The Hedgehog and the Fox: Italo Calvino on the Two Types of Writers
By Maria Popova
Ezra Pound outlined six types of literary personalities. Susan Sontag listed the four people a great writer must be. For Italo Calvino, every writer exhibited one of only two basic constitutions.
From Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941–1985 (public library) — the same treasure trove of wisdom that gave us Calvino’s advice on writing, his prescient meditation on abortion and the meaning of life, and his thoughts on America, how to assert oneself, and how to lower one’s “worryability” — comes the celebrated author’s clever classification of writerly temperaments.
Responding to literary critic Guido Almansi’s 1978 review of an essay collection by Isaiah Berlin titled after a line from Archilochus — “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” — 55-year-old Calvino writes:
The fox-hedgehog system would lead me to very different classifications from yours. If the hedgehog is the writer who has one unshakeable conceptual and stylistic unity, whereas the fox adapts his strategy to the circumstances, [the Italian novelist and journalist Alberto] Moravia is a hedgehog in that he is tenaciously consistent with himself whatever he writes, both in terms of poetics and of his vision of the world. Whereas I change my method and field of reference from book to book because I can never believe in the same thing two times running, therefore I am a fox, even though I dream of being a hedgehog in all my dreams, and even though I try to write hedgehog books if you take each of them one by one. [The film director, writer, and poet Paolo] Pasolini is a fox, yes, because he adopts different strategies (worldly novels written in dialect, poems with the virtuoso effects of classical rhetoric) but he is also a hedgehog (and not a super-fox) because in all his incarnations his conceptual world is at its core compact and unchangeable. It seems to me that your classification tends to be polarized along the extrovert-introvert axis and in my view this is beside the point.
Noting that classifying poets is particularly challenging, Calvino adds that the fox-hedgehog system doesn’t work for all literary landscapes, especially for the Italian literature of the time:
I see that I am tempted to define as “hedgehogness” the limited means used (which can also be a strength, in that it is an immersion in one’s own nature) and to see experimentalism as “foxness” (which can be motivated by serious anxieties) but maybe that is not the way that Berlin’s move should be understood — his system works for the great classics and defines categories of greatness and not limits: the hedgehog must know “one big thing” and the fox must identify with the Shakespearean variety of the world.
Supplement Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941–1985, an intimate glimpse of one of the most original minds in creative history, with Calvino’s poetic résumé, his witty and wise New Year’s resolution, and his 14 definitions of what makes a classic.
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Published September 3, 2014
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https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/09/03/hedgehog-fox-italo-calvino-writers/
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