Why Read the Classics?

by Italo Calvino

  Once he has re-established justice in his reign, Bahram can now reorganise the army and rout the Grand Khan of China. Having thus fulfilled his destiny, he has nothing left to do but disappear: in fact he does disappear, literally, riding into a cavern in pursuit of the wild ass he was hunting. The King in short is, in Bausani’s words, ‘Man par excellence’: what counts is the cosmic harmony of which he is the incarnation, a harmony which is reflected to a certain extent in his rule and subjects, but which resides above all in his person. (In any case, even today there are regimes which claim to be praiseworthy in and of themselves, even though their subjects live abject existences.)

  The Seven Princesses, then, blends two types of Oriental wonder-tale: the celebratory epic account in The Book of the Kings by Firdusi (the tenth-century poet whom Nezami follows) and the novelistic tradition which springs from ancient Indian collections and will eventually lead to The Arabian Nights. Of course our pleasure as readers is more gratified by this latter type of narration (so my advice would be to start with the seven tales and then turn to the frame story), but the frame is also rich in fantastic, magic and erotic refinement (foot-caressing, for example, is very much at a premium: ‘the king’s foot inserted itself between the stunning woman’s silk and brocade garments, right through to her hip’). As in fairy tales, cosmic and religious sentiments reach new peaks. For example, in the story of the two men who go on a journey, one who resigns himself to the will of God, the other who wants to have a rational explanation for everything, the psychological characterisation of the two men is so persuasive that it is impossible not to empathise more with the first man: he never loses sight of the complexity of everything, while the second is a malevolent and mean spirited know-all. The moral that we can derive from this is that what counts is not so much one’s philosophical stance as how to live in harmony with the truth one believes in.

  However, it is impossible to separate the various traditions which converge in The Seven Princesses because Nezami’s heady figurative language blends them all together in his creative melting pot, and he spreads over every page a gilded patina studded with metaphors which are embedded inside each other like precious gems in a dazzling necklace. The result is that the stylistic unity of the book seems all-pervasive, extending even to the introductory sections on wisdom and mysticism. (In connection with the latter I will mention the vision of Mohammed, who rises to heaven upon a winged angel, upwards to the point where all three dimensions disappear and ‘the Prophet saw God but no space, and heard words that came from no lips and carried no sounds’.)

  The decorations of this verbal tapestry are so luxuriant that any parallels we might find in Western literature (beyond the analogies of medieval thematics and the wealth of fantasy in Renaissance works by Shakespeare and Ariosto) would naturally be with works of heaviest baroque; but even Marino’s Adonis and Basile’s Pentameron are works of laconic sobriety compared to the proliferation of metaphors which encrust Nezami’s tale and germinate a hint of narrative in every single image.

  This universe of metaphors has characteristics and constants all of its own. The onager, the wild ass of the Iranian highlands — which if you see it in encyclopedias and, if I remember correctly, in zoos, is no more than an average-sized donkey—in Nezami’s verses acquires the dignity of more noble, heraldic creatures, and appears almost on every page. In Prince Bahrain’s hunts the onager is the most sought after and difficult quarry, often cited alongside the lion as the foe against which the hunter measures his strength and skill. When it comes to metaphors, the onager is an image of strength, and even virile sexual power, but also of amorous prey (the onager pursued by the lion), of female beauty and of youth in general. And since its flesh is extremely tasty, we find ‘maidens with onagers’ eyes, roasting onager thighs on the fire’.

  Another polyvalent metaphor is that of the cypress tree: used to evoke virile strength as well as being a phallic symbol, we also find it used as a paragon of feminine beauty (height is always especially prized), and associated with female hair, but also with flowing waters and even with the morning sun. Almost all the metaphorical functions of the cypress tree are applied also at one point to a lit candle, as well as having several other functions. In fact the delirium of similes here is such that anything can mean anything else.

  There are some bravura passages of strings of metaphors one after the other: for instance, a description of winter in which a series of frosty images (‘the attack of cold had turned the swords into water and water into swords’: the notes explain that the swords of the sun’s rays turn into the water of rain and the rain becomes the sword-like flashes of lightning; and even if the explanation is not accurate, it is still a beautiful image) is followed by an apotheosis of fire, and a corresponding description of spring, full of plant personifications such as ‘the breeze was then pawned for the basil’s perfume’.

  Another catalyst of metaphors is each of the seven colours which dominate each tale. How can one narrate a story all in the one colour? The simplest system is to have all the characters dressed in that colour, as in the black tale which tells of a woman who always dressed in black, because she had been the handmaid of a king who always dressed in black, because he had met a stranger dressed in black, who had told him of a place in China whose inhabitants all dressed in black …

  Elsewhere the link is simply symbolic, based on the meaning attributed to each colour: yellow is the colour of the sun, therefore of kings; so the yellow tale will tell of a king and will end in a seduction, which is compared to the forcing of a casket which contains gold.

  Surprisingly the white tale is the most erotic one, bathed as it is in a milky light in which we see girls moving ‘with breasts like hyacinths and legs of silver’. But it is also the tale of chastity, as I shall try to explain, though everything is lost in a summary of it. A young man, who amongst his many claims to perfection has that of being chaste, sees his garden being invaded by beautiful young girls who dance there. Two of them, after whipping him when they take him for a thief (a certain masochistic element is not excluded here), recognise him as the owner, kiss his hands and his feet and invite him to choose for himself the girl that he likes best. He spies on the girls as they bathe, makes his choice and (still with the help of the two guardians or ‘policewomen’ who guide his every move in the story) meets up with his favourite girl on his own. But in this and in each successive encounter something always happens at the crucial moment which prevents them consummating their relationship: the floor of the room subsides, or a cat trying to catch a little bird lands on the two embracing lovers, or a mouse gnaws through the stalk of a pumpkin on a pergola and the thud of the pumpkin falling puts the young man off his stroke, and so on until the moralising conclusion: the young man realises that first he has to marry the girl because Allah does not want him to commit a sin.

  This motif of constant coitus interruptus is one that is also common in popular tales in the West, where however it is always treated grotesquely: in one of Basile’s cunti (tales) the unforeseen interruptions are remarkably similar to those in Nezami’s tale, but out of it emerges a hellish picture of human squalor, scatology and sexual phobia. Nezami on the other hand paints a visionary world full of erotic tension and trepidation which is both sublimated and enriched with psychological chiaroscuro, where the polygamous dream of a paradise full of houris alternates with the reality of a couple’s intimacy, while the unbridled licentiousness of the figurative language is an appropriate style for the upheavals of youthful inexperience.

  [1982]

  Tirant lo Blanc

  The hero of the earliest Spanish chivalric romance, Tirant lo Blanc, makes his first appearance asleep on his horse. The horse stops to drink from a stream, Tirant wakes up and sees sitting by the stream a hermit with a white beard reading a book. Tirant tells the hermit of his intention to enter the chivalric order, and the hermit, a former knight, offers to instruct the young man in the rules of the order:

  ‘
Hijo mío,’ dijo el ermitaño,

  ‘toda la orden está escrita en ese

  libro, que algunas veces leo para

  recordar la gracia que Nuestro Señor

  me ha hecho en este mundo, puesto

  que honraba y mantenía la orden de

  caballería con todo mi poder.’

  (‘My son,’ said the hermit, ‘the entire rules of the order are written in that book, which I sometimes read in order to recall the favour which Our Lord has done me in this world, since I used to honour and maintain the order of chivalry with all my might.’)

  Right from its opening pages this first Spanish chivalric romance seems to want to warn us that every such text presupposes a preexisting chivalric book which the hero has to read in order to become a knight: ‘Tot l’ordre és en aques llibre escrit.’ From such a statement many conclusions can follow, including the one that perhaps chivalry never existed before chivalric books, or indeed that it only existed in books.

  It is thus not hard to see how the last repository of chivalric virtues, Don Quixote, will be someone who has constructed his own being and his own world exclusively through books. As soon as the priest, the barber, the niece and housekeeper have consigned his library to the flames, chivalry is finished: Don Quixote will be the last exemplar of a species that has no successors.

  The priest still manages to save from that provincial bonfire of vanities the major source texts, Amadís de Gaula and Tirant lo Blanc, along with the verse romances of Boiardo and Ariosto (in the original Italian and not in translation, in which they lose ‘su natural valor’). As far as these books are concerned, unlike others which are spared because they are considered to conform to morality (such as Palmerín de Inglaterra), it appears as if their salvation is due largely to their aesthetic values: but which ones? We shall see that the qualities that count for Cervantes (but to what extent can we be sure that Cervantes’ opinions coincide with those of the curate and the barber rather than with those of Don Quixote?) are literary originality (Amadís is defined as ‘único en su arte’) and human truth (Tirant lo Blanc is praised because ‘aquí comen los caballeros, y duermen y mueren en sus camas, y hacen testamento antes de sua muerte, con otras cosas de que los demás libros deste género carecen’ (here knights eat, sleep and die in their beds, and make a will before they die, along with other things which find no place in other books of this kind)). Thus Cervantes (or at least that part of Cervantes that coincides with etc.) respects chivalric works the more they contravene the rules of the genre: it is no longer the myth of chivalry that counts, but the worth of the book as a text. This is a criterion that is the opposite to Don Quixote’s (and to that part of Cervantes that identifies with his hero), who refuses to distinguish between literature and life and wants to find the myth outside the books.

  What will be the fate of the world of chivalric romance, once the analytical spirit intervenes and establishes clear boundaries between the realm of the marvellous, the realm of moral values, and that of reality and verisimilitude? The sudden but grandiose catastrophe, in which the myth of chivalry dissolves on the sun-scorched roads of La Mancha, is an event of universal relevance, but one which has no counterpart in other literatures. In Italy, or more precisely in the courts of northern Italy, the same process had taken place a century previously, though in less dramatic form, as a literary sublimation of that tradition. The waning of chivalry had been celebrated by Pulci, Boiardo and Ariosto in an atmosphere of Renaissance festival, with more or less marked parodistic tones, but also with nostalgia for the simple popular tales of the cantastorie: the empty remains of the chivalric imagination were now valued only as a repertoire of conventional motifs, but at least the heaven of poetry opened up to welcome its spirit.

  It might be worth recalling that many years before Cervantes, in 1526, we already find a pyre for books of chivalry, or more precisely, a choice between which books to condemn to the flames and which to save. I refer to a very minor text which is hardly known at all: the Orlandino, a brief epic poem in Italian verse by Teofilo Folengo (who was more famous under the name of Merlin Cocai as the author of the Baldus, a poem in macaronic Latin mixed with Mantuan dialect). In the first canto of the Orlandino, Folengo recounts that he was taken by a witch flying on the back of a ram to a cavern in the Alps where the real chronicles of Bishop Turpin are preserved: Turpin was the legendary source of the entire Carolingian cycle. When he compares them with this source he discovers that the poems by Boiardo, Ariosto, Pulci and Cieco da Ferrara are all truthful, even though they contain rather arbitrary additions.

  Ma Trebisunda, Ancroja, Spagna e Bovo

  coll’altro resto al foco sian donate;

  apocrife son tutte, e le riprovo

  come nemiche d’ogni veritate;

  Bojardo, l’Ariosto, Pulci e ’l Cieco

  autentici sono, ed io con seco

  (But Trebisunda, Ancroja, Spagna and Bovo with all the others, should be consigned to the fire: they are all apocryphal, and I accuse them of being the enemies of all truthfulness; but Boiardo, Ariosto, Pulci and Cieco are authentic, and I along with them.)

  ‘El verdadero historiador Turpin’, mentioned also by Cervantes, was a regular point of ludic reference in Renaissance Italian chivalric poems. Even Ariosto, when he feels he has been exaggerating too much, shields himself behind the authority of Turpin:

  Il buon Turpin, che sa che dice il vero,

  e lascia creder poi quel ch’a l’uom piace,

  nana mirabil cose di Ruggiero,

  ch’udendolo, il direste voi mendace. (O.F. 26.23)

  (But the good Turpin, who knows he is telling the truth, though he allows men then to believe what they like, tells incredible tales about Ruggiero, which if you heard them you would call him a liar.)

  The legendary Turpin’s role will be assigned by Cervantes in his work to the mysterious Cide Hamete Benengeli, whose Arabic manuscript he claims merely to be translating. But Cervantes is operating in a world that is by now radically different: truth for him has to be comparable with everyday experience, with common sense and also with the precepts of Counter-Reformation religion. For fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian poets (up to but not including Tasso, in whose case the question becomes really complicated) truth was still fidelity to a myth, as it was for the Knight of La Mancha.

  We can see this even in a late sequel such as Folengo’s, which is halfway between popular and erudite poetry: the spirit of myth, handed down from time immemorial, is symbolised by a book, Turpin’s book, which lies at the origin of all books, a hypothetical book, accessible only through magic (Boiardo too, says Folengo, was a friend of witches), a book of magic as well as a book of magic tales.

  The literary tradition of chivalry had died out first in its countries of origin, France and England: in England it received its definitive form in 1470 in Thomas Malory’s romance, though it also revived again in the Elizabethan faery world of Spenser; while in France it slowly declined after its earliest consecration in poetry in the twelfth-century masterpieces of Chrétien de Troyes. The revival of chivalry in the sixteenth century largely concerns Italy and Spain. When Bernal Díaz del Castillo tries to convey the amazement of the conquistadors at the sight of a completely unimaginable world such as that of Montezuma’s Mexico, he writes: ‘Decíamos que parecía a las cosas de encantamiento que cuentan en el libro de Amadís’ (We would say that it was like the enchanted things recounted in the book of Amadís). Here we feel that he can only compare this strange new reality to the traditions of ancient texts. But if we examine the dates, we shall see that Diaz del Castillo is recounting events which took place in 1519, when the Amadís could still be considered almost a publishing novelty… We can understand, then, that in the collective imagination the discovery of the New World and the Conquest went hand in hand with those stories of giants and magic spells which the contemporary book market offered in vast supply, in much the same way as the first European circulation of the French cycle of tales a few
centuries earlier had accompanied the propaganda that mobilised the Crusades.

  The millennium which is about to end has been the millennium of the novel (the successor of the romance). In the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries the chivalric romances were the first secular books whose circulation had a profound impact on the life of ordinary people, not just on the learned. Dante himself provides evidence of this when he writes about Francesca da Rimini, the first character in world literature to find her life changed by the reading of romances, long before Don Quixote, long before Emma Bovary. In the French romance Lancelot, the knight Galahad persuades Guinevere to kiss Launcelot; in the Divine Comedy the book Lancelot takes on the role played by Galahad in the romance, persuading Francesca to let herself be kissed by Paolo. By seeing the identity between the character in the book who influences other characters and the book which influences its readers (‘Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse’ (the book and its author were Galahads to us)), Dante carries out the first ever, disorientating manoeuvre of metaliterature. In verses that are unsurpassed in density and sobriety, we follow Paolo and Francesca who, ‘senza alcun sospetto’ (completely unsuspecting), allow themselves to be carried away by the emotions aroused by their reading, looking into each other’s eyes every now and then, turning pale, and when they reach the point where Launcelot kisses Guinevere on the mouth (‘il desiato riso’ (her desirable smile)), the desire described in the book makes obvious the desire felt in real life, and at that point life takes on the form narrated in the book: ‘la bocca mi baciò tutto tremante’ (trembling all over, he kissed me on the mouth).