Italo Calvino on the Written and the Unwritten Word

Summary

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New Books Network

Episode: Italo Calvino on the Written and the Unwritten Word

Date: May 10, 2026
Host: El Leo
Guest: Italo Calvino (James Lecture, 1983), introduced by Susan Sontag

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Episode Overview

This episode features a recording of Italo Calvino’s renowned James Lecture delivered at the New York Institute for the Humanities in 1983. Calvino, one of the 20th century’s most inventive Italian writers, meditates on the interplay between the written word and the lived (unwritten) world. He reflects on what it means to move between these two realities, the function and limitations of language, and the shifting boundaries of experience, knowledge, and literary creation. Calvino also discusses his own creative process, the evolving Italian language, and what literature can (and cannot) express about reality.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Anxiety and Compulsion of Writing vs. Speaking

• Calvino's discomfort in public speaking is rooted in being separated from the written page—the realm where he feels most at home ([04:10]).
• He questions whether words he thinks, writes, and speaks can ever truly align, particularly in a non-native language.
• Quote:

  “I must face not only the audience but also the question within me. What is this audience expecting from my words when I master [a] lecture in a language which is not my own language?” ([04:10] – Calvino)

2. The Discontinuity Between Text and World

• Calvino describes an unbridgeable tension between the fixity and orderliness of the written page and the unpredictable, endlessly shifting reality outside it.
• He outlines a “rite of passage” when he transitions between reading/writing and living—symbolized by putting on or removing his glasses ([06:20]).
• Quote:

  “This discontinuity between the written page fixed and settled and the moving multiform world outside the page never fails to strike me.” ([05:11] – Calvino)

3. Reading as an Illusion of Control; Life as Uncertainty

• Books provide him a space to “cherish the illusion that I am keeping everything under control” ([06:40]).
• Real life is full of uncertainty, ambiguity, and situations that elude immediate understanding and judgment.

4. The Limits of Language and Knowledge

• Calvino expresses his uncertainty about the future of human relationships and society, and his skepticism towards the pretensions of economists, sociologists, and politicians ([08:50]).
• He no longer sees literature as a “school of wisdom”—the ideal of wisdom itself feels unattainable today.

5. Writers’ Paradox: Drawing from the Unwritten to Feed the Written

• Even as his "true world" is the written page, Calvino feels compelled to repeatedly confront reality to gather material for literature ([09:55]).
• He identifies two dominant philosophical currents:
  • “The world doesn’t exist, only language exists.”
  • “Language has no meaning, the world is unspeakable.”
    Both philosophies intrigue but do not wholly convince him.

6. Modernity: The Saturation of the World With Language

• Calvino laments that everything (“even our very eyes are saturated with written language”) and points to how even the most immediate sensory experiences are “already read” ([27:05]).
• He characterizes modernity as a state in which “we live in a world where everything is already read, even before it starts to exist” ([24:27]).

7. Italian Peculiarities and the Crisis of Language

• As an Italian, Calvino notes that his country’s culture is marked by stories full of ambiguity and endless interpretation, and a language that is “getting more and more abstract, artificial, ambiguous” ([28:00]).
• He sees this as both a frustration and a source of literary opportunity.

8. Estrangement and Literary Reception of the World

• Calvino references the phenomenological approach in philosophy and the literary "estrangement effect"—the challenge to see the world as if for the first time.
• He explores the idea that our "eyes are programmed to read," leading not just to literacy but to a way of parsing experience as if it were always already textual ([33:50]).

9. Mimesis, Description, and the Materiality of Detail

• Calvino considers whether literature should strive to mimic the world’s language—a practice of writers like Pound, Joyce, and Gadda—or if the task is to renew the relationship between language and world, as Kafka did.
• He values precise description and the attentive focus on objects—citing Williams, Moore, Montale, and Ponge as examples.
• Quote:

  “Perhaps the first operation is the simplest: fixing our attention on any object, the most trivial and familiar, and describing it minutely, as if it were the newest and most interesting thing in the world.” ([37:03] – Calvino)

10. Autobiographical Meditations: Writing to Overcome Limitations

• Calvino admits to not being a natural observer; much of his writing arises from trying to do “the impossible” for himself ([40:00]).
• He mentions his ongoing projects:
  • A book structured around visual descriptions.
  • A book about the five senses, despite feeling he lacks special faculties for any of them.

11. Writing As Longing and Desire, Not Possession

• For Calvino, writing is motivated not by mastery but by the “longing for something one would like to possess and master, something that escapes us” ([43:39]).
• Even great writers, he observes, do not capture experience but approach it, keeping alive “the seduction of desire.”
• Quote:

  “In a certain way, I think we always write about something we don’t know. We write to give the unwritten world a chance to express itself through us.” ([44:15] – Calvino)

12. The Writer’s Challenge and Literature’s Promise

• Ultimately, literature provides a space to create “the most meaningful” world possible, opposed to an external world “lacking in meaning and in perspective” ([45:59]).
• He concludes that we look up from the written page “to look into darkness”—implying the perpetual, necessary incompleteness of human knowledge and literary endeavor.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Susan Sontag on Calvino’s Legacy ([02:53]):

  “Italo Calvino is a writer for whom one need make no allowances...already of the very highest stature...we already know that he and his work will not be forgotten.”

• Calvino on the discomfort of public sharing ([04:10]):

  “In public, as in private life, I keep always a written page a few inches from my nose... Each time I started again to read, I was more perplexed. Each time the text looked different from before.”

• On written and unwritten:

  “I think I felt the same in my youth. But at that time my illusion was that the written and unwritten worlds would mutually enlighten each other... Today I can say that I know much more about the written world than before. Inside books, experience is still possible, but its domain ends at the white edge of the page.” ([07:18])

• On modernity and reading:

  “Through the centuries, the habit of reading has changed Homo sapiens into Homo legends. But this Homo legends is not more sapiens than his ancestors.” ([27:23])

• On writing as transformation:

  “My efforts in this case, as in the others, are not merely aimed at making a book, but also at changing myself, the goal of every human endeavor.” ([41:20])

• On what writing achieves:

  “What they [great writers] succeeded in conveying to us was an approach to experience, not an arrival. This kept intact all the seduction of desire.” ([43:50])

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Key Timestamps

• [01:39] Introduction to Calvino’s life and significance (El Leo)
• [02:53] Susan Sontag’s assessment of Calvino’s place in world literature
• [04:10 – 09:54] Calvino on the experience of writing vs. facing reality; difficulties of being a writer in a foreign tongue
• [09:55 – 24:27] The divide between written language and reality; philosophical challenges to representation; the saturation of experience by textuality
• [27:05] The irreducible influence of language on perception; “Homo legends”
• [28:00 – 37:03] Italian social and linguistic peculiarities; literary techniques of description and mimesis
• [40:00] Auto-biographical confession: writing what he believes he cannot write; the challenge of representing the senses
• [43:39] On writing’s true motive: longing for the unattainable
• [45:59] Conclusion: literature as the attempt to make meaning where the observable world withholds it

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Summary Tone & Takeaway

Calvino’s lecture is wry, philosophical, self-effacing, and profoundly inquisitive. He sees both promise and failure in the project of literature, recognizing it as rooted in the desire to know and to capture the ultimately uncapturable. The episode is a rich meditation on the task of the writer as someone who is never at rest: bridging, for fleeting instants, the “discontinuity” between what is written and what is lived.

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Transcript

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[El Leo]

Welcome to the New York Institute for the Humanities Podcast. I'm El Leo. In this episode of the Vault, we revisit the Italian writer Italo Calvino's James Lecture, presented at the New York Institute for the Humanities on March 30, 1983, Italo Calvino was one of the most inventive and widely read Italian authors of the 20th century. Born in Cuba in 1945, 1923 and raised in San Remo, Italy, he began his literary career as a journalist and fiction writer after World War II, publishing his debut novel, the Path to the Nest of spiders in 1947. He went on to write some of the most formally original works in post war literature, including Our Ancestors, Cosmicomics, Invisible Cities, and if On a Winter's Night A Traveler. His work moved fluidly between realism, fantasy and structural experimentation, earning him a reputation as one of the foremost practitioners of what would come to be called postmodern fiction. He died in 1985 in Siena, Italy. In this lecture, Calvino reflects on writing, reading and what it means to live between the written world and the material world. He is introduced by NYIH fellow Susan

[Susan Sontag]

Sontag in a time when literature is as debauched as all the other currencies, Italo Calvino is a writer for whom one need make no allowances, an important writer, a writer who, by the authentic standards of literature, is already of the very highest stature. We already know he belongs to the very small number of living writers who will be a permanent part of of literature. Though we wait impatiently for new books, new prodigies from this writer, we already know he belongs to the future as well as to the present. We already know that he and his work will not be forgotten. In that sense, literally, Italo Calvino needs, or should, should need no introduction.

[Italo Calvino]

Ladies and gentlemen, when I'm asked for a lecture not about a particular subject, but leaving me free to choose what to speak about, I feel rather at a loss. Usually when I write, I feel myself protected behind that solid object which is the written text. It will be up to the public to read it, or, if they are not pleased, to let it drop at any moment. For a lecture, on the contrary, I must face not only the audience but also the question within me. What is this audience expecting from my words when I master lecture in a language which is not my own language? A supplementary question. Are the words I am thinking the same I am saying, and the same the listener will receive? To break through these difficulties, I start surrounding myself by dictionaries, as if it could be from them that a solution will come. For instance, I may look for the word lecture and see what the world provokes in me. Lecture, according to Webster's Dictionary, means a an informative talk given before an audience and usually prepared beforehand b the text of such a talk. Therefore, I am here, having carefully prepared my talk, and the pages I am holding in my hands are the text I have written. Being unable to improvise, I am obliged to read, comforted by the Latin etymology of the world lecture, also given by Webster. In any case, I can never escape my fate. In public, as in private life, I keep always a written page a few inches from my nose. During my trip to join you on the plane crossing the ocean and later in the Cabo crossing Manhattan, I was re reading my text also in order to practice my pronunciation, to make the difference between word and world, which is my problem. And every now and then I raised my eyes from the page, glanced around, discovered a world quite different from the world inside the written page. Each time I started again to read, I was more perplexed. Each time the text looked different from before. This discontinuity between the written page Fixed and settled and the moving multiform world outside. The page never fails to strike me. Even now, in this hall, every time I raise my eyes and look at my audience, I experience a well known feeling of embarrassment. And I ask myself, why have I written what I have written? This will be the subject of my talk. What happens the moment I take my nose from the written page and I look around? A moment repeated countless times during the day. Perhaps the key moment, the moment of truth. I belong to that part of humankind. A minority on the planetary scale. But I think a majority inside this hall, which spends most of its waking hours in a very special world. A world built by horizontal lines where words follow each other one at a time and every sentence and every paragraph occupy its orderly place. A world perhaps very rich, even more rich than the unwritten one, but in any case requiring a special adjustment in order to fit oneself into it. When I move from from the written world to the other, the one we currently call the world, based upon three dimensions, five senses peopled by 4 billions of our fellows. For me, this means repeating every time the event of my birth, passing again through its trauma to shape an intelligible reality. From a lot of confused sensations, to choose again a strategy for facing the unexpected without being destroyed by it. This new birth is marked for me every time by special rites signifying my entry into a different life. For instance, the rite of putting on my glasses, because I am a near sighted man and I read without spectacles. While for the far side, to the majority of you, the right would be the opposite. Taking off the spectacles you use for reading. Any rite of passage means a change in the attitude of our mind. When reading, I need to understand quickly every sentence, at least its literal meaning. And once I have understood it, I feel ready to pronounce judgment. What I have read is true or false, right or wrong, pleasant or disagreeable. In my ordinary life, on the contrary, countless circumstances escape my understanding. From the most general to. To the simplest and most trivial. I am often facing situations I can't give an opinion about, and I prefer to suspend judgment. As I wait for the written word to become clearer. There is always a written page opened before me where I can dive back in. I do it without delay and with the greatest satisfaction. Because there at least, even if what I understand is only a small part of the whole, I can cherish the illusion that I am keeping everything under control. I think I felt the same in my youth. But at that time my illusion was that the rich and unwritten worlds would mutually enlighten each other. Experience in life and experiences in books would be complementary. And advancing in one field, I would advance in the other. Today I can say that I know much more about the written world than before. Inside books, experience is still possible, but its domain ends at the white edge of the page. On the contrary, what happens around me, surprises me every time, scares me, leaves me puzzled. I've seen many changes in my life, the wide world, in the society around me, many changes even inside myself. And yet I can't foresee anything for me, for people I know, not to mention the future of mankind. I can't foresee the future relationship between the sexes, between the generations, future developments of society, of towns, of countries, what kind of peace there will be, or what kind of war? What will money mean? Which of the everyday objects surrounding us will disappear and which new ones will appear? What sort of vehicles and engines will exist? What will be the future of the sea, of rivers, of animals, of plants? I know that I share my ignorance with those who, on the contrary, pretend to know economists, sociologists, politicians. But the fact that I am not alone doesn't cheer me up. I could cheer myself up by thinking literature has always understood something more than other disciplines. But this makes me remember that the ancients saw in the humanities a school of wisdom. And I realize how much the very idea of wisdom is unattainable today. At this point, you will ask me, if you say your true world is the written page, the only one where you feel at ease, why do you want to leave it? Why do you venture into that wide world you are not able to master? The answer is very simple. In order to write, because I am a writer, I am supposed to cast exploring looks around, catch glimpses of what is going on, then bend again over my writing desk and go on with my temporarily interrupted job. It is in order to start again my factory of wealth, that I must draw new fuel from the wealth, the unwritten. But let's look further into the situation. Are things really like this? The leading present philosophies say, no, you are wrong. Two contrasting conclusions to two philosophical currents haunt the writer's mind. The one says the world doesn't exist, only language exists. The author says the common language has no meaning. The world is literally unspeakable. For the former, solid language stands over a world of shadows. For the latter, it is the world which stands like a stony silent sphinx upon a desert of worlds shifting in the wind. The first current has its source in today's Paris. The second flows from the turn of the century in Vienna that has gone through several revivals and is today widespread also in my country. Both philosophies have strong claims to be right. Both offer the writer a challenge. The first to use a language responsible only to itself, the other to use a language in order to reach the silence of the world. I am fascinated and influenced by both. This means that I don't follow either, that I don't believe in either. What do I believe in then? Let me see for a moment if I can get some satisfaction out of this difficult situation. First of all, if we feel so intensely the incompatibility between the written and the unwritten, it's because we are now much more aware of what the written world is. We can't ever forget that it is made by words, that language is used according to its own techniques and strategies, that meanings and relationships among meanings are organized according to special systems. We are aware that when a story is told to us, this story is set in motion by a machinery like other machineries of other stories. And almost every written text tells a story or many stories, even a book of philosophy, even a company budget, even a cooking recipe. This realization is already a great advance. We can now avoid any confusion between what is linguistic and and what isn't. So we can be more precisely aware of any possible relationship between the two worlds. Now I have only to do the countercheck, to test that the world outside is still there and doesn't depend on words. It is to some extent irreducible to worth, and no speech, no writing, could exhaust it. I have just to turn my back on the worth, on the wealth deposited in books. Dive into the outside world, and I will join the heart of silence, the very silence full of meaning. How can I reach it? In order to get in touch with the outside world, some people merely buy the newspaper every morning. I know that this way is wrong. I know that in the papers I may get only a reading of the world made by others, or rather by an anonymous machinery specialized in selecting from the infinite dust of events those which can be caught in the sieve of news. Other people, in order to escape written words, turn on the television. But I know that all the images, even live reporting, belong to a constructed speech not unlike that of the papers. So don't buy the paper, don't turn on the tv, just go out and walk. But everything I see in the city streets has already got its place in the pattern of homogenized information. This world I see, the one we ordinarily recognize as the world presents itself to my eyes, already defined, labeled, cataloged, at least to a large extent. It is a world already conquered, colonized by wealth, a world that bears a heavy crust of speech. The facts of our life are already classified, judged, commented upon even before happening. We live in a world where everything is already read, even before it starts to exist. I see my argument has led me into a dead end.

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[Italo Calvino]

If the unwritten world is actually entirely written, I'll never be able to to break the written shell surrounding me. Whether I raise my eyes from the page or I look down, I can't expect any change. Not only everything we see, but also our very eyes are saturated with written language. Through the centuries, the habit of reading has changed Homo sapiens into Homo legends. But this Homo legends is not more sapiens than his ancestors. The non reading man could see and hear here many things we are not able to perceive now. The tracks of the beasts he was hunting, the signs of the approaching of rain or wind. He could tell the hours of the day from the shadow of a tree or those of the night, from the position of stars upon the horizon. And as to hearing, smell, taste and touch, his superiority over us is undeniable. Anyway, I didn't come here to propose a revival of illiteracy in order to recover the knowledge of Paleolithic tribes. I regret everything we have lost, but I am bearing in mind that the gains exceed the losses. What I am trying to discover is what we can actually do today. I must mention the special difficulties I have as an Italian in my relationship with the world and with language. The man who is speaking to you is a writer from a country which causes a lot of frustrations for those who try to understand it. Italy is a place where many mysterious stories happen, widely discussed and commented on every day but never solved. Where every event hides a secret plot whose nature remains hidden while the fact of being a secret is not a secret at all. Where no story comes to an end because its beginnings remain obscure. But between the beginning and the end we may enjoy an infinite number of details. Italy is a place where changes in society, habits, behavior, are now very quick, maybe too quick to let us understand in what direction we are heading. And anyway, everything that happens is accompanied by forewarnings of degradation or catastrophe, or by declarations of our persistent triumph in our traditional art of surviving, picking our way and making do. Therefore, the stories we Italian writers can tell are marked on the one hand by the sense of the unknown, and on the other by the need for construction, for exactly drawn lines, harmony and geometry. That is the way we react to the quicksands we stand on. As for the language, a sort of plague has struck it. Italian is getting more and more abstract, artificial, ambiguous. The simplest things are not ever said directly. Everyday language, which used to be the living source writers could draw from, now doesn't escape the infection. Therefore, I think we Italians are in the ideal situation to connect our present difficulties in writing novels with general reflections about the world. An important international trend in the culture of our century, what we might call the phenomenological approach in philosophy, the estrangement effect in literature, urges us to break through the screen of worlds and concepts and see the world as if it appeared for the first time to our sight. Well, now let me try to create the void in my mind and gaze at the landscape, keeping it free of every cultural connection. What happens? Our site is programmed to read, and I notice that I am trying to read the landscape, the meadow, the stormy sea. Such a program doesn't mean that our eyes follow an instinctive horizontal movement from left to right, then from the left again, repeating the same movement a bit lower down, and so on. Of course, the eyes I am speaking about are programmed for the Western page. For Japanese eyes, we should suppose a vertical program, reading, more than an optic exercise, is a process involving mind and eyes, a process of abstraction, or rather an extraction of concreteness from abstract operations, like recognizing distinctive marks, breaking down everything we see into minimal elements, assembling them in meaningful segments, discovering all around us regularities, differences, recurrences, exceptions, substitutions, redundancies. The comparison between the world and a book has a long history, since the Middle Ages and Renaissance, in which language is the worst book written? According to Galilei, it was the language of mathematics and geometry, a language of absolute rationality and exactitude. Is that the way we can read today's world? Perhaps it might be so, but only for the extremely far galaxies, quasars, supernovae. As to our everyday world, it appears to be written rather in a mosaic of language, like a wall crowded with graffiti, filled with scribblings one upon the other, like a palimpsest whose parchment was scratched and rewritten several times, like Schwitter's collagen, a stratification of alphabets, heterogeneous quotations, slang terms, computer printouts. Should we try for mimesis of the worst language in our writing? Some of the most important writers of our century have done this. We may find exaples in Ezra Pound, or in Joyce, or in some vertiginous page by Carlo Emilio Gadda, always driven by an obsession with connecting every detail to the whole universe. But is Mimi this the right way? My starting point was the irreconcilable contrast between written and unwritten word. If their two languages merge, my argument goes to pieces. The true challenge for a writer is to speak about the tangled mess of our century, using a language so transparent that it reaches an hallucinatory level, as Kafka did, to renew a relationship between language and world. Perhaps the first operation is the simplest fixing our attention on an object, any object, the most trivial and familiar, and describing it minutely, as if it were the newest and the most interesting thing in the world. One of the lessons we can derive from the poetry of our century is the investment of all our attention, all our love for details in something very far from any human image, an object, a plant, an animal, then identifying in it our sense of reality, our morals, ourselves, as William Carlos Williams did with SC Klaman, Marianne Moore with Nautilus, Eugenio Montale with An Ile in France. When Francis Ponge wrote prose poems about such humble things as a piece of soap or a lump of coal, the philosophical question of the thing in itself began to mark literary research after the time of Sartre and Camus. This research had its extreme expression in the description of a Quarter of a Tomato by Rob Grie, but I think that the last word has not yet been said. Recently in Germany, Peter Hanke has written a novel based entirely upon landscapes, and in Italy, a visual approach is the common element among some of the latest young writers I happened to read. My interest in descriptions is also due to the fact, I must confess, that the book I am writing now includes several descriptions. I try to make description turn into a story while remaining just a description. In every story of this book there is a character who thinks only as insofar as he sees, and he mistrusts every thought coming to him by any other means. My problem in writing this book is that I am not what can be called an observer. I am very absent minded. So the first operation I have to perform is to concentrate my visual attention on something and then describe it, or rather do both at the same time. Because, not being an observer, if I observe, for instance, an iguana at the zoo and I don't write about it at once, I forget it. I must say that most of the books I have written and those I intend to write originate from the thought that it will be impossible for me to write a book of that kind. When I have convinced myself that such a book is completely beyond my possibilities of temperament or science, I sit down and start writing it. That's what happened also with my last novel, if On a Winter Night Traveler, I started imagining all the kinds of novels I would never write because I couldn't. Then I tried to write them, and for some time I felt in myself the energy of ten different imaginary novelists. Another book I am writing is about the five senses in order to demonstrate that contemporary man has lost the use of them. Writing it, I have the problem that my sense of smell is not very sharp. I lack a really keen hearing, I am not a gourmet, my sense of touch is unrefined and I am nearsighted. For each one of the five senses, I have to make an effort in order to master a range of sensations and nuances. I don't know if I shall succeed. But my efforts in this case, as in the others, are not merely aimed at making a book, but also at changing myself, the goal of every human endeavor. You may say that you prefer books conveying an actual experience, real and guaranteed. Well, I do too, but in my experience, the urge for writing is always connected with the longing for something one would like to possess and master, something that escapes us. Now, as I know very well this sort of urge, I have the impression that I recognize it also in the great writers whose voices seemed to reach me from the summit of an absolute experience. What they succeeded in conveying to us was an approach to experience, not an arrival. This kept intact all the seduction of desire. That is maybe the way great authors give us that precise feeling of knowledge that we cannot find anywhere else. In a certain way, I think we always write about something we don't know. We write to give the unwritten world a chance to express itself through us. Yet the moment my attention wanders from the settled order of the written lines to the movable complexity no sentence is able to hold entirely, I come close to understanding that on the other side of the words, there is something worth could mean. Poets and writers we admire have built up in their works a world we feel as the most meaningful, opposing it to a world they too felt lacking in meaning and in perspective. Believing that their gesture was not too different from ours, we raise our eyes from the page to look into darkness.

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[Italo Calvino]

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[Italo Calvino]

For more information, visit us@nyi humanities.org.

[Susan Sontag]

Sa.