Masquerade

Abstract

IN THE USES OF LITERATURE (1980), ITALO CALVINO, THE Italian avant-garde writer who died in 1985, wrote: “Whom do we write a novel for? Whom do we write a poem for? For people who have read a number of other novels, a number of other poems. A book is written so that it can be put beside other books and take its place on a hypothetical bookshelf. Once it is there, in some way or other it alters the shelf, expelling certain other volumes from their places and forcing them back into the second row, while demanding that certain others should be brought up to the front.” Besides commenting on the readership a writer targets, Calvino, like T. S. Eliot in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (The Sacred Wood, 1920), offers a compelling theory on how books make history. The present, he argues, is made of current volumes, only a handful of which will survive on the hypothetical bookshelf of the future. While the past in literature is represented by a glorious display of titles that have overcome the mercilessness of time, deleted from human memory are those that, fortunately or not, succumbed to oblivion.¹