Six Memos for the Next Millennium (7 page)

It is hard to keep up tension of this kind in very long works. However, by temperament I feel myself more at ease in short pieces: much of my work consists of short stories. For example, the sort of thing I tried out in
Cosmicomics (Le costnicomiche)
and
t zero (Tcon zero)
—giving narrative form to abstract ideas of space and time—could not be brought off except within the brief span of a short story. But I have experimented with even shorter compositions, with narrative on a smaller scale, something between a fable and a
petit poeme en prose
, in my book
Invisible Cities (Le citta invisibili)
and more recently in my descriptions in
Palomar.
Of course the length or brevity of a text is an external criterion, but I am speaking of a particular density that, even if it can be attained in narratives of broader scope, nevertheless finds its proper dimension in the single page.

In this preference for short literary forms I am only following the true vocation of Italian literature, which is poor in novelists but rich in poets, who even when they write in prose give of their best in texts where the highest degree of invention and thought is contained in a few pages. This is the case with a book unparalleled in other literatures: Leopardi's
Operette morali
(Essays and Dialogues). American literature has a glorious and thriving tradition of short stories, and indeed I would say that its most precious gems are to be found there. But the rigid distinction made by publishers—either short story or novel—excludes other possible short forms (which still may be found in the prose works of the great American poets, from Walt Whitman's
Specimen Days
to many pages of William Carlos Williams). The demands of the
publishing business are a fetish that must not be allowed to keep us from trying out new forms. I should like at this point to break a lance on the field for the richness of short literary forms, with all they imply in terms of style and concentration of content. I am thinking of the Paul Valery of
Monsieur Teste
and many of his essays, of the prose poems that Francis Ponge wrote about objects, of Michel Leiris' explorations of himself and his own language, of Henri Michaux's mysterious and hallucinatory humor in the very brief stories in
Plume.

The last great invention of a new literary genre in our time was achieved by a master of the short form, Jorge Luis Borges. It was the invention of himself as narrator, that “Columbus' egg,” which enabled him to get over the mental block that until nearly forty years of age prevented him from moving beyond essays to fiction. The idea that came to Borges was to pretend that the book he wanted to write had already been written by someone else, some unknown hypothetical author—an author in a different language, of a different culture—and that his task was to describe and review this invented book. Part of the Borges legend is the anecdote that when the first extraordinary story written according to this formula, “El acercamiento a Almotasim” (The Approach to Al'Mutasim), appeared in the magazine
Sur
in 1940, it was in fact believed to be a review of a book by an Indian author. In the same way, critics of Borges feel bound to observe that each of his texts doubles or multiplies its own space through the medium of other books belonging to a real or imaginary library, whether they be classical, erudite, or merely invented.

What I particularly wish to stress is how Borges achieves his approaches to the infinite without the least congestion, in the most crystalline, sober, and airy style. In the same way, his syn-
thetic, sidelong manner of narration brings with it a language that is everywhere concrete and precise, whose inventiveness is shown in the variety of rhythms, the syntactic movements, the unfailingly surprising and unexpected adjectives. Borges has created a literature raised to the second power and, at the same time, a literature that is like the extraction of the square root of itself. It is a “potential literature,” to use a term applied later on in France. The first signs of this may be found in
Ficciones
, in the little hints and formulas of what might have become the works of a hypothetical author called Herbert Quain.

Conciseness is only one aspect of the subject I want to deal with, and I will confine myself to telling you that I dream of immense cosmologies, sagas, and epics all reduced to the dimensions of an epigram. In the even more congested times that await us, literature must aim at the maximum concentration of poetry and of thought.

Borges and Bioy Casares put together an anthology of short extraordinary tales
(Cuentos brevesy extraordinarios
, 1955). I would like to edit a collection of tales consisting of one sentence only, or even a single line. But so far I haven't found any to match the one by the Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso: “Cuando desperto, el dinosauro todavia estaba alii” (When I woke up, the dinosaur was still there).

I realize that this talk, based as it is on invisible connections, has wandered off in many directions and is risking dispersion. But all the subjects I have dealt with this evening, and perhaps those from last time, might indeed be united in that they are all under the sign of an Olympian god whom I particularly honor: Hermes-Mercury, god of communication and mediation, who under the name of Thoth was the inventor of writing and who— according to C. G. Jung in his studies on alchemical symbolism— in the guise of “spirit Mercury” also represents the
principium
individuationis.
Mercury with his winged feet, light and airborne, astute, agile, adaptable, free and easy, established the relationships of the gods among themselves and those between the gods and men, between universal laws and individual destinies, between the forces of nature and the forms of culture, between the objects of the world and all thinking subjects. What better patron could I possibly choose to support my proposals for literature?

For the ancients, who saw microcosm and macrocosm mirrored in the correspondences between psychology and astrology, between humours, temperaments, planets, and constellations, Mercury's nature was the most indefinite and variable. But, in the more widespread view, the temperament influenced by Mercury, inclined toward exchanges and commerce and dexterity, was contrasted with the temperament influenced by Saturn, seen as melancholy, contemplative, and solitary. Ever since antiquity it has been thought that the saturnine temperament is the one proper to artists, poets, and thinkers, and that seems true enough. Certainly literature would never have existed if some human beings had not been strongly inclined to introversion, discontented with the world as it is, inclined to forget themselves for hours and days on end and to fix their gaze on the immobility of silent words. Certainly my own character corresponds to the traditional features of the guild to which I belong. I too have always been saturnine, whatever other masks I have attempted to wear. My cult of Mercury is perhaps merely an aspiration, what I would like to be. I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses.

But if Saturn-Chronos does exercise some power over me, it is also true that he is not one of my favorite divinities. I have never nourished any feeling for him other than a timorous respect. There is, however, another god with family ties to Saturn for whom I feel much affection. He is a god who does not enjoy
too much astrological and therefore psychological prestige, since his name was not given to one of the seven planets in the skies of the ancients, but still he has been well treated in literature from Homer on. I am speaking of Vulcan—Hephaestus, a god who does not roam the heavens but lurks at the bottom of craters, shut up in his smithy, where he tirelessly forges objects that are the last word in refinement: jewels and ornaments for the gods and goddesses, weapons, shields, nets, traps. To Mercury's aerial flight, Vulcan replies with his limping gait and the rhythmic beat of his hammer.

Here too I have to refer to some occasional reading of mine— from time to time enlightening ideas emerge from reading odd books that are hard to classify from a rigorously academic point of view. The book in question, which I read while studying the symbolism of the tarot, is Andre Virel's
Histoire de notre image
(1965). According to the author—a student of the collective imagination in what I take to be the school of Jung—Mercury and Vulcan represent the two inseparable and complementary functions of life: Mercury represents
syntony
, or participation in the world around us; Vulcan,
Jocalization
or constructive concentration. Mercury and Vulcan are both sons of Jupiter, whose realm is that of the consciousness, individual and social. But on his mother's side Mercury is a descendant of Uranus, whose kingdom was that of the “cyclophrenic” age of undifferentiated continuity. And Vulcan is descended from Saturn, whose realm was that of the “schizophrenic” era of egocentric isolation. Saturn dethroned Uranus, and Jupiter dethroned Saturn. In the end, in the well-balanced, luminous realm of Jupiter, both Mercury and Vulcan carry with them the memory of some dark primordial realm, changing what had been a destructive malady into something positive: syntony and focalization.

Even since I read Virel's explanation of how Mercury and Vul-
can are both contrasting and complementary, I have begun to understand something that I had only a rather vague idea of before—something about myself, about how I am and how I would like to be; about how I write and how I might be able to write. Vulcan's concentration and craftsmanship are needed to record Mercury's adventures and metamorphoses. Mercury's swiftness and mobility are needed to make Vulcan's endless labors become bearers of meaning. And from the formless mineral matrix, the gods' symbols of office acquire their forms: lyres or tridents, spears or diadems.

A writer's work has to take account of many rhythms: Vulcan's and Mercury's, a message of urgency obtained by dint of patient and meticulous adjustments and an intuition so instantaneous that, when formulated, it acquires the finality of something that could never have been otherwise. But it is also the rhythm of time that passes with no other aim than to let feelings and thoughts settle down, mature, and shed all impatience or ephemeral contingency.

I began this lecture by telling a story. Let me end it with another story, this time Chinese: Among Chuang-tzu's many skills, he was an expert draftsman. The king asked him to draw a crab. Chuang-tzu replied that he needed five years, a country house, and twelve servants. Five years later the drawing was still not begun. “I need another five years,” said Chuang-tzu. The king granted them. At the end of these ten years, Chuang-tzu took up his brush and, in an instant, with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen.

For the ancient Egyptians, exactitude was symbolized by a feather that served as a weight on scales used for the weighing of souls. This light feather was called Maat, goddess of the scales. The hieroglyph for Maat also stood for a unit of length—the 33 centimeters of the standard brick—and for the fundamental note of the flute.

This information comes from a lecture by Giorgio de Santil-lana on the precision of the ancients in observing astronomical phenomena, a lecture I heard in Italy in 1963 which had a profound influence on me. These days I have often thought of Santillana, who acted as my guide in Massachusetts during my first visit to the United States in 1960. In memory of his friendship, I have started this talk on exactitude in literature with the name of Maat, goddess of the scales—all the more because Libra is my sign of the Zodiac.

First I shall try to define my subject. To my mind exactitude means three things above all:

1. a well-defined and well-calculated plan for the work in question;
   

2. an evocation of clear, incisive, memorable visual images; in Italian we have an adjective that doesn't exist in English, “icastico,” from the Greek e??ast????;
   

3. a language as precise as possible both in choice of words and in expression of the subtleties of thought and imagination.
   

Why do I feel the need to defend values that many people might take to be perfectly obvious? I think that my first impulse arises from a hypersensitivity or allergy. It seems to me that language is always used in a random, approximate, careless manner, and this distresses me unbearably. Please don't think that my reaction is the result of intolerance toward my neighbor: the worst discomfort of all comes from hearing myself speak. That's why I try to talk as little as possible. If I prefer writing, it is because I can revise each sentence until I reach the point where—if not exactly satisfied with my words—I am able at least to eliminate those reasons for dissatisfaction that I can put a finger on. Literature—and I mean the literature that matches up to these requirements—is the Promised Land in which language becomes what it really ought to be.

It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty—that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meanings, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the spark that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances.

At this point, I don't wish to dwell on the possible sources of this epidemic, whether they are to be sought in politics, ideology, bureaucratic uniformity, the monotony of the mass media, or the way the schools dispense the culture of the mediocre. What interests me are the possibilities of health. Literature, and perhaps literature alone, can create the antibodies to fight this plague in language.

I would like to add that it is not just language that seems to have been struck by this pestilence. Consider visual images, for example. We live in an unending rainfall of images. The most powerful media transform the world into images and multiply it by means of the phantasmagoric play of mirrors. These are images stripped of the inner inevitability that ought to mark every image as form and as meaning, as a claim on the attention and as a source of possible meanings. Much of this cloud of visual images fades at once, like the dreams that leave no trace in the memory, but what does not fade is a feeling of alienation and discomfort.