Of love and content management
Italo Calvino always fits in moments for me. A shared love of narrative forms and impact likely explains this, but I'm still surprised each time.
Following the lessons last month from "Lightness," the first of Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium, I picked up the book again last night and read his second memo, "Quickness." It fit the moment perfectly.
Calvino tells an old story of Charlemagne and a magic ring. He notes different methods in which the story moves before focusing on one.
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 furioso 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 special powers that determine the relationships between certain characters.
In realistic narrative, Mambrino's helmet becomes a barber's bowl, but it does not lose importance or meaning. In the same way, enormous weight is attached to all the objects that Robinson Crusoe saves from the wrecked ship or makes with his own hands. I would say that the moment an object appears in a narrative, it is charged with a special force and becomes like the pole of a magnetic field, a knot in the network of invisible relationships. The symbolism of an object may be more or less explicit, but it is always there. We might even say that in a narrative any object is always magic.
Quickness enters this picture for Calvino as the special forces around objects, characters, phrasing, or other narrative tools bring continued meaning with concision. For a story's moments or a moment's assets, the speed of their imparting adds to their power, which adds back to speed. Both effects help understanding. It's narrative aerodynamics.
July 7th, 2010 at 8:17 AM
[...] difficult reality and his dreamlike aspirations. The next, "Quickness," explored narrative aerodynamics. Both essays spoke near-directly to my life in the weeks I read [...]