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.6 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 Postmodernism, 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 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 tale-telling, 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.
For reasons that will deliver me to the conclusion of this little homage, I regard Calvino as by far the finest writer in that lively Parisian group, which included the French/Polish Georges Perec and the American Harry Mathews, along with Queneau himself and a number of “recreational mathematicians” disporting with algorithmic narratives, or narrative algorithms. Calvino’s skill at and delight in combinatory possibilities, a sort of structural molteplicità, led him into enthusiasms that I cannot always share — e.g., for the aforementioned Georges Perec, whose “hyper-novel” La vie mode d’emploi (Life, a User’s Manual) Calvino calls “the last real event in the history of the novel thus far” (surely he means “latest,” not “last”) and which I myself find not only vertiginously ingenious but almost merely vertiginously ingenious. I read about a quarter of it, got the intricate idea (with Calvino’s help), nodded my official approval, and could not force myself through the remaining three-quarters, confident as I was that the author would not miss a trick. Likewise, I have to confess, with Perec’s algorithmic earlier novel La Disparition (translated as A Void), which so ingeniously manages not to use even once the most-used alphabetical letter in both French and English that at least some of the book’s reviewers failed to notice that stupendous stunt. I shake my head in awe, but agree finally with the Englishman who said, vis-à-vis some other such feat, “It’s a bit like farting Annie Laurie through a keyhole: damned clever, but why bother?”
That question happens to be answerable, but I prefer to move on to Calvino’s superiority, in my view, to such near-mere stunts; to his transcension of his own “oulipesque” enthusiasms; and to the close of this talk. 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 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).