2023-10-12 21:50:53
by DANIELE PICCINI
One hundred years ago one of the masters of the literary twentieth century was born: from Friday 13 October the essay by Mario Barenghi dedicated to him will be on sale for a month with the newspaper
Strange fate that of Italo Calvino, narrator, intellectual, publishing man. It’s a strange story about his fortune. This is how an expert like Mario Barenghi summarizes the graph, between oscillations and surges, whose volume Italo Calvino has been on newsstands together with the «Corriere della Sera» since Friday 13 October. The lines and the margins, one hundred years after the birth of the writer (Cuba, 1923 – Siena, 1985): «More or less, for about three decades, starting from the dazzling debut of the Path of the Spider’s Nest, Calvino was considered one brilliant but atypical, if not even marginal, writer: an excellent and talented narrator, but not very representative of the values and trends of the national literary panorama. Then, in a rather short space of time – roughly, between If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979) and the posthumous American Lessons (1988) – it was promoted to a great classic of late twentieth-century fiction”. It is at that point, continues Barenghi, that Calvino became, as an absolute dominator and almost Sole Writer for the school, a polemical target on the part of those who oppose him with this or that of his contemporary authors, perhaps classicized earlier than him. and then ended up in a sort of cone of shadow.
They are the intermittences and fluctuations of the Canon: those which fascinate sociologists of literature and which also make the simple reader, moved by pure passion, reflect a little. Calvino was someone who put his hands deeply into the workshop of telling, in the laboratory of narration. At the beginning, just after the war and the Resistance, he mixed an almost oral language and orchestrated a story that adopts, with decisive consequences, the perspective of a child, lost in history and in the world of adults. It is precisely the brilliant success of The Path of the Spider’s Nest (1947), starring little Pin. Returning, many years later, to that world, Calvino explained its genesis and meaning in a famous preface, dated 1964. The stories, says Calvino, were on everyone’s lips in the immediate post-war period, a crowd of oral tales offered to the writer, who took possession of them, mixed them with his own, reworked them. It was a kind of “desire to tell”, to which the writer added his own taste for narration and his own craft. «It was Pavese», notes Calvino in the 1964 preface, «the first to speak in a fairy-tale tone about me, and I, who until then hadn’t realized it, from that moment on knew it all too well, and I tried to confirm the definition.”
Following Pavese’s intuition, Calvino had meanwhile immersed himself in the sea of fairy tales of our tradition, with the collection edited in 1956 (Italian fairy tales). In the very dense introduction to the volume the collector-narrator said at a certain point: “I believe this: fairy tales are true.” Then he talked about the “catalogue of destinies” and again about the “infinite possibility of metamorphosis of what exists”.
We are already close to a particular experience: that of an operator who combines and weaves together stories, inviting the Reader to get lost in the meanders of the Book, perhaps winking at semiology and structuralism. It will then be necessary to quote – from an essayist Calvino who is always to be taken into consideration, as well as the epistolographer, in dialogue with colleagues, friends, even thorny interlocutors (for example the Fortini mentioned by Barenghi) – a famous writing, entitled Cybernetics and ghosts ( Notes on narrative as a combinatorial process), dating back to 1967. Impressive today for certain anticipations on artificial intelligence, on narration entrusted to machines, it is also full of indications on an evolving poetics: the one that will lead to The Castle of Crossed Destinies and If a traveler on a winter’s night. For example, it is said: «Let’s see what my psychological reaction is when I learn that writing is just a combinatorial process between given elements: well, what I instinctively feel is a sense of relief, of security». He is Calvino, a reader and admirer of Borges, a master in fact cited in the American Lessons. In the last of them, praise is given to the multiplicity of fictional worlds, which perhaps are the revelation of an unsuspected depth of ours: «Every life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a sample of styles, where everything can be continually mixed up and reordered in all possible ways.”
A thin thread of continuity and development is stretched between the beginnings of the Spider’s Nest Path and this author-combinator of stories. Yet, if I had to cite one title, just one Calvinian title, I would think of the long story The Cloud of Smog (1958), where an “I”, a Subject, is clearly in evidence, placed in front of the cloud of grayness that looms over his life of being common, anonymous, and faced with the chameleonism of a power that presents itself as a medicine for the evils that it itself generates. It is perhaps the first thing I read by Calvino, fixed in his memory: «There are those who condemn themselves to the grayness of the most mediocre life because they have had pain, misfortune; but there are also those who do it because they have had more luck than they felt they could handle.”
October 12, 2023 (modified October 12, 2023 | 9.49pm)
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