On Lightness
“Lightness stands for the unexpected, the leap, the exception, the deviation. (When something is expected to happen, something different happens.) Lightness is the movement of the thought, freed from the demands of legitimation and transparency.” Steve Sem-Sandberg, Swedish author, literary critic, and member of The Swedish Academy, has written a breathtaking editorial on the power of literature, of art. It’s an invitation to a world which is constantly reimagined and retold; it’s an invitation for the mind to wander.
By Steve Sem-Sandberg, author, literary critic, and member of The Swedish Academy
Photo: Daniele Levy-Pelusi/Unsplash
What does literature do? I’m not asking what literature produces or creates. It’s not my business to ask about the meaning of literature: to the individual or to society. These questions have already been answered in more or less satisfying ways. Most answers seek to portray literature either as a didactic tool or an aspect of humanistic, democratic core values. Literature brings knowledge, we’re told, and knowledge enlarges the world. It teaches us to tolerate and respect our fellow human beings. To cut it short: you learn more and become a better person by reading literature. This might well be a positive effect of reading literature on someone already characterized by these values. But the question remains what literature DOES. What it does to become what it is. And what it does in relation to what we in lack of a better word must call reality, the real world. Because literature presents, on that we must agree however we wish to define it, another world.
To answer this question, we must return to the point of departure of literature. Someone tells something to someone else.
In the final months of 13th century Genoa, the merchant and explorer Marco Polo shared a cell with a certain Rustichello. Polo was from Venice, Rustichello from Pisa. Both men had been captured after having fought against the mighty city-state of Genoa. As a prison pastime, so we’re told, Polo told the story of his almost 25 years of traveling in Asia and China to Rustichello who noted it down. Rustichello was the author of a novel on King Arthur - one of Italy’s first romances of chivalry -, and thus had a certain experience in writing fantastical stories.
Unfortunately, Rustichello’s prison manuscript has vanished since then. Afterwards, there were several versions of the book which was later to be called The Travels of Marco Polo. They were all different, but no one could tell exactly how they differed. It was impossible to tell if a version was a true copy of Rustichello’s manuscript or if it mainly consisted of fragments and rewritings from unknown co-authors. And then came the question of the veracity to Polo’s story found in Rustichello’s own manuscript. Perhaps they both sat in their cell, dreaming and fantasizing.
Italo Calvino considers this genesis in one of his most well-known novels, The Invisible Cities, as he lets his hero Marco Polo tell the Mongolian emperor Kublai Khan of the many incredible places that he has visited in the empire. The empire is so vast that no one can claim to know all corners of it, especially not Kublai Khan. Still, the emperor immediately suspects that Polo is lying:
“Your cities do not exist. Perhaps they have never existed. It is sure they will never exist again. Why do you amuse yourself with consolatory fables? I know well that my kingdom is rotting like a corpse in a swamp, whose contagions infect the crows that peck it as well as the bamboo that grows, fertilized by its humors. Why do you not speak to me of this? Why do you lie to the emperor of the Tartars, foreigner?”
But the explorer has a reply:
“Yes, the empire is sick, and, what is worse, it is trying to become accustomed to its sores. This is the aim of my explorations: examining the traces of happiness still to be glimpsed, I gauge its short supply. If you want to know how much darkness is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.”
Kublai Khan is in doubt but prefers Marco Polo’s account to the news from other observers. This is despite an initial language barrier between the two. In his first attempts at describing the fantastic cities, Marco Polo must resort to simple objects. [“Ostrich plumes, pea-shooters, quartzes.”] He uses mimicry, bold jumps and kicks, or forceful or cuddling hand movements. Little by little, these gestures are processed into a shared language. They agree upon the meaning of certain words. Eventually, the emperor doesn’t know if he truly understands Polo or if his understanding is merely an imagination brought forward by the explorer’s words.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Someone tells something to someone else. The story possibly behaves differently to storyteller and listener, and if the listener is writing it down, as Rustichello did, the two versions might differ. But the two still belong to the same world. In Calvino’s version, the explorer and the emperor switch roles. Kublai Khan tells of cities that Polo must seek out. One of these must “grow in lightness”, it is said. The city must be so light that the moon and the stars will rest on its roofs and spires.
Lightness and weight are essential to Calvino’s understanding of what literature does. In the posthumous collection of essays, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988), he dedicates the first essay to the concept of lightness. Among other things, he compares two of the greatest Italian poets of all time: Dante and Guido Cavalcanti. Dante is the poet of weight and gravity; he seeks to “[…] capturing the world in verse at all various levels, in all its forms and attributes, in transmitting a sense that the world is organized into a system, an order, or a hierarchy where everything has its place.” On the other hand, Cavalcanti “dissolves the experience of tangible experience in lines of measured rhythm, syllable by syllable, as if thought were darting out of darkness in swift lightning flashes.”
Calvino illustrates Cavalcanti’s lightness with a chapter from Decameron. In this chapter, Boccaccio describes how a group of naughty youngsters chases the poet into a cemetery and corners him among the marble sarcophagi. The youngsters mock him for not attending their parties and ask him where he will go when he realizes that there is no God, that is: when the last remains of the world is the crushing weight of the sarcophagi. The surrounded Cavalcanti responds: “’Gentlemen, you may say what you will to me in your own house'.”
“[T]hen, laying his hand on one of the great tombs aforesaid and being very nimble of body, he took a spring and alighting on the other side, made off, having thus rid himself of them.”
And being very nimble of body, he took a spring and alighting on the other side …
According to Calvino, lightness is one of literature’s most significant qualities. Lightness stands for the unexpected, the leap, the exception, the deviation. (When something is expected to happen, something different happens.) Lightness is the movement of the thought, freed from the demands of legitimation and transparency.
A fascination with lightness is the natural explanation of Kublai Khan’s preference for Marco Polo’s mapping of the imaginary cities. It’s literally easier to navigate these cities than those of the other observers. The thought moves more freely in them.
Marco Polo tells the emperor of 55 cities which all differ in the most astonishing ways. Some have streets made of porphyry, others have perfectly straight channels. Some cities are carved out of rocks or simply built into them, while other cities don’t touch the ground but rest on tall poles. (In the latter, two competing ideas of God exist, Marco Polo remarks with the speed that’s characteristic of lightness: one says that the divine dwells in the abyss of the ocean, another finds it in the buckets that are being lowered to bring the lifegiving water to the pole-resting city above.) The cities are being ruled by their own laws, completely logical despite all peculiarities. The only aspect uniting all cities is their invisibility. They’re inaccessible to all but those who tell of them and those, consequently, who listen. To further underline the peculiarity of each city, all descriptions are labelled with headlines such as “Thin cities” or “Trading cities”. Other headlines are “Cities and desire”, “Cities and memory”, and “Cities and signs”. Desire addresses the unattainable, memory addresses that which we’ve had but can no longer access, and signs tell of that which replaces or represents reality.
Marco Polo explains the details to the emperor:
“With cities, it is as with dreams: everything can be dreamt, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”
The emperor disagrees:
“I have neither desires nor fears […] and my dreams are composed either by my mind or by chance.”
Whereupon Marco Polo answers:
“Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.”
What is Kublai Khan’s question, then? What is he seeking when he asks Marco Polo to examine an empire so vast that neither Khan nor his explorers can grasp it all?
The two men agreed already at the beginning that the empire of Khan is in a miserable state. It has neither shining palaces nor pretty mosaic-clad bathhouses; it has just rotting, poisonous swamps. But reality is like the sarcophagus that Cavalcanti lightly skips. It can, at least in thought, be conquered. Like the Florentine poet, Kublai Khan resists being surrounded by facts and seeks understanding in another way. At the same time, it must be said that Cavalcanti’s jump hadn’t been possible without the enormous sarcophagus. That lightness depends on weight doesn’t imply that they’re interchangeable. Literature (if we consider literature to be an expression of lightness) is not to be considered as a masked reality. It doesn’t embellish reality; it doesn’t take reality’s place. If the latter had been the case, literature would have been a lie. And Marco Polo doesn’t lie. “It’s not the description that’s a lie,” Marco Polo states, “it’s the thing.”
Instead, Calvino writes that lightness is “an answer” to the weight of life. But it’s not possible to choose between lightness and weight. They’re not opposites. Calvino zooms in on the intelligence, the spirit, found through lightness. Not so much how lightness perpetually makes way for the escape but (as the example of Cavalcanti shows) how one by being a very “light” person can both escape and change, making any pursuit impossible.
At the same time, intelligence is a two-edged sword. In Milan Kundera’s novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” (1984), the intelligent author sees through the seductive twinkle of lightness. He realizes that it’s not only what we reject as evil and unjust that’s weighing us down but also much of what we cherish; not only the totalitarian state’s oppressive, bureaucratic apparatus but also the way that this apparatus invades our soul and mind and continually forces us to consider it. Lightness is not a counter to weight. It could be stated that weight, not least through the way it materializes, outnumbers lightness by a thousand.
With Kundera in the Czechoslovakia of the early 1980s, weight is primarily shown through kitsch, a concept that Kundera partly examines in depth in this novel. Kitsch is the totalitarian state’s primary or maybe even only type of manifestation. Kitsch might appear light and attractive, but in the novel, it’s crude and stale. Be it banal hit songs or political statements, it’s through kitsch that the totalitarian state keeps its citizens enslaved. Kitsch is the perception of understanding and enjoying without thinking. Against kitsch, lightness fights an uphill battle as the purpose of kitsch is to cancel thought.
A long time before Kundera’s novel, Franz Kafka wrote a short story titled “The Bucket Rider”. It’s winter; it’s cold. Other gloomy conditions might be present (the short story was written in 1917, during burning war). The narrator sits down on his bucket in search of something to burn on his stove. As the bucket is empty, it immediately flies two stories up in the air. But the coal is in the basement, and whatever the narrator does, he can’t maneuver the empty bucket down. It’s too light, so light that the coal dealer’s wife only needs to wave her apron in the air for the rider to drift away like a helpless fly.
This shows how lightness relates to weight, maybe also how literature relates to reality. It won’t be easier for you to reach the coal cellar if you make a shortcut through air. The spiritual stone found in Kundera’s novel has never splintered a single window in the armored façade of the totalitarian state.
But the opposite also rings true:
Having listened to Marco Polo’s fantastical accounts of the empire’s many shining, beautiful cities, Kublai Khan succumbs to arrogance:
“Perhaps, Kublai thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind’s phantasms.
“On the day when I know all the emblems,” he asked Marco, “shall I be able to possess my empire, at last?”
And the Venetian answered: “Sire, do not believe it. On that day you will be an emblem among emblems.”
To correct or complement reality is not what literature does. The person who, like Don Quixote, believes it is possible to seek refuge in literature as in any thinkable reality will reach nothing, least of all literature.
Towards the end of the book, towards the end of the long conversation, of the narrator and the listener, of the author and the reader, Kublai Khan finally poses the one question he has been contemplating throughout the conversation. He wants to know what the future cities of his empire will look like. Expecting the worst, he leafs through the atlas in search of the infernal cities: Enoch. Babylon. Yahooland. Butua. Brave New World.
“It is all useless if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is there, in ever-narrowing circles, that the current is drawing us.”
And Marco Polo answers:
"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."
The latter (demanding vigilance and apprehension) is what literature can do and does. Marco Polo has already said it:
If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.
(December 31st, 2021)
Quotes:
Boccacio, Giovanni: Decameron, trans. John Payne, Walter J. Black, Inc.,
Calvino, Italo: Six Memos For The Next Millenium, trans. Patrick Creagh, Harvard University Press, 1988
Calvino, Italo: The Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1974