The Situation in 1978

‘The big secret is to hide, escape, cover your tracks.’ Something you said to Arbasino,⁵⁶ at the start of the ‘belle époque’, as you called the 1960s. You’ve managed to do so. So much so that nowadays we wonder: is Calvino, like Astolfo, in the moon?

The moon would be a good vantage point from which to observe the earth from a certain distance. Finding the right distance to be present and at the same time detached: that was the problem of The Baron in the Trees . But twenty years have gone by, it is becoming more and more difficult for me to situate myself on the map that charts today’s dominant mental attitudes. And every elsewhere is unsatisfying, you cannot find one. Nevertheless I still reject the role of the person chasing events. I prefer that of the person who continues his discourse, waiting for it to become topical again, like all things that have a sound basis.

‘Discourse’: you said it. Now you have to explain.

Perhaps it was only a certain number of Yeses and Noes and a huge number of Buts. Sure, I belong to the last generation to believe in a model of literature that could be part of a model of society. And both models have gone up in the air. My whole life has been a process of recognizing the validity of things I said No to. But attributions of fundamental value remain, the more so the more you hear them being denied.

That model of society, your generation’s Communist model, has burnt out. New ones have appeared, from the same source. Do you feel at home with any of them?

The workers’ movement meant for me an ethic of work and productivity, which has faded in the last ten years. Today it is existential motivations that are in the foreground: everyone has the right to enjoy life just because they are in the world. This is a ‘creaturalism’ I do not share: I do not love people just because they are in the world. One has to earn the right to exist, and justify it with what you give to others. That is why the common ground which today unites Christian Democrat welfarism and the youth protest movement is foreign to me.

Every elsewhere, you said, is unsatisfying. Where would there be an elsewhere that would suit you?

For many writers, their own subjectivity is self-sufficient. That is where what counts happens. It is not even an elsewhere, basically what you live through is the totality of the world. Think of Henry Miller. Since I hate waste, I envy the writers for whom nothing is wasted, who use everything. Saul Bellow, Max Frisch: daily life as the constant nourishment for writing. I, on the other hand, feel that what happens to me cannot interest others. What I write I have to justify, even to myself, with something that is not just individual – perhaps because I come from a secular and intransigently scientific family, whose image of civilization was a human–vegetable symbiosis. Removing myself from that morality, from the duties of the agricultural smallholder, made me feel guilty. The world of my imagination did not seem important enough to be justifiable on its own. A general context was essential. It is no accident that I spent many years of my life banging my head against a brick wall, trying to square the circle that was involved in living the life of literature and Communism at the same time. A false problem. But still better than no problem at all, because writing only makes sense if you are faced with a problem to solve.

Would you like something which allowed you once more to say Yeses and Noes? To go back to the beginning? Would you like to have the ‘plan’?

Every time I try to write a book I have to justify it with a plan or programme, whose limits I quickly realize. So then I put it alongside another project, many other projects, and this ends up in writer’s block. Every time I have to invent, alongside the book I have to write, the author who has to write it, a kind of writer that is different from me, and from all other writers, whose limitations I see only too clearly…

And what if among the victims of this epoch was the very concept of ‘plan’? What if this was not a transition from a ‘used’ plan to a new one, but rather the death of the whole notion of ‘plan’?

Your hypothesis is plausible, it could be that it is our need to work things out in advance that is disappearing, and that we are entering into the way of life of other civilizations, which do not have time to plan. But the good thing in writing is the happiness in doing something, the satisfaction of something that has been completed. If this happiness replaced the will power involved in plans, then, my goodness, I would sign up immediately.

In one of your early narratives there is a cannon shot which divides The Cloven Viscount in two. For you then [1951] there were many possible divisions: subject/object, reason/fantasy, ‘the outside road’, as Vittorini called politics, and the inner road; Calvino the journalist on the Turin l’Unità and the writer who was already seeking images from the Middle Ages. For you, harmony was lost from the beginning. Have you ever found it again?

That’s true, there is laceration in The Cloven Viscount and perhaps in everything I wrote. And the awareness of laceration carries with it the desire for harmony. But every illusion of harmony in contingent things is mystification, so you have to look for it on other levels. That’s how I arrived at the cosmos. But the cosmos does not exist, not even for science, it is only the horizon of a consciousness that goes beyond the individual, where all chauvinistic and particularistic ideas of humanity are overcome, and one can perhaps attain a non-anthropomorphic perspective. I have never indulged in cosmic euphoria or contemplation in this ‘ascent’. More a sense of responsibility towards the universe. We are part of a chain that starts at sub-atomic or pre-galactic level: giving our actions and thoughts the continuity with what came before us and what will come after is something I believe in. And I would want this to be something that could be gleaned from that collection of fragments that is my oeuvre.

In your search for harmony, you have focused on higher rationality. This is the mathematics of geometrical metaphors (in the Our Ancestors trilogy), the combinatory calculus of structures (in The Castle of Crossed Destinies and Invisible Cities). Becoming more and more refined and perfect, forever upwards. At the top of this, will there not be just silence?

Yes, and this is the anguish I have been living with for years, and I do not know if I will find a way out of it. Even calculus and geometry represent the need for something beyond the individual. I have already said that the fact of existing, my biography, what goes through my head, does not authorize my writing. However, for me the fantastic is the opposite of the arbitrary: it is a way of going back to the universals of mythical representation. I have to construct things that exist for themselves, things like crystals, which answer to an impersonal rationality. And in order for the result to be ‘natural’ I have to turn to extreme artifice. With the inevitable failure this involves, since in the finished work there is always something arbitrary and imprecise which leaves me dissatisfied.

Of your life in the 1950s, the militant years, you said: ‘permanent professional (political) duty’. Of the 60s: ‘belle époque’. What name do you have in your calendar for the third decade that is now drawing to a close?

I would say: non-identification. There have been many things in the air, I have experienced them while remaining open to how they might develop, but always with reservations. In the final chapter of The Castle of Crossed Destinies I compare the figure of the hermit with that of the knight who kills dragons. Well, in the 1970s I have been, above all, the hermit. At a distance, yet not very far away. In the paintings of Saint Jerome or Saint Anthony the city is in the background. An image with which I identified. But in that same chapter of The Castle of Crossed Destinies there is a sudden switch, a revolt: I move towards the juggler, the Bateleur in the Tarot cards. And I offer this as the final resolution. This conjurer and charlatan, presenting himself openly as someone who does conjuring tricks, is deep down the one who is least mystificatory.

The Bateleur, the Juggler: is that the only card the intellectual can play today?

You know that my method never leads me to put everything on one single card. That is why I am remote from the hero-figures of culture in this century. The final three cards in The Castle of Crossed Destinies are three possible alternatives, united in their combination. But if the Bateleur wins, I then feel within me the need to undo all his tricks.

Paris, ‘the metropolis that my long flight took me to’. What were you fleeing, Calvino? And is Paris adequate for this flight?

The hermit has the city in the background, for me that city remains Italy. Paris is more a symbol of somewhere else rather than an actual elsewhere. And in any case is it true that I live in Paris? I have never managed to put together a discourse on my life in Paris, I’ve always said that instead of having a house in the country, I had a house in a foreign city, where I could have no function or role.

To stay in one place you stay away from it. In Paris, watching Italy. What sort of a trick is this?

Among the Invisible Cities there is one on stilts, and its inhabitants watch their own absence from on high. Maybe to understand who I am I have to observe a point where I could be but am not. Like an early photographer who poses in front of the camera and then runs to press the switch, photographing the spot where he could have been but isn’t. Perhaps that is the way the dead observe the living, a mixture of interest and incomprehension. But I only think this when I am depressed. In my euphoric moments I think that that void which I do not occupy can be filled by another me, doing the things that I ought to have done but was not able to do. Another me that could emerge only from that void.

Great absence or great presence, a public personage plays on one or the other. For instance, Tommaso Landolfi won by playing the mystery card. Did you win by absence?

I certainly cannot compete with Landolfi’s consistency. If in recent years I have even written lead articles for the Corriere della sera, that means that a part of me, which is the heir of a serious sounding voice and defined by Fortini as ‘the noble father’, is always on the public stage. It is not that I am very happy about this. I would rather pension off this noble father and use other images of myself. Perhaps that of the ‘cynical child’, to use another Fortini definition, from one of his epigrams.

Between laceration and harmony it is precisely the cynical child who is there, namely irony. What role does irony have for you: defence, attack, making the impossible possible?

Irony warns that what I write must be read with a distracted air, a mood of considerable lightness. And since I sometimes use other tones of voice, the things that count are particularly those I say with irony.

That is an irony for external use. What about inside?

With regard to laceration, irony is the announcement of a possible harmony; and with regard to harmony, it is the consciousness of the real laceration. Irony always warns of the other side of the coin.

We are what we do not throw away. Is that also what you wanted to say in your last story, ‘La poubelle agr ée’ (‘The Common Dustbin’)? What elements in your intellectual journey have and have not ended up in the ‘bin’?

Sometimes it seems to me that I have not thrown anything away, at others that I have not done anything but throw things out. In every experience what has to be looked for is the substance, which is then what remains. Here is a ‘value’: throwing much out in order to conserve what is essential.

With the passing of time the hand sti fens or becomes lighter. How do you come to write now compared with fifteen years ago?

I have learnt to discover the joys of writing to order, when I’m asked to do something for a definite destination, however humble. At least I know for certain that there is somebody for whom my writing serves a purpose. I feel freer, there is not that feeling of imposing on others a subjectivity that even I am not sure about. I believe in the absolute and necessary individualism of writing, but in order for it to work it has to be taken as contraband into something which denies it, or at least impedes it.

Calvino, I will not ask you what you are writing. I’ll ask you what you will not write any more.

If you mean will I never write again what I have already written, there is nothing that I reject in any of my writing. Of course, some roads do close. What I keep open is fiction, a storytelling that is lively and inventive, as well as the more reflective kind of writing in which narrative and essay become one.

[Paese sera, 7 January 1978. From an interview with Daniele Del Giudice. (Author’s note.) On the original is a note by Calvino: ‘Needs editing.’]