The Charterhouse of Parma a great ‘Italian’ novel is that sense of politics as a calculated readjustment and redistribution of roles: there is the prince who while he persecutes the Jacobins worries about establishing future balances of power with them, which will allow him to put himself at the head of the imminent movement of national unity; and there is Count Mosca, who having been a Napoleonic officer becomes a hard-line minister and head of a reactionary party (but only ready to encourage a faction of reactionary extremists in order to show himself up as a moderate by distancing himself from them), and all this without becoming in the least way involved in his inner essence.

  As we read further into the novel, the other Stendhalian image of Italy recedes further into the distance, that of the country of generous sentiments and spontaneity, that locus of happiness which opened up to the young French officer on his arrival in Milan. In La Vie de Henri Brulard, once he reaches this moment and is about to describe his happiness, he interrupts his account with the words: ’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).

  This sentence provided both the subject and the title of Roland Bardies’ last paper, which he was to have read at the Stendhal conference in Milan in 1980 (but it was while he was writing it that he was involved in the road accident that cost him his life). In the pages that he completed, Barthes observes that in his autobiographical works Stendhal emphasises on several occasions the happiness of his time in Italy as a young man, but he never manages to describe it.

  And yet twenty years later, in a kind of après-coup which also forms part of the contorted logic of love, Stendhal writes magisterial pages on Italy: yes, those pages enkindle in the reader like me (but I am sure I am not the only one) that ecstasy, that radiance that his intimate diary mentioned but could not communicate. There is a sort of miraculous empathy between the mass of happiness and pleasure which broke out in Milan with the arrival of the French and our joy in reading: at last the effect narrated coincides with the effect produced.

  [1982]

  The City as Novel in Balzac

  The enterprise which Balzac feels impelled to undertake when he starts to wri
te Ferragus is a vast one: to turn a city into a novel; to represent its districts and streets as characters, each endowed with a personality totally different from the others; to summon up human figures and situations like spontaneous vegetation burgeoning from the pavements of this or that street, or as elements that provoke such a dramatic contrast with those streets that they cause a series of cataclysms; to ensure that in every changing minute the real protagonist is the living city, its biological continuity, the monster that is Paris.

  And yet he had set out with a totally different idea in his head, namely the power exercised by mysterious characters through an invisible network of secret societies. To put it another way, his favourite sources of inspiration, which he wanted to blend to write a single novel-cycle, were two: secret societies, and the hidden omnipotence of an individual on the fringes of society. The myths that will inform both popular and highbrow fiction for over a century all surface in Balzac. The Superman who takes his revenge on the society that has outlawed him by turning into an elusive demiurge will pervade the various volumes of the Comédie humaine in the ever-changing guise of Vautrin and will be reincarnated in all the Counts of Montecristo, Phantoms of the Opera and perhaps even the Godfathers that the most successful novelists would later put into circulation. The murky conspiracy that spreads its tentacles everywhere will become a half-serious, half-playful obsession for the most sophisticated English novelists of the turn of the nineteenth century and will reemerge in the serial production of violent spy thrillers in our own times.

  With Ferragus we are still in the middle of a romantic, Byronic vogue. In an issue of the Revue de Paris for 1833 (a weekly for which Balzac had a contract to write forty pages a month, amidst the constant complaints of the publisher for his delay in delivering manuscripts and for the excessive number of corrections made at proof stage) we find the preface to the Histoire des treize (History of the Thirteen) in which the author promises to reveal the secrets of thirteen determined outlaws bound by a secret pact of mutual help which makes them invincible, and announces the first instalment as Ferragus, chef des Dévorants. (The term Dévorants or Devoirants traditionally signified the members of a guild, ‘The Companions of Duty’, but Balzac certainly played on its false etymology from the much more sinister ‘dévorer’ (to devour), and wants us to think of Devourers.)

  The preface is dated 1831, but Balzac only started work on the project in February 1833, and did not manage to deliver the first chapter in time for the issue following the one that contained the preface, hence it was only two weeks later that the Revue de Paris published the first two chapters together; the third chapter caused the following week’s issue to be delayed, while the fourth and the conclusion came out in a special supplement in April.

  But the novel as published was very different from what the preface had promised: the author was no longer interested in the original project, he was much more concerned with something else which made him agonise over his manuscripts instead of turning out pages to comply with the rhythm demanded by the journal, something which forced him to cover his proofs with corrections and additions, completely altering the typographers’ layout. The plot he followed was still enough to make readers hold their breath at its astonishing mysteries and reversals, and the dark character with the Ariostesque nickname of Ferragus plays a central role, but the adventures to which he owes both his secret power and his public notoriety are in the past and Balzac allows us only to witness his decline. And as for the Thirteen, or rather the other twelve members, the author apparently forgot about them, having them appear only in the distance, in an almost decorative role, at a ceremonial requiem mass.

  What now obsessed Balzac was a topographical epic about Paris, following the intuition that he had been the first to have of the city as language, as ideology, as something that conditions every thought, word and deed, where the streets ‘impriment par leur physionomie certaines idées contre lesquelles nous sommes sans défense’ (by virtue of their appearance impress upon us certain notions which we are powerless to resist), the city as monstrous as a giant crustacean whose inhabitants are merely the limbs which propel it. Already for some years now Balzac had been publishing in journals sketches of city life and portraits of typical characters: but now he had the idea of organising this material into a kind of encyclopedia of Paris in which there was space for a mini-treatise on following women in the streets, a genre sketch (worthy of Daumier) of passers-by caught in the rain, a survey of street vagabonds, an account of the grisette, and a register of the various kinds of language spoken (when Balzac’s dialogues lose their usual rhetorical emphasis they are able to imitate the most fashionable phrases and neologisms, even down to reproducing the intonation of people’s voices — for instance, when a streetseller claims that marabou feathers give to women’s coiffure ‘quelque chose de vague, d’ossianique et de très comme il faut’ (something airy, almost Ossianic and very much up to date)). To these exterior scenes he adds a similar range of interiors, from the squalid to the luxurious (with studied pictorial effects such as the vase of wallflowers in the widow Gruget’s hovel). The description of the Père-Lachaise cemetery and the labyrinthine bureaucracy connected with funerals rounds off the picture, so that the novel which had opened with the vision of Paris as a living organism closes on the horizon of the Parisian dead.

  Balzac’s History of the Thirteen turned into an atlas of the continent that is Paris. After Ferragus, he went on to write (his obstinacy never permitted him to leave a project half-finished) for different publishers (he had already quarrelled with La Revue de Paris) two further stories in order to complete a trilogy. These are two novels which are very different from the first and from each other, but which have in common, apart from the fact that their protagonists turn out to be members of the mysterious club (a detail which is in reality quite marginal to the aim of the plot), the presence of long digressions adding other entries to his encyclopedia of Paris: La Duchesse de Langeais (a novel of passions written on an autobiographical impulse) offers in its second chapter a sociological study of the aristocracy of the Faubourg Saint-Germain; La Fille aux yeux d’or (which is much more important: one of the key texts in that line in French literature which starts with Sade and still continues today, down to, say, Bataille and Klossowski) opens with a kind of anthropological museum devoted to Parisians divided into their various social classes.

  If the richness of such digressions is greater in Ferragus than in the other two novels of the trilogy, that is not to say that it is only in these digressions that Balzac invests the full power of his writing, for even the intimate psychological drama of the relationship between M. and Mme. Desmarets absorbs him totally. Of course we find this drama of a couple who are too perfect much less interesting, given our reading habits which at a certain height of the sublime allow us only to see dazzling clouds and prevent us from discerning movement and contrast. Nevertheless, the way in which the shadow of suspicion that refuses to go away is unable to scratch the exterior of their amorous trust but rather corrodes it from within, is a process narrated in anything but banal terms. Nor must we forget that passages which might only seem to us exercises in conventional eloquence, like the last letter from Clémence to her husband, were the virtuoso passages of which Balzac was proudest, as he himself confessed to Madame Hanska.

  The other psychological drama, concerning a father’s excessive love for his daughter, is less convincing, even though it can be seen as a first draft of Père Goriot (though here the egoism is all on the side of the father, and the sacrifice entirely the daughter’s). Dickens was able to develop a quite different plot from the return of an ex-convict father in his masterpiece Great Expectations.

  But once we accept the fact that the importance given to these psychological dramas also helps to relegate the adventure plot to a secondary level, we must recognise how much the latter still contributes to our pleasure as readers: the suspense works, even though the emotional centre of the story shifts constan
tly from character to character; the rhythm of events is exhilarating even though many sequences in the plot limp somewhat through illogicality or inaccuracy; the mystery of the visits by Madame Jules to the street of ill repute is one of the first criminal mysteries to confront an amateur detective at the opening of a novel, even though the solution is discovered too quickly and is disappointingly simple.

  The work’s whole strength as a novel is supported and enhanced by being founded on the myth of the metropolis, a metropolis in which every character still appears to have a distinctive face, as in portraits by Ingres. The age of the anonymous crowd has not yet begun: and it really is a short period, those twenty years that separate Balzac and the apotheosis of the city in the novel from Baudelaire and the apotheosis of the city in poetry. In order to offer a definition of that transition, two quotations will suffice, by readers from a century later, both arriving at an interest in such problems by different routes.