Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T01:46:02.922Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Narrative Discourse in Calvino: Praxis or Poiesis?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Teresa De Lauretis
Teresa De Lauretis*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Contrary to the view of Calvino as a writer divided between sociopolitical concern and escape into fantasy, his works point to an unambiguous poetics in which this apparent dichotomy is in fact a dialectic process. His stylistic and narrative experimentations, from the “neorealist” mode to allegorical and mathematical fictions, and to self-reflexive narrative, disclose a precise ideological intent: to propose ever-changing models of reality, to question each form as it is produced, to explode every narrative system so a new one may be created. By means of lexical and syntactical deformation, of shifts from one semantic code to another, of ironic metalinguistic references, and by the use of special subcodes (e.g., the comic strip), Calvino breaks down the conventional barrier separating high literature from popular culture, opens to question the whole of literary tradition, and exposes the paradoxical nature of writing (écriture) in the dialectics of signification.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 90 , Issue 3 , May 1975 , pp. 414 - 425
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1975

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 “Un'altra cognizione” in Conversazione in Sicilia (Torino: Einaudi, 1966), p. 27, trans, with the title In Sicily, in Elio Vittorini, The Twilight of the Elephant and Other Novels (New York: New Directions, 1973).

2 A recent article by Gore Vidal, “Fabulous Calvino,” The New York Review of Books, 30 May 1974, pp. 13–21, provides an excellent introduction to Calvino and reviews all of his works translated into English, including the very recent Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, 1974). The other works available in American editions are:

The Path to the Nest of Spiders, trans. Archibald Colqu-houn (Boston: Beacon, 1957) from Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (1947).

The Baron in the Trees, trans. Archibald Colquhoun (New York: Random, 1959) from Il barone rampante (1957).

The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount, trans. Archibald Colquhoun (New York: Random, 1962) from Il cavaliere inesistente (1959) and Il visconte dimezzato (1951).

Cosmicomics, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, 1968) from Le cosmicomiche (1965).

t zero, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, 1969) from 77 con zero (1967). Also published in England as Time and the Hunter.

The Watcher and Other Stories (New York: Harcourt, 1971) from La giornata di uno scrutatore (1963), La nuvola di smog (1958), and La formica argentina (1952).

All of Calvino's works were originally published by Einaudi (Torino).

3 By Roland Barthes in “Introduction à l'analyse structurale des récits,” Communications, 8 (1966), 1–27. The whole issue is devoted to narrative structures, and contains seminal studies by Bremond, Eco, Genette, Greimas, and Todorov. Synthesizing the various contributions in the issue, Barthes proposes that the structural analysis of narrative may be conducted, like linguistic analysis, by (a) a description of 3 distinct levels (découpage), and (b) the integration of the 3 levels into each other to place in evidence the modes of their interrelatedness (agencement). The 3 narrative levels, which coexist in the work, are described in the analysis in a “hierarchical” or “vertical” perspective: “The levels are operations. … To comprehend a narrative is not only to follow the unfolding of the story, but also … to project the horizontal links of the narrative thread on an axis implicitly vertical; to read (hear) a narrative is not only to pass from one word to another, it is also to pass from one level to the other… . The meaning is not located at the end of the narrative, it transverses it” (pp. 5–6, my translation). The levels identified by Barthes are (1) the level of functions, i.e., the functional sequence of events whose unit is the function as defined by Propp (“an act of the character, defined from the point of view of its significance for the course of the action”); (2) the level of actions, constituted by the activities of what Greimas calls “actants,” i.e., abstract narrative roles or spheres of action which become embodied in specific characters (“actors”) in each text; (3) the level of narration, or discourse, i.e., the manner in which the story is told, including organization of the events, narrative point of view, imagery, causal, temporal, and spatial order, and so on. For a more lengthy definition of discourse, see Tzvetan Todorov, “Poétique” in Qu'est-ce que le structuralisme?, ed. François Wahl (Paris: Seuil, 1968), pp. 99–166. Greimas' study (Sémantique structurale, Paris: Larousse, 1966) of Propp's functional sequence from a synchronic semantic angle also appeared in the same year as Barthes's study.

4 Propp's other basic work, which he wrote in 1946 after the Morphology, and which has not yet been translated into English, was translated into Italian as Le radici storiche del racconti di fate (Torino: Einaudi, 1949). A diachronic, Marxist study tracing the roots or genesis of fairy tales to the initiation rites of preclan societies, this work had immediate and lasting success in Italy and was certainly known to Calvino even before he undertook the task of collecting the Fiabe italiane (1956).

5 I am using Greimas' terminology as defined in Sémantique structurale, pp. 172–91, where he presents and discusses an actantial model for all mythical manifestations, based on the syntactic structure of natural languages. The equivalent Proppian terms here would be Hero-Villain and Hero-Princess (or Sought-for-Person), i.e., Hero-Rival and Hero-Loved Woman. In a text, the “actors” or characters embodying the actantial roles are defined by their contextual relations to each other and to the action of the narrative. One is thus able to identify specific actantial patterns in each text or in groups of texts that may or may not correspond to genres or subgenres. As regards the folktale, Propp was able to show a constant actantial pattern operating in all the tales of his chosen corpus.

6 See René Girard's study of triangular desire, based on the Hegelian master-slave relation, in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965).

7 The definitely allegorical nature of the characters of this novel has prompted many exegeses. An interesting one is Antonietta Dosi's “Italo Calvino tra realtà e fantasia,” Silarus, 6 (1971), 8–21. She sees the bodiless knight Agilulfo as the abstract rationality of technological civilization, as opposed to Gurdulú (his squire) who embodies instincts, the Id, at a stage anterior to the development of the Ego. Both are devoid of consciousness. The knights Rambaldo and Torrismondo are also opposed to each other as the respective embodiments of praxis, or the active experience of history, versus absolute morality existing a priori and regardless of experience. Their love Objects are unattainable, as each follows or seeks a woman who loves the man embodying the opposite qualities.

8 In his introduction to Fiabe italiane, collected and transcribed by himself from all the regions and dialects of Italy, Calvino states his view that folktales, like myths, are the collective representation of a system of values attributed to the world by a community, an interpretative model of reality. Both mythmaking and narrative are thus cognitive processes of meaning attribution on the part of the teller/writer and of the listener/reader. A very similar view is of course held by Lévi-Strauss in relation to mythology. In particular, see “The Effectiveness of Symbols,” in Structural Anthropology (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1967).

9 The distinction between semantic level and semiotic level is clearly outlined by Greimas in “Narrative Grammar: Units and Levels,” Modern Language Notes, 86 (1971), 793–806. Studying the relation between linguistic structures and narrative structures, Greimas proposes the notion of a generative narrative grammar: “The existence of different levels of depth in which signification is articulated is no longer a problem since the Freudian distinction between the manifest and latent levels of signification… . Between the manifest text of a narrative, which only hides its signification, and the deep structure of the myth … we had to insert the narrative structures described by Propp. We therefore decided to give to the structure evolved by Lévi-Strauss the status of deep narrative structure, capable, in the process of syntagmatization, of generating a surface narrative structure corresponding roughly to the syntagmatic chain of Propp” (p. 796). Greimas' distinction of 2 narrative levels does not contradict, but rather simplifies, the first formulation of narrative levels proposed by Barthes in “Introduction à l'analyse structurale des récits” (see n. 3 above). One of the very few examples of structural analysis of a full-length narrative text is Gérard Genot, Analyse structurelle de “Pinocchio” (Pescia: Quaderni della Fonda-zione Nazionale “Carlo Collodi,” No. 5, 1970).

10 Todorov, “Poétique.” Another very useful description of the narrative levels is suggested by Paul Ricceur's distinction between what he calls “sémantique du désir” and “syntaxe de la distortion” in his “Psychanalyse et culture,” in Critique sociologique et critique psychanalytique, Editions de l'Institut de Sociologie (Bruxelles: Université Libre de Bruxelles, 1970), pp. 179–91.

11 As well noted by D. S. Carne-Ross, “Writing between the Lines,” Delos, 3 (1969), 198–207.

12 The term “estrangement” only roughly renders the Russian word ostranenie, used by the Russian Formalists and synonymous with the German Verfremdung. Fredric Jameson translates it as “defamiliarization” in his The Prison-House of Language (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 50–58.

13 See Donald Heiney, “Calvino and Borges: Some Implications of Fantasy,” Mundus Artium, 2 (1968), 71–72.

14 This latter device was previously used by Elio Vittorini in Uomini e no (1945), a novel that, like its author, had a deep and long-lasting influence on all postwar Italian fiction.

15 In colloquial Italian “Zulu” is used to denote ill-mannered, unsophisticated, “uncivilized” persons.

16 My italics. William Weaver's translation unfortunately does not reproduce the significant difference in sound (an obvious phonemic opposition) between female and male emission: “So then, one of them, shlup shlup shlup, emitted her eggs, and I, shlup shlup shlup, fertilized them” (p. 144).

17 Preface to Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (1964), p. 11. My translation.

18 Introd. to Marcovaldo ovvero le stagioni in città (1966), p. 5.

19 Again, the translation, “I'll show you, Qfwfq, you pig!” (p. 67), does not necessarily convey this connotation.

20 Mainly Marxists and phenomenologists. In fact, I would submit that Calvino's creative work is so far the most successful attempt to integrate Marxism, structuralism, and existential phenomenology.

21 Preface to Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (1964), pp. 15–16. My translation. Calvino's other major critical essays are published in Paragone (1955) and Il menabò di letteratura (1960, 1962, 1964), a highly influential literary journal which he coedited with Elio Vittorini from 1959 to 1965. He has also masterfully translated Raymond Queneau's Les Fleurs bleus (I fiori blu, 1967), and edited for the publisher Einaudi an Italian translation of the works of Charles Fourier (1971).

22 “Linguistics and Poetics” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1966), pp. 350–77.

23 Cosmicomics, p. 21. See also the tentative conversation between Qfwfq and Ayl in “Without Colors,” Cosmicomics, pp. 53–54.

24 As Benvenuto Terracini first saw in his review of Cosmicomiche in Archivio glottologico italiano, 51 (1966), 94–97.

25 The self-disintegration of writing (écriture) is almost always present in Calvino. Cf. the close of Marcovaldo where self-destruction at the thematic level (a rich child who has everything receives a hammer and a box of matches for Christmas, and destroys his millionaire parents' house) is paralleled by the self-conscious disintegration of writing which yields to a visual cartoonlike description, and finally to the mere and mute presence of the blank page (absence of writing). The process of creative writing and the relation between signifiers and signifieds, or between linguistic and visual signs, are also conspicuous in the metanarrative segments of The Nonexistent Knight.

26 The game of tarot (from the Italian tarocco) is generally believed to have originated in Italy in the 14th century (when the Decameron was written, by the way). The tarot cards are supposed to have been carried into Europe by gypsies who used them for fortune-telling and divinatory purposes. The deck consists of 78 cards, of which 22 are symbolic figures (Major Arcana, or greater trumps) and the remaining 56 (minor arcana) are divided into 4 suits corresponding to the modern hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs. The tarot deck is the prototype of both the modern poker deck and the regional Italian playing cards which still retain the original suit names (cups, coins, swords, clubs) but not the Major Arcana. The card game has been used before as a set of relations sustaining the action of a narrative, e.g., by Lewis Carroll in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; and the magic or mystical symbolism of the tarot has been utilized, for instance, by Charles Williams, The Greater Trumps (1950). Calvino combines the pictorial, representational, and symbolic value of the tarot deck with its characteristic of being a system capable of generating many different games (or interpretations as in the divinatory process). As Maria Corti points out in “Le Jeu comme génération du texte: Des tarots au récit” (Semiotica, 7,1973, 33–48), the tarot functions as a type of generative grammar.

27 As an example of langue, and in order to illustrate the concept of synchrony of a system, Saussure mentions the game of chess whose rules are internally coherent and independent of the figurative style of the pieces, as well as of the genesis and history of the game (diachrony)—see Cours de linguistique générale (1915; rpt. Paris: Payot, 1969), pp. 43, 125–27. Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass is a text where the chess code is used to narrate Alice's second travel to Wonderland. Written in 1896, before the development of linguistic science, Carroll's work is an excellent ground for comparison with Calvino's book. It shows both Carroll's own extreme modernity in his awareness of the nature of language, and the different perspective and greater complexity brought to the problem by semiotic theory. Whereas the chess game provides Carroll with one action and one set of characters for one story, the tarot system is used by Calvino as a combinatoire, a story-generating mechanism: a perfect analogue of the langue, the tarot is a semiotic system capable of generating all narrative actions and containing all possibilities of actantial distribution for all possible narratives. Thus the internal rules (the structure) of the chess and tarot games are coextensive with the rules governing all symbolic representation.

28 In fact, as stated in a Note appended to the book, Calvino had originally planned to repeat the process 3 times, perhaps using the comic strip as a contemporary equivalent of the tarot to represent the “collective unconscious.” He had planned to entitle the third set “II motel dei destini incrociati.” But, he concludes, “my theoretical and expressive interest for this type of experiment has exhausted itself. It is time to pass on to other things” (p. 128; my translation).

29 Le Cru et le cuit (Paris: Pion, 1964), p. 24.