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Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literature (review)

Article  in  University of Toronto Quarterly · January 2004

DOI: 10.1353/utq.2005.0102

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 Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literature (review)
Rocco Capozzi

University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 74, Number 1, Winter 2004/2005,

pp. 581-583 (Review)

Published by University of Toronto Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/utq.2005.0102

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/180504

Accessed 16 Mar 2017 20:35 GMT

 humanities 581

Much as I learned from each of these four pieces and the introduction,
though, it is the two last sections (a table ronde and a question-and-answer
session with Gallant) that I found most exciting, because they focus on
translation  always a subject rife with its own complexities, but particu-
larly intriguing in Gallant’s case. Here we have a writer fluent in English
and in French, with strong views (stated, for example, in her much-quoted
‘An Introduction’ to Home Truths in 1981, and alluded to here again) on the
worlds of difference between the two languages and cultures, who for
decades worked in Paris entirely in English; it is only fairly recently that
her work has begun to be translated into French. It is fascinating to listen
in on translators, critics, and Gallant (her voice and views remain entirely
unmistakable, in English and in French) as they discuss, mainly in French,
the challenges of translating her work. As these spirited discussions show,
Gallant remains wonderfully certain that the writer’s and the critic’s worlds
are quite separate; it is to the credit of the book’s editors that the sparks of
these live talks still fly up from the page. Much more needs to be said about
translating Gallant; meanwhile, we can be thankful that Côté, Sabor, and
their colleagues have opened the doors, some windows, and looked into
some deep mirrors in a many-storied house. (NEIL BESNER)

Eugenio Bolongaro. Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literature

University of Toronto Press. 239. $50.00

In the late 1960s, writer-critics, including Barth, Vidal, Updike, and Rush-
die, praised Calvino as one of the most original, challenging, and entertain-
ing writers of our times. Soon after, in the English-speaking world,
numerous essays began to appear which examined mainly his so-called
postmodern works like Cosmicomics, Invisible Cities, The Castle of Crossed
Destinies, and If on a Winter Night a Traveler. Calvino’s fame has grown after
his death (1985), as readers continue to recognize the author’s talent as a
fantastic fabulator and his faith in literature, brilliantly illustrated in Six
Memos for the Next Millennium.
Eugenio Bolongaro’s study ‘stays away’ from what he feels is the
familiar beaten track of Calvino’s recent criticism as he proposes instead to
examine the author’s earlier works from 1947 to 1963: I giovani del Po
(written in 1950–51 and published in serial form in the journal Officina,
1957–58), the trilogy The Cloven Viscount, The Baron in the Trees, and The
Non-Existent Knight (published between 1952 and 1959), and The Watcher
(1963). Bolongaro claims that, whereas works dating from Cosmicomics to
Palomar have drawn plenty of attention, the earlier ones have not. Although
studies like those of Lucia Re, Martin McLaughlin, and Beno Weiss prove
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university of toronto quarterly, volume 74, number 1, winter 2004/5

 582 letters in canada 2003

the contrary, among English critics this may be partly true. But it certainly
is not in Italy, where critics, especially those of Gramscian and left-wing
formation, have delved at great length into Calvino’s works associated with
engagement and neo-realist narrative practices from the days of The Path
to the Spiders’ Nests to The Watcher.
Bolongaro does an outstanding job in the introduction and first chapter
in providing his readers with a clear and documented socio-historical
background within which Calvino writes his earlier works. In pursuing his
objective to ‘reflect the foundation of the intellectual project that endures
throughout Calvino’s career’ he discusses the relationships between
Vittorini and Calvino and the ideological goals of journals such as
Politecnico, Contemporaneo, Officina, and Menabò, in their attempt to ‘shake
the Italian intelligentsia out of its provincialism.’ As other critics have done,
Bolongaro focuses on Calvino’s essays (‘The Lion’s Marrow,’ ‘The Sea of
Objectivity,’ and ‘The Challenge of the Labyrinth’) in which the author
debates ideological and literary currents vis-à-vis the Gramscian definition
of an ‘organic intellectual.’ Within his definition of neo-realism as a ‘poetic’
(however, neo-realism, as Calvino has also stated, was mainly a ‘literary
current’ committed to narrate key socio-political issues of the time: the
Resistance, Fascism, the war, the South, etc), Bolongaro develops an
excellent discussion on political, sociological, and aesthetic elements of neo-
realism and on intellectuals in postwar Italy.
Never diverging from his position on Calvino’s life-long commitment
to the ethical function of literature, Bolongaro examines how the experience
of writing I giovani remains in the back of Calvino’s mind. This objective
proves to be counterproductive, however, because Bolongaro is then forced
to speak about the unsuccessful features of Calvino’s work, beginning with
the autobiographical protagonist: ‘Nino’s failure as a character mirrors
directly Calvino’s failure as a writer and intellectual’; ‘this dream of
cohesion, brotherhood, and clarity failed miserably in I giovani.’ It is
difficult to say why the author did not choose instead to examine The Path
to the Spiders’ Nests as the foundation of Calvino’s work; after all, Calvino
refused to publish I giovani in book form because he considered it ‘a rather
muddled neo-realist grotesque novel’ (Weiss). Consequently, at the end of
the analysis of each novel under examination, Bolongaro is compelled to
point out Calvino’s failures: ‘the attempt to portray a convincing social
synthesis, which Calvino has been pursuing since I giovani, has once again
failed.’
Bolongaro’s stimulating close reading of the ‘fantastic’ trilogy demon-
strates that he appreciates Calvino’s narratological skills, including the
metafictional ones. However, because he is constantly returning to I giovani
as a point of reference of ‘commitment’  as if Calvino had been obsessed
with this early failure (he wasn’t)  his diligent work tends to suffer with
xxxxxxx

university of toronto quarterly, volume 74, number 1, winter 2004/5

 humanities 583

refrains such as: ‘Cosimo is once again the committed intellectual ... Yet
Cosimo fails.’ Moreover, in his argumentation he could have eliminated the
remarks against ghost critics who supposedly have not understood
Calvino.
Bolongaro may have had in mind the article ‘Calvino: Keeping in Tune
with the Times’ (in a collection of essays edited by F. Ricci) when he refers
to Calvino ‘in tune with’ and ‘up to date on’ cultural theories (from neo-
realism to late postmodernism). As stated in that article, the strength of
Calvino emerges from his ability to adapt to new cultural changes without
ever becoming a chameleon or abandoning his own views on the func-
tion(s) of writing. Overall, Bolongaro’s study is convincing as it underlines
Calvino’s commitment to his ethical and cognitive dimension of literature
 his ‘compass of literature.’ One of the dangers in examining Calvino  the
writer and thinker  is to isolate his so-called neo-realist phase from his
alleged experimental writings and thus to lose sight that from The Path to
the Spiders’ Nests to Palomar Calvino was first and foremost committed to
a cognitive function of writing in which the mechanisms of docere et
delectare, fantasy and reality, literature and ideas, and continuity and
renewal are masterfully fused as instruments for his unveiling of ‘the
different levels of reality’ and for the ‘challenge to the labyrinth’ of reality.
(ROCCO CAPOZZI)

Dean Irvine, editor. Heresies: The Complete Poems of Anne Wilkinson (1924–1961)
Véhicule. 324. $24.95

When Anne Wilkinson died in 1961 at the age of fifty, she had published
two critically acclaimed volumes of poetry and had a third ready for the
press. The latter was never separately published, though some of its poems
were included by A.J.M. Smith in The Collected Poems of Anne Wilkinson and
a Prose Memoir (1968). Smith’s edition, reprinted in 1990, has until now been
the only place, apart from a few anthologies, where readers could find
Wilkinson’s poems.
With the publication of Dean Irvine’s edition we finally have in one
place all of Wilkinson’s known poems, including the forty-six that Smith
knew of but inexcusably omitted from his edition. Unless the early work
Wilkinson claims to have destroyed comes to light in some forgotten
location, this text will remain the definitive collected edition and should do
much to heighten the steadily growing interest in Anne Wilkinson’s work.
Irvine’s introduction chronicles the development of Wilkinson’s poetic
career, the difficulties she encountered with publishers, the critical recep-
tion of her work, and particularly the reappraisals undertaken by feminists
in recent years.

university of toronto quarterly, volume 74, number 1, winter 2004/5

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