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Dec. 8th, 2009 06:09 amActually all of Calvino is great. I'm liking his early, communist phase quite a bit; his fabulist strain already existed then, but it was in Hawthorne's mode up until he read Borges in the mid-'50s. In Hawthorne you spend some effort convincing yourself a particular story's ethical slant can be compatible with your own views--I'm convinced all artists are leftists to the extent they're artists--and it's refreshing to get some of his sort of vision on cheaper terms. It's my kind of communism: Calvino dodged the poisonous, prophetic aspect of Marxism mostly by associating it with nature (and, not unrelatedly, staying pretty vague about it). Doesn't usually amount in the stories to much more than: our music will reclaim its harmony...someday...I hope...and small reclaimings may merge into larger. Took him a while to squarely recognize the rather different flowchart many of his associates were working from.
I wonder if that had something to do with the Borges? Borges was fascinated, among other things, with how people disagree. Calvino claimed he dodged psychology, but you could say he was attempting a separate atomism of it. For Borges, we choose our principles based on simple needs, and when the intellect doesn't overrule them (out of our need or mental weakness) they can lead us far and angrily away from one another. Our arguments become our psychology, and this is why all his criminals seem completely rational. Not great as abnormal psych, but works fine for the widely-errant normal, including the political. Borges loved the beauty of the disagreement itself, which Calvino came to love even more: not the conflict, but the departures at the root that make later conflict inevitable. Not that he didn't have his own opinions, and note them and have them carry the day, but he makes the attempt to understand the other point of view as a direction he too could have gone, to admire its specific logical emanation from foundational illogic. A kind of vacation, a re-seeing of the whole world after paying a token fee of fundamental inaccuracy.
Late Calvino is obsessed with how, in dealing with what we can't know (rather than should know better about), we're full of incipient gestures like those of Borges' heresiarchs from reality. Not that that means there's no moral concern: he's about showing the self-correction involved in how we take changes in our world. The ethical angle tends to be what one of his characters is working through at the story's present time--or, closer to late Kafka, how a character corrects her own explanation to someone else of what she's been through. Decision-making as digression, as (usually) benign self-disagreement, arguments among newborn interpretations. Calvino, too, has his ideas about the world: the 'truth' of one his stories establishes itself, and that's part of the point. He was never interested in tractionless interpretation; the only reason to get how we get the world right is to get the world right. Well, that and the joy of recognizing how we work, that generalized human narcissism.
And a touch of that vacation of fantasy. Amazing how few fantasists are purists about that, though--I guess writers have to become moralists, psychologists, political analysts in the long run, however reluctantly, because human decision-making is the only subject matter that doesn't run out. And many do seem reluctant. Deferral of opinion is an interesting phenomenon in literature.
I wonder if that had something to do with the Borges? Borges was fascinated, among other things, with how people disagree. Calvino claimed he dodged psychology, but you could say he was attempting a separate atomism of it. For Borges, we choose our principles based on simple needs, and when the intellect doesn't overrule them (out of our need or mental weakness) they can lead us far and angrily away from one another. Our arguments become our psychology, and this is why all his criminals seem completely rational. Not great as abnormal psych, but works fine for the widely-errant normal, including the political. Borges loved the beauty of the disagreement itself, which Calvino came to love even more: not the conflict, but the departures at the root that make later conflict inevitable. Not that he didn't have his own opinions, and note them and have them carry the day, but he makes the attempt to understand the other point of view as a direction he too could have gone, to admire its specific logical emanation from foundational illogic. A kind of vacation, a re-seeing of the whole world after paying a token fee of fundamental inaccuracy.
Late Calvino is obsessed with how, in dealing with what we can't know (rather than should know better about), we're full of incipient gestures like those of Borges' heresiarchs from reality. Not that that means there's no moral concern: he's about showing the self-correction involved in how we take changes in our world. The ethical angle tends to be what one of his characters is working through at the story's present time--or, closer to late Kafka, how a character corrects her own explanation to someone else of what she's been through. Decision-making as digression, as (usually) benign self-disagreement, arguments among newborn interpretations. Calvino, too, has his ideas about the world: the 'truth' of one his stories establishes itself, and that's part of the point. He was never interested in tractionless interpretation; the only reason to get how we get the world right is to get the world right. Well, that and the joy of recognizing how we work, that generalized human narcissism.
And a touch of that vacation of fantasy. Amazing how few fantasists are purists about that, though--I guess writers have to become moralists, psychologists, political analysts in the long run, however reluctantly, because human decision-making is the only subject matter that doesn't run out. And many do seem reluctant. Deferral of opinion is an interesting phenomenon in literature.
