Note: Luigi Pirandello wrote a four-part appreciation of the work of the novelist Alberto Cantoni, which was included with the publication of Cantoni’s novel L’illustrissimo (Most Illustrious) in 1905, a year after Cantoni’s death in 1904.
This is my translation of the first part of that tribute, in which Pirandello lays out what he sees as the stagnant condition of Italian letters at the turn of the twentieth century. –Steve Eaton, April 12, 2024
Translation copyright © 2024, Steve Eaton
Perhaps everyone knows the tale of the poor yokel who heard the parish priest say he couldn’t read, because he’d left his glasses at home. So he puts his brain to work and conceives the brilliant idea that knowing how to read depends upon a pair of glasses. Then of course the poor man goes to the city and walks into an optician’s shop, demanding, “reading glasses!”
But since not one pair of glasses manages to let the poor man read, the optician, sweaty, gasping, and out of patience after upending half of his store, asks him, “Look, do you even know how to read?”
To which the astonished yokel replies, “Oh, fine! And if I knew how to read, why would I need you?”
Well now. All those who think that in order to compose prose or poetry without any thoughts or feelings of their own, they simply need to start writing in someone else’s style, should have the courage and honesty of the poor country fellow. To the question, “Look, do you have anything of your own to say?” they should have the courage and honesty to reply, “Oh, fine! And if we really had something of our own to say, would we write like this, in someone else’s style?”
But I understand that this would really be asking too much. It would be enough if these types didn’t get too offended, when someone politely points out that while there’s no rule against the exercise of writing, or transcribing, in a certain style, the exercise means that they don’t have their own eyes, but rather a pair of glasses borrowed from someone else.
It’s been said that the imitative faculty of our native intelligence is superior to the inventive, that the entire history of our literature is basically nothing more than an endless succession of imitated styles. In short–looking into it–we find quite a lot of eyeglasses and precious few eyes. And even those eyes are often not above, in fact are proud of, arming themselves with ancient classical lenses, to see in the style of Virgil, or Horace, or Ovid, or Cicero, who in their day had seen in the style of the Greeks. But at least these optical aids were fashioned at home by Madame Rhetoric,[1] who always kept her eyeglass shop in our neighborhood. And they passed from nose to nose, over many, many generations, until suddenly the cry was raised, “Gentlemen, let’s try for once to see with our own eyes!” We tried, but…well…we couldn’t see a thing. And that’s when the import of foreign glasses began.
Old history! And I wouldn’t have mentioned it if today we hadn’t actually arrived at the point where, if you want to gain the public’s favor, you need not so much your own pair of eyes, but rather a pair of glasses furnished by someone else, which make you see people and life in a certain style and a given type. Heaven help one anyone who scorns them and refuses to put them on, who persists in wanting to see people and life in their own way, from their own perspective; their vision, if simple, would be called bare, and if sincere, vulgar.
And the funny thing is that it’s precisely those who have the glasses and don’t realize it (or pretend not to) who preach that in art one absolutely must have eyes of one’s own, while opposing those who, for better or worse, use them. Because—let’s be clear—eyes of one’s own are fine; but they must be and see, in every way, like their eyes, which are actually eyeglasses, and if they fall off, good night!
One purchases these glasses, needless to say, in Paris. Its market for such goods has only recently turned international. It seems that the most renowned French factories are now in decline, and more than one has lost all credibility. It’s true that glasses, or rather monocles, from the Stendhal factory are still used by some of our men of letters; but the rest, who shop elsewhere, never pass up an opportunity to let them know that they’re damaging their eyesight, and that it’s time for them to shop elsewhere too. A pair of critical lenses, until recently highly recommended, for their, shall we say, idealistic virtue, came from the firm of Brunetière.[2] Without a doubt the lenses from various factories in nearby Belgium, Scandinavia, Russia, and Germany, which deposit their wares in France, are more in vogue. These are adopted in the greatest number by our men of letters, though they’re careful to insert two different panes in the frame, one Russian, let’s say, and one French, or rather one a Nietzschean concave, and the other an Ibsenist convex.[3]
The harm is this: that we, as much as want to believe the opposite, are still dominated by Rhetoric and still follow her rules and her precepts, without realizing it. And not only in literature, but in all the expressions of our lives. Rhetoric and imitation are fundamentally the same thing.
And the damage she causes in every age not only to our literature, but first to Latin as well and then, to a greater or lesser degree, to all the romance literatures, is incalculable. Rhetoric has almost always taught our poets what norms, what precepts should guide the construction of their works of art, as if the work of art was a formal argument. And it’s precisely Rhetoric’s fault, if all or almost all of our literary works have, in their patient diligence, in their rigorous composition, a discouraging air of familiarity. We do not have, for example, between one author and another, wide differences of personality, or obviously original forms, visions, and concepts, like English literature has. Almost all of our literature is arranged as if in a filing cabinet, belonging to Rhetoric: over here are the plays which—until Goldoni—all resemble each other, plays of classical imitation and commedia dell’arte;[4] over there are the chivalric romances, and so on. The Divine Comedy has always tormented the rhetoricians. Which drawer does it go in? Is it lyric, epic, dramatic, or instructive? You’d have to rip it up and scatter bits of it everywhere, in various drawers. And all the narrative literature, even of the most varied and diverse deeds, and all their descriptions, seem alike, precisely because Rhetoric has taught us how to narrate and describe this way, by genre, and how to architect the periods, the numerous Ciceronian periods.[5] But didn’t Rhetoric actually teach the poets how they should express feelings of love, how they should make love in verse? Oh yes! First, all of them followed the style of the Troubadours, who dictated the Laws of love, and then everyone followed Petrarch, their greatest heir. And for so many centuries of our literature, we have witnessed an infinite herd of love-smitten monkeys who go on a pilgrimage, sighing, to take the clear, cool, sweet waters of Laura’s serenader.[6]
Rhetoric is the one who not only approves, but recommends the imitation of every model she considers classical. And imitation was prized and honored by every writer, a testament to their high education, their high literary manners, to the obedient devotion to academic norms, to the rules defining beauty, or rather the beautiful, the good, and the true. To imitate; that is, not to have one’s own way of seeing, of thinking, of feeling; prized and honored. But why write, then? Why restate in a timid voice what others have shouted? Why be a ghost and not a person? To have a parrot within, instead of a soul?
Nor has it stopped yet, unfortunately! First they imitated the classical writers, and now the foreigners. And still we hear, from time to time, a voice raised which advises a return to the ancients, as if art could renew itself by turning old, reverting itself, that is, and adapting itself to the ideals and needs of the life of an age now long distant; as if the ancients—as Goethe has already stated—hadn’t been new in their day, and we aren’t condemning ourselves to turn old by imitating them; as if the imitator isn’t denying himself, keeping himself by definition a step behind his own guide; as if, finally, it wouldn’t be better to affirm one’s own feelings, one’s own life. And even today, in our analyses which call themselves “critical,” we hear talk of form and content, as if form were a suit, more or less elegant, more or less fashionably tailored, of more or less fine cloth, for dressing a mannequin. And debates break out, for example, around theater, which we’re incapable of because we lack a living language, etc. etc. Analyses, debates, outdated and vain, made by Rhetoric in every age, which will be made forever, until it’s understood that we shouldn’t start from external laws that works of art are supposed to conform to. Rather we must discover the law that each work of art necessarily has within itself, the law that defines it and gives it character, in short, the law of its own life, if that work of art is indeed vital, a law which cannot be arbitrary, as free or capricious as it may seem. And we must see a work of imagination as a work of nature, as a living, organic creation, and as such we must study its birth, its development, and its qualities; we must see in it nature itself, serving as the instrument of human imagination in creating a superior, more perfect work, since it discards all that is common, obvious, and ephemeral, since it is more defined, simplified, living only in its ideal essence. One cannot speak of art in the abstract, since the essence of art lies in its particulars; and the critic may criticize only on one condition: that with each work they penetrate the soul of the artist, in other words, that they identify and reveal in each work of art the seed from which it’s born and grows, given its temperament, its conditions, its behavior, in short the nature, the culture, and the temperament of the artist, as if they represent the landscape onto which the seed has fallen and the climate and the environment in which it has grown.
Two things are lacking, glaringly and most importantly, from our current literature: criticism and character. Two reasons, therefore, for which we lament the recent passing of a writer who possessed these two gifts, criticism and character, at the highest level: Alberto Cantoni.
[1] at home: that is, in classical Italy.
[2] Brunetière: the conservative Catholic critic Ferdinand Brunetière (1849-1906)
[3] one a Nietzschean concave, and the other an Ibsenist convex: concave lenses improve long-distance vision; convex lenses aid in seeing close-up objects.
[4] Goldoni…commedia dell’arte: Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) was a popular and influential playwright of social comedies; commedia dell’arte refers to a popular form of semi-improvised comedy, including Punch-and-Judy type puppet shows, which originated in Italy in the sixteenth century.
[5] Ciceronian periods: “Latin, unlike modern languages, expresses the relation of words to each other by inflection rather than by position. Hence its structure not only admits of great variety in the arrangement of words, but is especially favorable to that form of sentence which is called a Period. In a period, the sense is expressed by the sentence as a whole, and is held in suspense till the delivery of the last word.” (Allen and Greenough, Latin Grammar)
[6] the clear, cool, sweet waters of Laura’s serenader: A woman named Laura was the object of many of the romantic poems by Petrarch (1304-1374). “Clear, cool, sweet waters” (“Chiare, fresche et dolci acque”) is the opening line of one of his love poems.
The Garden of Eaton 