Italo Calvino: Multiplicity in Six Memos for the Next Millennium

Calvino, Italo. “Multiplicity” In Six Memos for the Next Millennium. 101-124. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1988.

keywords: Proust, Borges, Goethe, Mann, Flaubert, Malarme, Valery, Perec, novel as an encylcopedia, multiplicity, networks, nonsytematic thought, time

The declared subject of Calvino’s fifth lecture in the series titled Six Memos for the Next Millennium is “…the contemporary novel as an encyclopedia, as a method of knowledge, and above as a network of connections between the events, the people and the things of the world” (105). To explore “the world as a system of systems,” (105-106), Calvino marshals the help of a cavalcade of literary figures, including: Proust, Borges, Goethe, Mann, Flaubert, Malarme, Valery, Perec, Quenneau. More intriguing than these references, however, is Calvino’s discussion of two engineer-writers, the work of the Italian Carlo Emilio Gabba and Robert Musil. Comparing and contrasting their respective approaches, he describes their shared compulsion to structure their written fragments using some kind of network. Theirs is an almost intelligent network that yearns to transcend itself through infinite multiplication, to transgress its own limits. In this way, the writers seek to “…realize the ancient desire to represent the multiplicity of relationships both in effect and in potentiality.” And in important ways, their work explores the threshold of knowledge as both understanding and memory.

Fragmentary, unfinished and multiple: the knowledge systems described in this lecture take on specific significance in the final two paragraphs, where Calvino posits them as simultaneously inside and outside of the self. “Who are we,” he asserts on the one hand, “who is each one of us, if not a combinatorial of experiences, information, books we have read things imagined. Each life is an encyclopedia…a series of styles and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable” (124). On the other hand, he challenges us to, “Think what it would be to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like own but to give speech to that which has no language…to the gutter…to the tree…” (124).

Clearly, there are critical crossovers between Calvino's lecture and other literature/practice considered in my review. To escape the limited perspective of the individual ego seems a concise summary of Bakthin’s reading of Dostoevsky’s form-shaping ideology, his interest in arranging various orientations so they comprise complex points of view. Yet the obvious limitation of Dostoevsky et al.’s respective projects is the author’s retention of control over the work. Certainly, the reader brings the work into being through her understanding of the text. But what mechanism does the text offer for absorbing these reflections? Historically, the text, once printed, has appeared on the page unchanged for all time. But with the web, this has changed; wiki pages like this one, for example, are inherently unstable. They are constantly being reworked as a form of review. What would Calvino make of Web 2.0, I wonder? And in what ways might this peer-to-peer technology complicate the possibilities of conceiving the work from outside the self/selves? What interests me most about these questions is not so much working with others across platforms, as this is already an integral part of Web 2.0. It is the possibility of critical (re)purposing both individually and collectively authored texts in various ways. Rather than reference this wiki page, for example, how might Calvino (re)claim my reflections on his reflections (his text) in such a way that they illuminate or shift his “original” utterance?

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