Six Memos for the Next Millennium Read online

  An extraordinary writer, Cyrano, and one who deserves to be better known, not only as the first true forerunner of science fiction but for his intellectual and poetic qualities. A follower of Gassendi's “sensism” and the astronomy of Copernicus, but nourished above all by the natural philosophy of the Italian Renaissance—Cardano, Bruno, Campanella—Cyrano is the first poet of atomism in modern literature. In pages where his irony cannot conceal a genuine cosmic excitement, Cyrano extols the unity of all things, animate or inanimate, the combinatoria of elementary figures that determine the variety of living forms; and above all he conveys his sense of the precariousness of the processes behind them. That is, how nearly man missed being man, and life, life, and the world, the world.

  Vous vous etonnez comme cette matiere, brouillee pele-mele, au gre du hasard, peut avoir constitue un homme, vu qu'il y avait tant de choses necessaires a la construction de son etre, mais vous ne savez pas que cent millions de fois cette matiere, s'acheminant au dessein d'un homme, s'est arrêtée à former tantot une pierre, tantot du plomb, tantot du corail, tantot une fleur, tantot une comete, pour le trop ou le trop peu de certaines figures qu'il fallait ou ne fallait pas a designer un homme? Si bien que ce n'est pas merveille qu'entre une infinie quantite de matiere qui change et se remue incessamment, elle ait rencontre a faire le peu d'animaux, de vegetaux, de mineraux que nous voyons; non plus que ce n'est pas merveille qu'en cent coups de des il arrive un rafle. Aussi bien est-il impossible que de ce re-muement il ne se fasse quelque chose, et cette chose sera toujours admiree d'un etourdi qui ne saura pas combien peu s'en est fallu qu'elle n'ait pas ete faite. {Voyage dans la lune, 1661, Gamier-Flammarion edition, pp. 98-99)

  You marvel that this matter, shuffled pell-mell at the whim of Chance, could have made a man, seeing that so much was needed for the construction of his being. But you must realize that a hundred million times this matter, on the way to human shape, has been stopped to form now a stone, now lead, now coral, now a flower, now a comet; and all because of more or fewer elements that were or were not necessary for designing a man. Little wonder if, within an infinite quantity of matter that ceaselessly changes and stirs, the few animals, vegetables, and minerals we see should happen to be made; no more wonder than getting a royal pair in a hundred casts of the dice. Indeed it is equally impossible for all this stirring not to lead to something; and yet this something will always be wondered at by some blockhead who will never realize how small a change would have made it into something else.

  By this route Cyrano goes so far as to proclaim the brotherhood of men and cabbages, and thus imagines the protest of a cabbage about to be beheaded: “Homme, mon cher frere, que t'ai-je fait qui merite la mort? … Je me leve de terre, je m'èpan-ouis, je te tends les bras, je t'offre mes enfants en graine, et pour recompense de ma courtoisie, tu me fais trancher la tete!” (Man, my dear brother, what have I done to you, to deserve death?… I rise from the earth, I blossom forth, I stretch out my arms to you, I offer you my children as seed; and as a reward for my courtesy you have my head cut off!).

  If we consider that this peroration in favor of truly universal fraternite was written nearly one hundred and fifty years before the French revolution, we see how the sluggishness of the human consciousness in emerging from its anthropocentric parochialism can be abolished in an instant by poetic invention. And all this in the context of a trip to the moon, in which Cyrano's imagination outdistances his most illustrious predecessors, Lucian of Samo-sata and Ludovico Ariosto. In my discussion of lightness, Cyrano is bound to figure chiefly because of the way in which (before Newton) he felt the problem of universal gravitation. Or, rather, it is the problem of escaping the force of gravity that so stimulates his imagination as to lead him to think up a whole series of ways of reaching the moon, each one more ingenious than the last—for example, by using a phial filled with dew that evaporates in the sun; by smearing himself with ox marrow, which is usually sucked up by the moon; or by repeatedly tossing up a magnetized ball from a little boat.

  As for the technique of magnetism, this was destined to be developed and perfected by Jonathan Swift to keep the flying island of Laputa in the air. The moment at which Laputa first appears in flight is one when Swift's two obsessions seem to cancel out in an instant of magical equilibrium. I am speaking of the bodiless abstraction of the rationalism at which his satire is aimed and the material weight of the body: “and I could see the sides of it, encompassed with several gradations of galleries, and stairs at certain intervals, to descend from one to the other. In the lowest gallery I beheld some people fishing with long angling rods, and others looking on.” Swift was a contemporary and adversary of Newton. Voltaire was an admirer of Newton, and he imagined a giant called Micromegas, who in contrast to Swift's giants is defined not by his bulk but by dimensions expressed in figures, by spatial and temporal properties enumerated in the rigorous, impassive terms of scientific treatises. In virtue of this logic and style, Micromegas succeeds in flying through space from Sirius to Saturn to Earth. One might say that, in Newton's theories, what most strikes the literary imagination is not the conditioning of everything and everyone by the inevitability of its own weight, but rather the balance of forces that enables heavenly bodies to float in space.

  The eighteenth-century imagination is full of figures suspended in air. It is no accident that at the beginning of that century Antoine Galland's French translation of the Thousand and One Nights opened up the imagination of the West to the Eastern sense of marvel: flying carpets, winged horses, genies emerging from lamps. In this drive to make the imagination exceed all bounds, the eighteenth century reached its climax with the flight of Baron von Miinchausen on a cannonball, an image identified forever in our minds with the illustrations that are Gustave Dore's masterpiece. These adventures of Miinchausen, which— like the Thousand and One Nights—may have had one author, many authors, or none at all, are a constant challenge to the laws of gravity. The baron is carried aloft by ducks; he pulls up himself and his horse by tugging at the pigtail of his wig; he comes down from the moon on a rope that during the descent is several times cut and reknotted.

  These images from folk literature, along with those we have seen from more learned literature, are part of the literary repercussions of Newton's theories. When he was fifteen years old, Giacomo Leopardi wrote an amazingly erudite History of Astronomy, in which among other things he sums up Newton's theories. The gazing at the night skies that inspires Leopardi's most beautiful lines was not simply a lyrical theme: when he spoke about the moon, Leopardi knew exactly what he was talking about. In his ceaseless discourses on the unbearable weight of living, Leopardi bestows many images of lightness on the happiness he thinks we can never attain: birds, the voice of a girl singing at a window, the clarity of the air—and, above all, the moon.

  As soon as the moon appears in poetry, it brings with it a sensation of lightness, suspension, a silent calm enchantment. When I began thinking about these lectures, I wanted to devote one whole talk to the moon, to trace its apparitions in the literatures of many times and places. Then I decided that the moon should be left entirely to Leopardi. For the miraculous thing about his poetry is that he simply takes the weight out of language, to the point that it resembles moonlight. The appearances of the moon in his poetry do not take up many lines, but they are enough to shed the light of the moon on the whole poem, or else to project upon it the shadow of its absence.

  Dolce e chiara e la notte e senza vento

  e queta sovra i tetti e in mezzo agli orti

  posa la luna, e di lontan rivela

  serena ogni montagna.

  O graziosa luna, io mi rammento

  che, or volge l'anno, sovra questo colle

  io venia pien d'angoscia a rimirarti:

  e tu pendevi allor su quella selva

  siccome fai, che tutta la rischiari.

  . . . . . .

  O cara luna, al cui tranquillo raggio

  danzan le lepri nelle selve �
�

  . . . . . .

  Già tutta Paria imbruna,

  torna azzurro il sereno, e tornan Pombre

  giu da' colli e da' tetti,

  al biancheggiar della recente luna.

  . . . . . .

  Che fai tu, luna, in ciel? Dimmi, che fai,

  silenziosa luna?

  Sorgi la sera e vai,

  contemplando i deserti, indi ti posi.

  Soft and clear is the night and without wind, and quietly over the roofs and in the gardens rests the moon, and far away reveals every peaceful mountain.

  O gentle, gracious moon, I remember now, it must be a year ago, on this same hill I came to see you; I was full of sorrow. And you were leaning then above that wood just as now, filling it all with brilliance.

  O cherished moon, beneath whose quiet beams the hares dance in the woods …

  Already all the air darkens, deepens to blue, and shadows glide from roofs and hills at the whitening of the recent moon.

  What do you do there, moon, in the sky? Tell me what you do, silent moon. When evening comes you rise and go contemplating wastelands; then you set.

  Have a great number of threads been interwoven in this lecture? Which thread should I pull on to find the end in my hand? There is the thread that connects the moon, Leopardi, Newton, gravitation and levitation. There is the thread of Lucretius, atomism, Cavalcanti's philosophy of love, Renaissance magic, Cyrano. Then there is the thread of writing as a metaphor of the powder-fine substance of the world. For Lucretius, letters were atoms in continual motion, creating the most diverse words and sounds by means of their permutations. This notion was taken up by a long tradition of thinkers for whom the world's secrets were contained in the combinatoria of the signs used in writing: one thinks of the Ars Magna of Raymond Lully, the Cabala of the Spanish rabbis and of Pico della Mirandola Even…. Galileo saw the alphabet as the model for all combinations of minimal units …. And then Leibniz….

  Should I continue along this road? Won't the conclusions awaiting me seem all too obvious? Writing as a model for every process of reality…. indeed the only reality we can know, indeed the only reality tout court…. No, I will not travel such roads as these, for they would carry me too far from the use of words as I understand it—that is, words as a perpetual pursuit of things, as a perpetual adjustment to their infinite variety.

  There remains one thread, the one I first started to unwind: that of literature as an existential function, the search for lightness as a reaction to the weight of living. Perhaps even Lucretius was moved by this need, perhaps even Ovid: Lucretius who was seeking—or thought he was seeking—Epicurean impassiveness; and Ovid who was seeking—or thought he was seeking—reincarnation in other lives according to the teachings of Pythagoras.

  I am accustomed to consider literature a search for knowledge. In order to move onto existential ground, I have to think of literature as extended to anthropology and ethnology and my- thology. Faced with the precarious existence of tribal life— drought, sickness, evil influences—the shaman responded by ridding his body of weight and flying to another world, another level of perception, where he could find the strength to change the face of reality. In centuries and civilizations closer to us, in villages where the women bore most of the weight of a constricted life, witches flew by night on broomsticks or even on lighter vehicles such as ears of wheat or pieces of straw. Before being codified by the Inquisition, these visions were part of the folk imagination, or we might even say of lived experience. I find it a steady feature in anthropology, this link between the levitation desired and the privation actually suffered. It is this anthropological device that literature perpetuates.

  First, oral literature: in folktales a flight to another world is a common occurrence. Among the “functions” catalogued by Vladimir Propp in his Morphology of the Folktale (1968), it is one of the methods of “transference of the hero,” defined as follows: “Usually the object sought is in ‘another’ or ‘different’ realm that may be situated far away horizontally, or else at a great vertical depth or height.” Propp then goes on to list a great number of examples of the hero flying through the air: on horseback or on the back of a bird, disguised as a bird, in a flying boat, on a flying carpet, on the shoulders of a giant or a spirit, in the devil's wagon.

  It is probably not pushing things too far to connect the functions of shamanism and witchcraft documented in ethnology and folklore with the catalogue of images contained in literature. On the contrary, I think that the deepest rationality behind every literary operation has to be sought out in the anthropological needs to which it corresponds.

  I would like to end this talk by mentioning Kafka's “Der Ku-belreiter” (The Knight of the Bucket). This is a very short story written in 1917 in the first person, and its point of departure is plainly a real situation in that winter of warfare, the worst for the Austrian Empire: the lack of coal. The narrator goes out with an empty bucket to find coal for the stove. Along the way the bucket serves him as a horse, and indeed it takes him up as far as the second floor of a house, where he rocks up and down as if riding on the back of a camel. The coal merchant's shop is underground, and the bucket rider is too high up. He has a hard time getting his message across to the man, who would really like to respond to his request, but the coal merchant's wife wants nothing to do with him. He begs them to give him a shovelful of even the worst coal, even though he can't pay immediately. The coal merchant's wife unties her apron and shooes away the intruder as if he were a fly. The bucket is so light that it flies off with its rider until it disappears beyond the Ice Mountains.

  Many of Kafka's short stories are mysterious, and this one is particularly so. It may be that Kafka only wanted to tell us that going out to look for a bit of coal on a cold wartime night changes the mere swinging of an empty bucket into the quest of a knight-errant or the desert crossing of a caravan or a flight on a magic carpet. But the idea of an empty bucket raising you above the level where one finds both the help and the egoism of others; the empty bucket, symbol of privation and desire and seeking, raising you to the point at which a humble request can no longer be satisfied—all this opens the road to endless reflection.

  I have spoken of the shaman and the folktale hero, of privation that is transformed into lightness and makes possible a flight into a realm where every need is magically fulfilled. I have spoken of witches flying on humble household implements, such as a bucket. But the hero of Kafka's story doesn't seem to be endowed with the powers of shamanism or witchcraft; nor does the country beyond the Ice Mountains seem to be one in which the empty bucket will find anything to fill it. In fact, the fuller it is, the less it will be able to fly. Thus, astride our bucket, we shall face the new millennium, without hoping to find anything more in it than what we ourselves are able to bring to it. Lightness, for example, whose virtues I have tried to illustrate here.

  *The English translation of these lines from Montale's “Little Testament” has been provided by Jonathan Galassi.

  2

  QUICKNESS

  I will start by telling you an ancient legend.

  Late in life the emperor Charlemagne fell in love with a German girl. The barons at his court were extremely worried when they saw that the sovereign, wholly taken up with his amorous passion and unmindful of his regal dignity, was neglecting the affairs of state. When the girl suddenly died, the courtiers were greatly relieved—but not for long, because Charlemagne's love did not die with her. The emperor had the embalmed body carried to his bedchamber, where he refused to be parted from it. The Archbishop Turpin, alarmed by this macabre passion, suspected an enchantment and insisted on examining the corpse. Hidden under the girl's dead tongue he found a ring with a precious stone set in it. As soon as the ring was in Turpin's hands, Charlemagne fell passionately in love with the archbishop and hurriedly had the girl buried. In order to escape the embarrassing situation, Turpin flung the ring into Lake Constance. Charlemagne thereupon fell in love with the
lake and would not leave its shores.

  This legend, “taken from a book on magic,” is set down even more concisely than I have recorded it in a book of unpublished notes by the French Romantic writer Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly (you can find it in the notes to the Pleiade edition of Barbey d'Aurevilly's works, 1.1315). Ever since I read it, the legend has kept coming back into my mind as if the spell of the ring were continuing to act through the medium of the story.

  Let me try to explain why such a story can be so fascinating to us. What we have is a series of totally abnormal events linked together: the love of an old man for a young girl, a necrophiliac obsession and a homosexual impulse, while in the end everything subsides into melancholy contemplation, with the old king staring in rapture at the lake. “Charlemagne, la vue attachee sur son lac de Constance, amoureux de l'abime cache” (Charlemagne, his eyes fixed on Lake Constance, in love with the hidden abyss), writes Barbey d'Aurevilly in the passage in his novel (Une vieille mattresse, p. 221) which he annotates by relating the legend.

  To hold this chain of events together, there is a verbal link, the word “love” or “passion,” which establishes a continuity between different forms of attraction. There is also a narrative link, the magic ring that establishes a logical relationship of cause and effect between the various episodes. The drive of desire toward a thing that does not exist, a lack or absence symbolized by the empty circle of the ring, is expressed more by the rhythm of the story than by the events narrated. In the same way, the whole story is shot through with a sense of death, against which Charlemagne appears to be struggling feverishly by clinging to the last remnants of life; a fever that then subsides in the contemplation of the lake.

  The real protagonist of the story, however, is the magic ring, because it is the movements of the ring that determine those of the characters and because it is the ring that establishes the relationships between them. Around the magic object there forms a kind of force field that is in fact the territory of the story itself. We might say that the magic object is an outward and visible sign that reveals the connection between people or between events. It has a narrative function, whose history we may trace in the Norse sagas and the chivalric romances—a function that continues to surface in Italian poems of the Renaissance. In Ariosto's Orlando Jurioso we find an endless series of exchanges of swords, shields, helmets, and horses, each one endowed with particular qualities. In this way the plot can be described in terms of the changes of ownership of a certain number of objects, each one endowed with certain powers that determine the relationships between certain characters.