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read at night before going to bed, a beautiful article, take you into the memory world of reading.
To commemorate the centenary of Calvino's birth, the first Chinese translation of his biography was released recently. Tonight's night reading is an excerpt from "Italo Calvino: Novel Writer, Storyteller". With light strokes and rhythm, the author freely shuttles between the literary world and life experience of this alternative writer, outlines his creative veins, and spells out the charming image of Calvino from multiple angles-the storyteller.
As the writer Zhao Song wrote in the preface, he believes: "Different from those big biographies that excavate the life of the master with great fanfare, this short biography is a dance with Calvino's soul." It's named after everything.
Calvino's stories are novel because he chooses them so carefully—as if he's describing a whole new world—and in the way he makes them interact. Moreover, his intentions were at the right time, because it was an excellent historical opportunity to understand Italy, and Calvino mustered up the courage to use his language to respond to those unspoken and inexpressible expectations. Despite the superficial resemblance, our world is not Pavese's very poetic world, it is a world of fate, languishing in the folds of psychologisme, unable to escape the cycle of destiny. Nor are we in Vittorini's world, made of unanswered questions, enclosed within a kind of mystical, moralist writing.
Compared to Calvino, these two authors are like paysagistes, whispering almost silently. What they are striving for is basically a comprehensive historical narrative of the resistance movement. Most of the various expressions of neorealism come from their cultivation. Calvino freshens us precisely because we do not find in his novels his fidelity to traditional models. This traditional mode bears the shadow of Manzoni, and it is often seen in the writings of other writers in the same period. They are most concerned about being as realistic as possible (vraisemblable) and being a witness to history as much as possible.
Calvino in his youth
If Calvino had his concerns, it is clear that, from the earliest writings, his concern was to prove that writing has a simple power to express all that is intuitive and sensible but not immediately rationalized.
However, such an expression directly puts the narration and traditional storytelling in a secondary position, putting them at a disadvantage in the order of selection. There is no certain pattern in Calvino's works, but some works of imitation (mimesis) and transformation of various patterns filtered by life experience and intellectual experience. The work is incredible, both in terms of volume and the results of the transformation. He makes his own reading lists so often that it is worth reminding him that, in the sense of passive cultural acquisition, he is not attached to any one model.
reading experience and living experience are not two separate worlds, but a whole world. Every life experience, once it needs to be properly interpreted, must rely on your reading experience and then integrate it. The truth that all books are derived from other books is only superficially opposed to the truth that books are derived from actual life and the relationships between men.
For Calvino, culture is the result of a transcendence that leads him to reject an objective representation of events. We have already seen that that objectivity can only be an illusion; and that his operation begins with an artificial creation, that is, writing (écriture), which is more prone to illusion, and he accepts it frankly.
Calvino
In this sense, The Path, like Calvino's other works, is the result of careful construction: "It is not a child who tells a fresh, unadulterated story, but an intellectual who has carefully constructed this story. He wants people to see the world as if it was seeing it for the first time. He is ambitious, because he seems to aim at Pavese's mythical poetry, so that the work can reach an absolute value under the "eternal standard", and it is because this value is fixed that it is constantly shining. He chooses to attach this ambition to the indomitable people who are the protagonists of the most talked-about period of national history. This means that the author wishes to present, by contrast, rather than moralizing, the difficulties people face in knowing themselves and their relationship to others. The intellectual does not say what should be done, he just describes what he sees, so as to stimulate thinking.”
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In making this choice, it is also a conscious effort to maintain a great Italian tradition, that of the short story, and of poetry, but not of the novel. The genre of the
novel was not introduced into continental Europe until the beginning of the 19th century. Among the people introduced were translators like Foscolo and intellectuals like Manzoni—they lived in a culture whose reference to Italian culture was neither deep nor unique. Stories are a variant of the short story, and the French word for "stories" can only partly convey the meaning of the word, just as there are differences between the traditions of the two countries. Because of its verb form "raccontare" (to tell, to tell), "racconto" has the air of an allegory, which, before it was written, originated first in an oral tradition. The colloquial meaning of the Italian word has almost another meaning in the French vocabulary.
The fact is that Calvino loved storytelling, and he devoted himself to this allegorical form. It can be said that he never stopped writing fables, or never gave up speaking in the tone of a fable writer telling fables.
With this choice he answers the (political) question of whether he belongs to the canonical tradition or not, by which, in Gramsci's words, he makes himself a "great artist", reinvigorating a genre that has always existed in Italian literary culture anyway. Calvino also used this method to resolve the confusion of how to admit the narcissistic "I" in front of the story. He said: "The problem is to give a place to the "I" who is very cumbersome in the eyes of modern writers." In his excellent foreword to the collection, Jean Starobinski speaks of the pleasure conveyed by Calvino's work: "The obsession with narrative is the chief characteristic of Calvino's work... He is interested in everything that allows him to read stories: picture books, films, storybooks. He soon begins to tell stories to himself and develops a desire to communicate with others. Stories are moments connected to each other, events unfolding in the duration of time that make characters appear and disappear...that is, worlds that are similar to our world Similar, yet completely different from our world, because they take place elsewhere... To read a story is to temporarily believe in a past that needs to be believed in the telling; and the people who read the story, those who listen to the story innocently, because the beginning of the story gathers together, they know that after the beginning, there will be a later, an end, and they hold their breath—this is a common saying.” Anticipation is an absolutely real feeling, a joy mixed with disappointment. When it finally ends, it doesn't want to end like this, so it asks to tell another story from the beginning, and one more story. People are eager to distinguish the clues in countless intricate stories.'Once upon a time' is a unique expression capable of spawning endless stories. Each story—and Calvino knows it all too well—can be poured into all the stories at once, so that the stories never end, from one story to another, from one surprise to another. "
or Calvino
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Calvino has already talked about the universe, castles, restaurants and cities, and there is only one thing left for him to do: explain the creative techniques of these works, that is, the mechanism of symbol transmission between author and reader. is)'s works - present your own opinions. Calvino will appear on the stage as the author, and directly address the readers as you:
You will start reading Italo Calvino's new novel - "If On a Winter Night, A Traveler"...
To satisfy the desire to read, you need to make a series of adjustments and find a good posture: first, make sure you are alone with the book you want to read, find a comfortable posture, neither too strong nor too weak light; It requires a somewhat pessimistic abandonment of other forms of activity; mental and physical engagement with the book, leaving the bookstore or library like a fortress conquered.
Once these steps are done, we are ready to walk into joy, quite like starting a happy new relationship with someone. We start reading, and the reader's attitude depends on whether they are busy: reading can begin on a bus, in a car, at a desk, and the gestures in these situations are usually not very respectful of the book. So it is best to read it in your own home and evaluate it with another set of criteria. This novel just bought, such as the length of the book, the back cover, so that we can finally immerse ourselves in reading, especially when we don’t know exactly what the author’s book is about.
is still Calvino
This is not so much an assumption of a love relationship between the reader and the author through the book, but rather a relationship of seduction and conquest. A reader with a certain amount of education must be in a relatively relaxed and less stressful time and environment at this time. He must read step by step. Of course, he can also skip the reading. The above
is the general situation when he started reading this book, but then the book has a wrong page number caused by a typographical error; What's more, it was because of this book that he met female readers.
Female readers expressed their reading ambitions more clearly, while male readers did not. "She can articulate her expectations and rejections, which is the sublimation of 'general female readers', and her selfless enthusiasm makes her proud of the social role of female readers."
Neither of them can let go of the pleasure of reading this book. They searched for the missing parts of the story in other books, and even switched to other authors to complete the story. In fact, female readers have already predicted what kind of novels will appear in each chapter: "In addition, each 'novel' has a title, which corresponds to a certain need, because the titles of the novels you read next will also become the title of a chapter. Since the title of the book must be related to the theme of the story in words, each 'novel' will use its title to cater to the expectations of female readers, and the expectations of female readers are formed in the process of reading the previous chapters."
The book uses twelve chapters to talk about male readers and female readers Finally got married.Within the framework of this event setting, ten different stories appeared, and it was also the beginning of ten unfinished novels. The titles of all the novels were combined into a wonderful poem: What is the final outcome of
on the moonlit fallen leaves
around the empty tomb?
he asked, impatient to learn more.
...
content is selected from
[Method] Jean-Paul Manganaro /
Gong Linlin / translated
Nanjing University Press
new media editor: Yuan Huan
with pictures: historical data Tips to meet us on time:
