15.5.2010
It's almost a banality to state that living under illusions isn't good;
it is something like a basic premise of a good life that it must be
connected to reality. Losing that connection, whether we realize it or not,
is a form of unhappiness. We may not necessarily feel unhappy,
i.e. it isn't unhappiness in a psychological sense; it's not a question
only of a state of mind — when we talk about unhappiness here, it's
about a condition of our life as such. (For a little more background on that
distinction, see Dan Haybron's "The meanings of happiness", and generally
all the other excellent resources on his
happiness and well-being page. You'll particularly want to look up
his description of the 'George' case.)
Now why is this sort of life one that strikes us as unhappy, a way of
living that simply isn't good? One reason is that it makes us vulnerable
to others' attempts to use us. (And being used is in turn bad because it
means that our actions aren't for the sake of our own goals, including the
top-level goal of leading a happy life, but for the sake of others'
goals.)
In "Leaning from the steep slope", one of the beautifully composed
novel fragments in Italo Calvino's Se una notte d'inverno un
viaggiatore ("If on a winter's night a traveler"), the protagonist acts
continuously under misinterpretation of the events around him, as we can
easily recognize while the story unfolds. He is spending some time in a sea
town, recovering from an illness, and the people he meets, a pedantic
meteorologist and a young woman with some artistic preoccupation, both
pursue shady underground activities. The meteorologist seems to have a
political agenda; he submerges for a few days, asking the protagonist to
look after his weather instruments meanwhile, then there are some
dark-looking men searching for him, and finally he meets the protagonist
again in a conspirative setting. The young woman who makes drawings of sea
animals is seen to visit an inmate of the local prison, and she asks the
protagonist under a weak pretext to get tools (an anchor and a rope) that
look suspiciously useful for an escape attempt. None of this even enters the
mind of the protagonist, though. (Only at the end of the fragment, when he
is confronted by an actually escaped prisoner, there is 'a sudden crack' in
his universe, but it's not clear which of his illusions has been shattered;
or, for that matter, whether that phrase really shows that he's finally
recognized what's going on. For all we know, he might shortly come up with
another misinterpretation of what he sees.)
While the atmosphere of his surroundings is somewhat grey and clammy, his
view of things is exceedingly pathetic. The very beginning reads "I'm coming
to believe that the world wants to tell me something, through messages,
signs, warnings."[1] Yet the meaning of most observations he makes would be
plain with just a little common sense, and still they escape him. A little
further down the text: "On some days everything I look at seems laden with
meaning: full of messages which I'd have difficulty to define, to put into
words, to communicate to others, but which for that very reason seem
significant to me." Thus an incapability to perceive accurately and
realistically corresponds with a refusal to come to terms with his own
views, an indulgence in lofty self-talk, with the grander scheme of things
serving as an excuse not to look at the details of one's own life. (At some
point, he states: "I'm only reporting my first impressions; for only those
count.") Perhaps that sort of attitude is required for such a continuous
self-deception.
It is clear, however, that his naivety is used by both his
acquaintances. Ingeniously though his interpretations of the strange
goings-on may be, they are far off a much more simpler reality. He is the
tool both of a political underground group and a (very probably)
romantically motivated escape attempt from prison. Whatever justification
these may have in the broader constellation of the world of the novel,
the protagonist himself isn't really acting in that world, not
from his own motives, at least. He isn't, in a word, in the driving seat,
he's himself just moved around by others.
(A side-note for those familiar with Calvino's book and interested in the
delights of the postmodern novel: this tale of a person driven by other
people's interests is in the novel's surrounding plot read to the main
protagonist, the 'reader'; and the sentence immediately following is the
ironical: "Listening to someone else reading is entirely different from
reading yourself. When you're reading yourself, you can take your time or
quickly skim the sentences — it's you who controls the pace." It's
as if Calvino wanted to drive the point home from inside the guiding
metaphor of the framework plot.)
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[1] All quotes are my translations from what is already a
translation into German; so I might be a little removed from the actual (or,
if you will, the 'real') text.
