Capítulo V. Resultados
5.2. Presentación y Análisis de los Resultados
In Six Memos, Calvino introduced the example of Ignatius de Loyola’s 1548 Spiritual Exercises (Exercitia Spiritualia) in his chapter on visibility (83–86). It was probably to Barthes’s essay “Loyola” (1971) and his lengthy preface to the 1972 French edition, Exercises spirituels (1972), that Calvino owed his long-standing interest in the enormously infl uential handbook by the founder of the Jesuits now known as St. Ignatius.72 Loyola’s work, by
nature pedagogic, inspired Barthes and Calvino to buttress their belief in literature as the irreplaceable provider of exercitia for the imagination. Just as Loyola had aimed for the retreatant’s spiritual overhaul through a sys- tematic method of mental transformative exercises based on the power of imagining, so Barthes and Calvino deemed a training in making images out of nothing a tool to develop potentially transformative abilities that would raise the individual’s ethical and social awareness.
Barthes’s and Calvino’s respective debts to Loyola stemmed from his emphasis on the production of mental visualizations. In the prelude to each exercise, the founder of the Jesuit Order and their curriculum (ratio studio-
rum) instructed readers to concentrate on visualizing the composition of
place, on “seeing with the imagination” the physical location of the scene contemplated (Spiritual Exercises 23). Loyola’s most salient contribution to Barthes’s and Calvino’s respective theories of the imagination was the Renaissance idea that the retreatants’ mental fabrication of images was vital to their spiritual awareness and to their perceptual and cognitive development.73 Published in 1971, precisely when Calvino was immersed in
writing Invisible Cities, Barthes’s “Loyola” (Sade, Fourier, Loyola 38–75) distinguished between the imaginary—or a reservoir of images—and the imagination (49). Loyola’s reservoir, “the network of images [he] spontane- ously draws upon,” was skeletal (49–50). His imagination, on the contrary, was powerful and “exhaustively cultivated” (51). Barthes defi ned the Igna- tian imagination in the “wholly active meaning it can have in Latin,” as the energy enabling the fabrication of a new language, or the faculty that generates the new (51).
On Barthes’s view, Loyola’s images resulted from the parceling out of the whole into its constituent parts, a division into fragments containable
within a frame. At the same time, Calvino was parceling out the urban whole into discontinuous but contiguous minimal units in Invisible Cit-
ies: each a miniscule “composition seeing the place,” as Loyola prescribed
(Spiritual Exercises 23), or a “visual composition of the place,” as Calvino interpreted Loyola (Six Memos 84). The semiotician approached Loyola’s images as views, “in the sense this word has in graphic art (View of Naples, View from the Pont-au-Change, etc.)” (“Loyola” 56). What made Loyo- la’s “language of ‘views’” (56) particularly effective was that such units of imaginary perception were “caught up simultaneously in a difference and a contiguity (of the narrative type) . . . captured in a narrative sequence,” like “successive illustrations of a novel” (54–55). By hitching each view to a logic of rupture, Loyola established a semiotic code, Barthes contended: “Ignatius has linked the image to an order of discontinuity, he has articu- lated imitation, and he has thus made the image [itself] a linguistic unit, the element of a code” (56). That code was based upon a deliberate proce- dure of perceptual discernment or judgment (discretio, an oft-used term in
Spiritual Exercises) that distinguished and separated differences and that
was lushly illustrated in eighteenth-century editions of Loyola’s manual. Now the direct and indirect infl uences of Loyola on Invisible Cities can be appreciated, fi rst in the series of vistas (or vedute) in the novel, then in the discretio that identifi es and segregates individual units within the con- tinuum of urban matter.74
The affi nities and sharings between Calvino and Barthes are unmistak- able when Calvino’s views on the imagination are juxtaposed with Bar- thes’s observations on Loyola. The French semiotician focused on what he called Loyola’s creation of phantasmatic tableau vivants: visual renditions of abstract concepts (“invisible” concepts, Loyola called them) in concrete, material scenes (Barthes in Loyola, Exercises spirituels 36). Calvino, in the chapter on visibility in Six Memos, refers explicitly to the Spiritual
Exercises as a lesson in how to create icastic representations (83–86).Like Barthes, Calvino highly esteemed Loyola’s revolutionary efforts to break free from the abstraction of language and establish the image as the prin- ciple tool of meditation, ascribing to inner vision the primacy of perception (Barthes qtd. in Loyola, Exercises spirituels 42). Barthes spoke in this case of an “orthodoxy of the imagination,” where the image is the new minimal unit of the language that Loyola builds (Barthes qtd. in Loyola, Exercises
spirituels 40). The creation of phantasmata thus becomes the alphabet
of the penitent’s inner vision (or the reader’s inner city). Loyola’s form of visual meditation enables the practitioner to experience, identify, and judge specifi c spiritual experiences, thereby acquiring perceptual, cognitive, and decision-making skills (Heelan qtd. in De Nicolás xiii).
In Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, the art of “bringing to memory” is a tool to instruct the intellect. At the most immediate level it ensures concentra- tion: the retreatant builds detailed visions in his mind “so that the intellect, without meandering, may reason with concentration” (64). At a deeper
level, however, such a tool allows the individual to subjectively and cog- nitively reinterpret (through the act of building images) sensorial percep- tions, sins, souls in hell, angels singing, etc., therein performing a “radical hermeneutical act . . . born from a sheer power of imagining” (De Nico- lás 40–41). On the same wavelength, and echoing Barthes’s observations above, Calvino wrote in Six Memos: “what I think distinguishes Loyola’s procedure, even with regard to the forms of devotion of his own time, is the
shift from the word to the visual image as a way of attaining knowledge of the most profound meaning” (86 [emphasis mine]).
In “Loyola,” Barthes compared Loyola, or the spiritual director, to a doctor who tries to develop the retreatant’s ability to manipulate phan- tasmata, in particular to a psychotherapist who tries to inject images into the hypotonic and arid mind of the patient. Barthes qualifi ed a dearth of images as a symptom of a sickness that made those affl icted incapable of producing phantasmata, and he called for exercises to stimulate the pro- duction of images in therapeutic terms. Barthes mentioned explicitly Psy-
chosomatic Research: Seven Clinical Cases (1971), by Pierre Marty, Michel
M`Uzan, and Christian David, which in turn made Calvino refl ect on the relationship between imaginative scarcity and pathology, and reconfi rmed his formulation of the imagination as a force capable of confronting the most intractable individual and social problems of a frenzied era.
Psychosomatic Research showcased what was then an emerging dis-
cipline, psychotherapy, as it recounted the cases of patients beset with psychosomatic illnesses. Mannoni’s foundational study, Clefs pour
l’imaginaire ou l’autre scène (1969), had already sparked great interest in
psychoanalytic theory in Italy through its 1972 translation La funzione
dell’immaginario (The Function of the Imaginary). In contrast, Psycho- somatic Research was a collection of clinical dialogues between therapists
and patients that underscored the health benefi ts of representational or visualization activities, the absence of which triggers pathological condi- tions: the seven patients were incapable of seeing images in their minds, incapable “of inventing, of manipulating material, of sorting it out” (Marty et al. 148). The three psychotherapists insisted on the “poverty” and “pre- cariousness” of the “intellectual and phantasmatic tools of the patient” (24), thereby establishing a causal relationship between mental activity and disturbed somatic activity. Asked about their oniric and visualizing activi- ties, the seven patients demonstrated a lack of energy, reached an impasse, and eventually crashed altogether, experiencing what the doctors termed a “disintegration” or “debacle” (27) caused by the scarcity of their “repre- sentational activities” (28). When the therapist pressed one of the patients to produce visual associations, the patient fell into a state of “petrifi ca- tion,” “stupor,” and “non-responsiveness” (27). Psychosomatic Research deemed it fundamental to stimulate “representational activities” (33) in the patients, so they would become conscious of the situation that had trig- gered the pathology and begin to heal. It was therefore essential that the
therapist adopt a pedagogical attitude or posture that (like Loyola’s) would train patients in the exercise of image making. Calvino and Barthes must have been intrigued by the descriptions of each psychotherapist’s efforts to bring images to the surface in their patients, to remove their “phantasmatic inhibition,” or capacity for making mental pictures and visualizing situa- tions (187n36).
Calvino’s reading of Loyola, Barthes, and works on the imagination or image making during his French residence prompted him to link together Fourier’s insistence on the visibility (or visualizability) of utopia, Frye’s observations about utopia and the imagination, and the ethical and social ramifi cations of developing the individual’s inner city, or what Barthes called the “capacity for phantasy manipulation” (“Loyola” 69). This clus- tering is often refl ected in the intensely visual nature of his 1972 novel, whose descriptions foster image making. Of course, the act of reading itself triggers the imaginative process that produces visual images out of words. But the novel goes beyond that, exceedingly effective at triggering visual- ization in readers, in what Calvino called in his chapter on visibility the “‘mental cinema’ of the imagination,’” where images are projected “before our mind’s eye” (Six Memos 83), compelling readers “to paint frescoes crowded with fi gures on the walls of [the] mind” (86).75
The readings analyzed in this chapter and others discussed later (ch. 2) made Calvino sensitive to the dangers of imaginative entropy, the stagnant effects of the individual inability to produce phantasmata. Visibility, the “American lesson” (lezione americana) from the ’80s that owes the most to the authors discussed here, came out of this context. The risk of imagina- tive emptiness became to Calvino’s eyes even more severe as the years went by, and society became more and more dominated by the media and the “unending rainfall of images” (Six Memos 57). “What will be the future of the individual imagination in what is usually called the ‘civilization of the image’? Will the power of evoking images of things that are not there continue to develop in a human race increasingly inundated by a fl ood of prefabricated images?” (Six Memos 91). For Calvino, the problem since the late ’60s was the widespread leveling or homogenization of images in the mind of each individual, where no image could stand out with clarity and vis- ibility. In what he called the “rubbish dump” of memory (Six Memos 92), all capacity to generate the new, “the power of evoking images of things that are
not there” (91), of “bringing visions into focus with our eyes shut, of bringing
forth forms and colors from the lines of black letters on a white page, and in fact of thinking in terms of images” (92), was imperiled. To remedy this malady Calvino advocated visibility as a desirable characteristic of fi ction, endorsing “some possible pedagogy of the imagination that would accustom us to control our own inner vision without suffocating it or letting it fall” (92 [emphasis mine]).
He diagnosed a pathology (the plague of images, a concept that became, after his reading of Psychosomatic Research, more than metaphorical) and
prescribed a therapy. The therapy of course relied on literary means, as he indicated in his chapter on exactitude: “what interests me are the possi- bilities of health,” he wrote. “Literature, and perhaps literature alone, can create the antibodies to fi ght this plague” (Six Memos 56). Both healing and preventive, the power of image making is the therapeutically sound means offered by imaginative literature: “thinking in terms of images,” as through the icons offered in Invisible Cities, was for him (and, he hoped, for his readers in 1972) a matter of “daydreaming within the pictures” (Six
Memos 94), of practicing images crystallized into “a well-defi ned, memo- rable, and self-suffi cient form, the icastic form” (Six Memos 92 [emphasis
mine]). In this heuristic itinerary, readers and Kublai Khan are guided by the traveler Marco Polo, who has constructed his inner city of the imagina- tion and who exercises inner vision (ch. 3).
In this sense, the convergence of utopia, ethics, and the imagination developed in Calvino and other authors, artists, and philosophers of the period the belief in the utopian mentality as a tool to be employed for pedagogical goals. As Ruyer incisively phrased it: “the utopianist can be a thinking guide . . . helping [us] to comprehend and to foment the spirit of invention and initiative” (118). One of the most important documents in support of Calvino’s conjoining of utopia, the imagination, and literature in those years is the 1973 interview with Camon. The novelist’s fascina- tion with the conceptual knot between utopia and the imagination, which he had been turning over in his mind for many years as he read Fourier and Frye, emerged in that interview, along with his profound disappoint- ment that his efforts to rehabilitate Fourier’s utopianism had not had the desired impact on the Italian intellectual establishment (“Colloquio” 2792). When Camon inferred that the utopian, ethical, and social dimen- sions of Calvino’s fi ction had exhausted themselves over the years, the author vehemently contested the charge by invoking what had motivated his trio of essays on Fourier:
I wanted it to be my contribution to the mix of ideas from that time. It’s a work that I carried inside of me for at least fi ve years. I wanted this author, this world, this mode of making the brain work, different from all the others, to enter into the Italian circuit of ideas, into the patrimony of infl uences that are behind politics as well as literature, as a point of reference if nothing else, so that people would know that you can think this way and not just that way. But it didn’t happen. The chosen experts made me understand that it was better for me to keep away from their territory, and the literary establishment didn’t even take notice. (“Colloquio” 2792)
He further pointed out that mode utopique was a training of the imagina- tion that heightened ethical and social awareness, a way of thinking and being that had transformative potential for the individual and for society:
It was also because my attitude towards Fourier wasn’t easy to defi ne. I wasn’t looking to him for practical advice, but for training in ethics and the ways of the imagination. I read him as an author of fi ction, but you could say I read every author that way, looking for new possibili- ties for the workings of reason and the imagination, and only after this
training has been engraved upon our mental patterns, could it also in- fl uence our practice, though we don’t know how. . . . I believe that the
relationship between the written world and the world of actions must travel a long road; it must prove its capacity to crystallize the diverse materials that it has accrued over time. And that’s how not only phi-
losophers but also poets change the world. I don’t know of any more
direct relationships, or anyhow I don’t believe in them. (“Colloquio” 2792–93 [my emphasis])
One year after the publication of Invisible Cities, then, Calvino’s expecta- tions for imaginative literature and for himself as an author were unequivo- cally ethical and social. The acquisition of a new modality of imagining might eventually translate into social praxis. The written world and the object world might enter into a dialogue: imaginative literature could actively participate in changing the world. Nihil potest homo intelligere