There is “the particular existential inflection that makes it possible for Shakespeare’s characters to distance themselves from their own drama, thus dissolving it into melancholy and irony.” There is Leopardi’s infinitely exact moonlit world, Kafka’s grave and curiously buoyant parables there is Borges and Kundera.īecause, for Calvino, lightness is precisely not the same as the enforced buoyancy of industrial entertainment. Lightness through history: Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” and the airy atoms of Lucretius. “Perseus’s strength,” Calvino writes in a striking image for the artist, “lies in a refusal to look directly but not in a refusal of the reality in which he is fated to live he carries the reality with him and accepts it as his particular burden.” He cuts her head off and carries it with him. There is Perseus, able to approach the gnarled, petrifying visage of Medusa only by studying her through a mirror, and to subdue it by treading air on winged feet. He will deal with this question in a number of ways, but here he traces his own glancing spirit back through its predecessors.
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In “Lightness,” the first and in some ways the central lecture, Calvino takes on the main question for any writer: how to make art out of a chaotic, menacing and unanchored time? I felt the gulf between “the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world,” he recalls, “and the adventurous, picaresque inner rhythm that prompted me to write.” We are over the difficulty almost before we know it, and ready to change course. Characteristically, it takes a symbol, artfully constructed tale or character, and rotates it prismlike, so that it catches all kinds of new lights.Ĭalvino is as entrancing a theorist as he is a tale-teller his lectures contain flights of thought that are dazzling and difficult, but they are short, ending in a quotation or vignette, and then making a fresh start. It requires darting or, to use Calvino’s image, the many, angled and sharp facets of a crystal.Ĭalvino’s lectures, his shining literary testament, crystallize the spirit that has produced his work. The modern world is too fragmented and unstable to allow the laying of grand intellectual highways or leisurely speculative detours. Like a mayfly over water, he is a darter across a shimmering and deceptive surface.
His are short and fast, and each modifies the direction of its predecessor. None of these suggests digression that is, an ornamental or exploratory detour contained within a longer, straight-line progression.Ĭalvino believes in straight lines but not long ones. When Calvino sets out the qualities he believes literature must carry into the future-each one is the heading of a lecture-they include lightness, quickness, exactitude. It sounds like digression, but it is a little different.
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