Learning the wrong lessons from an Italian master

Andrew Clifford

hen an author brings forth a new feeling or understanding, we the readers are moved not only by the increased capacity for emotion or thought opened up for us, but by the reconfirmation that there exists someone who can comprehend us and the world we inhabit better than we can ourselves. Like children who learn that their nightmarish internal or practical problems can be resolved with a few revelatory words from Mum or Dad, we are relieved to discover that we are not, in the widest sense, on our own. The writing of Italo Calvino has precisely this effect: shrewd, detailed, personal, Calvino's short stories and novels offer up a kind of poetic parenting to the reader-infant.

This tutelage is facilitated not only by Calvino's emotional engagement with his work (and by implication us), but by the exactitude with which he uses ideas and theories to address and educate his reader — he is concerned at once with particulari- ties and with structures. Indeed, Calvino's writing cannot be understood without reference to his interest in theoretical disciplines. Of the Sixties he wrote:

Linguistics, information theory, the

sociology of the mass media, ethnology and anthropology, the structural study of myths, semiology, a new use of psychoanalysis, a new use of Marxism [meant that] literature found itself in a more promising situation than it had ever enjoyed before.

Yet he went on to voice strong doubts about art that was solely informed by these new approaches: `And what came of it? Nothing'.

Calvino, born in 1923, grew up in San Remo, and after the second world war began writing conventional, unusually intricate neo-realist stories about his experiences as an anti-fascist partisan. A Communist until 1957, Calvino always attended to the social or political in his fiction, even when it seemed to fly in the face of more traditional naturalistic left- wing literature. His magical fairy- and folk- tales of the Fifties and after, his familial science fiction of the Sixties, or even the post-structuralist narratives and anti-narratives of the Seventies were some- how never rarefied 'experiments'. But they always contained additional ingredients — a sense of idiosyncratic liveliness, a love of story-telling, a secret and penetrating Calvino vocabulary and cadence; and, above all else, an emphasis on the specificity of the world and of human feeling.

His literary territory was, intentionally, 'encyclopaedic'. His subjects included the gravitational attraction between the Earth and the Moon, tarot cards, the boundaries created by a wave, writing, a baron who lives all his life in the treetops, dinosaurs, mitosis or, in one short story, the 'half- respected convention' of topless bathing. One tale would be carved out with the coolness of a chemist or engineer; and the next would be full of passion, humour and flair. And Calvino seemed to have a God- like ability to inspect and catalogue what- ever he was interested in with extraordinary thoroughness.

Like all his books, Under The Jaguar Sun and Six Memos For The Next Millennium, both unfinished, posthumous works (Calvino died in 1985), are microcosmic representatives of Calvino's microcosmic universe. They are superb. Under The Jaguar Sun contains three of five planned stories centred around the senses. Six Memos contains, in fact, only five Harvard lectures on 'values, qualities, or peculiari- ties of literature' — Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility and Multiplicity (the missing sixth is Consistency) — which Calvino commends to writers for the year 2000.

Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude — these are old-fashioned merits for a 'modern' writer to extol, particularly given Calvino's post-structuralist leanings. In fact, while each essay in Six Memos is a soup of deconstructed codes and images, they owe more to F. R. 1.eavis than Derrida in their conversational vigour of expression. A little like the prose of Walter Benjamin, these webs of myth, innaga and allegories possess a 'mood' which is normally fiction's product.

They are crammed with insights, conceits, asides and speculations.. On Quickness, Calvino quotes Giacomo Leopardi, that speed 'almost gives you an idea of the infinite'. On Lightness, Calvino cites Perseus, whose

strength always lies in a refusal to look directly, but not in a refusal of the reality in which he is fated to live; he carries the reality with him (in the shape of a gorgon's severed head in a bag) and accepts it as his particular burden.

With versatile didacticism, Calvino weaves in references to Kafka, Galileo, Sterne, Ignatius Loyola, Leonardo, Beckett and many others.

The three stories of Under The Jaguar Sun are Six Memos' artistic metaphysic made flesh. The title story is a heated exploration of the sense of taste. A husband and wife travelling in Mexico find that their desire for the spiced and aromat- ic dishes of the various locales arouses in them a yearning so carnal it goes beyond even sexual appetite. The excavations they visit are ancient sites of human sacrifice where the victim offered to the gods was subsequently cooked and devoured by the worshippers. The protagonist's wife wonders: 'About the cooking of it — They didn't leave any instructions?' and the story becomes a kind of diagnosis of all the possible meanings of taste: its sensual pleasure, its physical, chemical satis- factions, and most importantly the repressed wish for omnipotence it flatters (cannibalism).

In 'A King Listens' (in another form, a libretto for Luciano Berlio's opera), the reader, addressed in the second person, is imagined as a king upon a throne awaiting his downfall, surrounded by the noise of the palace as it communicates either the support or conspiracy of his subjects. Nothing except the sheer detail and inten- sity of this story is realistic and what it real- ly offers is a prognosis of our own sense of kingship; our uncertainty concerning our self-coherence and mastery of the world. The final story, 'The Name, The Nose', is an only partially successful attempt to bring the sense of smell to link events through time. There is something curt and over- constructed here, and the book ends a little disappointingly.

Calvino was a great teacher, but in Britain we seem to have learnt the wrong lesson. Certainly, those writers who prac- tise what Calvino preached — Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie — offer a forced vivacity in place of Calvino's genuine alert- ness to detail and metamorphosis, or replace Calvino's exact scrutiny of concepts and objects with verbiage treading abstract- ed water. But that should not mean that the approach to writing which Calvino brilliantly exemplified, highly self- conscious, involved with ideas, philo- sophically sophisticated, politically engaged in the most complex way should be rejected. On the contrary, Calvino remains a writer to emulate and from whom we should continue to learn.