JeffHodsonHonorsThesis2016PDF

THE MISSING MEMO: AN ANALYSIS OF ITALO
CALVINO’S WORK AND PROPOSAL FOR THE CONTENT
OF CONSISTENCY
by
JEFF HODSON
A THESIS
Presented to the Department of Philosophy
and the Robert D. Clark Honors College
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Bachelor of Arts degree
December 2015

ii
An Abstract of the Thesis of
Jeff Hodson for the degree of Bachelor of Arts
in the Department of Philosophy to be taken December 2015
Title: The Missing Memo: An Analysis of Italo Calvino’s Work and Proposal for the
Content of Consistency
Approved: _______________________________________
Professor of Practice, Barbara Mossberg
In 1985, Italo Calvino set out to write six lectures for the upcoming Charles
Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University. As an allegorical fiction writer, literary
analyst, and essayist, Calvino intended to discuss his faith in the future of literature in
the coming millennium and advocate that there are things that only literature can give
us, by means specific to it. Thus, he devoted his lectures to certain values, qualities, or
peculiarities of literature that are close to his heart and situate them within the
perspective of the new millennium. Unfortunately, he died from the effects of a stroke
in September 1985, before he was able to complete his sixth and final lecture. Now,
fifteen years after the turn of the millennium, I will imaginatively engage with a
representative collection of Italo Calvino’s work including, unfinished lectures, literary
essays, allegorical fiction, published letters in order to derive a proposal for the content
of his missing sixth memo “Consistency.” My purpose is to provide a deductive
inquiry—not a speculative piece—supported by Calvino’s own words and a logically
based methodology. Towards this end, my own preparation necessitates a mathematical
and classical education to which I have added my own personal interest in the
convergence of philosophy and science. In pursuit of this convergence between
philosophical and scientific discourses I am applying to graduate programs that share a
similar affinity for interdisciplinary studies.

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Acknowledgements
First, I would like to thank Professor Alejandro Vallega for introducing me to a
variety of Italo Calvino’s works, and in particular Six Memos for the Next Millennium. I
would also like to thank him for his time, insight, and encouraging words—his
philosophy and literature class was the only class in which I emailed my professor and
asked if it would be acceptable if I wrote about more than what was required for the
final paper. I would also like to thank Professor Louise Bishop for meeting with me
periodically and not only discussing the content of the work product, but also the
intentional stylistic approach to this thesis, which is unique blend of a philosophical
analysis, purposeful exhibition, and creative emulation, and ordering. I would like to
thank Dean Terry Hunt, who unfortunately could not attend the defense, but who was
my prospectus instructor and was kind enough to discuss the nature of my project as it
evolved on multiple occasions. I would like to thank my parents for encouraging me to
attend the Clark Honors College—which has without a doubt been the most rewarding
component of my undergraduate education—and their willingness to read some of
Calvino’s work in order to talk about my project with me. But I would like to thank
above all, Professor Barbara Mossberg. Her ability to tease out the very best in people,
but particularly young students, is unrivaled by any professor, teacher, or mentor that I
have ever had or heard about. She has assisted me throughout this entire thesis process,
including the two other thesis ideas I was originally working on and encouraged me to
pursue an academic path that focuses on my interest in the convergence of science and
philosophy. Thank you to everyone for your time, assistance, and willingness to read
my work.

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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements iii
Introduction 1
SECTION I: METHODOLOGY 4
Elements of Consistency in Calvino’s Literary Analysis Essays 5
Elements of Consistency in Calvino’s Fiction 6
Elements of Consistency in Six Memos for the Next Millennium 7
Section II: Inquiry into the Nature of Consistency 9
Section III: Proposal for the Content of Consistency, Including Likely Topics of
Discussion 35
Bibliography 88

Introduction
In 1984, the Italian allegorical fantasy writer and literary analyst Italo Calvino
was selected to deliver the 1985 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University—
an annual lectureship given by distinguished creative figures and scholars in the arts
regarding the topic of “poetry in the broadest sense” and named after the former
professor of fine arts. His wife, Esther Calvino, stated that after Italo “settled on a
scheme to organize the lectures, he devoted most of his time to their preparation” and
from the first of January 1985 Calvino practically did nothing else.1
Apparently the
approaching lectures became an obsession for Calvino and at one point he even
announced to his wife that he had ideas and material for eight lectures—even though the
Charles Eliot Norton lectures are customarily composed of six. Here is the title for
what she claims might have been his eighth lecture: “On the Beginning and the Ending
of Novels,” although no text or notes on the eighth lecture concept has been found.
Calvino completed the five of the six lectures contained in Six Memos for the
Next Millennium by September of 1985, at the moment of his departure for the United
States and Harvard University. Tragically, Calvino died on September 19th
from the
complications of a stroke he suffered earlier that month in a hospital in Siena, Italy
before he was able to write his sixth lecture. According to Esther Calvino, Italo wanted
to call his sixth lecture “Consistency,” and he had planned to write it in Cambridge.
She found the first five memos, all in perfect order, in the Italian original, neatly stacked
on his writing desk ready to be put into his suitcase. Here is Calvino’s introduction to
Six Memos for the Next Millennium:

1
Calvino, Italo. "Introduction." Six Memos for the Next Millennium.

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“We are in 1985, and barely fifteen years stand between us and a new millennium. For
the time being I do not think the approach of this date arouses any special emotion.
However, I’m not here to talk of futurology, but of literature. The millennium about to
end has seen the birth and development of the modern languages of the West, and of the
literatures that have explored the expressive, cognitive, and imaginative possibilities of
these languages. It has been the millennium of the book; in that it has seen the object
we call a book take on the form now familiar to us. Perhaps it is a sign of our
millennium’s end that that we frequently wonder what will happen to literature and
books in the so-called postindustrial era of technology. I don’t feel much like indulging
in this sort of speculation. My confidence in the future of literature consists in the
knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it.
I would therefore, like to devote these lectures to certain values, qualities, or
peculiarities of literature that are very close to my heart, trying to situate them within
the perspective of the new millennium.”2
Now, fifteen years after the turn of the millennium, I am returning to Calvino.
In this project, I will imaginatively engage with a representative collection of Italo
Calvino’s work including, unfinished lectures, literary essays, allegorical fiction, and
published letters in order to derive a proposal for the content of his missing sixth memo
“Consistency.” My purpose is to provide a deductive inquiry—not a speculative piece—
supported by Calvino’s own words and a logically based methodology. Towards this
end, my own preparation necessitates a mathematical and classical education to which I
have added my own personal interest in the convergence of philosophy and science. In
pursuit of these intersections between philosophical and scientific discourses I am
currently applying to graduate programs that share a similar affinity for interdisciplinary
studies.
This project contains three sections. The first section seeks to justify my
qualifications, as an undergraduate and thorough reader of Calvino’s work to address
the task at hand and secure my method of inquiry. It seeks to demonstrate that large
portions of the content of Six Memos for the Next Millennium references and utilizes

2
Calvino, Italo. Six Memos for the Next Millennium. 1.

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ideas, excerpts, and analyses from Calvino’s own literary works and analytical
essays. Furthermore, this section exposes the entangled nature of Six Memos for the
Next Millennium, by demonstrating that elements of its composition are not only
repurposed from Calvino’s essays and literature, but that the individual memos
themselves are actually interdependent on each other like a ball of tangled yarn.
In the second section, I used the conclusion that Calvino’s lectures allude to the
nature of each other as a basis for an inquiry into the nature of Consistency. My intent
was to use Calvino’s own words reveal the nature of Consistency. This section is
perhaps the most analytical and although it logically pursued ideas, their pursuit
necessitated a nonlinear path through the text. Consequently, I was forced to jump and
twist, back and forth throughout Six Memos for the Next Millennium in order to
untangle the densely woven concepts and ideas. This analysis enabled the
identification of numerous identify common threads that I found to be essential to the
lectures as a whole; and thus, to Consistency. Additionally, I discerned unexplained yet
relevant topics regarding the allusions to Consistency imbedded within the other five
lectures, which yielded eight requirements for Consistency.
The third section utilized Calvino’s essays and literature to propose, justify, and
connect content that fulfilled the requirements determined from the analysis of Six
Memos for the Next Millennium in Section II. I believe the entirety of Section III is
relevant to the topics derived from the first and second section and fits snuggly within
the framework of Six Memos for the Next Millennium as well as the entirety of
Calvino’s works embracing the spirit of Calvino, while simultaneously allowing myself
to connect, explain, and analyze.

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SECTION I: METHODOLOGY
I believe that Calvino alludes to the nature of Consistency throughout Six
Memos for the Next Millennium and that a significant portion of the content can be
found in his literary essays and his own fiction. Prior to an investigation of the nature
of Calvino’s sixth memo, I would first like to justify the methodology of my inquiry in
order to demonstrate its applicability to this project’s search for Consistency.
The following three sections are lists of examples that validate my intentions
and process of analysis. They proceed in the following order: “Elements of Consistency
in Calvino’s Literary Essays,” “Elements of Consistency in Calvino’s Fiction,” and
“Elements of Consistency in Six Memos for the Next Millennium.”
First, allow me to present a quote that provides insight into Calvino’s vision for
writing and his emphasis on using primary documents over secondary documents. This
line is from Calvino’s 1980 essay entitled “Why Read the Classics?”:
“…No book, which discusses another book, can ever say more than the
original book under discussion.”3
Embracing the spirit of Calvino, I have relied heavily on my own notes and
readings of Calvino’s various works in order to better understand both the text and
Calvino himself. I used only a few secondary sources for assistance in placing
Calvino’s work within the context of his life and prominent world events. On an
important note, I have primarily focused on the English translations of Calvino’s words,
presuming that the integrity of his words were upheld by the translators who Calvino
entrusted with his work since I do not speak Italian.

3
Calvino, Italo. "Why Read the Classics?"(1980). Why Read the Classics? 5.

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Elements of Consistency in Calvino’s Literary Analysis Essays
Calvino begins “Multiplicity” with a quote from Carlo Emilio Gadda's novel
That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana (1946). He justifies his selection of Gadda
because he values Gadda’s perception and portrayal of the world as "a system of
systems...a knot, a tangled skein of yarn." However, this opening section deeply
resembles the opening of both Calvino's 1963 essay “The World is an Artichoke” as
well as his essay in 1984 “Carlo Emilio Gadda, 'The Pasticciaccio.”4
Similarly, the
emphasis on the Gadda's description of the stolen jewels in chapter nine of That Awful
Mess provided in Six Memos for the Next Millennium is emphasized almost identically
in Calvino’s 1984 essay “Carlo Emilio Gadda The Pasticciacco.” Similar uses and
references like the two presented above are scattered throughout Six Memos for the Next
Millennium, though these are definitely some of the most felicitous.
Elements from Calvino's Eugenio Montale essays (1976 and 1981), his Jorge
Luis Borges essay (1984), the essay on Francis Ponge (1979), the city as a novel in
Balzac (1973), knowledge as a dust-cloud in Stendhal (1980), the Book of Nature and
Galileo (1985), his essay on the Philosophy of Raymond Queneau (1981), Ludovico
Ariosto/Orlando Furioso essays (1974 and 1975), his essay on Cyrano and the moon
(1982), his essays on the mathematician Geralamo Cardano and Voltaire's Candide
(1976 and 1974 respectively), and his essay on Gustave Flaubert (1980) are all (among
others) utilized throughout all of the five memos contained in Six Memos for the Next
Millennium.

4
Calvino, Italo. “Multiplicity.” Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1985)."The World is an Artichoke.”
(1963) “Carlo Emilio Gadda, The Pisticciaccio.” (1984) Why Read the Classics? 197 & 207.

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Additionally, Calvino’s description of the most iconic scene in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses when Perseus creates a bed of seaweed and gently places the head of
the Medusa face down to protect it from the rough stone and the nymphs flock to it with
tiny plant matter to touch to the head and turn to coral an ornament themselves with—is
derived from Calvino’s 1979 essay “Ovid and Universal Contiguity.”5
More examples will be explained in Section II and Section III, but I feel that
those above have sufficed to demonstrate that Calvino is using his literary essays as
notes and references for Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Thus, I propose that hints,
elements, ideas and content for the sixth memo: “Consistency”, are also embedded
within these short literary analysis essays.
Elements of Consistency in Calvino’s Fiction
Calvino mentions nine of his own pieces of allegorical fiction thirteen times in
four sections of Six Memos for the Next Millennium: Italian Folktales (36),
Cosmicomics (49), Invisible Cities (49), and Mr. Palomar (49) are discussed in
“Quickness”; Invisible Cities (72-74) and Mr. Palomar (75) again in “Exactitude”, The
Cloven Viscount (88-89), The Baron in the Trees (88-89), The Nonexistent Knight (88-
89), Cosmicomics (89-90), and The Castle of Crossed Destinies (94) are considered in
“Visibility”, and If on a winter’s night a traveler (120) and The Castle of Crossed
Destinies (120) are examined in “Multiplicity”. Although Calvino does not reference
any of his own fiction in “Lightness” it is the section most densely packed with
references and allusions—all in all 28 different references explained and analyzed in

5
Calvino, Italo. "Ovid and Universal Contiguity." (1979). Why Read the Classics? 32.

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varying levels of detail—each dedicated to other prose writers, poets and work that he
admires.
These thirteen instances are very important because they are some of the few
times where Calvino reflects directly on his intentions, purpose and creation process of
his fictional pieces. Furthermore, Calvino has placed these nine works within his
lectures alongside the works of others he greatly admires and respects as examples of
his own utilization of the qualities highlighted in Six Memos for the Next Millennium. I
think it is justifiable to assume that Calvino would have identified elements of
“Consistency” in his own fiction as well and used a handful of examples.
Elements of Consistency in Six Memos for the Next Millennium
On a similar thread, Calvino alludes to memos to come in sections prior to their
formal introduction. For example, even in as early as “Lightness”, Calvino begins to
warm up the audience’s brain to the concept of multiplicity. He states:
“It is therefore not a dense, opaque melancholy, but a veil of minute
particles of humors and sensations, a fine dust of atoms, like everything
else that goes to make up the ultimate substance of the multiplicity of
things.”6
In “Quickness”, Calvino discusses how a magical object is often used in myth or
fiction as an outward sign that reveals the connection between people or between
events. He expands on this notion by saying:
“The moment an object appears in a narrative, it’s charged with a special
force and becomes like the pole of a magnetic field, a knot in the
network of invisible relationships.”7

6
Calvino, Italo. "Lightness." Six Memos for the Next Millennium. 20.
7
Calvino, Italo. "Quickness." Six Memos for the Next Millennium. 33.

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Here we see the symbol of the world as a knot that was discussed in the
beginning of “Multiplicity” and the reasoning for the selection of Gadda’s text 73 pages
before its introduction in connection with the fifth value.
The values selected ultimately reference, allude to, and depend on each other.
Each section contains some aspect of one or the other: Quickness can be seen as a tool
for rendering Lightness, or Quickness can be viewed as a form of Exactitude that
focuses on rhythm and order rather than image and calculated word selection, Lightness
comes from precision (read as Exactitude) and determination, the ability to create an
encyclopedic world in your writing that is manifold, complex and intertwined comes
from the use of various techniques and thought processes discussed in Lightness,
Quickness, Exactitude, and Visibility. Thus, because Six Memos for the Next
Millennium is such an entangled text, I propose that references and allusions to
Consistency also exist within the completed five lectures.

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Section II: Inquiry into the Nature of Consistency
Since I have already established that the text of Six Memos for the Next
Millennium is exceptionally dense, I have elected to adopt an inclusive and collective
tone for the second section of this project…
Our inquiry into consistency will require us to nimbly navigate back and forth
and then back again throughout Six Memos for the Next Millennium in order to
determine the certain qualities and aspects relevant to the value of consistency. We will
also need to search for elements that pertain to inconsistency, as well as to the nature of
the opposition between Consistency and Inconsistency since Calvino makes a point to
never establish a hierarchy between his chosen value and its antithesis. In fact, Calvino
intentionally establishes this position before he begins his lectures:
“I will devote my first lecture to the opposition between lightness and
weight, and will uphold the value of lightness. This does not mean that I
consider the virtues of weight any less compelling, but simply that I have
more to say about lightness.”8
Thus, we too will remain vigilant for elements relevant to Consistency and
Inconsistency as well as the nature of their opposition. Let us begin our inquiry into Six
Memos for the Next Millennium near the end of “Multiplicity.”
Calvino concludes his discussion of the encyclopedic novel and the unfinished
encyclopedic works of Carlo Emilio Gadda, Robert Musil, and Marcel Proust. Then he
returns to a discussion of the epic poems of Lucretius and Ovid and the idea of “a
system of infinite relationships between everything and everything else” found in both
De Rerum Natura and Metamorphoses (Six Memos, Calvino, 112). This is in order to
show that literature in our own times is attempting to realize an ancient desire to

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represent the multiplicity of relationships both in effect and potentiality reflected in both
Lucretius’ atomism and Ovid’s continuity of forms.
This thread of continually returning to the ancient Roman poets Lucretius and
Ovid connects all five completed memos from “Lightness” to “Multiplicity”. The
importance of these two thinkers even extends beyond Six Memos for the Next
Millennium to entirety of his work. In a 1985 interview, discussing his novel Mr.
Palomar, Calvino stated:
“I have two bedside books: Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura and Ovid’s
Metamorphoses. I would like everything I write to be related one or the
other, or better to both.”9
It is safe to assume that Ovid and Lucretius will play a significant role in the
formulation of the content of “Consistency” since they played a large role in the
formation of the other five memos. “Multiplicity” concludes—and thus “Consistency”
presumably begins—with Calvino’s final reference to Ovid and Lucretius. Calvino asks
the reader to consider the notion of a work conceived outside the self, a work that would
allow us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into other
selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language. He then asks:
“Was this not what Ovid was aiming at when he wrote about the
continuity of forms? And what Lucretius was aiming at when he
identified himself with that nature common to each and every thing?”10
Now to set aside Ovid and Lucretius until a later part of the argument, the
consideration of what a work conceived beyond the self would look like brings us back
to the original train of thought; back to the earlier part of “Multiplicity.” After Ovid
and Lucretius, Calvino advocates that the realm of literature remains the only field left

9
Weiss, Beno. “Conclusion: The Unredeeming Author: Mr. Palomar.” Understanding Italo Calvino.
210.
10
Calvino, Italo. "Multiplicity." Six Memos for the Next Millennium. 124.

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in which overambitious projects are not objected. He claims that literature remains alive
only if:
“We set ourselves immeasurable goals far beyond all hope of
achievement…the grand challenge of literature is to be capable of
weaving together the various branches of knowledge, the various
‘codes,’ into a manifold and multifaceted vision of the world.”11
Calvino then proceeds to talk about the encyclopedic books of both Mallarme
and Gustave Flaubert. Mallarme, whose poems Calvino believed succeeded in giving a
“crystalline form too nothingness” attempted to write the “Absolute Book,” as the
ultimate goal of the universe, though he ended up destroying the mysterious book
before it was ever completed; and Flaubert, who wanted to write a book about nothing
and then conversely, “devoted the last ten years of his life to the most encyclopedic
book ever written, Bouvard and Pecuchet.”12
For Calvino, knowledge is a multiplicity.
He mentions the idea of an open encyclopedia, a work that embraces the concept of a
totality that is potential, conjectural, and manifold. A text where:
“…Even if the overall design has been minutely planned, what matters is
not the enclosure of a work within a harmonious figure, but the
centrifugal force produced by it—a plurality of languages as a guarantee
of truth that is not merely partial.”13
With all of these concepts in mind, I would now like to designate the starting
point for our inquiry into the topic of Consistency. The allusion appears shortly after an
important transitional moment in “Multiplicity” when Calvino states:
“It is time to put a little order into the suggestions I have put forward as
examples of multiplicity.”14

11
12
Ibid. 113.
13
Ibid. 116-117.
14
Ibid. 117.

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This transition is indicated in three ways. First, the new text is physically
removed from the previous text above by a clear page break. Second, there is an
identifiable shift in Calvino’s tone as he regains control of the text and proposes a new
course of action for the text to come. And third, there is a change in content as the text
then proceeds according to the new direction established by the proposition. Promptly
following this transition we are given what I believe to be an allusion to the content of
“Consistency”:
“Among the values that I would like passed on to the next millennium,
there is above all: a literature that has absorbed the taste for mental
orderliness and exactitude, the intelligence of poetry, but at the same
time that of science and philosophy.”15
The exact placement of this text occurs on the 118th
page of Six Memos for the
Next Millennium, the contents of which have thus far introduced, explained, and
justified his personal selection of the first five memos: lightness, quickness, exactitude,
visibility, and multiplicity. Now, with less than six pages remaining, Calvino mentions,
but fails to name, a value that he places above all others: a literature that possesses
mental orderliness and exactitude, as well as the intelligence developed by the
convergence of poetic, philosophic, and scientific discourses. This is a transitional
tactic in which he shifts the trajectory of the text away from Multiplicity and toward the
content of Consistency.
Calvino implements a similar tactic near the conclusion of “Exactitude” in order
to foreshadow the proceeding content of “Visibility.” In his discussion of Leonardo da
Vinci Calvino explains the inventor’s struggle to accurately map the language of words
to the images he conjured in his imagination.

15
Calvino, Italo. "Multiplicity." Six Memos for the Next Millennium.118.

13
Calvino states that on folio 265 of the Codex of Atlanticus, Leonardo compiles
evidence to provide a theory for the growth of the earth. He provides examples of
buried cities found in the ground, marine fossils found in the mountains and in
particular a reference to certain bones that he supposes must have belonged to an
ancient sea monster. At this moment, da Vinci is taken by an imaginative vision of this
sea monster, and he turns the page upside down and tries to verbally capture the image
he has of the animal three different times. With each rewrite, da Vinci manipulates the
order of words, the selection of adjectives, and the rhythm of the lines. While
remaining relevant to his discussion of “Exactitude,” Calvino concludes this section
with Leonardo’s verbal pursuit of the cognitive apparition of the sea monster. This
allows Calvino to smoothly transition into “Visibility” which concerns an in depth
exploration of the source of mental images and the battle that poets and writers wage
with language in their ceaseless attempts to construct precise verbal reflections of their
imaginations.16
A similar transitional strategy occurs near the end of all of the five lectures. In
“Lightness,” Calvino purposely emphasizes his decision to follow a particular path that
corresponds to his vision for the proper use of words; then, in “Quickness” he explains
the importance of rhythmic ordering and structuring of words in sentences.17
In
“Quickness,” the necessity of a saturnine temperament and the craftsmanship of Vulcan
in order to document the aerial flight of Mercury correspond to the three key aspects of
Exactitude and the symbol of the crystal.18
Similarly, “Visibility” ends by embracing

16
Calvino, Italo. "Exactitude." Six Memos for the Next Millennium. 79-80.
17
18
Calvino, Italo. "Exactitude." Six Memos for the Next Millennium. 52-53, 55, 70.

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the possibilities of Multiplicity; exposing the written word as a form in which all
realities and fantasies are composed of the same verbal material like “grains of sand on
a surface that is always the same and always different—dunes shifted by the desert
wind.”19
Thus, I believe that allusions to the content of “Consistency” exist within
“Multiplicity” and this value he introduces and places “above all” is in fact an allusion
to the content of Calvino’s sixth memo.20
Since Calvino’s widow, Esther, has clarified
that Calvino intended to call the sixth memo: “Consistency”, we will proceed under the
assumption that the value Calvino is referring to is most likely Consistency.
Furthermore, as in the previous memos, I believe that the text that follows this allusion
is incredibly relevant to the nature of Consistency. We will return to multiplicity and
the content of the text that follows this allusion, but first I would like to move our
inquiry to the discussion of Exactitude since we know now that we must consider
exactitude, mental orderliness and the intelligence of poetry science, and philosophy
relevant components of “Consistency”.
For Calvino, Exactitude means three things:
1) “A well-defined and well-calculated plan for the work in question;
2) An evocation of clear, incisive, memorable images;
3) A language as precise as possible both in choice of words and in
expression of the subtleties of thought and imagination”21
He feels compelled to emphasize these aspects of Exactitude as a response to his
hypersensitivity toward the mistreatment and misuse of words and images in modern
language and media. Calvino observes that language is being used frivolously—in a

19
Calvino, Italo. "Visibility." Six Memos for the Next Millennium. 99.
20
Calvino, Italo. "Multiplicity." Six Memos for the Next Millennium.118.
21

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random, approximate, and careless manner. It has become a generic, automated, and
anonymous expression that has both diluted the meaning of words and revealed in
humans, a blatant lack of cognition. No doubt for Calvino, politics, ideology,
bureaucratic uniformity, the monotony of mass media, and school culture have
contributed to this pestilence that plagues humanity’s most distinctive faculty—the use
of words. However, he believes that a literature with an emphasis on precision
possesses the capacity to battle this blight and potentially become a form of media that
can “transform the world into images and multiply it by means of the phantasmagoric
mirrors.”22
Calvino’s memo on Exactitude begins with a discussion of its antithesis,
emphasized by the poet Giacomo Leopardi, who maintained that the more vague and
imprecise language is, the more poetic it becomes. Calvino explains that in Italian, the
word vago (vague) also means “lovely, attractive” and is associated with uncertainty
and indefiniteness as well as with gracefulness and pleasure. However, this discussion
of Leopardi’s argument for the poetic value of vagueness quickly shifts into an
explanation of the indefinite. For Leopardi:
“The words ‘faraway’, ‘ancient’, and similar words are highly poetic and
pleasurable because the evoke vast, indefinite ideas…The words ‘night’,
‘nocturnal’, and other descriptions of the night are highly poetic because,
as night makes objects blurred, the mind receives only a vague,
indistinct, and incomplete images of night, itself, and what it contains.
Thus the same is true of ‘darkness’ and ‘deep’.”23
Calvino demonstrates Leopardi’s passion for the indefinite in a large excerpt
from the Zibaldone, in which Giacomo lists a number of situations that for him spark an

22
Calvino, Italo. "Exactitude." Six Memos for the Next Millennium. 57.
23
Ibid. 58.

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indefinite state of mind. They include the exposure to light, directly or refractory, from
an unknown source or through an indeterminate medium, places and times where and
when light and shadow intermingle, and other situations or occurrences that stimulate
our perception in a way that it uncertain, indistinct, incomplete, or out of the ordinary.
However, Calvino uses the thread of Leopardi’s conception of vagueness to unravel the
argument in favor of Exactitude. For Calvino, the expression of the vague and
indefinite requires:
“A highly exact and meticulous attention to the composition of each
image, the minute definition of details, to the choice of objects, to the
lighting and the atmosphere, all in order to attain the desired degree of
vagueness.”24
Thus, Calvino believes that he has exposed that Leopardi, the poet of vagueness,
is actually the poet of Exactitude, he who utilizes precision in order to grasp and
verbalize the subtlest perceptions of the world. The search for expression of the
indefinite becomes the observation of all that is minute and multifaceted. It requires a
Lucretian conception of the universe. We should note that here, Calvino is already
hinting at the role of Multiplicity and its connection to Exactitude. The need for
Exactitude is a response to the manifold nature of a knowledge derived from an
atomistic conception of the universe—one composed of multiple, invisible particles
moving, colliding, and deviating from their trajectories.25
Calvino continues to explore Leopardi’s fascination with vagueness and his
famous argument for the difference between the infinite and the indefinite. Leopardi
regards the infinite as an absolute and believes that what we really value in the infinite

24
25
Lucretius. “Book II: The Dance of Atoms.” The Nature of Things. 37.

17
is its vastness and we project our own desires into it. However, since we cannot
conceive of the absolute nature of the infinite, we must settle for the indefinite which is
only an illusionary impression of time and space. Calvino sees this problem as a
speculative and metaphysical one concerning the relationship between the idea of
infinity as absolute space and absolute time and our empirical knowledge of space and
time. Leopardi begins with the rigorous abstraction of a mathematical notion of space
and time, and compares this with the vague, undefined flux of sensations.26
This is the first instance in which Calvino begins to define the two diverging
paths –each in correspondence with a particular type of knowledge—that dominate the
rest of the discourse contained in “Exactitude.” The paths are deliberately defined as
follows:
“One path goes into the mental space of bodiless rationality, where one
may trace lines that converge, projections, abstract forms, and vectors of
force. The other path goes through a space crammed with objects and
attempts to create a verbal equivalent of that space by filling the page
with words, involving a most careful, painstaking effort to adapt what is
written to what is not written, the sum of what is sayable and not
sayable.”27
In “Exactitude,” Paul Valery exemplifies the first path when he puts his
Monsieur Teste face to face with pain, making him combat the physical suffering with
an exercise in “abstract geometry.”28
The Monsieur Teste counts the tenths of seconds
to which each sensation of pain occurs and he divides the regions of his body into
different sectors, each with its own level and type of pain. He tries to shift his attention
away from the uncomfortable sensation to some meaningless mathematical task like
counting grains of sand, but the pain forces him to pay attention, and in observing and

26
27
Ibid. 74.
28
Ibid. 65.

18
geometrically analyzing the pain he is able to can derive something from it.
Conversely, the second path can be seen in Leopardi’s poetry; he demonstrates
Exactitude in the highest degree when he meticulously describes all of the indefinite
sensations that give him pleasure.29
Furthermore, both pathways are simultaneously embodied in the protagonist of
Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. Ulrich exists as a finite being with the
intellectual habits and temperament of Exactitude. Thus he operates as a paradoxical
combination of precision and indefiniteness, constantly oscillating between the poles of
exactitude and lack of definition. The French essayist Paul Valery in his analysis of
Edgar Allan Poe observes the same paradoxical combinations. In Poe he sees:
“The demon of lucidity, the genius of analysis, and the inventor of the
newest, most seductive combinations of logic and imagination, of
mysticism and calculation; the psychologist of the exceptional; the
literary engineer who studied and utilized all the resources of art.”30
This use of paradoxical combinations is strictly Calvinoesque. In fact,
the structure of each memo strives to blend together a selected value with its antithesis,
usually in a complementary and combinatory way. In “Exactitude” this is evident in
Calvino’s use of Leopardi’s poetic philosophy. Calvino used Leopardi’s avocation for
vagueness to support his own vision of Exactitude. In “Lightness,” Calvino implements
the concept of weight; since for him, Lightness goes with precision and determination,
along with the individual weighing of each word.31
Dante for example, tries to give
language the weight, density, and concreteness of things, bodies and sensations.

29
Ibid. 65-66.
30
31

19
Additionally, Visibility attempts to tap into the opaque realm of the imagination in order
to verbally convey the invisible images conjured in the imagination.
This inquiry into the infinite changes the trajectory of Calvino’s discussion of
Exactitude and the course of the following lectures. In the very beginning of
“Exactitude,” Calvino defines three key aspects of Exactitude and proceeds under the
pretense that he is going to then explain and exemplify those elements. However, the
text swiftly moves off course, away from Exactitude and into the realm of vagueness,
where Calvino reveals that vagueness and indefiniteness are actually the products of the
precision associated with Exactitude. Yet, Calvino remains unable to return to the
original path as deviation into vagueness leads to the topics of the indefinite, which in
turn leads Calvino to another discussion of the infinite and the role of cosmogony in
literature. The two paths of Exactitude take Calvino into Both infinitely vast mental
spaces and into the infinitesimal spaces preoccupied with the details of the details of the
details. Even Calvino admits that his discussion has wondered off topic:
“This talk is refusing to be led in the direction I set myself. I began
speaking of exactitude, not of the infinite and the cosmos.”32
However, this is not the first time that Calvino has gone off-track in his lectures.
Near the conclusion of “Lightness,” Calvino identifies four different threads that he has
already introduced thus far in lightness. The first thread is the one that connects the
moon, Leopardi, Newton, gravitation and levitation. The second is the thread of
Lucretius, atomism, Cavalcanti’s philosophy of love, Renaissance magic, and Cyrano.
The third thread is that of writing as a metaphor of the “powder-fine substance of the
world”—this idea not only stems from Lucretian atomism, but also is discussed at great

32

20
length in his 1980 essay titled “Knowledge as a Dust-cloud in Stendhal.”33
For
Lucretius, letters were like atoms in continual motion, creating the most diverse words
and sounds through their collisions, connections and dispersions. This third thread is a
notion taken up by a long tradition of thinkers including Galileo and Leibniz; thinkers
who believed that the world’s secrets were contained in the combinatoria of the signs
used in writing—this particular notion is thoroughly explored and explained in
Calvino’s 1985 essay titled “The Book of Nature in Galileo.”34
Calvino then asks:
“But which thread should I pull on to find the end in my hand?”
Before he introduces a fourth thread, he pauses in order to inform the reader that
he does not intend to follow any of these three paths for two particular reasons. The
first reason is that he is concerned that a pursuit of these three intellectual threads will
lead to all too obvious conclusions: that of writing as a model for every process of
reality and potentially the only reality we can know. Calvino is also fearful that
proceeding in the direction of either of these paths will take him too far away from the
use of words as he understands it—words as the perpetual pursuit of things, as a
perpetual adjustment to their infinite variety.35
He then reveals the fourth thread, the
one that he claims he intends to pursue. This literature as a search for knowledge and
literature as an existential function: the search for lightness as a reaction to the weight
of living. However, as Six Memos for the Next Millennium develops, the pursuit of this
fourth thread demands that Calvino engage all of the intellectual threads he originally
assured his reader would not stray into.

33
Calvino, Italo. "Knowledge as a Dust-cloud in Stendhal."(1980) .Why Read the Classics? 119.
34
Calvino, Italo. "Book of Nature in Galileo." (1985). Why Read the Classics? 83.
35

21
With regards to the topics contained within the first thread, we should note that
levitation appears in the discussion of the existential function of literature carries him to
the anthropological topic of the link between the levitation desired and the privation
actually suffered.36
We have already discussed at length the topic of Giacomo Leopardi
in “Exactitude.”37
The topic of the moon and gravitation are explored in “Visibility”
when Calvino explains that the inspiration for his most surrealistic story in
Cosmicomics—“The Distance of the Moon”—came from reading certain theories on
gravitational physics.38
Similarly, elements of the second thread become topics of discussion later in the
text as well. In the beginning of “Quickness,” Calvino discusses the legend of
Charlemagne’s love for a German girl, but the specific topic of the discussion revolves
around an analysis of a magical ring, the properties of which vary between different
Renaissance writers.39
Furthermore, Lucretius and Ovid are arguably the biggest
inspirational threads that weave themselves throughout the entirety of Calvino’s work.
Both poets are the first introduced and the last referenced in Six Memos for the Next
Millennium. Ovid and Lucretius share at least twelve references in Six Memos for the
Next Millennium alone. Recall the quote previously mentioned from the1985 interview
with Calvino:
“I have two bedside books: Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura and Ovid’s
Metamorphoses. I would like everything I write to be related one or the
other, or better to both.”40

36
Ibid. 27
37
38
39
Calvino, Italo. "Quickness." Six Memos for the Next Millennium.31-34.
40
Weiss, Beno, “Conclusion: The Unredeeming Author: Mr. Palomar.” Understanding Italo Calvino.
210.

22
The focus of the third thread: writing as a metaphor of the powder-fine
substance of the world is analogous to Calvino’s understanding of the objective of the
encyclopedic novel, particularly Gadda’s in which the world becomes a “system of
systems” and Proust’s in which everything dissolves into abstraction (Six Memos, 105-
106). Although Calvino wanted to avoid the conclusion of “writing as a model for
every process in reality”, he ultimately comes to embrace the conclusion at the very end
of “Visibility.” He states:
“All ‘realities’ and ‘fantasies’ can take on form only by means of
writing, in which outwardness and innerness, the world and I, experience
and fantasy, appear composed of the same verbal material. The
polymorphic visions of the eyes and the spirit are contained within the
uniform lines of small or capital letters, periods, commas, parentheses—
pages of signs, packed as closely together as grains of sand, representing
the many-colored spectacle of the world on a surface that is always the
same and always different, like dunes shifted by the desert wind.”41
Calvino appears to be purposefully and strategically stepping outside of his own
text in order to evaluate it alongside the reader and present the appearance of a text that
develops organically rather than from the outline held in the reader’s hand. As we read
Six Memos for the Next Millennium, we develop the impression that Calvino is
wandering through the text with us, uncertain himself as to where the next line will
lead. The fourth thread of “Lightness” transfers into “Quickness” where an abundance
of new threads are introduced, followed, and connected in various ways. The text reads
like a thoughtful discussion that seems grows and changes as we read on. However,
Calvino does remain steadfast to his promise to stay relevant to the use of words, as he

41

23
understands it—“words as a perpetual pursuit of things, as a perpetual adjustment to
their infinite variety.”42
This is perhaps the most important common thread that connects the five written
memos. “Quickness” is charged with the difficult task of creating verbal equivalents of
mental speed in text.43
“Visibility” focuses on creating verbal equivalents of mental
images in text.44
“Multiplicity” is concerned with encyclopedic texts that contain verbal
equivalencies of the complex, manifold, and dynamic world in which we live.45
And
“Exactitude”, attempts to do exactly what Calvino set out in “Lightness.” Recall that
“Exactitude” begins with the intention of creating precise verbal equivalents for things
and images.46
However, as Calvino feigns obliviousness to the direction of the text, the
reader has no choice but to wander off the designated path of “Exactitude” and
necessarily get lost in the concept of the infinite with Calvino. And it is precisely the
impression of this unintended deviation from the path that dictates the direction of the
following two memos: “Visibility” and “Multiplicity”, and presumably “Consistency”.
The departure from the presented trajectory of the lecture begins here:
“…Rather than speak to you of what I have written, perhaps it would be
more interesting to tell you about the problems that I have not yet
resolved, that I don’t know how to resolve, and what these will cause me
to write…”47
And so, the reader must follow the new route established for the written text by
the unreliable narrator, even though we now that that the following sections are already

42
43
44
45
46
47
Ibid. 68.

24
written and contained within the book held in our hands. The new discussion continues
to explore the two diverging paths of Exactitude. Recall:
“One path goes into the mental space of bodiless rationality, where one
may trace lines that converge, projections, abstract forms, and vectors of
force. The other path goes through a space crammed with objects and
attempts to create a verbal equivalent of that space by filling the page
with words, involving a most careful, painstaking effort to adapt what is
written to what is not written, the sum of what is sayable and not
sayable.”48
Both of these diverging paths fail to satisfactorily resolve the main thread of Six
Memos for the Next Millennium, that is, the use of language according to Calvino. The
first path fails because “natural” languages always seem to say something more than
formalized languages can, and the second path fails because in representing the density
and continuity of the world around us, language is revealed as defective and
fragmentary, always saying something less with respect to the sum of what can be
experienced. In order to combat this Calvino continually switches back and forth
between the two trying to fully explore one and then rushing across and trying to fully
explore the other. This explains Calvino’s attempts to alternate between the emphasis
on structure or on description in his fiction.49
However, even this strategy remains insufficient. In fact, Calvino spends the
rest of “Exactitude” describing examples of exemplary thinkers who waged a similar
“battle with language.” He mentions Gustave Flaubert in accordance to the second path
of Exactitude who claims in favor of description “the good god is in the details.”50
Eugenio Montale’s “L’anguilla”—the poem consisting of a very long sentence in the
shape of an eel following the entire life of the eel—can be viewed as upholding the

48
Ibid. 74.
49
50
Ibid. 69.

25
second pathway as well. Alternatively, Calvino examines Mallarme’s work in which
the word attains the highest degree of Exactitude through abstraction. Finally, he
describes Francis Ponge’s The Purpose of Things and associates his Lucretian style with
the second path of Exactitude.
“Exactitude” concludes with the previously discussed anecdote of Leonardo da
Vinci’s struggle to properly map words to both things and the images in his head, but
the battle remains unresolved. Thus “Exactitude” fails to adequately demonstrate and
explain two of the three defining aspects within its section.
While Calvino explains the necessity of Exactitude in response to the current
state of language, the majority of his memo steers off course onto the topic of the
infinite and examples of the “battle with language.”51
Elements of the third aspect of
Exactitude are covered throughout the entirety of the text—“Lightness” emphasizes the
individual weighing of words, “Quickness” involves the ordering of words and the
proper representation of the speed of mental thoughts, “Visibility” discusses expressing
the subtleties of the imagination, and “Multiplicity” attempts to express the complexity
of the world with words. In “Exactitude,” Calvino repeats his emphasis on the proper
use of language—one that enables us to approach things (present or absent) with
discretion, attention, and caution, with respect for what things (present or absent)
communicate without words.52
Although the second aspect of exactitude is touched on
in a transitional moment at the end of the memo, its discussion is explored in greater
depth in “Visibility”. And finally, an explanation for the first aspect of exactitude never
comes to fruition throughout the entirety Six Memos for the Next Millennium.

51
Ibid. 77.
52
Ibid.

26
There is however, a distinct moment in “Exactitude” where Calvino admits that
his lecture is veering of track and discloses his original intentions for the discussion of
exactitude. Before moving forward with his explanation into the infinite Calvino
discusses the original trajectory of “Exactitude”:
“This talk is refusing to be led in the direction I set myself. I began by
speaking of exactitude, not of the infinite and the cosmos. I wanted to
tell you of my fondness for geometrical forms, for symmetries, for
numerical series, for all that is combinatory, for numerical proportions; I
wanted to explain the things I had written in terms of my fidelity to the
idea of limits, of measure…But perhaps it is precisely this idea of forms
that evokes the idea of the endless: the sequence of whole numbers,
Euclid’s straight lines…Rather than speak to you of what I have written,
perhaps it would be more interesting to tell you about the problems that I
have not yet resolved, that I don’t know how to resolve, and what these
will cause me to write:”53
I believe that this is the second allusion to the nature of the content of
“Consistency”. I realize that it has taken some time to arrive at the second allusion;
however, I felt that broader understanding of the topics covered throughout Six Memos
for the Next Millennium and a particular focus on the aspects of Exactitude addressed
throughout the text was necessary to reveal that elements of Exactitude are not
completely discussed. For example: “a well-defined and well-calculated plan for the
work in question.” Additionally, this unexplored avenue of Exactitude pairs nicely with
our first allusion to Consistency, that is, a literature that has absorbed the taste for
mental orderliness and Exactitude, the intelligence of poetry, but at the same time that
of science and philosophy.
Before continuing, I would first like to address a potential criticism a thoughtful
reader may have regarding my proposition of this excerpt as relevant to the content of

53

27
“Consistency”—Why would consistency include the discussion of a topic that Calvino
explicitly states he does not intend to cover? Ordinarily I would agree with this
analysis. However, Calvino has already revealed himself as an unreliable source for the
content of his text. Recall the examination of the four threads in his section on
Lightness. Calvino explicitly states that he will no longer follow three of the
established threads, yet the text ends up discussing elements of each thread as it
develops into other memos. Calvino is masterful at creating the illusion of a new
trajectory, while secretly following his own within the course of Six Memos for the Next
Millennium. Although he never truthfully discloses the avenues his lectures will follow,
he rarely introduces a concept without exploring it.
Furthermore, the content of this excerpt lines up almost directly with the
transitional moment discussed at the end of “Multiplicity” when Calvino is presumably
preparing the reader for the sixth memo. At the point in “Exactitude” in which Calvino
alludes to the nature of Consistency, he shifts trajectory and takes off in the pursuit of
the explanation of the infinite. The concept for his two diverging paths of Exactitude
emerges from his own personal struggles with writing. Calvino explains:
“Sometimes I try to concentrate on the story I would like to right, and
realize that what interests me is something else entirely or, rather, not
anything precise but everything that does not fit in with what I ought to
write—the relationship between a given argument and all its possible
variants and alternatives, everything that can happen in time and space.
This is a devouring and destructive obsession, which is enough to render
writing impossible. In order to combat it, I try to limit the field of what I
have to say, divide it into still more limited fields, then subdivide these
again and so on and on. Then another type of vertigo seizes me, that of
detail of the detail of the detail, and I am drawn into the infinitesimal, the
infinitely small, just as I was previously lost in the infinitely vast.”54

54

28
This devouring obsession with infinite variants and the pursuit of both the
infinite and the infinitesimal corresponds to two other writers with a prominent place in
“Multiplicity”—Robert Musil and Carlo Emilio Gadda. The first branch of Exactitude
embraces Musil’s own philosophical attempt to step beyond the borders of a particular
system in order to objectively assess and describe the infinite relationships and
interactions between the things contained within.55
For Calvino, this side of the path
concerns the reduction of secondary events into abstract patterns according to which
one can carry out operations and repeatedly demonstrate applicable theorems. It
corresponds to a particular type of knowledge for both Musil and Calvino; one that
“goes into the mental space of bodiless rationality, where it may trace lines that
converge, projections, abstract forms, and vectors of force.”56
For both writers, this
branch is concerned with determining mathematical understandings of relations in the
world.
Conversely, Calvino’s second branch is comparable to Gadda’s approach to the
novel as an encyclopedia, or a method of knowledge that reveals the world as a network
of connections between events, people, and things.57
Like Gadda’s encyclopedism
which requires him to meticulously describe everything precisely in both space and
time, Calvino’s second branch concerns the effect made by words to present the
tangible aspect of things as precisely as possible. This path goes through a “space
crammed with objects and attempts to create a verbal equivalent of that space by filling
the page with words…a painstaking effort to adapt what is written to what is not

55
56
57

29
written.”58
Both Gadda and Calvino attempt to exploit the semantic potential of words
in all varieties of their verbal and syntactical forms in order to map language to reality
as completely as possible.
Yet both Musil and Gadda fail to complete their encyclopedic novels. For
Musil, the structure of a novel continuously changes and thus, can never be completed;
and for Gadda, the outline of the novel is lost when descriptions of every single detail
proliferate in his attempt to fill up the entire picture of the world. Similarly, Calvino
states that both of his own paths toward exactitude will never attain fulfillment, the first
because “natural” languages always say something more than formalized languages can,
and the other because in representing the density and continuity of the world around us,
language is revealed as fragmentary—always saying something less with respect to the
sum of what can be experienced.59
The unfinished encyclopedic works of Musil, Gadda, and Proust—for whom the
density of the world expanded until it could no longer be grasped—exemplify the
devouring obsessions mentioned in exactitude that make writing impossible for
Calvino.60
The two engineer-writers and the French Novelist uniquely epitomize the
battle with language that stems from the use of language established by Calvino in
“Lightness”, explored in “Quickness”, expanded upon in “Exactitude,” and then
continued through “Visibility” and into “Multiplicity.” This establishes a connection
between the original content for “Exactitude” mentioned before the discussion of the
infinite continues and the content of “Multiplicity.” The problem of the two divergent

58
59
60
Calvino, Italo. "Exactitude.” “Multiplicty." Six Memos for the Next Millennium. 68 & 111.

30
paths has been strung along from “Exactitude” through “Visibility” and into
“Multiplicity.”
In an attempt to put a little order into the suggestions that Calvino has put
forward for Multiplicity, he divides exemplary works into four categories. The first
Calvino calls the “unified text”, a text written as the expression of a single voice, but
reveals itself as open to interpretation on several levels. He uses the example of Alfred
Jarry’s L’amour absolu (1899), a fifty-page novel that can be read as three completely
different stories. Second, Calvino introduces the concept of a “manifold text”, one that
replaces the oneness of thinking “I” with a multiplicity of subjects, voices, and views of
the world. These texts are referred to as “polyphonic” or “carnivalesque” and traces
their roots from Plato’s dialogues and can be exemplified by Dostoevsky’s Brothers
Karamazov. There is another type of work that, like Gadda and Musil, attempts to
contain everything possible, but fails to take form, create outlines for itself, and thus
remains incomplete by its very nature.61
The fourth type of work is a literature that corresponds to the philosophy of
“nonsystematic thought, which proceeds by aphorisms, sudden discontinuous flashes of
light.”62
The essayist Paul Valery’s prose epitomizes this fourth type of literature.
Valery emphasizes the need for a philosophy that is portable and admits that he is on a
continuous search for what he calls a “Total phenomenon” in writing that is:
“The Totality of conscience, relations, conditions, and impossibilities;
(Cahiers, XII. 722)”63

61
Calvino, Italo. "Multiplicity." Six Memos for the Next Millennium. 117-118.
62
Ibid. 118.
63
Ibid.

31
Valery’s quest sparks the first allusion to Consistency, that of “a literature that
has absorbed the taste for mental orderliness and exactitude, and the intelligence of
poetry, but at the same time that of science and philosophy.”64
It is at this moment in
Six Memos for the Next Millennium that the elements of the second allusion to
Consistency in “Exactitude” and the first allusion in “Multiplicity” align. Calvino
finally connects the necessary tangent of his inquiry into the infinite back to his original
proposal for the requirements of Exactitude through his elaboration of the battle of
language in “Exactitude”, “Visibility”, and “Multiplicity.” However, it is the content
that he chooses to conclude “Multiplicity” with that ultimately exposes his return to the
original content of “Exactitude” and reveals a connection to the second allusion to
“Consistency.”
I believe that in the last few pages of “Multiplicity” Calvino introduces the
concept of the hypernovel as a key component of the first aspect of Exactitude—“a
well-defined and well calculated plan for the work in question”—and as a potential
resolution to the two diverging paths of exactitude and the failures of Musil, Gadda, and
Proust. The discussion of the hypernovel also simultaneously picks up the where the
text first diverged in “Exactitude” by introducing Georges Perec’s novel Life,
Directions for use, and using the philosophy of Raymond Queneau to emphasize the
importance of implementing rules and constraints when writing. Calvino even begins to
discuss his fondness for geometrical forms and all that is combinatory in his own works,
citing both If on a winter’s night a traveler and The Castle of Crossed Destinies as
examples of the hypernovel.

64
Ibid

32
We know that Six Memos for the Next Millennium is an unfinished text and was
intentionally written to be read by Calvino as a series of six lectures at Harvard
University. We also know that Calvino died before he wrote “Consistency”, although it
is likely that he had definite outline for the final section of his six lecture series.
Although I have only directly cited two distinct allusions that will provide partial
explanations for the nature of Consistency, we have actually spent a large amount of
textual analysis breaking down key aspects of Six Memos for the Next Millennium and
deciphering the common threads that weave the five written memos together. We have
used our first allusion to justify our search for the second, but the second allusion has in
turn justified our original assumption that there existed a transitional point in
“Multiplicity” that contained hints to the elements of “Consistency.” Thus, we must
regard the content that concludes the section of “Multiplicity” as relevant to
Consistency because it is relevant to our excerpt from “Exactitude”. Thus, in actuality,
we have determined two allusions AND all of the common threads that wind throughout
the progression of the memos AND Calvino’s explanation of his fondness for Jorge
Luis Borges, his reasoning for keeping his writing short, the concept of the hypernovel,
If on a winter’s night a traveler, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, his discussion of
Georges Perec’s novel and the use of rules, Raymond Queneau’s philosophy that
suggests that the imposition of rules creates more freedom in writing, Lucretius and
Ovid AND Calvino’s avocation for the creation of a novel that is conceived from
outside the self.65

65

33
After reflecting on our inquiry into the nature of the content of “Consistency,” I
have compiled eight requirements that we have determined must categorize
Consistency.
1. Consistency must briefly discuss its antithesis—inconsistency—and the
nature of their opposition.66
2. Consistency must pertain to the ultimate thread of Six Memos: the use of
words according to Calvino. The proper use of language as:
“…The perpetual pursuit of things, the perpetual adjustment of words to
the infinite variety of things.”67
“…One that enables us to approach things (present or absent) with
discretion, attention, and caution, with respect for what things (present or
absent) communicate without words.”68
3. Consistency must involve Calvino’s fondness for geometrical forms,
symmetries, numerical series, all that is combinatory, numerical
proportions.69
4. Consistency must address Calvino’s fidelity to the idea of limits,
constraints, and rules.70
5. Consistency must resolve the battle with language and the failure of
Calvino’s two divergent paths of exactitude as well as other failed
encyclopedic novels.71
6. Consistency must relate to mental orderliness, exactitude, and the
intelligence of poetry, science, and philosophy.72
7. Consistency must include the topic of the Hypernovel with an
explanation of examples like If on a winter’s night a traveler, The Castle
of Crossed Destinies, and Georges Perec’s Life, Directions For Use.73

66
67
Ibid. 26.
68
69
Ibid. 68.
70
Calvino, Italo. "Introduction." “Exactitude.” “Multiplicity.” Six Memos for the Next Millennium. 68,
121-123.
71
Calvino, Italo. "Exactitude." “Multiplicity.” Six Memos for the Next Millennium. 75, 110-112.
72
73
Ibid. 120-122.

34
8. Consistency must relate to Lucretius and Ovid, as well as Calvino’s final
proposition regarding the composition of an objective work conceived
outside the self and beyond the individual ego.74

74
Ibid. 124.

35
Section III: Proposal for the Content of Consistency, Including Likely
Topics of Discussion
In September of 1967, Calvino submitted an essay titled “Philosophy and
Literature” to the Times Literary Supplement (in a special issue entitled
“Crosscurrents”). The essay begins very concisely with this line: “Philosophy and
literature are embattled adversaries.”75
Calvino’s assertion stems from his conception of
the dueling nature of the two opposing disciplines. He believes that philosophy
attempts to see through the opaqueness of the world in order to reduce the variety of all
things to a network of relationships between general ideas and to establish fixed rules
according to which a finite amount of things move within a system, in a potentially
infinite number of combinations. Conversely, literature replaces these abstractions with
specifics; it focuses on particulars rather than generalities and consequently emphasizes
the expansion of content within a text rather than its reduction. Calvino properly
exemplifies this disparity between the two disciplines with the inclusion of an
explanatory metaphor pertaining to the game of chess.76
In philosophy, the finite numbers of generic pawns exhaust a number of
combinations that may be infinite, but in literature, “abstract chessmen are replaced
with kings and queens, knights and castles, all with a name, a particular shape, and a
series of attributes royal, equine, ecclesiastical; instead of a chessboard they roll out
great dusty battlefields or stormy seas.”77

75
Calvino, Italo. "Philosophy and Literature." (1967). The Literature Machine. 39.
76
Ibid
77
Ibid. 39-40.

36
The game of chess is a prominent theme in Calvino’s literature and essays;
Invisible Cities, Cybernetics and Ghosts, and Six Memos for the Next Millennium all
utilize analogies involving chess. In “Exactitude” of Six Memos for the Next
Millennium, Calvino references a passage in Invisible Cities (1972) in which Kublai
Khan—“who personifies the intellectual tendency toward rationalization, geometry, and
algebra”—reduces the knowledge of his empire to the combination of pieces and their
movements on a chessboard.78
Kublai represents the cities Marco Polo describes in
great detail with the various arrangements of chess pieces on the black and white
squares of a chessboard.79
The repetition of this particular theme likely corresponds to
Calvino’s fondness for the vast number of potential outcomes that can be derived from
the combinatorial play of a small number of basic elements, for as he states “no chess
player will ever live long enough to exhaust all the combinations of possible moves for
the thirty-two pieces on the chessboard.”80
Calvino believes that the literary writer upsets the rules of the philosopher’s
game and in turn, reveals a new order of things quite different from their original
suppositions; however, this overhaul of the system prompts the philosopher to again,
seek out and determine the new rules of the game and then attempt to demonstrate that
the manipulative operations implemented by the literary writer can still be reduced to a
set of philosophical operations. And so it goes, perpetual games of hide and seek,
currently treated like a war of disciplines. Philosophy and literature remain locked in
this bitter confrontation with both sides unable to approach and grapple with the subject

78
79
Calvino, Italo. ". . . . .." Invisible Cities. 131-132.
80
Calvino, Italo. "Cybernetics and Ghosts." (19670. The Literature Machine. 8.

37
of the opposition. For example, a literature that attempts to compete with philosophy by
launching its characters into profound debates and circumstances is unable to
completely shed the gravity of the habitual thoughts and humanity of everyday life, and
thus fails to adequately permeate into the layer of abstraction that philosophers
occupy.81
Similarly, when philosophy is “too fully clothed in human flesh, too sensitive
to the immediate, lived experience” it is a less exciting challenge for literature than
when it engages in the abstraction of metaphysics and pure logic.82
Favor toward one discipline over the other wavers back and forth, with each
side confident that it has outmaneuvered the other in its own quest for truth, while
simultaneously remaining aware that “the raw material of its own constructions is the
same of that of the opposition: words.”83
For Calvino, words are like crystals. Before
talking about words, I would first like to briefly talk about Calvino and crystals.
The crystal is another recurring icon that appears throughout Calvino’s work. In
“Exactitude,” the emblem of the crystal is cherished as a model for perfection—
especially since the discovery that certain properties of the birth and growth of crystals
resemble those of the most basic biological creatures, establishing a kind of bridge
between the mineral world and living matter. Calvino also values it as a form of perfect
beauty, a representation of growth in time, and the expenditure of the matter that
surrounds it. The discussion of the crystal as a sigil for Calvino’s writing directly
proceeds the short explanations of Jorge Luis Borges’ famous invective against the
infinite in Avatars of the Tortoise, Paolo Zellini’s Short History of the Infinite, the

81
Calvino, Italo. "Philosophy and Literature.” (1967).The Literature Machine.
82
Ibid. 41.
83
Ibid. 40

38
philosophy of Giordano Bruno concerning his conception of the infinite as the
composition of infinite finites, a short explanation of Gustave Flaubert’s emphasis on
the details. These follow two vertigos that seize Calvino and leave him adrift in the
impossibilities of writing: the concepts of the infinitely vast and of the infinitely small,
and Calvino’s admission that:
“This talk is refusing to be led in the direction I set myself. I began by
speaking of exactitude, not of the infinite and the cosmos. I wanted to
tell you of my fondness for geometrical forms, for symmetries, for
numerical series, for all that is combinatory, for numerical proportions; I
wanted to explain the things I had written in terms of my fidelity to the
idea of limits, of measure…”84
Calvino believes that there is an inherent bond between the formal choices of
literature and the need for a cosmological model or general mythical framework even in
writers who do not explicitly declare it. Furthermore, he asserts that this inclination
toward geometrical composition and order is imbedded in a long history of world
literature, but is also a reactionary consequence of the contrast of order and disorder
fundamental to contemporary science. He states that in science:
“The world disintegrates into a cloud of heat, it falls inevitably into a
vortex of entropy, but within this irreverent process there may be areas
of order, portions of the existent that tend toward a form, privileged
points in which we seem to discern a design or perspective.”85
For Calvino, literature is one of these minimal portions in which the existent
“crystallizes into a form” and acquires a meaning that is not fixed, definitive, or
hardened into a mineral immobility, but alive as an organism.86
As a partisan and
advocate of the crystal, Calvino uses this symbol to categorizes and classify facts, ideas,
styles, and feelings. In the context of the reevaluation of logical, geometrical, and

84
85
Ibid. 69.
86
Ibid. 70.

39
metaphysical procedures in literature, the emblem of the crystal is used to distinguish
numerous poets and writers who are very different from one another, such as Paul
Valery in France, Wallace Stevens in the United States, and Jorge Luis Borges in
Argentina. The crystal represents both the “self organizing system” and the “invariance
of specific structures”, but more importantly, it links Calvino’s fondness for geometrical
forms, symmetries, combinations, and limits to the concepts of the infinitely vast and
the infinitely small; the bond between the formal choices of literature and cosmological
models/mythological frameworks; the order and disorder fundamental to contemporary
science; and the inanimate world to the animate world.87
So, when Calvino claims that words—the raw material of both philosophy and
literature—are “like crystals”, one should recall Calvino’s allusion in Six Memos for the
Next Millennium to Hofmannsthal who said: “Depth is hidden. Where? On the surface.”
Thus, the connotations of the simile “words are like crystals,” contain far deeper
implications than the similarities shared between the two that rest on the surface;
namely, that they have facets and axes of rotation with various properties, each that
refracts light differently according to how these word crystals are formed, manipulated,
and ordered.88
In the beginning of his essay, Calvino suggests that perhaps this
perpetual battle between philosophy and literature does not need a resolution, but rather,
that their continuous refutations protect words and ourselves from verbal stagnation.89
But Calvino reveals that this conclusion does not hold as the essay develops.

87
88
89
Ibid. 40.

40
The fact that literature has taken an interest in philosophy is only a sign of its
“voracious eclecticism” according to Calvino.90
Literary writers draw inspiration from
the latest philosophical works, without toppling the systems of the world we exist in.
The philosophical literature of the world has the capacity to both confirm and question
what we already know, independently of the philosophy that inspired it. For Calvino,
philosophical depth in literature depends on how the writer penetrates below the surface
of things. Calvino states that James Joyce for example:
“Projected onto a desolate beach all the theological and ontological
conundrums he had learned at school, things very far from his concerns
at the time of writing. Yet everything he touched—old shoes, fish eggs,
old pots and pans—was utterly transformed to the very depths of its
being.”91
Writers like Joyce are, for Calvino, evidence that literature is no longer tied
down to the outcries of tragedy or the fantasies of happiness, but that literature has been
freed and uplifted into the realm of impassive speculative activity. Thus, the original
conjecture mandating the repetitive confrontations between philosophy and literature
has been exposed as impossible, since literature now appears to possess its own
capacities for philosophical endeavors independent from that of philosophy. Yet it is at
this moment of the text that Calvino introduces an unexpected—given the title
“Philosophy and Literature”—element into his proposition for literature. He tosses the
discipline of science into the ring with philosophy and literature and proposes a
convergence of all three disciplines:
“What I have described in terms of a twin-bed marriage must be seen as
an ménage a trois: philosophy, literature, and science.”92

90
Ibid. 44.
91
Calvino, Italo. "Philosophy and Literature. (1967)." The Literature Machine. 44.
92
Ibid. 45.

41
But before explaining the manifold interactions between these disciplines and
writers who embody this philosophy of interdisciplinary convergence, perhaps I should
first explain—in a manner similar to the explanation of Calvino’s impression of the
relationship between philosophy and literature—his stance on the rapport that science
and literature have with each other. Conveniently, in a 1968 Roman television
interview, Calvino was asked:
“In your opinion, what is the relationship today between science
and literature?”93
Calvino begins his response by first describing the opposing schools of thought
of two of his most influential mentors at the time: Roland Barthes and Raymond
Queneau. The discussion unfolds when Calvino mentions that he had recently read an
article by Roland Barthes called “Literature versus Science”. In the article Barthes,
who was a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician,
explains the opposing conceptions of language in literature and science. Calvino
explains that Barthes tends to view literature as the awareness that language has of
being a language—it has both an autonomous existence and density of its own.
Furthermore, the use of language in literature is never “transparent” and is never used as
merely an instrument to convey a “meaning, fact, thought, or truth”; that is it cannot
mean anything other than itself.94
Conversely, Barthes suggests that the idea of language provided by science is
that of language as a neutral device for saying something else, for conveying a meaning
that is extraneous to it. Calvino states that it is this dissimilar conception of language

93
Calvino, Italo. “Two Interviews on Science and Literature." (1968). The Literature Machine. 28.
94
Ibid. 29.

42
that differentiates science from literature for Barthes. The explanation continues and
Barthes argues that in this particular way, literature is more scientific than science
because literature recognizes that language is never oblivious to itself, and writing can
never say something foreign to writing or express something that does not have to do
with the art of writing.95
But Calvino questions Barthes’ claim and wonders whether science can really be
defined by such “trust in an absolute code of references”, or whether or not it is in itself
a continual “questioning of its own linguistic conventions.”96
Calvino is under the
impression that Barthes’ vision of science is one that is far more “compact” and certain
than it really is; and with regard to mathematics, Calvino suggests that we find science
constantly fiddling with its own formulaic processes rather than claiming to base an
argument on a truth beyond itself.
The above-mentioned article by Barthes was included in an a 1968 issue of the
Times Literary Supplement that was devoted to continental European literature and the
relations between literature and other fields of research. Interestingly, an article by
Raymond Queneau, the French novelist, poet and founder of Oulipo—The Workshop of
Potential Literature in which the ten members carry out mathematic-literary research—
was also included in the same 1968 issue of the Literary Times Supplement. Calvino
explains that the perspective of the Oulipo towards science is very different than the
perspective held by Roland Barthes and the writings of his Tel Quel group of authors.
The dominant feature of Raymond Queneau’s Oulipo is “play, and the acrobatics of

95
Calvino, Italo. "Two Interviews on Science and Literature." The Literature Machine. 29.
96
Ibid. 29.

43
intellect and imagination.”97
This Workshop of Potential Literature is actually a branch
of the College of Pataphysics, an academy of mockery and practical joking that was
founded in memory of Alfred Jarry, the French writer and dramatist who coined the
term and philosophical concept of “Pataphysics”—an absurdist, pseudo-scientific
literary trope with multiple changing definitions. Jarry specifically expressed the
concept of Pataphysics in a mock-scientific manner and considered it to be a branch of
science or philosophy that examines imaginary phenomena that exist in a world beyond
metaphysics; the science of imaginary solutions. The magazine of the College of
Pataphysics publishes the work of the Oulipo, and Calvino provides an example of the
type of work Oulipo pursued:
“A study of the mathematical problems posed by the series of rhymes in
the metrical form of the sestina in the work of Provençal poets (and
Dante), a series can be represented as a spiral.”98
Calvino admits that he finds himself oscillating between these two poles of
Barthes and Queneau and although he feels the attraction of both, he simultaneously
attempts to remain aware of the limitations of each type of thinking. He suggests that
Barthes and his followers in the Tel Quel group can be viewed as the “enemies”—or at
least harsh critics—of science, even though they think and talk with scientific precision.
Conversely, there is Queneau with his friends of science in Oulipo, who think and talk
in terms of the whimsical and pursue the playful gymnastics and mathematical
manipulation of language and thought.99
Yet, this continual oscillation between two
starkly different pathways is another intrinsic theme of Calvino’s writing and
temperament.

97
Ibid.
98
99
Ibid. 31.

44
In “Quickness” of Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Calvino unites the
concepts of Lightness and Quickness under the sign of the Olympian god Mercury, the
god of communication and mediation. Mercury’s winged feet allow the messenger god
to establish the relationships between the gods themselves, between gods and men,
between universal laws and individual deities, between the forces of nature and the
forms of culture, and between the objects of the world and all its thinking subjects.100
Calvino explains that for the ancients, Mercury’s nature was the most indefinite
and variable and contrasted with the solitary, contemplative, and melancholy
temperament of Saturn. These characteristics correspond with Calvino’s own character,
and he admits that he is a saturnine by nature, but aspires to be mercurial. Additionally,
there is another god who shares family ties with Saturn for whom Calvino feels great
affection: Vulcan, the god of fire and the forge who resides not in the clouds, but in the
underworld. To Mercury’s aerial flight, Vulcan conversely replies with his limping gait
and the rhythmic beat of his hammer.101
The complex interplay between these three deities exemplifies Calvino’s
tendency to fluctuate back and forth between polar opposites and it symbolically
provides insight into whom he is and who he would like to be, how he writes and how
he would like to write. He is a Saturn who strives to be like Mercury. He reveals that
the concentration and craftsmanship of Vulcan are needed to record Mercury’s
adventures and transformations. Similarly, Mercury’s swiftness and mobility are
necessary to make Vulcan’s endless labors achieve meaning; “from the formless
mineral matrix, the gods’ symbols of office acquire their forms: lyres or tridents, spears

100
101
Ibid. 52-53.

45
or diadems.”102
Thus, Calvino finds necessity in these strikingly different divinities.
The intricate connections between these symbols are further complicated when one
considers another mercurial quality that Calvino fails to mention. Mercury was
considered an interpreter for the gods who epitomized the power of language; however,
he was also considered by the ancients to be a notorious and deceptive thief—over the
course of various mythological narratives, Mercury stole the bow and quiver of Apollo,
the girdle of Venus, the trident of Neptune, the tools of Vulcan, and the sword of
Mars.103
Further evidence for Calvino’s tendency to perpetually alternate between
divergent pathways can be found in his admission regarding the destructive obsession to
get lost in the infinitely vast or the infinitely small. He also concedes that in Invisible
Cities “every concept and value turns out to be a double—even Exactitude.”104
His
search for Exactitude branches out in two directions and he admits that his writing has
“always found itself facing two divergent paths that correspond to two different types of
knowledge.”105
Additionally, the entirety of Six Memos for the Next Millennium refuses
to hierarchically place one value over another, even its antithesis. Rather, Calvino
expends a great amount of effort pursuing an inquiry into the invisible relations between
the selected value and its antithesis: Lightness and weight, Quickness and lingering,
Exactitude and vagueness, Visibility and opacity, Multiplicity and dearth.
It is time for this discussion to return to the topic of the relationship between
science, literature, and philosophy. Recall Calvino’s proposition for a polygamous love

102
Ibid. 54.
103
Weiss, Beno. “Calvino’s Ultimate Hypernovel; If on a winter’s night…” Understanding Italo Calvino.
174.
104
105
Ibid. 74.

46
affair between these three disciplines.106
Calvino believes that science suffers troubles
very similar to literature. It attempts to make patterns of the world that are called into
question; it maneuvers back and forth between the methods of induction and deduction,
and must remain ever vigilant lest it mistake its own linguistic conventions for objective
laws. In order to construct a literature that remains valid in the present and the future
Calvino advocates the need to compare the basic problems of science, philosophy, and
literature together in order to call them all into question. In Six Memos for the Next
Millennium, Calvino states:
“Among the values I would like passed onto the next millennium, there
is this above all: a literature that has absorbed the taste for mental
orderliness and exactitude, the intelligence of poetry, but at the same
time, that of science and of philosophy.”107
This is Calvino’s vision for literature, but he admits that we are still
waiting for its arrival. But while we wait, Calvino encourages us to embrace the spirit
of his aspirations embodied in the relatively contemporary authors who strive towards
this dream. We must abide in “a literature that breathes the air of philosophy and
science but at the same time keeps its distance, while with a gentle puff it blows away
both theoretical abstractions and the apparent concreteness of reality.”108
Calvino
explains that he is speaking of the fantastic and indefinable area of human imagination
produced by thinkers like Lewis Carroll, Raymond Queneau, and Jorge Luis Borges.
And for Calvino, this convergence of philosophy, literature, and science all began with
Lewis Carroll.

106
107
108

47
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson—better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll—was
a nineteenth century English writer, poet, mathematician, and logician. His most
famous writings are Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, its sequel Through the Looking-
Glass, which includes the poem Jabberwocky, and the poem The Hunting of the Snark.
Certainly, Calvino admired these fantastical works for their poetic intelligence,
inventive structure, mathematical puzzles, nonsensical language, and complex patterns
of logical play.
In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, after a curious exchange with the Cheshire
Cat Alice stumbles upon the house of the March Hare and finds herself joining the
March Hare and his friend the Hatter at an unusual tea party. At the tea party, various
linguistic logic games occur, mostly involving the misuse of language and inquiry into
the equivalency of sentence structure. At one point in the discussion, the March Hare
urges Alice to “say what you mean” to which she responds, “I do, at least—at least I
mean what I say—that’s the same thing you know.”109
The Hatter quickly (and
correctly) disagrees with Alice’s statement that “I say what I mean” and “I mean what I
say” hold a verbal equivalence; he extrapolates that she may as well say that “I eat what
I see” is the same as “I see what I eat.”110
The Hatter is correct according to standard
philosophic and mathematical systems of logic, but the true brilliance of Carroll resides
within the creation fantastic space in which these logic-linguistic puzzles occur, making
the discussion of linguistic validity according to mathematical and philosophical logic, a
kind of game that is engaging for almost all ages.

109
Carroll, Lewis. "A Mad Tea-Party." Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass.
54.
110
Ibid.

48
Another example of Carroll’s cleverness occurs at an earlier point in her
journey through Wonderland. After having accidentally shrunk herself, Alice finds
herself tired and treading water in a previously excreted pool of her normal-sized tears.
When suddenly, she spots a mouse bobbing in the water near her. She attempts to get
the attention of the mouse, and when she does, asks if it knows a way to shore. As they
swim, the mouse reveals that he hates both cats and dogs, and promises to explain to
Alice this long history of hatred once they reach land. Upon reaching land, the mouse is
shown to be a history aficionado and in an attempt to help dry off Alice and the other
tear-soaked creatures she swims ashore with—a Dodo, a Lory, and an Eaglet—with the
“driest” lecture he knows concerning William the conqueror.111
When the lecture
inevitably fails to literally dry the crowd, a Dodo solemnly rises to his feet and proposes
a Caucus-race; a race with no track, no pathways, no regulations and in which when it is
finished—that is, when the Dodo decides it is over—everyone wins a prize. Once the
Caucus race is finished and everyone is dry, Alice sits down and begs the mouse to tell
the crowd something more; she then requests that he explain the reasons for his disdain
for cats and dogs.
“ ‘Mine is a long and sad tale!’ said the Mouse, turning to Alice, and
sighing.
‘It is a long tail, certainly,’ said Alice, looking down with wonder at the
Mouse’s tail; ‘but why do you call it sad?’ And she kept puzzling about
it while the Mouse was speaking, so that her idea of the tale was
something like this…”112

111
Carroll, Lewis. "A Caucus Race and a Long Tale." Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the
Looking-Glass. 117.
112
Carroll, Lewis. "A Caucus Race and a Long Tale." Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the
Looking-Glass. 20.

49
What follows directly on the next page of the text is a poem that bends back and
forth down the page in the shape of a mouse’s tail with the font of the words decreasing
in font size as the poem concludes in order to complete the structure of the text as an
image for the tail of a mouse. Carroll’s imaginative capacity to create a “tail-tale” poem
combines content with verbal structure and an affinity for illustrative order that is
shared by and admired by Calvino in other exemplary thinkers. Recall that one of the
projects of Raymond Queneau’s Oulipo was a study that revealed that the mathematical
structure of Dante’s Inferno as series of rhymes in the metrical form of the sestina that
could be represented in the shape of a spiral.113
Thus, as the imagination of the reader
accompanies Dante on his descent into the different layers of hell, the physical text
adopts a structure that mirrors the imaginative journey; both follow the pathway of a
downward spiral. Likewise, Carroll presents a mouse’s tale that resembles a mouse’s
tail. In “Exactitude,” Calvino pays homage to a similar literary device present in
Eugenio Montale’s poem “L’anguilla.” The poem consists of a single very long
sentence in the shape of an eel and the content of the poem depicts the entire life of the
eel, which for Calvino turns the eel into a kind of moral symbol.114
Similarly, the tail of
a mouse and a downward spiral also acquire a deeper meaning since they not only
physically contain the text but also become powerful images and emblems of their own.
Calvino has a particular fondness for powerful emblems. In his requirements
for the values of Lightness and Exactitude, he explicitly includes the use of either “a
visual image that acquires emblematic value” or “a clear, incisive, memorable visual

113
Calvino, Italo. "Two Interviews on Science and Literature." (1968). The Literature Machine. 30.
114

50
image.”115
Furthermore, the topic is explored for the majority of “Visibility” and part of
“Quickness”. The symbolic instance when Cavalcanti nimbly leaps over the tombstone,
the aquatic emblem of the dolphin wrapped around the anchor, of the unique symmetry
of the butterfly paired with the crab, the crystal, and the world as a tangled ball of yarn
are all significant symbols used throughout Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next
Millennium. In a way, the three examples of a text in which the physical structure
resembles the content actually unite both of Calvino’s diverging paths of Exactitude. By
combining geometrical structure with thoughtful description, these texts are able to
bridge the two diverging paths of exactitude by encompassing both abstract forms and
projections as well as creating a text that is the verbal equivalent of a space crammed
with objects.116
In Through the Looking Glass, Alice travels through a mirror and finds herself
in an alternate wonderland populated by anthropomorphic red and white chess pieces.
The entirety of the story is structured around the game of chess and depicted
accordingly in the illustrations that accompany the text. In the preface to the story,
Carroll presents a chess problem to the reader along with the following note: “White
pawn (Alice) to play, and win in eleven moves.” This series of eleven moves roughly
corresponds to the twelve chapters contained within Through the Looking Glass, and
although the various chess moves that organize the structure of the narrative often
display a disregard for the actual rules of chess in certain instances, the moves make
sense within the broader context of the narrative’s plot. Both the structure of the
chessboard and the structure of the narrative simultaneously dictate the nature of the

115
Calvino, Italo. "Lightness." “Exactitude.” Six Memos for the Next Millennium. 16 & 56.
116

51
operations contained within each other. This interdependence creates a complex
entangled system in which the structure of the novel and the actions of the characters
within are determined by both the potential sequences of finite moves available to
individual chess pieces at particular locations on the board and instances within the plot
of the story as well as the characteristics bestowed to them in Carroll’s narrative fantasy
For Calvino, the various adventures of Alice revealed a new relationship
between philosophy and literature. Although Calvino mentions other philosophical
novels—Robinson Crusoe, Don Quixote, and Hamlet—Calvino asserts that Carroll
most effectively demonstrated that “philosophical reason can have the loveliest of
daydreams, absolutely worthy of its loftiest moments of speculation.”117
Calvino also
recognizes the philosophic qualities of Raymond Queneau and Jorge Luis Borges, who
have different relationships with different philosophies and use these to create diverse
imaginative linguistic worlds. Moreover, the prominent characteristic in these writers is
the habit of engaging their speculative and scholarly appetites without dogmatism. The
philosophical aspects emerge in their work through their “allusions to great texts,
metaphysical geometry, and erudition…a game played between signs and meanings,
myths and ideas.”118
Furthermore, these writers treat their own work with a certain
detachment that is the product of a thoughtful recognition of their own fallibility
concerning the complexity of the world that they have attempted to simulate in their
writing.
In Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Calvino states:

117
Calvino, Italo. "Philosophy and Literature." (1967). The Literature Machine. 47-48.
118
Ibid. 48.

52
“If I had to say which writer has perfectly achieved Valery’s aesthetic
ideal of exactitude in imagination and in language, creating works that
match the rigorous geometry of the crystal and the abstraction of
deductive reasoning, I would without hesitation say Jorge Luis
Borges.”119
Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentinian short-story writer, essayist, poet,
translator, and a monumental figure in Spanish literature. His philosophical literature
was comprised of short stories each interwoven with complex themes like dreams,
labyrinths, mirrors, fiction, philosophy, and religion and contributed significantly to the
entire fantasy genre. The content of Borges’ writing can be understood as a reaction to
the literary tendencies toward realism and naturalism that dominated the 19th
century.
According to Calvino, Borges has had an incredible influence on creative literature in
Italian and on the very nature of literature—Calvino admits that writers that belong to
his own generation have been “profoundly shaped” by Borges.120
Borges plays a significant role throughout Calvino’s literary essays and Six
Memos for the Next Millennium, which contains references to Argentinian’s masterful
technique, precision, and density in “Quickness”, “Exactitude”, and “Multiplicity”.
Near the end of “Multiplicity,” Calvino quickly summarizes the reasons for his own
personal affinity for Borges, but a substantial portion of this section in Six Memos for
the Next Millennium is actually drawn from his 1984 essay titled “Jorge Luis Borges”.
In this essay, Calvino appreciates in Borges the idea of literature as a “world
constructed and governed by intellect,” an idea that he argues runs contradictory to the
common idea in 20th
century literature which attempts to provide a language, a series of
narrated events, or an exploration into the subconscious that is equivalent to the chaotic

119
120
Calvino, Italo. "Jorge Luis Borges." (1984). Why Read the Classics? 237.

53
flow of existence.121
Borges’ literary tendencies, which are wholeheartedly supported
by French essayist and prosewriter Paul Valery, champion the “victory of mental order
over the chaos of the world.”122
The emphasis of the victory of mental order over the chaos of the world
potentially reveals the nature of the opposition between Consistency and inconsistency
for Calvino. “Multiplicity” regards the novel as an encyclopedia, a method of
knowledge, and a network of connections between the events, the people, and the things
of the world. But maintaining that the nature of the world is complex, indeterminate,
manifold, and deeply entangled consequently produces a chaotic experience and
perception of things. Carlo Emilio Gadda attempted to develop a linguistic and literary
style that matched his complex epistemology, yet all of his novels are unfinished or left
in fragments. Robert Musil maintained a similar vision of the world and attempted to
create a general mathematics composed of the combination of single solutions, and
although he believed that each particular system drew him closer to his ideal
mathematics he was always unable complete his project. Similarly, for Marcel Proust,
the density of his text expanded the dimensions of space and time until the world could
no longer be grasped and knowledge was lost to intangibility. In pursuit of the network
that links all things, all three writers failed to complete their literary works. The world
they attempted to create within each of their literary endeavors was inconsistent with
the world they experienced and lived in.
A paradox begins to emerge. The models and principles we construct in order to
convey the perceptual flux of our experience and accurately account for the complex

121
Ibid. 238.
122
Ibid.

54
and entangled nature of things are derived from the subjectivity of our own mind and
are thus, often inconsistent. The battle of language Leonardo da Vinci struggled with in
“Exactitude” directly concerns Calvino’s understanding of the use of words in
“Lightness”—words as the perpetual pursuit things, as a perpetual adjustment to their
infinite variety. But how does one perfectly map their own words, mathematical
models, and ideas to the chaotic experiences and uncertainty of the world while
simultaneously embracing a vision of the world derived from “Multiplicity”?
Let’s examine a strictly mathematical version of Zeno’s famous paradox
discussed by Henri Bergson and clarified by William James. We express the limit as n
approaches infinity of the sequence ½+1/4+1/8+…+1/(2^n) as equal to 1; however,
through experience we know that the limit never actually reaches 1. Our experience
often defies our intellectual models and vice versa. We attempt to adjust the
subjectivity of our language, but we struggle to perfectly embrace the objectivity of
reality when limited by the particular agency of our own mind. Attempts to perfect
Exactitude still do not yield perfect descriptions or general solutions to the world
around us. Are we doomed to continuously shatter our limited evaluations and
interpretations in a perpetual struggle against the randomness, uncertainty, and the
vastness of the world, which if we agree with multiplicity is more complex than we can
possibly understand?
Recall Calvino’s strategy to propose the poetic philosophy of Giacomo
Leopardi—the poet of vagueness—and then manipulate his fondness for ambiguity to
construct an argument in favor of exactitude.123
Similarly, in an earlier discussion

123

55
regarding Calvino’s belief that there is a bond between the formal choices of literary
composition and the need for a cosmological model or mythical framework in
exactitude, he states that the tendency toward geometrical forms in literature is a
response to the order and disorder fundamental to contemporary science. Here is a the
excerpt:
“The universe disintegrates into a cloud of heat, it falls inevitably into a
vortex of entropy, but within this irreversible process there may be areas
of order, portions of the existent that tend toward a from, privileged
points in which we seem to discern a design or perspective.”124
Perhaps the order that Calvino believes one can derive from things that appear to
be chaotic and disorderly is an example of him grappling with the relationship between
Consistency and inconsistency. From the inconsistent one has the capacity to discern
the consistent. Consistency in literature involves the combination of mental orderliness
and Exactitude, as well as the intelligence of poetry, science, and philosophy. This
belief is reflected in Calvino’s appreciation for Borges. He explains that the discovery
of Jorge Luis Borges’ work was for Calvino like:
“Seeing a potentiality that had always been toyed with now being
realized: seeing a world being formed in the image and shape of the
spaces of intellect, and inhabited by a constellation of signs that obey a
rigorous geometry.”125
Calvino also admired Borges’ mastery of concision and economy of
expression—both dominant aspects of Quickness—his ability to condense an
extraordinary amount of rich ideas and poetic attraction into very short texts. For
Calvino, every piece of Borges’ work “contains a model of the universe or of an

124
Ibid. 69.
125
Calvino, Italo. "Jorge Luis Borges." (19840. Why Read the Classics? 238.

56
attribute of the universe (infinity, the innumerable, time eternal or present or cyclic).”126
Borges’ texts are short, concise, versatile, and assume various outer forms, drawing
inspiration from popular literature while simultaneously creating mythical structures of
their own. Additionally, Borges’ brief style is coupled with tangential narration,
precision, and a concreteness of language that is unique, surprising, and powerful.
In his 1984 essay on Borges, Calvino explains that in order to write briefly and
overcome the writer’s block that kept Borges from shifting from essays to narrative
prose until his forties, Borges simply pretended that the book he wanted to write had
already been written by some imaginary writer. He then described, summarized, or
reviewed the hypothetical book. Comically, when the first story that Borges wrote
using this strategy, The Approach of Almotasim, appeared in the journal Sur, it actually
convinced a number of readers that it was an honest book review of an Indian author.
Critics of Borges regularly point out that each of his texts doubles or multiply its own
space through other books cited from an imaginary or real library, works that are either
classical, scholarly, or nonexistent.127
Calvino adopts this narrative function of Borges’ in Six Memos for the Next
Millennium. “Lightness” alone contains references to over twenty-five different
thinkers and works. Calvino purposely interweaves other prominent works into his own
brief text in order to vastly expand the implications, relevancies, and coverage of his
own work. In Borges, Calvino views the utilization of this tactic as the “birth of
literature to the second degree…a ‘potential literature’,”

126
Calvino, Italo. "Multiplicity.” Six Memos for the Next Millennium. 119.
127

57
Calvino also says that for Borges, “only the written word has a full ontological
reality and that the things of this world exist for him inasmuch as hey refer back to
things which have been writer.”128
And Calvino feels the need to emphatically stress the
circuit of values that characterize this relationship between the world of literature and
that of experience. He states that:
“Lived experience is only valued for what it can inspire in literature or
for what it in turn repeats from literary archetypes: for instance, there is a
reciprocity between a heroic or daring enterprise in an epic poem and a
similar deed actually happening in ancient or contemporary history
which makes one want to identify or compare episodes and values from
the written event with those from the real event.”129
The moral problem always resides in this context for Borges “like a solid
nucleus in the fluidity and interchangeability of his metaphysical scenarios” according
to Calvino.130
This problem is constantly reiterated in exactly the same terms from one
literary universe to another in Borges’ writing and these terms are reduced almost to the
terms of a geometry in which the individual must then recognize a pattern before
making their decision. Calvino believes that in “Conjectural Poem,” Borges is
“Dantesque” when he imagines the thoughts of one of his ancestors, as he lies wounded
in a marsh after a battle. In Calvino’s mind this a perfect example of the “osmosis
between what happens in literature and what happens in real life”—the ideal source is
not some sort of mythical event, but a text which is “a tissue of words and images and
meanings, a harmonization of motifs which find echoes in each other, a musical space
in which a theme develops its own variations.131

128
Ibid. 239-240.
129
Ibid. 240.
130
Calvino, Italo. "Jorge Luis Borges." (1984) Why Read the Classics? 240.
131
Ibid. 240-241.

58
Calvino believes that Borges purposely selects a finite number of mythical or
archetypal motifs and places them within the infinite backdrop of metaphysical themes.
In his most famous story, only a dozen pages, The Garden of Forking Paths, Borges
presents a spy story that includes a “logico-metaphysical” story, which also contains
within itself the description of an endless Chinese novel. But Calvino argues that the
suspense of the story has more to do with the logic and metaphysics than it does with
the actual spy story. After completing the story, Calvino realizes that although the story
has the appearance of a thriller, it is actually a complex narrative tangled in a
philosophical reflection on time.132
The Garden of Forking Paths contains three different notions of time conceived
by Borges. First, there is the idea of “constant time”, which Calvino understands as a
kind of subjective understanding of time in which the person perceiving time recognizes
that their notions of time are dominated by this faculty of perception in which things to
be happening to them specifically although other objects (animate or inanimate) may be
involved. The second conception of time that Calvino pulls from Borges’ story is the
idea of “time determined by will” which involves the immobility in which the future
presents itself as a consequence of a selected course of action, it remains fixed like the
past. The final conception of time is that of a “multiple and ramified time” in which
every present splits and branches off to form a dizzying web of divergent, convergent,
and parallel times—recall Calvino’s discussion of Invisible Cities when he says that
“every concept and value turns out to be doubled.”133
Calvino says that:

132
133
Calvino, Italo. "Multiplicity." “Exactitude.” Six Memos for the Next Millennium. 119 & 72.

59
“This idea of infinity of contemporary universes, in which all
possibilities are realized in all possible combinations, is not a digression
from the story, but the very condition, which is required so that the
protagonist can feel authorized to commit the absurd and abominable
crime, which his spying mission imposes on him.”134
According to Calvino, this conception of “ramified time” is dear to Borges
because it is a conception that dominates literature. Furthermore, it is what makes
literature possible. Calvino utilizes an example from another one of Borges’ essays
concerning the controversy surrounding the possibility that Conte Ugolino committed
cannibalism in Dante’s Inferno. Borges examines the specific line “What grief could
not manage hunger did”, and explains the views of many critics who interpret the line to
mean that Ugolino died by starvation rather than committed cannibalism. Borges also
adds that Dante likely wanted the reader to suspect, but with some uncertainty, that
Ugolino ate his children by providing a list of all the hints of cannibalism, starting with
the opening image of Ugolino chewing the skull of Archbishop Ruggieri. But Calvino
decides to particularly emphasize the conclusion of Borges’ essay because it closely
resembles an analytical method similar to structuralism, which holds that “a literary text
consists solely of a succession of words of which it is composed” and therefore,
Ugolino is “textual construct.”135
This reveals in Borges according to Calvino, an
awareness of the impersonality of literature—Borges acknowledges that Dante may not
have known more about Ugolino than what he wrote.
In real life, when a person makes a decision to select one alternative over
another he eliminates the other option, but Borges wants to demonstrate that time
behaves differently in art and literature. The concept of “ramified time” corresponds to

134
135

60
literary time where, like Schrödinger’s cat, characters operate in superposition—
“Hamlet is both mad and sane…Ugolino devours and doesn’t devour the bodies of his
beloved children” in the Tower of Hunger.136
This single example in Dante, exemplifies
Borges’ ability to condense a scheme of the network of possibilities into only a few
pages of a story. Furthermore, Borges confirms Calvino’s “Keep It Short” rule, which
can even be applied to long novels that adopt a structure that embraces the same
regulation only in a manner that is “accumulative, modular, and combinatory.”137
These considerations of Borges are at the basis of what Calvino calls the
“hypernovel,” which he states that he tried to epitomize in If on a winter’s night a
traveler. In If on a winter’s night a traveler, Calvino explains that he tried to convey
the nature of the essence of a novel by providing it in a concentrated form, with ten
beginnings; each beginning in a different way generating a multiplicity of acts and
actors within a framework that is both determined and undetermined. Similarly, in
another Calvino novel The Castle of Crossed Destinies, he attempted to “create a kind
of machine for multiplying narratives that began with visual images charged with
multiple meanings” like the cards of a tarot pack.138
He states that his own temperament
“prompts me to ‘keep it short,’ and such structures as these enable me to unite density
of invention and expression with a sense of infinite possibilities.”139
Another example of the hypernovel is Life a User’s Manual by Georges Perec, a
French novelist, filmmaker, documentarist, and essayist who was also a member of
Raymond Queneau’s Oulipo group. The title page of Life a User’s Manual describes it

136
Ibid. 243.
137
138
139
Ibid.

61
as “novels” likely because it contains multiple interwoven stories and ideas as well as
several literary and historical allusions, though the story only revolves around the
residents of a single fictional apartment block in Paris. Calvino claims that in his own
view, Perec’s book, published in Paris in 1978, is the last real event in the history of the
novel so far (in 1985 that is). He supports this claim by praising Life a User’s Manual
as follows:
“The plan of the book, of incredible scope, but at the same time solidly
finished; the novelty of its rendering; the compendium of a narrative
tradition and the encyclopedic summa of things known tend to lend
substance to a particular image of the world; the feeling of ‘today’ that is
made from accumulations of the past and the vertigo of the void; the
continual presence of irony and anguish together—in a word, the manner
in which the pursuit of a definite structural project and the imponderable
element of poetry become one and the same thing.”140
Perec’s novel embraces the formal structure of a type of mathematical puzzle.
The entirety of the novel takes place in a typical Parisian apartment structure, and each
chapter takes place in a particular room in the structure. There are five levels of the
apartment complex, and in each level, Perec provides description of the furniture,
appliances, the change of tenants and owners and their lives, as well as all of their
ancestors and descendants. Calvino returns again to the theme of chess, and describes
the plan of Perec’s fictional apartment complex as a bi-square of ten squares by ten—a
chessboard—and Perec moves from room to room (chapter to chapter) according to a
scheme of rules and restriction of pathways. Life a User’s Manual is 600 pages long
and contains ninety-nine chapters, to which Calvino claims Perec purposely decided to

140
Ibid. 121.

62
write ninety-nine instead of one hundred chapters in order to leave an “intentional
loophole for incompleteness.”141
The content of the Life a User’s Manual was determined both mathematically
and analytically for Perec. First, he created a list of themes, and then he organized
those themes. He then determined that one theme from each category should appear in
each chapter of his novel, but in such a way that the sequence of appearance varied
from chapter to chapter, making each chapter unique. Even Calvino, who was a friend
of Perec’s and visited him periodically during the nine years Perec spent writing Life a
User’s Manual confesses that he was unaware of the exact mathematical procedures
Perec implemented in order to decide on the order that the content of each chapter
would appear. According to Calvino, Perec had at least forty-two categories—of which
Calvino only knew a few—but they included “literary quotations, geographical
locations, historical facts, furniture, objects, styles, colors, foodstuffs, animals, plants,
minerals,” and other things.142
Amazingly, Perec managed to respect all of his
mysterious rules and still condense his content into brief chapters.
Calvino explains that Perec purposely imposed these unknown, but rigorous
rules and regulations on himself in order to escape the arbitrary nature of existence.
Perec wrote according to a complex plan of writing constraints and constructed from
multiple elements, the combinations of which added density and layering to his text.
Another example of the Perec’s imposition of rigorous rules on the geometric structure
of his novel can be seem in La disparition, a 300-page novel that never uses the letter
“e”. Calvino states:

141
142
Ibid. 122.

63
“I would like to stress the fact that for Perec the construction of a novel
according to fixed rules, to constraints, by no means limited his freedom
as a storyteller, but stimulated it.”143
Recall again, the previous discussions of chess. Calvino says “no chess player
will ever live long enough to exhaust all the combinations of possible moves for the
thirty-two pieces on the chessboard.”144
Recall the point in “Exactitude” when Calvino
says, “This talk is refusing to be led in the direction I led myself…I wanted to tell you
of my fondness for geometrical forms, for symmetries, for numerical series, for all the
is combinatory, for numerical proportions; I wanted to explain the things that I had
written in terms of my fidelity to the idea of limits, of measure.”145
Recall Esther
Calvino’s note to the reader in the introduction of Six Memos for the Next Millennium
when she specifically mentions that Italo believed in the importance of constraints.
Recall the geometrical, cosmological, and structural implications of the image of the
crystal in “Exactitude.” Recall what Calvino said at the end of “Multiplicity”, “among
the values I would like passed on to the next millennium, there is above all: a literature
that has absorbed the taste for mental orderliness and exactitude, the intelligence of
poetry, but at the same time that of science and philosophy.”146
Recall the unfinished
encyclopedic novels of Carlo Emilio Gadda, Robert Musil, and Marcel Proust.
The hypernovel is Calvino’s solution to the unfinished encyclopedic novels
discussed in “Multiplicity.” The encyclopedic novel attempts to become a container of
things either through the use of meticulous description or the creation of a single
metaphysical system. But the encyclopedic novel is inconsistent because it fails to

143
Calvino, Italo. "Multiplicity.” Six Memos for the Next Millennium. 123.
144
Calvino, Italo. "Cybernetics and Ghosts." The Literature Machine. 8.
145
146

64
properly map its content and the use of words to the complexities of the world.
Conversely, the hypernovel never attempts to be a container of things, but rather, better
resolves the problems of Multiplicity by implementing narrative functions and
frameworks that use literature like a machine to generate a vast number of potential
possibilities that are both determined and indeterminate, creating both a unique density
and the sense of infinite possibilities within a text.
In Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, the presentation of the Mouse’s tale
simultaneously assumes the physical structure of a mouse’s tail, generating manifold
implications of the short text through imagery. In Jorge Luis Borges’ work, he
frequently cites other famous texts real or imaginary, which multiplies the density of the
text tremendously. Although the physical text itself may only be a dozen pages,
through the inclusion of several references, Borges connects every implication, every
event, and every component of his own text into a network of other texts, thoughts, and
conversations. Calvino adopts the same tactic in Six Memos for the Next Millennium;
by making allusions to historical and literary people and works, his text is multiplied
exponentially despite its brevity due to the invisible connections referentially
established to other texts and thinkers. Additionally, in Borges’ essay on Dante’s
Inferno, he exposes the intentional open-endedness of the text. The uncertainty is
revealed as a deliberate literary strategy to generate an uncontained text with multiple
potential literary realities. And in Perec’s Life a User’s Manual a mathematical
structure is revealed, content of each chapter follows a calculated combinatorial method
that ensures the ordering of order of presentation of each theme is unique in each
chapter.

65
Thus, like the game of chess, the literary writers that Calvino admires and
Calvino himself all use narrative functions like a chessboard, in order to mathematically
generate a vast quantity of potentialities from a relatively small, finite number of basic
verbal components. There is another influential writer who unites the brevity and
density of Borges, with the imagination of Carroll and the generative possibilities of
Perec—Raymond Queneau. The founder of the Oulipo group (the Workshop of
Potential Literature), Queneau pursues a unique combination of intellectual interests,
namely, mathematics in writing and poetry. Like Perec, Queneau insists on utilizing
rules and constraints in his writing. In a critique of the automatic writing of surrealists
and in favor of writing with constraints, Queneau stated:
“Another very wrong idea that is also going the rounds at the moment is
the equivalence that has been established between inspiration,
exploration of the subconscious and liberation, between chance,
automatism, and freedom. Now this sort of inspiration, which consists in
blindly obeying every impulse, is in fact slavery. The classical author
who wrote his tragedy observing a certain number of known rules is freer
than the poet who writes down whatever comes into his head and is a
slave to other rules of which he knows nothing.”147
Queneau believed that all the great inventions in the field of language and
literature emerged through transitions from spoken to written language and attempted to
bridge the gap between the rigidity and immobile regulations concerning proper
spelling and syntax in the written French language with the inventiveness, mobility, and
economy of expression in the spoken French language. The stylistic revolution that
Queneau promoted stemmed from a philosophical context and method. In his 1933
novel The Bark Tree, Queneau created a linguistic and structural experiment that
dabbled in numerical, symmetrical structures as well as catalogues of narrative genres,

147

66
and explored different definitions of existence and thought. According to Calvino, The
Bark Tree “spotlights those things which are thought but not real, but influence the
reality of the world: a world that in itself is totally devoid of meaning.”148
Then in
direct challenge to this meaningless world, Queneau establishes the need for order by
inserting small areas of order into the universe revealing a sense of order that derived
from mathematical and literary invention.
Structure is freedom for Queneau. It produces his text and at the same time, it
encompasses the possibility of all virtual texts that can replace it. This is the novelty
that resides in the idea of “potential multiplicity” inherent in his promotion of a
literature developed from constraints that literature elects to impose on itself. This
methodology—determined by Queneau and his group at Oulipo—is a playful approach
that imposes rules on writing like a game that results in “a rigorous formalization
applied to poetic invention.”149
In opposition to the surrealist automatic mechanism that
appeals to chance or the unconscious, structuralists like Queneau and Perec constructed
text according to precise rules that in turn, opened up the potential multiplicity of all the
texts that can be virtually written according to these rules.
Calvino mentions that it is important to remember that Raymond Queneau
worked as an encyclopedia consultant and editor as it is relevant to his temperament for
inclusion. Queneau published three volumes of essays and occasional writings during
his lifetime, which Calvino believes provide an “intellectual outline” for Queneau,
which is the starting point for analyzing his creative work. At first glance, Queneau’s
interests seem divergent to Calvino; however, after thorough investigation, they provide

148
Calvino, Italo. "The Philosophy of Raymond Queneau." (19810. Why Read the Classics? 248.
149
Ibid. 258.

67
a framework of an implicit philosophy that Calvino prefers to call “a mental attitude and
organization.”150
Queneau combines this intelligence with an endless need to invent and
test possibilities in both literary creation and theoretical speculation in a game-like
manner that ensures he never strays too far from reality.
In his novel Exercises in Style, Queneau narrates an episode in only a few
sentences and then repeats the sentence 99 different times in 99 different styles.
Queneau’s Portable Small Cosmogony is a poem on the origin of earth, chemistry, the
origin of life, animal evolution and the development of technology. And in One
Hundred Million Million Poems, Queneau developed a machine for composing sonnets,
consisting of ten sonnets using the same rhymes printed on pages cut into horizontal
strips with one line on each strip so that every first line can be followed by a choice of
ten second lines, and so on until the total of 10^14 combinations are reached. As a
producer of mathematical ideas, the field of combinatory systems—a tradition that
stems from ancient western systems—is a favorite intellectual realm of Queneau’s and
he used this passion to combine mathematics and literature.151
One Hundred Million
Million Poems is very similar to Perec’s literary decision to construct each one of his
chapters in Life a User’s Manual to contain all of his themes, but in a different order in
each chapter. Although Perec’s novel is composed of only ninety-nine chapters, there
are an incredibly large, though finite number of potential combinations of the sequence
of Perec’s themes. His structural method provides 42 factorial—
42x41x40x39x38x…x2x1—unique combinations.

150
Calvino, Italo. "The Philosophy of Raymond Queneau." Why Read the Classics? 246.
151
Ibid. 246 & 258.

68
Perhaps this is Calvino’s solution to his two diverging paths of Exactitude and
the incomplete encyclopedic novels. Queneau and Perec demonstrate the success that
stems from the blending of mathematics with literary structure in order to create a piece
of potential literature that has an expansive number of combinatorial possibilities
generated from only a small number of finite elements. These structures do not yield an
infinite number of possibilities, but the variety is incredibly large, perhaps
inconceivably so, and it creates a system that follows a type of mental orderliness in
which a desired particular variety can be derived through a series of repeatable logical
processes. Furthermore, these literary structures are not inherently hierarchical or
dogmatic; they are tools of design that recognize the complex nature of the universe and
level the variety of multiple possibilities.
“Multiplicity” concludes with a refutation of the objection that the more a work
tends toward the multiplication of possibilities, the further it departs from that “unicum
which is the self of the writer, his inner sincerity of his own truth.”152
Calvino answers
with the question what are people if not the combinatoria of multiple experiences,
information, books read, lessons learned, and things imagined? He views each life as an
encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, in which everything
can be shuffled around and reordered in every conceivable way possible. But then he
questions what a work conceived outside of the self would look like; one that would
allow one to escape the limited perspective of the individual ego and enter into selves
like our own as well as give speech to that which has no language. Finally, Calvino
speculates:

152

69
“Is this not what Ovid was aiming at when he wrote about the continuity
of forms? And what Lucretius was aiming at when he identified himself
with that nature common to each and every thing?”153
The ancient Roman poet Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (“The Nature of Things”)
is a poem that does not contain people or a story, but is instead, a treatise on science and
philosophy. The Nature of Things embodies the philosophy of materialism and utilizes
natural philosophy to deduce philosophical truths from the external world. Lucretius
deduces that nothing exists except for “matter and void” and that all matter is made up
of indivisible particles called atoms that cannot be created or destroyed.154
Rather, he
poses that all events and processes are merely the effects of the movement of an infinite
number of atoms and an infinite amount of space. Every atom is immortal, indivisible,
and indestructible and ceaselessly in motion.155
Thus, every action, all creation and
destruction alike is the product of the push and pull of atoms, as these elementary
particles collide, cohere, or fly apart. Furthermore, the universe is immutable; it exists
as the sum of infinite space and an infinite number of atoms—nothing is added and
nothing is taken away.156
For Lucretius, all existence is material and a part of nature.
Therefore, there is no supernatural realm, and insofar as the gods exist, they too must be
made of atoms, and are not responsible for the creation of the world, nor do they play a
role in its governance.
The complex combinations of chance and changelessness are celebrated
throughout his epic poem, but specifically in his metaphor of Venus and Mars.
Lucretius aims to show through his poetry that the teachings of Epicurus are true, but

153
154
Lucretius. “Book I: Matter and Void.” The Nature of Things. 13.
155
156
Lucretius. “Book I: Matter and Void.” The Nature of Things. 21.

70
also that life and the world are beautiful, lovable, and meaningful. He creates a system
that levels all things—nature and culture, plants, animals, and cities—through one
energizing force, that is, that the activity of atoms that are the cause of everything that
exists and everything that happens. Lucretius possessed a scientific mind with
philosophic inclinations and was able to produce an inspiring piece of quantum poetry
that beautifully exposed the entangled nature of all things by emphasizing a mutual
cooperation and universal kinship between both animate and inanimate objects.157
Furthermore, Lucretius constructed a world that is both mobile and eternally new, and
recognized the interdependency of the complex relationships that exist between all
things.
This same theme of leveling all things both animate and inanimate is proposed
by Calvino at the end of “Multiplicity” and is also strongly emphasized in Calvino’s
1979 essay regarding Metamorphoses titled “Ovid and Universal Contiguity.” Calvino
writes:
“The contiguity that exists between gods and humans—who are related
to the gods are the objects of their compulsive desires—is one of the
dominant things in “Metamorphoses”, but this is simply the contiguity
that exists between all the figures and forms of the existing world,
whether anthropomorphic or otherwise.”158
Calvino describes the universe contained in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a space
densely packed with forms that constantly swap size and nature, while the flow of time
is continually filled by an expanding sequence of tales and cycles of tales. Both earthly
and heavenly forms intertwine until the confines of the two worlds are blurred. In the
myth of Paetheon and the sun’s chariot in Book 2 of Metamorphoses, Calvino

157
158
Calvino, Italo. "Ovid and Universal Contiguity" (1979). Why Read the Classics? 25.

71
recognizes that heavens appear “both as unconfined space, abstract geometry, and at the
same time as a scene of human adventure recounted with such detailed precision that we
never lose the thread even for a moment.”159
He also remarks that it is not simply the
precision of Ovid’s description of the chariot’s movement or the emotions of the young,
unskilled charioteer that Calvino values, but it is Ovid’s exactness in the visualization of
extraterrestrial forms that map the heavens.
Ovid reveals that the invisible connections between the gods, humans, and
nature do not imply a hierarchical order, but rather an intricate system of interrelations
in which each level possesses the capacity to influence another. Calvino identifies that
myth, for Ovid, operates as a “field of tension where forces clash and balance each
other out.”160
Furthermore, the tone in which the myth is narrated is the ultimate
determining force. Ovid, according to Calvino, attempts to portray the entirety of the
narrative tales that have been handed down through literature without privileging any
particular reading. For example, sometimes the gods themselves tell a myth in which
they have played a significant role, as moral examples to warn mortals; alternatively,
humans also tell the same myths as arguments or challenges to the gods.161
Calvino
reflects:
“Only by accepting into his [Ovid’s] poem all the tales and intention
behind them which flow in every direction, pushing and shoving to
squeeze them into the ordered ranks of the epic’s hexameters, only in
this way will the poet be sure of not serving a partial design, but a living
multiplicity that does not exclude any known or unknown god.”162

159
160
Ibid. 28.
161
Ibid.
162

72
In addition to the inclusive though often contradictory compilation of all tales,
Calvino emphasizes that Ovid uses another specific narrative technique. Ovid expands
the space inside Metamorphoses by placing tales within other tales in order to heighten
the impression of a densely packed and entangled space within the poem. Calvino
directs the reader to Book 8 where a boar hunt brings together the stories of multiple
different heroes throughout the text. In the narrative, the forest is placed near the
whirlpool of Achelous—the river-god—that ends up blocking the way home from the
hunt. In Metamorphoses, as the heroes return from their hunt, Achelous offers to them
his hospitality and invites them into his home, which Calvino emphasizes becomes “an
obstacle and a refuge, a pause in the action, and an opportunity for stories and
reflection.”163
The river-god, who is now accompanied by Theseus and Pirithous, is
then encouraged to tell tales of metamorphoses, and his guests are encouraged to
reciprocate. This purposeful, narrative function allows Ovid to continuously overlap
and combine new layers of stories. Calvino concludes, “The passion which
demonstrates Ovid’s compositional skill is not systemic organization but accumulation,
and this has to be combined with various points of view and changes in rhythm.”164
The poetic style of Metamorphoses contains the same principle of
cinematography for Calvino: each of Ovid’s episodes follows in a purposeful rhythm, in
order to strike our imagination, each image overlays another one, acquiring density
before disappearing.165
The masterful utilization of these techniques conjures a picture
of the world that Calvino attempts to construct in his own writing; namely, Ovid

163
Ibid. 30.
164
Ibid.
165

73
portrays the world as a system made up of elementary components. Even the unlikely
and fantastical process of transformation is reduced to a sequence of simple processes.
The metamorphoses of things is no longer represented as a fictional phenomenon, but
instead, as the collection of realistic facts—things grow, lessen, harden, soften, curve,
straighten, join, separate etc.166
The example of Ovid’s prose that Calvino uses in his
1979 essay is identical to the example provided in “Lightness” concerning the
transformation of seaweed into coral:
“Water was brought and Perseus washed his hands, triumphant hands,
and, lest the snake-girt head be bruised on the single hard shingle, made
a bed of leaves and spread the soft weed of the sea above and on it
placed the Medusa’s head. The fresh seaweed, with living spongy cells,
absorbed the Gorgon’s power and at its touch hardened, its fronds and its
branches stiff and strange. The sea-nymphs tried the magic on more
weed and found to their delight it worked the same, and sowed the
changeling seeds back on the waves. Coral still keeps that nature…”167
Calvino emphasizes that Ovid’s manner of portraying animate and inanimate
objects objectively, as “ different combinations of a relatively small number of basic,
very simple elements” is the ultimate philosophy of the Metamorphoses. It exemplifies
the interconnectedness of everything that exists in the world, both things and living
creatures.168
Like Lucretius, Ovid set out the cosmogony at the beginning and in his
profession of faith at the end—Ovid dedicated his work to Pythagoras and Lucretius to
Epicurus. Both ancient poets wanted to provide a natural philosophy with a theoretical
basis. Calvino states:
“The only thing that matters is the poetic consistency of the manner in
which Ovid portrays and narrates his world: namely, this swarming and

166
Ibid. 32.
167
Ovid. “Perseus and Andromeda.” Metamorphoses. iv. 740-745.
168
Calvino, Italo. "Ovid and Universal Contiguity" (1979). Why Read the Classics? 33.

74
intertwining of events that are often similar but always different, in
which the continuity and mobility of everything is celebrated.”169
This is perhaps the most definitive conception of consistency that I have
provided. The poetry of Lucretius and Ovid exemplify the convergence of the
intelligence of poetry, science, and philosophy. Both poets strive towards the creation of
a work that generates order without the installation of a dogmatic hierarchy of values
and seeks to recognize the complexity of the world and compensate for uncertainty by
incorporating all tales for Ovid or leaving room for slight deviation and chance for
Lucretius.
There are two writers who think and operate quite similarly to Ovid and
Lucretius respectively. The first is Pliny the Elder. Calvino admires Pliny for the
movement of his prose and his appreciation for everything that exists as well as his
respect for the infinite diversity of all phenomena. Calvino explains that there are
however, two sides of Pliny: Pliny the poet and philosopher who possessed awareness
for the universe and sympathy for knowledge and mystery and Pliny the neurotic
collector of data and compiler of facts.170
Pliny collected multiple written sources and
divided them into separate groupings; facts he recorded as true, others that he gave the
benefit of the doubt, and others he deemed as false. However, Calvino reveals in one
essay that Pliny’s method of evaluation is extremely inconsistent and unpredictable.
Calvino believes that Pliny wants to describe a single world that is composed of a great
variety of forms. In order to this, he—like Ovid—attempts to embrace the infinite

169
170
Calvino, Italo. "The Sky, Man, the Elephant." (1982). Why Read the Classics? 38.

75
number of existing forms in the world, which is multiplied by all of the countless
reports that exist about these forms.171
Calvino describes Pliny’s scientific method as oscillating between “a desire to
find an order in nature and the recording of what is extraordinary and unique, and it is
the latter tendency which always prevails in the end.”172
Pliny viewed nature as eternal,
sacred, and harmonious, but he purposely left a wide margin for the occurrence of
miraculous and inexplicable phenomena resulting in the creation of an explanatory
system that is entirely composed of exceptions to the rules or subject to rules beyond
human understanding. Although Pliny believed that there is an explanation for every
occurrence and upholds the logic of cause and effect, he frequently minimizes it as well,
for even when Pliny finds an explanation for the facts, the facts do not thereby cease to
be miraculous.173
In Pliny’s catalogue of man and animals, both real and imaginary, maintain a
place in the realm of fantasy: every time an animal is named it is invested with the
power of illusion, it becomes an allegory, a symbol, and an emblem. Calvino believes
that the main theme of Pliny’s work is the idea of nature as “something external to
humanity, but also indistinguishable from what is innermost in man’s mind, his
dictionary of dreams and catalogues of fantasies, without which we can have neither
reason nor thought.”174

171
Ibid. 38.
172
Calvino, Italo. "The Sky, Man, the Elephant." Why Read the Classics? 39.
173
Ibid. 40.
174
Ibid. 46.

76
The thinker who corresponds with Lucretius’ philosophy is Cyrano de Bergerac,
who Calvino claims is “the first poet of atomism in modern literature.”175
Cyrano, who
was a forerunner in science fiction, created fantastical stories based on the scientific
knowledge of his time and the traditions of Renaissance magic. For example, Cyrano
described the movement of an astronaut free of the pull of gravity, rockets involving
several stages, and ‘sound books’—a mechanism that is wound up, a needle is placed on
the required chapter, and then one can listen to the sound that emerges from a kind of
mechanical mouth.176
Cyrano’s poetic imagination stems from what Calvino calls “a true cosmic
sense” and allowed Cyrano to reproduce a version of Lucretius’ atomistic philosophy.
Both Cyrano and Lucretius celebrated the unity of all things, living or inanimate.
Calvino utilizes the same excerpt from Cyrano in his 1982 essay as he does in
“Lightness.” It reads:
“You are amazed how this mixture which is a purely haphazard mixture,
and governed only by chance, can have produced a human being, since
there were so many things essential to the construction of man’s being,
but you are not aware that hundreds of millions of times this same
matter, when it was on the brink of producing man, stopped and formed
a stone, lead, coral, a flower, or a comet, all because of the fact that too
few or too many patterns were necessary to plan a human.”177
This acknowledgement of a complex system of combinations of basic patterns
that determines the variety of living forms is inherently Lucretian, and links Epicurean
science with DNA genetics and quantum entanglement. In Cyrano, Calvino sees the
convergence of poetics with Gassendi’s sensism, Copernicus’ astronomy, and sixteenth-

175
176
Calvino, Italo. "Cyrano on the Moon." Why Read the Classics? 92.
177
Ibid.

77
century natural philosophers.178
Cyrano even meets Rene Descartes in Journey to the
States of the Sun, the sequel to The States and Empires of the Moon. Calvino values
Cyrano as a writer who did not illustrate or defend a certain theory, but rather created
inventions in imagination and language that were equivalent to the new scientific and
philosophic theories of his time. This playful and imaginative approach is what Calvino
admirers the most in Cyrano and in Six Memos for the Next Millennium he admits that
in his 1965 book Cosmicomics; he embraced a similar writing strategy.
Calvino explains that the point of departure for the short stories contained in
Cosmicomics was a statement taken from the language of science and the consequences
of the independent play of visual images that arise from a conceptual statement. He
explains further that his “aim was to show that writing using images typical of myth
could grow from any soul, even from the language furthest away from any visual image
as science is today.”179
He believes that even in reading the most technical scientific
book or the most abstract book of philosophy, one can stumble upon a phrase that
unexpectedly spurs the visual imagination. However, for Calvino, although the initial
image may be determined by a preexistent written text, it can stimulate an imaginative
process that may either be “in the spirit of the text or go off in a direction of its own.”180
For example, in his first cosmicomic, “The Distance to the Moon,” the impulse
for the content of the story, which was inspired by gravitational physics, created a
surrealistic and dreamlike fantasy.181
Calvino admits that in his other cosmicomics, the
plot remains closer to the scientific principle that inspired it, but he insists that each

178
Ibid. 94.
179 Calvino, Italo. "Visibility." Six Memos for the Next Millennium. 89.
180
Ibid. 90.
181
Calvino, Italo. “The Distance to the Moon.” (1965). Cosmicomics. 3.

78
story is always “clad in a shell of imagination and feeling, and spoken by one voice or
two.”182
Calvino explains:
“In short, my procedure aims at uniting the spontaneous generation of
images and the intentionality of discursive thought. Even when the
opening gambit is played by the visual imagination, putting its own
intrinsic logic to work, it finds itself sooner or later caught in a web
where reasoning and verbal expression also impose their logic. Yet the
visual solutions continue to be determining factors and sometime
unexpectedly come to decide situations that neither the conjectures of
thought nor the resources of language would be capable of solving.”183
The ability to convey the world objectively in the manner that Calvino values
seems to be dependent on the use of poetry and narrative. Narrative functions often
provide unique explanative techniques that construct thoughtful, complex, and potential
conceptions of the world that cannot be adequately matched by philosophy or science
alone.
Similarly, in a 1968 interview, Calvino was asked, “ You recently said that the
greatest Italian writer is Galileo, why?” Calvino begins his answer by first explaining
that Giacomo Leopardi admires Galileo’s prose for their elegance and precision and that
if one were to look at any of the selected passages from Galileo that Leopardi includes
in his Anthology of Italian prose to realize how much the language of Leopardi owes to
Galileo. Calvino states that Galileo “uses language not like a neutral utensil, but with
literary awareness, with a continuous commitment that is expressive, imaginative, and
even lyrical.”184
Calvino believes that Galileo uses language to make inanimate objects
real for human kind. When Galileo describes the moon, Calvino asserts that Galileo’s
prose consequently create a the conception of the moon as a tangible thing, while he

182
183
184

79
simultaneously, conjures an image of the moon that creates a “rarefication, almost
levitation” that is mirrored in Galileo’s prose.185
Calvino informs the interviewer that
Galileo was an admirer of the lunar and cosmic poet Ludovico Ariosto, and suggests
that the ideal way in which Galileo regarded the world even as a scientist was nourished
by a literary culture. Furthermore, this style of prose connects Ariosto to Galileo to
Leopardi.
Additionally, in his 1985 essay “The Book of Nature in Galileo,” Calvino
explains that the most famous metaphor in Galileo—one that contains within itself a
small kernel of new philosophy—is that of the book of nature written in a mathematical
language. Calvino includes this quotation from Galileo:
“Philosophy is written in this enormous book, which is continually open
before our eyes (I mean the universe), but it cannot be understood unless
one first understands the language and recognizes the characters with
which it is written. It is written in a mathematical language, and its
characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures. Without
knowledge of this medium it is impossible to understand a single word of
it; without this knowledge it is like wandering hopelessly through a dark
labyrinth.”186
Calvino recognizes that this image of a book of the world has roots in medieval
thinkers like Nicholas Cusanus and Montaigne, and has been perpetuated by
contemporaries of Galileo like Francis Bacon and Tomasso Campanella.187
However,
Calvino believes that Galileo’s most novel contribution to the metaphor of the book of
the world is his emphasis on its special alphabet. Galileo also argues that the
metaphorical link is not between world and book, but rather, between world and
alphabet. Galileo says:

185
Ibid. 32.
186
Galileo, Galilei. The Assayer. 6.
187
Calvino, Italo. "The Book of Nature in Galileo." (1985). Why Read the Classics? 83.

80
“I have a little book, which is considerably shorter than Aristotle, and
Ovid, which contains all sciences, and which with just a little study, can
allow others to form the perfect idea of it. The book is the alphabet, and
there is no doubt that the person who knows how to put together and
juxtapose this or that vowel with those or other consonants, will get the
most accurate responses to all doubts and will derive lessons pertaining
to all the sciences and the arts.”188
Calvino believes that when Galileo mentions the alphabet, he means “a
combinatory system capable of representing everything in the universe.”189
Galileo even
compares the alphabet to painting. He draws equivalence between the combinations of
letters in the alphabet to the mixing of colors in a palette. Furthermore, Calvino
concludes from Galileo’s text that Galileo believed that a combination of objects that
are already endowed with meaning cannot represent all of reality; “in order to achieve
this one needs to turn to a combinatory system of minimal elements such as primary
colors or the letters of the alphabet.”190
In the same 1968 interview, Calvino further explains the relationship between
scientific writing and literary writing chiefly concerning the use of words. He states
that scientific writing tends toward a purely formal and mathematical language based on
abstract logic indifferent to its content. Conversely, he explains that literary writing
tends toward a construction of a system of values in which “every word, every sign, is a
value for the sole reason that it has been chosen and fixed on the page.”191
He argues
that there can never be a meeting of scientific and literary languages, but there can be a
challenge between the two of them. Calvino suggests that in certain situations,

188
Galileo, Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.
189
Calvino, Italo. "The Book of Nature in Galileo." (1985). Why Read the Classics? 85.
190
Ibid.
191

81
literature can provide imaginative inspiration for scientists, urging them to follow a
hypothesis to its ultimate consequences and vice versa. He states:
“At the moment the language of mathematics, of formal logic, can save
the writer from the disrepair that words and images have fallen into as a
result of being misused. Even so, the writer should not think that he has
found anything valid absolutely. Here, too, the example of how science
can be of use to him, and teach him the patient modesty of considering
each and every result as being part of a possibly infinite series of
approximations.”192
Calvino admits that in the particular direction that his work is taking him, he is
finding nourishment in Galileo’s precision of language, scientific-poetic imagination,
and his posing of conjectures. He then compares Galileo to Dante, who in a different
cultural context created an “encyclopedic and cosmological works, and he too, tried to
construct an image of the universe by means of written word.”193
This vocation deeply
embedded in Italian literature Calvino believes has been handed down from Dante to
Galileo.
One could follow the thread even further and argue that Lucretius and Ovid
passed down this vocation to Dante. Recall that Calvino explains in “Lightness” that
Dante’s real genius lies in his “extracting all of the possibilities of sound and emotion
and feeling from language, in capturing the world in verse at all its various levels, in all
its forms and attributes, in transmitting the sense that the world is organized into a
system, an order where everything has its place.”194
In his essay on Galileo and the book of nature, Calvino explains similar notions
historically held by Italian literary traditions:

192
193
Ibid. 32.
194

82
“This notion of the literary work as a map of the world and of the
knowable, of writing driven on by a thirst for knowledge that may by
turns be theological, speculative, magical, encyclopedic, or may be
concerned with natural philosophy or with transfiguring, visionary
observation. It is the tradition that exists in all European literatures, but I
would say that in Italian literature it has been dominant in every shape
and form, making our literature very different from others, very different
but at the same time perfectly unique. In the last few centuries this vein
has emerged less frequently, and since that time, certainly our literature
has diminished in importance. Maybe now is the time to find that vein
again.”195
Ludovico Ariosto is another Italian author whom Calvino holds in high regard.
Both Ariosto and his famous novel Orlando Furioso are repeatedly referred to
throughout the course of Six Memos for the Next Millennium; however, though they are
never explicitly analyzed in the lectures. However, in a 1974 essay on Orlando
Furioso, Calvino determined several narrative functions and structural designs that I
believe resemble those that he admires in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. For example,
Calvino identifies the cinematic nature of the progression of the Orlando Furioso in
which there occurs shifts in narration from one character to another without losing the
continuity of the narrative. Similarly, Calvino notices that the text expands from within
as “episodes proliferate from other episodes, generating new symmetries and contrasts”
and this characterizes Ariosto’s creative method.196
Calvino believes that it is
impossible to give a single definition of the structure of Orlando Furioso since the
poem purposely lacks a rigid geometry but instead possesses a “polycentric, synchronic
structure, whose episodes spiral off in every direction, continually intersecting with and
bifurcating from each other.”197
Calvino provides the image of an energy field, which

195
Calvino, Italo. "Two Interviews on Science and Literature." (1968). The Literature Machine. 32-33.
196
Calvino, Italo. "The Structure of Orlando Furioso." (1974). Why Read the Classics? 59.
197
Ibid.

83
contains a constant centrifugal force that continually generates a form within itself in
order to describe its indeterminate structure.
Calvino believes that Ariosto constructed a model of the universe that appears to
be a continuation of someone else’s work—much like Jorge Luis Borges. Ariosto also
implemented deceitful discretion and unreliability by intentionally understating
elements of the story that are incredibly important until the proper moment. Ariosto’s
poem zigzags back and forth between the intersections and divergences of storylines
that trace across Europe and Africa. Calvino explains that like Dante, Ariosto did not
set himself a rigid division of subject matter, or any rules of symmetry that would force
him to set the number of canti or number of stanzas in each canto.
Orlando Furioso implements a narrative function that layers in multiple stories
like the construct of Ovid’s forest. Ariosto creates a kind of vortex in his poem that
traps his main characters one by one: the wizard Atlante’s magic castle. The wizard
Atlante is especially gifted at creating architectural illusions and he constructs multiple
castles one for example that is simply an empty vortex in which all of the images of the
poem are refracted. Atlante’s spell concentrates all of the unsatisfied desires of
Ariosto’s characters into the false enclosure designed as a labyrinth, but the rules that
govern the movement of the characters and the open spaces of the world remain
unchanged. As the story progresses, characters journey towards their particular desires
and objectives only to one by one unknowingly converge on the castle and remain
trapped inside. However, the character Astolfo—who believes he is chasing a horse
thief when he is tricked into entering the castle—is immune to the entrapment spell of
Atlante because he possesses a magic book that explains to him everything one could

84
know about Atlante’s castle of illusions. Astolfo learns that all he must do to
disintegrate the illusion spell of the castle is touch a certain marble stone, but just before
he reaches it, he is descended upon by a crowd of knights who under the illusory power
of Atlante’s spell attempt to kill him.
Calvino explains Atlante the wizard and Ariosto the poet are very similar in that:
“The castle turns out to be a crafty structural device for the narrator
because of the physical impossibility of developing simultaneously a
large number of parallel plots, he feels the need to remove characters
from action for the duration of a number of canti, setting aside a number
of cards in order to continue his game and to bring them out at the
appropriate moment. The magician who wants to delay the fulfillment of
destiny and the poet-tactician who alternately multiplies and reduces the
threads of the threads of the characters he deploys on the field, now
grouping them together, now dispersing them, blend into one another
until they are inseparable.”198
But Ariosto employs another narrative function that allows the story to
objectively examine itself. Calvino says that the forty-sixth canto opens with a list of a
crowd of people who Calvino believes represent the public that Ariosto was writing his
poem for. Of course Ariosto, out of obligation, was required to acknowledge his
benefactor(s) at the start of his poem, but Calvino insists that this section is the real
dedication of Orlando Furioso.199
Ariosto sets the scene of the boat entering the harbor
surrounded by knights, poets, beautiful noblewomen, and intellectuals. Calvino
believes that through this “structural reversal,” Ariosto is providing a role call of his
contemporaries, allowing the poem to step outside of itself and then examine itself
through the eyes and ears of the Furioso’s intended audience.200

198
Calvino, Italo. "The Structure of Orlando Furioso.” (1974). Why Read the Classics? 66.
199
Ibid.
200
Ibid. 67.

85
Perhaps this essay is not following the course that I set for myself when I first
began. Every time I try to conclude my thesis project, another pesky thought arises and
forces me to attempt to connect and explain different sequences of Calvino’s essays and
fiction in a unique and insightful manner. I wanted to write about the narrative
functions that Calvino admired in others and used his own analysis of these structures to
expose similar elements in his own writing and to discuss Calvino’s interpretation of the
multiple odysseys that occur within Homer’s Odyssey and expose the narrators of
Calvino’s own fiction to be as unreliable as Ulysses. I wanted to talk about Agilulf, the
nonexistent knight, an empty suit of white armor who goes around performing chivalric
deeds, and ironically embodying the very same temperament that I have come to
associate with Calvino. I wanted to compare Atlante’s castle of illusions in Orlando
Furioso with Calvino’s Castle of Crossed Destinies and explain the image generator
that grappled with the ordering, swapping, and reordering of tarot cards and analysis as
well as the inclusion of multiple variants and interpretations. I wanted to talk about
Cosmicomics in relation to Calvino’s influences from Jorge Luis Borges and the reason
that Calvino prefers to write fiction. I wanted to talk about Mr. Palomar in relation to
Lucretian atomism and further examples of objective approaches to envisioning the
world. I wanted to talk about the mathematical design of Invisible Cities, the
unreliability of Marco Polo, and the complex and vast encompassing ramifications of
filtering all of Calvino’s ideas through the single symbol of the city. I wanted to talk
about If on a winter’s night a traveler, and the intentional unreliability of the narrator,
the complex series of design and imitation as well as Calvino’s philosophy regarding
the relationship between the reader and the writer. I wanted to talk about Calvino the

86
poet, the philosopher, the scientist, the interdisciplinary thinker; I wanted to talk about
Don Quixote and literature machines…
I do not consider the project I set out to write to be completed. However, I do
consider the content of Consistency that I have proposed thus far to be sufficient for the
completion of an undergraduate thesis project. My interest in Calvino and the enormity
of topics that remain necessitate further essays, further analysis, and further study. I
cannot adequately express with words the gratitude I have for the opportunity to learn
about Mr. Calvino and in my pursuit of interdisciplinary thought I intend look to him
for inspiration. Perhaps it is fitting that like Six Memos for the Next Millennium the
vision I had for my thesis project is incomplete. Six Memos for the Next Millennium is
an incredibly insightful, small, and relevant work.
I have given multiple copies to people in my life that I respect and thought
would appreciate it. The most interesting thing that I have pulled from discussing
Calvino’s work is that no matter what educational background one comes from, Six
Memos for the Next Millennium means something unique to the reader. It bridges all
disciplines and occupations because it is ultimately concerned with the one thing that
connects us to one another, the past and the future: the proper use of language and an
understanding of the world that comes from the proper use of language. I believe that
this awareness of the proper use of language, a language that strives to map all things
and possibilities in order to remain relevant and true is the main purpose of Calvino’s
lectures. And in that sense, although the lectures are incomplete, he succeeded in his
purpose.

87
I think that my own project thoughtfully engages a significant portion of
Calvino’s work and proposes relevant content for “Consistency,” although no one can
say for sure what Calvino would or would not have included. This project has been the
first step I have made towards being an interdisciplinary scholar: exposure to a thinker
who is inspiring, thoughtful, and certainly a master of his own work. I am at the
beginning of the next step of my educational path, but this project has crystallized in my
mind multiple ideas on what I am and who I would like to be, as well as how I would
like to write.
Furthermore, by studying Calvino’s essays and listing his references in Six
Memos for the Next Millennium I have begun to compile a list of classics as well as
assembled a list of interdisciplinary thinkers who inspired Calvino, who I am now
interested in learning about. I am proud of what I have written, and will definitely talk
about the other elements that I would like to have been able to discuss in this project at
my defense.

88
Bibliography
Calvino, Italo. Six Memos for the Next Millennium. London: Penguin Group, 2009. Print.
This translation first published by Harvard University Press, 1988
Calvino, Italo. Cosmicomics. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt and Jonathan
Cape Limited, 1968. Print. This is a translation of Le cosmicomiche, 1965
Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1974. Print. This is a translation of Le citta invisibili, 1972
Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass. New
York: Bantam Dell A Division of Random House, 1981. Print.
Calvino, Italo, and Michael Wood. “Chapter.” Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985.
Trans. Martin McLaughlin. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2013. Print.
Calvino, Italo. “Collection of Sand.” Collection of Sand: Essays. Trans. M. L.
McLaughlin. Estate of Italo Calvino. 2002. 5-17. Print. First published in Italy
as Collezione di sabbia by Garzani, 1984
Calvino, Italo. Why Read the Classics? Trans. Martin McLaughlin. New York:
Pantheon, 1999. Print. First published in Italy as Perche leggier i classici by
Arnoldo Mandadori Editore, 1991
Calvino, Italo. The Literature Machine. Trans. Patrick Creagh. London: Vintage, 1997.
Print. First Published in Great Britain by Secker & Warberg Ltd, 1987
Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. A.D. Melville. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Print. First
published 1986 by Oxford University Press
Lucretius. The Nature of Things. London: Penguin, 2007. Print. Translation of De
Rerum Natura
Weiss, Beno. Understanding Italo Calvino. Columbia, S.C.: U of South Carolina, 1993.
Print.

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