Why Read the Classics?

by Italo Calvino

  But I would like to choose a poem, which though it has long stayed in my memory and bears the scars of that stay, lends itself better to a totally contemporary, objective reading rather than leading to a search for the conscious or unconscious autobiographical echoes that Montale’s poems, particularly the early ones, arouse in me. I am going to choose, therefore, ‘Forse un mattino andando in un’aria di vetro’ (‘Perhaps One Morning Walking in an Air of Glass’), one of the poems that has continued to go round more than most on my mental turntable, and which comes back to me every time without any tremor of nostalgia, as though I were reading it for the first time.

  ‘Forse un mattino’ is an ‘osso di seppia’ (cuttlefish-bone) which stands out from the others not so much because it is a narrative’ poem (the typical narrative poem by Montale is ‘La folata che alzò l’amara aroma’ (‘The Gust that Stirred the Bitter Aroma’), where the subject of the action is a gust of wind and the action itself is simply the realisation of the absence of a person, so the narrative movement resides in contrasting an inanimate subject which is present with a human object who is absent), but because it is without objects, natural symbols, or a particular landscape, it is a poem of abstract imagination and thought of a kind that is rare in Montale.

  But I notice that (and this distances it even more from the others) my memory had corrected a bit of the poem: as far as I am concerned the sixth line begins ‘alberi case strade’ (trees houses streets) or Domini case strade’ (men houses streets) not ‘alberi case colli’ (trees houses hills), which only now rereading the text after 35 years do I see is the right reading. That means that by substituting ‘strade’ (streets) for ‘colli’ (hills), I am setting the action very much in a city landscape, perhaps because the word ‘colli’ sounds too vague for me, or because the presence in the poem of ‘uomini che non si voltano’ (men who don’t turn round) suggests the rush of passers-by. In short, I see the disappearance of the world as the disappearance of the city rather than of nature. (I now notice that my memory was only grafting on to this poem the image of the verse ‘Ciò non vede la gente nell’affollato corso’ (the people on the crowded street do not see this), which appears four pages before this, in a companion piece to this poem.)

  If we look closely, we shall see that what sets off the ‘miracle’ is something natural or rather atmospheric, the dry, crystalline transparency of the winter air, which makes things so clear as to create an effect of unreality, almost as though the halo of haze which usually covers the landscape (here once again I am setting Montale ’s poetry, the early Montale ’s poetry, in the usual coastal landscape, assimilating it into the Ligurian landscape of my own memory) is identifiable with the density and weight of existence. No, that’s not quite it: it is the concreteness of this invisible air, which seems in fact like glass, with a self-sufficient solidity of its own, which in the end settles on the world and makes it vanish. The glass-air is the real element in this poem, and the city in which I place it is a city of glass, which becomes more and more diaphanous until it eventually disappears. It is the definite nature of the air that leads to a sense of emptiness (whereas in Leopardi it is the indeterminacy which reaches the same effect). Or to be more precise, there is a sense of being suspended which is caused by that opening ‘Forse un mattino’ (Perhaps one morning), which is not so much indeterminacy as a careful equilibrium, ‘andando in un’aria di vetro’ (walking in an air of glass), as though we were walking in the air, in the fragile glass of air, in the cold light of morning, until we realise that we are suspended in the void.

  The sense of suspension and at the same time of concreteness continues in the second line because of the oscillating rhythm, with that ‘compìrsi’ which the reader is continually tempted to pronounce ‘còmpiersi’, but notices each time that the whole line rests on that prosaic ‘compìrsi’ which dulls any emphatic overtone in stating the miracle. This is a line which my ear has always been fond of precisely because when you say it mentally it needs some help, it seems to have one foot too many, but it is not in fact one too many: often my memory tends to discard the odd syllable. The most vulnerable area of the line in terms of memory is that ‘rivolgendomi’ (turning round) which sometimes I abbreviate to ‘voltandomi’ (turning) or ‘girandomi’ (spinning), thus disrupting the rhythm of all the successive accents.

  Of all the reasons that cause a poem to stick in the memory (first almost asking you to commit it to memory, then allowing itself to be memorised) metrical peculiarities play a decisive role. I have always been attracted by Montale’s use of rhyme: two-syllable words (‘parole piane’) rhyming with three-syllable ones (‘parole sdrucciole’), imperfect rhymes, rhymes in unusual positions like ‘Il saliscendi bianco e nero dei / [balestrucci dal palo]’ (the black and white rise and fall of the little swallows from the pole) where ‘dei’ rhymes with ‘dove piú non sei’ (where you are no more). The surprise in the rhyme is not just a question of sound: Montale is one of the few poets who knows the secret of using rhyme to lower the tone, not to raise it, with unmistakable repercussions on meaning. Here the word ‘miracolo’ (miracle) which closes the second line is attenuated by rhyming with ‘ubriaco’ (drunk), and the whole quatrain seems to stay teetering on the edge, vibrating eerily.

  The ‘miracle’ is Montale’s first theme, which he never abandons: it is the ‘maglia rotta nella rete’ (broken skein in the net), ‘l’anello che non tiene’ (the link that does not hold) in the opening poem, but this poem is one of the few occasions on which that other truth which the poet presents beyond the solid wall of the empirical world is revealed in a definable experience. We could say that it is about nothing more nor less than the unreality of the world, if that definition did not risk making hazy and generic something which is conveyed to us in precise terms. The unreality of the world is the basis particularly of Oriental philosophies, religions and literatures, but this poem moves in a different epistemological area, one of clarity and transparency, just as though it were a mental ‘aria di vetro’ (air of glass). Merleau-Ponty has many fine pages in his Phenomenology of Perception on cases in which the subjective experience of space separates from the objective experience of the world (at night in the dark, in dreams, under the influence of drugs, when suffering from schizophrenia etc.). This poem could be one of Merleau-Ponty’s examples: space separates from the world and presents itself to us as just space, empty and limitless. The poet greets this discovery favourably, as a ‘miracle’, as the acquisition of a truth as opposed to the ‘inganno consueto’ (usual illusion), but it also makes him suffer a terrifying vertigo: ‘con un terrore di ubriaco’ (with a drunk’s terror). Not even the ‘aria di vetro’ (air of glass) can support man’s footsteps any more: that balanced opening with ‘andando’ (going), after the sudden turning around, becomes a kind of staggering without anything to hold on to.

  The ‘di gitto’ (instantly) which closes the first line of the second quatrain limits the experience of the void in temporal terms to an instant. The walking movement resumes again inside a landscape that is solid but now fleeting: we realise that the poet is merely following one of many vectorial lines along which the other men present in this space also move, ‘gli uomini che non si voltano’ (the men who do not turn round). The poem thus ends on a multiple movement of people along uniform straight lines.

  The doubt still remains whether these other men had also disappeared in the instant when the world disappeared. Amongst the objects which come back ‘ad accamparsi’ (to position themselves) there are trees but no men (though my memory’s variations lead to different philosophical outcomes); so the men might have remained there; just as the disappearance of the world stays external to the poet’s self, so it could spare every other person from that experience and judgment. The background void is studded with units, populated by so many point-like selves which if they turned round would discover the deception, but they continue to appear to us as backs moving, confident of the solidity of their trajectory.

  We
could see here the opposite situation from that of ‘Vento e bandiere’ (‘Wind and Flags’), where the lability is all on the part of the human presence while ‘II mondo esiste …’ (The world exists…) in a time that will never come back. Instead here only the human presence persists while the world and its values fade away; the human presence is a subject in a desperate condition because it is either the victim of deception or the holder of the secret of the void.

  My reading of ‘Forse un mattino’ could now be considered to have reached its conclusion. But it has sparked off inside me a series of reflections on visual perception and the appropriation of space. A poem lives on, then, also through its power to emanate hypotheses, digressions, associations of ideas in distant areas, or rather to recall and hook on to itself ideas from different sources, organising them in a mobile network of cross-references and refractions, as though viewed through a crystal.

  The ‘vuoto’ (void) and the ‘nulla’ (nothing) are ‘alle mie spalle’ (behind my back). This is the key point of the poem. It is not an indeterminate sense of dissolution: rather it is the construction of an epistemological model which is not easy to refute and which can coexist within us with other more or less empirical models. The hypothesis can be enunciated in very simple and rigorous terms: given the bipartite division of the space surrounding us into a visual field in front of our eyes and an invisible one behind our backs, the first is defined as the screen of deceptions and the second as the void which is the real substance of the world.

  It would be legitimate to expect that having established that behind him is the void, the poet would also extend this discovery in other directions; but in the rest of the poem there is nothing to justify this generalisation, whereas the bipartite model of space is never denied by the text, on the contrary it is reaffirmed by the tautologous third line: ‘il nulla alle mie spalle, il vuoto dietro / di me’ (nothing behind my back, the void behind me). When I knew this poem only by memory, this tautology at times perplexed me, so I tried a variant: ‘il nulla a me dinanzi, il vuoto dietro / di me’ (nothing in front of me, the void behind me); that is to say, the poet turns round, sees the void, turns back round again and the void has spread to all sides. But on reflection I realised that part of the poetic richness was lost if the discovery of the void was not located specifically ‘dietro’ (behind).

  The division of space into an anterior and posterior visual field is not only one of the most elementary human operations in terms of categories. It is a basic fact common to all animals, which starts very early in the biological scale, with the appearance of living beings which no longer develop according to radial symmetry but along bipolar lines, with the organs which relate to the outside world placed at one end of the body: a mouth and some nerve ends, some of which will become organs of sight. From that point on the world is identified with the anterior field, and complementary to this there is an unknowable zone, a zone of non-world, of void, located behind the observer. As it moves and adds together the successive visual fields, the living being successfully constructs a complete and coherent circular world, but this is always an inductive model, evidence of which will never be conclusive.

  Man has always suffered from the lack of eyes on the back of his neck, and his attitude to knowledge can only be problematic because he can never be sure what is behind him; in other words, he cannot check if the world continues between the extreme points he manages to see by stretching out his pupils to right and left. If he is not immobilised he can turn his neck and his whole body to confirm that the world also exists there, but this is also the confirmation that his visual field is still what he has in front of him, extending to a width of so many degrees and no more, while behind his back there is a corresponding arc in which at that moment the world might not exist. In short, we wheel round on ourselves putting before our eyes our visual field and we never manage to see what the space which our visual field excludes is like.

  The protagonist of Montale’s poem succeeds through a combination of factors both objective (air of glass, arid air) and subjective (receptivity to an epistemological miracle), in turning round so fast as to manage, let’s say, to cast his eye on the place where his visual field has not yet reached: and he sees nothing, the void.

  I discovered the same set of problems more positively (or negatively, at any rate with the opposite sign) in a legend from the Wisconsin and Minnesota wood-dwellers, cited by Borges in his Fantastic Zoology. There is an animal called the ‘hide-behind’ which when you go for wood in the forest is always behind you, following you everywhere: you turn around, but however quick you are the hide-behind is quicker still and has moved behind you already; you will never find out what it looks like but it is always there. Borges does not cite his sources, and it could be that he invented this legend himself; but that would not take anything away from its hypothetical force which I would say is genetic, categorical. We could say that Montale’s man is the one who has managed to turn round and see what the hide-behind looks like: and it is more frightening than any other animal, it is the void.

  Continuing with these free-wheeling digressions, one could argue that the context of this whole discourse precedes a fundamental anthropological revolution in the twentieth century: the invention of the rear-view mirror in cars. Motorised man should feel reassured of the existence of the world behind him, in the sense that he possesses an eye that can look backwards. I am talking of car-mirrors in particular, not of mirrors in general, because in ordinary mirrors the world behind us is seen as adjacent to or complementary to our own person. What ordinary mirrors confirm is the presence of the observing subject, in relation to which the world is merely a secondary backdrop. Such mirrors perform an operation that objectifies the self, along with the imminent danger, which is the point of the myth of Narcissus, of being drowned in the self and of the subsequent loss of both the self and the world.

  Instead the great discovery of this century is the daily use of a mirror positioned in such a way as to exclude the self from vision. Motorised man can be considered a new biological species more because of this mirror than because of the motor car itself, since his eyes see a road which progressively gets shorter in front of him and longer behind him, in other words he can take in with one look two opposite visual fields without the encumbrance of the image of himself, as though he were nothing but an eye hovering over the whole world.

  But, on closer inspection, the hypothesis of ‘Forse un mattino’ is not really undermined by this revolution in perception techniques. If the ‘inganno consueto’ (usual illusion) is whatever we have in front of us, this deception extends to that portion of the anterior field of vision which, because it is enclosed in the mirror, claims to represent the posterior visual field. Even if the ‘I’ of ‘Forse un mattino’ was driving along in an air of glass and was to turn round in the same receptive condition, he would see beyond the car’s rear window not the landscape receding into the distance in the mirror, with the white lines on the tarmac, the stretch of road just past, the cars he thinks he has overtaken, but an empty abyss that knows no bounds.

  In any case, in Montale’s mirrors—as Silvio D’Arco Avalle has shown in ‘Gli orecchini’ (The Earrings’) and ‘Vasca’ (‘Pool’) and stretches of water in other poems—images are not reflected but rather surface ‘di giú’ (from down there), coming towards the observer.

  In reality, the image we behold is not something which the eye records, or which resides in the eye: it is something which takes place entirely in the brain, following stimuli transmitted by optic nerves, but which only acquire shape and sense in one part of the brain. That part is the ‘screen’ against which the images stand out, and if I succeed by turning round, that is by turning myself round within myself, in seeing beyond that part of my brain, that is to say in understanding what the world is like when my sense perceptions are not attributing to it the colour and shape of trees, houses, hills, I will be groping in a darkness that has no dimensions or objects, and contains only a d
ust-cloud of cold, shapeless vibrations, shadows on a badly tuned radar system.

  The reconstruction of the world takes place ‘as though on a screen’, a metaphor that can only summon up the cinema. Our native poetic tradition has habitually used the word ‘schermo’ (screen) in the sense of ‘a shelter which obscures vision’ or ‘diaphragm’, and if we wanted to risk claiming that this is the first time that an Italian poet uses ‘schermo’ in the sense of ‘surface on which images are projected’, I do not think the risk of error would be very high. This poem, datable to somewhere between 1921 and 1925, clearly belongs to the cinema age, in which the world now runs before us like the outlines on a film: trees, houses, hills, stretch out on a canvas backdrop which is two-dimensional, and the speed with which they appear (‘di gitto’ (instantly)) and the listing of them conjure up a sequence of images in movement. It is not said whether they are images which are projected, their ‘accamparsi’ (positioning themselves, placing themselves in the field, occupying a field—here the visual field is actually alluded to) might not actually refer to a real source or matrix for the image, they might emerge directly from the screen (as we saw happen with the mirror), but the cinema spectator’s illusion is also that the images come from the screen.

  The illusion of the world was traditionally conveyed by poets and dramatists using metaphors of the theatre; the twentieth century replaces the world as theatre with the world as cinema, a vortex of images on a white screen.

  * * *

  Two distinct speeds run through the poem: the speed of the mind that perceives the intuition and the speed of the world flashing by. Understanding is all a question of being fast enough to turn around suddenly to surprise the hide-behind, a dizzying turning around on oneself, and in that dizziness lies knowledge. The empirical world, on the other hand, is the familiar succession of images on the screen, an optical illusion like the cinema, where the speed of the photograms convinces you of their continuity and permanence.