Mosaics, magicians, & mystery:

...As God gradually departed, "the single divine Truth decomposed into myriad relative truths parceled out by men...

...Finally, however, the un-professored reader looking for some manageable purchase against the babbling tower of the postmodern novel-with its unwelcoming authorial self-consciousness and wearying explorations of technique-is likely to find these apologias mannered and of dubious efficacy...

...That is the modern predicament, and it finds its most egregious expression in totalitarianism, although the "nonthoughtof received ideas" also curses the West...

...The Iri ai On Morel, Milan Kundera, translated by Linda Asher, Grove Press, 1988, $16.95, 165 pp...

...The tradition Kundera and Calvino emerge from is bookish, cosmopolitan, formalist, but entertaining in its own exacting way...

...to the tree...to stone, to cement, to plastic...

...But once having toppled tradition, reason had no framework within which its own value could be verified and assured...

...We each live this tale...

...They generally disavow the life of the body and of the earth, while tirelessly insisting we ascend to some higher plane of existence by virtue of a special, essentially mystical knowledge...

...You see: not wonder at the immeasurable infinity of the soul...

...Nor does Milosz welcome the embrace of either immutable natural law or a universe of randomness and chance...

...I think so...

...In his engaging dialectical fashion he moves back and forth among literature, his other ultimate concerns, and the concrete experience of life in the twentieth century...

...From this, Milosz goes on to speak eloquently of "our hope" lying in a heightened sense of history, a rootedness in time that is biblical and incarnational...

...Cartesian rationality, he argues, while freeing man to pursue knowledge, also undermined every accepted value...

...Milosz maintains a European reserve, but a sense of his passion, intellectual honesty, and lived life comes through...

...Refreshingly, however, he does not see literature as redemption or as an end in itself...

...Only after "passing through the purgatory of historical thought" can we seek "the ontological dimension...

...Where Milosz bemoans the loss of the sacred, Calvino embraces it, seeking meaning only in the crystalline imaginative object, "alive as an organism...

...Italo Calvino, translated by Patrick Creagh, Harvard University Press, 1988, $12.95, 124 pp...

...Man lives in time and in some way has to build those eternal or lasting values out of time...

...Kundera's ambition as a novelist is "the union of a frivolous form and a serious subject (which) lays bare our dramas (those that occur in our beds as well as those we play out on the great stage of history) in all their terrible insignificance...

...Kundera, who insists that oppression in private and political life operates on the same metaphysical level, is compelling as he analyzes the origin of this cultural problem...

...Time is given for his use...

...It brings together, in a "polyphonic" and multilayered manner, a variety of imaginative forms, such as fantasy, autobiography, narrative, ironic essay, and history...

...As Kundera sees it, the novel must resist this "forgetting of being...

...Relativism and the uncertainty of all things is a liberation...

...Instead, he insists on a fixed, and in his case religious, point of reference and value if the human enterprise, including the imaginative enterprise, is to go forward...

...Fiction has no reason to be embarrassed about telling the same story again and again, since we all, with infinite variations, experience the same story...

...Kundera, the lambent phenomenologist and jokester, laughing in his dark Central European way (Kafka is one of his heroes) as he faces the gallows...

...Books Discussed in this Column Conrerartioni with Ciosbw Hum, Ewa Czarnecka and Aleksander Fiut, translated by Richard Lourie, Har-court Brace Jovanovich, 1987, $27.95, 332 pp...

...Thank God...

...In the last resort, however, "chance will win the battle...

...Even the self floats free...

...In the end it is hard to suppress the suspicion that the search for poetic detachment and purity is neither new nor especially fruitful...

...Milosz is no less subtle or knowledgeable than they about the mystery of the self or the potentialities of existence...

...When a writer's scheming is fiendishly clever we indulge it-if it is sufficiently playful...

...As critics or theorists both novelists demonstrate a weakness for big ideas: British critic John Bayley finds Kundera prone "to run a good idea into the ground...

...Poetry is both the daughter and enemy of chance...

...Like the age itself, the postmodern novel is syncretistic...

...As John Updike has written in expressing reservations about Calvino's The Castle of Crossed Destinies: "The combinations that the human mind invents are relatively facile and unmagical compared to reality's dovetailed richness...

...Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz, although largely devoted to the exegesis of specific, often arcane texts, ranges over a wide variety of topics, from family history to politics to religion...

...Perhaps this is poetical genius, but it is not far from the hallucinations vulgarly called mad...

...He has been a victim of both Nazism and Stalinism...

...Narrative and metaphysics alike become flimsy and frivolous if they venture too far from the home base of all humanism-the single, simple human life that we all more or less lead, with its crude elementals of nurture and appetite, love and competition, the sunshine of well-being and the inevitable night of death...

...Art is a minor affair compared with the complexity and richness of the visible world," he says, knowing how heretical such a sentiment sounds in certain quarters...

...A high price to pay, since both are storytellers first and theorists second...

...In presenting the history of the novel, which he calls the "image and model" of the Modern Era, Kundera champions the genre as the meditative tool, the supreme "ironic art," uniquely qualified to explore the questions of contemporary existence...

...Although he acknowledges, very much in the spirit of Kundera and Calvino, the difficulty of creating "significant forms," he comes down on the side of books that relate "directly to life," not principally to other books...

...Interestingly, each traces the source of his imaginative work to some suprahu-man dimension...

...In the seventeenth century, God becomes 'Deus abscondi-tus' and man the ground of all things," he writes...

...But he is not as sanguine as the Italian experimentalist about the cultural ascendancy of scientific rationalism...

...Calvino, as he has written elsewhere, is not interested in introspective or psychological fiction, but rather in the "mosaic in which man is set...

...Milosz considers himself a "medium," but a "mistrustful" one...

...The point is to accept our animal nature while at the same time not allowing ourselves to be diminished...

...SO MANY BOOKS, SO LITTLE TIME Mosaics, magicians, & mystery PAUL BAUMANN These tomes-two of which are deceptively, nay, sinis-terly, thin-each present the literary ideas of an estimable man of letters...

...After all, the novel's principal claim to our attention is its ability to convincingly re-present the mysterious, even irrational dimension of life...

...To describe a fiction as "calculated" is usually a pejorative...

...Writers infatuated by such "self-enclosed" systems are engaged in a pursuit as artificial as that of dogs chasing a mechanical rabbit, he warns...

...Calvino employs a neo-Platonic model, where imagination participates in the "truth of the world," and confesses he has always "sought out in the imagination a means to attain a knowledge that is outside the individual, outside the subjective...

...Calvino writes...

...Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined...

...Kun-dera shares this promiscuous phenomenalism...

...But Calvino and Kundera venture far to avoid that kind of embarrassment...

...Part of his comparative agreeableness is due to the HH HH nature of the book...

...Indeed, Calvino issues a call for rigorous literary forms-"geometric compositions" modeled on the cosmologies of modern science, specifically the science of entropy, where despite the irreversible collapse of a system, areas of order and form can take shape, if only temporarily...

...But a chilling, somewhat inhuman quality is present in such literary exercises...

...Too often the postmodernist sees history only as a nightmare...

...Milan Kun-dera, author most famously of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), is a Czech exile living in France, who has a reputation as a brilliant and epoch-making novelist, or as a brilliant yet somewhat inaccessible talent, depending on your literary taste, educational pedigree, and politics...

...These are difficult and paradoxical writers who deprecate the fiction of psychological realism, plead the "opacity" of reality, and call upon literature to approach its subject obliquely...

...Kundera remarks that great novels are "always more intelligent than their authors" and that every "true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom...

...If Milosz has written elsewhere of how "I need a Thou to address, I cannot speak to clouds and stones"(VisionsfromSanFranciscoBay), Calvino's aesthetic convictions, his acceptance of fluidity and "the vortex of multiplicity," lead him to call for a literature that does in fact "give speech to that which has no language, to the bird...

...The worst to be said about their various essays and edited conversations is that if you were first to come to either novelist by way of these reflections it is unlikely you would subsequently pick up their fiction...

...Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable...

...And that is exactly where I now propose to take my various selves.opose to take my various selves...

...That mosaic is best illuminated, for this storyteller, in a literature steeped in science, philosophy, and logic, avenues of imaginative investigation just as poetically rewarding as the subjects of more traditional novels...

...Calvino is not blind to these dangers, but he applauds most loudly the emergence of human consciousness from the shackles of "an-thropocentric parochialism...

...This polymath posits the "world as a system of systems, where each system conditions the others and is conditioned by them" and he envisions the postmodern novel as a "vast net" linking "the various branches of knowledge, the various 'codes,' into a manifold and multifaceted vision of the world...

...Cosmos as mathematical necessity is mostly pain for living creatures," he comments...

...Sound sterile and dry as classroom chalk...

...Certainly there is a gnostic flavor to Kundera's and Calvino's thinking...

...1982...

...Typically, he extols "the ambiguity of the epoch, which is decline and progress at the same time...

...More than for knowledge, we turn to fiction for experience...

...purpose of literature and the conundrums of epistemology...

...We get little of the authors in flesh and blood...

...Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish poet, essayist, and Nobel Prize winner, who has lived in the United States since 1960, shares the European perspective of Calvino and Kundera, but cannot easily be accommodated to their aesthetics...

...He distrusts the relativistic cosmology manifest in so much contemporary writing...

...ilosz is a somewhat different case...

...Philosophy and science, with their impersonal operations, "forget about man's being...

...Each of these writers is a metaphysician in his own idiosyncratic way: Milosz, for the most part the traditional Thomist, with a Catholic sense of a hierarchy of values and a historical ontology...

...rather, wonder at the uncertain nature of the self and of its identity...

...Kundera shares Calvino's extravagant veneration of literature as the possible vehicle for a great modern synthesis...

...We can too easily get hung up on definitions here, but the direction Milosz wants to go is clear...

...Like Milosz, Kundera is enough a student of history and culture to be haunted by a sense of doom at the loss of ontological certainty...

...Six Memos, which Calvino wrote for Harvard's Charles Eliot Norton lectures shortly before his death in 1985, and Kundera's The Art of the Novel, set forth rigorous meditations on the nature and PAUL BAUMANN experiences the trap of existence as a staff writer and movie critic for The Day in New London, Connecticut...

...Where does the self begin and end...

...Six Hums br flw Mt MOmaiu...

...The late Italo Cal-vino is regarded as an equally coruscating literary magician, an Italian and a "fabulist" best known for Cosmicomics (1965), Invisible Cities (1972), and If on a Winter's Night, a Traveler...

...These writers differ, however, in their analysis of the problem and in where they locate reason for hope or faith...

...We must be returned to the natural world, he says...

...Calvino, the craft-conscious aesthete, inspired to fashion transcendent beauty on the brink of the void...

...But he should not allow himself to be completely carried away by time, because then he will be lost in relativism and utter fluidity and be smashed to bits...

...Consequently, irrationality, the mere force of will, has triumphed...

...To be sure, there's plenty of dazzle in both these books (Calvino's excursus on the myth of Perseus is a bit of genius), and a wealth of literary perception and inventive scholarship...

...Kundera and Calvino are, after the European fashion, philosophical novelists though Kundera hems and haws about this...

...But Kundera's Delphic speculations can seem pedestrian next to Calvino's laby-rinthian schematics...

...A self-conscious obsession with the "means of expression" is a dead end...

...A common description of our present intellectual, literary, and existential dilemma is also offered...

...He's a man, and a thinker, of piquant contradictions...

...Milosz reminds us that it is also an indispensable tool...