Calvino's Literary Manifesto

As we roll up to the next millennium, many have taken the time to reassess their values. Random House has assembled a collection of Calvino's essays, and entitled it Why Read the Classics? and the book is just fine. The publisher purports that the book will "account for the enduring importance to our lives of crucial writers of the Western canon," and this is fine too. For those who know and love and read Calvino, we also know it for the mularkey it is.

Whatever else Calvino did--as a writer and a reader--he was able to make the world new again, and his essays in Six Memos for the Next Millenium are his manifesto for a new kind of writing. Calvino espouses five literary values in these essays (they were meant to be six lectures, delivered at Harvard, but he died before they were finished): lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity. The essays turn back to the classics, but Calvino's readings are appropriations. He finds in the classics exactly what he needs.

For instance, when reading Kafka--a writer in whom few would find lightness--Calvino sees only the magic of the bucket rider. This same magic can be seen in his own work, perhaps best in Cosmicomics when the dinosaur slips away on the metro.

In Six Memos for the Next Millennium Calvino seeks to subvert the heavy handedness of deep meaning and anxiety with which our contemporary writing is frought. He creates a kind of anti-canon in which all things are made deft and lively. In "Visibility" he proposes:

Let us return to purely literary problematics and ask ourselves
about the genesis of imagery at a time when literature no longer
refers back to an authority or a tradition as its origin or goal
but aims at novelty, originality, and invention.

It is Calvino's ability to reinvent familiar, worn out forms that make him great. His energy and vitality stand against classicism and it's contemporary partner, cynicism. As the year turns, it is time to re-examine Calvino, and time to reassert his vision for literature.