Writer vs. Critic

Italo Calvino was a prolific writer of criticism – mostly appreciations of individual books and authors, reflections on the current state of literary affairs (particularly in Italy), and/or theoretical pronouncements about literature's rapporti with the world. Those essays, lectures, prefaces, interviews, and whatnot which have been collected and reprinted – at least six volumes’ worth of them – commentators on Calvino have continued to rely on, more or less, as a guide to his fiction. The problem with any such approach derives from the fact that Calvino the critic and Calvino the fiction writer are for the most part two different personages.

The difference is partly a matter of degree. The critic, for example, shares the writer's passionate engagement with literature, mostly in terms of particular books; but eclectic as the critic's reading is, it still doesn't quite measure up even to that of the author of Il barone rampante (‘The Baron Rampant,’ 1957), let alone of Calvino's entire fictional opus. At the same time, the critic generally evinces neither of the qualities which, mostly by their fusion, give Calvino his peculiar literary identity as the author of ‘cosmicomic’ stories: (1) a humor generated by incongruities, and (2) most of all by those linguistic incongruities that make for his distinctive style. The critical pronouncements, if they reveal anything of that Calvino, do so chiefly by contrast with their own moral earnestness and lack of stylistic distinction.