Survival of the Fictive

...Calvino felt that as the 20th century was drawing to a close, and he with it, there was need to commend his treasured values to the next millennium, and so, he hopes, to eternity...

...he is an accurate evoker of the bureaucratic hell of his times and, even more so, ours...

...And if, as the next section, "Dialogue on the Art of the Novel" (the first half of a Paris Review interview), has it, God is gone and man is no longer master, "the planet is moving through a masterless void," or what Kundera calls, as in the title of his latest novel, "the unbearable lightness of being...

...However much a creative writer's subject is writing in general, he always ends up discussing his own work...

...Next Calvino examines the theory of atomic lightness as found in Lucretius' De rerum natura, and finds in both Ovid and Lucretius "a lightness of thoughtfulness" as distinct from and superior to "a lightness of frivolity...

...A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral...

...Six Memos for the Next Millennium By Italo Calvino Translated by Patrick Creagh Harvard...

...agility of both thought and expression...

...Literature, and perhaps literature alone, can create the antibodies to fight this plague in language...

...He does, however, quote at length the not especially verbal Leonardo da Vinci's fascinating struggles in his journals to get at the mot juste...

...Under the rubric "kitsch" we read also the following bracing statement: "I never minded Agatha Christie's...

...Each life as an encyclopedia" may indeed have been what Ovid and Lucretius had in mind, Calvino argues, bringing us back to the beginning of these lectures...

...But Calvino is also aware of the value of weight and density in literature...

...All are illustrated by Calvino from the works of others, and occasionally from his own...

...But the masters of "howness" discover paradoxically, by their originality, new forms of "whatness...

...He stresses literature's quest for knowledge, extending into "anthropology, ethnology, mythology...

...Yet as an Italian, with the likes of Dante and Leopardi in his blood, Calvino can't help being more open to poetry than Kundera, despite the Czech writer's lip service to a few poets, and so the spectrum is widened in a different way...

...But the talk includes an important observation concerning Tolstoy, who first made Anna Karenin a less sympathetic character, then changed her for the better in both senses...

...If you say so, Milan—and I'm sure that dear, dear Octavio would believe you...

...A joke," we are told,"is a joke only if you're outside the [fish] bowl...

...in the other, the "what...

...Perhaps that is in some respects just as well...

...Reviewed by John Simon By a strange and graceful coincidence, Milan Kundera's thoughts on fiction, The Art of the Novel, and Italo Calvino's lectures onliterature, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, reach us simultaneously...

...And more could have been done by Broch with the "specifically novelistic essay," where the author, through essayistic interpolations, becomes more "hypothetical, playful, or ironic...

...That makes all except one of his novels (The Farewell Party) "variants of an architecture based on the number 7," considered by Kundera neither superstition nor calculation, but "adeep, unconscious, incomprehensible drive...

...Happily, the oeuvres of Kundera and Calvino, including these two books, may help stave off that dreadful fate...

...A leap into the future, therefore, and it is with a leap that "Lightness" more or less begins...

...then a nod to Kundera and his Unbearable Lightness of Being—all illustrations of flight from what is heavy and oppressive...

...Broch, Musil, Kafka, Hasek (with his Schweik) and, somewhat later, Gombrowicz became standard-bearers of the realization that man is the master of neither nature nor history...

...And "knowledge as multiplicity" binds together the modern and the postmodern, and provides a "thread...

...Proof that nothingness and nonbeing are two entirely different things...

...There are essentially two kinds of fictions: those that play with the very form of fiction and those that don't...

...With Balzac, the world begins to shrink...

...Thus Broch did not accomplish "radical divestment" —i.e., keeping the novel from sprawling beyond the limits of human memory—a problem of Robert Musil, too...

...The comic does not, as in Shakespeare, merely accompany the tragic as relief, but actually destroys it, depriving the victims of the consolation "found in the (real or supposed) grandeur of tragedy...

...The danger forthewriteristhathisglory will be un-Ovidianly metamorphosed into oblivion...

...The novel, for Kundera as for Broch, is existential rather than psychological and rejects symbols (a slap at Freud), also viewed as politically dangerous by Kundera, the Soviet Union having won a war of symbols against the West...

...In prose narrative, "events that rhyme" replace the forward thrust that rhyme affords poetry...

...Such near misses, however, seem to be a part of greatness...

...with Flaubert, the infinite has to be internalized as the "great illusion of the irreplaceable uniqueness of the individual...

...But what about that "next millennium...

...This is from Part Five, "Sixty-three Words," where Kundera defines some terms that have been particularly important for him and his work...

...Had Six Memos been finished and Kundera not chosen to split one piece into two, each would have comprised six sections and roughly the same number of pages...

...Kundera further hails Kafka as being, like Broch, the great enemy of kitsch...

...And now the great leap...

...12.95...

...Right off the bat Kundera tells us that "the sole raison d'être of a novel is to discover what only the novel can discover...

...Exactitude" elicitsoneof the book's supreme pleas: "Apestilencehas struck the human race's most distinctive faculty...

...They are also rather more limited to Italian and French authors (though not entirely) and they are less successful at creating systems out of personal preferences...

...These "memos" are less structured than some of Kundera's performances...

...The pleasure is dimmed only by Calvino's untimely death, which prevented the sixth of these Harvard Norton Lectures from getting written, and all of them from being delivered...

...revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression...

...There are a few errors in Calvino's text and /or in Patrick Creagh's translation, but one of them contains a truth of its own: Ovid's account of the pursued Daphne has her change into a laurel tree, which on page nine of Six Memos becomes a "lotus tree...

...It is appropriate that Italo Calvino should figure on Kundera's good list in The Art of the Novel, for Kundera is respectfully cited in Six Memos for the Next Millennium...

...Lotuses do not grow on trees, and they are symbols of forgetfulness, even as the laurel symbolizes its opposite, immortal glory...

...inks willingness to indulge in the lightest fantasy, the most ironic playfulness, as long as it is consistent with shedding light on the human condition...

...But with quickness, immense sagas and epics could be reduced to "the dimensions of an epigram...

...I wonder what he made of the fairly big Hollywood film into which his own last novel was transmogrified...

...He stresses his problems with getting lost in "variants and alternatives" as well as in "the detail of the detail of the detail...

...Another near miss occurs in the realm of "novelistic counterpoint" or "polyphony": juxtapositions of different modes, rhythms, dreams, plot lines, time sequences to achieve a special music and added insight...

...Multiplicity" opens with a lengthy passage from Carlo Emilio Gadda's The Awful Mess on Via Merulana, exemplifying "the contemporary novelas an encyclopedia, as a method of knowledge [Kundera again], and above all as a network of connections between the events, the people, and the things of the world...

...Every true novelist listens to that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors...

...then a modern poet's, Eugenio Montale's, evocation of Lucifer...

...This first essay in The Art of the Novel, "The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes," examines how Cervantes discovered the possibilities of bold movement through vast space, whereas Samuel Richardson began to explore "what happens inside" in our inner space...

...The titles of the lectures give away the content: "Lightness" (which mentions and owes something to Kundera), "Quickness," "Exactitude," "Visibility," and "Multiplicity...

...more improvisatory and gustatory, as if to ask, "Look, isn't this a nice passage...

...Oddly, Kundera does not advert in this context to Proust, who managed the impossible...

...but, then, I am not a novelist, a breed that, according to you, is answerable only to Cervantes...

...But the proper use of language "enables us to approach things (present and absent) with discretion, attention, and caution, with respect for what things (present and absent) communicate without words...

...the use of words...

...Mental speed is valuable for its own sake, for the pleasure it gives to anyone who is sensitive to such a thing," for the "something special derived from its very swiftness...

...Then comes the all-important search for the written word as equivalent of the visual image, and as the story acquires "the most felicitous verbal expression," the visual imagination has to "tag along...

...Knowledge is the novel's only morality...

...In a fine peroration, Calvino pleads for "the novel as a vast net," a concept that does no injustice to "the selfoï the writer," inasmuch as we are, each of us, "a combinatoria [sic] of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined...

...We get, too, an homage to Joyce's "polyphonic multiplicity," again reminiscent of Kundera...

...those I detest...

...He cites a long passage from Cyrano de Bergerac in praise of cabbages as an example of "how the sluggishness of the human consciousness in emerging from its anthropomorphic parochialism [surely he means "anthropocentric"!] can be abolished in an instant by poetic invention...

...144 pp...

...Calvino unfortunately does not develop his attractive concept of language as giving words to the wordless...

...war, Kundera argues, is disinterested and unmotivated, whether fascist, Communist, or other...

...It lies in the self-reliance of the literary work...

...The lecture on "Visibility" begins with Dante and soon switches to Calvino's own way of writing, which crystallizes around images and gradually, by accretion, shifts from the purely visual to the conceptual...

...What would the missing lecture on "Consistency" have provided...

...Because he is friends with Octavio Paz, for example, "Octavio" becomes a key word: "I make his dear, dear name the forty-ninth of these sixty-three words.' Or, consider the entry on "Nonbeing": "...' death sweetly bluish like nonbeing' (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting...

...Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work...

...what he opposes is the kind of weight that hampers the lightness of thought...

...Even long novels must resort to techniques of shortness by making their structures "accumulative, modular, and combinatory," but literature needs to be overambitious, for it "remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement...

...In the even more congested times that await us, literature must aim at maximum concentration...

...In the one, the "how" predominates...

...in its pursuit, by whatever means, of the multiplicity, polymorphism, polyphony of the world...

...I myself think nonbeing scarcely more bluish than nothingness...

...For Calvino opens every lecture by introducing either sizable quotations from favorite authors or an illuminating anecdote...

...Quickness" perceives correctness of style as "quick adjustment...

...A quoted anecdote from the Decameron tells about how the poet Guido Cavalcanti eluded some hecklers with triple lightness: speed of comeback, wit of reply, and bodily athleticism that enabled him to leap out of their reach...

...Beyond the similarity of their literary tastes, the books exhibit more fundamental likenesses...

...Weshall never know, yet from the very consistency between these two provocative books we can infer an answer...

...Kundera considers his pieces, though written on various occasions, as conceived for a future book of a "practitioner's confessions," and that is what Calvino's lectures are too...

...We cannot say 'bluish like nothingness,' because nothingness is not bluish...

...novels...

...He flatters the Israelis by calling them "the true heart of Europe—a peculiar heart located outside the body," something that must have sounded pretty odd to the younger listeners...

...There are many racy, idiosyncratic aperçus in this section, and several eccentricities and self-indulgences...

...so Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers explores the role the irrational plays "in our decisions, in our lives...

...Although Broch fathomed the novel's extraordinary power to incorporate other forms—philosophy, poetry, the essay—some possibilities were not fully exploited by him...

...Major 20th-century fiction has tended to gravitate toward the former because there are virtually no untold stories left, most plots being conscious or unconscious variations on previous plots...

...The Kaflcan takes us inside, into the guts of a joke, into the horror of the comic...

...In "Notes Inspired by 'The Sleepwalkers,' " the incompatibility of totalitarianism and the novel is again stressed, the latter thriving only on "relativity, doubt, questioning...

...We get first the myth of Perseus and Medusa as related by Ovid...

...Calvino adduces instances of how this was accomplished by poets as diverse as Leopardi and Francis Ponge, and by his own "fondness for geometrical forms, for symmetries, for numerical series, for all that is combinatory...

...Part Four, the second half of the Paris Review interview, discusses under the heading "Dialogue on the Artof Composition" both the conscious and unconscious strategies that go into Kundera's fiction...

...If he is a good writer, who's to complain...

...In Part Five, "Somewhere Behind," we get an astute analysis of Kafka and the Kafkan (the form Linda Asher, the translator from the French, rightly picks over "Kafkaesque," which has other implications...

...Cartesian rationalism gradually won out over God, but was itself defeated by the irrationality of totalitarianism, "force willing only its will...

...that I hope will continue into the next millennium...

...Digression—and here Calvino's tribute to Tristram Shandy is no less handsome than Kundera's—is a strategy of evasion to keep mortality at arm's length...

...There is something deeply sad about a work apocopated by death, particularly if the death was so premature and the missing lecture was to have been on "Consistency," a quality we all could use more of...

...to dilute meanings, to blunt the edge of expressiveness...

...The Czech writer credits his early musical training with helping to bring about "polyphonic confrontations...

...The reason we are told, is that "he was listening to . . . the wisdom of the novel...

...And Kafka is not, as commonly held, a "rebus to be decoded...

...Absurdity enters our awareness as the "terminal paradoxes" discovered by Central European novelists who, partly in the breakdown of the Hapsburg Empire, could study the true nature of irrationality...

...Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Diderot's Jacques le fataliste discovered the possibilities of "play," which presupposes limitless space and time...

...Shouldn't we all try to emulate it...

...Shades of Kundera and his sevens...

...The last section, duly numbered Part Seven, is Kundera's acceptance speech upon receiving the Jerusalem Prize...

...Whereas Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Horowitz at the piano, the big Hollywood films...

...I wonder about that unconsciousness: The A rt of theNovelis also in seven parts, and only because Kundera consciously split one of its sections into two...

...Calvino's admiration for the "Keep It Short" principle finds a worthy hero in Borges, who is extolled for his ability to compress physical and metaphysical immensities into a tiny fiction...

...Still, the chapter is especially rich in suggestive formulations, e.g., "the novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters," and "to compose a novel is to set different emotional spaces side by side...

...Its greatest enemy, though, may be Kundera himself, who neatly describes kitsch as "the need to gaze into the mirror of the beautifying lie and to be moved to tears of gratification by one's own reflection...