Of all the qualities Calvino admires, exactitude may be the one that is most difficult to achieve, the one that a writer can at best only strain toward. Throughout this essay, Calvino presents the challenges of exactitude in terms of polarities: the infinite and the indefinite, the limits of both vastness and granular detail, a path of pure reason divorced from any object (and perhaps from language itself) and a path full of objects (and thus full of words). Discuss the quality of exactitude in any way that gets at its essential paradox.
The word imagination itself, deriving from image, implies visual experience (image itself derives from the Latin word for imitate, which derives from mimesis). So does the verb envision, and even common phrases such as picture in your mind. Indeed, the connection between any kind of mental conception and vision is almost unavoidable, even though a person who has been blind from birth is certainly as capable of the former as one who can see. What then is the connection between concept and vision? In an era in which visual stimulation can be as constant as we like — whether movies, television programs, or the latest forty-second clip of cute, frolicking animals accessible through the device still called a phone (though hardly anyone uses it primarily for talking to people now), or in another medium the popularity of graphic literature like manga — is Calvino right to worry that people could lose their capacity for turning text into visual images when reading?
Calvino talks about the concept of the hypernovel — a work of unusual ambition in which an author attempts to contain multitudes. You may not have heard of Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi, but we briefly examined Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, one of the most widely discussed (and generally admired) novels of the last two decades, and J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s S. As we saw, House of Leaves is full of footnotes and marginal comments, some of which extend for many pages, plus features such as pages that must be read in a mirror, that proceed backwards in the book, and that depict pieces cut out of one page through which one can read another. Woe be unto him or her who tries to read it on a Kindle or Nook. S. takes the form of a fictional narrative by V. M. Straka (not a real person, though prepare to go down the rabbit-hole if you Google him or her) supposedly published in 1949, onto which are superimposed through marginal glosses another narrative told by two readers who trade the book back and forth. These glosses are not necessarily chronological and appear in variously colored inks. Also, the book contains numerous physical artifacts — handwritten letters, photocopies, maps, and so on — that are loose and can fall out of the book as you read. Some have put S. into a category that has been called Mash-Up Fiction, a category that includes works such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith, though because Straka’s book is Abrams and Dorst’s own creation, S. is more like a pseudo-mash-up than a real one. What do you think of these works? Are they gimmicks, or are they the kind of thing Calvino was calling for in his essay on multiplicity?
As we first discussed when reading Invisible Cities, the members of Oulipo strongly believed that restriction is essential to creativity, and that unrestrained freedom is poisonous to it. Calvino discusses this idea further here. What do you think? Especially if you do creative work of any kind, do you find specific constraints, whether imposed by others or by yourself, helpful or even necessary? Or consider academic work: how would you feel if you were told you had to complete a paper that is worth a significant part — 20%, 50%, or more — of your final grade, but were given absolutely no parameters regarding length or focus or approach, and no examples of successful papers to use as a model?
Again, how does reading any of these essays inform your reading of either Invisible Cities or If on a winter’s night a traveler? How do Calvino’s fictional works reflect his “literary values,” as he calls them, or vice versa? Once more, avoid any of Calvino’s own examples from and explanations of his own works in these pages in answering this question; make your own connections.