Chapter 4 Lecture 2: Quickly [2]

The legend recurs in different variants in the flamboyant language of sixteenth-century Italy, where its necrophilic tendencies are given maximum emphasis.The Venetian short-story writer Sebastiano Erizzo gave Charlemagne several pages of mourning monologue as he slept with the corpse.On the other hand, the emperor's homosexuality to the bishop's passions is barely addressed, or even deleted altogether, as in one of the most famous love treatises of the sixteenth century (by Giuseppe Bettussi), The story ends with finding the ring.As for the epilogue, in the writings of Petrarch and his Italian disciples, Lake Constance is not mentioned, because the whole plot takes place in Acres, and because the legend is supposed to be an account of the palace and A description of the church.The ring was thrown into a swamp, and the emperor inhaled the thick stench of the swamp as if it were a fragrance, and "gave pleasure in using the muddy water of the swamp."This is a connection to another local legend about the origin of the hot spring, a detail that emphasizes more the death-heavy nature of the event as a whole.

Earlier than all this was the study of German medieval legends by Gaston Paris.These legends are all about Charlemagne's love for a dead woman: but the story is different according to the variable.At one moment the lover was the emperor's court lady, who used the magic ring to test the emperor's loyalty to her; Take it away and reveal the face of the corpse.The basis of all this is probably a Scandinavian hero legend: King Harold of Norway sleeps with his dead queen, wrapped in a strange cloak that makes her seem alive. In short, what is lacking in the medieval variants collected by Gaston Paris is the chain of plot; what is lacking in the literary variants of Petrarch and the Renaissance writers is speed.Therefore, I still love the handwriting of Babe Dollaway, although it is rough and seems to be patchwork.The secret of his story is its texture: the plot, however long, becomes points connected by right-angled pieces, forming a zigzag pattern of infinite motion.

I'm not saying swiftness is a value in itself.Time in the narrative may also be dragging, cyclical, or lacking in motion.In any case, however, a story is a contemplation done in terms of a certain length of time, an obsessive activity that depends on the expenditure of time, shortening or lengthening it.Sicilian storytellers use the formula lu cuntu nun metti tempu (lu cuntu nun metti tempu) as a way of skipping intermediate steps or pointing out the passage of weeks or years, folk traditions of oral narrative The techniques followed are functional criteria.It cuts out irrelevant details and emphasizes repetition: a story, for example, consists of a series of identical obstacles for different people to overcome.Part of the child's enjoyment in listening to stories lies in waiting for what he expects to repeat: situations, sentences, formulas.Just as the rhyme in stanza and lyrics contributes to the rhythm, so the events in a prose narrative form the rhythm.The narrative of the Charlemagne saga works well because a series of events echo each other like rhymes in stanza.

There was a period in my writing career when I was passionate about folk tales and fairy tales, not because I was faithful to a certain national tradition (my roots are in a thoroughly modern and cosmopolitan Italian region) nor because I missed my childhood books read (in my house, the children could only read books that had an educational content, especially books that had some kind of science), but because of the style, structure, simplicity, rhythm, and obviousness with which the stories were told. logic.In my compilation of Italian folk tales recorded by nineteenth-century scholars, I have appreciated great simplicity in the original text.I worked to convey this identity, respecting its simplicity while striving for maximum narrative power.See, for example, canto fifty-seven (Italian folk tales):

A king was ill, and the doctor told him: "Your Majesty, to be cured: Your Majesty must get two feathers from the man-eating monster. It is not easy, because the man-eating monster eats everyone." The king sent a message to everyone. People, but no one wants to go to that cannibal.So he asked one of his most loyal and bravest squires.The attendant said, "I would like to go." Someone pointed the way to the attendant and told him: "There are seven caves on the top of the mountain, and a human-eating monster lives in one of them." The attendant set off until it was dark, and came to an inn...

Here, what disease the king got, why the cannibal got feathers, and what the cave looked like, they didn't mention a word.But everything mentioned in the story plays an essential role in the plot.The first characteristic of folktales is the texture of expression. The strangest sinister tales are told, too, with an eye to the essentials.There is always a struggle, a struggle against time, against obstacles that prevent or delay the fulfillment of a wish or the regaining of a lost cherished object.Or, time may stand still completely, such as in Sleeping Beauty's castle.To achieve this effect, Charles Perrault wrote only a few words: "Even the spit over the fire, hung with grouse and pheasants, fell asleep, and so did the fire. It all happened In a flash: the fairies are out of work."

The relativity of time is the subject of a class of folk tales in all countries: to travel to another world, a person thinks it only takes a few hours.But when he came back, his hometown was completely changed, because a long time had passed.In early American literature, of course, this was the subject of Washington Irving's short story Rip van Winkle; The story has acquired the qualifications of the original myth. This theme can also be interpreted as a metaphor for narrative time.and narrative time in a way that is not measurable in real time.This meaning can also be seen in the reverse thinking, using the unique internal derivation method from one chapter to one in the Eastern storytelling method to delay time.Shaikh Ratchada tells a story, someone tells a story in this story, someone tells a story in the two stories, and so on.The art by which Scheherazade saves her life each night is that she knows how to connect one story to the next while ending at just the right moment—this is what controls continuity and discontinuity. There are two ways.This is the secret of rhythm that we see from the beginning, a way of managing time: in epic poetry by the rhyming effect of the verse, in prose narrative by the effect that makes us want to know what follows.

We've all had that uncomfortable feeling that someone wants to tell a joke, but can't, and it sounds annoying.I think it's mainly a matter of cohesion and rhythm.A short story by Boccaccio (VI. 1) describes this feeling and is actually a comment on the art of storytelling.A Florentine lady invited many guests to her country house, and the merry company of gentlemen and ladies, after lunch, went to another cozy place nearby.A gentleman wants to raise everyone's spirits.He volunteered to tell a story. "Mrs. Oletta, you and I have a long way to go on the same horse. Let me tell you the best story in the world[*]. Would you like to?" Tell me, it would be very good." The knight lord's ability to tell stories is probably not much better than swordsmanship, and he started to tell the story as soon as he was allowed, and the story was really good.However, because he repeated a word three or four times or five or six times from time to time, he kept telling the story from the beginning, mixed with "I didn't say this sentence correctly", and his name was Zhang Guan Li Dai, which made the story a mess.Moreover, his tone is very flat and dull, and it is not in harmony with the situation or the character of the characters.Mrs. Oletta listened to his words, many times sweated all over her body, her heart sank, as if she was about to die from a serious illness. I was very confused, so I politely teased him and said: "My lord, although your horse is trotting, it is too hard, so please let me get off the horse and walk."

A novelette is a horse, a horse is a means of transportation with its own gait, trot or gallop depends on the distance and the ground conditions, but the speed Boccaccio talks about is the grasp of the speed in feeling.The faults of this poor storyteller are, first of all, violations of rhythm and bad style, for he employs phrases which are neither appropriate to the character nor to the plot.In other words, getting the style right is even a matter of quick adjustments in thinking and expression, adapting to changing circumstances. The horse as a symbol of speed, and even of speed of thought, runs through all of literary history and foretells all the problems of our modern view of technology.The age of speed in transportation and communication was started by an excellent treatise in English literature, Thomas de Quincey's The English Mail Coach.As early as 1849, he understood the various aspects of our present world of motor highways, including the problem of high-speed vehicle crashes killing people.

In the second paragraph, titled "The Vision of Sudden Death," De Quincey describes a nocturnal journey in which the passengers sit in the boxes of an express mail truck while the fat driver is asleep.The technical perfection of the vehicle, the condition of the coachman reduced to a blind inanimate object, makes the life of the passenger entirely at the mercy of the mechanics of that machine.With a dose of laudanum, De Quincey was conscious of the fact that the horses had strayed off the road and were galloping at thirteen miles an hour, unstoppable.Misfortune was set, not so much for the stalwart Mercedes-Benz mail van, but for the unlucky first vehicle down the road in the opposite direction.In fact, at the end of this straight three-lane road that looked like a "ghost corridor", he saw a "thin single carriage with a reed canopy", and a young couple was sitting in it. miles. "No matter how the mathematician calculates, there is only a minute and a half between them and eternity." De Quincey exclaimed: "I have taken the first step, the second step is the youth's, the third step Steps to God." De Quincey's account of those few seconds is unparalleled, even in an age when the experience of high speed has become a fundamental fact of life.

The scanning of the eyes, the thinking of the human brain, the wings of angels, which of them can quickly pass between the question and the answer and separate the two?The speed of light catching up to light's footsteps may be separated, but the luck of our vehicle sweeping everything to beat the pony carriage's escape efforts is inseparable. De Quincey succeeds in expressing the feeling of a very short period of time: although very short, it still contains an estimate of the technical inevitability of the crash.And an estimate of an unpredictable situation, that is, the role of God: to prevent two cars driving in opposite directions from colliding. The subject of interest to us here is not the speed of bodies, but the relation between the speed of bodies and the speed of both thought and feeling.An Italian poet of De Quincey's time was also interested.Giacomo Leopardi was surprisingly inactive in his youth, but records a rare moment of joy in his diary Zibaldone dei pensieri: For example, the speed of a fine horse—whether we observe it or experience it, that is to say, on horseback—is most pleasant in itself; that is, that gaiety, that vitality, that power , this living feeling.Indeed, this speed almost gives you a sense of infinity, purifies your mind, strengthens your mind. (October 27, 1821) In his notes for the next few months in Mortal Trivia, Leopardi develops his reflections on the topic of speed, at one point beginning to speak of literary style: The swiftness and simplicity of style pleases us because it furnishes our mind with a gallop of thoughts which occur simultaneously, or which intersect each other so rapidly that they seem image or mental feeling; the mind either cannot fully embrace each of these or has no time for leisure, or loses feeling.The force of poetic style is largely equal to swiftness, delightful only because of that effect, and nothing else.The excitement produced by simultaneous thoughts may arise either from each isolated word—whether literal or figurative—or from an arrangement of words, a change of situation; or even a compression of other words or phrases. . I think the use of horses as a metaphor for quick thinking was first seen in Galileo.In arguing with an adversary who put together a theory of ancient classics, Galileo wrote: If discussing a difficult problem is like carrying heavy loads, many horses can naturally carry more food than a single horse, and I would agree that multiple discussions involve more than single discussions; however, discussions are in fact like A race, not like portage, in which one Barbary horse can run far faster than a hundred Freeland cows. For Galileo, discussion, debate, meant reasoning, and often deductive reasoning. "Discussion is like a race", this proposition may be Galileo's statement of belief; this is a way of thinking and literary aesthetic taste.For him, good thinking meant quick, flexible reasoning, and concise arguments; but it also included the use of imaginative illustrations.Galileo also shows a certain preference for horses in metaphors and "thought experiments."In a treatise on Galileo's metaphors, I present at least eleven important instances of him talking about the horse: the horse is a dynamic figure, and thus an instrument for experiments with motion; ; is the shape that sparks the imagination in hypothetical situations where the horse is put to the most bizarre test, or grown to gigantic proportions. —However, all this is different from comparing reasoning to a race: "Discussing is like coursing". In Dialogo dei massimi sistemi (Dialogo dei massimi sistemi), the speed of thought is exemplified by Sagredo, a figure joined by the Ptolomaic Simplicio ( Simplicio and the Copernican Salviati.Salviati and Sagredo represent two sides of Galileo's temperament.Salviati is a person who strictly reasoned step by step, slow and cautious; while Sagredo was "sharp" and looked at things more imaginatively, often coming to unrevealed conclusions, putting every idea pushed to its extreme results.Sagredo hypothesized how there might be life on the Moon or what would happen if the Earth stopped spinning.Salviati, however, identified the measure of value that Galileo placed mental agility into.Momentary inferences without transition are inferences of God's mind: God's mind is infinitely higher than man's mind: but man's mind should not be despised, or made insignificant, for it too was created by God, and, with Time passed, it researched, understood and accomplished many great things.At this point, Sagredo interjected, praising the greatest invention of mankind - the alphabet: But beyond all the splendor of a mind of great invention, this man dreamed of seeking a means of communicating his deepest thoughts to others, however remote in time and place.He thought of talking to people who were in India, who were not yet born, and who were born a thousand or ten thousand years later.In what way?By the kaleidoscopic arrangement of twenty little symbols on the page! In my lecture on lightness I quoted Lucretius, who saw in the combinations of letters the uncanny patterns of atomic structure of matter.Now I quote Galileo, because he saw in the many combinations of letters ("twenty little symbols arranged in a kaleidoscopic variety on the page") the ultimate means of communicating thoughts and feelings.It is, says Galileo, communication with persons remote in time and place: but we may add that it is also the immediate connection that writing establishes between all things that are or are possible. In each lecture I set myself the task of recommending to the next millennium a particular value with which I feel dear: and what I propose today is precisely this: In our time, other things are surprisingly swift, And the pervasiveness of a widely used medium carries the danger of pushing all other communication towards a single, homogeneous surface, where the function of literature is to communication between them; literature, far from blurring, even emphasizes the differences, following exactly the true tendencies of written language. The age of motorization has imposed on us speed as a measurable quantity, and the record of speed is a milestone in the history of the progress of man and machine.But the speed of the mind is not measurable, neither comparable nor competitive; nor does it exhibit historical results.The speed of mind is precious in itself, because it confers pleasure to those who have a sensibility for such things, rather than a practical use-value that can be exploited.A quick and unstoppable reasoning is not necessarily better than a well thought out reasoning.Far from it.What the former convey, however, is a certain special quality that stems directly from its hasty nature. I said at the outset that every value or virtue which I have chosen as the subject of my lectures does not exclude its opposite.In my admiration of lightness there is my respect for heaviness, and in the same way this tribute to swiftness does not intend to exclude the pleasures of slowness.Literature has honed various techniques for slowing the passage of time.I mentioned the technique of repetition, but now I will briefly discuss off-topic side narratives. In real life, time is a kind of wealth, and we are very stingy in allocating it.In literature, time is an asset that we spend leisurely and without restraint.We don't have to cross a preset finish line first.On the contrary, saving time is a good thing, because the more you save, the more you can afford it.The quickness of style and thinking is first of all flexibility, mobility and unhurriedness. These qualities are parallel to writing, because writing can naturally leave the topic, jump from one topic to another, and can deviate from the main line a hundred times and go through a hundred times. After twists and turns, it returns to the original main line. Laurence Sterne's great invention, the novel composed entirely of creeping branches, was succeeded by Diderot.The sprawling branch is a strategy to postpone the ending, prolong the time of the work, and keep escaping or soaring.Soaring is to get rid of what?To escape death, of course, says Carlo Levi in ​​his preface to the Italian edition of Steyn's Tristram Shandy.Few would have imagined Levi to be an admirer of Steyn, but his own secret lay precisely in an off-topic spirit, and a sense of infinite time, which he developed even in observing social problems.Levi wrote: The clock is the first symbol of Shangdi.Under the influence of the clock he is conceived, and his unhappiness begins; his unhappiness is identical with this sign of time.As Bailey said, death is hidden in the clock: the unhappiness of individual life, this fragment of life, the unhappiness of this divided, disunified thing without wholeness, this is death, death is time, the time of individual existence, Differentiated time, abstract time rolling forward towards the end.Shangdi didn't want to be born because he didn't want to die.Every means and every weapon is valuable against death and time, and if a straight line is the shortest distance between two doomed and inescapable points, this distance can be lengthened by detours from the subject; Yes, who knows if the ramifications get complicated, multiplied, and twisted quickly enough to obscure themselves? —perhaps death would not find us, perhaps time would be lost, perhaps we ourselves would remain hidden in our ever-changing hiding places. words.Words make me think.Since I am not a fan of aimless wandering, I would say that I am willing to throw myself into a straight line, hoping that this line will continue indefinitely and make me unattainable.I am willing to calculate the trajectory of my flight in detail, hoping that I can throw myself out like an arrow, and then disappear beyond the horizon.Or, if I am blocked by too many obstacles, I calculate the sequence of straight line segments that lead me out of the maze as quickly as possible. Since my youth, my personal motto has been an old Latin phrase: slow is quick [+].Perhaps, what attracts me more than the words and concepts themselves are the meaningful marks.As you may recall, the great Venetian humanist, Aldus Manutius, used a dolphin leaping in a curve above an anchor on the title pages of all his books to symbolize "slowness and speed". "This proverb.The intensity and regularity of intellectual labor are expressed in this elegant engraving trademark, which Erasmus of Rotterdam commented on in several pages. However, dolphins and anchors are both nautical symbols, but I have always liked to see symbolic patterns that gather together disconnected and enigmatic shapes, like a puzzle.This is the case with the butterflies and crabs that are diagrams of "speed in slowness" in the sixteenth-century symbolism collected by Paolo Giovio.Butterflies and crabs are both strange, but symmetrical in shape, forming an unexpected harmony between the two. As a writer, I have sought from the outset to explore the flashes of mental wiring that captures and connects distant points in time.I love adventure stories and fairy tales, and try to find in them the equivalent of some inner energy, some movement of the mind.I have always been looking for images and the movement that naturally emerges from them, and I have also realized that we can only talk about a certain literary effect after the flow of imagination into words.This is true for poets who write poetry, and it is also true for prose writers: success depends on the use of words and refinement of words. Of course, the appropriateness of expression often comes from the rapid flashes of inspiration, but the rule is to patiently search for the right words, to find each word. Irreplaceable sentences, looking for the most effective combination of word sounds and concepts.I am convinced that writing prose should not be any different from writing letters [Editor: suspected to be "writing poetry"].The point of both is to find unique words, words that are concise, condensed, and easy to remember. It is difficult to maintain this tension constantly in a long work.Temperamentally, however, I find myself more comfortable writing short stories: most of my work is short stories.For example, my attempts in Cosmicomics and t zero—to give the abstractions of time and space a narrative form—could only be done in the compact length of a short story.However, I have also experimented with shorter pieces, shorter stories, between fables and prose poems, see my descriptions in "The Invisible City" and more recently in "Mr. Palomar".Of course, the length of a text is an extrinsic criterion, but what I am talking about is a particular kind of density; although this density can be achieved in larger narrative works, its proper dimension is found in the individual one page. My preference for short forms is only due to the fact that I follow the true mission of Italian literature; which lacks novelists, but has many poets; His innovation and thinking ability are only found in a few pages.An example of the incomparable literature of other countries is Leopardi's Operette morali. There is a glorious and lively tradition of the short story in American literature, and indeed, I would say, the most precious works of American literature are in the short story.But the strict divisions drawn by publishers—short story and novel—excluded other short genres (still seen in the prose works of great American poets: from Walt Whitman's Specimen Days to many essays by William Carlos Williams).Publishers' requirements are sacrosanct, but they shouldn't stop us from experimenting with new genres.Here I should really cry out, in defense of the richness of the short literary genre, and of the refinement of style and content it expresses.I am thinking now of Paul Valery's Monsieur Teste and his many other essays, and of Francis Ponge's prose poems about objects of all kinds , Michel Leiris' explorations of himself and his own language, the mystical and hallucinatory in Henri Michaux's short stories published in Plume[#] humor. The last great invention of a new contemporary literary genre was accomplished by the master of the short story, Jorge Luis Borges.His design of himself as the narrator, "Columbus' Egg," enabled him to overcome the mental block that, at nearly forty, still kept him from moving beyond the essay to the novel.Borges' idea was to imagine that the book he was about to write had already been written by someone else, an unknown, hypothetical author, in another language, from another cultural background , and his own task was to describe and comment on the invented book.There is such an anecdote in the legend about Borges: the first excellent short story "El acercamiento a Almotasim" written according to the above rules was published in 1940 (Sur ) magazine, indeed it was seen as a review of a book by an Indian author.Likewise, critics of Borges feel compelled to point out that each of his works is doubled or tripled in length by borrowing fragments from other books belonging to real or imagined libraries, No matter whether these books are classics, extensive theory, or fabricated. What I want to emphasize in particular is how Borges has found a way to approach the infinite without any hindrance, and the style is extremely crisp, crisp and fresh.Likewise, the language of his synthetic, side-cutting narrative is everywhere concrete and precise, innovative in its rhythmic variety, in its syntactic inversions, in its unexpected and breathtaking use of adjectives. above.Borges created a literature that is raised to the quadratic, a literature that seems to take the square root of itself.It was a "gesture literature," a term that was later used in France.A hint of this is found in the Ficciones, in the little foreshadowings and rules of what might become the work of the supposed author Herbert Quain.