September 15, 2002

“Everything can change but not the language that we carry inside us.” Italo Calvino, the quintessential postmodern writer, was a master of allegory and fantasy. With his fluid imagination, he is perhaps the most original, imaginative, and appreciated writer of post-second world war Italy. Calvino’s long career took him from neo- to magical realism.

Born in 1923 in Cuba, he grew up in San Remo, Italy, when his father obtained a post as curator in the botanical gardens there. His mother was also a botanist and this early exposure to science instilled in him a lifelong passion for precision and symmetry. He began as a writer of realistic political works set in the upheaval of postwar Italy.

His first work, The path to the nest of spiders is the story of a boy from the slums who joins the partisans. It was published in 1947 and sold 6,000 copies, an unusually high number at that time. But beginning with The cloven viscount, Calvino found his voice as a storyteller, taking simple conceits and spinning them into fantastic tales, and exploring the boundaries of narrative in all its forms.

The story is of a man cut in half by a cannonball during the Turkish-Christian war. Each half survives on its own, one embodying the good and the other the evil.

In the past, fair -tales have been a major form of writing for many imaginative authors of the world. In search of cultural roots, much of Europe focused on its folk tale and fairy tales . However, early modern and contemporary Italy took its tales and changed, manipulated, and combined them to concerns of its societies. During the 1950s Calvino collected folk tales from all over Italy. From studying Propp’s Morphology of the folktale, he became particularly interested in the shape and functions of the story.

Thus influenced by his nation’s overall approach to its heritage, and by his national culture, folk tales, knights, social and political allegories, and science fiction formed the stuff of his tales. His most admired novel, If on a winter’s night a traveller, is a fantastic tale blatantly using, as the fundamental structure, the plot and theme of fairy tales. As it turns out it is ten novels not one, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. The heroes of the novel are two readers, one male and one female.

Calvino frequently broke stride with fashionable literary movements, as with the publication of his trilogy The cloven viscount, The baron in the trees, and The nonexistent knight and such later works as Invisible cities, If on a winter’s night a traveller, and Mr Paloma.

Invisible cities is cited by many as his best work. It is not really a novel at all but a sort of fugue on the nature of the city. Marco Polo, the protagonist, tells tales of the cities he has been to. Soon it becomes clear that each of these fantastic places is really the same place.

Calvino’s early experiences, exposure to his parents’ botany careers, participation in the Italian Resistance during the second world war, an extended residence in Paris, greatly influenced him. As a partisan in the Italian Resistance during the war, Calvino was thrust into a tradition of story telling as a way of providing social coherence and reassurance in uncertain times. While waiting in the forest for attacks, his comrades swapped folk tales.

Calvino saw how fables functioned both as repositories of idealistic, or practical wisdom and as a technique for expressing fears or hopes. Calvino decided to begin a series of raccontini, little tales that could function both as light entertainment and anti-Fascist exhortation. His belief that at the end of the war he would abandon allegory and move to other concerns was precluded by his immersion in the form. He never really forsook the fable and even his most obdurate realistic work has fabular resonances. Absurd, sly, often nightmarish, these raccontini are like sharp needles, threaded with reels of black wit.

After the war Calvino graduated from the university of Turin with a thesis on Joseph Conrad and then worked for the communist periodical L’Unita in 1945 as a journalist and for Einaudi publishing house from 1948 to 1984. The post-1956 period, marked by the events in Hungary, caused Calvino to leave the Italian Communist Party, and devote himself to writing. When Calvino left the party he felt deeply distressed and wrote: “Having grown up in times of dictatorship, and being overtaken by total war when of military age, I still have the notion that to live in peace and freedom is a frail kind of good fortune that might be taken away from me in an instant.”

During the fifties, Italian literature, and the novel in particular, aspired to represent the ethical and social conscience of contemporary Italy. During the sixties, this claim was attacked on two fronts. On the front of literary form the new avant-garde that attacked and questioned Italian fiction, accusing it of being sentimental, antiquated, and hypocritically consolatory. Only a violent break in the language and the space and time of fiction could represent contemporary life and dispel illusions.

Also the cultural hinterland of Italian literature was undergoing a complete change. Linguistics, information theory, the sociology of the mass media, ethnology and anthropology, the structural study of myths, a new use of psychoanalysis, a new use of Marxism, all challenged established literary norms. In this milieu, Calvino gradually developed his interest in metafiction. This was fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.

In providing a critique of their own methods of construction, such writings not only examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text.

In 1964 Calvino went to Paris to strengthen his ties with the latest innovative trends, and he stayed there, on and off, for the next fifteen years. During this time he associated with literary theorists Claude Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes, and literary circles like Tel Quel and the Oulipo. Raymond Queneau, founded the Oulipo (le Ouvroir de Litt’rature Potentielle) school in 1960. Numbering as many mathematicians as writers, the Oulipists rejected the idea of fiction as social document, preferring to subject literature to sundry rigorous and arbitrary mathematical rules as a method of forcing writers into the construction of elaborate word-games.

Form was the one honest function of writing. The Oulipo contentions can be seen in Calvino’s unique literary creations, Cosmicomics, a phantasmagoria on creation, an enchantingly ingenious idea which translates theories about the evolution of the universe into stories and makes “characters” out of mathematical formulas and simple cellular structures. The narrator, Qfwfq, who is as old as the universe, is a result of this entrancing union of mathematics and poetic imagination. Through the boasting accounts of Qfwfq, central in the former novel as well, Calvino questions all the basic concepts of scientific theories.

The early 1960s also saw the participation of Italian writers and intellectuals in the last great episode of the centuries-old language debate in Italy. Among those involved was, of course, Italo Calvino. The debate touched on crucial issues for the evolution of the Italian language such as the survival of dialects, the psychology of language and the need to find a national language.

Calvino was of the view that “Common Italian is an impossible language, not easily accessible”, but he focused on expanding the boundaries of linguistics by using the international community as a reference point. Calvino was able to project his language into the postmodern global village of multiple possible readers by using a highly communicative language. His consciousness of the problems of language was a crucial issue in his poetics. In Calvino’s opinion writers ought to aim at preserving the special essence of the Italian language by constructing the basis for its ‘internationality’.

On this he wrote, “The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.”

Calvino died of cerebral haemorrhage in Siena, in September 1985. The road to San Giovanni, a collection of five essays, and Numbers in the dark, a book of short stories, were posthumously published. From the collection Under a Jaguar sun, stories on the five senses, ‘sight’ and ‘touch’ were never completed. Calvino works in it around five central qualities of good fiction — lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity.

In The uses of literature, published in 1980 and consisting of essays about the craft of literature, Calvino noted, for the reader, that there should be a time “in adult life devoted to revisiting the most important books of our youth. Even if the books have remained the same (though they do change, in the light of an altered historical perspective), we have most certainly changed, and our encounter will be an entirely new thing.”

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