Wednesday, June 3, 2015

subject to subtle change as they stand waiting to be called forth - Little, Big on the Art of the Novel

A character in Little, Big is the “greatest mage of this age of the world,” a common personage in fantasy novels.  Crowley cleverly makes her master of a single form of magic, one that is in fact real, the Art of Memory.  Like Giordano Bruno and other masters of the art, now “for the most part rendered obsolete by the invention of the filing-cabinet,” the wizard creates a place, a memory palace, which she furnishes with everything: “her dog Spark, a trip to Rockaway, her first kiss.”  How is this skill magical rather than merely impossible?

It was discovered, for instance, that the symbolic figures with vivid expressions, once installed in their proper places, are subject to subtle change as they stand waiting to be called forth.  The ravished nun who meant Sacrilege might, when one passes her again, have acquired a depraved air about the mouth and eyes one hadn’t thought he had bestowed on her…  Also: as a memory house grows, it makes conjunctions and vistas that its builder can’t conceive of beforehand…  that new gallery might also turn out to be a shortcut to the ice-house where he had out a distant winter once and then forgot.  (Book 3, Ch. IV, “The Art of Memory,” ellipses mine)

Crowley is describing his own novel, in fact all novels and literature, and in a sense the history of literature, since the builders it turns out do not all have to be the same person.  But he is specifically describing his own novel, first in that much of it takes place in a house that functions as described here, and second because this is his method: do not just create but accrete, which is itself a form of creation.  Little, Big is a Joseph Cornell box of a novel.

Crowley uses tarot cards similarly, with the entire novel, every plot and subplot, implicit in the deck of cards.  “As in Calvino’s Castle of Crossed Destinies I wanted to create a situation where it was impossible to know whether the cards were bringing about, prophesying, or summing up the story” (the Perpetual Crowley Interview).  Calvino’s book (1969 / 1973) lays out the entire deck of cards in a sort of crossword puzzle and then tells stories using every row and column, backwards and forwards, discovering or creating the stories of Faust, Parsifal, Roland, and Hamlet within the cards.

I began by trying to line up tarots at random, to see if I could read a story in them.  “The Waverer’s Tale” emerged; I started writing it down; I looked for other combinations of the same cards; I realized the tarots were a machine for constructing stories; I thought of a book, and I imagined its frame: the mute narrators, the forest, the inn; I was tempted by the diabolical idea of conjuring up all the stories that could be contained in a tarot deck.  (p. 126, tr. William Weaver)

The good joke here is that all possible stories are contained in the tarot deck, given the free application of the imagination by the storyteller, and if somehow a limit is reached, the writer can always switch to another deck, which Calvino does – the book actually has two parts, the Castle and the Tavern, each using a different deck (the Tavern is pictured above, the scan borrowed from a writer interested in the book's architecture).  Crowley creates his own imaginary deck.

When I first read The Castle of Crossed Destinies many years ago, I placed it among Calvino’s most minor works.  That was not correct.

12 comments:

  1. The Tarot cards hold little meaning for me, personally; I do not even know their names. But, I think it's very clever for Calvino to write a whole story from laying them out, and I think it's very clever of you to connect his writing with Crowley.

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  2. Crowley himself mentioned the borrowing from Calvino. It gave me another chance to pull towards Italian literature. So did my ongoing reading of Calvino's Italian Folktales, which is full of the same fairy tales devices Crowley uses, even though he got them from Grimm and the like.

    The Perpetual Interview linked above has a fine summary of both the traditional tarot and Crowley's use of it. There are enough references to tarot out there that it is worth knowing a little bit about the subject. But not too much:

    "CROWLEY: To tell you the truth, I knew next to nothing about Tarot when I began the book, and know not much more now."

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    1. I remember reading that quote from Crowley and being surprised he could use the Tarot cards as frequently as he did in his novel. Reading cards, reading one's future from a piece of paper, is more unbelievable to me than fairies.

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    2. For the characters who become interested in the cards, they carry a bit of a curse. They become all too interesting, a big time-waster, like the internet. Then for other characters who get near them - August, Ariel Hawksquill, and that other fellow, they carry a different kind of curse.

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    3. Which is consistent with Christianity where one is not to consult mediums, or cards. No surprise that the characters acquire a curse of some sort. (Not implying, of course, that Crowley means his book to reflect Christianity.)

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    4. Yes, Crowley takes the power of the cards seriously, in the novel at least.

      The Aegypt pursue this idea in a more specifically Christian context. Demonology, astrology, all kinds of early modern hermeticism. Memory palaces, again.

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  3. I heard Madeleine L'Engle speak at Wheaton College when I was in my twenties. I have always admired her faith, her view of Christianity, and it was a thrill to hear her address the audience. When she spoke of the Bible as Story, not particularly caring if Eve bit an apple or a pomegranate, she was practically lynched.

    The audience didn't understand that she meant the Truth is in the Story, which is something I think Crowley is hinting at. We have to look at the deeper meaning.

    Some day I will forgive myself for not sticking up for her, although it's been thirty years and I am still ashamed.

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  4. Sacred texts have more complex claims. Crowley has the advantage of working with concepts no one takes quite so seriously and personally. Or so one hopes.

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    1. Yes, he has a lighter touch, lighter themes. Still, I'm intrigued by the concept of Story.

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    2. That's the great postmodern project, Story.

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  5. As I understand it (note the "as"), tarot readers don't actually see themselves as reading the future in the cards, but use the cards as a stimulus for intuition. The cards just offer a rich set of suggestions and connections: not that different, in other words, from the way Calvino used them.

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  6. That is very close to how Crowley uses the tarot cards withing the story. Are the card readers discovering something internal or external to themselves? They rarely know.

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