Yu Gengyun text.
In September 1985, Italo Calvino died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Like his friends Roland Barthes and Perek, there is no chance of a long goodbye and a reminiscence of his old age. Without an autobiography, he was reluctant to make himself a case of psychoanalysis.
Calvino was born in 1923 on the outskirts of Havana, Cuba, and later lived with his parents in San Remo, Italy. In 2023, the centenary of the birth of the writer Calvino, the Chinese translation of Living in a Tree: A Biography of Calvino was published, providing a valuable commemorative and literary guide. Authors Luca Barranelli and Ernesto Ferrillo write: "Through the rigorous and extremely modern cognitive framework of Calvino's work, it introduces the places where he lived and worked and the themes of his works. "This biography, which does not seek to be comprehensive, attempts to restore Calvino's perspective. It is similar to the creation of quotations, in that it faithfully borrows the author's own published and unpublished works (letters, interviews, and scattered documents) to complete the chronological and thematic commentary. Just like the ancient calligraphy, it can also be combined with a complete chapter;A biography is a collection of fragments of thought, which leads to a world of Calvino.
Living in a Tree" forms an interesting pun with "Baron in a Tree". It is a metaphor for the writer's origin, taste, and spirituality. Calvino's parents devoted themselves to agronomy and botanical research. The writer's closeness to the natural world comes from the psychological accumulation of childhood. He recalls that he liked to hide among the roots of the trees in the forest, imagining pine needles as knights, noblewomen or courtiers. This description led me to imagine Calvino as an elven phantom like a forest demon. The essence of the boundless is to indulge in fantasy, to live in a tree, to leave the ground and escape the gravitational pull of reality. In The Way of St. John's Non-fiction, he chronicles his childhood with his father's botanical station.
On the surface, he did not continue his parents' career, and "rebelliously" became an exception to the family and became a literati. But in fact, Calvino's writing is embedded with a scientific spirit and intellectual pleasure. The categorical interests and hierarchical order of the subjects can be completely transformed into structuralism in the work. How literature is integrated into the natural universe is extended to a genealogical and naturalistic approach. In my opinion, what he learned from his parents was not concrete scientific knowledge, but the thinking of imagining and understanding the world. The biography presents the writer's multipolarity and bidirectionality: both cinematic addiction and urban landscapes, such as Fourier's utopias;There is also the will to fight to participate in the resistance, guerrilla warfare. Just as he regarded guerrilla life as a different "fairy tale in the forest" and the press and advertising work in a publishing house as a "secret life", reality always wears a veil of fantasy.
Professional editing is the prelude to a writer's career, and he goes from a man who claims not to have much ink in his belly to a man who is self-taught. His professional writing career began in Turin. The charm of Turin is so in tune with the writer's penchant, "not an ethereal romance, but fully committed to his work, shy by nature, actively involved in the wider world, not self-contained, slightly sarcastic in life, transparent and rational wisdom." Writers in the new era must not only have the "ruthlessness" and rational technology of scientists, but also open up an ethical world full of courage and moral responsibility. "How can a writer's cultivation and poet's acumen be transformed into the organization and dissemination of ideas, and into the education and practice of combining all science and technology with modern civilization".
In the early 60s of the 20th century, Calvino left Turin and traveled between Rome and Paris. Interestingly, Calvino's relationship with the city is based on abstract ideas and overall imagery. In his description, it is difficult to find concrete, private urban life. "Maybe I lack the talent to build a personal relationship with the place, and I'm always a passing visitor to various cities. My desk is like an island: here or anywhere else. Moreover, the differences between cities are now gone, they have lost their once distinct characteristics, and they have become one". This may provide an interpretive perspective on why Calvino developed a neo-allegorical, realistic style of fairy tale writingPerhaps it stems from his detachment from spatial geography and the relationship between survival, as well as the refinement of the essence of life. He sees the way of life in different worlds as a totality, an extension of life that can be continuously integrated.
This draws the line between him and Baudelaire, Benjamin and others, the wanderers and wanderers. Calvino sees world travel as a displacement of breakpoints, rather than an exploration of territory. "It's just a simple move from one point to another, and there is nothing in between those two points, without any continuity. He is more obsessed with the pleasure of anonymity in the city, the deliberate alienation of "hiding in the city". For example, writing in solitude in a Parisian country house, the unchanged life is just in line with the spiritual portrait of the "urban hermit". Imagining a city is far more important than writing about it. Paris, which he regarded as an encyclopedic text, gained a new understanding. The store is like a chapter of **, an entry to be consulted, and a newspaper page.
This kind of urban imagery constructs the world, perceives the world, and gazes at the world, so that the urban space and the text structure are highly integrated, and the essence is to isomorphize daily life and reading behavior. The encyclopedia, the realization of Calvino's idea of a "literary machine", carries collective memory, the historical unconscious and surreal dreams. "We can also interpret Paris as a book of dreams, a photo album that collects our unconscious, a monster atlas. It is entirely from this urban concept that we can understand Calvino's writing and communication. They have a hidden, consistent, deep connection. Calvino's closeness to the structuralists, surrealists, and members of the Ulibo can be summed up in a fascination with space, an exploration of infinity, and a common search for suprahistorical structures.
Every space and element involves a full range of knowledge, which can be found in other contexts." Collecting and adventure have become two ways to read the city, and Calvino has always had a strong habit of collecting and classifying, which is inseparable from the background of his studies in the Faculty of Agriculture. "Accumulate collections, classify them, and then redistribute ......Finding oneself with the help of objects is an exploration of the world and a kind of self-realization. This kind of confession is exactly in line with Perek's writing experiment, and "The Puzzle of Life" is surprisingly consistent with Calvino's concept—it explores the inner relationship between objectivity and subjectivity in literature by using the appearance of the world of coordinates, locations, and objects.
The Invisible City transcends the material-bearing city and presents a symbolic exchange field of memory, desire, and discourse. As a result, the city becomes a modality of literary space, which is constantly generating and disappearing. "My book begins and ends with happy cities, which are hidden in the unfortunate cities". Can literature lead to the infinity of the world in a data-based, structured, and restrictive way?This is where Calvino and the members of Ulibo meet: precision and science, a contract with writing. The mode of getting along with the world lays the foundation for the intercommunication of the two creations. "My relationship with the world has shifted from exploration to consultation, that is, the world is a set of data that is independent of me. I can compare, combine, transmit, and maybe enjoy the data once in a while, but it's always superficial and I can't get into it. ”
The biography re-examines Calvino's intrinsic turnaround. The "Young Calvino" was passionate and impulsive, passionate about the practical philosophy behind Stendhalism. His description of realism is not a traditional statement of representation, critique, or exposure. On the contrary, he values the essential significance of realism in the achievement of individual values and the shaping of private life. Calvino's love for Flaubert, Conrad and Stevenson stemmed from their deep understanding of the different dimensions of reality. In my opinion, Flaubert pushed the "reality of language" to the limit, and he was able to present a precise, rational and practical life. Stevenson and Conrad embody the "reality of the self"—the characters are full of affirmation, value, and reflection on what they do.
In other words, conscious living is the first essence of realism and the root of the moral strength of the work. "Conrad was a great captain and this experience has given him a rich content in his work, with 'a sense of the unity of man and nature that comes from real life, how man realizes himself in what he does, in the moral admonition implicit in his work, and in the face of difficulties, whether on the deck of a sailboat or between the lines of his work'. Calvino's selection and evaluation of classic writers is in essence a re-evaluation of the profound relationship between literary history and contemporaneity. He uses the method of literary genealogy to sort out the kinship between himself and tradition and the changes in the origin.
Like his Italian predecessor Boccaccio, he did not write heroic legends, but only captured frustrations, comical loves, cunning or generous actions, all kinds of life crises. The tradition of short stories and prose has become Calvino's aesthetic style and writing ethic. The short stories present the world of the everyday and the customary, and the prose points to the practical, experiential life as it is. For Calvino, writing is a derivation of the work ethic, in which different subjects communicate through the creation of labor. At this point, precision is both a measure of morality and a requirement for writing. "There is an ethic in which precision is a value, something that requires effort but enriches the life of society is a value. ”
The notion of writing as a public service and a subjective interaction has profoundly influenced writers' creations. I call it writing that leads to existential meaning. Literature is a way of observing, evaluating, and judging the world, which precedes the writer, who only gives him personal attributes, "so that the world can be transmitted through me and circulated again". It can be seen that the writer does not create anything, but acts as a carrier and conductor. Calvino does not speak of the writer's view of enlightenment. He did not write for the sake of teaching, but for self-realization. "I write to learn things I don't understand......A certain knowledge or a particular ability", "What makes me want to write is not that I want to teach others what I know or what I think I know, but that I have a painful intellectual shortcoming." ”
His motivation to write stems from dissatisfaction with the subjective, withdrawn, self-contained world. Writers need to overflow their own experience, pretend to have abilities that they do not have, break free from individual limitations, and conceive works outside of themselves. This external pursuit of objectivity forces writers to accumulate knowledge, experience, and opinions. Calvino was fascinated by astronomy, cosmic tales, and folk fairy tales, all of which were paths to infinity. Just as every fairy tale can be transformed into another story, into countless versions. Palomar, who is completely immersed in the outside world, is like the embodiment of the writer's intellect. The observation of being in the world to achieve the expression of overlooking the world is the ultimate tension, which Calvino calls the contrast of "density" in writing.
The Complete Works of Cosmic Wonders tells the abstract concept of time and space in a narrative form, all in short works. Can shorter prose poems and fables cut the narrative even further, with only one sentence and one line per story?He "dreamed that the long cosmological works, legends, and heroic epics could be condensed into short poems." In an era when the pace of society is accelerating, literature should strive to achieve the greatest condensation of poetry and thought." This is Calvino's vision that distinguishes it from other writers: literature must serve future readers, making its own adaptations and choices. Literature that is long and long, long and redundant, like "osteoporosis", is inefficient literature. When I associate literature with efficiency, I'm afraid that most people will question it.
In fact, literature should emphasize efficacy, which is the respect for the reader's intellect and time. It requires precision, simplicity, lightness and conciseness, the standards that Calvino admires. More importantly, the author attempts to illustrate the inner unity behind Calvino's different genres. His early loyalty to historical reality turned into a later fantasy tone. However, "what I am not willing to give up is the epic adventures of Resistance literature, the dual energies of body and spirit." "In my opinion, Calvino never stopped realist narration, but the energy of his writing transcended and overflowed the picture of contemporary life. Therefore, he tried his best to excavate the mutations, grotesques and paradoxical signs of reality. "These stories are a little too sad. So, I felt like I needed to alternate between realistic and fantasy stories in my narrative work."
Although the title of this book is "Calvino's Biography", it essentially constitutes a pictorial biography and a record of words and deeds. The author is writing about "Calvino's time" – his distinction and his mutual success in his travels with a large number of writers, artists, and thinkers of his generation. Art is not only a solitary creation, but also a "circle" does not necessarily have a narrow and derogatory meaning. Relying on each other is the social attribute of writers, and the road to fame is also the social effect of artistic value. He communicates with those close to him concisely and to the point, but he is very patient and teaches those who are strange. "His friendships are protective of his unknown peers and younger generations." The beauty of his personality, like that of a gentle gentleman, rarely argues, never aggressive, and "expresses a clear reservation about any explanatory, educative, and enlightening statement of reality." ”
The biography is like another version of "When the Stars of Mankind Shine", writing Calvino's flowing feast. The writer is reduced to a speaker who is forever in dialogue and self-commentary. A large number of interviews are embedded to present his views and tendencies on life, art, and friends. It can be said that our understanding of Calvino is perceived from the world of Calvino's commentary. This is completely different from relying on the world to get to the writer's heart. It's a secret path, straightforward and accessible. "Living in a Tree" is a construction of the writer's relationship, position, and influence. When we commemorate Calvino, Calvino commemorates his good friend in the book. The eulogy of the obituary he wrote also applies to himself, and this intertextuality is quite meaningful. Biographies, eulogies and photographs all have a quality of formality, solidification, and finality. The writer must be talented enough to free it from its resemblance to the trait of death (closed iconology). This book certainly does just that.