Six Memos for the Next Millennium

by Italo Calvino

  There is the type of work that, in the attempt to contain everything possible, does not manage to take on a form, to create outlines for itself, and so remains incomplete by its very nature, as we saw in the cases of Gadda and Musil.

  There is the type of work that in literature corresponds to what in philosophy is nonsystematic thought, which proceeds by aphorisms, by sudden, discontinuous flashes of light; and at this point the time has come to mention an author I never tire of reading, Paul Valery. I am speaking of his prose work composed of essays of only a few pages and notes a few lines long, found in his notebooks, “line philosophic doit etre portative” (A philosophy should be portable), he wrote (Cahiers, XXIV713), but also: “J'ai cherche, je cherche et chercherai pour ce que je nomme le Phenomene Total, c'est-a-dire le Tout de la conscience, des relations, des conditions, des possibilites, des impossibilites” (I have sought, I am searching, and I will search for what I call the Total Phenomenon, that is, the Totality of conscience, relations, conditions, possibilities, and impossibilities; XII.722).

  Among the values I would like passed on to the next millennium, there is this above all: a literature that has absorbed the taste for mental orderliness and exactitude, the intelligence of poetry, but at the same time that of science and of philosophy: an intelligence such as that of Valery as an essayist and prose writer. (And if I mention Valery in a context in which the names of novelists prevail, it is partly because, though he was not a novelist and indeed—thanks to a famous quip of his—was thought of as the official liquidator of traditional fiction, he was a critic who understood novels as no one else could, defining their specificity simply as novels.)

  If I had to say which fiction writer has perfectly achieved Valery's aesthetic ideal of exactitude in imagination and in language, creating works that match the rigorous geometry of the crystal and the abstraction of deductive reasoning, I would without hesitation say Jorge Luis Borges. The reasons for my fondness for Borges do not end here, but I will mention only the main ones. I love his work because every one of his pieces contains a model of the universe or of an attribute of the universe (infinity, the innumerable, time eternal or present or cyclic); because they are texts contained in only a few pages, with an exemplary economy of expression; because his stories often take the outer form of some genre from popular literature, a form proved by long usage, which creates almost mythical structures. As an example let us take his most vertiginous “essay” on time, “El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan” (The Garden of Forking Paths), which is presented as a spy story and includes a totally logico-metaphysical story, which in turn contains the description of an endless Chinese novel—and all this concentrated into a dozen pages.

  The hypotheses on the subject of time enunciated by Borges in this story, each one contained (and virtually hidden) in a handful of lines, are as follows. First there is an idea of precise time, almost an absolute, subjective present: “reflexione que todas las cosas le suceden a uno precisamente, precisamente ahora. Siglos de siglos y solo en el presente ocurren los hechos; innumerables hombres en el aire, en la tierra y el mar, y todo lo que realmente pasa me pasa a mi” (I reflected that everything, to everyone, happens precisely, precisely now. Century after century, and only in the present, do things happen. There are innumerable men in the air, on land and on sea, and everything that really happens, happens to me). Then there is a notion of time as determined by the will, in which the future appears to be as irrevocable as the past; and finally the central idea of the whole story—a manifold and ramified time in which every present forks out into two futures, so as to form “una red creciente y vertiginosa de tiempos divergentes, convergentes y paralelos” (a growing and bewildering network of divergent, convergent, and parallel forms of time). This idea of infinite contemporary universes in which all possibilities are realized in all possible combinations is by no means a digression in the story, but rather the very reason why the protagonist feels authorized to carry out the absurd and abominable crime imposed on him by his spy mission, perfectly sure that this happens only in one of the universes but not in the others; and indeed that, if he commits this crime here and now, in other universes he and his victim will be able to hail each other as friends and brothers.

  The scheme of the network of possibilities may be condensed into the few pages of a story by Borges, or it may be made the supporting structure of immensely long novels, in which density and concentration are present in the individual parts. But I would say that today the rule of “Keep It Short” is confirmed even by long novels, the structure of which is accumulative, modular, and combinatory.

  These considerations are at the basis of what I call the “hyper-novel,” which I tried to exemplify in If on a winter's night a traveler (Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore). My aim was to give the essence of what a novel is by providing it in concentrated form, in ten beginnings; each beginning develops in very different ways from a common nucleus, and each acts within a framework that both determines and is determined. The same principle, to sample the potential multiplicity of what may be narrated, forms the basis of another of my books, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, which is intended to be a kind of machine for multiplying narratives that start from visual elements with many possible meanings, such as a tarot pack. My temperament prompts me to “keep it short,” and such structures as these enable me to unite density of invention and expression with a sense of infinite possibilities.

  Another example of the hyper-novel is La vie mode d'emploi (Life, Directions for Use) by Georges Perec. It is a very long novel, made up of many intersecting stories (it is no accident that its subtitle is Romans, in the plural), and it reawakens the pleasure of reading the great novelistic cycles of the sort Balzac wrote. In my view, this book, published in Paris in 1978, four years before the author died at the early age of forty-six, is the last real “event” in the history of the novel so far. There are many reasons for this: the plan of the book, of incredible scope but at the same time solidly finished; the novelty of its rendering; the compendium of a narrative tradition and the encyclopedic summa of things known that lend substance to a particular image of the world; the feeling of “today” that is made from accumulations of the past and the vertigo of the void; the continual presence of anguish and irony together—in a word, the manner in which the pursuit of a definite structural project and the imponderable element of poetry become one and the same thing.

  The element of “puzzle” gives the novel its plot and its formal scheme. Another scheme is the cross-section view of a typical Parisian apartment house, in which the entire action takes place, one chapter to each room. There are five storeys of apartments for each of which we are told about the furnishings and fittings, the changes of ownership and the lives of the inhabitants, together with their ancestors and descendants. The plan of the building is like a bi-square of ten squares by ten, a chessboard on which Perec passes from one pigeonhole (room, chapter) to another as the knight moves in chess, but according to a scheme that enables him to land on each of the squares in turn. (So are there a hundred chapters? No, only ninety-nine. This ultra-completed book has an intentional loophole left for incompleteness.)

  So much for the container of things. As for the content, Perec drew up lists of themes, divided into categories, and decided that, even if barely hinted at, one theme from each category ought to appear in each chapter, in such a way as constantly to vary the combinations according to mathematical procedures that I am not able to define, though I have no doubts as to their exactitude. (I used to visit Perec during the nine years in which he worked on the novel, but I know only a few of his secret rules.) These categories number no fewer than forty-two and include literary quotations, geographical locations, historical facts, furniture, objects, styles, colors, foodstuffs, animals, plants, minerals, and who knows what else—and I have no idea how he managed to respect all these rules, which he did even in the shortest and most compressed chapters.

  In order to escape the arbi
trary nature of existence, Perec, like his protagonist, is forced to impose rigorous rules and regulations on himself, even if these rules are in turn arbitrary. But the miracle is that this system of poetics, which might seem artificial and mechanical, produces inexhaustible freedom and wealth of invention. This is because it coincides with something that had been Perec's passion ever since his first novel (Us choses, 1965): a passion for catalogues, for the enumeration of objects, each defined both in itself and by its belonging to an epoch, a style, a society; a passion extending to menus, concert programs, diet charts, bibliographies real or imaginary.

  The demon of “collectionism” is always beating its wings over Perec's pages, and of the many collections conjured up by this book the one that is most personal and “his,” I would say, is a passion for the unique, that is, the collection of objects of which only one specimen exists. Yet a collector he was not, in life, except of words, of the data of knowledge, of things remembered. Terminological exactitude was his way of possessing things. Perec collected and gave a name to whatever comprises the uniqueness of every event, person, or thing. No one was ever more immune than Perec to the worst blight in modern writing— which is vagueness.

  I would like to stress the fact that for Perec the construction of a novel according to fixed rules, to constraints, by no means limited his freedom as a storyteller, but stimulated it. It was no coincidence that Perec was the most inventive of the members of Oulipo (Workshop of Potential Literature), founded by his mentor Raymond Queneau. Many years earlier, when he was quarreling with the automatic writing of the surrealists, Queneau wrote:

  line autre bien fausse idée qui a également cours actuelle-ment, c'est l'equivalence que Ton etablit entre inspiration, exploration du subconscient et liberation, entre hasard, au-tomatisme et liberte. Or, cette inspiration qui consiste a obeir aveuglement a toute impulsion est en realite un escla-vage. Le classique qui ecrit sa tragedie en observant un certain nombre de regies qu'il connait est plus libre que le poete qui ecrit ce qui lui passe par la tete et qui est l'esclave d'autres regies qu'il ignore.

  Another very wrong idea that is also going the rounds at the moment is the equivalence that has been established between inspiration, exploration of the subconscious, and liberation, between chance, automatism, and freedom. Now this sort of inspiration, which consists in blindly obeying every impulse, is in fact slavery. The classical author who wrote his tragedy observing a certain number of known rules is freer than the poet who writes down whatever comes into his head and is slave to other rules of which he knows nothing.

  I have come to the end of this apologia for the novel as a vast net. Someone might object that the more the work tends toward the multiplication of possibilities, the further it departs from that unicum which is the self of the writer, his inner sincerity and the discovery of his own truth. But I would answer: Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? 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.

  But perhaps the answer that stands closest to my heart is something else: Think what it would be to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to stone, to cement, to plastic

  Was this not perhaps what Ovid was aiming at, when he wrote about the continuity of forms? And what Lucretius was aiming at when he identified himself with that nature common to each and every thing?

  *Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (Milan: Garzanti, 1957); That Awful Mess on Via Merulana, translated by William Weaver (New York: George Braziller, 1965), pp. 4-6.

  *A la recherche du temps perdu: La prisonmere (Paris: Pleiade, Gallimard, 1954), III. 100; Remembrance of Things Past: The Captive, translated by C. K. MoncrieflF, Terence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor (New York: Random House, 1981), p. 95.

  TALKING IT OVER

  by Julian Barnes

  Through the indelible voices of three narrators—two best friends and the woman they both love—-Julian Barnes reconstructs the romantic triangle as a weapon whose edges cut like razor blades.

  “An interplay of serious thought and dazzling wit…. It's moving, it's funny, it's frightening…fiction at its best.” —The New York Times Book Review

  Fiction/Literature/0-679-73687-5

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  POSSESSION

  by A. S. Byatt

  An intellectual mystery and a triumphant love story of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets.

  “Gorgeously written…dazzling…a tour de force.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  Fiction/Literature/0-679-73590-9

  ……………………………………………………….

  THE STRANGER

  by Albert Camus

  Through the story of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder, Camus explores what he termed “the nakedness of man faced with the absurd.”

  Fiction/Literature/0-679-72020-0

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  BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S

  AND THREE STORIES

  by Truman Capote

  Truman Capote created in Holly Golightly a heroine whose name has entered the American idiom and whose style is now part of the literary landscape. Holly knows that nothing bad can ever happen to you at Tiffany's; her poignancy, wit, and naivete continue to charm.

  Also included in this volume are the stories “House of Flowers,” “A Diamond Guitar,” and “A Christmas Memory.”

  “Truman Capote is the most perfect writer of my generation. He writes the best sentences word for word, rhythm upon rhythm.” —Norman Mailer

  Fiction/Literature/0-679-74565-3

  INVISIBLE MAN

  by Ralph Ellison

  This searing record of a black man's journey through contemporary America reveals, in Ralph Ellison's words, “the sheer rhetorical challenge involved in communicating across our barriers of race and religion, class, color and region.”

  “The greatest American novel in the second half of the twentieth century…the classic representation of American black experience.” —R.W. B. Lewis

  Fiction/Literature/0-679-72313-7

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  THE SOUND AND THE FURY

  by William Faulkner

  The tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in American literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant.

  “For range of effect, philosophical weight, originality of style, variety of characterization, humor, and tragic intensity, [Faulkner's works] are without equal in our time and country.” —Robert Penn Warren

  Fiction/Literature/0-679-73224-1

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  A ROOM WITH A VIEW

  by E. M. Forster

  Caught up in a world of social snobbery, Lucy Honeychurch breaks from the claustrophobic constraints of her British guardians and takes control of her own fate, finding love with a man whose free spirit reminds her of a “room with a view.”

  Fiction/Literature/0-679-72476-1

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  THE REMAINS OF THE DAY

  by Kazuo Ishiguro

  A profoundly compelling portrait of the perfect English butler and of his fading, insular world in postwar England.

  'One of the best books of the year.” —The New York Times Book Review

  Fiction/Literature/0-679-73172-5

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  THE WOMAN WARRIOR

  by Maxine Hong Kingston

  “A remarkable book…As an account of growing up female and Chinese- American in California, in a laundry of course, it is anti-nostalgic; it burns the fat right out of the mind. As a dream—of the ‘female avenger’—it is dizzying, elemental, a poem turned into a sword.” —The New York Times

  Nonfiction/Literature/0-679-72188-6

  ALL THE PRETTY HORSES

  by Cormac McCarthy

  At sixteen, John Grady Cole finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey, to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.

  “A book of remarkable beauty and strength, the work of a master in perfect command of his medium.” —Washington Post Book World

  Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction

  Fiction/Literature/0-679-74439-8

  DEATH IN VENICE

  AND SEVEN OTHER STORIES

  by Thomas Mann

  In addition to “Death in Venice” (“A story,” Mann said, “of death…of the voluptuousness of doom”), this volume includes “Mario the Magician,” “Disorder and Early Sorrow,” “A Man and His Dog,” “Felix Krull,” “The Blood of the Walsungs,” “Tristan,” and “Tonio Kroger.”