Italo Calvino's Compass

Eugenio Bolongaro's book reassesses author's accomplishments

A good book for me is a book that is trying to do something - i.e. to make us think and see the world from a different perspective, and possibly lead to some kind of action."

Before reading Eugenio Bolongaro's new book, Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literature, one wouldn't have thought this sentiment was typical of a Calvinian scholar. Reading the book, and speaking with Bolongaro (when he made the statement), confirmed this suspicion. The point is that Bolongaro, who is indeed an expert, has a different perspective on Calvino.
Calvino ranks amongst the most celebrated authors in modern Italian literature, and his works are studied alongside the masters of postmodernism, like Borges, Perec, and Pynchon. Critics celebrate the playful nature of his works from the 60s and 70s, focusing on post-structuralist themes like the 'death of the subject' or the 'death of the author.'
For Bolongaro, this kind of analysis is valid but incomplete. He argues that to truly appreciate Calvino's accomplishment, we must consider each work within its specific historical context. Only then can we see how they participate in ongoing political and aesthetic debates of their time; only then can we understand Calvino's "lifelong commitment, as an intellectual, to writing as a way of intervening into a particular social and historical situation while taking an ethical and political stance." Compass traces the development of Calvino's understanding of his own role as an intellectual during the first two decades after WWII.
Calvino fought with the Resistance during the war, and was a member of the Partito Comunista Italiano until 1956. During this time he participated in seminal cultural forums like Il Politecnico, Officina, and Il Menabò, working with luminaries like Vittorini and Pasolini. Victory at war and liberation from fascist rhetoric and ideology made this an exciting time for these young intellectuals. They hoped the solidarity amongst classes that took place during the Resistance could continue in peacetime. They created neorealism, a new aesthetic, to express this solidarity, and looked for inspiration to the writings of Antonio Gramsci.
"Gramsci felt that it was the intellectual who brings a class to consciousness," says Bolongaro. "The class doesn't know what its historical mission is, but finds this out in time through the work of its intellectuals. So the intellectual's function... is to tell a class what are its needs, what it needs to do, what kind of world it wants to live in... and to address the needs and aspirations of the class."
As his first novel, I Giovanni, reveals, Calvino began with a firm belief in the possibility of becoming the type of "organic intellectual" Gramsci envisioned. But through the writing of the book he discovered neorealism's fatal flaw: the intelligentsia could not speak for the working class because they did not belong to it. Bolongaro shows how the sensibility of Nino, the hero of I Giovanni, "has nothing to do with the recently urbanized factory worker we are supposed to take him to be, and everything to do with the bourgeois intellectual Calvino was." Calvino himself later said of the work: "It's an essay about problems I care about but expressed in a narrative formulae which didn't suit me."
I Giovanni led Calvino to a paradoxical realization: in order to pursue the initial aims of neorealism, he had to reject its poetics. He could not honestly engage the present without acknowledging his own role in it, but the narrow scope of neorealism did not permit this kind of reflexivity. When Calvino began The Cloven Viscount, the first installment of his fantastic trilogy, he felt the need to set the story far from contemporary events in order to address them more directly.
One of the strengths of Bolongaro's argument is its ability to demonstrate the ethical quality of Calvino's decision to abandon neorealism and argue against its increasingly prescriptive nature. It was this same critical sense of ethics that finally led Calvino to turn away from the PCI in 1956, when it refused to criticize the Soviet invasion of Hungary.
Given Bolongaro's description of "a good book," one wondered how he viewed his own. What are its aims? Who is its target audience? He said that part of the project was to clarify earlier work in the hopes reaching a wider audience. If he were writing the book today, he'd place even greater emphasis on the historical context within which Calvino was working.
Bolongaro hopes to inspire others to continue the story his book begins. True to its name, Compass defines the space for and points the way to further investigations.

Publication Date: 2004-03-07
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=3710