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黑倪先生為紐約時報所寫的Mr. Palomar導讀


The Sensual Philosopher
By SEAMUS HEANEY
September 29, 1985

Symmetries and arithmetics have always tempted Italo Calvino's imagination to grow flirtatious and to begin its fantastic displays. Early on, he gave us some marvelous binary blarney in his tale ''The Cloven Viscount,'' a dual patterning of good and evil, a two-storied story that opened as fluently and knowingly as a zipper in a penthouse. That same allegorical impulse operated with equal freedom but with even more archness and architectural invention in ''Invisible Cities.'' Then came the cat's cradle narrations of ''The Castle of Crossed Destinies,'' regulated but not determined by the inner relations of the cards in the tarot deck. Now we ask ourselves, can he possibly get away with it again?

Mr. Calvino's new book has three main sections entitled ''Mr. Palomar's Vacation,'' ''Mr. Palomar in the City'' and ''The Silences of Mr. Palomar.'' Each main section has three subsections and each subsection three parts and Mr. Calvino has created a numbering system for them. ''The numbers 1, 2, 3 that mark the titles of the index,'' he writes, ''whether they are in the first, second, or third position, besides having a purely ordinal value, correspond also to three thematic areas, three kinds of experience and inquiry that, in varying proportions, are present in every part of the book. Text:

''Those marked '1' generally correspond to a visual experience. . . .

''Those marked '2' contain elements that are anthropological, or cultural in the broad sense. . . .

''Those marked '3' involve more speculative experience, concerning the cosmos, time, infinity, the relationship between the self and the world.''

But can this tongue that stays so neutrally in its cheek as it explains the book's structural principles woo us into pleasure and assent all over again in the actual text?

Happily, the schema turns out to be not just a prescription; what might have been for a lesser imagination a grid acts in this case like a springboard, and indeed one suspects anyhow that the numerological stuff evolved from the accidents of composition and not vice versa. Each of these pieces has the feel of a single inspiration being caught as it rises and then being played for all its life is worth - though not for an instant longer than it takes to exhaust its first energy.

Mr. Palomar is a lens employed by his author in order to inspect the phenomena of the world, but the lens is apt to turn into a mirror which reflects the hesitations and self-corrections of Mr. Palomar's own reflecting mind. The book consists of a graduated sequence of descriptions and speculations in which the protagonist confronts the problem of discovering his place in the world and of watching those discoveries dissolve under his habitual intellectual scrutiny.

So the very first movement is entitled ''Reading a Wave'' and here Mr. Palomar attempts to see and describe and kidnap into language the exact nature of a single wave. His precisions, which he must keep revising, are constantly accurate and constantly inadequate; yet it is these very frustrations which constitute the reader's pleasure. By the last movement, however, Mr. Palomar has turned his gaze inward and is now, as the title of the piece puts it, ''Learning to Be Dead.'' But his appetite for certain knowledge remains equally tantalized and unsatisfied: ''You must not confuse being dead with not being.'' In between there are the other 25 texts which one hesitates to call prose poems since it makes them sound much too affected and humorless, or meditations, since that undersells their lovely metaphorical ease and rapture.

Mr. Calvino's line whispers and lazes and tautens and sports itself very cajolingly. His gaze, like Mr. Palomar's as he contemplates the stars, ''remains alert, available, released from all certitude.'' ''In August,'' he tells us, ''the Milky Way assumes a dense consistency, and you might say it is overflowing its bed.'' The lavish simplicity of that, its double gratitude for the world and for words adequate to the world, its mingled sense of something sweetly and personally discovered yet also something of almost racial memory, this atmosphere of spacious and buoyant reverie is typical of the whole work.

Here is a large unhampered talent sailing a middle course between the sophistication of the avant-garde and the innocence of the primitive poetic imagination, between the kind of intelligence that constructed the medieval bestiaries and the preliterate intuitiveness that once chanted hunters' prayers. If the persona of Mr. Palomar is haunted at times by the petulant shade of Molloy in Samuel Beckett's play, trying to devise an infallible method by which to rotate his sucking stones from pocket to mouth to pocket, and at other times by the urbane Jorge Luis Borges, softly expatiating upon the question of whether writing gets done by ''Borges'' or ''I,'' the reader is not worried. Nor is Mr. Calvino. He knows that everybody ends up worrying about the same things anyhow.

Mr. Palomar worries and watches incessantly and in Italian; but William Weaver has me persuaded that I now know his fastidious, easily beguiled and graciously implacable mind in English. The rhythms and savors of Mr. Weaver's language can render equally well the punctilio of Mr. Palomar's intellectual searches and the civility and eroticism of his daydreams. It is a language that brings us nearer that destination which Mr. Palomar constantly aspires to - ''a step closer to true knowledge, which lies in the experience of the flavors, composed of memory and imagination at once.''

''Behind every cheese,'' he muses, ''there is a pasture of a different green under a different sky: meadows caked with salt that the tides of Normandy deposit every evening; meadows scented with aromas in the windy sunlight of Provence; there are different flocks, with their stablings and their transhumances; there are secret processes handed down over the centuries. This shop is a museum: Mr. Palomar, visiting it, feels as he does in the Louvre, behind every displayed object the presence of the civilization that has given it form and takes form from it.''

Nevertheless, for all its sensual felicity, the writing is philosophically impelled. Mr. Palomar, who takes his name from the famous telescope and observatory, is both an ''I'' and an ''eye,'' ''A world looking at the world,'' as the title of one of Mr. Palomar's meditations suggests, a question mark retroactively affecting his own credibility: ''Is he not a piece of the world that is looking at another piece of the world? Or else, given that there is world that side of the window and world this side, perhaps the 'I,' the ego, is simply the window through which the world looks at the world. To look at itself, the world needs the eyes (and the eyeglasses) of Mr. Palomar.''

Which mercifully takes us, Mr. Palomar and Italo Calvino beyond the impasse of solipsism, the distrust of language and the frigid fires of ''experiment.'' There may be a problem of knowledge, but the consciousness only comes alive to this problem by suffering those constant irrepressible appetites for experience which want to rampage beyond the prison of the self. Mr. Calvino may divide and categorize in triplicate the visual, the cultural and the speculative aspects of Mr. Palomar's world, he may prompt and tag and analyze and juxtapose to his (and our) heart's content, but Mr. Palomar himself remains wonderfully spontaneous and receptive to the pell-mell of the senses. Lawns, breasts, starlings, planets, lizards, the moon in the afternoon, the blackbird's whistle, the clack of mating tortoises, the fog of memories in ''Two Pounds of Goose Fat'' where ''in the thick, soft whiteness that fills the jars, the clangor of the world is muffled'' -all these things and a thousand others keep the mind from its ultimate shadow feast. Mr. Palomar may collapse at the end, like the book named for him, in a syllogism, but not before he has outstripped his conclusion in one incandescent apotheosis after another. I F it often seems in the course of this book that Mr. Calvino cannot put a foot wrong, this is because he is not a pedestrian writer. Like Robert Frost, his whole concern is for himself as a performer, but whereas Frost performed at eye-level, as it were, on vocal cords and heartstrings, Mr. Calvino is on the high wires, on lines of thought strung out above the big international circus. Yet such high-wire displays engage us only if the performer is in fact subject to gravity and genuinely at risk. A lightweight can throw the same shapes but cannot evince that old, single, open-mouthed stare of hope and wonder which we all still want to be a part of. What is most impressive about ''Mr. Palomar'' is a sense of the safety net being withdrawn at the end, of beautiful, nimble, solitary feats of imagination being carried off not so much to dazzle an audience as to outface what the poet Philip Larkin calls ''the solving emptiness / That lies just under all we do.'' ---This review was written before the death of Italo Calvino in Italy on Sept. 19.


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