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 | | Six Memos for the Next Millennium/the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1985-86 (Vintage International) by Italo Calvino ISBN-10: 9780679742371 ISBN-10: 0-679-74237-9 ISBN-13: 9780679742371 ISBN-13: 978-0-679-74237-1 Paperback 1993-08-31 Vintage Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description A series of lectures which Italo Calvino wrote in the final year of his life. Drawing on the works of Lucretius, Ovid, Boccaccio, Flaubert, Kundera, Perec and many more, he pinpoints the universal laws and literary values: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity. | ||
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. | ||
Reviews | ||
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. | ||
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. | ||
il futurismo A new italian Futurist Manifesto, but this time a good one. | ||