Fantastic Metropolis

Cloven, leafy, impossible—the fiction of Italo Calvino looms over the European literary landscape like a non-existent viscount in the trees. For the past fifty years, the versatility and daring of the author has enriched and influenced the modus operandi of modern writing. Calvino was a restless and audacious experimenter, forever attempting to merge opposing fictive forms or to extend literature into other disciplines. More than his contemporaries, he managed to reconcile form and content, tradition and innovation, cerebration and emotion, in his search for a style which “breathes philosophy and science but keeps its distance.” Now his heirs continue that search.

Born in Cuba in 1923, he grew up in San Remo on the Italian Riviera when his father obtained a post as curator in the botanical gardens. His mother was also a botanist and this early exposure to science instilled in him a lifelong passion for precision and symmetry. Like Ernst Jünger, who was already applying the rigorous descriptions of a scientist to the events in his novels (and comparing the eye of a botanist to the eye of a sniper), he became obsessed with detail and methodology. Unlike Jünger he restricted his ‘scientific’ detachment to the mechanics of literature rather than its subject matter.

His tendency to formality was partly tempered by his experiences as a partisan in the Italian Resistance during the war, where he was thrust into a tradition of story-telling as a way of providing social coherence and reassurance in uncertain times. While awaiting attack in the forest, his comrades would swap folk-tales and Calvino saw how fables functioned both as repositories of idealistic, ethical or practical wisdom and as a technique for expressing fears or hopes when more direct forms of verbal communication might prove traumatic. His first year as a partisan, 1943, marked a threshold in his attitudes.

Having already written dozens of juvenile plays, Calvino decided to begin a series of raccontini, little tales which could function both as light entertainment and anti-Fascist exhortation. His belief that at the end of the war he would abandon allegory and move to other concerns was precluded by his immersion in the form for other, non-moral reasons. He never really forsook the fable and even his most obdurate realistic work has fabular resonances. Absurd, sly, often nightmarish, these raccontini are like needles in the cushions of his later projects: sharp and slight and threaded with reels of black wit.

His first book, published in 1947, was conceived and executed in a neo-realist mode, though the critic and writer Cesare Pavese immediately termed Calvino a Romantic. The Path to the Nest of Spiders, a picaresque novel, was an urgent attempt to present the partisans neither as wholly committed politicos nor as opportunists, but as human beings adapting to a new environment. The main character, the adolescent Pin, who is a sort of pliable Pinocchio, is compelled to join a Resistance unit when one of his practical jokes—the theft of a pistol from a German soldier—goes wrong. The characters who move around Pin fluctuate in their loyalties, refusing to conform to standard patterns of hero or villain. A competent debut, this rite of passage tale won Calvino the Premio Riccione, adding his name to the list of instant literary champions who were being forged the length of post-war Italy.

The actual process of making his experiences public had a radical existential impact on Calvino. He later said: “It would always be better not to have written one’s first book… Your first book already defines you, while you are really far from being defined.” He felt he might have betrayed his former comrades by reducing their genuinely heroic aspects to a conformity of humanism, the expected standards of realism. He came to accept that fiction is a lie and that realism, which claims veracity, is the most deceitful genre of all. The act of writing a realistic text is a negation of the form: writing is essentially a romantic pursuit and not one grounded in everyday shared existence. The more ‘truth’ a writer sets down on a page and the closer a realistic story comes to completion the higher that writer ascends into the ranks of the elite. Realists are supremacists by the nature of the medium: printed egos, the preservation of a transient subjectivity.

Continuing to publish in a highly intimate naturalistic vein, while clandestinely writing fantastical works, Calvino gradually developed his interest in meta-fiction, literature which is wholly aware of its status as an artform and relates to its own parts rather than external demands, comprising an analytic or deductive, rather than synthetic or inductive, fiction. It was a number of years before he was to try such experiments himself, but he keenly followed the progress of Raymond Queneau, who in 1960 founded the OuLiPo (Le Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) school. Numbering as many mathematicians as writers, the Oulipists rejected the idea of fiction as social document, preferring to subject literature to sundry rigorous and arbitrary mathematical rules as a method of forcing writers into the construction of elaborate word-games: form was the one honest function of writing.