"The Parallels!" Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges John Barth

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"The Parallels!" Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges
John Barth

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I discovered Italo Calvino's fiction in 1968, the year Cosmicomics appeared in this country in William Weaver’s translation. I was teaching then at the State University of New York at Buffalo and had fallen much under the spell of Jorge Luis Borges, whom I had discovered just a couple of years earlier. In that condition of enchantment I had published in '68 a sort of protopostmodernist manifesto called “The Literature of Exhaustion” and also my maiden collection of short stories, entitled Lost in the Funhouse and subtitled Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice (that particular deployment of the term “fiction” is of course a salute to Borges’s ficciones). In short, the ground had been prepared for my delight in Calvino’s Cosmicomics and then in his t zero stories, which appeared in Mr. Weaver’s English the following year. Here, I thought, was a sort of Borges without tears, or better, a Borges con molto brio: lighter-spirited than the great Argentine, often downright funny (as Sr. Borges almost never is), yet comparably virtuosic in form and language, comparably rich in intelligence and imagination.
In September of 1985, just a week or so after the news reached us of Calvino’s death, Umberto Eco happened to be our guest at Johns Hopkins, and of course we spoke of our mutual lost friend (a much closer friend of Eco’s, to be sure; Calvino had been Eco’s “chaperon,” as Eco himself put it, for the Strega Prize). He had it on good authority, Eco told me, that despite the damage of the massive stroke that had felled Calvino a fortnight earlier, the man managed 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 mostly obvious, the relevant anti-paralleli no doubt likewise. To begin with, both writers, for all their great sophistication of mind, wrote in a clear, straightforward, unmannered, nonbaroque, but rigorously scrupulous style. ”. . . crystalline, sober, and airy . . . without the least congestion” is how Calvino himself describes Borges’s style (in the second of his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, the Norton lectures that Calvino died before he could deliver), 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 the senses both of economy of means and of velocity in narrative profluence; “Exactitude” (Esatezza) both of formal design and of verbal expression; “Visibility” (Visibilita) in the senses both of striking detail and of vivid imagery, even (perhaps especially) in the mode of fantasy; “Multiplicity” (Molteplicita) in the senses both of an ars combinatoria and of addressing the infinite interconnectedness of things, whether in expansive, incompletable works such as Gadda’s Via Merulana and Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities or in vertiginous short stories like Borges’s “Garden of Forking Paths”—all cited in Calvino’s lecture on multiplicity; and “Consistency” in the sense that in their style, their formal concerns, and their other preoccupations we readily recognize the Borgesian and the Calvinoesque. So appealing a case does Calvino make for these particular half-dozen literary values, it’s important to remember that they aren’t the only ones; indeed, that their contraries have also something to be said for them. Calvino acknowledges as much in the “Quickness” lecture: ”. . . each value or virtue I chose as the subject for my lectures,” he writes, “does not exclude its opposite. Implicit in my tribute to lightness was my respect for weight, and so this apology for quickness does not presume to deny the pleasures of lingering,” etc. We literary lingerers—some might say malingerers—breathe a protracted sigh of relief.
Reviewing these six “memos” has fetched us already beyond the realm of style to other parallels between the fictions of Borges and Calvino. Although he commenced his authorial career in the mode of the realistic novel and never abandoned the longer narrative forms, Calvino like Borges much preferred the laconic short take. Even his later extended works, like Cosmicomics, Invisible Cities, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, and If on a winter’s night a traveler, are (to use Calvino’s own adjectives) modular and combinatory, built up from smaller, quicker units. Borges, more from aesthetic principle than from the circumstance of his later blindness, never wrote a novella, much less a novel (in the “Autobiographical Essay” he declares, “In the 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 my way to their last page”). And in his later life, like the doomed but temporarily reprieved Jaromir Hladik in “The Secret Miracle,” he was obliged to compose and revise from memory. No wonder his style is so lapidary, so . . . memorable.
On with the parallels: Although one finds flavors and even some specific detail of Buenos Aires and environs in the corpus of Borges’s fiction and of Italy in that of Calvino, and although each is a major figure in his respective national literature as well as in modern lit generally, both writers were prevailingly disinclined to the social/psychological realism that for better or worse persists as the dominant mode in North American fiction. Myth and fable and science in Calvino’s case, literary/philosophical history and “the contamination of reality by dream” in Borges’s, take the place of social/psychological analysis and historical/geographical detail. Both writers inclined toward the ironic elevation of popular narrative genres: the folktale and comic strip for Calvino, supernaturalist and detective-fiction for Borges. Calvino even defined Post-modernism, in his “Visibility” lecture, as “the tendency to make ironic use of the stock images of the mass media, or to inject the taste for the marvelous inherited from literary tradition into narrative mechanisms that accentuate their alienation”—a tendency as characteristic of Borges’s production as of his own. Neither writer, for better or for worse, was a creator of memorable characters or a delineator of grand passions, although in a public conversation in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1975, in answer to the question “What do you regard as the writer’s chief responsibility?” Borges unhesitatingly responded, “The creation of character.” A poignant response from a great writer who never really created any characters; even his unforgettable Funes the Memorious, as I have remarked elsewhere, is not so much a character as a pathological characteristic. And Calvino’s charming Qwfwq and Marco Polo and Marcovaldo and Mr. Palomar are archetypal narrative functionaries, nowise to be compared with the great pungent characters of narrative/dramatic literature. A first-rate restaurant may not offer every culinary good thing; for the pleasures of acute character-drawing as of bravura passions, one simply must look elsewhere than in the masterful writings of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino.
Attendant upon those “Postmodernist tendencies” aforecited by Calvino—the ironic recycling of stock images and traditional narrative mechanisms—is the valorization of form, even more in Calvino than in Borges. At his consummate best, Borges so artfully deploys what I’ve called the principle of metaphoric means that (excuse the self-quotation) “not just the conceit, the key images, the mise-en-scène, the narrative choreography and point of view and all that, but even the phenomenon of the text itself, the fact of the artifact, becomes a sign of its sense.” His marvelous story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is a prime example of this high-tech taletelling, and there are others. Borges manages this gee-whizzery, moreover, with admirable understatement, wearing his formal virtuosity up his sleeve rather than on it. Calvino, on the contrary, while never a show-off, took unabashed delight in his “romantic formalism” (again, my term, with my apology): a delight not so much in his personal ingenuity as in the exhilarating possibilities of the ars combinatoria, as witness especially the structural wizardry of The Castle of Crossed Destinies and If on a winter’s night a traveler. His extended association with Raymond Queneau’s OULIPO group was no doubt among both the causes and the effects of this formal sportiveness.
At his Johns Hopkins reading in 1976, Calvino briefly described the conceit of his Invisible Cities novel and then said, “Now I want to read just one little . . . ” He hesitated for a moment to find the word he wanted. ”. . . One little aria from that novel.” Said I to myself, Exactly, Italo, and bravissimo. The saving difference between Calvino and the other wizards of OULIPO was that (bless his Italian heart and excuse the stereotyping) he knew when to stop formalizing and start singing—or better, how to make the formal rigors themselves sing. What Calvino said of Georges Perec very much applied to his own shop: that the constraints of those crazy algorithms and other combinatorial rules, so far from stifling his imagination, positively stimulated it. For that reason, he once told me, he enjoyed accepting difficult commissions, such as writing the Crossed Destinies novel to accompany the Ricci edition of I Tarocchi or, more radically yet, composing a story without words, to be the dramatic armature of a proposed ballet (Calvino made up a wordless story about the invention of dancing).
To come now to the last of these paralleli: Both Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino managed marvelously to combine in their fiction the values that I call Algebra and Fire (I’m borrowing those terms here, as I have done elsewhere, from Borges’s First Encyclopedia of Tlon, a realm complete, he reports, “with its emperors and its seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish, with its algebra and its fire.”) Let “algebra” stand for formal ingenuity and “fire” for what touches our emotions (it’s tempting to borrow instead Calvino’s alternative values of “crystal” and “flame,” from his lecture on exactitude, but he happens not to mean by those terms what I’m referring to here). Formal virtuosity itself can of course be breathtaking, but much algebra and little or no fire makes for mere gee-whizzery, like Queneau’s Exercises in Style and A Hundred Thousand Billion Sonnets. Much fire and little or no algebra, on the other hand, makes for heartfelt muddles—no examples needed. What most of us want from literature most of the time is what has been called passionate virtuosity, and both Borges and Calvino deliver it. Although I find both writers indispensable and would never presume to rank them as literary artists, by my lights Calvino perhaps comes closer to being the very model of a modern major Postmodernist—not that that very much matters, and whatever the capacious bag is that can contain such otherwise dissimilar spirits as 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 I mean is not only the fusion of algebra and fire, the great (and in Calvino’s case high-spirited) virtuosity, the massive acquaintance with and respectfully ironic recycling of what Umberto Eco calls “the already said,” and the combination of storytelling charm with zero naiveté, but also the keeping of one authorial foot in narrative 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 humanity and 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, is essentially Euclidean. He goes in for rhomboids, quincunxes, and chess logic; even his ubiquitous infinities are of a linear, “Euclidean” sort. In Calvino’s spirals and vertiginous recombinations I see a mischievous element of the non-Euclidean; he shared my admiration, for example, of Boccaccio’s invention of the character Dioneo in the Decameron: The narrative Dionysian wild card who 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 quantum mechanics and chaos theory, but my strong sense is that he would have regarded them as metaphorically rich and appealing.
Only once, to my knowledge, did these two splendid writers happen to meet (in Rome, near the end of Borges’s life). Calvino’s esteem for Borges is a matter of record; I regret having neglected to ask Borges, in our half-dozen brief conversations, his opinion of Calvino. My own esteem for both is obvious. In Euclidean geometry, paralleli never meet, but it is among the first principles of non-Euclidean geometry that they do meet—not in Limbo (where Dante, led by Virgil, meets the shades of Homer and company), nor yet in Rome 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 it sing.
Adapted from address to conference on Italo Calvino, U.C. Davis, 4/4/97
Selected Works by Jorge Luis Borges