A critical study of Six Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino.

Abstract

In 1986, on the occasion of the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton Poetry Lectures, Italo Calvino was invited to give a series of talks at Harvard University. He was the first Italian writer in history to be given such an honour. Calvino was supposed to give six lectures on the function and the destiny of literature, but he died in September 1986, a few weeks before going to the U.S. The typescript of those lectures, collected and edited by Calvino’s wife and published under the title Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Italian title: Lezioni americane, sei proposte per il prossimo millennio) three years after his death, has been considered Calvino’s major scholarly work. It has been translated into more than fifteen languages and used on numerous academic courses, in Italy and abroad, as a model of comparative method. According to Calvino himself, he never had a vocation for theory; on the contrary, he always tended to consider theories, in general, as “gadgets”, or “amusements” to play with, as he claimed in an interview a few months before his death. The aim of this article is to show that the comparative method Calvino adopted in his Six Memos has several weak aspects to it (i.e. contrived comparisons among authors, apodictic – instead of dialectic and problematic – judgments or assertions) which testify his aforementioned attitude towards theory. On the other hand, this article, which does not follow the generally enthusiastic critical reception of Calvino’s Six Memos, analyses the reasons why this work is a worldwide best seller nevertheless. The article concludes by emphasizing the fact that Calvino’s method is “easy”, that is to say it does not require particular literary competencies, in terms of historical, exegetic or philological knowledge. The method therefore suits many contemporary academic departments of humanities, which increasingly have to cope with a lack of funds and time and, as a consequence, cannot invest much of either in improving their literary theory courses and materials.

Keywords: Calvino, Literature, Lightness, Comparative (method), Post-modernism