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Modern Italy
Journal of Modern Italian Studies
RIVISTA DI STUDI ITALIANI
Anno XXI , n° 2, Dicembre 2003 ( Contributi ) pag. 42-58
LIGHTNESS AND MULTIPLICITY:
THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF CALVINO'S POETICS
MARTIN MCLAUGHLIN
Magdalen College, Oxford
Leggerezza is without doubt the most famous and perhaps the most important of the literary values outlined by Calvino in the Lezioni americane1. Its fame and popularity are due not only to the fact that it is the first lecture in that posthumous collection, but also because it is a quality that is in tune with what for want of a more precise term might be
called the postmodern Zeitgeist2. Yet no matter how closely in tune with recent times literary lightness might be, it must not be forgotten that it is an element that does not characterize only Calvino's late poetics. It is, as I hope will be seen, a quality that he valued right from the outset. Indeed it is present in one of his earliest pieces of literary critical writing, written forty years before the Harvard lectures, his graduating thesis on the works of Joseph Conrad. When in the second chapter he discusses Conrad's short story Karain (from his Tales of Unrest), a story Calvino considers one of his finest, the young 23-year old student notes a change in Conrad's style at the point when the eponymous protagonist starts to tell his story aboard the English ship: up until this point in the tale Conrad's language had been overblown,
but it now changes: "il linguaggio, per adeguarsi alla mentalità del selvaggio, si fa leggero e lineare e la sua storia è d'una poesia tutta risolta in immagini"3. This is the first mention of writing that is 'leggero' in Calvino and it is coupled with another adjective 'lineare' which will also often be used by Calvino of his own writing: in fact he was to emulate Conrad's work throughout his career as a writer4. Lightness is also a value that he cherished in his early years as a literary scout for Einaudi in the USA: during his first trip to America he reported to Luciano Foà, in a letter dated 29 January 1960,
that "[Paul] Goodman non ha la leggerezza di Purdy"5. The importance of this criterion was to remain with Calvino when analysing the works of other major literary figures in the 1970s, figures of the stature of Luigi Malerba and Guido Almansi, some of whose works he found lacking in lightness6. Naturally the fullest treatment of the topic is in the Lezioni americane.
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