“And then one day,” as the narrative formula puts it, the Dramatic Vehicle rolls into town: A murrain descends upon Thebes and environs and is determined to be owing to the gods’ displeasure at the unsolved murder of old King Laius. Because most stories originate in some arresting experience or event—“Wait’ll you hear what happened to me last night! ”—it’s a common failing of apprentice fiction to be more interesting in its action and characters than in its point; to launch an arresting or at least entertaining (potential) dramatic vehicle without a clearly established and thought-through ground situation, as ripe as Sophocles’s Thebes for Incremental Perturbation—
Which is to say, for the successive complications of the conflict. That crazy old prophet Tiresias reluctantly claims that Oedipus himself was old King Laius’s murderer, and then…. The conflict-complications comprising a story’s Middle may in some cases be more serial than incrementaclass="underline" One can imagine rearranging the order of certain of Don Quixote’s sorties against Reality or of Huck’s and Jim’s raft-stops down Old Man River without spoiling the effect. Even in those cases, however, the overall series is cumulative, the net effect incremental; the unstable homeostatic system is quantitatively perturbed and re-perturbed, until….
In the most efficiently plotted stories, these perturbations follow not only upon one another but from one another, each paving the way for the next. In what we might call a camel’s-back story, on the other hand, the complicative straws are simply added, one by one, as the story’s Middle performs its double and contradictory functions of simultaneously fetching us to the climax and strategically delaying our approach thereto. In both cases, however — as Karl Marx says of history and as one observes everywhere in nature — enough quantitative change can effect a comparatively swift qualitative change: The last straw breaks the camel’s back; one degree colder and the water freezes; at some trifling new provocation the colonies rebel. You say the ditched baby had a swollen foot, like, uh, mine? And that the uppity old dude I wasted back at that place where three roads meet was actually. .?
How many perturbatory increments does a story need? Just enough: Too few leads to unconvincing climax, faked orgasm; too many is beating a dead horse, or broken camel. And how many are just enough? Just enough — although one notes in passing the popularity of threes, fives, and sevens in myths and folk-stories.
The climax or turn, when it comes, happens relatively quickly: It’s “catastrophic” in the mathematicians’ Catastrophe Theory sense, whether or not (as Aristotle prescribes) it involves the fall of the mighty from the height of fortune to the depths of misery. Even in the most delicate of “epiphanic” stories, the little epiphany that epiphs, the little insight vouchsafed to the protagonist (or perhaps only to the reader), does so in a comparative flash — and for all its apparent slightness, is of magnitudinous consequence.
Which consequence we measure by the net difference it effects in the ground situation. Like some pregnancy tests, the measurement is only one-way valid: If nothing of consequence about the ground situation has been altered, no story has been told; the action has been all Effort and no Work. If the ground situation has unquestionably been changed (all the once-living characters are now dead, let’s say), then a story may have been told. The follow-up test is whether that change — be it “dramatic,” even melodramatic, or so almost imperceptible that the principals themselves don’t yet realize its gravity — is dramaturgically/thematically meaningful, in terms of what has been established to be at stake. The “equilibrium” of a story’s denouement is not that of its opening: Order may reign again in Thebes, for a while anyhow, under Kreon’s administration; but Jocasta has hanged herself, and Oedipus has stabbed out his eyes and left town. It is an equilibrium complexified: qualitatively changed even where things may appear to all hands (except the reader/spectator) to be Back to Normal.
Otherwise, what we have attended may have its incidental merits, but for better or worse (usually worse) it’s not a story.
“The Parallels!”: Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges
This record of encounters with two of my literary navigation stars was delivered to a conference on Calvino at the University of California at Davis in April 1997 and subsequently published in the inaugural issue of the journal Context in 1999. I include it here among these essays “On Reading, Writing, and the State of the Art,” but it could as fittingly appear in the later “Tributes and Memoria” section of this volume.
MY PERSONAL REMINISCENCES of the writer we here celebrate can be covered in short order, for I didn’t come to know the man nearly so well on that level as I wish I had. Italo Calvino’s fiction I discovered in 1968, the year Cosmicomics appeared in this country in William Weaver’s translation.1 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 proto-postmodernist manifesto called “The Literature of Exhaustion”2 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 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.
I was sufficiently impressed — and the university was sufficiently well funded in those Lyndon Johnson/Nelson Rockefeller years — to write soon after to Signor Calvino at his Paris address, inviting him to visit Buffalo as Señor Borges had recently done, also at my eager invitation. Indeed, I urged Calvino to be my professorial replacement for a semester or even a whole academic year. At that time I was the lucky sitter in a brand-new and peculiarly endowed professorial chair whose generous income I was not permitted to draw as additional salary, but was allowed to use to hire a visiting writer to replace me from time to time. The first of these eminent succedanea had been Donald Barthelme; I much wanted the second to be Italo Calvino. In due time I received a cordial reply — in Italian, which I gathered (and a bilingual colleague confirmed) to say that while Calvino was gratified by the invitation, he was not yet confident enough of his English to preside over a “creative writing” course at our university. Such enterprises were and are, of course, quite foreign to our European brethren. My enthusiasm for Calvino’s fiction, however, was sufficiently shared by others at that lively place in that lively time (imagine having Don Barthelme and Michel Foucault as simultaneously visiting professors, as we did in Buffalo in 1972) to inspire the drama department to mount a charming stage adaptation of Cosmicomics in honor of the author; and having made each other’s epistolary acquaintance, Calvino and I exchanged books and occasional letters thereafter. He sent me Invisible Cities and the Tarots, both of which I found wonderfully good; I sent him Lost in the Funhouse and Chimera.