Why Read the Classics?

by Italo Calvino

  Of course the Stendhalian hero typically possesses a linearity of character, a continuity of will, and a compactness of ego as he lives through his internal conflicts. All of this seems to take us to the opposite extreme from a notion of existential reality which I have tried to define as punctiform, discontinuous and pulviscular. Julien is entirely defined by the conflict in him between shyness and will which commands him, as though by some categoric imperative, to take Madame de Rênal’s hand in the darkness of the garden, in that extraordinary passage describing his internal struggle in which the reality of his passionate attraction finally triumphs over his presumed hardness and her presumed innocence. Fabrizio is so cheerily allergic to any form of anguish that even when imprisoned in the tower he is never once affected by the depression of incarceration, and his prison transforms itself into an incredibly versatile means of communication, and becomes almost the very condition under which his love will be fulfilled. Lucien is so caught up in his own self-esteem that his desire to recover from the mortification of falling from his horse or from the misunderstanding of a careless phrase by Madame de Chasteller, or from the gaucherie of having kissed her hand, conditions all his future actions. Naturally the course of Stendhal’s heroes is never a linear one: since the scene of their actions is so far from the Napoleonic battlefields that they dream about, in order to express their potential energies they have to don the mask that is at the opposite extreme from their inner image of themselves. Julien and Fabrizio don priestly vestments and undertake an ecclesiastical career whose credibility from the point of view of historical verisimilitude is at least debatable; Lucien simply buys a missal, but he has a double mask, that of an Orléanist officer and that of a nostalgic Bourbon sympathiser.

  This bodily self-consciousness in living out their passions is even more marked in the female characters. Madame de Renal, Gina Sanseverina, Madame de Chasteller, are all above their young lovers either in age or in social standing, and more clear-minded, decisive and experienced than them, as well as being willing to tolerate them in their hesitations before becoming their victims. Perhaps they are projections of the image of the mother that the writer never had and that in Henri Brulard he immortalised in the snapshot of the resolute young woman who leaps over the baby’s bed; or perhaps projections of an archetype whose traces he constantly sought in the ancient chronicles he read as sources: like that young stepmother with whom a Farnese prince fell in love, the prince who is evoked as the first prisoner in the tower, almost as though Stendhal wanted to establish them emblematically as the mythical core behind the relationship between Sanseverina and Fabrizio.

  In addition to this tussle between the wills of the female and male characters, there is also the will of the author and his plan for the work: but each will is autonomous and can only present opportunities which the other wills can either exploit or reject. There is a marginal note in the manuscript of Lucien Leuwen which reads: ‘The best hunting dog can only get the quarry to pass within the range of the hunter’s rifle. If he does not fire, the dog can do nothing about it. The novelist is like the hero’s hunting dog.’

  Amidst these trails followed by the dog and the hunters, we can see taking shape in Stendhal’s most mature work, Lucien Leuwen, a representation of love which is genuinely like a Milky Way, dense with emotions and sensations and situations which follow, supersede and cancel out one another, following the programme outlined in On Love. This happens particularly during the ball at which Lucien and Madame de Chasteller have the chance to talk for the first time and get to know each other. The ball, which begins in chapter 15 and ends in chapter 19, chronicles a succession of minimal incidents, bursts of unremarkable dialogue, gradations of shyness, hauteur, hesitation, love, suspicion, shame and contempt on the part both of the young officer and of the woman.

  What strikes us in these pages is the profusion of psychological detail, the variety of fluctuating emotions and of intermittences du coeur — and the echo of Proust, who will be the inevitable destination along this road, only serves to emphasise how much is achieved here by an extremely economical use of description and a linearity of procedure which ensures that our attention is always concentrated on the knot of essential relationships in the plot.

  Stendhal’s portrait of aristocratic society in the legitimist provinces during the July monarchy is like the objective observation of the zoologist, sensitive to the morphological specifics of the tiniest of fauna, as is openly declared in these very pages in a sentence attributed to Lucien: ‘I should study them as one studies natural history. Cuvier used to tell us, in the Jardin des Plantes, that a methodical study of worms, insects and the most repellent sea crabs, carefully noting their differences and similarities, is the best way to cure oneself of the disgust they inspire.’

  In Stendhal’s novels the settings — or at least certain settings, such as receptions and salons — are used not just to establish atmosphere but to chart positions. Scenes are defined by the movements of characters, by their position at the moment when certain emotions or conflicts are aroused, and in turn each conflict is defined by its happening in that particular place and time. In the same way Stendhal the autobiographer feels the strange necessity to fix places not by describing them but by sketching rough maps of them, where as well as giving a summary account of décor he marks the points where the various characters were, so that the pages of La Vie de Henri Brulard come before us as detailed as an atlas. What does this topographical obsession derive from? From that haste of his which makes him omit initial descriptions only to develop them subsequently on the basis of those notes which merely served to jog his memory? Not only from this, I think. Since it is the uniqueness of every event that interests him, the map serves to fix that point in space in which the event happens, just as the story helps to fix it in time.

  The settings described in the novels are more often exterior than interior: the Alpine landscapes of Franche-Comté in The Red and the Black, or those of Brianza gazed upon by the abbé Blanès from the belltower in The Charterhouse of Parma, but the prize Stendhalian landscape for me would be the plain, unpoetic one of Nancy, as it appears in chapter 4 of Lucien Leuwen, in all its utilitarian squalor typical of the start of the industrial revolution. This is a landscape which betokens a conflict in the protagonist’s conscience, caught as he is between his prosaic bourgeois existence, and his aspirations towards an aristocracy that is now a mere ghost of itself. It represents an objectively negative element but one which is ready to crystallise for the young lancer into buds of beauty if only it can be invested with an existential and amorous ecstasy. The poetic power of Stendhal’s gaze lies not merely in its enthusiasm and euphoria, it lies also in the cold repulsion for a completely unattractive world which he feels himself forced to accept as the only reality possible, such as the outskirts of Nancy where Lucien is sent to quell one of the first workers’ uprisings, as the soldiers on horseback file past through those grim streets in the grey morning.

  Stendhal registers these social transformations through the minute vibrations in the behaviour of individuals. Why does Italy occupy this unique place in his heart? We continually hear him repeat that Paris is the realm of vanity: in opposition to Italy, which is for him the country of sincere and objective passions. But we must not forget that in his spiritual geography there is another pole, England, a civilisation with which he is continually tempted to identify himself.

  In his Souvenirs d’égotisme (Memoirs of an Egotist) there is a passage in which he makes a decisive choice for Italy over England, and precisely because of what we today would call its underdevelopment, whereas the English way of life which obliges its workers to labour for eighteen hours per day seems to him ‘ridiculous’:

  The exaggerated and oppressive workload of the English labourer is our revenge for Waterloo…. The poor Italian, dressed only in rags, is much closer to happiness. He has time to make love, and for eighty to a hundred days per year he gives himself over to a religion which is so m
uch more interesting because it actually makes him a little bit afraid.

  Stendhal’s idea is a certain rhythm of life in which there should be room for many things, especially wasting a bit of time. His starting point is his rejection of provincial squalor, his anger against his father and Grenoble. He heads for the big city: Milan for him is a great city where both the discreet charms of the Ancien Régime and the passions of his own Napoleonic youth live on, even although many aspects of that country of religion and poverty are not to his liking.

  London too is an ideal city, but there the aspects which satisfy his snobbish tastes have to be paid for with the harshness of advanced industrialism. In this internal geography of his, Paris is equidistant between London and Milan: both the priests and the law of profit rule there, hence Stendhal’s continual centrifugal urge. (His is a geography of escape, and I should also include Germany in it, since it was there that he found the name with which he signed his novels: this name was thus a more serious identity than so many other masks that he used. But I would have to say that for him Germany represents only his nostalgia for Napoleon’s epic struggle, a memory that tends to disappear in Stendhal.)

  His Souvenirs d’égotisme, an autobiographical fragment about his time in Paris in between Milan and London, is the text which contains the essential map of Stendhal’s world. It could be defined as his best novel manqué: manqué perhaps because he lacked a literary model that could convince him that it could become a novel, but also because only in this manqué form could a story about absences and missed opportunities develop. In Souvenirs d’égotisme the dominant theme is his absence from Milan, which he abandons after the famous, disastrous love affair. In a Paris that is seen as a place of absence, every adventure turns into a fiasco: physiological fiascos in his affairs with prostitutes, mental fiascos in his relations with society and in intellectual exchanges (for instance, in his meetings with the philosopher he most admired, Destutt de Tracy). Then comes the journey to London, in which his chronicle of failure culminates in the extraordinary tale of the duel that never happens, his search for the arrogant English captain whom he had failed to challenge at the right moment and for whom he continues to hunt in vain through the dockland taverns.

  There is but one oasis of unexpected happiness in this tale of disasters: the house of three prostitutes in one of the poorest London suburbs, which instead of turning out to be a sinister trap as he had feared, is instead a space that is tiny but elegant like a doll’s house. The inhabitants are poor young girls who welcome the three noisy French tourists with grace and dignity and discretion. Here at last is an image of bonheur, a poor and fragile bonheur, as far as could be from the aspirations of our ‘egotist’!

  Must we therefore conclude that the real Stendhal is Stendhal in negative, a writer who must be sought out only in his disappointments, adversities and defeats? No, the value championed by Stendhal is one of existential tension which stems from measuring one’s own specific nature (and limits) with the specific nature and limits of one’s environment. Precisely because existence is dominated by entropy, by the dissolution of everything into instants and impulses like corpuscles devoid of shape or connection, he wants the individual to fulfil himself according to a principle of energy conservation, or rather of constant reproduction of energy charges. This is an imperative that becomes so much more rigorous the closer he comes to realising that entropy will in any case triumph in the end, and that all that will remain of the universe with all its galaxies will be a vortex of atoms floating in the void.

  [1980]

  Guide for New Readers of

  Stendhal’s Charterhouse

  How many new readers will be attracted to Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma by the new film version of the novel, shortly to be broadcast on television? Perhaps very few when compared to the total number of the TV audience, or perhaps very many when compared to the statistics for the number of books Italians read. But no data can ever supply us with the most important figure, and that is how many young people will be smitten right from the opening pages, and will be instantly convinced that this has to be the best novel ever written, recognising it as the novel they had always wanted to read and which will act as the benchmark for all the other novels they will read in later life. (I’m talking particularly about the opening chapters; as you get into it, you will find that it is a different novel, or several novels each different from the other, all of which will require you to modify your involvement in the plot; whatever happens, the brilliance of the opening will continue to influence you.)

  This is what happened to me and to so many others in the various generations that have read the work in the last hundred years. (The Charterhouse came out in 1839, but you have to exclude the forty years that it had to wait before Stendhal was understood, a period he himself had foreseen with extraordinary precision; even although of all his works this was the most instantly successful, and could count for its launch on a lengthy and enthusiastic essay by Balzac, a good 72 pages long!)

  Whether this miracle will happen again and for how long, we cannot be sure: the reasons why a book fascinates us (that it is to say, its powers of seduction, which is something very distinct from its absolute worth) are composed of so many imponderable elements. (As is a book’s absolute worth, presuming that that phrase means anything at all.) Certainly, if I open The Charterhouse again even today, as on every occasion I have reread the book in different periods and throughout all the changes in tastes and expectations, what I find is that the charge of its music, that Allegro Con Brio, immediately recaptures me: those opening chapters in Napoleonic Milan in which history with the rumble of its cannons marches side by side with and at the same pace as the rhythm of the individual life. And the atmosphere of pure adventure which you enter, as the sixteen-year-old Fabrizio wanders around the damp battlefield of Waterloo amidst the victuallers’ carts and fleeing horses, is the archetypal novelistic adventure, full of a deliberately calibrated amount of danger and safety and not without a strong dose of youthful candour. And the open-eyed corpses with outstretched arms are the first real corpses exploited by literature to try to explain what a war really is. And that amorous female atmosphere which starts to circulate from the very first pages, full of protective trepidation and jealous intrigue, already reveals the novel’s real theme, which will accompany Fabrizio right to the end (an atmosphere which cannot but become oppressive in the long run).

  Perhaps it was because I belonged to a generation which in its youth lived through wars and huge political upheavals that I have become a lifelong reader of The Charterhouse. Yet in my personal memories, which are so much less free and serene, what dominates are discords and stridency, not that seductive music. Perhaps the exact opposite is true: we consider ourselves children of a particular epoch because we project Stendhalian adventures onto our own experiences in order to transform them, just as Don Quixote did.

  I said that The Charterhouse contains many different novels and I concentrated on the opening: it starts as a chronicle about history and society, and a picaresque adventure. Then we enter into the heart of the novel, in other words into the world of the small court of Prince Ranuccio Ernesto IV (this apocryphal Parma is historically identifiable with Modena, as is passionately claimed by the Modenese, such as Antonio Delfini, but even Parma people like Gino Magnani remain happy with this account, as though it were a sublimated version of their own history).

  At this point the novel becomes a kind of theatre, a closed space, a chessboard for a game involving a finite number of players, a grey, fixed place in which a whole chain of mismatched passions develops: Count Mosca, a powerful man who is the love slave of Gina Sanseverina; Sanseverina who obtains what she wants but who only has eyes for her nephew Fabrizio; Fabrizio who loves himself first and foremost, enjoys a few, quick adventures as sideshows, and finally concentrates all these energies gravitating around him into his hopeless passion for the angelic and pensive Clelia.

  All this in the
petty world of court and society intrigue, between a prince haunted by fear for having hanged two patriots and the ‘fiscal général’ (justice minister) Rassi who is the incarnation (perhaps for the first time in a character in a novel) of a bureaucratic mediocrity which also has something terrifying in it. And here the conflict is, in line with Stendhal’s intentions, between this image of the backward Europe of Metternich and the absolute nature of those passions which brook no bounds and which were the last refuge for the noble ideals of an age that had been overcome.

  The dramatic centre of the book is like an opera (and opera had been the first medium which had helped the music-mad Stendhal to understand Italy) but in The Charterhouse the atmosphere (luckily) is not that of tragic opera but rather (as Paul Valéry discovered) of operetta. The tyrannical rule is squalid but hesitant and clumsy (much worse had really taken place at Modena) and the passions are powerful but work by a rather basic mechanism. (Just one character, Count Mosca, possesses any psychological complexity, a calculating character but one who is also desperate, possessive and nihilistic.)

  But the element of ‘court novel’ does not end here. On top of the novelistic transformation of Italy into a nation espousing the Bourbon Restoration there is the Renaissance chronicle plot, from one of those historical sagas which Stendhal had hunted out in the libraries to draw on for his own Chroniques italiennes (Italian Chronicles). This one dealt with the life of Alessandro Farnese. Being very much loved and protected by one of his aunts, a gallant and scheming noblewoman, Alessandro enjoyed a glorious ecclesiastical career despite having spent his youth in libertine adventures (he had also killed a rival and had been imprisoned for it in Castel Sant’Angelo) before becoming Pope Paul III. What has this violent tale of Rome in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries got to do with that of Fabrizio in a society riddled with hypocrisy and scruples of conscience? Nothing at all, and yet Stendhal’s projected novel had begun as just that, a transposition of Farnese’s life into the contemporary age, demonstrating an Italian continuity of vital energy and passionate spontaneity in which he never tired of believing (though he was also able to discern less obvious things in Italians: their lack of confidence, their anxiety, their caution).