Cristina Campo: Cartographer of Sunken Continents
If Cristina Campo is remembered at all outside her native Italy, it is usually because of her involvement with Una Voce, an organisation founded in 1964 to foster the cultural heritage of the Latin rite of the Catholic Church. But there is another side to Campo, who was also a distinguished poet and essayist. Neglected by the mainstream and untranslated into English until now, her work has languished in European literature’s dusty bottom drawer. Part of the reason for this neglect was that she published only two short books of prose in her lifetime: “I have written little,” she once said, “and would like to have written less.” Another reason is that she died young. Born in Bologna in 1923, Campo—or, to use her full name, Vittoria Maria Angelica Marcella Cristina Guerrini—died in Rome a mere 53 years later. We should, therefore, be grateful to NYRB for publishing this wonderful collection of her prose. It has certainly been worth the wait.
Underlying much of Campo’s work is a keen sense of loss. As she wrote in what is perhaps her greatest essay, “The Flute and the Carpet”:
What does any examination of man’s condition come down to today if not a list—stoical or terrified though the list-maker may be—of his losses? From silence to oxygen, from time to mental equilibrium, from water to modesty, from culture to the kingdom of heaven. And there really isn’t much to offset the horrifying catalogue. The whole picture seems to be that of a civilization of loss.
Writing primarily in the 1960s and 1970s, Campo was, of course, responding to the destruction she saw all around her, but the root causes of that destruction stretched back long before the horrors of the 20th century:
The Renaissance, the Reformation, the incessant necessity of theological disputes, above all the Enlightenment: all of these trials were promptly overcome by doctrine, but each time it seemed to tear away another strip of the radiant corporeality, the vivid skin of the old Christian life.
So what was to be done? What could a writer in the 20th century still do? Having outlined this horrifying catalogue of losses, Campo boldly announces the possibility of “a civilization of survival,” in which might survive “some islander of the mind still capable of drawing up maps of the sunken continents.” This was how Campo saw herself: as a cartographer of sunken continents.
First among these continents were the writings of the Desert Fathers upon which, Campo argued, “the whole mystical Church of the East” had been built. It was precisely here, in the “radical silence that only their rare sayings would have furrowed,” that Campo discovered the foundations of her broken civilization, the beginnings of a tradition that stretched out through Athanasius, Chrysostom, Basil, Cassian, Benedict, the Philokalia, The Way of a Pilgrim, Lorenzo Scupoli, John of the Cross, and Elizabeth of the Trinity. Here too, Campo discovered a model for her own writing, for the Desert Fathers said little and would have liked to have said less.
Campo may have been a cartographer of sunken continents but she also mapped an archipelago that had somehow escaped the apparently universal Atlantean destruction. Her essays on the work of Borges, Simone Weil, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and John Donne are all miniature masterpieces, as are her reflections on “those little gospels called fairy tales.”
Understanding Campo’s attitudes towards fairy tales is the key to understanding all her work, for she saw them all round her, not just in fairy tale collections but also in the Book of Tobit—“the fairy tales of all fairy tales, the journey of all journeys”—and “the sayings and deeds of the Fathers were at all times collected with extreme devotion, for they were almost always very hard, uncrackable nuts, to be carried around for life and crushed between the teeth, as in fairy tales, in the moment of gravest danger.”
These fairy tales are “a first initiation, if not to the meaning, at least to the power of symbols,” providing an essential education for adults and children alike:
It is worth noting that a writer who attempts a fairy tale unfailingly produces his best prose, becoming a writer even if he has never been one before: almost as if language, when it comes into contact with symbols so universal and particular, so sublime and palpable, cannot help but distill its purest flavor. So that a classic book of fairy tales opens not only the atlas of life for a child but also the atlas of language.
Above all else, though, Campo believes that fairy tales, like attention, give us access to reality. Her arguments, though not dissimilar to those of Chesterton and Tolkien, have a distinctly Franco-Italian lilt thanks to the mediation of Simone Weil: “If attention is a patient, fervent, fearless acceptance of reality,” it is possible to understand Beauty and the Beast, “like any perfect fairy tale,” as being “about the loving re-education of a soul—an attention—which is elevated from sight to perception.” If attention “is the only path to the unsayable, the only path to mystery,” it is most purely expressed in the fairy tale, for attention, like fairy tales, “is firmly anchored in the real, and only through allusions hidden in reality is that mystery manifested.”
Eschewing the Romantic idolisation of the imagination, Campo argues that fairy tales are the surest guides to reality, the paths on which we travel to the real, the source of spiritual truths bound up in earthy realism: they are “a quest for the kingdom of heaven, the pursuit of an unknown and inexplicable vision, often only of an arcane word, for which the hero abruptly deserts his beloved homeland and all good things in order to become a pilgrim and a beggar, a holy fool with a heart of fire, whom the whole world will mock and that ‘the world behind the real world’ will help and guide with marvelous signs and wonders.”
To read the rest of this essay, please see the full version here.