Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino (Santiago de Las Vegas, Havana Province, October 15, 1923 - Siena, September 19, 1985) was an Italian journalist and writer, mainly short stories and novels. His best-known works include the trilogy Our Ancestors (1952–1959), the short story collection Las cosmicómicas (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If a traveler on a winter night (1979).

Admired in Britain, Australia and the United States, he was the most translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death.

Biography

Italo Calvino being interviewed in 1958.

Origins

Italo Calvino was born in Santiago de las Vegas, a suburb of Havana, Cuba, in 1923. His father, Mario, was an agronomist and tropical botanist who also taught agriculture and floriculture. Born 47 years earlier in San Remo, Italy, Mario Calvino had emigrated to Mexico in 1909, where he held an important position in the Ministry of Agriculture. In an autobiographical essay, Italo Calvino explained that his father "had been in his youth an anarchist, a follower of Kropotkin, and later a socialist reformer." In 1917, Mario went to Cuba to conduct scientific experiments, after living through the Mexican Revolution.

Calvino's mother, Giuliana Luigia Evelina "Eva" Mameli, a botanist and university professor, originally from Sácer in Sardinia and 11 years younger than her husband, she married while she was still a professor at the University of Pavia. Born into a secular family, Eva was a pacifist educated in the "religion of civic duty and science." Eva gave Calvino his unusual first name to remind him of his Italian heritage, though he ended up growing up after all. in Italy, Calvino thought his name sounded "belligerently nationalistic". Calvino described his parents as "very different in personality from each other", suggesting perhaps deeper tensions behind a comfortable, if strict, middle-class upbringing devoid of conflict. When he was a teenager, he found it difficult to relate to poverty and the working class, and he was "uncomfortable"; with his parents opening up to the workers who entered his father's studio on Saturdays to receive their weekly paycheck.

Early years and education

During his childhood, he received a secular and anti-fascist education, in accordance with the attitude of his parents, who proclaimed themselves freethinkers. He attended St. George College Infant School. Later, during elementary school, at Scuole Valdesi, and did secondary school at the Ginnasio-Liceo G.D. Cassini. In 1941, he enrolled in the agronomy faculty of the University of Turin, where his father taught tropical agriculture.

World War II

Shortly after, World War II broke out and he interrupted his studies. In 1943, he was called up for military service by the Italian Social Republic. He deserted and joined the Garibaldi Partisan Brigades along with his brother, while his parents were held hostage by the Germans.

Once the war was over, he moved to Turin, where he contributed to a few newspapers, enrolled in Literature (he would graduate with a thesis on Joseph Conrad) and joined the Italian Communist Party (PCI). It was during this period of his life that he came into contact with Cesare Pavese, who got him hired by the Einaudi publishing house, where Elio Vittorini was already working.

The publishing house environment was fundamental in Calvino's cultural formation. Already in 1947 he published his first novel: Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno , based on his experiences as a partisan. And in 1949, a volume of short stories: Último viene il corvo. The two works were written within the aesthetics of Italian neorealism, despite the fact that the first has a fable-like tone. From this period, and also with a neorealist and worker theme, with visible influences from Pavese, is an unfinished novel that should have been titled I giovani del Po. Calvino was then looking for an objective writing and tried to define the condition of the man of our time.

In 1952, following Vittorini's advice, he abandoned social-realistic and picaresque literature to dedicate himself to a kind of fantastic narrative that could be read on different interpretive levels. This is the trilogy called I nostri antenati (Our Ancestors), an allegorical representation of contemporary man. Three novels are part of it: The mediated viscount, The rampant baron and The non-existent gentleman. The second, the most famous, is the result of the ideological disappointment of the author who, after the Invasion of Hungary by the USSR (1956), had abandoned the PCI and set aside political commitment.

Apart from this, during the early sixties, Calvino published two articles (Il mare dell'oggetività and La sfida al labirinto) in which he enunciated a ethical-cognitive poetics that tried to define the situation of contemporary man within a world that was increasingly complex and difficult to decipher. Thus, he came into contact with a rising current of neo-avant-garde, in whose poetics Calvino saw a deepening of the reasons for technology and industry.

In 1963 he published La giornata d'uno scrutatore, a book that somehow appeared out of place and at the wrong time. While the so-called Gruppo 63 proposed disruptive texts, Calvino published a text that was the complete opposite of the neo-avant-garde ideals of that group: a sociological, psychological and ideological novel.

That year he published Marcovaldo, ovvero le stagioni in città, a compilation of modern fables in which the contrast between nature and progress is evident.

In 1964, he made a trip to Cuba that allowed him to visit the house where he had lived with his parents and hold various meetings, one of which was with Ernesto Che Guevara. On February 19, in Havana, he married the Argentine Esther Judit Singer, Chichita. Together they went to live in Rome, where a year later their daughter Giovanna will be born. The Italian cultural atmosphere had changed a lot. The neo-avant-garde had consolidated its positions of prestige and structuralism and semiotics had become the social sciences to which everyone referred. From these years are Le Cosmicomiche (1965), a compilation of apparently science fiction stories that are actually based on a fantastic and surreal current. And Ti con zero (Tiempo cero) from 1967 that shares many of those characteristics.

In 1967 he moved to Paris, increased his interest in natural sciences and sociology and came into contact with the Oulipo group. Il castello dei destini incrociati (1969), La taverna dei destini incrociati (1973), Le città invisibili (1972) and Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore (1979), the works that belong to his so-called combinatory period, are a sample of how these contacts influenced Italo Calvino. The construction method of these works is based on the use of different combinations of a certain number of elements (such as the tarot figures in Il castello...), which give rise to innumerable potential events..

In 1980 he returned to Rome with his family. In 1983 she published Palomar , in which the anecdote is reduced to the maximum, in favor of metaphysical reflections and descriptions.

Calvino suffered a stroke on September 6, 1985, in Roccamare in Castiglione della Pescaia where he spent his vacations. He was working on a series of lectures that he was to give at Harvard University (and which would be published under the title Lezioni americane , or in Spanish Six proposals for the next millennium ). He was taken to the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala, where he died two weeks later, on the night of September 18-19.

Poetics

The experience of neorealism

Neorealism, more than a school, was a way of feeling common to young writers who, after World War II, felt they were depositaries of a new social reality. It was in this intellectual climate that Italo Calvino conceived a short novel Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno and a certain number of short stories that would appear grouped under the title Ultimo viene il corvo. The two books reveal a writer with a singular capacity to represent reality, combining political commitment and literature in a spontaneous and light way. According to the writer himself, after the war he had tried to tell his partisan experience in the first person, but without satisfactory results. When, instead, he started writing stories that didn't affect him personally and adopted an objective point of view, he got a job that fit his purpose. The memories of him as a teenager and the partisan fights became opportunities to learn about the world: each gesture tries to reveal its meaning.

In Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, the adoption of the point of view of Pin —the adolescent protagonist of the narrative— makes possible the fabulous and fantastic character of the book. Through this technique the writer can describe reality as if it were a dream but without making it lose consistency. He also allows her to write a novel about the resistance without falling into excessive rhetoric.

With this book, Calvino initiates a way of working that will become one of his intrinsic characteristics: the simplification of the narrative form in such a way that the entire work becomes something readable by different types of readers, even by non-readers. too attentive.^{[citation needed]}

The Fantastic Period

Calvino had always been drawn to popular literature, especially the world of fables.^{[citation needed]}

I nostri antenati: With Il visconte dimezzato he goes a little further on his path of fantastic invention. Now it is completely installed within the field of the fable and the fabulation. If this allows a first reading that is somewhat superficial, but pleasant, the novel also has another, more allegorical and symbolic reading, this one loaded with historical and political, public and private meanings (demediation as division between ethics and ideology, between political blocks and as a division between illusion and reality). The conclusion of the novel would therefore be an invitation to moderation and balance, since no one is the custodian of the absolute truth.

Many of these features are also found in the other two novels that complete the trilogy. The protagonist of Il barone rampante (The rampant baron) is the alter ego of the author who has just left the Communist Party and the idea of literature as a political message. Man, in his understanding, has to disassociate himself from ideological and political conditioning, preconceived ideas and intellectual impositions. The novel, set in 18th century Italy, is at the same time an illustrated vindication of reality.

In Il cavaliere inesistente (The Non-Existent Knight) this faith in reality, however, has entered into crisis. The reality seems somewhat irrational. And Calvino's pessimism deepens.

Apart from the allegorical and symbolic production, Calvino also produces a narrative that has as its object, despite maintaining the contamination coming from the world of the fabulous and often from the absurd, the contemporary reality of the author. He reexamines society and the place that the intellectual (to whom he denies real possibilities of intervention) occupies in it. This ideological narrative-literature dualism is not only found in Calvino. It is equally present in other Italian authors of the time. An example of this is Elio Vittorini. However, Calvino resolves the dilemma by accepting a literature in which only an attentive reader is capable of perceiving more than one reading level. Vittorini, on the other hand, will not be able to resolve this contradiction and will end up not accepting a non-ideological literature and will renounce writing (1956).

Apart from the trilogy, two more books also belong to this period: Marcovaldo and La giornata d'uno scrutatore

Marcovaldo ovvero Le stagioni in città is divided into two series published on two different dates (1958 and 1963), which allows us to appreciate the evolution of the author. The first series is closer to the realm of the fable, while the second deals with the same themes—the themes of urban society—but taking them, instead, ironically towards the absurd. In a certain way, it can also be said that the central character of Marcovaldo prefigures that of Palomar and his peculiar gaze on reality.

In 1963 Calvino ended a phase of his literary production that coincided, albeit approximately, with the 1950s. His farewell this decade is La giornata d'uno scrutatore. A communist militant acts as electoral controller (scrutatore) of the Italian Communist Party in a mental hospital. This fact will make him enter into a crisis when he is faced with irrationality. According to the author himself, the topics covered in the book, unhappiness, pain or the responsibility of procreation, had never dared to touch them until then. La giornata will also suppose a kind of relationship of his own ideological journey.

Then comes Sfida al labirinto (dell'esistenza) where Calvino takes a position on the debate on the place to be occupied by the intellectual who, according to him, has to identify ethical and cognitive theoretical models that can allow us to understand, even partially, the chaos of reality and thus give meaning to our existence.

However, two books, in which the influence of different sciences can be appreciated, Le cosmicomiche and Ti con zero (Tiempo cero) will open a new phase of science fiction. In truth, however, we are not looking at science fiction books. What Calvino does is reflect a peculiar projection of his human and social analysis. In fact, in the last stories of Ti con zero, the protagonists are no longer the same as in the rest of the book or in Le cosmicomiche, so to speak, They are no longer so science-fiction, but are normal people looking for a scientific solution to their problems. Calvino wonders to what extent reason and science can modify man's concrete relationship with the world. The existential search, even if frustrated, will never be interrupted.

The combinatorial period

In the 1960s, Calvino signed up for a new way of writing literature, understood now as artifice, now as a combinatory game. In his understanding, the structure of the narrative must be made visible to the reader and thus increase their complicity. It is at this time when Calvino approaches a kind of writing that could be defined as combinatory because the same mechanism that allows writing assumes a central role within the work. Calvino, in fact, has become convinced that the linguistic universe has supplanted reality and conceives of the novel as a mechanism that plays with the possible combinations of words. Despite the fact that this aspect can be considered the closest to the neo-avant-garde, Calvino distances himself from it both for his style and his language, both of which are extremely understandable.^{[citation needed ]}

This new conception of Calvino is the result of numerous influences: structuralism and semiology, the lessons given by Roland Barthes on the ars combinatoria, the approach to Oulipo by Raymond Queneau, the labyrinthine writing of Jorge Luis Borges, as well as a rereading of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne whom he will define as the father of all the avant-garde novels of our century.

The crystallization of this new conception of literature will be Il Castello dei destini incrociati (1969) to which La Taverna dei destini incrociati will be added in 1973 and where the narrative journey it is entrusted to the combination of tarot cards. A group of travelers find themselves in a castle. Each of them will have an adventure to tell but they can't because they have lost their voice. To communicate, therefore, they use tarot cards and thus reconstruct, thanks to the cards, the events that have happened to them. In this book, Calvino uses the tarot cards as a system of signals, as a true language of his own. Each printed figure depends on the context in which it is pronounced. Calvino's attempt is to remove the mask from the mechanisms that are at the base of all narratives. The novel, then, goes beyond itself, since it is a reflection on its own nature and configuration.

This combinatorial game also occupies a central place in his next book, Le città invisibili (1972) (Invisible Cities), a kind of rewriting of the Book of Wonders by Marco Polo, in which it is the Venetian who describes to Kublai Khan the cities of his empire. These cities, however, do not exist anywhere other than in Marco Polo's imagination, they live nothing more than within his words. Therefore, for Calvino, the narration can create worlds, but it cannot destroy the "hell of the living" that is around us and to combat it, as the novel's conclusion suggests, one can do nothing but is to give value to what is not hell.

In The Invisible Cities the exhibition of the combinatorial mechanisms of the narration is even more explicit than in El Castillo..., it is even in the very structure of the novel, segmented into short texts that follow one another within a framework structure.

The cities..., in fact, is made up of nine chapters, each one inside a frame in italics in which the dialogue between the emperor of the tartars, Kublai Khan, and Marco Polo. Within the chapters the description of fifty cities is narrated, according to some thematic nuclei. This complex architectural construction is undoubtedly aimed at the reader's reflection on the compositional modalities of the work. In this sense, Las ciudades invisibles is a strongly metatextual novel, since it leads to the production of reflections on itself and on the functioning of the narrative in general.

However, Calvino's most metanarrative work is surely Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore (1979). In this novel, more than in any other, Calvino lays bare the mechanisms of narration, triggering a reflection on the practice of writing and on the relationship between the writer and the reader. The book is made up of ten chapters inserted in a frame: in truth the chapters are ten incipit of as many novels. In the framework, however, the story between the Reader and Ludmilla, the Reader, is told, a traditional adventure that does not lack a happy ending. The narrative begins with the Reader going to buy a copy of Calvino's novel Se una notte d'inverno... but after a few pages he discovers that the book is defective, it is composed of stories all the same. He then returns to the bookstore and there he finds Ludmilla (to whom the same thing has happened). Thus begins a story composed only with beginnings of novels. Every time Ludmilla and the Reader immerse themselves in a novel that they are passionate about, the narrative is interrupted for the most diverse reasons. In the end, the Reader will not be able to complete the reading of the novels, but he will marry the Reader to whom, in bed, before turning off the light, he will say that he is finishing reading Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore by Italo Calvino. The ten principles of which the book is composed each correspond to a different type of narrative. With this exercise in style in the manner of Queneau, Calvino exemplifies the models and styles of the modern novel (from the neo-avant-garde to the neo-realist, from the existential to the fantastic and surreal). At the base of the narrative is embedded the scheme of the Thousand and One Nights, within which Calvino places the suggestions and requests from the contemporary novel.

Se una notte d'inverno... is essentially a game in which Calvino, almost provocatively, shows off his tricks as a storyteller. But it is a serious game, almost dramatic, because it wants to show the impossibility of getting to know reality. The novel had considerable success, both in Italy and in other countries, especially in the United States, where it was immediately read as an example of postmodern literature.

Bibliography