Six Memos for the Next Millennium (ISBN 0099730510)

Amazon.com Review:
Italo Calvino cast his lofty thoughts toward the pending millennium long before the rest of us. Now that the zeitgeist has caught up with him, it seems a good time to revisit his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, an investigation into the literary values that he wished to bequeath to future generations. Calvino, the author of Invisible Cities, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, and other postmodern fictional works, was to deliver these five "memos" (there was to be a sixth) as Harvard's Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1985-86, but he died before doing so. These lectures are dense, rigorous, and seemingly full of contradiction. The first is a paean to lightness (though "light like a bird," as Paul Valéry wrote, "and not like a feather"). Lightness is followed by quickness (without "presum(ing) to deny the pleasures of lingering"), exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity. The perfect antidote to writerly laziness.

Calvino manifesto:
This book is a collection of talks on writing Calvino was preparing as a series of documents specifying some important keys of literature that he felt needed to be recorded as crucial elements of literary tradition. Indeed, in his essay "Visibility," Calvino brings up his concern for the future of imagination and literature in a world so full of prefabricated imagery, where images are provided rather than solicited. While his initial impulse was to write six lectures, he evidently reported at one point of his process that he had ideas for eight, but in the end he only completed five. In her introduction, Esther Calvino clarifies that she decided to keep the title true to Italo's original intention and publish the series under the original title, despite the missing sixth. In the lectures themselves, Calvino provides the kind of insight and fascination with the making of literature that fuels so many of his best books. Rather than come across as a manifesto of his own brilliance, as the premise may sound, Calvino spends a lot of time in admiration of the work of other writers, from classics like Ovid and Dante to colleagues and contemporaries, like Francis Perec and Douglas R. Hofstadter. The lectures are of course sometimes punctuated with personal details about his own writing processes, but I found them very inviting and revealing about the ideas he was trying to point out. Each lecture dedicates itself to an aspect of literature that Calvino finds crucial: "Lightness," or the aspect of language that speaks directly to a reader and is not always weighed down with intellectual metaphor but with direct communication; "Quickness," or the immediacy of literature - the way it cuts through random detail to get to the necessary; "Exactitude," or the precision of language (and when it needs imprecision); "Visibility," or the power of imagery to convey ideas; and "Multiplicity," or the complexity of content. Calvino is a writer who has always presented a kind of fascinating enigma. His works is spectacularly visual, and while crucially uncategorizable in its sense of being not easy to nail down in the area of metaphor or theme (something that Calvino no doubt worked quite strenuously at, clear when he talks about a poem's meaning in "Exactitude" as being "not fixed, not definitive, not hardened into mineral immobility, but alive as an organism"), it is also quite accessible and always an enjoyable read. Calvino mastered the art of experimentalism that did not read as though one needed to be schooled in the traditions of literature to understand his intents. Though Calvino clearly wants to offer his lectures as guides for the necessities of literature for posterity, it is also a manifesto on the man's own aesthetic, though it is not a manifesto that demands the agreement of others, or the demand that others follow in his footsteps. Though Calvino does have moments of criticism, as when he accuses schools of dispensing "the culture of the mediocre," which I take to mean the conveying of literature as something with set meaning that we must all learn and emulate (or at least parrot back), and also directs a barb or two at the publishing industry when he supports experimentalism with the following caveat: "The demands of the publishing business are a fetish that must not be allowed to keep us from trying out new forms." In this lecture series, Calvino presents himself quite wise and worldly, but also quite direct and earnest. A reading of this work at the start of any literature course on almost any level of schooling might provide a stiff reminder that literature is a work of passion, not just analysis, and it also works in the realm of paradox, as Calvino himself presents--that it is structure in literature that is needed to make it transcend structure, that one needs to be as aware of the lack of success in literature as much as success to see the stuff of great literature. Calvino's last `memo,' "Consistency," was never written, but I could only imagine where he would have gone with it, which was always a strength of Calvino's work. The last lecture seems to bring to a full circle many of things he brings up through the series, but Calvino's work always found a way to extend beyond the full circle. Perhaps, in the end, the consistency needs to be ours, to make sure that this wisdom does not go to waste.

Five Illuminating Literary Values:
I found my copy of this small but elegantly written gem of a book in our local second-hand bookshop. I had long been intrigued by Calvino's writing, and snatched up the copy with delight. I was not disappointed. The short note at the beginning of the book, by the author's wife, tells about the choice of title, the preparation of the material by the author for the Charles Edward Norton Lectures at Harvard University in the US, and its translation by Patrick Creagh. Calvino completed writing only five of the six lectures, and these form the chapters of the book - Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity. The sixth, which was to be called "Consistency", he intended to write on his arrival in Cambridge, but Calvino died before making that journey from Italy to Harvard University. Calvino draws on areas as diverse as mythology, poetry, art, science and history to illustrate his theses, and brings fresh insights to, for example, the story of Perseus and Medusa. A few small extracts from the chapter on various aspects of Lightness will serve to illustrate this diversity of supporting material: First, from poetry. "... there is a lightening of language whereby meaning is conveyed through a verbal texture that seems weightless, until the language itself takes on the same rarefied consistency... Emily Dickinson, for instance... A sepal, petal, and a thorn// Upon a common summer's morn-// A flask of Dew-A Bee or two-... " Then, from computer science: "It is true that software cannot exercise its powers of lightness except through the weight of hardware. But it is the software that gives the orders, acting on the outside world and on machines that exist only as functions of software and evolve so that they can work out ever more complex programs. The second industrial revolution, unlike the first, does not present us with such crushing images as rolling mills and molten steel, but with `bits' in a flow of information traveling along circuits in the form of electronic impulses. The iron machines still exist, but they obey the orders of weightless bits." Despite the fact that this is a work of non-fiction, Calvino's skill as a master storyteller is evident. The chapter entitled "Quickness", for instance, begins with a fascinating and very concise story of necrophilia and magic. His exposition on the technique of Jorge Luis Borges, near the end of this chapter, reads like a story itself. For anyone interested in the craft of the short-short story, or flash fiction, this chapter should prove edifying. Several passages from works of European writers are used as examples throughout the book. I was grateful that these were always accompanied by their English translations. For example, extracts from the writings by Leopardi, Musil, and Valéry were presented in the original Italian, German, and French, in the chapter entitled "Exactitude" together with their English translations. In the "Multiplicity" chapter I encountered the notion that every object, no matter how apparently insignificant, is the center of an infinitely expanding network of relationships. Wow - what an immensely powerful antidote to writer's block. This is a wonderful and thought-provoking book.

The infinite writing:
In the last chapter of this meditation on writing Calvino writes about the value of ' multiplicity'. He considers what the 'hyper-novel' might be, some vast conjunction of Encyclopedia and Bible which tells in some way the ongoing story of the Universe as a whole. He seems to be suggesting a kind of writing which is open and unending, a kind of infinite blog that goes on along with the Universe. I do not know if he asks the question of what happens when the very finite writer of the hyper-novel has his last word. Calvino died before completing the intended sixth lecture in which the Literary value to be examined was ' consistency'. Calvino, is a writer of great ideas and imagination. And his work provides suggestions of new ways of thinking and perceiving.

Something to Hold Onto:
Six Memos for the Next Millennium is a collection of lectures Italo Calvino had intended to deliver late in his lifetime. There are only five, as he died before writing the sixth. In a paragraph that opens the collection, Calvino writes: "My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it. I would therefore like to devote these lectures to certain values, qualities, or peculiarities of literature that are very close to my heart, trying to situate them within the perspective of the new millennium." Through 124 pages, then, Calvino presents us the qualities of Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity. The sixth quality, left unattended, was meant to be Consistency. Although Calvino can get too cerebral for my tastes, any reader with an interest in the discipline of literature, and certainly any writer interested in better understanding the value and craft of writing, will find in Six Memos for the Next Millennium something to hold onto.

A portable philosophy . . .:
Writing, as a true art (a "techne" in Aristotle's time), has not always been a universally accepted idea. Even Plato regarded writing as nothing more than a neat little trick that helps a person remember what they already know (In his work "Phaedrus," I do believe). Obviously, times have changed since then, and the difficulties of the written word--the imperfections that plague the inherently flawed medium--are what drive it and the writer to imitate life in a manner that only art can. It is odd, then, that Calvino starts his book off with a single paragraph introduction, stating near the end of it that his "confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it." The segregation of different art forms is mainly decided by the particular, unique function that it serves. Calvino's introductory statement must be either the beginning of a defense of literature or a rallying of the literary troops to keep fighting the good fight. Of course, it's both. (Grace Paley said that all good stories have two stories in them. Regardless of whether or not that's true, she's much smarter than I am, and I'm going to believe her). I read this book after the constant gladhanding it was given by a friend of mine, and read it with such a close eye because I ended up doing one of those overly-academic rhetoric papers that are a right-of-passage for all English majors ("The Static and Evolutionary Qualities of Literary Theory from Aristotle to Calvino" just drips with snobbery). However, I learned that from the foundation of literary theory and criticism as laid down by Aristotle over 2,300 years ago, to the hope that Italo Calvino had for literature in the present day, there have been ever-present and ever-changing features that define what makes up irrefutable brilliance within the written word. These characteristics can be established by looking at the classical work of Aristotle's Poetics and, to a lesser but no-less-important extent, Longinus's On the Sublime and comparing them to the various concepts or figureheads in the modern era, including a brief look at Kenneth Burke's Language as Symbolic Action and Italo Calvino's hope for the future in Six Memos for the Next Millennium. An understanding of both the changing and persistent ideals of literature will allow writers and readers of the future to make their own decisions about what must stay and what must go. To understand, though, we must take a look at prior alterations and lack thereof. That is obviously a discussion for another day (and cribbed almost verbatim from my paper). The important things to discuss right now are the concepts laid out by Calvino. My copy is about half hi-liter, and while it's possible for a reader to get lost some of the denser, more cerebral parts, it's more than possible to go through with a sharp eye and mark down the main ideas. This text doesn't exactly necessitate numerous readings, but, as with anything else, it certainly would help. With all work so squarely rooted in something as dense as the human race (because even when writing about otherworldly things, the experiences of the author and the audience are all based on human experience), Calvino makes a wise decision in starting his book off with his riff off Milan Kundera's seminal work, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. "Lightness," as it is called, is described as--amongst other things--a "lightening of language whereby meaning is conveyed through a verbal texture that seems weightless, until the meaning itself takes on the same rarefied consistency." This highlights Calvino's focus on both appropriateness as a key theme in all aspects of literature and an almost slow-churning of language, where it must unify (balance, perhaps) itself with the subject. As most descriptive power comes from the truest metaphor, Calvino ends up echoing the Aristotelian idea that the essence of a riddle is to express true facts under impossible combinations. Because you can't just use any type of word-soup, you're going to have to use metaphor. Lightness as the embodiment of the best language and coordinating best weight for the subject matter has been a desirable quality of literature forever, and Calvino tackles it with brilliance in this chapter, speaking of language as made up of "a fine dust of atoms, like everything else that goes to make up the ultimate substance of the multiplicity of things." In the present and for the future, Calvino has encapsulated the idea of size and magnitude into "multiplicity" as well as the closely-related "quickness" and "exactitude" (which appear one right after the other in the book, wisely). Though economy has been used in terms of language, Calvino applies that very term to the embodiment of concepts in objects, saying that with "quickness" the "secret of the story lies in its economy: the events, however long they last, become punctiform, connected by rectilinear segments, in a zigzag pattern that suggests incessant motion." Calvino is speaking of achieving the maximum immediacy of literature while getting the most mileage out of the language as possible. His example/dissection of Charlemagne and the ring is perfect, and the whole section is easily one of the best parts of the book. Where "quickness" dealt with an appropriateness of detail, "exactitude" could be said to deal with a precision of detail. In the realm of style, Calvino agrees with those who came before him, speaking to the importance of "exactitude" and through it the necessity for "a well defined and well-calculated plan for the work in question." In establishing a bond between the writer and the reader, there must be characters or events that either purposely gel with the definition in question or purposely defy it. The fiction definition uses logos (the factual truth), pathos (the emotional truth), and ethos (the believable truth) to form the connection. With a nod to Burke's discussion of definitions and man as a symbol-using creature, Calvino champions finding the correct definitions in order to use them to the best purposes of exactitude. Even Faulkner said, "sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forgot the words," and he was an a******. To move beyond abstractions, the definitions of details in relation to everything must be considered at all turns. From there Calvino moves on to "visibility," speaking to an image's ability to convey ideas, moving from either word to image or image to word. This includes the correlation between the two, making words appear as their appropriate corresponding image. Calvino again echoes Aristotle by stating his method of trying to "establish which meanings might be compatible with the overall design (he wishes) to give the story and which meanings are not compatible." This weaves a thread through the history of literary craft and entwines not just precision of detail, but Aristotle's ideas on imitation, Vico's championing of imagination, and Burke's emphasis of the terministic screen through which humans see all things. Calvino has given anyone who reads this book the strongest foundation possible to move forward with literature. Calvino ends with his chapter on "multiplicity," addressing the right time to simplify the complex connections between two things and how to do it in an appropriate manner. Upon much speak of uncontrollable convergences and tangential whirlpools of unforeseen consequences and effects, Calvino looks at complexity not as a clear decision between the simple or the complex, but as a balance between "exactitude--or at other times mathematics, pure spirit, or even the military mentality," and "soul, or irrationality, humanity, chaos." This goes well with what he says on the following page about balancing the ever-mixing universe and void. There exists the question of how and when multitasking is acceptable within a piece of literature, a question that Calvino claims can be aided by brevity: the key that let's a writer "unite density of invention and expression with a sense of infinite possibilities." He quotes some Italian dude, and I quote him too: "A philosophy should be portable." The resounding idea that something is correct (functional and beautiful) if it works, and there is no way to ensure correctness with rules, lays behind everything Calvino says in his memos. And while he or I or you could go on about literary theory, Calvino's book serves the purpose of reminding us all to think and write and think and write, regardless of theory. An anti-theory theory book? Maybe, but it's more likely that Six Memos For the Next Millennium will serve as the proof of literature's artistic essence, a general on his horse, firing-up writers for the war of the words.