Six Memos for the Next Millennium

Italo Calvino

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780544230965
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

The celebrated author of Cosmicomics and Invisible Cities shares his "brilliant, original approach to literature" in these late-career lectures ( San Francisco Chronicle ). At the time of his death, Italo Calvino was at work on his Charles Eliot Norton poetry lectures to be delivered the following year at Harvard University. The six planned lectures would define the qualities he most valued in writing, and which he believed would define literature in the century to come. Six Memos for the Next Millennium collects the five lectures he completed, forming not only a stirring defense of literature, but also an indispensable guide to the writings of Calvino himself. He devotes one "memo" each to the concepts of lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity, drawing examples from his vast knowledge of myth, folklore, and works both ancient and modern. Written in the mid-1980s, these lectures have proven to be astonishingly prescient as we have entered Calvino's "next millennium". "One of the most rigorously presented and beautifully illustrated critical testaments in all of literature."— Boston Globe "A key to Calvino's own work and a thoroughly delightful and illuminating commentary on some of the world's greatest writing."— San Francisco Chronicle

1

Lightness

I will devote my first talk to the opposition between lightness and weight, and I will make the case for lightness. This is not to say that I regard the case for weight as weaker, only that I think I have more to say about lightness.

After four decades of writing fiction, after exploring many avenues and undertaking various experiments, the time has come for me to seek a general definition of my work. I propose this one: my method has entailed, more often than not, the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight from human figures, from celestial bodies, from cities. Above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of the story and from language.

In this talk I will try to explain—to myself as well as to you—why I have come to regard lightness as a virtue rather than a fault, where among the works of the past I find examples of my ideal of lightness, and how I locate this quality in the present and project it into the future.

I’ll start with the last point. When I began my career, the duty of every young writer, the categorical imperative, was to represent our times. Full of good intentions, I tried to become one with the ruthless energy that, collectively and individually, was driving the events of our century. I tried to find some harmony between the bustling spectacle of the world, by turns dramatic and grotesque, and the picaresque, adventurous inner rhythm that spurred me to write. I soon realized that the gap between the realities of life that were supposed to be my raw materials and the sharp, darting nimbleness that I wanted to animate my writing was becoming harder and harder for me to bridge. Perhaps I was only then becoming aware of the heaviness, the inertia, the opacity of the world—qualities that quickly adhere to writing if one doesn’t find a way to give them the slip.

I sometimes felt that the whole world was turning to stone: a slow petrifaction, more advanced in some people and places than in others, but from which no aspect of life was spared. It was as if no one could escape Medusa’s inexorable gaze.

The only hero capable of cutting off Medusa’s head is Perseus, who flies on winged sandals, Perseus, who looks not upon the Gorgon’s face but only upon her image reflected in his bronze shield. And so it is that Perseus comes to my aid even now, as I begin to feel caught in a grip of stone, as happens whenever I try to mix the historical and the autobiographical. Better to make my argument using images from mythology. In order to cut off Medusa’s head without being turned to stone, Perseus supports himself on the lightest of stuff—wind and clouds—and turns his gaze toward that which can be revealed to him only indirectly, by an image caught in a mirror. I am immediately tempted to find in this myth an allegory of the relationship between the poet and the world, a lesson about how to write. But I know that every interpretation of a myth impoverishes and suffocates it; with myths, it’s better not to rush things, better to let them settle in memory, pausing to consider their details, to ponder them without moving beyond the language of their images. The lesson we can draw from a myth lies within the literality of its story, not in what we add to it from without.

The relationship between Perseus and the Gorgon is complex, and it doesn’t end with the beheading of the monster. From Medusa’s blood a winged horse, Pegasus, is born; the heaviness of stone is transformed into its opposite, and with the stamp of a single hoof on Mount Helicon, a fountain springs forth from which the Muses drink. In some versions of the myth, it is Perseus who rides this marvelous horse, so dear to the Muses, born from the cursed blood of Medusa. (The winged sandals, by the way, also come from the world of monsters: Perseus got them from Medusa’s sisters, the Graeae, who shared a single eye.) As for the severed head, rather than abandoning it, Perseus takes it with him, hidden in a sack. When in danger of defeat, he has only to show it to his enemies, lifting it by its mane of snakes, and in the hero’s hand the bloody prize becomes an invincible weapon—a weapon he uses only in dire need and only against those who deserve the punishment of being turned into statues of themselves. Here, certainly, the myth is telling me something, something that is implicit in its images and can’t be explained by other means. Perseus masters that terrible face by keeping it hidden, just as he had earlier defeated it by looking at its reflection. In each case his power derives from refusing to look directly while not denying the reality of the world of monsters in which he must live, a reality he carries with him and bears as his personal burden.

We can learn more about the relationship between Perseus and Medusa by reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Perseus has won another battle, has hacked a sea monster to death with his sword, freeing Andromeda. And now he wants to do what any of us would do after such a nasty job: he wants to wash his hands. At such times he must decide what to do with Medusa’s head. And here I find Ovid’s verses (IV, 740–752) extraordinary for the way they show how much delicacy of spirit is required to be a Perseus, a slayer of monsters: “That the rough sand not harm the snake-haired head [anguiferumque caput dura ne laedat harena], he makes the ground soft with a bed of leaves, and over that spreads sprigs that grew in water, and there he sets Medusa’s head, face-down.” I can think of no better way to represent the lightness of which Perseus is the hero than with his refreshingly tender gesture toward that being who, though monstrous and terrifying, is also somehow perishable, fragile. But the most surprising part is the miracle that follows: when the marine plants come into contact with Medusa, they are transformed into coral, and the nymphs, wanting to adorn themselves with coral, rush to bring more sprigs and seaweed to the terrible head.

Again, this juxtaposition of images, in which the delicate grace of the coral brushes up against the fierce horror of the Gorgon, is so richly suggestive that I hesitate to spoil it with commentary or interpretation. What I can do is place these lines of Ovid alongside those of a modern poet, Eugenio Montale, in whose 1953 poem “Piccolo testamento” (“Little Testament”) we also find the subtlest of elements, which could stand as emblems of his poetry—“mother-of-pearl snail’s track / or emery of trampled glass” (traccia madreperlacea di lumaca / o smeriglio di vetro calpestato)—set against a frightening infernal monster, a Lucifer with wings of pitch descending on the capitals of the West. Nowhere else does Montale conjure such an apocalyptic vision, and yet what he foregrounds are those tiny, luminous traces that counterpoint the dark catastrophe: “Keep its powder in your compact / when after every lamp’s gone out / the circle dance becomes infernal” (Conservane la cipria nello specchietto / quando spenta ogni lampada / la sardana si farà infernale). But how can we hope to find salvation in that which is most fragile? Montale’s poem is a profession of faith in the perseverance of what seems most doomed to perish, and in the moral values that imbue the faintest traces: “the faint flare down below / was not the striking of a match” (il tenue bagliore strofinato / laggiù non era quello d’un fiammifero).

And so it is that in order to speak of our own times, I have had to make a long detour, by way of Ovid’s fragile Medusa and Montale’s pitch-black Lucifer. It’s hard for a novelist to convey his idea of lightness with examples drawn from the events of contemporary life without making it the unattainable object of an endless quest. Yet Milan Kundera has done just that, with clarity and immediacy. His novel Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1981) is in fact a bitter declaration of the Ineluctable Weight of Living—living not only with the desperate and all-pervading state of oppression that was the fate of his unlucky country, but with the human condition shared also by us, however much luckier we may be. For Kundera, the weight of living is found in all types of restriction, in the dense network of public and private restrictions that ultimately envelops every life in ever-tighter bonds. His novel shows us how everything in life that we choose and value for its lightness quickly reveals its own unbearable heaviness. Perhaps nothing escapes this fate but the liveliness and nimbleness of the mind—the very qualities with which the novel is written, qualities that belong to a universe other than the one we live in.

When the human realm seems doomed to heaviness, I feel the need to fly like Perseus into some other space. I am not talking about escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I feel the need to change my approach, to look at the world from a different angle, with different logic, different methods of knowing and proving. The images of lightness I’m looking for shouldn’t let themselves dissolve as dreams do in the reality of the present and future . . .

In the infinite universe of literature there are always other avenues to explore, some brand-new and some exceedingly ancient, styles and forms that can change our image of the world. And when literature fails to assure me that I’m not merely chasing dreams, I look to science to sustain my visions in which all heaviness dissolves . . .

Today every branch of science seems intent on demonstrating that the world rests upon the most minute of entities: DNA messages, the pulses of neurons, quarks and neutrinos that have wandered through space since the beginning of time . . .

And then there are computers. It’s true that software cannot exert the power of its lightness except through the heaviness of hardware, but it’s the software that’s in charge, acting on the outside world and on machines that exist solely as functions of their software and that evolve in order to run ever-more-complex programs. The second industrial revolution doesn’t present us, as the first did, with overwhelming images of rolling mills or molten steel, but rather with bits of information that flow, as electrical impulses, through circuits. We still have machines made of steel, but they now obey bits that are weightless.

Is it legitimate to extrapolate from the discourse of science an image of the world that corresponds to my desires? If what I’m undertaking here appeals to me, it’s because I feel it may be tied to a very old thread in the history of poetry.

Lucretius’s De rerum natura is the first great poetic work in which knowledge of the world leads to a dissolution of the world’s solidity and to a perception of that which is infinitely small and nimble and light. Lucretius wants to write the poem of matter, but he warns us from the start that the reality of matter is that it’s made of invisible particles. He is the poet of physical concreteness, seen in its permanent, unchanging substance, but he begins by telling us that empty space is just as concrete as solid bodies. His greatest concern seems to be preventing the weight of matter from crushing us. As soon as he lays out the rigorous mechanical laws that govern every event, he feels the need to allow atoms to deviate unpredictably from the straight line, thereby ensuring the freedom both of matter and of human beings. The poetry of the invisible, the poetry of infinite unpredictable potentialities, even the poetry of nothingness, originate in this poet who has no doubts about the physical reality of the world.

This atomization of reality also extends to its visible aspects, and it’s there that Lucretius shines as a poet: the dust particles that churn in a shaft of sunlight in a dark room (II, 114–124); the tiny shells, all similar yet each distinct, that a wave pushes gently onto the bibula harena, the thirsty sand (II, 374–376); or the spiderwebs that wind around us without our noticing them as we walk along (III, 381–390).

I have already mentioned Ovid’s Metamorphoses, another encyclopedic poem (written half a century after Lucretius’s), one rooted however not in physical reality but in the fables of mythology. For Ovid too everything can be transformed into new forms; for Ovid too knowledge of the world entails dissolving the solidity of the world; for Ovid too there is among everything that exists an essential equality that runs counter to all hierarchies of power and value. If Lucretius’s world is composed of unalterable atoms, Ovid’s is composed of the qualities, attributes, and forms that reveal the distinctiveness of every object and plant and animal and person but that are merely thin sheaths over a common substance which—when stirred by profound emotion—can change itself into radically different forms.

It is in tracking the change from one form to another that Ovid displays his incomparable gifts, as when he describes a woman as she realizes she is changing into a lotus tree: her feet become rooted to the ground, soft bark slowly rises to cover her groin, and she tries to tear at her hair but finds her hands full of leaves. Or when he describes Arachne’s fingers, their deftness in gathering and unraveling wool, in turning a spindle, in working her embroidery needle, before suddenly showing them stretching into thin spider legs and beginning to weave webs.

For both Lucretius and Ovid, lightness is a way of seeing the world based on philosophy and science—on the doctrines of Epicurus for Lucretius, on the doctrines of Pythagoras for Ovid (a Pythagoras who, as Ovid depicts him, closely resembles Buddha). In both cases, however, this lightness is something created in the writing, using the linguistic tools of the poet, independent of whatever philosophical doctrine the poet claims to be following.

I think my idea of lightness is starting to come into sharper focus; more than anything, I hope that what I have said so far shows that there is a lightness that is thoughtful and that is different from the frivolous lightness we all know. Indeed, thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem heavy and opaque.

I can best illustrate this idea with a tale from the Decameron (VI, 9) in which the Florentine poet Guido Cavalcanti appears. Boccaccio depicts Cavalcanti as an austere philosopher walking pensively among the marble tombs beside a church. The jeunesse dorée of Florence were riding through the city in groups from one party to the next, looking for any opportunity to widen their circle of social invitations. Cavalcanti, despite his wealth and elegance, was not popular among them, because he never joined their reveling and because his mysterious philosophy was suspected of impiety:

Ora avvenne un giorno che, essendo Guido partito d’Orto San...