Italo Calvino: visbility, imagination, Balzac

Of Italo Calvino's six lectures (Six Memos for the Next Millennium, one of which I've previously written considered*), "Visibility" is the richest. He considers imagination, a writer's most essential and complex tool, in all six lectures but here he bears down on the image as spark, and looks ahead to our millennium, more image than substance (or so I say) and challenge the imagination with its bombardment of images.

Writing about Balzac he acknowledges the impossibility of fully transferring the image imagined to the page. . . Balzac rejected the literature of fantasy, which for him had meant art as the mystical knowledge of everything, and turned to the minute description of the world as it is, still convinced that he was expressing the secret of life.

Since Balzac is pioneer and master of realism, I assume he made a good choice. The fact that he made a choice is important and enviable. To choose he had to envision, however incompletely, his new direction. He had a vision of the way.


Earlier in this lecture, Calvino identifies imagination as springing from and connecting to Plato's forms, an ultimate perfection we're doomed (or lucky) to incompletely achieve. Art is, in a sense, the history of the effort to create the impossible, though artists like Balzac, Michelangelo, Sappho, Cassatt have made me wonder if some aren't lucky enough to have their hand guided by angels. Or if the hierarchy of angels guiding is evident in the final draft. Visibility is not the same as vision, however. Calvino challenges us to make visible as much of our vision as we're able.

So here's one of Calvino's definitions of imagination. I urge you to read the full lecture. This posting is an imperfect reproduction of a more perfect form.

The poet's mind, and at a few decisive moments the mind of the scientist, works according to a process of association of images that is the quickest way to link and to choose between the infinite forms of the possible and the impossible. The imagination is a kind of electronic machine that takes account of all possible combinations and chooses the ones that are appropriate to a particular purpose, or simply the most interesting, pleasing, or amusing.

Quotes from Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium,Vintage International, tr. Patrick Creagh.
*See previous posting Italo Calvino: immeasureable goals, dare.

Image from: http://www.printfection.com/twigadesign/Fractals/_s_13841

Italo Calvino: immeasureable goals; dare

 

*Invisible Cities* Stephen Nova, Melbourne

I'm thinking of discoveries I've made while standing on an old crate. I'm spying over a wooden fence into a private garden lush and inventive. It's impossible to remember each quiet invention hidden in every town or city I've strolled in, as it's impossible to remember every painting I've ever studied in museums or galleries.

To continue.  As much as I appreciate tidy rows of vibrant colors in the careful suburban garden, it is the small strange garden with sculpture and bloom in odd, compelling symbiosis which achieves an immortality of spirit. An originality.

I suspect that style of art is what Italo Calvino is calling out and calling for. He is challenging writers to originality by way of grand scheme.  In "Multiplicity," the last of his six Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, he praises the overreach.

I am attentive to Calvino's challenge. The art, result, product may be eccentric rather than grand classic writing.  He doesn't say that, I do. "Grand" and "classic" signal brilliantly inventive writers, Dante, Rabelais, Joyce, writers signaling us to make it if not new, at least different. To try.  I have worried some of my poetry is eccentric but I suspect eccentricity is on the path to "overambitious."  I'm trying. At least I'm trying. Calvino died before he could deliver the six lectures.   

Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function. Since science has begun to distrust general explanations and solutions that are not sectorial and specialized, the grand challenge for literature is to be capable of weaving together the various branches of knowledge, the various "codes," into a manifold and multifaceted vision of the world.

Italo Calvino, from "Multiplicity" in Six Memos for the Next Millennium (tr. Patrick Creagh; edited by Ester Calvino)____