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In Our Time
Italo Calvino
00:48:31
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the influential 20th-century Italian novelist and essayist
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- [00:00]
Melvin Bragg
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.
- [00:05]
Jennifer Burns
BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts this is.
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Melvin Bragg
In our time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. Angelo Colbino, 1923-1985 what an Italian author of inventive, bedazzling stories with a passionate belief that writing and art could make life better for everyone. Works like Invisible Cities or if On a Winter's Night A Traveler and the science fiction of his cosmic comics have inspired writers and delighted readers in Italian and in translation around the world. And as for why his stories are fantastical, fabulous fables at one step from reality, then perhaps his time with the partisans in World War II and the poverty of the following decade offers some explanation. With me to discuss Italo Calvino are Beatrice Sica, Associate professor in Italian Studies at UCL Jennifer Burns, professor of Italian Studies at the University of Warwick, and Guido Bonsovera, professor of Italian Cultural History at the University of Oxford. Let's start with you, Guido. How and when did Calvino start out in life?
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Guido Bonsaver
Well, he was born in 1923 and oddly, on the isle of Cuba. But that's important because he only spends a year. But it's important because it tells us something about his parents. They were both scientists, both botanists, and indeed they were there because the father was directing a floricultural center there on the island. But the following year they came back and his youth was very much in a way determined by the kind of scientific background of his parents. I remember in his memoirs he wrote about the fact that he was almost he had to kind of hide away the fact that he had a literary interest because everybody was into science and the suggested reading was all about scientific knowledge. And indeed, it took World War II eventually to kind of get him out of this because indeed, even when he went to university, when he was 17, 1940, he actually initially chose agricultural science, so following the family tradition. But then World War II broke out and that was kind of a life changer for him in many ways. And yeah, the importance of World War II for Calvino and for a lot of young men of his generation is not so much related to the beginning of the war, that is 1940 for Italy, but 1943 with the collapse of Fascism, because at that point Italians of his age had to decide basically whether to join the Fascist army, which had been reorganized by the Nazis or go up the hills, become a partisan and fight against it. And that's what Calvino did. And that's how he emerged from the war as a kind of militant, committed young communist intellectual. And what the partisans were doing is basically involved in a sort of guerilla war, trying to fight against the Nazis and the fascists, disrupting their logistic lines. And he was indeed, he was involved in a number of armed combat situations and he wrote about it in his first novel, the Path to the Spider's Nest, which came out in 1947.
- [03:26]
Melvin Bragg
We'll come to that in a second. But Jenny Burns, how does the experience as a partisan in the war, the fascists there, Mussolini joining forces with the Nazis, how did that affect his ideology? Did it affect it in a lasting way? If so, what was that?
- [03:40]
Jennifer Burns
After joining the communist partisans, he developed a much more, as we've heard, militant position. But he also observed how the resistance was made up of, in many ways a bunch of misfits and people who were not necessarily ideologically committed to the cause. People who had in various ways been abandoned or damaged by the experience of the war so far and were not necessarily following a single and clear ideological line. And this becomes very clear in his first novel, the Path to the Spiders Nests. And I think it. It does influence him in the long term in the sense that he is, whilst a committed writer and committed to the bettering of society and human experience through reading and writing. He nevertheless, I think, remains sceptical and, well, increasingly sceptical about any strong ideological commitment and party affiliation. He styled himself as more perhaps an anarchist rather than a communist and commented that he joined a communist brigade simply because they were the best organized of the resistance fighters.
- [04:53]
Melvin Bragg
Well, let's bring his writing in right away. A very early work, the Path to the Nest of spiders in 1940. Can you tell the listeners something about that?
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Jennifer Burns
It's a story which tells the reality of fighting in the Resistance, but he disrupts the realism. I'll come back to the point about realism in a second. But he disrupts that by focalizing the novel through the eyes of a child, young adolescent boy called Pin. So we experience the environment of the Resistance through the eyes of this boy whose trying to become an adult male. So the title comes from this perspective. The Spiders Nests are something that Pin regards as his special secret. So a network of underground tunnels that he's found in the hills, in the forest that he sees as the nests of the spiders. He thinks nobody knows about them, so he sees this as his power, that he knows where these are and that one day he will share that with someone that will become a friend. Because Pin is an orphan, he has a sister who's a prostitute and whom he despises, so they live alone in a village. He spends much of his time in a bar entertaining the older men, and then more or less accidentally steals a pistol from a Nazi sailor and on the basis of that has to run to the hills. So he sees alongside the secret of the spider's nest, this somewhat sort of mystical, magical place. He also sees as his other access to power, this pistol that he owns, and he chooses to hide that where the spiders nests are. So by using this somewhat fable like perspective, and also some of the tropes of the adventure novel, Calvino gives a very different take on the resistance novel, but it is also regarded. I mentioned realism as one of the early examples of what later came to be described as Italian neorealism in literature and also in film. This was an initiative by many intellectuals and writers and artists like Calvino after the war to make a decisive shift away from the somewhat artificial and aspirational literature and film associated with fascism to something which much more closely engaged with the experience of everyday Italians after the destruction of the war.
- [07:26]
Melvin Bragg
Can we develop that, Beatrice? Can we talk about his move away from. From neorealism and why he gave that up and why he felt he had to give it up.
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Beatrice Sica
Calvino was really convinced that as a Marxist, and he was convinced that his duty as a politically engaged writer was to tell about the reality and not of fantasies. So he, after writing his first novel, he tried to write a second one, and he made several attempts, but these attempts proved to be more difficult. So at some point, while he was trying to write this realist novel, he sat down and he thought, maybe I should just write the novel that the fantasy novel that I would like to read instead of the novel that I feel compelled to write as a politically engaged writer. And he wrote this, the Cloven Viscount, in just in little over a month, and then he published it in 1952. And the same thing happened with the second fantasy novel, which is the Baron in the Trees. I mean, the Baron in the Trees is about this Cosimo Ravasco di Rondo, who at 12 decides that he wants to just climb up into a tree and live there his entire life, which is what he actually does. Throughout the 1950s, Calvino finds out that in fact, it's easier for him to talk about social and political reality through a metaphor. So by writing Fantastical tales rather than a realist novel.
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Melvin Bragg
So this was a trilogy, wasn't it? The Cloven Viscounts you talked about, and the Baron in the trees, and then the others are non existent.
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Beatrice Sica
Non existent knights. Yes. So I mean, very briefly, the. The Cloven Viscount is a. Is about this character Medardo, who goes to war and is severely wounded and is basically cut in half. And so there are the two halves that go back home and one is the bad half and one is the good half and, you know, a series of adventures followed. But the interesting thing there is that Calvino problematizes this dichotomy, which in itself would be rather superficial. So the two halves both praise the fact that being half, you pay more attention to other, you have a sense of what the others are rather than, you know, if you are just one piece, you're more limited in a sense. And non existent Knight is basically an armor that goes around, but nobody's inside it. But the real protagonist there is again a young boy or an adolescent. So it's in all the three novels. Calvino is interested precisely in this maturing process, in the growing up, not in the result.
- [10:11]
Melvin Bragg
Thank you. Thank you very much, Guido. Can we just pursue this a bit more? He was interested in fables, which he collected, and he's writing fantasies and fables here, isn't it? So can you develop that?
- [10:24]
Guido Bonsaver
Yes, it's quite important to. To say that we're talking about the 1950s here. And during those years in parallel, Calvino was working on what was actually the first collection in Italian of fairy tales. You know, Italy never had a Brothers Grimm's collection before, and it was a German fairy tale. Yes. And despite the fact that Italy had this kind of huge and very varied and sophisticated regional tradition of fairy tales, nobody had put them together and tried to produce a corpus, a national corpus. So Calvino did that. But what's interesting is in the introduction to FIA Italiane, which is this collection, he wrote about the importance that fairy tales had for him as a writer. And it talks about them in terms of models, narrative models. He thought they were good examples of how to be extremely succinct and straight to the point and be able to literally reduce to the absolute minimum the narrative backbone, but at the same time enrich it with all sorts of different values. And I think we can see this also in the evolution of the trilogy, because if one reads the Cloven Viscount, it's very close to the fairy tale tradition, and indeed it's been turned into narrative for children as well. But Then there's a sense that when he moved to the bar in the trees, there's a sense that Calvino is trying to kind of find his voice and trying to move out of traditional genre and see what can be done with this sort of fantastical dimension inserted into very detailed historical settings. But then he moved on to the non existent night and that an even more experimental novel. And you can see how much now he's moving towards what we normally call metafictional dimension novels about writing novels. And indeed, one of the protagonists of the novel is Sualtodora, who happens to be a nun whose, you know, locked up in a convent writing the stories of the knights, which are, if you like, the narrative parts of the traditional narrative part of the novel. And you can sense that Calvino at that point is moving out of the fairy tale tradition and trying to find a way to combine the fantasy approach with still having a strong engagement with contemporary issues.
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Melvin Bragg
Thank you very much, Gianni. It's a bit out of sequence, but let's go for one of his major works, Invisible Cities, 1972. Can you tell us about that?
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Jennifer Burns
Yes. So Invisible Cities is in many ways a collection of stories. And it's a text which doesn't exactly inaugurate, but certainly uses a form that Calvino will continue to work with, which is that of a frame narrative with multiple parts inside. So the invisible cities.
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Melvin Bragg
What do you mean by frame narrative?
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Jennifer Burns
So he's in many ways drawing on traditional forms. So in Italian, Boccaccio's Decameron, where there's a frame story of a group going up into the hills to escape the plague and telling each other stories. It's similar to the Thousand and One Nights and other sort of traditional stories. Yes, Canterbury Tales, exactly as well. But here what he does is to describe a total of 55 cities, often described just in a single paragraph, others a couple of pages, all of which have the names of women. And the frame story is that these cities are described by Marco Polo reporting to Kublai Khan the cities of his empire. So alongside the 55 stories are chapters which start and end with an italicized section where Marco Polo reports to Kublai Khan what he has seen. So we have the linear story of the frame narrative. And between that, this collection of 55 cities. And there's a further structural sort of subtlety, which is that there are 11 themes attached to the cities, such as cities and memory cities and the eyes, hidden cities, subtle or thin cities. So there's an internal structure which complexifies further the structure of the whole work and enables readers to read sort of in a network, to read transversally as well as following the linear narrative of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. And the interactions between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan are interesting, very interesting in their own right, in the sense that Kublai Khan is getting tired of his oversized, disintegrating, troublesome empire. And whilst his other emissaries are telling him stories of defeats and rebellions, Marco Polo is giving him these beautiful descriptions of cities which seem to be cities of the imagination. And in that way we start to understand, well, a number of things. It transpires across this linear discussion between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo that ultimately Marco Polo is actually describing Venice, his home city, through all of these fragmented or specific cities that he's imagining. And also it tells us something about. I mean, the original name of Marco Polo's travels was the. The description of the world, in a sense, in English. And so the act of describing all these cities enables Kublai Khan and Marco Polo and the reader to understand what it is about cities that animate human society and human sociality, why it is that humans like to identify themselves and organize themselves in cities.
- [16:17]
Melvin Bragg
Beatrice, can you tell us how much he was drawing as his reading as a child?
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Beatrice Sica
Yes. I mean, first of all, we should remember that he got passionate about literature by reading Kipling's Jungle books. And then of course, he read Kim, Captain Courageous, and he also liked, very much as a child, Stevenson's Treasure Island. So this sense of adventure, he. I mean, he kept it and he then transferred it into the trilogy. And later, another thing that he got from his early readings, because Calvino wasn't just a reader of literature, but he was also an avid reader of children's magazines. And in particular he read the Corriere DEI Piccoli, which was a children magazines published by the Corriere della Sera, which is still today one of the major Italian newspapers, The Corriere del Piccolo is not published anymore, but it got published from 1909 until the 1980s. And there one can see the first examples of a series of episodes that then make a narrative which one finds not just in invisible cities, as Gianni was saying, but also in his book Marco Valdo, which is another book that is based on series of adventure in the city by this character, Marco Baldo, then collected together, that together make a book. And also another thing that I think needs to be mentioned, Calvino, after, you know, when he was an adolescent, was an avid reader of a satirical journal whose name was Bertoldo, which was published in Italy from 1936 to 1943. And as you can imagine, if you were a satirical journal in Fascist Italy, you had to avoid certain things. So satire could not be directed against political figure or Mussolini. Even less so, the kind of satire that Calvino learned from there was a satire against, for example, bourgeois habits and things that a group of people does. And this remained with him because Calvino is also a very funny writer. I mean, you laugh when you read Calvino often. So this ability to capture the essence of a character as if it were a caricature, really. So to have exaggerated, grotesque, I think, came from his early readings.
- [18:48]
Melvin Bragg
Thank you, Jenny. He was known to be relatively shy in public, but prolific in his work, particularly in essays. Is there any way you can give us a brief global view of these essays?
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Jennifer Burns
Yes, he is extremely prolific from the early stages of his career and throughout, to the extent that when he died, he was writing a series of lectures rather than essays to be given for the Norton Lectures at Harvard University. But in the early years, his essays are interesting in offering a very clear sort of intellectual biography of a writer, in some ways struggling to understand the role of literature in this environment of an Italy that was being born as a republic for the first time and after the devastation of fascism and the war. So he's part, at that point, of a group of intellectuals grappling with the same questions about the role of literature in society. And his essays really animate that debate. Essays from the mid-50s onwards offer different ways of trying to understand how literature can intervene for social good. But it's clear that he finds that, as we've heard from the. The other kinds of writing he was doing at the time, he finds that difficult. So he talks about, in an early essay from 1955, he talks about the key to literature's intervention in society being in the formation of the literary character as somebody who is not just ideologically one dimensional, but is a fully formed character. He then starts to, especially as we move into the late 50s and Italy is experiencing an economic boom, which changes the landscape of Italy in very real ways, both physically in the sense of a construction boom, but also socially in the sense of changed social attitudes over that period. There he starts to talk about the outside world being a sea, a labyrinth, all kinds of metaphors for not really being able to fathom the outside world from the point of view of literature. And he comes to some sort of conclusions about what writing can do. But the sense is that he is withdrawing more and more from a sense that the writer can directly intervene.
- [21:17]
Melvin Bragg
Can I move across the question, Guido? Can we see him inventing and reinventing himself as he developed his writing?
- [21:25]
Guido Bonsaver
Oh, absolutely so. And indeed, I remember in an interview, one of the last interviews he gave to Maria Corti, a literary critic, he mentioned the fact that whenever he finished writing a novel, the first thing he thought was how to move away from the kind of writing, the kind of subject matter that he had addressed in the novel, because there was so much he would have liked to say, would have liked to write about, that had left unwritten. Hence, no doubt, if we look at Calvino's literary career from the 1940s all the way to the 1980s, there's a sense that we also give better. We have a sense of the development of Italian, if not European, Western literature throughout those decades. And he constantly experimented and constantly pushed the boundary. And as I was saying before, in the 1950s, he decided to be more experimental, and he decided that the time had come, to some extent, to create a shape of the novel that should reflect the knowledge that contemporary intellectuals have in the 20th century, hence moving away from the linear narratives that had been inherited throughout the decades, and in a way, trying to represent, through a literary form, the kind of. How can I say, perception of the world, of the complication, the multiplicity, the difficulty we have in defining what the material world is and in the way in which language can define it. Hence the kind of structures that we mentioned before when talking about invisible cities, in which instead of having one single linear narrative, we have this kind of archipelago of different texts, all kind of united and held together by a frame story, but at the same time, very independent from each other. And I think that gets to the core of the Calvino of the 1970s and 80s, that is to deliver a view of reality that is much more complicated, much more fragmented than what we would like it to be.
- [23:34]
Melvin Bragg
Does this include the importance to him of his time in Paris?
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Guido Bonsaver
Certainly. So in a way, I mean, there's a biographical dimension related to his move to Paris in the 1960s because he got married to his wife, who's Argentinian, but at the time was working in Paris as a translator. But at the same time, there's no doubt that Calvino wanted to, in a way, move out of the kind of the provincial intellectual debate of Italy in the 1950s, all about neorealism, as we were saying before, commitment. And he realized that Paris was, in a way, the place to be in the 1960s. There's a lot of revolutionary approaches, innovative approaches, not just to literature, but to also the branches of culture. And indeed, as soon as he was there, he became a friend of Roland Barthe, Grimat, other key intellectuals in Paris, and indeed he became one of them. And there's no doubt that he benefited from being in Paris and that was his way to be, in a way, at the avant garde of European culture.
- [24:45]
Melvin Bragg
Jenny. Jenny Burns. Another of his best known novels. We won't have time to go through all of them. This one is particularly striking. The title is if On a Winter's Night a Traveler. What happens after that?
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Jennifer Burns
Well, good question. Yes. So this comes out of the Paris milieu that we've just talked about and the notion of, in many ways, the balance shifting from the author being responsible for the meaning that is derived from a text to the reader being entirely in charge of interpreting and drawing meaning from the text. And this again is influenced by Roland Barthes.
- [25:21]
Melvin Bragg
Is there any simple way of explaining that?
- [25:24]
Jennifer Burns
Yes. So around this time there starts to be a strong interest in the reader as ultimately the creator of a text, because they interpret what the author has produced and the author has no sort of control or dominion of the eventual meaning that is derived from a text.
- [25:43]
Melvin Bragg
Doesn't seem to have killed the linear narrative in novel, does it?
- [25:47]
Jennifer Burns
No, it doesn't. No, it is very much a theory of that time. If On a Winter's Night A Traveler again has a frame story of a reader, it opens saying, you're about to start reading the new novel by Italo Calvino. If On a Winter's Night A Traveler. So the frame story addresses a reader who then meets also a female reader who are looking to read Calvino's new novel, but are repeatedly frustrated in doing that, because initially the first one has the beginning of that novel and then the pages are blank, so they take it back to the bookshop. This triggers a very long process through the linear narrative whereby they keep being frustrated in their readings. But the if on the Winter's Night a Traveller is the title of the first opening of a novel that they read, it then moves along more novel openings that these two readers locate, thinking they're eventually finding Calvino's novel and yet find that it isn't. So this takes. It allows a number of stories to be begun and to then be left hanging by the author. And this allows a number of different genres to be visited, particularly the sort of thriller, the noir. And each of these novels has a title which, when you put them all together, reads if on a Winter's Night a traveller and I can't remember every single segment of it, but ultimately it says if they sort of find themselves on a dark night looking into an abyss or pit or grave, what is the story that is awaiting its ending down there?
- [27:26]
Melvin Bragg
Beatrice, can we take Calbino to his period? How is he relating to the writers? Because he's always part of a group, he's part of a cultural group and the forefront of it. How is he relating to them at this moment?
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Beatrice Sica
I mean, while he was in Paris he was part of the so called ou lipo ouvoir de litterateur potential, which is like a workshop of potential literature where precisely writers would experiment with the form of. Well, with forms of writing, but certainly including the novel as respect the Italian cultural milie. I think Calvino, he was a big figure, but he also liked to keep his independence in a sense. So since he resigned from the Communist Party in 1957, he somehow was independent and felt independent and I think he liked very much to remain independent.
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Melvin Bragg
How did what he do affect the way the novel was being written then and has that influence continued?
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Guido Bonsaver
Yes, in one way. Yes, because through these framed narratives the literary offered a new way of looking at how a novel can be built. And it certainly was influential with a number of different writers of different generations at the same time. As we said before, that hasn't kind of declared the death of linear narratives which continue to be very popular. But there's no doubt that after the, if you like, let's call it the postmodernist generation, of which Calvino was one of the protagonists, it's much more difficult to go back to that traditional type of writing without the knowledge of the artificiality of it all and therefore often the capacity to be able to complicate it and make it a little bit more closer to our understanding of reality, which is everything but linear and univocal.
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Melvin Bragg
So did it have an effect on the later development of the novel? Or is it something that almost stands alone?
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Guido Bonsaver
I wouldn't say stands alone, I. I see it more in terms of influential, not so much because somebody started to write novels a la Calvino, so to speak, but it's amazing the number of younger writers or writers of his generation who wrote about the influence that his writing had on them. And for example, amongst English speaking authors I can think of here in Britain, Jeanette Winterson, Salma Rushdie, they both wrote about how influential Calvino was on them and or in the US we have John Updike, Gore Vidal, so big names who Literally, particularly I remember after the death of Calvino, came out and said, well, this was a great author which in a way taught us what could be done with literature as a tool to understand reality.
- [30:28]
Melvin Bragg
How was that different from the way literature had been used before?
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Guido Bonsaver
I think Calvino is always convinced that the aim of an author should be to try to make language as sophisticated as possible in order to translate as much of the real world, the material world around us into words. And in that respect, language is an ambiguous tool. It's a very rich tool, but at the same time has to be in a way perfected. And so in a way, the kind of commitment that Calvino found in 1970s, if before it was a political commitment in the 1970s and 80s, it becomes a commitment of, as he used to say, using language to touch the unwritten world around him. That is, the aim of an author should be to expand the language and allow language to tap into aspects of reality that had never been turned into words before.
- [31:26]
Melvin Bragg
Hasn't that been happening before, though? I mean, Shakespeare used language that had never been used before to turn a reality into prose or more verse and prosecution.
- [31:36]
Guido Bonsaver
Yeah, absolutely. And in a way, Calvino was the first one we mentioned, if On a Winter Night at Traveler. And parts of one of the themes of that book is about the kind of the cyclical dimension of literature, the fact that after all, indeed, it goes back to Arabian Nights. To give you a sense that in a way, writers are still going back to the same kind of main kind of subject matter and main points. But at the same time, what I think makes Calvino's writing original is the fact that this, if you like, philosophical dimension is part of the subject matter of his novels. Going back to Invisible Cities, for example, you read the dialogue between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo and it's a philosophical dialogue. They're talking about the way in which individuals are able to make sense of reality around them, the way in which language is able to convey the reality around them. And hence that kind of philosophical core to me is literally what Calvino brought to 20th century literature.
- [32:38]
Melvin Bragg
Where are the women in Calvino's work?
- [32:41]
Jennifer Burns
Calvino's work has been endlessly and very beautifully analysed by readers and critics and academics. A question I think nobody has ever quite asked and certainly not answered is about Calvino and women, which is a very tricky question. As I mentioned, the Invisible Cities all have the names of women. Women feature in all of his works. But I think it's fair to say that women are mostly the Object of the writers, characters, reader's gaze, and very rarely fully formed as subjects. And if on a winter's night, a traveller is a very interesting example because there is a frame story of the reader, male reader, who meets a female reader. They end up in a relationship, but she really doesn't have quite the agency and independence that the male reader has. And I think one striking point is towards the end of the frame narrative, as the male reader is still on the trail of these multiple truncated novels that he can't find and is in a library waiting for them to be produced, he watches another reader reading in a particular way and asks about that. That reader talks about his mode of reading. A succession of seven readers in the library explain how they read and why none of them are women. All of these readers are men. And there is a sense, not that Calvino is a misogynist by any means, but that he.
- [34:15]
Melvin Bragg
But what's going on then?
- [34:16]
Jennifer Burns
I think he struggles to articulate sort of fully formed female subjectivity and to engage with that.
- [34:27]
Beatrice Sica
Thank you, Jenny. Thank you for saying this, but it's complicated.
- [34:31]
Guido Bonsaver
I remember at the time of the publication of if Only Winter's Night, A Traveler, it was openly criticized by some feminist critic. And if I remember well, his defense was that because he's a man, his fiction comes out of his own self and he doesn't want to try and enter the self of another gender. And therefore it kind of sticks to his. Because, after all, that's the only way it can be genuine. Obviously this can be problemized in so many ways. In so many ways. But that's the way he felt that in a way, the first person narrative of a male character was the one that was closest to his own vision of the world.
- [35:16]
Melvin Bragg
Okay, Jenny, we're getting towards the end now, but can you tell the listeners which of his works are most popular around the world today and where they're most popular? Which countries, which places?
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Jennifer Burns
Yeah, he's been hugely translated, I think into 56 languages in total. And this did start quite early. So he was Translated in the mid-50s into French and into English, which gave him access, obviously to British and US markets and beyond. I think what's interesting here, I mean, his work has been translated and then distributed in countries including Iran, Japan, South Africa, Argentina, Brazil. He has global reach. But I think two interesting things about the way in which he's been translated are firstly, we haven't talked about the cosmicomics, but this was a collection of stories that was published in 1965 and is located in the cosmos around a character called qfwfq. I won't go into the stories, but published at that moment in the decade of space exploration, later moon landings, a huge sort of imaginary around science fiction and what was beyond this planet. The translation of the Cosmic Comics into English first established him as a science fiction writer in the US which is not a title really that he would be recognized as in Italy at that point or now. But also it meant it took him into a lot of other markets and languages where the impact of the Cosmic Comics being translated and being very much liked was then that his back catalogue became translated in those countries as well. But the other novel that has had, well, two more texts are the ones we've talked about today that are sort of globally known. Invisible Cities and if on a winter's night a traveler.
- [37:17]
Melvin Bragg
Yes, Beatrice. And then everybody can come in here because we are near the end. It's almost 40 years since his death. Why should we be? Why are people reading him now? It seems so much of his time at the time.
- [37:31]
Beatrice Sica
I think with Calvino you have a writer who is a classic, who has become a classic, but at the same time you also have a writer who changed very much throughout his life and produced very different kinds of writing. So you have in a sense a classic who was experimental. Calvino, he was also a great essayist. And one of the essays that he wrote is entitled why Read the Classics? Where he gives various definitions of what a classic is and does. And there are two. I mean, one of the most famous is perhaps a classic is a work that has never exhausted what it has to say to us. But there's another one that I like very much which says your classic. And here already in this beginning, you see, Calvino doesn't give you a model to follow. It gives you an hypothesis that you can follow that you can take or refuse. So there you have a classic that is open, it's against the norm, it's an anti conformist classic. So this definition that I like very much is your classic is a book to which you cannot remain indifferent and which helps you define yourself in relation or even in opposition to it. And I think that Calvina is precisely.
- [38:52]
Melvin Bragg
This, thank you very much, a last word for anyone.
- [38:55]
Jennifer Burns
I mean, I think there are some specific points and one that goes back to his biography that we talked about that growing up with an agronomist as a father. And you can read it through his text throughout is an interest in the natural world, the world beyond human animals, and particularly in the landscape and the environment. And I think that speaks very much to some of the concerns of today. He has a very strong understanding of the relationality between humans, but also between humans and what is beyond the human.
- [39:28]
Melvin Bragg
And sometimes you think he is writing like a scientist for scientists and using their. The way that they think and the way that they progress their thought.
- [39:36]
Jennifer Burns
Yes, I think that's right. He, as Guido was saying before, he can sort of posit an argument and then develop it in a very interesting and sort of intricate way. So there's a philosophical charge to all of his writing, whether that's essays or fictions, but also, I think quite simply as well, the precision of his writing, which may or may not come from a scientific background, that the precision with which he uses language and the more almost kind of artisanal way in which he develops text, often writing and rewriting and rewriting over a period of time, means that there's a sort of a limpidness and quality to his prose which has enduring appeal.
- [40:17]
Guido Bonsaver
I definitely agree. And in a way, that's another aspect that is peculiar to Calvino, that underneath this kind of very crystalline, splendid prose, he introduces us to a kind of a labyrinth, sort of like kaleidoscopy world. And it is not just for entertainment. It's literally part and parcel of this idea of presenting us with a view of the world as complicated, as difficult to decipher, and this constant attempt by literature and us as rational beings in general, to kind of make sense of it. And I think that's a kind of also call to tolerance that Calvino brings to his literature, which I think is universal and hopefully will last for decades to come. That is literature as a way to understand the. The frailty and the mortality of us as individuals and therefore make us more aware of the frailty of the world and the humanity around us.
- [41:16]
Jennifer Burns
This all makes him sound sort of deeply serious and intellectual, as Beatrice said earlier. His humour also gives him massive appeal, I think, across generations and across languages and cultures.
- [41:28]
Melvin Bragg
Well, thank you very much. Thanks to Jennifer Burns, Beatrice Sika and Guido Bonsaba. Next week, how and why George I succeeded his distant relative Queen Anne, when others had much closer family ties. That's a Hanoverian succession. Thank you very much for listening.
- [41:46]
Jennifer Burns
And the In Our Time podcast gets.
- [41:48]
Beatrice Sica
Some extra time now with a few.
- [41:50]
Jennifer Burns
Minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
- [41:53]
Melvin Bragg
What did you not have time to say that you'd like to have said?
- [41:56]
Beatrice Sica
I would like to make the point again that Marco Valdo, which we haven't talked about, is a Great book. I mean, I like it very much. And perhaps what I would add is reading suggestions. So if listeners haven't read any book by Calvino, I would probably start from the end and then go backwards. That's another way to approach him. Instead of, you know, going chronological and starting from the realist novel, but start from the end, from Mr. Palomar, which is this, you know, it's this Mr. Palomar who observes the world and in its fragment, in its very little aspect, and then go backwards towards if on a winter's night, etc. Etc. That's the thing that I would add.
- [42:43]
Melvin Bragg
Can we go back to the question of women in Calbino's work?
- [42:46]
Guido Bonsaver
What's interesting is that it actually takes me back to I mentioned Jeanette Winterson and Jeanette Winterson did write an article in 1919. It was published in independent sort of weekend issue and each week one author was asked to talk about their hero, their model as writers. And she wrote about Calvina and she wrote about the crisis she went through after the second novel, the first one, everybody remembers oranges are not the only fruit very successful. And the second was not so successful. And then a friend said, well, why don't you read Italo Calvina? Which she did. And apparently it opened a new window and a new kind of creative spur. And indeed, if you were to read some of Winterson's novels such as the Passion and Sex and the Cherry, you can certainly see Calvino's sort of shadow looming behind. But what's interesting is that at the end of that article, Jeanette Winterson said, he's my hero, but if I were to meet him and she was writing after his death, if I had, you know, if I had met him before he died, there's one question I would have asked him and which the question was why, oh why were you so sort of not narrow minded when addressing female characters? You know, a sophisticated writer like you. And if I can try and sort of like imagine an answer to this, I'll refer to another, to a great book on Calvino written by an English medievalist, Catherine Hume, who again fell in love with Calvino's fiction, wrote this book called Cogito and Cosmos, which entire oeuvre of Calvina by Calvina. And what's interesting is that Katharine Hume comes to this point and that point in a way is implicit in the title, that the whole of Calvino's novels are about a cogito, a thinking, a rational mind looking at the cosmos. And that kind of relates to gender because in so many ways that kind of thinking mind is a male mind. It's because I think of the autobiographical dimension. Calvino, in a way, sees himself looking at the world and Palomar, in a way, this kind of last novel he wrote, again, Palomar is sort of an alter ego, satirical alter ego of Calvino. And I think perhaps that kind of two dimensional created a situation whereby, you know, the female presence sometimes is part of the cosmos rather than the thinking mind at the very center. And that perhaps it's a limitation.
- [45:21]
Beatrice Sica
Yeah, no, I think you shouldn't look for female voices or, you know, complex representations in Calvino, but everything else you take it. But this is definitely something that is missing there. Yes.
- [45:35]
Melvin Bragg
Do any of you have an explanation for this or have you. Do you think you've covered it by what you've been saying about it?
- [45:40]
Jennifer Burns
I don't have an explanation. I think there's probably more to say. I mean, one is that it's very surprising, and it's not surprising given the milieu in which he sort of came to writing and continued to work, in which was very much dominated by male intellectuals and males of the corgitan side. So a highly sort of rational and theoretical approach to their work and to their thinking about literature. But it's just interesting that having been a keen observer of Italian society in particular throughout the the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s, he does go quiet in the 60s and 70s, but that's the period of the major feminist movements in Italy and significant change as a result of the success of those movements. And he. He really stays quiet on that. But I think the other point is that. And it's sort of. It's in some ways silly and somewhat redundant to speculate, but had he lived a little bit longer, I think there's a trace in some of the posthumous collections that have been published, particularly a collection called under the Jaguar sun, which was designed to be engaging with the five senses. And there he is starting to move from that sort of very prominently rational, cerebral, almost approach to understanding the world to an attention much more to the embodied. There's something more carnal about those texts and about some of his other writings in the time, which suggests that he might have been shifting his perspective slightly. Whether that would have come to include women more fully, I don't know.
- [47:24]
Melvin Bragg
Well, thank you all very much. It's a total pleasure and I'm completely exhausted.
- [47:30]
Jennifer Burns
Does anyone want tea or coffee?
- [47:32]
Melvin Bragg
Melvin? Tea? Tea, please.
- [47:35]
E
Thank you.
- [47:38]
Beatrice Sica
Thank you very much.
- [47:38]
Jennifer Burns
Thank you.
- [47:40]
F
In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a.
- [47:43]
Jennifer Burns
BBC Studios audio production.
- [47:46]
E
In 1984, an IRA bomb planted under a bath in Brighton's Grand Hotel came close to killing Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet. It was the biggest direct assault on a British government since the gunpowder plot. From BBC Radio 4, I'm Glenn Patterson and in the Brighton Bomb I tell the story of the deadly attack, unraveling the threads that brought all involved, often by heartbreaking chants to that place and time. 2:54am on the morning of the 12th of October and I reveal how the police only just averted a follow up bombing campaign aimed at England's beaches. To hear the Brighton Bomb and many other great history documentaries serve for the history podcast on BBC Signs.
- [48:41]
G
Yoga is more than just exercise. It's the spiritual practice that millions swear by. And in 2017, Miranda, a university tutor from London, joins a yoga school that promises profound transformation.
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F
It felt a really safe and welcoming space after the yoga classes. I felt amazing.
- [49:02]
G
But soon that calm, welcoming atmosphere leads to something far darker. A journey that leads to allegations of grooming, trafficking and exploitation across international borders.
- [49:15]
F
I don't have my passport, I don't have my phone, I don't have my bank cards. I have nothing. The passport being taken, the being in.
- [49:24]
Jennifer Burns
A house and not feeling like they can leave.
- [49:26]
G
World of Secrets is where untold stories are unveiled and hidden realities are exposed. In this new series, we're confronting the dark side of the wellness industry with a hope of a spiritual breakthrough. Gives way to disturbing accusations.
- [49:42]
Jennifer Burns
You just get sucked in so gradually and it's done so skillfully that you.
- [49:49]
F
Don'T realize and it's like this. The secret that's there. I wanted to believe that, you know, that whatever they were doing, even if it seemed gross to me, was for some spiritual reason that I couldn't yet understand.
- [50:09]
G
Revealing the hidden secrets of a global yoga network.
- [50:12]
F
I feel that I have no other choice. The only thing I can do is to speak about this and to put my reputation and everything else on the line. I want truth and justice and for other people to not be hurt, for things to be different in the future.
- [50:36]
Jennifer Burns
To bring it into the light and almost alchemize some of that evil stuff that went on. And take back the power.
- [50:47]
G
World of Secrets Season 6 the Bad Guru Listen wherever you get your podcasts.