Six Memos for the Next Millennium (12 page)

One point to be cleared up about anthropomorphism in
Cosmicomics:
although science interests me just because of its efforts to escape from anthropomorphic knowledge, I am nonetheless convinced that our imagination cannot be anything
but
anthropomorphic. This is the reason for my anthropomorphic treatment of a universe in which man has never existed, and I would add that it seems extremely unlikely that man could ever exist in such a universe.

The time has come for me to answer the question I put to myself regarding Starobinski's two modes of thought: imagination as an instrument of knowledge or as identification with the world soul. Which do I choose? From what I have said, I ought
to be a determined supporter of the first tendency, since for me the story is the union of a spontaneous logic of images and a plan carried out on the basis of a rational intention. But, at the same time, I have always sought out in the imagination a means to attain a knowledge that is outside the individual, outside the subjective. It is right, then, for me to declare myself closer to the second position, that of identification with the world soul.

Still there is another definition in which I recognize myself fully, and that is the imagination as a repertory of what is potential, what is hypothetical, of what does not exist and has never existed, and perhaps will never exist but might have existed. In Starobinski's treatment of the subject, this comes up when he mentions Giordano Bruno. According to Bruno, the
spihtus phan-tasticus
is “mundus quidem et sinus inexplebilis formarum et spe-cierum,” that is, a world or a gulf, never saturable, of forms and images. So, then, I believe that to draw on this gulf of potential multiplicity is indispensable to any form of knowledge. 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 are simply the most interesting, pleasing, or amusing.

I have yet to explain what part the
indirect
imaginary has in this gulf of the fantastic, by which I mean the images supplied by culture, whether this be mass culture or any other kind of tradition. This leads to another question: What will be the future of the individual imagination in what is usually called the “civilization of the image”? Will the power of evoking images of things that are
not there
continue to develop in a human race increasingly inundated by a flood of prefabricated images? At one time the
visual memory of an individual was limited to the heritage of his direct experiences and to a restricted repertory of images reflected in culture. The possibility of giving form to personal myths arose from the way in which the fragments of this memory came together in unexpected and evocative combinations. We are bombarded today by such a quantity of images that we can no longer distinguish direct experience from what we have seen for a few seconds on television. The memory is littered with bits and pieces of images, like a rubbish dump, and it is more and more unlikely that any one form among so many will succeed in standing out.

If I have included visibility in my list of values to be saved, it is to give warning of the danger we run in losing a basic human faculty: the power of bringing visions into focus with our eyes shut, of bringing forth forms and colors from the lines of black letters on a white page, and in fact of
thinking
in terms of images. I have in mind some possible pedagogy of the imagination that would accustom us to control our own inner vision without suffocating it or letting it fall, on the other hand, into confused, ephemeral daydreams, but would enable the images to crystallize into a well-defined, memorable, and self-sufficient form, the
icas-tic
form.

This is of course a kind of pedagogy that we can only exercise upon ourselves, according to methods invented for the occasion and with unpredictable results. In my own early development, I was already a child of the “civilization of images,” even if this was still in its infancy and a far cry from the inflations of today. Let us say that I am a product of an intermediate period, when the colored illustrations that were our childhood companions, in books, weekly magazines, and toys, were very important to us. I
think that being born during that period made a profound mark on my development. My imaginary world was first influenced by the illustrations in the
Corriere dei piccoli
, the most widely circulated weekly for children. I am speaking of my life between three and thirteen years of age, before a passion for the cinema became an absolute obsession, one that lasted all through my adolescence. In fact I believe that the really vital time was between three and six, before I learned to read.

In Italy in the twenties the
Corriere dei piccoli
used to publish the best-known American comic strips of the time: Happy Hooligan, the Katzenjammer Kids, Felix the Cat, Maggie and Jiggs, all of them rebaptized with Italian names. And there were also Italian comic strips, some of them of excellent quality, according to the graphic taste and style of the period. In Italy they had not yet started to use balloons for dialogue (these began in the thirties with the importation of Mickey Mouse). The
Corriere dei piccoli
redrew the American cartoons without balloons, replacing them with two or four rhymed lines under each cartoon. However, being unable to read, I could easily dispense with the words— the pictures were enough. I used to live with this little magazine, which my mother had begun buying and collecting even before I was born and had bound into volumes year by year. I would spend hours following the cartoons of each series from one issue to another, while in my mind I told myself the stories, interpreting the scenes in different ways—I produced variants, put together the single episodes into a story of broader scope, thought out and isolated and then connected the recurring elements in each series, mixing up one series with another, and invented new series in which the secondary characters became protagonists.

When I learned to read, the advantage I gained was minimal. Those simple-minded rhyming couplets provided no illuminating information; often they were stabs in the dark like my own, and
it was evident that the rhymster had no idea of what might have been in the balloons of the original, either because he did not understand English or because he was working from cartoons that had already been redrawn and rendered wordless. In any case, I preferred to ignore the written lines and to continue with my favorite occupation of daydreaming
within
the pictures and their sequence.

This habit undeniably caused a delay in my ability to concentrate on the written word, and I acquired the attention needed for reading only at a later stage and with effort. But reading the pictures without words was certainly a schooling in fable-making, in stylization, in the composition of the image. For example, the elegant way in which Pat O'Sullivan could draw the background in a little, square cartoon showing the black silhouette of Felix the Cat on a road that lost itself in a landscape beneath a full moon in a black sky: I think that has remained an ideal for me.

The work I did later in life, extracting stories from the mysterious figures of the tarot and interpreting the same figure in a different way each time, certainly had its roots in my obsessive porings over pages and pages of cartoons when I was a child. What I was trying to do in
The Castle of Crossed Destinies (II castello dei destini incrociati)
is a kind of “fantastic iconology,” not only with the tarot but also with great paintings. In fact I attempted to interpret the paintings of Carpaccio in San Giorgio degli Schia-voni in Venice, following the cycles of St. George and St. Jerome as if they were one story, the life of a single person, and to identify my own life with that of this George-Jerome. This fantastic iconology has become my habitual way of expressing my love of painting. I have adopted the method of telling my own stories, starting from pictures famous in the history of art or at any rate pictures that have made an impact on me.

Let us say that various elements concur in forming the visual
part of the literary imagination: direct observation of the real world, phantasmic and oneiric transfiguration, the figurative world as it is transmitted by culture at its various levels, and a process of abstraction, condensation, and interiorization of sense experience, a matter of prime importance to both the visualization and the verbalization of thought. All these features are to some extent to be found in the authors I acknowledge as models, above all at those times particularly favorable to the visual imagination—that is, in the literatures of the Renaissance, the Baroque, and the Romantic age. In an anthology that I compiled of nineteenth-century fantastic tales, I followed the visionary and spectacular vein that pulses in the stories of Hoffmann, Cham-isso, Arnim, Eichendorff, Potocki, Gogol, Nerval, Gautier, Hawthorne, Poe, Dickens, Turgenev, Leskov, and continues down to Stevenson, Kipling, and Wells. And along with this I followed another, sometimes in the very same authors: the vein that makes fantastic events spring from the everyday—an inner, mental, invisible fantasy, culminating in Henry James.

Will the literature of the fantastic be possible in the twenty-first century, with the growing inflation of prefabricated images? Two paths seem to be open from now on. (1) We could recycle used images in a new context that changes their meaning. Postmodernism may be seen 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 its alienation. (2) We could wipe the slate clean and start from scratch. Samuel Beckett has obtained the most extraordinary results by reducing visual and linguistic elements to a minimum, as if in a world after the end of the world.

Perhaps the first text in which all these problems are present at the same time is Balzac's
Le chef-d'oeuvre inconnu
(The Unknown
Masterpiece). And it is no coincidence that what we may call a prophetic insight came from Balzac, situated as he was at a nodal point in the history of literature, in a liminal experience, now visionary and now realistic, now both together—always apparently drawn by the forces of nature, though always very much aware of what he was doing.

L· chef-d'oeuvre inconnu
, on which he worked from 1831 to 1837, at first carried the subtitle of “conte fantastique,” while in the final version it figures as an “etude philosophique.” What happened in between was that—as Balzac himself puts it in another story—literature had killed the fantastic. In the first version of the story (published in a magazine in 1831), the elderly painter Frenhofer's perfect picture, in which only a woman's foot emerges from a chaos of color, from a shapeless fog, is both understood and admired by the artist's two colleagues, Pourbus and Nicholas Poussin: “Combien de jouissances sur ce morceau de toile!” (How many delights on this small piece of canvas!). And even the model, who does not understand it, is nonetheless impressed in some way.

In the second version, still 1831 but in book form, a few added scraps of conversation reveal the incomprehension of Frenhofer's colleagues. He is still an inspired mystic who lives for his ideal, but he is condemned to solitude. The final version (1837) adds many pages of technical reflection on painting, and an ending that makes it clear that Frenhofer is a madman doomed to lock himself up with his supposed masterpiece, then to burn it and commit suicide.

Le chef-d'oeuvre inconnu
has often been commented on as a parable of modern art. Reading the latest of these studies, by Hubert Damisch (in
Fenetre jaune cadmium
, 1984), I realized that the story can also be read as a parable of literature, about the unbridgeable gulf between linguistic expression and sense experience, and the
elusiveness of the visual imagination. Balzac's first version contains a definition of the fantastic as indefinable: “Pour toutes ces singularites, Pidiome moderne n'a qu'un mot:
cetait indefinissable
… Admirable expression. Elle resume la litterature fantastique; elle dit tout ce qui echappe aux perceptions bornees de notre esprit; et quand vous Pavez placees sous les yeux d'un lecteur, il est lance dans Pespace imaginaire” (For all these remarkable things, modern idiom has but the one word:
it was indefinable
… An admirable expression. It sums up the literature of the fantastic; it says everything that eludes the limited perceptions of our spirit; and when you have placed it before the eyes of a reader, he is launched into imaginary space).

In the years that followed, 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. Just as Balzac himself was for a long time uncertain whether to make Frenhofer into a seer or a madman, so his story continues to contain an ambiguity in which its deepest truth resides. The artist's imagination is a world of potentialities that no work will succeed in realizing. What we experience by living is another world, answering to other forms of order and disorder. The layers of words that accumulate on the page, like the layers of colors on the canvas, are yet another world, also infinite but more easily controlled, less refractory to formulation. The link between the three worlds is the
indefinable
spoken of by Balzac: or, rather, I would call it the
undecidable
, the paradox of an infinite whole that contains other infinite wholes.

A writer—and I am speaking of a writer of infinite ambitions, like Balzac—carries out operations that involve the infinity of his imagination or the infinity of the contingency that may be attempted, or both, by means of the infinity of linguistic possibili-
ties in writing. Some might object that a single lifetime, from birth to death, can contain only a finite amount of information. How can the individual's stock of images and individual experience extend beyond that limit? Well, I believe that these attempts to escape the vortex of multiplicity are useless. Giordano Bruno explained to us that the
spiritus phantasticus
from which the writer's imagination draws forms and figures is a bottomless well; and as for external reality, Balzac's
Comedie humaine
starts from the assumption that the written world can be homologous to the living world, not only that of today but also of yesterday or tomorrow.