On the knowable world – James Butler in LRB:

“Italo Calvino has an image problem. He has been pigeonholed as an Italian Queneau or a knock-off Borges. His admirers proselytise – not always helpfully – about The Joy of Semiosis. Reviewers have tried to account for his interest in narrative at both the level of theory and pleasure by calling him a ‘storyteller’, meaning that he wrote books that are both compelling and showily self-aware. Calvino himself embraced the description. The Uses of Literature, a selection of his non-fiction published in English in 1986, opens: ‘It all began with the first storyteller of the tribe.’ He is also called a fabulist, as much for his narrative conceits as for his vast repertoire of Italian folktales. Both terms are more ambiguous than ‘novelist’. Both invite suspicion.
Calvino’s affinity with Parisian intellectuals (he was an Oulipo fellow traveller) has sometimes meant that his later fiction is interpreted as merely illustrating theoretical concepts – concepts a good deal less interesting than the novels themselves. Condensed descriptions can make these books sound like exercises: novels made up of the first chapters of other (fictional) novels or composed at the random direction of Tarot cards or consisting only of descriptions of cities. But each book is also a detective story or a romance, with an array of characters, funny, vain, perceptive, lost, wise.”

(…)

“Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923, but raised in Liguria. His parents, both botanists, were rational, scientific, austere (in a laudatory sense). He fought in the Resistance; the experience led him to join the Italian Communist Party, which he left slightly later than many intellectuals, in 1957 rather than 1956. He went to university to study agronomy (following in his father’s footsteps), while building an eccentric personal canon dominated by Pavese. For most of his adult life Calvino maintained some contact with the ‘real’ world of money, deadlines and public appetites as a publisher at Einaudi. He moved to Paris, though he spent time in Turin and San Remo. He married and had a daughter. Altogether his life lacked the alcoholic and sexual drama of many postwar Anglophone writers. Global celebrity arrived in 1974 with an appreciation by Gore Vidal in the New York Review of Books. Critics murmured about a Nobel. Ten years later Calvino died of a cerebral haemorrhage, aged 61, while completing the texts for his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard. Only five of the six lectures were finished, but they were nonetheless published as Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Their themes – lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity – are the signatures of Calvino’s own work.”

(…)

“He admires writers who force their language into weird contemporary shapes (Joyce, Pound, Gadda), but his solution is Kafka’s: ‘to speak of the intricate tangle of our situation using a language so seemingly transparent that it creates a sense of hallucination.’ For this Calvino, drawn to limits, boundaries and impossible projects, it’s important that a part of the world remains unwritten, and the essay concludes with a striking metaphor: ‘From the other side of the words, from the silent side, something is trying to emerge, to signify through language, like tapping on a prison wall.’ Decaying language, political immobility, homogenised culture: Calvino’s world is also ours. But his sense of the problem is distinctive. He participated in a sharp discontinuity – the Resistance – that changed the future of his country. To experience a shift from historical agency to immobility is a special catastrophe. It is a necessary context for the somewhat barbed praise he gave in 1960 to a group of younger writers more theoretically adept than his cohort but for whom the link between ideology and human action was already dissolving: ‘For me, ideas have always had eyes, mouths, arms and legs. Political history for me is above all a history of human presences.’” (…)

“Calvino had a practitioner’s distrust of academics. He regretted the rise of ‘overlong and over-academic introductions’ and warned against the aesthetic triumph of a ‘rampant neo-professorialism’. Lotaria’s students communicate from this abyss, where ‘events, characters, settings, impressions are thrust aside, to make room for general concepts.’ His objection isn’t that literature is being sullied by the grubbiness of the world: elsewhere he praises the insights offered by new analytic disciplines, though his admiration is qualified by their tendency to displace their object of study. He wants to preserve the primacy of literature as a distinct mode of thought against its reduction to a series of predictable consequences, ‘illustrations, examples, of a discourse created elsewhere’. He disdains critics who impose themselves on a text, already certain of what they are about to discover. Such reading is not only impoverished, inadequate, boring, careless, inert and arid – it isn’t really reading at all.
In a late essay on Carlo Ginzburg, Calvino suggests that the role of the critic might equate to that of the hunter or the lover, but might also degenerate to that of a policeman. ‘The curse of our century’ (he is writing about both states and critics) ‘is that every cognitive interest is transformed into an accusation.’ Intellectuals are always ‘in search of a crime to try, a disgrace to report, a secret to violate’. The analogy is provocative and uncomfortable, and Calvino does not exempt himself. His manuscripts are fraught with evidence of self-suspicion – deletions, insistent rephrasings, new structures. Ludmilla’s ingenuous mode of reading could not be his, but that didn’t make it any less enviable. A longing for inaccessible modes of being recurs through late Calvino: he conjures the thought-world of a caveman, able to read natural signs now closed to us; in his American lectures he represents himself briefly as a leaden Saturn longing to be a quicksilver Mercury, only capable of mimicking weightless and intricate motion in his texts. Yet, he writes, ‘I never forget the gains are greater than the losses’: precision, clarity, the capacity for accurate description. He is impatient with muddy or uncertain aesthetic criteria. Calvino rarely alludes to Dante, but the moments when he does are significant: he compares the critic to Minos, judge of the damned, assigning hellish placements with a flick of his tail, but ‘without ever being sure which god has assigned him that ungrateful task for ever’.” (…)

“All of Calvino’s later work engages with the notion that the world can be changed because it can be known. The fictions don’t attempt to conceal the authorial control that oversees their many recursive layers and complex structures. It is notable that texts so artificial (or, to use the Oulipian verb, ‘constrained’) nonetheless describe reality so closely. It ‘requires a clear mind, control of reason over instinctive or unconscious inspiration, stylistic discipline ... to read the world on multiple levels and in multiple languages at the same time’. Calvino was here describing the discipline required of writers of the fantastic, but not without self-projection. He tells us, with only a little irony, that he aspires to write a book ‘completely beyond the capacities of my temperament and my technical skills’.”

(…)

“It is hard to know whether to call this tension between epistemic modesty and aesthetic ambition a contradiction, not least because Calvino was perfectly aware of the tension and set it to work. Sometimes he seems on the brink of an empty aestheticism. ‘If the world is increasingly senseless,’ he wrote in 1982, ‘all we can do is try to give it a style.’ This is almost caricature Calvino (Penguin has put the quote on the back cover of The Written World). It concludes an essay devoted to the worthwhile difficulty of communicating across languages and insists on the importance of the ‘writer’s particular accent’. Even here, Calvino avoids sentimentalism by approaching the subject at one remove, through quotation, allusion or implication. Styles are unequal, after all. Some repeat the world’s senselessness, its nullities and violence, or render these things slick and inviting.”

Read the article here.

This is a delightful essay, which convinced me at least that I should give Calvino another try. The last time I tried him was in the nineties, my Italian editor was bragging about him, as were many others, I decided he was not for me.

The word is changeable, and to a certain degree knowable – I’m not sure if you have to know something in order to change it – and I’m even less sure that the world is changeable by us.

Ironically enough his insistence on style brings Calvino close to an author like Céline.

The desire to write a novel beyond our capacities, isn’t that what most authors aim for, at least the authors with some serious ambitions.

Style is unequal, but the senseless can be inviting and comforting, that was what absurdism taught us. Slickness is a whole other problem.

And yes, intellectuals are too often ‘in search of a crime to try, a disgrace to report, a secret to violate’. Not only intellectuals. Everybody is an intellectual. Just look at Twitter.
The slickness of finding and reporting about the disgrace, now that’s the sign of our times. Which is not to say that there are no disgraces, there are too many. The outrage has just become another matter, outrage for the sake of outrage, with or without style.