Animals in Italo Calvino's War Novels and Novellas (1947-1957)

‘Figlio d’esseri umani’: Animals in Italo Calvino’s War Novels and Novellas (1947-1957) Submitted by: Molly Abigail Tanış Department of Italian School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Dublin, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland Spring 2020 Doctoral Committee: Advisor: Giuliana Adamo, Trinity College Dublin Clodagh Brook, Trinity College Dublin Guido Bonsaver, University of Oxford Declaration I declare that this thesis has not been submitted as an exercise for a degree at this or any other university, and it is entirely my own work. I agree to deposit this thesis in the University’s open access institutional repository or allow the Library to do so on my behalf, subject to Irish Copyright Legislation and Trinity College Library conditions of use and acknowledgment. Molly Abigail Tanis Signature ABSTRACT ‘Figlio d’esseri umani’: Animals in Italo Calvino’s War Novels and Novellas (1947-1957) Molly Abigail Tanış On November 17, 1946, the former Partisan and budding Italian writer, essayist, and intellectual, Italo Calvino, wrote an article for L’Unità against the atomic bomb testing done in the Bikini Atoll of the Marshall Islands. He did not chastise his fellow man alone for this atrocity. Instead, he asked the reader to consider the perspective of the human and nonhuman animals living in the affected areas and having to not merely survive, but somehow live, in the wake of the aftermath. Throughout history, war has long exposed humanity’s most base cruelties for the sake of greed and power, even if they are often carefully wrapped under cover of welcoming ideals like glory, honor, and sacrifice. Beyond textbooks and bids for political gain in times of war, glimmers of humanity’s generosity of spirit also thrive. A photograph of a child caught in the brutal workings of the war machine can still touch us. People’s stories and their experiences of war speak to every one of us as they call into question equally the depths as much as the heights of our humanity. The male protagonists from three of Calvino’s war novels and novellas from the postwar period, from 1947-1957, forge the definition of humanity anew by challenging dichotomies between humans and nonhuman animals. The placement of Calvino’s protagonists on the threshold when faced with both fictional and historical wars offers new insight on timeless questions of the body, the soul, and language. The methodological approach undertaken to conduct this research reflects the multiplicity of the subject at hand. A two-fold comparative literary and multidisciplinary perspective with a focus on new and old fields of Philosophy, Psychology, Literary Criticism, (Zoo)Anthropology, and Ecocriticism intends to engage a variety of human and nonhuman branches of knowledge and experience as well as meaningfully juxtapose them on the same page. The hope of this project is, albeit in a small way, to illuminate the many paths towards an inquiry of the soul and reinvigorate the power of literature as a scene of engagement across time, space, and language. Keywords: Italo Calvino – war – humanity – animals – storytelling – novel Abstract Word count: 342 Dissertation Word Count: 90, 609 DISSERTATION SUMMARY This dissertation, ‘Figlio d’esseri umani’: Animals in Italo Calvino’s War Novels and Novellas (1947-1957), demonstrates one possible research pathway to challenge the definition of what humanity consists through the relationships and encounters of humans with nonhuman animals, especially dogs, cats, horses, and birds in addition to many other species. A series of interrelated case studies based on works of literature, in which the male protagonists of Italo Calvino’s novels and novellas from the immediate post-war period of 1947-1957 and their relationships with nonhuman animals upend assumed intrinsically human features. When these characters are not explicitly stripping away at dichotomous modes of thinking, they are also thoughtfully playing with the definitions of humans as the animal that has language or the animal that clothes itself. The methodological framework employed to carry out this research was two-fold: a comparative literary perspective was united with a multidisciplinary approach, which includes fields such as Literary Criticism, Psychology, Philosophy, (Zoo)anthropology, and Ecocriticism. The focus of this study on the novels’ male protagonists also favored a specifically character-based approach to the texts. This interest in the points of interaction between human and nonhuman animals, especially against the backdrop of war stories, seeks to challenge the timeless and timely debates between the physical body and the rational mind, nature, and culture, animal and human, body and soul, us and “the other.” The consignment of polarizing dichotomies and the divisive wars that spring from them to the annals of history and legend may be a fool’s errand and even impossible. Nevertheless, this thesis is not merely the demonstration of a variety of academic skills and an accumulation of knowledge on a particular area of study. A part of its work is also to encourage dialogues, exchanges, and explorations beyond the confines of definitions. Yet, some things do require an unambiguous rigor, such as the following, which delineates the boundaries of the following composition, which the reader will soon be encountering in its entirety. The whole thesis encompasses the following components, which will each be described more fully in the following paragraphs: an introduction, three content chapters, a conclusion, and a list of references. The introductory chapter elaborates on the key concepts upon which are the foundation of this dissertation. Italo Calvino would write about war and its atrocities throughout the entirety of his writing life, without restrictions of genre or period. The present selection of texts, his first three war novels, and novellas, is also compared and studied with regards to his other works related to the subject of war, such as newspaper articles, essays, songs, short stories, caricatures, letters or interviews. Calvino’s conviction throughout his reading and writing life of the singular importance of experience and living in the world gave a unique perspective to his fascination with matters of language and storytelling. The myriad of animals the male protagonists of Calvino’s war novels and novellas encounter contour a “di scorcio” or defamiliarized poetics that can unsettle established norms and situations, including the atrocities of war that have become all too commonplace and on the brink of normalization. Although Calvino’s novels would require a sizeable menagerie to house all the nonhuman animals these three texts alone present, the tension between domesticated and wild animals, especially for birds, cats, dogs, and horses, will be demonstrated. Calvino’s animals do not speak for their own sake. Instead, they retain a symbolic quality that dialogues with nonhuman animals from literary history in comparative texts from Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, up to the twentieth century. In addition to multiple literary texts providing a more rounded perspective on our understanding of Calvino’s three novels and novellas, the multidisciplinary considerations into a variety of fields of knowledge will also attempt to confront the dichotomies between human and nonhuman animals apparent in those disciplines as well. This dissertation has aimed to intersect studies of Italo Calvino’s war novels and novellas with the roles of animals in them to observe whether any meaningful aspects of the human form are either reinforced or torn asunder. While the original spark of this dissertation was to locate Calvino’s components of the definition of “human” and “humanity,” upon embarking on this research, it reveals a far more vibrant dialogue among human and nonhuman animals. The section delineating the particulars of the many interrelated and evolving research questions precedes a more greatly detailed roadmap of the three content chapters the reader will encounter before the conclusion of this dissertation. The first content chapter analyzes Italo Calvino’s debut novel, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (1947), which is entitled: “Along the Threshold in Calvino’s Bestiary of the Resistance.” The two protagonists that are analyzed are Pin, the child narrator, and Kim, the psychology student brigade commissar. While Pin lies on the threshold between the home front and the battlefields of war, child and adulthood, together with Kim, they jointly form as much as they challenge the dichotomous poles of nature and culture, imagination, and rationality, child and adulthood. The chapter contains three sections. The first section analyzes the animality and humanity of Pin as he navigates the world of children, men, and women, his utopic space where the spiders make their nests, his hometown torn apart by civil war, and the complicated interpersonal and inter-creatural dynamics of the partisan’s camp. In the second section, peripheral characters, such as the townsmen, Italian Fascist and German Nazi soldiers, and the women that are a part of Pin and Kim’s life stories elaborate upon the flexibility of identities bestriding the thresholds of child and adulthood, town and countryside, human and nonhuman animals. Given that Kim makes but a cameo appearance in the ninth [out of twelve in total] chapters in the novel, it seems reasonable that Kim’s interest in humanity, and almost utter lack of interactions with nonhuman animals, expends a similar proportion of the following literary analysis. The second content chapter initiates the study of the first installment of Calvino’s post-facto trilogy, I nostri antenati, from the 1950s, with Il visconte dimezzato (1952), which is entitled: “The Humanizing Power of Reading: Medardo and Pamela’s Comprehension Skills of Non-human Animal Others.” Albeit this novella is structurally composed of dual pairs of characters or groups of them, it challenges the dichotomous structure of understanding life or a text.

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