The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Literature and the Gods by Roberto Calasso. Trans. Tim Parks
Thomas Hove

Untitled document

Roberto Calasso. Literature and the Gods. Trans. Tim Parks. Knopf, 2001. 212pp. $22.00; The Forty-nine Steps. Trans. John Shepley. Univ. of Minnesota, 2001. 290pp. $29.95.

Roberto Calasso is one of the most learned and daring voices on the global literary scene. Because of his originality, his work is difficult to classify. Much of his writing looks like scholarly criticism, but his unorthodox style and unbounded imagination make it hard to call his work anything but literature—and that in the unfashionable, purely laudatory sense of the term. On top of this, Calasso’s vast erudition is unrivalled, unless one goes back to the days of Erich Auerbach and E. R. Curtius. In Literature and the Gods he attempts to revive a sense of the divine in an age when ideals of “society” and “community” threaten to eradicate the kinds of mental experience characteristic of religious awe. Taking the early German Romantics and Baudelaire as his points of departure, Calasso’s lectures explore three topics he sees interlinked in postromantic literature: “the reawakening of the gods, parody, and ‘absolute literature’ . . . literature at its most piercing, its most intolerant of any social trappings.” Calasso locates the gods in the private act of reading. Now that “the way of cult and ritual is barred,” the only “natural condition” of the gods is “to appear in books—and often in books that few will ever open.” Plenty of recent books have predicted the demise of print culture and the ascendancy of the computer. But Calasso sees no cause for dismay in this surface change: “That we may be gazing at a screen rather than a page, that the numbers, formulas, and words appear on liquid crystal rather than paper, changes nothing at all: it is still reading.” No matter what the technology, he claims, the mind craves activity, and one of the highest forms of this activity can be inspired only by literature that is “sufficient unto itself.” Lest this sound like a mandarin aestheticist pose, Calasso is quick to add that literature isn’t “merely self-referential.” Quite the contrary, absolute literature is “omnivorous, like the stomachs of those animals that are found to contain nails, pot shards, and handkerchiefs.

The Forty-nine Steps is itself an omnivorous collection of reviews, prefaces, and essays, mainly on German writers, thinkers, and cultural critics from Marx’s generation to Adorno’s. Evoking once again Calasso’s fascination with the divine, the title refers to Walter Benjamin’s method of studying “in the theological sense . . . in accordance with the Talmudic doctrine of the forty-nine steps of meaning in every passage of the Torah.” Along with Nietzsche, Benjamin is at center stage in several of these pieces. But the starting point for the tradition these essays focus on is Max Stirner, the most rabid critic of “society’s superstitious faith in itself.” Some of Calasso’s subjects are familiar in English-speaking intellectual circles, particularly Benjamin, Adorno, and Heidegger. Other figures he covers are less familiar, notably Stirner, Robert Walser, and Karl Kraus. As in his earlier book The Ruin of Kasch, Calasso manages to rescue Stirner from his subordinate role in the history of philosophy as nothing more than the target of Marx’s and Engels’s extensive ridicule in The German Ideology. Calasso performs similarly impressive acts of literary retrieval in his remarks on Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet, and Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind.

These two books reveal Calasso doing what he has done so well in his previous work. Combining recent modes of knowledge with an unparalleled ability to generate new meanings from old myths, he provides modern consciousness with a road map through “the treacherous waverings of that uninterrupted experiment-without-experimenter that is the world’s recent history.” [Thomas Hove]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Literature and the Gods by Roberto Calasso. Trans. Tim Parks Thomas Hove Untitled document Roberto Calasso. Literature and the Gods. Trans. Tim Parks. Knopf, 2001. 212pp. $22.00; The Forty-nine Steps. Trans. John Shepley. Univ. of Minnesota, 2001. 290pp. $29.95. Roberto Calasso is one of the most learned and daring voices on the global literary scene. Because of his originality, his work is difficult to classify. Much of his writing looks like scholarly criticism, but his unorthodox style and unbounded imagination make it hard to call his work anything but literature—and that in the unfashionable, purely laudatory sense of the term. On top of this, Calasso’s vast erudition is unrivalled, unless one goes back to the days of Erich Auerbach and E. R. Curtius. In Literature and the Gods he attempts to revive a sense of the divine in an age when ideals of “society” and “community” threaten to eradicate the kinds of mental experience characteristic of religious awe. Taking the early German Romantics and Baudelaire as his points of departure, Calasso’s lectures explore three topics he sees interlinked in postromantic literature: “the reawakening of the gods, parody, and ‘absolute literature’ . . . literature at its most piercing, its most intolerant of any social trappings.” Calasso locates the gods in the private act of reading. Now that “the way of cult and ritual is barred,” the only “natural condition” of the gods is “to appear in books—and often in books that few will ever open.” Plenty of recent books have predicted the demise of print culture and the ascendancy of the computer. But Calasso sees no cause for dismay in this surface change: “That we may be gazing at a screen rather than a page, that the numbers, formulas, and words appear on liquid crystal rather than paper, changes nothing at all: it is still reading.” No matter what the technology, he claims, the mind craves activity, and one of the highest forms of this activity can be inspired only by literature that is “sufficient unto itself.” Lest this sound like a mandarin aestheticist pose, Calasso is quick to add that literature isn’t “merely self-referential.” Quite the contrary, absolute literature is “omnivorous, like the stomachs of those animals that are found to contain nails, pot shards, and handkerchiefs. The Forty-nine Steps is itself an omnivorous collection of reviews, prefaces, and essays, mainly on German writers, thinkers, and cultural critics from Marx’s generation to Adorno’s. Evoking once again Calasso’s fascination with the divine, the title refers to Walter Benjamin’s method of studying “in the theological sense . . . in accordance with the Talmudic doctrine of the forty-nine steps of meaning in every passage of the Torah.” Along with Nietzsche, Benjamin is at center stage in several of these pieces. But the starting point for the tradition these essays focus on is Max Stirner, the most rabid critic of “society’s superstitious faith in itself.” Some of Calasso’s subjects are familiar in English-speaking intellectual circles, particularly Benjamin, Adorno, and Heidegger. Other figures he covers are less familiar, notably Stirner, Robert Walser, and Karl Kraus. As in his earlier book The Ruin of Kasch, Calasso manages to rescue Stirner from his subordinate role in the history of philosophy as nothing more than the target of Marx’s and Engels’s extensive ridicule in The German Ideology. Calasso performs similarly impressive acts of literary retrieval in his remarks on Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet, and Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind. These two books reveal Calasso doing what he has done so well in his previous work. Combining recent modes of knowledge with an unparalleled ability to generate new meanings from old myths, he provides modern consciousness with a road map through “the treacherous waverings of that uninterrupted experiment-without-experimenter that is the world’s recent history.” [Thomas Hove]

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