Once upon a time in Harvard University, the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship of Poetry was established as an annual cycle of lectures. These lectures, which were named after a former Professor in fine arts of the illustrious institution, hosted each year a different writer, or poet, who would teach Harvard pupils the mesmerising secrets and techniques for writing legendary literary pieces. T.S. Eliot, Toni Morrison, Umberto Eco, George Steiner, and Wim Wenders are only a few of the legends that sat on the chair of this lectureship throughout the last one-hundred years—which started in 192.
The first Italian to sit on that chair was Italo Calvino. He was, for those who never heard of him, one of the greatest Italian writers of all time. He still is, I guess. Italo Calvino is one of the first writers young Italians encounter when they start reading. He writes of war, grief, families, existence, nature, everything basically. He does it so well that he could explain very complex topics on the sense of life to a twelve-year-old. Probably this is one of the major reasons why Calvino is still celebrated today, decades after his death, as an example of great italian prose to look up to.
Calvino taught writing at Harvard University, and structured his course in six thematic lessons that were meant as landmarks for those who were about to become writers of the 21st century. His lessons were published posthumously in 1988, incomplete. He could not finish his sixth lesson nor could he deliver his lessons to the students.
Although incomplete, the essay that resulted from these six (five) lessons is a light in the dark for whoever would like to put their thoughts on paper but feels lost and can’t help feeling discouraged by the aggressive advancing of irrelevance that the post-human society is promoting.
In an era where social medias tell us to say everything by writing nothing, where the average attention span of a human being is scientifically shorter than the one of a goldfish, reading Calvino’s American Lessons can help us reconnect with good literature, which is good language, which is good communication. And good communication, you understand, is good for everybody.
According to Calvino, the six memos to bear in mind for this new millennium are:
- Lightness
- Quickness
- Exactitude
- Visibility
- Multiplicity
- Consistency (unfortunately, unwritten...)
Remember, these are not just writing tips for everybody to apply and become decent authors. These are, in Calvino’s imagination and perception, rules to apply to life in general. To explain it better, I shall introduce these five points here, but bear in mind that these precepts are drawn from linguistics, philology, history of literature and of the world, science and, most of all, philosophy. It is unthinkable for me to replace a good Calvino read with an article of a couple of thousand words, so please go ahead with this article but READ. THE. BOOK. It’s important. You’ll thank me later
My trust on the future of literature lies in knowing that there are things that only literature can give with its specific devices
Lightness
In literature, to use ‘lightness’ is to dwell lightly on any theme. The ‘grotesque’, the ‘dramatic’, the ‘heavy’, are not necessarily ‘wrong’ features for literature. Calvino never demonises the opposite concept of the one he talks about, he just expresses, lightly, his preferences. Lightness here is to be perceived as ‘absence of weight’. In a science-driven, formula-society, lightness in writing is imperative for generating sense into the people who read you. So, you might be wondering: how the heck does ‘lightness’ translate into practical hacks? How do I practise lightness? Well, it consists, according to C., in describing things without judging them. Calvino sustains that science, the dominator of this millennium, can teach us how to report things without the heavy burden of personal judgement. Try saying things as they are, and don’t forget metaphors. Metaphors are very good for you, even better if you sprinkle them with Humour, the master of lightness.
Quickness
The word of this century, for sure. Calvino never made it to the 2000s, but I am sure that, if he did, he wouldn't have believed the precision of his forecasts on the future of literature (or communication, in a broader sense). Although today we see quickness in literature as negative, because we tend to write by keywords, to the detriment of complexity, Calvino teaches us not to refuse ‘quickness’ completely. His trust on humanity, typical of the men of the past millennium, and long forgotten by our disillusioned generations, might come in handy here.
Storytelling is a manipulation of time, of reality. It delays moments, stretches them, or shrinks them. Therefore, the success of a text depends on how you manage time in it. The ability to keep up the reader's attention coincides with managing the distribution of the events in the narration. Quickness is bearing in mind the relationship between physical speed and mental speed, the difference between time of action and time of thought.
So, quickness is not about ‘shortness’, it’s about the tempo. Keep up with your thoughts, don’t fixate on images, let them flow, let them go. Let the reader fly.
Exactitude
Probably one of my favourites. I’ll try to be as exact as I can with this one. For explaining what he meant with being ‘exact’, calvino points out three principal concepts to contour the face of this concept:
You must have a clear plan, well calculated and structured, when you want to write a-n-y-t-h-i-n-g. Even your shopping list.
Call to action images, visuals, clear, and self-explicative, and most of all memorable images. People want to see and you want them to remember. Calvino is very, very fixated with the theme of ‘vision’. You’ll see that in a bit.
Use. Precise. Vocabulary. Everything you see around you might have the perfect, exact word you need to convey the meaning you were looking for. Give yourself time to think about your words, your vocabulary. Remember the boiled-egg exercise? You could start off with that one and try describing an egg the most exact way possible. It is a very funny and intelligent way of training.
Two more to go, bear with me a second, then we’ll draw the conclusions.
Visibility
Forecast in the previous three points, the vision is probably the most important of the five senses for Calvino. He always talks about using images, he loved photography, he described the action of learning the existence of things with the verb to see.
This is why, for the writer, a good text must be drawn from an image, which can be a photograph, a landscape, a real-life scenario, a drawing, a painting, anything that the writer can see, and therefore describe. Nothing works better than images to describe the world, and the more literature resembles an image, the more effective it will be in communicating.
As the writer foresaw the advent of overstimulation by the images we are constantly subjected to,and the consequent loss of sense of them due to overexposure, he proposed two main ways to rebuild significance out of images: to try using already existent images and give them new meanings, the iconoclastic-postmodern way, let’s say. Or else, he proposes to try deconstructing all the prior knowledge you have and start from zero. What does it mean? Ask Beckett.
Samuel Beckett, I’m sure you’ve heard of him.
Multiplicity.
“The plurality of languages [registers, literary devices, imagery,..] as a grant on a non-partial truth.”
Here we come at the end of our journey, since the sixth lesson remains unknown to us. Multiplicity, the fifth element of Calvino’s heritage, refers to literature’s vocation to describe the plurality of reality. Reality is kaleidoscopic and, to be able to describe it, the writer must strive for conveying multiplicity. Let’s try sort this out:
Alfred Jarry, in L'amour Absolu, does exactly what calvino explains: he tries to convey one single fact by describing it with diverse, numerous literary devices. You may describe just one, single, event, but you must understand that reality is a multitude, and therefore it is composed of several layers of meaning. The more layers you convey, the more realistic your text shall be. So, this is it: don't tell everything to your reader. Focus on one thing, and tell them about it from different perspectives. You’ll see that that singularity will mirror the multiplicity it dwells in.
In the end, what can we say about all these memos? The sixth’s title would have been Consistency, and with this in mind I can’t help but think that this future of ours, the collapse of context, this apocalyptic overflow of meaning that makes everything make no sense, has been long foretold by the great minds of our past. But if we look closer, there is something in these words that stands out, that feels different: that science might not be the evil repressant of humanities, in favour of synthesis or logic, it might be instead a teacher, a source of new ways of telling reality that literature could experiment with.
What if we took advantage of the collapse of context, to generate a new one? I think Calvino wanted to take us right here.