Italo Calvino’s Lecture at Mount Holyoke College: Description and the Future of Literature

Less than a year before his untimely death, Italo Calvino received an honorary degree from Mount Holyoke College. In his acceptance remarks, Calvino spoke about the importance of what he perceived as a lost skill, the art of description. Reflecting on different types of description, Calvino selected several readings from his own works: “The Button,” Invisible Cities , and Mr. Palomar . Calvino’s choice of readings invites a comparison with his posthumous Six Memos for the Next Millennium , recalling, in particular, his chapters on “Exactitude” and “Visibility.” Calvino’s 1984 recommendation to revive the art of description goes hand in hand with his invitation to reflect on the shades and nuances of language, on precision and rigor as solutions to rescue language and literature from ambiguity and vagueness. He found this rigor and precision in the writings of several authors (from Leopardi to Valéry), as well as in art, in Domenico Gnoli’s work in particular. The intersection between Calvino’s writing and art has been examined by many; my paper further explores this interdisciplinary area. Starting with Calvino’s selections for his Mount Holyoke readings, and with what he construed as “descriptions from life” and “from imagination” (Gnoli as the poet of objects as landscapes, the imaginary scenery of Marco Polo’s intellectual travels, and Palomar’s existential reflections on objects), my article investigates Calvino’s descriptive impulse and the interconnections between literature and art, word and image.