Reviewing ‘The Watcher’ (September 2024)

Italo Calvino’s 1963 short story, ‘The Watcher,’ is a fictional, yet somewhat autobiographical, account of the 1953 Italian election where a Communist Party member is one of the poll watchers in Turin's Cottolengo Hospital for Incurables, a vast Church-run complex for the housing and care of those mentally and physically handicapped. At stake in this election is the new law passed by the coalition government led by the Christian Democrat Party that would award a supermajority of seats (2/3) in the Chamber of Deputies to the party (or coalition) that is able to secure a majority of the popular vote. It is a most consequential election coming so soon after the fall of Fascism in Italy and Italy’s defeat in World War II.

This is the context for the lengthy and torturous (especially for the reader) internal monologue that is occasionally interrupted by phone calls between the protagonist and his mistress and by conversations either among the election officials or between these officials and the voters (residents) themselves. The point of view in the narrative is the limited third person omniscient. The narrator knows how and what the protagonist, Amerigo, thinks, but is limited to describing the words and actions of the other characters in the story. It is the wandering and vacillating stream of conscious narrative that makes the story quite difficult to read.

Below is an example of the worst of the stream of consciousness narration, which is reproduced in full not for its profundity but to render the thoughts and feelings that conflict Amerigo.

Even in his calling himself a “Communist” (and in this journey he was making for the party, in the dawn as damp as a sponge) you couldn’t tell how much was duty handed down from generation to generation (between the walls of those ecclesiastical buildings, Amerigo saw himself—half ironically and half seriously—as a final, anonymous heir of eighteenth-century rationalism, though with only a remnant of that heritage which had never borne much fruit in the city where Pietro Giannone was kept in irons) and how much was the outcome of another chapter of history, barely a century old, but already bristling with obstacles and restrictions: the advance of the socialist proletariat (then it was through the “inner contradictions of the bourgeoisie” or the “self-awareness of the declining class” that the class struggle had managed to bestir even the ex-bourgeois Amerigo), or the more recent incarnation of that class struggle, only about forty years old, as Communism had become an international power and the revolution meant discipline, preparation for responsibility, bargaining among powers even where the party wasn’t in power (then Amerigo was attracted by this game many of whose rules seemed established and inscrutable and obscure, though you often felt you were helping establish them), or else, within this participation in the Communist movement, there was a faint reservation about general questions that led Amerigo to choose the more limited and modest party assignments as if recognizing that they were the most surely useful, and even in them he was always prepared for the worst, while trying to remain serene in his (another generic term) pessimism (also partly hereditary, that sigh-filled family air that marks the Italians of the non-Catholic minority, which, every time it wins, realizes it has lost), but always subordinate to a coexistent, stronger optimism, that optimism without which he wouldn’t have been a Communist (then we should have said: a hereditary optimism, in the Italian minority which thinks it has won each time it loses; in short, the optimism and the pessimism were, if not the same thing, then opposite sides of the same artichoke leaf), and, simultaneously, subordinate to its opposite, the old Italian skepticism, a gift for adapting to circumstances and waiting (in other words, that minority’s age-old enemy: and then everything became mixed up again because a man who sets out to make war on skepticism cannot be skeptical about his victory, cannot resign himself to losing, otherwise he is identified with the enemy), and above all, having finally understood what wasn’t really so hard to understand: that this is only one corner of the immense world and that decisions are made—we won’t say elsewhere, because “elsewhere” is everywhere—but on a vaster scale (and even here there were reasons for pessimism and reasons for optimism, but the former came more spontaneously to mind).

Perhaps this overextended stream of consciousness would have been more convincing and compelling if narrated in the first person. Nevertheless, it is clear that Amerigo is tossed and turned on a tumultuous sea of contingencies—his mind a turbulent world in which he reacts to entropic forces beyond his command.

In the following quote, Calvino's protagonist struggles to grasp the essence of the two different views competing in the election:

Amerigo promptly recognized the true meaning of democracy, and he thought of the paradox of their being there together, some believers in a divine order, in an authority which is not of this earth, and then his own companions, well aware of the bourgeois deceit of the whole business; in short, two kinds of people who should have had little faith in the rules of democracy, and yet each side convinced they were its most zealous guardians, its very incarnation.

Yet a little later, Amerigo questions himself and his own commitment to democratic ideals, "But wasn’t this implicit evaluation of his own vote as superior to the idiot’s also an admission that there was some logic in the old anti-egalitarian argument?" In other words, by determining who was and who wasn't qualified to vote—in terms of mental and/or physical capacity—wasn't he committing the same violence against "idiots and the deformed" that had been done by Sparta and Hitler?

He seesaws back and forth asserting one thing and then casting doubt on it as in the following passage as he races through a dialectic to restore order and certainty:

His thoughts raced in such an agile objectivity that he could see with the adversary’s own eyes the very things he had felt contempt for a moment earlier, only to swing back, then, and feel with greater coldness how right his criticism was, and, finally, to attempt a serene judgment. Here again he was inspired not so much by a spirit of tolerance and of solidarity with his neighbor as a need to feel superior, capable of thinking all that was thinkable, even the adversary’s thoughts, and capable of reaching a synthesis, of perceiving everywhere the patterns of History, according to the prerogative of the true, liberal spirit.

Amerigo vacillates over whether the mentally and physically infirm should be counted or not. On the one hand, the Church is catering to these voters, who are, after all, its charges, to amplify the vote for the Christian Democrats, but on the other hand, who was he to deny these voters their political rights. Was he such an elitist? How does it square with democracy that only those should vote who fully comprehend the issues and understand how the political system works? Is it only the case that the residents of Cottolengo are mentally and physically unfit to be voting citizens? Among the masses, how many others could be denied the vote by elites on account of lack of fitness of some sort or another?

So were progress, liberty, justice then only ideas of the healthy (or of those who could, in other circumstances, be healthy), ideas of a privileged class, not universal ideas?

Already the boundary line between the Cottolengo men and the healthy was vague: what do we have beyond what they have? Limbs a bit better turned, a somewhat better proportion in our appearance, a somewhat greater capacity for co-ordinating sensations and thoughts... not much, compared to the many things that neither we nor they manage to do or know... not much, compared to our presumption that we can construct our history.

And his conversations with his mistress interrupt and confuse his thoughts as in the following, demonstrating how difficult it is for him to navigate between his inner world of dogma and the uncomfortable and mundane reality of interpersonal relationships:

After the phone call, Amerigo sat down at the table and began to eat, the book open before him, and at the same time he tried to resume his interrupted thinking. He had come to a point, an opening tiny as a pinprick, through which he could see a human world of a structure so different that even nature’s injustices lost their importance, became negligible, and there was an end to that struggle for mastery which lies in charity, between those who offer it and those who receive it.... But no, he couldn’t find his place again, it was hopeless, he had lost the thread; it was always the same with that girl! Just the sound of her voice seemed enough to alter all the proportions around him, so whatever he happened to argue about with Lia (anything at all, some piece of nonsense, horoscopes, Colonel Townsend, the best diet for colitis victims) became of all-consuming importance, and he was engulfed body and soul in a quarrel which then continued as a soliloquy, an inner rage, accompanying him for the rest of the day.

And then towards the end of the story, he imagines having a fleeting epiphany that might, if he could make it last, reconcile the apparent contraries of fidelity and betrayal:

"[F]or the space of a second (that is to say, forever) he thought he had understood how the same meaning of the word “love” could comprehend a thing like his affair with Lia and the peasant’s silent Sunday visit to his son at Cottolengo."

Amerigo’s progressive political philosophy entails the belief that not only should the course of the present be changed but also that it can be changed. It is not enough to criticize and rebel against a system that entrenches power in a reactionary elite and its institutions to the detriment of the humanity’s vast powerless; the system must be changed. Yet, reading Amerigo’s thoughts as reported by the narrator, the reader is left wondering just how revolutionary Amerigo’s commitment to the cause can be if he is constantly buffeted by the elements so much so that he often goes off course, losing sight of his destination.

* * *

Calvino’s story raises questions about the legitimacy of democracy where theoretically the principle of one person, one vote obtains but where some acting on the authority or acquiescence of the state determine who can be disqualified. He uses the extreme example of voters mentally and/or physically incapable of freely exercising their right to vote yielding that right, implicitly and often unwittingly, to others. In ‘The Watcher,’ the threat to democracy arises when the state uses its influence to ensure that people in a certain demographic vote the 'right' way. For Calvino, democracy can be too easily twisted and shaped by the state or the powers it represents, e.g., the Church, so the question then becomes who watches the watcher?

For the contemporary reader, this democracy deficit, as it has been termed, applies just as well to the U.S. Despite the egalitarian promise of the Declaration of Independence’s absolute rights to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,” the U.S. has a long history of denying and suppressing the right to vote—most notably through nearly a century of slavery (1776-1863) and a further century from the legal ending of slavery in 1863 to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Nearly three score years later, voting rights are being rolled back by Republican state houses across America with the legal authority of the U.S. Supreme Court, a Republican Court. Their principal target . . . still Black Americans.

Just as troublesome in the U.S. is the influence of biased media (where the lines between reporting and opining are deliberately blurred), overbearing employers who signal their preferences to their employees, proselytizing religious leaders who offer fraternity (belonging) and otherwise threaten with this-worldly or otherworldly violence, and a vast array of other special interests, all of whom intend to exercise greater political influence than is envisioned in the abstract and wholly theoretical egalitarian model of 'one person one vote.' Extended networks of special interest lobbies for all matter of public policy, directed and financed by elites compete in the auction of state power.

This leads to a second important theme in Calvino’s story, viz. the role of elites in democracy. His protagonist, Amerigo, is aware of the inconsistencies, even performative contradictions, between the idealized life of the intellectual as an elite and a leader and the real day-to-day life of the intellectual as an ordinary human being and member of society. Is one elite superior to another elite? With respect to elites, is the Communist elite superior to the elite of the Christian Democratic Party or the Church for that matter? To what extent can there be true democratic freedom if the people have to be prompted, prodded and coerced by a vanguard wielding some banner or other?

A third significant theme running through Calvino’s story emerges from the internal contradictions of a ‘managed’ demos. Amerigo, the progressive intellectual, overthinks, and when he thinks too much, he wavers and struggles to maintain a fixed course towards his goal of a politically and economically free society. He succumbs to a condition of paralysis brought about on by an analytical approach that is not suited to the supralogical world of human interaction and governance, i.e., politics. And while Amerigo is incapacitated, his political adversaries and fellow travelers understand that in politics, one has to be flexible in employing an 'ends justify the means' approach. Such a method rarely inhibits action. And here, Calvino's outlook is not sanguine, as it is men of action, not of contemplation, who will determine the unfolding future of human societies. This notwithstanding, the temporary success of the opposition prevented the Christian Democrats from reaching the popular vote threshold that would have triggered the legge truffa, or swindle law as it was commonly known.