Fantastic Metropolis

The new tales Calvino penned to complete the mosaic share insights with the ancient fables. Morbid elements abound, partly due to the fact that the key cards in the tales are often the violent ones of the Major Arcana—Death, The Devil, The Tower Of Destruction, The Hanged Man. It is the context of cards which makes each interpretation unique. When the Graverobber places The Ten Of Cups next to The Last Judgement it is to indicate he was viewing a cemetery (with its cup-like urns) from above, whereas in another story, placed next to a different Arcana, the former card might suggest a feast or an alchemist’s apparatus. Written in 1969 the first part of the book was followed within four years by the second, which is even more complex. The guests seated at the table with the pack of cards have grown impatient. Rather than waiting for each traveller to recount a tale one at a time, they try to tell them all simultaneously. The result is a disconcertingly abstract tangram, a jumble of images and ideas which defiantly attempts to impose form on chaos and ends with the homogenised form of chaos itself.

While grappling with the nuances of this arcane system, Calvino was also completing a further OuLiPo project. Invisible Cities, published in 1972, is his most famous, though not most popular, book. A slight volume made up of vignettes, it is partly based on the legend that Marco Polo, when describing his travels to Kublai Khan, was forbidden to mention one city—Venice. To violate the dictum, Polo began expounding on imaginary places composed of a single Venetian element which, when combined, added up to a description of his home-town. But with typical Calvinoesque wit, these vignettes also provide a catalogue of moods and philosophies. Like Borges, Lem and Pavić, Calvino shows it is feasible to construct valid fiction lacking most or all the trappings of standard literature—plot, character, dialogue and anthropicism.

Invisible Cities, which is a congealing and distillation of all his frames—realism, fabulism, OuLiPo, meta-fiction—belongs to a category of works which must be considered impossible, not in the sense that they cannot be written at all but because their genesis is so unlikely they are impossible to all intents and purposes. This quasi-impossibility is clearly expressed in the anthropic notion of infinity. We often mislead ourselves with technicalities: infinity may have a fixed and exact definition in algebra but in normal human terms any number higher than a centillion has all its properties. If it feels like infinity then it might as well be infinity. Calvino is an impossible writer in that many of his schemas seem to be beyond the conception of the archetypal ‘writer’. This is not simple uniqueness, which is a probable element of the archetype, but an exo-auctorial and Lobachevskian quality.

An even more severe meta-fiction appeared in 1979. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller is totally self-referential, a tautologous anti-novel whose plot comprises the reading of itself. By making the reader a main character, and setting the action in real-time, Calvino softens the text from an arid intellectual experiment into a delightful, but never petty, piece of whimsy. The opening—“The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph.”—shows how a dose of meta-fiction can inject new life into the most traditional scenarios. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller is classic Absurdism, undermining itself at every opportunity.

The really odd thing about this book is that the only way to finish it in complete accordance with the development of the first few chapters is to stop reading it; or even better, to not read it at all. Those who reach the end read themselves out of the experience. Indeed, readers who have never even heard of the novel are those who share most empathy with it. Calvino has thus press-ganged the general public, ensuring that his readership grows backwards. Anyone who has never read the book but still feels strangely unsatisfied by this action may prefer to consult one of the less paradoxical works: Marcovaldo, Time and the Hunter, Mr Palomar, Difficult Loves or Adam, One Afternoon. Or even better: Under the Jaguar Sun, a compendium of senses.

Among the numerous titles of his other books, some of which provide extremely digestible fare, others which are more avant-garde, Numbers in the Dark, a posthumous anthology of ‘uncollected’ texts stands out as a representative sample of Calvino’s entire oeuvre. Containing examples of his worst and best writing, the anthology spans his career from 1943 to his death in 1985. The early raccontini rub conceits with more realistic work, including an unfinished novel, as well as fiction which straddles the genres. One of the best OuLiPo fictions ever published, ‘The Burning Of The Abominable House’, a text designed by computer, is preceded by an eccentric, though fundamentally cogent, plea for a new political system, which relies on the periodic execution of the ruling classes. ‘Beheading The Heads’, originally a sketch for a novel, is one of Calvino’s wryest short-stories. The collection also contains two new Qfwfq tales, set at the birth and death of the cosmos.