Narrative Discourse in Calvino: Praxis or Poiesis?Author(s): Teresa de LauretisSource: PMLA, Vol. 90, No. 3 (May, 1975), pp. 414-425Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/461628 .Accessed: 13/04/2011 10:44

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TERESA DE LAURETIS

Narrative Discourse in Calvino: Praxis or Poiesis?

SINCE THE publication of his first novel, II senztiero dei nidi di ragno (The Path to the Nest of Spiders), in 1947, Italo Calvino has

been a very visible participant in the Italian cul- tural and literary scene. The early years of his critical and creative production were spent in the most active and stimulating literary milieu of post- war Italy, the Einaudi Publishing Company in Turin, around which gravitated people such as Cesare Pavese, Natalia and Leone Ginzburg, Elio Vittorini, in short, some of "the best minds of our generation." Calvino had joined the partisans of the Italian Resistance in 1943 at the age of twenty, and the Communist Party in 1945 (to leave it in 1958). The Resistance came to be for Calvino, as for Pavese and Vittorini, more than a single political action. It meant the total renewal of a cultural tradition that had worn itself out and helplessly flown into Fascism. It represented what Vittorini called "another cognition,"'1 the opening up of a stifling provincial culture to influence from the great world outside (the myth of America, Hemingway, Melville, and of Russia, the people's revolution, Marxist praxis). At the same time, the Resistance created a new national heritage, the basis of different values, myths, memories, and aspirations for the people of Italy. Yet, the real task of Calvino was to recuperate and integrate with the new culture a great literary and popular tradition dating back to the Middle Ages-a task all the more difficult since it carried the danger of being misunderstood by both sides of the political barricade.

As many critics have accusingly asked, how can a Marxist writer pursue the fantasies of Ariosto, the paladins of Charlemagne, the fable of Beauty and the Beast, the poetics of dolce stil novo and the age of courtly love, the mercantile world of Boc- caccio, and the tragedy of Macbeth? A Marxist writer, they quickly answered, must be concerned with today's world, with technology, consumer- ism, urbanization, the work of farmers, the strug- gle between labor and capital, the politics of the

Church and of the Communist Party. In my opinion, it is precisely the fact that Calvino has succeeded in integrating these concerns, in re- vitalizing and re-presenting our whole cultural tradition, past and present, literary and popular, and that he has done so creating a highly original style of writing, that makes him one of the most important writers of today.

While in the United States Calvino's works are just beginning to acquire a wider audience (as the number and success of translations indicate),2 in Italy and, in fact, in all of Europe he is and has been widely read, studied, and acclainmed. His fic- tional and critical work is solidly placed at the crossroads of the major issues in contemporary social, cultural, and literary theory- Marxism and structuralism, anthropology and semiotics, popu- lar culture and antinarrative. Under the guise of telling us tongue-in-cheek sophisticated fairy tales or self-conscious modern epics, he forces us to re- think through notions such as form and content, language and style, literary imagination, creative discourse, the role of science, the purpose of litera- ture, the artist's participation in society. His achievement, however, has not yet been fully understood. One of the goals of this study is to promote such understanding by suggesting or proposing an alternative direction of reading.

It is often said that Calvino's writings oscillate between two extremes, one being sociopolitical in- volvement resulting in a style that may be called "neorealist," and the other the fantastic or escapist literature of works like Le cosmicomiche or the re- cent Le citta invisibili (1972). This polarity is be- lieved to be caused by divided impulses or irrecon- cilable interests in the author. I would like to argue that, on the contrary, Calvino's works remain constantly focused on a basic vision of human activity as both praxis and poiesis, and that, if thematic polarity does exist in his narrative, it is not a contradictory impasse but rather a dialectic process reflecting his awareness of the very nature of culture as the highest and unique form of hu-

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man "doing." I believe that Calvino's message can be best understood in the light of certain basic con- cepts that are central to his work and to the recent formulations of semiotic literary theory: the no- tions of langue and parole as defined by Saussure, narrative and discourse structures as defined by Propp, Greimas, and Todorov, the poetic function of language as defined by Roman Jakobson, the unconscious or symbolic function as defined by Levi-Strauss, desire as redefined by Lacan, and the notion of ecriture (writing, script) discussed by Barthes and Derrida.

Although a coherent analytical method for the structural analysis of literature was outlined only as late as 1966,3 these concepts had been part of the intellectual climate of Europe since at least 1958, the year of publication of Levi-Strauss's Anthropologie structurale and of the English trans- lation of Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale.4 However valuable may be the methodo- logical framework provided by structural analysis to literary criticism, it is the conceptual basis of structuralism and semiotics that intrigues and affects Calvino the writer, giving a new slant to motifs and concerns already apparent in his earlier works and suggesting new modes of expression, new stylistic solutions.

Looking at the whole of Calvino's fiction, one is surprised to find, under a wealth of invention and an extraordinary stylistic variety, a remark- able constancy in what structural analysis would call (a) semantic content and (b) thematic invest- ment, that is to say, the actantial or character op- positions and plot development that sustain the movement of each narrative (a), and the thematic elements that convey its first or most immediate meaning (b). For example, most of the tales of Cosmicomics and t zero are based on the binary actantial opposition of Subject-Opponent and Subject-Object:5 "A Sign in Space" is built around the rivalry between the hero Qfwfq and his anti- thetical and symmetrical Opponent Kgwgk, the only characters; similarly, "Without Colors" is centered on the desire of Qfwfq for Ayl, patterned on the Orpheus-Eurydice myth. Often a tale pre- smnts the familiar triangular structure, Hero- Woman-Rival (Subject-Object-Opponent), a com- bination of the preceding two, which is the com- plete formulation of the dialectics of desire, as in "The Aquatic Uncle."6 At times this basic actantial pattern is enriched with minor characters dis-

tributed in various kinship and social relationships to create a universe representing typical modern social structures like the family ("At Daybreak"), the community ("All at One Point"), or the oedipal-stage family ("The Distance of the Moon"). This essentially binary opposition, at both the thematic and actantial levels, can be found in the other works as well, such as The Cloven Viscount, the dimidiated par excellence, or The Nonexistent Knight, where all the characters are symmetrically and diametrically opposed to each other.7 In Marcovaldo (1966), the thematic oppositions rural versus urban, nature versus technology, labor versus capital also correspond to the actantial oppositions Subject-Opponent. Gli amori difficili (1958) is a series of "adventures" or love affairs whose constant theme is the im- possibility of attaining the love Object. And one could continue, for the same paradigm can be shown to exist in each work.

In other words, the functional sequence of events making up the plot of Calvino's tales is constant and very simple, often consisting of only a few essential functions among the thirty-one that Propp showed to constitute the fairy-tale archetype. Likewise, the themes invested in this simple structure are the very elementary contents of human experience: desire, rivalry, guilt, the im- pulse to express and to communicate, the need for self-affirmation but also for belonging, the neces- sity to make ethical and existential choices. His longer tales usually show the journey of discovery or quest pattern, which is particularly evident in his first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders, and which is significant in view of Calvino's ideological and stylistic use of myth and folktale as his chosen narrative form.8

One could, to be sure, give a fully detailed de- scription of the functional and actantial structures I have just briefly indicated, which constitute the semantic level of the narrative. But, within the re- stricted space of this essay, it is perhaps more im- portant to consider another level of description, namely, that of discourse structures which, by analogy, we can say constitute the semiotic level.9 Discourse may be defined as the particular way in which the semantic elements are organized by means of constructional and stylistic devices such as narration and point of view, spatial and tem- poral patterns, imagery, language, special sub- codes, etc.'0 In contrast to the stability of thematic

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Narrative Discourse in Calvino: Praxis or Poiesis?

and semantic structures, narrative discourse in Calvino is directly responsible for the extraordi- nary originality of his ever-changing formal solu- tions, from his first "neorealist" novel and short stories to the allegorical tales of I nostri antenati (1963), the cosmogonic and mathematical fiction of Cosmicomiche and Ti con zero, the philosophical and political vignettes of Marcovaldo and La gior- nata di uno scrutatore, the "oneirigrams" of Le citta invisibili, and the combinatory games of his latest II Castello dei destini incrociati (1973).

As the author himself points out in his preface to the 1964 edition of II sentiero dei nidi di ragno, the first novel already contained the elements most typical of Calvino's style: a language both idio- matic, colloquial, with rhythms and cadences of the local dialect, and at the same time poetic, lyrical;1l adventurous situations, magic sugges- tions, familiar settings that are perceived as exotic or supranatural by virtue of the perspective from which they are framed, and of the estrangement effect produced by a logic or affective contrast in the persona, the main organizational device from which the narrative radiates.'2 In The Path to the Nest of Spiders, this persona is Pin, whose position of noninitiated adolescent, not yet a man physi- cally or emotionally, both precludes him from active participation in the events and confers upon him the mythical status of quest hero, chosen to experience and discover the contents and meanings of human existence. In The Cloven Viscount, it is no longer the war that deforms/forms the people and things surrounding the narrating conscious- ness, but the presence of Distortion personified in the character of Medardo, through which the young narrator perceives or experiences reality. The story of Cosimo, The Baron in the Trees, is narrated through the eyes of his eight-year-old brother, and here the distortion is provided by Cosimo's ek-centricity in relation to the world. Medardo and Cosimo, as later Agilulfo, the in- existent Knight, are allegorical personifications of a way of being in the world, of an existential con- dition. The contrast they cause in the persona is of an affective nature. Later, in Cosmicomics and t zero, the distortion is produced by subversion of the logic of spatio-temporal categories and by the atemporal and diffuse consciousness of the narrator.

The Nonexistent Knight abandons the Steven- sonian model with the narrator as a child, ob-

server but not pivotal center of the action, which nonetheless is reflected in his consciousness.13 The persona, or in Calvino's words, the "symbolic transposition key" allowing the passage from autobiography to fiction and from lived experience to discourse, is moving farther away not only from the author (who could hardly identify with the amazon nun Bradamante), but also from us. Whereas the nameless narrators of the previous novels, however incidental to the action, impose themselves on the reader as a distinct presence from the opening lines, in The Nonexistent Knight the narrator appears only in Chapter iv and, al- though a character in the novel, she has two totally differentiated functions, Bradamante the warrior and Suor Teodora the nun-narrator. In fact, it is precisely the clashing incongruity of these two characters, whose dedoublement has no justi- fication and whose final assimilation is at best mechanical, that first indicates what is later con- firmed by the numerous self-referential paren- theses: the narrator has no function in relation to action development, nor is she there to favor the author's identification or to provide a specific point of view. On the contrary, her voice is totally outside the narrative context and is thus capable of attracting the attention to the very act of nar- rating as discourse, that is, creation by means of language, and to the structuring process of writing (ecriture).

With this latter stylistic choice Calvino increases the distance between narrating consciousness and autobiographical self, at the same time diminishing the narrator's credibility or naturalistic individual- ity and increasing its resonance in the spacetime of writing. He thus prepares us to accept a narrator such as the truly "inexistent" and diffuse Qfwfq or even like Edmond Dantes in "The Count of Monte Cristo," a fictional character belonging to another novel. As the narrators become more and more anonymous, pure literary personae, so is discourse increasingly detached from and finally deprived of any narrative support proper: in t zero characteri- zation is abolished as characters become mere luminous signals ("The Night Driver"), or the plot sequence is limited to the single function of chase ("The Chase"). In Invisible Cities both plot and characterization are missing, as Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, deprived of all naturalistic at- tributes, are reduced to their mythical names and to the extracontextual resonance that their names

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Teresa de Lauretis evoke. What is left is the narrating consciousness of Marco Polo in the process of creating images of the infinite cities of the mind, a purely functional persona, the subject of writing. Thus Calvino's discourse evolves, not in the sense of a perfectible movement or progress, but diachronically, inas- much as it is linked to the historical time of Cal- vino the writer. The narrative persona, screen of the historical and biographical person, which had been embodied in the naturalistic child-hero Pin, and in Qfwfq, spirit of the natural and techno- logical evolution, or of scientific and mathematical thought, is further metamorphosed into the pure voice of a discourse totally rarefied, lyrical, oneiric, beyond the threshold of antinarrative.

Parallel to the overall distortion brought about by the ek-centricity of the persona, or narrating consciousness, which we have seen develop or transform itself into an entity less and less novel- istic and more and more metanarrative, is the specific utilization and transformation of the nar- rative code by means of imagery, special subcodes, and metalinguistic references. Instead of following each work chronologically, I will select the most conspicuous types of deviation from the code and stylistic experimentation, for I intend not only to point out a development, in Calvino's writing, from traditional narrative modes to self-reflexive, pure discourse, but also to show that all his writings bear witness to a precise ideological in- tent, an unambiguous poetics.

Language. Both lexicon and syntax are subject to a deformation consisting mainly in the juxta- position of the common "spoken language" usage and a highly specialized, scientific or literary lan- guage. The specific terminology of art criticism, for example, is followed in the same sentence by the imprecise idiomatic catchall words of daily speech:

e questa conchiglia era una cosa diversa da me ma anche la parte piu vera di me, la spiegazione di chi ero io, il mio ritratto tradotto in un sistema ritmico di volumi e striscie e colon e roba dura.

(Cosmicomiche, p. 176; my italics)

and this shell was a thing different from me but also the truest part of me, the explanation of who I was, my portrait translated into a rhythmic system of volumes and stripes and colors and hard matter.

(Cosmicomics, pp. 146-47)

The lexicon of botanical or biological classifica-

tions may be used not in contrast but in complete equality with everyday words as in the description of the "moon milk":

Era composto essenzialmente di: succhi vegetali, girini di rana, bitume, lenticchie, miele d'api, cristalli d'amido, uova di storione, muffe, pollini, sostanze gelatinose, vermi, resine, pepe, sali minerali, materiale di combustione.... [In the process of fermentation] non tutti i corpi si fondevano; alcuni rimanevano con- ficcati li: unghie e cartilagini, chiodi, cavallucci marini, noccioli e peduncoli, cocci di stoviglie, ami da pesca, certe volte anche un pettine. (Cosmicomiche, p. 12)

It was composed chiefly of vegetal juices, tadpoles, bitumen, lentils, honey, starch crystals, sturgeon eggs, molds, pollens, gelatinous matter, worms, resins, pepper, mineral salts, combustion residue.... [In the process of fermentation] not all the bodies melted; some remained stuck in it: fingernails and cartilage, bolts, sea horses, nuts and peduncles, shards of crockery, fishhooks, at times even a comb.

(Cosmicomics, p. 6)

The numerous examples of enumeracion caotica have their syntactical counterpart in the stream-of- consciousness passages such as the beautiful last paragraph of "All at One Point" or the whole of "II sangue, il mare" ("Blood, Sea" in t zero) whose very title reflects the purposeful lack of syntactical organization.

Graphic symbols, different print types, and un- usual spelling are also used to supply a strong visual perception (e.g., the signs hanging from the galaxies in "The Light-Years") or to indicate that a different temporal mode is used (i.e., the syn- chronic vs. the diachronic in Pt. II of "The Spiral").14 Particularly original to Calvino are the purely graphic signifiers like the names of the characters of Cosmicomics, which are totally im- possible to articulate as sounds, but visually sug- gest the qualities of their referents: the symmetri- cal, orderly molecular structure of Qfwfq, the un- imaginative and gossipy narrow-mindedness of Mr. PbertPberd, archetypal Fellinesque sexuality in Mrs. Ph(i)Nko, introverted visionary complexity in the sister G'd(w)1, or the terrestrial long- leggedness of Ll 1. In some of them a phonic sug- gestion is included: the uncivilized "immigrants" Z'zu,15 Mr. Hnw ("who later became a horse"), and De XuaeauX, the lover of Mrs. Ph(i)Nko, who simply has to be a Frenchman. Onomatopoeic sig- nifiers also add an acoustic dimension to the reader's perception: "Ecco insomma che una di

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Narrative Discourse in Calvino: Praxis or Poiesis?

loro, sflif sflif sfli, emetteva le sue uova, e io sfluff sflffsfluff, le fecondavo."'l6 And new signifiers are created for newly created objects (referents):

-Ho fatto delle cose con le cose-. . . . G'd(w)Y dava sempre risposte senza capo ne coda: -Un fuori con dentro un dentro. Tzlll, tzIll, tzlll....

(Cosmicomiche, pp. 32-33; my italics)

"I made some things with things...." G'd(w)1 never gave you a straight answer. "An outside with an inside in it." (Cosmicomics, pp. 23-24)

Finally, the formulas of "t zero," used for indi- vidual and diachronic characterization (the lion L, the arrow A, the narrator [Qfwfq] at different moments of consciousness in time QoQiQ2QaQn) as well as for the synchronic system of interrelated characters and events in each of the possible time universes of the story ("the various tl's of Q1, L1, E(a)l, E(l), which have the power to determine the fundamental qualities of to," p. 117). Like the three characters Q, Y, and Z of "The Night Driver," moving on the freeway between the two destination points of A and B, these formulas re- veal the purely functional nature of narrative characters as roles or actants, and correspond to the more and more abstract narrators of their re- spective works. Even when, after t zero, Calvino no longer uses formulas as characters, but rather mythical or folklore figures, he represents them in the iconic fixity of the figures of a deck of cards (In Castello dei destini incrociati).

Special subcodes. The use of another semiotic code in addition to language in narrative has pri- marily the purpose of augmenting the expressive potential of the medium and building into it addi- tional (possibilities of) connotation. In his first novel Calvino had interspersed his narration with dialect and folksongs in a "documentary" or naturalistic manner. Later he felt that dialect ought to be "totally absorbed in the language, as a vital but hidden plasm,"17 and thus experimented with other subcodes, less exploited than dialects and belonging to contemporary popular culture, like the comic strip, the cartoon or vignette, and the Western. In the opening of The Cloven Vis- count, where Medardo is crossing the battlefield to reach the Christian headquarters, he comes upon a finger (not a picture, a real finger) pointed in the direction of the camp. This is the first, surrealistic example of a vignette, an element of the narration that signifies through a visual code, not linguis-

tically, for we could not understand its meaning if we had never seen this peculiar type of road signal. Similarly, the signs hanging from the galaxies in "The Light-Years," which accuse Qfwfq of un- known crimes (as his guilt suggests to him), are public displays, conspicuous as advertising posters along the highway. In fact, they reappear as such in Marcovaldo's "Il bosco dell'autostrada" ("The Forest on the Freeway"), this time fused with the motif of the forest-the primeval locus of initiation and fairy-tale ordeals. Marcovaldo is, in fact, Cal- vino tells us, a series of modern folktales which re- main faithful to a classic narrative structure, the cartoon story of children's comic books.'8 The particular language of comic books is used again, for example, in Cosmicomics' "Games without End" where Qfwfq and Pfwfp play a game of marbles with hydrogen atoms: "Ti faro vedere io, cane d'un Qfwfq!"'9 Or take Marcovaldo's "Luna e Gnac" ("Moon and Gnac"), where the intermit- tent neon light of a cognac advertisement robs the moon (every twenty seconds) of its timeless sym- bolism, substituting a technological code for a natural and cultural one.

One of the most complete examples of subcode use is "The Origin of the Birds," which the author considers "told better with strip drawings than with a story composed of sentences one after the other" (t zero, p. 21). The story "t zero" itself is told as if by photograms. In "The Form of Space" explicit references are made to the Western genre, although not to the film medium itself; here the reference is totally incongruous with the tale situa- tion (which is the parallel fall in gravity-free space of Qfwfq, the beautiful Ursula H'x, and Qfwfq's rival Lieutenant Fenimore) or with the scientific topic from which the tale spins off, given in the epi- graph (i.e., the relation of the curve of space to matter according to the gravitational field). After savoring many theoretical possibilities of erotic en- counters with Ursula in the "soft cavities" of space, Qfwfq's oedipal imagination envisions a murderous showdown with Lieutenant Fenimore described as follows:

Facendo ben attenzione, potevo accorgermi di quando il percorso del Tenente Fenimore passava in fondo a un canyon stretto e tortuoso; allora mi appostavo sull'alto d'uno strapiombo e al momento giusto mi buttavo sopra di lui badando di colpirlo con tutto il mio peso sulle vertebre cervicali. II fondo di questi precipizi del vuoto era pietroso come il letto d'un

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Teresa de Lauretis

torrente in secca, e tra due spunzoni di roccia che affioravano il Tenente Fenimore stramazzando restava con la testa incastrata e io gia gli premevo un ginoc- chio nello stomaco ma lui intanto stava schiacciandomi le falangi contro le spine d'un cactus . . . perche non riuscissi a impadronirmi della pistola che gli avevo fatto cadere con un calcio. ... Fenimore era riuscito a raccattare la sua pistola; una pallottola mi fischio all'orecchio, deviata da una proliferazione del vuoto che s'elevava in forma di termitaio. E gia io gli ero addosso con le mani alla gola per strozzarlo, ma le mani mi sbatterono l'una contro l'altra con un "paff!": le nostre vie erano tornate a essere parallele.

(Cosmicomiche, pp. 145-46)

If I looked carefully, I could observe when Lieutenant Fenimore's course passed through the bed of a narrow, winding canyon; then I placed myself on the top of a cliff and, at just the right moment, I hurled myself down on him, careful to strike him on the cervical vertebrae with my full weight. The bottom of such precipices in the void was stony as the bed of a dried- up stream, and Lieutenant Fenimore, sinking to the ground, remained with his head stuck between two spurs of rock; I pressed one knee into his stomach, but he meanwhile was crushing my knuckles against a cactus's thorns . . . to prevent me from grabbing the pistol I had kicked from his hand. . . . Fenimore had managed to collect his pistol; a bullet whistled past my ear, ricocheting off a proliferation of the void that rose in the shape of an anthill. And I fell upon him, my hands at his throat, to strangle him, but my hands slammed against each other with a "plop!": our paths had become parallel again. (Cosmicomics, p. 122)

Here, too, the juxtaposition of a sophisticated scientific theory to the popular Western stereotype produces the deforming effect, which emphasizes the presence of the subcode at the same time as it unmistakably links science and pop culture de- spite, or rather because of, the too obvious and striking incongruity. The last and most significant type of code used in a narrative is the tarot card deck, a complete semiotic system by means of which are told all the tales of II Castello dei destini incrociati. I shall discuss it later.

Imagery. With descriptive or comparative terms, Calvino's imagery may be called surrealistic, plas- tic, comic, technological, and so on ad libitum. The variety is great. But the specific and unique feature of Calvino's imagery is that it is based on the reversal of the semantic code, or on shifts from one code to another and, therefore, in addition to any or all of the previous terms, it is always ironic,

self-conscious, self-reflexive. Appropriately, of course, The Cloven Viscount has many examples of such imagery. Color patterns are reversed as flocks of carrion-eating cranes fly over fields cov- ered with human and animal corpses; the bushes are black because they are totally covered with feathers and claws formerly belonging to crows and vultures; the plague-disfigured cadavers ap- pear feathered and winged as a result of being mingled in death with the vultures; a sentry's coat is covered with mold and musk like the bark of a tree exposed to the north; and the doctors taking care of wounded horses kick and neigh exactly like their patients. The shift from one code to another is particularly evident in Calvino, and akin to the ironic juxtaposition of noncontiguous lexicons in- dicated above. In "The Form of Space," he hypothesizes:

1 L'universo andava dunque considerate non un rigonfiamento grossolano piantato i come una rapa, ma come una figura spigolosa e puntuta in cui a ogni rientranza o saliente o sfaccettatura corrispondevano cavita e bugne e dentellature dello spazio e delle linee da noi percorse. Questa era pero ancora un'immagine schematica, come

2 se avessimo a che fare con un solido dalle pareti lisce, una compenetrazione di poliedri, un ag- gregato di cristalli; in realta lo spazio in cui ci

3/A muovevamo era tutto merlato e traforato, con guglie e pinnacoli che si irradiavano da ogni parte, con cupole e balaustre e peristili, con bifore e trifore e rosoni, e noi ... in realta scorrevamo

3/B sul bordo di modanature e fregi invisibili, come formiche che per attraversare una citta seguono percorsi tracciati non sul selciato delle vie ma lungo le pareti e i soffitti e le cornici e i lampadari.

1 The universe, therefore, had to be considered not a crude swelling placed there like a turnip, but as an angular, pointed figure where every dent or bulge or facet corresponded to other cavities and projections and notchings of space and of the lines we followed. This, however, was still a

2 schematic image, as if we were dealing with a smooth-walled solid, a compenetration of poly- hedrons, a cluster of crystals; in reality the space

3/A in which we moved was all battlemented and perforated, with spires and pinnacles which spread out on every side, with cupolas and balustrades and peristyles, with rose windows, with double- and triple-arched fenestrations, and . . . we were rac-

3/B ing along the edge of moldings and invisible friezes, like ants who, crossing a city, follow itineraries traced not on the street cobbles but

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Narrative Discourse in Calvino: Praxis or Poiesis? along walls and ceilings and cornices and chande- liers.

The numbers identify the three consecutive but not contiguous lexicons of (1) colloquial speech, (2) geometric or geological classification, (3) archi- tecture. The difference between (3/A) and (3/B) is one of scale and perspective, as (3/B) is described from the viewpoint of ants crossing a city by fol- lowing their own paths which, unlike people's, go through the interiors of houses and along vertical walls. The passage continues with three more lexi- cons being used: (4) botanical, (5) photographic, and (6) anatomical. This time the slippage between (4/A) and (4/B) is given by the expressionistic quality of the language in (4/B). And this distor- tion is carried through to the end of the description by the close-up focus reminiscent of Gulliver's Travels:

Ora dire citta equivale ad avere ancora in testa figure in qualche modo regolari, con angoli retti e proporzioni simmetriche, mentre invece dov- remmo tener sempre presente come lo spazio si

4/A frastaglia intorno a ogni albero di ciliegio e a ogni foglia d'ogni ramo che si muove al vento, e a ogni seghettatura del margine d'ogni foglia, e pure si modella su ogni nervatura di foglia, e sulla rete delle venature all'interno della foglia e sulle

4/B trafitture di cui in ogni momento le frecce della luce le crivellano, tutto stampato in negativo nella

5 pasta del vuoto, in modo che non c'e cosa che non vi lascia la sua orma, ogni orma possibile di ogni cosa possibile, e insieme ogni trasforma- zione di queste orme istante per istante, cosicche

6 il brufolo che cresce sul naso d'un califfo o la bolla di sapone che si posa sul seno d'una lavan- daia cambiano la forma generale dello spazio in tutte le sue dimensioni.

(Cosmicomiche, pp. 144-45; my italics)

Now if I say city it amounts to suggesting figures that are, in some way, regular, with right angles and symmetrical proportions, whereas instead, we should always bear in mind how space breaks

4/A up around every cherry tree and every leaf of every bough that moves in the wind, and at every in- dentation of the edge of every leaf, and also it forms along every vein of the leaf, and on the network of veins inside the leaf, and on the pierc-

4/B ings made every moment by the riddling arrows 5 of light, all printed in negative in the dough of the

void, so that there is nothing now that does not leave its print, every possible print of every possible thing, and together every transformation

of these prints, instant by instant, so the pimple 6 growing on a caliph's nose or the soap bubble

resting on a laundress's bosom changes the gen- eral form of space in all its dimensions.

(Cosmicomics, p. 121)

The above example is closely related to the work done in Le citta invisibili, where the intent of pre- senting in succession countless possibilities of per- ception or composition of a form, stemming from a given and perhaps unconscious structure, is the very idea of the book. The names of each of the cities are like titles of individual tales, of achieved literary forms deriving from a common under- lying code or system (the city), yet all different from each other and each unique, unrepeatable, original.

All attempts to imagine or to describe analogi- cally not only a difficult abstract notion like the curve of space, but any aspect of the world, are the product of the human capacity for formal or- ganization and symbolic representation which Levi-Strauss has identified as the symbolic func- tion, standing at the origin of human society and culture. Such capacity, Calvino maintains, is able to produce infinite forms, and not limited, as claimed by the opponents of structuralism,20 to carrying out a single program inherent in the struc- ture itself. Within the framework of the langue, the parole is capable of infinite variety, because the forms produced are the result of a dialectic interaction between the structuring capacity of the mind and the reality with which, at any given time, we must come to terms. Of literature in particular he says:

Readings and lived experience are not two universes, but one. To be interpreted, every experience of life recalls certain readings and becomes fused with them. That books are always born of other books is a truth only seemingly contradictory to this other truth: that books are born of practical day-to-day life, and of the relationships among men.21

Thus the shifts in codes observed in Calvino's imagery are not there to denounce the absurdity of the world, but, on the contrary, to prove its certainty.

Metalinguistic references. In describing the six functions and factors of language, Roman Jakob- son defines the poetic function as "the set (Ein- stellung) toward the MESSAGE as such, focus on the message for its own sake" which, while not

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confined to poetry but existing in all types of speech and writing, is nonetheless based on the specific compositional devices of poetry such as parallelism, symbolism, etc. On the other hand, the metalingual function is focused on the code, i.e., explains or makes direct reference to the code used in conveying the message.22 Whereas it has always been true that literature makes maximum use of the poetic function, only recently has the metalingual function become an important ele- ment of narrative discourse, and one of the dis- tinctive stylistic traits of what is called self-reflexive fiction or antinarrative. The awareness on the part of the writer of performing an act of writing, the questioning of one's motivations, purpose, re- sponsibilities in writing, and of the very meaning of writing is reflected by a hyperconscious, willful manipulation of the code(s). Although this poetic and esthetic problem is also central to the work of other writers as different as, for instance, Borges, Barth, and Sellers, the formal and ideological solu- tions given remain as distinct as the (natural) languages in which they write. In Calvino, meta- linguistic and metanarrative references have the main function of exposing, or even exploding, the code so that a new one may be created. No code or system is given once and for all, no matter how established or accepted by tradition.

Language, the primary and oldest code, is ques- tioned: at the beginning of the universe, "our father's cry: 'We're hitting something!,' a mean- ingless expression (since before then nothing had ever hit anything, you can be sure) . . . took on meaning at the very moment it was uttered, that is, it meant the sensation we were beginning to experience, slightly nauseating, like a slab of mud passing under us."23 And, of course, the whole of "A Sign in Space" is about the nature of the lin- guistic sign, arbitrary and unmotivated, the result of the human need to express and symbolize.24 The social nature of the institution of language, for which communication is a circuit, as Saussure described it, is reflected in the frustrated isolation of Qfwfq whose signs of self-defense cannot be read or answered for billions of years. The graphic symbols of written language are used to depict an eerie landscape where

le stesse righe anziche successioni di lettere e di parole possono benissimo essere srotolate nel loro filo nero e tese in linee rette continue parallele che non significano altro che se stesse nel loro continuo scorrere senza in-

contrarsi mai cosi come non ci incontriamo mai nella nostra continua caduta io, Ursula H'x, il Tenente Fenimore, tutti gli altri. (Cosmicomiche, p. 147)25

the same lines, rather than remain series of letters and words, can easily be drawn out in their black thread and unwound in continuous, parallel, straight lines which mean nothing beyond themselves in their con- stant flow, never meeting, just as we never meet in our constant fall: I, Ursula H'x, Lieutenant Fenimore, and all the others. (Cosmicomics, p. 123)

The chivalric code of medieval legends and ro- mances, Charlemagne's paladins, the Crusades, the Knights of the Holy Grail, and Ariosto's re- adaptation of that code, itself in turn becoming the code of Renaissance epic and heroic literature, are utilized again in another system which incor- porates elements and values of the modern indus- trial society, of Freudian psychology and Marxist economic theory, in The Nonexistent Knight. Countless and continuous references to other fic- tional works are mingled with references to liter- ary, mythical, and historical figures and events. "Space is curved everywhere, but in some places it's more curved than in others," says Qfwfq echo- ing Orwell (Cosmicomics, p. 66); we find the Woman in the Moon, Endymion, Persephone, Captain Cook, Voltaire, and Bakunin. In fact, there are so many that only a cross-reference index could list them properly. The story "How Much Shall We Bet?" is Calvino's metanarrative refer- ence to his own work: Qfwfq's bets with Dean (k)yK cover prehistory, history, sports, Dow aver- ages, and fiction past, present, and, with the help of a Research Foundation, future too.

Part I of "Priscilla" in t zero takes no less than the genetic code in the light of Hegelian desire and do/ce stil novo poetics:

Ma quando non si puo fare nessuna cosa per mancanza del mondo esterno, l'unico fare che ci si puo permet- tere disponendo di pochissimi mezzi e quello speciale tipo di fare che e il dire. Insomma io ero mosso a dire; il mio stato di desiderio, il mio stato-moto-desiderio di moto-desiderio-amore mi muoveva a dire, e siccome l'unica cosa che avevo da dire era me stesso, ero spinto a dire me stesso, cioe a esprimermi... . Per dire ci vuole un linguaggio, e scusate se e poco. Io come linguaggio avevo tutti quei bruscolini o stecchini detti cromosomi. (Ti con zero, pp. 74-76; my italics)

But when you can do nothing because of the lack of an outside world, the only doing you can allow your-

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Narrative Discourse in Calvino: Praxis or Poiesis?

self with the scant means at your disposal is that special kind of doing that is saying. In short, I was moved to express: my state of desire, my state-motion- desire of motion-desire-love moved me to say, and since the only thing I had to say was myself, I was moved to say myself, to express myself. . . . For ex- pressing you need a language, and that's no trifle. As language I had all those specks or twigs called chro- mosomes. (t zero, p. 68)

And he goes on to identify the nucleus with con- sciousness, chromosomes with words, "the assort- ment" of chromosomes forming a vocabulary which results in "that sense of fullness which I earlier called quote spiritual unquote" (p. 69), directly responsible for human creativity. This story, appropriately entitled "Mitosi" (which means "mitosis" but also plays on a possible "mythosis," myth-creation, by analogy with poie- sis or as a contraction of mythopoiesis) is parallel to "The Spiral" in Cosmicomics. As the latter deals with the human activity of doing (ilfare), that is to say the praxis, "Mitosis" deals with poiesis, or creation by language (ii dire). In order to mark his individual presence in the undifferen- tiated life of the sea, and impelled by Eros, the blind gasteropod begins to make its beautifully shaped and colored shell, creating an artifact, an artistic object, an image which in turn will cause the development of the sight organ in the others. Similarly moved by Desire, the protozoon ex- presses itself by articulating, rearranging, and re- peating the elementary units of its genetic code, i.e., using it as a language. Whereas "The Spiral" is focused on the product, the result of doing, the message, "Mitosis" is about the code and the process of saying. For both, the teleological moti- vation is the same-it presupposes the existence of the world, the Other, to which communication is directed and from which comes the impulse to ex- press. Thus the relation between praxis and poiesis is a dialectic one: whether unconscious as in "The Spiral," or conscious as in "Mitosis," human ac-

tivity consists in formal organization and symbolic representation, the two inseparable and dialectic moments of the cultural process.

To summarize what I have indicated as the key stylemes of Calvino's narrative discourse, I must mention in some detail his latest published work,

II Castello dei destini incrociati (The Castle of

Crossing Destinies). The book consists of two parts, two sets of tales told by different narrators

in the manner of Boccaccio or Chaucer, the re- spective "frames" being a Castle and a tavern (Calvino's capitalization) surrounded by a forest, in an indefinite time and location. The essential formal innovation is that, the narrators having magically lost the ability to speak (i.e., to use the linguistic code), the tales are told by means of a substitute code or system, namely, the tarot deck- a handpainted Renaissance deck for the first set, and a printed eighteenth-century deck from Mar- seilles for the tavern tales.26 Each narrator selects from the deck those cards (figures, number cards, or Major Arcana) that best suggest characters and situations of his or her story, and lines them up on the table in two parallel rows of eight cards each, the sequential order of the cards giving the basic narrative sequence. All narrators subsequent to the first utilize for their stories some of the cards already laid down (that is how the stories and destinies cross each other) until all the cards are used up and arranged on the table. At this point the remaining narrators' tales can be read by following different paths, reading the cards in re- verse order, or crisscross. At first the Narrator is an unidentified personage who rides through the forest seeking shelter in the Castle, sits at the one empty place at the table, and joins in the com- munal game of charade. Later, however, he ap- pears as the author himself, unmediated by the persona, and metanarratively reflecting on the na- ture of writing. Here language, imagery, and metalinguistic references are all dictated by the particular narrative code (the tarot) that the author imposes, as a strictly constraining grill, on his material.

That the book can sustain our interest, and in fact increase it as we read on, is indeed, on Cal- vino's part, a feat of inventiveness and stylistic mastery. But more important, it is a proof of the infinite resources of the human imagination, of the boundless freedom of the parole which exists and defines itself against the constricting rules of a closed internally coherent system, the langue.27 Within all the possible combinations of the seventy-eight cards of a tarot deck, as with the forty or so phonemes of natural languages, a prac- tically unlimited number of stories and characters can be created. By using for the second set of tales another deck, whose figurative style calls for an- other type of language, Calvino is showing how a different discourse can be effected within the same

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system.28 If the opposition between langue and parole, as given unconscious structure and indi- vidual unique expression, is resolved by poetic justice in favor of the parole, it is because Calvino stresses the presence of the langue (of the code) which in his work appears in the guise of the fairy tale, myth, the epic-heroic code, the city as a sys- tem of social, architectonic, economic, visual, and emotional relations.

But the writer's parole is written and, once written, it becomes itself a system. The book, which is meant to be one vision of reality, must not be allowed to become the only view of what is. Thus the system-book must in turn be exposed and exploded, and for this purpose Calvino builds into the system the seeds of its destruction, the self-conscious metalinguistic irony. (Once the cards are all on the table, and the guests have told their stories, the deck is reshuffled and the telling begins anew. The storytelling must go on. At the Castle or at the tavern, on the way to Canterbury, during the Florence plague or the endless thou- sand and one nights, the stories are told to while away time, to keep away death. As Levi-Strauss says of music and mythology, the stories also need time in order to deny time. They also are instru- ments for the obliteration of time.29) Each of

Lauretis 423

Calvino's fictions proposes new forms, new combi- nations of elements within the narrative structure as if, in order to escape from the closure of writing, which inevitably selects and fixates the undiffer- entiated flux of living memory and awareness, the writer must constantly seek to recover the images left out, the possibilities not realized, the elements latent in the system and not utilized, in a continu- ing effort to construct new models of possible universes, of invisible cities, of systems closed but constantly and dialectically reopened.

What I have called the evolution of Calvino's discourse from the neorealism of his early tales to metarealism, mythical discourse, and antinarrative is both the sign of an extraordinary literary aware- ness and a perfectly consistent statement of his poetic and ideological vision: human activity is at once "doing" and "saying," praxis and poiesis. Its freedom is asserted in the permanence of dis- course which paradoxically exists only denying it- self as ecriture, continually violating its own sys- tem and reconstituting itself in the dialectics of signification.

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Milwaukee

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 II barone rampante (1957).

The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Yiscount, trans. Archibald Colquhoun (New York: Random, 1962) from 11 cavaliere inesistente (1959) and II visconte dimezzato (1951).

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

t zero, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, 1969) from Ti 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 a l'analyse struc- turale des recits," 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 nar- rative may be conducted, like linguistic analysis, by (a) a description of 3 distinct levels (decoupage), and (b) the inte- gration 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

424 Narrative Discourse in (

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, con- stituted by the activities of what Greimas calls "actants," i.e., abstract narrative roles or spheres of action which be- come 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, "Poetique" in Qu'est-ce que le structuralisme?, ed. Francois Wahl (Paris: Seuil, 1968), pp. 99-166. Greimas' study (Semantique structuralel, 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 dei 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 im- mediate and lasting success in Italy and was certainly known to Calvino even before he undertook the task of collecting the Fiabe italiane (1956).

6 I am using Greimas' terminology as defined in Seman- tique structurale, pp. 172-91, where he presents and dis- cusses 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 con- textual 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 pat- tern operating in all the tales of his chosen corpus.

6 See Rene 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 allgorical nature of the characters of this novel has prompted many exegeses. An interesting one is Antonietta Dosi's "Italo Calvino tra realta e fantasia," Silarus, 6 (1971), 8-21. She sees the bodiless knight Agilulfo as the abstract rationality of technological civilization, as opposed to Gurdulu (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 unattain- able, 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

Calvino: Praxis or Poiesis?

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 Levi-Strauss in relation to mythology. In particular, see "The Effectiveness of Symbols," in Struc- tural Anthropology (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1967).

9 The distinction between semantic level and semiotic level is clearly outlined by Greimas in "Narrative Gram- mar: Units and Levels," Modern Langluage 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 articu- lated 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 Levi-Strauss the status of deep narrative structure, capable, in the process of syntagmatization, of generating a surface narrative structure corresponding roughly to the syntag- matic 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 a l'analyse structurale des recits" (see n. 3 above). One of the very few examples of structural analysis of a full-length narrative text is Gerard Genot, Analyse structurelle de "Pinocchio" (Pescia: Quaderni della Fonda- zione Nazionale "Carlo Collodi," No. 5, 1970).

10 Todorov, "Poetique." Another very useful description of the narrative levels is suggested by Paul Ricceur's dis- tinction between what he calls "semantique du desir" and "syntaxe de la distortion" in his "Psychanalyse et culture," in Critique sociologique et critique psychanalytique, Editions de l'Institut de Sociologie (Bruxelles: Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 1970), pp. 179-91.

' 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 osftraenie, used by the Russian Formalists and synonymous with the German Verfremdcung. 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 Impli- cations 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,

Teresa de Lauretis

emitted her eggs, and I, shlup shlup shlup, fertilized them" (p. 144).

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

18 Introd. to Marcovaldo ovuero /e stagioni in citta (1966), p. 5.

19 Again, the translation, "I'11 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, structural- ism, and existential phenomenology.

21 Preface to II sentiero dei nlidi di ragno (1964), pp. 15-16. My translation. Calvino's other major critical essays are published in Paragone (1955) and 1/ menabi di letteratlura (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 bh/, 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 Archicio glottologico italiano, 51 (1966), 94-97.

25 The self-disintegration of writing (ecriture) is almost always present in Calvino. Cf. the close of Marcoclado 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 Decanmeron 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 generation du texte: Des tarots au recit" (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 inde- pendent of the figurative style of the pieces, as well as of the genesis and history of the game (diachrony)-see Cours de linguistique generale (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 aware- ness 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 co- extensive with the rules governing all symbolic representa- tion.

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 uncon- scious." 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 ex- hausted itself. It is time to pass on to other things" (p. 128; my translation).

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

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