670
PARTISAN REVIEW
The attempted embrace of opposites informs the book in yet other
ways. Calvino is repeatedly drawn to figures that combine opposing values.
He speaks lovingly of a Renaissance emblem that combines a butterfly and a
crab, thereby producing an unexpected harmony. Elsewhere he celebrates
the opposing virtues of the crystal and the flame, and then wishes to identify
with both. In a remarkable mythographic self-exegesis, Calvino explains that
he is a Saturn who wishes to be a Mercury. The figure of the balance,
Calvino's astrological sign of Libra, subtends these predilections for harmo–
nizing or balancing opposing traits.
Despite the range of texts and issues treated in the essays, certain
leitmotifs appear to govern and shape the book, though Calvino more than
once notes that he is going in a direction he hadn't planned on. He is consis–
tently fascinated by the microstructures from which the luxuriant variety of
the world is generated; he writes lovingly of Lucretius's atoms and motes of
dust, and even of the "bits" into which we now process our information. His
feeling for the miniscule particles from which
all
that exists is constructed and
into which all that exists will be dissolved is tied to a vision of the unity and
continuity of life; at the same time, Calvino, like the writers he most admires,
insists on respect for the particularity and infinite variety of things.
Lucretius and Ovid are cited at the very beginning of the first essay,
and once again at the conclusion of the fifth (so that the book feels as if it has
come full circle, even if the projected sixth essay doesn't exist). Ovid's
"continuity offorms" and Lucretius's identification with the "nature common
to each and every thing" are consonant with Calvino's own imagination of
continuity and unity. His favorite writers share a cosmological model that
unites the infinite with the infinitessimal, a model that also subtends his own
meditations on literary form and on writing itself: "The polymorphic visions
of the eyes and the spirit are contained in uniform lines of small or capital
letters, periods, commas, parentheses - pages of signs, packed as closely to–
gether 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."
Calvino's literary self-reflexiveness has the potential for aridity. But in
Six Memos
the modulations of his voice and the range of the authors and is–
sues invoked make us feel that we are not dealing with a merely literary
exercise; perhaps not even a merely human one.
RACHEL JACOFF
