Few genres are as deceptive as the fairy tale. The Germans call them Märchen—“wonder tales” that bring “news of the strange”—messengers from times when wishing was still effective. In 1812, Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm published the first edition of German fairy tales, Kinder-und-Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales). It contained the first widely-available versions of many stories since strip-mined by Disney: “Rapunzel,” “Rumpelstiltskin,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Snow White,” “The Frog Prince.” As good Romantic German nationalists, they sought to rediscover what was particularly Deutsche in them, defining the very spirit of a new “German” people—the volksgeist.
The Grimms discovered very little uniquely “German” in these stories. The tales reappeared in other countries, other traditions. This is something subsequent phylogenetic fairy tale analysis has confirmed over and over: to varying degrees, tales share the same elements, from figures and plots to narratives and characters, and they are not bound by geography or race. Researchers believe that many stories go back to the Bronze Age, and probably much farther than that. Yet through the changes of centuries, countries, and cultures, a story’s core may be miraculously preserved.
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For Cristina Campo, fairy tales were “those gospels which discourse so casually upon morality,” an “atlas” for all of one’s life. Cristina Campo was but the most consistent pen name of Vittoria Guerrini, born in Bologna in 1923. The New York Review of Books has taken the long overdue step of making her complete yet slim corpus of prose available in English, elegantly translated by Alex Andriesse. “I have written little,” Campo once wrote, “and would like to have written less.” It seems to me that Campo is among the great essayists of her century, and the fact that her work is becoming known to English readers should be a cause for excitement. Her prose is a potent draught, combining an allusive and elliptical coolness with a ferocious directness. It elucidates—even as it repeatedly encircles—mysteries.
An unorthodox scholar, poet, and translator with something of the anchorite about her, Campo was an Italian translator of Simone Weil (whose influence pervades her thought) and of William Carlos Williams. She left behind a single volume of poems. Her essays are charged, compact, Baroque and subtly wild. The Unforgivable includes her two collections in full: Fairy Tale and Mystery (1962) and The Flute and the Carpet (1971). “Every fairy tale,” Campo writes, “is freighted with one central, impenetrable enigma: destiny, election, error.” Her interest in the mechanics of “destiny,” one of her precious handful of themes, was no doubt influenced by the strictures of her own: an invalid’s life stemming from a congenital heart defect, which killed her in January 1977 at age fifty-three.
Language and silence, illumination and unknowing, sprezzatura and grace, transformation and transcendence, limits and freedom: Campo’s spiritual obsessions recur and coil between the essays. Her subjects range from Shakespeare to Chekhov, Williams and Marianne Moore to Mansfield and Donne. Certain names recur, like her personal pantheon of the imperdonabili—the “Unforgivables” of the title—Chopin, Bach, Benn, Pasternak, Proust, Weil, the Desert Fathers, other saints and mystics of her Catholic tradition. But, above all, fairy tales.
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Fairy tales are the unifying thread of Campo’s work, vessels of her two deepest concerns: perfection and destiny. Her mystical hermeneutics have little to do with the more utilitarian psychologising of Bruno Bettelheim, or the somewhat Linnaean, not to say taxidermic, impulses of Joseph Campbell. What makes Campo the greatest commentator on fairy tales I know is her depth—her insight is not into purely literary, moral, anthropological, or semiotic matters, but the patterns of narrative as an irreducibly unfolding “enigma,” an engine of mystery—the ultimate hermeneutic for the soul.
Yet there are few close readings of tales in the essays that make up The Unforgivable. There is talk of “Beauty and the Beast,” of “Cinderella,” and of several figures from The Thousand and One Nights, but Campo generalizes, generatively: She works through tropes, such as the “marvellous fate” of fairy tale heroes, in which a complete transformation of fortune is experienced only after relinquishing any attachment to fortune as such. Only once we have made such a leap, beyond “the visible” and “the game of forces” (here we see Weil’s influence) can revelation take place.
Of “Cinderella,” Campo notes the moment when the heroine flees the “precipice” of her time limit on the final night of the ball. In her obedience to the magic limit, Campo says, Cinderella “doesn’t care about losing her vair slipper or giving up a shred of the freely given, ecstatic gift in which a power has garbed her.” And yet it is this same slipper which will allow the prince to find Cinderella again. And, as it turns out, it is Cinderella he loves, not the garments which allowed her access to the society of the ball.
Campo’s vision of the fairy tale is centered on this: the tale’s main function is to make us unsee the visible and to render the invisible. It always embraces paradox. The spiritual discipline imposed on Cinderella is just one dazzling reflection of Jesus’s dictum, via Matthew: “Whosoever shall lose his life shall save it.” Or, as Campo puts it, “What else truly exists in this world, if not what is not of this world?”
In “Beauty and the Beast,” the heroine, Belle, is in danger of “falling back into the magic circle of the past, which can devastate, like an unseasonable frost, what has so long been waiting to bloom: the present.” The Beast can only be transformed into a Prince once Belle, having divested herself of “adolescent regret and every stain of fantasy, leaving her only an attentive soul stripped bare” can say: “He no longer seems like a Beast, and even if he were one, I would marry him anyway, for he is so perfectly good and I could never love anyone but him.” The Beast becomes a handsome Prince as soon as Belle no longer looks “with the eyes of the flesh.”
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Campo was no devotee of the Grimms (“a stultifying harvest of unmagical herbs”); both “Beauty and the Beast” and “Cinderella,” in the versions by which most of us know them, were the literary fruits of a distinct fairy tale tradition, inaugurated in France at the turn of the eighteenth century, and continued by writers like Angela Carter and the late Robert Coover. It had its birth in 1697, when Charles Perrault’s Histoires ou contes du temps passé, avec des moralités (Stories or Tales from Past Times, with Morals) contained France’s first “definitive” versions of stories like “Cinderella,” “Puss-in-Boots,” “Red Riding Hood,” and “Bluebeard.” Perrault, an aristocrat out of favor at King Louis XIV’s court, found a haven among les précieuses, a movement of women among the Paris salons. They emphasized grace in all things, and aristocracy not merely as a way of life but a way of being: wit and studied charm in conversation, parlor games and studiedly “spontaneous” retellings of folktales in their salons. In their own distinctly anti-Grimm, anti-volksgeist mode, they started a new strain in the long history of tale-telling, which (from the proverbial peasant grandmother round the fire up to Campo herself) has always been the province of women.
Through such studiedly frivolous pursuits, les précieuses were also a quiet rebuke to the rough and disputatious world of court, with its constantly bickering factions. One of the sources of this factionalism was the dispute that came to be known as the “Quarrel Between Ancients and Moderns,” in which Perrault was a key figure representing the Moderns. Perrault’s “Moderns” sought to uphold the apparent perfection of church, state, and civilization, while the “Ancients” believed that cultural progress should continue the Renaissance trajectory of looking to Classical tradition.
Time has not been kind to the Moderns. Perrault is more or less their only writer not utterly forgotten. And he was a unique case: the leader of the faction, he nevertheless recognized the need for some “modernization” of church and state, and in the 1690s he was outcast from court for his reformist proposals. Finding himself a pariah on both sides, he began frequenting the salons of les précieuses. He planned to re-enter the fold by popularizing their aristocratically “retold” fairy tales, and perhaps symbolically reconcile the opposing camps: “ancient” plots were to be written in a “modern” style, dressed in the kind of literary embellishment and artfulness which, as he and his fellow aristocrats believed, only a rightly bred and educated aristocratic sensibility (like theirs) could provide or even appreciate.
Where the Grimms collected their folktales in pursuit of the volksgeist, a unifying “spirit” of the commons, Perrault sought to affirm the rarefied virtues of aristocracy.
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Campo’s own attachment to the aristocratic hermeneutic of morality she found in the fairy tale makes more sense in light of her biography. Born into an upper-class milieu (with a countess for a grandmother), her father was a passionate fascist and composer, ascending the ladders of Florence’s music scene with the support of Mussolini. With him, the teenage Vittoria (as she was known then) helped the occupying Germans interrogate prisoners and partisans during the war. She seems to have remained a sympathizing fascista for the rest of her life, perhaps connected to her being a devoted Catholic. She reacted with despair and disgust to almost everything about the modern world, from television to youth activism to the Second Vatican Council’s abandonment of the Latin mass in 1965.
I’m obliged for the biographical details to Toril Moi’s review of The Unforgivable in The London Review of Books. In that review, Moi turns out to be far more interested in Campo’s biographical shortcomings than in her writing; she admits that she “had half-hoped to discover another Natalia Ginzburg; in that, I was disappointed.” Most of Moi’s piece consists of a litany of such disappointments, a generalized disapproval that Campo was not at all like Ginzburg, especially in her politics. And her style Moi finds “intensely belletristic … to the point where I couldn’t always figure out what she was saying.” It was this stylistic gap, perhaps, that led her to “wonder whether she has anything to say to our time.”
Campo’s fascist sympathizing is certainly an inescapable and depressing fact, just as it is with, say, Ezra Pound or Yeats. Yet unlike Pound’s explicitly political writing, Campo’s essays maintain complete silence on political matters—there is not a whisper of explicitly politics in either collection. She focuses solely on literary and spiritual concerns, allowing her insights into fairy tales and mystical experience to stand on their own.
Campo is, primarily, a mystic practitioner of a liturgy of the sentence. In this she has few, if any, rivals among twentieth-century essayists. Reading her produces a feeling that signals the luminosity of the fundamentally unsayable, yet seems to capture some of its light in glints of amber. It is on this deeper level, style’s substrate, that she will work on you, if she works at all. Above all, I mean her conviction: all great styles have conviction. In spite of her detestable politics, the abiding and tangible ecstasy hovering in her labyrinthine sentences, her spiralling paragraphs, her often tortuous unweaving of symbol and image, all these unique difficulties (difficulties to match her personality) make her more worth reading to me than many a more worthy writer.
“Style is renunciation,” Campo writes. Again and again across the essays she returns to this imperative: “renunciation.” The quality of “negative virtue,” like Keats’s “negative capability,” is as common to Belle or Cinderella as it is, in Campo’s view, to great poets. Yet Campo knows that spiritual attentiveness of this order, that “aerial terrible weight—of silence, and waiting, and duration,” has been made increasingly impossible by the enforced “progress” of modernity. (As if for good measure it has also been deemed an “unforgivable” indulgence, the preserve of the privileged. This last point may be largely true, but it doesn’t redeem it as an argument. “In a true democracy,” Wilde wrote, “every man is an aristocrat.”)
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Campo speaks despairingly of modernity’s “mutilation” of the “organ of mystery,” the “ear of the soul.” We are living, she writes, “in paranoid terror of feeling and precision, humility, concentration, taste.” The most dreadful casualty of this accumulating “civilization of loss,” she concludes, is that men and women have “lost their own destiny.” With this diagnosis Campo’s deep pessimism rears its head, her grim belief that “the species is changing,” that impulses towards such quaint ideas as “perfection”—in art or in life—are fast becoming “a thing of the past.”
For Campo the sense of destiny and sense for perfection are coequal. The sense of destiny goes beyond even the religious: “religion is nothing other than a destiny sanctified.” By destiny (to put it too simply) she means the realm beyond Weil’s “game of forces” governing both our everyday lives and the relentless meat-grinder of history. And the way towards this realm is the way of perfection. “Trying to save Perfection,” wrote another Catholic, Paul Valéry, in a notebook in 1937, “in the shipwreck that is modern times … the idea of time, of work, being as beautiful as the work itself.”
Destiny, perfection, soul…what do such rarefied and dusty ideas really have to do with fairy tales; and what, for that matter, do fairy tales have to do with so-called real life? In the essay “On Fairy Tales,” Campo strikes at the heart of it: “the mystery of character,” the central problem of fiction and everyone’s individual experience of reality. Like Destiny and Perfection, Character and Soul are twinned terms. Novelist Rachel Cusk flatly stated in a 2018 New Yorker interview that “I’m not interested in character because I don’t think it exists anymore.” Cusk has never done much to flesh out this grand and vague pronunciation, though she added, “I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all … It’s one of the things that I realized had changed since the old templates, the Victorian template of novel writing, where character is a big thing … I think it probably operates to create what we might fairly see as a dysfunction—not sticking to what you’re meant to be doing.” Whatever she means by this, it seems that for Cusk character is a principle of literature first and a part of life second. It is also true that “character” in Campo’s sense is quickly becoming a shunned and forgotten idea. This is surely strange, given our culture of auto-hypnotic narcissism.
Our screened and bubbled present manages to be both mimetic and hermetic, adrift in a soup of “manifestation,” discovering and following “my path” and “your truth”; the half-ironic, half-earnest cinematic and gaming language used to describe real life, with one’s own “main character syndrome” or fellow humans as “NPCs.” This inanity reveals the kind of buried, inverted, and perverted recognition of essential truth so common to our strange moment, when the concern for perfection or the state of the soul has mutated into the only forms allowed it under the degrading deadweight of an undying historical moment—namely, the treadmill “optimizations” of “wellness” and “wellbeing” and, yes, “mental health.” From somewhere in this mess, Campo’s “mutilated” organ of destiny issues a faint but potent distress signal.
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Italo Calvino was born in 1923, the same year as Campo. Introducing his own magisterial 1985 collection of Italian Folktales, Calvino explains why he undertook the task: “because of a deep-rooted conviction that some essential, mysterious element lying in the ocean depths must be salvaged to ensure the survival of the race.” The key word here is “mysterious.” If for Campo, an impulse toward mystery is inseparable from destiny—both point toward what lies beyond rational control—Calvino recognizes that mystery must be preserved precisely because it cannot be grasped. You could say the impulse toward mystery and destiny is one and the same.
In 2013 Ursula Le Guin reviewed an English reissue of Calvino’s volume, noting that the Italian word for “fairy” (fata), like the English word “fate,” like the word for “fable” in both languages, derives from the Latin fari: “to speak.” Fate is “that which is spoken.” Le Guin concludes: “To speak is to tell tales.” Calvino also observes that “the moral function of the tale, in the popular conception, is to be sought not in the subject matter but in the very nature of the folktale, in the mere fact of telling and listening.” To tell and hear a tale is to anticipate the future and to recall the past. It is nothing more than “the invention of a destiny.” Storytelling’s invention of destiny reveals us to ourselves as both the subject of our tales and its narrator. And destiny, thankfully, cannot be “manifested”; it can only be lived through careful attention. Calvino describes the effect on his own psyche of being so thoroughly immersed: “I had the impression that the lost rules which govern the world of folklore were tumbling out of the magic box I had opened … the confirmation of something I already suspected—folktales are real.”
“The art of storytelling is dying,” Walter Benjamin wrote nearly a hundred years ago, “because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.” Might this not be reversed? Wisdom is dying because storytelling is dying. (Once every brand and charlatan says they are “in the business of telling stories,” you can be fairly sure that the art is on life support.) And here we might listen to a sometime disciple of Benjamin’s, the English art critic and fiction writer John Berger, whose ideas drew increasingly on decades of life alongside the peasants in the Alpine village of Quincy, where he moved in the 1970s. Berger observed that, for the village, the act of communal storytelling—as pastime and social technology, and surely the beating heart of the tales that have come down to us through the ages—was a “shelter from oblivion, forgetfulness and daily indifference.” Through an oral tradition, the village is able to create “a living portrait of itself, where the portrayed are also the carvers … not out of stone, but out of words, spoken and remembered.”
In a televised conversation broadcast in 1983, Berger and Susan Sontag find themselves disagreeing over the role of fiction in contemporary life; Sontag declares herself to be “loyal to certain tenets of modernism” whereas for Berger the modern project of the novel has stalled, because it continues to place “the private and the privileged at the heart of its form.” The opposing positions Berger and Sontag take echo conflicts we have already encountered: the Ancient and Modern cultural battle in Perrault’s time; Campo’s religious, aristocratic, mystically individualist reading of fairy tales versus the Grimms’ volksgeist vision of a “commons”—perhaps the last we have left—of the imagination. In an observation that shows us how little literature has progressed since then, Berger defends his new approach, which Sontag has dismissed as, “traditional”:
People say, how do you have the right to write about peasants? You’re not a peasant. Or to write about women, you’re a man, or vice-versa? It is not possible to write about what one has not lived, or seen…. I believe in experience being shareable … that identification with that capacity for empathy is, it seems to me, the first fruit of that social creation which is imagination. And if, in general today, there is a kind of failure of nerve in fiction, it is because most novels are really, now, disguised autobiographies.
As the name suggests, the preserve of the novel is that classically “modern” project—the new and its novelty. The fairy tale (especially in oral form) is a verbal embodiment of the ancient, the process of preservation and transmission—Berger’s “shelter from oblivion.” Where the novel seeks new ways to tell “the private and the privileged,” the traditional tale draws on that all-surpassing economy of the imaginative commons. In this way, Benjamin notes, the tale, whittling and self-renewing over centuries, belongs altogether to the anti-modern time “in which time did not matter.” In a description that might be from Campo herself, Valéry, quoted by Benjamin, calls such ancient narrative travellers “flawless pearls, full-bodied mature wines, truly developed creatures … the precious product of a long chain of causes similar to one another.” In contrast, writes Benjamin, in an aperçu that still handily summarises most contemporary fiction, “Modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated.”
I’ll return to Toril Moi’s stated doubt in the LRB as to whether Campo “has anything to say to our time.” She does. But not because she may be amenable to quotation by“traditional Catholics” or other reactionary projects. Despite her own manifold shortcomings, Campo perceived something important. Transcending or transforming the dead weight of “the modern” in literature—which she knew and loved through Mansfield, Moore, Benn, Pasternak, and above all Proust—and in life, means one thing above all: memory. Remembering that there is a time in which time does not matter, and perhaps space too, “the space of destiny—concave, silent and resonant.” In the writing of Campo, the ancient and modern, aristocratic and common need not be opposed. Stories, whether related in the written or oral tradition teach us this forgotten fact again: the individual destiny and the common fate are indivisibly related.
Gus Mitchell
Gus Mitchell is a writer from London. His work has appeared in 3 Quarks Daily, Lit Hub, Compact, Long Now, and Maisonneuve, among other places.