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| V V: Classics revisited | |
| V V / New Delhi June 27, 2009, 0:31 IST | |
Italo Calvino, one of Italy’s leading writers and literary critics, had written a seminal essay, “Why Read the Classics?” in 1981 that was subsequently translated into English in an anthology, The Literature Machine in 1999. This essay has now been reissued in Penguin Modern Classics (£6.99) along with thirty-six essays that represent Calvino’s canon of great works—such as Homer, Hemingway, Borges, Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Balzac, Stendhal and others from the western canon. All are full of fascinating insights from the incisive mind of a brilliant reader as well as a writer and all subscribe to the European philosophy that a novel is nothing except a philosophy expressed in images—no philosophy, no literature.
Calvino laid down fourteen attributes that define a classic—number one—classics are those books that people always say that they are ‘re-reading’ not ‘reading’. Some of the others are:
- A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
- A classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers. (Elsewhere, in an essay on “Pasternak and the Revolution” he says that a classic is a book with which we can argue.)
- The classics are those books which come to us bearing the aura of previous interpretations, and trailing behind them the traces they have left in the culture or cultures (or just in the language and customs) through which they have passed.
- A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans.
- Your classic is a book to which you cannot remain indifferent, and which helps you to define yourself in relation to it or even in opposition to it.
- A classic is a work that comes before other classics; but those who have read other classics first immediately recognise its place in the genealogy of classic works.
- A classic is a work which relegates the noise of the present to a background hum, which at the same time the classics cannot exist without.
- A classic is a work which persists as background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway.
You can check out the rest but each attribute of a classic is illustrated with examples drawn from the entire corpus of world literature. But Calvino warns that “each one of us has to invent our own ideal library of classics; and I would say that one half of it should consist of books we have read and that meant something for us, and the other half of books which we intend to read and which we suppose might mean something to us. We should (also) leave a section of empty spaces for surprises and chance discoveries.” Very simply, you have to make the discoveries yourself.
Having laid down the parameters of what are classics, Calvino takes one European classic after another but the problem here is an embarrassment of riches. Not just in terms of his analysis that is original and uniquely his own, but what it can lead us on to. His method is simple: he picks on one novel or short story and uses it as a peg to cover the entire corpus of the author’s writings. The basic thrust of his essay is to uncover the writer’s mind and what makes him/her tick and resonate with us years after they had written their piece. Here is a sampling from the thirty-six essays included in the book.
In “Hemingway and Ourselves” what attracts is the “existentialist nothingness” of his stories. And this ‘nothingness’ is expressed with open, dry eyes, without illusion or mysticism, “how to be alone without anguish and how it is better to be in company than to be alone.” What has attracted readers was Hemingway’s style, which fully expressed his conception of life. It can be considered “the driest and most immediate language, the least redundant and pompous style, the most limpid and realistic in modern literature.”
“Pasternak and the Revolution” which is essentially a review essay on Dr Zhivago links Pasternak to the great 19th-century Russian novel with its “explicit and general discussion of life, capable of putting the particular in direct relation to the universal, and of containing the future in its portrayal of the past.” In analysing the political undertones of Dr Zhivago, Calvino provides a picture of what the Revolution brought to the intelligentsia—it simply drove them underground. But Calvino reminds us that Dr Zhivago is not a book of nostalgia for the pre-revolutionary period; it is a book that asks many questions that lead to a nostalgic, conservative vision.
The answer to Calvino’s central question, “Why Read the Classics?” will be found in the essays: they will compel you to look at the classics again and find things you had not seen in them before.
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