Italo Calvino's essay – a contribution to a series called Crosscurrents,
which sought answers to the question of “how responsive is the writer to his
intellectual environment, and in what special ways does he contribute to it”
– was published in the TLS of September 28, 1967
The relationship between philosophy and literature is a prolonged contest. The
eye of the philosopher pierces the opacity of the world, nullifies its
fleshy density, reduces the variety of the existent to a spider’s web of
relations between general concepts, fixes the rules by which a finite number
of pawns moving upon a chessboard works out a possibly infinite number of
combinations. Along come the writers and replace the abstract chessmen by
kings and queens, knights and castles with names, with particular shapes,
with a complete set of attributes, royal or equine; in place of the
chessboard they present dusty battlefields or stormy seas; and so the rules
of the game are thrown to the winds, and an order different from that of the
philosophers allows itself gradually to be discovered. And the discoverers
of these new rules of the game are, again, none other than the philosophers,
returning to recover their position and to demonstrate that the operation
performed by the writers is reducible to an operation of their own kind,
that the decisive castles and bishops were merely general concepts in
disguise.
And so the dispute continues, each of the two sides convinced that it has
taken a step forward in the conquest of truth or at least of a truth, and at
the same time conscious that the raw material of its own constructions is
the same as that of the other: words. But words, like crystals, have facets
and axes of rotation with different properties, and light is refracted
differently according to how these crystal-words are orientated, according
to how the polarizing laminae are cut and superimposed. The opposition
between literature and philosophy does not demand to be resolved; on the
contrary, only if it is considered as permanent and always new does it give
us a guarantee that the sclerosis of words will not close over us like a cap
of ice.
It is a war in which the two contestants must never lose sight of one another,
but neither must they maintain relations that are too close. The writer who
attempts to vie with the philosopher by launching his characters into
profound dissertations ends, at best, by making the giddy heights of thought
habitable, persuasive, commonplace, yet without breathing into them the air
proper to these great heights. Anyhow this type of writer belongs to the
first decades of our century, to the period of the ratiocinative theatre of
Pirandello and of the intellectual conversations of Huxley’s novels, and
appears nowadays to be extremely remote. The intellectual novel, the
discussion-novel, has also vanished; anyone who today set out to write a new
Magic Mountain or a new A Man without Qualities would not be writing a novel
but an essay on the history of ideas or on the sociology of culture.
In the same way a philosophy too heavily clothed in human flesh, too sensitive
to the immediate and to life as it is lived, constitutes a less exciting
challenge for literature than the abstraction of metaphysics or pure logic.
Phenomenology and existentialism lie side by side with literature across
frontiers that are not always clearly marked. Can the philosopher-writer
take a fresh philosophical look at the world, which is at the same time a
fresh literary look ? For a moment, when the protagonist of La Nausée is
observing his own face in the glass, this may be possible: but throughout
the main part of his work the philosopher-writer appears as a philosopher
who has at his service a writer versatile to the point of eclecticism. The
literature of existentialism failed to make progress because it did not
succeed in acquiring a proper literary rigour. Only when the writer writes
before the philosopher who interprets him will literary rigour serve as a
model to philosophical rigour: even if writer and philosopher coexist in the
same person. This holds good not only for Dostoevsky and for Kafka but also
for Camus and Genet.
The names of Dostoevsky and Kafka bring us to the two greatest examples in
which the authority of the writer—that is, the power to transmit an
unmistakable message through a special intonation of language and a special
distortion of the human figure and of situations––is combined with the
authority of the thinker at the highest level. This also means that the
“Dostoevsky man” and the “Kafka man” have changed man’s image even for those
who have no particular inclination for the philosophy which lies—more or
less explicitly—behind this representation. On this level of authority, the
writer of our own time who can be placed beside these two is Samuel Beckett.
The image of man that we form for ourselves today cannot but take into
account the negative absoluteness of the “Beckett man”.
It must be said that applying philosophical labels to writers (what is
Hemingway? a behaviourist; what is Robbe-Grillet? an analytical philosopher)
is a cocktail-party game whose unreality could be pardoned only if it were
very witty, which it is not. How many times has the name of Wittgenstein
been made use of in respect of writers who had nothing in common except the
fact that they had nothing whatever to do with Wittgenstein! To establish
who is the writer of logical positivism might be a good theme for an
international congress of the P.E.N. Club. As for structuralism, it is best,
after the brilliant results attained in various fields, to await the
establishment, in its case, both of a philosophy and of a literature.
The traditional ground for the meeting-place of philosophy and literature is
ethics. Or rather, ethics has almost always provided an alibi, so that
philosophy and literature shall not look each other straight in the face and
shall remain sure and satisfied that they can easily find themselves in
agreement in their common task of teaching virtue to mankind. This has been
the literary misfortune of practical philosophies, especially of Marxism: to
have, tagging along behind them, an illustrative, exhortatory literature,
which aims at rendering the philosophical vision of the world natural and in
conformity with spontaneous feelings. Hence the loss of the true
revolutionary value of a philosophy, which consists entirely in prickings
and frictions, in the upsetting of common sense and feelings, in doing
violence to every way of “natural” thinking.
The description of Marxist writer perhaps applies only to Brecht, who, in
contradiction to the official ethics and aesthetics of communism, did not
pay attention to the surface of “realism” but to the logic of the internal
mechanism of human relations, to the overturning of values, and displayed an
anti-virtuist didacticism. Today––in Germany, in Italy, and also to some
extent in France––in the literature of the “New Left” which descends from
Marxism and rejects “realist” and pedagogic explanation, there exists a
trend which continues to regard Brecht as a master: because he was didactic,
paradoxically and provocatively; a different trend holds that Marxism is and
must be merely the consciousness of the hell in which we live, and that
anyone who claims to indicate ways of escape lessens the power of this
consciousness; revolutionary literature, for them, is simply the literature
of absolute negation.
At the same time it now seems clear that, if it is true that the philosophers,
having interpreted the world, must change it, it is equally true that, if
they cease for a moment to interpret it, they no longer succeed in changing
anything. Dogmatism has lost ground; the expectation of discovering some
hidden truth in foreign ideologies today unites ex-sectarians and
neo-extremists.
From the point of greatest resistance this situation extends in all
directions. It is beneath the sign of a voracious eclecticism that
literature is taking a renewed interest in philosophy; and we can see
writers of established tradition deriving inspiration by bringing their
philosophical reading up to date, without the monochrome, uniform surface of
their world becoming cracked. Philosophical study of the world can serve as
much to confirm what we already know as to bring it to a crisis,
independently of the philosophy that inspires us. Everything depends upon
how the writer penetrates beneath the crust of things: Joyce projected upon
a dreary beach the theological and ontological questions which he had learnt
at school and which were remote from present-day preoccupations, but
everything that he touched —worn-out shoes, fishes’ eggs, pebbles—seemed to
have its essential substance turned inside out.
This stratigraphic analysis of reality continues to be employed today by
writers endowed with the most modem and rigorous cultural and
epistemological equipment (I will cite only Michel Butor and Uwe Johnson).
And it leads to the discussion not only of the world (which would be a small
matter) but of the very essence of the literary work. There are risks that
one must be prepared to run if one wishes to follow this road.
The prevailing trend among the young writers of today is more philosophical
than ever, but with a philosophy interior to the actual act of writing. In
France the Tel quel group, headed by Philippe Sollers, concentrates upon an
ontology of language, of writing, of “the book”, which had its prophet in
Mallarmé; in Italy the destructive function of writing appears to be at the
centre of research; in Germany the difficulty of writing the truth is the
main theme; anyhow, common characteristics are predominant in the general
tendency in these three countries. In literature this tends to present
itself as a speculative activity, austere, unemotional, remote both from the
cries of tragedy and from the caprices of happiness: its only colours, its
only images are the whiteness of the pages and the array of black lines.
Does my previous argument, then, no longer hold water? A frontal encounter
between two ways of seeing the world appears to have become impossible, ever
since literature seems to have outflanked philosophy’s positions and to have
shut itself up in a philosophical fortress which can hold out with perfect
self-sufficiency.
In reality, if I wish my picture to be valid not only for today but also for
tomorrow, I must include in it an element which I have so far neglected. The
thing I was describing as a marriage with separate beds should be seen as a
ménage à trois: philosophy, literature and science. Science is faced with
problems not dissimilar to those of literature; it constructs models of the
world which are continually being challenged, it alternates between the
inductive and the deductive method, and has always to take care not to
mistake its own linguistic conventions for objective laws. A culture that is
equal to the situation will exist only when the problems of science, those
of philosophy and those of literature are continually challenging each
other.
While we await this moment all we can do is to pause and consider the
available examples of a literature which breathes philosophy and science but
keeps its distance and dissolves, with a slight puff of air, not only
theoretical abstractions but also the apparent concreteness of reality. I am
alluding to that extraordinary, indefinable region of the human imagination
from which have issued the works of Lewis Carroll, of Queneau, of Borges.
But I must first observe one simple fact, out of which I do not claim to
construct any general explanation: while the relationship of literature to
religion, from Aeschylus to Dos-toevsky, is established under the sign of
tragedy, its relationship with philosophy becomes explicit for the first
time in the comedy of Aristophanes, and was to continue its progress behind
the screen of the comic, the ironical, the humorous. It was not for nothing
that those works which, in the eighteenth century, were called contes
philosophiques were in reality gay vendettas against philosophy carried on
through the literary imagination.
But in Voltaire and Diderot the imagination is governed by a precise didactic
and polemical purpose; the author already knows, right from the start, all
that he wishes to say. Does he know or does he think he knows? The laughter
of Swift and Sterne is full of shadows. At the same time as the conte
philosophique, or, slightly later, the conte fantastique and the Gothic
novel released obsessive visions of the unconscious. Does the real challenge
of philosophy lie in lucid irony, in the sufferings of reason (we Italians
think immediately of Leopardi’s dialogues), in transparency of intelligence
(the French will at once think of Monsieur Teste), or in the conjuring up of
the ghosts which continue to haunt our brightly lit houses?
Both traditions have been carried on, here and there, up to the present day.
The eighteenth-century “philosophe” writer has his most flourishing
reincarnations today in Germany, both as a poet (Enzensberger), as a
dramatist (Peter Weiss’s Marat-Sade), and as the novelist (Günter Grass). On
the other side, “fantastique” literature has been revived by surrealism in
its struggle to throw down the barriers between the rational and the
irrational in literature. With his formula of the “hasard objectif”, Breton
exposes the irrationality of the case: associations of words and images
respond to a hidden logic no less authoritative than that which is commonly
called “thought”. There, perhaps, lies the main philosophical node of the
literature of our century.
In point of fact the new horizon opened out when a clergyman, a student of
logic and mathematics, started inventing the Alice stories. From’that moment
we ,know, that philosophical reason (which “when it sleeps breeds monsters”)
can, with its eyes open, have magnificent dreams which are also completely
worthy of its loftiest moments of speculation.
From Lewis Carroll onwards a new relationship is established between
philosophy and literature. There arise the great samplers of philosophy as a
stimulus to the imagination. Queneau, Arno Schmidt, Borges carry on
different relationships with different philosophies and make use of them to
foster visionary and linguistic worlds of very different kinds. They have
the common habit of hiding their cards: their philosophical associations are
visible only through allusions to the great originals, metaphysical
geometry, erudition. Every moment we expect that the secret watermark of the
universe is about to become visible against the light—an expectation that is
always disappointed, as is right.
Characteristic of this family of writers is their inclination to cultivate the
most compromising passions, both speculative and erudite, without ever,
fundamentally, taking them seriously. On the borders of their realm are to
be found: Beckett, who constitutes a unique case, so much so that his cruel
mockery is suspected of having a tragic and religious quality—I do not know
whether wrongly; Gadda, divided between the ambition to write, each time, a
Natural History of mankind, and the rage which, each time, congests him to
the point of causing him to break off his books halfway through: and
Gombrowicz, divided between a tight-rope lightness (the splendid duel
between a Synthetist and an Analyst) and a devouring concentration upon
Eros.
Introducing Eros into culture is a game between symbols and meanings, between
myths and ideas which can reveal gardens of visionary delights, but must be
practised with supreme detachment. It is appropriate here to quote a book
which came out a few months ago in France—Vendredi, by Michel Tournier, a
reworking of Robinson Crusoe packed with references to the “human sciences”,
in which Crusoe makes love (literally) with the island.
Robinson Crusoe was, unconsciously, a philosophical novel, and even before
that Don Quixote and Hamlet—how consciously I do not know—announced a new
relationship between the phantom-like lightness of ideas and the heaviness
of the world. When one speaks of relations between literature and philosophy
one must not forget that that is where the argument begins.
