jorge luis borges,italo calvino

7/27/2019 Jorge Luis Borges,Italo Calvino

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John Barth

"The Parallels!" Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges

I discovered Italo Calvino's fiction in 1968, the year Cosmicomicsappeared in this country in William Weaver's translation. I wasteaching then at the State University of New York at Buffalo and hadfallen much under the spell of Jorge Luis Borges, whom I haddiscovered just a couple of years earlier. In that condition ofenchantment I had published in '68 a sort of protopostmodernistmanifesto called "The Literature of Exhaustion" and also my maidencollection of short stories, entitled Lost in the Funhouse andsubtitled Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice (that particulardeployment of the term "fiction" is of course a salute to Borges'sficciones). In short, the ground had been prepared for my delight inCalvino's Cosmicomics and then in his t zero stories, which appeared

in Mr. Weaver's English the following year. Here, I thought, was asort of Borges without tears, or better, a Borges con molto brio:lighter-spirited than the great Argentine, often downright funny (asSr. Borges almost never is), yet comparably virtuosic in form andlanguage, comparably rich in intelligence and imagination.In September of 1985, just a week or so after the news reached us ofCalvino's death, Umberto Eco happened to be our guest at JohnsHopkins, and of course we spoke of our mutual lost friend (a muchcloser friend of Eco's, to be sure; Calvino had been Eco's"chaperon," as Eco himself put it, for the Strega Prize). He had iton good authority, Eco told me, that despite the damage of themassive stroke that had felled Calvino a fortnight earlier, the manmanaged to utter, as perhaps his final words, "I paralleli! I

paralleli!" ("The parallels! The parallels!").The paralleli of the achievements of Borges and Calvino are mostlyobvious, the relevant anti-paralleli no doubt likewise. To beginwith, both writers, for all their great sophistication of mind,wrote in a clear, straightforward, unmannered, nonbaroque, butrigorously scrupulous style. ". . . crystalline, sober, and airy . .. without the least congestion" is how Calvino himself describesBorges's style (in the second of his Six Memos for the NextMillennium, the Norton lectures that Calvino died before he coulddeliver), and of course those adjectives describe his own as well,as do the titles of all six of his Norton lectures: "Lightness"(Leggerezza) and deftness of touch; "Quickness" (Rapidita) in thesenses both of economy of means and of velocity in narrative

profluence; "Exactitude" (Esatezza) both of formal design and ofverbal expression; "Visibility" (Visibilita) in the senses both ofstriking detail and of vivid imagery, even (perhaps especially) inthe mode of fantasy; "Multiplicity" (Molteplicita) in the sensesboth of an ars combinatoria and of addressing the infiniteinterconnectedness of things, whether in expansive, incompletableworks such as Gadda's Via Merulana and Robert Musil's Man WithoutQualities or in vertiginous short stories like Borges's "Garden ofForking Paths"-all cited in Calvino's lecture on multiplicity; and"Consistency" in the sense that in their style, their formal


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concerns, and their other preoccupations we readily recognize theBorgesian and the Calvinoesque. So appealing a case does Calvinomake for these particular half-dozen literary values, it's importantto remember that they aren't the only ones; indeed, that theircontraries have also something to be said for them. Calvinoacknowledges as much in the "Quickness" lecture: ". . . each valueor virtue I chose as the subject for my lectures," he writes, "doesnot exclude its opposite. Implicit in my tribute to lightness was myrespect for weight, and so this apology for quickness does notpresume to deny the pleasures of lingering," etc. We literarylingerers-some might say malingerers-breathe a protracted sigh ofrelief.Reviewing these six "memos" has fetched us already beyond the realmof style to other parallels between the fictions of Borges andCalvino. Although he commenced his authorial career in the mode ofthe realistic novel and never abandoned the longer narrative forms,Calvino like Borges much preferred the laconic short take. Even hislater extended works, like Cosmicomics, Invisible Cities, The Castleof Crossed Destinies, and If on a winter's night a traveler, are (touse Calvino's own adjectives) modular and combinatory, built up fromsmaller, quicker units. Borges, more from aesthetic principle thanfrom the circumstance of his later blindness, never wrote a novella,much less a novel (in the "Autobiographical Essay" he declares, "Inthe course of a life devoted chiefly to books, I have read but few

novels, and in most cases only a sense of duty enabled me to find myway to their last page"). And in his later life, like the doomed buttemporarily reprieved Jaromir Hladik in "The Secret Miracle," he wasobliged to compose and revise from memory. No wonder his style is solapidary, so . . . memorable.On with the parallels: Although one finds flavors and even somespecific detail of Buenos Aires and environs in the corpus ofBorges's fiction and of Italy in that of Calvino, and although eachis a major figure in his respective national literature as well asin modern lit generally, both writers were prevailingly disinclinedto the social/psychological realism that for better or worsepersists as the dominant mode in North American fiction. Myth andfable and science in Calvino's case, literary/philosophical history

and "the contamination of reality by dream" in Borges's, take theplace of social/psychological analysis and historical/geographicaldetail. Both writers inclined toward the ironic elevation of popularnarrative genres: the folktale and comic strip for Calvino,supernaturalist and detective-fiction for Borges. Calvino evendefined Post-modernism, in his "Visibility" lecture, as "thetendency to make ironic use of the stock images of the mass media,or to inject the taste for the marvelous inherited from literarytradition into narrative mechanisms that accentuate theiralienation"-a tendency as characteristic of Borges's production asof his own. Neither writer, for better or for worse, was a creatorof memorable characters or a delineator of grand passions, althoughin a public conversation in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1975, in

answer to the question "What do you regard as the writer's chiefresponsibility?" Borges unhesitatingly responded, "The creation ofcharacter." A poignant response from a great writer who never reallycreated any characters; even his unforgettable Funes the Memorious,as I have remarked elsewhere, is not so much a character as apathological characteristic. And Calvino's charming Qwfwq and MarcoPolo and Marcovaldo and Mr. Palomar are archetypal narrativefunctionaries, nowise to be compared with the great pungentcharacters of narrative/dramatic literature. A first-rate restaurantmay not offer every culinary good thing; for the pleasures of acute


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character-drawing as of bravura passions, one simply must lookelsewhere than in the masterful writings of Jorge Luis Borges andItalo Calvino.Attendant upon those "Postmodernist tendencies" aforecited byCalvino-the ironic recycling of stock images and traditionalnarrative mechanisms-is the valorization of form, even more inCalvino than in Borges. At his consummate best, Borges so artfullydeploys what I've called the principle of metaphoric means that(excuse the self-quotation) "not just the conceit, the key images,the mise-en-scne, the narrative choreography and point of view andall that, but even the phenomenon of the text itself, the fact ofthe artifact, becomes a sign of its sense." His marvelous story"Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is a prime example of this high-techtaletelling, and there are others. Borges manages this gee-whizzery,moreover, with admirable understatement, wearing his formalvirtuosity up his sleeve rather than on it. Calvino, on thecontrary, while never a show-off, took unabashed delight in his"romantic formalism" (again, my term, with my apology): a delightnot so much in his personal ingenuity as in the exhilaratingpossibilities of the ars combinatoria, as witness especially thestructural wizardry of The Castle of Crossed Destinies and If on awinter's night a traveler. His extended association with RaymondQueneau's OULIPO group was no doubt among both the causes and theeffects of this formal sportiveness.

At his Johns Hopkins reading in 1976, Calvino briefly described theconceit of his Invisible Cities novel and then said, "Now I want toread just one little . . . " He hesitated for a moment to find theword he wanted. ". . . One little aria from that novel." Said I tomyself, Exactly, Italo, and bravissimo. The saving differencebetween Calvino and the other wizards of OULIPO was that (bless hisItalian heart and excuse the stereotyping) he knew when to stopformalizing and start singing-or better, how to make the formalrigors themselves sing. What Calvino said of Georges Perec very muchapplied to his own shop: that the constraints of those crazyalgorithms and other combinatorial rules, so far from stifling hisimagination, positively stimulated it. For that reason, he once toldme, he enjoyed accepting difficult commissions, such as writing the

Crossed Destinies novel to accompany the Ricci edition of I Tarocchior, more radically yet, composing a story without words, to be thedramatic armature of a proposed ballet (Calvino made up a wordlessstory about the invention of dancing).To come now to the last of these paralleli: Both Jorge Luis Borgesand Italo Calvino managed marvelously to combine in their fictionthe values that I call Algebra and Fire (I'm borrowing those termshere, as I have done elsewhere, from Borges's First Encyclopedia ofTlon, a realm complete, he reports, "with its emperors and its seas,with its minerals and its birds and its fish, with its algebra andits fire.") Let "algebra" stand for formal ingenuity and "fire" forwhat touches our emotions (it's tempting to borrow instead Calvino'salternative values of "crystal" and "flame," from his lecture on

exactitude, but he happens not to mean by those terms what I'mreferring to here). Formal virtuosity itself can of course bebreathtaking, but much algebra and little or no fire makes for meregee-whizzery, like Queneau's Exercises in Style and A HundredThousand Billion Sonnets. Much fire and little or no algebra, on theother hand, makes for heartfelt muddles-no examples needed. Whatmost of us want from literature most of the time is what has beencalled passionate virtuosity, and both Borges and Calvino deliverit. Although I find both writers indispensable and would neverpresume to rank them as literary artists, by my lights Calvino


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perhaps comes closer to being the very model of a modern majorPostmodernist-not that that very much matters, and whatever thecapacious bag is that can contain such otherwise dissimilar spiritsas Donald Barthelme, Samuel Beckett, J. L. Borges, Italo Calvino,Angela Carter, Robert Coover, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Elsa Morante,Vladimir Nabokov, Grace Paley, Thomas Pychon, et al. . . . What Imean is not only the fusion of algebra and fire, the great (and inCalvino's case high-spirited) virtuosity, the massive acquaintancewith and respectfully ironic recycling of what Umberto Eco calls"the already said," and the combination of storytelling charm withzero naivet, but also the keeping of one authorial foot innarrative antiquity while the other rests firmly in the high-tech(in Calvino's case, the Parisian "structuralist") narrative present.Add to this what I have cited as our chap's perhaps larger humanityand in-the-worldness, and you have my reasons.All except one, which will serve as the last of my anti-paralleli:It seems to me that Borges's narrative geometry, so to speak, isessentially Euclidean. He goes in for rhomboids, quincunxes, andchess logic; even his ubiquitous infinities are of a linear,"Euclidean" sort. In Calvino's spirals and vertiginousrecombinations I see a mischievous element of the non-Euclidean; heshared my admiration, for example, of Boccaccio's invention of thecharacter Dioneo in the Decameron: The narrative Dionysian wild cardwho exempts himself from the company's rules and thus adds a lively

element of (constrained) unpredictability to the narrative program.I didn't have the opportunity to speak with Calvino about quantummechanics and chaos theory, but my strong sense is that he wouldhave regarded them as metaphorically rich and appealing.Only once, to my knowledge, did these two splendid writers happen tomeet (in Rome, near the end of Borges's life). Calvino's esteem forBorges is a matter of record; I regret having neglected to askBorges, in our half-dozen brief conversations, his opinion ofCalvino. My own esteem for both is obvious. In Euclidean geometry,paralleli never meet, but it is among the first principles ofnon-Euclidean geometry that they do meet-not in Limbo (where Dante,led by Virgil, meets the shades of Homer and company), nor yet inRome or Buenos Aires, but in infinity, where I imagine them smiling

together at this effort to draw parallels between them.A pretty notion, no? One worthy of an Italo Calvino, to make itsing.

jorge luis borges,italo calvino

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