TO COME NOW to the last of these paralleli: Both Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino managed marvelously to combine in their fiction the values that I call Algebra and Fire (I’m borrowing those terms here, as I have done elsewhere, from Borges’s First Encyclopedia of Tlön, a realm complete, he reports, “with its emperors and its seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish, with its algebra and its fire”). Let “algebra” stand for formal ingenuity, and “fire” for what touches our emotions (it’s tempting to borrow instead Calvino’s alternative values of “crystal” and “flame,” from his lecture on exactitude, but he happens not to mean by those terms what I’m referring to here). Formal virtuosity itself can of course be breathtaking, but much algebra and little or no fire makes for mere gee-whizzery, like Queneau’s Exercises in Style and A Hundred Thousand Billion Sonnets. Much fire and little or no algebra, on the other hand, makes for heartfelt muddles — no examples needed. What most of us want from literature most of the time is passionate virtuosity, and both Borges and Calvino deliver it. Although I find both writers indispensable and would never presume to rank them as literary artists, by my lights Calvino perhaps comes closer to being the very model of a modern major Postmodernist (not that that very much matters), or whatever the capacious bag is that can contain such otherwise dissimilar spirits as Donald Barthelme, Samuel Beckett, J. L. Borges, Italo Calvino, Angela Carter, Robert Coover, Gabriel García Márquez, Elsa Morante, Vladimir Nabokov, Grace Paley, Thomas Pynchon, et al. . What I mean is not only the fusion of algebra and fire, the great (and in Calvino’s case high-spirited) virtuosity, the massive acquaintance with and respectfully ironic recycling of what Umberto Eco calls “the already said,” and the combination of storytelling charm with zero naiveté, but also the keeping of one authorial foot in narrative antiquity while the other rests firmly in the high-tech (in Calvino’s case, the Parisian “structuralist”) narrative present. Add to this what I have cited as our chap’s perhaps larger humanity and in-the-worldness, and you have my reasons.
All except one, which will serve as the last of my anti-paralleli: It seems to me that Borges’s narrative geometry, so to speak, is essentially Euclidean. He goes in for rhomboids, quincunxes, and chess logic; even his ubiquitous infinities are of a linear, “Euclidean” sort. In Calvino’s spirals and vertiginous recombinations I see a mischievous element of the non-Euclidean; he shared my admiration, for example, of Boccaccio’s invention of the character Dioneo in the Decameron: the narrative Dionysian wild card who exempts himself from the company’s rules and thus adds a lively element of (constrained) unpredictability to the narrative program. I didn’t have the opportunity to speak with Calvino about quantum mechanics and chaos theory, but my strong sense is that he would have regarded them as metaphorically rich and appealing.
DID THESE TWO splendid writers ever meet?7 Calvino’s esteem for Borges is a matter of record; I regret having neglected to ask Borges, in our half-dozen brief conversations, his opinion of Calvino. My own esteem for both you will by now have divined. In Euclidean geometry, paralleli never meet, but it is among the first principles of non-Euclidean geometry that they do meet — not in Limbo, where Dante, led by Virgil, meets the shades of Homer and company, but in infinity.
A pretty principle, no? One worthy of an Italo Calvino, to make it sing.
Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges. From Album Calvino, ed. Luca Baranelli and Ernesto Ferrero (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1995).
My Faulkner
First delivered at a conference on William Faulkner at the University of Mississippi in 1999, this brief appreciation of that novelist’s importance to this one was subsequently included (along with more scholarly presentations by other participants in the conference) in the volume Faulkner and Postmodernism, published later that year.1 Reviewing my amateur remarks in the context of theirs, I’m reminded of what Flannery O’Connor is reported to have said about her work’s being compared to Faulkner’s: “Best get off the track when the Dixie Special’s coming down the line.”
IT’S UNDERSTOOD, I trust, that I’m with you today not in my capacity as a Faulkner specialist, for I have no such capacity, but merely and purely as a writer of fiction, who will presently read a short passage from a not markedly Faulknerian work in progress.2 But the great American writer celebrated by this annual conference happens to have been among my first-magnitude navigation stars during my literary apprenticeship, and I’d like to speak a bit to that subject before I change voices.
In 1947, virtually innocent of literature, I matriculated as a freshman at the Johns Hopkins University. I can scarcely remember now what I had been taught before that in the English courses of our semi-rural, semi-redneck 11-year county public school system on Maryland’s lower Eastern Shore; I certainly don’t recall having been much touched by any of it, or inspired by any of my pleasant, well-meaning teachers. I borrowed books busily from the available libraries3—Tom Swift, Edgar Rice Burroughs — and indiscriminately from my father’s small-town soda-fountain/lunchroom, whose stock in trade included magazines, piano sheet music, and the newfangled paperbound pocket books: Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, and my favorite of all, the Avon Fantasy Reader series (Abe Merritt, John Collier, and H. P. Lovecraft, inter alia). I remember being baffled but intrigued by an item called Manhattan Transfer, by one John Dos Passos, and by another called Sanctuary, by somebody named William Faulkner, when they turned up randomly in my borrowings. Those were, I came to understand later, my accidental first exposures to modern lit; I sensed their difference from my regular diet, and even found and read some other items by that Faulkner fellow in the pile: The Wild Palms, Soldier’s Pay, and Pylon. On the whole, however, I was more intrigued by another anthology series just then appearing on Dad’s shelves, called The Ribald Reader: pretty spicy stuff by my then standards, and illustrated with titillative line-drawings. What I only dimly registered at the time was that those naughty anthologies were of considerable literary quality and admirable eclecticism: Their ribaldry was culled from the Decameron, Pentameron, and Heptameron, from The 1001 Nights and the Gesta Romanorum and the Panchatantra, among other exotic sources — all news to me, and not to be found in either the Dorchester County Public or the Cambridge (Maryland) school libraries (where The Arabian Nights was a much-abridged and expurgated edition illustrated by N. C. Wyeth).