The Forty-Nine Steps

by Roberto Calasso, John Shepley (Translator)

In books lauded as "brilliant"( New York Review of Books on The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony), "exhilarating" (Times Literary Supplement on Ka), and "profound"( New York Times Book Review on The Ruin of Kasch) Roberto Calasso has revealed the unexpected intersections of ancient and modern through topics ranging from Greek and Indian mythology to what a legendary African kingdom can tell us about the French Revolution. In this first translation of his most important essays, Calasso brings his powerful intellect and elegant prose style to bear on the essential thinkers of our time, providing a sweeping analysis of the current state of Western culture.

"Forty-nine steps" refers to the Talmudic doctrine that there are forty-nine steps to meaning in every passage of the Torah. Employing this interpretive approach, Calasso offers a "secret history" of European literature and philosophy in the wake of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. Calasso analyzes how figures ranging from Gustav Flaubert, Gottfried Benn, Karl Kraus, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, and Theodor Adorno have contributed to, or been emblematic of, the current state of Western thought. The book's theme, writ large, is the power of fable-specifically, its persistence in art and literature despite its exclusion from orthodox philosophy.

In its breadth and the nature of its concerns, The Forty-nine Steps is a philosophical and literary twin to the widely-praised The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. Combining erudition with engaging prose and original insights, Calasso contributes a daring new interpretation of some of the most challenging writers of the past 150 years.

About the Authors:

Roberto Calasso is the author of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (1993), The Ruin of Kasch (1994), Ka (1998), and Literature and the Gods (2000). He is the publisher of Adelphi Edizioni and lives in Milan.

John Shepley is a freelance writer and translator who lives in New York City. His translation of Pasolini's Roman Nights and Other Stories won the first Italo Calvino Translation Award in 1987.

Genres: Philosophy, Essays, Nonfiction, Criticism, Literature, Literary Criticism, Art

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Roberto Calasso (1941 – 2021) was an Italian writer and publisher.

Calasso was born in Florence in 1941, into a family of the Tuscan upper class, well connected with some of the great Italian intellectuals of their time.

Calasso worked for the publishing firm of Adelphi Edizioni since its founding by Roberto Bazlen in 1962 and became its Chairman in 1999. In 2015, he bought out the company to prevent it from being acquired by a larger publishing firm. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages.

He was the author of an unnamed ongoing work reflecting on the culture of modernity, which began with The Ruin of Kasch in 1983, a book admired by Italo Calvino. Dedicated to the French statesman Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord or, Talleyrand, it was followed in 1988 by The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, in which the tale of Cadmus and his wife Harmonia becomes a pretext for re-telling the great tales of Greek mythology and reflecting on the reception of Greek culture for a contemporary readership. Another world civilization is surveyed in Ka (1996, where the subject of the re-telling is Hindu mythology). K restricts the focus to a single author, Franz Kafka; this trend continues with Il rosa Tiepolo (Tiepolo Pink), inspired by an adjective used by Marcel Proust to describe a shade of pink used by Venetian artist Giambattista Tiepolo in his paintings. With La folie Baudelaire, Calasso once more broadens his scope from fresco to a whole civilisation, that of Paris in the latter half of the 19th century, reconsidering the lives and works of the post-romantic generation of writers and artists from Baudelaire to Valéry. In one of his more recent works, Ardore (2010), the author returns to India for an exhaustive analysis of the theory and practice of Vedic sacrifice and its significance for post-modern epistemology.

Along with his status as a major analyst specifically of the works of Kafka, Calasso was, more broadly, active in many essays in retrieving and re-invigorating the notion of a Central European literary culture. He also served as the president of the International Alexander Lernet-Holenia Society, which promotes the publication, translation and study of this multi-genre Austrian writer and his focus on the identity crisis of his characters at odds with postimperial Austria and Central Europe.

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

A few lines about a bad book can become a repository of confessions.

This dazzling project looks at the history of representation in a series of essays, most of which concern Walter Benjamin and Karl Kraus. About a third of these piece were introductions to various translations of texts by Nietzsche, Walser, Wedekind and Stirner among others. The others are outgrowths of newspaper columns. The solidity they find together is impressive. The coalescence isn't perfect. We cover all the bases, Nietzsche Marx and Freud -- even Wagner (to please the Barzunian delegates).

Stupidity is the bloodthirsty paper realm of public opinion.

There is palpable elegance on display, even as the reader contorts to follow the digression on the utopian ideal, or the collective shame of every philosopher who read Max Stirner, the undue influence Brecht had on Benjamin, a very Italian obituary for Heidegger and the quixotic pursuits of Gottfried Benn (as well as Nietzsche). It lacks the sinew of the other works, which is understandable given its intermittent origins.

[Eric Byrd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Calasso’s cabinets are as wondrous as his long galleries, and I hope there remain in his archive short pieces still to be published. The essays in The Forty-Nine Steps focus on German literature and philosophy from, say, Nietzsche to Adorno (on founding Adelphi Edizioni in 1962 Calasso and Bazlen agreed that their first venture must be a complete Nietzsche), with Hegel and Marx brought in for brief glosses, and appearances by those never-far-off Frenchmen, Flaubert and Baudelaire. I particularly enjoyed the essays on Nietzsche’s annus mirabilis/horribilis 1888 and the “fatal monologue” Ecce Homo; on Karl Kraus, who is treated in three essays totaling 65 pages, one-fourth of the book, and whose work, especially The Last Days of Mankind, sounds terrifying, abyssal; on Gottried Benn’s Gehirne, the novella rooted in his World War One service as an army venereologist in occupied Brussels, an assignment that reminded me of Somerset Maugham’s stint as an obstetrician in a dire London slum, though I suspect Liza of Lambeth (1897), the novel he derived from the experience, has little in common with the hermetic collages of “absolute prose” Benn produced. I also enjoyed the four essays on Walter Benjamin, whose letter to the Swiss critic Max Rychner supplies the title:

I’ve never been able to study and think except in the theological sense, if I may put it that way, that is, in accordance with the Talmudic doctrine of the forty-nine steps of meaning in every passage of the Torah.

Most of Calasso’s obsessions are present in the collection, so much so that I would recommend it to someone curious about him (with the caveat that the Eurocentric focus means they must go directly to Ka and Ardor to access Calasso’s absorption of the Vedas and Hinduism). As always, Calasso is at pains to point out the great gulf separating, and the merely superficial resemblances connecting, his intimidating sages – Nietzsche, Kraus, Benjamin, Weil – and the facile artistic and political avant-gardes of the first half of the twentieth century. (It was amusing to reach the essay on Brecht and hear Calasso call him a “great writer” after earlier judging that, despite his profitable borrowings from Kraus, Brecht remained a vastly inferior thinker.)

Calasso was interested only in the enigmatic, the singular; the richly contradictory, the strangely personal; and his efforts at distinction extended to the excavation of certain writers from what he saw as naïve ideological or systematic commitments. In a 1970 review of Adorno’s posthumously published Aesthetic Theory Calasso was pleased to find “not a renovated Hegelian Escorial, heavy and majestic, but at most a timid Petit Trianon.” He valued an Adorno “stripped of any doctrinal support.” Aesthetic Theory, “despite a certain academic allure, is desperately autobiographical,” “by no means a work to recommend to anyone wishing to maintain the illusion of Adorno the rigorous philosopher.” It is a work in which Calasso saw Adorno turning back to “the secret center of his thought, unknown to his official followers, a center that is not in Marx, nor even Hegel, but close to the animal muteness of art.” In the “interstices of his philosophizing” Adorno waged “a radical, albeit concealed, revolt against his master Hegel, who had described and approved the domesticating aspect of art.” And Calasso advised readers of Brecht to scrape away the “solemn social kitsch” that had settled on his work, to “forget for a moment the plays and the didactic perorations and turn instead to the poems and The Stories of Herr Keuner to refurbish the image of an enigmatic, coarse, almost disagreeable, and very, very insolent writer.”

Also present is Calasso’s abiding obsession with the blending of the esoteric and the exoteric, the essential and the ephemeral, the “public secrets.” "Like all esoteric beings," he writes in Tiepolo Pink, "Tiepolo said nothing about his secret. He merely displayed it." In La Folie Baudelaire he would demonstrate how Baudelaire scattered his key formulations in feuilletons, Salons, and other forms of hired journalism. He found that newspaper assignments, “at once public and private, coincided with one of Benjamin’s profound desires”:

For what could be more esoteric than writing for newspapers? To reveal one’s own secrets, appropriately disguised, on a page that circulates everywhere, but only for a few ours, and to know that by the next day they will have disappeared while continuing to exist in that secularized version of the realm of Platonic ideas known as the archives. This produces an ambiguous elation, one that Proust recounted in two memorable pages of Contre Sainte-Beuve. But for Benjamin, an eminent formal strategist, it also hinted at a further secret, one very close to the heart of his work: the dazzling connection among maximum availability to the public (to which Baudelaire had already given a more precise and noble name: prostitution), the ephemeral, and esotericism. As a result of all this, the most private and idiosyncratic Bejamin can be found not only in his letters and important essays but also in his reviews. A few lines about a bad book can become a repository of confessions.

Calasso saw in Kraus the writer who went furthest, fulfilling and even going beyond the Nietzschean injunction that the philosopher deal with what is at hand – Kraus who rejected “the quest for noble, uncontaminated materials” – the aesthete’s quest - and decided “to move in the continuum of public opinion, to draw from it all his materials.” A master of aphorism, Kraus also made devastating use of quotation. In “On Public Opinion” Calasso describes his method:

If it is true that the ‘supreme stylistic task [of satire] is its graphic arrangement,’ then this is the basis for Kraus’ theory of quotation, the height of his satire…At the outset of World War I, Kraus wrote, ‘It is my duty to put my epoch in quotation marks, for I know that that alone can express its unspeakable infamy.’ Thus, at times, the simple typographical combination of two newspaper quotations on the eloquent blankness of a particular page is enough for the language of infamy to pass judgement on itself.

In “A Chinese Wall,” published a year later, Calasso goes further, calling Kraus’s satirical method akin to shamanism:

The page of the newspaper, for example, is immediately translated into a verbal jumble. As in a fable, Kraus knows he is doomed to hear these voices forever. All the inflections, accents, cadences – they envelop him acoustically, challenging, jeering, piercing. This spiritualism of the living was forced on Kraus by the precision of his ear. For him, the quotation is first of all a magical means. Whatever he quotes has been felt as a threatening, hallucinatory presence but in the end it has been overcome by the fury of the writer who, lying in wait like a marauder, has wrenched the ghoulish words from their context to enclose them forever, as though in amber, in their stiff and ultimately revealing gesture in the pages of Die Fackel. They retain few signs of the treatment – at most some typographical spacing – and the perfect example is one in which there is no visible trace of the shamanic operation.

It is easy to see why a writer who, as far as possible, disappeared into his material, usurping it smoothly, so appealed to Calasso’s love of clandestinity and esotericism.

[Shane Eide · Rating 5 out of 5]

www.emergenthermit.com

In his interview with The Paris Review, Roberto Calasso said the following:

‘I feel thought in general, and in particular what is unfortunately called “philosophy,” should lead a sort of clandestine life for a while, just to renew itself. By clandestine I mean concealed in stories, in anecdotes, in numerous forms that are not the form of the treatise. Then thought can biologically renew itself, as it were.’

It would appear that Roberto Calasso’s own works set out to do just that. The 49 steps alluded to in the title of Calasso’s book refer to a sequence of meaning in the Talmud. Here, however, the sequence, or something like it, is used not on the Talmud but on the whole plane of western thought in the past few centuries.

In freeing himself from the philosophical treatise of which he spoke, abandoning the essay as we know it today with a strong supportable thesis, and without resorting to the constant chain of overcoming that often happens in western thought—you know, the easy academic distinction which believes that analytic philosophy supersedes Derrida, who supersedes Heidegger, who supersedes Nietzsche, who supersedes Plato—Calasso resorts to those very anecdotes, stories and other forms he favors to weave a narrative of the modern world.

The project that Calasso seems to take on here is a means of exploring those more latent features of history that, while not belonging to the socially accepted sequence of historical influence, may have left a definite imprint on modern consciousness.

One can’t so easily accuse him of jazzing around unseriously with history. Calasso, rather, seems to ascertain that if one doesn’t weave one’s own narrative, one is weaved by someone else’s narrative. Yet, all the while, he feels somewhat easy with the recognition that we are always wrapped up in some narrative not of our own making; another feature of life.

Most systems of thought have come about through someone trying to escape history, whether it be Marxism, The French Revolution or The Society of the Best Sunday Cheeses. Revolutions and intended revolutions, gigantic cultural gestures, act as instant points by which we can map out human progress or history.

Rather than escaping history, Calasso, rather, digs deep into the sediment of history, burrows through its tunnels, pays careful attention to its sequential blips and interruptions, comes out the other side and explores the secret rooms of the ancient cities of civilization. He walks the dark alleyways of society, lying adjacent to the boulevards filled with the humbuggy chants of party members making political changes, and in these alleyways a secret history is played out.

In Calasso’s narrative, everything new is actually an eventuation of something incredibly ancient. The peculiar, bisexually misogynistic message of Otto Weininger, which captivated a few college boys and girls in the early part of the twentieth century, is not a new psychological breakthrough but merely a more immediate and honest manifestation of how men have viewed women for countless millennia. Likewise, the mostly discarded writings of Marx (even by most Marxists) on the role of women in society can be seen as a hyper-reduction of an almost primitive tendency to view women as mere agents of sexual utility.

In like manner, many specific artists, politicians and historical figures make ‘cameos’—to use a theatrical phrase—on Calasso’s stage in order to embody a specific problem or a very distinct yet ongoing thread of thought or behavior. Yet, because this is not a story in the classic sense, Calasso’s narrative takes the form, not of a theatrical stage, but a sort of web. Each thread is connected to a different branch. Each essay is a branch on which Calasso sits for a time to gain a different thought.

He returns frequently to Walter Benjamin and Karl Kraus. There is one amusing anecdote in which Calasso tells us that we can ascertain the shape of Walter Benjamin’s thought by some of the things he reviews—as is the case when Benjamin employs his knowledge of Freud alongside philosophy of identity and pleasure when reviewing a book about toys.

Calasso’s frequent return to Kraus gives special attention to his prolific periodical, Die Fackel, along with The Last Days of Mankind. Kraus is depicted as the careful scribbler of uncareful half-truths and truth-and-a-halfs. Calasso gives us a picture of Kraus holed up during the Nazi-apocalypse, more intent on determining the perfect placement of commas than fighting the devil, with the firm belief that good grammar prevents future genocide.

Max Stirner earns an awkward place in the anxiety of influence, as most philosophers who’ve read him seem anxious to even admit his obvious influence on their work.

As Calasso weaves this narrative, it is easy to get lost in the euphoria of his poetic command. As a reader, I want to believe that his various curiosities and interests give us a more likely sequence of historical movement, even if it is only along some sub-current. But to trust the very finitude of Calasso’s narrative, bound by the walls of the book and its bindings, is to betray the spirit of the work, for part of the euphoria offered by the reading experience, I suspect, comes from a sense of inexhaustibility.

Following a similar trajectory through history as 49 Steps, there are all kinds of places one can go, suspicions one can entertain and conclusions one can draw. It acts almost as a mystery story through the walls of history, as we try to trace, not necessarily its origins, but how we relate to it.

Toward the book’s close, in a chapter called ‘The Terror of Fables,’ Calasso talks about our modern relationship with the word ‘myth’ and its having become a sneering synonym for ‘lie.’ He tries to restore myth as an ancient form of truth.

‘Thus now we can own up to what was—what is—that ancient terror that the fables continue to arouse. It is no different from the terror that is the first one of all: terror of the world; terror in the face of its mute, deceptive, overwhelming enigma; terror before this place of constant metamorphosis and epiphany, which above all includes our own minds, where we witness without letup the tumult of simulacra.
No, if myth is precisely a sequence of simulacra that help to recognize simulacra, it is naïve to pretend to interpret myth, when it is myth itself that is already interpreting us.’

Perhaps it should be no wonder that Roberto Calasso only wrote one novel. After that, history itself was novel enough.

[Facundo Melillo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Calasso es, entre mucha otras cosas, un punto de contacto. La forma de leer que tiene es envidiable, haciendo conexiones que en apariencia son inexistentes entre textos lejanos temporalmente como en su misma temática. Lo que ofrece Calasso es, ante todo, una impronta de lectura distinta. El acervo es siempre el mismo: el de un reaccionario que busca los datos tradicionales y mitológicos que configurados a lo largo del tiempo. Así se permite una nueva lectura de Benjamin -por fuera de las impostadas por Brecht, Adorno y, en menor medida, Scholem- como un pensador de de tipo esotérico-hermético y no como el escritor de la "Tesis sobre la filosofía de la historia". Así también, son fantásticas sus lecturas sobre Nietzsche y la locura de su última etapa. Esta idea se relaciona directamente con otro de los grandes ensayos de Calasso, La locura que viene de las ninfas, y su idea sobre la posesión que toma de Platón y Delfos. El concepto de locura y posesión reaparece constantemente en todas las obras con Stirner, Wedekind, Flaubert y un sinfín de escritores a los que Calasso les da una nueva lectura.
Otra de las cosas obvias que me parecen notables: Roberto Calasso es un escritor que, por sobre todas las cosas, me da unas ganas enfermizas de leer todo lo que se me cruce. No con ese genio, pero si envidiándolo.
Lean a Calasso.

[Teresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

«O pior inimigo é o inimigo que tem os nossos argumentos.»
— Roberto Bazlen


Roberto Bazlen
Theodor W. Adorno
Karl Kraus
Walter Benjamin
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Sigmund Freud
Bertholt Brecht
Stendhal
Simone Weil
Gustave Flaubert
Platão e Homero

São os "protagonistas" principais dos onze ensaios sobre literatura, cujas três estrelas, com que globalmente os avalio, refletem o quanto os entendi: medianamente.

[Márcio · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Os 49 degraus" é um daqueles livros que eu pensei em deixar de lado logo no início, no primeiro ensaio sobre Nietzsche. Tratava-se de um texto interessante, mas árduo para quem, embora interessado, tenha conhecimentos limitados sobre literatura, filosofia, política. E foi com grata supresa que me empenhei em continuar a leitura, não gosto de abandonar livros iniciados, a não ser que sejam realmente intragáveis.

Calasso oferece-se nos uma motanha-russa intelectual. Não de altos e baixos, mas de uma sensação constante de nos aventurarmos na história e formação do pensamento ocidental, da história que moldou parte do mundo, em que não temos como pedir para parar para descermos. Eu não quis parar.

Assim como em "As núpcias de Cadmo e Harmonia", mesmo que não tivesse conhecimento pleno dos temas tratados, concluí essas leituras como a sensação de que conhecia um pouco mais da condição humana. Somos deuses, mas também somos monstros.

[Andrea Giovanni Rossi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nulla è più umiliante, e insieme più affascinante, che perdersi nei meandri labirintici dell’erudizione di Calasso

[Francesco Tenaglia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cartografia di geografie a lui letterarie molto care. Molti punti di scrrittura alta, molti sassolini tolti con eleganza. Divertentissimi i momenti sul teatro di Brecht.

[a · Rating 5 out of 5]

only read the opening Nietzsche essay.

[Simona Moschini · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una sintesi della cultura occidentale (dal punto di vista calassiano, beninteso).

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of essays and prefaces by one of the great scholars of our time.

Every bit of Calasso is essential.

[Yann · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[Melinda · Rating 2 out of 5]

not a favourite.....blurk!