Strangely San Francisco

157 REVIEWS mathematician), Boccaccio and Swift. Given this outline, it is quite evident that Calvino and Moravia have two different notions of the artist's role in society, even though Calvino, too, sees Uterature as a tool for "reinventing words and stories that have been removed from coUective and individual memory"; even though he, too, says that writing presupposes a determinate relationship with the world and that Uterature cannot be separated from the language system, the system of codes, which the writer necessarily shares with others. In other words, language is never innocent, never a pure instrument. It is precisely in their use of language, in fact, that the two writers, Moravia the realist and Calvino the experimentalist-fantasist, differ the most. While Moravia admits that experimentalism is not escapism, he himself refuses to fracture the conventional semantic value of words in order to test their ability to signify. On the contrary, Calvino is more word-conscious and word-sceptical. His flight from realism calls for a coUective evasion from the labyrinth: This must also take place at the level of words and fantastic imagery: to escape from the prison of representations of the world that repeat with each sentence your enslavement means to propose another code, another syntax, another dictionary through which form can be given to your desires." Calvino attacks the whole storehouse of already codified fictional forms as too stereotyped to face the possibilities of a new vision. It is no longer possible to name things directly; the writer must subvert these stereotypes by placing them within a totally new context. Calvino says, "In this moment, the mathematical model of language, that of formal logic, can save the writer from words and images that have been worn out through false use." Calvino, then, conducts his revolt from the outside, from the perspective of the fairy tale and the fable, and this gives him the cold lucidity of a new relation, a new re-entry into the world. Like Propp, Barthes, N. Frye and others, he commits himself to a rational perspective which is stubbornly dialectical in that it refuses to surrender to the chaos of contemporary reality and insists on challenging the labyrinth. In this challenge lies Calvino's historical hope. These two volumes are, of course, thematicaUy much richer than I have time to show, but if the single observations and essays converge, it is because this theme of defining artistic commitment is there to gather them up. It is this very intellectual coherence and persistence on the part of these two major living writers, I might add, that is the best answer to the theme itself. WaLlAM BOELHOWER STRANGELY SAN FRANCISCO Lawrence FerUnghetti and Nancy J. Peters, Literary San Francisco: A Pictorial History from Its Beginnings to the Present Day. San Francisco: City Lights and Harper & Row, 254pp. $15.95. What happens when two Uterary radicals sit down to write the history of America's most bohemian corner? Answer: something remarkable. This is not a Uterary travelogue, not a picture book, not an eccentric encyclopedia or a compendium of judgments but somehow all of these, visual and intellectual entertainment as precious few Left books are. And it delivers a wallop that the academic highbrows, professional structuraUsts and closet conservatives may never see coming. Lawrence FerUnghetti is of course author of Coney Island of The Mind among other books, populist-anarchist proprietor of a City Lights Bookstore which once had signs informing browsers that not even for shopUfting would police be called in. Nancy Joyce Peters, extraordinary surrealist poet and Co-Director of City Lights Books, is a Uterary historian in the making. Together they lay out quite a saga. Peters captures the personalities and incidents from Pre-Colombian days through the appearances of Richard Henry Dana, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce, Robert Louis Stevenson, Frank Norris, Jack London, Upton Sinclair and a host of others. 158 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW Especially impressive is Peters' keen appreciation of women writers from the wellremembered Gertrude Atherton and Charlotte Perkins Stetson (later Gilman) to nowforgotten figures like Meta Frances Victor (author of powerful anti-slavery novels during the Civil War, and probably the first popular novelist to praise Nat...