Rocco Capozzi 2

INTRODUCTION

wo decades after his untimely death, (Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba, 1923 - Siena, 1985) remains one of the most read, studied, quoted, and respected modern Italian writers both at home and abroad. He is also one of the most complex, cerebral, innovative, interdisciplinary, and playfully imaginative metafictional narrators of XXth Century. The author s popularity outside of grew rapidly in the Sixties and early Seventies after the overwhelming success of Cosmicomics (1965), Invisible Cities (1972) and The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1974). The seminal study of J. R. Woodhouse (1968) on Calvino s trilogy Our Ancestors (The Cloven Viscount, 1952; The Baron in the Trees, 1957; The Nonexistent Knight, 1959) was among the first essays, in English, to underline the Italian writer s original and unconventional witty fabulations. In North America Calvino s fame increased as a result of the enthusiastic reviews of Calvino s work by writers such as Gore Vidal, John Updike, Salman Rushdie and, above all, after John Barth s famous essays The Literature of Exhaustion (1967) and The Literature of Replenishment (1980), in which he refers to the fiction of J. L. Borges and I. Calvino as perfect models of postmodernism. Calvino s interdisciplinary approach to literature and his overall (at times ironic) postmodernism can be traced back to his trilogy of Our Ancestors and more specifically in The Cloven Viscount and The Nonexistent Knight. Here we have the first clear evidence of his art of mixing media (especially comic books and cinematic techniques that we find masterfully exploited in Cosmicomics), with history, literature, fables, allegory, myths, and satire as the author unleashes a subtle mockery of wars and sharp criticism of the perils of a hedonistic neo-capitalist society. The long history of Calvino s eclectic interests, his vast encyclopedic competence, his poetics of docere et delectare and his love for fusing interdisciplinary and multimedia elements, contribute to making him an early pioneer of European postmodernism. Indeed, several of Calvino s works illustrate very well Leslie Fiedler s postmodernist notions expounded in the article Cross the Border Close the Gap (1971) as it combines with great

Introduction 3 sprezzatura (Castiglione s sprezzatura and Calvino s notion of leggerezza seem to have a lot in common) classic and academic culture with popular culture, literary and philosophical texts, science and the humanities, past and present history, written and visual images. These, we would agree, are the same characteristics that we find in the clever encyclopedic hyperfiction of Umberto Eco who began his Norton Lectures , Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (1994), by praising Calvino. Part of Calvino s overall success especially among academics is the result of his close attention to the literary climate of his time. This is most obvious in the short stories of Cosmicomics and T zero (the two collections are loaded with examples of allusions to semiotics, structuralism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis), and in If on a Winter s Night a Traveller (1979), where underneath the superficial detective-fiction we recognize both a parody and a clever demonstration of reader reception theories. The author s attention to literary and cultural issues is amply documented throughout his numerous essays from the Fifties to the writings that were to be delivered at Harvard in 1985 - the Norton Lectures . Calvino s rich production of essays collected in Una pietra sopra (1980; several of them have appeared in English in The Uses of Literature, 1986), Collezione di sabbia (1984), Perché leggere i classici (1991), and the more recent ones collected by Mario Barenghi, Mondo scritto e non scritto (2002), contain a goldmine of opinions on literature in relation to science, art, philosophy, humor, cinema, other writers, and on literature s potential to discuss different levels of reality. It should be added that in his essays Calvino is often quite generous in providing us with his private bookshelf that is, with a library of his favorite authors which in turn shed additional light on his fiction, on his narratological strategies, and on his views on contemporary literary theories. In Six Lessons for the Next Millenium (1988) Calvino refers back to his own works essays and fiction which well exemplify his skills as artisan and artist of narration. The author makes specific references to the novels of other writers (from Dante and Boccaccio, to Cervantes, Flaubert, Valery, Perec, and Gadda) as he examines a variety of narrative strategies. Each lecture: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity is a different but complimentary approach to the discussion on the art of writing and reading fiction. And just as important, the lessons are an excellent testimonial to his lifelong faith in the role of literature.

***** [The articles that follow, with the exception of Wladimir Krysinski s, Franco Gallippi s, Ruggero Pierantoni s and Slavica Gruji i s, are revised papers read at the international congress dedicated to Italo Calvino on the theme of

Rocco Capozzi 4

Lightness and Multiplicity/Leggerezza e Molteplicità held at the University of Toronto, 28-29 March 2002].

The special focus given to Cosmicomics (see the articles of Bartezzaghi, Capozzi and Chirumbolo) is in part due to the fact that originally I had asked some colleagues to write on the collection of short stories Cosmicomics (1965) and T zero (1967) in order to illustrate Calvino s notion of a novel as a vast net of relationships . However, as I began to mail the invitations to other colleagues I asked that the discussions should underline specific features of theories and practices of Calvino s poetics on fiction that the author himself had outlined in his own work both his essays and his fiction , for nearly four decades, culminating with the memos of the Norton Lectures (see the articles of Bernardini, Calvo, Habegger-Conti, and McLaughlin). I also invited two scholars who have worked extensively on Calvino s visual images (see Belpoliti and Ricci) asking them to discuss the notion of ekphrasis that accompanies the author s narrative from Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (1947) to Palomar (1983). My own interests in Cosmicomiche (1965) and T con zero (1967) influenced to some degree the direction of the meeting. For nearly thirty years I have been teaching the collection of short stories [republished by Garzanti in 1984 as Cosmicomiche vecchie e nuove and then by Mondadori in 1997 as Tutte le cosmicomiche] as a key work of Calvino in which the author s imagination, literary theories and narrative practice are brilliantly fused. Thirty years after their initial publication, I felt that it was time to re- examine, with hindsight and with the help of Calvino scholars, whether or not critics around the world had often chosen to illustrate the author s poetics on writing, language and narrative strategies by discussing mainly Invisible Cities (1972), The Castle of Crossed Destinies, If on a Winter s Night a Traveller, and Mr. Palomar and perhaps neglecting the role and importance of Cosmicomics especially in terms of their timely publication amidst the exciting theoretical debates involving psychoanalysis, linguistics, semiotics, structuralism, media and mass communication, and narratology. This had been the case not only in Italy but also in North America where Calvino had been labeled as Mr. Invisible Cities by writers and critics such as Gore Vidal and John Barth, who had praised the narrative skills, imagination and originality of the Italian author in a most unusual fiction that defied traditional definitions of a novel. Moreover as the popularity of structuralism increased throughout the Seventies so did the number of critics who used Invisible Cities and The Castle of Crossed Destinies as models for illustrating textual analyses based on structuralist and narratological theories. Also, especially in the Eighties, for many critics, If on a Winter s Night a Traveller became the chosen text to illustrate Calvino s art of intertextual postmodern

Introduction 5 fabulation. In Cosmicomics we find a plethora of allusions to narratological, semiological and structuralist notions that were at the center of literary theories of the Sixties and Seventies. Just as important, in the fantastic adventures of Qfwfq the author mixed in a most fascinating way classic and popular culture in a decade when the media and visual images had taken center stage in a variety of cultural debates. These stories are also excellent for investigating Calvino s views on a type of literature that combined philosophy and science as integral elements of fiction writing. As we recall, in Two interviews on Science and Literature and Philosophy and Literature (1967) he had spoken about a happy ménage à trois between philosophy, literature and science. The same year appeared one of his most important essays Cybernetics and Ghosts where he examines at great length the art and practices of ars combinatoria dating back from the writing of R. Lullo to the study of V. Propp on the morphology of fables, as he discusses literature as a machine , as a network of relationships, and as an open system. Speaking of science and literature, I am referring to a type of interdisciplinary literature that Calvino had admired in the work of Galileo and Leopardi (see Gallippi) and more recently in the writings of authors such as C. E. Gadda, , R. Queneau, and George Perec. In fact, Cosmicomics illustrates how Calvino had wanted to close the gap of the two cultures both in terms of C. P. Snow (the humanistic and the scientific) and Leslie Fiedler who in the Sixties had advocated in the USA a way of closing the gap between erudite and popular culture. Within the poetics of docere et delectare I feel that Cosmicomics shows us most clearly a Calvino who follows the tradition of Leonardo da Vinci as he combines artistic sensitivity and imagination with a strong (scientific) desire for knowledge. Indeed, it is not surprising that in Six Memos for the Next Millennium we find numerous instances where Calvino speaks about imagination and knowledge and in particular about literature as a search for knowledge ( Lightness , p. 26), fully convinced that: Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world (p. 9). We should also add that when he speaks of how Gadda s passion for knowledge carries the author from the objectivity of the world to his own irritated subjectivity ( Multiplicity , p. 108) it is easy to see that Calvino is also speaking of his own passion for knowledge that resides in the heart of his narrative. My dilemma in choosing a title for the convention was resolved by selecting two lessons from the Six Memos, Lightness and Multiplicity , which addressed most of the above issues and at the same time dealt with Calvino s own notions on language and writing (on écriture, in a Barthesian and Derridean sense) and on the verbal texture of narratives. Six Memos are

Rocco Capozzi 6 in fact also an excellent testimonial to his own art of writing which shows little love for mimetic modes of representation and great interest in narratives as instruments of cognition based on rationality, discursiveness, imagination, mental activities, literariness, intertextuality, and literary machines used for generating other literature. Consequently, we see in his work a move from socio-historical contexts to (meta)literary, existential, philosophical, and mythical contexts dominated by visual and verbal thinking or if we wish, illustrated by mental imagery of possible worlds. Lightness and multiplicity are terms that Calvino had used on several occasions in his articles (see in particular his introduction to Ovid s Metamorphoses). As Martin McLaughlin discusses in his article, lightness is not only a key element that characterizes Calvino s poetics, it is also a postmodern Zeitgeist . And in terms of postmodernism, throughout Six Memos we notice that for Calvino Multiplicity goes hand in hand with lightness, knowledge, ars combinatoria, intertextuality, hypertext, and hybrid and encyclopedic novels. As an example, here we need only to recall the author s words from Multiplicity : Knowledge as multiplicity is the thread that binds together the major works, both of what is called modernism and of what goes by the name of postmodern, a thread over and above all the labels attached to it that I hope will continue into the next millennium ( Multiplicity , p. 116). I also suggested to my colleagues that in the papers or during the round table there should be some discussions on why in the Seventies some Italian critics were somehow obsessed to determine whether or not Calvino, in the Sixties, had become too eclectic, too experimental, and too Parisian. Beginning with Cosmicomics, was Calvino in fact keeping in tune with the times or was he abandoning leftist notions of engagement, which were still popular in Italy, in order to embrace new literary trends popularized by the French group Tel Quel, and by the increasing number of strong supporters of Russian formalism and structuralism? This issue has re-emerged more recently as a result of a controversial study by one of Italy s leading new critics, Carla Benedetti, as she compares Calvino to Pasolini (Benedetti 1998; 2002). Calvino s experimentation with literariness and metafiction did increase after his French contacts during his Parisian sojourns in the Sixties (I am speaking of contacts with authors such as R. Barthes, A. Greimas, G. Genette, Robbe-Grillet, R. Queneau, G. Perec, and M. Serres). His attention to open systems related to literary structuralism and semiotics also increased as he became interested in the works of Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi- Strauss in conjunction with Barthes notion of explosive chains of signifiers. In Jakobson Calvino had found an excellent bridge between Russian formalism, Saussurean and Peircean semiotics and structural linguistics. Of

Introduction 7 course these were also the days when Calvino was examining the novels of great masters such as Borges, Stevenson, Nabokov, Barth and Pynchon. In short, this is an era when his already strong encyclopedic competence was expanding rapidly while the author was also becoming skeptical towards new literary theories claiming to have a stronghold on writing and reality. The best indication of Calvino s reluctance to embrace completely any specific theory is evident in some of his most quoted essays like Il mare dell oggettività; (The sea of objectivity) , La sfida al labirinto; The challenge to the labyrinth , Cibernetica e fantasmi ; (Cybernetics and Ghosts), and I livelli della realtà; The Levels of Reality in Literature (the last two appear in The Uses of Literature). In fact we notice his unwillingness to espouse new literary trends such as Letteratura e industria in Italy and l école du regard in France. Meanwhile his fundamental belief about the role of literature remains that of challenging the labyrinth (a familiar Borgesean metaphor of an imprisoning chaotic reality). This was in part the topic that I had chosen for my own paper in order to discuss how Calvino had consistently repeated starting in the mid 50s, that he had chosen to adopt an indirect approach in examining the so called new cultural and literary realities that surrounded him. He had declared on several occasions, that his interests now centered on a literature that could examine the different levels of reality and in using the literary text as a cognitive instrument rather than in writing in order to suggest solutions to specific socio-cultural problems. From the days of the composition of the trilogy Our Ancestors we can already see that he was choosing to exploit fantasy, metaliterary strategies, intertextuality, and other self-reflecting elements of writing rather than continuing to narrate through more traditional means of representations of reality. This also meant that he was interested in a type of metafiction that mirrored the very act of narration as a process of constructing and deconstructing possible worlds used in the examination of existential, social, cultural, and literary issues (see above all T. Pavel and L. Dole el on possible worlds ). In short, rather than approaching and confronting reality head on (and relying on techniques of mimesis) Calvino preferred constructing mental images of labyrinths, hell, prisons, and paradoxes (see especially the last four stories of T zero) that served as images and metaphors of contemporary reality. Consequently, in his narratives we find narrators who focus on the processes of perceiving and understanding socio-cultural and existential issues rather than on trying to solve them (see Grujicic s article on Calvino and Lotman). Furthermore, rather than narrating quests for truths in the tradition of the grand récit (F. Lyotard) Calvino chooses a type of cerebral fiction (or metafiction) characterized primarily by metaphysical, deductive, or phenomenological petit récit that we see illustrated especially in Invisible

Rocco Capozzi 8 cities, Cosmicomics and Palomar. And so, although it is true that his engagement had become less ideological, and certainly less political, his commitment as a writer on the other hand continued to be deeply rooted in his goal to examine observable patterns, systems, relationships, and the different levels of reality surrounding his protagonists. Calvino was well aware that the Italian novel, at the beginning of the century, had seen dramatic changes. Two great masters like Italo Svevo and Luigi Pirandello had not used their narratives for ideological and sociological purposes; instead, they had used them as vehicles for examining subjective, psychological, existential, and philosophical issues, which reflected the universal condition of modern man. But in Italy, in the mid and late Fifties, critics and writers were still debating aspects of realism versus neorealism, even as the new literary trend of Letteratura e industria (Literature and industry) affirmed itself, championed by new voices such as Luciano Bianciardi, Ottiero Ottieri, , and (see volumes IV and V of Il Menabò, directed by Calvino and Vittorini). The coup de grâce to these debates came in 1963 from the exponents (such as R. Barilli, A. Gugliemi, U. Eco, L. Malerba, G. Celati, A. Porta, and N. Balestrini) of the Gruppo 63 which opened up the scope and horizon of Italian literature to new interdisciplinary studies that were soon associated with the rising popularity of structuralism, semiotics, School of Frankfurt, neoavangarde, experimentalism, and the overall dominating role of mass media in the arts and in everyday life. It comes as no surprise then if in the early Sixties, for Calvino, not satisfied with the socio-political and cultural arena at home, Paris and New York became his favorite cities. They were in fact the arena of new ideas, exposures and contacts with writers such as R. Barthes, T. Todorov, J. Lotman, G. Perec, N. Frye, L. Fiedler, J. Barth, D. Bartheleme, and T. Pynchon, just to mention a few. Now his lifelong admiration for the works of Ariosto and Galileo could be combined for example with his interest in the writings of authors such as J. L. Borges, R. Queneau, M. Foucault, M. Blanchot, and A. Greimas. It is also quite natural if his own work would manifest some anxiety of influences of these voices without, however, being overpowered by them, as he pursued his own avenues of inventiveness in language, style and content. All of this is not really new if we consider that two decades earlier his friends and fellow writers Cesare Pavese and Elio Vittorini had directed their attention at American authors in order to instill new life into the Italian novel. Calvino s goals to dissolve the weight of reality through the lightness of language and the process of writing are already clear in the trilogy Our Ancestors (see Cannon s article). Again, we could even say that with The

Introduction 9

Cloven Viscount we have Calvino s beginning with his own postmodernism avant la lettre: rich with elements of parody, divertissement, visual images, pop culture, and metafictional strategies. Furthermore, speaking of distance and indirect approaches, in 1957, the year of the publication of The Baron in the Trees, in Cosimo s need to keep a distance from the activities on the ground, we recognize Calvino s sense of critical and aesthetic distance that he considered necessary in order to maintain the needed distance from certain realities linked for example to the invasion of Hungary, to Pasolini s and other leftist writers continued polemics on the death of realism, to socio- political implications of the intensification of industrialization in Italy, and to the call for a renewed engagement on the part of intellectuals. Six Memos for the Next Millennium confirm the image of a Calvino who was always open to worldwide cultural events but who, starting in the mid Fifties, refused to be weighed down by Italian socio-political issues. And so, just as Cosimo (Baron in the Trees), Amerigo (Giornata di uno scrutatore, 1963; trans. The Watcher, 1975), Qwfwq (Cosmicomics), or Mr. Palomar can be seen as alter egos of Calvino, as they reflect many of the author s personal views, in similar ways the author s essays provide us with a most valuable dispersed autobiography from the Fifties on. His fiction and his essays compliment one-another to the extent that they become an excellent testimonial to his unshaken faith in the role of literature which is best summarized in the opening remark of Six Memos: My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it . The posthumous Six Memos, as it was underlined repeatedly in the articles and round-table of our international conference, are a final testimonial of the author s love for literature. Lightness and Multiplicity , as well as the other memos, deal extensively with writing and narrating revealing a great deal of Calvino the writer, such as his preferences for short narratives, for encyclopedic authors, and for cognitive processes. Just as important, throughout the Norton Lectures we find again some of the names of Calvino s favorite authors in connection to his love for a literature that is essentially a possible world constructed by the intellect and as a instrument for putting mental order on a chaotic reality. ROCCO CAPOZZI Toronto, 2004 ______

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barth, John. The Literature of Exhaustion and The Literature of Replenishment , in The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction, New York: Putnam, 1984.

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Benedetti, Carla. Pasolini contro Calvino, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1998. _____. Il tradimento dei critici, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002. Calvino, Italo. Una pietra sopra, Turin: Einaudi, 1980. _____. Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. _____. Collezione di sabbia, Milan: Garzanti, 1984. _____. The Uses of Literature, trans. Patrick Creagh, San Diego-New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. _____. Why Read the Classics ? New York: Pantheon Books, 1999. _____. Mondo scritto e mondo non scritto, ed. Mario Barenghi, Milan: Mondadori, 2002. Corti, Maria. Intervista a Italo Calvino , Autografo (October 1985), pp. 47-53. Dole el, Lubomir. Heterocosmica. Fiction and Possible Worlds, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Eco, Umberto. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994. Fiedler, Leslie. Cross the Border Close the Gap , in The Collected Essays, New York: Stein and Day, 1971. Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978. Pavel, Thomas. Fictional Worlds, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands, London: Granta Books, 1991. Vidal, Gore. Fabulous Calvino , New York Review of Books (30 May 1974), pp. 13- 21.