Structure and Content- Diachronic Tessellations
The access literature provides to time and place is fenced in by the limitations of language- that of the reader, the writer, and the nature of language itself. The more we learn about language the more we begin notice there is something strange going on. There is a forgetting and a remembering, a tessellation of knowledge. Literature is a way of imparting the drama of the search for truth, a way to communicate that which has been lost.
Authors like Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, and Daniel Heller-Roazen explore how literature houses time and the ways in which structure can be more informative than content. In his book Echolalias, Daniel Heller-Roazen stresses that language functions as both the mechanism and the process for forgetting. To learn a language is to forget some of the sounds we were able to make at birth. The language(s) we learn necessarily leave out other utterances. There is a sense that there once was or perhaps could be again, some type of perfect language.
For Heller-Roazen language is most itself when it is not limited to accepted utterances: “It is here that one language, gesturing beyond itself in a speech that is none, opens itself to the nonlanguage that precedes it and follows it.” Like the experience of time the border is not fixed, it does not adhere to one shape. In this way literature provides a form for time through language. It is the cast from which we shape our concept of experience despite it having no mold of its own. It moves freely between past and future, collective and personal, scientific and esoteric.
In Serendipities Umberto Eco tracks the historical search for a universal language from Francis Bacon to chemical symbols and yet it is unclear whether it is possible for a symbolism to exist that truly unites the world with the understanding of language. The plurality of knowledge, like that of languages, necessitates an organizational system that is elastic and accounts for both science and myth as well as their intersection. Knowledge about the world is constantly assembled and disassembled. At times we recognize an order, a symmetry but it often shifts just as we begin to grasp its meaning.
Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, utilizes symmetry shifts to highlight structure in a piece of literature that appears to lack order. There is constant tessellation in the parts that are not thematic. The thematic portion of the book is a frame narrative between Marco Polo and Kublai Kahn. It is here that the experience of time is tangible and contributes to the book’s progression. This is the first area where we can see symmetry in what is being built and what is wasting away. The key to recognizing the patterns can be found in the final paragraph of the central piece of the book, Cities and Eyes. It comes down to mirroring: “At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it. Not everything that seems valuable above the mirror maintains its force when mirrored” (Calvino). This is the city of Valdrada, where one sees two cities. One of which must, by default be the invisible city.
A city can be invisible for a multitude of reasons. Calvino’s Invisible Cities is a book of mirrors and tessellations, language and communication, but it also a book about an empire. The future of empires is always predetermined. They collapse. Power is transferred through narrative and it is often those who can communicate the best that control its direction.
Literature can change the course of the future, rewrite history, or assemble an inventory of experience. On a fundamental level it is a repository for our collective search. With no shortage of information the lines between truth and error blur. The encyclopedia is constantly being rewritten and the narratives changed. Sometimes one must stop looking at content and start focusing on form. There is often an architecture that is concealed but filled with knowledge for those willing to travel across time and place to look for that which literature seeks and language fails to encompass.
