Why Read the Classics?

Summary

Why Read the Classics? is an essay by Italo Calvino, first published in Italian in 1981 and later chosen as the title piece of Perché leggere i classici (1991), a posthumous collection of his essays on books and authors. Rather than giving a single definition of a classic, Calvino proposes fourteen numbered definitions, each growing out of the reflections that precede it, so that the essay reads as a chain of attempts that circle the subject from different sides. He begins with a social observation: people tend to say they are rereading a famous book rather than reading it. Calvino treats this as a small, forgivable pretense, noting that even the best-read person has missed many fundamental works, and that meeting a great book for the first time in maturity is a pleasure of its own. Books read in youth may be half forgotten, yet they leave models, comparisons and scales of value that keep working on the reader; returning to them in adult life is therefore a new encounter, because the reader has changed. From there the definitions develop. A classic offers as much discovery on rereading as on first reading; it never exhausts what it has to say; it reaches us bearing the interpretations of earlier readers and the traces it has left on languages and customs, as the Odyssey carries all that Ulysses has come to mean. Calvino urges readers to go to the text itself before the commentary, observing that no book about a book says more than the book in question. He adds that classics are read for love rather than duty, except at school, whose task is to give students enough acquaintance with them to choose their own. A personal classic, he suggests, is one the reader cannot be indifferent to and against which the reader defines himself, even in disagreement, as Calvino says of his own quarrel with Rousseau. The final definitions take up the relation between the classics and the news of the day. Calvino doubts the value of reading only old books in isolation, since a reader needs to know from where he is reading; ideally the present becomes background noise while the voice of the classics is heard clearly, and a classic persists even when the present seems wholly opposed to it. He recommends that each reader assemble an ideal library, half of books that have mattered and half of books expected to matter, with empty shelves left for surprises. The essay ends with an anecdote borrowed from E. M. Cioran about Socrates learning a tune on the flute while the hemlock was prepared. Brief, witty and widely anthologized, the essay is often cited in discussions of the canon, rereading and the purpose of literary education.

Plot or Argument

• Definitions 1–3: Reading and rereading

  Calvino begins with the habit of saying 'rereading' and reflects on books met in youth and again in maturity, and on their hidden influence.

• Definitions 4–7: Inexhaustible books

  Each reading is a discovery; a classic never finishes saying what it has to say and reaches us carrying earlier readings and cultural traces.

• Definitions 8–12: Direct reading and personal classics

  He favors the text over commentary, describes reading for love, defines one's own classic as a book one cannot ignore, and places classics in a family tree.

• Definitions 13–14 and conclusion: Classics and the present

  Calvino balances the classics against current events, proposes an ideal personal library and closes with Cioran's anecdote about Socrates.

Characters

• Italo Calvino, author

  Italian novelist and essayist reflecting on what makes a book a classic.

• Martin McLaughlin, translator

  British scholar of Italian whose translation of the collection appeared in 1999.

• Patrick Creagh, translator

  English poet and translator of the essay's first English version (1986).

• Giacomo Leopardi, authority

  Italian poet whose father's great library Calvino describes as an ideal of classical education.

• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, authority

  Author Calvino names as one he constantly argues with yet counts among his own.

Lessons

• Reading and rereading

  Calvino argues that a great book changes as the reader changes. Students can reflect on books they have returned to.

  • Why does Calvino think rereading in adulthood is a new experience?
  • Is there a book you understood differently the second time?

• The text before the commentary

  Calvino recommends reading the work itself before introductions and criticism. This invites discussion of how secondary sources help or hinder.

  • What does Calvino say about books that talk about books?
  • When is a guide or commentary useful, and when does it get in the way?

• Choosing your own classics

  School supplies acquaintance with some classics, Calvino says, but readers choose their own. Students can consider what makes a book theirs.

  • What is the role of school in Calvino's account?
  • What book might you call 'your' classic, and why?

Context

By the late twentieth century, debates about the literary canon, the place of classics in schools and the pressure of mass media were active in Europe and America. Calvino, a novelist who had also worked for decades as a publisher's editor, wrote often about reading and literary tradition.

Composition

The essay first appeared in the Italian weekly L'Espresso in 1981. Patrick Creagh's English translation was published in The New York Review of Books in October 1986. After Calvino's death in 1985, the essay gave its title to Perché leggere i classici (Mondadori, 1991), a collection of his essays on writers from Homer to Borges; Martin McLaughlin's English translation of the collection appeared in 1999.

Reception

The fourteen definitions are widely quoted in classrooms, anthologies and writing on the canon, and the collection remains one of Calvino's most read nonfiction books.

Comparisons

• If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

  Calvino's novel about the pleasures and frustrations of reading dramatizes many of the essay's ideas about readers and books.

• Walden

  Thoreau's chapter on reading argues, like Calvino, for the lasting value of the great classics, Homer and Aeschylus among them.

• Essays

  Montaigne, whom Calvino lists among the classics, wrote essays that turn constantly on his own reading of ancient authors.

• Essays

  Bacon's 'Of Studies' ranks books as tasted, swallowed or digested, an earlier short guide to how and why to read.

• The Odyssey

  Calvino uses the Odyssey to show how a classic reaches us carrying centuries of interpretation.

• Fathers and Sons

  Calvino cites Turgenev's novel as a classic whose characters keep reappearing in later times.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• How each definition grows out of the paragraph before it.
• The difference between reading in youth and in maturity.
• Calvino's advice about commentaries and introductions.
• The image of the present as background noise.

Key terms and names

Canon

The body of works generally regarded as classics in a culture.

Rereading

Returning to a book already read, which Calvino treats as a fresh encounter.

Commentary

Writing that explains or interprets another text.

Corollary

A statement that follows directly from one already established.

Talisman

An object believed to hold special power; Calvino likens some classics to talismans.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension Why do people say they are 'rereading' a classic, according to Calvino?
2. Comprehension What does Calvino recommend about introductions and criticism?
3. Interpretation How can a classic help a reader define himself 'even in opposition to it'?
4. Interpretation What does Calvino mean by calling the present 'background noise'?
5. Big Question What makes a book a classic?
6. Big Question Should schools choose which classics students read?

Faith Connections

• Matthew 13:52 (Scripture)

  The householder 'which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old' suggests Calvino's picture of a classic that yields fresh meaning on every return.

• Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 'Reading' (Great Conversation)

  Thoreau's call to read the heroic books of antiquity offers a nineteenth-century companion to Calvino's essay.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: A classic cannot be fixed by one definition; it is recognized by the way it rewards rereading, carries its history with it, shapes the reader's identity and endures alongside the noise of the present, so reading the classics is better than not reading them.

Rhetorical device: numbered definitions. Calvino builds the essay as a sequence of fourteen definitions, each revising or extending the last, so the reader watches the concept take shape.

Debate: Resolved: Students should choose their own classics rather than read an assigned list.

Memory Work

A classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Choose three of Calvino's definitions and apply them to one work you have read, explaining whether it qualifies as a classic.

Comparison with Walden: Compare Calvino's reasons for reading the classics with Thoreau's in the chapter 'Reading'.

Creative Prompts

• Essay

  Write your own fifteenth definition of a classic and explain it with an example from a book you know well.

• Classroom

  Each student chooses one of Calvino's definitions and tests it against a work read this year.

• Fiction

  Describe a reader returning to a childhood book many years later and discovering something new in it.

• Dialogue

  Write a dialogue between Calvino and a student who says the classics are irrelevant to modern life.

Further Reading

• If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino

• Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino

• The Uses of Literature, Italo Calvino

• Walden (chapter 'Reading'), Henry David Thoreau