Carlo Levi: Portraits with Words

Agustín Fuentes, throughout his book The Creative Spark, emphasizes the importance of communication in human evolution. Instruction of children, coordination of scavenging and hunting, and organizing social relationships all required various types of communication- beginning with demonstration, transitioning to pre-language and language, and eventually adding symbolic information. As human behavior became more complex, so too did our communication styles become more complex. 

Artistic expression seems to be an extension of that communication. It is not enough to simply represent an image. The artist must convey some information- they must inspire the same emotions they felt upon creation in the hearts of their observers. Otherwise, what would be the point of creating art? There are more straightforward ways than verse and prose to recount events both real and imagined. 

Consider the following quote from Carlo Levi's memoir wherein he describes the fascist mayor who runs the southern Italian town in which he is exiled:

"He was an overgrown, corpulent young man with a lock of oily black hair tumbling over his forehead, a yellowish, beardless face and darting black eyes both insincere and self-satisfied in expression. He wore high boots, checked riding breeches, and a short jacket, and his hands were toying with a small whip." - Christ Stopped at Eboli, pp 19-20

Levi does not describe a realistic person. If one were to attempt to draw this mayor based only on Levi's description, one would need to make many inferences. He does not emulate Tolstoy, or many contemporary novelists, by trying to describe, in the minutest of terms, a real person who could have stumbled out of a movie screen and into the reader's mind. While such descriptions are technically quite beautiful- by this I mean that they are awe inspiring for the skill required in making them- they do not always evoke the thematic meaning which the writer wishes to convey. Levi abstracts away the real man beneath the mayor and leaves merely the blurry image of a well-fed man in a land of perennial famine, wielding an insignificant amount of power greedily while dressing as Mussolini's stunt double. 

If Levi had intended to communicate what the man looked like and how he acted, he could have done so much more easily, or with a great deal more detail and technical skill, but he did not. Yet, his description leaves a more profound impression than either of those methods and conveys something of the subject's soul as received by Levi in that snapshot. Both the Tolstoy-esque detail-oriented description and Levi's obscure impressionism convey information which tells the reader something about an individual. This process is integral in human behavior. We needed, and still need, to be able to talk about each other so as to form cohesive and effective groups. If someone cannot be trusted or does not work very hard, the group must be able to discuss how to intervene. The detail oriented, technically challenging method is one way of doing this. It is like holding up an imagine for exhibition so that it may be studied cooly. 

Levi does not opt for that. When reading his descriptions of people, the reader is not able to be this detached; rather, the reader feels what Levi felt when meeting such a person. There is a glimpse of the subject's character imbedded but not wholly revealed. This may seem to be imprecision, but in reality, it corrects the fundamentally flaw of the prior information sharing: it is near impossible to entirely represent a person. Levi does not pretend to know exactly who a person is when he describes them. There is space for surprising, novel behavior and, more importantly, errors in judgement. 

Such a description more genuinely reflects how we relate to an discuss one another. We do not have clear ideas of who people truly are. Snapshots and glimpses are all we get. Levi's writing style means to capture that ambiguity and incorporate it. It is a reflection of the basic human function of communication and a novel approach to representing it literarily.