by Gore Vidal
In Cosmicomics Calvino makes it possible for the reader to inhabit a meson, a mollusk, a dinosaur; makes him for the first time see light ending a dark universe. Since this is a unique gift, I find all the more alarming the “literariness” of Time and the Hunter. I was particularly put off by the central story “t zero,” which could have been written (and rather better) by Borges.
With a bow and arrow, Qfwfq confronts a charging lion. In his head he makes an equation: Time zero is where he Qfwfq is; where the Lion-o is. All combinations of a series which may be finite or infinite pass through Qo’s head, exactly like the man before the firing squad in Borges’s celebrated story. Now it is possible that these stories will appeal to minds more convergent than mine (students of mathematics, engineers, Young Republicans are supposed to think convergently while novelists, gourmets, and non-Christian humanists think divergently) but to me this pseudo-scientific rendering of a series of possibilities is deeply boring.
But there are also pleasures in this collection. Particularly “The Origin of the Birds.” “Now these stories can be told better with strip drawings than with a story composed of sentences one after the other.” So the crafty Calvino by placing one sentence after another describes a strip cartoon and the effect is charming even though Qfwfq’s adventure among the birds is not really a strip cartoon but the description of a cartoon in words.
The narrator’s technique is like that of The Nonexistent Knight. He starts to draw a scene; then erases it the way Sister Theodora used to eliminate oceans and forests as she hurried her lovers to their inevitable rendezvous. Calvino also comes as close as any writer can to saying that which is sensed about creation but may not be put into words or drawn in pictures.
“I managed to embrace in a single thought the world of things as they were and of things as they could have been, and I realized that a single system included all.” In the arms of Or, the queen of the birds, Qfwfq begins to see that “the world is single and what exists can’t be explained without…” But he has gone too far. As he is about to say the unsayable, Or tries to smother him. But he is still able to blurt out, “There’s no difference. Monsters and non-monsters have always been close to one another! What hasn’t been continues to be….” At that point, the birds expel him from their paradise; and like a dreamer rudely awakened, he forgets his vision of unity. “(The last strip is all photographs: a bird, the same bird in close-up, the head of the bird enlarged, a detail of the head, the eye….)” It is the same eye that occurs at the end of Cosmicomics, the eye of—cosmic consciousness for those who recall that guru of a past generation, Dr. Richard M. Bucke.
Calvino ends these tales with his own The Count of Monte Cristo. The problem he sets himself is how to get out of Château d’If. Faria keeps making plans and tunneling his way through an endless, exitless fortress. Dantès, on the other hand, broods on the nature of the fortress as well as on the various drafts of the novel that Dumas is writing. In some drafts, Dantès will escape and find a treasure and get revenge on his enemies. In other drafts, he suffers a different fate. The narrator contemplates the possibilities of escape by considering the way a fortress (or a work of art) is made. “To plan a book—or an escape—the first thing to know is what to exclude.” This particular story is Borges at his very best and, taking into account the essential unity of the multiplicity of all things, one cannot rule out that Calvino’s version of The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas is indeed the finest achievement of Jorge Luis Borges as imagined by Italo Calvino.
Calvino’s seventh and latest novel (or work or meditation or poem), Invisible Cities, is perhaps his most beautiful work. In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo—Tartar emperor and Venetian traveler. The mood is sunset. Prospero is holding up for the last time his magic wand: Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire, of his cities, of himself.
Marco Polo, however, diverts the emperor with tales of cities that he has seen within the empire and Kublai Khan listens, searches for a pattern in Marco Polo’s Cities and memory, Cities and desire, Cities and signs, Thin Cities, Trading Cities, Cities and eyes, Cities and names, Cities and the dead, Cities and the sky, Continuous Cities, Hidden Cities. The emperor soon determines that each of these fantastic places is really the same place.
Marco Polo agrees: “‘Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,’ Polo said. ‘Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.’” Again the theme of multiplicity and wholeness, “when every city,” as Calvino wrote at the end of “The Watcher,” “is the City.”
Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvelous creation like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant. I shall spare myself the labor; noting, however, that something new and wise has begun to enter the Calvino canon. The artist seems to have made a peace with the tension between man’s idea of the many and of the one. He could now, if he wanted, stop.
Yet Calvino is obliged to go on writing just as his Marco Polo goes on traveling because
he cannot stop; he must go on to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else’s present. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
“Journeys to relive your past?” was the Khan’s question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: “Journeys to recover your future?”
And Marco’s answer was: “Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.”
Later, after more descriptions of his cities, Kublai Khan decides that “the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind’s phantasms.”
“On the day when I know all the emblems,” he asked Marco, “shall I be able to possess my empire, at last?”
And the Venetian answered, “Sire, do not believe it. On that day you will be an emblem among emblems.”
Finally, Kublai Khan recognizes that all cities are tending toward the concentric circles of Dante’s hell.
He said: “It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us.”
And Polo said: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension; seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
During the last quarter century Italo Calvino has advanced far beyond his American and English contemporaries. As they continue to look for the place where the spiders make their nests, Calvino has not only found that special place, but learned how himself to make fantastic webs of prose to which all things adhere. In fact, reading Calvino, I had the unnerving sense that I was also writing what he had written; thus does his art prove his case as writer and reader become one, or One.
The New York Review of Books
May 30, 1974
THE HACKS OF ACADEME
The Theory of the Novel: New Essays, edited by John Halperin. The two articles arouse suspicion. The theory? The novel? Since there is no such thing as the novel, how can there be a single theory? Or is the editor some sort of monist? Blinkered hedgehog in wild fox country? The jacket identifies Mr. Halperin as “Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of English at the University of Southern California.” This is true academic weight. “He is also the author of The Language of Meditation: Four Studies in Nineteenth-Century Fiction and Egoism and Self-Discovery in the Victorian Novel.” Well, meditation
if not language is big in Southern California, where many an avocado tree shades its smogbound Zen master, while the Victorian novel continues to be a growth industry in Academe. Eagerly, one turns to Professor Halperin’s “A Critical Introduction” to nineteen essays by as many professors of English. Most are American; most teach school in the land of the creative writing course.
“Christ left home at twelve.” Professor Halperin’s first sentence is startlingly resonant, to use an adjective much favored by the contributors, who also like “mythopoeic,” “parameter” (almost always misused), “existential” (often misused), “linear,” “schematic” and “spatial.” Professor Halperin tells us that during the lifetime of Nazareth’s gift to the joy of nations,
poetry’s age…was in the thousands of years and drama’s in the hundreds. It was not until a millennium and a half later that the gestation period of the novel began. Thus it is not surprising, three quarters of the way through the twentieth century, that we find ourselves with a growing but still relatively small body of critical theory pertaining to the novel…
This is sweet innocence; also, ignorance. Two very good novels (Satyricon, Golden Ass) were written by near-contemporaries of the gentle Nazarene. Later, during the so-called long “gestation,” other cultures were lightened (as William Faulkner would put it) of novels as distinguished as the Lady Murasaki’s Tale of Genji (c. A.D. 1005).
But Professor Halperin is not very interested in novels. Rather:
It is the purpose of the present volume to reflect and hopefully to deal with some of the more radical issues of contemporary novel-theory…. This collection, containing original essays of theoretical cast written especially for this volume by some of the most distinguished critics of our time, hopefully will be a major addition to the growing corpus of theoretical approaches to fiction.
Professor Halperin has not an easy way with our rich language. Nevertheless, one opens his book in the hope that the prose of “some of the most distinguished critics of our time” will be better than his own. Certainly the great names are all here: Meir Sternberg, Robert Bernard Martin, Irving H. Buchen, Alan Warren Friedman, Max F. Schulz, Alice R. Kaminsky, George Levine, John W. Loofourow, Marvin Mudrick, Walter F. Wright, Robert B. Heilman, Richard Harter Fogle, Dorothea Krook. Also Leon Edel, Leslie. A. Fiedler, Walter Allen, and Frank Kermode. Un sac mixte, as Bouvard might have said to Pécuchet.
Professor Halperin quotes approvingly Barthes’s
Flaubert…finally established Literature as an object, through promoting literary labour to the status of a value; form became the end-product of craftsmanship, like a piece of pottery or a jewel…[The] whole of Literature, from Flaubert to the present day, became the problematics of language.
Professor Halperin adds his own gloss.
Modern theoretical novel-criticism…is occupied less with the novel as a mimetic and moral performance than with the novel as an autonomous creation independent of or at least not wholly dependent on the real world. The world of the autonomous novel may inevitably resemble our own, but it is not created as a conscious representation of anything outside itself.
American professors of English have never had an easy time with French theoreticians of the novel (close scrutiny of the quotation from Barthes reveals that it was taken from an English not an American translation). Nevertheless, despite various hedges like “may inevitably,” Professor Halperin has recklessly enrolled himself in the school of Paris (class of ’56). As a result, he believes that the autonomous novel “is not created as a conscious representation of anything outside itself.” Aside from the presumption of pretending to know what any writer has in mind (is he inevitably but not consciously describing or mimicking the real world?), it is naïve to assume that a man-made novel can ever resemble a meteor fallen from outer space, a perfectly autonomous artifact whose raison d’être is “with the relationships among the various structural elements within the work of fiction itself” rather than “between reader and text.” Apparently the novel is no longer what James conceived it, a story told, in Professor Halperin’s happy phrase, from “the limited perspective of a single sentient consciousness.” And so, in dubious battle, unconscious sentiencies clash in the English departments of the West with insentient consciousnesses.
The first essay is called “What Is Exposition?” This subject plainly troubles Professor Meir Sternberg. At a loss for the right words, he resorts to graphics. An inverted “V” occupies the top of one page. At the foot of the left leg is the word “introduction” then “exciting force” then “rise.” The apex of the inverted “V” is labeled “climax.” Partway down the right leg is the word “fall,” while at the base occurs the somber word “catastrophe.” This treasure-seeker’s map to tragedy is something called “Freytag’s pyramid,” which the eponymous architect set up in the desert of novel-theory to show how “time-honored” exposition works in tragedy.
Professor Sternberg then adds his own markings to the sand. “Suppose an author wishes to compose a narrative which is to consist of three motifs: a1, a2, a3. These motifs, arranged in an order in which a2 follows a1 in a time and a3 follows a2, will form the fabula of his story.” The sequence of numbered a’s is then arranged vertically on the page, and casts almost as minatory a shadow as Freytag’s pyramid. Later Professor Sternberg assembles a positively Cheopsean structure with such parallel headings as “story,” “fabula,” “plot,” “sujet,” a monster Rosetta stone with which to confound strawman Freytag. The resulting agon (or duel or lutte) in the desert is very elaborate and not easy to follow. Occasionally there is a simple sentence like: “A work of fiction presents characters in action during a certain period of time.” But, by and large, sentences are as elaborate as the ideas that they wish to express are simple. And so, as the sun sinks behind the last tautology, our guide sums up: “As my definition of it clearly implies, exposition is a time problem par excellence.” (Instructor’s note: Transpose “it” and “exposition.”)
Further on in the Sahelian wilderness we meet Professor Irving H. Buchen. At first, one is charmed: “Critics may need novels to be critics but novels do not need critics to be novels.” This is fine stuff. The pathetic fallacy is at last able to define for us that mysterious entity “the living novel.” Professor Buchen likes his literature lean.
Almost all novelistic failures, especially significant ones, are the result of crushing richness. Plenitude swelled to bursting Fielding’s Tom Jones, deluged Conrad’s Nostromo, over-refined Proust’s sensibility, and transformed Joyce in Finnegans Wake into a self parodist.
Solution? “The key to the artistry of the novel is managing fecundity.” The late Margaret Sanger could not have put it better.
Although Professor Buchen’s “The Aesthetics of the Supra-Novel” deals only in the obvious, his footnotes are often interesting. Occasionally a shy aphorism gleams like a scarab in the sand. “The novel is not a given form; it is given to be formed.” Pondering the vast amount of novel-theory” written for classrooms, he notes that this process of over-explicating texts produces
new novelists who, like the re-issue of older novelists, seemed to be buttressed both in front and in back. Finally, virtually every facet of the novel has been subjected to structural, stylistic, formalistic, epistemological processing. Aside from some outstanding seminal pieces, what is instructive about the entire theoretical enterprise is that it has created a Frankenstein.
I assume that he means the monster and not the baron. In any case, relieved of those confining “parameters” of “novel-theory” (also known as “book-chat”), Professor Buchen’s footnotes betray glimmers of true intelligence.
In general, Professor Halperin’s novel-theorists have nothing very urgent or interesting to say about literature. Why then do they write when they have nothing to say? Because the ambitious teacher can only rise in the academic bureaucracy by writing at complicated length about writing that has already been much written about. The result of all this book-chat
cannot interest anyone who knows literature while those who would like to learn something about books can only be mystified and discouraged by these commentaries. Certainly it is no accident that the number of students taking English courses has been in decline for some years. But that is beside the point. What matters is that the efforts of the teachers now under review add up to at least a half millennium of academic tenure.
Although The Novel is not defined by Professor Halperin’s colleagues, some interesting things are said about novels. Professor Frank Kermode’s “Novel and Narrative” is characteristically elegant. In fact, so fine-meshed is his prose that one often has to reread whole pages but then, as Kant instructs us, “comprehension is only a knowledge adequate to our intention.” Kermode is particularly good on the virtues and demerits of Roland Barthes, no doubt because he has actually read Barthes and not relied upon the odd quotation picked up here and there in translation. Kermode tends to pluralism and he is unimpressed by the so-called great divide between the mimetic fiction of the past and the autonomous fiction of the present. “It seems doubtful, then, whether we need to speak of some great divide—a strict historical coupure—between the old and new.” Minor complaint: I do wish Kermode would not feel obliged always to drag in the foreign word whose meaning is no different from the English equivalent. Also, my heart sinks every time he fashions a critical category and then announces firmly: “I shall call it, hermeneutic activity.” As for the great divide: