Introduction
In the course of working my Calvino comic, Under False Pretenses, I was happy to reread Six Memos for the Next Millennium. This slim volume collects a series of lectures that Calvino planned to deliver in 1985, though he died before doing so or indeed before finishing the work – he only completed five of the planned six memos. This Calvino-esque twist leaves readers to guess at what that final essay might have contained based on the gaps or the implied conclusions in the essays we do have.
I suspected Six Memos wouldn’t end up having a place in my comic, and it didn’t. But I’ve continued to think about it, so I decided that as I did previously with Virginia’s Woolf’s diary I would write something about how Calvino’s ideas might apply to comics.
All quotes below are from Six Memos, followed when necessary by my comments, my thoughts, my attempts to re-articulate or pick apart what Calvino had to say. I’m quoting from the 2016 translation by Geoffrey Brock.
Lightness
Above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.
This is an interesting comment from an author who employed constraints and pre-determined structures in much of his work. Aren’t those constraints weighty? But it is true that Calvino never places structure in the forefront of his writing, and that you can enjoy the work without any knowledge of its formal scaffolding. His plots are never particularly complex, and there’s an undeniable lightness to his language.
Thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem heavy and opaque…lightness for me is related to precision and definition, not to the hazy and haphazard.
Say something once and say it precisely. Don’t beat the reader, don’t beat your characters, don’t beat yourself over the head with a theme or a motif or a plot point. Don’t use flowery, opaque language; state your ideas beautifully and plainly.
It’s very useful for me to think about how this quote also applies to flowery, opaque images and also to vague images. With a strong degree of confirmation bias, my instinct is that a “light” image would be a quick scribble, a profile in a single line, a gesturing towards the idea of an image. More Schulz than Hal Foster. I suspect Calvino, who said that a poster of Snoopy writing “It was a dark and stormy night…” was one inspiration for If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, would agree.
But then I’ve often found myself using mystery and vagueness as a crutch — not sure what goes in the next panel? A drawing of a tree or some clouds will do! This isn’t precise, Calvino would say. This isn’t light. An images can be, should be, simple but direct.
Quickness
I don’t mean to say here that quickness has value in itself. Narrative time can also be delaying, cyclic, or static. In any case, a story is an operation on duration, an enchantment that affects the flow of time, contracting it or expanding it.
One way to understand the structure of your story, and indeed its formal approach, is by considering whether it contracts or expands time. This lends itself well to comics, where even the layout and size of your panels is another axis around which time can turn. I’ve tried before to make a comic during which no time passes. I didn’t quite succeed. I’d like to try again.
I am not a devotee of digression. I might say I prefer to entrust myself to the straight line, in the hopes that it will continue on into infinity and make me unreachable.
Calvino’s books are generally short, and often made up of individual stories and chapters that are even shorter. By focusing on a single idea, he extracts from it more meaning and depth than you might have expected. Suggesting that there is at the margins of the work more depth still.
In the ever-busier times that await us, literature will need to aim for the highest concentration of poetry and thought.
I’m not sure you can concentrate poetry and thought much more densely than in a four panel comic. I’m not sure there’s a more stifling example of slowness and heaviness than a mundane or poorly executed four panel comic.
Exactitude
For me, exactitude means above all three things:
- A well-defined, well-considered design for the work
- The evocation of clear, sharp, memorable images
- A language that is as precise as possible in its expression of the nuances of thoughts and images
I edit my work a great deal, as regular readers might know. If anything, that trend is accelerating. I’m not sure how Calvino approached editing, but it seems to me that one should have the first point decided at or near the beginning of a project but pursue the second and third points through editing. Remove images that aren’t clear and sharp. Rewrite language that isn’t precise.
Since the human brain can’t grasp the infinite, indeed recoils in fear from the very thought, it must content itself with the indefinite, with sensations that as they blur together create an impression of boundlessness, illusory but still pleasing.
I like this quote just because it strikes me that the effect Calvino describes here is much easier to achieve with image than with text.
Visibility
My method tries to join the spontaneous generation of images to the intentionality of logical thought.
One could derive an entire practice, an entire approach to making comics, just from this sentence. Calvino also mentions in this essay a formative experience he discusses a few other times in his writing: reading American newspaper strips as a child. These strips, he explained, were either poorly translated or had no words at all; he credits his attempts to decode these stories with helping to develop his awareness of the power of images.
…for me reading the pictures without the words was undoubtedly an education in storytelling, stylization, and image composition. The graphical elegance, for example, of Pat Sullivan, who within a small square frame sets the black outline of Felix the Cat on a road that disappears into a landscape crowded by full moon in a black sky — I think that has remained an ideal for me.
Multiplicity
If medieval literature tended towards works that assimilated human knowledge into stable, compact, ordered forms – works such as the Divine Comedy, where multifarious linguistic riches meet the application of systematic and unified thinking – the best-loved modern books, by contrast, arise from the confluence and collision of a multiplicity of interpretive methods, modes of thought, and styles of expression.
What Calvino describes here is certainly one mode of modern literature — he mentions Carlo Emilio Gadda, Robert Musil, Proust, and Joyce as being among admirable practitioners of this mode. But while I like some of those writers, I’ll admit I struggled with this essay both as someone who is often not a fan of complex mega novels and because I don’t see much multiplicity in Calvino’s own work. Or at least, not multiplicity in the way he describes it here. Calvino’s multiplicity is light, quick, exact; ideas do collide but with often only by suggestion.
Consistency
This is the sixth memo, which Calvino titled but did not write before his death. Here, presumably, he would present some ideas on how to bring together the discrete and even arguably contradictory elements of the preceding essays. Indeed the essays do present contradictory (multiplitious?) ideas, at least superficially. Would this essay have resolved those contradictions and articulated a systematic, unified approach to literature? A quote from the “Exactitude” essay might provide a clue:
The book in which I think I’ve had the most to say remains Invisible Cities, because I was able to focus all my reflections and experiences and conjectures on a single symbol. And also because I created a multifaceted structure in which each brief text sits close to others in a sequence that doesn’t suggest causality or hierarchy but rather a network within which one can follow multiple paths and come to various ramified conclusions.
In that quote, and in Invisible Cities itself, I feel like I can glimpse what consistency might mean for Calvino. The individual stories in Cities are quick, just a few pages, and exact in their attempts to describe a single element of a city, a single type of city. Those elements are often visual striking, even exaggerated to offer the reader compelling imagery.
The multiplicity arrives above all in the interactions between the stories. The gaps between the panels. Felix the Cat, walking on an empty road towards a full moon, again and again and again.