Why Read the Classics?
Page 30
2 A. Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, Leçons sur la phénoménologie de l’esprit professées de 1933 à l’École des Hautes Études, réunies et publiées par R. Queneau (Paris: Gallimard, 1947).
3 ‘Sur Nietzsche’, in G. Bataille, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard), VI, 416.
4 On this subject see D. Hollier, Le Collège de sociologie (1937-1939) (Paris: Gallimard, 1979).
5 Les Écrivains célèbres, vol. II. Before editing Gallimard’s Encyclopédie de la Pléiade, Queneau edited for the publisher Mazenod the three large folio volumes of Les Écrivains célèbres, as well as compiling an ‘Essai de répertoire historique des écrivains célèbres’, published as an appendix. The chapters on each author were entrusted to experts or to famous writers. It is significant which authors Queneau himself chose to write on: Petronius, Boileau, Gertrude Stein. He also wrote the introduction to the final section: ‘Twentieth-century masters’, where he discusses Henry James, Gide, Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Gertrude Stein. Queneau never included his entries in this work in his collected essays; I have inserted in this Italian translation the pieces on Petronius and on the ‘Twentieth-century masters’. Another editorial initiative typical of Queneau was the enquiry Pour une Bibliothèque idéale (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), which he organised and edited: the most famous French writers and scholars were each invited to suggest his or her own choice of tides for an ideal library.
6 R. Queneau, Una storia modello, ed. by R. Romano (Milan: Fabbri, 1973).
7 J. Roubaud, ‘La mathématique dans la méthode de Raymond Queneau’, Critique, 359 (April, 1977).
8 In Cahiers de Linguistique Quantitative (1963).
9 In Subsidia Pataphysica, vol. 29.
Pavese and Human Sacrifice
Each one of Pavese’s novels revolves around a hidden theme, something unsaid which is the real thing he wants to say and which can be expressed only by not mentioning it. All around it he constructs a tissue of signs that are visible, words that are uttered: each of these signs in turn has a secret side (a meaning that is either polyvalent or inexpressible) which counts more than its obvious one, but their real meaning lies in the relation which binds them to the unspoken theme.
La luna e i falò (The Moon and the Bonfires) is the novel by Pavese which is densest with emblematic symbols, autobiographical motifs, and peremptory statements. Perhaps to excess: it is almost as though out of his typical style of narrating, reticent and elliptical, there emerged that profusion of communication and representation which transforms a short story into a novel. But Pavese’s real ambition in this work did not reside simply in the creation of a successful novel: everything in the book converges in one single direction, images and analogies bear down on one obsessive concern: human sacrifices.
This was not a passing interest. The linking of ethnology and Greco-Roman mythology with his own existential autobiography and his literary achievement had always been part of Pavese’s programme. The roots of his devotion to the works of ethnologists lay in the powerful appeal of a work he had read as a young man: Frazer’s The Golden Bough, a work that had already proved crucial for Freud, Lawrence and Eliot. The Golden Bough is a kind of round-the-world tour in search of the origins of human sacrifice and fire-festivals. These are themes which would resurface in Pavese’s mythological revocations in Dialoghi con Leucò (Dialogues with Leucò): the passages in this work on rural rites and ritual deaths pave the way for La luna e i falò. Pavese’s exploration of the theme ends with this novel: written between September and November 1949, it was published in April 1950, four months before the author took his own life, after recalling in one of his last letters the human sacrifices of the Aztecs.
In La luna e i falò the first-person narrator returns to the vineyards of his home village after making his fortune in America; what he is looking for is not only his memories of the place or his reintegration in a society or any revenge for the poverty of his upbringing. He is looking for the reason why a village is a village, the secret that links places and names and generations. It is not by accident that this ‘io’ has no name: he was a foundling in a hospice, brought up by poor farmers as a low-paid labourer; and he grew into adulthood by emigrating to the United States, where the present has fewer roots in the past, where everyone is just passing by, and he does not have to account for his name. Now, back in the unchanging world of his own countryside, he wants to discover the real substance behind those rural images which are the only reality he knows.
The brooding, underlying fatalism in Pavese is ideological only in the sense that he sees it as an inevitable point of arrival. The hilly area of Lower Piedmont where he was born (‘la Langa’) is famous not only for its wines and truffles, but also for the crises of despair which are endemic, constantly afflicting the peasant families. It could be said that not a week goes by without the Turin newspapers reporting the story of a farmer who has hanged himself, or thrown himself down a well, or (as in the episode at the heart of this novel) set fire to the farmhouse with himself, his family and animals all inside.
Of course Pavese does not seek the reason for this self-destructive despair only in ethnology: the social background of the isolated smallholders in these valleys is portrayed here in the various classes with the sense of social completeness of a naturalist novel (in other words a type of literature which Pavese felt was so much the opposite of his own that he thought he could avoid or annex its territories). The foundling’s upbringing is that of a ‘servitore di campagna’ (country labourer), an expression which few Italians understand except the inhabitants of some of the poorest areas of Piedmont—and we hope that they need not know it for long. On the rung below paid workers, he is a boy who works in a family of smallholders or sharecroppers, and receives only his board and the right to sleep in the barn or the stall, plus a minimal seasonal or annual bonus.
But this identification with an experience so different from his own is for Pavese just one of the many metaphors of his dominant poetic theme: his sense of exclusion. The best chapters in the book narrate his experiences of two different festivals: one as the despairing young boy who had to stay at the farm and miss the fun because he had no shoes, the other when as a young man he had to take his master’s daughters to it in the cart. The existential vitality which is celebrated and let loose in the festival, and the social humiliation which now demands revenge, enliven these pages which blend the various levels of knowledge on which Pavese conducts his research.
A thirst for knowledge had driven the protagonist to return to his village; and three levels of this search could be distinguished: the level of memory, the level of history, the level of ethnology. A typical feature of Pavese’s stance is that on these two latter levels (the historical-political one and the ethnological) just one character acts as a guide to the narrator. The carpenter Nuto, clarinettist in the local band, is the village Marxist, the one who recognises the injustices of the world and knows that the world can change, but he is also the one who continues to believe in the phases of the moon as essential for various agricultural activities, and in the bonfires on the feast of St John which ‘reawaken the earth’. Revolutionary history and this mythical, ritual anti-history have the same face in this book, speak with the same voice. A voice which only mutters through his teeth: Nuto is the most closed, taciturn and evasive figure imaginable. This is the opposite extreme from an open declaration of faith; the novel consists entirely in the protagonist’s efforts to get a few words out of Nuto. But it is only in this way that Pavese really speaks.
Pavese’s tone when he mentions politics is always a bit too brusque and trenchant, as though he were shrugging his shoulders because everything is already clear and it is not worth expending any more words. But nothing really was understood. The point of confluence between Pavese’s ‘Communism’ and his recovery of man’s prehistoric and atemporal past is far from clear. Pavese was well aware that he was dealing with the topics which had been most compromised by twentieth-century decade
ntism: he knew that if there is one thing one cannot joke with, that is fire.
The man who comes back to his village after the war records images, following an invisible thread of analogies. The signs of history (the corpses of fascists and partisans which the river still occasionally brings down to the valley) and the signs of ritual (the bonfires lit every summer on the hilltops) have lost their significance in the frail memories of his contemporaries.
What happened to Santina, the beautiful but careless daughter of his masters? Was she really a Fascist spy or was she on the partisans, side? No one can say for sure, because what drove her was an obscure desire to surrender herself to the abyss of war. And it is pointless to look for her grave: after shooting her, the partisans had buried her in vine shoots and had set fire to her corpse. ‘By midday it was all just ashes. A year or so ago the sign of it was still there, like the bed of a bonfire.’
[1966]
Publisher’s Note
The essays collected in this volume for the first time were published in the sources listed below. The asterisk (*) indicates that the title is the one used by the author; whereas words in bold print are the bibliographical notes that Calvino himself had prepared with a view to the eventual publication of some of his essays.
’Why Read the Classics?’ (*), L’Espresso, 28.6.1981.
‘The Odysseys within The Odyssey’ (*), partially published in la Repubblica, 21.10.1981. Later in Risalire il Nilo. Mito fiaba allegoria, ed. Ferruccio Masini and Giulio Schiavoni (Palermo: Sellerio, 1983).
Xenophon, Anabasis, introduction to the BUR (Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli) edition (Milan: Rizzoli, 1978).
‘Ovid and Universal Contiguity’ (*), Preface to an edition of the Metamorphoses, 1979. The only changes Calvino made to this preface written for the Einaudi edition are the change of tide, and the addition of the paragraph on p.33, beginning ‘This technique of metamorphosis’ and ending ‘straightening, joining, separating etc.)’.
(Pliny), ‘The Sky, Man, the Elephant’ (*), preface to Pliny, Storia naturale (Turin: Einaudi, 1982).
‘Nezami’s Seven Princesses’ (*), la Repubblica, 8.4.1982.
‘Tirant lo Blanc’, in Tesoros de España, published by the Spanish Ministry of Culture for the Exhibition, Ten Centuries of Spanish Books’, in the New York Public Library, 1985.
(Ludovico Ariosto), ‘The Structure of the Orlando Furioso’ (*). Text written for the radio, in 1974, on the occasion of the fifth centenary of Ludovico Ariosto’s birth, broadcast on 5.1.1975. Calvino modified the title which had been used when the text was published in Terzoprogramma, 2-3 (1974).
(Ludovico Ariosto), ‘Brief Anthology of Octaves’ (*), La rassegna della letteratura italiana, 79:1-2 (January-August 1975).
‘Gerolamo Cardano’, written on the fourth centenary of the death of Gerolamo Cardano, physician and mathematician, Corriere della sera, 21.9.76.
‘The Book of Nature in Galileo’ (*), written in French, under the title ‘Exigences et perspectives de la sémiotique’, for Recueil d’hommages pour A. J. Greimas (Amsterdam-Philadelphia, 1985). Translated into Italian by Carlo Fruttero.
’Cyrano on the Moon’ (*), la Repubblica, 24.12.1982.
(Daniel Defoe), ‘Robinson Crusoe, Journal of Mercantile Virtues’ (*), in Libri del tempo (Turin: Aurora Zanichelli, 1957).
(Voltaire), ‘Candide or Concerning Narrative Rapidity’ (*). Preface to an Italian edition of Voltaire’s Candide with illustrations by Klee, BUR (Milan: Rizzoli, 1974).
‘Denis Diderot, Jacques le Fataliste’, la Repubblica, 25.6.1984.
‘Giammaria Ortes’, introduction to Calcólo sopra la verità della storia e altri scritti (Genoa: Costa & Nolan, 1984).
‘Knowledge as Dust-cloud in Stendhal’ (*), in Stendhal e Milano. Atti del 14° Congresso Intemazionale Stendhaliano (Florence: Olschki, 1982), where it appeared under the title ‘La conoscenza della Via Lattea (Knowledge of the Milky Way)’.
’Guide for New Readers of Stendhal’s Charterhouse (*), la Repubblica, 8.9.1982.
‘The City as Novel in Balzac’ (*). Preface to a translation of Ferragus, written for the Centopagine series (Turin: Einaudi, 1981).
‘Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend’, la Repubblica, 11.11.1982.
‘Gustave Flaubert, Trois Contes’, la Repubblica, 8.5.1980.
‘Leo Tolstoy, Two Hussars’, preface written for the Centopagine series (Turin: Einaudi, 1973).
‘Mark Twain, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg’, preface written for the Centopagine series (Turin: Einaudi, 1972).
‘Henry James, Daisy Miller’, preface written for the Centopagine series (Turin: Einaudi, 1971).
‘Robert Louis Stevenson, The Pavilion on the Links’, preface written for the Centopagine series (Turin: Einaudi, 1973).
‘Conrad’s Captains’ (*), on the thirtieth anniversary of Conrad’s death, l’Unità, 3.8.1954.
‘Pasternak and the Revolution’ (*), Passato e presente, 3 (June 1958).
(Carlo Emilio Gadda), The World is an Artichoke’ (*). Speech delivered at a meeting of the Premio Internazionale degli Editori (International Publishers’ Prize), in Corfu, 29 April-3 May 1963, supporting the (eventually successful) candidacy of C. E. Gadda. Translated from the French original. Unpublished.
‘Carlo Emilio Gadda, the Pasticciaccio’. Gadda’s American publisher asked Calvino to write this introduction to introduce the novel to the new reading public of the paperback edition. Partially published in la Repubblica, 16.4.1984. Here we give the full edition.
‘Eugenio Montale, Forse un mattino andando’, in Letture montaliane in occasione dell’80° compleanno del poeta(Genoa: Bozzi, 1977). Partially published in Corriere della sera, 12.10.1976.
‘Montale’s Cliff, (*), in memory of Eugenio Montale, la Repubblica, 15.9.1981.
‘Hemingway and Ourselves’ (*), Il Contemporaneo, 1:33 (13.11.1954).
‘Francis Ponge’, written on the occasion of the poet’s 80th birthday, Corriere della sera, 29.7.1979.
‘Jorge Luis Borges’, speech delivered at the Italian Ministry of Education on the occasion of a visit by the Argentinian writer, partially published in la Repubblica, 16.10.1984.
‘The Philosophy of Raymond Queneau’ (*). Preface to an Italian edition of Bâtons, chiffres et lettres and of other essays by Raymond Queneau (Turin: Einaudi, 1981).
‘Pavese and Human Sacrifice’ (*), Revue des Études Italiennes, 2 (1966).
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, DECEMBER 2000
Translation copyright © 1999 by Jonathan Cape
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Italy as Perché leggere i classici by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A., Milan, in 1991. Copyright © 1991 by Palomar S.r.1. This translation originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Random House U.K., London, and subsequently in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1999.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Calvino, Italo.
[Perché leggere i classici. English]
Why read the classics? / Italo Calvino;
translated from the Italian by Martin McLaughlin.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-54931-0.
1. Canon (Literature) 2. Literature—History and criticism. I. Title.
PN81.C25513 1999
809—dc21 99-21535
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