Fantastic Metropolis

Oddly enough, it was found that when form became ultra-rigorous, it created content as a side-effect. The Oulipists maintained that right at the beginning of a text the choice of possible words is too great for a writer and that constriction of choice will ensure originality, as the author reacts directly with the matrix of the work. One good example of the technique is Georges Perec’s novel A Void, written without using the letter ‘e’. The effects of this formalism on the emerging content are as coherent as they are startling: Perec’s world, determined solely by this hindrance, is one almost beyond unfettered imagination. More importantly A Void is more internally consistent than most realistic fiction: there are logical, rather than psychological, controls on dialogue, characters and situations. In many ways, the formulae of OuLiPo are more analogous to the rituals of the real world than the minute observations offered by realism, and more profoundly social.

Calvino embraced OuLiPo, but maintained his interest in other forms of writing. Ultimately, he was to blend such mechanical determinism with the subconscious expressionism of the raccontini. But first, in 1952, he ended his reputation as a neo-realist by publishing a fabulist novel, an amoral fable composed for the single purpose of reconstructing one of those imaginary stories which only lurk on the edge of childhood memory, a lost book “by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic.” The Cloven Viscount is not a simple allegory or purely symbolic text. Its meanings are uncertain and contradictory. This astonishing tale of a man blown into two pieces by a cannonball, both of which are tended by military physicians and survive independently before being reunited in a duel, triumphantly achieves its aim of blending cool whimsy with self-aware psychologism.

Two more volumes with similar objectives appeared in 1957 and 1959. Together they form a loose triptych of ‘forgotten’ chronicles. Baron in the Trees and The Non-Existent Knight also develop from a single image. In the former, an alienated character adopts an exclusive and liberated life in the trees; the latter relates the adventures of a suit of armour which thinks it is a man. Both are crammed with ideas, many more than is usual in the Anglo-American tradition. Anglophone readers prefer one or two ideas per book, feeling that excessive invention impedes suspension of disbelief and renders the frame of the story visible. In the European tradition, especially in France and Italy, the frame can be appreciated as an object of artistry in its own right. Calvino regularly wrote with an invisible as well as a visible frame, but also discovered how to fill a fiction with ideas while preserving a sense of belief: allow the ideas to mirror and reinforce each other.

Involved in leftist politics since the war, Calvino resigned from the Communist party in protest at its impotent dogmatism and attempted to develop an Italian form of apolitical realism. Like so many schemes he began during his career, this was soon abandoned for a new interest. He had discovered science-fiction and saw in its myriad contradictions suitable material for a series of tales which would relate contemporary experience to cosmic and ontological thaumaturgics. The result was the dazzling Cosmicomics, published in 1965 and one of the most innovative books in the SF canon. Mathematical fairy-tales featuring the ineffable character Qfwfq, the sequence translates human problems into a googolic setting and triumphantly combines retrospeculative fabulism with social commentary. More Qfwfq stories were to follow and he remains Calvino’s most successful and genuine creation.

Nothing if not prolific, writing every day in any location, it was inevitable that one of his manifold OuLiPo projects would eventually see print. The apotheosis of his work in this field is surely The Castle of Crossed Destinies, which endeavours to blur the distinction between the word and the image. Lost travellers who seek refuge in a castle in the middle of a wood discover they have been robbed of the power of speech. Seating themselves around a table on which lies a pack of Tarots, they realise they can use the cards to relate their personal adventures. What follows is a complex and mandala-like intertwining of a score of tales, each one overlapping with others to form a matrix of cards which can be deciphered in a multitude of ways.

It was Calvino’s absurd intention to conjure up every possible tale contained in the Tarot deck—a “diabolical idea” which obsessed him for years. He spent weeks arranging cards into ever more elaborate patterns, some taking on a third dimension, growing into polyhedrons, to the point where (as he later confessed) he became completely lost in them. Within the random sequence of cards, he recognised various well-known tales and legends: Faust, Hamlet, Oedipus, Parsifal, de Sade’s Justine. The first part of the book takes two tales from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso as the central axes of the grid upon which all the other stories depend. When read backwards, each tale is transformed into something new. The tale of ‘Astolpho On The Moon’ becomes that of ‘Helen Of Troy’ and the ‘Ingrate’ becomes the ‘Man Who Slew Death’