Italo Calvino (Bloom's Major Short Story Writers)

Italo

Calvino

C U R R E N T LY AVA I L A B L E

BLOOM’S MAJOR DRAMATISTS

BLOOM’S MAJOR NOVELISTS

BLOOM’S MAJOR POETS

BLOOM’S MAJOR SHORT STORY WRITERS

Aeschylus Aristophanes Berthold Brecht Anton Chekhov Henrik Ibsen Ben Johnson Christopher Marlowe Arthur Miller Eugene O’Neill Shakespeare’s Comedies Shakespeare’s Histories Shakespeare’s Romances Shakespeare’s Tragedies George Bernard Shaw Neil Simon Oscar Wilde Tennessee Williams August Wilson

Jane Austen The Brontës Willa Cather Stephen Crane Charles Dickens William Faulkner F. Scott Fitzgerald Nathaniel Hawthorne Ernest Hemingway Henry James James Joyce D. H. Lawrence Toni Morrison John Steinbeck Stendhal Leo Tolstoy Mark Twain Alice Walker Edith Wharton Virginia Woolf

Maya Angelou Elizabeth Bishop William Blake Gwendolyn Brooks Robert Browning Geoffrey Chaucer Sameul Taylor Coleridge Dante Emily Dickinson John Donne H.D. T. S. Eliot Robert Frost Seamus Heaney Homer Langston Hughes John Keats John Milton Sylvia Plath Edgar Allan Poe Poets of World War I Shakespeare’s Poems & Sonnets Percy Shelley Alfred, Lord Tennyson Walt Whitman William Carlos Williams William Wordsworth William Butler Yeats

Jorge Louis Borges Italo Calvino Raymond Carver Anton Chekhov Joseph Conrad Stephen Crane William Faulkner F. Scott Fitzgerald Nathaniel Hawthorne Ernest Hemingway O. Henry Shirley Jackson Henry James James Joyce Franz Kafka D.H. Lawrence Jack London Thomas Mann Herman Melville Flannery O’Connor Edgar Allan Poe Katherine Anne Porter J. D. Salinger John Steinbeck Mark Twain John Updike Eudora Welty

Italo

Calvino

© 2002 by Chelsea House Publishers, a subsidiary of Haights Cross Communications. Introduction © 2002 by Harold Bloom. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher. Printed and bound in the United States of America. First Printing 135798642 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Applied for

Chelsea House Publishers 1974 Sproul Road, Suite 400 Broomall, PA 19008-0914 www.chelseahouse.com Contributing Editor: Brian Baughan Layout by EJB Publishing Services

CONTENTS User’s Guide

7

About the Editor

8

Editor’s Note

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Introduction

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Biography of Italo Calvino

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Plot Summary of Invisible Cities List of Characters in Invisible Cities Critical Views on Invisible Cities Harold Bloom on the Story JoAnn Cannon on Models of the Universe Carolyn Springer on the Reader’s Role Peter G. Christensen on the Utopian Vision William Franke on Post-Structuralist Interpretation Albert Sbragia on Models of the Universe Michael Wood on the Limitations of Language

15 18 19 19 21 24 26 28 30 32

Plot Summary of The Cloven Viscount List of Characters in The Cloven Viscount Critical Views on The Cloven Viscount J. R. Woodhouse on the Naive Vision Constance Markey on the Existential Choice I. T. Olken on Imagery Albert Howard Carter III on the Grotesque Kathryn Hume on the Novel’s Ending Beno Weiss on Calvino’s Preface

35 38 40 40 42 44 47 50 52

Plot Summary of The Baron in the Trees List of Characters in The Baron in the Trees Critical Views on Baron in the Trees Sergio Pacifici on Calvino and Ariosto Jack Byrne on the Fantasy Milieu Peter A. Muckley on Literary Allusion Alan A. Block on Perspectives of Reality Tommasina Gabriele on the Protagonist Constance Markey on the Biased Narrator

55 59 61 61 63 65 67 69 71

Plot Summary of The Nonexistent Knight List of Characters in The Nonexistent Knight Critical Views on The Nonexistent Knight John Gatt-Rutter on Allegory Sara Maria Adler on Characterization JoAnn Cannon on the Narrator Richard Andrews on Self-Reflexive Narration J.R. Woodhouse on Realism Martin McLaughlin on the Protagonists

74 77 78 78 81 82 84 86 87

Works by Italo Calvino

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Works about Italo Calvino

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Acknowledgments

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Index of Themes and Ideas

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USER’S GUIDE This volume is designed to present biographical, critical, and bibliographical information on the author and the author’s best-known or most important short stories. Following Harold Bloom’s editor’s note and introduction is a concise biography of the author that discusses major life events and important literary accomplishments. A plot summary of each story follows, tracing significant themes, patterns, and motifs in the work. An annotated list of characters supplies brief information on the main characters in each story. As with any study guide, it is recommended that the reader read the story beforehand, and have a copy of the story being discussed available for quick reference. A selection of critical extracts, derived from previously published material, follows each character list. In most cases, these extracts represent the best analysis available from a number of leading critics. Because these extracts are derived from previously published material, they will include the original notations and references when available. Each extract is cited, and readers are encouraged to check the original publication as they continue their research. A bibliography of the author’s writings, a list of additional books and articles on the author and their work, and an index of themes and ideas conclude the volume.

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A B O U T T H E E D I TO R Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University and Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of English at the New York University Graduate School. He is the author of over 20 books, and the editor of more than 30 anthologies of literary criticism. Professor Bloom’s works include Shelly’s Mythmaking (1959), The Visionary Company (1961), Blake’s Apocalypse (1963), Yeats (1970), A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism (1982), The American Religion (1992), The Western Canon (1994), and Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (1996). The Anxiety of Influence (1973) sets forth Professor Bloom’s provocative theory of the literary relationships between the great writers and their predecessors. His most recent books include Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, a 1998 National Book Award finalist, How to Read and Why (2000), and Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages (2001). Professor Bloom earned his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1955 and has served on the Yale faculty since then. He is a 1985 MacArthur Foundation Award recipient and served as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University in 1987–88. In 1999 he was awarded the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Criticism. Professor Bloom is the editor of several other Chelsea House series in literary criticism, including BLOOM’S MAJOR SHORT STORY WRITERS, BLOOM’S MAJOR NOVELISTS, BLOOM’S MAJOR DRAMATISTS, MODERN CRITICAL INTERPRETATIONS, MODERN CRITICAL VIEWS, and BLOOM’S BIOCRITIQUES.

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E D I TO R ’ S N OT E My Introduction celebrates the hilarity of The Nonexistent Knight. Considerations of Italo Calvino’s masterpiece, Invisible Cities, begin with my overview, and continue with JoAnn Cannon juxtaposing the cosmic visions of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. The reader’s share in expounded by Carolyn Springer, after which Peter G. Christensen sees Invisible Cities as Utopia’s masterpiece. A Nietzschean dance of perspectives is traced by William Franke, while Albert Sbragia contrasts the analogical techniques of Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, and Michael Wood astutely sets forth the dialogical difficulties between the two. The Cloven Viscount is seen through the naïve prism of its young narrator by J.R. Woodhouse, after which Constance Markey elaborates the difficulties of moral choice in the novella. I.T. Olken centers on the war imagery of the opening, while A.H. Carter III speculates on the Grotesque. The ending of the story is analyzed by Kathryn Hume, while Beno Weiss examines the Preface. Sergio Pacifici relates The Baron in the Trees to the poet Ariosto, one of Calvino’s prime precursors, after which Jack Byrne demonstrates the consistency of the novella’s fantasy. Literary allusion is studied by Peter A. Muckley, while Alan A. Block meditates upon perspective, and Tommasina Gabriele praises Cosimo’s moral stance. Constance Markey cautions us against the point of view of the narrator, Cosimo’s brother. John Gatt-Rutter rather humorlessly censures the allegory of The Nonexistent Knight, while Sara Maria Adler focuses upon characterization, and JoAnn Cannon upon the complex narrator, both female knight and nun. The story’s sophisticated self-awareness is the concern of Richard Andrews, after which J.R. Woodhouse commends realism in this fantasy, and Martin McLaughlin studies the protagonists.

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I N T RO D U C T I O N

Harold Bloom As this volume reprints my overview of Invisible Cities, I will devote my remarks here to my other favorite in Calvino, the delightful Nonexistent Knight. Calvino’s triumph in this exquisite and zany fantasy is that Agilulf, who is only an empty suit of white shining armor, nevertheless endears himself to the delighted reader. The book’s glory is the development of Agilulf from a martinet of exemplary will power to a charmingly devoted quester heroically seeking to restore the authenticity of his knighthood. When poor Agilulf despairs, and abandons his armor as a legacy to Raimbaut, he vanishes forever, and we are saddened. An absurd yet heartening atmosphere of good will pervades The Nonexistent Knight. All its characters, the Saracens included, have verve and style. Calvino even is able to invest Charlemagne with a sly sense of humor. The spirit of Ariosto, Calvino’s true precursor, hovers nearly, and informs the personalities of Bradamente/Theodora and Raimbaut, and of Sophronia and Torrismund. Entirely Calvino’s own are the nonexistent knight Sir Agilulf and his squire, the uncanny clown Gurduloo, who cannot hold on to the consciousness that he truly has a body. In a superb contrast, Calvino metaphysically exploits the difference between knight and squire, and the normative Raimbaud. As Agilulf dragged a corpse along he thought, ‘Oh corpse, you have what I never had or will have: a carcass. Or rather you have; you are this carcass, that which at times, in moments of despondency, I find myself envying in men who exist. Fine! I can truly call myself privileged, I who can live without it and do all; all, of course, which seems most important to me; many things I manage to do better than those who exist, since I lack their usual defects of coarseness, carelessness, incoherence, smell. It’s true that someone who exists always has a particular attitude of his own to things, which I never manage to have. But if their secret is merely here, in this bag of guts, then I can do without it. This valley of disintegrating naked corpses disgusts me no more than does the flesh of living human beings.’

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As Gurduloo dragged a corpse along he thought, ‘Corpsy, your farts stink even more than mine. I don’t know why everyone mourns you so. What’s it you lack? Before you used to move, now your movement is passed on to the worms you nourish. Once you grew nails and hair; now you’ll ooze slime which will make grass in the field grow higher towards the sun. You will become grass, then milk for cows which will eat the grass, blood of the baby that drinks their milk, and so on. Don’t you see you get more out of life than I do, corpsy?’ As Raimbaut dragged a dead man along he thought, ‘Oh corpse, I have come rushing here only to be dragged along by the heels like you. What is this frenzy that drives me, this mania for battle and for love, when seen from the place where your staring eyes gaze and your flung-back head knocks over stones? It’s that I think of, oh corpse, it’s that you make me think of: but does anything change? Nothing. No other days exist but these of ours before the tomb, both for us the living and for you the dead. May it be granted me not to waste them, not to waste anything of what I am, of what I could be: to do deeds helpful to the Frankish cause: to embrace, to be embraced by, proud Bradamante. I hope you spent your days no worse, oh corpse. Anyway to you the dice have already shown their numbers. For me they are still whirling in the box. And I love my own disquiet, corpse, not your peace.’

Agilulf is mistaken, in that he does have an attitude all his own, while Gurduloo is even more off-the-point, since he is simply unaware of his separate existence. Only Raimbaut is accurate, in love with his own disquiet, which is life itself. He is fit husband for Bradamente, who closes the book as she hurries to meet him, forsaking her other identity as Sister Theodora, the narrative voice. She cries out to the future, in a comic ecstasy: What unforseeable golden ages art thou preparing, ill-mastered, indomitable harbinger of treasures dearly paid for, my kingdom to be conquered, the future. . .

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BIOGRAPHY OF

Italo Calvino Born in 1923 to Mario Calvino and Evelina Mameli, Italo Calvino spent the first two years of his life in Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba. His parents, both botanists, decided to move the family to San Remo, Italy, where Calvino remained throughout his childhood and adolescence. In 1927 Calvino’s brother, Floriano, was born. By this time Mario was a professor at the University of Turin, where at the encouragement of his parents Italo later enrolled in the Faculty of Science to study agriculture, though he preferred reading poetry and fiction. During the beginning of the German occupation in 1943, Calvino was drafted into the military service. He ignored the government order and instead joined the Italian Communist resistance with Floriano. For the next two years he and his brother fought in the Maritime Alps, where Italo’s battle experiences provided material for his early fiction. After the liberation of Italy, Calvino returned to Turin, this time to take up a degree in literature. He soon established ties with Natalia Ginzburg, Elio Vittorini, and Cesare Pavese, writers who like him were early proponents of neorealistic fiction. Calvino also became friends with editor Giulio Einaudi, whose company of the same name published The Path to the Nest of Spiders, Calvino’s first novel. Written when Calvino was only 24, the book sold 6,000 copies, an unusually high number for a fledgling writer. Einaudi and Calvino developed a close working relationship that lasted for decades. Along with publishing most of his own writing with Einaudi, Calvino also worked as a senior editor at the firm. Calvino’s political interests eventually led him to the Soviet Union, where he gathered reports of Communist life through his travels of the country. In 1948, he temporarily left Einaudi to be a full-time editor at the newspaper L’Unità. He also became a regular contributor to the Communist weekly Rinascia. Throughout the 1950s, Calvino gradually realized he was more suited to writing fiction than a career in politics or journalism. In 1957 he decided to leave the Communist party, but he did not give up his political leanings, and for some time he advocated the writer’s role in reflecting societal ills.

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A year before his resignation from the party, Calvino finished editing Italian Fables. The book was the result of extensive research, and for the general Italian audience it would be his most recognized work. The folk literature that he encountered also served as inspiration for much of his later fiction, which delved into the worlds of fable and fantasy. Over the course of nine years, Calvino published three modern folk tales—The Cloven Viscount, The Baron in the Trees, and The Nonexistent Knight. The tales, considered a significant departure from his earlier socio-realistic fiction, were printed separately first but were later collected in 1960 and issued as a threevolume set entitled Our Ancestors. Calvino spent much of the 1950s in Rome, the cultural center of Italy. In 1959 he and Elio Vittorini founded Il Menabò, a journal featuring commentary on literature and politics. While collaborating with Vittorini, Calvino met and married Chichita Singer, an Argentine translator. They settled in Rome in 1964 and a year later had a daughter, Giovanna. Upon Vittorini’s death in 1966, Calvino stopped working on the journal and writing literary criticism altogether, citing too much pressure to write simple interpretations of literature that he found too complex. With a new orientation to his writing, Calvino continued to move from a traditional framework toward a more experimental one. Cosmicomics (1965), for instance, was a series of narratives depicting the evolution of the universe. Calvino’s innovative works found an expanding international audience and received more written commentary. Through his celebratory reviews, American writer and essayist Gore Vidal helped introduce Calvino to a new group of readers who enjoyed his fusion of fantastic storytelling with a simple and precise prose style. Calvino’s most ambitious fiction was published in the final two decades of his career. Invisible Cities (1972) is less a novel than a series of prose poems, and The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973) was originally written to accompany a collection of tarot cards. During the 1980s he received a number of awards for his literary achievements, including the Italian Legion of Honor in 1981. Dozens of universities, both in Italy and abroad, invited him to speak at conferences and symposiums. In 1984 he accepted the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton lectureship at Harvard University. While

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preparing for the lectures series, he suffered a severe stroke and died on September 5. Mr. Palomar, a novel that some consider his finest, was at press at the time of his death. It is difficult to find a modern author writing in Italian more revered than Italo Calvino. In heeding his famous credo, “I believe that fables are true,” most critics choose to view his fantasies not as escapes from reality but as alternate ways to perceive it. His literary career stands as a restless search for the newest approach to storytelling, with each successive work opening another door of the imagination.

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P L O T S U M M A RY O F

Invisible Cities Many believe Invisible Cities is the most innovative of Calvino’s fictions. Published in 1971, the book’s catalogue of 55 fictive cities, comprising one large section of the book, shakes up many expectations of the conventional narrative. The book’s other section, a series of dialogues between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, exposes contemporary dilemmas like the futility of language and memory. Together, the two pieces put forth a profound cosmological vision, as well as the age-old question: how does such a disparate world of ours find a common link? The first and the last chapters contain seven descriptions of individual cities, the middle chapters contain five. On their own, the descriptions—one to two pages in length—are fragmented pictures of Calvino’s imaginary world. The conversational pieces between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, which open and close the nine chapters, provide a much-needed framework for the book. The worldtraveler Polo is ostensibly the expert on each city as well as the narrator of the accounts, which are told to entertain and edify the emperor. The men play with the notion that an understanding of the world’s cities will inform the emperor on how to govern his realm. Another structuring device is the numbering and heading of the cities. The accounts are divided into eleven categories, each consisting of five cities: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and signs, thin cities, trading cities, cities and eyes, cities and names, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, continuous cities, and hidden cities. In each succeeding chapter, a new city category is introduced. Most accounts focus on one peculiar attribute that gives the city an unreal quality. For some cities it is a unique design, such as Zenobia, which is set high in the air on stilts; for some, it is their natural materials, such as Argia, comprised entirely of clay and rock. For others, the populace makes it unique, such as Chloe, where everyone is mute. All of the cities seem timeless except for the final cities in the book, whose descriptions allude to modern problems like overcrowding and pollution.

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Italics mark off the continuous dialogue between the Tartar emperor and his guest. It is clear from the beginning that Khan reserves some doubts about the veracity of Marco Polo’s stories, yet he nonetheless remains a faithful listener, captivated by the cities and the way in which Polo remembers them. Of all his foreign guests, Marco Polo has become Khan’s most favored. The emperor rarely asks questions about individual cities because he is more concerned about how they are related, humbled by the truth that the pattern behind them is beyond detection. With Khan consistently anxious about his vast empire, Polo’s tales are in most cases a welcome diversion. Polo wins the emperor’s graces with innovative attempts to bridge the communication gaps between them. He uses wild gestures and props standing as emblems of the cities to illustrate where he has been. Eventually, he learns the Tatar language and is able to converse with Khan, but verbal communication soon reveals its own inherent problems. Faced with an impossible chore of presenting an infinite set of cities at once, Polo decides to use models of the universe. One particular model that interests Khan is a chessboard, with its pieces standing for cities. Later, the two men consult Khan’s atlas, which includes cities of the future like San Francisco and New York. The atlas also alludes to an unnamed empire “more vast than the Great Khan’s” that will hold these future cities. Polo, and to a greater extent Khan, are often frustrated by their problems in communicating. At one point they sit in silence while Khan continues their conversation in his mind. During another exchange, an irate Khan accuses Polo of tainting his accounts with his unreliable memory. Polo does not deny the accusation, admitting that each new city he visits alters his recollection of all the cities. He also acknowledges that his memory of his first city, Venice, runs through his descriptions of every subsequent city he has visited. Polo goes on to admit to his discomfort with the storyteller’s role. He believes that as a listener Khan also has a role in the stories, and even encourages him to participate in the storytelling process: “It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear”—perhaps an epigram for Calvino’s philosophy behind Invisible Cities. Khan takes Marco Polo’s cue and as an experiment, imagines a city and asks Polo if it coincides with what he has

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seen. Owing to the number of cities Polo has visited, he does in fact recall the city. By this point in the story, with Khan more pessimistic than before, the scenes become more dreamlike and the men’s ideas more conjectural. First they doubt the existence of the cities; then they doubt their own existence, imagining they are merely the dreams of ordinary citizens in a foreign land. The emperor’s anxiety about his empire and its future never abates, and both men are ultimately overwhelmed with the cities and their infinite possibilities. Polo, the more optimistic of the two, envisions that a perfect city is still attainable. Khan, the more fatalistic, fears for what he calls the “infernal” city. But Polo has the final word, stating that with proper insight, the infernal city is avoidable. It is the challenge of humankind, he believes, to “seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

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L I S T O F C H A R AC T E R S I N

Invisible Cities Marco Polo is the famous Venetian world-traveler commissioned by Kublai Khan to report on the many cities he has visited. Using his expansive imagination, he devises ways to bridge the language barrier between Khan and him. Over the course of communicating his experiences, he acknowledges the limitations of his memory, as well as his powerlessness in knowing anything for certain. Nonetheless, he is usually optimistic about the advice he offers. Kublai Khan is the Tartar emperor and the host to Marco Polo. He is a confident leader, but is burdened by the imminent end of his vast empire. He listens to Polo’s many descriptions of cities with the hope that they will help him better understand his own realm. As he loses faith in the relevance of Polo’s tales, he becomes more skeptical about the future of his empire and the world in general.

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CRITICAL VIEWS ON

Invisible Cities HAROLD BLOOM ON THE STORY [Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University and Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of English at the New York University Graduate School. He has published numerous books including The Western Canon¸ and How to Read and Why. In this extract, Harold Bloom looks at the debate between Khan and Polo and touches on various aspects of certain cities—ultimately pointing out what the reader can take away from the story.] A description of Calvino’s invention, if rendered properly, could show others how and why Invisible Cities should be read and reread. Marco Polo is the tale-teller, and the venerable Kublai Khan his audience, as we listen to stories about imaginary cities. The stories are only a page or two long yet they are short stories, in the Bogesian of Kafkan, rather than the Chekhovian, mode. Marco Polo’s cities never were, and never could be, and yet most readers would go there, if only they might. Calvino’s Invisible Cities come in eleven groupings, scattered rather than bunched: cities and—memory, desire, signs, eyes, names, the dead, the sky—as well as thin cities, trading cities, continuous cities, and hidden cities. Though one can become dizzy keeping all these in mind, it will not do to say that each of these cities is actually the same place. Since they are all named for women, that would amount to saying that all women are one woman, the doctrine of the Spanish philosopher-novelist Miguel de Unamuno, but not Calvino’s view. Kublai Khan, listening to Marco Polo, would certainly agree with Calvino and Polo, and not with de Unamuno. For Kublai, old and weary of power, finds in Marco Polo’s visionary cities a pattern that will endure, after his own empire is dust. Nostalgia for lost illusions, loves that never quite were, happiness perhaps only tasted—these are the emotions Calvino evokes. In Isidora, one of the Cities of Memory, “the foreigner hesitating between two

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women always encounters a third,” but alas you can arrive at Isidora only in old age. “You leave Tamara without having discovered it,” and in Zirma you see “a girl walking with a puma on a leash.” Kublai, after many recitals, begins to note a family resemblance among the cities, but that means only that the emperor is learning how to interpret Polo’s art of narrative: “There is no language without deceit.” In Armilla, one of the Thin Cities, the only activity seems to be that of nymphs bathing: “in the morning you hear them singing.” This is bettered by: “A voluptuous vibration constantly stirs Chloe, the most chaste of cities.” This is akin to one of Marco Polo’s principles as a storyteller: “Falsehood is never in words, it is in things.” Kublai protests that, from then on, he will describe the cities, and Marco Polo will then journey to see if they exist. But Marco Polo denies Kublai’s archetypal city and proposes instead a model made up only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions. The reader begins to understand that the true story is the ongoing debate between the visionary Marco and the skeptical Kublai, perpetual youth against eternal age. And so the recital goes on: Esmerelda, where “cats, thieves, illicit lovers move along higher, discontinuous ways of dropping from a rooftop to a balcony,” or Eusapia, a city of the dead where “a girl with a laughing skull milks the carcass of a heifer.” Wearying even of this, Kublai orders Marco to cease his travels, and instead engage the great Khan in an endless chess match. But this does not slow Marco down; the movement of the chess pieces becomes the narrative of the invisible cities. We come at last to “Bernice, the unjust city,” which has a just city within it, and an unjust within that, and on and on. Bernice is then a sequence of cities, just and unjust, but all the future Bernices are present already, “wrapped one within the other, confined, crammed, inextricable.” And since that is where we all live, Marco Polo ceases. There are then no more Invisible Cities. One final dialogue between Kublai and Marco remains. Where, Kublai asks, are the promised lands? Why has Marco not spoken of New Atlantis, Utopia, the City of the Sun, New Harmony, and all the other cities of redemption? “For these parts I could not draw a route on the map or set a date for the landing,” Marco replies, but already

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the Great Kahn, leafing through his atlas, comes upon the cities of “nightmares and maledictions”: Babylon, Yahooland, Brave New World, and the others. In despair, the aged Kublai states his nihilism: the current draws us at last to the infernal city. Wonderfully, the last words are given to Polo, who speaks for what is still hopeful in the reader. We are already in “the inferno of the living.” We can accept it, and so cease to be conscious of it. But there is a better way, and it might be called the wisdom of Italo Calvino: . . . seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

Calvino’s advice tells us again how to read and why: be vigilant, apprehend and recognize the possibility of the god, help it to endure, give it space in your life. —Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why, (New York, Scribner, 2000): pp. 62–64.

JOANN CANNON ON MODELS OF THE UNIVERSE [JoAnn Cannon is Professor of French and Italian at the University of California–Davis. She is also the author of Postmodern Italian Fiction: The Crisis of Reason in Calvino, Eco, Sciascia, Malerba and Italo Calvino: Writer and Critic. The following extract, drawn from her book on Calvino, examines the different models of the universe proposed by Marco Polo and Kublai Khan.] Kublai Khan embodies the sense of frustration of one who is unable to find a rational meaning in the universe. The master of a boundless empire, he is at the mercy of others for any knowledge which he may have of it: “l’imperatore è colui che è straniero a ciascuno dei suoi sudditi” (29). It is only through Marco Polo’s reports that the Khan can in some way possess his empire. “Solo nei resoconti di Marco Polo, Kublai Kan riusciva a discernere, attraverso le muraglie e le torri destinate a crollare, la filigrana d’un disegno così sottile da sfuggire al morso delle termiti” (13–14). If the Khan cannot share with Polo the naturalist’s direct observation of his empire, he can, nonetheless, discern in the repetition in

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Polo’s descriptions a certain systematic nature: “Kan s’era accorto che le città di Marco Polo s’assomigliavano, come se il passaggio dall’una all’altra non implicasse un viaggio ma uno scambio d’elementi” (49). In fact, beginning with his first report and continuing throughout the work, Marco Polo repeatedly calls attention to the redundancy of the cities in the Khan’s empire. The Khan decides that he need not have Marco Polo’s empirical knowledge of the world to Tcreate his own cities. He interrupts Polo’s report, saying that henceforth he will describe the cities and Polo must simply verify whether they exist in the form in which he, the Khan, has thought them up. From this intuition on the part of the emperor it is only a small step to the construction of a model from which all of the cities may be deduced. The discovery of the systematic nature of his empire seems to provide a solution to the Khan’s spiritual crisis: be feels a sense of relief when he begins to perceive order in his chaotic empire. This penchant for order is shared by Calvino: in “Appunti sulla narrativa come processo cornbinatorio,” the author describes the feeling of security which he experiences: “ogni volta che una estensione dai contorni indeterminati e sfumati mi si rivela invece come una forma geometrica precisa, ogni volta che in una valanga informe di avvenimenti riesco a distinguere delle serie di fatti, delle scelte tra un numero finito di possibilità. Di fronte alla vertigine dell’innumerevole, dell’inclassificabile, del continuo mi sento rassicurato dal finito, dal sistemizzato, dal discreto.” The author’s desire to superimpose a systematic design on every manifestation of chaos is constantly betrayed in his fictions: in Ti con zero, the crystal comes to symbolize the consolatory quest for order in a disordered world. The crystal, “in cui a ogni asimmetria rispondeva in realtà una rete di simmetrie,” is like Borges’ universe-library in which “the same volumes are repeated in the same disorder (which, repeated, would constitute an order: Order itself).” Both Borges and Calvino would embed the apparent disorder of the universe in the framework of a larger design. It is this type of all-encompassing design which Kublai Khan attempts to find in his empire. (. . .) The Khan is in search of a generative model from which to deduce all the possible cities. But in this search, he relinquishes the diversity of his empire. Polo stands at the opposite extreme, striving to maintain the multiplicity of the Khan’s cities and to avoid the pos-

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sible reductiveness of the structural model. In fact, while many of Marco Polo’s reports begin with the description of elements which are common to all the cities in the Khan’s empire, there is a turning point in the narration where the ambassador points to the uniqueness, the “segreto” hidden in each city. As he describes the city of Anastasia, for instance, Marco Polo interpolates this comment: “Ma con queste notizie non ti direi la vera essenza della città” (20). This movement from the generic to the specific is repeated again and again in Polo’s accounts. But while the ambassador recognizes the unique quality of each city in the Khan’s empire, this specificity escapes the emperor. The image of the chessboard which recurs throughout the novel becomes a metaphor for the Khan’s structural project. This same metaphor is often used by structuralist theoreticians Saussure frequently cites it in describing the functioning of la langue, the code or “grammar” which makes individual speech acts possible. Through a similar analogy with the game of chess, the Khan comes to understand the systematic nature of Polo’s accounts. Before Marco Polo has mastered Kublai Khan’s language, he must rely upon sign language and other nonverbal forms of communication to represent the Khan’s empire. The emperor and his ambassador are seated in the throne room, with a tiled floor, as the latter gives his mute account. By placing and displacing on the tiles of the floor certain samples (a shell or a fan) which be has gathered in his travels, he describes the cities to Kublai Khan. Khan, a chessplayer, observes that certain pieces imply or exclude the nearness of other pieces and are displaced according to specific rules. “Trascurando la varietà di forme degli oggetti, ne definiva il modo di disporsi gli uni rispetto agli altri sul pavimento di maiolica. Pensò: ‘Se ogni città è come una partita a scacchi, il giorno in cui arriverò a conoscerne le regole possiederò finalmente il mio impero, anche se mai riuscirò a conoscere tutte le città che contiene”’ (127). The Khan has discovered that this system is indeed structural—his cities are not mere aggregates of isolated elements: rather they are made up of elements which are subordinated to the laws of combination. Once he understands the rules of the game, he will have mastered his empire. —JoAnn Cannon, “The Map of the Universe: Le città invisibili.” Italo Calvino: Writer and Critic, (Ravenna, Italy: Longo Editore, 1981): pp. 84–85, 86–88. CAROLYN SPRINGER ON THE READER’S ROLE

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[Carolyn Springer is the author of Marble Wilderness: Ruins and Representation in Italian Romanticism, 1775–1850 and is Associate Professor of French and Italian at Stanford University. In this excerpt, she makes a case for the reader’s responsibility to find meaning in the novel.] Apart from its complex literary resonances, Invisible Cities deserves new attention from students of reader response precisely because it anticipates the concerns of their discourse—concerns dialectically reelaborated in Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore. In this essay I propose to reread Invisible Cities as a dramatization of the role of the reader in contemporary fiction. In order to clarify the reader’s relationship with the text, I have found it essential to distinguish, as previous studies of this novel have neglected to do, between the diegetic and extra-diegetic components of the frame structure. Using the term “diegetic” to refer in a semiotic sense to all that occurs within the apparent world of the narrative, we can identify as the diegetic component the eighteen italicized dialogues between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan which frame the nine chapters of the book. The extra-diegetic component includes all the remaining signs (and spaces) which comprise the external apparatus of the text: the table of contents, the chapter headings, numbers, and classifications, and the blank pages separating the individual chapters. Only by enforcing and duly exploring the distinction between the double components of the frame can we appreciate the complex relationship between this text and its readers. It is the extra-diegetic architecture of the book that presents the most immediate challenge to the careful reader. Accustomed to the convention of a numerically ordered frame, he brings to the text a series of informed assumptions which prove to be of little help in understanding the scheme. Here, as in any other book, the Table of Contents (cf. Appendix I) functions as a map or spatial model to enable the reader to synthesize and survey the overall structure of the work, thus compensating for the inherent dispersion of the narrative (what Wolfgang Iser calls the “wandering viewpoint” of the Reader). But the frame seems governed by no external logic or necessity; it is entirely without precedent; it is both intricate and gratuitous. (. . .)

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Unlike the extra-diegetic frame which presents an immediate challenge to the reader in the form of an abstract mathematical model to be decoded, the diegetic frame presents a challenge which is mediated by the figure of the Khan. As he listens to Marco Polo’s tales, the Khan searches for a pattern in the narrator’s words. As model reader within the text, he enacts our own range of responses as readers of Calvino’s Invisible Cities. As we confer meaning on Calvino’s text through the act of reading, we begin to discern a broad progression within the diegetic frame. This progression contrasts with the randomness and discontinuity among the cities themselves. The descriptions or rècits of cities are totally interchangeable, lacking plot, or character, indifferent to the coordinates of space or time—multiple views assembled from one kaleidoscope of attributes and properties. The combinatory game which generates the production of cities itself governs, in miniature, many of the individual cities: Entropia, where jobs, wives, and identities are constantly rotated and “variety is guaranteed by the multiple assignments” (70), Chloe, a carousel of infinite and intersecting fantasies, where incessant “meetings, seductions, copulations, orgies are consummated . . . without a word exchanged” (57), or Melania, the stage of a fluctuating but uninterrupted dialogue where roles are constantly reassigned as the participants die, one by one (86). Yet there is an overall progression in the interaction between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan which parallels our own gradual mastery of the text. But it can not be traced in a continuous, systematic fashion; if this is a reader’s Bildungsroman, it has abandoned strict linear schemes of development. In fact, the reader is free to traverse and explore the text in any order he pleases; this is the privilege he gains once he has learned its rules. —Carolyn Springer, “Textual Geography: The Role of the Reader in Invisible Cities,” Modern Language Studies 15 (1985): pp. 290, 292–93.

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PETER G. CHRISTENSEN ON THE UTOPIAN VISION [Peter G. Christensen, a former instructor at State University of New York at Binghamton, now teaches at University of Milwaukee–Wisconsin, specializing in 20thcentury fiction and drama. In this extract, he examines Calvino’s image of a Utopia through the writer’s perspective.] In his Pour une poétique de la science fiction (1976), Darko Suvin has a chapter, “pour une définition de l’utopie,” which, in part, attempts to understand Utopia as a “verbal construction.” He writes: En tant qu’élément de définition, la notion de «construction verbale» est un dépassement, je l’espère, de la vieille querelle dogmatique au sujet de la réalisation possible de l’utopie: serait de l’utopie (selon une école) seulement ce qui est réalisable; au contraire (selon une autre école tout aussi intransigeante) seulement ce qui est irréalisable. Ainsi que plusieurs critiques l’ont noté, l’utopie n’est ni prophétie, ni évasion, mais un «comme si», une expérience de l’imaginaire, ou «un organe méthodologique du Nouveau». L’utopie littéraire (et toute description d’une utopie est littéraire) est un moyen heuristique de perfectionnement—une entité épistémologique, et non pas ontologique.”

This notion of “verbal construction” has great relevance to Invisible Cities, where the Utopias and Dystopias of the historical and literary past are mentioned in the concluding cursives of the book. Here Marco Polo talks about the “perfect city” unavailable to view and inaccessible along the usual coordinates. Marco has used imagination to activate Kublai’s atlas and now he explains, in part, how he has had the power to do that. The Great Khan’s atlas contains also the maps of the promised lands visited in thought but not yet discovered or founded: New Atlantis, Utopia, the City of the Sun, Oceana, Tamoe, New Harmony, New Lanark, Icaria. Kublai asked Marco: “You, who go about exploring and who see signs, can tell me toward which of these futures the favoring winds are driving us.”

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“For these ports I could not draw a route on the map or set a date for a landing. At times all I need is a brief glimpse, an opening in the midst of an incongruous landscape, a glint of lights in the fog, the dialogue of two passersby meeting in the crowd, and I think that, setting out from there, I will put together, piece by piece, the perfect city, made of fragments, mixed with the rest, of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sends out, not knowing who receives them (164).

In this instance, Utopia is a method for Marco, his personal means of forming the perfect city for himself. As Suvin points out, Utopia is always “un récit dans un récit,” writing which offers us an image and its contrary at the same time. The descriptions of the 55 cities are not necessarily reduceable to parts of the dialogue between Marco and Kublai. This strategy keeps them from being seen by the reader simply as products or realizations. Told by no one named to no one named, they stand forth clearly as verbal constructs. The récit is in the récit, but as a floating part, unhooked to its frame. Suvin writes that the utilization of Utopia has as much importance as was once granted to its realization. Without it, man is truly one-dimensional. Mais l’utilization d’un texte littéraire signifie d’abord (quels qu’en soient les développements ultérieurs)—une lecture qui est dialogue dramatique avec le lecteur.

We are not left to decide whether Marco or Kublai has the most intelligent attitudes, but to participate in a dialogue with the text based on what we learn from the conflicting views of the explorer and emperor. As we do this, we must resist the notion of reading Invisible Cities primarily as a novel. Suvin, quoting Frye, reminds us that Utopias fall into the categories of anatomy and Menippean satire. It is not true-to-life characters that count here, but their totally intellectual models of vision. We must not anticipate the development of character across the text, but watch the protagonists don and discard ideas about city/text production with the skill of quick-change artists. In 1975 at the Colloque de Cérisy on Utopia, Raymond Trousson asked why Utopia has never produced a literary masterpiece. He fell into the trap of looking for Utopia to be too novelistic, but he still made a good point along the way. The literary Utopias from the

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Renaissance to the nineteenth century tended to simplify, mutilate, and schematize, and they provided no heroes for the reader. Once Dystopia became popular, there were heroes, conflicts, and possibilities for more exciting plots. By refusing Utopia as a realization and stressing it as an experience of the imaginary, Calvino rescues it from the boredom which weighed down so many earlier writers. In fact, Invisible Cities really is Utopia’s masterpiece. —Peter G. Christensen, “Utopia and Alienation in Calvino’s Invisible Cities,” Forum Italicum 20 (1986): pp. 17–19.

WILLIAM FRANKE ON POST-STRUCTURALIST INTERPRETATION [William Franke is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian at Vanderbilt University and is author of Dante’s Interpretive Journey. He focuses his analysis of the novel on the two characters’ different interpretations of the world through signs.] Italo Calvino’s later texts are particularly intelligible and rewarding when read in the context of trends of thought now termed “poststructuralist.” In conception and in detail Calvino’s imaginary universes follow or perform the logic of dissolution of sense and significance (which is also an exposition of universes of surfaces in their rich multifacetedness) that has been the theme, above all, of “deconstructionists” such as Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. The attack of these writers and/or others on the “metaphysics of presence” and “self-identity,” or again on metaphors of origin, has been taken up by Calvino and played through a whole range of imaginative registers, implementing that spirit of playfulness (in all seriousness) which the philosopher-critics, are sometimes more apt to extol than exemplify. Working with and against the background of these ideas/procedures of post-structuralist theory, Calvino is in his element: indeed according to post-structuralists philosophy in any traditional sense is not possible; there can only be writing, and Calvino is a virtuoso. Perhaps only in the writing of such a consummate imaginative and linguistic artist does the vision (or blindness) of the

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world(s) proposed by post-structuralism come to be realized (or to appear) fully, or even at all—since such a philosophy cannot be identical with itself, but can only be identified in its Other, in literature. Calvino may be as necessary to post-structuralist theory as it is to him. Le città invisibili, while not argumentative in tone, insists on a certain philosophical stance which is not a stance at all, but more like a Nietzschean dance. The “perspective” from which the book is written is that of the polemic against logo-centrism, which is made mockery of by the centerless involution of Calvino’s self-deconstructing imaginative constructions. Rather than give a definition of logo-centrism, which would be a paradigmatically logo-centric operation, I will proceed, as Calvino does, by way of description of a universe (which is no longer a universe but a polyverse) from which the logo-centric thread has been withdrawn, and see how it unravels itself in “invisible cities.” I The scene for the contemporary undoing of Western metaphysics of power and possession is chosen with a deliberate distancing manoeuvre in the 13th Century Mongol Empire (even though the aromatic, acoustic and panoramic signposts of a gorgeous and ancient Orient will merge with those of a modern Western metropolis in open ambiguity before the book half ends). The figure of the Great Khan transposes typically Western impulses for mastery to an East of the imagination. Not surprisingly, the ontological atmosphere, with its feel of substanceless yet allusive invention, closely resembles that of the system of signs, likewise laden with subtextual messages about an aggressive West, though not supposed to correspond to any geographical or national entity, christened “Japon” by Roland Barthes in L’Empire des Signes. Khan in his various positions and predicaments recapitulates the history of at least modern philosophy, and thereby embodies also the basic motivations of Western consciousness per se, with its metaphysical underpinnings. At the outset, his limited channels of access to his own empire make Khan a sort of classical subject— solo attraverso occhi e orecchi stranieri l’impero poteva manifestare la sua esistenza a Kublai—

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closed in by the alien body, reading the world by signs through external sense organs, no longer sure of its reality. Like Descartes who doubted in his Méditations whether he might not just be dreaming everything that he took for the world, “Forse l’impero, pensò Kublai, non è altro che uno zodiaco di fantasmi della mente” (30). Obsessed with possessing his empire, Khan asks whether he will be able to do so by coming to know all the signs in the repertory of emblematic objects Polo uses for his descriptions in “pantomimes” of the cities of the realm: il giorno in cui conoscerò tutti gli emblemi, . . . riuscirò a possedere il mio impero, finalmente?

But such an exploitation of signs within a traditional dialectic of power will not avail. Marco replies: Sire non lo credere: quel giorno sarai tu stesso emblema tra gli emblemi. (30) Rather than mastery of reality by semiological instruments, Marco proposes a deconstructive solution: that old metaphysical postulate, the self, cedes to the free play of signs in the open field of the text. The Emperor himself becomes a sign among signs. —William Franke, “The Deconstructive Anti-Logic of Le città invisibili,” Italian Quarterly 6 (1989): pp. 31–32.

ALBERT SBRAGIA ON MODELS OF THE UNIVERSE [Albert Sbragia is an Associate Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Washington. He translated into English The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture by Franco Moretti. Here he compares the different worldviews of Kublai Khan and Marco Polo revealed through their uses of analogy.] The image of transparent, diaphanous models as fine as cobwebs reminds us of the many rarefying structures Marco Polo imagines in Invisible Cities to give lightness to the Khan’s earthly empire. The danger of this metaphysical and metaphorical rarefaction, however, is that it too can become a confining power-play, leading us to the

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other pole of chaos, the void. This is the error Kublai Khan enters into when he attempts to reduce the chaotic heaviness of his empire to the disembodied politics of the chessboard (a Saussurean-structuralist model par excellence). The Great Khan tried to concentrate on the game, but now it was the game’s purpose that eluded him. Each game ends in a gain or a loss: but of what? What were the true stakes? At checkmate, beneath the foot of the king, knocked aside by the winner’s hand, a black or a white square remains. By disembodying his conquests to reduce them to the essential, Kublai had arrived at the extreme operation: the definitive conquest of which the empire’s multiform treasures were only illusory envelopes. It was reduced to a square of planed wood: nothingness. (Invisible Cities, 123)

Paradoxically, the impasse of the void is resolved only when Marco Polo applies the rules of synecdoche to the chess square and recreates the universe: “Your chessboard, sire, is inlaid with two woods: ebony and maple. The square on which your enlightened gaze is fixed was cut from the ring of a trunk that grew in a year of drought: you see how its fibers are arranged? Here a barely hinted knot can be made out: a bud tried to burgeon on a premature spring day, but the night’s frost forced it to desist. [. . .] The quantity of things that could be read in a little piece of smooth and empty wood overwhelmed Kublai. Polo was already talking about forests, about rafts laden with logs that come down the rivers, of docks, of women at the windows. . . . (131, 132)

Synecdoche and mise en abyme are Calvino’s unruly tools in his attempt to impart order to his fictional universe. Each can lead to excess and imbalance, as is illustrated at the end of Invisible Cities by the nightmarish proliferation of metonymic “continuous cities” and metaphoric “hidden cities.” This is not surprising since synecdoche and mise en abyme are perhaps the purest examples of language’s tendency to constitute itself according to the principles of contiguity and similarity. As such Calvino uses them to probe the contiguous and metaphysical boundaries of literature, “the universe and the void,” as he puts it, “between which the target of literature swings back and forth” (“Multiplicity,” Six Memos, 113). Used alone

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synecdoche and mise en abyme succumb to the chaos they would try to order. But perhaps, as JoAnn Cannon argues, by refusing to resolve the conflict between Khan’s metaphoric model and Polo’s metonymic catalogue, Calvino suggests that the solution, the order, lies in their interaction (Italo Calvino, 95). —Albert Sbragia, “Italo Calvino’s Ordering of Chaos.” Modern Fiction Studies 39 (1993): pp. 300–301.

MICHAEL WOOD ON THE LIMITATIONS OF LANGUAGE [Michael Wood is Chair of the English Department at Princeton University. His recent writings include The Magician’s Doubt’s: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction and Children of Silence: On Contemporary Fiction, and he is a regular contributor for the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. In this excerpt, he analyzes communicative difficulties between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan.] Marco Polo and Kublai Kahn, in Invisible Cities, converse among the fountains and magnolias of the Khan’s hanging garden. At first, the Venetian is unable to speak the Khan’s language, and can recount his travels in the empire only with gestures, leaps, and cries, and by exhibiting various objects he has brought back with him. He also resorts to pantomime: One city was depicted by the leap of a fish escaping the cormorant’s beak to fall into a net; another city by a naked man running through fire unscorched; a third by a skull, its teeth green with mold, clenching a round, white pearl. The Great Khan deciphered the signs, but the connection between them and the places visited remained uncertain; he never knew whether Marco wished to enact an adventure that had befallen him on his journey, an exploit of the city’s founder, the prophecy of an astrologer, a rebus or a charade to indicate a name. But, obscure or obvious as it might be, everything Marco displayed had the power of emblems, which, once seen, cannot be forgotten or confused. (21–22)

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Before long Marco masters the Tartar idiom (or the Emperor begins to understand Italian), and the dialogue proceeds with greater precision. But then a certain nostalgia for the emblem sets in: “You would have said communication between them was less happy than in the past” (38–39). Marco Polo and the Great Khan experience the shift from gestures to words chiefly as a loss. Words are more precise, of course, “more useful than objects or gestures in listing the most important things of every province and city,” but Marco Polo finds he can’t put the daily life of those places into words, and goes back to “gestures, grimaces, glances” (39). So, for each city, after the fundamental information given in precise words, he followed with a mute commentary, holding up his hands, palms out, or backs, or sideways, in straight or oblique movements, spasmodic or slow. A new kind of dialogue was established: the Great Khan’s white hands, heavy with rings, answered with stately movements the sinewy, agile hands of the merchant (39).

But then this language in turn becomes stable, conventional, closed. “The pleasure of falling back on it also diminished in both; in their conversations, most of the time, they remained silent and immobile” (39). We must guard against too literal a reading of this situation. The decay of dialogue is part of the beautifully elegiac and speculative movement of the whole of Invisible Cities, which begins with the Khan seeing his vast empire as a sumptuous, corrupt ruin and takes us deeper and deeper into his melancholy, his “sense of emptiness” (5) and loss. We are repeatedly invited to wonder whether anything of what we read is actually happening, even within the world of the fiction. Do the Khan and Marco Polo, historical figures already thoroughly reimagined in the mind of the writer, really communicate with each other in this story, or do they dream they do? “The foreigner had learned to speak the emperor’s language or the emperor to understand the language of the foreigner” (38). This is to say they had turned to words, but not to whose words. And the supposed communication is often located more openly within the minds of the characters: “Marco Polo imagined answering (or Kublai Khan imagined his answer)”; “Kublai Khan interrupted him or imagined

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interrupting him, or Marco Polo imagined himself interrupted”; “Marco Polo could explain or imagine explaining or be imagined explaining or succeed finally in explaining to himself ” (29). The characters imagine themselves to be in dialogue, which is a way of saying that we have to imagine them at it, and that is the dialogue we imagine that matters, —Michael Wood, “Hidden in the Distance: Reading Calvino Reading,” Kenyon Review 20 (1998): pp. 156–57.

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P L O T S U M M A RY O F

The Cloven Viscount The Cloven Viscount, published in 1951, marked a clear shift in Calvino’s writing style. This short novel later became the first installment of the Our Ancestors trilogy. Readers observe this odd mixture of traditional fable and grotesque comedy in sharp contrast to his earlier neorealist fiction. There were—and still are—conclusions that it is a simple allegory of a soldier who, literarily split into two halves, becomes a complete man again. Behind the straightforward arc of the plot, however, lies a critical examination of conventional morality and the disintegration of modern society. We only know the tale’s narrator as the cloven viscount’s nephew, a seven- or eight-year-old boy at the mercy of the adult community. The boy, observing his world through wholly innocent eyes, begins his account with his uncle traveling through Bohemia, en route to fight in the Turkish wars of the 17th century. Medardo, who at this stage is also naive, is accompanied by his squire, Kurt, who has seen his share of war and can answer Medardo’s numerous questions. He explains to the viscount some of the gruesome sights they pass, such as the tangled heaps of vulture carcasses and human bodies. The first day of battle finds Medardo scared and regretful that he decided to fight. He is immediately unhorsed, then runs straight into a cannonade that hits him square in the chest, slicing his body in half. One side inexplicably remains alive, and field doctors, fascinated with this medical miracle, stitch him up and send him back to his village of Terralba. Everyone gathers around the castle entrance to welcome the fallen soldier, including Medardo’s nanny, Sebastiana, and his aged father, Aiolfo. Much to their shock, they find that Medardo—at least what is left up him—has returned as a wretch. He shuns all greetings and retreats to his room. As an official welcome, Aiolfo sends a trained shrike from his aviary to enter a window of Medardo’s room. The viscount kills the bird and throws it out the window. The next morning Aiolfo finds the carcass and observes that his son has ripped off all the major body parts on one side—a masochistic practice that Medardo will soon perform on many animals and plants. Heartborken, Aiolfo falls ill and dies the next day.

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Medardo eventually ventures away from the castle, followed by the people of the court. Behind him the viscount leaves a trail of a dead frog, a melon, and mushrooms—all hacked in half. He hands the mushrooms to the narrator, who has strangely remained innocuous until this point in the tale. Sebastiana believes that Medardo’s destruction is proof that his evil half has returned from the war. In the next scene, in which a group of robbers are brought before him, Medardo proves Sebastiana right. Instead of delivering the customary lenient punishment, he orders the robbers, the injured parties, and the constables who failed to prevent the crime all to their deaths. Despite the havoc wreaked by the viscount, the boy manages to enjoy life. His favorite pastime is assisting Dr. Trelawney, the court physician and a former shipmate of Captain Cook. The idyllic scenes in which the boy and Trelawney roam the countryside, catching willo’-the-wisps for scientific study, stand in sharp contrast to the rest of this macabre story. The members of Medardo’s court continue to suffer from his tyranny. Master Pietrochiodo, the court carpenter, is burdened by guilt after following orders to construct gibbets and other instruments of torture. After Sebastiana suffers facial burns from a fire, Medardo mistakes the marks on her face for leprosy and sends her to Pratofungo, a village reserved for lepers. Dr. Trelawney, a caricature of the modern physician, refuses to examine Sebastiana because he is repelled by illness. Disappointed that Trelawney fails to defend the nanny, the boy looks for friendship elsewhere, marking the end of his naive love for his older friend. He soon meets Esau, a young boy living among a nearby colony of Huguenots. The religious group is another target of Calvino’s satire, in this case of religious folly. The leader of the Huguenots, Ezekiel, is given to delivering absurd exhortations about the importance of hard work and the imminence of God’s wrath. With his typical aggressiveness, Medardo declares his intention to wed Pamela, a rustic maid, who as one might expect has her reservations. The story receives a jolt with the return of the other half of Medardo. He has also survived the cannonade blast, but unlike his other half, he is entirely good. Hereafter, the two characters are referred to as the Good ‘Un and the Bad ‘Un.

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Virtue and vice compete through the actions of Medardo’s two halves, who also clash for the hand of Pamela. The Good ‘Un’s moral rectitude turns out to be just as repugnant as the Bad ‘Un’s brutality: he chastises the lepers for their sexual escapades—their only source of joy—and aggravates Ezekiel and the Huegenots with his instructions to lower their crop prices for the sake of the poor. By this point, Calvino’s character study has turned out to be not the expected rehashing of the Jekyll and Hyde theme, but instead a deconstruction of traditional morality. The Bad ‘Un decides that the other half must marry Pamela and arranges a wedding with the girl’s mother. The Good ‘Un, ignorant of the Bad ‘Un’s plans, has the same intentions and arranges a wedding with her father. When Pamela discovers that there are to be two weddings, she decides to have it on the same day, letting chance dictate whom she will marry. Both men show up for the ceremony, and to decide whom the husband will be, they agree to hold a duel, during which the Good ‘Un and Bad ‘Un suffer mortal wounds. Dr. Trelawney sees their injuries as the perfect opportunity to stitch the two sides together. In a fantastic turn of events, Medardo becomes whole again, marries Pamela, and they begin a family. After The Cloven Viscount was published, Calvino admitted to leading critics down the wrong path by disguising his ambiguous story as a simple allegory. The tale’s conclusion remains true to the author’s vision, as the once-naive narrator now pokes fun at the traditional fairy-tale ending: “Some might expect that with the Viscount entire again, a period of marvelous happiness would open, but obviously a whole Viscount is not enough to make all the world whole.” The narrator, moreover, has no desire to stay in the town, even with its rehabilitated leader. When Captain Cook’s ship reaches the shore to retrieve Dr. Trelawney, the boy regrets not being able to leave with him. Instead, he remains stuck in Terralba and “this world of ours full of responsibilities and will-o’-the-wisps.”

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L I S T O F C H A R AC T E R S I N

The Cloven Viscount Medardo, the Viscount of Terralba, suffers a cannon blast during battle that splits his body completely in half. Both remaining halves miraculously survive and return home—one half (the Bad ‘Un) is entirely evil; the other (the Good ‘Un) is entirely good. With their respective malice and sanctimonious preaching, the two halves remain a burden to the townspeople until the court doctor stitches them back together, whereupon the Viscount becomes a complete individual once again. The narrator, Medardo’s young nephew, tells the story from the innocent perspective of a child. He enjoys roaming the countryside, collecting will-o’-the-wisps with his friend, Dr. Trelawney, and remains content even during the terror that ensues with the Bad ‘Un’s return. Dr. Trelawney, the English court physician, is a former shipmate of Captain Cook. He is an enthusiastic student of nature, yet his aversion to sickness makes him a useless doctor. Pamela is the sensible shepherdess whom both halves of Medardo wish to wed. Always true to her earthy personality, she remains unexcited about the prospect of marriage. Sebastiana is the faithful old nurse to the Viscount and one of the worst victims of the Bad ‘Un’s wrath. She is the first to observe that it is Medardo’s evil half who has returned from the war. Ariolfo, the former Viscount of Terralba, leads a relaxed life training the birds from his aviary. Upon learning that the trials of war have turned his son into a monster, he falls ill and dies immediately. Master Pietrochiodo is the court carpenter caught between the instructions of the Bad ‘Un, who commissions only gibbets and instruments of torture, and the Good ‘Un, who designs multi-tasked devices that are impossible to make. Ezekiel is the overzealous leader of a Huguenot colony that has recently escaped persecution in France. He overworks his people to

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prevent what he fears is God’s imminent wrath through famine and plague. Esau is Ezekiel’s son and the narrator’s friend. He demonstrates the ineffectiveness of his father’s preaching in his desire to drink, steal, and commit every sin he can think of. Kurt, the experienced squire of Medardo during the Turkish wars, appears only in the opening chapters. He dutifully answers Medardo’s numerous questions on their way to battle.

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CRITICAL VIEWS ON

The Cloven Viscount J. R. WOODHOUSE ON THE NAIVE VISION [J. R. Woodhouse is Professor of Italian at Oxford University and author of Italo Calvino: A Reappraisal and an Appreciation of the Trilogy. He also helped edit Building the Text: Architecture as Metaphor in Late Medieval and Early Modern France. In this excerpt, he discusses the naive perspective of the young narrator and its impact on the story.] Calvino’s awareness of the value of naive vision is well illustrated by the care with which he describes the Jim Hawkins type of narrator in Il visconte dimezzato. Apart from the allusions to the leper-colony and the likeliness which this adds to the boy’s character, Calvino goes into great detail in Chapter V to explain why the boy is as free as he is and also to explain the eccentric nature of Dr. Trelawney and the boy’s peculiar relationship with him. Calvino has evidently gone to some trouble to make the youngster’s visit to Pratofungo as plausible as possible. Why should the young boy want to risk his life despite the traditional attitudes of the villagers to the lepers? Basically he has the child’s curiosity to investigate the unknown and the forbidden. This is a characteristic underlined throughout the book, but by itself it would not be enough to drive him to Pratofungo. The exile there of the nurse Sebastiana provides him with a good motive, however, for since her departure the boy has begun to feel the complete lack of affection and emotion in his life and wants to know her fate, see her again. The lepers have a contact with the outside world, Galateo, who could conceivably have helped the narrator with information; but again Calvino’s care has successfully sidetracked this possibility, because Galateo is so tired of having the village boys pelt him and yell at him (from safe distances) that he is utterly indifferent to the present anxious pleas about Sebastiana, treating the narrator as one of his usual tormentors and ignoring him completely. So the narrator is forced by circumstances and careful plot-construction to make his own way to Pratofungo.

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Calvino also uses the naive narrator in Il visconte dimezzato to evoke very successfully the delight which youth can take in the flora and fauna of the neighbourhood. The enchantment which one feels at the nipotino’s idyllic landscape is similar in many ways to Torrismondo’s delight in the fauna and flora of Curvaldia. In the case of the young boy, here Calvino very often evokes the sights, sounds and scents of boyhood for their purely lyrical effect. The verisimilitude of the naive narrator is well established, and perhaps nowhere better than in this relationship of his with the leper-colony at Pratofungo. The boy’s entire life seems to be lived in the open air, and the book is, of course, full of the usual allusions to a Riviera-like countryside around Terralba. Natural beauty and naivety are used in this novel more than any other to highlight horror. In the earlier part of the book, the horror of the old battlefields has already been put into relief by the contrast between Medardo’s innocent questions and the blasé nature of Curzio’s informative, if macabre, replies. But more subtly later on, the young narrator undergoes several alarming experiences, the horror of which is heightened because of his extreme youth, because of the contrast between the wholesome and friendly countryside and the horror it conceals. There is a hint of the horrors of the leper colony of Pratofungo half-way through Chapter V, when the child juxtaposes the beautiful weather and scenery, his own feeling of well-being, with the advent of Galateo the leper and the general fear which he inspires in the Terralbans: L’ora piú bella veniva quando il sole era alto e il mare d’oro, e le galline fatto l’uovo cantavano, e per i viottoli si sentiva il suono del corno del lebbroso.

This is a semiprophetic description for the little boy, because at the beginning of Chapter VII, when he begins his search for Sebastiana, nature surrounds him with scents and sights, varieties of scented shrubs, disarming to the reader, as to the narrator himself. But suddenly he sees a leper get up from a hiding-place in a patch of thyme, calls out to him, and finds other figures rising all around him. The country idyll had become a nightmare in a very few lines of dramatic narrative: M’accorsi allora che il pomeriggio di sole era pieno di lebbrosi sdraiati, nascosti nei cespugli, e adesso si levavano pian piano nei loro chiari sai, e camminavano controluce verso Pratofungo . . .

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The boy’s attempts to escape from the surrounding lepers almost bring him into horrifying contact, and in his anxiety to avoid them he finds himself being led slowly, but implacably, back to the lepers’ huts. Here again his verisimilitude is well brought out, when he crouches to make himself small, to avoid the lepers and also what is evidently one of their sexual orgies, though to his innocent eyes it is a group of men throwing themselves on women: Non capii bene cosa successe poi: uomini e donne si buttarono gli uni adosso agli altri e iniziarono quella che poi appresi doveva essere un’orgia. Mi feci piccino piccino . . .

The whole episode, anyway, is one of contrast between idyll and horror. The lepers who capture the narrator are called giardinieri; the song with which they taunt him is apparently equally innocent, “Il pulcino senza macchie, va per more e si macchiò!” But beneath the rosemary and peppermint scents is a horror which makes us want to wash our hands. His childlike curiosity has led him into this predicament, and his joy at seeing Sebastiana again is mixed with despair at the knowledge that she has grasped him with her (apparently) infected hand, and has certainly infected him in turn. The lepers are constantly present in the young narrator’s thoughts, and perhaps more than any other aspect of the book, his reaction to the lepers illustrates his naive outlook, and makes his existence more authentic. —J. R. Woodhouse, Italo Calvino: A Reappraisal and an Apprecia-tion of the Trilogy, (Yorkshire, England: University of Hull Public-ations, 1968): pp. 61–63.

CONSTANCE MARKEY ON THE EXISTENTIAL CHOICE [A former peer of Calvino’s, Constance Markey was originally an instructor at Loyola University and now teaches Italian at DePaul University. Author of Italo Calvino: A Journey Toward Postmodernism, she has also published articles in Italica and Italian Quarterly. In this excerpt, she describes the protagonist Medardo’s existential dilemma, which she argues is also prevalent with the other protagonists of the Our Ancestors trilogy.] 42

In Visconte, for example, a presumably straightforward dialogue on life’s choices begins. And again, in a typically existential vein, alternatives are weighed and considered carefully, and again the resolutions are precarious. For each novel of the trilogy, at least from a philosophical view, has been provided with an ending as patched together as is Uncle Medardo’s body at the close of Visconte. Each story has a finish appropriate to fantasy, but which has been effectively designed to put the lie to facile or conventional moralizing. For that reason all of them eventually raise more questions than they provide answers, and this inquiring attitude is typical of all Calvino’s work. In Visconte, for example, the narrator introduces the reader to Uncle Medardo’s two halves and what appears on the surface to be a rather obvious approach to choosing by means of a simple allegory about good and evil. Or at least, as we mentioned earlier, that is how many critics saw the novel, above the author’s own protests. Calvino himself, however, has always viewed the novel with more caution. For him Uncle Medardo’s two halves, rather than representing any concepts so tidily opposed as good and evil, actually represent two equally dismal, but contrasting slices of “disumanità.” For him, he insists, “il problema del bene e male,” at least in its traditional Victorian sense, never even entered his mind, “neanche per un minuto” (Pref., I nostri, xiii and xi–xiii). This last perspective on his work, vehemently expressed by the author, is only recently coming to be shared by others as well. The American novelist Gore Vidal, for example, comments on the absence of clearly defined moral issues in our author, stating quite simply that “there is no Christian sense of good and evil in Calvino.” Another recent critic, Gatt-Rutter, elaborating on the same theme, phrases his thoughts more negatively when he says there is no perception of evil or “moral wrong doing” in Calvino, and hence no moral judgments.” Elementary as these observations may appear today, in the light of Calvino’s current works, they bear repeating. In the denial of a priori values, Christian or ethical, as inferred by the author himself in his discussion of Visconte, we already see the overwhelming presence of a gloomy contemporary, often existential, perspective. This point of view espouses a morality where black and white norms, definitive choices in the Christian sense, are obvious-

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ly inconceivable. It further embraces, as we have shown, a world where in the absence of God or the comfort of reason there abides only gray confusion and doubt. In Visconte, therefore, the dialogue between the interrogating narrator and the other characters over which of Uncle Medardo’s two bits of “disumanità” is the easier to live with soon takes on the same lesser-of-two-evils quality which characterized choosing in Barone. Neither of Medardo’s two halves represents an optimum choice. The good half with its misguided sense of duty is no less perverse than the bad with its penchant for cruelty. Even the final bandaging together or “integrazione” (Pref., I nostri, xii–xiv) of Uncle Medardo’s two sides does not constitute an ideal resolution of the dialogue, but rather a compromise in the face of the lack of a best answer. This is one of the reasons why in the final paragraph of the novel the narrator, with his usual deceptive benignity, cynically cautions the reader against a happy ending: Forse ci s’aspettava che tornato intero it visconte, s’aprisse un’epoca di felicità meravigliosa; ma è chiaro che non basta un visconte completo perché diventi completo tutto it mondo. —Constance Markey, “Calvino and the Existential Dilemma: The Paradox of Choice.” Italica 60 (1983): pp. 61–62.

I. T. OLKEN ON IMAGERY [I. T. Olken was Associate Professor in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Michigan and wrote With Pleated Eye and Garnet Wing: Symmetries of Italo Calvino. The following extract, taken from her book, explains how the war imagery of the novel’s opening chapters relates to the protagonist’s subsequent development.] The trilogy provides a wealth in clustered images of horrification among which an obvious and most effective series is introduced in the first pages of Il visconte dimezzato. It then traverses the entire novel, ending only at the moment of resolution, the achievement of which introduces several final bloody details. As Medardo and Curzio ride across the plains of Bohemia, accompanied by startling

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numbers of storks, stilt-birds, flamingos, and cranes, Curzio explains, answering Medardo’s curiosity, that these have replaced the indigenous crows and vultures, recent drought and subsequent famine having deprived them of food in their normal habitat. “E i corvi? E gli avvoltoi?” [“And the crows? And the vultures?”] asks Medardo. Curzio tells him that they have eaten infected human corpses and fallen to the plague along with the people. The two enter a gory landscape, filled with putrid mixed remains of human and bird: “In groppi di carcasse, sparsi per la brulla pianura, si vedevano corpi d’uomo e donna, nudi, sfigurati dai bubbom, e cosa dapprincipio, inspiegabile, pennuti: come se da quelle loro macilente braccia e costole fossero cresciuti nere penric e ali. Erano le carogne d’avvoltoio mischiate ai loro resti.” [They saw scattered across the barren plain tangled heaps of men’s and women’s corpses, naked, disfigured by bubonic swelling, and, inexplicable at first, feathered; as if those emaciated arms and ribs had grown black feathers and wings. It was the carcasses of vultures mingled with their remains. Farther along, victims of the Turkish scimitars, lie dead horses, supine, legs extended in the air. Curzio promptly explains: “Quando il cavallo sente d’essere sventrato, cerca di trattenere le sue viscere. Aleuni posano la pancia a terra, altri si rovesciano sul dorso per non farle perizolare.” [When a horse feels its belly slit open, it tries to keep its guts in. Some lie down with their belly on the ground, others turn over on their back to keep them from falling out.] Closer now to the camp rise the pinnacles of the tents, and recently dug soldiers’ graves appear, but strewn along the way are also scattered human appendages, predominantly fingers. “Ogni tanto c’è un dito che c’indica la strada, disse mio zio Medardo. Che vuol dire?” Curzio answers, “Dio li perdoni: i vivi mozzano la dita ai morti per portar via gli anelli.” [“Every now and then there’s a finger indicating our direction, said my uncle Medardo. What does it mean?” “God forgive them: the living chop off the fingers of the dead to steal their rings.”] They are stopped by a sentinel whose overcoat is musty and covered with mold. After the formal exchange of serious passwords, “Viva la sacra corona imperiale!” from Curzio, and the sentinel’s response, “E che il sultano muoia!” the two continue on their way, their horses now at full gallop to escape the clouds of flies attracted to the mountains of excrement surrounding the encamp-

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ment. “Di molti valorosi,” Curzio observes, “lo stereo d’ieri è ancora in terra, e loro sono già in ciclo” [Of many a brave man, yesterday’s excrement is still on the ground when he’s already in heaven]. At the entrance to the camp, the courtesans’ tents extend in a long row. Curzio tells Medardo that no army has their match in beauty. Fie also warns him not to go anywhere near the ladies because they are so filthy and riddled with plague that even the Turks would reject them as booty. “Ormai non sono piú soltanto cariche di piattole, cimici e zecche, ma indosso a loro fanno il nido gli scorpioni e i ramarri.” [By now they’re not only covered with bedbugs, lice, and ticks, but even with the nests of scorpions and lizards.] The description of a grim, repellent scene is laced with effective touches of the humorous, abrupt strokes of playful incongruity: human bodies appear to have grown feathers; fingers stick out of the ground like directional signals; the weary sentinel asks the two riders to request a change of guard at the command post before he begins to sprout roots. The core of the description, however, insinuates the chaos and dissonance of the horrible. It foreshadows the cleaving of Medardo in several of its details—the grotesque feathered corpses, the severed appendages, the horses’ bellies slit open by the Turkish scimitars. With these are established the supremacy of mutilation eventually imposed on and by Medardo, Il Gramo. Almost every scene in which he appears contains an act of violent destruction, motivated now by anger or rage, now by subtle, perverse jealousy, and even by the gentler emotion of love, albeit an insanely possessive love. In the opening chapter, for all its images of the grotesque, Medardo’s ingenuous questioning of Curzio sets the unquestioned tone of the last moments of innocence. It is the perfect shield against the grotesque, against horror. Medardo sees only with his eyes, not with experience. There is neither nostalgia, doubt, nor apprehension, in his heart. He has no feeling for all the blood already spilled on the battlefield. The last paragraph of the chapter explains this in a moment of sad, lyric foreboding, another presage of what awaits Medardo the next morning: “Se avesse potuto prevedere la terribile sorte che l’attendeva, forse avrebbe trovato anch’essa naturale e compiuta, pur in tutto il suo dolore. Tendeva lo sguardo al margine dell’orizzonte notturno, dove sapeva essere il campo dei nemici, e a

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braccia conserte si stringeva con la mani le spalle, contento d’aver certezza insieme di realtà lontane e diverse, e della propria presenza in mezzo a esse.” [Had he been able to foresee the terrible fate that awaited him, perhaps he would have even found it quite natural, with all its pain. His eyes moved toward the edge of the dark horizon where he knew the enemy camp lay, and he hugged his shoulders, happy with the double certainty of distant and different realities, and with his own presence in the midst of both. —I. T. Olken, With Pleated Eye and Garnet Wing: Symmetries of Italo Calvino, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984): pp. 105–107.

ALBERT HOWARD CARTER III ON THE GROTESQUE [Albert Howard Carter III, author of First Cut: A Season in the Human Anatomy Lab and Italo Calvino: Metamorphoses of Fantasy, has done extensive interdisciplinary research in the fields of literature and medicine. He is Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Eckerd College. In this excerpt he writes about the grotesque in the novel.] We may start with some of Wolfgang Kayser’s ideas on the grotesque to describe evil in this story, but the novella pushes us beyond this point of view. Kayser’s study, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, emphasizes the more horrible aspects of the grotesque; if there is humor, it is a humor to be transcended by the deep forces of the horrible. But in The Viscount the opposite happens: we start with a brutal setting of war, full of grotesque effects lightly tinged with macabre humor, and we follow the evil Medardo for about twothirds of the book. Then, with the arrival of the good half of Medardo, the book turns into a lively dialogue, not only of the two halves, but of grotesque and humorous effects. Finally, the many reconciliations, reintegrations, and restitutions at the end give us a mythos of comedy, as Northrop Frye describes it. Kayser’s theory of the grotesque is unable to account for this movement, but a discussion in terms of fantasy can treat both the dark and light sides and, most important, the mixture of the two.

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In discussing the graphic arts, Kayser suggests a distinction between the “fantastic grotesque” and the “satiric grotesque” (173). Although his vast historic and generic scope does not allow him to explore this distinction at length theoretically, it is clear that for him the “fantastic grotesque” is the horrible, demonic dream workd of repulsive objects created through capricious and malevolent combinations. The “satiric grotesque,” on the other hand, is a mode of comic distortion based on cynical and caricatural principles (178). (. . .) To discuss The Viscount strictly in Kayser’s terms would be to misuse it. Rather, the novella forces us to see a closer link between the grotesque and the comic than Kayser specifies. If we discuss the grotesque as a kind of fantasy, the transition toward comedy should be easier. I will follow the usual approach, starting with the creation of the fantastic, using Kayser’s final definition of the grotesque, “an attempt to invoke and subdue the demonic aspects of the world” as my entry point. And by “demonic aspects,” I mean not just evil in general, but malicious and fiendish forms of evil in particular. Despite the mixture of grotesque, humorous, and philosophical effects, the creation of the fantastic in The Viscount depends upon several ordinary elements and conventions. The style is clear and expository. The narrator (introduced in chapter 3) quickly earns our trust; he is modest, neither ironic nor self-aggrandizing. The first chapter opens in a matter-of-fact sort of way, with a question-andanswer dialogue to bring out the oddities of the war with the Turks. Our first point of view, Medardo, is, like us, a newcomer to the scene; a good Horatio figure, he asks a series of questions of his experienced squire Kurt (Curzio in the Italian). The dialogue brings out by gentle steps that the many storks, flamingos, and cranes now eat human flesh on the battlefield because the crows and vultures have been killed off by the same plague that killed the men they ate; both dead men and dead crows and vultures remain in grotesque heaps. Next Kurt explains that all the cadavers of horses are a result of disembowelment by scimitars; further on the way it becomes the men’s turn, he explains. Up to this point there are two reactions built into the story, that of Medardo and that of the horses. The first, somewhat indirect, is

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expressed through Medardo’s aggressive questioning, which the narrator explains as part of Medardo’s youthful confusion between good and evil, his indiscriminate love of life—even the parts of it that are macabre and inhuman. Not only is this confusion between good and evil important thematically, but in taking such aggressive interest in anything new, Medardo becomes an excellent character to explore fantasy with, a daring investigator who will take the risks for us. The second reaction is that of Medardo’s and Kurt’s horses; Kurt explains that the horses do not like to smell the bowels of the dead horses. The emotional impact here is mixed. There is a primal animal fear of death that helps make more immediate the horrors of war, but there is also the ironic comparison of the horses with the men—who have not smelled anything. The horses have a more biologically realistic fear of war than the men do; the men take death as a sort of occupational hazard. Calvino does not make much of this; fantasy often works best when the readers complete the sketch for themselves. The rest of the opening chapter continues the introduction to the world of the war without any noticeable technical innovations, except the last paragraph. The squire continues to answer questions, even when Medardo does not ask them specifically, so that we learn about the soldiers’ cutting fingers off corpses to get rings, the harem of the camp, the seiving of the earth to recover gunpowder. the range of these details runs from the gruesome to the carnal to the absurd; the soldiers are barbaric, animalistic, ridiculous. Calvino is slowly building up a strange combination of values around the war that Medardo has come to join and around Medardo himself, who takes a vital interest in all he sees. By the last paragraph of the chapter, we may already be feeling a tension between this brutal world of potential violence and Medardo’s willingness to participate in anything, come what may. —Albert Howard Carter III, Italo Calvino: Metamorphoses of Fantasy, (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1987): pp. 26, 27–28.

KATHRYN HUME ON THE NOVEL’S ENDING

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[Kathryn Hume is Distinguished Professor of English at Penn Sate University and is author of American Dream, American Nightmare: Fiction Since 1960 and Pynchon’s Mythography: An Approach to Gravity’s Rainbow. In this extract from her book on Calvino’s work, she analyzes the novel’s conclusion.] Medardo’s story puts the search for meaning in terms of the divided self, the person who feels incomplete and longs for wholeness. Calvino talks about this element in the story in his 1960 preface to Our Ancestors: Divided, mutilated, incomplete, enemy to himself—contemporary man is all of these; Marx called it ‘alienated’, Freud, ‘repressed’; a state of ancient harmony has been lost, and he aspires to a new kind of completeness. This was the ideological-moral kernel I consciously wished to give to the story. Dimidiato, mutilato, incompleto, nemico a se stesso è l’uomo contemporaneo; Marx lo disse ‘alienato’, Freud ‘represso’; uno stato d’antica armonia è perduto, a una nuova completezza s’aspira. It nocciolo ideologico-morale che volevo coscientemente dare alla storia era questo. (I nostri antenati, 402) [The English translation above is my own; the volume entitled Our Ancestors does not include this 1960 preface.]

As will become his custom, Calvino explores this generative notion—division—from several angles, embodying the problem in more than one character. Medardo is literally split in half, his nephew suffers the alienation brought on by youth and by lack of position in the society. Dr. Trelawney is an exile in addition to being a man who cannot reconcile theory with practice; although a doctor, he suffers from revulsion at the unsavoury physical details of human existence. The Huguenots are cut off from their original source of inspiration, and stumble blindly after a religion they no longer understand, and as they do so, they violate basic Christian charity. The lepers are cast off from society, and must make sense of the life permitted them by disease. Even Pietrochiodo is riven by his love of engineering and his knowledge that he creates instruments of tor-

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ture. All suffer from forms of division and alienation. (. . .) In most of the sub-plots, the divisions do not reach happy conclusions. The lepers lose the hedonistic pleasures they had cherished when the good half of Medardo shames them into more conventional behaviour. The division within the Huguenots expresses itself in their lack of charity, and in Esau, a thief, cheat, non-respecter of parents, and breaker of every rule. He is a boy determined to commit every sin he hears of, including those that adults think he cannot yet understand. His actual sins to date seem little more than those of the fruit thieves in The Baron in the Trees, but in this younger generation and in their joyless rigidity, the Huguenots do not appear to be heading for happiness. Dr. Trelawney, cheerfully borrowed from Robert Louis Stevenson, is also denied a conventional happy ending. After making slight concessions to his obligations as a doctor, he sees a British ship: ‘The gunwales and rigging were full of sailors carrying pineapples and tortoises and waving scrolls with maxims on them in Latin and English’ (246) (‘Ai parapetti delle murate e sulle alberature c’era pieno di marinai che mostravano ananassi e testuggini e sroltolavano cartigli su cui erano scritte delle massime latine e inglesi’ (Il visconte dimezzato, 76–7)). Captain Cook sights the Doctor through his telescope and invites him on board to resume their card game. The Doctor thus disappears into something like an old map (maximemblazoned scrolls, exotic new-world discoveries). This departure smacks of stepping back into a picture frame; it is not a happy ending so much as suspended animation. And finally, we have the unnamed narrator, Medardo’s nephew. His separation is social to start with, because he is the product of a misalliance. He also suffers the discontent of youth. He laments being abandoned by Dr. Trelawney, stuck in a world full of responsibilities and will-o’-the-wisps. But he has no responsibilities. He has no function in a world where function is mostly hereditary. This feudal world that gives Medardo his means of uniting himself to society is less forgiving or helpful towards the products of misalliances. For lack of better object, the boy seems all too likely to waste his life on will-o’-the-wisps. So how do we read the solution proposed for Medardo? It is con-

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ventional in terms of family, in terms of finding meaning through begetting children, and in terms of living in the post to which one is born. The narrator, however, who by virtue of his function is important to readers, cannot benefit from such a solution. Nor can Dr. Trelawney, the lepers, or the Huguenots. Only Pamela may be said to benefit, for like her English namesake, this humble girl marries the local lord. This answer, in other words, is singularly unhelpful for most characters in the novel. Had Pamela married a local swain, she would have lived in poverty, and her many children would sometimes have gone hungry, and possibly been hanged for smuggling by Medardo or his successor. Wealth plays its role in this happiness, and too many of the possible happy endings in this story are prevented by lack of such wealth for Medardo’s solution to pose as a panacea. Calvino’s light tone and conventional ending should not blind us to subversive elements in this story. Far from simply accepting the fairy-tale ending, Calvino seems to be deconstructing it. He gives us the romance, with the traditional titled character, and then makes us feel the limitations of the romance conventions. In so far as there is any political commentary, that too points to problems rather than offering real solutions. The last word of the story, will-o’-the-wisps, is disturbing for its suggestion that life may mostly consist of those insubstantial fires rather than of any secret fire like that invoked in The Watcher. The story is at some levels less cheerful than its surface, and the variously expressed fears of the feminine, of life’s carnal crudities, and of castration all suggest that ‘Marry! Have children! Be normal!’ is a futilely simple-minded answer to the complexities of human experience. —Kathryn Hume, Calvino’s Fictions: Cogito and Cosmos, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): pp. 95–96, 97–98.

BENO WEISS ON CALVINO’S PREFACE [Beno Weiss is Professor of Italian at Penn State University and is author of Understanding Italo Calvino and Italo Svevo, a study of the contemporary Italian author. In this excerpt, he interprets the novel in light of Calvino’s preface.] In the preface to The Cloven Viscount, Calvino informs the reader

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that when he began writing the novel in 1951, it was as a pastime, and he intended it to be merely a fantastic tale. Yet he found himself unable to escape the impact of the turbulent times in which he was living: We were in the heat of the cold war, in the air there was a tension, a deaf sundering, which was not manifest in visible images, but nonetheless bore down on our hearts. . . . Much to my surprise I found myself expressing not only the suffering of that particular moment, but also the urgency of escaping it.

This was certainly a very trying moment for Europe and the world. In 1946 Winston Churchill declared that an Iron Curtain had fallen across Europe, and in 1948 the Soviets seized Czechoslovakia and blockaded the Allied sector of Berlin; in 1949 the Chinese Communists defeated Chiang Kai-shek and gained control of mainland China, while on the European continent the Western allies formed NATO; in 1950 North Korea with China’s support invaded South Korea, bringing the world powers to the brink of a nuclear conflagration; finally, in 1952 the United States, after many atomic tests, exploded its first hydrogen bomb. In his 1955 essay “Il midollo del leone” (The Lion’s Marrow), discussing his own existentialistic anguish as well as the “literature of negation,” Calvino wrote: “This awareness of living at the most tragic and lowest point of a human parabola, to live between Buchenwald and the H-bomb, is the point of departure of all our fantasies, all our thoughts.” In spite of these traumatic events that would lead us to believe that Medardo’s two parts are in effect representative of this struggle, Calvino insisted that he was not interested merely in the problem of good and evil, but in dimidiamento (sundering, rift, splitting, halving, estrangement); that he used the two traits solely to create a contrast, just as a painter employs colors to accentuate a particular form. The two opposite sides of Medardo served to accentuate the pervasive dimidiamento of the individual and of society: “Sundered, mutilated, and enemy to himself is contemporary man; Marx called him ‘alienated,’ and Freud ‘repressed.’” Man’s old harmony has vanished, Calvino concluded in this essay, and we must strive for a new wholeness. Certainly Medardo’s disharmony and division are meant to underscore the inability of contemporary man to see clearly what is happening to the world and to himself. Although the

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author readily offers helpful ideas about interpreting the novel, he admits that his characters may be interpreted differently from his own suggestions. —Beno Weiss, Understanding Italo Calvino, (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993): pp. 41–42.

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P L O T S U M M A RY O F

The Baron in the Trees The second book of the Our Ancestors trilogy, The Baron in the Trees is the story of a rebellious son of an Italian nobleman who goes up into the trees and never comes down. This short novel, written in 1957, has much in common with children’s fantasies. Calvino himself suggested that it be classed with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and in 1965, an illustrated and abridged edition was published for a middle school curriculum. Despite its fairy-tale elements, the novel’s ironic tone and clever handling of philosophical themes have made it appealing to adult readers for decades. The narrator, Biagio Piovasco di Rondò, begins the story on June 15, 1767. Though recalled from a long time ago, he is certain about the date because it is his brother Cosimo’s final appearance at the dinner table. In the opening scene, Cosimo defiantly refuses to eat the snails prepared by his wicked sister, and his father, the Baron Arminio Piovasco di Rondò, orders him from the table. Twelve-yearold Cosimo responds by running out of the house and climbing up into the trees, vowing never to come down again. Only after Cosimo spends an entire night in the trees does his family take his oath seriously. Cosimo is advantaged with the dense forests of Ombrosa, which allow him to travel from tree to tree. He finds new friends among a gang of fruit thieves, and develops a lifelong fixation on their leader, the haughty and beguiling Viola. When he invites her into the trees with him, he articulates his lofty dreams: “You come up with me . . . and we’ll make an army in the trees and bring the earth and the people on it to their senses.” In keeping with the conventions of fable, Calvino populates the Rondò home with a cast of colorful characters, all with their own peculiar relationship to the hero. The Baron, a social climber with little tolerance for his son’s disreputable behavior, sends the Abbé Fauchelefleur into the trees to exorcise him. The Baroness, a military aficionado, remains content tracking him through her field telescope and communicating by waving flag patterns. The Baron’s illegitimate brother, the hapless Cavalier Enea Silvo Carrego, is comissioned to lead a roundup of the boy, but with no success. After a few

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more failed attempts to bring him down, the Rondòs and the befuddled citizens of Ombrosa realize that Cosimo’s stay in the trees is permanent. The boy’s arboreal life is not as isolated as his detractors would predict. While before his life was sheltered, now his mobility over the town lets him mingle with farmers and the underclass as well as the gentry. His reputation also grows and soon spreads throughout Europe. Although he makes no progress with tutoring sessions given by the Abbé Fauchelefleur, through independent study he becomes a well-read scholar, specializing in botany and other natural sciences. His intellectual curiosity helps spawn two unlikely friendships, one with the Cavalier, who shares with the boy his interest in hydraulics and beekeeping, and another with the infamous brigand Gian dei Brughi, who develops an obsession with reading novels. Cosimo and Gian dei Brughi regularly meet to discuss and trade books right up until the town authorities hang the thief. Eventually, the ever-restless Cosimo seeks a more utilitarian kind of knowledge that can benefit his neighbors. The town finds more reason to appreciate Cosimo after he successfully coordinates an effort to put out a large-scale fire. Here, through the beneficence of Cosimo and the viewpoint of a sympathetic narrator, the novel puts forth the argument that a stubborn non-conformist can still be a humanitarian. Tragedy strikes the Rondò family when it loses the Cavalier in a bloody fight with pirates. The Baron, grieving over the death of his brother and his failure to attain the title of duke, dies shortly thereafter, and Cosimo inherits the estate. Contrary to the people’s expectations, the new title is a negligible change that does not keep Cosimo from managing his affairs from the trees. Time passes and Cosimo reaches adulthood. He decides to synthesize his utopian philosophy in a treatise, a Project for the Constitution of an Ideal State in the Trees. An amusing meeting between Biagio and the philosopher Voltaire in Paris reveals the extent of Cosimo’s fame. Asked by Voltaire if he lives near “that famous philosopher who lives on the trees,” Biagio answers that Cosimo is his brother. Voltaire then asks why Cosimo chose to live there, to which Biagio replies, “My brother considers that anyone who wants to see the earth properly must keep himself at a necessary

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distance from it”— a lucid summary of Cosimo’s philosophy, fittingly made by his most faithful supporter. Despite his international fame and his reclusive lifestyle, Cosimo remains loyal to his widowed mother when she falls ill. He stays by her bed during her final days, perched on a branch just outside her window. After the Baroness dies, Viola finally comes back to Ombrosa, and Cosimo’s rational powers are tested. Now a beautiful woman, she returns Cosimo’s affections, but also takes advantage of his devotion by purposefully stirring up his jealousy. The relationship ends abruptly, leaving Cosimo spiritless and mentally unbalanced. To Biagio’s shame, Cosimo soon becomes helpless, relying on others to bring him food rather than hunting for it on his own, as he did before. Up until this point Biagio has maintained a deep respect for Cosimo and the path he has chosen. Just as it seems Cosimo has lost all his glory, he redeems himself by coordinating an attack on wolves plaguing the town. Now into his later years, he also pursues his vision of a universal society by joining a number of guilds and committees, disseminating his ideas to his peers. When the French Revolution begins, he keeps the town abreast of its political ramifications. During a series of armed conflicts in Ombrosa, Cosimo engages in the combat by dropping objects from the trees. Later, Napoleon pays a visit to Ombrosa and the famous Cosimo, whom the emperor commends as an exemplary citizen. After Cosimo reaches his 65th birthday, Biagio senses that his brother’s end is near. The narrator rescinds his earlier doubts about Cosimo, revering him for having lived well by “being so frankly himself.” In a final demonstration of his defiance, Cosimo refuses even to climb down from the trees to die. Instead, he spots a chance for a heroic exit when two English aeronauts experimenting with hot air balloons float by his tree. Just before dying, he leaps and grabs hold of the anchor rope as the balloon drifts off to sea. On a family tomb unaccompanied by the hero’s corpse, an inscription reads, “Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò—Lived in Trees—Always loved earth—Went into sky.” Biagio, who has narrated the story long after Ombrosa and its dense forests have faded away, wonders to himself if the town ever even existed. He humbly attributes the same hazy quality of the

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Ombrosa in his mind to his written account, which he has “let run on for page after page.” His confession stands as one last reminder of the transience of Cosimo’s vision, and of fiction in general.

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L I S T O F C H A R AC T E R S I N

The Baron in the Trees Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò is a young upstart fed up with the strictures of aristocratic life. One day, in an act of defiance, he climbs up into the trees and vows never to come down, spending an entire lifetime above the heads of his family and neighbors. To the surprise of many, he becomes an internationally known adventurer, philosopher, and pioneer for non-conformists. Baigio is Cosimo’s younger brother and the narrator of the story. Though he does not have Cosimo’s rebellious spirit, he remains the biggest supporter of his brother’s unconventional lifestyle. Viola is the haughty and beautiful daughter of the Ondarivas, neighbors and rivals to the Rondò family. She enjoys playing with Cosimo’s affections, as a child and much later as a widowed marchesa. Baron Arminio Piovasco di Rondò, Cosimo’s father, desperately wants to be the Duke of Ombrosa, and believes that Cosimo’s selfexile brings shame to the family and jeopardizes his chances of attaining the title. He unsuccessfully tries to bring Cosimo down from the trees. Baroness Corradina di Rondò, Cosimo’s eccentric mother, is nicknamed the “Generalessa” and spends much of her time studying battles and field tactics. Battista is the wicked sister, disliked by both of her brothers. She prepares the dinner of snails that Cosimo refuses to eat, which leads to his defiant retreat into the trees. Abbé Fauchelefleur lives with the Rondòs and tutors the children. Though a disciplined priest with a strict agenda, he also suffers from lethargy and frequent spells in which he dumbly stares into space. Cavalier Enea Silvio Carrega is Baron Arminio’s illegitimate brother, rescued from a Turkish prison. Biagio and Cosimo initially view the Cavalier as a family nuisance, until he impresses Cosimo with his knowledge of hydraulics and beekeeping.

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Gian dei Brughi is the infamous brigand who befriends Cosimo. He inherits from the boy a preoccupation with reading books, which leads to his failure to elude the authorities, who catch and hang him.

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CRITICAL VIEWS ON

The Baron in the Trees SERGIO PACIFICI ON CALVINO AND ARIOSTO [Sergio Pacifici taught at Harvard, UCLA, and Yale, where he was Assistant Professor of Italian, and wrote The Modern Italian Novel from Capuana to Tozzi and A Guide to Contemporary Italian Literature: From Futurism to Neorealism. In the following excerpt, he explains how Calvino’s work differs from that of his literary ancestor, Lodovico Ariosto.] This brief account of the story is sufficient to give the reader an idea of the richness of Calvino’s imagination. The novelist has no doubt been influenced by his family’s professional interest in botany and by his own interest in science and folk tales. His work recalls the Grimm brothers and Swift, or, especially to the Italian reader, Boccaccio, and, above all, Ariosto. It is with the great poet from Ferrara that Calvino has closely identified himself and has confessed all admiration that goes well beyond that felt by every youngster and adult for the Orlando Furioso. In a lecture given at Yale, he said: Of all the poets of our tradition, the one I feel nearest to me and at the same time most abstrusely fascinating, is Ludovico Ariosto, and I never tire of rereading him. This poet, so absolutely limpid and cheerful and problemless, and yet, at bottom, so mysterious, so skillful in concealing himself; this unbeliever of the sixteenth century who drew from Renaissance culture a sense of reality without illusions and . . . persists in creating a fable.

Calvino, much like Ariosto, abstracts from our historical time certain verities that he weaves into fantastic stories about knights and their adventures. Like Ariosto, Calvino sits in his laboratory (his study in Turin) and dreams of a world created by the novelist’s fantasy. Unlike Ariosto, however, Calvino holds that his fables are not, in fondo, flights from reality, but come from the bitter reality of our twentieth century. They are the means—perhaps the only means left to a writer tired of a photographic obsession with modern life—to

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re-create a world where people can still be people—that is, where people can still dream and yet understand; flee from the world (as the young Cosimo does) and yet never sever relations with it; where man’s aspirations are fulfilled through his intellect rather than through his physical power. However, there is a passage in which Calvino mocks the pure use of reason. When Cosimo’s brother (who is the narrator of the tale) goes to France, he visits Voltaire, the great French sage. The old philosopher was in his armchair, surrounded by a court of ladies, gay as crickets and prickly as a porcupine. When he heard I came from Ombrosa he addressed me thus: “Is it near you, mon cher Chevalier, that there is that famous philosopher who lives in the trees comme un singe?” And I, flattered, could not prevent myself replying: “He’s my brother, Monsieur, le Baron de Rondeau.” . . . “But is it to be nearer to the sky that your brother stays up there?” “My brother considers,” answered I, “that anyone who wants to see the earth properly must keep himself at a necessary distance from it.” And Voltaire seemed to appreciate this reply. “Once it was only Nature which produced living phenomena,” he concluded. “Now it is Reason.” And the old sage plunged back into the chatter of his theistic adorers.

Through the fable, told in an ironic, amusing style, Calvino manages well to recapture much of the silliness and the seriousness of life. But one wonders where his fiction leads. Calvino himself seems to have become aware of this issue, for in the closing pages of Il cavaliere inesistente he formulates it explicitly: “Lately I have started writing furiously. From one line to the next I jumped from nation to nation and from sea to sea and from continent to continent. What is the fury that has overtaken me? One would say that I am waiting for something.” He may indeed. And the future work, now in progress, should best answer the question. —Sergio Pacifici, A Guide to Contemporary Italian Literature: From Futurism to Neorealism, (Cleveland, Ohio: The World Publishing Company, 1962): pp. 148–49.

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JACK BYRNE ON THE FANTASY MILIEU [Jack Byrne is former Associate Editor of the Review of Contemporary Fiction. In this extract taken from a special issue commemorating Calvino, Byrne focuses on the elements that make the fantastic world within the novel plausible.] The fairy tale that follows cannot hold up unless Calvino creates a world that is plausible, that is circumscribed, that is true to the fairy element. Biagio tells us what we must know in order to accept Cosimo’s world: I don’t know if it’s true, the story they tell in books, that in ancient days a monkey could have left Rome and skipped from tree to tree till it reached Spain, without ever touching earth. The only place so thick with trees in my day was the whole length, from end to end, of the gulf of Ombrosa and its valley right up to the mountain crests; the area was famous everywhere for this.

(. . .) Having accepted Cosimo’s world, the reader can more readily accept his activities covering a lifetime. There are the objects and conveniences he manages to create or haul into the trees—water tanks, ovens, game, guns, fur jackets, sleeping bags, books, bookcases, a printing press, women (including Viola), even a confessional for a priest to use! We accept all this because we understand the process of his education based on a respect for books. After he meets a brigand, Gian dei Brughi, he develops “a passion for reading and study which remained with him for the rest of his life.” He corresponds with the major philosophers and scientists of Europe— Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert, among others—and meets Napoleon on his return from Milan. He fights pirates and wolves, encourages the Freemasons against the Jesuits when they are under suppression, and promotes socialism in Ombrosa, writing a Project for the Constitution of an Ideal State in the Trees and a Constitutional Project for a Republican City with a Declaration of the Rights of Men, Women, Children, Domestic and Wild Animals, Including Birds, Fishes and Insects, and All Vegetation, Whether Trees, Vegetables, or Grass. Like Sweeney among the trees, he goes mad

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and in his madness writes such works as The Song of the Blackbird, The Knock of the Woodpecker, and The Dialogue of the Owls, but he recovers his wits and publishes a weekly, The Reasonable Vertebrate. But like a Crusoe among the trees, whom he resembles with his hat made from a wild cat he had fought, killed and skinned, he lacks a “Friday.” In Cosimo’s case, his companion appears in the body of a dog, a dachshund, whom he names Ottimo Massimo. Later he discovers that Ottimo is Viola’s dog, left behind when she went away to school. From the time that he meets her until she tells him, “I leave tonight. You won’t see me again,” the Sinforosa Viola Violante of Ondariva, Duchess of Tolemaico, holds him in thrall. “Their world was a world of trees—intricate, gnarled and impervious. ‘There!’ she would exclaim, pointing to a fork high in the branches, and they would launch out together to reach it and start between them a competition in acrobatics, culminating in new embraces. They made love suspended in the void, propping themselves or holding onto branches, she throwing herself upon him, almost flying.” And though she apparently is unfaithful to him (“Gossip has it that in Paris she passes from one lover to another, in such rapid succession that no one can call her his own and consider himself privileged. But every now and again she vanishes for months at a time and they say she retires to a convent, to wallow in penance”), he comes to believe after she has left him forever that she is faithful to him in her own peculiar way, like Nana or Lady Brett Ashley. His brother tells us that this gentle, though rebellious, young baron was described in an almanac as “‘L’homme sauvage d’Ombreuse (Rep. Génoise). Vit seulement sur les arbres.’ They had represented him all covered in leaves, with a long beard and a long tail, eating a locust. This figure was in the Chapter of Monsters, between the Hermaphrodite and the Siren.” Even Caliban would have wept at it! Later Biagio meets Voltaire who questions him about his brother: “But is it to be nearer the sky that your brother stays up there?” Biagio tells the sage that “my brother considers . . . that anyone who wants to see the earth properly must keep himself at a necessary distance from it.” Perhaps enchantment requires distancing in one way or another. At any rate, it wouldn’t do to bury the old Baron in the earth, and so after a priest goes up to hear his last words, a balloon appears in the

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sky (like Flaubert’s parrot?): The dying Cosimo, at the second when the anchor rope passed near him, gave one of those leaps he so often used to do in his youth, gripped the rope, with his feet on the anchor and his body in a hunch, and so we saw him fly away, taken by the wind, scarce braking the course of the balloon, and vanish out to sea. . . .

With that the brother-narrator, Biagio, tells us, “So vanished Cosimo, without giving us even the satisfaction of seeing him return to earth a corpse. On the family tomb there is a plaque in commemoration of him, with the inscription: ‘Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò— Lived in trees—Always loved earth—Went into sky.’”: Ombrosa no longer exists. Looking at the empty sky, I ask myself if it ever did really exist.

Never fear! It exists for dead Calvino’s appreciative readers, if only “in the mind’s eye.” —Jack Byrne, “Calvino’s Fantastic ‘Ancestors’: The Viscount, the Baron and the Knight,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 6 (1986): pp. 47, 48–49.

PETER A. MUCKLEY ON LITERARY ALLUSION [Peter A. Muckley has published articles about Calvino’s work in the Italian Quarterly and American Journal of Italian Studies. In this excerpt, he identifies a number of literary allusions and discusses the relationship between life and literature in the novel.] While The Baron in the Trees has something of the texture of the fairy tale or legend—the initial premise, Cosimo’s blood initiation by killing “the most savage wild cat in the woods,” the Robin Hoodlike colliers, and so on—yet it is also every inch a sophisticated writer’s work. All together, there are references to some nineteen literary figures, either classical or Enlightenment, ranging from Ovid (43 B.C.) to Bernadin de St. Pierre (1734–1814). Further, two of the characters, Orbecche, the Jewish book-dealer, and the deracinated

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Russian Prince Andrei, are named after other writers’ characters; Giraldi’s Orbecche (1541) and Tolstoy’s Andrei Bolkonski (1869), respectively. The hero of Calvino’s work is himself a writer of the eighteenth century projector/didactic school, with four publications and one newspaper, The Biped’s Monitor, later The Reasonable Vertebrate, to his credit. (. . .) The seminal chapter to consult for the relationship between literature and its effects on life in The Baron in the Trees might be considered to be Chapter 12. Here, Gian dei Brughi, the feared brigand whose name strikes terror into the valley-dwellers, and makes the real experts laugh, meets with Cosimo while the latter is reading Lesage’s Gil Blas. Gian subsequently, and as a direct result, becomes addicted to the perusal of literature, develops bourgeois airs through Richardson’s Clarissa and, in a quite literal fashion, enacts Oscar Wilde’s dictum that “life follows art” by being hanged in imitation of Fielding’s Jonathan Wild, the novel Cosimo reads to him while he is imprisoned, and whose ending he narrates to Gian from the hanging tree. As Gian becomes the perfect literature consumer, he ceases to have any valid function in society. Previously, the underworld fraternity had enjoyed immunity from the law since Gian was held responsible for all misdemeanors. While reading Clarissa, the bandit develops “a yearning for the cozy habits of family life” (93), and finds it impossible to take himself seriously as an outlaw, when forced to carry out one last raid, under threat of “Clarissa-withdrawal.” So addicted is he indeed that he resists the rack just so that he might listen to Cosimo terminate the novel. In this satirical spoof, Calvino seems to imply that literature may in fact induce virtue, as Lesage, Richardson and Fielding, each in their way, had claimed that it could and should, but only at the price of the total otiosity of the reader. Literature does not fit Gian for life but rather becomes his whole life. The effects are similar to those experienced by Enea Silvio Carrega—”waterworks supervisor,” Cosimo’s “natural uncle”—in the previous chapter; specialism, absorption leading to separating one’s fate from that of others, can only result in a fragmented, crippled existence. The Gian chapter serves as a warning to all literary critics, more especially “ivory-tower” modernists obsessed by

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autotelic texts. —Peter A. Muckley, “Senseless Cluster: A Note on Literary Allusion and Literacy in The Baron in the Trees,” Italian Quarterly 30 (1989): pp. 17–18.

ALAN A. BLOCK ON PERSPECTIVES OF REALITY [Alan A. Block is a Professor of Education at the University of Wisconsin–Stout and is author of Anonymous Toil: A Reevaluation of the American Radical Novel in the 20th Century. Here he discusses the protagonist’s unique understanding of reality.] For Calvino, in Baron in the Trees, reality depends not solely on the materialist presences received through the complex ties and connections by which society is organized and controlled. Reality exists in the myriad interactions with which we engage as human beings during the course of our daily lives, and can thus be known in the conscious understanding of the relationships that exist between the self and everything else in the cosmos. The process of education: the processes of a much wider social training within institutions like the family: the practical definitions and organizations of work; the selective tradition at an intellectual and theoretical level; all these forces are involved in a continual making and remaking of an effective dominant culture and on them, as experienced, as built into our living, reality depends.

Change the relationships and we change reality. Hence, as Cosimo’s relationships with the “complex ties and connections to how society is maintained and controlled” changes, so too will Cosimo’s reality change as well. On the ground, he is subject to the traditional, established and confining relationships which determine his behaviors not only in the present, but in the future as well. Such is the experience of his younger brother, Biagio, a perfect foil for Cosimo in the schema of the novel. Four years Cosimo’s junior, Biagio remains aground while his brother, Cosimo, takes to the trees. And on the ground, Biagio engages with the world much as people of his class and character have always engaged with the world. Of his own

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future, which might have been Cosimo’s, Biagio says, “All I had to do was to take over direction of the estate and choose a wife, and already I saw ahead of me that regulated and pacific life which, inspite of all the great upheavals at the turn of the century, have succeeded, in fact, in living.” Now to upheavals there may be two separate, traditional responses: to acquiesce in them, as does Biagio, or, alternatively, to react against them, as does Cosimo’s father. Describing his father, Biagio acknowledges that “The turbulence of the times makes some people feel a need to bestir themselves, but in the opposite direction, backwards rather than forwards . . .” (5). And describing himself Biagio reports that during the latter quarter of the eighteenth century “. . . many nobles were already taking to commerce, and I was among the first” (168). Both of these separate alternatives to change, however, require a relationship to the world already determined on preexistent patterns of interaction, and do not offer the opportunity to alter the very nature of one’s relations to the world, and hence, to the nature of reality. But Cosimo engages with his world in a wholly new relationship, and lives not amidst upheavals and movement, but outside of them. His engagements are ones of his own choosings, and things enter his consciousness only as he chooses to establish relation with them. “For long before Cosimo joined the Masons, he had been in various associations and confraternities of trades and professions . . . As he made on his own nearly everything he needed to live with, he knew a great variety of trades, and could boast himself a member of many guilds, which on their part were pleased to have with them a member of a noble family, of unusual talents and proved disinterest” (190). Hence, his involvement with such guilds is purely social, for the advantages pecuniary or otherwise are of little concern to him. Unlike the other members, who join for their own protection and advancement, Cosimo’s decision to involve himself with such organizations is a purely voluntary and social act. “What he had in mind was an idea of a universal society . . . his speeches passed easily from the particular to general, and from the simple rules of some manual trade moved far too easily to a plan for installing a world republic of men—equal, free and just” (191). And as a result of the nature of his relations, Cosimo’s world is different from that not only of his brother and his father, but from that of the rest of humanity as well; what he considers possible in

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and for the world is made feasible by the very fact that he has lived this existence. —Alan A. Block, “The Utopian Reality of Italo Calvino: Baron in the Trees,” Italian Quarterly 30 (1989): pp. 6–7.

TOMMASINA GABRIELE ON THE PROTAGONIST [Tommasina Gabriele is Associate Professor of Italian Studies at Wheaton College in Massachusetts and is author of Italo Calvino: Eros and Language. In this excerpt, she examines how the exemplary protagonist Cosimo serves a didactic function in the novel.] Calvino seems to have intended the novel to have moral impact, although he shies away from reducing his messages to a facile list, and leaves to the reader the dynamics of the search. One often-cited example of this is Calvino’s affirmation, under the significant heading, “La ricerca di una morale,” in the 1965 Introduction, that: “La prima lezione che potremmo trarre dal libro è che la disobbedienza acquista un senso solo quando diventa una disciplina morale più rigorosa e ardua di quella a cui si ribella” (10). There is little doubt that, at the time he first published Il barone rampante, Calvino supported the didactic role of literature, as his famous article, “Il midollo del leone” (June 1955) indicates. In fact, this is perhaps the article critics quote most often, especially in relation to Il barone rampante, and we briefly refer to it here. In this very significant article, Calvino carves out what he feels to be the role of the intellectual and literature in society, and states, “Noi pure siamo tra quelli che credono in una letteratura che sia presenza attiva nella storia, in una letteratura come educazione, di grado e di qualità insostituibili.” Yet Calvino’s approach, states Woodhouse, is “undogmatic”: Calvino “declares that his readers may find in them [“his creations”] what messages they wish” (Woodhouse, xxvii). Most critics agree that the didactic messages, the moral lessons, converge in the exemplary protagonist, Cosimo. In addition, Cosimo is an “autobiographical” protagonist. Calvino himself asserts: “lo prendevo sul serio, ci credevo, m’identificavo con lui.” Yet other crit-

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ics have questioned whether Cosimo is indeed a successful “model” figure, or whether Calvino really believed in literature’s ability to teach; these critics provoke the following crucial questions. Is this figure with whom Calvino identified himself an unequivocally exemplary hero? If so, is he exemplary from the start, or does he become exemplary gradually? We propose that, unlike other young protagonists who painstakingly stumble along searching for the right road, Cosimo seems motivated and directed from the very beginning by that “arduous and rigorous moral discipline” which Calvino praises in his 1965 Introduction. Cosimo, “like Robinson must learn to survive” in the forest, but he already knows how to rigorously uphold and put into practice what he believes. While Cosimo’s eccentricity and the fantastical nature of his lifestyle somewhat mitigate the author’s “seriousness” toward him (when is Calvino ever completely serious?), he nonetheless seems to embody many of Calvino’s ideals. Which ideals does Cosimo embody and (since rarely do we penetrate Cosimo’s thoughts) how does the author transmit them? The analysis of a central narrative device might furnish some answers and at the same time substantiate our point of view. Like S. Adler, we feel that Calvino must surely have Il barone rampante at least partly in mind when he says in a letter to Mario Boselli, “Anche per questa struttura potrai trovare una serie di riferimenti in altre narrazioni mie che sono costruite così: con al centro una relazione ax data come esemplare, e intorno una raggera o casistica di relazioni bx, cx, dx, etc.” The characterization technique of likeness and contrast reveals Cosimo’s character while highlighting his model qualities: Cosimo encounters characters who superficially have something in common with him but are essentially his opposite. In fact, almost every encounter between Cosimo and another character or group of characters serves to sharpen Cosimo’s identity, and specifically his strengths as contrasted to these characters’ weakness. —Tommasina Gabriele, “Literature as Education and the NearPerfect Protagonist: Narrative Structure in Il barone rampante.” Stanford Italian Review 11 (1992): pp. 92–94.

CONSTANCE MARKEY ON THE BIASED NARRATOR

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[In this extract from her book on Calvino’s fiction, Markey critically observes the Baron’s brother, Biagio. She argues that Biagio, also the story’s narrator, is a product of Enlightenment thinking and thus has a skewed perspective of Cosimo’s agenda.] Biagio’s emphasis, as the Enlightened Narrator, is necessarily (and ironically) on his brother’s viable fraternity with man (albeit at great distance) and he takes great care to document such moments. His examples are often deceptively appropriate too, as is the instance when Cosimo, from his vantage point in the trees, is able to alert the farmers to the threat of fire (104–9). At other times, however, Biagio’s examples strain the possibilities of treetop humanitarianism and appear ludicrous, precisely because of the purported solemnity in which they are framed. Such is the case with Cosimo’s deathbed ministrations to his mother from a nearby tree branch outside her window (144–46). Innocently locked as he is into his eighteenthcentury attitudes, Biagio is simply blind to the contradiction that the contemporary author has here with conscious forethought planted in the novel. Biagio cannot therefore conceive of the twentieth-century moral and philosophical discrepancy of his brother’s life: Cosimo’s very real existential dilemma in deciding between the passive isolation of his arboreal existence and his role as an active social being. For all Biagio’s goodwill, or perhaps largely because of it, his story is misleading. Nor, for that matter, should it be assumed that it mirrors the author’s mind. To learn about Cosimo’s actual drama and the nature of his existential choices in Baron it becomes necessary to remove the narrator’s rose-colored glasses and take a hard look at the central character’s life as it finally evolves in the novel. At the same time it is also wise to pause for a moment to consider Calvino’s own observations of Cosimo’s character, for these are telling. Beginning with the author, one soon learns that Calvino’s conception of Cosimo’s life in the trees does not coincide with the storyteller’s. The author is not subject, as is Biagio, to the “enlightened prejudices” of the society depicted in the novel, at least not at the time of his later writing on the trilogy. Here Calvino tells the reader clearly that he chose the eighteenth-century ambience for Baron not

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because he necessarily identifies with Biagio and Enlightened social reform, but rather because he empathizes with Cosimo and admires him essentially as a character whose eccentricity would fit nicely in that “great century of eccentrics” (“Nota,” 419). Furthermore, Calvino acknowledges that Cosimo’s arboreal life is a lonely choice, one motivated not by sociability, but by the character’s deeply felt sense of “singularity and solitude” (“Nota,” 418). If the author admires Cosimo, therefore, it is not especially for his Enlightened Voltairean traits, as once thought, but rather because existentially the character represents to him “a person [who] willingly sets himself a difficult standard and follows it to its ultimate consequences, because without [doing so] he could not be himself either for himself or for the others” (“Nota,” 417). This attitude toward Cosimo is of course Sartrean, as Calvino himself readily admitted in an interview (Paris, 1978). It reflects not only the philosopher’s paradoxical position on man’s freedom of choice but even his very words. It is Satire who, early in his career, advocated the heroic existence and decisions made boldly and even in defiance of the Other. In fact, it is this Sartre’s too-emphatic denial of the Other that, by the end of his own life, fractured the facade of his humanism, precipitating a serious conflict in the philosopher’s thoughts on man’s obligation to self versus his responsibility to others.” At novel’s end when Cosimo opts to speak no more, Calvino (like Sartre) has finally put forth as primary the peculiar existential emphasis on self and personal freedom, relegating Cosimo’s other role as a social do-gooder, along with Enlightenment ideals, to second place. It might be added that, even where Calvino’s portrait of Cosimo does coincide with the moral model of Biagio’s Enlightened philosophy, this connection is superficial and more related to the way Voltaire’s thinking anticipates Sartre’s than to the specifics of Voltaire’s own reasoning. Turning now to the person of Cosimo himself in the novel, one sees beneath the author’s humorous gloss marked evidence of a sobering perspective. Terrible solitude, not social amenability, ultimately predicates Cosimo’s existence. Caution colors his relationships with his fellows, including family and lovers. Flamboyant gestures but not great deeds characterize his actions (or rather, nonactions). Although the storyteller Biagio may figure Cosimo a

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vigorous molder of society, events in the novel do not bear this out. Rather, in this character, as in many other Calvino characters, the reader witnesses a retreat from human community, a withdrawal from decisive action, and a tangible existential reluctance to choose definitively, and not without good reason. —Constance Markey, Italo Calvino: A Journey Toward Postmodernism, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999): pp. 75–76.

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P L O T S U M M A RY O F

The Nonexistent Knight Of the three books of the Our Ancestors collection, The Nonexistent Knight is the most postmodern. Published in 1959, the final act of the trilogy draws on European legends, such as Charlemagne and the Knights of the Round Table—only to send them up with light-hearted burlesque. As with The Cloven Viscount and The Baron in the Trees, Calvino once again uses fable to place modern issues—in this case the demythologization of war, religion, and literature—in the context of fantasy. The title character, Agilulf, is a dutiful soldier with an impeccable record, made up of only the white shining armor that he wears. He meets Charlemagne in the opening scene while the king is reviewing his paladins before they battle the Saracen armies. Charlemagne is dumbfounded upon finding nothing behind the helmet veil of Agilulf. The knight explains the mystery to the king (and the reader), boasting that he exists “by will power . . . and faith in our holy cause!” Agilulf’s immateriality, along with his dull personality, hardly makes him an engaging hero; fortunately, he is surrounded by a group of colorful supporting characters, one of whom is the young and passionate Raimbaut. After joining the service explicitly to avenge the murder of his father, Raimbaut turns to the more-experienced Agilulf for direction. Raimbaut is the perfect counterpoint to Agilulf, who does not fight for personal reasons, but only out of a cold sense of duty. The author presents yet another counterpart to Agilulf with Gurduloo, an unrestrained clown who routinely forgets his corporeal existence. Charlemagne, amused by the polar natures of Gurduloo and the knight, commissions the clown as Agilulf’s squire. At this point, the narrator introduces herself as Sister Theodora, a nun who is painfully self-conscious about her inexperience as a writer and a person of the world. The self-reflexive narrator, common to all three books of the trilogy but here the most prominent, is the product of Calvino’s aim to demystify the writer, and throughout the book Sister Theodora interjects with her concerns and doubts about writing, which she views as a “hard penance.”

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Raimbaut’s mission to kill Isohar, his father’s murderer, is cut short when another Christian soldier slays Isohar during battle. Raimbaut still gets his share of combat when, with the help of a mystery knight, he faces and routs two foes. The knight makes a sudden departure, but Raimbaut follows him to express his gratitude. He discovers that the knight is actually a beautiful woman named Bradamente. The lady, spellbound by the ideals of chivalry, in turn falls for Agilulf, the model of knighthood. This unraveling comic sub-plot is reminiscent of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, one of Calvino’s favorite texts. At a banquet hosted by Charlemagne, the paladins share accounts of their adventures. Agilulf annoys everyone with his insistence that the storytellers stick to the facts. Some knights respond by questioning the legitimacy of Agilulf’s knighthood. Agilulf defends himself, explaining that he earned his knighthood by saving the daughter of the King of Scotland from being raped, thereby preserving her virginity. A young knight, Torrismund of Cornwall, refutes Agilulf’s claim by confessing that Sophronia bore him out of wedlock years before the knight rescued her. He also states that his father is not the Duke of Cornwall, but one of the Knights of the Holy Grail. The fact that the admission could revoke his own knighthood hardly concerns Torrismund, already disillusioned by war and the hypocrisies of knighthood. Charlemagne decides to discharge Torrismund and Agilulf, but he leaves Torrismund with the opportunity to keep his title if he can get the Knights of the Holy Grail to claim him as one of their own. Agilulf, accompanied by Gurduloo, leaves the banquet on a mission to find Sophronia. He believes that he can validate his knighthood by proving that she is still a virgin. Bradamente, meanwhile, follows close behind pursuing Agilulf; not far behind her is the lovelorn Raimbaut. Agilulf’s mission is interrupted when he hears that bears threaten a damsel, Priscilla, and her retinue. After Agilulf beats back the bears, Priscilla, who immediately falls for Agilulf, invites him into her castle where they spend a romantic evening together. Sister Theodora, realizing that her complex tale is beginning to meander, draws a map and describes where she pinpoints her characters and their paths. Her map gives her the freedom to let Agilulf

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jump over to England, where he learns that Moorish pirates had already sacked the convent where Sophronia lived and taken her to Morocco. Agilulf travels to Morocco, where he rescues Sophronia from captivity. On the way home, Agilulf’s ship crashes on the rocks of Breton. He decides to leave Sophronia, too weary to continue traveling, to find refuge in a cave while he returns to France to find Charlemagne. Agilulf hopes that when the king sees that Sophronia is still pure, he will reinstate him as knight. Meanwhile, Torrismund finds the Knights of the Holy Grail headquarters just outside the Scottish village of Koowalden. Quickly forgetting his original mission, Torrismund is inspired by one of the Knights to begin training for membership in the Order. However, the required meditation exercises turn out to be too demanding for Torrismund, and he also learns from nearby peasants that the Knights are oppressing them and confiscating their food. When the Knights attack the peasants after an innocent protest, Torrismund joins forces with the peasants. After successfully defending the people in the altercation, he leaves Koowalden and begins to wander through different lands, finally stumbling upon Sophronia’s cave. Eventually, all the major characters converge at the cave, where they find Sophronia and Torrismund—both oblivious to their familial relationship—in bed together. After an initial moment of panic, everyone realizes that there are no blood ties after all between the two lovers. In a deus ex machina resolution, four of the characters find marital bliss—Sophronia with Torrismund, and Raimbaut with Bradamente, who finally returns Raimbaut’s love. The only person who does not find happiness is Agilulf, who leaves the cave in shame before Charlemagne has the chance to restore his title. No longer willing to exist if he is not a true knight, Agilulf leaves his armor behind for Raimbaut and vanishes. The final scene, in which Raimbaut and Bradamente reunite at her convent, is perhaps the most befuddling. Sister Theodora reveals herself as Bradamente—the nun and the knight are the same person. The reader can only take such a devious narrator and her silly tale as a farce. Thus, the story ends as lighthearted as it began, but only after hacking away at some old and respected traditions.

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L I S T O F C H A R AC T E R S I N

The Nonexistent Knight Agilulf Emo Bertrandin is the title character whose tremendous will allows him to exist even without a body. Encased in his white shining armor, he stands as an exemplary warrior, but his pompous attitude irritates his fellow soldiers. A claim threatening his legitimacy as a knight forces him on a long adventure to regain his title. Bradamente/Sister Theodora has two separate identities. As Bradamente, she is the proud warrior obsessed with chivalric ideals; as Sister Theodora, she is the convent-bound, self-effacing narrator. Only at the end of the tale do we learn that the two characters are the same woman. Raimbaut of Roussillon is the young, passionate warrior and protégé of Agilulf who stubbornly pursues Bradamente. He joins the war in order to seek vengeance on the Turkish warrior who murdered his father. Torrismund, an illegitimate son of a Knight of the Holy Grail, is the young upstart who challenges Agilulf’s legitimacy as a knight. Disillusioned by war and the knighthood, he shows little concern when his own legitimacy is in question. Gurduloo is Agilulf’s outlandishly primitive squire. His inability to distinguish himself from his surroundings regularly places him in comic situations. Sophronia, daughter of the King of Scotland, was rescued by Agilulf from rape. Originally mistaken to be Torrismund’s mother, she later becomes his wife. King Charlemagne is the legendary Frankish king, here appearing less grand than he does in the epic romances for which he is known. He makes the final decision on the legitimacy of Torrismund’s and Agilulf’s titles as knights. Priscilla is the damsel in distress who enjoys a brief romance with Agilulf after he saves her and her retinue from wild bears.

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CRITICAL VIEWS ON

The Nonexistent Knight JOHN GATT-RUTTER ON ALLEGORY [John Gatt-Rutter holds the Vaccari Chair in Italian Studies at La Trobe University in Australia and specializes in reading Italian literature of the past two centuries. In this excerpt he takes a critical look at allegory in the novel.] Thus, for all its simple fantasy, for all its effortless allegory, the trilogy remains an anachronism, or rather, an archaism. Not in the obvious sense that it is set in the distant past (indeed the flow and ebb of the French Revolution in Il barone rampante is a transparent metaphor for the failure of the Resistance in Calvino’s own time). The archaism—to take Il cavaliere inesistente as the simplest example—is that the symbols of the chivalric world are simply inadequate in an age when we live our computerized lives under the threat of annihilation and in a world-wide system of economic exploitation both between and within nations. What Torrismondo will free today’s oppressed Curvaldians, when the system of oppression is usually invisible, and even presents itself, and is accepted by most, as freedom? At the end of Calvino’s story, the Curvaldians accept Torrismondo only as an equal one of themselves, though Charlemagne has appointed him Count of Curvaldia: but Calvino offers no answer to the real problem, which is, how can Charlemagne himself, with all his paladins and knights, be done away with, ‘made equal’, or, better still, ‘made ‘ human’? To entertain this possibility would be to rip the flimsy fabric of Calvino’s fantasy-play—or to transform it into something incomparably more potent and, aesthetically, more difficult. Anachronism in the internal structure of the tale would make the tale itself less anachronistic in relation to the modern world for which it was written (and Calvino will attempt something like this in the subsequent Qfwfq stories). Once again the author has carefully avoided any opportunity for real drama. All this is not to undervalue the amount of real critique, full of playful subtlety and fantasy, which Calvino has woven into the narrative. As in Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato, true to the spirit of the

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popular imagination, Charlemagne is presented as a dotard. We have his unforgettable remark, on first meeting Agilulfo, ‘Be’, per essere uno che non esiste, siete in gamba!’ (I nostri antenati, p. 8). The knights at mess, asleep in their tents, on the battlefield, are shown in all their brutish carnality. They are subhuman beasts whom their armour turns into inhuman war-machines. They are the alienated split between body and mind. Agilulfo, the mirror of chivalry, is not really there, and finally even his not-being comes to an end, when the chivalric code that gives his suit of armour the semblance of life breaks down. Once again, the germ of this story was an image—the non-existent knight—which Calvino then elaborated in both narrative and ideographic terms (as he explains in the Prefazione to the trilogy, p. xviii). The author stresses that he developed Agilulfo as an image of institutional man, of the faceless conformist in modern society (of course, anyone but ourselves, who identifies himself without residue with the workings of our social machinery. He also explains that Agilulfo’s opposite, his squire Gurdulù, was, exceptionally, created ideographically before he became a concrete image. Gurdulù is very much there, but does not know it: he cannot distinguish himself from his surroundings (‘Nature’), and answers to many different names. The reader cannot be blamed if he sees Agilulfo and Gurdulù as amusing variations on Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (though that of Cervantes is a name Calvino never mentions). However, we need hardly search for literary or typological or ideographic sources when we have observed that right from the start Calvino’s artistic thumbprint showed in juxtaposition an interest in abstract geometry with a curiosity for the tactile and visual world. Agilulfo and Gurdulù embody the poles of Calvino’s inspiration, but in static contrast rather than in the dramatic relationship of Cervantes’ heroes. Nor do they really interact with the central characters, Rambaldo and Torrismondo, though Calvino attempts at least a narrative link through the female characters, Bradamante and Sofronia, with the former pursuing Agilulfo, and Agilulfo pursuing the latter. This failure at the level of the drama reflects the author’s failure at the intellectual level to explore to the full the potently dramatic subject he had set before himself—the modern and ancient cleavage between body and mind, between physical and mental activity. This

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is one of the central alienating divisions in the modern world, that which divides the three or four thousand million members of our modern world society into the two great classes of those who toil with their hands and those who labour with their brains. And it also explains the gap between the two cultures—the written, intellectual ‘high’ culture, depending on printed notations and codes; and the oral and visual ‘low’ culture, more directly based on the human body, though nowadays electronically recorded and transmitted. Calvino touches on this rich problematic in the most dramatic part of his story, that which revolves around Torrismondo. Torrismondo discovers that the mysticism (pure mental activity) of his collective ‘father’, the Cavalieri del San Gral, is the other face of their brutal oppression, condemning their Curvaldian serfs to toil and sweat for them (pure physical activity) under the point of sword or lance. ‘L’amore dell’universo può prendere forma di tremendo furore e spingerci a infilzare amorosamente i nostri nemici.’ (93) For the rest, the theme develops allegorically rather than dramatically. The knights are both shining armour—Agilulfo—and gross flesh—Gurdulù: but the conflict of the two is again static, it is described, not enacted; nor is it resolved. The young Rambaldo is not split between mind and body: but the hows and whys of this are not brought out in the narrative. Rambaldo is one of Calvino’s typical adolescent observers bewildered by the spectacle of ‘adult’ reality. Torrismondo’s dynamism dazzles him, but does not change him. Finally, he inherits Agilulfo’s armour, and with it the enamoured Bradamante: he embodies the virtues of being young. He discovers no purpose outside himself, no new use for his armour. It is not enough for Calvino, in his preface to the trilogy, to claim that woman represents reality. It is the armour itself, the inescapable initial image, which has really won the day. —John Gatt-Rutter, “Calvino Ludens: Literary Play and Its Political Implications,” Journal of European Studies 5 (1975): pp. 332–33.

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SARA MARIA ADLER ON CHARACTERIZATION [Sara Maria Adler is Professor of Italian at Scripps College with a research interest in Italian literature from World War II to the present. In the following extract taken from her book Calvino: The Writer as Fablemaker, she focuses on the characterization of the secondary characters.] The protagonist of Il cavaliere inesistente is the knight Agilulfo, a strange bodyless figure who represents “inexistence fortified by will and conscience” (xvii). Admired by some and hated by others, he is quite literally a perfect knight whose powerful will to exist is expressed in doing everything in the most correct manner possible. This will to be by doing, the central theme of the novel, is also reflected in the attitudes of the many characters who surround Agilulfo. For example, there is Rambaldo, the young and naive warrior whose will to exist is tested out on the battlefield as well as with Bradamante, the woman he loves. On the other hand, Bradamante, a headstrong and somewhat disorderly beauty, finds her reason to be in loving Agilulfo. Another important figure, moreover, is Torrismondo, a highly moral knight who seeks the key to his existence in discovering his origins. These characters add a certain narrative richness to Il cavaliere which is not present in either of the other two novels in the trilogy. In Il visconte, the secondary characters are part of the setting and do not possess much personality at all. In Il barone, moreover, though full of life, the peripheral figures are always portrayed in terms of their relationship with Cosimo. They are, in other words, never completely free of the influence he holds over their lives. The plot structure of Il cavaliere, however, is quite different. For, as Calvino explains in his preface, Agilulfo is too abstract a character upon which to build a story. As a result, continues the author, it is the crowd of characters around him who bring the central theme to life (p. xvii). Each one, moved by the will to search out a reason for existing, develops his or her own relationships and, independently from Agilulfo, is challenged by his or her own adventures. —Sara Maria Adler, Calvino: The Writer as Fablemaker (Potomac, Maryland: José Porrúa Turanzas, 1979): pp. 36–37.

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JOANN CANNON ON THE NARRATOR [In this excerpt taken from an article published in Symposium, Cannon discusses the reliability of the narrator, Sister Theodora.] Il cavaliere inesistente is a whimsical rewriting of the adventures of Charlemagne’s knights. The protagonist of the novel, Agilulfo Emo Bertrandino dei Guildiverni e degli Altri di Corbentraz e Sura, Cavaliere di Selimpia Citeriore e Fez, is an empty suit of armor, an identity without substance. Agilulfo’s companion, Gurdulù, is the specular opposite of the knight, “uno che c’è ma non sa d’esserei.” The other characters of the novel, Bradamante, Rambaldo, and Torrismondo, lie somewhere in between these two extremes, “inesistenza munita di volontà e coscienza” and “esistenza priva di coscienza” (I nostri antenati, xvii). Rambaldo joins Charlemagne’s army in order to avenge his father’s death at the hands of a Turk. He falls in love with Bradamante, who yearns for the nonexistent knight. Meanwhile Agilulfo, who earned his knighthood by saving the King of Scotland’s virgin daughter from brigands, finds his credentials called into question by Torrismondo, who claims that Sofronia was no virgin. Subplot follows upon subplot, much as in the Orlando Furioso by Ariosto, Calvino’s favorite author. Ultimately, Rambaldo and Bradamante are united, as are Torrismondo and Sofronia; Agilulfo’s claim to knighthood is proven valid. But Agilulfo has vanished into thin air: “l’armatura é vuota, non vuota come prima, vuota anche di quel qualcosa che era chiamato il cavaliere Agilulfo e che adesso è dissolto come una goccia nel mare” (154–55). To stop here, however, would be to neglect a crucial element of the novel. We have not yet taken into account the dual nature of the narrative text in which the énonciation, the process of narration itself, may predominate over the énoncée, the sequence of events. In fact, a careful reading of Il cavaliere inesistente reveals the centrality of the process of narration. The real thrust of the novel lies less in the events narrated than in the narration itself. The novel seems at first to be told from the point of view of an unidentified, omniscient narrator. Only at the beginning of Chapter Four do we learn that the

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tale is being told by a certain Sister Theodora, nun of the order of Saint Colomba. The narrator informs us that she has undertaken the writing of the tale as a penance. The narrator’s reliability proves to be somewhat questionable. Sister Theodora claims to have little first-hand knowledge of the things about which she writes. This apology is, however, immediately undercut as she continues: “fuor che funzioni religiose, tridui, novene, lavori dei campi, trebbiature, vendemmie, fustigazioni di servi, incesti, incendi, impiccagioni, invasioni d’eserciti, saccheggi, stupri, pestilenze, noi non si è visto niente. Cosa può sapere del mondo una povera suora?” (44). At the beginning of Chapter Six, the narrator again claims ignorance of the subject matter. “Ecco che mi tocca rappresentare la più gran follia dei mortali, la passione amorosa, dalla quale il voto, il chiostro e il naturale pudore m’hanno fin qui scampata” (74). But when we learn at the end of the novel that Sister Theodora who is telling the tale and Bradamante are one and the same, the narrator’s protestations of ignorance with respect to love ring false indeed. From the entrance of the narrative persona in Chapter Four to the final page, the focus of the novel vacillates between the énoncé and the énonciation. The “story” is frequently derailed by narrative comments which call attention to the status of the text as discourse, i.e., “every utterance assuming a speaker, and a hearer, and in the speaker, the intention of influencing the other in some way.” The narrative comments deal primarily with the difficulty of leaping the gap between writing and empirical reality. At the beginning of Chapter Seven, the narrator interrupts her tale to describe this dilemma. “Ci si mette a scrivere di lena, ma c’è un’ora in cui la penna non gratta che polveroso inchicistro, e non vi scorre più una goccia di vita, e la vita è tutta fuori, fuori dalla finestra, fuori di te, e ti sembra che mai più potrai rifugiarti nella pagina che scrivi, aprire un altro mondo, fare il salto” (85–80). The text becomes increasingly self-reflexive, focusing on the materiality of writing rather than the actions of the fictional characters. In Chapter Nine the narration again falters when the narrator complains of the difficulty of weaving together the strands of the text. “Ma questo filo, invece di scorrermi veloce tra le dita, ecco che si rilassa, che s’intoppa, e se penso a quanto ancora ho da mettere sulla carta d’itinerari e ostacoll e inseguimenti e inganni e duelli e

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tornei, mi sento smarrire” (132). Such narrative interventions, through which the mechanics of narrative are deliberately exposed, have the same effect in all self-conscious novels, from Don Quixote onwards: “the reader is successfully drawn into the suspense and interest that the characters themselves provide and is wrenched away from them to an awareness of the pen which controls them. —JoAnn Cannon, “Literary Signification: An Analysis of Calvino’s Trilogy,” Symposium 34 (1980): pp. 8–10.

RICHARD ANDREWS ON SELF-REFLEXIVE NARRATION [Richard Andrews is Emeritus Professor at the University of Leeds in England. He wrote Scripts and Scenarios: The Performance of Comedy in Renaissance Italy and contributed to the Cambridge History of Italian Literature. In this extract, he sheds light on the self-conscious style of the narration.] In Il cavaliere inesistente, however, the writer is initially separated from the men and women of action, as a commentator and recorder of their deeds. This brings out, among other things, the problematic relationship between a written text and what it describes. In the fourth chapter it emerges that the narrative of the book, which had so far seemed quite impersonal, is being composed by a nun in a monastery, Sister Teodora. From then on, at intervals, we are aware of Sister Teodora’s presence and of her difficulties. Can a cloistered nun really give a proper description of the active world which she does not know? (But the list of experiences which she does know is made sensationally varied.) How much of what she imagines is influenced by irrelevant images in her immediate surroundings, by her current mood, by the time of day? What does the writer gain from writing? But most of all, in the eighth and ninth chapters, Sister Teodora questions the very validity of the black words which she writes down on the white page, questions their ability to refer properly to anything in the world outside. In an apparent crisis of confidence, she resorts to drawing pictures of her characters’ journeys and of the obstacles they meet, as though visual images were more reli-

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able than words; and she has moments of mesmeric awareness of the unbroken, meaningless texture of paper and ink. Commentators have since seen these moments, quite rightly, as linking up with more recent developments in semiotic criticism, whereby both critics and writers have become aware of the separateness of the word, the literary signifier, from anything which it might signify. In this respect, as in others, Calvino was slightly ahead of his time; but there has been a tendency since (Cannon 1981, ch. II) to attribute to him a rather despairing perception of the gap between words and things, as if this book were proclaiming an impasse and the impossibility of writing anything significant. This, I think, is an interpretation to be resisted. The impasse is perceived, by Sister Teodora, but broken by Calvino, as he incorporates her doubts and questions into a significant literary text. The nun’s claim that she cannot write, only draw, is comically exploded by the fact that we read verbal descriptions of her drawings (verbal cartoons again) rather than seeing them, and the story is adequately conveyed nonetheless. The close-up view of the fibre of a blank page may be discouraging, but the world which you were hoping to describe on the page can sometimes appear equally blank and meaningless: Ogni cosa si muove nella liscia pagina senza che nulla se ne veda, senza che nulla cambi sulla sua superficie, come in fondo tutto si muove e nullo cambia nella rugosa crosta del mondo, perché c’è solo una distesa della medesima materia, proprio come il foglio su cui scrivo . . . (Everything moves on the smooth page without anything being seen, without anything altering on its surface, just as ultimately everything moves and nothing alters on the wrinkled crust of the world, because all that is there is an expanse of the same matter, just like the page on which I write . . .) (Antenati, 82)

In other words, this state of vertigo is not the fault of literature. Words and signs, it is true, have no intrinsic meaning, but nor does the world as a whole—until it is selectively interpreted into words and signs. Statements of this sort become more explicit in later books like Cosmicomiche and Le città invisibili, but they are implicit here too. The impossibility of writing is successfully written about. To watch a story being composed, to be aware of the conscious and arbitrary

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choices involved, turns out neither to obscure the story nor to make it insignificant. Rather the story becomes doubly interesting—as an event described, and as an artefact which describes it. —Richard Andrews, “Italo Calvino,” Writers & Society in Contemporary Italy, ed. Michael Caesar and Peter Hainsworth (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984): pp. 265–66.

J. R. WOODHOUSE ON REALISM [In this excerpt from an article covering the writer’s early years, Woodhouse identifies one scene from the novel as an example of how Calvino deconstructs the conventions of traditional epic.] The third story, The Nonexistent Knight, is also unusual in the extreme. The action of this novel takes place during a campaign of Charlemagne against the Saracens. One of the Emperor’s knights, Agilulfo, is merely an empty suit of armor, held together by willpower. Like the other two stories, this too has a series of incredible adventures and characters which are witnessed by an ingenuous personage—Rambaldo, the young army recruit—and described by the apparently ingenuous “nun,” Suor Teodora. Rambaldo comes to the Christian camp filled with empty, chauvinistic illusions. By the end of the story he has attained a fuller personality, having overcome the obstacles in his path, having also jettisoned his more meaningless ideals and illusions, to find genuine happiness. The nonexistent knight, personification or symbol of so many things—pedantic bureaucracy, inhuman perfection and the alienation of the individual—is found at the end of the story as an abandoned, dismantled suit of armour. Its reason for existence no longer valid, Agilulfo gives way to the wholly human personalities of the two vigorous young men, Rambaldo and Torrismondo. For example, one of the traditionally romanticized epic descriptions was the massed combat. Calvino, through Rambaldo’s eyes, gives a more realistic view of the battle’s commencement: Coughing was the signal that the battle had started. In the distance he saw a cloud of yellow dust advancing, and another cloud rising

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from the ground as the Christian horses broke into a canter. Raimbaut began coughing and the entire Imperial army began coughing and shook in its armor, quivering and shaking as it raced towards the Infidel dust, hearing more coughing getting nearer and nearer. The two dust clouds fused; the plain rang with the echo of coughs and the clang of lances.

Hacking coughs in the dust-cloud raised by the charge affect the troops as effectively as the hacking swords of the ensuing battle. —J. R. Woodhouse, “From Italo Calvino to Tonio Cavilla: The First Twenty Years,” Calvino Revisited, ed. Franco Ricci (Toronto: Dovehouse Editions Inc., 1989): pp. 45.

MARTIN MCLAUGHLIN ON THE PROTAGONISTS [Martin McLaughlin is University Lecturer in Italian at Oxford University and author of Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance. He is also Italian Editor of the Modern Lanuage Review. In this extract, he argues for the possibility of multiple protagonists in the novel.] As in his first novel so in the fantastic trilogy as a whole, the characters are all exaggerated grotesques, ranging from the physical and moral extremes of the divided viscount himself and his terrorised subjects to the bizarre family of eccentrics that surround Cosimo and the polar opposites of, on the one hand, Agilulfo, who is an invisible mental force inside a suit of armour, and, on the other, Gurdulù, who is all too physical and threatens on every occasion to blend into the sea of objects that surround him. The only rounded characters, physically and metaphorically, are the females: Sebastiana and Pamela in the Visconte have already been mentioned; Viola is the specular opposite of Cosimo, everything that he is not—if he represents Enlightenment man, she stands for the baroque/romantic female who borders on the destructive (I, 1215); Bradamante (strong-lover) and Teo-dora (Given to God), as their names suggest, constitute one single, more complete character than any of the male characters. Hume (1992a) rightly observes that the problems even in the last novel of the trilogy are the same as in The Path: for Rambaldo and

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Torrismondo the problem of integration with others in general; for Agilulfo and Gurdulù the particular question of integration with the feminine other. But the protagonists of the earlier two books came closer to happiness than those of the Cavaliere. Stylistically there are some familiar features. Apart from the opening two hendecasyllables—‘Sotto le rosse mura di Parigi / era schierato l’esercito di Francia’ (‘Beneath the red ramparts of Paris lay marshalled the army of France’: I, 955; Our Ancestors, 287)— which recall the Ariostan intertext, poetic passages appear elsewhere, often linked to Bradamante as in these alliterations: ‘Volteggiando veloce una leggera lancia teneva discosti i saraceni’ (‘Swiftly turning a light lance round the warrior kept the Saracens at bay’: I, 987; Our Ancestors, 315), or when in a caricature of the first appearance of Ariosto’s Bradamante by the river at the start of the Orlando furioso (1.59–64), Rambaldo comes upon her as she urinates into a stream, parodistically described in two straight hendecasyllables: ‘Era una donna di armoniose lune, / di piuma tenera e di fiotto gentile’ (‘She was a woman of harmonious moons, tender plumage, gentle flow’: I, 990; Our Ancestors, 317). The standard scene of male knight recognising female knight by the hair that emerges from her helmet, a topos in Italian romance epic, is here literally reversed and seen from the opposite angle. However, this last book is really so different from the other two books as almost to hint at the disintegration of the trilogy (Bonsaver, 1995c). Not only is the reader’s attention split between the paladin’s deeds and the nun’s narratological ruminations, but unlike the other two eponymous protagonists, Agilulfo is more deuteragonist than main character, disappearing as he does at the beginning of the penultimate chapter. In fact, as in the other two novels, the narrative focus is on the young man on the threshold of maturity, in this case Rambaldo who is seeking an identity for himself both in war and in love. The open ending pointing towards the future which still has to be conquered is clearly differentiated from the traditional closures of marriage and death that had haunted the conclusions to the previous two novels (and of Ariosto’s text), and is in fact prophetic of Calvino’s own radically different future as a novelist. In the 1960s he would abandon both the fantastic and realistic modes which characterised his writing up until the end of the 1950s.

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As to what that different future would contain, a discarded preface to the trilogy, also written in 1960, provides some clues. It claims that although this cycle of fantastic tales was complete (I, 1220), the author was undecided what to write next (I, 1223). He had stopped writing realist fiction because each realist work had turned out to be negative and defeatist; only in these fantasy tales did he achieve an active thrust which was genuinely optimistic. Hence his love for Ariosto’s optimism, irony and sadness: the Renaissance poet can be a model, he argues, even in the age of electronic brains and space shots, which are in a sense the continuation respectively of the knights’ magic weapons and their travels over the globe and up to the moon (I, 1223–4). —Martin McLaughlin, Italo Calvino, (Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 1998): pp. 45–46.

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WO R K S B Y

Italo Calvino (English editions in parentheses) The Path to the Nest of Spiders. 1947 (1957). Last Comes the Crow. 1949 (1994). The Cloven Viscount. 1951 (1962, 1968). The Argentine Ant. 1952 (1971). Entry into War. 1954. Italian Fables. 1956 (1961). A Plunge into Real Estate. 1957 (1984). The Baron in the Trees. 1957 (1959). Young People of the Po. 1957–58. The Tales. 1958. The Nonexistent Knight. 1959 (1962). Our Ancestors. 1960 (1980). Marcovaldo, or, The seasons in the city. 1963 (1983). The Watcher. 1963. Cosmicomics. 1965 (1968). t zero. 1967. (1969). Memory of the World and Other Cosmicomic Stories. 1968. Difficult Loves. 1970 (1984). The Watcher and Other Stories. (1971). Invisible Cities. 1972 (1974). The Castle of Crossed Destinies. 1973 (1976). If on a winter’s night a traveler. 1979 (1981). The Uses of Literature: Essays. 1980 (1986). Mr. Palomar. 1983 (1985). Old and New Cosmicomics. 1984. Under the Jaguar Sun. 1986 (1988).

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On Fables. 1988. Six Memos for the Millennium. 1988 (1988). The Road to San Giovanni. 1990 (1993). Why Read the Classics? 1991 (1999). Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories. 1993 (1995).

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WO R K S A B O U T

Italo Calvino Adler, Sara Maria. Calvino: The Writer as Fablemaker. Potomac, Maryland: José Porrúa Turanzas, 1979. Andrews, Richard. “Italo Calvino.” Writers & Society in Contemporary Italy, edited by Michael Caesar and Peter Hainsworth. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984. Barth, John. “The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodernist Fiction.” Atlantic 245 (January 1980): 65–71. Beckwith, Marc. “Italo Calvino and the Nature of Italian Folktales.” Italica 64 (1987): 244–62. Block, Alan A. “The Utopian Reality of Italo Calvino: The Baron in the Trees.” Italian Quarterly 30 (1989): 5–16. Bloom, Harold, ed. Italo Calvino. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2001. Byrne, Jack. “Calvino’s Fantastic ‘Ancestors’: The Viscount, the Baron and the Knight.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 6 (1986): 42–53. Cannon, JoAnn. “The Map of the Universe: Le città invisibili.” Italo Calvino: Writer and Critic. Ravenna, Italy: Longo Editore, 1981. ———. “Literary Signification: An Analysis of Calvino’s Trilogy.” Symposium 34 (1980): 3–12. ———. “The Image of the City in the Novels of Italo Calvino.” Modern Fiction Studies 24 (1977): 83–90. ———. Postmodern Italian Fiction: The Crisis of Reason in Calvino, Eco, Sciascia, Malerba. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989. Carlton, Jill Margo. “The Genesis of Il barone rampante.” Italica 61 (1984): 195–206. Carter, Albert Howard III. Italo Calvino: Metamorphoses of Fantasy. Ann Arbor, Michigan.: UMI Research Press, 1987. Christensen, Peter G. “Utopia and Alienation in Calvino’s Invisible Cities.” Forum Italicum 20 (1986): 16–27.

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Davies, Russell. “The Writer Versus the Reader.” Times Literary Supplement (10 July 1981): 773–74. de Lauretis, Teresa. “Narrative Discourse in Calvino: Praxis or Poetis?” PMLA 90 (1975): 414–25. Dillard, Annie. “The Fiction of Possibility.” Living in Fiction. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. du Plessix Gray, Francine. “Visiting Italo Calvino.” New York Times Book Review (21 June 1981): 1, 22–23. Franke, William. “The Deconstructive Anti-Logic of Le città invisibili.” Italian Quarterly 6 (1989): 31–42. Gabriele, Tommasina. “Literature as Education and the Near-Perfect Protagonist: Narrative Structure in Il barone rampante.” Stanford Italian Review 11 (1992): 91–102. ———. Italo Calvino: Eros and Language. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1994. Gatt-Rutter, John. “Calvino Ludens: Literary Play and Its Political Implications.” Journal of European Studies 5 (1975): 319–40. Hayman, David, and Eric Rabkin. Form in Fiction: An Introduction to the Analysis of Narrative Prose. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974. Heiney, Donald. “Calvino and Borges: Some Implications of Fantasy.” Mundus Artium 2 (1968): pp. 66–76. Hume, Kathryn. “Italo Calvino’s Cosmic Comedy: Mythography for the Scientific Age.” Papers on Language and Literature 20 (1984): 80–95. ———. Calvino’s Fictions: Cogito and Cosmos. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, trans. Ulrich Weisstein. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1940. James, Carol P. “Seriality and Narrativity in Calvino’s Le città invisibli.” MLN 97 (January 1982): 152–54. Janome, Claudia J. “Plato’s Fourth Bed: Italo Calvino.” New Orleans Review 9 (1982): 37–40. Jeannet, Angela M. “Calvino’s Invisible City.” Perspectives on Contemporary Literature 3 (1977): 38–49.

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Kayster, Wolfgang. The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. Ulrich Weisstein. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966. MacShane, Frank. “The Fantasy World of Italo Calvino.” New York Times Magazine, 10 July 1983. Markey, Constance. “Calvino and the Existential Dilemma: The Paradox of Choice.” Italica 60 (1983): 55–70. ———. Italo Calvino: A Journey Toward Postmodernism. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. McCaffery, Larry. “Form, Formula and Fantasy: Generative Structures in Contemporary Fiction.” Bridges to Fantasy, edited by George E. Slusser, Eric S. Rabkin, and Robert Scholes. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982. McLaughlin, Martin. “Life and Literature in Calvino’s Early Works.” Association of Teachers of Italian Journal 35 (1982): 49–59. ———. “Calvino’s Visible Cities.” Romance Studies 22 (1993): 67–82. ———. Italo Calvino. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. Merrell, “The Writing of Forking Paths: Borges, Calvino and Postmodern Novels of Writing.” Variaciones Borges 3 (1997): 57–68. Montgomery, Robert L., Jr. “Allegory and the Incredible Fable: The Italian View from Dante to Tasso.” PMLA 81 (1946): 45–55. Muckley, Peter A. “Senseless Cluster: A Note on Literary Allusion and Literacy in The Baron in the Trees.” Italian Quarterly 30 (1989): 17–22. Naveh, Gila Safran. “Italo Calvino: Cities and Signs.” Biblical Parables and Their Modern Re-creations. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Olken, I. T. With Pleated Eye and Garnet Wing: Symmetries of Italo Calvino. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984. Pacifici, Sergio. A Guide to Contemporary Italian Literature: From Futurism to Neorealism. Cleveland, Ohio: The World Publishing Company, 1962. Rabkin, Eric S. The Fantastic in Literature. New York: Humanities, 1952. Ragusa, Olga. “Italo Calvino: The Repeated Conquest of

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Contemporaneity.” World Literature Today 57 (Spring 1983): 195–201. Re, Lucia. Calvino and the Age of Neorealism: Fables of Estrangement. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. ———. “Calvino and the Value of Literature.” MLN 113 (1998): 121–37. Ricci, Franco, ed. Calvino Revisited. Ottawa, Canada: Dovehouse Editions Inc., 1989. ———. “The Quest for Sonship in Le città invisibili and La strada di San Giovanni by Italo Calvino.” Forum Italicum 29 (1995): 52–75. Sbragia, Albert. “Italo Calvino’s Ordering of Chaos.” Modern Fiction Studies 39 (1993): 283–307. Spindler, William. “Magic Realism: A Typology.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 29 (1993): 75–85. Springer, Carolyn. “Textual Geography: The Role of the Reader in Invisible Cities.” Modern Language Studies 15 (1985): 289–99. Stille, Alexander. “An Interview with Italo Calvino.” Saturday Review (March–April 1985): 36–39. Tocci, Giovanni. “Perceiving the City: Reflections on Early Modern Age.” Critical Quarterly 36 (1994): 30–38. Updike, John. “Metropolises of the Mind.” Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983. Varsava, Jerry. “Calvino’s Borgesian Odysseys.” Borges and His Successors, edited by Edna Eizenberg. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990. Vidal, Gore. “Fabulous Calvino.” New York Review of Books (30 May 1974): 13–21. ———. “Remembering Italo Calvino.” New York Review of Books 32 (15 August 1985): 3–10. Weiss, Beno. Understanding Italo Calvino. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993. Woodhouse, J. R. Italo Calvino: A Reappraisal and an Appreciation of the Trilogy. Yorkshire, England: University of Hull Publications, 1968. ———. “From Italo Calvino to Tonio Cavilla: The First Twenty

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Years.” Calvino Revisited, edited by Franco Ricci. Toronto: Dovehouse Editions Inc., 1989. Wood, Michael. “Hidden in the Distance: Reading Calvino Reading.” Kenyon Review 20 (1998): 155–70.

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A C K N OW L E D G E M E N T S “The Map of the Universe: Le Città Invisibili” by JoAnn Cannon from Italo Calvino: Writer and Critic © 1981 by Longo Editore. Reprinted by Permission. “Textual Geography: The Role of the Reader in Invisible Cities” by Carolyn Springer from Modern Language Studies 15 © 1985 by Northeast Modern Language Association. Reprinted by Permission. “Utopia and Alienation in Calvino’s Invisible Cities” by Peter G. Christensen from Forum Italicum Vol. 20, no. 1 © 1986 by Forum Italicum. Reprinted by Permission. “The Deconstructive Anti-Logic of Le Citta Invisibili” by William Franke from Italian Quarterly 6 © 1989 by Italian Quarterly. Reprinted by Permission. “Italo Calvino’s Ordering of Chaos” by Albert Sbragia from Modern Fiction Studies Vol. 39, no. 2 © 1993 by Perdue Research Foundation. Reprinted by permission of the Johns Hopkins University Press. “Hidden in the Distance: Reading Calvino Reading” by Michael Wood from The Kenyon Review Vol. 20, No. 2 © 1998 by Kenyon College. Reprinted by Permission. Woodhouse, J.R. Italo Calvino: A Reappraisal and an Appreciation of the Trilogy by J.R. Woodhouse © 1968 from University of Hull Publications. Reprinted by Permission. “Calvino and the Existential Dilemma: The Paradox of Choice” by Constance Markey from Italica Vol. 60, No. 1 © 1983 by Italica. Reprinted by Permission. With Pleated Eye and Garnet Wing: Symmetries of Italo Calvino by I.T. Olken © 1984 by University of Michigan Press. Reprinted by Permission. Italo Calvino: Metamorphoses of Fantasy by Albert Howard Carter III © 1987 by UMI Research Press. Reprinted by Permission. © Kathryn Hume 1992. Reprinted from Calvino’s Fiction’s: Cogito and Cosmos by Kathryn Hume (1992) by permission of Oxford University Press.

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Understanding Italo Calvino by Beno Weiss © 1993 by the University of South Carolina Press. Reprinted by Permission. A Guide to Contemporary Italian Literature: From Futurism to Neorealism by Sergio Pacifici © 1962 by The World Publishing Company. Reprinted by Permission. “Calvino’s Fantastic ‘Ancestors’: The Viscount, the Baron and the Knight” by Jack Byrne from Review of Contemporary Fiction Vol. 6, no. 2 © 1986 by Dalkey Archive Press. Reprinted by Permission. “Senseless Cluster: A Note on Literary Allusion and Literacy in The Baron in the Trees” by Peter A. Muckley from Italian Quarterly 30 © 1989 by Italian Quarterly. Reprinted by Permission. “The Utopian Reality of Italo Calvino: Baron in the Trees” by Alan A. Block from Italian Quarterly, Vol. 30 © 1989 by Italian Quarterly. Reprinted by Permission. “Literature as Education and the Near-Perfect Protagonist: Narrative Structure in Il barone rampante” by Tommasina Gabriele from Stanford Italian Review, Vol. 11, no 1-2 © 1992 by Stanford Italian Review. Reprinted by Permission. Markey, Constance. Italo Calvino: A Journey Toward Postmodernism © 1999 by University of Press of Florida. Reprinted by Permission. “Calvino Ludens: Literary Play and Its Political Implications” by John Gatt-Rutter from Journal of European Studies Vol. 5 © 1975 by Journal of European Studies. Reprinted by Permission. “Fantastic Journeys” by Sara Maria Adler from Calvino: The Writer as Fablemaker © 1979 by Sara Maria Adler. Reprinted by Permission. “Literary Signification: An Analysis of Calvino’s Trilogy” by JoAnn Cannon from Symposium 34 © 1980 by Heldref Publications. Reprinted by Permission. “Italo Calvino” by Richard Andrews from Writers & Society in Contemporary Italy, eds. Michael Caesar and Peter Hainsworth © 1984 by St. Martin’s Press. Reprinted by Permission. “From Italo Calvino to Tonio Cavilla: The First Twenty Years” by J.R. Woodhouse from Calvino Revisited, ed. Franco Ricci © 1989 by Dovehouse Editions Inc. Reprinted by Permission. Italo Calvino by Martin McLaughlin © 1998 by Edinburgh University Press. Reprinted by Permission.

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INDEX OF

Themes and Ideas BARON IN THE TREES, THE, 53–73; And Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 55; attack on wolves, 57; Baron in, 59, 71; Baroness in, 59; Biagio in, 55–59, 64–68, 71–73, and bias of, 71–73, and as narrator, 55, 71–73; character list, 59–60; as children’s fantasy, 55, 65; Cosimo in, 55–73, and his fame, 56–57, and his project, 63–64, and his stay in the trees, 56, and his treatise, 56–57; critical views, 61–743; and Crusoe, 64; didactic message in, 69–70; enchantment in, 64–65; fantasy milieu, 63–64; Fauchelefleur, Abbe’ in, 55, 59, literary illusions in, 65–67; moral impact of, 69; in Our Ancestors Trilogy, 55; peculiar relationship to hero, 55–56; perspectives of reality, 67–68; philosopher in, 56–57; plot summary, 55–58; the protagonist in, 69–70; relationship between literature and its effects on life, 66–67; tragedy to Rhondi’s family, 56 Calvino, Italo: and Ariosto, 61–62; biography of, 12–14; family influence on, 61–63; favorite author, 82 CLOVEN VISCOUNT, THE, 35–54; Aifo in, 35, 38; character list, 38–39; critical views, 40–54; Curzio in, 44–46; ending of, 50–51; Esau in, 36, 39; evil in, 47; existentialist choice in, 42–44; Ezekiel in, 36, 38; the good un’ and the bad un’ reference, 36–37; the grotesque in, 35, 46–49; imagery in, 44–46; Kurt in, 39, 48; leper colony, 40–42; Medardo in, 35–54, and his two halves, 37, 43–44, 47, 50; mythos of comedy, 47–48; naïve vision, 40–42; narrator in, 35, 40–41, 43–44, 51; in Our Ancestors Trilogy, 35; Pamela in, 36–39; Pietrochiodo in, 36, 38; plot summary, 35–37; Sebastiana in, 35–36, 38, 40–42; sub-plots, 51; Trelawney in, 36–38, 40, 50; two reactions, 48–49; Vidal’s comments on, 43; world war in, 49 INVISIBLE CITIES, 15–34; character list, 18; conversations of Polo and Kahn, 15–21, 24–25, 34, and the decay of them, 33–34; description of cities, 15, 19; diegetic architecture in, 24–25; emotions evoked in, 19–20; image of chessboard, 23; imaginary world, 15, 19; innovation in, 15; Kahn, Kablai, 15–34; limitations of language, 32–34; models of universe, 21–23, 30–31; narrative of, 15; ‘perspective’ of, 29; plot summary, 15–17; Polo, Marco in, 15–34;

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power play in, 30–32; post-structuralism interpretation, 28–29; readers’ role, 24–25; structuring devices in, 15–16; Tartar Emperor, 16–17; utopian vision in, 26–28; ‘verbal’ construction, 26–27 NON-EXISTENT KNIGHT, THE, 74–89; Agiluf in, 74–89; allegory in, 78–79; archaism, 78; battle in, 86–87; and Boiardo’s Orlando inamorato, 79; Bradamente in, 75–77; character list, 77; characterization in, 80–81; comic sub-plot, 75; critical views, 78–79; disintegration of the Trilogy, 88; fables and modern issues, 74, 80; grotesque characters, 87–88; Gurdulou in, 75, 77; ‘hard’ penance in, 74–75; image in, 79; King Charlemagne in, 75–79, 86; Isohar in, 75; map of Sister Theodora, 75–76; the narrative, 82–83; in Our Ancestors Trilogy, 74; plot summary, 74–76; post-modernism, 74; preface, 89; Priscilla in, 77–78; the protagonist in, 87–89; Rainbaut in, 75–77; realism in, 86; as self-reflective narrative, 74, 79, 82–85; Sister Theodora in, 74–77, 83, and as Bradamente, 76, and as narrator, 82–83; state of vertigo, 85–86; symbols of chivalry, 78; Torrismund in, 76 Our Ancestors Trilogy, 35, 55, 74

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