The Anonymous Voice of the Age
I’ve been thinking a great deal about the preface Italo Calvino wrote in 1964 to his first novel, The Path to the Spider’s Nest, first published in 1947. The book is quite unlike most of what Calvino is known for; it’s far more realist, with a straight-forward narrative, and reads closer to For Whom the Bell Tolls than it does Invisible Cities. In his preface, there’s almost a sense of distancing, even close to disowning, this early work, as though having to make apologies for its uncharacteristic style. But in the process of contextualizing this very un-Calvino-esque Calvino book, he hits on something else, something that has stayed with me in the back of my mind since I first read it over twenty years ago, and something which, in the wake of the last year, has taken on for me a certain prescience. Here’s the passage:
The literary explosion of those years in Italy was not so much an artistic phenomenon, more a physical, existential, collective need. We had come through the war, and those of us of the younger generation — who had just been old enough to be partisans — did not feel crushed or defeated or damaged by the experience; rather we were the victors, carried onward by the forward thrust of the battle which we had just won, the exclusive guardians of its legacy. This was not facile optimism, however, or gratuitous euphoria; quite the opposite: what we felt ourselves to be the heirs…
