Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Vintage International)

by Italo Calvino

  The real protagonist of the story, however, is the magic ring, because it is the movements of the ring that determine those of the characters and because it is the ring that establishes the relationships between them. Around the magic object there forms a kind of force field that is in fact the territory of the story itself. We might say that the magic object is an outward and visible sign that reveals the connection between people or between events. It has a narrative function, whose history we may trace in the Norse sagas and the chivalric romances—a function that continues to surface in Italian poems of the Renaissance. In Ariosto's Orlando Jurioso we find an endless series of exchanges of swords, shields, helmets, and horses, each one endowed with particular qualities. In this way the plot can be described in terms of the changes of ownership of a certain number of objects, each one endowed with certain powers that determine the relationships between certain characters.

  In realistic narrative, Mambrino's helmet becomes a barber's bowl, but it does not lose importance or meaning. In the same way, enormous weight is attached to all the objects that Robinson Crusoe saves from the wrecked ship or makes with his own hands. I would say that the moment an object appears in a narrative, it is charged with a special force and becomes like the pole of a magnetic field, a knot in the network of invisible relationships. The symbolism of an object may be more or less explicit, but it is always there. We might even say that in a narrative any object is always magic.

  Returning to the Charlemagne legend, we find it has a literary tradition in Italian. In his Lettere famigliari (1.4) Petrarch tells us that he had heard this “not unpleasant tale” (fabella non ina-mena)—which he says he doesn't believe—while visiting Charlemagne's tomb at Aix-la-Chapelle. In Petrarch's Latin, the story is much richer in moral comment, and also in detail and feeling (the bishop of Cologne, in obedience to a miraculous voice from heaven, gropes with his finger beneath the cold, rigid tongue of the corpse: sub gelida rigentique lingua). But speaking for myself, I greatly prefer the bare résumé, in which everything is left to the imagination and the speed with which events follow one another conveys a feeling of the ineluctable.

  The legend reappears in the flowery language of sixteenth-century Italy in various versions, in which the necrophiliac aspect acquires the most emphasis. Sebastiano Erizzo, a Venetian writer of novellas, puts into the mouth of Charlemagne—while he is in bed with the corpse—a lamentation several pages in length. On the other hand, the homosexual aspect of the emperor's passion for the archbishop is hardly ever alluded to, or even expunged altogether, as in one of the most famous sixteenth-century treatises on love (that of Giuseppe Bettussi) in which the story ends with the finding of the ring. As for the ending, in Petrarch and his Italian followers, Lake Constance is not mentioned because the entire action takes place at Aix-la-Chapelle, since the legend was supposed to be an explanation of the origins of the palace and the church the emperor had built there. The ring is thrown into a marsh, whose muddy stench the emperor breathes in as if it were perfume, while “he takes delight in using its waters.” Here there is a link with other local legends on the origins of the thermal springs, details that put even more emphasis on the mortuary quality of the whole affair.

  Even earlier than this were the German medieval traditions studied by Gaston Paris. These deal with Charlemagne's love for a dead woman with variants that make it a very different story. Now the beloved is the emperor's legal wife, who uses the magic ring to ensure his fidelity; at other times she is a fairy or nymph who dies when the ring is taken from her; sometimes she is a woman who seems to be alive but is discovered to be a corpse once the ring is removed. At the bottom of all this there may well be a Scandinavian saga: Harald, king of Norway, slept with his dead wife who was wrapped in a magic cloak that gave her the appearance of being alive.

  In a word, in the medieval versions collected by Gaston Paris, what is lacking is the chain of events; in the literary versions of Petrarch and the Renaissance writers, what is missing is speed. So I still prefer the version given by Barbey d'Aurevilly, in spite of its rather patched-up crudity. The secret of the story lies in its economy: the events, however long they last, become puncti-form, connected by rectilinear segments, in a zigzag pattern that suggests incessant motion.

  I do not wish to say that quickness is a value in itself. Narrative time can also be delaying, cyclic, or motionless. In any case, a story is an operation carried out on the length of time involved, an enchantment that acts on the passing of time, either contracting or dilating it. Sicilian storytellers use the formula “lu cuntu nun metti tempu” (time takes no time in a story) when they want to leave out links or indicate gaps of months or even years. The technique of oral narration in the popular tradition follows functional criteria. It leaves out unnecessary details but stresses repetition: for example, when the tale consists of a series of the same obstacles to be overcome by different people. A child's pleasure in listening to stories lies partly in waiting for things he expects to be repeated: situations, phrases, formulas. Just as in poems and songs the rhymes help to create the rhythm, so in prose narrative there are events that rhyme. The Charlemagne legend is highly effective narrative because it is a series of events that echo each other as rhymes do in a poem.

  If during a certain period of my career as a writer I was attracted by folktales and fairytales, this was not the result of loyalty to an ethnic tradition (seeing that my roots are planted in an entirely modern and cosmopolitan Italy), nor the result of nostalgia for things I read as a child (in my family, a child could read only educational books, particularly those with some scientific basis). It was rather because of my interest in style and structure, in the economy, rhythm, and hard logic with which they are told. In working on my transcription of Italian folktales as recorded by scholars of the last century, I found most enjoyment when the original text was extremely laconic. This I tried to convey, respecting the conciseness and at the same time trying to obtain the greatest possible narrative force. See, for instance, number 57 in Italian Folktales (Fiabe italiane):

  Un Re s'ammalo. Vennero i medici e gli dissero: “Senta, Maesta, se vuol guarire, bisogna che lei prenda una penna delPOrco. E' un rimedio difficile, perche POrco tutti i cri-stiani che vede se li mangia.

  II Re lo disse a tutti ma nessuno ci voleva andare. Lo chiese a un suo sottoposto, molto fedele e coraggioso, e questi disse: “Andro.”

  Gli insegnarono la strada: “In cima a un monte, ci sono sette buche: in una delle sette, ci sta POrco.”

  Cuomo ando e lo prese il buio per la strada. Si fermo in una locanda …

  A king fell ill and was told by his doctors, “Majesty, if you want to get well, you'll have to obtain one of the ogre's feathers. That will not be easy, since the ogre eats every human he sees.”

  The king passed the word on to everybody, but no one was willing to go to the ogre. Then he asked one of his most loyal and courageous attendants, who said, “I will go.”

  The man was shown the road and told, “On a mountain-top are seven caves, in one of which lives the ogre.”

  The man set out and walked until dark, when he stopped at an inn … *

  Not a word is said about what illness the king was suffering from, or why on earth an ogre should have feathers, or what those caves were like. But everything mentioned has a necessary function in the plot. The very first characteristic of a folktale is economy of expression. The most outlandish adventures are recounted with an eye fixed on the bare essentials. There is always a battle against time, against the obstacles that prevent or delay the fulfillment of a desire or the repossession of something cherished but lost. Or time can stop altogether, as in the castle of Sleeping Beauty. To bring this about, Charles Perrault has only to write: “Les broches memes qui etaient au feu toutes pleines de perdrix et de faisans s'endormirent, et le feu aussi. Tout cela se fit en un moment; les Fees n'etaient pas longues a leur besogne” (Even the spits on the fire, all laden with partridges and pheasants, went to sleep, and t
he fire along with them. All this happened in a moment: the fairies were not long at their work).

  The relativity of time is the subject of a folktale known almost everywhere: a journey to another world is made by someone who thinks it has lasted only a few hours, though when he returns, his village is unrecognizable because years and years have gone by. In early American literature, of course, this was the theme of Washington Irving's “Rip Van Winkle,” which acquired the status of a foundation myth for your ever-changing society.

  This motif can also be interpreted as an allegory of narrative time and the way in which it cannot be measured against real time. And the same significance can be seen in the reverse operation, in the expanding of time by the internal proliferations from one story to another, which is a feature of oriental storytelling. Scheherazade tells a story in which someone tells a story in which someone tells a story, and so forth. The art that enables Scheherazade to save her life every night consists of knowing how to join one story to another, breaking off at just the right moment—two ways of manipulating the continuity and discontinuity of time. It is a secret of rhythm, a way of capturing time that we can recognize from the very beginning: in the epic by means of the metrical effects of the verse, in prose narrative by those effects that make us eager to know what comes next.

  Everybody knows the discomfort felt when someone sets out to tell a joke without being good at it and gets everything wrong, by which I mean, above all, the links and the rhythms. This feeling is evoked in one of Boccaccio's novellas (VI. 1), which is in fact devoted to the art of storytelling.

  A jovial company of ladies and gentlemen, guests of a Florentine lady in her country house, go for an after-lunch outing to another pleasant place in the neighborhood. To cheer them on their way, one of the men offers to tell a story.

  “Madonna Oretta, quando voi vogliate, io vi portero, gran parte della via che a andare abbiamo, a cavallo con una delle belle novelle del mondo.”

  Al quale la donna rispuose: “Messere, anzi ve ne priego io molto, e sarammi carissimo.”

  Messer lo cavaliere, al quale forse non stava meglio la spada allato che 1 novellar nella lingua, udito questo, co-mincio una sua novella, la quale nel vero da se era bellis-sima, ma egli or tre e quatro e sei volte replicando una medesima parola e ora indietro tornando e talvolta di-cendo: “Io non dissi bene” e spesso ne' nomi errando, un per un altro ponendone, fieramente la guastava: senza che egli pessimamente, secondo le qualita delle persone e gli atti che accadevano, profereva.

  Di che a madonna Oretta, udendolo, spesse volte veniva un sudore e uno sfinimento di cuore, come se inferma fosse stata per terminare; la qual cosa poi che piu sofferir non pote, conoscendo che il cavaliere era entrato nel pecoreccio ne era per riuscirne, piacevolemente disse: “Messer, questo vostro cavallo ha troppo duro trotto, per che io vi priego che vi piaccia di pormi a piè.”

  “Mistress Oretta, if you please, I shall carry you a great part of the way we have to go on horseback, with one of the best stories in the world.” “Sir,” she replied, “I pray you to do so; that will be most agreeable.” Hearing this, master cavalier, who perhaps fared no better with sword at side than with tale on tongue, began his story, which was indeed a very fine one. But what with his repeating of the same word three or four or six times over, his recapitulations, his “I didn't say that right,” his erring in putting one name for another, he spoiled it dreadfully. Also his delivery was very poor, quite out of keeping with the circumstances and the quality of his persons. Mistress Oretta, hearing him, was many times taken with a sweat and a sinking of the heart, as if she were sick and about to die. At last, unable to endure the torment any longer and seeing that the gentleman was entangled in a maze of his own making, she said pleasantly: “Sir, this horse of yours has too hard a trot, and I pray you to set me on my feet again.”

  The novella is a horse, a means of transport with its own pace, a trot or a gallop according to the distance and the ground it has to travel over; but the speed Boccaccio is talking about is a mental speed. The listed defects of the clumsy storyteller are above all oflFenses against rhythm, as well as being defects of style, because he does not use the expressions appropriate either to the characters or to the events. In other words, even correctness of style is a question of quick adjustment, of agility of both thought and expression.

  The horse as an emblem of speed, even speed of the mind, runs through the whole history of literature, heralding the entire problematics of our own technological viewpoint. The age of speed, in transport as in information, opens with one of the finest essays in English literature, Thomas De Quincey's “The English Mail-Coach.” In 1849 he already understood everything we now know about the motorized highway world, including death-dealing high-speed crashes.

  In the section called “The Vision of Sudden Death,” De Quin-cey describes a night journey on the box of an express mail coach with a gigantic coachman who is fast asleep. The technical perfection of the vehicle, and the transformation of the driver into a blind inanimate object, puts the traveler at the mercy of the mechanical inexorability of a machine. In the clarity of perception brought on by a dose of laudanum, De Quincey becomes aware that the horses are running uncontrollably at thirteen miles an hour on the wrong side of the road. This means certain disaster, not for the swift, sturdy mail coach but for the first unfortunate carriage to come along that road in the opposite direction. In fact, at the end of the straight, tree-lined avenue, which looks like a “Gothic aisle,” he sees a “frail reedy gig” in which a young couple are approaching at one mile an hour. “Between them and eternity, to all human calculation, there is but a minute and a-half.” De Quincey gives a shout: “Mine had been the first step; the second was for the young man; the third was for God.” The account of these few seconds has not been bettered even in an age in which the experience of high speeds has become a basic fact of life.

  Glance of eye, thought of man, wing of angel, which of these had speed enough to sweep between the question and the answer, and divide the one from the other? Light does not tread upon the steps of light more indivisibly than did our all-conquering arrival upon the escaping efforts of the gig.

  De Quincey succeeds in conveying a sense of an extremely short period of time that nonetheless contains both the calculation of the technical inevitability of the crash and the imponderable— God's part in the matter—in virtue of which the two vehicles do not collide.

  The motif that interests us here is not physical speed, but the relationship between physical speed and speed of mind. This was also interesting to a great Italian poet of De Quincey's generation. Giacomo Leopardi, whose youth was as sedentary as one can imagine, struck a rare joyful moment when he wrote in his diary, the Zibaldone di pensieri (Casual Thoughts):

  La velocita, per esempio, de' cavalli o veduta, o sperimen-tata, cioe quando essi vi trasportano … e piacevolissima per se sola, cioe per la vivacita, Penergia, la forza, la vita di tal sensazione. Essa desta realmente una quasi idea delP infinito, sublima Panima, la fortifica … (27 Ottobre 1821).

  Speed, for example, of horses, whether seen or experienced, that is, when they are carrying you … is most pleasurable in itself; that is, for the vivacity, the energy, the strength, the sheer life of such a feeling. Indeed it almost gives you an idea of the infinite—elevates the soul, fortifies it.

  In his notes in the Zibaldone over the following few months, Leopardi develops his reflections on the subject of speed, and at a certain point starts to speak about literary style:

  La rapidità e la concisione dello stile, piace perche presenta all'anima una folia d'idee simultanee, o cosi rapidamente succedentisi, che paiono simultanee, e fanno ondeggiar Panima in una tale abbondanza di pensieri, o d'immagini e sensazioni spirituali, ch'ella o non e capace di abbracciarle tutte, e pienamente ciascuna, o non ha tempo di restare in ozio, e priva di sensazioni. La forza dello stile poetico, che in gran parte e tutt'uno colla rapidita, non e piacevole per altro che per questi effetti, e non
consiste in altro. L'ecci-tamento d'idee simultanee, puo derivare e da ciascuna pa-rola isolata, o propria o metaforica, e dalla loro colloca-zione, e dal giro della frase, e dalla soppressione stessa di altre parole o frasi ec. (3 Novembre 1821).

  Speed and conciseness of style please us because they present the mind with a rush of ideas that are simultaneous, or that follow each other so quickly they seem simultaneous, and set the mind afloat on such an abundance of thoughts or images or spiritual feelings that either it cannot embrace them all, each one fully, or it has no time to be idle and empty of feelings. The power of poetic style, which is largely the same thing as rapidity, is pleasing for these effects alone and consists in nothing else. The excitement of simultaneous ideas may arise either from each isolated word, whether literal or metaphorical, from their arrangement, from the turn of a phrase, or even from the suppression of other words and phrases.

  The metaphor of the horse for the speed of thought was, I think, first used by Galileo Galilei. In the Saggiatore (The Tester), arguing with an adversary who propped up his own theories with a vast number of classical quotations, he wrote:

  Se il discorrere circa un problema difficile fosse come il portar pesi, dove molti cavalli porteranno piu sacca di grano che un caval solo, io acconsentirei che i molti discorsi facesser piu che un solo; ma il discorrere e come il correre, e non come il portare, ed un caval barbero solo correra piu che cento frisoni. (45)

  If discoursing on a difficult problem were like carrying weights, when many horses can carry more sacks of grain than a single horse, I would agree that many discourses would do more than a single one; but discoursing is like coursing, not like carrying, and one Barbary courser can go faster than a hundred Frieslands.