Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures: Word and Image Relations in the Work of Italo Calvino 9781442678231

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PAINTING WITH WORDS, WRITING WITH PICTURES

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Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures Word and Image in the Work of Italo Calvino

F R A N C O RICCI

U N I V E R S I T Y OF T O R O N T O P R E S S Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2001 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-3507-8

Printed on acid-free paper Toronto Italian Studies Excerpts from 'The Painter Dreaming in the Scholar's House,' by Howard Nemerov, in The Painter Dreaming in the Scholar's House (New York: Phoenix Bookshop, 1968), courtesy of Margaut Nemerov. 'Anecdote of the Jar,' from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, copyright 1954 by Wallace Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Ricci, Franco, 1953Painting with words, writing with pictures : words and image in the work of Italo Calvino (Toronto Italian studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-3507-8 1. Calvino, Italo - Criticism and interpretation. PQ4809.A45Z88 2001

853'.914

I. Title. II. Series.

C2001-930326-2

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Research and Publications Committee of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ottawa. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPTDP).

BEING A MAN, and not a god, he stands Already in a world of sense, from which He borrows, to begin with, mental things Chiefly, the abstract elements of language: The point, the line, the plane, the colors and The geometric shapes. Of these he spins Relation out, he weaves its fabric up So that it speaks darkly, as music does Singing the secret history of the mind. And when in this the visible world appears, And it does do, mountain, flower, cloud, and tree, All haunted here and there with the human face, It happens as by accident, although The accident is of design. It is because Language first rises from the speechless world That the painterly intelligence Can say correctly that he makes his world, Not imitates the one before his eyes. Hence the delightsome gardens, the dark shore, The terrifying forests where nightfall Enfolds a lost and tired traveler. And hence the careless crowd deludes itself By likening his hieroglyphic signs And secret alphabets to the drawings of a child. That likeness is significant the other side

Of what they see, for his simplicities Are not the first ones, but the furthest ones, final refinements of his thought made visible. He is the painter of the human mind Finding and faithfully reflecting the mindfulness That is in things, and not the things themselves. For such a man, art is an act of faith: Prayer the study of it, as Blake says, And praise the practice; nor does he divide Making from teaching or from theory. The three are one, and in his house of art There shines a happiness through darkest themes, As though spirit and sense were not at odds.

vi

His dream an emblem to us of the life of thought, The same dream that then flared before intelligence When light first went forth looking for the eye. Howard Nemerov, The Painter Dreaming in The Scholar's House (New York: Phoenix Bookshop, 1968)

Contents

Preface ix Introduction 3 1 From Word to Image 15 Overreaching Boundaries 16 Of Fantasy Images and Visual Patterns 20 Imagism: New Ways of Seeing 34 Real Images and Fantasy Imaginings 43 Personal Re-memberings 58 2 From Image to Word 69 A Verbal Order to Visual Chaos 70 Cosmicomics 77 'L'origine degli Uccelli' 86 Visually Potentializing Literature 106 St George and St Jerome 113 3 Variations on a Theme 123 Vision and the Validity of Understanding Writing as Description 131 Writing as Eskesis 145 4 Verbal Order to Visual Chaos 157 Mapping the Seeable and Sayable 159 Mapping Internal Geography 167

124

viii

Contents

If on a winter's night a traveller ... following a map ... discovers a painter's studio 174 Squaring the Text 185 5 The World's Seamless Web 191 Writing with Art 192 Thinking of Art 200 Stealing from Art 212 6 Painted Stories and Novel Spaces 220 Writing and Painting 222 Valerio Adami 229 Domenico Gnoli 248 Giorgio De Chirico City 261 Conclusion: A New Point of Departure 276

Notes 291 Bibliography

321

Name Index 337 Subject Index

341

Title Index 343

Preface

The present version of this book began as an idea spawned in a seminar given by W.J.T. Mitchell for the School of Criticism and Theory held at Dartmouth College in the summer of 1990. Besides losing many a tennis match to Professor Mitchell, conversations with him and fellow classmates Mario Klarer and Enric Sulla helped shape my thinking on word and image relations. So too am I grateful to the many participants in my yearly Word and Image sessions at the American Association for Italian Studies conventions. I have profited greatly from their expertise and enthusiasm. I would like to think that the final result is a compilation of these moments that sheds some light not only on specific issues related to the work of Italo Calvino but on larger matters of word and image relations as well. Having spent many years on this still continuing project, I have a large number of people to thank. I would like to express my gratitude to those most directly involved. To my friends Marco Belpoliti, Salvino Bizzarre, Maria Jose Calvo Montoro, Rocco Capozzi, Andrea Dini, Joseph Francese, Glenn Pierce, Jose Ruano della Haza, Anthony J. Tamburri, Beno Weiss, from whom I have learned much. To my unknown peer reviewers, whose comments and suggestions helped crystalize my thinking in several important areas. Special thanks to the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme and to the editors of the Modern Language Review for permission to reprint a revised version of 'De Chirico City: Calvinian Ambulations.' Heartfelt gratitude to Vida Abedi, whose patience and precision helped forge the final manuscript. The late Gian Paolo Biasin read the manuscript and was eminently

x Preface

and unforgettably generous with advice and encouragement. His approval was especially gratifying. Above all I thank my wife, Hoda Eid, for her sustaining encouragement. She is my image of eidos, an intellectual presence felt in each eidolon; I also thank Alessandro, my son, my new eikon of knowledge. A Note on Textual Practices

Translations are from published sources, where they exist. Where no page number is provided for an English translation of the Italian text, the translation is my own.

PAINTING WITH WORDS, WRITING WITH PICTURES

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Introduction

The work I did later in life, extracting stories from the mysterious figures of the tarot and interpreting the same figure in a different way each time, certainly had its roots in my obsessive porings over pages and pages of cartoons when I was a child... This fantastic iconology has become my habitual way of expressing my love of painting. I have adopted the method of telling my own stories, starting from pictures famous in the history of art or at any rate pictures that have made an impact on me. Italo Calvino1

In a letter to Francois Wahl dated 1 December I960, Calvino thanks Wahl for the kind words expressed on his behalf. After praising his friend's critical acumen - 'E' la prima volta che ho la soddisfazione d'avere una definizione critica cosi' intelligente e completa' (This is the first time that I have the satisfaction of receiving such an intelligent and complete critique') - the author gives reasons for his satisfaction: 'perche e la prima volta che si analizza il mio modo di immaginare e costruire una storia' ('because it is the first time that my method for imagining and constructing a story is analysed'). He then states: Insomma, quello cui io tendo, Tunica cosa che vorrei poter insegnare e un modo di guardare cioe di essere in mezzo al mondo. In fondo la letteratura non puo insegnare altro. In short, my aim, the only thing that I would wish to teach is a way of seeing, a way, that is, to be in the world. In essence, literature cannot teach anything else.2

4 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

This is one of the first of many statements Calvino would make regarding the visual propensity of his narrative imagination, in which he locates the art of looking as central to his poetics of writing. Typically, the candid observation is made privately and to a friend. When read with other, similar statements it is easy to deduce that the author's selfproclaimed 'punto di partenza sia I'immagine' ('point of departure is the image'), an image seen up close - scrutinized - and that his narrative act 'svilupppi una logica' ('develops a logic') that is 'interna deU'immagine stessa' (350; 'inside the image itself). However, what I find most compelling in this private correspondence is the author's attitude towards the lack of any real action in his stories: Giustamente Lei osserva che questo processo logico portato alle ultime conseguenze a un certo punto si spegne e annulla in un terzo momento: quello della contemplazione. (350) You correctly observe that this logical process, taken to its ultimate consequences, at a certain point is extinguished and nullifies itself in a third moment: that of contemplation.

Taking the argument beyond the simple notion of looking at things to be written about, the author juxtaposes two eternally opposite creative impulses: he is exasperated at the lack of temporal flow in his narrative, yet exhilarated by the notion of narrative space, of tranquil contemplation. These counter-tendencies suggest a sense of uneasiness, of irresolution, of incompleteness that, like the cloven viscount, the protagonist of // visconte dimezzato (1952), divides the author between active storytelling with action characters and a self-effacing, psychological predisposition towards inactive prose, a style more in tune with his visual 'rapporto verso il mondo' ('relation with the world'). Although he claims to have suspected a dormant love of action ('ho sempre pensato d'amare 1'azione, la pratica'; T always thought I loved action, experience'), Calvino admits, 'di fatto non sono un uomo d'azione istintivamente, ma solo per volonta e spinta razionale' ('in fact I am not a man of action by instinct, but only by volition and rational thrust'). Sounding very much like a divided viscount finally accepting and acknowledging a 'shortcoming' in his narrative ('1'azione costituisce sempre per me un problema'; 'for me, action always constitutes a problem') Calvino again praises the critic for his perspicacity:

Introduction 5 scoprire che i miei racconti hanno tutti questo problema dell'agitazione inutile e dell'azione reale, e per me una acquisizione preziosa. (350) to discover that all my short stories share this problem of useless agitation and real action, is for me a valuable acquisition.

But how sincere is this disclosure? The year is 1960. The letter to Wahl postdates the Note attached to the heraldic trilogy 7 nostri antenati (1960; Our Ancestors) by six months.3 In this Note the author had already publicly revealed the inspirational font for his stories in the often-quoted phrase, 'All'origine di ogni storia che ho scritto c'e un'immagine che mi gira per la testa, nata chissa come e che mi porto dietro magari per anni' (354; 'At the origin of every story I have written there is an image that revolves in my head, born who knows how and that I carry with me even for years'). He had, in short, already admitted the need for a spatial fix. Is the author tipping his hand to a friend, characteristically reprising a motif that adumbrates the heart of his literary enterprise? Is he signalling a new-found well of personal and professional vigour? Was he wondering, in private, to a friend capable of rendering the news public, if anyone was listening? The Note, like the collection of essays Una pietra sopra (1980), was published at an important moment and marks the beginning of a transitional phase (1960-7) in the author's career. The letter to Wahl consolidates the moment. It signals, to those able to follow the traces, a turn in inspirational fonts and creative spirits. No longer willing to search, to quote Wolfgang Iser, for 'the simultaneity of the mutually exclusive/4 Calvino now gives in to his ekphrastic impulse, despite its inevitably paradoxical consequences. The Note continues with a telling description of his working method: A poco a poco mi viene da sviluppare questa immagine in una storia con un principio e una fine, e nello stesso tempo - ma i due processi sono spesso paralleli e indipendenti - mi convince che essa racchiude qualche significato. (354) Slowly I begin to develop this image into a story with a beginning and an end, and at the same time - but the two processes are often parallel and independent - I convince myself that it holds some significance.

In other words, the spatial image that pervades his imagination is

6 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

eventually translated into a temporal sequence, the eidolon into a story. An all-encompassing and seemingly inexhaustible paradigmatic space is constricted to the syntactic requisites of finite temporal verbs. The bemoaned inaction that Wahl espies and that so paralyses the author is energized into effective action during the act of writing - 'E' solo scrivendo che ogni cosa finisce per andare al suo posto' (354; 'It is only through writing that everything winds up in its place') - but is never, and cannot be translated into a story. Although the passive image is transformed into an active word sequence, inaction remains inactivity, visual space is translated into contemplation. In other words, any action Calvino attempts to narrate has the habit of freezing itself within a spatial frame. Calvino closes his comments to his friend Wahl with the following sentence: 'II suo discorso potrebbe essere ampliato in un vasto saggio' (354; 'Your argument could be broadened into a lengthy essay'). The present study intends to do just that and proceeds on two basic premises. It postulates first that Calvino's narrative is generated by an imagocentric program and, second, that the nature of Calvino's literary proposals is ekphrastic. These tendencies must, however, contend with the arbitrary and sightless nature of the writing experience. Language belies the transiency of the creative moment and tends to thwart the dream of corporeal presence, because words cannot have capacity. They cannot, literally, contain space. Calvino's images are word bound and therefore affected by the representational means used to present their reality. I will thus examine not so much the function, place, or quality of images in the writings of Calvino but instead search for the grain of Calvino's thinking by assessing a primary facet of shared human thinking, perception; that act that transforms a perceived phenomenon into a description, a meditation, a story, a text. Calvino himself puts it succinctly when speaking of his fascination with the writing style of Lucretius. 'Cio che ci interessa,' he states, 'e il modo in cui... e descritta un'esperienza che pare semplicissima e che invece sfugge a chiunque voglia fissarla sulla pagina'5 ("That which interests us is the manner in which ... an apparently simple experience is described when instead it eludes anyone who wishes to fix it on the page'). I am interested, then, in the difficult interface between word and image that Calvino struggled with throughout his career, and in the act of perception that rendered visible that which was invisible and transformed what was seen into what is read. To be sure, the notion that Calvino's literary enterprise is visual in

Introduction 7

inspiration is not novel. Broached by many but never fully examined, the subject receives its most eloquent and extended statement to date in Marco Belpoliti's L'occhio di Calvino.6 An excellent study, Belpoliti presents a far-reaching overview of Calvino's visual tendencies with a subtending critical discourse that highlights the author's recurring imagery (the labyrinth, the net, the crystal, and the spiral, for example), his tendency to 'think with his eyes/ the irresistible urge to read the world as if it were an inexhaustible and seamless surface. Both our works benefit from conversations held during conferences in Italy and Spain, where our common interest in the nature of seeing in Calvino was discovered. Our studies are the result of an idea whose time had come. Yet, where Belpoliti is analytical, separating parts to better understand the whole, I am more synthetic, more systematic, and limit myself to assembling elements that form a snapshot of Calvino's narrative system from a visual perspective. Where Belpoliti ably uncovers the basic principles of visuality critically expressed by the author, I move from these principles to practical application. I wish to display Calvino's underlying visual tendency by presenting turnstile moments of ideological/thematic/methodological transition that reveal what Mieke Bal would call a mode of discourse that produces specific visual effects.7 Calvino's main effect is to be variably different from others in writing style but also visually different, both in the appearance of his works and in the visual images he imagines. Even within his own corpus of words the author constantly sought variety and difference. The term 'difference' is apropos because Calvino has always been considered different, an outsider; never really a communist, never a realist, never really a fantasist. An uneasily cornered 'scoiattolo' (squirrel) as it were, he shares the squirrel's tendency to live in high places (Calvino's apartments in Paris and Rome were always on the uppermost floor), the ability, therefore, to view things from above, the ultimate necessity (personal and professional) of benign aloofness, of salutatory distance ('Alle volte,' he stated in an interview, 'bisogna saper restare soli; e' 1'unico modo per far capire che le cose che contano non sono quelle/;8 'Sometimes one must remain alone; it is the only way to demonstrate what is truly important'). Calvino's enduring legacy is that though he was an ever-present cultural operator to be reckoned with, he never really entered the fray. While he expressed measured opinions with eloquent, if not terse, aplomb, he was also able to scurry with wonderfilled surefootedness amidst the most playful of ideas and notions. Yet Calvino has also expressed a certain monological constancy. There is

8 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

embedded within his discourse a propensity towards descriptive exercises. The exercises are always discursive; they are part of the cognitive process that Calvino calls writing. They are necessarily sensory in nature, incorporating all the senses but privileging the primary sense of vision. For Calvino, thinking began at the eye. The idea and indeed the inherent danger of recording visual experience is not new to culture. From Plato's Cratylus to Michael Ann Holly's Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image,9 the scope and aims of the two contending signifying systems, verbal as opposed to imagistic, have haunted attempts to imitate reality. The conflict over both the nature and careless use of words, icons, verbal images, metaphor, and metonymy has produced a swinging pendulum of logocentric versus imagocentric values. In our century, the classic accounts of Aristotle, Alberti, Leonardo, Burke, Lessing, and Panofsky have gained increasing currency as historians of systems of signification attempt to erase the traditional boundaries between the arts.10 Modern philosophers (the early Wittgenstein, Derrida), psychologists (Arnheim, Kennedy, Hagen), constructionists (Hochberg), iconologists (Gombrich), modern theorists (Goodman, Mitchell, Krieger), and art historians (Bryson, Holly) are investigating the corollaries between entrenched verbal and visual canons and contemporary conventions.11 Literary theorists have turned to Roland Barthes's multi-tracked and laterally connected arguments about textuality that display the complex symmetries and subversive complementarities of their aesthetic ideals.12 Calvino's propensity towards description may be interpreted as endorsing one of Barthes's principal theses, that the surface is always more telling than depth. His exaltation of Tightness,' 'quickness,' and Visibility' as ideals to be preserved for the next millennium recalls Nietzsche's panegyrics on spectacle and visibility. While genre theory has given preference to active narratives, that is, those narratives that assert action rather than description, in his work Calvino subverted this traditional power structure in favour of a discourse that privileges vision, description, and contemplation as a means of active intellectual involvement, what St Augustine called distension. Yet, by using these terms to characterize his writings we are led to the inevitable (and now characteristic) picture of the artist as a loner, a creator of inert protagonists, an author who passively watched the world as an ocular spectacle, never participating but always remaining off the socio-political map. This is the image that Calvino cultivated

Introduction 9 both in his private and public life. Such a view, however, tends to trivialize his art, leaving it on the margins of the social canvas. The reality is that Calvino understood voyeurism as both a contemporary malaise and a postmodern necessity. Calvino's ideas on the visual nature of language, combined with his use of scientific theory as a reliable touchstone for the creative process, have gained currency in contemporary theories of perception generated by developments in gender-related issues. Consideration of his love of paintings, then, is an essential key to making sense of Calvino's visual writing style. Calvino approached the world from a consistently perceptual or imagocentric vantage point. The juxtaposing of verbal images that inspire the visions his narratives portray often follows the same patterns that characterize representational art. Though critics often suggest in passing the possible influences of cartoon characters and fairy-tale images in Calvino's work, and may allude to the allencompassing, all-embracing outreach of the author's gathering vision, the truth is that issues of imaging, of what happens to thefabula of the world once it enters the Calvino story machine, are always considered from a thematic perspective or within ideological contextualizations that often become reductionist. No one has ever addressed the practical issues of imaging, perception, imagining, or representation.13 Calvino wrote a number of introductions to art catalogues, commented on art exhibitions, and published newspaper travelogues in which he described visits to museums and archeological sites. Often the author rearranged what he saw into playful voyages inside the artworks, essentially animating their visual signs with verbal narrative. Calvino was obviously interested in more than simply recording these memorable 'border crossings' (the terminology is Lessing's). Yet critics have either treated these writings as peripheral to his work as a serious artist or dismissed them altogether as para-literary games. Consider the amusing and meditative essays contained in Collezione di sabbia (1984). These are, to my mind, Calvino's port of call. This is a book of things: things, not events, that have been looked at and discerned; things examined and collated, things re-presented and re-invented and re-told. These things provide the stimulus for the author's imaginative act, the fabula of the author's intreccio. The essays effectively demonstrate Calvino's disposition towards the experience of looking. They provide an opportunity to observe how Calvino perceived the world while demonstrating how far he had come from // sentiero del nidi di ragno (1947; The Path to the Nest of Spiders). While writers continued to

10 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

look for a story that created a possible reality, Calvino gripped reality itself. The world, the real world, was critical to his performance. By drawing objects closer to himself, he was able to shift focus from his audience to the thing itself. By understanding this ability to connect, visually, with the specific objects of his gaze we may better understand the intimate nature of his narrative. Moreover, we may be able to eventually uncover the visual sources, the art, that inspired Calvino's creative writing. But this could be the subject of another study. Active vision renders Collezione di sabbia a remarkable illustrated book of emblems, a list of costumes, interests, anatomical parts, and adventures that are captioned, so to speak, by Calvino's verbal aphorisms. Most of these pieces appeared in newspapers over a long period of time; none are subordinate to an overarching structure beyond a general classification that identifies them as impressionistic, visual reportage. As in his ruminations on paintings, however, these exercises free the author from the responsibility of inventing new possible narrative worlds and concentrate on those already extant. He merely needs to discover those that exist in what he sees. In an insightful review of Collezione di sabbia, Giorgio Ficara14 begins with two contrasting ideas regarding discovery. One is Petrarch's optimistic notion that the antipods are waiting to be discovered and that "1 di' nostro vola / a gente che di la forse 1'aspetta' ('our day flies / towards people that perhaps await it there'). The other citation is from Leopardi. The poet laments novelty, deploring the futile attempt at attenuating Nature's malignity: 'E figurato e il mondo in breve carta; / Ecco tutto simile, e discoprendo, / solo il nulla s'accresce' ('The world is already imagined on brief papers; / Everything is similar, and discovering, / only the void increases'). The question for Calvino, however, is no longer whether voyages of discovery are legitimate, but whether, as Calvino speculates in the Collezione di sabbia piece 'Com'era nuovo il Nuovo Mondo,' we would even be capable of discerning a new world if one were discovered: 'se un nuovo Nuovo Mondo venisse scoperto ora, lo sapremmo vedere7.' (15; 'if a new New World were discovered now, would we be able to see it?'). From youthful musings on goats in 'Le capre ci guardano'15 to wondering whether it was possible to follow the undulations of a breaking wave in Palomar (1983), Calvino maintained a vantage of the world imbued with the childlike wonder and amazement of the traveller. Is it possible today to 'scartare dalla mente tutte le immagini che siamo abituati ad associare all'aspettativa d'un mondo diverse (quelle della

Introduction 11

fantascienza, per esempio) per cogliere la diversita vera che si presenterebbe ai nostri occhi?' (15; 'discard from the mind all the images that we are accustomed to associate with the expectations of a diverse world (those of science fiction, for example) in order to capture the true diversity that would present itself to our eyes?'). Since we are all conditioned to notice only that which is immediately identifiable as part of our world, it is entirely possible that 'un Nuovo Mondo ci si apre tutti i giorni, e noi non lo vediamo' (15; 'a New World opens itself to us each day, and we do not see it'). Not unless, Calvino continues, we remain in the guise of a traveller to which everything is new. Calvino's writings on extraliterary topoi propose just such an exercise in visual recognition. I hypothesize that these writings confirm an innate visualizing tendency latent in Calvino's style that may reveal definite extraliterary sources of inspiration for much of his narrative. His lifelong interest in cinematic images, music, theatre, paintings and sketches, art exhibits, and collections of paraphernalia moves well beyond vicarious pursuits. The author actively engaged his creative talents with a variety of arts in an attempt to derive personal pleasure and enhance artistic plenitude. His attempts to transcribe the world into finely detailed descriptions, when considered with the theoretical scope of his articles on cognitive functions and the senses, convince me that for Calvino words and images were perhaps the same thing.16 While it is indeed arguable whether seeing is an appropriate metaphor for writing, the central self-conscious theme of most of his works is the visualization of space through words. For Calvino, to relate to the world is to see it, to transpose it, fully, onto the white page before him, the so-called allegorical canvas of the mind. This descriptive impulse is sustained by a pictorially evocative technique that orders reality within a measurable grid, deciphers the world, transforming a visual experience into a depicted temporalized event. To describe the world with words is thus tantamount to locating, not fixing, it in time, to taking an evolving snapshot, to deciphering and depicting it. For Barthes, these de-picted objects can never translate the world nor may an author use the object as its own referent because reality is never still but in constant emersion. An author must instead transcodify reality from one system of referents to another, equally suspect one.17 Though literature may install a fictive form of visual presence, literary language is made up of names which are never truly transparent. They are visual markers and have no essential content. This problem is the focus of Calvino's essay 'The Written and the Unwritten Word'18 and is part

12 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures of the unresolvable dilemma of Calvino's art. It is no small irony that the very words used to depict the world may in no way reflect it. This is an issue Calvino grappled with time and again. If, as Barthes states, every literary description is a view,19 Calvino's views enfranchise the primacy of the visual as the hallmark of his narrative activity. While the author's painterly inclinations reach their maximum import in Palomar (in the interview 'E 1'occhio scruta il caos del mondo' Calvino states 'Ho voluto scrivere come un tempo disegnavano i pittori'20 ['I wanted to write the way painters once painted']), it is interesting that as early as the 1955 essay 'II midollo del leone' Calvino was contemplating a literature that would somehow breach its confines and be all things to all readers: E sempre con curiosita e speranza e meraviglia che il giovane, 1'operaio, il contadino che ha preso gusto a leggere, aprono un libro nuovo. Sempre cosi' vorremmo che venissero aperti anche i nostri.21 It is always with curiosity and hope and marvel that the youth, the worker, the farmer who has acquired the pleasure of reading, opens a new book. It is always in this fashion that we would wish our books to be opened. This type of literature would demand a purview that was more innovative than fictive, more artistic than narrative,22 a style that inspires 'meraviglia' and 'speranza' ('marvel' and 'hope'), two requisites that recall baroque canons of intricate design and visual haptic texture. Calvino described such a system of fiction building in the 1960 Note to / nostri antenati when speaking of the process that generated // visconte dimezzato: Dunque, da un po' di tempo pensavo a un uomo tagliato in due per lungo, e che ognuna delle due parti andava per conto suo. La storia di un soldato, in una guerra moderna? Ma la solita satira espressionista era fritta e rifritta: meglio una guerra dei tempi andati, i Turchi, un colpo di scimitarra, no: meglio un colpo di cannone, cosi' si sarebbe creduto che una meta era andata distrutta, invece poi saltava fuori. (355) Therefore, for some time I had been thinking of a man cut in half, with each of these two parts living on its own. The story of a soldier, in a mod

Introduction 13 ern war? But the usual expressionist satire had been done and redone: better a war from some remote past, the Turks, a scimitar's blow, no: better a cannon blast, in this way it would be assumed that one half had been destroyed, only to reappear later.

Calvino continues thinking aloud until he confesses a telling analogy. Come un pittore puo usare un ovvio contrasto di colori perche gli serve a dare evidenza a una forma, cosi' io avevo usato un ben noto contrasto narrative per dare evidenza a quel che mi interessava, cioe il dimidiamento. (355) Just as a painter might use an obvious colour contrast because it serves to highlight a shape, I had used a well-known narrative contrast to highlight what really interested me, that is, division.

This 1960 reference to painting galvanizes an early possible model of interaction between discursive and imagistic signifying practices that will evolve to include paintings. It is an act of recognition that writing, for Calvino, is a production, rather than a perception of meaning. It is an admission he enhances years later in Turti ad arte': La pittura mi e servita sempre come spinta a rinnovarmi, come ideale di invenzione libera, di essere sempre se stessi facendo sempre qualcosa di nuovo.23 I have always used painting as a stimulus of personal renewal, as an ideal of free invention, always remaining the same while always doing something new.

Critics have signalled a shift in texture and perspective in the new and improved sixties Calvino, with a cosmic dimension replacing a provincial one. I would contend, instead, that concomitant to the author's move from capricious inventions of fantasy to the objective categories of science there is an easing from temporality and differentiation (narratives that tell a story) to spatiality and density (image-bound, nondiscursive gestalts).24 Calvino is tapping into his original pleasures of writing, a pleasure we will attempt to pursue to its ultimate conclusion. This not only involved combinatorics (a skill he possessed in early tales25 and honed while a member of the experimental French

14 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

group OuLiPo, Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle) but also an expanding confidence in his own creative possibilities as a depictive writer. In this study I do not pretend to supply ideal solutions of what Calvino's narrative project is or what, indeed, it is meant to be. Rather, my interpretation serves as a model for possible further explorations of the images that he used, be they drawn from real or imaginary experiences (stories written in the fifties), gleaned from readings in parascientific literature (the sixties), hammered from playful excursions into narratology (the seventies), inspired from collected paraphernalia in exhibitions (the eighties), or meticulously rendered from personal perceptions before artworks. I thus intend to approach Calvino's writings as a composite of this variegated and self-pollinating system of images. What this approach does in the first instance is displace the notion of sign from the hegemony of logocentrism. The question of action or inaction, addressed by Calvino in his letter to Wahl, is therefore of utmost importance, for it augurs parallel discussions of linear and spiral, of time and space, of word and image, as well as tangential issues of gender. I will also map the visual pathways of Calvino's writings by examining what I consider transitional short stories, introductions and prefaces to art catalogues, his critical and imaginative essays on art. Finally, I will examine Calvino's descriptions of specific paintings and use of cultural icons. As a lateral thinker, the author was able to make intriguing connections between the most disparate items. Calvino's methodological gaze will prove invaluable, as it permits us an illuminated vision of things as if they had never been fathomed.

Chapter One

From Word to Image

Time and Space are Real Beings, a Male and a Female. Time is a Man, Space is a Woman. William Blake1

/ live in an age which is over saturated with theories and abstract discourse, in reaction, I try to focus my attention on the things I see, on images. Italo Calvino2

This chapter examines Calvino's move from a narrative constructed with words to one built on images. The nature of this migration is subtle. Indeed, one can argue that the author's visual project is indigenous, that curt, crisp, revelatory images are the hallmark of his entire writing experience. For Francois Wahl Lo choc del reale provoca 1'apparizione d'un'immagine: e ancora il reale ed e gia un'altra cosa; 1'immagine traduce un'esperienza, ma significa di piu e su un altro piano. Ed ecco che questo simbolo si mette a vivere; sviluppa una logica sua propria; porta con se una rete d'avvenimenti, di personaggi; impone il suo tono, il suo linguaggio.3 The shock of reality provokes the apparition of an image: it is still reality and it is already something else; the image translates an experience, but it signifies more and on another plane. And so this symbol comes to live; develops its own logic; carries with it a series of events, characters; imposes its own tone, its own language.

16 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

These images are nevertheless coerced by language to travel uneasy ideological paths: the fabulous path to the origin (nest) of spiders, the cosmological path to the origin (science) of concepts, the hyperscrutinizing path to the origin (natural history) of the senses, for example. Calvino will feel confident with his hidden talent only after 1963, a watershed year for both a renewal of his narrative topoi (the use of infinite universal paradigms) and a renewed and enhanced critical reception. My hypothesis is that Calvino's attention to visual representations is commensurate with his lifelong ambition to extend the wordbound limits of the literary medium. I speculate that Calvino, like his twentieth-century counterparts in the visual arts, would have liked to have turned the word itself into an image of meaning, but preferred the comfortable, controlled climate of his writing table. This explains his toying with sister arts analogies. In this chapter, then, I will ground my arguments within an interarts analogy that contrasts the colours of nature and paint with verbal language and structure. I will not stress the traditional mirroring function of the two arts, nor attempt to resolve the greater epistemological questions of communication, but will instead focus on the paradoxical nature of the two media by interpreting them as signs of reality, as perceptual systems in their own right. This semiotic concreteness allows Calvino to juxtapose verbal and visual sign systems in an unlimited cultural semiosis while maintaining the vigilant awareness of his own dominant discourse. Overreaching Boundaries One of the fundamental structures of the modern imagination is the visual metaphor. Images have achieved a power over us that was only dreamed of (and feared) in the past. The power unleashed by the spatial visualization of culture has broken down the hierarchical orders of institutionalized linear discourses (particularly philosophy, art history, literature) that promoted self-sufficient, singular, often exclusionary, aesthetic canons. The success of the figurative paradigm in contemporary culture has spawned irredentist claims by art historians who wish to safeguard the exclusive visual and spatial component of their medium. Literary proponents of narrative space, on the other hand, hold that current notions of architectonic design and spatial topicality in the temporal arena of literature are inferred by the nature of the medium. These critics argue that spatial metaphors never intended to physically occupy the body of a text but are, nevertheless, an essential

From Word to Image 17

and not incidental component of the reading experience. There is a considerable body of literature that attempts to either reconcile or exacerbate the obvious differences between the arts.4 Strategies for explaining away the exceptions to the rule of a space-time differentiation have produced valid theories, but they have also renewed age-old fears of logocentric versus imagocentric values. W.J.T. Mitchell views objections to the notion of literary space as symptomatic of a traditional ekphrastic fear that promotes an attitude of mistrust of and anxiety towards all sorts of images, be they mental, pictorial, verbal, or perceptual.5 The relevance of the word and image controversy is essential to my argument for it strikes at the very nature of Calvino's writing style and his use of imagery and images. Conventionally, the term image is applied to patterns of reality presented to the eye; that is, photos, projections, displays, and so forth. In a standard sense, these items have a visual appearance; they look like the something that is undisputably being represented. So-called mental images, on the other hand, those relegated to the realm of perception, occur as a pattern of nervous activity in the lateral geniculate nucleus within the spectator. The epistemology of these two types of images is decidedly different. Indeed, the format of the neural hardware that reproduces the event on the mind's canvas has no direct relationship to the pre-retinal scene of which it is said to be an image. Yet, whether they impress themselves upon our senses or develop, often unintentionally, as phantasms within, images are part of a fundamental principle of what Michel Foucault calls 'the order of things.'6 Narrative, too, is one of the fundamental order-making operations of culture. Working primarily through tropisms, the process of narrativization converts impressions into mental images. Description is the primary vehicle for constructing the contiguous chain of events in space-time that we interpret as a story. It has been acknowledged that Calvino's narrative is subtended by a visual writing style that is primarily descriptive in nature. His discourse proceeds by a series of synecdochic or metonymic details which stand as it were for the totality of items being represented, and he is able to generate additional meaning through connotation and metaphoric patterning. This narrative is, in fact, subtended by the image and reveals a fabulatory 'delight in design.'7 This purely visual universe moves beyond natural likeness towards an imaging of the world that is based on a verbal (temporal) sign system grounded in iconicity (spatiality). In such a scenario, man is both imagined and re-imagined and is able to play a role in the re-imagination of himself.

18 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

Calvino has often been deemed an aloof and detached writer: the visual index of his narrative is such that reality is explored from a willed and comfortable distance. Yet, the visual component of his work has received scant and, for the most part, unsatisfactory critical attention.8 Scholars have preferred to focus on his eclectic and ludic use of modern literary techniques, the fantasy-like quality of his narrative, or the use of scientifically inspired patterns and forms. I wish instead to read Calvino's fiction as part of a visual system that develops cognitive patterns which attempt to create a synergism between verbal and visual language systems. For this reason, I am zeroing in on a particular aspect of this visual system, that is, the painterly, or descriptive posture this attitude privileges. It was Calvino himself who made the most extensive comparisons between the words he used and the sources (real and imagined) that may have inspired them. An innovative and unorthodox writer, his fiction moves beyond simple classifications and welcomes just this sort of interart and interdisciplinary comparison. The son of scientists, Calvino wrote essays in the sixties postulating the use of scientific equations as sources for literary inspiration and often fused ideas of relativity and quantum mechanics, simultaneity and cybernetics into his creative work, especially the cosmicomic tales. These critical and creative writings present a synthesis of scientific knowledge and literary form, polysemic inversions and narrative possibilities that may be seen to augur current epistemological questions. For example, by mythologizing the most obscure formulae of the new physics in the collection of stories Ti con zero (1967, T Zero) Calvino confronted the reader with the possibility that alternate explanations exist regarding the interaction of man and the universe. Several short stories in I racconti (1958) can be seen as possible early metaphors for both word processing ('La notte dei numeri' ['The Night of Numbers']) and the perceptual problematic inherent to virtual reality ('L'avventura di un lettore' [The Adventure of a Reader'], 'L'avventura di un soldato' [The Adventure of a Soldier'], 'L'avventura di un viaggiatore' [The Adventure of a Traveller']), and cyberspace paradigms ('La Signora Paulatim' ['Mrs. Paulatim']). His article 'Cibernetica e fantasmi' (1967; 'Cybernetics and Ghosts') postulated the creation of 'una macchina poetico-elettronica' ('a poetic-electronic machine') that could 'proporre nuovi modi d'intendere la scrittura' ('propose new ways of conceiving writing').9 Finally, in 'Che testa,' an article regarding the interface of the human senses and the world, Calvino, taking his cues from research into interactive information systems, postulated the primacy

From Word to Image 19

of vision and touch as metaphors of human consciousness.10 He even intended to write five short stories each highlighting a different sense. It should be apparent from these few examples that Calvino viewed literature as an investigative activity that may examine the existential, spiritual and, why not, neurophysiological processes that shape worldly experience. Calvino was an iconic thinker. By this I do not mean that his work is representational, although its underlying strategy is the re-assembly of reality through minute verbal descriptions. Rather, the descriptive process causes the author to create icons (be they literary images, verbal diagrams, or visual metaphors) that tend to generate textual resemblance while at the same time eschewing closeness. Thus, if the patterns and symmetries generated in the text correspond to or imitate existing elemental relations, their iconicity as an image or diagram of reality is intensified. This occurs in the early war tales where terror, not facts, are highlighted through intense descriptions, as well as in the cosmicomic tales where theories, not reality, are mimicked through style. If, instead, Calvino establishes a symbolic circuit through which he affords insight into a particular relation of logocentric meaning to imagocentric meaning (for example, in the Palomar stories where the image constructed by words is simultaneously deconstructed by its slippery context, or, and more pertinently, in his interpretations of paintings and artworks), then his text is not representing an Other reality but rather constructing a way to achieve a parallel or anagogical way of thinking. The patterns, diagrams, models, and analogies that animate Calvino's writings create a dynamism that is both exploratory (in that it investigates reality) and formulative (in that it creates a new reality). It is exploratory in its unceasing quest for cultural icons that bear scrutiny and may reveal hidden values. Icons, according to Charles S. Peirce, are unique in their capactity to uncover 'unexpected truth': 'a great distinguishing property of the icon is that by the direct observation of it other truths concerning its object can be discovered than those which suffice to determine its construction. Thus, by means of two photographs a map can be drawn, etc. Given a conventional or other general sign of an object, to deduce any other truth than that which it explicitly signifies, it is necessary, in all cases, to replace that sign by an icon.'11 And it is formulative because through the protean workings of his mind, Calvino is able to shape, as Wendy Steiner states, the 'ineluctable modality of the visible'12 into images of constantly evolving and unexpected matter. Calvino's narrative is a melange of polysemic styles and methods

20 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

that attempt to do just that. It is his potential for 'morphing' or shapechanging that makes his narrative the dynamic process that it is, a fact he ironically alludes to, as we have seen, in the opening chapter of Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore (1979, If on a winter's night a traveller) when he states, referring to himself, 'si sa che e un autore che cambia molto da libro a libro. E proprio in questi cambiamenti si riconosce che e lui' (9; 'he is known as an author who changes greatly from one book to the next. And in these very changes you recognize him as himself 9). At the same time there is a subtending core to Calvino's professional activity that guarantees a directional focus and constancy. The underlying and unifying motivation of his writings is the exploitation of the mimetic potential of literature and its ability to bridge the gap between the written and the unwritten world. He was given to mannerism, to technical experimentation, to the adaptation of ideas foreign to literature, to the re-utilization of his own and others' topoi and motifs to create a grand mosaic of orderly and re-ordered worlds. He was wont to set his stories together, treating their themes like spatial bodies, juxtaposing and arranging them on the canvas of the Table of Contents page much as a painter arranges objects on a dais.13 His eventual turn to narrativizing the images in paintings was, to my mind, part of this desire to foreshorten the barrier between the arts, the ultimate aim of which was to contrive a semiosis appealing to all the senses. A 'speaking picture,' such as those painted by the artist Valerio Adami and narrativized by Calvino, for example, would have all the qualities of its makers. It would signify itself, becoming a voice or presence, exactly what Peirce called an icon. This need to overreach the boundaries of one's own art, to integrate extra-literary topoi into the realm of literature, is 'an attempt to dispel (or at least mask) the boundary between art and life, between sign and thing, between writing and dialogue.'14 The topos of the artwork that comes to life is a constant in the aesthetics of all ages and it is not my aim to widen my discussion here.15 It is interesting to note, however, that Calvino's love affair with the image begins, according to the author, at a very young age. Of Fantasy Images and Visual Patterns From early tales to the roving eye of Mr Palomar, Calvino's texts have been dominated by ekphrastic tendencies privileging the synchronic modelling of reality into moving visual tableaus rather than a narrative

From Word to Image 21

steeped in temporal exigencies. Perhaps it was Calvino's ingrained disaffection with standard party politics and suffocating ideology that led him to question the very validity of words in the service of any creed. He questions the schizophrenic stance of leftist intellectuals, including himself, who laboured under the emotional strain of serving two masters, Literature and Politics: Noi comunisti Italian! eravamo schizofrenici. Si, credo proprio che questo sia il termine esatto. Con una parte di noi eravamo e volevamo essere i testimoni della verita, i vendicatori del torti subiti dai deboli e dagli oppress!, i difensori della giustizia contro ogni sopraffazione. Con un'altra parte di noi giustificavamo i torti, le sopraffazioni, la tirannide del partito, Stalin, in nome della Causa. Schizofrenici. Dissociati.16 We Italian communists were schizophrenics. Yes, I believe that this is the exact term. Part of our being wanted to testify to truth, we were the vindicators of the wrongs suffered by the weak and the oppressed, the defenders of justice against abuse. With another part of ourselves we justified the wrongs, the abuse, the tyranny of the party, Stalin, in the name of the Cause. Schizophrenics. Separate.

This attitude spawns the cloven viscount, one of Calvino's most memorable and significant genetic characters: 'la lacerazione c'e nel Visconte dimezzato e forse in tutto cio che ho scritto. E la coscienza della lacerazione porta il desiderio d'armonia' ('laceration is part of The Cloven Viscount and perhaps in everything I have written. The knowledge of laceration leads to the desire for harmony').17 Always sceptical of immanent domains or transcendent systems of values, words seemed chock full of ambiguity; they were manipulative, could easily deceive. Perhaps Calvino's lifelong passion for film and love of painting fuelled his distanced narrative gaze. Yet, as a writer, words were necessary to engender the images that fostered the newly found social collectivity. Words produced the scenes of war, the shared pictures of tragedy, the emotional icons of struggle relived in the vivid hues of memory. Once depicted, however, these images bore 'lo stampo delle favole piu remote' ('II midollo del leone/ 15; 'the imprint of the most remote fable'). They became, that is, somehow preternatural and antecedent to the text that re-presented them. Though subtended, conjured, created by words, the images, indeed, were not the words themselves. In the remarkable Preface to // sentiero del nidi di ragno Calvino pre-

22 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

sents what amounts to a public confession of this eternal dilemma. He begins with the euphoric image of an all-encompassing vibrancy - 'ci muovevamo in un multicolore universe di storie' (8; 'we moved in a varicolored universe of stories/ vi) - and ends with the introspective candour of losing 'le immagini' ('the images'), not the words, 'che avevi immagazzinato' ('that you had stored'): le immagini privilegiate resteranno bruciate dalla precoce promozione a motivi letterari, mentre le immagini che hai voluto tenere in serbo, magari con la segreta intenzione di servirtene in opere future, deperiranno, perche tagliate fuori daH'integrita naturale della memoria fluida e vivente. (23) the favored images will be consumed by their premature promotion to literary themes, while the images you wanted to keep in reserve, perhaps with the secret intention of using them in future works, will wither, because they are cut off from the natural wholeness of vital, flowing memory, (xxiv)

Collective memory is decanted into suffered personal loss of self: Cosi mi guardo indietro, a quella stagione che mi si presento gremita d'immagini e di significati: ... e tutto e lontano e nebbioso, e le pagine scritte sono li' nella loro sfacciata sicurezza che so bene ingannevole ... e avrei bisogno di tutto il resto, proprio di quello che li' non c'e. (24) And so I look back, to that season which appeared to me crammed with images and meanings: ... and everything is distant and misty, and the written pages are there, in their shameless confidence which I well know is fraudulent... and I would need all the rest, the very things that are not there, (xxiv)

The words 'immagini' ('images') and 'significati' ('meanings') stand out. The 'immagini' ('images') remain distant, nebulous, uncertain; they commingle with staid, solid, mockingly sure and written 'significati' ('meanings'). These thoughts leave an indelible thumbprint of unfulfilled expectancy ('quello che li non c'e' ('the very things that are not there'), a void, that would condition his entire career. To my mind, Calvino's preference for the much ballyhooed motifs of lightness, exactitude, and visibility in narrative indicate not a late, inci-

From Word to Image 23

dental, or arbitrary happenstance but a definite, ongoing narrative search to fill this void. Already in // sentiero dei nidi di ragno there is a willed passage to iconic plenitude and modes of representation that combined novel techniques with traditional subjects. No longer would words arbitrarily fix and condition images; they would instead provide them with a pluri-probable existence imbued with a reverie of limitless design. There is a return, if you will, to a primitive notion of narration, a combinatory of limited elements with infinite potential where 'ogni parola acquistava nuovi valori e li trasmetteva alle idee e alle immagini da essa designate' ('Cibernetica e fantasmi/ 165; 'each word acquired new values and transmitted them to the ideas and images they defined,' 5). Writing would become an active sense not merely recording reality but creating it through the act of regard. Indeed, just as fable (an 'insieme di frasi, immagini' [a 'collection of phrases and images']) is to myth (Vive di silenzio oltre che di parola' ['it lives of silence as well as of words']), so is the image to the word. For Calvino, fable (the image) gives rise to myth (the word), but myth 'aspira le parole nel suo vortice e da alia fiaba una forma' ('Cibernetica e fantasmi/ 174-5; 'draws words up into its vortex and bestews a form on fable,' 19). Calvino believed that fable created visual tapestries that hovered in the collective imagination. There is a position, stated clearly in 'Cibernetica e fantasmi' but enacted in all his prose, that in an archaic time there existed a purity of language where words and things were intimately connected with everyday experience and visual perception: II narratore della tribu mette insieme frasi, immagini: il figlio minore si perde nel bosco, vede una luce lontana, cammina cammina, la fiaba si snoda di frase in frase, dove tende? (174) The storyteller of the tribe puts together phrases and images: the younger son gets lost in the forest, he sees a light in the distance, he walks and walks; the fable unwinds from sentence to sentence, and where is it leading? (18)

The process leads, for Calvino, to 'il farsi d'un destine' ('the creation of a destiny'), to the certainty that the fanciful patterns and fantastic sequences imagined in the mind find currency in the images, the imaginary world of a peoples' culture. Indeed, 'le fiabe sono vere'18 ('fables are real'). As a cultural process narrativization releases the storyteller

24 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

from the social taboo against unfettered and irresponsible thought, opening him to infinite possibilities, raising the consciousness of the individual to that of the collective. The storyteller improvises visual worlds with words, inventing dreams to share. An ideal fable world allows the storyteller to transport himself into his envisioned world, transforming himself into an eagle in flight and the world into unbounded sky. For the participants things really are as they seem. A suspension of disbelief is required on the part of the interlocutors in order to activate the story, to produce the effect and maintain the visual illusion. This is also a requisite of fantasy narratives where, according to Tzvetan Todorov, 'the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as "poetic" interpretations/19 The literal content of these worlds thus assumes the spontaneity and flexibility of a real dream, of a subjective partaking of the Jungian unconscious. Creativity becomes a shared medium, a communication between author (teller) and reader (listener) taken to an intimate level of shared imagined experience. Though frustrated by the limiting potential of the written word, Calvino's need for total fulfilment within the textual experience is the motivating factor of his narrative. If any disappointment is sensed in Calvino and his characters it is usually caused by metaphysical and narratological obstacles rather than existential impediments. In 'Ultimo viene il corvo' ('The Crow Comes Last'), an enigmatic short story written in 1946, for instance, a young boy joins a group of Partisans on their military forays. The seasoned men are immediately both amazed and amused by the boy's uncanny marksmanship as he unerringly fells any object he places within his rifle sights. The boy's thoughts, however, reveal a more philosophical, existential insight to this practical skill: Si fece dare altre cartucce. Erano in tanti ormai a guardarlo, dietro di lui in riva al fiumicello. Le pigne in cima agli algeri dell'altra riva perche si vedevano e non si potevano toccare? Perche quella distanza vuota tra lui e le cose? Perche le pigne che erano una cosa con lui, nei suoi occhi, erano invece la, distanti? Pero se puntava il fucile la distanza vuota si capiva che era un trucco; lui toccava il grilletto e nello stesso momento la pigna cascava, troncata al picciolo. Era un senso di vuoto come una carezza: quel vuoto della canna del fucile che continuava attraverso 1'aria e si riempiva con lo sparo, fin laggiu alia pigna, allo scoiattolo, alia pietra bianca, al fiore di papavero. (134)

From Word to Image 25 They gave him some more cartridges when he asked for them. Lots of men were looking on now from the bank behind him. Why, he thought, could he see the pine cones at the tops of the trees on the other bank and not touch them? Why was there this empty distance between things and himself? Why were the pine cones, which seemed part of him, inside his eyes, so far away instead? Surely it was an illusion when he aimed the gun into the empty distance and touched the trigger and at the same second a pine cone dropped in smithereens? The sense of emptiness felt like a caress, emptiness inside the rifle barrel continuing through the air and filling out when he shot; the pine cone up there, a squirrel, a white stone, a butterfly. (96)

The protagonist's ekphrastic hope, his desire to reach out to objects, is facilitated by the rifle, which indeed reaches its targets and extends, literally, his voyeuristic grasp. The all-encompassing reach, however, proves, at this stage in the young author's career, to be destructive. A modern-day Medusa, everything he fixes in his gaze turns to stone; images are stilled, made passive by their submission to a penetrating bullet. It is telling that the protagonist is a child. By foregoing spatial distance the boy has destroyed any possibility of future perspective. The rifle, like words, gets in the way. In effect, a vicarious proximity does not provide satisfaction. The boy is frustrated by the inability to physically touch the objects without the mediating rifle, to reach out endlessly without any cost, indeed, to become, as in fable, the bullet that does not destroy the object. The young author's pertinacious attempts to touch reality with words promotes a similarly thwarted euphoria. Like the boy, he is genuinely unable to touch the real crow circling overhead without destroying the stitched icon of the eagle on the German soldier's jacket: Allora il soldato si alzo in piedi e indicando 1'uccello nero col dito, - La c'e il corvo! - gido, nella sua lingua. II proiettile lo prese giusto in mezzo a un'aquila ad ali spiegate che aveva ricamata sulla giubba. (139) So the soldier got to his feet and pointed at the black bird. There's a crow!' He shouted in his own language. The bullet hit him in the middle of an eagle with spread wings embroidered on his tunic. (101)

Behind the icon stands a real object in relation to which the interpreter is merely a receiver. But here the equation reverses itself. The boy takes

26 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures subject status over the symbol as object, only to destroy it, unintentionally, because his means of appropriation, his semantic point of view, is ekphrastic violence. This is an exceptional instance of figurative ecstasy, one, Plato reminds us, that constructs reality through visual perception and imagination but frustrates the artist when desire is unfulfilled because the tools, the words, are immature. To speak of Calvino's use of imagery, then, is to search for the grain of his thinking as a creative writer and developing artist. For Calvino, fantasy is at once and at the same time a willed retreat from the rigours of reality and a salutary and enlightening engagement within it, a moment of ekphrastic ecstacy when the connection between words and images becomes primal. His strategy is that of the detached yet ever-present observer; cognizant yet engagingly naive about life, profound yet purposely remaining on the surface of phenomena. This reluctance to impose authorial definition makes for a kind of literary syncretism that invites the reader to join in a visual quest of conceptual expansion. Fantasy permits the young artist to emerge from the ordinary and find the 'varco' (passage, safety valve) that permits a different point of view, that sanctions an escape from automatic (and unavoidable) obedience to gravity, that allows a bending of the spacetime continuum, basic laws of Newtonian physics, what Kathryn Hume calls 'consensus reality.'20 In these terms, fantasy is a deliberate departure from reality, from the mimesis that has traditionally conditioned man's physical existence. As an artist, Calvino has consistently wrestled with these binds by offering many differing and complex versions and visions of reality, always attempting to move beyond the word-bound and sequential linearity of the text without, however, ever losing sight of mankind. Visual fantasy thus fulfils some of the primary tenets of Calvino's approach to the world and to literature. First, it is highly structured. The reader assumes an extraordinary sense of pleasure in form and a basic delight in designs that are to be appreciated for their visual complexities. Second, fantasy is never stagnant but promotes diversity and is often multimedia oriented. Ultimately fantasy wishes to stretch the reading experience by appealing to all the senses. Calvino's narratives exhibit these requisites in unfaltering constancy. In the Introduction to Racconti fantastici dell'ottocento (Fantastic Stories from the Nineteenth Century), the author retroactively explains the relevance of his audaciously fantastic trilogy and attempts to situate himself within a definite stream of fantasy writing (among those writ-

From Word to Image 27 ers, he states, who place 'in primo piano una suggestione visiva'21 ['a visual suggestion as primary']) by toying with authorial intentionality. These words echo motivations described twenty years earlier in the Note to I nostri antenati. Speaking of II visconte dimezzato Calvino stated that by writing a tale that was 'completamente fantastica, mi trovavo senz'accorgermene a esprimere non solo la sofferenza di quel particolare momento ma anche la spinta a uscirne' (354; 'completely fantastic, I found myself, without knowing it, expressing not only the suffering of that particular moment but the stimulus to escape it'). Calvino makes it clear that it was his intention to use fantasy imagery as a vehicle for the discussion about the condition of man in the fifties: Ho voluto fame una trilogia d'esperienze sul come realizzarsi esseri umani: nel Cavaliere inesistente la conquista dell'essere, nel Visconte dimezzato 1'aspirazione a una completezza al di la delle mutilazioni imposte dalla societa, nel Barone rampante una via verso una completezza non individualistica da raggiungere attraverso la fedelta a un'auto-determinazione individuale; tre gradi d'approccio alia liberta. (360) I wanted to write a trilogy about the experiences of becoming human: The Nonexistent Knight would deal with the conquest of being, The Cloven Viscount would treat the aspirations of wholeness that went beyond the mutilation imposed by society, The Baron in the Trees would show a way towards a non-individualist wholeness to be achieved through faith in individual auto-determination; three stages in the acquisition of liberty. The use of imagery is more than a conditioning theme. It has become instead a method, a way of defusing potentially disturbing confrontations with existential dis-ease. The progression is noted by Calvino: 'capivo benissimo che il pregio e d'essere favolosi quando si parla di proletariate e di fattacci di cronache mentre a esserlo parlando di castelli e di cigni non c'e nessuna bravura' (353; T knew very well that it was meritorious being fabulous when one is speaking of the proletariat and of news facts while to be so while speaking of castles and swans needs no cleverness'). Thus the quickness, lightness, rapidity, exactness, multiplicity and, above all, the visibility Calvino wishes to impart to the next millennium in the posthumous Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988) is indigenous to fantasy literature as described by the author in Racconti fantastid dell'ottocento. These attributes would form

28 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

the nucleus of his fabulous style. The subject matter would remain the grand encyclopedia of ethically inspired 'real experience.' How else do we explain Calvino's characters of the fifties? All of them, whether they are battling non-existent knights in 7 nostri antenati or immersed in the vicissitudes of everyday existence in 7 racconti, invariably exist in alternative or parallel universes that draw their premises from reality but move at a level that is literally beyond both space and time. While it is easy to accept the unreal texture of 7 nostri antenati, the stories that comprise I racconti seem unclassifiable as fantastic tales. While the ancestors are unable to differentiate between ideas and myopic perception, the characters of these supposedly real worlds have difficulty distinguishing between themselves and the world they reify. Their worst fears have become palpable, their wildest ideas have become visible. They are subject to the same chance occurrences as characters in a fairy tale. This 'imaginary causality/ as Todorov calls it,22 interrupts their ordinary lives with events which are out of the ordinary (the 'avventures' in / racconti, 1958), surreal (La formica argentina, 1952), or make-believe (the Marcovaldo stories, 1963), to cite a few examples. In each of these cases, the surreal begins the moment the unconventional occurs. Thus, though the stories in 7 racconti are not fantasy by any stretch of the imagination, they nevertheless fall under the rubric of what Calvino labelled the 'fantastico "mentale", o "astratto", o "psicologico", o "quotidiano"' (Racconti fantastici, 10; 'the mental, abstract, psychological, or quotidian fantastic'). These characters follow a series of patterned adventures in which each undergoes a sort of spiritual or physical metamorphosis centred on outward appearances. There is, in other words, an effacement of the limit between the external and internal self.23 The imaginary thus becomes real and threatens normal existence. As the physical world and the imagined world interpenetrate, even time is suspended ('Andato al comando' [1946; 'Going to Headquarters']; 'Campo di mine' [1946; 'Mine Field']), while space is transformed into an often menacing (Taura sul sentiero' [1946; 'Fear on the Footpath']; 'Uno dei tre e ancora vivo' [1947; 'One of the Three is Still Alive']), often fanciful ('II bosco degli animali' [1948; 'Animal Woods']; Tl gatto e il poliziotto' [1948; 'The Cat and the Policeman']) engulfing existential flux. All attempts to actually live the misconception are doomed to failure as they become strait-jacketed to a solipsistic misreading of the visual cues around them. In the Note to 7 nostri antenati Calvino retrospectively explains the

From Word to Image 29

two poles of experience that provided the tension of his writing in the fifties. Consonant with future comments in Six Memos for the Next Millenium, he states that on the one hand there were 'le storie che si svolgono all'aria aperta, e in posti pubblici, per esempio una stazione, con quel tanto di rapporti umani tra gente che si trova per caso' (353; 'stories that take place in the open air, and in public places, for example in a train station, along with that bit of human interaction of people who are there by chance'). These were stories generated through diachronic sequencing, the game of life that depended upon detail and logical connections between actions. On the other hand, we recall, there were imaginary tales that stimulated the author's senses and refuelled his imagination so that 'la storia s'organizzava su se stessa secondo uno schema perfettamente geometrico' (355; 'the story organized around itself a perfect geometric design'). Calvino decanted the complexity of reality to two personal centres of interest: action that evolves through sequencing, imagery that proceeds through visual patterns. The tension between the two constitutes the nature of his narrative. Calvino discounts mere expedience and always tries to live up to a personally set ideal. Meaning is achieved through a model-oriented aesthetic where the ultimate and irreducible point of validation remains within himself. Hence, the source of inspiration is more lyric than narrative; and sight, reserved at this stage of his career for the inner eye, is predominant: Quando comincio a scrivere pero, tutto cio e nella mia mente ancora in uno stato lacunoso, appena accennato. E solo scrivendo che ogni cosa finisce per andare al suo posto. (354) When I begin to write however, everything in my mind is still full of gaps and barely hinted. It is only through writing that everything falls into place.

Calvino is describing a direct confrontation between two contexts, the spatial act of imagining and the temporal act of writing, that produces a drama not unlike that described by Mikhail Bakhtin as dialogue.24 This dramatic quality is not the result of two interlocutors but ultimately lies somewhere between the semantics of scientific and poetic language, between escapism and didacticism, between emotion and intellect. The oppositional nature of the heraldic trilogy that has heretofore

30 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

been grounded in a confrontation between fantasy and reality may now be seen as conversations between two opposing and unique linguistic entities: the referential system (for example, the setting of the stories described in denotative terms) and the poetic phenomenon (the unique happenstances surrounding each protagonist that inspire connotation). The fragility of this dialogue resides in the danger that one component may disappear (and indeed the protagonist of // cavaliere inesistente, 1959 [The Non-Existent Knight], Agilulfo, disappears once the issue of showing has been resolved in Calvino's mind and becomes a telling, that is, once Bradamante assumes control of the story as a complete character who both shows [as Suor Teodora] and tells [by writing] of herself), thereby revealing the unique nature of this particular writing/reading experience. We shall see that as Calvino becomes more confident with this technique, the reader will be given an everincreasing role, being asked not only to imagine the unimaginable but to help, in the best tradition of contemporary art, to decipher, and while helping, to construct the text. If these tales have been called surreal it is because of their subject matter. Their surreality is enhanced, however, not only by the quality of the images generated but by Calvino's complex reworking of space as an agrammatical construction. The viscount, for example, splits reality into manageable bits, a surreal visual collage of maimed objects that suits his own limited requisites. The baron's more conventional, yet equally abstract, method is to override civilization, ideology, and natural laws by erecting a scaffolding of self-sustaining rules. As one would expect, // cavaliere inesistente is a synthesis of the former two tales. As a surrealist painter bends light and mass by distilling their essence and rendering their contours, in this third tale the self becomes a distilled essence of sheer will. Accordingly, the knight has no spatial consistency; he is only an empty white carapace (a white expanse of page) separated from its surroundings by a thin black line outline, a drawn edge or border. If it is true that the only controllable world, as Calvino will discover, is the world of art circumscribed within the lined pages of a book, then art must dissect reality and transform its volatile corporality into eternal ideal. And so, Suor Teodora transforms common kitchen utensils into the regal paraphernalia of battle, ultimately allowing her imagination to re-invent and re-imagine herself, protected within the surreal carapace of literature. This character is the perfect paradigm of Calvino himself. As an incipient bricoleuse, Suor Teodora initiates a discourse that mixes media and involves the reader, all the while playing her

From Word to Image 31 game with tongue in cheek and joyous aplomb. While this may be seen as an attempt by the author to gain a state of exuberant innocence where storyteller and audience share in the reverie of shared fiction, it is also possible that Calvino is already sensing the inadequacy of writing as a viable means of total experience. This is especially apparent in episodes of / nostri antenati, where the linear discourse seems overwhelmed by the spatial imagery. Throughout // cavaliere inesistente the author laments the tools of his trade, cautious since narrative often does not permit him to fully exploit his imagination. Hiding behind his narrator's vow of chastity, the author deploys a subtle metacritique of writing's shortcomings: Questa storia che ho intrapreso a scrivere e ancora piu difficile di quanto io non pensassi. Ecco che mi tocca rappresentare la piu gran follia dei mortal!, la passione amorosa, dalla quale il voto, il chiostro e il naturale pudore m'hanno fin qui scampata ... Dunque anche dell'amore come della guerra diro alia buona quel che riesco a immaginarne: 1'arte di scriver storie sta nel saper tirar fuori da quel nulla che si e capito della vita tutto il resto; ma finita la pagina si riprende la vita e ci s'accorge che quel che si sapeva e proprio un nulla. (63) This tale I have undertaken to write is even harder to write than I thought. Now I must describe that greatest of mortal follies, the passion of love, from which my vow, the cloister and my natural shyness have saved me till now ... Therefore of love as of war I shall give an idea as best as I can of whatever I am able to imagine: the art of writing tales consists in the ability to draw the rest of life from the little one has understood of it: but at the end of the page life begins again, and one realizes that one knew nothing at all. Or again: E verso la verita che corriamo, la penna e io, la verita che aspetto sempre che mi venga incontro, dal fondo d'una pagina bianca, e che potro raggiungere soltanto quando a colpi di penna saro riuscita a seppellire tutte le accidie, le insoddisfazioni, 1'astio che sono qui chiusa a scontare ... Ora devo rappresentare le terre attraversate da Agilulfo e dal suo scudiero nel loro viaggio: tutto qui su questa pagina bisogna farci stare, la strada maestra polverosa, il fiume, il ponte, ecco Agilulfo che passa sul suo cavallo dallo zoccolo leggero, toc-toc-toc-toc ... Ora sul ponte passa un galoppo

32 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures pesante: tutu turn! e Gurdulu ... Traccio sulla carta una linea diritta, ogni tanto spezzata da angoli, ed e il percorso di Agilulfo. Quest'altra linea tutta ghirigori e andarivieni e il cammino di Gurdulu. (87-8) It is towards the truth that we hurry, my pen and I, the truth that I expect will arrive from the bottom of a white page, and which I can reach only when my pen strokes have succeeded in burying all the disgust and dissatisfaction and rancour which I am here enclosed to expiate ... Now I must show the lands crossed by Agilulfo and his squire on their journey; I must fit everything on this page, the dusty main road, the river, the bridge, here's Agilulfo passing on his light hooved horse, tock-tock, tock-tock ... Now a heavy gallop passes over the bridge: tututurn! ... its Gurdulu ... On my paper I trace a straight line with occasional angles, and this is Agilulfo's route. This other line with its twirls and zigzags is Gurdulu's. The inadequacy of words as a conduit for imagination is a recurring theme in several of Gli amori difficili and the Marcovaldo tales.25 A dissatisfied author realizes that words must somehow acquire 'nuovi valori' ('new values') and must be capable of transmitting these values to the 'idee e alle immagine da essa designate' ('Cibernetica e fantasmi/ 165; 'ideas and images they defined/ 5). In order to accomplish this, the elusive quality of words needed to be controlled. Neorealism had momentarily achieved just such harmony through a rule-oriented strategy: la letteratura come la conoscevo io era un'ostinata serie di tentativi di far stare una parola dietro 1'altra seguendo certe regole definite, o piu spesso regole non definite ne definibili ma estrapolabili da una serie di esempi o protocolli, o regole che ci siamo inventate per 1'occasione cioe che abbiamo derivato da altre regole seguite da altri. ('Cibernetica e fantasmi,' 172) Literature as I knew it was a constant series of attempts to make one word stay put after another by following certain definite rules; or, more often, rules that were neither definite nor definable, but that might be extracted from a series of examples, or rules made up for the occasion, that is to say, derived from the rules followed by other writers. (15) But this reduced the figure of the author to a 'macchina scrivente'

From Word to Image 33 ('writing machine'), already a 'personaggio anacronistico' (172; 'anachronistic character/ 15). In the same article, Calvino posits an avenue of escape for this apparent impasse: La linea di forza della letteratura moderna e nella sua coscienza di dare la parola a tutto cio che nell'inconscio sociale o individuale e rimasto non detto: questa e la sfida che continuamente essa rilancia. (175) The power of modern literature lies in its willingness to give a voice to what has remained unexpressed in the social or individual unconscious: this is the challenge it throws down time and again. (19) He then delineates this quest, mentioning those authors who explored the irrational, including Lautreamont, who exploded 'la sintassi deirimmaginazione' ('the syntax of imagination') and expanded 'il mondo visionario' ('the visionary world'). Calvino then cites the surrealists, stating that scoprono nelle associazioni automatiche di parole e d'immagini una ragione obiettiva contrapposta a quella della nostra logica intellettuale. (175-6) In automatic associations of words and images the Surrealists discover an objective rationale totally opposed to that of our intellectual logic. (20) This interest in the psychology of artistic production signals a future paradigm shift. Beginning with Freud's writings on art, Calvino cites two art historians who consider artistic expression in terms of combinatorial poetics. He values Ernst Gombrich's appraisal of poetry and art as processes analogous to children's wordplay: II procedimento della poesia e dell'arte - dice Gombrich - e analogo a quello del gioco di parole; e il piacere infantile del gioco combinatorio che spinge il pittore a sperimentare disposizioni di linee e colori e il poeta a sperimentare accostamenti di parole. (177) The processes of poetry and art, says Gombrich, are analogous to those of a play on words. It is the childish pleasure of the combinatorial game that leads the painter to try out arrangements of lines and colors, the poet to experiment with juxtapositions of words. (21)

34 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

There seems to be a willed passage, here, from spontaneous games to fixed methods, from initial stages of verbal perception to the tried wisdom of visual experience, from writing about reality to the sequential creation of it in sensual material imagery. The reference to surrealism is particularly appropriate to the spatial nature of modern literature and to Calvino's narrative in particular. The pivoting between two worlds and two systems of meaning that haunted the young author is just the sort of liminality with which surrealist artists had experimented. It comes as no surprise that Calvino's writing becomes ever more sensitive and open to the challenge of the other's voice. There is an extraliterary world that he discovered and that he wished to graft, like a visual collage, onto his own plots as an act of capricious artistic creation. Imagism: New Ways of Seeing Calvino's writings have always been characterized by a powerful spirit of imagism. Consider the opening scene of // sentiero dei nidi di ragno: Per arrivare fino in fondo al vicolo, i raggi del sole devono scendere diritti rasente le pareti fredde, tenute discoste a forza d'arcate che traversano la striscia di cielo azzurro carico. Scendono diritti, i raggi del sole, giu per le finestre messe qua e la in disordine sui muri, e cespi di basilico e di origano piantati dentro pentole ai davanzali, e sottovesti stese appese a corde; fin giu al selciato, fatto a gradini e a ciottoli, con una cunetta in mezzo per 1'orina dei muli. Basta un grido di Pin, un grido per incominciare una canzone, a naso all'aria sulla soglia della bottega, o un grido cacciato prima che la mano di Pietromagro il ciabattino gli sia scesa tra capo e collo per picchiarlo, perche dai davanzali nasca un'eco di richiami e d'insulti. (29) To reach the depths of the alleys the sun's rays must go straight down, grazing cold walls spanned by arches that crisscross a strip of heavy blue sky. The sun's rays descend directly, falling over windows scattered haphazardly here and there over the walls, over tufts of basil and oregano planted in cooking pots sitting on sills and underclothes hung out on clotheslines; down to the pavement, made of cobbled steps with a gutter in the middle for mule urine. All you needed was a cry from Pin, a yelp that begins a song, his nose

From Word to Image 35 poking out from the shop door, or a shriek let out just before Pietromagro the cobbler's hand smashed down between head and neck to strike him, and suddenly a chorus of shouts and insults pour from every window.

At first reading, this easily recognizable opening segment faithfully presents a plausible literary scene: a typically realist (spatial) description is interrupted, abruptly, by a verbal utterance, an activating (timebound) action. Calvino seems to be following standard neorealist canons of representation that privilege action above description, word above image, ideology above nature. Upon careful rereading, however, the passage appears to be at odds with such perfunctory definitions. The paradigm does not quite fit. As if setting the stage for future intracodal relationships between literature and the other arts, Calvino actualizes the scene with a cinematic quality. Images flash before the viewer; colours are blurred into a fleeting impression. The moment we perceive these images, however, the scene shifts to Pin. It is also interesting that we see the scene; we are not immersed in it. Pathos is foreshadowed, not directly dwelt upon. Even at this early stage in his career Calvino prefers a physical detachment and voyeuristic distance from the world, a gap that is shortened only by the fact that we are within earshot of Pin's shrill voice. The young author, already grappling with epistemological questions of 'la memoria - o meglio 1'esperienza' (Preface, 23; 'memory - or bet ter experience'), can be forgiven a bit of unbridled enthusiasm. He was obviously influenced by his love of film,26 but I also sense a deepseated inclination towards what will eventually become a visual hallmark. The scene is pictorially evocative. The long harsh rays that plummet down and graze, but do not warm, the cold walls, descend from a thick, heavily textured slice of blue sky. An austere noon-day glare plumbs this space, revealing its distorted contours. This dense, blue material light is criss-crossed by layers of surreal geometric patterns. Uneven windows drip with disorder, tufts of basil and oregano flourish on sills. Underclothes, the sure sign of a human presence, hang limply on clotheslines. Pause. Then, the reader's eye is abruptly pulled downwards, smashing into the stepped cobbled pavement, drawn forward by the scene's focal point, the gutter, that stretches into the distance carrying the pungent flow of mule urine. Calvino's description is thus anything but neorealistic; it is instead imagistic. Anyone awakening from a deep sleep would have the same

36 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

hazy impression of dilated spatial configurations. The scene has no shadows, little variation of tonality. Instead, the space is diffused with varying gradations of blotches of colour, saturated with the pungent redolence of herbs and urine. Temporality has been transfixed, fused into an ethereal present. These tangible images are woven together by the single verb scendere ('to descend'). The verb is repeated twice; the rays 'devono scendere diritti' ('must descend directly') in the first sentence and the second sentence opens with the words 'scendono diritti' ('they descend directly'), a proclitic illocutionary performative speech act that commandeers passage through the images the rays reveal. The scene is presented as a stained glass visual mosaic of independent scenes held together yet kept apart by slender ribs: 'tenute discoste a forza d'arcate' ('held apart because of arches'). The spatial pattern is static and unmoving yet it is traversed by an active, temporal, traditionally male entity, the sun. Only light animates the scene; it alone possesses an active verb function; light penetrates as it creates, animating the richly visual narrative. Then, suddenly, Pin bursts onto the scene. Rather, the visual landscape is overtaken by a something that is all decibel and testosterone. Though a war novel would not be as exciting without noise, Pin's explosion of sound serves to wrap the spatial dexterity of the scene within the cage of words: 'un grido per cominciare una canzone ... perche dai davanzali nasca un'eco di richiami e d'insulti' (29; 'a yelp that begins a song ... and a chorus of shouts and insults pours from every window'). Pin's presence infuses temporality into the scene, breathing life into the still life while simultaneously installing a crescendo of vocal stress. The opening sequence of the short story 'Buon a nulla' (1945),27 written in the same period, begins in a similar fashion: II sole entrava nella via di sbieco, gia alto, illuminandola disordinatamente, ritagliando le ombre dei tetti sui muri delle case di fronte, accendendo di barbagli le vetrine agghindate, battendo, sbucato da insospettati spiragli, sul volto dei passanti frettolosi che si scansavano su marciapiedi affollati. Vidi per la prima volta I'uomo dagli occhi chiari a un crocicchio,... (37) The sun entered the street aslant, already high in the heavens, confusingly illuminating it, cutting out shadows of roofs on the facing walls of houses, setting the windows ablaze with glare, springing out from unsus-

From Word to Image 37 pected openings, beating against the faces of hurried passers-by as they dodged along the crowded sidewalk. I saw the man with clear eyes for the first time at a crossroads ...

The smooth, staccato rhythm of the passage juxtaposes images into a spontaneous, accidental collage. Once again, light is the revelatory agent, the animating, assaulting, foreign entity that 'illuminando/ 'ritagliando/ 'accendendo,' and 'battendo' ('illuminating,' 'cutting out/ setting ablaze' and 'beating') connects the images and establishes an expressive potential reflected in the face of passers-by. It penetrates the scene not directly, but aslant. The result is an undulating application of energy that injects flattened images with shadows that imbue unsuspected vigour. Again, unexpectedly, a figure emerges from the canvas, Tuomo dagli occhi chiari' ('the man with clear eyes'). The stranger's eyes possess a predatory, even demonic, quality. His vision is tactile, absorbent, haptic (from the Greek haptein, to seize or grasp). It captures the narrator ('il suo sguardo posato su di me' ['his gaze captured me']) ensnaring him, penetrating his essence ('uno sguardo immobile che mi comprendeva dalla testa ai piedi e non mi risparmiava neppure dietro e dentro' [37; 'an immobile gaze that embraced me from head to foot and did not even spare behind me or inside me']), confounding his actions ('mi osservava e non perdeva una mossa delle mie dita e sentivo il suo sguardo in mezzo ad esse, ad imbrogliarmi' [41; 'he observed me and did not lose a single movement of my fingers and I felt his gaze amonng them, confusing me']). From early tales such as 'Buon a nulla/ now collected in Prima che hi dica 'Pronto,' it is apparent that what instilled vigour into the young author's stories was not so much the action-packed word but the staid visual image. Calvino's natural tendencies are towards weaker spatial descriptions at a time when neorealist canons, in rhetoric reminiscent of the classic argument for the separation of visual/verbal and spatial/ temporal categories by G.E. Lessing, promoted an ideology of virile political action.28 Calvino confronts this issue in several articles published between 1946 and 1950 (though the same sentiments resonate in all his subsequent critical essays).29 Disputing the ideological direction ('direzione ideologica') being imposed, he states that 'i linguaggi letterari sono personali come fazzoletti da naso'30 ('literary language is as personal as a handkerchief). Wishing to highlight the inventive capacity of this work he continues:

38 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures lo invece faccio racconti di partigiani, di contadini, di contrabbandieri, in cui partigiani, contadini, contrabbandieri non sono che pretesti a storie piene di colore, d'accorgimenti narrativi e d'acutezze psicologiche:... I instead write stories about partisans, about peasants, contrabandists, in which partisans, farmers, peasants, contrabandits are nothing more than a pretext for stories rich with colour, narrative expedients and psychological acuteness:...

Furthermore, the work is personal, subjective, almost romantically inspired: in fondo non studio che me stesso, non cerco che di esprimere me stesso, non cerco di rappresentare che dei simboli di me stesso nei personaggi e nelle immagini e nella lingua e nella tecnica narrativa ... non sono in fin dei conti che uno dei vecchi scrittori individualisti che pero s'esteriorizza in 'simboli' d'interesse attuale e collettivo.31 in reality I do nothing but study myself, I do nothing but express myself, I do not attempt to represent anything but symbols of myself in the characters and the images and in the language and in the narrative technique ... in the final analysis I am nothing more than one of those old individualistic writers who reveals himself in 'symbols' of actual and collective interest.

This personal visual attitude runs counter to the strong characterizations touted by the debates on neorealism and conditions Calvino's choice of protagonists. Always inept, usually introverted, their gestures are deliberately executed and meticulously documented by an intrusive narrator. They become the reader's eyes; roving, inquisitive, tele- and microscopic, but above all, detached. Their relationship with the external world is linear, chronological, unhesitatingly photographic. As prototypical Marco Polos and Palomars their mission is to record the world in all its particulars, however idiosyncratic or farfetched this may seem. Irony, incongruity, paradox, contradiction, and dualism now emerge as principles that inform this dynamic visual style. Vision is a parabolic act, a simultaneous intro- and extroverting that suggests paradigms of presence and absence. The archetype of these characters, then, is not one of action but one of reflection. Examples of these character types

From Word to Image 39

abound in all of the author's early stories and are too numerous to list. Their continued presence in his universe perpetuate a singular Calvinian point of view. Calvino's narrative point of view posits the spectacular, the visual, the act of seeing as a means of recapturing or creating the self through external identification. In all of Calvino's stories from this period, the subject is not the man of action but the lost soul, the man who has either forgotten or indeed has never known how to act effectively. These stories always open on a world shrouded in contrasts: light/dark; fantasy/real; young/old; earth/water. These contrasts draw attention to surface textures, never allowing psychological penetration, always highlighting the visual. Many of Calvino's early stories are dramatic because they highlight moments of decision by unsure and youthful characters. The stories focus on their will to participate, however marginally, in the action at hand. In later tales, however, the emphasis is placed on the spectator's ability to become an observing eye, to identify with extraordinary precision and disembodied sensations, the formal composition of ordered surfaces. The world for Calvino is a series of special frames that remind this reader of Leon Battista Alberti's idea that the canvas, like Calvino's white page, should function as a window on the world, a window that erects projective and protective screens.32 The reality he encodes is always (re)presented as spectacle. Far from being Nietzschian, Calvino expresses a Schopenhauerian tenet. For the Romantic philosopher, the artist was to remain outside of history. As Hayden White has summarized, genius was marked not by 'involvement in the historical process but in the capacity to remain a prime spectator.'33 Reality already possesses shades and nuances of the unreal; one need only to remain positioned outside of it to observe it, to freeze its mobility into comprehensive verbo-visual packets. This attitude causes the rhythm of the narration to overtake the story, rendering it immobile as, for example, in this monotonic paragraph from 'II reggimento smarrito':34 Fuori s'aperse la vista della citta, sotto un cielo celeste attraversato da morbide nuvole, la citta coi camini che perdevano baffi di fumo, i terrazzi con le corde irte di pinze per stendere la roba, i riflessi del raggi di sole che battevano sugli speech! del como, le tende cacciamosche che s'impigliano agli orecchini delle madame con la sporta, un carretto di gelataio con 1'ombrello e la scatola di vetro per i coni e raso terra un aquilone con le code di carta rossa inanellata che correva trascinato dai bambini per un

40 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures lungo spago e a poco a poco andava su nell'aria e si drizzava contro le morbide nuvole del cielo. Outside one could see the city beneath a blue sky traversed by soft clouds, the city with its chimneys that lost puffs of smoke, terraces with lines bristling with clothes pins, reflected rays of sunlight that beat against dresser mirrors, bug curtains that got caught on earrings of miladies laden with groceries, an ice cream cart with an umbrella and a glass case for cones and along the ground a kite with tails made of red paper rings that was pulled along by children by a long string and little by little rose into the air and straightened up against the sky's soft clouds. A mature, more refined artist will remove all the dominant predicate cases, imperfect tenses, and adjectival clauses when embarking upon the longwinded descriptions in Palomar, significantly lightening the dramatic weight of the scene. Primal colours and major chords will give way to subtle hues and ascending minor variations on a single theme. Calvino will refine, like Goethe, the wisdom of Anschauung, an innate capacity to 'grasp, through observation aided by intuition, a thing in its wholeness.'35 La forma vera della citta e in questo sali e scendi di tetti, tegole vecchie e nuove, coppi ed embrici, comignoli esili o tarchiati, pergole di cannucce e tettoie d'eternit ondulata, ringhiere, balaustre, pilastrini che reggono vasi, serbatoi d'acqua in lamiera, abbaini, lucernari di vetro, e su ogni cosa s'innalza 1'alberatura delle antenne televisive, dritte o storte, smaltate o arrugginite, in modelli di generazioni successive, variamente ramificate e cornute e schermate, ma tutte magre come scheletri e inquietanti come totem. Separati da golfi di vuoti irregolari e frastagliati, si fronteggiano terrazzi proletari con corde per i panni stesi e pomodori piantati in catini di zinco; terrazzi residenziali con spalliere di rampicanti su tralicci di legno, mobili da giardino in ghisa verniciata di bianco, tendoni arrotolabili; campanili con la loggia campanaria scampanante; frontoni di palazzi pubblici di fronte e di profilo; attici e superattici, sopraelevamenti abusivi e impunibili; impalcature in tubi metallici di costruzioni in corso o rimaste a mezzo; finestroni con tendaggi e finestrini di gabinetti; muri color ocra e color siena; muri color muffa dalle cui crepe cespi d'erba riversano il loro pendulo fogliame; colonne d'ascensori, torri con bifore e con trifore; guglie di chiese con madonne; statue di cavalli e quadrighe; magioni decadute a tuguri, tuguri ristrutturati a gaconnieres; e cupole che

From Word to Image 41 tondeggiano sul cielo in ogni direzione e a ogni distanza come a confermare 1'essenza femminile, giunonica della citta: cupole bianche o rosa o viola a seconda dell'ora e della luce, venate di nervature, culminanti in lanterne sormontate da altre cupole piu piccole. (56-7) The true form of the city is in this rise and fall of roofs, old tiles and new, curved and flat, slender or squat chimneys, arbors of reed matting and sheds of corrugated iron, railings, balustrades, little columns supporting pots, metal water tanks, dormers, glass skylights, and, rising above all else, the rigging of TV antennas, straight or crooked, enameled or rusting, in models of successive generations, variously ramified and horned and shielded, but all of them thin as skeletons and disturbing as totems. Separated by irregular and jagged gulfs of emptiness, proletarian terraces with lines for drying laundry and with tomato plants growing in tin cans directly facing residential terraces with espaliered plants growing against wooden trellises, garden furniture of white-painted cast iron, awnings; pealing campaniles; facades of public buildings; in profile and fullface; garrets and penthouses, illegal and unpunished constructions; pipe scaffoldings of constructions in progress or left half finished; large windows with curtains, and little WC windows; ocher walls and burnt sienna walls, walls the color of mold from whose crevices clumps of weeds spill their pendulous foliage; elevator shafts; towers with double and triple mullioned windows; spires of churches with madonnas; statues of horses and chariots; great mansions that have decayed into hovels, hovels restructured into smart bachelor apartments; and domes that make round outlines against the sky in every direction and at every distance, as if to confirm the female, Junoesque essence of the city: white domes or pink or violet, according to the hour and the light, veined with nervations, crowned by lanterns surmounted by other, smaller domes. (54-5) The first passage seeps with temporal sluggishness. Both reader and narrator are bogged down in visual lethargy. The second passage, though longer, sweeps the reader away in a clever manipulation of perspective. Calvino now embraces a space-time continuum that accepts new shapes and evinces visual geometries. The rooftops of Rome become a suspended surface that appears seamless and endless, recursive and simultaneous. This geometricizing scheme, however, creates no receding perspective but rather a collage effect. All appears side by side, fitting together without a vanishing point. The thematic implications are important. The world is a flatland, perspective is

42 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

reduced to a suspended monocular site. This distanced observer-writer produces worlds sorely dependent on his singular vantage point. His vision is the animating spirit that pervades all of Calvino's work: it is a substantive choice that gave his work an ideological shape and cultural significance. Symmetry is the hallmark of this visual style, pictorially evocative technique the mark of the narrative. Yet, Calvino does not lose himself in spectatorship for it is precisely this visual intensity that engenders a self-authentication of the observing subject. Francois Wahl speaks of the apparition of reality as a shock that stimulates the formation of an image (Calvino will use the same analogical details when describing the cognitive processes of his imagistic style in the introduction to / nostri antenati), that becomes the structuring device for the emanation of narrative consciousness. As one of the first commentators to positively value Calvino's visual predisposition, Wahl notes that the symbol spawned by this epistemology sviluppa una logica sua propria; porta con se una rete d'avvenimenti, di personaggi; impone il suo tono, il suo linguaggio. Ma questa logica, a sua volta, ha alcune delle sue articolazioni ed il suo punto d'arrivo fissati fin da principio; 1'incalzare di formule e d'avvenimenti s'esaurisce per terminare infine nella pace d'una contemplazione. Questo e il processo che governa ogni opera di Italo Calvino.36 develops its own logic; carries with itself a web of occurrences, of characters, imposes its own tone, its own language. But this logic, in its own right, has some of its own attachments and its own point of arrival from the outset; the pressing of formulas and conditions exhausts itself and finally comes to rest in the peace of contemplation. This is the process that governs every work of Italo Calvino.

This process permits a construction of self as protagonist in control of a self that is projected onto the described object. The structuring subject finds solace and welcome peace in the restful gaze - or does he? The Conradian stare of which Calvino speaks in his thesis on Joseph Conrad is the stuff of which his protagonists are made. Calvino's protagonists do not participate in life but exhibit an aleatory stance to events. They watch, look, think, and describe. Characters' exploits are anything but humorous, although their observations are often compelling as their role is to record events as bystanders. Like the paladins of // cavaliere inesistente, everyone seems to be looking for the right per-

From Word to Image 43 spective, Tangolo giusto per vedere le cose' (69; 'the right angle from which to view things'). Frequently the character is reduced to a monoscopic walking eye, a traditional icon of extrasensory imaginative prowess. In 'La nuvola di smog' (1958, 'Smog'), 'La speculazione edilizia' (1957, 'Building Speculation'), and La giornata di uno scrutatore (1963, The Watcher), to name only a few of the major stories from the late fifties and early sixties, these Palomar prototypes have no corporeal essence but are reduced to a synecdochic eye, a vantage that emanates subjective pseudointellecutal opinions. Ultimately they are willed into the hands of malevolent fate. In 'Campo di mine' (1946, 'Mine Field') a short story that adumbrates the cerebral gyrations of future characters, a hyperscrutinizing soldier attempts to divine a mental map that leads out of a minefield. At the story's climax, the character's body is portentiously reduced to a reflected eye seen in a triangular shard of mirror, prefiguring his own immanent explosion into a million points of oblivion. The pattern is set. Years later, in chapter 8 of Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, Calvino will bemoan the dismemberment of the author. It is through this sort of visual iconography of the person, the body, of seeing and thinking that Calvino reinforces a default concept of his ideology: the reality of his narrative universe is ontologically self-referential and based solely on one signifying structure, sight. For this reason, his narrators are often unable to distinguish between the real and the imagined and are thus doubly condemned, once as unreliable narrators, and again as protagonists doomed to live life as a sad melancholic farce (see, for example, the Marcovaldo tales). Some early commentators, especially Renato Barilli, found this spectator attitude troublesome, for it intimated an inherent incapacity to overcome the 'good sense' of acceptable Italian paradigms and therefore a reluctance, if not an inability on the part of the author, to infuse nobler poetic sentiments with time-worn, time-bound, and comfortable bourgeois visual icons. 37 Real Images and Fantasy Imaginings One of Calvino's most visually oriented characters from the adventure tales is Antonino Paraggi in the short story 'L'Avventura di un fotografo' (1955; The Adventure of a Photographer'). Purposefully tagged as a 'non-photographer,' Antonino's aversion to the popular societal fanaticism with photography is surpassed only by his eventual

44 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

absorption into its black hole. This story is one of Calvino's first attempts to articulate his own obsession with the gaze. It begins with a devastating denunciation of photography as a devilish technology that dissects the world with impune sterility, freezes ontology by framing and halting its chronological mobility, and finally denies life's immediacy by postponing sensual gratification. The reader is informed that Antonino's world-view is word bound. He is a storyteller, an inveterate observer of life and haughty cogitator whose passion is commentare con gli amici gli avvenimenti piccoli e grandi sdipanando il filo delle ragioni generali dai garbugli particolari; egli era insomma, per atteggiamento mentale, un filosofo, e nel riuscire a spiegarsi anche i fatti piu lontani dalla sua esperienza metteva tutto il suo puntiglio. (35) commenting to his friends on current events large and small, unraveling the thread of general causes from the tangle of details; in short, by mental attitude he was a philosopher, and he devoted all his thoroughness to grasping the significance of even the events most remote from his own experience. (220)

For Antonino, words alone engender time in all its nuances; camera images merely confirm its passing by framing and freezing its spatial contours. As John Berger states in Ways of Seeing, The camera isolated momentary appearances and in so doing destroyed this idea that images were timeless. Or, to put it another way, the camera showed that the notion of time passing was inseparable from the experience of the visual/38 Word versus image - a true battle for the soul of Antonino - the classic war of sign types becomes a modern Da Vincian paragone where Antonino falls squarely on the side of logocentrism. The longwinded protagonist rails against image-based phenomena with selfassured aplomb: Perche una volta che avete cominciato, - predicava - non c'e nessuna ragione che vi fermiate ... gia siete sul terreno di chi pensa che tutto cio che non e fotografato e perduto, che e come se non fosse esistito, e che quindi per vivere veramente bisogna fotografare quanto piu si puo e per fotografare quanto piu si pud bisogna: o vivere in modo quanto piu fotografabile possibile, oppure considerare fotografabile ogni momento della propria vita. La prima via porta alia stupidita, la seconda alia pazzia. (37)

From Word to Image 45 'Because once you've begun/ he would preach, 'there is no reason why you should stop ... you are already close to the view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it had never existed, and that therefore, in order to really live, you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity; the second to madness.' (223-4)

As a working prototype of the more hypercritical Mr Palomar, Antonino initially decries the person who 'vuole recuperare tutto cio che passa sotto i suoi occhi' (37; 'wants to capture everything that passes before his eyes/ 224), but he eventually succumbs to the lure of photography because 'ora sentiva che qualcosa nell'essenza dell'uomo fotografico gli sfuggiva' (35; 'he felt that something in the essence of photographic man was eluding him/ 221). There was a secret appeal, a siren's mesmerizing call, that beckoned him. Antonino legitimizes his pseudo-intellectual attraction by substituting an intellectual convention. This permits a distancing screen. He will perceive photographs in terms of a limited perspective. Towards this end, Antonino invents a challenge (a sfida).He will allow photography to violently confront itself: La sua polemica antifotografica poteva essere condotta solo dall'interno della scatola nera, contrapponendo fotografia a fotografia. (39) His antiphotographic polemic could be fought only from within the black box, setting one kind of photography against another. (226)

This is one of those 'infinite unexpected possibilities' (Six Memosfor the Next Millennium, 9) that give life to literature and sanction its very existence. Just as Perseus defeats Medusa by catching her debilitating stare on a polished shield, Antonino will attempt to deflect the mesmerizing influence of photography by setting up a similar mise en abyme play of reflected images. He proceeds with classical, logical precision. His pedantically methodological process of investigation follows typical left-brain sequencing of logical protocols. He purchases a camera, but it must be an old box camera. He ransacks flea markets in order to outfit his apartment with old-fashioned equipment. Finally, in order to avoid compromising the integrity of the self-sustaining

46 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

project, he installs a reassuring conventionality: a female model who poses 'nel modo in cui i nostri nonni si mettevano in posa' (39; 'in the way our grandparents assumed a pose/ 227). An indispensable element to the strategy, the female trope completes the latent sex-bound choreography and will rendere espliciti i rapporti col mondo che ognuno di noi porta con se, e che oggi si tendono a nascondere, a far diventare inconsci, credendo che in questo modo spariscano ... (39) make explicit the relationship with the world that each of us bears within himself, and which today we tend to hide, to make unconscious, believing that in this way it disappears ... (227)

This dependence on a traditional past that Antonino imbeds as a natural outgrowth of rationality is effectively undermined, however, by the metaphorical (right brain) attraction to the progenitive nature of the female image. A Stevensonian Hyde gestates within the somber intellectual. Once Antonino avails himself of a camera he is precipitously drawn within the visual vortex of frozen imagery. He chooses a subject to photograph, Bice. Shielding himself from possible emotive and sensual implication he views her image, like a modern Perseus, by reflecting her gaze on a polished prism: La fece sedere in una grande poltrona, e infilo la testa sotto il drappo nero che guarniva 1'apparecchio. Era una di quelle cassettte dalla parete posteriore di vetro, dove 1'immagine si specchia gia quasi come su una lastra, spettrale, un po' lattiginosa, separata da ogni contigenza nello spazio e nel tempo. (40) He made her sit in a big armchair, and stuck his head under the black cloth that came with his camera. It was one of those boxes whose rear wall was of glass, where the image is reflected as if already on the plate, ghostly, a bit milky, deprived of every link with space and time. (227-8)

Indeed, though he feels he may dislodge the effects of the female image, his artistic side, the right brain, is inspired in a synthetic, holistic, and all-at-once manner: C'erano molte fotografie di Bice possibili e molte Bice impossibili a

From Word to Image 47 fotografare, ma quello che lui cercava era la fotografia unica che contenesse le une e le altre. (40) There were many possible photographs of Bice and many Bices impossible to photograph, but what he was seeking was the unique photograph that would contain both the former and the latter. (228)

Antonino's visual enthusiasm, paralleled by a mounting verbal aphasia, knows no limits. All arguments, all reason, any rationality constructed by words disappear as Antonino is literally absorbed into the vortex of images that is photography. Before he succumbs to total dispassion he gathers his photographs, torn and ripped as they are, and attempts a finality: Esaurite tutte le possibilita, nel momento in cui il cerchio si chiudeva su se stesso, Antonino capi che fotografare fotografie era la sola via che gli restava, anzi la vera via che lui aveva oscuramente cercato fino allora. (45) Having exhausted every possibility, at the moment when he was coming full circle Antonino realized that photographing photographs was the only course that he had left - or, rather, the true course he had obscurely been seeking all this time. (235)

Life, for Antonino, has lost its spontaneity, becoming instant nostalgia, a living that commemorates itself for the sake of its own momentary self-presentation as unchanging and eternal image. What Antonino has failed to realize is that he has experienced a new way of seeing. Many of the assumptions he had nurtured regarding his logocentric interface with the world no longer seem to fit. Out of true contact with the present, his reactionary rhetoric only obscures his past and unhinges any viable future. The result is a mystification of the visionary import of photography rather than a clarification of its mechanical potential. As for a knight in search of the grail, or a mythological hero battling the gods, success depends upon a clear idea of the danger at hand and a resolve to deal efficiently with the eventual consequences. Antonino's cultural mystification of an image-based reality, however, leads to a double loss. First, he succumbs to the seduction of the visual text and, second, he is defeated by the medium's arresting potential. Calvino has not yet developed a cognizance of his own evolving stance regarding words and images. He has yet to discover that 'nuovo

48 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

spazio letterario' 'privo di vibrazioni religiose e di suggestion! antropomorfe e antropocentriche' ('new literary space' 'devoid of religious vibrations and anthropomorphic and anthropocentric suggestions/ 'La sfida al labirinto/ in Una pietra sopra, 95) that will launch him into the next millennium. But the word and image thematic is already present; it is endemic to his writing posture. Antonino never resolves his dilemma. He is unable to retain the traditional view while flirting with notions that reveal the image as a natural sign that conceals its own contradictory character. His ensnarement within the web of images is predetermined by the gaze of Medusa. The Medusa stare freeze-frames many of Calvino's most common stories. Indeed, to speak of his tales is to retell not so much an adventure or time-ridden action but instead to relate atemporal experiences, moods, states of being. More importantly, the descriptive passages that punctuate these texts arrest the already sludgy narrative flow. The author's attraction to the female Other (image), like Antonino, is symptomatic of a repressed desire that is first espoused as physical indifference (the inability to have children), then intellectual indifference (his own rational superiority), and then expressed as an attempt to contain the emotional (spatial) upheavel with the orderly (emotionless) syntax of language. For instance, it is interesting that Antonino is labelled a 'non-procreatore' (36; 'non-procreator') and attributes his aversion to photography as a consequence of his status as 'scapolo' ('single'): spesso la passione dell'obiettivo nasce in modo naturale e quasi fisiologico come effetto secondario della paternita ... Ma le sue riflessioni sul nesso iconoteca-famiglia-follia erano sbrigative e reticenti: altrimenti avrebbe compreso che in realta chi correva il pericolo maggiore era lui, lo scapolo. (36) the passion for the lens often develops in a natural, virtually physiological way as a secondary effect of fatherhood ... But his reflections on the iconography-family-madness nexus were summary and reticent: otherwise he would have realized that the person actually running the greatest risk was himself, the bachelor. (222)

Indeed, Antonino has no relationship with the female entity. He therefore begets no offspring (male or female). He is a rationalist, firmly embedded in the male-oriented discourse of philosophy. He therefore

From Word to Image 49

begets no photographic images. His is a world ideally inspired and nominally sanctioned by a faith in the masculine, power-oriented logos. While the photographer may attempt to control the phi/sis(spatiality) of the image through the techne (temporality) of photography, he is unable to command its pervasive and insidiously enveloping power. Antonino's end is sanctioned the moment he takes his first step towards the female. An exhausted (physically) and spent (emotionally) Antonino can only be left in the wake of the realm of images. He remains perpetually unfulfilled but also existentually scarred: Torse la vera fotografia totale, - penso' - e' un mucchio di frammenti d'immagini private, sullo sfondo sgualcito delle stragi e delle incoronazioni' (44; 'Perhaps true, total photography, he thought, is a pile of fragments of private images, against the creased background of massacres and coronations,' 235). This sort of conundrum is a common Calvinian pretext and presents itself as a vital obstacle to overcome. The dilemma usually begins with an indifference to or an incompatibility with the female Other indicative, on a stylistic level, of an ekphrastic incompetence.39 The protagonist appears reclusive, prone to silent reflection, and will often perceive the world in emotionally intense terms. 'At these times,' Aristotle states, 'opinion is fettered and assents to the mental picture.'40 The psyche, in other words, records what it believes to be real, engendering an eidelon (visible image) or false image of what the character thinks he perceives. Since these protagonists are convinced that women (and indeed all the 'female world' may offer) are indifferent to them, it is difficult to understand and translate their heightened sensibilities into a manageable experience. An ekphrasis, or rendition of this external body in visual terms, is, therefore, impossible, if not ultimately futile. This does not stop the protagonist from attempting such a translation. The resulting aphasia is typical of Calvino's protagonists. Soft-spoken, inveterate thinkers, they reformulate the desire to capture what is seen into a manageable verbal grid that systemizes reality in controllable piecemeal packets. They use vision as a vehicle of knowledge, but need words as a ground for their thinking. One need only recall any of Calvino's protagonists from the wide-eyed Pin, the non-existent knight, to Qfwfq, to Marco Polo, to the card-wielding tarot sayers, to Palomar to understand that it is only by seeing that these beholders grasp the epiphanic presence of proto-archetypal icons. Yet as visual thinkers, words are insufficient to arrest the flow of images that parade before them.

50 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

In these and other cases, phantasma (semblance) is the product of a character's obsessions. Since his internal mind's eye is already crowded with images of imagined enemies or dauntless beloveds, the real evaporates before the daydream. The only recourse is to actively re-compose images of increasingly complex and compelling vividness. For example, Lupo Rosso's telling of men in overcoats in cinematographic detail, scope, and rhythm in // sentiero del nidi di ragno is a precursor to the poet's romantic effusion of seaside landscape in 'L'Avventura di un poeta' (1958, 'The Adventure of a Poet'), to Marco Polo's crystalline spires and latticed cityscapes in Le citta invisibili (1972, Invisible Cities), to Palomar's compulsive voyeurism, and to Bradamante's compulsive storytelling in // cavaliere inesistente. These characters see the world and immediately words form in their eyes. Any ekphrastic fears give way to momentary ekphrastic hope. The female object is fascinating. It flashes before the hapless protagonist in recognizable spatial images that seem to stir latent desires. At this point the Other often overcomes the willing protagonist, enveloping him in its deceptive snare, stealing his words, rendering him a mute visionary spectator, an author staring at a blank page. At these moments, the protagonist typically searches for more consolatory imagery. Often, however, as is the case with the watcher Amerigo Ormea, he suffers visual overload. Amerigo must shield his eyes from the unending spectacle of suffering humanity, searching within himself for answers, eventually reposing his gaze on a simple, singular gesture: S'avvicino alia finestra. Un poco di tramonto rosseggiava tra gli edifici tristi. II sole era gia andato ma restava un bagliore dietro il profile dei tetti e degli spigoli, e apriva nei cortili le prospettive di una citta mai vista. (95) He went to the window. A shred of sunset glowed among the sad buildings. The sun was already down but there was a reddish color behind the outline of the rooftops and the eaves, and in the courtyards it opened perspectives of a city that had never been seen. (72)

As action dissolves into indolence, images melt dissonant words into a euphoric dream. In La nuvola di smog the protagonist seeks an exit from the weight of existence in the female's embrace, in the enticing promise of a new life, 'quella vita verde e oro che correva in confuse immagini ai lati della strada' (47-8; 'the new life that, in blurred images ... ran by

From Word to Image 51

at either side of the road/ 109). The image of Claudia's ethereal lightness only reminds him, however, of his own plodding listlessness: dal di fuori la nuvola che mi circondava in ogni ora, la nuvola che abitavo e che m'abitava ... e sapevo che di tutto il mondo variegato che m'era intorno solo quella m'importava. (49) from outside, the cloud that surrounded me every hour, the cloud I inhabited and that inhabited me ... I knew that, in all the variegated world around me, this was the only thing that mattered to me. (Ill)

So he too is emasculated, desperately searching for new visions of the world, 'una nuova immagine del mondo che desse un senso a questo nostro grigiore' (70; 'a new image of the world that would give a meaning to our greyness/ 127). Unfortunately, the blurred images push reality into confused contours. Colour is also an illusion. Though man believes it to be an inherent function of the world's molecular understructure colour is in fact relative to the perceptual abilities of the observer. In 'Senza colori' ('Without Colors'), a short story in the collection Le cosmicomiche (1965, Cosmicomics) a beguiling female leads the hapless protagonist on a merry chase of world discovery. He is utterly confused by her unorthodox perspective on things, by her new way of seeing. But of course, she has evolved and is able to perceive the full range of the colour spectrum while he only sees shades of grey. At every turn, the clarity of Qfwfq's grey world is shattered into broken chips, reality a maelstrom of perceived assumptions. Before Ayl no one had ever painted a scene with such a varied palette. This is precisely the moment when language becomes the prosthetic of the protagonist's challenged vision and attempts to arrest the fleeting images in a stable, logocentric description. The male invents his own world-view, his own linguistic code: Alberi di lava color fumo protendevano contorte ramificazioni da cui pendevano sottili foglie d'ardesia. Farfalle di cenere sorvolando prati d'argilla si libravano sopra opache margherite di cristallo. (68) Trees of smoke-colored lava stretched out twisted branches from which hung thin leaves of slate. Butterflies of ash flying over clay meadows hovered above opaque crystal daisies. (55)

52 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures The language is pristine, rigid, as biting as its cold chromatic hues. Once the initial fear of female engulfment is overcome, a potentializing masculine language becomes the controlling, distancing, displacing medium that enfranchises world formation in spite of female imagism. At this point, "the possibilities/ states Mitchell, 'and the hopes for verbal representation of visual representation become practically endless.'41 These protagonists, Bradamante-Io-Qfwfq (and Calvino for that matter) thus turn to narration, to a full-time and supposedly salutary relationship with lexis, that is, style and semantics, in order to survive. Narration is the second method espoused in Quintillian's Institutio Oratoria.42 The first is ethopeia, the simulation of emotion; the third is a focus on detail followed by precise diction that brings together the first three. These impressions give rise to an enargeia that illustrates events so that they may be seen clearly. The term enargeia is particularly pertinent for it emphasizes the use of words with such visual forcefulness that they must, as Quintillian asserts, 'thrust themselves into the mind just as sunlight forces itself upon the eyes' (Institutio Oratoria, VII.II). Calvino's hope is to achieve a vividness of scene construction by utilizing a sort of visual thesaurus of recognizable icons. Recurring images of webs, spirals, filigree, water scenes, and lush greenery permeate his descriptions and illustrate his pages. The dream is to permit the two discordant impulses of simultaneity and representation, of physis and techne, to come together in the paradoxical immediacy of ekphrasis. The entire writing project, therefore, remains on illusionary ground. While the language is meant to function transparently, the panoply of visual images generated often cascades into a natural-sign aesthetic. When reading Calvino one senses a constant craving for a spatial fix subtended by a yearning for the exhilaration of temporal flow: the ebb and flow between these delicate boundaries produces the illusion of animation. It is telling that at the same time as the author populates his landscape with silent straw men like Antonino, Amerigo Ormea, and lo, he also finds an invigorating release in the storytelling prowess of the narrators of the heraldic trilogy. The narrators of these tales are imbued with a faith in the visual power of telling. The child narrator of // visconte dimezzato, the brother of the baron in // barone rampante (1957; The Baron in the Trees), and the fable maker Bradamante-Suor Teodora in // cavaliere inesistente do not question the validity of their imaginative impulses. Instead, they revel in the generative power of their words, oblivious to the implicit consequences of unrestricted possible world

From Word to Image 53 formation. The child narrator of // visconte dimezzato confesses his imaginative impulses: lo non avevo visto nulla. Ero nascosto nel bosco a raccontarmi storie ... io rimasi qui, in questo nostro mondo pieno di responsabilita e di fuochi fatui. (71) I hadn't seen a thing. I was in the woods telling myself stories ... I remained behind, in this world of ours full of responsibilities and wills-o'the-wisp. The narrator of the baron's exploits looks up from his labyrinth of words, peers out the frame of his studio window, and delights in the narcissism that accompanies his fictional diegesis: Ombrosa non c'e piu. Guardando il cielo sgombro, mi domando se davvero e esistita ... forse c'era solo perche ci passasse mio fratello col suo leggero passo di codibugnolo, era un ricamo fatto sul nulla che assomiglia a questo filo d'inchiostro, come 1'ho lasciato correre per pagine e pagine, zeppo di cancellature, di rimandi, di sgorbi nervosi, di macchie, di lacune, che a momenti si sgrana in grossi acini chiari, a momenti si infittisce in segni minuscoli come semi puntiformi, ora si ritorce su se stesso, ora si biforca, ora collega grumi di frasi con contorni di foglie o di nuvole, e poi s'intoppa, e poi ripiglia a attorcigliarsi, e corre e corre e si dipana e avvolge un ultimo grappolo insensate di parole idee sogni ed e finite. (261) Ombrosa no longer exists. Looking at the empty sky, I ask myself if it ever did really exist... perhaps it was only there so that my brother could pass through it with his light-footed walk, it was embroidered on nothing, like this thread of ink which I have let run on for page after page, swarming with cancellations, corrections, doodles, blots and gaps, bursting at times into clear big berries, coagulating at others into piles of tiny starry seeds, then twisting upon itself, forking off, surrounding buds of phrases with framewords of leaves and clouds, then interweaving again, and so running on and on and on until it splatters and bursts into a last senseless cluster of words, ideas, dreams, and so ends. While the male child meditates upon the memory of the written text, the hermaphroditic male-female narrator, Bradamante-Suor Teodora,

54 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

uses a multidimensional game ploy to push her writing into the future: La penna corre spinta dallo stesso piacere che ti fa correre le strade. II capitolo che attacchi e non sai ancora quale storia raccontera e come 1'angolo che svolterai uscendo dal convento e non sai se ti mettera a faccia con un drago, uno stuolo barbaresco, un'isola incantata, un nuovo amore. (135) The pen rushes on urged by the same joy that makes me rush through the streets. The chapter that you begin without knowing which story you're going to tell is like the corner you turn when leaving the convent without knowing that you might come face to face with a dragon, a gang of barbarians, an enchanted island or a new love.

All three are unreliable narrators whose conjuring of fanciful images leave the reader with a sense of bewilderment only partially mollified by the sensual rush of visual wonder. They promote aperture rather than closure, literally abducting the reader into a temporal and spatial circling of the subject. What is most interesting is that the strongest, yet most unreliable narrator, Bradamante-Suor Teodora, is a resilient female, a weaver of tales who plays at the male games of writing and war.43 Not content to remain invisible in the nunnery, hers is a narcissistic narrative intent on both hiding and revealing her own linguistic identity. Her stance is ultimately ironical. She is a Janus image constructing her own narrative by marrying male action with female imagery. I would suggest that Suor Teodora effectively castrates male discourse by appropriating to herself its actualizing potential. She is Calvino's most successful pre-Qfwfq character, since she is able to escape her physical and epistemological confines by becoming both representational word and illustrative image. The gambit, however, is necessarily short lived. While the exercise provides a vital consolation for living in a world which is usually chaotic, the simultaneous plenitude of the word and image wedding begets a referential fictiveness that is axiomatic; Suor Teodora literally runs out of reality to relate, or at the least, fiction she would like to write. The writing process gains the upper hand, controlling her pen, rushing her towards an uncomfortable conclusion: she is a nun writing in a monastery. Before this occurs, Suor Teodora breaks out of the metafictional allegory and assumes her natural place in the male discourse; she becomes a woman and runs away with her image of Rambaldo:

From Word to Image 55 Finalmente sei tu a corrermi incontro, inafferrabile guerriero! - esclama Bradamante. - Oh, mi fosse dato di vederti correre appresso a me, anche tu, 1'unico uomo i cui atti non sono buttati li come vien viene, improvvisati, faciloni, come quelli della solita canea che mi vien dietro! - E in cosi dire, volta il cavallo e prova a sfuggirgli, sempre pero girando il capo a vedere se lui sta al gioco e la rincorre. (129) 'Finally it's you that rushes to meet me, oh unseizable warrior!,' exclaimed Bradamante. 'Oh, that it should be granted to me to see you rushing so after me, you, the only man whose actions are not impulsive, improvised, shallow like those of the usual rabble that follows me!' And so saying, she wheels her horse and tries to escape him, though turning her head every now and again to see if he were playing her game and following her.

The words ('inafferrabile guerriero'; 'unseizable warrior') possess a variety of styles ('atti'; 'acts') able to restrain the indomitable Bradamante (image), whose elusive consistency ('prova a sfuggirgli'; 'tries to escape him') epitomizes the spatial structuration of the narrative process. Rambaldo's discourse, his Lacanian 'pen/ will now guide, without tyrannizing, the female virago. It is a union Bradamante welcomes; she revels in the possibility of consuming the ritual: - Oh, si, ne ero certa! - esclama Bradamante, a occhi chiusi. - Ero sempre certa che sarebbe stato possibile! - e si stringe a lui, ed in una febbre che e pari da parte d'entrambi, si congiungono. - O si, o si, ne ero certa! (130) 'Oh, yes, I was sure of it!,' exclaimed Bradamante with closed eyes. 'I was always sure it would be possible!' and she hugs him close and in a joint fever pitch, they unite. 'Oh yes, yes, I was sure of it!'

Writing is a contest between art and reality, between the image's status of evanescence and the word's prerogative of control. The resulting erotic encounter is an enabling conquest of both space ('penna/ 'carta/ 'castello,' citta') and time ('passato/ 'presente/ 'future'): Per questo la mia penna a un certo punto s'e messa a correre ... Dal raccontare al passato, e dal presente che mi prendeva la mano nei tratti concitati, ecco, o future, sono salita in sella al tuo cavallo. Quali nuovi stendardi mi levi incontro dai pennoni delle torri di citta non ancora fon-

56 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures date? Quali fiumi di devastazioni dai castelli e dai giardini che amavo? Quali impreviste eta dell'oro prepari, tu malpadroneggiato, tu foriero di tesori pagati a caro prezzo, tu mio regno da conquistare, future ... (135-6) That is why my pen at a certain point began running on ... From describing the past, from the present which seized my hand in its excited grasp, here I am, oh future, now mounting the saddle of your horse. What new pennants will you unfurl before me from the towers of cities as yet unfounded? What rivers of devastation set flowing over castles and gardens I have loved? What unforeseeable golden ages are you preparing, illmastered, indomitable harbinger of treasures paid dearly, my kingdom to be conquered, the future ... The loneliness of the writer Suor Teodora is reversed upon the sexual intercourse of the heroine who in turn enlivens the time-bound selfreflexive discourse with images of future consummation. The struggle between seeing as knowledge (word) and seeing as imagining (image) is consumed in the intercourse of fiction making. We are years away from the intermodel image of 'una nuvola di fumo [che] nasconde parte del primo capoverso' (11; 'the cloud of smoke that hides part of the first paragraph' 10) of Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore that fogs the imagination of both protagonist and reader. The gambit, however, is the same: a writer, an image, a word; a lover, a visual impulse, a temporal act. The pattern is familiar and recurring. Through description, Calvino collapses the temporal and the spatial in a stylized movement that incorporates the described object into a dynamic system of sign types. The world, in other words, as he states in 'La penna in prima persona/44 is translated into a plotline: II mondo e trasformato in linea, un'unica linea spezzata, contorta, discontinua. L'uomo anche ... Tutto cio che 1'uomo fa e figurazione, e creazione visuale, e spettacolo. (295,297) The world is transformed into line, a single line, broken, twisted, discontinuous. Man, too ... Everything man does is depiction, visual creation, spectacle. (293,296) We may now better understand the delicate sandcastles of Calvino's imagination that belie the metamorphic powers of the author's light-

From Word to Image 57 ness of vision. Like the universe itself, his visual flights of fancy are supported by the evanescent powders of existence: the grains of sand in La formica argentina (1952; The Argentine Ant) and Palomar, the dust in La nuvola di smog, the untraceable filigree of a termite's gnawing in Le citta invisibili, the delicate ribs of the spider's web in // sentiero dei nidi di ragno. Knowledge is not some a priori postulate encoded into the system but rather a formulaic construction that conforms to each perception of the world. Take, for instance, the world-generating vision of the mollusk in the cosmicomic tale 'La spirale' (The Spiral'): Forma non ne avevo, cioe non sapevo d'averne ... se e questo che chiamate simmetria raggiata, vuol dire che avevo la simmetria raggiata ... ma dato che non avevo forma mi sentivo dentro tutte le forme possibili, e tutti i gesti e le smorfie e le possibilita di far rumori anche sconvenienti... Ma non ero mica cosi indietro da non sapere che oltre a me esisteva dell'altro: ... 1'acqua era un mezzo d'informazione attendibile e precise ... informazioni dell'essenziale, sulle quale potevo poi lavorare lungamente l'immaginazione ... elaboravo un'immagine di me armoniosa e colorata per poter entrare nella ricettivita visiva di lei, occuparne il centre, stabilirmici, perche lei potesse fruire di me continuamente, con il sogno e col ricordo e con 1'idea oltre che con la vista. E sentivo che nello stesso tempo lei irradiava un'immagine di se tanto perfetta che si sarebbe imposta ai miei sensi brumosi e tardi, sviluppando in me un campo visivo interiore dove avrebbe definitivamente sfolgorato. (170-81) Form: I didn't have any; that is, I didn't know I had one ... if this is what you call radial symmetry, I suppose I had radial symmetry ... But since I had no form I could feel all possible forms in myself, and all actions and expressions and possibilities of making noises, even rude ones ... But I wasn't so backward that 1 didn't know something else existed beyond me ... The water was a source of information, reliable and precise ... essential information, which I could then develop at length in my imagination ... I elaborated a harmonious, colored image of myself to enter her visual receptivity, to occupy its center, to settle there, so that she could utilize me constantly, in dreaming and in memory, with thought as well as with sight. And I felt at the same time she was radiating an image of herself so perfect that it would impose itself on my foggy, backward senses, developing in me an interior visual field where it would blaze forth definitely. (141-51) Or read, for example, the projection of sexual desire into sensual land-

58 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

scape in this story from Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, 'Sul tappeto di foglie illuminate dalla luna' ('On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon'): Le foglie del ginkgo cadevano come una pioggia minuta dai rami e punteggiavano di giallo il prato ... Se dall'albero di ginkgo cade una sola fogliolina gialla e si posa sul prato, la sensazione che si prova guardandola e quella d'una singola fogliolina gialla. Se due foglioline scendono dall'albero, 1'occhio segue il volteggiare delle due foglioline nell'aria che s'avvicinano e s'allontanano come due farfalle che si rincorrono, per planare infine una qua una la sull'erba ... Ora io, pur senza perdere nulla di queste gradevoli sensazioni complessive, averi voluto mantenere distinta senza confonderla con le altre 1'immagine individuale d'ogni foglia ... (199) The ginkgo leaves fell like fine rain from the boughs and dotted the lawn with yellow ... if from the ginkgo tree a single little yellow leaf falls and rests on the lawn, the sensation felt in looking at it is that of a single yellow leaf. If two leaves descend from the tree, the eye follows the twirling of the two leaves as they move closer, then separate in the air, like two butterflies chasing each other, then glide finally to the grass one here, one there ... Now, without losing anything of these pleasant general sensations I would like to maintain distinct, not confusing it with the others, the individual image of each leaf ... (199)

The idea of immersion, of using stereoscopic descriptions and gazeintensive prose to create the illusion of being with the narrator, is the foundation of Calvino's ability to simulate reality in words. These are only two of many splendidly detailed illusions in Calvino's universe that suggest that perhaps for the author reality is literally beyond space and time and we all float on the edge of presently describable and potentially projectable word and image event horizons. Personal Re-memberings A text from the transitional period of the fifties that bears careful scrutiny is 7 racconti. The themes and perspectives generated in this text render the stories an integral part of the network of Calvino's visionary universe and provide a launching pad into the sixties. These elements include a spatial causality that invites comparisons with our own,

From Word to Image 59

present-day notions of reality, a pan-determinism, the multiplication of personality that collapses the limits between subject and object and, lastly, the transformation of time and space into personal analogue. Moreover, the fragmentation of character in these stories deforms the realistic language of the narrative to the point of dissimulation. The reader is unsure whether the events are real or occur as personally lived fantasies (see especially the sections 'Le memorie difficili' [Difficult Memories] and 'Gli amori difficili' [Difficult Loves]). This breakdown of referential contexts is central not only to / racconti but to Calvino's evolving visual strategy. In all of these stories the reader is expected to risk an act of faith. Thus, within the range of responses readers usually bring to the text, Calvino adds compliance and then demands total complicity. We are asked to believe in the literary enterprise without question. This is reminiscent not only of fable but of all fantasy literature the primary concern of which is the changing of a contrary or implausible fact to concentrating on the fact itself. This type of fantasy is born from within the characters; it lives inside them as both a conventional sign and a literary construct that creates a new virtual, therefore visual, reality. It is a way of classifying experience, of making sense of the world even if the results are not always favourable. In these tales humanity meets the challenge of its own creations and survives the crucible with a renewed, though not necessarily bettered, perspective. Three of these tales are most relevant to my argument: 'L'avventura di un poeta' (The Adventure of a Poet'), 'L'avventura di un lettore' (The Adventure of a Reader'), and 'L'avventura di uno sciatore' (The Adventure of a Skier'). Each deals with a specific aspect of the literary process.45 In 'L'avventura di un poeta' a word-worker accustomed to attaining a fullness of being through the traditional site of such fullness, poetry, is stymied by the world beyond the text. The image of Delia H. represents just such an unreachable, untouchable, ultimately unutterable image. She is the tranquil, serene word of his poetry that has magically materialized before his eyes and become an overpowering image. She is another Pygmalion figure, a Medusa who arrests male energy, turning Usnelli to stone. Just as Dante is rendered helpless before Francesca, a sinner he considers to be of his own partial making, so too the poet becomes mute, but for a different reason. Delia H.'s narrative hubris had produced a logocentric sensuality capable of swaying human emotion; her image, however, produces a metaphysical conceit in Usnelli that paradoxically deprives his words

60 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures of any potential figuration. Unable to write, the poet's only recourse is silence: La felicita era per Usnelli uno state sospeso, da vivere trattenendo il fiato. Da quando amava Delia egli vedeva in pericolo il suo cauto, avaro rapporto con il mondo, ma non voleva rinunciare a nulla ne di se ne della felicita che gli si apriva. Adesso stava all'erta, come se ogni grade di perfezione che la natura intorno a loro raggiungeva - un decantarsi dell'azzurro dell'acqua, uno smorire del verde della costa in cinerino, il guizzo d'una pinna di pesce proprio al punto dove la distesa del mare era piu liscia - , non facesse che precedere un altro grado piu alto, e cosi via, fino al punto in cui 1'invisibile linea dell'orizzonte si sarebbe aperta come un'ostrica svelando tutt'a un tratto un pianeta diverse o una nuova parola. (92) Happiness, for Usnelli, was a suspended condition, to be lived holding your breath. Ever since he began loving Delia, he had seen his cautious, sparing relationship with the world endangered; but he wished to renounce nothing, either of himself or of the happiness that opened before him. Now he was on guard, as if every degree of perfection that nature achieved around him - a decanting of the blue of the water, a languishing of the coast's green into gray, the glint of a fish's fin at the very spot where the sea's expanse was smoothest - were only heralding another, higher, degree, and so on to the point where the invisible line of the horizon would part like an oyster revealing all of a sudden a different planet or a new word. (284) Similar to Dante's self-interrogating soliloquy before Paolo e Francesca, Calvino is questioning the status of language as both a recorder of real events and an eventual harbinger of revelation, of salvation, of deception, and even of death. Language may indeed open vistas onto new worlds, 'un pianeta diverse' ('a different planet'), but it also poses normative (and for Dante, moral) limits. Dante must die as a poet and be reborn a prophet and in order for Usnelli to inhabit a full articulation of the world he too must fall silent. Out of this silence, 'un silenzio che si sente' (91; 'a silence you can hear'), Usnelli wishes to enter into a world 'al di la della parola' (93; 'beyond words'). Unfortunately, while the poet is enthralled by the vision of Delia H., in essence achieving the apocalyptic spatial fix he had craved, he still yearns for the security of temporal flow that, to his mind, precedes and controls

From Word to Image 61

imagery. Yet, mundane images crowd the horizon: huts, fishermen's nets, tiled roofs, and crowded beaches. This preverbal, unmediated, sensorial immediacy dazzles him, erasing the world of concrete words at a single stroke, leaving only 'il nero piu totale, impenetrabile, disperato come un urlo' (95; 'the most total black, impenetrable, desperate as a scream,' 290). This route clearly produced a dead end. In The Written and the Unwritten Word'46 Calvino observes that modern homo legens is trapped by language. Like the hapless poet who stares at Delia's beauty unable to find the proper words to express his emotions, the author too suffers inexorably when confronted by the elusive and unbounded temporal flow of reality: 'When I move from the written world to the other, the one we currently call the world, based on three dimensions, five senses, peopled by four billion of our fellows, this means, for me, repeating every time the event of my birth, passing again through its trauma, to shape an intelligible reality from a lot of confused sensations, to choose again a strategy for facing the unexpected without being destroyed by it' (38). It seems that the very medium that so inspired the young author to create the world anew, purged of all conditioning ideologies, is experienced by the more mature author as a form of splitting, of isolation from some more authentic realm of artistic experience yet to be achieved. It is interesting that in 'L'avventura di un poeta' it is a poet, the privileged oracle of the gods, who experiences verbal dyslexia. By trying to hold out for the spatial object in deference to the temporal word, language sacrifices its own being for its referent. But of course, as Murray Krieger suggests, "The aesthetic dream of our culture has long been of a miracle that permits these opposed impulses to come together in the paradoxical immediacy of ekphrasis, whether as a verbal replacement for a visual image of its own verbal emblem that plays the role of a visual image while playing its own role.'47 From this point on, Calvino will attempt to resolve the iconic duplicity of language. He will strive to achieve artistic plenitude by playing out his semiotic desire for the natural sign, that is, to see the world in the word, a kind of iconic duplication of the image within verbal language; what Derrida would term logocentric desire. The realization that fiction is only language now spurs the author to investigate other possibilities for the medium. Since language is limited in its representational possibilities, Calvino invents interpretative acts that depend, in large part, on the user's perception. He thus moves from a position of sensed phenomena to one of abstract conjecture and

62 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

theoretical conundrum. The author takes upon himself the task of formulating a narrative swept up in purely verbal logic. Narrative is now understood as a linking of sounds to hollow words rather than to preconceived meanings. An examination of Calvino's many writings from the period 1960-7 reveals an author examining his past and reinventing both his public and private selves. We are witness to an evolution in his aesthetics as he abandons an earlier Marxist belief that the world can be changed through writing. His attention is now drawn to more open vistas that move towards infinity; his writings posit issues that examine man's place in the cosmos. In 1960 he published new introductions to new editions of // sentiero del nidi di ragno and / nostri antenati; he also published the essay 'La sfida al labirinto/ In 1962 he published the short story 'La strada di San Giovanni' (The Road to San Giovanni'); in 1963 he published La giornata di uno scrutatore La Speculazione edilizia. These publications reinterpret his former self and forge a new public image of the author. While La giornata di uno scruttore closes a segment of his past, 'La strada di San Giovanni' examines a crucial, lingering moment from this past. Calvino, it would seem, is in one of his 'morphing' stages; shedding old mores in search of new modes of becoming. He also distances himself physically from past surroundings, moving his family to Paris in 1963. So begin the years of OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle; Workshop of Potential Literature) of new vital acquaintances, of concentrated reading, writing, and of experimentation in formulaic, combinatoric language.48 A new Calvino eventually emerges, one whose prose is forged in science, whose dedication to deductive reasoning is uncompromising; one who finds inspiration in classic literary models while raising the stakes of fiction to include avant-garde experimentation. A recovery of self occurs during this period. As the author edits and rewrites his already published works, he re-imagines his own past to suit his evolving character. His works assume the tones of a confessional exercise. In La giornata di uno scrutatore, a somber restless mood permeates the work as the author publicly reassesses his political choices. The final pages of this work bear a striking sense of Catholic piety. The moment begets a forgotten figure, the father, who reemerges, here and elsewhere, as a textual presence. Though his first published short stories contain several father-son stories that mask repressed personal emotions, Calvino's re-evaluation of self in the early sixties causes him to transform these once painful finalities into

From Word to Image 63

writing possibilities. For the moment, the memory opens up a new epistemological space, a new relationship with the father, a new politics of public performance and hyper-embodied discourse. It is no longer a question of exorcising uncomfortable memories but of creating new cultural constructs within a highly personalized semantic system. Though the authorial voice disappears into the carapace of the distanced, playful technician, it is the father's discourse, the denotative language of science, that was to provide the concreteness behind the fantasy images and help rekindle Calvino's narrative. This process is most salient in 'La strada di San Giovanni' (but is completed, to my mind, years later in Le citta invisibili).45 This story, and the poetic distillations of cities by Marco Polo, frame a period in which Calvino reconstitutes himself in a process akin to soul making, where writing and imagination embody a process of artistic revelation and personal transformation. In the first, self-affirming meaning is bestowed by the memories of the child protagonist caught between the symbolic canon of the father and a desire for the mother. The shifting perspective between these two worlds of conscious rationality and unconscious drives is unstable and unresolvable, as is that of the writer who has heretofore fluctuated between referential listing (realism) and connotative descriptions (fantasy). Though the child in 'La strada di San Giovanni/ much like Qfwfq, externalizes worldly control through language, the protagonist of Le citta invisibili reifies a world of distilled images that moves beyond language to reconstitute preternatural patterns of fragmented visual memories. Literature assumes properties of selfauthentification. As a human activity, it helps promote personal 'integration' by moving beyond 'alienation/ 'division/ and 'solitude.'49 Literature, in other words, now assumes its proper niche in Calvino's grand scheme of things. He is growing to fit the armour of his once invisible knight. A revealing interview with Madeleine Santschi in 1967 validates a new point of orientation that replaces the subject in associational systems of interdependence: lo non sono tra coloro che credono che esista solo il linguaggio, o solo il pensiero umano. (Ce ne sono anche tra coloro che passano per 'realist!'), lo credo che esista una realta e che ci sia un rapporto (seppure sempre parziale) tra la realta e i segni con cui la rappresentiamo. La ragione della mia irrequietezza stilistica, dell'insoddisfazione riguardo ai miei procedimenti, deriva proprio da questo fatto. lo credo che il mondo esiste indipendentemente dall'uomo; il mondo esisteva prima dell'uomo ed

64 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures esistera dopo, e 1'uomo e solo un'occasione che il mondo ha per organizzare alcune informazioni su se stesso. Quindi la letteratura e per me una serie di tentativi di conoscenza e di classificazione delle informazioni sul mondo, il tutto molto instabile e relative ma in qualche modo non inutile.50 I am not among those who believe that only language exists, or only human thought. (Some of these are also among those who pass for 'realists'.) I believe that there exists a reality and that there is a rapport (even if only partial) between reality and the signs we use to represent it. The reasons for my stylistic unease, for my dissatisfaction with respect to my procedures, derives precisely from this fact. I believe that the world exists independently of man; the world existed before man and it will exist after him, and man is only one of the possibilities that the world has in order to arrange some information about itself. Therefore, literature for me is a series of attempts at knowledge and of classification of information about the world, all of which is very unstable and relative but in some ways not useless.

Language, as Qfwfq comes to learn, is only one of many epistemological systems, including writing, reading, speaking, drawing, painting, and imagining, that help to explain the world. As he will learn, and as we shall see in 'L'origine degli Uccelli,' it is also the most subversive. But of course. It is much more natural, more innate, and comfortable to perceive the world visually. Signs can be perceived simultaneously, grasping, in one fell swoop, integral elements of the variegated whole. But Calvino is a writer and writing requires sequential processing, labelling, and making connections within a sentence structure. Writing implies naming, an analytical process that engages theories of context, fosters commitments to ideologies, and assures the interrelationship of assumptions and values. It is a method of categorization, a cultural tool that promotes social integration and interpersonal understanding when competently executed. In the story 'La strada di San Giovanni' Calvino presents a competent namer and categorizer, his father, and admits to his own inability, at that stage in his development, to share his father's sober perspective: Per mio padre le parole dovevano servire da conferma alle cose, e da segno di possesso; per me erano previsioni di cose intraviste appena, non possedute, presunte. II vocabolario di mio padre si dilatava nell'intermi-

From Word to Image 65 nabile catalogo del generi, delle specie, delle varieta del regno vegetale ogni nome era una differenza colta nella densa compattezza della foresta, la fiducia d'avere cosi' allargato il dominio dell'uomo - e nella terminologia tecnica, dove 1'esattezza della parola accompagna lo sforzo d'esattezza dell'operazione, del gesto ... lo non riconoscevo ne una pianta ne un uccello. E bastava un brandello di giornale calpestato che mi finiva tra i piedi ed ero assorto a bere la scrittura che ne sortiva mozza e inconfessabile - nomi di teatri, attrici, vanita e gia la mia mente aveva preso il galoppo, la catena delle immagini non si sarebbe fermata per ore e ore mentre continuavo a seguire in silenzio mio padre... (20-2) To my father's mind, words must serve as confirmations of things, and as signs of possession; to mine they were foretastes of things barely glimpsed, not possessed, or presumed. My father's vocabulary welled outward into the interminable catalogue of the genuses, species and varieties of the vegetable world - every name was a distinction plucked from the dense compactness of the forest in the belief that one had thus enlarged man's dominion - and into technical terminology, where the exactness of the word goes hand in hand with the studied exactness of the operation, the gesture... I could recognize not a single plant or bird. And all it took was for a scrap of trampled newspaper to find its way beneath my feet and I would be engrossed in soaking up the writing on it, mutilated and unmentionable - names of theatres, actresses, vanities - and already my mind would be racing off, the sequence of images would go on for hours and hours as I walked silently behind my father ... (10-11)

Besides demonstrating an incompatibility of conflicting generational canons this is also an admission, on the author's part, of an inherent propensity towards visual thinking that must somehow be trained, conditioned, even coerced into an orderly, temporal, narrative sequence. The written memory, the story as related in 'La strada di San Giovanni/ is just such a belated attempt to restore unity to disunited and conflicting aesthetic tendencies. Initially, a tentative author clings to a juvenile form of selfhood: « Ypotoglaxia jasminifolia » (ora invento dei nomi; quelli veri non li ho mai imparati), « Photophila wolfoides » diceva, (sto inventando; erano nomi di questo genere), oppure « Crotodendron indica » (certo adesso

66 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures avrei potuto pure cercare dei nomi veri, invece di inventarli, magari riscoprire quali erano in realta le piante che mio padre andava nominandomi. (220) 'Ypotoglaxia jasminifolia' (I'm inventing the names; I never learned the real ones), Thotophila wolfoides/ he would say (I'm inventing; they were names of this sort), or 'Cortodendron indica,' (of course I could prefectly well have looked up some real names, instead of inventing them, and maybe rediscovered what plants my father had actually been naming for me. (12) This is supplanted by a sense of guilt: ma sarebbe stato barare al gioco, non accettare la perdita che mi sono io stesso inflitto, le mille perdite che ci infliggiamo e per cui non c'e rivincita. (22) but that would have been cheating, refusing to accept the loss that I inflicted on myself, the thousands of losses we inflict on ourselves and for which there is no making amends. (12) The result, however, is festering ineptitude couched in ironic parody. Only a painful admission of a crisis in representation potentially opens the discourse to new modes of selfhood: (Eppure, eppure, se avessi scritto qui dei veri nomi di piante sarebbe stato da parte mia un atto di modestia e pieta, finalmante un far ricorso a quell'umile sapienza che la mia gioventu rifiutava per puntare su carte ignote e infide, sarebbe stato un gesto di pacificazione col padre, una prova di maturita ... (22) (And yet, and yet, if I had written some real names of plants here it would have been a gesture of modesty and devotion on my part, finally resorting so that humble knowledge that my youth rejected in order to try my luck with other cards, unknown and treacherous, it would have been a way of making peace with my father, a demonstration of maturity... (12) The confession eventually dissolves into an admission of remorse, a poetic argument that extends from heartfelt silence:

From Word to Image 67 e invece non 1'ho fatto, mi sono compiaciuto di questo scherzo del nomi inventati, di quest'intenzione di parodia, segno che ancore una resistenza e rimasta, una polemica, segno che la marcia mattutina verso San Giovanni continua ancora con il suo dissidio, che ogni mattina della mia vita e ancora la mattina in cui tocca a me accompagnare nostro padre a San Giovanni). (22) and yet I didn't do it, I indulged in this joke of invented names, this intended parody, sure sign that I am still resisting, arguing, sure sign that that morning march to San Giovanni is still going on, with its same discord, and that every morning of my life is still the morning when it's my turn to go with Father to San Giovanni). (12-13) In a sense, Calvino is blurring personal experience into metaphor, elevating the predicament to universal syntony. The schematic pairing of son and father generates the necessary drama in the story by bridging the uncomfortable generational synapse between them while permitting the young protagonist temporal slippage into singulative memory. By dwelling upon his character in the text, Calvino is forced to question his own choices vis-a-vis the image of the father and penetrate even more deeply into his own sublimated essence both as son and as maturing professional author. The centre (his self as character) and circumference (his self as author) are one but compete for the same vital narrative space, which in turn is competing with the narrative memory space of the father. The representation of the contentious and often intolerable relationship between father and son thus engenders a feeling of dissatisfaction and colours the child's ontology. The author will not be comfortable with his writing style until he comes to terms with the memory of his father's conditioning master text. Indeed, the inability of the young protagonist to speak or walk with the father on his daily forages (both in this and in other father-son stories collected in Ultimo viene il corvo (1949, The Crow Comes Last) and / racconti is indicative of the spiritual lameness of the father-son rapport; 'parlarci era difficile' (20; 'talking to each other was difficult/ 10). In Lacanian terms, Calvino must resolve his fears of castration and accept a submissive role with regard to the symbolic father. Indeed, according to Lacan's reading of Freud, the problem of the son's relationship to the father is paralleled by the subject's difficulty of relating to the symbolic order. The subject will never accept the father until the father has been defined within the triangular relationship (father-

68 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

language; mother-image; offspring-receptor) of the home. Once this is accomplished, the subject may redefine his relationship by consciously acceding to his own definition of the world through language, for language ultimately constitutes difference. For this reason, Calvino's narrators constantly substitute the paternal metaphor with fantastic (I nostri antenati), ideological (La giornata di uno scrutatore), scientific (Le cosmicomiche), even infernal metaphors (Le citta invisibili) in an attempt to preserve personal relevance. In this way, they slyly introduce a deviant set of signifiers in order to subvert any potential or real contact with the symbolic order. Meaning, then, is only bestowed by the images the narrating subject perceives. In this manner, the linguistic hegemony of the colonizing father is kept at bay by the constantly shifting perspectives of never totally reliable narrators. The position of the author, ultimately Calvino the man, remains apparently undecidable. Or does it?

Chapter Two

From Image to Word

Each act that involves stealing, copying, remaking, changing, distorting, citing, and reading with ludic intentions surely gives pleasure. Tullio Pericoli1

It is the childish pleasure of the combinatorial game that leads the painter to try out arrangements of lines and colors, the poet to experiment with juxtapositions of words. Italo Calvino2

In this chapter I will use the terms image and imagery as relays that connect notions of language, theories of perception, instances of picturing with ideologies of social, cultural, and political value. I investigate how Calvino envisioned a new order of things, one that escaped thematic provincialism, linguistic colonization, ideologies of nihilism, and spectres of negativity in favour of an all-encompassing global perspective that wished to transfer narrative categories onto visual texts while at the same time appropriating painterly techniques for literature. Images are not simply a different kind of sign; they are fundamental elements of world making. Like language, they hold the world together with 'figures of knowledge' that cannot be reduced to simple notions of representational artifice. Importantly, 'the relation of language to painting is an infinite relation.'3 The differences between images and language are not simply formal ones. Questions of representation trace their linkages to issues of media, epoch, value, and power. When comparing what is seen with what is said, rigorous tax-

70 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

onomists tend to differentiate one field as background, the invisible text behind an obvious foreground. In this manner either the word or the image acquires a kind of Other status that insulates what could, in a more democratic sense, be considered the same inspiration. For these "judicious differentiators'4 any image creates its own insular space while any written word is always conceived to stand out against a hidden, though poignant, neutral background. Those who caution against the wisdom of interart comparisons sense the danger of transcribing makeshift terminology between the arts. Indeed, words like metaphor, image, icon, colour, and line assume different connotations within each art. The attempts of semiotics, however, to limit the capacious nature of the icon is a misguided tendency to constrict signs within specific codified systems. Some traditionalists, like Rene Wellek, would suggest that perception of a parallel between literature and art is essentially a subjective experience, the result of a mood or of an impression that depends on the ability of the individual reader or viewer to make the free associations.5 Today, however, the sister arts analogy has resurfaced because of our renewed hypersensitivity to visions of reality and the communicative systems we have developed to represent them. Knowledge, we are realizing again, is a cognitive network, the outcome of a multiplicity of world-forming methods that interact to constitute representation. There are no purely visual or verbal arts. A Verbal Order to Visual Chaos The origins of literature's association with the visual arts is usually traced back to the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos, who is reportedly responsible for the well-known dictum that 'painting is mute poetry and poetry a speaking picture.' Horace's dictum of 'ut pictura poesis' helped establish the parallelism between the sister arts that usually amounted to the poet using pictorial description or the painter taking his subject matter from poetry. Painting, not literature, was for centuries regarded as the cumulative discipline par excellence. Romantic supporters of a holistic notion of the noble art of painting could cite a steady evolutionary progress from classical realism towards a more accurate rendering of the real world that sanctioned the practice as culturally institutionalized. The revelatory power inherent in the image evoked an ahistorical sense of human reality, be it physical or spiritual, that could be summed in terms of universal experience. Only when painting renounced representation as its goal did the cleavage between

From Image to Word 71 the physical sciences and the arts assume its present depth.6 There is a considerable body of literature which discusses the differences and/or similarities between the representational arts, essentially between words and images.7 The 'infinite relation of language to painting' that Foucault adduces is linked to fundamental sensory divisions between modes of experience, for example, telling and seeing, speaking self and seen other, words heard and words inscribed, actions seen and actions described.8 Current attempts to cast a transdisciplinary net over the sister arts, the multimedic impulse to interartistic borrowing, corresponds to a critical desire, as well as the technological feasibility, to connect different aspects of artistic experience. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry launched the enduring defence of the convention that divided the visual and the verbal into two separate and exclusive spheres: the pictorial, for Lessing, should concern itself with the depiction of space (scenes); poetry, on the other hand, should deal exclusively with questions of time (events).9 Far from resolving the issue, Lessing's arguments of time versus space, nature versus convention, power versus value, fuelled a debate that remains contentious. Modern critics have aligned themselves with one or the other viewpoint: some insisting that the two arts have to be separated, others maintaining that a comparison is mutually illuminating. Yet, both temporal (written, acted) and spatial (painted, sculpted) art involve both simultaneity and sequencing in their concretions. Images, whether visualized through reading or perceived through vision, are held in the mind and must be processed by retention as well as protention in order to achieve a complete cognitive synthesis. Though differences remain in the way one would process a verbal text (left to right, top to bottom, and linear) vis-a-vis a visual one (eye saccades are free and not strictly dictated by spatial hierarchy), an imaginary scene (seen) is nevertheless reified in the mind. In essence, although subject to a new spin, the question to be resolved remains a traditional one: is there a difference between images and words? In his books, Iconology (1986) and Picture Theory (1994), WJ.T. Mitchell attempts to understand this issue in relation to the human interests that gives the question urgency in particular situations.10 His is a contextual approach that promotes a dialectic of exchange rather than confrontation between words and images. 'Why does it matter what an image is? What is at stake in marking off or erasing the differences between images and words: What are the systems of power and canons of value - that is, the ideologies - that

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inform the answers to these questions and make them matters of polemical dispute rather than purely theoretical interest?'11 Mitchell holds that a complex transformation has occurred in the human sciences and in public culture. He calls this shift 'the pictorial turn.'12 This reorientation of culture towards visual paradigms is unleashing ageold iconoclastic fears. But it should be clear that the pictorial turn is not a return to naive mimesis. What we have spawned is a culture of spectatorship, one that raises as many issues of looking, gazing, deciphering, interpreting, and literacy as it seems to bury. Not immune to these issues, in Six Memosfor the Millennium Calvino deals with the epistemological process of world formation. He distinguishes between two imaginative processes: 'the one that starts at the mental image and arrives at the visual image [seeing], and the one that starts at the visual image and arrives at its verbal expression [writing]' (83). For Calvino, concepts, sensations, ideas, the visual can be narrativized, depicted with words. Quoting Leopardi he states: 'le parole lontano and antico e simili sono pietissime e piacevoli, perche' distano idee vaste, e indefinite ...', ('58; the words faraway, ancient and similar words are highly poetic because they evoke vast, indefinite ideas ...'). Further on he continues that in order to 'savor' the indefinite, the writer 'requires a highly exact and meticulous attention to the composition of each image, to the minute definitions of details, to the choice objects ...' (60). In all these essays, but especially 'Visibility,' the author speaks of the chiasmic process of writing that always involves a circularity of positions, a perceptual movement that forever undermines the apparent fixity of words and images. Just as the crystal is a 'self organizing system' (71) so too 'the story [words] is the union of a spontaneous of images' (91) whose points of departure and arrival, though assumed, are embedded in 'a field of infinite possibilities' (86) in their application: In devising a story, therefore, the first thing that comes to my mind is an image that for some reason strikes me as charged with meaning, even if I cannot formulate this meaning in discursive or conceptual terms ... At the same time, the writing, the verbal product, acquires increasing importance. I would say that from the moment I start putting black on white, what really matters is the written word, first as a search for an equivalent of the visual image, then as a coherent development of the initial stylistic direction. (88-89)

From Image to Word 73 Further on he states, my procedure aims at uniting the spontaneous generation of images and the intentionality of discursive thought ... Yet the visual solutions continue to be determining factors and sometimes unexpectedly come to decide situations that neither the conjectures of thought nor the resources of language would be capable of resolving. (90) All of Calvino's writing is characterized by just such a potent spirit of imagism. His texts have been dominated by ekphrastic tendencies that have privileged the spatial, synchronic, sense-based modelling of reality rather than a narrative steeped in temporal exigencies. He has steadily moved away from a narrative that interprets events (time) towards a narrative that promotes description and aspires ideally to a natural relation between the word and its signified. All of Calvino's stories, whether realist or fantastic, scientific or philosophical, follow the same descriptive patterning: the eye records public events then retreats to privately recreate particulars that invent a story. The term ekphrasis (from the Greek ed, 'out/ and phrazein, "to speak') is rarely used to describe Calvino's art. Although Joseph Francese has dedicated a section of his book Narrating Postmodern Time and Spaceto this argument; and Eberhard Leube has examined issues of ekphrasis in his 'Sul rapporto tra letteratura e arti figurative nelle ultime opere di Italo Calvino/13 most scholars have continued to allow a linguistic bias temper the visual potential of Calvino's writing strategies. Yet the ekphrastic attitude is ubiquitous in Calvino's writings. His descriptions, as we will see, blur the boundaries of art and nature, permitting the reconstruction of mimetic concepts by redrawing the borderlines between word and image. For classical rhetoricians 'ekphrasis could be a description of a person, a place, even a battle, as well as of a painting or sculpture.' The notion that this advanced exercise in the Progymnasmata referred only to transcriptions of emotions before art works is a modern emendation. It is instead a type of speech (logos) crafted to have a predetermined effect upon an audience. An ekphrasis, in other words, is a finely constructed argument by an adept author that 'appeals to the mind's eye of the listener, making him or her "see" the subject-matter, whatever it may be.'14 This is an apt, unintentional description, I would contend, of Calvino's fiction. The author's carefully invented subjects and exquisitely tailored prose transform his

74 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

narration into vivid visualizations, a potentially contradictory feat, as Calvino was aware, since the mere accumulation of detail mitigates against descriptive intent. In order to achieve this delicately balanced transformation he describes the world into depicted, therefore pictured, objects. But, since it is impossible, Roland Barthes reminds us, to truly depict these objects employing the same experience that energizes them, they must be transcoded from a system of natural referents to an artificial one.15 This is the focus of Calvino's essay, 'The Written and the Unwritten World/ and it is part of the unresolvable dilemma of his art, for the objects he describes may only be mirrored in the verbal propositions he chooses. Unfortunately, literary language is made up of names which are transparent, that is, they are visual but have no essential content. It is no small irony that the very words used to picture the world may in no way authentically reflect it. Calvino grappled with this issue time and again. Since every literary description is a point of view (Barthes states that a literary description 'is a view'),16 Calvino's views have consistently privileged a reading of reality in which sight gains ontological primacy and sensual stimuli are often conflated with the act of seeing. This primacy of the visual as the foundation for knowledge is concomitant with the neoclassical belief that art is the visual expression of an invisible idea. It is also a condition that Calvino, as he stated in 'Cibernetica e fantasmi' craved as a writer, since art endows the user with a magical power to inform the world with gesture, to blur the threshold between semantic realms: II mondo fisso che circondava 1'uomo della tribu, costellato di segni di labili corrispondenze tra parole e cose, s'animava alia voce del narratore, si disponeva nelflusso d'un discorso-racconto, aH'interno del quale ogni parola acquistava nuovi valori e li trasmetteva alle idee e alle immagini da essa designate; ogni animale ogni oggetto ogni rapporto acquistava poteri benefici e malefici, quelli che saranno detti poteri magici e che si potrebbero invece dire poteri narrativi, potenzialita che la parola detiene, facolta di collegarsi con altre parole sul piano del discorso. (165, my emphasis) The immobile world that surrounded tribal man, strewn with signs of the fleeting correspondences between words and things, came to life in the voice of the storyteller, spun out into the flow of a spoken narrative within which each word acquired new values and transmitted them to the ideas and images they defined. Every animal, every object, every relationship took on

From Image to Word 75 beneficial or malign powers that came to be called magical powers but should, rather, have been called narrative powers, potentialities contained in the word, in its ability to link itself to other words on the plane of discourse. (5, my emphasis)

Clearly, language brings inert objects to life and anthropomorphizes the world with human names. It reveals a secret, unseen order behind reality and creates a spoken universe filled with the potential for narrative. Stories are thus not autonomous artifacts bereft of life but anthropological objects of human discourse that convey knowledge and tradition wrapped in a sociocultural context. There is no question that visual images constantly bombard the eye. These demand interpretation, are ripe for arrangement into coherent sequences. Calvino revels in the materiality of the world and in the richness of its changing contours. By rearranging what is seen, an artistic subjectivity is constituted that has a phenomenological link in the real. In other words, the material world is recuperated through sight, not solely, and here he is bridling against his Crocian upbringing, through intuition: lo credo che questa ricchezza sia gia nelle cose, credo all'esistenza del mondo. Non credo che il mondo sia soltanto pensiero o linguaggio.17 I believe that this richness is already inherent in things, I believe in the existence of the world. I do not believe that the world is only comprised of thought or language.

This feeling echoes throughout his writings, both creative and critical. As early as the essay 'II midollo del leone' (1955), Calvino was contemplating a literature that would somehow broach its confines and be all things to all readers. This type of literature would demand a purview that was more innovative than fictive, more artistic than narrative, a style that inspires marvel and hope, two requisites that recall baroque canons of intricate design and visual texture. Though seeing may be deemed an inappropriate metaphor for writing, it is indicative of Calvino's commitment to writing that the central self-conscious theme of most of his works is indeed the verbalization of visual space. What this attitude reveals is a dissatisfaction with words, and Calvino is consequently obliged to elaborate strategies of representation that confront the autonomy of language. If it is impossible to remove the medium, one must write 'through' it by accepting its supposed immanence as a controlling system. Thus, while Calvino's

76 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures narrative often gives the impression of remaining ensconced within self-contained and self-designated language play, he dramatizes this rule-bound activity by choosing words that act as visual signposts of their own representational inadequacy. An example is his description of the artist Luigi Serafini's illustrated Codex in 'L'enciclopedia d'un visionario': La parola scritta e anch'essa vivente (basta pungerla con uno spillone per vederla buttare sangue), ma gode della sua autonomia e corposita, puo diventare tridimensionale, policroma, sollevarsi dal foglio appesa a palloncini, o calarvi col paracadute. Ci sono parole che per tenerle attaccate alia pagina bisogna cucirle, facendo passare il filo attraverso gli occhielli delle lettere anellate. (Collezione di sabbia, 153) The written word is also a living thing (one need only prick it with a needle to see it spit blood), but it enjoys its own autonomy and corporality, it can become three-dimensional, polychromous, lift itself from the page suspended by balloons, or drop onto the page by parachute. Some words can only be attached to the page by sewing them, passing the thread through the eyes of the ringed letters. The word as image is a surrealist ideal. Yet even this potential is destined to demise, leaving the word with only the image of its empty carapace: Alia fine ... il destine d'ogni scrittura e di cadere in polvere, e pure della mano scrivente non resta che lo scheletro. Righe e parole si staccano dalla pagina, si sbriciolano, e dai mucchietti di polvere ecco che spuntano fuori gli esserini color arcobaleno e si mettono a saltare. II principio vitale di tutte le metamorfosi e di tutti gli alfabeti riprende il suo ciclo. (Collezione di sabbia, 153) In the end ... the destiny of every writing is to fall into dust, and even the writing hand becomes nothing more than a skeleton. Lines and words detach themselves from the page and crumble, and it is from these little heaps of dust that sprout essences of coloured rainbow that begin to dance. The vital beginning of all metamorphoses and of all alphabets renews its cycle. Calvino attempted to capture this same energy early in his career by

From Image to Word 77 playing with archetypal images of cloven men, tree-ridden ancestors, invisible automatons, bumbling simpletons. He incarnated his desire to collapse the distance between seeing and telling by projecting brilliant visual details onto the cosmos through the world-engendering eyes of Qfwfq, by allowing the images of tarot cards to relate verbal tales, by sculpting landscapes in vials of sand. In this manner, he proposed an animated fiction that bridged the gap between signified and signifier. Innocence and wide-eyed wonder were to be the vehicle that allowed language to breach the rift the young author felt between the multifarious world and the blank page. Speaking of Palomar he states, non sono partito dalla perplessita, che non e interessante, bensi dall'interrogazione, dal desiderio di cogliere cio che e al di la delle parole.18 I did not begin from perplexity, which is not interesting, but rather from interrogation, from the desire to capture that which lies beyond words. Calvino thus neatly distances himself from the Borgesian articulation that fiction is all. Though the two authors share a conviction that fiction may propose an infinite number of codes, for Calvino the taxonomic freedom this portends can only lead to humble, ironic detachment and epistemological satire. All systems of representation are valid, on the other hand, when one celebrates heterotopias. Calvino was to explore this new frame of mind in Le cosmicomiche. Cosmicomics Le cosmicomiche (Calvino's first major collection of stories in the sixties) is central to my evolutionary model, since it completes the dissolution of all previous thematic strictures while positing new narrative horizons. The primary motif of the cosmicomic series (these include Le cosmicomiche, Ti con zero, La memoria del mondo e altre storie cosmicomiche [1968, The Memory of the World], and Cosmicomiche Vecchie e Nuove [1984, Cosmicomics Old and New]) is the ideal of undifferentiation. Instead of separating characters into discreet selves Calvino posits a universal condition of articulated lateral connections that converge to spawn a new prototype, the visual palindrome Qfwfq. As the embodiment of a new interpretive praxis, Qfwfq is a peculiar sign type, a visual image of scientific, linguistic, and hermeneutical as well as temporal and spatial subversion. In this scenario, death and rebirth are merely a trans-

78 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

mutation of form, matter, knowledge, the human condition merely a transitory state between alternative realities. Thus, while the tales pull the reader towards a zero point of entropy (Tutto in un punto' ['All at One Point']), they simultaneously provide a model (Qfwfq) of a perpetual renaissance. This is achieved by blurring the distinction between animate and inanimate objects and by anthropomorphizing the universe, by making it something that is experienced only when it is seen (scene). For example, while these stories contain the usual fantasy elements of speaking animals and exotic settings, Calvino also attempts synesthetic transference: colours are heard, odours are seen, time is tasted. As well, cells think, stars write, and the moon acquires the sensual qualities of soft and hard as well as the emotional attributes of mood. Perhaps Calvino's attraction to this type of totally potentialized literature results from his scientific upbringing. More likely, his romantic affectation with the seasons of nature, for example, the leopardian moon with its waxing and waning, reflects his own personal disposition towards reality and fantasy, theory and practice, alienation and proximity, words and images. That same distance/proximity causes the Baron Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo of // barone rampante (1957) to live his life precariously perched in trees whose roots are firmly planted in the ground. This fantastic whim of Calvino's is anything but whimsical; it is in fact well planned. Cosmicomics is an epiphanic moment in Calvino's career, a moment in which the author is at his most revelatory.19 For Rocco Capozzi 'Qfwfq proves to be the most fabulous alter ego through which our author addresses his readers.'20 Each cosmicomic tale is a branch of a deconstructive process that mingles different cultural image banks as part of a post-Italian project. Calvino is distancing himself from a provincial Italian context. There is an inner meaning to the neologism cosmicomic: It is a noncausal label that signals a conscious move away from neorealism, from fabulism, from residual formalism, from any vestiges of colonial monopoly. These tales are to be ahistorical, replete with epistemological breaks, moments in which things change with a blinding flash and spring forward with unbridled freedom. Qfwfq is an ambassador of anti-colonization struggling to reclaim and reconstruct an identity that is both verbal presence (a name) and visual representation (a palindrome). By blurring local things into universals, experience into metaphors, and existence into objective correlatives, Calvino's crisis of verbal presentation opens into new visual modes of selfhood. The metallic, disembodied voice of the non-existent knight has resurfaced in the warmer, more humorous

From Image to Word 79

tones of Qfwfq. Qfwfq is Calvino's most endearing and most enduring creation. He is an enigmatic witness to the birth and development of the universe, of man, of his languages and cultures. In many respects, the same fervour that inspired Ovid and Lucretius to endow a hypostatized nature with a form of mythical presence spurs Calvino to bridge the ontological gap that separates language from the world and spawns Qfwfq. Calvino portentously labels him una voce, un punto di vista, un occhio (o un ammicco) umano proiettato sulla realta d'un mondo che pare sempre piu refrattario alia parola e aH'immagine.21 a voice, a point of view, a human eye (or a wink) projected upon the reality of a world that appears evermore refractory towards words and images.

As a product of a number of analytically distinct yet related scientific phenomena, metaphorical associations, and basic human issues, Qfwfq is Calvino's ultimate literary incarnation, a veritable precursor to the catch-all virtual image par excellence. Word and image paradigms and gender difference issues are embedded in his essence. As such he testifies to Calvino's latent enthusiasm for an ekphrastic discourse that produces a parallel equivalent to the reality being described. Qfwfq is also an important touchstone for the way Calvino is beginning to identify himself within the realm of literature. It is possible to trace a developing trajectory that moves from a joyous affirmation of the world as language (the early war tales, including // sentiero dei nidi di ragno) to language as iconic representation (the cosmicomic tales), to an eventual dynamics of movement and play (as we shall see) that hovers between the arts. In this sense, the ever agile Qfwfq is that protean palindrome that best sums up Karcevskij's position that it is thanks to the dualistic nature of the structure of their signs that language systems evolve. Words must adapt to their situations in order to make sense of the chaotic reality that both surrounds and engenders them.22 Consonant with scientific principles, Calvino distilled the cosmicomic tales to a limited number of thematic hypotheses: creation, evolution, semiotics, the Big Bang, and so forth. The narrative is imbued with exacting description and first-hand reportage. His words were to be heavily charged, producing 'replete symbols'23 of hypothetical

80 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

events. A modern Lucretius, Calvino asks the reader to relearn the world through these new literary insights that offer light comical treatments of some of life's most crucial issues. A buoyant literature, ballasted with science, would now provide the vitality for a new, universal folklore that borrows its visual vibrancy from the best traditions of fable and fairy tales. Each cosmicomic story is a mode of inquiry, an inventive set of cognitive patterns that intersect at a juncture of intellectual query. This constitutes a rejection of absolutes and the embracing of a strategy that seeks moments of conjecture and disjuncture. The new cosmology connects all matters of fact with the spiritual unconscious that binds humanity. The cosmicomic tales are infused with human desire, intellectual love, and the physical potential of human fulfilment. Calvino had announced this newly inspired ethic at the end of La giornata di uno scrutatore: Tumano arriva dove arriva 1'amore; non ha confini se non quelli che gli diamo' (83; 'humanity reaches as far as love reaches; it has no frontiers except those we give it/ 64). The function of literature is just such an idealistic pragmatic whose job it is to say that which the other fields of human endeavour may not reveal, to work at the limen of knowledge while empowering a new materialism. This Dantean faith in the power of love expresses itself as a pristine intelligence empowered to establish the vital links that fuse the lateral connections. Literature can create a Peircian bridge and make whole those partial units of meaning that spawn posterity. In the end, it is a way to relate to the world by re-creating it and without, in the end, being destroyed by it. For example, the shift in epistemological perspective from a Saussurean faith in the referentiality of language to an open-ended Peircian semiosis is expressed in the short story 'Un segno nello spazio' ('A Sign in Space'). The first version of the story, dated 17-18 May 1964, is accompanied by a Chagho sketch that pictures a man horizontally suspended between a checkerboard pattern of dark blotches. It was first published in 17 caffe along with three other tales: 'La distanza della luna' (The Distance of the Moon'), 'Sul far del giorno' ('At Daybreak'), and 'Tutto in un punto.' The same issue contains an article by Themerson on the author as well as one by Francois Wahl entitled 'La logica deH'immagine in Calvino.'24 Pertinently, the four tales are illustrated by seven liberally inspired Chagho renderings. This juxtaposing of words and images is especially relative to my argument. In a letter to Emilio

From Image to Word 81

Garroni dated 26 October 1965, Calvino admits a particularly tormented birth to the story: La lettura del Suo libro mi e venuta al momento giusto, dato che le cose che scrivo adesso sono del racconti in cui piii che mai sono alls prese con 'segnicita' e 'semanticita.' C'e un racconto in cui addirittura la parola chiave e segno (Un segno nello spazio) che era venuta fuori prima con tutta 'innocenza' e poi si e caricata delle intenzioni culturali inevitabili, e cosi e un racconto che da un paio d'anni continuo a riscriverlo e ritoccarlo e gli ultimi ritocchi sono riuscito a darglieli dopo la lettura del Suo libro.25 (my emphasis) I read your book at a most appropriate moment, given the fact that the things that I am now writing are short stories in which more than ever I am wrestling with issues of 'segnicity' and 'semanticity.' There is even a story in which the key word is sign ('A Sign in Space') that was written in all 'innocence' and then was loaded with inevitable cultural intentions, and therefore it is a story that I have been continually rewriting and retouching for a couple of years now and to which I have managed to give the final touches after reading your book.

The book Calvino is referring to is Garroni's La semantica delle arti.26 Its impact was such that the short story published in Ti con zero is vastly different from the previously published magazine version. The book allows Calvino to surmount an obviously difficult hurdle. He is in the midst of rethinking both his approach and his motivations towards writing. 'Un segno nello spazio' deals primarily with the reification of language. A companion story, 'L'origine degli Uccelli' (The Origin of the Birds'), deals with rendering images through words (though published in 1967, this tale was actually begun in 1964 and is contemporary to 'Un segno nello spazio' and its creative drama). In 'Un segno nello spazio' Qfwfq circumnavigates at the edge of our galaxy. During his trek he deposits signs he hopes to find upon his return every 200 million years. A primary or first sign indicates space relative to the starting point of the subject, Qfwfq. It is a marker, an expression of identity. It is not, however, language, nor is it expressive until Qfwfq establishes its identity as more than a spatial coordinate, as matter that has been interpreted as a form of subjectivity. This empowering structure, however,

82 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

once systematized as knowledge, legitimizes a hierarchical canon. The language that emanates from the simple sign in space is bereft of objective properties save those Qfwfq wishes to attribute. The self-generated ego projects itself upon the universe in a process of militant reification. Rather than extolling the hegemonic properties of written language, as some have contended, this short tale reveals the debilitating nature of such an hypostatization. We may now understand Calvino's so-called shift from a poetics of traditional subjective fabulation to a poetics of impersonal combinatorics in the early sixties as a willed shift from viewing language as a colonizing tool.27 Language is a potential screen, a prosthetic that permits anonymity and shields personality from the outside world. It may only generate an absence, a distancing. The unstable equilibrium produced by a language motivated by the egotistical need to encapsulate the infinite within the finite sign system invented by Qfwfq ultimately implies self destruction. Qfwfq's sign no longer corresponds to reality as it has evolved in the first place and secondly, even more importantly, as he perceives it. His subsequent attempts to render it figure-less, unimaginative, and absolutely referential are doomed to failure. Yet, he nevertheless remains obtuse by insisting, like the Duck in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, that of course it means something - but only when he decides so. This attempt at forcing an unswerving referentiality of the sign to the reality in which it is hatched is a direct criticism of the seventeenth-century thing-word approach to language. According to this view, a mathematical relation or empirical one-to-one correspondence should exist between words and the things they express. The scientifically motivated nature of this language would end ambiguity.28 This reformist canon would also, unfortunately, eliminate imagination, a prospect Calvino ultimately feared. As Elizabeth Dipple remarks, The quest of the writer in a world split between the written and the unwritten is nevertheless unitive: secure as (s)he might feel with the written world, the writer's task is to wrestle with the problem of what language can actually do, and Calvino's career can be described as an anxious pro-literary battle against chaos.29

The type of chaos in question crowds this dense descriptive passage from the 1951 short story 'L'avventura di una bagnante' (The Adventure of a Bather'):

From Image to Word

83

Alia banchina s'affacciavano le grige case del pescatori, con rosse reti tese addosso a corti pali, e dalle barche attaccate qualche giovanotto alzava pesci color piombo e li passava a ragazze ferme con ceste quadrate dal basso orlo puntate all'anca, e uomini con minuscoli orecchini d'oro seduti in terra a gambe distese cucivano reti interminabili, e in certe nicchi bollivano mastelli di tannino per ritingerle, e muretti di pietre dividevano piccoli orti sul mare dove le barche giacevano a fianco delle canne dei semenzai, e donne con la bocca piena di chiodi aiutavano i mariti sdraiti sotto la chiglia a riparare falle, e su ogni casa rosa una tettoia copriva i pomodori spaccati in due e messi a seccare col sale su un graticcio, e ai piedi delle piante d'asparago ... (26) The gray fishermen's houses overlooked the dock; red nets were stretched across short stakes; and from the boats, already tied up, some youths lifted lead-colored fish and passed them to girls standing with square baskets, the low rims propped against their hips; men with tiny gold earrings, seated on the ground with spread legs, were sewing endless nets; and in some tubs they were boiling tannin to dye the nets again; little stone walls marked off tiny vegetable gardens overlooking the sea, where the boats lay beside the canes of the seedbeds; women with their mouths full of nails helped their husbands, lying under the keel, to patch holes; every pink house had a low roof covered with tomatoes split in two and set out to dry with salt on a grill; and under the asparagus plants ... (208)

In this example, the diegesis is the mimesis. The elusive transmutation of reality, however, threatens to distort the very image of what is seen into passive receptivity. Nevertheless, the compelling feature of the passage is the linguistic playfulness that generates mercurially cascading images. The limitations of this sort of mimesis are not resolved with irony, as was the case in the fantasy trilogy, but via sequential stacks of colour packets that form an unmistakable visual mosaic. As parodies of language theory, narratology, and deconstruction, the cosmicomics provide a measure of Calvino's critical thinking on questions of language, narrative, and narrative theory and, above all, writing and narrative control. Never one to elaborate theory, Calvino liked to couch his opinions in these creative working papers, a sort of response to the exercises de style of the Tel Quel group. Rather than insisting on the scientific quality or systematic recasting of post-structuralist theories it might be more profitable to speak of his dialogic qualities

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and the tension created between words and images in these tales. They are, ultimately, nonsense tales conjured to dispel the nonsensicality of contemporary literary theory and technological being. Regardless of the rational precision of the prose, for Calvino, a fully real language, to the exclusion of imagined entities, was impossible. Such a logical language would reveal an inability to engage the object world. The only way to avoid this dead-end outcome is, according to Wendy Steiner 'to create a self-consciously non-real, fictitious language supplemented with the image'30 since language depends upon fictitiousness to function and is clarified through the image. This being the case, a text must be open to the interaction of interpretative systems within the boundaries of its own experience. Calvino's fascination with the writings of Galileo Galilei is attributable to the scientist's ability of forming and using images as evidentiary support for his concepts. Rather than impoverishing the discourse, imagery enriched the content and augmented the narrative force of his didacticism. His clear-cut and carefully defined images functioned as an act of transgression, breaking the rules of contemporary scientific convention, engaging a passionate interaction between reader and scientific researcher. Instead, therefore, of viewing Calvino's penchant for particulars as a super-scientific method of impersonal and detached observation devoid of metaphors, Calvino's prose should be interpreted as a throwback to a pre-seventeenth century Galilean aesthetic, where no distinction was made between the artist's truth and imaginative scientific inquiry.31 This linking of image and concept is precisely the case that we have been building. Calvino's prose must be understood as a willed attempt to return to a preternatural metaphysical plenitude that coupled the word to its image-laden baggage and Le cosmicomiche are a turnstile moment in this evolution. Whereas logic and conciseness had once been valued as the means to model the world to the detriment of the image, Calvino was now aiming for metaphors that installed an immediate image-argument combination. He was not content to allow literature to wallow in chimerical imprecision, nor willing to compromise preciseness with realist sterility. Calvino bridled against both modernist doctrines of the image, which often resulted in a rabid juxtaposition of disjointed illustrations, as well as neorealist prescriptions of style that usually degenerated into static Marxist pamphlets. The critical conundrums dreamt up by scholars in the fifties to define the author's sometimes fantastic, sometimes realistic style, even Cesare Pavese's

From Image to Word 85

famous 'scoiattolo della penna' ('squirrel of the pen') epithet,32 are a weak response to the difficult but ever-elusive balance that Calvino sought in his narrative. The desire for this balance surfaces, not surprisingly, as a call for an image-based, yet logically inspired, fantasy. Calvino was searching for a literature that would legitimize meaning in life. When the master plots, as Francois Lyotard has called them, lost their revelatory impact, Calvino turned to reviving the imaginative impact of literature with new plots, new perspectives, but above all, new methods that involved active seeing. To describe, Calvino discovered, is not to represent. The reader will never actually see the visual likeness the author wishes to convey. The plight, already experienced by Hermann in Nabokov's Despair, is that of all authors who would escape from language. How I long to convince you! And I will, I will convince you! I will force you all, you rogues, to believe ... though I am afraid that words alone, owing to their special nature, are unable to convey visually a likeness of that kind: the two faces should be side by side, by means of real colors, not words, then and only then would the spectator see my point. An author's fondest dream is to turn the reader into a spectator; is this ever attained?33

In his early works, the author had attempted just such an end by presenting self-consciously ironic portrayals of reality through the eyes of a child. Innocence and wide-eyed wonder were to be the vehicle through which language would somehow breach the rift that Calvino already felt between the world and the page. From the cosmicomic tales onwards, however, arbitrary taxonomies (Collezione di sabbia), visual details (Palomar), and combinatorial possibilities (Le citta invisibili and // castello del destini incrociati [1973, The Castle of Crossed Destinies]) become the 'basic story stuff,' as Eco would say,34 of his world. Just as Raymond Queneau, a writer Calvino respected and translated, would generate fictional worlds by promoting a free-flowing syntax of lexical permutations, Calvino rhapsodizes over the possibilities of creating spirited narratives from freestyle visual associations. This raises the issue of whether the sheer provocative power of such interpretations produces privileged insights, and whether these ideas constitute a way to truth. For Calvino, the devising of possible mental schemes will produce no complete truth, no perfect pattern, only the possibility of discerning, as Marco Polo notes in Le citta invisibili, the 'inferno dei

86 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

viventi' (170; 'inferno of the living'). Signs, visual labyrinths, offer passage only to other signs and the semantic fields they generate. Yet, by holding language up as the touchstone for its own representational inadequacies, Calvino adds a metalinguistic twist to this pursuit. While language remains his preferred medium (in an interview with Luca Fontana he states, 'I do trust language as an instrument of knowledge, and narrative as a way of producing rationality';35 speaking to Alexander Stille he emphasizes that 'literature has full status as a form of knowledge'),36 rationality and knowledge, the traditional lackeys of language, now assume connotations of wilfully subjective canons that are to be questioned using a poetics of contrast and paradox. The writer's task is to allow the world to reveal and question itself through comical ekphrastic gestures. 'L'origine degli Uccelli' One such gesture comes in the form of the short story 'L'origine degli Uccelli,' one of Calvino's first long-playing multimedia scenarios, a story that needs to be read in the light of the word and image paradigm. In this story, the discourse is made to conform to the natural world being reified, a typical and traditional motivation of realism. The cartoonlike quality of the tale, however, is anything but real or traditional. The result is a nonsense tale in which the language becomes ultra-code-oriented. By this I mean that the grammatical, syntactical, and figurative modes are totally controlled by the idiosyncratic nature of the story. 'L'origine degli Uccelli' has a dialogic quality. The speaking subject talks directly to the reader and, as in other cosmicomic tales, his familiar voice and rambling monologue establish an immediate rapport that engages the reader in a sympathetic storyteller-listener exchange. This rapport is crucial to the felicitous unfolding of the story, since it permits the creation of the proper visual effects that accompany the written text while it is narrated: Ogni figurina avra la sua nuvoletta con le parole che dice, o con i rumori che fa, ma non c'e bisogno che leggiate lettera per lettera tutto quello che c'e scritto, basta che ne abbiate un'idea generale a seconda di come vi diro. (22) Each figure will have its own little balloon with the words it says, or with the noises it makes, but there's no need for you to read everything written

From Image to Word 87 there letter for letter, you only need a general idea, according to what I'm going to tell you. (16)

The essence of the story lies in the tension among its individual components, namely, the visual (the transformational elements that are to be pictured) and the verbal (the untransformational elements that intrude upon the discourse and refrain its import). By employing the properties normally found in comic books, Calvino oversteps the boundaries between the visual and the verbal. The semiosis rests upon the process that seeks transparency, if only slightly, between transparent fantasy and the one-to-one strategy of simplism to which it is bound. These methods include captioning, ballooning, and the framing of sequences. Calvino describes the comic book page as if it really existed and encourages the reader to imagine the pages in vivid detail. Seeking to portray the story as a visual strip, Calvino obviously cannot draw a picture but instead coaches the reader to draw or imagine the scene as if it were being drawn in the mind's eye. A similar attempt had been made in ekphrastic episodes of // cavaliere inesistente. An example is Suor Teodora's synesthetic reification of a chivalric world of knights and damsels from the real world experiences of the convent: leri scrivevo della battaglia e nell'acciottolio dell'acquaio mi pareva di sentir cozzare lance contro scudi e corazze, risuonare gli elmi percossi dalle pesanti spade; di la del cortile mi giungevano i colpi di telaio delle sorelle tessitrici e a me pareva un battito di zoccoli di cavalli al galoppo: e cosi quello che le mie orecchie udivano, i mid occhi socchiusi trasformavano in visioni e le mie labbra silenziose in parole e parole e la penna si lanciava per il foglio bianco a rincorrerle. (My emphasis, 52) Yesterday I was writing of the battle and I seemed to hear in the sink's din the clash of lances against shields and armor plate, and the clang of helmets struck by heavy swords; from beyond the courtyard came the beating strokes of the looms of weaving nuns; to me it seemed like the pounding of galloping horses' hoofs; and so whatever my ears heard, my half-dosed eyes transformed into visions and my silent lips into words and words and my pen raced over the white sheet to catch them.

In a similar manner, in the short story 'Luna e Gnac' ('Moon and Gnac') Marcovaldo's family re-imagines the natural objects outside

88 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures their apartment window (the moon) as elements of a technological world ('Gnac'): la famiglia di Marcovaldo era attraversata da opposte correnti di pensieri. C'era la notte e Isolina... si sentiva trasportata per il chiar di luna ... e fino il piu smorzato gracchiar di radio dai piani inferiori dello stabile le arrivava come i rintocchi d'una serenata; c'era il GNAC e quella radio pareva pigliare un altro ritmo, un ritmo jazz, e Isolina pensava ai dancing tutti luci ... Pietruccio e Michelino sgranavano gli occhi nella notte e si lasciavano invadere da una calda e soffice paura d'esser circondati di foreste piene di briganti; poi, il GNAC! e scattavano coi pollici dritti e gli indici tesi, 1'uno contro 1'altro.' - Alto le mani! Sono Nembo Kid!' - Domitilla, la madre, a ogni spegnersi della notte pensava: 'Ora i ragazzi bisogna ritirarli, quest'aria pud far male. E Isolina affacciata a quest'ora e una cosa che non va!' Ma tutto poi era di nuovo luminoso, elettrico, fuori come dentro, e Domitilla si sentiva come in visita in una casa di riguardo. (93) Marcovaldo's family was traversed by conflicting trains of thought. It was night, and Isolina ... felt carried away by the moonlight ... and even the faintest croaking of a radio from the lower floors of the building came to her like the notes of a serenade; there was the GNAC, and that radio seemed to take on a different rhythm, a jazz beat, and Isolina thought of the dance hall full of blazing lights ... Pietruccio and Michelino stared wide-eyed into the night and let themselves be invaded by a warm, soft fear of being surrounded by forests full of brigands; then, GNAC!, and they sprang up with thumbs erect and forefingers extended, one against the other: 'Hands up! I'm Superman!' Domitilla, their mother, every time the night was turned off, thought: Now the children must be sent to bed; this air could be bad for them; and Isolina shouldn't be looking out of the window at this hour: it's not proper! But then everything was again luminous, electric, outside and inside, and Domitilla felt as if she were paying a visit to the home of someone important. (71-2) In both these examples ontological experience is effectively replaced by autonomous perceptions; inner coherence, rational or useful, illogical or whimsical, supplants outer correspondence. The essence of Calvino's language lies not in its conforming to facts but in its metacritical ability to create new worlds, or heterocosms, from the real objects of the world. This re-ordering of events is a shared narrative experience as together, author and reader share the process of generat-

From Image to Word 89 ing a fictive universe. Rather than carrying some singular meaning, these stories revel in their supersensible ability to re-assemble reality into novel visual forms. In a more evolved manner, in 'L'origine degli Uccelli' the verbal imitation of comic strips manifests itself through an emphasis on linear design with metareferences to the materiality of the medium itself. The two sign vehicles, the verbal and the visual, bind together ideally to form a structure of a higher order, the nature of which is the subject of great debate. Yet, though the reader feels their common existence, and reacts to each individual medium's limitations, there is never a headon confrontation between the two because the visual images are described, never really rendered. Calvino is merely toying with the notion of illustrating his text with captions. These are the years, we recall, of regular contributions to OuLiPo debates and narrative experimentation that lead to his writing a veritable imagetext,37 // castello del destini incrociati. Here, instead, the instructions are verbal and share the same severe qualities of The Spiritual Exercises ofSt Ignatius (as we shall see) where the patient and pious reader is supposed to fire the imagination with images on the canvas of the mind. Later, in Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore Calvino will instruct the reader to assume positions, natural and not, for reading, that promote, in much the same manner of Ignatius's calculated positions of kneeling, prostration, pacing, sitting rigidly, and so forth, the proper attitude for the upcoming spiritual exercise. In a more subdued fashion, in 'L'Origine degli Uccelli' Calvino solicits imagination from his reader through phatic reinforcement. As in // cavaliers inesistente and Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore there are constant reminders that the reader must participate in the enterprise with phrases such as: 'E' meglio che cercate voi stessi d'immaginare ...; 'C'e una vignetta tutta imbrattata di tuorlo d'uovo'; 'dico per dire'; 'Qui potete immaginare la serie di vignette con tutte le figurine dei personaggi ...'; 'lascio fare a voi'; 'immaginate come vi vien meglio'; 'Se questo non vi piace potete immaginarvi un'altra storia' ('Its better if you try to imagine'; There is one frame all stained with egg yolk'; 'It goes without saying'; 'It's best for you to try to imagine the series of cartoons with all the little figures of the characters ...'; Til leave it to you'; 'imagine as best you can'; Tf you don't like this story you can think up another one'). These phrases all serve to mark the proper colour, tone, and mood, create the proper ambience, and set the unique balance that allows the reader's guided imagination adequately to follow the tongue-in-cheek instructions. These imagi-

90 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

nary pictures are used for their evidentiary force. They are of equal importance to the verbal text since they both augment and subtend, thereby making more convincing, Qfwfq's story. The effect is twofold. By relating his story through words, Qfwfq relates an adventure from the past. By drawing his tale with an imaginary pen, Qfwfq contemporizes the events, rendering them present. As in the Spiritual Exercises, the linguistic world becomes a physical one in as much as words are the agent used to create the illusion of spatial simultaneity. By drawing with words, Qfwfq designates memory as a palpable mental process that is basically spiritual, always pictorial.38 As Steiner suggests in her discussion of the Mad Hatter from Through the Looking Glass, 'It would seem that if something cannot be pictured, it cannot be thought, and should not be spoken.'39 I make reference to non-sense literature in order to suggest that a limit has been reached. This limit is demanded by verbal logic; it is impossible to draw with words, at least in a narrative frame. This does not stop the author from trying: 'Sono rappresentato io solo, di profile; quello che vedo resta fuori della vignetta' (26; T'm depicted alone, in profile; what I'm looking at remains outside the frame'); only the author may really see beyond the immediate text, only the author is fully, and jealously, contextualized: 'nel fumetto continua ad essere situata in modo che ad averla di fronte sia solo io, mai il lettore' (26; 'in the frame it is still placed in such a way that only I have it before me, not the reader'). The reader, despite all the solicitation, remains essentially blind to the author's vision. The closing sequence of 'I figli di Babbo Natale' ('Santa's Children') suggests the same potential contradiction: C'era una linea in cui finiva il bosco tutto nero e cominciava la neve tutta bianca. II leprotto correva di qua ed il lupo di la. II lupo vedeva sulla neve le impronte del leprotto e le inseguiva, ma tenendosi sempre sul nero, per non essere visto. Nel punto in cui le impronte si fermavano doveva esserci il leprotto. E il lupo usci dal nero, spalanco la gola rossa e i denti aguzzi, e morse il vento. II leprotto era poco piu in la invisibile; si strofino un orecchio con una zampa, e scappo saltando. E' qua? e la? no, e un po' piu in la? Si vedeva solo la distesa di neve bianca come questa pagina. (148) There was a line where the forest, all black, ended and the snow began, all

From Image to Word 91 white. The hare ran on this side, and the wolf on that. The wolf saw the hare's prints on the snow and followed them, always keeping in the black, so as not to be seen. At the point where the prints ended there should be the hare, and the wolf came out of the black, opened wide his red mouth and his sharp teeth, and bit the wind. The hare was a bit farther on, invisible; he scratched one ear with his paw, and escaped, hopping away. Is he here? There? Is he a bit farther on? Only the expanse of snow could be seen, white as this page. (121)

While the sensuous nature of the language secures our intellectual reception of the scene, our perception via senses other than sight remains limited. Though the author encourages the reader to see and hear the footsteps of the wolf, hear the scratching of the rabbit, smell and feel the wolf's hot breath, feel the cool freshness of the newly fallen snow by extension, he chooses to assign the primary role of interpretation to what we are able to see. In distinguishing between the senses, Calvino, like Diderot, an author with whom he became increasingly familiar during these years, is playfully suggesting the disadvantages of the verbal medium as a means to express the senses, especially that of vision. Though Calvino never developed a systematic theory of aesthetic perception, clearly he considered the.medium of literature as both an intellectual and a sense-simulating instrument. In his attempts to extend the boundaries of literature he used the sensuality of objects to create literary effects. This passage shows a limited attempt to draw into play senses other than the sense of sight. Eventually, Calvino will move towards distinctions among the senses by proposing to write five short stories that characterize the temperament of each sense individually.40 The inadequacy of using only the sense of vision is embodied in the hapless attempts of the wolf (the male writer) to capture the rabbit (an eidelon of the fleeting female image), by following the traces (writing) left behind on the white snow (blank page). Though Calvino may grant the sensible force and graphic play of language, in the end, the referent defies capture. Indeed, every shrewdly drawn image both emblematizes and contradicts itself. But of course; beyond its own linguistic limit, it is really not there.41 This limit will become an exacerbated existential dilemma in the final episode of Palomar, where the desire for ultimate knowledge through a vision of death leads inexorably to ultimate textual silence. These examples remind the reader of the limits of the written

92 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

medium, yet also reiterate the desire to overstep these bounds, and of the willed necessity to do so. They also attest to Calvino's deepening interest in aesthetics and the interface of image and word in his work. This places the story 'L'Origine degli Uccelli' at the very centre of a newly hatched, but long brooded, enterprise. 'L'Origine degli Uccelli' represents a reversal of the transparency sought in other cosmicomic tales. Here Calvino imbues the word with imagery and attempts a visual writing style that finds its apogee in Le citta invisibili, II castello dei destini incrociati, Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, Palomar, and subsequent writings on artworks. The narrative is to express the primitive vitality he discussed in 'Cibernetica e fantasmi' (written, interestingly enough, during the same years of composing 'L'Origine degli Uccelli'). To signal this new beginning, Qfwfq returns to the Jurassic, an era which is pre-linguistic, indeed pre-human, where he supplies the words that are to describe the new and wondrous sights, a new Eden that will beget a different culture. Qfwfq immediately runs into some difficulty. He prefaces his story with an apology: Erano giorni in cui non ci aspettavamo piu sorprese ... come sarebbero andate le cose ormai era chiaro ... La scelta era tra un numero di possibilita limitate. (21) In those days we weren't expecting any more surprises ... by then it was clear how things were going to proceed ... The choice had to be made from a limited number of possibilities. (15)

The universe has evolved into a comfortably closed and staid system that allows no exceptions or deviations from the canonical norm. Into this world alight creatures with wings. Like the fleeting, uncontrollable images that were soon to invade Qfwfq's linguistic system, the lightness of the birds displaces the solidity of the verbal universe. Qfwfq was soon to discover that there is an essential, non-verbal component to language that, like the birds, may channel expression (physical things as well as the heretofore undiscovered symbolic and spiritual ones) into alternative definitions that remain beyond his control. Words, which had to this point (though it is impossible to speak of temporality in the multidimensional simultaneity of these stories) supplied an adequate and reliable source of world patterning, suddenly

From Image to Word 93

become insufficient to describe the plumed marvels that appear before Qfwfq's eyes, or more appropriately, present themselves, as is typical in Calvino, to his sense of hearing. Following the same narrative patterning that begins the descriptive opening sequence of // sentiero del nidi di ragno ('Basta un grido di Pin' ['All you needed was a shout from Pin']) Qfwfq is shaken out of his demure complacency by a noise, 'un canto, da fuori, che non avevo mai sentito' (22; 'a song, outside, that I had never heard before/ 15). This physiologically determined signal is non-linguistic. It is an acoustic sound, 'dato che il canto non si sapeva ancora cosa fosse' (21; 'since we didn't yet know what singing was,' 15) that enters his language (read cosmological) system and causes considerable curiosity. Qfwfq's reflex is normal: 'M'affaccio' (21; 'I look out'). For Jacques Lacan, the gaze, like language, is a preconscious register.42 But the novelty of the sight/site is too information-dense for a normative response, so he improvises: 'Adesso, queste storie si raccontano meglio con dei fumetti che non con un racconto di frasi una dopo 1'altra' (22; 'Now these stories can be told better with strip drawings than with a story composed of sentences one after the other'). Across the ages Qfwfq calls upon the reader to immaginare la serie di vignette con tutte le figurine dei personaggi al loro posto, su uno sfondo efficacemente tratteggiato, ma cercando nello stesso tempo di non immaginarvi le figurine, e neppure lo sfondo. (22) imagine the series of cartoons with all the little figures of the characters in their places, against an effectively outlined background, but you must try at the same time not to imagine the figures, or the background either. (16)

Qfwfq implores the reader's help because we understand these things: 'Era un uccello; voi 1'avevate gia capito; io no' (21-2; 'It was a bird; you've realized that already, but I didn't,' 15). He is relying on our capacity to supply the eidos or supra-sensible reality behind the words he will dispose upon the page in a new and novel way because we are accustomed to the opacity of language, to the lightness of birds; he is not. Qfwfq's semantic naivete is woefully apparent; his incompetence, and our future inability to cleanly distinguish between arts of time and arts of space, is showing. Attempts to control the irrepressible birds

94 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

within solid lines of print cause both humour and consternation. The obvious exit, for Calvino, is to create new and unexpected visual scenarios: Nella striscia di furnetti che segue, si vede il piu sapiente di tutti noi, il vecchio U(h), che si stacca dal gruppo degli altri, dice: - Non guardatelo! E un errore! - e allarga le mani come volesse tappare gli occhi dei presenti. Adesso lo cancello! - dice, o pensa, e per rappresentare questo suo desiderio potremmo fargli tracciare una riga in diagonale attraverso la vignetta. L'uccello sbatte le ali, schiva la diagonale e si mette in salvo nell'angolo opposto. U(h) si rallegra perche con quella diagonale in mezzo non lo vede piu. L'uccello da una beccata contro la riga, la spezza, e vola addosso al vecchio U(h). II vecchio U(h) per cancellarlo cerca di tracciargli addosso due fregacci incrociati. Nel punto dove le due righe s'incontrano, 1'uccello si posa a fare 1'uovo. II vecchio U(h) gliele strappa di sotto, 1'uovo casca, 1'uccello vola via. C'e una vignetta tutta imbrattata di tuorlo d'uovo. (22-3) In the strip that follows, you see the wisest of us all, old U(h), who moves from the group of the others and says: 'Don't look at him! He's a mistake!' and he holds out his hands as if he wanted to cover the eyes of those present. 'Now I'll erase him!' he says, or thinks, and to depict this desire of his we could have him draw a diagonal line across the frame. The bird flaps his wings, eludes the diagonal, and flies to safety in the opposite corner. U(h) is happy because, with that diagonal line between them, he can't see the bird any more. The bird pecks at the line, breaks it, and flies at old U(h). Old U(h), to erase him, tries to draw a couple of crossed lines over him. At the point where the two lines meet, the bird lights and lays an egg. Old U(h) pulls the lines from under him, the egg falls, the bird darts off. There is one frame all stained with egg yolk. (16-17)

The humour of the scene belies an underlying theoretical tension. In an attempt to force the bird to enter his heuristic system, U(h) tries to frame the anomalous entity (this must be considered man's first attempt at framing) within clearly defined, 'historically' based, and conventional (again, words such as historically, conventional, are retroactively applied) forms. He wishes, in other words, to still the moment. Any student of prehistoric art knows that painted images usually

From Image to Word 95

occur on unprepared surfaces where the irregularities of the environment, earth or rock, invariably show through and condition the image. The ritual of framing, of circumscription within customary and accepted boundaries, is an invention that accompanies the development of tools, the creation of pottery, artefacts, and language. These are acts that mark the environment as 'sign-bearing objects.' In this story, the creation of a field with a distinct plane establishes coordinates of stability that order movement within a predetermined and conditioning scheme. The problem is that the bird refuses to be integrated into U(h)'s universe. Her act of defiance, laying an egg, both defiles male attempts at coercion and augurs future generational antagonism. She has, in effect, castrated U(h)'s penmanship. The magic that spurs Qfwfq to harness his stimulated imagination is indicative of what Mitchell calls ekphrastic hope.43 This is the moment when he discovers that language incorporates a visual ingredient, that it can actually make the reader see what is written: 'lascio fare a voi' (27; Til leave it to you' ). This is the moment when language is put to the service of vision, when writing becomes representation. It is this newly discovered primal connection between words and images that fuels the power of his storytelling and permits the serializing of the world into formal structural patterns. Qfwfq may now make quasiscientific claims of realism: Raccontare con i fumetti mi place molto, pero avrei bisogno d'alternare alle vignette d'azione delle vignette ideologiche ... Immaginatevi dunque un quadratino di quelli tutti scritti, che servono per informare sinteticamente sui precedent! dell'azione. (23) I like telling things in cartoon form, but I would have to alternate the action frames with idea frames ... So imagine one of those little frames all filled with writing, which are used to bring you up to date on what went before. (17)

This inevitably leads to substantiating footnotes: 'puo precisare una note in cake' (23; 'a footnote can clarify'). Quickly appropriating techniques of recognition, Qfwfq invents (or plugs into as only he can) conventional notions of style: L'uccello volo lontano. (Nella vignetta si vede un'ombra nera contro le

96 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures nuvole del cielo: non perche 1'uccello sia nero ma perche gli uccelli lontani si rappresentano cosi). (24) The bird flew far off. (In the drawing you see a black shadow against the clouds in the sky: not because the bird is black but because that's the way distant birds are drawn.) (18)

In some measure, Qfwfq wants to illustrate the possibilities of the verbal/visual gambit and extend the still unknown limits of the experience of reading by using language as illustration. On the other hand, U(h)'s reactionary cries against the birds install an ekphrastic fear of the image; the concern that the imaginary desire of the other might be realized literally. His attempts to resist the incursion of the birds into the visible universe are undertaken under the guise of a moral and aesthetic imperative. 'Non guardatelo!' (22; 'Don't look at him!') he cries, his vehemence directed at the debilitating influence of a profusion of figures. This iconoclasm is a reaction to the anticipated muteness and stupefaction that occurs before an enthralling yet uncontrollable natural order, the paralysis before the Medusa. U(h) wishes to freeze the pattern, control it, fix it within his logical structure of male-gendered probabilities. Is it any wonder that he would view Qfwfq's sensual intoxication with the image of the bird and his free transference between the visual and the verbal as a dangerous liaison? Unfortunately, U(h)'s abhorrence reveals his own weakness towards the eidola as a system of inevitable interrelations. U(h)'s eventual fascination with the holistic superstructure that surrounds the birds (Credeva che gli uccelli fossero non piu 1'errore ma la verita, la sola verita del mondo. S'era messo a interpretare il volo degli uccelli cercando di leggervi il future, 29) (He believed the birds were no longer a mistake, but the truth, the only truth of the world. He had taken to interpreting the birds' flight, trying to read the future in it, 24)

is the consequence of an idolatrous and fetishistic emulation of the visual image, a reaction emanating from his former denial. He changes tactics. Rather than controlling the birds he now hopes to enfranchise them with his own ethic by interpreting their invisible traces against

From Image to Word 97

the sky. The dream of verbocentric control remains even if the ground against which it is cast, the sky, is no more than a mirage. His initial pleas against the destabilizing force of the image and his anxious yearnings for a stable, unchanging lexicon have been muted by the symbolic nature of purely figurative signs. The game has been spoiled. His prescriptions are admonitions of stone. Just as ludicrous, however, are Qfwfq's continuing attempts to write using words as a material presence. His dream is to comprehend the simultaneity of the visual figure within the crevices of language. This impulse is sponsored by his wish to see words as mysteriously selfsubstantial. Not willing to forgo the temporal evolution his masculine language has generated, after his words have spawned the universe, he cannot help but crave the indeterminate spatial/sensual exhilaration offered by Org-Onir-Ornit-Or, queen of the birds. To quote Murray Krieger: The exhilaration ... derives from the dream - and the pursuit of a language that can, in spite of its limits, recover the immediacy of a sightless vision built into our habit of perceptual desire since Plato. It is the romantic quest to realize the nostalgic dream of an original, prefallen language of corporeal presence, though our only means to reach it is the fallen language around us. And it would be the function of the ekphrastic poet to work the magical transformation.'44 In his attempt to appropriate the power of the Other, to become the transforming poet, Qfwfq only succeeds in subordinating his own verbal discourse to an ambivalent and dangerous visual space. Or is the perfect prototype for the figure of Medusa, the dangerous female Other that threatens to silence male discourse with her debilitating stare. Any pleasure that might allow the contemplation of her beauty during their physical union is subverted by the unending involutions of the male subject upon itself. The once loquacious Qfwfq has suddenly been struck dumb, his mind so pervaded by a plethora of cascading images that any attempt at verbalization is nullified: Si celebrarono le nozze. Neanche di questo posso raccontare nulla: tutto quello che m'e rimasto nella memoria e uno spiumio d'immagini cangianti. Forse pagavo la felicita con la rinuncia a comprendere quello che vivevo. (31) Our wedding was celebrated. I can't tell you anything about this either: the only thing that's remained in my memory is a feathery flutter of iri-

98 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures descent images. Perhaps I was paying for my happiness by renouncing any understanding of what I was living through. (25)

Qfwfq is petrified by Or; she paralyses thought, she stills temporality and ensnares space. The situation epitomizes the duplicity of cognition ('m'accorsi che un solo sistema comprendeva tutto' [31; 'I realized that a single system included all' 26]) as Qfwfq equivocates perfectly between the categories of real and unreal, seen and unseen ('II mondo e uno e quel che c'e non si spiega senza ... [32; 'The world is singular and what exists can't be explained without...']), word and image, time and space ('Non c'e differenza! Mostri e non-mostri sono sempre stati vicini! Cio che non e stato continua a essere ... [32; There's no difference. Monsters and non-monsters have always been close to one another! What hasn't been continues to be ...' 27]). All the calm and semantic serenity the male voice had appropriated to itself is subverted by the emergence of the image the word had once so brutally repressed. Qfwfq, energetic creator of his world through words, has been reduced to a passive and, for the moment, inept recorder of an ever-shifting spatial mirror. The transparency of his words has vanished, his universe will never be the same: Da quando s'era scoperta 1'esistenza degli uccelli, le idee che regolavano il nostro mondo erano entrate in crisi. Quello che prima tutti credevano di capire, il modo semplice e regolare per cui le cose erano com'erano, non valeva piu; ossia: questa non era altro che una delle innumerevoli possibilita; nessuno escludeva che le cose potessero andare in altri modi tutti diversi. (28-9) Since the existence of birds had been discovered, the ideas that governed our world had come to a crisis. What everyone had thought to be understood before, the simple and regular way in which things were as they were, was no longer valid; in other words: this was nothing but one of the countless possibilities; nobody excluded the possibility that things could proceed in other, entirely different ways. (22-3)

At this stage, the female image has not yet become an object to be caressed and fondled with contemplative ambivalence, read with loving care. No other woman will populate Calvino's universe until reincarnated as an avid reader, a tangible entity occurring within the text and therefore controllable, in Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore. Nev-

From Image to Word 99

ertheless, it is interesting that for the first time, the latent debate between word and image has achieved a sustained narrative presence in Calvino's work. Like U(h), Calvino will eventually learn that the image is the emblem of irresistible destiny. Indeed, after the cosmicomic series the author will allow his latent love for ekphrastic ecstasy to dominate his narrative field. It is inevitable, however, that he, the word giver, remain in control. The final image of this story is indicative of Calvino's point of view. The image of the bird has been disseminated, arbitrarily isolated from the world and abruptly brought into focus. The close-up of the head heightens the partial, fragmentary, and contingent nature of the image within the controlling narrative frame: (L'ultima striscia del fumetto e tutta di fotografie: un uccello, lo stesso uccello in primo piano, la testa dell'uccello ingrandita, un particolare della testa, 1'occhio ...) (33) (The last strip is all photographs: a bird, the same bird in close-up, the head of the bird enlarged, a detail of the head, the eye ...) (27)

The final cropping highlights an unforgiving and staring monoscopic eye that recalls the heterotopic eye reflected in the mirror shard in the final scene of the short story 'Campo di mine' just before the soldier's death. It also portends the stilling, telescopic gaze of Palomar.45 A visual tension remains; the image is anything but anomalous and carries an unmistakable visual weight. For Calvino, literature will continue to provide a precariously balanced haven of ekphrastic fear and ekphrastic hope that both preserves the allure of the feminine mystique while re-affirming an entrapping male discourse. It is the tone and texture of 'L'origine degli Uccelli' that opens the doors to multimedic cultural projects of the type envisioned with Gianni Celati.46 By attempting a seamless web between sign-type codes Calvino is forging a gesture towards cultural wholeness and creating a discourse that wishes to become fully communicative. Another tale that deals with overstepping the limits of the written medium is 'La spirale' (The Spiral'). The theme of this story is the hope of achieving Vision,' iconicity, and presence through language. The unlikely protagonist of the story, a conch, lives fully ensconced both within his shell and within his range of vision but is able physically to migrate beyond the limited confines of the space defined by his

100 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

own spiralling secretions. The story begins with the conch's exclusive view of the world and already a spatial tension is enfranchised between concepts of inside and outside, inclusion and exclusivity. As the limen between inside and outside, private and public, becomes porous, the textual renderings open transparent windows onto reality. This is a tale of pure envisagement. The conch's relation with otherness and alterity is predetermined in specific contexts of pragmatic application. Like the air we breathe, the scheme of things disappears, simply becoming the way things are. An analogy may be made with Calvino's evolving pictorial modality. Just as the conch in 'La spirale' secretes a new portion of the world with each new layer of shell, so too each new verbal accretion generates meaning within a realm of self-reflecting orders in Calvino's ever-expanding and evermore visual universe. A compact, quickly paced tale, 'La spirale' was written in five months in 1965, while the author was agonizing over 'L'Origine degli Uccelli.' It is an instructive tale, a moment of epiphany that allows Calvino to voice his ekphrastic hope, but residing ambivalence, about the word and image relationship. At its completion, he had experienced the sentiment of creating something important, something beautiful. In a letter to Hans Magnus Enzensberger Calvino wrote that 'La spirale' is 'la piu interessante' ('the most interesting') of the cosmic tales.47 For our purposes, it is the most theoretically visual of the tales, one that dialogues with theories of perception and world creation. It is a meditation on beginnings, an inaugural act of usurpation that reduplicates the visual field within the sphere of verbal enactment. Towards this end, the conch literally draws the world, dredging inspiration from itself while simultaneously creating a self, a style that reifies other styles and all subsequent activities: A intervalli regolari la roba calcarea che secernevo mi veniva colorata, cosi' siformavano tante belle strisce che continuavano diritte attraverso le spirali, 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 strisce e colori e roba dura, ed era anche il ritratto di lei tradotto in quel sistema li, ma anche il vero identico ritratto di lei cosl com'era, perche nello stesso tempo lei stava fabbricandosi una conchiglia identica alia mia e io senza saperlo stavo copiando quello che faceva lei e lei senza saperlo copiava quello chefacevo io, e tutti gli altri stavano copiando tutti gli altri e costruendosi conchiglie tutte uguali, cosicche si sarebbe rimasti al punto di prima se non fosse per il fatto che in queste

From Image to Word 101 conchiglie si fa presto a dire uguale, poi se vai a guardare si scoprono tante piccole differenze che potrebbero in seguito diventare grandissime. (176, my emphasis) At regular intervals the calcareous matter I was secreting came out colored, so a number of lovely stripes were formed running straight through the spirals, 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, and it was the portrait of her as she was, because at the same time she was making herself a shell identical to mine and without knowing it / was copying what she was doing and she without knowing it was copying what I was doing, and all the others were copying all the others, so we would be back where we had been before except for the fact that in saying these shells were the same I was a bit hasty, because when you looked closer you discovered all sorts of little differences that later on might become enormous. (146-7, my emphasis)

Like an artist before an easel, the eye creates as it sees and sees only that which it creates: La conghiglia cosi era in grado di produrre immagini visuali di conchiglie, che sono cose molto simili - per quel che se ne sa - alia conchiglia stessa ... (180) The shell in this way was able to create visual images of shells, which are things very similar - as far as we know - to the shell itself ... (150)

The reader accepts the representation not as an annex to the conch but as an autonomous spatial entity beheld from a unique perspective. 'Un'immagine presupponeva dunque una retina, la quale a sua volta presuppone un sistema complicato che fa capo a un encefalo' (180; 'An image therefore presupposes a retina, which in turn presupposes a complex system stemming from an encephalon/ 150). What's more, the conch assumes a harmonious interaction between imagination, creation, perception, presentation, appreciation, representation, and analysis by consolidating its world formation: Tutti questi occhi erano i miei. Li avevo resi possibili io; io avevo avuto la parte attiva; io gli fornivo la materia prima, I'immagine. Con gli occhi era

102 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures venuto tutto il resto, quindi tutto cio che gli altri, avendo gli occhi, erano diventati, in ogni loro forma e funzione, e la quantita di cose che avendo gli occhi erano riusciti a fare, in ogni loro forma e funzione, veniva fuori da quel che avevo fatto io. Non per nulla erano implicite nel mio star li nel mio aver relazioni con gli altri e con le altre eccetera, nel mio mettermi a fare la conchiglia eccetera. Insomma avevo previsto proprio tutto. (183, my emphasis) All these eyes were mine. I had made them possible; I had the active part; I furnished them the raw material, the image. With eyes had come all the rest, so everything that the others, having eyes, had become, their every form and function, and the quantity of things that, thanks to eyes, they had managed to do, in their every form and function, came from what I had done. Of course, they were not just casually implicit in my being there, in my having relations with others, male and female, et cetera, in my setting out to make a shell, et cetera. In other words, I had foreseen absolutely everything. (153, my emphasis) Cutting through the limitations of categories the conch lays the groundwork for a theory that proposes that palpable things be treated as verbal activities, as expressions of a visual experience. In this way, objects out there and objects in here meet, merge, reinforce one another to compose a compelling visual whole. We are witness to a complete rethinking of the forms of visual expression. At this point, the visual displaces the word as the dominant focus of attention in Calvino's universe. The conch evolves from passive looking to active perception, from seeing to observation, from noting the passage of sensory stimuli to the reification of patterns, textures, colours. It is an elevation of ekphrasis as a disciplinary principle. The canvas of the world is animated with surging masses of relentless activity: Tanto che adesso, passati cinquecento milioni d'anni, mi guardo intorno e vedo spora lo scoglio la scarpata ferroviaria e il treno che ci passa sopra con una comitiva di ragazze olandesi affacciate al finestrino e nell'ultimo scompartimento un viaggiatore solo che legge Erodoto in un'edizione bilingue, e sparisce nella galleria sopra alia quale corre la strada camionale con il cartellone 'Visitate la Rau' che rappresenta le piramidi, e un motofurgoncino di gelati tenta di sorpassare un camion carico di copie della dispensa 'Rh-Stijl' di una enciclopedia a dispense ma poi frena e si

From Image to Word 103 riaccoda perche la visibilita e impedita da una nuvola di api che attraversa la strada proveniente da ... (177) And so now, after five hundred million years have gone by, I look around and, above the rock, I see the railway embankment and the train passing along it with a party of Dutch girls looking out of the window and, in the last compartment, a solitary traveler reading Herodotus in a bilingual edition, and the train vanishes into the tunnel under the highway, where there is a sign with the pyramids and the words 'VISIT EGYPT/ and a little ice-cream wagon tries to pass a big truck laden with instalments of RhStijl, a periodical encyclopedia that comes out in paperback, but then it puts its brakes on because its visibility is blocked by a cloud of bees which crosses the road coming from a row of hives in a field from ... (147-8)

The tiny conch can command vast spaces with ease and authority by projecting its desire directly onto the landscape. The conch reminds this reader of Wallace Stevens's 'Anecdote of the Jar': 1 placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air. It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee.48

Like the jar, the spiralling conch takes 'dominion everywhere/ 'sprawling/ turning the 'slovenly wilderness' into something 'no longer wild.' Though words, by way of their patterning, usually appropriate reality, stilling its temporal flow, the conch's irrepressible spiralling produces the illusion of movement, the illusion of an organized simultaneity.

104 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

The use of the image of the conquering spiral (similar in its persistence to the image of colonizing ants in La formica argentina), is very apropos. Like Wallace's jar, the conch is a civilizing force, a formal impulse that animates the world by spatializing and arranging, changing by its presence, the ceaseless flow of phenomena. Through its ekphrastic principle, the conch converts the empirical into the archetypal, even as it turns its circular patterning into the sequentiality. 'If literature's true aim/ Calvino speculates, 'is to produce models of vision, of thought, of language, and of feeling, then it has already met these goals.'49 At this moment, the very medium that so inspired the young author to create the world anew, purged of all conditioning ideologies, is experienced as a form of splitting, of physical isolation (like the conch) from some other, perhaps more authentic realm of experience that it must appropriate in order to survive. The precipitate of this desire for spatiality transfers into a general refusal of any symbolic reading of his works. Meaning must remain on the surface, spiralling outward irrevocably, must somehow break through conventional allegorical barricades and achieve a visual transparency. Matter must be located in visible time and space in order to be discernable, to be knowable. In his treatise on painting, Leon Battista Alberti strikes a similar note when describing the act of painting: 'No one would deny that the painter has nothing to do with things that are not visible. The painter is concerned solely with representing what can be seen.'50 Mr Palomar makes the same claim at the end of the short story 'Dal terrazzo' ('From the Terrace'). After what could be considered a modern Descriptio urbis Romae,51 Palomar's roving eye gives a highly detailed and poetically pictorial relief of the rooftops of Rome. The exquisitely detailed description is illuminated by the effects of natural light and shade on objects and sustained by the interlacing of visual patterns created by the focusing on minimal sculptural elements. The effect is to create a timeless subsystem of heretofore unread architectural minutiae now rendered legible because they have been seen and reflected upon. Palomar states: Solo dopo aver conosciuto la superficie delle cose ... ci si puo spingere a cercare quel che c'e sotto. Ma la superficie delle cose e inesauribile. (57) It is only after you have come to know the surface of things ... that you can venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible. (55)

From Image to Word 105

Again it is the surface, or superficie as Alberti calls it, that gains primacy. The underside, the psychological belly or underpinnings of a thing, though critical, need not be investigated personally by the observer. There is a definite separation, then, between the material of the object (the signified) and its visual value (or signifier). There is a need, as Calvino states when discussing Diderot, to exclude ideology from observation: Diderot e convinto che non si pud costringere la verita in una forma, in una favola a tesi; I'omologia che la sua invenzione letteraria vuol raggiungere e quella con la vita inesauribile, non con una teoria enunciabile in termini astratti.52 (My emphasis) Diderot is convinced that truth cannot be constrained within a form, a fable with a preconceived thesis: the homology his literary invention wants to achieve is with inexhaustible life, not with a theory which could be enunciated in abstract terms. (My emphasis)

Calvino aspires to the quality of timeless reflections sparked by the lightning precision of the casual observation of inexhaustible life. Another point in common with Alberti is perspective. For the Renaissance artist, there is a 'divine power to sight' that is ultimately magnified through the utilization of the cross-section, because it ensures the proper construction of a visual, mathematically determined viewpoint independent of conditioning ideologies. This monocular eye that scrutinizes the world occupies a point in space that is both transcendental (universal, able to be occupied by any viewer of the same scene [seen] given the same mathematical parameters) and contingent (solely dependent upon a distinct vantage). The selfconscious observer is crucial to this idea of perspective; his posture in front of the object is fundamental as he may be 'locked in place' or mobile.53 The black-and-white reproduction of the etching by Albrecht Diirer, Drafstman Drawing a Reclining Nude, on the cover of Palomar, visualizes Calvino's conception of the spectator stance. With eyes open and fixed centric gaze the draftsman recreates the world in miniature strokes, making manifest the narrative of the world in a precisely crafted visual istoria.54 The artist possesses absolute omnipotence in his ability to re-compose the world at will.55 This phenomenological project manifests itself in formal composition, in the ordering of sur-

106 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

faces, the precise delineation of bodies, planes, lines, angles. Being acts of observation that are visual and accomplished, we are reminded in 'La spirale/ with the eyes. It would seem a truism to say that the eyes are essential to the activity yet, as observed by G.E.M. Anscombe, often we are not aware of the importance of the eyes in the looking experience.56 This experience must somehow be attuned to the intentions of the looker, for it is not enough that an author (or a painter) arouse an experience in the mind of a receiver; the meaning and content of this experience must be encoded in such a way as to potentially convey an impression of the original inspiration. The author must, in other words, remain aware that representation is a process that not only follows seeing, but that this seeing reflects images in the mind's eye of the reader. The cognition that the reader attains is exponentially marked by the attention the author/observer pays to the surface of the described object. It is also totally dependent upon the author's perspective. Ironically, regardless of the peculiarity of the object, or indeed of the event described, in Calvino's narrative the objects/events are never of a particular thing. On the contrary, his descriptions are always of things of a particular kind.57 This is why there are no faces in Calvino's cosmos, no endearing vistas, no sentimental dramatizations. Instead, each cosmicomic tale is like a Rorschach inkblot: Calvino provides the canvas, colours, shapes, and perspective, the distinctive perceptions, the revelatory insights, the collateral connections. The capacity to experience the visual delight is dependent on the reader's ability to find the transcendent vantage that opens the experience. Visually Potentializing Literature It is significant that Calvino's most visual literary texts derive from his involvement with the French writers of the Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle (OuLiPo). // castello dei destini incrociati (1969, with its companion second section, La taverna dei destini incrociati, 1973; The Tavern of Crossed Destinies) and Le citta invisibili explore the interaction of verbal patterns with visual schemes, mathematics, and information theory, ideals of the OuLiPo, as themes that condition both life and art. These texts consciously explore parody, distortion, and the word and image interface. // castello dei destini incrociati and La taverna dei destini incrociati especially are predetermined by the combinatory games that con-

From Image to Word 107 trol their visual diagrams. In both the players are mute, mysteriously robbed of written and spoken language by some mystical force. They must tell their tales by aligning the pictorial signs represented in the two seventy-eight-card tarot decks in legible visual patterns that reveal a semantic and syntactic sense. In the 1960 Preface to / nostri antenati Calvino addresses a similar issue of image sequencing: E nello stesso tempo ho voluto che fossere tre storie, come si dice, 'aperte/ che innanzitutto stiano in piedi come storie, per la logica del succedersi delle low immagini, ma che comincino la loro vera vita nell'imprevedible gioco d'interrogazioni e risposte suscitate nel lettore. (360-1, my emphasis) And at the same time I wanted them to be three 'open' stories, as they say, that would hold up in the first place as stories, because of the logic of the succession of their images, but that would begin their real life in the unforeseeable play of questions and answers aroused in the reader, (my emphasis) The readers determine the success or failure of the patterns. As ideal spectators, we complete the project and may, in a modernist sense, step back and view the entire space of the work in order to understand and appreciate its full intellectual and artistic beauty. In // castello del destini incrociati and La taverna del destini incrociati it is the 'logic of the succession of [the] images' (the fabula) that become events in an unforeseeable sequence of stories activated by readers (actors) in the text. The reader may inspect the cards, admire their colours (the Franco Maria Ricci deluxe edition), appreciate the details. The thematic conflict between word and image, the rational and the sensual, is couched within life patterns of seeing/touching, reading/writing, imagining/ perceiving, even of fate and doom. In Le citta invisibili the invisible cityscapes (the fabula) are logically sequenced on the unchanging checkered pattern of the chessboard. Here, too, the reader helps construct the visual pattern of the cities' numeric atlas, responds to the seminal suggestions of the poetic language, perceives the detailed architectural images in his mind's eye. Throughout Le citta invisibili Marco Polo must continuously remind the Khan that the concretization of desire through description is as ephemeral as the language used to accomplish the task. An imploring Kublai optimistically asks: 'II giorno in cui conoscero tutti gli emblemi... riusciro a possedere il mio impero, finalmente?' ('On the day when I know

108 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

all the emblems ... shall I be able to possess my empire, at last?'). Polo replies: 'Sire, non lo credere: quel giorno sarai tu stesso emblema tra gli emblemi' (30; 'Sire, do not believe it. On that day you will be an emblem among emblems/ 21). The possibility of being reduced to a visual emblem, an icon, frozen into a static array that represents his kingdom, paralyses the Khan. Polo reminds him that he must not succumb to this sort of ekphrastic fear and subsequent inaction: La citta cui tende il mio viaggio, e discontinua nello spazio e nel temmpo, ora piu rada ora piu densa, tu non devi credere che si possa smettere di cercarla. (169) The city towards which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed, you must not believe the search for it can stop. (126)

The same destiny does not, however, freeze the tongueless interlocutors of // castello del destini incrociati. On the contrary, their linguistic castration and loss of social propriety is transformed into visual promiscuity. The loss of logos provides a moment of idolatry, a free and guiltless exchange between visual and verbal arts heretofore banned from personal expression. As image becomes flesh their touching begets tales that breech the confines of chivalric desire. In Le citta invisibili the gambit is more complex though no less vital. A type of verbal/visual interaction is installed between the active scenes of the frame tale and the descriptive scenes of the cities. The duel fuels fantasies of both ekphrastic fear and hope. The Khan is apprehensive that Polo's image-laden discourse threatens to supplant what he considers to be the rational, logical, literal, and therefore narrative, priorities of his word-laden temporality. A Khan, after all, creates his world by verbal decree, not pictures. If his entire universe can be depicted upon a chessboard, Polo's imagocentric treachery may have even more grandiose aspirations than simple synecdochical representation. The reduction of these issues to the visual paradigm of Tinferno dei viventi' ('the inferno of the living') constitutes an occasion for a symbolic confrontation with the feared Other: Due modi ci sono per non soffrirne. II primo riesce facile a molti: accettare 1'inferno e diventarne parte fino al punto di non vederlo piu. II secondo e rischioso ed esige attenzione e apprendimento continui: cercare e saper

From Image to Word 109 riconoscere chi e cosa, in mezzo all'inferno, non e inferno, e farlo durare, e dargli spazio. (170) There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space. (126-7)

The claims of ekphrastic hope and the anxieties of ekphrastic fear raise an anxious aversion to the continuing ambivalence of Polo's discourse. What indeed is he trying to say? If the goal of ekphrasis is to 'overcome the otherness/58 the closing lines of Le citta invisibili do little to lessen the tension between the familiar oppositions of natural and conventional signs, good and evil, time and space. Indeed, the network of ideological associations embedded in the real and metaphysical oppositions this often-cited maxim contrasts is the perfect prototype for the image as an ominous female presence about to still the writer's pen. The very thing assumed to provide grace and comfort (not inferno) can itself be construed as a dangerous force, a paralysing eternity of perfect desolation. Nevertheless, Calvino remains faithful to his verbal strategy for repressing/representing the visual Other. The result is a risky narrative enterprise that skirts anecdotal description, that thrives on unending involutions of subject, that somehow conjures natural signs without being destroyed by them. The characters of // castello castello del del destini destiniincrociati incrociatiand andLa Lataverna taverna del del des- destini incrociati must also steel themselves against an aesthetic death, but they are allowed to measure their mortality against the physical space of the tarot cards before them. Calvino's dismay at having lost the ability to use words resonates throughout: Come faccio a raccontare adesso che ho perduto la parola, le parole, forse pure la memoria, come faccio a ricordare cosa c'era li fuori, e una volta ricordato come faccio a trovare le parole per dirlo; e le parole come faccio a pronunciarle ...? (52). How can I tell about it now that I have lost my power of speech, words, perhaps also memory, how can I tell what was outside; and once I have remembered, how can I find the words to say it, and how can I utter those words? ... (52)

110 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

Survival is dependent upon the cards, upon their visual imprinting. In essence, Calvino forces his characters to do what he is unable to do, that is, to write with images. It is interesting that these cards with their 'curious ontology of cardboard/ as Howard Carter calls them,59 echo the life-art relationship that Calvino will foster in his art-inspired texts. Art is man's attempt to systematize life events, to place a pattern on causality. Calvino is therefore careful to choose those cultural situations, in this case the magnificently suggestive engravings of the Visconti-Sforza deck and the popular tarot deck of Marseilles, that presuppose new vocabularies and visions of life. It is telling that in the Note accompanying the Italian text, Calvino compares his own imaginative process with the possibility of a similar intentionality on the part of Ariosto when composing the Orlando furioso: anche se le miniature di Bonifacio Bembo precedevano di quasi un secolo il poema di Ludovico Ariosto, esse potevano ben rappresentare il mondo visuale nel quale la fantasia s'era formata. (125) even if Bonifacio Bembo's miniatures preceded by almost a century Ludovico Ariosto's poem, they could very well represent the visual world upon which the fantasy had been formed.

What's more, Calvino tests his hypothesis, realizing that the matching of image to text was easier than expected: Provai subito a comporre con i tarocchi viscontei sequenze ispirate all'Orlando furioso; mi fu facile cosi' costruire 1'incrocio centrale dei racconti del mio 'quadrato magico.' Intorno, bastava lasciare che prendessero forma altre storie che s'incrociavano tra loro, e ottenni cosi' una specie di cruciverba fatto di figure anziche di lettere, in cui per di piu ogni sequenza si pud leggere nei due sensi. Nel giro d'una settimana, il testo del Castello dei destini incrodati (non piu La taverna) era pronto per essere pubblicato nella lussuosa edizione alia quale era destinato. (125) I immediately tried to use the Visconti tarots to construct sequences inspired from the Orlando furioso; it was thus easy for me to construct the central axis of the stories of my 'magic square.' All around, I allowed other stories to take shape that criss-crossed amongst themselves; in this way I obtained a type of crossword puzzle made up of figures instead of words in which for the most part each sequence may be read in two direc-

From Image to Word 111 tions. In a week's time, the text of The Castle of Crossed Destinies (no longer The Tavern) was ready to be published in the luxurious edition for which it was destined.

The cards, in other words, provided Calvino with a sphere of imaginative freedom heretofore only experienced as the painful chore of writing.60 A spirit of continuing inspiration seems to emanate from the cards, especially from the more plebeian, less ornate popular cards, and captures the author: i tarocchi popolari, oltre che meglio riproducibili in bianco e nero, erano ricchi di suggestioni narrative che nel Castello non avevo potuto sviluppare. (126) the popular tarots, besides being better reproducible in black and white, were rich in narrative suggestions that I had not been able to develop in The Castle.

The narrative suggestions make anything possible, and the framing devices, moreover, guarantee that this controlled abundance allows the author to inhabit a world of pure wish-fulfilment. The operative word here is control; external, concerned, assuming, rule-oriented, and plotted control. Years later Calvino will confess to a jouissance when writing under commission. These jobs offered him the possibility of discovering novel solutions to aesthetic issues. Also, by jobbing himself out writing recovered a usefulness, a labour-intensive artisanlike quality that characterizes and illuminates his carefully wrought phrases: Ho imparato ad apprezzare le delizie dello scrivere su commissione, quando mi chiedono qualcosa per una destinazione definita, anche modesta. Almeno so per certo che c'e qualcuno cui cio che scrivo serve. Mi sento piu libero, non c'e la sensazione di imporre ad altri una soggettivita di cui nemmeno io sono sicuro.61 I have learned to appreciate the delight of writing under commission, when I am asked for something with a definite destination, even a modest one. At least I am sure that there is someone for whom what I write is useful. I feel freer, there is no sensation of imposing a subjectivity of which not even I am sure.62

112 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

For Calvino, the competition between individual freedom (imagination) and external control (rules) does not end in stalemate, as some have suggested as a reason for abandoning the tarot trilogy. Rather, it is the re-combination and re-utilization of cultural icons such as cards and comic strips in a regimented exercise that truly excites the author: Per prima cosa dovevo costruire anche con i tarocchi di Marsiglia quella specie di 'contenitore' dei racconti incrociati che avevo messo insieme coi tarocchi viscontei. Ed era questa'operazione che non mi riusciva: volevo partire da alcune storie che le carte m'avevano imposto per prime, cui avevo attribuito certi significati, che avevo perfino gia scritto in larga parte, e non riuscivo a farle entrare in uno schema unitario, e piu ci studiavo piu complicata sifaceva ogni storia, e attirava a se un numero sempre maggiore di carte, contendendole alle altre storie cui pure non volevo rinunciare. (126, my emphasis) The first thing was to construct even with the Marseilles tarots that type of 'container' of crossed stories that I had placed together for the Visconti pack. And it was precisely this operation that just didn't turn out: / wanted to start with the stories that the cards had imposed as first, to which I had attributed certain meanings, which I had already written to a great extent, and I was not able to make them enter a unitary scheme, and the more I studied the issue the more complicated each story became, and attracted to itself an always greater number of cards, competing with other stories which I did not wish to renounce. (My emphasis)

One questions why, then, an apparently defeated author admits exhaustion: A un certo momento sopravvenne in me un senso di fastidio per la prolungata frequentazione di questo repertorio iconografico medieval-rinascimentale che obbligava il mio discorso a svolgersi entro certi binari. (128) At a certain point I was overtaken by a sense of unease due to the prolonged contact with this medieval-Renaissance iconography that forced my discourse to evolve along strict lines.

Instead of reading this statement as an admission of defeat or discomfiture, I feel that the essence of the discourse lies in the sentence that immediately succeeds: 'Sentii il bisogno di creare un brusco contrasto

From Image to Word 113

ripetendo nn'operazione analoga con materiale visivo moderno' (128, my emphasis; 'I felt the need to create a sharp contrast, repeating an analogous operation with modern visual material'}. He intended to use comic strips as a source of inspiration, 'ma non seguendo 1'ordine d'ogni strip: passando da una strip all'altra in colonne verticali o in diagonale' (128, 'not following the order of each strip but by passing from one strip to another in vertical or diagonal columns'). Because the author is more interested in the process than in the referential outcome, the new proto-tale is dismissed out of boredom: II mio interesse teorico ed espressivo per questo tipo d'esperimenti si e esaurito. E' tempo (da ogni punto di vista) di passare ad altro. (128) My theoretical and expressive interest for this type of experimentation is exhausted. It is time (from all points of view) to move on to other things.

Calvino is tired not of the experiment, but of this specific situation. To constantly play the game leads inexorably to exhaustion. He is eager to pass on to mechanisms that do not superimpose teleology upon causality, that allow him to change tactics without affecting style. We recognize the future author of Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore precisely because of this quality; 'I always feel the need to alternate one type of writing with another, completely different, to begin writing again as if I had never written anything before.'63 For Calvino the act of writing was imperative. It is important that Castdlo del destini incrociati and Taverna dei destini incrociati are written in a period of combinatoric exhaustion. These are transitional texts presenting visual systems that permit reconfigurations but allow no additional elements. Calvino tires not of the fundamental visual images used to spark the act of writing, but of his own self-imposed limits. If writing had become nothing more than 'slight of hand' performed by an 'illusionist' (105), then the moment had come to restore the mythic centre to the labour and hence, to surrender the visual impulses that animate his narrative, to move on by returning to a time prior to language, when the veins and arteries of myth surged with the power of the visual image. St George and St Jerome Amidst the linearly ordered chaos of the tarot cards, Calvino fixes a

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physical and spiritual as well as psychological spot that ensures his survival by revealing essential images of his Self. The penultimate section of La taverna del destini incrociati is entitled 'Anchi'io cerco di dire la mia' ('I Also Try to Tell My Tale') and presents an occasion where Calvino 'elevates his own autobiography to a symbolic level.'64 The cards dealt by the author are representative mirror shards, each one exposing an aspect of himself, each node in the story leading inexorably towards a confrontation with the self, with the unconscious. For example, the King of Clubs, the first card, is Calvino himself, since the King 'regge un arnese puntuto con la punta in giu, come io sto facendo in questo momento' (99, 'is holding an implement with the point downward as I am doing at this moment/ 99). There are infinite subtleties in this casting of tarot characters: the Page of Clubs ('mi ritrae [my emphasis] mentre mi chino a scrutare dentro 1'involucro di me stesso,' 100; 'depicts me [my emphasis] as I bend to peer into the envelope of myself/ 100), the Devil ('la materia prima dello scrivere/ 100; 'the raw material of writing/ 101), the King of Swords ('lo slancio guerriero della giovinezza, 1'ansia esistenxiale, 1'energia dell'avventura spesi in una carneficina di cancellature e fogli appallottotati/ 104; 'the warrior impetuosity of youth gallops away, the existential anxiety, the energy of the adventure spent in a slaughter of erasures and crumpled paper/ 104), the Hermit ('segregate da anni nella sua cella, topo di biblioteca che perlustra a lume di lanterna una sapienza dimenticata/ 104; 'isolated for years in his cell, a bookworm searching by the lantern's light for a knowledge forgotten/ 104-5), the Juggler ('un giocoliere e illusionista che dispone sul suo banco da fiera un certo numero di figure e spastandole, connettendole e scambiandole ottiene un certo numero d'effetti/ 104-5; 'a juggler, or conjurer, who arranges on a stand at a fair a certain number of objects and, shifting them, connecting them, interchanging them, achieves a certain number of effects/ 105). 'Sono sempre io come di volta in volta mi sono immaginato d'essere [my emphasis]/ he states, 'mentre continue a star seduto menendo la penna su e giu per il foglio/ (104; 'It is always me as I have imagined myself from time to time [my emphasis], while I remain seated, driving the pen up and down the page'). A case could be made that the Page of Coins, interpreted as an Oedipus image, represents the author's struggle to confront his own killing of the father figure ('tu Edipo non Thai fatto apposta' [102; 'you, Oedipus, did not do it on purpose/ 102]). The use of the cards, the reliance on myth, is a way of working out personal experience on a higher level of integration. Every individual in the castle needs to

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make the revelatory journey in his own unique way. These tarot figures lay down roads to universals beyond the immediate writing experience. Their linkage is temporal and spatial in extremis. One of these roads leads to Calvino himself. It is paramount that halfway through the section Calvino inserts the blaring headline: 'Anche io cerco di dire li mia' ('I Also Try to Tell My Tale'). The caption is a kind of pregnant relay point as the author abandons the tarot deck underhand, replacing them with his favourite paintings. This is a myth-making gesture, a moment when painterly archetype portends a sense of personal identity. Like the Page, Calvino is at a crossroads; he places his writing at a crossroads and allows the reader to visit the central characters in the drama of his intellectual life. In this surprising turn, the Knight of Swords is replaced by paintings of St George, the Hermit is supplanted by St Jerome. The space of the written text is now expanded, becoming a museum site decorated with images that range from Diirer to Botticelli, Raffaello, Antonello da Messina, Tintoretto, Giorgione, Pisanello, and Paolo Uccello. It is the artist Vittore Carpaccio, however, who receives special mention: Se uno scrittore puo contare un pittore tra i suoi maestri, tra coloro che hanno influenzato il suo mondo poetico, la sua immaginazione, e anche il suo stile, il suo modo di raccontare, certo Carpaccio ha contato soprattutto nei primi anni della mia attivita letteraria, ma devo dire che non ha mai smesso di pormi del problemi: sento il bisogno di tornare - quasi direi - a consultarlo, a verificare se 1'avevo capito bene, se non ha da dirmi qualcosa che non avevo afferrato. (276) If a writer may count a painter among his teachers, among those that have influenced his poetic world, his imagination, and even his style, his way of telling a story, certainly Carpaccio has counted above all in the first years of my literary activity, but I must say that he has not stopped posing me problems: I feel the need to return - I would almost say - to consult him, to ensure that I have understood him well, and that he doesn't have something to tell me that I had not grasped.

The above quotation is not from La taverva del destini incrociati but from an unpublished piece now in Album Calvino. Basically the same writing, the unpublished pages should be considered a rough draft of the more polished and urbane, and indeed less revelatory, prose of 'Anch'io cerco di dire la mia.' They cover the same themes, explore the

116 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

same paintings. This is the author's first extended commentary on painting and it is interesting that a modified version appears in La tav erna dei destini incrociati, a text that signals both the end of a poetics of combinatorics and the beginning of an increasing propensity towards a visual poetics. It is not my purpose to compare these two texts, save for noting a more reflexive author in the Album Calvino piece, one who easily indulges personal insight. This unpublished reflection permits the reader to grasp a piece of the inner Calvino. The essay unfolds as a progressive revelation of Calvino to himself. As the physical space of the paintings is explored the author finds particulars that reflect his own thoughts and impressions. Indeed, it is as if the painted surface serves as a mirror for his own psyche, a pretext for his own supposedly immediate emotions. He is in fact laying bare the ekphrastic anxieties that underlie his writing. Calvino does not mask the fact that what he states as personal revelations derived from the paintings arise from a continued, consistent, quasi-spiritual exercise of observation conducted over the span of his career. In essence, even in this most personal and, for that matter, vulnerable note, Calvino's writing is scientific, its development consisting of the addition of accumulated information of a specific nature to an existing corpus of propositional knowledge. Although it may be true that the stock of knowledge to be gained from his observations is limited, there is no guarantee that the sequence of observation will continue to recur in the same way, or that the ensuing description will be the same. Expectation is incapable of being inferred from logical procedure. The unpublished essay bears the date 1973; the same year of the publication of the Einaudi edition of // castello dei destini incrociati. Calvino's rewriting of this essay and presentation of these particular paintings at this particular juncture of his career and in this particular text is a sign of a recognition of the limitations of formulaic or combinatoric praxis. This is a first instance in which, although it may seem logically true that the degree of probable truth is raised by a procedure that controls each confirming instance, the accumulation of these instances cannot and does not verify a proposition. This is a fact of human psychology and not of logic. It would seem that Calvino has realized that all his propositions will never produce a map of the universe, since they will never transcend their provisional status as repeatable patterns. He cannot help, however, but test a proven schema against the backdrop of his own emotions. This is why, I believe, he never published the essay in

From Image to Word 117

its longer form. It is fraught with emotion, induces a sense of guilt and paralysis. It gets too close to the mark. By severely cropping the piece, he avoids the danger inherent in the overt psychology that denies the independence of the paintings from his own psyche. The resulting story published as 'Anch'io cerco di dire la mia' is no longer an insight into Calvino but rather a brief encounter with the narrative motifs inherent in the paintings of Carpaccio. Having said this, the Album Calvino piece is my preferred source, for it is most revelatory. As we read the paintings along with the author, the visual narratives of Carpaccio solicit action, while the painted details encourage a sort of self-confession. We come to see Calvino's psyche and space of the paintings as a share of the same mental attitude. For example, a perennial topos in Calvino's narrative, the figure of the double cannot help but reappear as the author discusses these paintings and painterly motifs. As he leads the reader through the visual landscape, he is not interested in the particulars per se but in their archetypal import. The hermit St Jerome sitting with a lion before a city conjures couplets of hermit/lion, hermit/city, nature/civilization, solitude/company. The knight St George slaying a dragon inspires pairings of knight/dragon, city/desert, chaos/law. The pattern is reminiscent of Calvino's description of himself as both Mercury (active) and Saturn (cerebral) in Six Memos for the Next Millennium. In this transitional moment in the author's career, he pauses for a moment of reflection, a summing of the parts of himself. Indeed the author strongly identifies with the subjects of the paintings he so engagingly portrays: Le opere d'arte che contano nella vita d'una persona sono di due tipi: ci sono quelle che si vedono una volta e rimangono nella mente come un tutto, impongono alia memoria una loro immagine, fedele o trasfigurata, a cui sempre ci si attiene; e ci sono le opere che si tornano a rivedere innumerevoli volte, e ogni volta revelano un nuovo particolare, ogni volta hanno qualcosa di nuovo da dirci. Molte volte nel corso della mia vita, quasi direi ogni volta che torno a Venezia, ho sentito il bisogno di fare una visita qui, a San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, a rivedere questi dipinti di Carpaccio, quasi direi a rileggerli,... (274) The works of art that matter in the life of a person are of two types: there

118 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures are those that are viewed once and remain in the mind as a whole, impose their own image upon memory, to which they are always faithful; and there are works that one returns to view many times, and each time they reveal a new particular, each time they have something new to tell us. Often during the course of my life, I would say every time I return to Venice, I have felt the need to visit here, at San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, to see these paintings by Carpaccio, I would almost say to reread them,... Following the prescription to read and reread the classics,65 Calvino is following his own advice, expressing an innate need to learn, to uncover the profound message of the master artists he admires. Humanity's Ur myths are to be found in the particulars of these paintings that he so engagingly reads and rereads with infinite mastery and elegance. His observations bring life to the time-bound images. In San Giorgio in lotta con il dmgo (St George Battles the Dragon) the samples of partially eaten body parts scattered in the foreground speak of events prior to the depiction of the dragon's slaying (Tantefatto') and anticipate the resurrection of life after the dragon's death. In the Visione di sant'Agostino (The Vision of St Augustine) a personal note adds a vibrant dimension to an otherwise solemn and contemplative space.66 The studio is familiare quanto quello del mio studio, mi ci aggiro come nel mio studio, cercando qualcosa che mi pare d'aver lasciato li ora e poco. (277) as familiar as my own study, I wander through it as if I were in my study, searching for something that I seem to have left there recently The space of the paintings is thus first and foremost an opportunity to read objects; it affords an occasion to de-scribe their visual potential. More importantly, they are mirrors in which to disseminate the evolving images of oneself: Insomma, col passare degli anni mi vedo venire incontro da queste mura un Carpaccio sempre diverse, come se queste tele avessero il potere di riflettere i cambiamenti che avvengono dentro noi stessi. (278) In short, with the passing of years it is a constantly changing Carpaccio that greets me from these walls, as if these canvases had the ability to reflect the changes that occur within us.

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Similar to the classics of narrative, Calvino finds himself in these visual narratives. He enjoys their painterly complexity; vi si possono riconoscere le varie specie d'alberi alia consistenza del fogliame tenero, ispido o piumoso, a cui il pennello leggero e sottile ha cominicato la vibrazione d'un filo di vento. E chiaro che il soggetto del quadro e la foresta; la leggenda di San Giorgio e il drago e solo un pretesto. (273) one can recognize the various species of trees from the consistency of the tender leaves that are either bristly or feathery, and to which the artist's gentle stroke has communicated the vibrations of a gust of wind. It is clear that the subject of the painting is the forest; the legend of St George and the dragon is only a pretext. He revels in textual inconsistencies ('San Girolamo o Sant'Agostino che dir si voglia (la sua identificazione e stata controversa/ 276; 'St Jerome or St Augustine say what you will, [his identity has been controversial]'). Mostly, he is compelled to attraction because in these paintings 'la vita intellettuale e rappresentata attraverso oggetti, c'e un ordine negli spazi e nelle cose che corrisponde a un ordine mentale' (280; 'intellectual life is represented through object, there is an order in the spaces and in the things that correspond to a mental order'). It is clear that these paintings provide a bridge between conscious concerns and unconscious realities. The forms of myth Calvino derives from them are infinite, but the individual myth he chooses to relate is central to his personal drama. Every conscious myth is balanced in our unconscious by a contrary picture. It is no surprise that St Geroge and St Girolamo are two sides of the same coin. A furia di girare lo sguardo su questi dipinti, mi sono convinto che essi formano un'unica storia, la vita d'un solo personaggio, d'un uomo che passa dalla giovinezza combattiva alia conquistata saggezza della vecchiaia, fino alia morte ... (282) After having so often focused on these paintings, I am convinced that they tell a single story, the life of one person, of a man that passes from a combative youth to the conquered wisdom of old age, up to death ...

Thus the hermit (Calvino in Paris) who shuns company for books

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resembles the warrior who battles with his lance (pen) the raging animal within ('L'animale che portiamo in noi stessi e che cambia forma nelle epoche della nostra vita'; [283; 'the animal that we carry within and that changes shape in the different ages of our lives']). The Knight (youth), the Fante (an old and pensive hermit), the Devil (the raw material of writing) of the tarot cards, all find expression in the paintings of Carpaccio. We cannot escape believing in the assumption that these archetypes and self-consciousness are to some degree synonymous. The cloven viscount has found uneasy peace within a reality that stretches beyond the rational cataloguing, collecting, and regulating of reality. Having once almost succumbed to pragmatic rationalism, the author, like Palomar, has reached the limits of his epistemological quest and now identifies intuition as the supreme form of guidance, the spirit as ultimate motor of the imagination. Like the rain that 'Piovve dentro a 1'alta fantasia' ('rained down into the high fantasy'),67 the balance of the author's career hangs on the confirmation of a collective unconscious, on the acceptance of an autonomous unifying discourse that he does not reify new worlds, but which may only imaginatively describe and visually redefine the mental images provoked by the world at hand: II grande passo sara accettare ... cio che incombe su di noi come eredita biologica della specie e delle specie che ci hanno preceduti, come parte oscura della nostra storia collettiva e individuale, fame una nostra ombra vivente e dolorosa. (283) The great leap will be to accept... that which is incumbent upon us as the biological heredity of the species that have preceded us, as a dark side of our collective and individual history, and make of this a living and painful shadow.

The author exists, but only because he is authenticated as object of his writing. In the La taverna del destini incrociati version of 'Anch'io cerco di dire la mia' Calvino is more existentially dramatic but no less uncertain of his reconditioned status as self-authenticating subject of his own fictive meditations: le storie di San Giorgio e di San Girolamo continuano 1'una di seguito all'altra come fossereo una storia sola. E forse sono davvero una sola sto-

From Image to Word 121 ria, la vita d'uno stesso uomo, giovinezza maturita vecchaia e morte. (110) the stories of St. George and St. Jerome follow one another as if they were a single story. Arid perhaps they really are one story, the life of the same man, youth, maturity, old age and death. (110)

The theme of the monster within returns in Six Memosfor the Next Millennium in the images of Perseus and the Medusa. The mythical hero uses a mirror to defeat the debilitating stare of the Gorgon, just as the author uses the self-reflective space of these paintings to find the images that sustain the words that communicate his interior feelings. In 'Anch'io cerco di dire la mia' the author rereads, contemplates tearing up these symbolically autobiographical pages, then pauses, setting himself squarely within the visual field of his writing: Vediamo, la prima cosa da dire e che quella del Sangiorgio-Sanfgirolamo non e una storia con un prima e un dopo: siamo al centro d'una stanza con figure che si offrono alia vista tutte insieme. II personaggio in questione o riesce a essere il guerriero e il savio in ogni casa che fa e pensa, o non sara' nessuno, e la stessa belva e nello stesso tempo drago nemico nella carneficina quotidiana della citta e leone custode nello spazio dei pensieri: e non si lascia fornteggiare se non nelle due forme insieme. (111) Let us see, the first thing to be said is that the story of St. George-St. Jerome is not one story with a before and an after: we are in the center of a room with figures who offer themselves to our view all together. The character in question either succeeds in being warrior and sage in everything he does and thinks, or he will be no one, and the same beast is at once dragon-enemy in the daily massacre of the city and lion-guard in the space of thoughts: and he does not allow himself to be confronted except in the two forms together. (Ill)

He is in a castle/room, surrounded by images, watching himself read cards/paintings that relate a silent linear narrative. As will be the case with La scjuadratura,68 Calvino is imagining a totalizing text where he is both artificer and artefact of his own creation. The very images that are supposed to rescue him, the ones in which he has sought validation as an author and as an awakened self, get their power through his words,

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receive their import through his gaze. Such a pattern could become destructive if Calvino were not to admit the quandry: 'Cosi ho messo tutto a posto. Sulla pagine, almeno. Dentro di me tutto resta come prima' (Thus I have set everything to rights. On the page, at least. Inside me, all remains as before/ 111). Envy is the characteristic of the person who has not developed a reliant inductive system. Writing objectifies the problem, gives outlet to further procreation. Ekphrastic envy is the desire to be absorbed by the semantic other, in this case, the visual image of himself contemplating the visual images. Calvino's gaze now turns to search for a stable, unchanging material referent that does not spiral off into uncontrollable linguistic chaos. Is it possible, he will ask in La squadratura, to 'tenersi alle cose di cui si puo essere sicuri, che sono pochissime, e per poterle guardare con fiducia e simpatia, almeno per un momento' (vii, 'stay with the things of which one can be certain, which are very few, and look at them with faith and sympathy, at least for a fleeting moment?'). Calvino's future writings will display a delicate balancing act between ekphrastic envy, fear, and hope. A future narrating voice will install a highly significant and symbolic subjective dimension, and will heavily rely on the 'spazio mentale' (mental space) he has always craved in the material/ethereal space of paintings.

Chapter Three

Variations on a Theme

Describing a familiar object might seem the easiest thing in the world. Instead, try looking at something, a watch, a bicycle, or something even simpler like a pen knife, a raincoat: you'll find that if you wish to account for even the smallest detail, and then for details about each detail, you will need to write page upon page. The important thing, naturally, is to capture the essential: even objects, like people, have characteristics that distinguish them from all the others ... Italo Calvino1

/ believe that there is today a recovery of visual data in literature, an attempt to exhaust objects in an unending chase because the dizziness of infinity can strike us by moving towards detail, not merely by contemplating the universe. Italo Calvino2

If we have, till now, examined several key moments in the evolution of Calvino's visual style, it is appropriate at this juncture to discuss the practical and methodological current that rides beneath the verbal flow of words. Calvino once commented: il mio temperamento mi ha portato sempre a sistemi di rifiuto articolati, mai assoluti. cosi anche le mie adesioni, tutte le volte che ho aderito a qualcosa, che ho creduto di identificarmi con qualcosa mi sono portato dietro le mie riserve, i miei distinguo e quel tanto di distacco che permette di guardare le cose da fuori.3

124 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures my temperament has always led me to systems of articulated refusals, never absolute ones. The same holds for my beliefs; every time I have believed in something, that I thought I could identify myself with something I have always carried with me my reserves, my distinctions, and that bit of distance that permits one to observe things as an outsider.

How did this legendary stoic attitude condition his work? How is it reflected in his writings? Calvino's assumption of a difficult role, the lessons learned as a youth and honed during his life, will be seen as the building blocks of a lifelong writing project that leads him into the world of art. Vision and the Validity of Understanding In an introductory note on the inside cover of Calvino's Sotto il sole giaguaro (1986; Under the Jaguar Sun) Giorgio Manganelli speaks of the author's obsessive activity of writing as an exercise: Con questa parola intendo la difficile sfida di una invenzione strutturale, formale, tematica che attraversava in modo indiretto, trasversale, la tensione narrativa; cosi che la narrazione veniva colta e adoperata nell'ambito di una invenzione mentale, geometrica, un arduo incontro di astrazione e tangibilita.4 With this word I mean to imply the difficult challenge of creating a structural, formal, and thematic structure that would cross, in an indirect and transversal way, the narrative tension; so that the narration was understood to be used within the sphere of a mental, geometric invention, an arduous encounter of abstraction and tangibility.

It is precisely this dichotomy between abstraction and tangibility, between a mercurial proclivity for dextrous and agile correspondences and a saturnine impulse for stolid concreteness, that interests me, for it mirrors the image and word paradigm I wish to develop. Calvino's type of rational (formal and deductive) and abstract (informal and inductive) analysis does not seek tangible historical validation, moving as it does on the shifting 'sabbia mentale'5 ('mental sands') of myth and memory. Nor is it really concerned with scientific and tangible accuracy, since scientific theories merely serve as a springboard for fanciful conjecture. It is instead a method for perceiving the

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world and then discerning the experience through a rigorous program of writing that initiates a contemplative withdrawal from the real world, eventually leading to a total immersion within the self. This is a realm, a 'mondo' ('world') Calvino will write while studying the work of the artist Enrico Baj, 'che ... non era intorno a me, ma dentro di me'6 ('that... was not around me, but inside me'). The operative word here is method, for indeed Calvino's approach to literature was that of an ascetic bricoleur meticulously rearranging worldly elements into latent and infinite possibilities. This reconstructed world, 'a world built by horizontal lines where words follow each other one at a time, and every sentence and every paragraph occupies its orderly place' (The Written and the Unwritten Word/ 38), suggests accuracy and lucidity but above all precision in a language that places the physical world under the mastery of subjective reason. Indeed, the mere fact that there exists an 'outside world' 'quite different from the world inside the written page' implies a certain discomfiture with external reality. Writing is a mediating practice. Literature, in turn, becomes a safe haven, a place where one 'can cherish the illusion that ... everything is under control' ("The Written and the Unwritten Word,' 38). To achieve this state of momentary bliss, however, the author must 'choose again a strategy' that will permit vital experience while ensuring personal survival. This is a lesson learned as a child when, because of a liberal and non-conformist upbringing, Calvino often found himself in awkward situations with respect to his peers. 'Non credo/ he states, che questo mi abbia nuociuto: ci si abitua ad avere ostinazione nelle proprie abitudini, a trovarsi isolati per motivi giusti, a sopportare il disagio che ne deriva, a trovare la linea giusta per mantenere posizioni che non sono condivise dai piu.7 I do not believe that this hurt me: one learns to persist in one's own habits, to find oneself isolated for just causes, and to bear the resultant discomfort, to find the proper way to maintain positions that are not shared by the majority.

These strategies, or rites of passage (written and unwritten) as the author calls them, guarantee a neutral arena where all the possibilities that have not come true are given a space to develop. Literature provides such a space. It guarantees an occasion for absorption and detachment, for reflection and growth.

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Calvino was not a stranger to such strategies. When speaking of his classificatory work with fables his emphasis is not on themes but on the method he used to complete the collection. The work involved comparing, classifying, ordering data, examining variants, developing schemes. The more the author submerged himself in his work, the more he was overtaken by a maniacal obsession to divine the essence of the symbols displayed before him. Captured, as he admits, within the tentacles of his work, 'il mio occhio si faceva - come dei maniaci d'una mostruosa acutezza' ('my eye became - like those of maniacs monstrously acute'). The activity triggers a familiar compulsion: Cosi, piu mi sospingevo nella mia immersione, piu il controllato distacco con cui m'ero tuffato cadeva, e mi sentivo ammirato e felice del viaggio, e la smania catalogatoria - maniaca e solitaria - veniva scalzata dal desiderio di comunicare agli altri le visioni insospettate che apparivano al mio sguardo. (Fiabe Italiane, 13) And so, the more I was driven to immerse myself in my work, the more the detached control with which I had plunged fell away, and I felt awe and happy with the trip, and the cataloguing mania - maniacal and solitary - was substituted with the desire to communicate to others the unsuspected visions that appeared before me.

These visions engender an irremovable creative urge to narrativize the visual impressions into a story. By inventing configurations that transformed the visual experience into verbal text, Calvino was able to decipher and explain the world of fable. Writing thus visualizes the world by creating it ex nihilo from the colours, traces, and letters of the alphabet. Just as the painter Paul Klee believed that the function of art was not to repeat visible things but rather to render things visible,8 Calvino's task was to assemble and reassemble the visual images engendered by this 'mondo subalterno' (Fiabe italiane [1956], 12; 'subaltern world') into a narrative. These are not expeditious tasks but cognitive operations that require discipline, constancy, and devotion. Just as a scientist isolates nature and its effects into salient packets of information, Calvino filters worldly experience into dynamic visual word packets that achieve significance. This is possible because thinking, indeed 'il cervello,' Calvino extemporizes in a review of a book dedicated to vision, L'occhio e I'idea (The Eye and the Idea) by Ruggero Pierantoni, 'comincia nell'occhio/9

Variations on a Theme 127 ('the brain begins in the eye'), adding immediately as if to emphasize his propensity towards this line of speculation: 'Quest'ultima frase la dico io e speriamo che sia giusta' (These are my words and I hope I'm correct'). As he states in another review of a popular science book by Renato Balbi and Rosellina Balbi, Lungo viaggio al centra del cervello (The Long Voyage to the Centre of the Brain), vision is the stimulus for learning and the prime for evolution: E in questa ricerca mi servo della vista, come gia gli scoiattoli dell'era paleocenica, quando comincio 1'apprendimento per quei nostro remoti progenitori arboricoli, cosi come per me quando avevo tra quattro e sei mesi.10 And in this search I use vision, just as squirrels from the Paleocene era, when learning began for those remote arboreal progenitors of ours, just as for me when I was between four and six months old. In this review the author describes the physiological processes involved in the construction of ideas as they pass through the various levels of the brain. Language is not indispensable to this process, though it never seems to enter the parameters of Calvino's views on the cognitive operations that constitute thinking. They are, instead, part of the residual effect, the reasoned end product of the idea, not the eidelon itself. Calvino writes of this logically layered process in the essay on 'Visibility' in Six Memosfor the Next Millennium: In devising a story, therefore, the first thing that comes to my mind is an image that for some reason strikes me as charged with meaning, even if I cannot formulate this meaning in discursive or conceptual terms. As soon as I set about developing it into a story; or better yet, it is the images themselves that develop their own implicit potentialities, the story they carry within them. Around each image others come into being, forming a field of analogies, symmetries, confrontations. Into the organization of this material, which is no longer purely visual but also conceptual, there now enters my deliberate intent to give order and sense to the development of the story; or rather, what I do is try to establish which meanings might be compatible with the overall design I wish to give the story and which meanings are not compatible, always leaving a certain margin of possible alternatives. At the same time, the writing, the verbal product, acquires increasing importance. I would say that from the moment I start

128 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures putting black on white, what really matters is the written word, first as a search for an equivalent of the visual image, then as a coherent development of the initial stylistic direction. Finally the written word little by little comes to dominate the field, from now on it will be the writing that guides the story toward the most felicitous verbal expression and the visual imagination has no choice but to tag along. (87) For the author, then, language is part of the process that has everything to do with writing and imagining, has almost nothing to do with inspiration, and is actively constructed through patient intellectual exercises (will return to this term shortly). In an interview with Ferdinando Camon, Calvino expressed a great diffidence towards words, especially those which are spoken: Dicevo di un disgusto fondamentale per la parola, per questa roba che esce dalla bocca, informe, molle molle ... Scrivere ha senso solo partendo da questa difh'denza per la parola, da questo disgusto ...n I was speaking of a fundamental disgust for the word, for this stuff that leaves the mouth, shapeless, mushy mushy ... Writing acquires a sense only if it grows from this diffidence for the word, from this disgust ... His primary love for the visual image as a vehicle of personal expression is a reaction to his own travail when confronted with the verbal act, be it spoken or written: lo ho un'enorme difficolta a esprimermi: a voce e un disastro, ma anche per iscritto ... E per questo che ho dovuto diventare scrittore, per questo bisogno che ho di riscrivere una frase quattro, cinque volte prima di trovare la forma giusta di dire una cosa, anche la piu semplice, questo bisogno di strappare fogli appena cominciati ...12 I have great difficulty expressing myself: aloud I'm a disaster, but even in writing ... It is for this reason that I had to become a writer, from this need that I have to rewrite a phrase four, five times before finding the right way to say something, even the most simple, this need to tear up just-begun sheets... When Calvino speaks of 'la pagina da voltare' (20; 'the page that needs to be turned') in the short story 'La strada di San Giovanni' he is

Variations on a Theme 129

searching for a leap of faith that will allow him to order, understand, and express the pandemonium of images that crowd his tormented ability to speak: 'Per me le cose erano mute. Le parole fluivano fluivano nella mia testa non ancorate a oggetti, ma ad emozioni fantasie presagi' (21; Tor me things were mute. Words flowed and flowed in my head without being anchored to objects but to emotions fantasies premonitions'). If only he could find a passage, a bridge 'che immette in un mondo dove tutte le parole e le figure diventassero vere, presenti, esperienza mia, non piu 1'eco di un'eco di un'eco' (20; 'that admits to a world where all words and images are real, present, my experience, no longer the echo of an echo of an echo'). That bridge is the site of writing, a place where, as Calvino states when quoting Douglas R. Hofstadter, inspiration is an iceberg, and where 'much of the source ... is deep, underwater, unseen' (Six Memosfor the Next Millennium, 87). Literature is thus a task, be it rational or fanciful, that has all the implications of labour, albeit one of love. One aspect of this task is its willed solitude. Writing entails an almost mystical retreat from the world's irrationality. It is a retreat involving rites that engender personal, and eventually worldly, renewal. These rites are 'passaggi obbligati' ('obligatory passages') to borrow the provisional title of the book Calvino was assembling at the time of his untimely death and which was posthumously published as La strada di San Giovanni (1990; The Road to San Giovanni).13 The autobiographical stories contained in this collection present chronological stages of personal and professional development in the life of the author. The shifting boundaries between these private inner realities relived as public outer events attest to the fact that instead of exorcising personal memories these stories create an objectified cultural construct (an object called Calvino) within a predetermined semantic system (a system called literature). This normative system provides an orderly medium through which the author may reinvigorate a dishevelled self. Since language is itself a set of perceptual, kinesthetic, and visual shapes, it may interact with images as part of a continuous field and provide the orderly, and eventually the controlling, component that arranges the flux of reality. Also, given that the raw material of the world is not packaged in neat dichotomies, language, as Rudolph Arnheim observes, 'supplies a clear-cut, distinct sign for each type and thereby encourages perceptual imagery to stabilize the inventory of visual concepts.'14 What is interesting here is that a prosthetic structure of rules is needed to ensure survival. These rules prescribe a formal exercising of the powers of observation and descrip-

130 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

tion. This permits the author to structure, through his words, the symbolic narratives of his own past15 or re-enact, through his polyvalent mnemonic strategies, the perceptual experiences that stimulate his visual field. The varco (exit from the labyrinth), often mentioned by both critics and the author himself (although it has never received sufficient attention), is part of this search for a bridge or passage between nodes of experience (real or imagined) that enact a self-sustaining cognitive loop programmed to be both flexible in its creative thrust and rigid in its vital performance. As Pietro Citati observes, la letteratura non risiedeva, per lui [Calvino}, in se stessa; c'era sempre un luogo, un aldila, un imprevisto, un caso, un azzardo, un dono, una speranza, una grazia, un enigma, un vuoto dal quale essa discendeva. Scrivere non era altro, per lui, che tendere verso questo luogo, che attendere questo luogo.16 literature did not reside, for him [Calvino], in itself; there was always a place, a hereafter, an unexpected, a chance, a risk, a gift, a hope, a grace, an enigma, an empty space from which it descended. Writing was nothing else, for him, than reaching for this place, waiting for this place.

Calvino's narrative tended towards this visual Otherness, a destination as distant as the realms he fathomed yet as close as the gliding of his pen on the paper void. This paradoxical search for an envisioned future self is not, to quote Douglas R. Hofstadter, 'a paradox at all, but a fundamental, simple fact about the mechanisms of intelligence.'17 The quest ended where it had begun, with Calvino's relationship with his father. The place, now, is the site of writing, the stable prototype of any redeeming interpretative act 'un gesto,' he says, 'di pacificazione col padre' (22; 'a reconciling gesture with the father'). Though it is true that Calvino insists on the primacy of the image in his world modelling, these images, whether mental (imagined) or real and relived in memory, essentially remain narrative pretexts for the quest towards selfhood. His strategy rested more on the technologies of the act of writing, which become a conduit for survival, rather than on any images. And yet, the fascination with imagery and images runs parallel to his development of a personal science of writing. The subliminal lure of imagery would eventually overcome his ekphrastic fear creating a visual rhetoric of considerable innovative import.

Variations on a Theme 131 Writing as Description In 1974 Calvino and Giambattista Salinari edited the anthology La lettura 3: Antologia per la scuola media.18 A specific section of this anthology entitled 'Osservare e descrivere' ('Observing and Describing') was personally edited by Calvino. The passages include: Lucretius: 'I granelli di polvere' ('Grains of Dust') J. Ruskin: 'Per disegnare le nuvole' ('Designing Clouds') L. da Vinci: 'II fuoco' ('Fire') A. Robbe-Grillet: 'Un pomodoro tagliato in quattro' ('A Tomato Cut in Four') G. Galilei: 'Un tramonto sul mare' ('Sunset at Sea') J. Conrad: 'Le ancore' ('Anchors') Alain: 'Gli utensili' ('Utensils') C. Cattaneo: 'Laghi e fiumi della Lombardia' ('Lakes and Rivers of Lombardy') C.E. Gadda: 'II risotto alia milanese' ('Risotto Milanese Style') L. Einaudi: 'Che cosa e un mercato' ('What is a Market') H. Melville: 'La coda della balena' ('The Whale's Tail') E. Cecchi: Tesci rossi' ('Red Fish') E. Hemingway: 'Un bastimento affondato' (The Sunken Ship') G. Caesar: 'Costruzione di macchine da assedio' ('Constructing Siege Machines') N. Machiavelli: 'Come si schiera un esercito in battaglia' ('How to Deploy an Army in Battle')

Each passage elaborates strategies for the performance of a task. Calvino's arrangement of these tasks moves the reader from the innocuous slicing of tomatoes to the vital displacement of soldiers, from the mundane to the vital. Though the subjects present a veritable potpourri of projects and styles, it is the logical arrangement of words that conjures a precise and unerring visual picture highly prized by the author-cum-editor. Lucretius's 'esattezza' ('exactness') and 'nitidezza' ('neatness') in describing 'immagini cosi' incorporee come uno spiraglio di luce nel buio e un turbine di corpuscoli appena percettibili che si muovono a caso' ('such bodiless images as a gleam of light in the dark and a whirl of barely perceptible corpuscles that move about by chance,' 162), fascinate the author. Ruskin's passage is 'un corso di disegno per princip-

132 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures ianti, sotto forma di lettere' (163; 'a beginner's course in design, under the guise of words'); Robbe-Grillet's prose is only 'apparentemente elementare, in realta studiatissimo' (167; 'apparently elementary, but in reality very studied'); special praise is reserved for a past mentor, Joseph Conrad: fu anche un uomo per cui ogni operazione che si compie a bordo era una prova di valore morale, e la forma d'ogni strumento nautico era un modello di perfezione, come un'opera d'arte. Non solo: uno dei punti d'onore dello scrittore Conrad ... e la precisione del linguaggio, e non a caso: la vita marinara richiede un'esatta terminologia che spesso chi vive sulla terraferma non sospetta. (170) he was also a man for which every operation that was done on board was a test of moral valour, and the shape of each nautical instrument was a model of perfection, like a work of art. Not only: one of the points of honour for Conrad the writer ... is precision of language, and not by chance: a seaman's life requires exact terminology that those who live on dry land do not suspect. In Alain's description of utensils 'ogni semplice gesto si carica di significato morale' (176; 'each simple gesture is loaded with moral significance'). Nature as a theme is elevated to scientific inquiry in Cattaneo: la carta geografica si anima, i fiumi che escono dai laghi portano acque diverse da quelli che scendono direttamente dalle montagne, ogni segno e ogni dato numerico richiede precisazioni sul clima e le piogge e le stagioni per acquistare significato in rapporto al paesaggio e alle forme di vita, la natura non e qualcosa di immobile ma richiama a riflettere sul suo passato... (178) the geographic map becomes animated, rivers that flow from lakes carry different waters from those that descend directly from the mountains, each sign and each number requires precise facts concerning climate and rainfall and weather in order to acquire significance in light of the landscape and other forms of life, Nature is not an immobile thing but it causes us to reflect upon its past... Gadda merits the epithet 'bizzarre' ('bizarre') for his humorously rich 'precisione terminologica e tecnica [e] amore per gli oggetti e i gesti piu

Variations on a Theme 133

quotidian! della cucina' (182; 'terminological precision [and] love of objects and the most quotidian of kitchen routines'): Come definire la consistenza del riso a giusta cottura? Gadda dice - e non potrebbe esser detto meglio e con piu spirito - che ogni chicco deve mantenere la sua «personalita». (182) How to define the proper consistence of cooked rice? Gadda says - and it could not be said any better or with more wit - that every grain must maintain its own 'personality.'

Machiavelli's 'spirito di classificazione' (201; 'classificatory spirit') and 'capacita d'enunciare massime e regole general!' ('ability to pronounce general rules and maxims') closes the section by adumbrating a typically Calvinesque image: D'ogni situazione Machiavelli enumera ed esemplifica i vari casi: il suo freddo sguardo si posa sulle vicende piu tragiche e ne stabilisce le leggi interne, le regole del gioco che in esse sono implicite, come fossero mosse di pezzi su di una scacchiera. (201) In each situation Machiavelli enumerates and exemplifies various cases: his cold gaze falls on the most tragic events and ascertains its internal rules along with the rules of the games that they imply, as if they were pieces on a chessboard.

These few examples serve up a stew of exciting commentary offered by an equally excited author. Calvino's goal is to familiarize students with the conventions writers follow to construct their worlds. Once again, literature is presented as a formal praxis instead of a purely inspirational activity, an operation that does not end when a phrase has neared perfection, nor when a story has found a conclusion. Instead, it requires guided value judgments, an informed consensus of views, acquired skills that vitalize the subject, whatever that subject may be. The passages cited in the school anthology are particularly revealing because they comprise a notebook of readerly expectations, writerly admirations, and personal ambitions. As examples of style they represent a veritable 'Do it yourself of literary description. One notes the refinement of choice and the variety of approaches each passage elucidates. All share, however, the common store of visual experience. Their

134 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

project of eidetic reduction, of concentrating on an intellectual observation of the object and its workings, is not inconsistent with Calvino's own phenomenological project. What's more, the authors chosen are particularly remembered for their pictorially evocative techniques, ekphrastic attitude, and historiographic imagination. Their writing mirrors picturing and is consistent with Hermogenes of Tarsus's definition of ekphrasis: Ekphrasis is an account with detail; it is visible, so to speak, and brings before the eyes that which is to be shown. Ekphrases are of people, actions, times, places, seasons, and many other things ... The special virtues of ekphrasis are clarity and visibility; the style must contrive to bring about seeing through hearing. However, it is equally important that expression should fit the subject; if the subject is florid, let the style be florid too, and if the subject is dry, let the style be the same.19

Ekphrasis becomes a metaphor for the shaping of language into descriptive patterns that breathe life into verbal representation. As seeing becomes telling, description elides into demonstration. Both the visual and the descriptive mechanics of the process demand attention. Just as Calvino would admonish Italians to 'leggere i classici' ('read the classics'), to create 'una biblioteca ideale dei nostri classici' ('an ideal library of our classics'), and to 'leggere' and 'rileggere' ('read' and 'reread') the same vital books, one can imagine Calvino reading and rereading these passages in order to relearn his own descriptive lessons well.20 Years later, in an interview with Walter Mauro, Calvino will recall similar textual operations that constructed the book Palomar. After having laboured over the individual stories for ten years, some written during his work on the anthology, he retraces his thought processes: Un giorno ne faro un libro, mi dicevo, ma come fame un libro: cercavo di raggrupparli per categorie e al momento in cui mi son deciso dapprima ho aggiunto molti prezzi, poi ho cominciato a toglierli. Sulla base di quello che avevo scritto ho create delle categorie, delle serie, dei gruppetti ... La mia prima ambizione era di fare una specie di enciclopedia, ma poi ho preferito concentrare il libro sui pezzi piu descrittivi.21 One day I will make a book of them, I would say to myself, but how to make this book: I tried to group them in categories and at the moment I

Variations on a Theme 135 decided I began to add many pieces, then I began to eliminate them. On the basis of what I had written I created categories, series, groupings ... My first ambition was to make a type of encyclopedia, but then I decided to base the book on the more descriptive passages.

Palomar is an important text for it crowns this maniacal mantra in the author for precise and minutely elaborated renderings of reality. As he states in an article written on the occasion of its publication: La descrizione e un procedimento letterario che si e un po' perso nella letteratura di questo secolo, ma da parecchi anni mi sono interessato al tema della descrizione, anche attraverso la lettura di scrittori come ad esempio Francis Ponge, il poeta francese autore di // partito preso delle cose. E ho provato a costruire delle descrizioni che diventassero racconto ponendomi sempre 1'ossessione della completezza. Description is a literary procedure that has been lost in the literature of this century, but for several years I have been interested in the theme of description, even through reading writers such as Francis Ponge, the French poet of // partito preso delle cose. And I have tried to construct descriptions that could become a story all the while paying special attention to my obsession for completeness.

Palomar was approached with a deep sense of humility and a sense of apprenticeship: in questo libro ho scelto la descrizione, che presuppone una modestia, una umilta dinanzi a cio che si vede. Ho incominciato a fare esercizi di tipo descrittivo, nel senso elementare della parola, elementare da scuola elementare. in this book I have chosen description: this presupposes a modesty, a humility before that which is seen. I began to do exercises of a descriptive nature, in the elementary sense of the word, elementary as in elementary school.

Calvino was deeply influenced by these practitioners of ekphrasis. They are constantly referred to as his fonts of inspiration. In a brief introductory piece to this section of the anthology, Calvino states that these passages 'ci mostrano come il desiderio di conoscere trovi nello

136 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

scrivere un modo di realizzarsi' (364; 'demonstrate how the desire to know finds its realization in writing'). Precise methods of observation and description thus enlist a continuity between the object described and the describer. These schoolboy exercises permit a recovery of both the abstract notions one devises and the tangible contours and shadows one perceives in the object: the ephemeral image represented in the word. Through writing, Calvino recovers both the abstract visual experience (seeing with the mind's eye) and the tangible act of vision (seeing the written text). The epistemological basis for the project is a cognitive process that literally builds the image to the degree that it is able to replace the original site with inspired imagination. In other words, it replaces what is seen in the mind's eye with the building blocks of the alphabet. The operations involved in this process are not dissimilar to the aesthetic sensibilities that inform the construction of literary tropes. Like the progymnasmata, a series of school boy exercises designed to cultivate proficiency in rhetorical skills of ascending difficulty, Calvino's self-imposed observational and descriptive exercises depend upon the position of the narrator as an eyewitness. By focusing on the perceptual requisites necessary to the skills of observation and description, Calvino artfully draws attention to the technical and material limitations inherent in the verbal medium. It is significant that once again Calvino views literature as a site of personal trial and that observation and description are the training ground. In 'Osservare e descrivere' he asserts that 'E' in questo sforzo, in questi passi successivi che compiamo verso 1'esattezza, la vera lezione che possiamo ricavare da queste pagine' (364; 'It is in these efforts, in these successive steps that we make towards exactness, that we find the true lesson that may be drawn from these pages'). Speaking of Calvino's penchant for analysis Gianni Vattimo states that the ruminations of Palomar rivela il vero significato dell'atteggiamento analitico e 'razionale' di Calvino: la sempre piu netta esemplificazione della letteratura con una attenzione che ha piuttosto il senso di un' 'ascesi' che non quello di una ricerca di obiettivita.23 reveal the real significance of Calvino's analytical and 'rational' attitude: the increasingly neat illustration of literature with an alertness that shows a sense of an askesis rather than a search for objectivity.

Variations on a Theme 137 As a privileged place literature endows imaginative acts and imagination with notions of self-realization, of revelation, of transformation. The author's perennial search for objectivity, for Vattimo, must be seen as 'un esercizio di 'ascesi' in cui il soggetto mette in gioco anzitutto se stesso' (97; 'an askesis in which the subject puts himself on the line first of all'). Writing reveals the soul of the author moving him, as it does, from the fiction of reality into the reality of fiction.24 Calvino speaks of this magical, mythical, even mystical process in his essay on visibility in Six Memosfor the Next Millennium. He cites The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius and indeed much can be said of the intensely wilful program of the saint and Calvino's own stoic style of personal exactitude. The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius are an energetic program of activity that engage the believer in a series of immanent self-explorations. When rigorously followed they provide an opportunity for developing ascetic spiritual stamina. It could be argued that Calvino is attracted to the Spiritual Exercises because they are reminiscent of the intellectual rigour that characterized his education and upbringing. It could be construed that they were interpreted with the same ardour as Antonio Gramsci's call to self-sacrifice and social responsibility, the type of seminal fortitude he then translated in the 1955 essay 'II midollo del leone.' Indeed, although composed with very different philosophical and social values in mind, both cultural projects suggest the creation of a renewed individual achieved through a progressive and constructive cognitive process. In the Spiritual Exercises, ample weight is given to the construction of the individual through a visual framework. Calvino admires the revolutionary import of the saint's method, stating: 'What I think distinguishes Loyola's procedure, even with regard to the forms of devotion of his own time, is the shift from the word to the visual image as a way of attaining knowledge of the most profound meaning' (86). Loyola appeals to Calvino's super-intellectual sensibilities. He is attracted, no doubt, to the saint's transformation of a logo-theistic doctrine into an imagotheistic experience. From the preponderance of sensual details to the notion that the believer is called upon to 'paint frescoes crowded with figures on the walls of the mind' after having been stimulated by 'a laconic verse from the gospels' (86), the purposeful and regimented step-by-step meditative process of the Spiritual Exercises is similar to Calvino's own systematic and wilful shift from the word to the visual image.

138 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

In Loyola, blind faith is displaced by language; these discreet signs, in turn, conjure a picture in the mind that ultimately leads to spirituality. In Calvino, the real world is displaced by myth; these image-laden signs, in turn, conjure pictures in the mind that compel the author to de-scribe them with words. When Calvino speculates on the source of these pictures he quotes Dante, Purgatorio XVII.25, in which images rain directly into the mind from the heavens. These images acquire form, they are reconstructed in the words the poet uses to convey 'the visual part of his fantasy' that Calvino feels 'precedes or is simultaneous with verbal imagination' (83). In this same essay Calvino ponders on the faculty of imagination. He examines the philosophy of Jean Starobinsky and considers the philosopher's views on the roles of imagination as either 'an instrument of knowledge or as identification with the world soul' (90). Calvino admits an affinity with the second position, although he adds that he is also a determined believer that a story 'is the union of a spontaneous logic of images and a plan carried out on the basis of a rational intention' (91). Calvino's intention is to rationally display the 'spontaneous logic of images' as a carefully considered and elaborate plan subordinated to writing. This is precisely why his writing displays extraordinary skills of analysis, comparison, perception, and organization. It is not, however, automatically so. Calvino once stated that 'Scrivere e una gran fatica. E' 1'aver scritto che da soddisfazione, non 1'atto di scrivere in se'25 ('Writing is great labour. It is having written that is satisfying, not the act of writing itself). He has described the woes of an easily distracted, lateral-thinking intellectual working in a message-saturated world in the short story 'La poubelle agreee':26 Scrivere e dispossessarsi non meno che il buttar via, e allontanare da me un mucchio di fogli appallottolati e una pila di fogli scritti fino in fondo, gli uni e gli altri non piu miei, deposti, espulsi. Writing, no less than throwing things away, involves dispossession, involves pushing away from myself a heap of crumpled-up paper and a pile of paper written all over, neither of the two being any longer mine, but deposited, expelled.

His wife spoke of this habit of list making, stating that 'Antes de morir dejo un folio escrito donde explica todos sus proyectos'27 ('Before dying he left a written sheet of paper explaining all of his projects'). In

Variations on a Theme 139

another interview she produced a grey folder full of snippets of collected clippings: I foglietti sono di varia foggia e natura: un invito a un convegno o a una mostra, un lembo di giornale, una pagina di taccuino. Vi sono annotate citazioni da Nietzsche, Borges, Corbin, Huxley, Poe, Buffon, Whitehead, Freud, Prigognine, Lucrezio, Leiris ... Era una cartellina che doveva servire a un racconto che non e stato scritto.28 The small sheets are of various nature: an invitation to a convention or to an exhibit, a strip of newspaper, a notebook page. There are annotated quotations from Nietzsche, Borges, Corbin, Huxley, Poe, Buffon, Whitehead, Freud, Progognine, Lucretius, Leiris ... It was a folder for a story that was never written.

Calvino partially resolved this diurnal need by continually compiling a prolific abundance of lists: Solo resta a me e m'appartiene un foglio costellato d'appunti sparsi, in cui durante gli ultimi anni sono andato segnando sotto il titolo La poubelle agreee le idee che mi affioravano alia mente e che mi proponevo di svolgere in distesa scrittura, tema della purificazione delle scorie il buttar via e complementare dell'appropriazione inferno d'un mondo in cui non fosse buttato via niente si e quel che non si butta via identificazione di se stessi spazzatura come autobiografia soddisfazione del consumo defecazione tema della materialita, del rifarsi, mondo agricolo la cucina e la scrittura autobiografia come spazzatura il trasmettere per conservare e altre note ancora delle quali adesso non riesco a ricostruire il filo, il ragionamento che le legava, tema della memoria espulsione della memoria memoria perduta il conservare e il perdere do che e perduto do che non si e avuto do che si e avuto in ritardo do che d portiamo dietro do che non ci appartiene il vivere senza portarsi dietro niente (animale): d si porta dietro forse di piii il vivere per I'opera: ci si perde: c'e I'opera inservibile, non ci sono piu io. (115-16) All that's left to me and belongs to me is a sheet of paper dotted with a few sparse notes, on which over the last few years under the title La Pou belle Agreee I have been jotting down the ideas that cropped up in my mind and that I planned to develop at length in writing, theme of purification of dross throwing away is complementry to appropriating the hell of a world where nothing is thrown away one is what one does not throw away identification

140 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures of oneself rubbish as autobiography satisfaction of consumption defecation theme of materiality, of starting again, agricultural world cooking and writing autobiography as refuse transmission for preservation and still other notes whose thread and connective reasoning I can no longer make out, theme of memory expulsion of memory lost memory preserving and losing what is lost what one hasn't had what one had too late what we carry around from the past what does not belong to us living without carrying around any thing from the past (animal): perhaps one carries around more living for the work one produces; one loses oneself: there is the work that doesn't work, I am no longer there. (125-6) For Gerald Grow, list making is typical of people who think in images. Indeed, 'the words of visual thinkers often make more sense if you consider them not as the exposition of a verbal, logical idea, but as labels for unseen pictures/29 To write, and write legibly for Calvino, is not a natural act but a task achieved through deliberate exercises that conjure visual realities. The task is not so much a problem of choosing words but of finding those words 'that trigger an invasive analytical consciousness which imposes combative categories upon activities which function much better as unverbalized skills or feelings.'30 For these reasons, Calvino developed a hyperliterate style of tightly logical and expository prose projected on an image-oriented ground. This results in passages that stack and layer detail upon detail, making many elements appear all at once, just as they do when they are initially perceived. Take, for example, the passage below. It is a wideangle panoramic shot in which several scenes (seens) are simultaneously displayed: Incontrammo delle donne anziane che portavano grandi ceste in bilico sul capo posate sopra un cercine - camminavano immobili, col torso fermo sulle reni, gli occhi bassi -; e da un giardino di monache un gruppo di ragazze cucitrici corsero a una ringhiera per vedere un rospo in una vasca e dissero': - Oh che angoscia -; e dietro un cancello, sotto un glicine, delle giovinette biancovestite facevano giocare con un pallone da spiaggia un cieco; e un ragazzo mezzo nudo e barbuto coi capelli fino alle spalle, coglieva i fichi d'India con una canna aperta a forchetta da una vecchia pianta irta di spine lunghe e candide; e i bambini d'una casa ricca, tristi e occhialuti, facevano bolle di sapone alia finestra; ed era 1'ora che ai vecchi del ricovero suona la ritirata e salivano per quelle scale 1'uno dietro 1'altro col bastone, con la paglietta in capo, parlando ciascuno per suo conto; e allora dei due operai del telefono quello che teneva la scala disse a quello

Variations on a Theme 141 controluce sui fili: - Scendi, e ora, domani finiremo. (La formica argentina, 126) We met old women balancing great baskets resting on head pads, walking rigidly with straight backs and lowered eyes; and in a nuns' garden a group of sewing girls ran along a railing to see a toad in a basin and said: 'How awful!'; and behind an iron gate, under the wistaria, some young girls dressed in white were throwing a beach ball to and fro with a blind man; and a half-naked youth with a beard and hair down to his shoulders was gathering prickly pears from an old cactus with a forked stick; and sad and spectacled children were making soap bubbles at the window of a rich house; it was the hour when the bell sounded in the old folks' home and they began climbing up the steps, one behind the other with their sticks, their straw hats on their heads, each talking to himself; and then there were two telephone workers, and one was holding a ladder and saying to the other on the pole: 'Come on down, time's up, we'll finish the job tomorrow.' (180)

The individual visual micropackets are temporally connected, suspended in time at 'the hour when the bell sounded/ Similarly, the following passage extends details into an expanding and open-ended memory crescendo that moves the reader-observer away from the particular scene and towards infinity: io ricordo il mio paese seminato dal vento in riva al mare, con case una a monte 1'altra a valle, e in mezzo il vento che scende e sale, e vie a gradini e a ciottoli, e squarci di cielo azzurro e ventoso sopra i vicoli. E casa mia con le persiane che sbattono, le palme che gemono alle finestre, e la voce di mio padre che grida in cima alia collina. ('Vento in una citta/ 63)31 I remember my town sown with wind from the sea coast, with houses high and low, and in between the wind that raised and lowered, and streets of stairs and of cobblestones, and slices of blue sky windy above the alleys. And my house with its slamming shutters, the trembling palms at the windows, and my father's voice that screams at the top of the hill.

Though it is the sense of hearing that unites the scene, the sense of vision dominates the emerging picture: the father's voice at the end of the passage can be seen as it moves over the valley and enters the house. Leading the reader through the individual scenes as if they were dis-

142 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

played on a grand glass mosaic, the images form a simultaneous, allencompassing scenario of life. The lightness of the passage is conveyed through the intangible yet sensually palpable essences of 'slices of blue sky/ 'trembling palms/ 'my father's voice.' Such examples are numerous and intensify as we approach the sense-motivated tales of Sotto il sole giaguaro. However, as early as La formica argentina and even in several of his earliest prose pieces now published in Prima che tu dica 'Pronto/ methodical, even obsessive, self-indulgent descriptions that create visual tableaus are notable. This stacking technique reconstitutes objects and scenes at the same time that it recreates and legitimizes the observing self. As sensations are noted impressions are recorded; these impressions are stored, then manipulated by a wordy medium that pulverizes, disassembles, and hyperscrutinizes reality in an attempt to achieve a figurative presence within the text. An overlapping effect is created that establishes a multidimensional network of words; it is as if the page of print had the capabilities of hypertext or at least of the multiplicity inherent in myths and dreams. Unlike visual thinkers whose descriptive abilities tend to produce static rhetoric (this is one of the points argued by Lessing) Calvino is able to relate the disparate images that appear in his mind to a central pattern that ensures a narrative coherence. As the images coalesce and crystallize, a term Calvino uses in Six Memosfor the Next Millennium when referring to his tendency to prefer combinatory systems, the stories almost generate themselves. As the author weaves a web ('a vast net' ['Multiplicity/ Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 124]) that entraps him and the reader within its intersecting lines (always bound to rules that ensure safe haven in the realm of literature) he simultaneously provides the perfect controlling mechanism (therefore a source of inspiration) for his imagination. It's all a balancing act, a selfsustaining dance that wills its own survival. We are reminded of the well-known oppositional binary prototype of the cloven viscount. The author comments on his creation: Cosi la storia s'organizzava su se stessa secondo uno schema perfettamente geometrico. E i critici potevano cominciare ad andare su una falsa strada: dicendo che quel che mi stava a cuore era il problema del bene e del male. No, non mi stava a cuore per niente, non avevo pensato neanche per un minuto al bene e al male. (Note to / nostri antenati, 355) In this way the story arranged itself around a geometric scheme. And crit-

Variations on a Theme 143 ics could begin walking a false path: stating that that which interested me was the problem of good and evil. No, I wasn't interested at all, I hadn't thought about good or evil for a single moment. It is not the story or the possible interpretations that move the author's pen, but the inventive, analytical, creative process and organizational skills, the aplomb required to invent and sustain a difficult visual paradigm. In this sense, it could be said that Calvino writes as if he were perpetuating a preverbalized thought that is not yet ripe for communication but must somehow be sequenced into a literate visual model.32 Because words are a facet and not the end to this thinking, his writing is paratactic, lacks connectives, transitional words and phrases that would serve to interlock the elements intratextually, as well as intertextually, into temporal macrosequences. Instead, one notes a freehold juxtapositioning of textual properties that are pieced together in a natural ritual of pragmatic speech acts. First, these descriptive moments assemble a short story. These are then sequenced to form a series of thematically similar, I will call them micropropositions (a series of similar stories), then a macroseries of micropropositions (a series of similar series) which may evolve to form a text of similarly structured and thematically parallel collections33 (e.g., Le cosmicomiche, ti con zero, Cosmicomiche vecchie e nuove, La memoria del mondo). At the end of any of these creative and editorial stages, a spatial pattern, be it mathematical, geometric, analytical, or sensual, emerges. As this editorial processing becomes evermore elaborate, even more refined, Calvino's skills as a visual bricoleur fuse the elements of story, context, process into a fullfledged narrative experience that is the hallmark of Calvino's career. As a writer he is an empiricist, writing and rewriting his stories over a number of years, lining up similar stories to arrive at systemic solutions. The entire process is a normative one derived explicitly from systemic reflection of an epistemological order. Once a topos is chosen, Calvino conceives the discourse as a set of rules of language, of modes of expression, of norms of action. Fantasy and folklore also make use of striking visual symbols developed through culturally determined iconographic elaboration. These symbols develop tightly coherent, always self-referential, contexts. Even the most bizarre associations are detailed in fantastically organized visual systems. This is what attracts Calvino. He describes this alluring visualizing effect in the article 'Cybernetics and Ghosts.' What's more, these cultural icons are conditioned by mnemonic pat-

144 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

terns that give them a formulary character not unlike Calvino's early writings.34 This is why he is so attracted to patterned spatial expressions such as maps, symbols, pictures, and labyrinths. While only experimenting with the possibility of incorporating these fantasy symbols into his stories at the beginning of his career, especially the heraldic trilogy, Calvino eventually makes the visual pattern itself the story. Especially noteworthy are the short OuLiPoian inventions now collected in Romanzi e racconti III, as well as the longer pieces // castello del destini incrociati and Le citta invisibili. Visual orderliness, balance, proportion, design, as well as analytical perception and a commitment to a particular strategy are part of Calvino's program of constant possibilities. Within this program, writing is seen as a planned and secure means to a predetermined rationalized end: Ogni volta che tento un libro devo giustificarlo con un progetto, un programma, di cui vedo subito le limitazioni. Allora lo affianco con un altro progetto, molti progetti, e finisce che mi blocco. Ogni volta, insieme al libro da scrivere debbo inventarmi 1'autore che lo scrive, un tipo di scrittore diverse da me e da tutti gli altri di cui vedo bene i limiti ...35 Each time that I attempt a book I must justify it with a plan of work, a program. I immediately envision limitations. I therefore support it with another project, many projects, and at this point I freeze. Each time, along with the book to be written I must invent for myself an author that will write it, a type of writer different from me and from all others whose limits I recognize...

The eternal polarity between the real and the imagined, thought and process, is thus partially resolved through writing because the grapheme exhibits a polyphonic symphony of visual and perceived, temporal and spatial experience. Writing is a hybrid and ultimately paradoxical phenomenon, capable of animating a static world through exhilarating description while simultaneously arresting experience through its static visual presence on the page. Because language is the fabric of a text, the literal adventure contained within its pages is recoverable through reading. But because the text is also a language that transforms the world, visually imagining what is read is the key to any interpretation. Here is where the Spiritual Exercises become important.

Variations on a Theme 145 Writing as Eskesis

For the purpose of my argument, I am assuming a synergism between the exercises described by Loyola and the writing process as practised by Calvino. Both involve a program of conceptual self-awareness that offers opportunities, Calvino once stated, for an 'autocostruzione interiore' ('interior self-construction') that may eventually lead to a 'completezza umana' ('human wholeness'). Non credo a nessuna liberazione ne individuale ne collettiva che si ottenga senza il costo d'un'autodisciplina, di un'autocostruzione, d'uno sforzo.36 I do not believe that any form of liberation, be it individual or collective, can be achieved without the price of self-discipline, self-construction, and effort.

The sensitization to life and to oneself that takes place through an act of self-discipline, self-reflection, and self-construction transforms the meditative experience into willed recuperative acts. These difficult acts are fully determinative and open horizons already present in the psyche but which have remained beneath the threshold of articulation. A process such as imagining, whether it involves words or images, is both fully predetermined and predeterminative; it is innovative as it renews, through mnenomic recovery, latent human sensations: Le storie che m'interessa di raccontare sono sempre storie di ricerca d'una completezza umana, d'una integrazione da raggiungere attraverso prove pratiche e morali insieme, al di la delle alienazioni e dei dimidiamenti che vengono imposti all'uomo contemporaneo.37 The stories that I am interested in telling are always stories that seek human completeness, of an integration that is achieved through practical and moral trials, and that go beyond the alienation and divisions that are imposed upon contemporary man.

What the author is really alluding to in this passage is the act of witnessing, be it a moral witnessing for Christ, as in the case of Loyola, or,

146 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures in the case of Calvino, a literal witnessing of history to posterity. Writing becomes a moral act towards humanity. Calvino often bemoaned the loss of man's ability to reconstruct the world through the senses: Da un po' di tempo mi interrogo sulla decadenza dei sensi. L'uomo moderno percepisce alcune cose ma non ne capta altre: 1'olfatto e atrofizzato, il gusto e limitato a una gamma di sensazioni ristrette. Quanto alia vista, abituata com'e a leggere e a interpretare immagini fabbricate, essa non ha piu quella capacita di distinguere dettagli, tracce, indizi, come certamente aveva 1'uomo della tribu. Su questi temi vorrei lavorare, ma non so ancora che cosa faro.38 I have been asking myself for some time about the decadence of our senses. Modern man perceives some things but misses others: Our olfactory has atrophied, taste is limited to a restricted range of sensations. As for vision, accustomed as it is to reading and interpreting fabricated images, it no longer has that capacity to distinguish details, traces, clues, as most certainly primitive man had. I would like to work on these themes, but I do not as yet know what I will make of them. The author would have agreed with Diane Ackerman's statement that 'The senses don't just make sense of life in bold or subtle acts of clarity, they tear reality apart into vibrant morsels and reassemble them into a meaningful pattern/39 Understanding, then, is always a matter of comprehending past and present sensations, of the ability to reassemble separate and often fragmented sensory information. Calvino will selectively address these issues in a series of stories dedicated to the senses, Sotto il sole giaguaro. For the moment, he is still primarily concerned with the many social relationships to be understood with respect to the construction of a visually oriented culture: Insomma la mia idea e sempre stata di partecipare a costruire un contesto culturale che risponda alle esigenze d'una Italia moderna e in cui la letteratura costituisca una forza innovatrice e il deposito delle ragioni piu profonde.40 In short, my idea has always been to participate in the construction of a cultural context that responds to the needs of a modern Italy in which lit-

Variations on a Theme 147 erature constitutes an innovative force as well as the repository of the most profound considerations.

Towards this end, literature assumes the characteristics of a deliberate exercise. Through a stepwise ascent from level to level a sensory experience is scrutinized, meditated upon, memorized. Writing becomes a recording activity suffused with a sense of Offentlichkeit (finding a public) that allows the author first to reconcile himself within the bosom of the community and second to heal himself within the body of the text. This is achieved 'attraverso prove pratiche e morali insieme' ('through practical and moral trials') and the construction of a writing style. This style 'non e sovrapposizione d'una cifra e d'un gusto ma scelta d'un sistema di coordinate essenziale per esprimere il nostro rapporto col mondo' (my emphasis)41 ('is not the overlayering of a code and a preference but the selection of a system of essential coordinates that express our rapport with the world'). There is an insistence on direct experience, a unity between sensual perception (tangibility) and mental conception (abstraction) which suggests that intelligent understanding takes place within the realm of the visually (sensorially) demonstrable. From this perspective springs, according to Claude Gandelman, a Lacanian 'scopic pulsion'42 that we may equate with a physical touching that, as in the case of the blind, permits visual recognition.43 On the level of artistic production, there are two fundamental categories of seeing. One is the optical. This consists, according to Alois Riegl, in that type of seeing that recognizes outlines and shapes.44 The opposite type of seeing emphasizes the value of the surface of things; it is sensually oriented. This is haptic vision (from the Greek haptein, to seize or grasp); it derives its pleasures from textures, pattern recognition, contextualization. Purely optical vision is usually devoid of any synesthetic sense. Haptic vision, instead, is apperceptive and results in succeeding acts of evaluation and projection. This provides another point of contact with Loyola's Spiritual Exercises. From a distributive perspective, Calvino is enthralled by the saint's focus on selective images that emanate from the materiality of discrete verbal signs. It is precisely this emphasis on imaging, this elevation of the faculty of imagining that attracts the author. Long a propounder of eiditic insight, for Calvino visual imagination is the primary form of world transformation. It is an agent of metamorphosis, a tool for description, the ultimate gesture of world formation: 'Still there is another defini-

148 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

tion in which I recognize myself fully, and that is the imagination as a repertory of what is potential, what is hypothetical, of what does not exist and has never existed, and perhaps will never exist but might have existed' ('Visibility,' 91). These reified images draw attention to themselves and force a new reading of what suddenly appears as totally strange. Imagining and writing, like observing and describing, are paradigmatic topoi of abstraction and physical tangibility. They are a means to achieve an end and should not be considered for their own sake but insofar as they contribute to a pre-established goal. The Spiritual Exercises also proceed not by abstract conjecture but rather by bringing about a new visual articulation of language through the creation of pristine images in the mind: 'What I think distinguishes Loyola's procedure, even with regard to the forms of devotion of his own time, is the shift from the word to the visual image as a way of attaining knowledge of the most profound meaning. Here too the point of departure and the point of arrival are already established, but in the middle there opens up a field of infinite possibilities in the application of the individual imagination, in how one depicts characters, places, and scenes in motion' (86). The visible, in this sense, is the crucible of intelligence. With Loyola, Christ and the mysteries of Faith are visible and at the origin of the intelligible; for Calvino, the intelligible is the result of an externalization of his fantasies, be they visible, auditive, olfactory, or tactile, through language. Fantasy, or at least Calvino's conception of the term, ensures a Loyolian form of visual alterity. It supplies a distance, a different visual vividness that allows the diversity that stimulates ideas. i termini fantasia e fantastico non implicano ... tuffo del lettore nella corrente emozionale del testo; implicano al contrario una presa di distanza, una levitazione, 1'accettazione d'un'altra logica che porta su altri oggetti e altri nessi da quelli deU'esperienza quotidiana (o dalle convenzioni letterarie dominanti).45 the words fantasia and fantastico by no means involve this leap on the part of the reader into the emotional flood of the text. On the contrary, they imply a detachment, a levitation, the acceptance of a different logic based on objects and connections other than those of everyday life or the dominant literary conventions. (72)

Variations on a Theme 149 The Latin meaning of the word fantasy (phantasia, ideas or notions) connects our discussion to the visual concepts that reside somewhere in the mind as mental images. Its Greek sense (phainein, a making visible, to show) introduces an active notion of imagining. Fantasy is thus to be understood as something quite different from abstract imagination. It is instead an active power of elaboration, something that demonstrates with pictures, facsimiles, images and includes the operations of analysis, synthesis, comparison, combination, and putting into context. The fantasy aspect of Calvino's narrative is embodied in the visuality of the phantasma. Thus it is not just the thematic scope of his narrative that renders it fantastic but indeed the visual constancy of his imagination, as well as the way Calvino hypothesizes new possible world prototypes. These entiae rationis are abstract notions freely constructed by the human mind and called into existence through the power of language. Calvino had always been interested in how an event in reality is registered - first as a relatively close match to what the senses might actually see or hear or feel on a physical level, and second, how these sensations are transformed into a more reliable and patterned visual code. In Chapter 9 of his first novel, // sentiero dei nidi di ragno, for example, he revealed an inherent faith in science by stating that the answers to man's woes are not to be found in ideological canons but in the codified genetic patterns that create life. Years later, in an article entitled 'Che testa!'46 he reproduced pages from an imaginary personal diary in which he classified the sensory perceptions he experienced while strolling through the streets of Rome. Subtending his discourse with information appraised from Balbi's Lungo viaggio al centro del cervello,47 everything from the smell of coffee to spontaneous memories to the subliminal programming of one choice of beer over another is localized in specific loci and levels (which are strikingly similar to the ascending nature of the Spiritual Exercises of Loyola) of brain consciousness. As the author moves from sensory fact (paying for a coffee before consuming it) to philosophical speculation (this presupposes a projection of the self into the future) to scientific hypothesis (the concept of a possible future is located at level 15 in the brain) possible worlds are generated and distilled into narrative. These observations are similar in many ways to Palomar's idiosyncratic speculations on the nature and interrelatedness of things. The world, it would seem, is ultimately nothing more than a reconstructed physical perception replete with memories, emotions, and active visual spaces.48

150 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures Such fantasies, or visual mental spaces, dominate all the conceptual constructs of Calvino's narrative. His stories are awash with different kinds of entity-invoking fields that implicate symmetry and enfold protagonists into 'explicate orders of manifestation.'49 All of his characters must contend with a vast and infinite configuration of things and accept almost any type of consciousness that is possible. They are at odds with their immediate environment and often induce a mental projection (a mask or role as in Gli amori difficili) of possible tangential realities (new visual orders) to survive. In // cavaliere inesistente the realm is both geometric, envisioned by Agilulfo in the diffused light of dawn, and verbal, literally written by Bradamante-Suor Teodora; in Le cosmicomiche and Ti con zero the realm is scientific, based upon the infinite combinations of DNA as well as other scientific hypotheses and theories such as Bubble's Big Bang Theory, Darwinian evolution, and so forth; in Le citta invisibili and // castello del destini incrociati an architectonic solidity is achieved through rigorous language games, while in Palomar layers of thought build a philosophical palace of fanciful memory that reveal the existential heart of the entire project. All of Calvino's characters exist in similar alternative or parallel universes. By projecting themselves as visual palimpsests Calvino may try out different versions of himself in the world without personal risk. Calvino's actors thus think themselves into existence ('La spirale,' 'Mitosi/ 'Meiosi,' 'Morte' from the cosmicomic series), by programming themselves to act in a certain way (Gli amori difficili, La nuvola di smog, La giornata di uno scrutatore), then sit back and observe themselves from a disembodied posture (Palomar). The key here is physical distance; the paradox is hypersensitive myopic vision. A classic example of this predicament is Edmond Dantes in the story 'II conte di Monte Cristo.' Although able to picture the reality of the fortress within which he is imprisoned, his conceptualized model bears little resemblance to what others actually see. While he endeavours to reproduce a mental image of the perfect fortress from which he may not escape in order to find the design error in the real fortress so that he may escape, the purely conjectural nature of his visual exercise lacks empirical evidence. What matters most to Dantes is mental vision, theoretical assumption, methodological procedure. Dantes speculates: esiste una fortezza perfetta, dalla quale non si puo evadere; solo se nella progettazione o costruzione della fortezza e stato commesso un errore o una dimenticanza 1'evasione e possibile. Mentre Faria continua a smon-

Variations on a Theme 151 tare la fortezza sondando i punti deboli, io continue a rimontarla congetturando barriere sempre piu insormontabili... sviluppo ogni segmento in una figura regolare, saldo queste figure come facce d'un solide, poliedro o iperpoliedro, iscrivo questi poliedri in sfere o in ipersfere, e cosi piu chiudo la forma della fortezza piu la semplifico, definendola in un rapporto numerico o in una formula algebrica. (157) there exists a prefect fortress, from which one cannot escape; escape is possible only if in the planning or building of the fortress some error or oversight was made. While Faria continues taking the fortress apart, sounding out its weak points, I continue putting it back together, conjecturing more and more insuperable barriers ... I develop each segment into a regular figure, I fit these figures together as the sides of a solid polyhedron or hyperpolyhedron, I inscribe these polyhedrons in spheres or hypersheres, and so the more I enclose the form of the fortress the more I simplify it, defining it in a numerical relation or in an algebraic formula. (144)

Almost a decade has elapsed since Agilulfo drew similar speculative insights in the sand at that most uncertain of hours, dawn. Though the metaphor has been refined and the gambit of escape has become more intense, the survival stakes have been lessened. After all, Dantes, for all his consternation, indeed exists and does not disappear at the end of the story. Yet, Calvino's characters are still unable to succeed in the demanding visual exercise he posits for them. Marcovaldo, Amerigo Ormea, 'Io' of La nuvola di smog, Dantes, Palomar, all remain uncomfortably maladjusted misfits or prisoners, literally, of their own fanciful obsessions. It is as if they were improvising a Cartesian script, acting out naturally disturbing roles while discovering consciousness, all the while trapped in an ongoing process of visual creativity that only permits surface textures. One might suggest that for the more cerebral of these characters, visual forms are symbols that can be explained through recourse to esoteric knowledge: astronomy, alchemy, and, within their contained spheres of influence, perhaps even heresy. I would argue that far from being accounted for down to the smallest detail, their imagery (Dantes's fortress, Palomar's castle of cheeses), is incapable of fostering an allegorical substructure that leads to redemption. Do they lack faith in the project? Or is the project simply a game? Rather than drawing attention to the possible depths of meaning of their fantasy exercises, perhaps we should emphasize their opacity.

152 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

After all, these characters always remain at the surface level of the forms their imaginations animate. It is all a game, one that affords access to an intellectual realm behind the surface of the word but that simultaneously resists the penetration of an observer's gaze. This is a trait that Michel Foucault attributes to contemporary culture and is perhaps the best explanation for the malaise of Calvino's characters: The contemporary critic is abandoning the great myth of inferiority:... He finds himself totally displaced from the old themes of locked enclosures, of the treasure in the box that he habitually sought in the depths of the work's container. Placing himself at the exterior of the text, he constitutes a new exterior for it, writing texts out of texts/50 Perhaps Calvino's most perfect virtual, therefore flat, impenetrable, wilfully abstract and timeless character, is, once again, Qfwfq. Able to morph into any shape or form he exists simultaneously within and without time, a strategy that serves to abstract signification from its social and cultural circumstances and provides a schema for unpredictability. As a speck of potentiality, he is 'the convergence of infinite relationships, past and future, real or possible' (Six Memos for the Next Millennium 107). As a subatomic phenomenon he may be a single category of something called quantum, what physicists believe is the basic stuff from which the entire universe is made. As the ultimate post-human machine, Qfwfq is able to animate himself into new shapes and interesting visual configurations. Hume refers to this metamorphic quality as a 'shape-shifting capacity.'51 In the best tradition of Lucretius and Ovid, Calvino metamorphosizes the external world by using a perspective totally removed from the usual, or, as he states in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, with 'un altro spazio ... un'altra ottica ... un'altra logica' (6; 'a different space ... a different perspective ... a different logic'). Qfwfq is the articulate intersection of Lucretian's notion of atomization and departure from mimesis, Ovid's propensity for visual alterity and vision as a process of metamorphosis, as well as Calvino's quasi-religious fervour for constant personal growth and change. In an age in which mechanical operations and cybernetic thought processes are controlled by the electronic impulses inside microchips, where life is predetermined by programmable DNA blueprints and simultaneous multidimensionality eschews notions of past and future, and in which the universe itself may be considered a kind of visual hologram or constructed visual image created by the human mind

Variations on a Theme 153

Calvino's deconstruction of physicality into easily imagined visual information packets foresaw man's ability to interconnect not only with his own species but ultimately with matter itself. It is timely to recall his description of imagination as a 'luminous source in the skies that transmits ideal images, which are formed either according to the intrinsic logic of the imaginary world per se ('by itself) or according to the will of God: 'o per voler che giu lo scorge' ('or by a will that guides it downward/ 'Visibility/ 82). This is a process, like Loyola's Spiritual Exercises, for knowing the undefinable, often indescribable, outer world through a perceptual interface fostered through an inner visual experience. This privilege of observing everything in relation raises the complexity of cognition and, in many ways, the validity of understanding. It also charges the observer with the necessity of making pertinent distinctions, of assembling the various m-sights into a stable and relatively unified whole: 'Still, all "realities" and "fantasies" can take on form only by means of writing, in which outwardness and innerness, the world and I, experience and fantasy, appear composed of the same verbal material. The polymorphic visions of the eyes and the spirit are contained in uniform lines of small or capital letters, periods, commas, parentheses - pages of signs, packed as closely together as grains of sand, representing the many-colored spectacle of the world on a surface that is always the same and always different, like dunes shifted by the desert wind' ('Visibility/ 99). Calvino is indeed a grand bricoleur who is constantly shuffling the cards in the intricate fantasy game he is playing. Be they minuscule atoms or grand fables, shifting ideologies or problematic characters, the words are constantly forming one more ring in the perennially evolving and interconnected subatomic matrix that binds apparently unrelated events. The fantasy, then, in such a world of continuous possibility, is ultimately the visual image of Calvino himself. He is at the centre of his own ever-expanding and spiralling universe. He is an optical illusion, the writing hand ever present yet surreptitiously vague and forever wandering amidst ephemeral possible worlds. In Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore the author speculated upon his constant changing of stylistic registers and wondered, tongue in cheek, what it would be like to be only a hand: Come scriverei bene se non ci fossi ... se fossi solo una mano, una mano mozza che impugna una penna e scrive ... Non e per poter essere il por-

154 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures tavoce di qualcosa di definibile che vorrei annullare me stesso. Solo per trasmettere lo scrivibile che attende d'essere scritto, il narrabile che nessuno racconta. (171) How well I would write if I were not here ... If I were only a hand, a severed hand that grasps a pen and writes ... It is not in order to be the spokesman for something definable that I would like to erase myself. Only to transmit the writable that waits to be written, the tellable that nobody tells. (171) Is it possible to recognize any unifying element in Calvino's work? This constant shifting, the protean capacity to dissolve and reform, to mutate so effortlessly, so thoroughly, so seamlessly, is the most constant feature of the chameleonlike author: 'si sa che e un autore che cambia molto da libro a libro. E proprio in questi cambiamenti si riconosce che e lui' (9; 'he is known as an author who changes greatly from one book to the next. And in the very changes you recognize him as himself). In this manner, Calvino robs the reader of familiar signposts, forcing any prospective traveller to rely not only on his wits but to hypersensitize the senses. The reader, in other words, is jolted into putting his entire being into play, enticed to enter the virtual reality fabric opened up by the author. Since it was no longer possible to rely on the capabilities of the reader, in Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore Calvino generated his own ideal reader, an eager and pious retreatant, ready to follow the reading exercises offered by the text. Calvino's ideal reader is ultimately also a fantasy; a meticulously constructed modality to be experimented with, a fine-tuned image containing a host of information, including intellectual understanding and interpretations, prejudices both conscious and unconscious, hopes, joys, worries, and fears. We may now use a different vocabulary, drawn from the world of computers, to describe Calvino's project. Calvino's project suggests that literature is used by the author to conjure full-contact wrap-around adventures that produce solitary moments of epiphany, moments that burst into what once would have been called a spiritual revelation. In the best of mystic traditions, Calvino realized that la mia operazione e stata il piu delle volte una sottrazione di peso; ho cercato di togliere peso ora alle figure umane, ora ai corpi celesti, ora alle

Variations on a Theme 155 citta; soprattutto ho cercato di togliere peso alia struttura del racconto e al linguaggio. ('Lightness/ 3) my working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.

Surely, Calvino was most comfortable thinking of literature as a currency of mediation, as a technology that promoted change rather than a medium of change itself. Through it one can build virtually anything, though language, the material of literature, unfortunately presented the greatest barrier. Yet, it was Calvino's persistent goal to achieve the power to simulate reality, to create reality, independent of and beyond the boundaries of the written page, as he speculated in The Written and the Unwritten Word.' He attempted to do this by incorporating the rational, the precise, the observable, as well as the irrational and the imaginary, into literature, through the fusion of the physical and the spiritual. Pushing the metaphor, his writing may be interpreted as a kind of precursor to virtual images. Many of the kinds of interactions he posited are now possible in virtual reality simulators in which the world is completely artificial and situations are dictated by the mind of the maker without limitations. Calvino's works may be seen as sample worlds, moused together in a virtual reality scheme. To enter these worlds, the user is presented with a credibility test that must be passed in order to proceed. The test is a deliberate password designed to provide the reader with a clearly scripted program menu to follow. The program is generated by the author yet relies totally upon the visualization capabilities of the reader/user to imagine/assemble pictures on the mind's screen. As in theatre or carnival, the pervasiveness of the visual spectacle serves the function of creating a technical deception for the purpose of selfregeneration. When an ideal reader/user begins to read/play Calvino, then, he is immediately surrounded by seemingly familiar objects that have somehow been transformed to produce momentary discomfort and incredulity: battle deaths become innocent pawns in a child's ingenuine game of hide-and-seek ('Un bel gioco dura poco'), a disgruntled worker constructs unreliable mental models of city life (Marco-

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valdo), knights dissolve into thin air, spoiled intellectuals refuse to climb down from the lofty heights of trees, genes talk, narcissistic cells replicate, a soft moon leaks milk; the list is as long as Calvino's scenarios. 'Give me some elbow room/ he seems to say, parodying Mrs Ph(i)Nk from Tutto in un punto/ 'and I'll create a universe' ('Ragazzi, avessi un po' di spazio, come mi piacerebbe farvi le tagliatelle!' [59; 'Oh, if I only had some room, how I'd like to make some noodles for you boys!']). Not the universe, it is understood, but a universe; one that is parallel, changing, multidimensional, but above all visual and imagistic. Like the computer-animated characters created inside the virtual space of the computer, with features sculpted from computer-generated lines and curves, Calvino's characters are caressed into existence through the skilful manipulation of a reading experience that moves from the simple acceptance of an unusual, child-centred perspective (Pin) to the full integration of the adult reader into the text (Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore), to the experimental uni-sensorial tales of Sotto il sole giaguaro. In order to breathe life into their imagination, computer animators and writers must carefully study reality to properly construct their wildest, or most realistic, images. Finally, both literature and virtual reality transport the reader into a reasonable, convincing, imagined facsimile of a replicated world. Interaction with this world is hampered only insofar as the potential reader/user (1) is willing to follow and accept these experiments with the medium;52 (2) learns the lessons well and executes them with rigour; and (3) is willing to detach from the mass of fellow citizens and enter the new virtual community. This community may be as personal as an abstract picture meticulously recreated in the mind or as public as a tangible object waiting to be dissected, described, and replicated into the grids, pulses, and matrices of the information age. In the evocative, previrtual world in which Calvino wrote it is interesting that rigorous writing exercises morphed into imploding literary games. The use of fantasy, then, is not to be misunderstood as an escapist or solely pleasurable impulse, but as a tactical manoeuver that ensured Calvino's continued survival as an imaginatively visual writer. In the next chapter, I will follow this process of personal development and map the way in which the rhetoric of expansion and outward development is eventually superseded by an inward spiral of personal revelation.

Chapter Four

Verbal Order to VisualChaos

There is a deep-rooted vocation in Italian Literature, handed on from Dante to Galileo: the notion of the literary work as a map of the world and of the knowable. Italo Calvino1

'We [Mayflies] live in the space of air, we beat time with the vibrations of our wings. What else does living mean?,' the fragile creatures replied. 'You, on the other hand, are only a shape that marks the limits of the time and space that we inhabit.' 'Time passes over me: I remain,' the fortress insisted. 'You may only brush the surface of becoming like a hair on a stream.' And the may flies: 'We wiggle in the void like writing on a white sheet and the notes of a flute playing in the silence. Without us there remains nothing but an almighty and omnipresent void of such heaviness that it crushes the world; the void, whose annihilating power empowers itself with the denseness of fortresses; complete void that can only be dissolved by that which is light and rapid and subtle.' Italo Calvino2

The articulation of a visually narrative style is a magnificent balancing act between observation and description, pattern and design, narratological cataloguing and abstract conceptualization. The archetype of this method is the map, the metaphor, in many ways, of an allinclusive temporal and spatial totality. Cartography is also a rationally patterned visual representation that simplifies complex and often

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unsettling visual experiences. These points are discussed by Calvino in the essay 'II viandante nella mappa': 'La necessita di comprendere in un'immagine la dimensione del tempo insieme a quella dello spazio e alle origini della cartografia. Tempo come storia del passato: penso alle mappe azteche sempre piene di figurazione storico-narrative, ma anche a carte mediovali... E tempo al future: come presenza di ostacoli che s'incontreranno nel viaggio, e qui il tempo atmosferico si salda al tempo cronologico.3 The necessity of comprehending in a single image the dimensions of both time and space is at the origen of cartography. Time as history of the past: I am thinking of Aztec maps that are always full of historical-narrative figures, but also of medieval maps ... And time as future: as in the notion of presenting of obstacles that will be met during the voyage and it is here where atmospheric time joins chronological time.

Maps, in other words, make things visible. They not only detail particulars but are able to transcend themselves once the viewer imagines an itinerary. They make reality a visible narration: 'La carta geografica insomma, anche se statica, presuppone un'idea narrativa, e concepita in funzione d'un itinerario, e Odissea' (24; 'The map, in short, even if it is static, presupposes a narrative idea, is conceived in the function of an itinerary, it is Odyssey'). Map symbolism abounds in the works of Calvino and could form the crux of another study. These range from three-dimensional spider webs in // sentiero del nidi di ragno, fourdimensional mental figurations of Dantes and Faria in 'II Conte di Monte Cristo/ intricate delineations of space that adumbrate other cosmological maps in the cosmicomic tales, narratological maps that lead to dead ends in Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, the intricate mental maps of Palomar, as well as delicate visual mappings of art works in Collezione di sabbia. Ultimately, the chronology of Calvino's opus is the homuncular syntactic map of his intellectual life as writer and thinker. Calvino's figurative mapping of the visible/invisible, real/imaginary world into an intelligible sense-generating paradigm is a tenacious program of self-imposed conduct. By rearranging merciless logic into benign continuity, he is able to author new beginnings, the intention of which is to make an order out of chaos.4 But maps also hide by deception or visual embroilments. Labyrinths, a particularly dear icon

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for the author, are notorious for their exclusionary and diversionary mapping. It is the perfect oxymoron, juxtaposing the chaos of metaphorical irrationality with the geometric rigidity of visual precision. It is a commonplace that for Calvino the writer (poietes, < Greek, one who makes) is a maker of verbal maps. In any case, positive or negative, maps embody a synthesizing process similar to the building activity of description. Both entail a dialectic correlative beween two interdependent realities, the plotted and the imagined, that ensure a proper translation of the apperceived object or envisioned destination. Throughout the process there is an interplay between the traveller's continually modified future expectations and transformed past memories. As a constant metaphor in Calvino's work, the map implies the temporal ordering of geographic and mental spaces. All becomes sequence and cause, closure and plot. As a story unravels and is unravelled, a design emerges that orders the temporal experience into a manageable and intelligible spatial picture able to transmit an indefinite variety of visual messages in verbal syntax. Writing and mental sketching thus come together as visual tools that reveal both an exterior (the text) and interior (the idea) spatial typography. I will examine the author's interior map in the following section. We now turn to Calvino's attempts to turn language into a natural sign. Mapping the Seeable and Sayable In // cavaliere inesistente Calvino attempts to absorb the external world into the text by drawing upon its textures. He begins his plotting by decrying the inadequacy of the writing medium: Per raccontare come vorrei, bisognerebbe che questa pagina bianca diventasse irta di rupi rossicce, si sfaldasse in una sabbietta spessa, ciottolosa, e vi crescesse un'ispida vegetazione di ginepri. In order to narrate as I would like, this blank page would have to bristle with reddish rocks, flake with pebbly sand, sprout sparse juniper trees.

Not dissuaded, he proceeds with extraordinary meticulousness to chart a visual canvas. The coordinates he provides explore the problem of transposing a spirited intellectual imagination onto the flat surface of a sheet of parchment:

160 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures Con la penna dovrei riuscire a incidere il foglio, ma con leggerezza, perche il prato dovrebbe figurare percorso dallo strisciare d'una biscia invisibile nell'erba, e la brughiera attraversata da una lepre che ora esce al chiaro, si ferma, annusa intorno nei corti mustacchi, e gia somparsa. With my pen I should also trace faint dents in the paper to represent the slither of an invisible snake through grass or a hare crossing a heath, suddenly coming into the clear, stopping, sniffing around through its short whiskers, then vanishing again. The vision has become more than metaphorical. The reader is encouraged to use his navigational prowess to measure his reactions, to mark off the known from the unknown; the transcendental capabilities of the word-bound convention are stretched to their limits by the guileful artesan. The discourse acquires an enargeia that fuels the mimetic illusion.5 Agilulfo now materializes before the readers' eyes: Possiamo dire che 1'unico che certamente compie uno spostamento qua in mezzo e Agilulfo, non dico il suo cavallo, non dico la sua armatura, ma quel qualcosa di solo, di preoccupato di se, d'impaziente, che sta viaggiando a cavallo dentro 1'armatura. The only person who can be said definitely to be on the move is Agilulf, by which I do not mean his horse or armour, but that lonely self-preoccupied impatient something jogging along on horseback inside the armour. The graphic raw material of narrative begins to reverberate with sensual resonance: Intorno a lui le pigne cadono dal ramo, i rii scorrono tra i ciottoli, i pesci nuotano nei rii, i bruchi rodono le foglie, le tartarughe arrancano col duro ventre al suolo, ma e soltanto un'illusione di movimento, un perpetuo volgersi e rivolgersi come 1'acqua delle onde. Around him pine cones fall from branches, streams gurgle over pebbles, fish swim in streams, maggots gnaw at leaves, tortoises rub their hard bellies on the ground; but all this is mere illusion of movement, perpetual revolving to and fro like waves.

Verbal Order to Visual Chaos 161 The reader is asked for compliance, to indulge in the playful subterfuge: Bisognerebbe che ci fosse sulla superficie uniforme un leggerissimo affiorare, come si pud ottenere rigando dal di sotto il foglio con uno spillo, e quest'affiorare, questo tendere fosse pero sempre carico e intriso della generate pasta del mondo e proprio li fosse il senso e la bellezza e il dolore, e li il vero attrito e movimento. There would have to be some such very faint pucker on the surface as can be gotten by pricking paper from below with a pin; and this pucker would always have to be impregnated with the general matter of the world and this itself constitutes its sense and beauty and sorrow, its true attrition and movement. Together, writer and reader overlay and underlay the story, both above and below the white canvas, with a chain of animation that plots a verbal/visual storyline: Tutto questo che ora contrassegno con righine ondulate e il mare, anzi 1'Oceano. Ora disegno la nave su cui Agilulfo compie il suo viaggio, e piu in qua disegno un'enorme balena, con il cartiglio e la scritta 'Mare Oceano.' Questa freccia indica il percorso della nave ... (all preceding quotations, 104-7) All this that I am now scoring with wavy lines is the sea, or rather the ocean. Now I draw a ship on which Agilulf makes his journey, and farther on I draw an enormous whale, with an ornamental scroll and the words 'Ocean Sea.' This arrow indicates the ship's route ... At the optic level the viewer's eye is invited to travel through the mapped space of the white page by trailing the verbal narrative of the author. We move through the vegetation, plummet underwater on the back of a whale, remain snared in a fisherman's net. Defying the flat surface of the page, we are asked to re-figure the site, to find a pin, to scratch beneath the page thereby raising ridges on its smooth surface. We now have marked the crust of a multiform world. This dis-figuring paradoxically multiplies the negative, transforming the un-seen into a positive scene (seen) that can also be felt with the fingertips. This hap-

162 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

tic exercise telescopes space and time. As our reading becomes both visual and tactile, spaces follow one another in a succession of compressed temporal moments that emerge, literally, from beneath the page. Calvino will hone the technique to the point where storytelling and description become a format onto which the author paints scenes. The aesthetics of this process induces the reader to complete the picturing of the scene and enter into the animated dimension. At this point, the story ceases to be an element of plot but a mere pretext for an overriding intellectual schema: the physical mapping of temporal synecdoche. Calvino has drawn attention to the visual aspect of the word's presence as well as the interstices of its absence. Qfwfq and Lieutenent Fenimore in 'La forma della spazio/ for instance, dart in and out between written letters on a white page, literally tap dancing amidst the dotted i's and looped 1's, slamming their chins on the bottoms of the v's and m's and n's that appear as holes in a rough pavement. In these instances, the narrator insists on the flatness of the scene as a necessary condition to a literal reading of the events. In OuLiPoian writings Calvino toyed with the look of words, inventing narrative puzzles (Trose e anticombinatoria'), playing with nonsense rhymes ('Piccolo sillabario illustrate'),6 designing visual cavalcades of imagistic reverie (Le citta invisibili and // castello dei destini incrociati) that emphasize notions of code and 'agrammaticalite,' as Michael Riffaterre calls them. These works focus on the hermeneutic of reading while abandoning the purely referential function of language.7 Literature is pushed into a hypo-/hyper-space where the original reliable narrative matrix becomes a mise en abyme game of endless troping and figuration. The image of the blank page (the opposite of a grid-patterned map) in Calvino's writings may be read as a preparatory site for the pictures that will spring from the colours of a new verbal-visual palette. The image of the blank white page also torments the author as he searches for both the images that will inhabit the narrative space and the words that will sustain the spatio-temporal incantation. Once this canvas is filled with words, in a second moment of observation, the viewer's eye is instructed to dwell on detail, to contemplate the single static image, to associate metaphorically what he has assembled metonymically, to follow the map, literally, to its conclusion. The author may be highlighting an isolated detail, as in the short story 'I figli di Babbo Natale' from Marcovaldo, ovvero le stagioni in citta:8

Verbal Order to Visual Chaos 163 Usci un leprotto, bianco, sulla neve, mosse le orecchie, corse sotto la luna, ma era bianco e non lo si vedeva, come se non ci fosse. Solo le zampette lasciavano un'impronta leggera sulla neve, come foglioline di trifoglio;... (148) A jack-rabbit came out, white, onto the snow, he twitched his ears, ran beneath the moon, but he was white and couldn't be seen, as if he weren't there. Only his little paws left a light print on the snow, like little clover leaves;... (120-1)

He may infuse vitality into a sublimely inert intellectual argument by allowing a butterfly to alight on a written page, capturing the attention of an otherwise intent author-reader in Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore: Tra i suoi occhi e la pagina vola una farfalla bianca. Qualsiasi cosa lei stesse leggendo ora certo e la farfalla che ha catturato la sua attenzione. II mondo non scritto ha il suo culmine in quella farfalla. II risultato cui devo tendere e qualcosa di precise, di raccolto, di leggero;... (172) Between her eyes and the page a white butterfly flutters. Whatever she may have been reading, now it is certainly the butterfly that has captured her attention. The unwritten world has its climax in that butterfly. The result at which I must aim is something specific, intimate, light;... (172) He may appeal to temporality, leading the reader through a sequence of deceptive incidents. The voyage through the visual space of this multidimensional narrative plane is mapped as a ideologically selfsealing realm in the cosmicomic tale 'La forma dello spazio': in realta lo spazio in cui ci 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 mentre ci sembrava di piombar giu dritto in realta scorrevamo 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. Ora dire citta equivale ad avere ancora in testa figure in qualche modo regolari, con angoli retti e proporzioni simmetriche, mentre invece dovremmo tener sempre presente come lo spazio si frastaglia intorno a ogni albero di ciliegio e a ogni foglia d'ogni ramo che si muove

164 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures 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 trafitture di cui in ogni momento le frecce della luce le crivellano, tutto stampato in negativo nella 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 trasformazione di queste orme istante per istante, cosicche il brufolo che cresce sul naso d'un califfo o la bolla di sapone che si posa sul seno d'una lavandaia cambiano la forma generate dello spazio in tutte le sue dimensioni. (144-5) in reality the space 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 doubleand triple-arched fenestrations, and while we felt we were plunging straight down, in reality we were racing along the edge of moldings and invisible friezes, like ants who, crossing a city, follow intineraries traced not on the street cobbles but along walls and ceilings and cornices and chandeliers. 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 up around every cherry tree and every leaf of every bough that moves in the wind, and at every indentation 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 piercing made every moment by the riddling arrows 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 growing on a caliph's nose or the soap bubble resting on a laundress's bosom changes the general form of space in all its dimensions. (121) In these examples, the principle vectors of an emerging poetics are in the details. Calvino has embarked upon a new way of seeing. In essence, his ekphrastic impulse for spatial presence must somehow be balanced with the statisticity of the preformative word. He must somehow celebrate the transformational power of the created symbol before it dissipates, like Agilulfo, into the dust of dawn. This is why Calvino's characters are overrun by a manic desire to haptically possess what they fleetingly espie. Whether it is Pipin il Maiorco, who 'ogni mattina passsava in rivista i suoi otto alberi, controllando se mancassereo dei

Verbal Order to Visual Chaos 165

frutti, pesando con gli occhi il carico del rami' ('Alba sui rami nudi/ Ultimo viene il corvo, 27; 'each morning would review his eight trees checking whether any fruit was missing, weighing the weight of the branches with his eyes'), or the ravenous Gesubambino ('Furto in una pasticceria/ Ultimo viene il corvo}, who devours his pastry world with his eyes, the query the young marksman poses in 'Ultimo viene il corvo' (Ultimo viene il corvo) remains forever pertinent right through to the equally solitary protagonist of Palomar: Le pigne in cima agli alberi dell'altra riva perche si vedevano e non si potevano toccare: perche quella distanza vuota tra lui e le cose? Perche le pigne che erano una cosa con lui, nei suoi occhi, erano invece la, distanti? (53) Why, he thought, could he see the pine cones at the tops of the trees on the other bank and not touch them? Why was there this empty distance between things and himself? Why were the pine cones - which seemed part of him, inside his eyes - so far away instead? (53)

Why indeed? This idolatry of the spatial is a vestige of the modernist dream of the natural sign. Calvino's return to spatiality is made on the terms of verbal art - a hard-won, if not impossible, victory to achieve given the transience of the verbal sequence. Hence the constant questioning, the attempts at mapping, the allusions to the painter's white canvas, the Grecian worship of ethereal form. Even when the aesthetic distance is momentarily broached, as in the short story 'Un bastimento carico di granchi' (Ultimo viene il corvo}, the ekphrasis may only indulge in a captivating spirit of iconic illusion; it can never overcome the figurative verbal play: E c'era un brulicare di granchi ai margini dell'acqua, migliaia di granchi di tutte le forme e di tutte le eta che ruotavano sulla zampe curve e raggiate, e digrignavano le chele, e sporgevano gli occhi senza sguardo. (27) And there were crabs teeming at the edges of the water, thousands of crabs of every shape and every age, which scuttled on their curved, spoked legs, and opened their claws, and thrust forward their sightless eyes.

Calvino has made the scene so sensually palpable that the reader is

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lulled to accept the paradoxical co-existence of the sensible and the intelligible. By virtue of this double power, the reader experiences the temporality of the event (the crabs 'were teeming/ 'scuttled/ 'opened/ 'thrust forward'), while enjoying the illusionary trompe I'oeil of the passage's painterly devices. Similar visual dramas are conjured by an innate skill that attempts to picture the unpicturable. Let us imagine, Calvino suggests in 'La fame a Bevera' (Ultimo viene il corvd), what a mule sees: Marciava [il mulo] a muso chino, e il suo sguardo, limitato dai paraocchi neri, faceva osservazioni bellissime: lumache dal guscio rotto dagli spari che perdevano una bava iridata sulle pietre, formicai sventrati con fughe bianche e nere di formiche e uova, erbe strappate che alzavano strane radici barbute come d'alberi. (123) It [the mule] was walking along with its muzzle bent down, and its eyes, limited by the black blinkers, were noticing all sorts of things: snails, broken by the shelling, spilling an iridescent slime on the stones; ant hills ripped open and the black and white ants hurrying hither and thither with eggs; torn-up grasses showing strange hairy roots like trees.

Or the final sensations of a fallen soldier in 'Andato al comando' (Ultimo viene il corvo): Casco con la faccia al suolo e 1'ultima cosa che vide fu un paio di piedi calzati coi suoi scarponi che lo scavalcavano. Cosi rimase, cadavere nel fondo del bosco, con la bocca plena d'aghi di pino. Due ore dopo era gia nero di formiche. (132) He fell face downwards and the last shot caught him with a vision of stockinged feet and his boots being pulled off. So he remained, a corpse in the depths of the woods, his mouth full of pine needles. Two hours later he was already black with ants.

The compulsion of the scenes emanate from the unsavory nature of the elements described (typical of neorealism), as well as from Calvino's interest in the dynamic visualization of the drama. Relentless ants move over the still-warm corpse; wounded snails leave traces of oozing slime. Reality is a spectacular gallery of festering, seething, teeming, unstoppable images that whiz before the reader's eye with the

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same unerring precision and constancy of the young marksman's bullets in 'Ultimo viene il corvo.' Just as it is impossible to imagine Homer's (narrative) description of the famous shield of Achilles in Book 18 of the Iliad as being static, in Calvino's descriptions the ants, crabs, insects, the stars, nebula, atoms, the labyrinths and spirals that animate this narrative cosmos can be written but cannot be stilled. These depicted still lifes are emblems of an irresistible destiny. Mapping Internal Geography Nothing could be more obvious to the casual reader than Calvino's cult of precision, his predilection for a combinatory poetics, his determination to lay a grid on reality in order to plot and better analyse its changing face. The pattern of contrasts that emerges from all the possible developments of this methodological style suggests a cosmology that is the visual prototype of the author himself. Beyond this public self-imaging it is also possible to divine a self-conscious mapping that, because it is internalized, holds within itself the seeds of a narcissistic reading of Calvino's narrative. Perhaps we may now extrapolate a map that moves in an unexpected thematic direction. Hidden surreptitiously within and behind the public map is a sort of watermark that intersects and interconnects with an author's ideology. Not an imaginary construct, rather, it is a built-in physiologicalsemiotic consistency, a stratagem that perambulates along the writer's body, diagraming its contours, revealing and concealing its hidden corridors. It is this body, or homunculus, that lurks behind the literary representations of self as it reads, pictures, rationalizes, and imagines the Other in many of Calvino's stories.9 But this body map is distorted, foregrounding different body parts and functions with respect to the narrative representation at hand. Generic choices, semantic fields, even an author's writing style can be valued according to a criterion one might call toposensibility. At times this style is visceral, foregrounding physical body functions. At others it is esoteric and sensual, highlighting the spiritual faculties.10 Haptics, the touching of the world out there, is central to this sort of body epistemology. Essentially, the cogitator, be it Agilulfo, Monte Cristo, or Palomar, projects the internal map of the hidden self onto the public discourse of the Other. This is 'depth writing.'11 Internal body sensations and feelings are relayed onto an external canvas. The text, therefore, is merely a surface phenomenon, a relay that allows the author to dis-simulate

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(not re-present) reality within the boundaries of the written page. One of Calvino's most fleeting, yet hauntingly unforgettable characters, is Kim. He appears only once, in Chapter 9 of // sentiero dei nidi di ragno. He is, to my mind, however, the homunculus buried within Calvino's literary persona. Calvino always buttressed his views with the logic of observation, so indispensable to the science of map-making, and with the belief that the knowable world is divined through the codes of Nature, of which man is a homogeneous part. Kim, a thinly veiled spokesman for the young author in his first novel, is described as one who has un desiderio enorme di logica, di sicurezza sulle cause e gli effetti, eppure la sua mente s'affolla ogni istante d'interrogativi irrisolti. (138) a great yearning for logic, for certainty about cause and effect, otherwise his mind is apt to crowd at every second with unanswered questions.

The confusion belies an underlying necessity for precision and for a reasonable explanation of the world. Kim seems to be especially concerned with cataloguing the forms of homuncular behaviour. Why, he asks, do men fight? What is inside that causes them to act? Importantly, he is interested not in heroes but in 'i declassati' ('the declassed'), 'gli insabbiati' ('the beached'), 'the outcasts' - terms Calvino uses when developing an Identikit of Conrad's characters.12 As Kim walks through Pin's enchanted forest, reality assumes anthropomorphic likeness: 'I tronchi nel buio hanno strane forme umane' (148; 'the tree trunks have strange human shapes'). His discourse is laden with corporal imagery: faces, hands, life, death, dirty huts. Reality is constructed of words, is heavy with 'simboli: casa, mucche, raccolto,' 'contadini,' 'una patria fatta di parole' (145; 'symbols: home, cows, harvest/ 'farmers,' 'a country made up of words'). The only reality that counts for Kim, it would seem, is a homuncular one. A child lives within, and Tuomo porta dentro in se le sue paure bambine per tutta la vita' (148; 'man carries within himself his childhood fears throughout his lifetime'). Kim must learn to assimilate this eternal subliminal unconscious if he ever wishes to reach higher plateaus of being, to arrive at a state in which, 'tutto deve essere logico, tutto si deve capire' (139; 'everything must be logical, everything must be understood'). He aspires to 'un umanesimo ateo' ('an atheist humanism') that will divine the hidden order of things. It is for this

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reason that he studies medicine, 'perche sa che la spiegazione di tutto e in quella macina di cellule in moto, non nelle categoric della filosofia' (139; 'because he knows that the explanation for everything is in that grindstone of cells in motion, and not in philosophical categories'). For Kim, the war is first a subtext about the body, then a text of ideological conflict. Similarly, in the short story 'Come un volo d'anitre' (Prima che tu dica 'Pronto'} the protagonist, Natale, a prototype of Gurdulu, feels the world as un insieme di colori verdi e gialli, di rumori e di urli, di voglia di mangiare e di dormire. Un buon mondo, pieno di cose buone, anche se non ci si capiva niente, anche se a tentare di capire si sentiva quella fitta in mezzo al cranio, quel volo d'anitre nel cervello, la bastonata che gli picchiava in testa. (47) a union of green and yellow colours, of sounds and shouts, of longings for food and sleep. A good world, full of good things, even if impossible to understand, even if when attempting to understand you could feel that pain in the middle of your skull, that flight of ducks in your skull, the blow that struck you in the head.

The psychological pattern cannot be underestimated. Both Kim and Natale walk through a bodyscape that is physically unscathed by war yet both are propelled by their nature to make sense of the world through body language. Natale laments a suffering humanity, while Kim's constant desire is to 'arrivare a non avere piu paura ... la meta ultima,' he states, 'deH'uomo' (148; 'to arrive at a point where one is no longer afraid ... the final goal of man'). A voyage, then, much like that of another Kim 'in mezzo all'India, nel libro di Kipling tante volte riletto da ragazzo' (149; 'in the middle of India, in the book by Kipling that was reread so many times when he was a boy'). The reference to Rudyard Kipling invites a thematic circularity. In his thesis on Conrad, Calvino reveals a telling comparison. After examining the author's style he praises Kipling for 'quel suo gusto per 1'utilizzazione del materiale di minuta osservazione ambientale ai fini di complesse fiabe, quel suo favolistico gioco d'animali, quel suo voler sempre scoprire i mondi nuovi con occhi di fanciullo' ('his pleasure in using minute local observations in order to create complex fables, his fable-like use of animals, his constant wish to discover new worlds as seen through the eyes of a child').13 Calvino achieves a similar transfer-

170 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

mation of the details of the map of war into the cartography of the self, that same self Calvino will irradiate onto a cosmic map of the universe. This cosmic journey begins here, in the partisan wood, through the eyes of Kim, who travels, much as 'Kim, il ragazzo mezzo inglese mezzo indiano che viaggia attraverso 1'India col vecchio Lama Rosso' ('Kim, the half English half Indian boy who travels across India with the old man Red Blade') in search of 'il fiume di purificazione' (152; 'the river of purification'). Far beneath Calvino's opus deeply lies his homunculus: dwarf images of Conrad and to a lesser degree Kipling. He wrote his university thesis on Conrad and many reviews and an important essay reiterate his indebtedness to the author (Saggi I, 808-19). His essays reverberate with Conradian stoicism. A reading of this thesis reveals the young student's admiration and inspirational indebtedness. Calvino was quick to dismiss works from a period of his career we may now term lyrical, when colour and effects, not patterns and design, were foregounded by his developing technique. He often returned to these works suppressing anti-feminist sentiments, political extremism, sex, and violence.14 The thesis and articles written shortly afterwards reveal, however, the young author's attraction to what Calvino sees as Conrad's 'midollo del leone' ('lion's marrow'). In 'I capitani di Conrad'15 Calvino describes the author as one who possesses il senso di una integrazione nel mondo conquistata nella vita pratica, il senso dell'uomo che si realizza nelle cose che fa, nella morale implicita nel suo lavoro, 1'ideale di saper essere all'altezza della situazione, sulla coperta dei velieri come sulla pagina. the sense of integration in the world that is achieved in one's daily life, the sense of realizing oneself through the things one does, in the implicit morality of his work, in the idea of being up to the task at hand, be it on the deck of a ship or on the written page.

Against this background, Kim's presence takes on fuller dimensions. Kim has decided to become a psychiatrist, an antipathetical profession to real men: non e simpatico agli uomini perche li guarda sempre fissi negli occhi come volesse scoprire la nascita dei loro pensieri e a un tratto esce con

Verbal Order to Visual Chaos 171 domande a bruciapelo, domande che non c'entrano niente, su di loro, sulla loro infanzia. (139) People do not like him very much because he looks them fixedly in the eyes as if he were trying to discover the source of their thoughts; and then he comes out suddenly with point-blank questions that have nothing to do with the conversation, about the other's childhood.

Kim is a true Conradian hero, one who resembles Calvino's description of Conrad, who Vedeva 1'universo come qualcosa d'oscuro e nemico, ma ad esso contrapponeva le forze deH'uomo, il suo ordine morale, il suo coraggio' ('I capitani di Conrad/ 818; 'saw the universe as something dark and hostile, but against these forces he placed man's strengths, his moral order, his courage'). Similarly, Kim wishes the hostile world to be cause and effect to the detriment of his own emotion. Ti amo, Adriana' ('I love you, Adriana'), he thinks, and the words are suffocated in consequence. Such guilt is the result of transposing personal, physical, and emotional need into the horror of war, a lesson Calvino learned from Conrad's sullen heroes. In Conradian fashion Kim cries in desperation 'Kim ... Kim ... chi e Kim?' (152; Kim ... Kim ... Who is Kim?,' emphasis Calvino). But, as if convoking all past, present, and future loves, the rebounding phrase plays a crucial role with its initiatory resonances. The phrase is repeated to underscore its importance. It is a self-validating metadiscourse about the nature of writing itself. It is the first move in a labyrinthine matrix that both hides and reveals the author's ultimate objective; the transformation, through words, of the female body (Adriana) into a domain that is touched and possessed, that is, like the future Ludmilla of Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, not only imaginable, but ultimately readable. The general direction towards the fusion of the dichotomy of word and image would seem to have its masculine counterpart in the ideological program of revolutionary struggle. Though Calvino partook of and diffused communist imagery and its emblems of reason, his heart, like that of Kim, his mind, like that of Natale, are consumed almost entirely with the silent and courtly imagery of the softer underbelly of revolution.16 Torse,' Kim states, 'non faro cose importanti, ma la storia e fatta di piccoli gesti anonimi' (151; 'Perhaps I will not do great things, but history is made up of little anonymous gestures'). Torse/ Natale ruefully muses, 'era il volo d'anitre; questo era, niente'altro' (51; 'Perhaps it was simply the flight of ducks, only this and nothing more').

172 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures For Kim,

le cose ritornano misteriose e magiche, la vita degli uomini piena di miracoli. Abbiamo ancora la testa piena di miracoli e di magie, pensa Kim. Ogni tanto gli sembra di camminare in un mondo di simboli, come il piccolo Kim in mezzo all'India ... (149) (my emphasis) things become mysterious and magical again, and life seems full of miracles. Our heads are still full of magic and miracles, thinks Kim. Sometimes he feels he is walking amid a world of symbols, like his namesake, little Kim in the middle of India ... (my emphasis)

The rationalist must constantly check the dreamer; the map-maker must rationalize any imagined destination/destiny. There can be no doubt that Calvino's aversion to psychological profiling of his characters stems from this innate propensity towards flights of the imaginary that stray from a precise course of action.17 It is much more profitable, and personally less painful, the author discovers, to make a compensatory reparation that bridges the rift between fantasy and reality, and to develop strategies that somehow open up a two-way circuit between schematic necessities and creative complexities while indulging an image-fettered imagination. Kim's final words are revealing: Domani sara una grande battaglia. Kim e sereno. 'A, bi, ci/ dira. Continua a pensare: 'ti amo, Adriana.' Questo, nient'altro che questo, e la storia. (153) Tomorrow there will be a big battle. Kim is serene. 'A, b, c/ he'll say. Again and again he thinks: 'I love you, Adriana.' This, and this alone, is history.

The restrictions of exactness (Kim-Agilulfo) must be tempered with the potentialities of ambiguity (Natale-Gurdulu). This is a certainty that will be carried out with great thoroughness. I think it would be a correct conjecture to assume that the particular nature of Calvino's narrative can be deduced by a careful consideration of Kim's resolve. Literature need not preclude morality because it scrutinizes reality, it need not be fanciful because it constructs mental models; it must not, in any case, dissolve the self. Exterior forms may change, the Cartesian cogito cannot. In the Preface to // sentiero dei nidi di ragno, Calvino,

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echoing the words of a sententious Qfwfq in 'Un segno nello spazio/ states, 'la mia storia cominciava a essere segnata, e ora mi pare tutta contenuta in quell'inizio' (17; 'my story was beginning to be marked, and now it seems that everything was contained in that beginning'). It is for this reason that Calvino is ultimately unable to find any lasting satisfaction with political ideologies and strategies that limit imagination. He opts instead for narratives that highlight the potential visual component of the imagined itineraries of the mind rather than the definitive pulp of reality that would ultimately stifle generative possibilities. In an interview entitled 'In principio e 1'immagine' Calvino speculates upon the creative process and notes: II problema dell'immaginazione per lo scrittore e: esiste un'immaginazione visiva o un'immaginazione verbale? Direi che io mi baso su un processo misto. Spesso e un'immagine visiva che ho in mente per prima. Puo pero essere accompagnata (o puo non esserlo) in parte da frasi o brani di frasi. Comunque il vero momento decisive e quello in cui mi metto a scrivere e secondo come mi vengono le parole e le frasi, anche la visione originale, I'intenzione originate, cambia.18 The problem of imagination for the writer is this: does a visual or a verbal imagination exist? I would say that personally I work on a mixed process. Often, the first thing I have in mind is a visual image. But this may be accompanied (or it may not be) partly by phrases or parts of phrases. In any case, the decisive moment is that in which I set myself to writing and, depending upon how I come up with words and phrases, even the original vision, the original intention, changes.

The written word represents an extension of the existing visually imagined image. The manner in which this image is controlled is of vital importance. The starting point begins with the formula the author devises to assemble a corresponding context. The process is fluid and lays emphasis on the transitory nature of the image. The paradox is that verbal enrichment may change or impoverish the ever-receding characteristics of the original concept: E puo anche trasformarsi del tutto e di solito viene dimenticata e sostituita da quell' immagine in atto che ho depositato sulla pagina. (5)

174 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures And it may even transform itself completely and is usually forgotten and substituted from the image that I have deposited on the page.

At this point, instead of a single image we have a sequence of schemata that stimulate the writer (now also a reader) to reconstitute the images within the text. Through a continual readjustment of focus a totality or 'epiphenomenon'19 is ideated, which may or may not uncover the original concept (Timmaginazione concettuale') that stimulated the entire word-seeking enterprise. Nevertheless, as Calvino affirms in this interview: ho bisogno di inventare un'immagine che mi serve a un determinate fine (per esempio nell'intreccio di un racconto o nel progetto di un racconto in cui voglio dire determinate cose). Ma ripeto: io di solito parto da un'immagine. (5) I need to invent an image that will help me towards a determined end (for example, in the plotline of a story or in the project for a story in which I wish to say determined things). But I repeat: I usually depart from an image.

The image of the map as a visual icon may embody this elusive search, the 'diagram for praxis' as Teresa De Lauretis calls it,20 to which the author aspired. It is rich with symbolic and allegorical implications, it unleashes potentially evocative and generative archetypical images, the quietest yet most enduring of which is Kim, the soul in all of Calvino's characterizations. If on a winter's night a traveller ... following a map ... discovers a painter's studio The visual connection between maps and narrative will permit me to draw an analogy between two forms of representation, literature and the visual arts. In 'I segni alti/ a brief introduction to a book on sculpture by Fausto Melotti, Calvino draws the reader into the world of the artist's atelier by using a standard narrative strategy, that of the voyage: Che per visitare lo studio di Melotti occorra passare per una botola salendo e scendendo una scaletta da sottomarino, e un dato di fatto da non

Verbal Order to Visual Chaos 175 trascurarse. Non perche la caverna deva restare elemento indispensabile d'ogni mito delle idee ultime, - e d'un viaggio fuori della caverna che qui si tratta, verso un mondo dove il dentro non esiste - ma perche ogni itinerario conoscitivo non puo iniziarsi che con una scoscesa dislocazione verticale, - come ben sanno Alice precipitante nella tana del coniglio e 1'eroe prometeico del mito Bororo che deve raggiungere un nido di pappagalli arrampicandosi a un tronco o a una liana. II viaggio pero potrebbe compiersi ugualmente attraverso uno specchio cui non resti altro da specchiare che la propria cornice, oppure attraverso una finestra che s'affacci sul fuori da ambedue le parti. L'importante e non aspettarsi di raggiungere un al di la ma un al di qua, il vero al di qua del nostro mondo gia inghiottito nel suo spettrale occaso la pagliuzza o lamella luccicante che resta nel setaccio dopo che tutta la sabbia se ne e andata.21 That in order to visit Melotti's studio it is necessary to pass through a trap door and climb and descend a submarinelike staircase, is a fact not to be overlooked. Not so much because the cavern must remain an indispensible element of any myth that deals with the end days, - this is a voyage outside the cavern, towards a world where an inside does not exist - but because every cognitive journey cannot but begin with a steep vertical dislocation, - as Alice falling into the rabbit's lair and and the Promethean hero of myth who must reach a parrot's nest by climbing a tree trunk or liana both know. The voyage, however, could also be accomplished by using a mirror with nothing left to mirror but its own cornice or by using a window that faces the outside on both of its sides. The important thing is that one does not expect to reach a hereafter but a here and now, a real now of our world already swallowed up by its spectral horizon; the small straw or glittering lamella that is caught in the sieve once all the sand has been sifted.

This combination physiological-intellectual introduction to Melotti's studio transforms the trauma of physical entry (the descent, via a spiral staircase which, by coincidence, also marked the spiral ascent to Calvino's Einaudi office in Turin)22 into a heightened drama of enlightened discovery. Calvino is less interested in revealing an epistemological intersection than he is in blurring conceptual boundaries, the concept of Viaggio' (travel), as a metaphor for cognizance. Maria Corti makes a similar claim when she states that Facendosi la parola viaggio immagine e metafora di un processo sia ere-

176 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures ativo sia critico, essa al di la della nozione di percorso pud significare 1'inaspettato, un senso originario delle cose, direzione, deviazione, nomadismo della penna o tutte queste cose insieme.23 If we turn the word voyage into the image and the metaphor of a process that is both creative and critical, beyond the notion of journey, then, it can come to signify the unexpected, a novel sense of things, direction, deviation, nomadic penmanship or all of these things taken together. As a point of ingress into his world of images, Melotti's submarine staircase is a rite of passage, an initiation that immediately establishes a subordinate relationship with the interlocutor that is both physical and intellectual. Moreover, as Calvino reminds us, this beginning, though familiar as a topos, signals a departure from all other possible itineraries. We have entered a new domain, that of sense data, of contrived appearances and manipulated perceptions. There is no shortage of beginnings, origins, departures, and arrivals in the works of Calvino. By using situations that surprise (precisely cloven men that live) and even disorient (a castle of mute storytellers) the reader, the author is able to take control of the willing traveller and lead him through intentional blindness (loss of control) to unexpected insight. In these instances, the adventure gains power from its uniqueness and aesthetic status. In order to fully appreciate the scope of the author's reliance upon these initial orientating images, I now turn to one of Calvino's most felicitous imaginary voyages, Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore. This work is Calvino's most dramatic exploration of how narrative systems (art) and life interact. As a demonstration of the vast homonymic potential of fiction, the work is dependent upon the maintenance of a paradoxical world-view in which writer and reader, truth and fiction, story and frame, and yes, words and images are mutually implicative. The text is, in fact, a visual metaphor that both opens new regenerative possibilities while exposing the all-devouring limits of the system(s) being reified. The work's polivalently articulated style is a provocative balancing act between observation, description, narratalogical cataloguing, and abstract conceptualization. The archetype of this method is the map, the metaphor, in many ways, of an all-inclusive temporal and spatial totality. It is also a rationally patterned, visual representation that simplifies, we have seen, a complex temporal and spatial experience. This is the beginning of a voyage of discovery whose end

Verbal Order to Visual Chaos 177 (as in medieval maps, wall murals, and stained glass windows), is already known and is present before the eye as in a visual mosaic where all the fun is in getting to the destination. Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore is one of literature's most structured and rule-bound works, chained, as it is, to fulfil the hermetic phrase: Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, fuori dell'abitato di Malbork, sporgendosi dalla costa scoscesa senza temere il vento e la vertigine, guarda in basso dove 1'ombra s'addensa in una rete di linee che s'allacciano, in una rete di linee che s'intersecano sul tappeto di foglie illuminate dalla luna intorno a una fossa vuota - Quale storia laggiu attende la fine? - chiede, ansioso d'ascoltare il racconto. (260) If on a winter's night a traveller, outside the town of Malbork, leaning from the steep slope without fear of wind or vertigo, looks down in the gathering shadow in a network of lines that enlace, in a network of lines that intersect, on the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon around an empty grave - What story down there awaits its end? - he asks, anxious to hear the story. (258) The story that awaits telling is a deciphering of this cryptic circular code that is understood only at book's end but which has conditioned the reading experience throughout. This rigid program permits a freeflowing voyage of highly spirited stops along a severely limited and calculated spatial itinerary. For Calvino: In un romanzo molto costruito e che segue determinate regole ci puo essere uno scatenamento di fantasia maggiore che in una prosa informale. Una delle immaginazioni piu vorticose e irrefrenabili dell'inizio del nostro secolo, Raymond Roussel, procedeva ponendosi delle stranissime regole. Per esempio cominciare un romanzo con una frase e poi costruire una frase completamente diversa cambiando solo alcune lettere e ponendola come meta finale del romanzo. In mezzo a questi due punti faceva succedere tutto quello che gli passava per la mente, ma sempre tenendo ben presente quel fine ... lo non ho il culto del caso. Credo che dal caso non si tiri fuori niente di buono.24 In a rigidly constructed novel that follows predetermined rules it is possible to find more unrestrained fantasy than in an informal work. One of the most vertiginous and irrepressible imaginations from the beginning of

178 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures our century, Raymond Roussel, proceeded by imposing very strange rules upon himself. For example, beginning a novel with a phrase and then constructing a completely different phrase by changing only a few letters and placing it as the final line of the novel. Between these two nodes he allowed anything that popped into his mind, always aware, however, of that final line ... I am not one for chance. I believe that nothing of consequence can be had from chance.

We have already seen how Calvino's creative energy and his combinatory experiments arrived at an impasse while shuffling tarot cards. He was to find a way out of this cul-de-sac by toying with the very structuring devices that caused his weariness. In Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore the author literally embarks upon a voyage through these devices and over the body of literature these mechanisms subtend. In the article 'Se una notte d'inverno un narratore'25 Calvino describes the mechanisms of his work. The narrative models he lists are placed on a grid, a pattern of lines that bridges the gaps between the topoi elaborated in the individual tales and the overall structuring matrix of the frame tale. Calvino's discourse spans the existential void, defying engulfment with acrobatic agility. The successive levels of the work's shifting realities are ordered in a pattern that recalls the invisible body conjured in Le citta invisibili.26 The scheme is a geometric construction built with the same visceral logic of anatomy. We depart from the 'head' to arrive at the 'foot' of the work. The moves, again, are predetermined and determinative: from the airy 'nuvola di fumo' (14; 'cloud of smoke) to the earthy 'fossa vuota' (223; 'empty grave'); from initial hope ('tutte le vite che potrei aver avuto cominciano di qui' [211; 'all the lives that I could have led begin here'); to disillusion ('il mondo e ridotto a un foglio di carta' [254; 'the world is reduced to a sheet of paper'); from ignorance (it is not known where the story will lead) to revelation (the final story is a vision of apocalypse); beginnings, in other words, that imply endings; endings that imply beginnings ... As we move down the body the images in the stories become more corporeal, limbic, more sensually fixed (reading of body), more rooted to primal instincts (fear of falling), and preternatural archetypes (death, apocalypse). The frame too is a veritable tableau of complications that assume baroque proportions. In another of his articles that explains the work, Calvino calls its serpentine turn of events 'baroccamente virtuosistica'27 ('symptomatic of baroque virtuosity') and highlights the elegant

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geometry of the plot's iterativity, fragmentation, symmetrical doublings, and schematic condensation. Appropriately, the entire enterprise is erected and maintained, according to the author, by a wellworn visual topos of 'un proteiforme deus-ex-machina' ('a proteiform deus-ex-machina'), a 'Gran Mistificatore' ('Grand Mystifier') that multiplies images at will. Language is still privileged, but it is now engaged in a human drama backdropped by death. In this scenario, it is not so much the story ('il letterario'; 'the literary') that counts but the process and procedures ('il romanzesco'; 'the romantic') that sustain the vital drama. At each turn of the adventure every move threatens extinction. The pleasures of the chase, however, ensure that the generative power of verbal combinatorics proceeds as plotted. On a larger scale, the chase for Calvino is really a contest between words and images, since the world, he discovered, is no more that an amalgam of intelligible temporal and spatial signs. The thrust of his writing, from the early sixties was directed towards the forging of a neutral middle topography that eliminated any sense of difference or historical sequence by the very act of verbal/visual juxtaposition. A 1965 letter to Emilio Garroni sheds some light on the depth of the author's concern: La lettura del Suo libro mi e venuta al momenta giusto, dato che le cose che scrivo adesso sono dei racconti in cui piu che mai sono alle prese con 'segnicita' (quello che per me e uno sviluppo d'una immagine di partenza secondo una logica interna all'immagine o al sistema d'immagini) e 'semanticita' (quello che per me e la raggera di possibili significati d'ogni segno-immagine-parola, per lo piu allegorizzazioni storico-intellettuali, che si presentano sempre un momento dopo e di cui non devo mai preoccuparmi troppo se voglio trovare 1'organizzazione perfetta in cui la logica segnica - che e una e una sola - e la logica semantica - che deve avere libero gioco su vari piani - diventano una sola cosa).28 I read your book at just the right moment, since the things I am now writing are stories in which more than ever I deal with 'signicity' (what for me is the development of an initial image according to a logic internal to the image itself or to the system of images) and 'semanticity' (what for me is the radial diposition of the possible meanings of each sign-image-word, in addition to its historical-intellectual allegories, that always present themselves a moment later and of which I should concern myself if I want to find the perfect organization in which the sign logic - which is one and

180 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures one only - and the semantic logic - which must have free reign on various levels - become one and the same thing. Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore is premised upon the possibility of mending the rift between conventional signs and natural ones. Though Calvino is reluctant to abandon some sort of fit relationship between name and thing, between intelligence and sense, it is also true that his commitment to a visual epistemology forces words to eventually yield to his, indeed to their own, internal pictorial essence. Among the papers found in Calvino's studio after his death were files containing alternative endings to several of the tales of Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore. The papers include a different chapter 11, a new ending to the work that projects a totality, a sense of closure that the printed version eschews: Senti, anch'io cerco delle spiegazioni per quello che succede, ma posso solo costruire dei modelli ipotetici, finche tengono. C'e una sfera di materia scritta che involge il mondo, da alcuni millenni. E'il mondo stesso che la secerne per il bisogno di supporre che esistano altri mondi possibili, altri modi d'essere, altre storie, che abbiamo un principle e una fine, una forma, un senso, uno stile, a differenza delle storie frantumate e informi che brulicano sulla crosta terrestre. La sfera scritta cerca d'imprimere la sua forma e la sua logica sulla faccia del mondo vivente; non ci riesce; ma il mondo vivente a poco a poco si convince che la sfera scritta sia il suo specchio, e quest'illusione lo fa vivere piu che mai nella menzogna, nelle pretese infondate e nell'incapacita di mutarsi. Ecco allora che la materia scritta, per non prestarsi piu a questo gioco, precipita sul mondo inzuppandolo del suo buio inchiostro, saldandogli addosso una corazza di squame e di scaglie, assorbendo la sua sostanza deforme e mendace fino a che ogni cosa non e assimilata al modo d'essere della finzione. II mondo scritto dissolvendosi nel mondo qual e, identificandosi ad esso, forma il mondo apocrifo in cui ci muoviamo. - E non c'e via d'uscita? - Se ogni mondo scritto presuppone un mondo non scritto contrapposto e distinto, dal mondo apocrifo dovra distaccarsi un mondo trasparente e precise e ben sfaccettato come un cristallo, un cristallo vivente. - Cominci a vederlo formarsi? - lo no. Non il minimo accenno. - Ma speri di vederlo?

Verbal Order to Visual Chaos 181 - Non tocca a me sperare. lo sono coinvolto nel processo. Forse tutti noi viviamo di vita apocrifa, e resteremo da questa parte per sempre.29 Listen, I too am looking for explanations for what's happening, but I can only construct hypothetical models, or as long as they hold. There is a sphere of written material that has wrapped the earth for some millennia. It is the earth itself that secretes it because it is necessary for it to suppose that other possible worlds exist, other ways of being, other stories, that we have a beginning and an end, a form, a sense, a style, that we are different from the fractured and ill-formed stories that swarm upon the earth's crust. The written sphere tries to imprint its form and its logic upon the face of the living world; it is not able to; but the living world is slowly convinced that the written world is its mirror, and this illusion causes it to live evermore as a lie, in unfounded expectations and in the inability of changing itself. At this point the written material, in order to no longer play the game, throws itself upon the world drenching it with its dark ink, welding upon it a layer of scales and flakes, absorbing its deformed and mendacious substance up to the point of assimilating everything into the fiction. In this manner the written world dissolves itself into the world as it is and forms the apocryphal world in which we move. - And is there no way out? - If every written world presupposes a non-written one with which it is counterbalanced and distinct, one should be able to detach from this apocryphal world one that is transparent and precise and as well faceted as a crystal, a living crystal. - Can you begin to see one forming? - Not me. Not the slightest inkling. - But do you hope to see it happen? - It is not for me to hope. I am involved in the process. Perhaps we all live an apocryphal life, and we remain on this side of things forever. In this unpublished ending the author yields to the temptation of an Ur-language of visual transparency. As words are reabsorbed by their genitive images the semiotic begets a simple, yet fathomless, image of pristine illusion. Such attempts to create order merely encourage the notion that an ordering experience exists elsewhere, in this case, in the precisely sculptured image. As in the final pages of Palomar, the self no

182 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

longer differentiates itself from the material universe but is part of its generative matrix. In the end, the text itself is the ultimate irony: a jeu de mots that cleverly elevates the generative capacity of literary structures while debunking their superficiality. Calvino achieves this by highlighting the haptic qualities of reading: readerly foreplay ('distendi le gambe ... togliti le scarpe' [4; 'stretch your legs ... take your shoes off']), the unforeseen and constantly changing mise en scene, the physical sensation of the stories ('appena sarai sprofondato nella lettura non ci sara piu verso di smuoverti' [4; 'once you're absorbed in reading there will be no budging you']), the minutiae of the creative task at hand ('regola la luce ... le sigarette a portata di mano ... devi far pipi'?' [4; 'adjust the light... cigarettes within reach ... do you have to pee?']). He is also concerned with the production of the text from initial encounters with the publisher ('ci teniamo tanto, no, non per pubblicarlo, ci teniamo per darglielo indietro' [94; 'it means so much to us, no, not to publish it, it means so much for us to give it back to you') to writing and revisions (97-8), translation ('Marana traduceva questo romanzetto da due soldi, parola par parola, e ce lo faceva passare per cimmerio, per cimbro, per polacco ...' [95; 'Marana translated this trashy novel, word by word, and passed it off to us as Cimmerian, Cimbrian, Polish...']), production problems ('Che importa il nome dell'autore in copertina?' [101; 'What does the name of an author of the jacket matter?']), buying ('Gia nella vetrina della libreria hai individuate la copertina col titolo che cercavi' [5; 'In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for']) and touching ('e gia in libreria che hai cominciato a sfogliare il libro' [7; 'you started leafing through the book already in the shop']) to fondling the text with longing expectation ('rigiri il libro tra le mani... fa parte del piacer del libro nuovo ... serva a spingere verso il piacere piu consistente della consumazione dell'atto' [9; 'you turn the book over in your hands ... it is a part of the pleasure in a new book... it serves as a thrust towards the more substantial pleasure of the consummation of the act']). This is a way of distancing the text, a way of avoiding obvious autobiographical implications. Calvino revels in the tacit anonymity: 'Per questa donna io non sono altro che un'impersonale energia grafica, pronta a trasportare dall'inespresso alia scrittura un mondo immaginario che esiste indipendentemente da me' (190; Tor this girl I am nothing but an impersonal graphic energy, ready to shift from the unexpressed into writing an imaginary world

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that exists independently of me'). A sign on a page, a stroke on a canvas implies a stroker, a maker, but does not implicate him in the process. This also highlights the materiality of the text and the processes of creative activity that reside outside the story. One of these activities is the signature. As if conducting a tour in some literary art gallery, the first words of the work emphasize the writer's signature: 'Stai per cominciare a leggere il nuovo romanzo Se un notte d'inverno un viaggiatore di Italo Calvino' (3; 'You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveller'). It is interesting that Calvino's signature is the most prominent feature in a text that promotes apocrypha. The book is signed, literally, by the artisan's insistence on a voice beyond the reading experience ('una voce che viene non si sa da dove, da qualche parte al di la del libro' (242; 'a voice that comes from an unknown source, from somewhere beyond the book/ 239) that guarantees an uneasy authenticity. Indeed, the entire first chapter is a kind of claim to territory lest the reader, whoever he may be, mistake it for a specious copy. The signature has become an element of the discourse, no less than a visual artist's signature on a canvas. It predetermines and guarantees value. The supposed recovery of falsified signature initiates a quest through apocrypha, palimpsests, imitations, counterfeits, and pastiches, and orchestrates a meta- and interartistic system that sanctions the search for the original author's trace. The text itself now becomes both personal signature and aesthetic testament. Throughout the work the reader is led over a physical corpus of works that contains, buried deep within, the organic material that is the nucleus of Calvino's lion's marrow displayed, as an intellectual self-portrait, on the visual canvas of the written text. But the author is also toying with tautology: La tautologia pud essere intesa come un gioco di specchi o come la manifestazione piu incontrovertibile della verita: nell'un caso e nell'altro ha il potere d'incantare, basta entrarci e non si vuole piu uscirne.30 Tautology may be understood as a game of mirrors or as the most incontrovertible manifestation of the truth: in either case it has the power to enchant, one need only enter within its grasp and never wish to leave.

There is an implied intimacy is this game of mirrors, in which doubling becomes an illusion of sameness. The perennial conceit, however, is that the author remains, despite all the reading-writing fuss, the ulti-

184 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures mate enchanter. In this ironic Utopia, the real protagonist who maintains the unflinching gaze between writer and reader is the sense of longing. What Calvino is proposing in this multilevelled text of classic proportions is an anguished relation to creative experience. In this case, it is his own longing to transfer onto a literary platform the techniques

of painting. The sheer proliferation of words, the aegis of the panoptic writer, does not guarantee the metaphysical ideal of wholeness. Instead, they merely confirm an exhausting and trying multiplicity. I sense a tiredness in Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, a will to coerce multiple meanings into one complete interpretation that allows polysemy while eschewing dogmatism. Calvino does not wish to relinquish the self, however, but the mapping function of the pervasive author: Anch'io vorrei cancellare me stesso e trovare per ogni libro un altro io, un'altra voce, un altro nome, rinascere; ma il mio scope e di catturare nel libro il mondo illeggibile, senza centre, senza io. (180) I, too, would like to erase myself and find for each book another I, another voice, another name, to be reborn; but my aim is to capture in the book the illegible world, without center, without an I. (180) This must not be read, however, as a Barthesian pronouncement on the death of the author.31 Instead, Calvino is hypothesizing a unity of destination, in this case, the possibility of becoming like 'II pittore [che] tende a ricondurre il molteplice all'uno (Io scrittore, forse, il contrario)'32 ('a painter who tends to reduce the variegated world to one concept [the writer, perhaps the opposite']) and is able to annul the self within the instruments and space of his trade: Annullare 1'io individuale per identificarsi con 1'io della pittura d'ogni tempo, 1'io collettivo dei grandi pittori del passato, la potenzialita stessa della pittura; questa e la grandi modestia e la grande ambizione del pittore.33 To cancel the individual self in order to identify with the I within the painting of all ages, the collective self of the great masters of the past, the potential itself of painting; that is the great modesty and the great ambition of the painter.

Verbal Order to Visual Chaos 185 The analogy is an interesting one for it is in the 1970s that Calvino began to re-explore the homologies between the two arts that had inspired him throughout his career, literature and painting. Since he was very fond of the mechanisms that generate meaning, his interest in the writings of Gombrich and the iconologists Warburg, Panofsky, Saxl; his friendships with art historians such as Enrico Castelnuovo, Salvatore Settis, Carlo Ginsburg; as well as his passion for the images that emerged from the painted canvases of Matta, Romano, Adami, Gnoli, Melotti, and Arakawa attest to an ongoing search for new meanings. A pleasant consequence is a renewed visual inspiration. It should come as no surprise, then, that besides the prearranged strictures used to generate meaning in the text, it is also true that the word/image paradigm is part of a mutually implicative project that generates the stories of Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore. Squaring the Text While it is easy to understand or imagine the possible critical contexts implied when referring to writers and readers, stories and frames, and so forth, it is legitimate to question the inclusion of the word and image paradigm for such a self-contained, word-oriented text as Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore. By using this paradigm, I am appealing to definitions of word-image that place it in the centre of a typology of sense formation connected with the notion of illustration. For Steiner, 'the verb "illustrate" itself seems to have been used to refer to verbal elucidation before it was transferred to the pictorial supplementation of verbal texts.'34 Using examples from the '1538 Cloverdale New Test. Prol., Thou shalt see that one translation declareth, openeth, and illustrateth another'; and '1691 Norris Pract. Disc. 77, When Revelation had illustrated the obscure Text of Reason' (OED), she makes the case that these usages root illustration in notions of interpretation and intertextuality. In this sense, one text reveals another by presenting a clearer vision. Heidegger writes that 'showing is revealing something precisely as it is; it is to delineate its structure so clearly that the structure is finally seen, not merely indicated or described.'35 Seeing and saying would seem to overlap, intensely informing each other in a quasimagical relationship that weaves linguistic and pictorial signs into an image-based cultural fabric. For Mitchell, this fabric is never solid but interwoven with contending ideologies and hierarchical struggles for representational dominance that are ultimately bound up with the on-

186 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

again/off-again relationship between words and images. The history of culture/ he states, 'is in part the story of a protracted struggle for dominance between pictorial and linguistic signs, each claiming for itself certain proprietary rights on a "nature" to which only it has access.'36 It is interesting that such a logocentrically intertextual work as Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore can be interpreted, I suggest, as a dialogue between the descriptive (painterly) aspirations of the author and his theoretical (writerly) self. As Cesare Segre says about the book: Apprendo da Calvino che il capitolo VIII e veramente il nucleo generative del libro: avrebbe dovuto far parte dello scritto 'La squadratura' ... ed essere seguito da abbozzi di romanzo che sarebbero stati appunto abbozzi di Se una notte ...37 I understand from Calvino that Chapter VIII is really the generative nucleus of the book: it was to have been a part of 'La squadratura'... and followed by sketches for a novel which were to in fact to be the sketches for If on a winter's night...

'La squadratura/ as we have noted, is the title of a short essay that appeared in IDEM, a slim artbook by Giulio Paolini. It is interesting that Calvino would choose this relatively obscure venue to announce this most ambitious and eloquent work. Chapter 8, in fact, can be read as a kind of Da Vincian paragone in which the theoretical, often subversive frame tale explains, exemplifies, effaces the visible diegetic surface of the incipits. The same transaction occurs in Le citta invisibili, in which the repertoire of verbal potentialities between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan bury the images of the invisible cities in a multilayered visual palimpsest. Calvino is thus working with an infinitely more sophisticated narrative hypothesis than has heretofore been suggested. Not only is he attempting a tour deforce, he is pushing the limits of his writing as never before. Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore is born of the possibility of writing while somehow emulating, or at least maintaining one eye, on the techniques of the painter. In previously unpublished pages of 'La squadratura/38 Calvino speculated upon the possibility of transferring the painter's codes of connotation to those of writing: Quello che per il pittore e la squadratura della tela, per lo scrittore e

Verbal Order to Visual Chaos 187 Yindpit, la formula d'apertura che puo anche essere anonima, di repertorio, 1'alpha di ogni possibile finzione scrittoria, non ancora proprio la finzione ma 1'avviso che nella finzione si sta entrando. (1382) As the squaring of the canvas is to the painter, so too the incipit is to the writer, it is the opening formula that may also be anonymous, repertorial, the alpha of every possible writing fiction, not really the fiction itself but the signal that one is entering fiction.

One senses in these words a conversion from the principle of opposition, word versus image, to one of interchangeability, to word and image, to what can be called a natural attitude.39 The importance of this perspective is testified to by Calvino himself since he places Flannery's diary (unpublished pages of which are part of 'La squadratura') at the structural core of the work. One reference remains, however, and was published in the Paolini introduction. The final lines of 'La squadratura' allude to Calvino's future masterpiece: Le fotografie di questa tela squadrata potranno riempire il catalogo d'una pinacoteca immaginaria, ripetute identiche ogni volta col nome d'un pittore inventato, con titoli di quadri possibili o impossibili che basta aguzzare lo sguardo per vedere. Lo scrittore guardandole gia riesce a leggere gli incipit d'innumerevoli volumi, la biblioteca d'apocrifi che vorrebbe scrivere. (xiv) The photographs of the squared canvas could fill the catalogue of an imaginary picture gallery, repeated each time with the name of an invented painter, with titles of possible or impossible paintings that one need only sharpen one's gaze to see. Looking at them the writer is already able to read the beginnings of innumerable volumes, the library of apocrypha the he would like to write.

Accordingly, each incipit can be interpreted as an opening brush stroke that sets the colour of the following visualization. These visual tableaux are ensconced within framing mullions, the frame tale. Each incipit is colourfully distinct yet drawn from the same topical palette. When viewed together they form a narrative mosaic with both spatial depth and temporal sequence. Thus a seemingly innocuous theoretical reflection on the phenomenology of writing vis-a-vis the prospectus of

188 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures painting, 'La squadratura/ becomes a quintessential key in the genesis of Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore and squarely sets the novel in a new visual context. This shift from a poetics of combinatorics (using the sense of signs) to one of haptic-visualizing (using the sign of the senses) is further described in the Introduction to IDEM. Written in the same years Calvino is composing his most visual works, the author speaks of a writer whose emotional absorption with the painter's craft causes him to pine with envy. For the writer-protagonist of the story, the compositional mode of painting suggests continuous movement and transparency of action while exuding surety of purpose, tranquility of design, and immediacy of expression, elements totally lacking in his own craft: Da un'opera all'altra il pittore continua un unico discorso, non comunicativo ne espressivo, perche non pretende di comunicare qualcosa che e fuori ne di esprimere qualcosa che ha dentro, ma comunque un discorso coerente e in continue svolgimento. (vii) From one work to another the painter continues a single discourse, neither communicative nor expressive, because he does not pretend to communicate something that is outside nor express something from within, but nevertheless a coherent discourse in continuous development. The writer, it seems, may only ponder such inspired bliss: Lo scrittore guarda il mondo del pittore, spoglio e senza ombre, fatto solo di enunciati affermativi, e si domanda come potra mai raggiungere tanta calma interiore. The writer watches the world of the painter, naked and without shadow, made up only of affirmative enunciations, and he asks himself how he could ever achieve so much interior calm, (vii) Calvino's writer-protagonist examines the nature of the painting process and envies the unique status that the painted image installs for itself: Non e il rapporto dell'io col mondo che queste opere cercano di fissare: e un rapporto che si stabilisce indipendentemente dall'io e indipendentemente dal mondo. Anche allo scrittore piacerebbe fare delle opere cosi. (vii)

Verbal Order to Visual Chaos 189 These works do not try to achieve a relationship with the world: it is a rapport that is established independently of the self and independently of the world. Even the writer would like to create this kind of work. But is it possible? The writer-protagonist describes the painter's art as a procedure. The painter is able to open a discourse on the canvas with a preliminary move or stroke of no particular import: II pittore ha cominciato il suo discorso quindici anni fa con una tela grezza in cui sono tracciate due linee perpendicolari e due diagonali: la squadratura geometrica del foglio, 'il disegno preliminare di qualsiasi disegno.' (viii) The painter began his discourse fifteen years ago with a rough canvas on which are traced two perpendicular lines and two diagonals: this is the geometric squaring of the sheet, 'the preliminary design of any design.' The words are reminiscent of the 1963 Note to I nostri antenati, in which Calvino describes a similar cognitive procedure in his own writing process. From the inauspicious beginnings of a fixed image that spins in his mind ('AH'origine di ogni storia che ho scritto c'e un immagine/ ['At the beginning of every story that I have written there is an image']), the author, we recall, develops a story: 'A poco a poco mi viene da sviluppare questa immagine in una storia ...'; ('Slowly I am able to develop this image in to a story ...'). The painter too, the writerprotagonist hypothesizes in IDEM, finds unsuspected significance emerging from the lines of his drawing: gli sembra che quelle linee occupassero il quadro con troppa presunzione, quasi credendosi piu importanti della tela su cui erano tracciate, le ha messe tra parentesi: parentesi appena accennate, perche non si credano d'essere chissacosa neppure loro. (viii) it seems to him that those lines occupy the canvas with inordinate presumption, almost to the point of considering themselves more important than the canvas on which they were drawn, and that has placed them within parentheses: parentheses which are barely visible, because they do not believe themselves to be of whatever importance. Calvino's verbal image seems to take on a life of its own, unfolding in

190 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

perfect symmetry: 'Cosi' la storia si organizzava su se stessa secondo uno schema perfettamente geometrico' ('In this way the story organized around itself a perfect geometric design'). Its disposition on the page inspires content and eventual multiple interpretation: 'E i critici potevano cominciare ad andare su una falsa strada: dicendo che quel che mi stava a cuore era il problema del bene e del male' ('And critics could begin travelling the wrong road: saying that that which truly interested me was the problem of good and evil'). In IDEM, the painter's diagonal and perpendicular lines also suggest a possible content. The canvas, however, solicits a univocal interpretation through colour: Toi si e proposto di fissare il momento in cui il colore entra a far parte del quadro, il momento del colore prima del colore' ('Then he decided to freeze the moment that colour enters to become a part of the canvas, the moment of colour before colour'). The new content begets further colour, new geometrically ordered contexts: Silenziosi suggerimenti raggiungevano intanto 1'occhio del pittore: la carta quadrettata per esempio invita a tracciare altre quadrettature o linee rette a matita o a inchiostro di china, che s'alternino o si sovrappongano a quelle stampate, o tagli che rivelino quello che c'e sotto ... (ix) Silent suggestions reached the painter's eye: the checkered paper for example invites one to trace other squares or straight lines in pencil or india ink that alternate or superimpose themselves on the printed squares, or cuts that reveal that which lies beneath ...

On the painted canvas, every line, each colour on the surface reveals its complement, its intended performance40 as an interacting sign. On the written page, on the other hand, every line, every semblance of content is revealed through narratological strategies that tend to confuse and obscure meaning. These statements may be interpreted as a continuing self-interrogating stance in which Calvino questions the status of language as a form of revelation or recording, as a limit or articulation of the world. They also point to common concerns that are central to the way Calvino identifies himself within the realm of literature and the other arts. Should it be any surprise, then, that Calvino's hyper-scrutinizing gaze would eventually turn to gaze at and appropriate on the canvas of his white page, as had Flaubert, painted images themselves?

Chapter Five

The World's Seamless Web

Crossed-out death is made of the same substance as drawn life, a movement of the pen on the page. Italo Calvino1

There are no doubts that written words are written words and that the night's darkness is only the black of the inkwell. Italo Calvino2

/ cannot overemphasize my contention that meaning is not in the signs, the things, or the head; it is in the processual rush o/semiosis. Floyd Merrell3

If for Cesare Pavese telling stories is like dancing ('Raccontare e come ballare'),4 for Calvino telling stories is a bit like painting. To relate to the world, for our author, is to see it, to transpose it, to translate it, totally and with pristine verbal clarity, onto the allegorical canvas of the mind, onto the driven whiteness of the blank page. If it is possible to speak of an aesthetics of image production it would have to include what can be termed visual writing. An incorrigible fabricator of wondrous realms and repository of fiction, Calvino's narrative, we have seen, has always sought to revivify the latent potential of reason in concrete and visible images expressed through words. He has often compared himself to a Shaman, a tribal soothsayer, imagining the world in images, speaking the world in explanatory parables. Calvino's stories require a reader who is verbally and visually literate, capable of both disambiguating the text while re-inscribing the image

192 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures the author sketches. It is a narrative, we have seen, of observation, of image making, 'a fundamental impulse in both the theory and practice of the arts, one which is not confined to any particular genre or period/5 As a fable maker Calvino's prose is haunted by images and the imaginary. As a storyteller his prose has attempted to explore the black hole that is the centre of word and image relations. In either instance, his writing is and remains at the limen that separates writing and drawing. Writing with Art Calvino's first creative passion as a youth was sketching. His work appeared in the Milanese weekly // Bertoldo, a highbrow lampoon that opened 'spazi diversi' ('different areas') for the future verbal caricaturist (Album Calvino, 49). His vignettes are witty, sardonic, visual moments of life in fascist Italy. The most revealing are of himself and his father, whom he represented as a robust, active, and strong-willed individual. It is no coincidence that his preferred sketch artist, Saul Steinberg, with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship, was an animator for the same publication. That Calvino considered his intellectual alter ego Palomar a designer before a writer is evidenced in the brief but illuminating piece 'Palomar e Michelangelo.'6 In this essay, the author links Palomar's visual experience to the artistry of Michelangelo, adding that Palomar 'e convinto di ripensare quel che pensava Michelangelo, tenendo conto dei cinquecento anni passati e del fatto che questi pensieri gli vengono mentre e al volante della sua vettura' (1992; 'is convinced to be rethinking that which Michelangelo thought, always taking into account the five hundred years that have passed and the fact that these thoughts come to him while he is driving his car'). The author then makes a case for his own natural proclivitiy for sketch by quoting Michelangelo in Francisco De Hollanda's Dialoghi romani: Talvolta io penso e immagino che tra gli uomini esiste una sola arte e scienza, e che questa sia il disegnare o dipingere, e che tutte le altre siano sue derivazioni. (1991) Often I think and imagine that only one art and science exists among men, and that this is drawing or painting, and that all the others are derived from it.

The World's Seamless Web 193 It is on these grounds that Michelangelo, and subsequently Palomar, perceive the surface of the world as material for the arts: Certamente, infatti, ben considerando tutto quello che si fa in questa vita, vi accorgerete che ognuno, senza saperlo, sta dipingendo questo mondo, sia nel creare e produrre nuove forme e figure, come nell'indossare vari abbigliamenti, sia nel costruire e occupare lo spazio con edifici e case dipinte, come nel coltivare i campi, nel fare pitture e segni lavorando la terra, nel navigare i mari con le vele, nel combattere e dividere le legioni, e finalmente nelle morti e nei funerali, come pure in tutte le altre operazioni, gesti e azioni. (1991) Certainly, in fact, when considering everything that is done in this life, you realize that each one of us, without knowing it, is depicting this world by creating and producing new forms and figures, by wearing different clothes, by building and occupying space with buildings and painted houses, as well as by cultivating fields, by making pictures and signs while working the soil, by navigating the seas with sails, by battling and dividing legions, and finally in death and in funerals, as in all other worldly operations, gestures and actions. The world is fair game for the visual artist. Whether created by nature or convention, the qualitative variations of size, shape, colour, and sound produce the intrinsic patterns of experience that solicit a human response: Vi sono momenti in cui il signer Palomar crede di riconoscere nelle orme che I'uomo lascia sulla terra non una astratta violenza ma un'aggiunta necessaria a completare e svelare la forma di cio che esiste. (1992) There are moments in which Mr Palomar thinks he recognizes in the traces that man leaves upon the earth not an abstract violence but a necessary adjunct that completes and reveals the forms of existence. The discriminatory order of human intervention on the planet is something Calvino not only accepts but actively promotes. Indeed, this rejection of dualism, of the rupture between self and object, is at the font of his tropology of similitude. With these writings on art and culture, the author offers specific examples of a pre-Cartesian cultural forma mentis that privileges a presumed network of natural signatures

194 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

that need only to be discovered in order to be understood. More than his creative narrative, these writings may offer a truer insight to the real colours of Calvino's inventive palette. For Calvino a sign, or a combination of signs from varying systems, is an avenue for knowing more about a possible interpretative meaning. It is important to note that unlike contemporary 'theories of drift/ as Umberto Eco calls them, Calvino's semiosis is about meanings engendered when signs are in their act of becoming signs. Meaning is not in the signs, and a sign is not, again I quote Eco, 'something by knowing which we know something else.'7 Indeed, signs acquire symbolic value only when they are in the process of being used as signposts on a cognitive journey, when the furtive glance of the inquisitive author begins to describe reality through the shimmering mirage of words. Besides being sign vehicles of a myriad of possible social, political, or cultural uses, a word object 'already has its own sign function, and therefore a semiotic value.' As contents of possible signification, then, 'cultural phenenomena must be seen as significant devices.'8 For Calvino, the theoretical underpinning of the signifying process is the generation of meaning on the part of signifiers, whatever their origin or composition. This process coalesces in an alchemy of visualization which is the point of departure for all knowledge and communication. The contention that the visual image plays an originary role in imagination seeps through all of Calvino's writings, both creative and critical. His thoughts on the matter, collected in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Collezione di sabbia as well as his many brief critical pieces, are strikingly similar to Giordano Bruno's reflections on signs and senses: 'For all things, in whatever way they signify and represent, are referred to and lead back to species comprehensively by sense, and the genera of all perceptible species are finally limited to the visible, that is assuredly to the liveliest and most effectual species, since sight is the most spiritual of the senses.'9 Calvino's own Promethean encounter with the spellbinding image is found in 'Autobiografia di uno spettatore.'10 In this piece the author recounts his childhood passion for moving celluloid and creates an image of himself as a passionate and ardent movie-goer. Calvino is offering a careful rendering of mythic and archetypal signs that are to serve as a foundation for critical understanding. Not surprisingly, the recurring theme in this poignant autobiography is the creation of a Calvino persona. Although the reader is furnished with compelling personal tidbits, one is never quite sure whether the narrated self faith-

The World's Seamless Web 195 fully corresponds to a real memory or to a compulsive strategy to conjure an imagined self: II cinema come evasione, si e detto tante volte, con una formula che vuol essere di condanna, e certo a me il cinema allora serviva a quello ... Certo per crearsi uno spazio diverse ci sono anche altri modi, piu sostanzioni e personali: il cinema era il modo piu facile e a portata di mano, ma anche quello che istantaneamente mi portava piu lontano. (43) Cinema is evasion, it has been said many times, with a formula that wishes to be a condemnation, and certainly for me cinema served that purpose ... Indeed, there are more substantial and personal means to create a different space: cinema was the easiest and most convenient, but also the means that instantly transported me the greatest distance. Calvino is retroactively building a case for his later literary predilections. He states that he preferred films that displayed 'tecniche narrative piu sofisticate del cinema d'oggi' (45; 'narrative techniques that were more sophisticated than today's cinema') and enjoyed the mechanisms of storytelling: diro che assistere all'inizio del film dopo che se ne conosceva la fine dava soddisfazioni supplemantari: scoprire non lo scioglimento dei misteri e dei drammi ma la loro genesi... (45) I will say that viewing a film from the beginning after already knowing the ending gave additional satisfaction: one discovered not only the unravelling of the mysteries of plot and drama but their genesis ... His rapport with the medium was personal and interactive; his search for meaning continuing throughout his career: molti film mi sono rimasti con un buco nel mezzo, e ancor oggi, dopo piu di trent'anni, - che dico? - quasi quaranta, quando mi capita di rivedere uno di quei film d'allora - alia televisione, per esempio - , riconosco il momento in cui ero entrato nel cinema, le scene che avevo visto senza capirle, recupero gli spezzoni perduti, rimetto insieme il puzzle come 1'avessi lasciato incompiuto il giorno prima. (46) many films have remained with a hole in the middle, and even today,

196 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures after more than thirty years, what am I saying - almost forty, when I happen to see one of those films - on television, for example -, I recognize the moment in which I entered the theatre, the scenes that I had seen without knowing their meaning, I recover lost pieces, I reassemble the puzzle as if I had left it unfinished the day before.

Puzzles, games, repertoires of instructions, processes of meaning assembly; the image Calvino wilfully generated of himself and aesthetically sustained is of a man with a purposeful and enduring communicatory purpose, the course of which is activated in the projected light of moving images. Calvino was to find the same exciting alchemy of discontinuity between 'due dimensioni temporali diverse, dentro e fuori del film' (47; 'the two diverse temporal dimensions, within and without the film') in 'the discontinuity between the written page, fixed and settled, and the moving multiform world outside the page' (The Written and the Unwritten Word/ 38). Writing comes to represent that same rite of passage that allowed him to escape the provincialism of San Remo and enter 'un altro mondo da quello che mi circondava' (43; 'another world than the one that surrounded me'). Nevertheless, there were correspondences with the external world. Sounding very much like a future Ermes Marana confusing life and literature, the young Calvino confuses reality and art; 'quando nel film pioveva, tendevo 1'orecchio per sentire se s'era messo a piovere anche fuori' (47; 'whenever it rained in the film, he would strain to hear if it was also raining outside'). Ultimately, however, the Very special world [s]' of cinema and then literature ensnare the willing accomplice. The lure of film is overpowering, attracting the author come il canto delle sirene, e io passando ogni volta sotto quella finestrella sentivo il richiamo di quell'altro mondo che era il mondo. (48) like a siren's call, and each time I passed under that window I heard the call of that world that for me was the world.

Literature too will provide a safe haven, a realm 'built by horizontal lines where words follow each other one at a time, and every sentence and every paragraph occupies its orderly place, a world perhaps very rich, even more rich than the unwritten one, but in any case requiring a special adjustment in order to fit oneself into it' (The Written and the

The World's Seamless Web 197 Unwritten Word/ 38). There are two worlds, each requiring initiation, concretization, principles of conformity and control, a belief in ruleoriented processes. Both allow the author a privileged vantage ('when I write I feel myself protected behind that solid object which is the written text/ 38) and guarantee a degree of anonymity, that same 'pathos of distance'11 that characterized his relationship with the unwritten world: Cos'era stato dunque allora il cinema, in questo contesto, per me? Direi: la distanza. Rispondeva a un bisogno di distanza, di dilatazione del confini del reale, di veder aprirse intorno delle dimensioni incommensurabili, astratte come entita geometriche, ma anche concrete, assolutamente piene di facce e situazioni e ambienti, che col mondo dell'esperienza diretta stabilivano una loro rete (astratta) di rapporti. ('L'avventura di uno spettatore/ 61) What had cinema, in this context, represented for me? I would say: distance. It responded to a necessity of distance, it dilated the confines of reality, it opened incommensurable dimensions, as abstract as geometric entities, but also concrete, absolutely full of faces and situations and locations, that established a web (abstract) of relations with the world of direct experience. The author will decry the eventual loss of distance that contemporary film promotes. Again, as in Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, conventions are unmasked, and the once silent spectator has become the invasive generator of the vie wing/reading performance: E il senso irreversibile che tutto ci e vicino, ci e stretto, ci e addosso ... e il fuori che invade lo schermo, il buio della sala che si rovescia nel cono di luce. (64-5) It is the irreversible sense that everything is close, is tight, is upon us ... it is the outside that invades the screen, the darkness of the theatre that reverses itself in the cone of light. Cinema thus represented a first and determinate encounter with worlds alien to Calvino's own personal experience. Within their moving frames he was to discover a latent passion for the exotic, the structured story, the manipulated vantage, elements he was soon to

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transfer onto the blank page in verbal form. Static satirical sketches thus give way to moving pictures which subsequently yield to the creative combination of both on the mind's canvas through literature. In this way, the flavours of ironic colour and the conventionality of symbolic meaning are fused to produce a transcendent narrative that somehow manages to remain underpinned with its originary impulses: 'Io sono entrato presto nel mondo della carta scritta, che lungo qualche suo margine confina col mondo della celluloide' ('L'avventura di uno spetttore/ 60; 'I entered early into the world of written pages, which along some of its edges borders with the world of celluloid'). Literature comes slowly to substitute film. The blank page metamorphoses into a freeze-frame that Calvino fills with colourful minutiae. Just as his taste for films was eclectic, moving from American to French and later to Italian films, so too the author's still lifes are eclectic moments of distilled observation that evolve, quite methodically and in schoolboy fashion, from myihos (fable) to fullfledged ekphrasis, the final stage, we recall, of classical rhetoric. The two representational systems, paper and celluloid, in this way complement each other on the author's voyage of discovery. Eventually, however, Calvino's passion for the moving image becomes secondary; the potential of literature is more alluring, even if film will always offer moments of prospective insight. For example, Calvino once commented that films like Guardie e ladri 'sarebbero stati davvero utili al politico e allo scrittore come a tutto il pubblico che vuol prendere coscienza di se stesso'12 ('would have been useful to politicians and writers as well as a general public interested in acquiring a consciousness of itself). Yet, as the author's competence in literature increases, so too does his dissatisfaction with film. He will come to replace temporal sequential action with spatial description, neorealistic collectivity with solitude and anonymity: Direi che uno alle volte pensa quale puo essere la reazione ad una cosa che sto scrivendo letta da una persona che conosco o dall'altra, pero il pubblico non ha un volto, e un pubblico che io non conosco.13 I would say that at times one may think of the reaction to something that I am writing by a person I know or by someone else, but the public has no face, it is a public that I do not know.

Literature provides the increasingly reclusive adult the same escape

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('scappando di casa da nascosto' ['sneaking away from home']) that film offered the inquisitive youth: E vero che negli anni passati ero molto spesso a Parigi; ed e vero che negli ultimi anni mi si trova piu spesso in Italia. Ci sara qualche motive esistenziale ...? Mah, forse e sempre quel problema del nascondersi. E' un bisogno che ho sempre ma qualcosa forse e cambiato ... Quando ero piu giovane avevo bisogno di nascondermi perche mi sentivo come senza guscio; oggi ho 1'illusione d'aver un guscio che porto con me e che mi fa da nascondiglio dovunque io sia. ('Se una notte d'autunno uno scrittore/ 85) It is true that in recent years I was often in Paris; and it is true that in these past few years I find myself more often in Italy. Is there some existential reason ...? Well, perhaps its that same old problem of wishing to hide oneself. It is a constant need but perhaps something has changed ... When I was younger I needed to hide myself because I felt exposed; today I have the illusion of travelling within a shell that acts as a hiding place wherever I may be.

Moreover, film now seems limited. When film images are seen independently of their visual tale they become static, remaining suspended in space: 'In cinema the size of the image does not have any affective connotations, but a syntactical function - or, rather, the function of marking 'privileged' points in a succession of images.'14 Still images, the author intuits, require the subtending text of a word-based temporal dimension. Words, on the other hand, may create a visual story on their own. What's more, 'with language one can create mysterious effects' ('Cinema and the Novel/ The Uses of Literature, 75). It is important to recall that for all of Calvino's supposed attraction to cinema, none of his characters are preoccupied with film, except for Quinto Anfossi, who finds work in the world of Roman film production. Rather than drawing inspiration from cinematic themes, it is Calvino's belligerent contention that literature is the source of cinema's ekphrastic envy: The cinema has always been afflicted by jealousy of the written text: it wants to 'write'... The challenge of the written word continues to be one of the chief motive forces of invention in the cinema, but - a thing that never happened in the past - literature has begun to function as a model of freedom ... From this point of view the cinema is still a tributary of literature, but the situation is fluid and

200 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

may well change' ('Cinema and the Novel/ 77-8). True to his first love, sketching, Calvino states: 'I have always enjoyed the cinema purely as a spectator, without its having anything to do with my literary work. If any part of cinema has in fact influenced some of my work, it is the animated cartoon. The world of drawing has always been closer to me than that of photography'... ('Cinema and the Novel/ 78). For Calvino, the word and image dichotomy is harmonized through the transgressive matching of verbal mobility with visual corporality: 'I find that the art of moving cartoon figures about on a static background is not so different from that of telling a story with words arranged in lines on a blank sheet of paper' ('Cinema and the Novel/ 79-80). Cartoons move us beyond the boundaries of what people say about images and into the realm of what they do with them. The war-torn border between embattled words and images is momentarily resolved as the fragmented practice of perceiving either words or images independently becomes untenable. A new iconology simultaneously invites us to note the presence of visual, verbal, pictorial, graphic, perceptual, and conceptual features in an encapsulated and, importantly, controlled literal meaning: 'It is a metaphorical and metonymic art at one and the same time; it is the art of metamorphosis (the great theme of novels ever since Apuleius, and one that the cinema is so bad at) and of anthropomorphism (a pagan vision of the world, far less humanist than is often supposed)' ('Cinema and the Novel/ 80). Calvino's answer to a science that has sacrificed natural world images in favour of an abstract humanism was to enter and populate that world with concrete and visible pagan icons. Thinking of Art In fact there can be no other end than that of extracting all that is possible from pictorial potential. This is also true for literature. Italo Calvino15

Calvino's initial passion for drawing - his natural ability to freeze and capture action at its most salient moment - and his attraction to the sequencing of static images in film are transferred onto the pages of his narratives. In sketches the world's seamless web of interpretable objects is recast in an authoritative artistic language that fuses nature, humans, ideas, and artifacts into one harmonious syntax. Calvino's interest in paintings for inspiration, then, should not be seen as a sym-

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bolic gesture that spites language or literature, nor as a minor aberration in an otherwise compelling narrative. This lateral thrust is instead symptomatic of a far-ranging thinker's crossing of disciplinary boundaries while figuring the interactions between theory and critical practice. Indeed, it should be remembered that in a 1958 lecture entitled 'Natura e storia del romanzo/ a lecture in which the author reads and comments on famous novels, he states that 'La narrativa allegorica, il teatro, la pittura non fanno che completare il quadro tracciato [del mondo] dagli scrittori di romanzi' ('Allegorical narrative, theatre, and painting complete the picture [of the world] drawn by writers of novels').16 Theatre, paintings, the visual arts, and collections of artworks should be studied for purposes of aesthetic analogy. In the same lecture he cites the narrative impact of Picasso's Guernica, granting to the artist a space alongside the dramas of Kafka and Brecht. In his painting, Picasso 'fissa 1'immagine deH'umanita' ('fixes the image of humanity') in a universally understood story. For Calvino, the figurative elements of a painting can construct a metapictorial awareness that can perform the narrative function of commentary. In a sense, paintings are reminiscent of the two-dimensional surfaces of his own pencil-drawn cartoons. Drawn to provoke commentary, they are first and foremost visual anecdotes with a projected purpose and fixed theme. This flat yet infinitely deep surface captivates the author, the intersection of lines inspires his gaze, the intellectual impact of the message can be more poignant and real than the written word. Content follows form in visual art and owes its existence to the well-wrought image. The book that Calvino considers 'un modello di narrazione' ('a model of narration'), Pinocchio, measures as such first and foremost because 'ogni personaggio ha un'evidenza visiva e un'inconfondibilita di linguaggio'17 ('each character has a colourful visual presence and an unmistakable language'). That Calvino was attracted to the painted image has become a commonplace. Esther, the author's widow, recalls, 'eravamo divoratori di musei; la pittura lo interessava moltissimo'18('we devoured museums; paintings greatly interested him'). In recently published pages of what Calvino had titled 'Pagine autobiografiche' are a series of letters written to Daniele Ponchiroli while the author visited the United States. This 'Diario americano 1959-1960'19 is replete with accounts of visits to museums, public buildings, and art exhibits. The author presents himself as a roving anthropologist possessing a way of seeing that infuses objects with ideas. What is significant for our purposes is that this trav-

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elogue prefigures a descriptive style Calvino will use in future writings when dealing with art. It is a style that presumes, that makes things appear as if they are part of a larger narrative. The cities, bars, and paintings he describes are virtual presences made to be felt as a part of a communal experience to be shared with the letter reader. Calvino's earliest writing on art are newspaper reviews aimed at a general reading public. These reviews are sporadic but increase in frequency and intent in the later part of his career. Even in these newspaper clippings, something he himself considered 'cattiva letteratura' ('bad literature'), since the effect was to 'fare il colore' ('create colour'), one notes an emerging style. The author pretends no expertise during the event, preferring to assume the role of casual bystander, of informed spectator. This is very much in consonance with the style of his short stories written in the fifties, in which meaning is rooted in the contingent nature of lived experience. In these pieces the author narrates the viewing experience as a series of logical, but never conclusive, deductions. One also notes the same sardonic political slant he used as a contributor to several newspaper rubrics during the forties and fifties.20 Titles from 'Gente nel Tempo' such as: 'Bing Crosby teologo' (Bing Crosby theologian), 'Soggezione di un cane' (Subjection to a dog), 'Le capre ci guardano' (The goats are watching), 'Picasso e 1'ortolano/ (Picasso and the gardener), to name only a few, offer the image of a writer whose daily readings and observations are recast as anecdotal and provocative diversions on aesthetic and political issues. In other words, Calvino observes all of life's surfaces, written, filmed, sketched, painted, or otherwise, as generators of meanings whose interplay with the onto-existential situation of the observer structures a possible understanding of the event, reality, and the self. Unavoidably, a certain amount of intellectual autobiography seeps into these texts. As impressions are couched within metaphor, opinions are ensconced within an implicit conceptual dimension. What remains constant in the exercise is the principle of universal analogy whereby every item of the world is linked by means of similitude and resemblance. This relation is also physical, as evidenced in a brief essay titled 'Reinhard': Tutta la terra era dentro se stessa, nel volume della sfera, con il suo calore concentrate, la ricchezza degli elementi che si mescolavano in tutte le combinazioni possibili e tornavano a respingersi; fuori esisteva soltanto il fuori, il rovescio freddo e squallido del dentro.21 The entire earth was within itself, within the volume of the sphere, with

The World's Seamless Web 203 its concentrated heat, the richness of elements that mixed in all possible combinations only to return to repelling one another; outside there existed only the outside, the cold and squalid opposite of the inside.

Calvino's tact is to generate visual episodes that correspond to his own expertise as a narrator seeking to communicate, through words, across, within, and to a variety of semantic fields that are different to his own but nevertheless intellectually cognate. This attitude is rooted in a strong Neoplatonism where physical kinship is the touchstone for an emanative continuity between elements in a universe of continual flux. He does so because, as he succinctly states in 'La generazione degli anni difficili': Almeno due cose in cui ho creduto lungo il mio cammino e continue a credere ... Una e la passione per una cultura globale, il rifiuto della incomunicabilita specialistica per tener viva un'immagine di cultura come un tutto unitario, di cui fa parte ogni aspetto del conoscere e del fare, e in cui i vari discorsi d'ogni specifica ricerca e produzione fanno parte di quel discorso generate che e la storia degli uomini, quale dobbiamo riuscire a padroneggiare e sviluppare in senso finalmente umano. (E la letteratura dovrebbe appunto stare in mezzo ai linguaggi diversi e tener viva la comunicazione tra essi.)22 There are at least two things in which I have believed along my way and continue to believe ... One is a passion for a global culture, the refusal of specialist non-communicability in order to keep alive a vision of culture as a complete whole, of which each aspect of knowing and doing are a part, and in which the various discussions of each specific research and production are part of that general discussion that is man's history that we must finally control and develop in a human sense. (And literature should be precisely in the middle of these diverse languages and keep alive the communication between them.)

For Calvino the cultural stakes are high. As evidenced in his personal correspondence, in newspaper articles, and in his writings on art, he was a voracious reader, gleaning science and culture for his ideas, appropriating novel perspectives for his stories. At times one notes an affinity between a published article and a contemporary short story.23 At others one senses a docking, an intellectual affirmation of something the author always inherently believed and has gladly confirmed. This is the sense of the 1959 article 'Correnti del romanzo italiano

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d'oggi/ In what was to become a commonplace in his critical writings on literature, Calvino borrows examples from the world of painting. He speaks of Eugenic Montale and Giorgio Morandi as two giants that influenced his generation of writers. Montale's poetry and Morandi's still lifes are a 'lezione di stoicismo' (lesson in stoicism) essential to his own developing socio-literary project. Montale aside, Morandi is especially appreciated for his ability to cut to the quick, and for his constancy in presenting images of unaffected purity, for his exercising of common sense. Calvino continues this duplicitous method of mapping his own poetics by examining literature and painting in parallel in 'II mare dell'oggettivita' (1959) and 'La sfida al labirinto' (1962). In these seminal pieces, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, and Carlo Emilio Gadda are viewed alongside Mondrian, Kandinsky, Pollock, and Wols, while the visceral vein of literature - Louis Celine, Antonin Artaud, James Joyce, Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett - is set alongside the 'linea razionalistica dell'avanguardia' ('rational line of the avant-garde') represented by Leger, Cezanne, and Picasso. The Spanish painter also figures prominently in the article 'Vittorini: Progettazione e letteratura' (1967). This article is a reserve of Calvino's feelings released at the death of his mentor Elio Vittorini. For the first time he makes definite associations between the sister arts. Robbe-Grillet is referred to as 'lo scrittore-Cezanne' ('the writer-Cezanne') for his ability to draw, that is, to verbally depict the contours of an object; he is Tequivalente letterario di un Cezanne' (135; 'the literary equivalent of a Cezanne').24 But this is only a prelude to Calvino's real intent, which is to lionize Vittorini, and it is followed by a surprising association between Vittorini and Picasso. The link between literature is nowhere made more explicit. The author's subtle analysis of Vittorini's poetics is a type of diagram that closely approximates his own criteria of perfection. Beyond the discussion of models, concepts, comparisons with other writers, Calvino's most telling and interesting comments are dedicated to a revelatory comparison between Picasso and Vittorini: Per Vittorini, Picasso e un paradigma decisive: come critico lo tiene come costante punto di riferimento di valore letterario; e come scrittore si trova - quasi per natura, per occhio interiore - a essergli analogo. Oltre tutto Vittorini e colui che ha scritto un libro-Guernica, Conversazione in Sicilia, il libro-Guernica, 1'unico che si definisca attraverso questo semplice trattino

The World's Seamless Web 205 di congiunzione. E la fratellanza picassiana tocca il suo culmine con II Sempione, con questa estrema stilizzazione della figurazione narrativa ... (135-6) For Vittorini, Picasso is a decisive paradigm: as a critic he holds him as a constant literary reference point; and as a writer he finds himself - almost by nature, by his interior eye - to be similar to him. After all it is Vittorini that wrote a Guernica-nove\, Conversation in Sicily, the Guernica-novel, the only one that defines itself with this simple hyphen. This Picassian fraternity reaches its climax with The Sempione, with this extreme stylization of narrative figuration...

The crux of this aesthetic comparison is its intrinsic innovative spirit. Both artists function at the highest forms of their artistic expression. In doing so, both disclose a new rule to be emulated. Their innovation is not produced by simple appropriation of systemic characteristics endemic to the other but by their ability to reveal new dimensions of their unique sign types. Calvino relates these two artists for their iconic qualities. Moreover, their hovering, whether using written words or painted images, between figuration and abstraction, creates a sense that their similar messages move beyond the space of their works to meet in a collective unconscious. In words that both explain and fortell Calvino's own aesthetic preoccupations, he compares the functions of verbal and visual representations: Qui entra pero in gioco la differenza tra la figura e la parola: esiste la felicita del dipingere, ma una felicita dello scrivere non esiste. (136) What enters into play here is the difference between images and words: there is felicity in painting, but felicity in writing does not exist.

Continuing his analysis the author speaks in pictorial terms of Vittorini's need to rewrite texts, to issue new editions with different stories and re-ordered indices. Writing what could be construed as a selfcritique he states: Piu importante e per Vittorini ritornare sull'affresco, coprirne delle zone con intonaco e ridipingere, quasi con la mano di prima ma con la coscienza d'adesso.

206 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures More important for Vittorini is to return to the fresco, to cover areas with plaster and repaint, .almost using one's original style but with today's consciousness.

Again, both Picasso and Vittorini share common tendencies: Vittorini scrive e nasconde le pagine come un Picasso-talpa, che seppellisca i suoi quadri cosicche il giorno che usciranno alia luce non saranno piu classificati in relazione a una data ma costituiranno una serie a se' ... (137) Vittorini writes and hides his pages like a Picasso-mole, that buries his paintings so that the day they come to light they will no longer be classified in relation to a date but constitute a series unto themselves ...

It is impossible not to see Calvino in this cryptic self-study. In these instances, one must make an exhaustive leap of faith, quickly followed by a replenishing vow that the project at hand is a piece in the puzzle, part of a larger evolving humanist scheme (Calvino refers to Vittorini's project as an exploit). The tactic is an inherent trait: the scheme is global, it is tenaciously intellectual, it is hegemonic. The space between this, one of the first writings on the rapprochement between the verbal and visual arts, and the 1985 brief comment on the artist Shusaku Arakawa, his last piece, is minimal: 'Vittorini: Progettazione e letteratura' looks forward while the latter is an illuminating retrovision of long-held beliefs. Calvino senses a kindred spirit in Arakawa, a man whose work adumbrates those elements that so moved his own art: lines, words, focal points, arrows, blanks, rapidity, intelligence, light. If the mind could be mapped, it would have the essential structure of the paintings of Shusaku Arakawa: Guardando un quadro di Arakawa cosa mi viene in mente? La mente ... Un quadro di Arakawa sembra fatto apposta per contenere la mente, o per esserne contenuto. Parlo della mia mente ...2S What comes to my mind while observing one of Arakawa's paintings? The mind ... A painting by Arakawa seems intentionally made to contain the mind, or to be contained by it. I am speaking of my mind ...

Cognition and creation; Calvino's self-reflexive penchant for intellectu-

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alization is encountered and matched in the abstract, geometric visualizations of Arakawa: Non dico con questo che i quadri di Arakawa 'somiglino' a una mente, nel senso che prima esiste una mente e poi viene dipinto un quadro che la rappresenta cosi come un paesaggio rappresenta un luogo; sono io che dopo aver osservato attentamente un quadro di Arakawa comincio a sentire che la mia mente 'somiglia' al quadro. Non solo, ma non ricordo piu quale altra immagine potessi attribuirle prima. (2001) I am not saying with this that Arakawa's paintings 'resemble' a mind, in the sense that there first exists a mind which then is depicted in a painting that represents it just as a landscape represents a place; I am the one that after carefully observing a painting by Arakawa I begin to feel that my mind 'resembles' the painting. Moreover, I no longer recall what other image I could have possibly attributed to it before. This is not an a-causal moment. Things seem to have changed in a blinding flash. Written only months before his death, Calvino's art had approached some ultimate consummation as the image banks of international culture yielded to his emergent multimedic language. Though published posthumously, suddenly all previous frames and borders, story incipits and excipits, do not so much delineate moments of static narrative space but instead become signposts in an evolving dynamic synergism. The phenomenological enterprise of mapping the mind requires eidetic insight, the type Calvino finds in the work of the artist Arakawa. Calvino enjoys the sequential trajectories, the indeterminate status of the lines and arrows. He seems to have found a way to depict that 'zone of darkness' he refers to in 'Cibernetica e Fantasmi': Le varie teorie estetiche sostenevono che la poesia fosse una questione d'ispirazione discesa da non so quali altezze o sgorgante da non so quali profondita, o intuizione pura o momento non meglio identificato della vita dello spirito, o voce dei tempi con la quale lo spirito del mondo decide di parlare attraverso il poeta, o un rispecchiamento delle strutture sociali che non si sa attraverso quale fenomeno ottico si riflette sulla pagina, o una presa diretta della psicologia del profondo che permette di scodellare le imrnagini deU'inconscio sia individuale sia collettivo, comunque qualcosa d'intuitivo d'immediato d'auntentico di globale che chissa' come salta fuori, qualcosa equivalente omologo simbolico di qualcos'altro. Ma sempre

208 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures restava in esse un vuoto che non si sapeva come colmare, una zona oscura tra la causa e 1'effetto: come si arriva alia pagina scritta? Per quale vie 1'anima e la storia o la societa o 1'inconscio si trasformano in una sfilza di righe nere su una pagina bianca? (171-2) (my emphasis) Various aesthetic theories maintained that poetry was a matter of inspiration descending from I know not what lofty place, or welling up from I know not what great depths, or else pure intuition, or an otherwise not identified moment in the life of the spirit, or the Voice of the Times with which the Spirit of the World chooses to speak to the poet, or a reflection of social structures that by means of some unknown optical phenomenon is projected on the page, or a direct grasp on the psychology of the depths that enables us to ladle out images of the unconscious, both individual and collective; or at any rate something intuitive, immediate, authentic, and allembracing that springs up who knows how, something equivalent and homologous to something else, and symbolic of it. But in these theories there always remained a void that no one knew how to fill, a zone of darkness between cause and effect: how does one arrive at the written page? By what route is the soul or history of society or the sub-conscious transformed into a series of black lines on a white page?

What if the mind, speculates Calvino, was just a series of lines and arrows? His descriptive account of an artist's imagination is a linear arabesque traced out following steadily unfolding ideas. His commentary on Arakawa ponders on how imagination may enter into close alliances with similar acts of imagination, indeed even touch what Averroes considered the 'mente universale' (universal mind): I quadri di Arakawa sono pieni di frecce; la mia mente anche ... Nei quadri di Arakawa ci sono molte linee ... Nei quadri di Arakawa ci sono delle parole, parole rarefatte come quelle che risuonano nella mente ... I quadri di Arakawa sono pieni di punti focali. (2001,2002, 2003) Arakawa's paintings are full of arrows; my mind too ... In Arakawa's paintings there are many lines ... In Arakawa's painting there are words, rare words similar to those that resonate in the mind ... Arakawa's paintings are full of focal points.

The lines promote order, linearity, logic; they are a component of any geometric pattern. The words, on the other hand, crumble into 'segni

The World's Seamless Web 209 alfabetici' that may or may not promote a value. The discontinuity created by these two opposing contingencies fill the blank canvas with 'linee, piani, volumi, colori, forme, universi' (2003; 'lines, planes, volumes, colours, forms, universes'). The mind is a blank page that implodes and explodes with similar drama, that 'nasconde abissi nelle sue pieghe' (2004; 'hides an abyss in each of its folds'). Viewing Arakawa is similar to the act of reading a verbal text, to the act of thinking. At the end of Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, he states that any book is simply 'un supporto accessorio o addirittura un pretesto' (257; 'an accessory aid, or even a pretext'). If a story is interesting the author writes, non riesco a seguirlo per piu di poche righe senza che la mia mente, captato un pensiero che il testo le propone, o un sentimento o un interrogative, o un'immagine, non parta per la tangente e rimbalzi di pensiero in pensiero d'immagine in immagine ... (256) I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image ... Reading is 'un operazione discontinua e frammentaria' (256; 'a discontinuous and fragmentary operation'). Much like the paintings of Arakawa, in which the dense, rarefied material is a self-contained, selfenclosed, and monadic experience, the material simultaneously calls for further imaginings and exploratory mental acts: Quante linee s'intersecano in un punto? Quanti piani in una linea? Quanti volumi in un piano? In questi quadri non ci sono linee ne piani ne volumi, ma solo le loro intersezioni, proiezioni, focalizzazioni, che vibrano e vorticano e traboccano fuori dal quadro. (2003) How many lines intersect at one point? How many planes are there in a line? How many volumes in a plane? In these paintings there are neither lines nor planes nor volumes, but only their intersections, projections, focalizations, that vibrate and whirl and overflow outside the painting. Calvino's meditation before Arakawa's works is representative of a protracted thought or daydream in which the author projects his own

210 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

thinking processes, his mind, as an event to be mapped and designed. At the same time, he maps the visual patterns of Arakawa's painting as 'if they were representative of the mind of the artist. This is consonant with his passion for visual representations, and, in his poetics, for visual thinking. The mind for Calvino, we recall, begins at the eye. The text, be it verbal or visual, 'continuera a nascere, a essere guidicata, e essere distrutta o continuamente rinnovata al contatto dell'occhio che legge' ('will continue to be born, to be judged, to be destroyed or constantly renewed on contact with the reading eye'). To see with the mind, to render it as fluid, as silent, as vibrant, as blank, as the paintings of Arakawa; to purify the mind, to exercise its visual capacity to sense diagrams, to discern sense-data, to stay the fleetingness of imagining and achieve precise observation; these are the aims of Calvino's narrative process. The theme of mind is central not only to this 1985 piece on Arakawa; it is motivational in all Calvino's writings on art, emblematic of the essays contained in Collezione di sabbia. The space of the canvas, like that of the mind, is as precise as the young marksman's aim (a direct line connects his eye with the object in his rifle sight) in 'Ultimo viene il corvo/ as vast as the cosmos inhabited by Qfwfq, that perennially changing speck of order, who maps the possible worlds of galaxies, planets, and stars, with the same aplomb of an accomplished artist: Le frecce e le linee e le parole, quando escono dal margine del quadro, dove vanno? Vanno in un altro quadro di Arakawa: e sicuro che i suoi quadri comunicano tra loro, ci sono linee che passano da un quadro all'altro, mappe di citta che sono la stessa citta, oppure citta comunicanti ... I bordi del quadro tutt'intorno non sono altrettanto decisive, perche potrebbero spostarsi piu in la, il quadro potrebbe estendersi in tutte le direzioni, diventare infinite - dico infinitamente estendibile sebbene limitato dalle sue discontinuity interiori. (Cos! la mente, che nasconde abissi nelle sue pieghe). (2004) Where do the arrows and the lines and the words go when they leave the borders of the painting? They move into another Arakawa painting: his paintings definitely communicate with each other, there are lines that pass from one painting to another, city maps that are of the same city, or of nearby cities ... The borders of the painting are not as decisive because they could move further out, the painting could extend itself in all directions, become infinite - I mean infinitely extendable if not limited by its

The World's Seamless Web 211 own interior discontinuities. (Just as the mind that hides an abyss in each fold).

Calvino's discourse with paintings and collections of paraphernalia affords him the possibility of engendering a new semiotic interface with an artificial reality out there and provides one more layer of 'mondo esterno'26 ('external reality') that acts as 'uno schermo' ('a screen') between himself and his vocation as a writer.27 The author must hold reality at bay lest he become enveloped by his own propensity towards a Qfwfq-ianalphabetization of the universe that we have seen in the cosmicomic tales. In those tales the illusion created by words lock the author within a natural-sign aesthetic that gives the impression that the absent image is present. His deepening rapport with words as image surrogates became inversely related to his growing commitment to a culture that was purely visual. No longer satisfied with absence, Calvino desires the plenitude of a holistic narrative in which the subject is naturally present. After all, the word may only relate to the intelligible. The picture, on the other hand, relates to the sensible, a port of call towards which Calvino's narrative swiftly sailed, as demonstrated by his meditations on Arakawa. As he stated at a similar moment of recognition before the works of another highly admired artist, Saul Steinberg: Tutto cio che 1'uomo fa e figurazione, e creazione visuale, e spettacolo. II mondo, marcato dalla presenza dell'uomo in ogni sua parte, non e piu natura, e prodotto delle nostre mani. S'annuncia una nuova antropologia per cui ogni attivita e produzione dell'uomo vale in quanto comunicazione visiva nei suoi aspetti linguistic! ed estetici. Ma e solo 1'uomo che tende a creare forme e figure? Non vi tendono pure ogni animale e pianta e cosa inanimata e cosi' il mondo intero e 1'universo? Diremo dunque che 1'uomo e uno strumento di cui il mondo si serve per rinnovare la propria immagine di continue. ('La penna in prima persona/ 297) Everything that man does is figurative, visual creation, and spectacle. The world, marked by the presence of man in all of its parts, is no longer natural, it is a product of our own hands. A new anthropology is thus announced where every human activity and production is valid insofar as it is a visual communication in its linguistic and aesthetic aspects. But is man the only one to create forms and figures? Don't animals,

212 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures plants, and inanimate objects and indeed the entire world and the universe have the same tendency? I would therefore say that man is but an instrument used by the world in order to renovate its own image continuously.

The year is 1977. As the author explores the external world of artists he develops a strong methodological context that aims to fuse his own unlimited world-view with the inner world of the pictorial artist. Notions of familiar/alien, inner/outer, private/public now come to the fore. Stealing from Art The interpersonal relation the author wishes to establish with pictorial artists involves his desire to frame their pictorial vernacular within literary motifs. These incursions into the world of art are an outgrowth of a constant will to expansion and growth within and without the medium of literature. Calvino's enormous output includes collaborative efforts with writers, musicians, dramatists, and painters.28 In all these collaborations, Calvino is interested in the 'fundamental impulse in both the theory and practice of the arts, one which is not confined to any particular genre or period/29 but which relays his own narrative spirit across the arts. At times the relation is easily achieved. In one of his first brief texts for an exhibition catalogue, Calvino reads the writer-painter Carlo Levi's lithographs as if they were poetry: Parlare d'amore e diventato difficile. Percio diciamo che queste silenziose figure d'amanti di Carlo Levi sono 1'unico vero canzoniere del nostro tempo, forse 1'unico possibile, che testimoni di cio che e il sapore e lo sgomento dell'amore nell'uomo e nella donna d'oggi.30 Speaking of love has become difficult. It is for this reason that we say that these silent figures of lovers by Carlo Levi are the only real songbook of our time, perhaps the only one possible, that testifies to that which is the taste and discomfort of love in man and in woman today.

Already we note two themes that the author will carry through all of his writings on art: the pregnant silence of images, the absolute necessity of a rhetorical verbal presence. Most importantly, however, is the

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budding notion that these two independent sign systems may indeed somehow share similar functions or types of meaning relations. Elsewhere, the task appears more complex. In 'Ricevimento al Castello di Bardbaj' (The Reception at Castle Bardbaj'), the insularity of the narrator is overcome in a whirlwind of sensually rich and exotic objects that explode the sign-generated text into a difficult confession: E piu m'invadeva la paura delle cose, perche le cose altro non erano che le persone, piu sentivo che non potevo far a meno di provare una solidarieta disperata per le persone, la stessa solidarieta o pieta o fratellanza che mi legava alle cose. Quel mondo che contemplavo non era intorno a me, ma dentro di me ...31 And the more I was invaded by the fear of things, because these things were nothing more than people, the more I felt that I could not help but sense a desperate solidarity for these people, the same solidarity or pity or brotherhood that tied me to things. That world that I was contemplating was not around me, but inside me ...

The phenomenological search for an epiphanic detail draws the author away from the specific work and into himself. It is at these moments that Calvino, like Palomar, needs a visual stimulus as he 'hopes to uncover a pattern or a constant' (81) on which to hinge his perceptions. These processes of abstraction are an attempt to move beyond the immediate model and develop a project that constructs a new prototype of the world. This is the key to understanding Calvino's ruminations on artworks. This project is articulated in distinct, yet overlapping phases: (1) as a senior editor for Einaudi, Calvino promoted the idea of using artworks on book jackets; (2) the author's forays into the art world awaken a latent interest in art works as a rhetorical trope; (3) ludic descriptions of works by Saul Steinberg, Valeric Adami, Domenico Gnoli, and others allow him to express his indebtedness to strategies of visual representation; and (4) the desire to invest his writing with visuality turns the observer into artist. These ruminations on the works of Giorgio De Chirico and Shusaku Arakawa permit the world-weary writer to see the world anew, to refresh his vision, to reinvent his craft (as he had reinvented the 'scenario quotidiano'32 [daily scenario] of the war). Calvino had an interest in artworks that many of his literary contemporaries lacked and a command of language that most of them envied.

214 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

He brought to this interest literary, philosophical, and scientific baggage that permitted him to re-articulate the borders between the arts in more perspicacious terms. His treatment of the individual art objects problematizes, interrogates, and pushes the limits of aesthetics by juxtaposing the visual and the verbal and then demanding a new sort of reader participation. For Linda Hutcheon, these types of border pilferings often 'involve a coming-to-terms with the theoretical and political implications of what has too often been seen as an empty, formal play of codes.'33 Having come to terms with these implications, Calvino stops playing with codes and makes, I believe, genuine claims for a new, liminal art. Unlike those artists who wish to create alternative spaces for their art by marauding traditional art forms, Calvino's work is anything but controversial. He is, however, naturally drawn to artists who share a common fascination with what Foucault labelled heterotopias.34 Highly refined heterotopic projects are often dangerous because they are subversive and may secretly seek to undermine the very code that engenders and subtends them. In this sense, the tension that Calvino's verbal commentary installs with the artist's visual text fosters a dangerous liaison, because together they aspire to undermine rationality, to foster nuance, to inspire asymmetry. These texts enjoy the visual, the intellectual non sequitur. Much as in the well-known relationship between the painter Rene Magritte and the philosopher Michel Foucault, these visual artists and Calvino are cartographers of heterotopia. Both engage in a metacritique of their respective languages: the painter's critique is visual, Calvino's is verbal. Their works attain conceptual signification insofar as they evoke ideas that function within an entire system of semantic fields conceived as a network which, far from undermining convention, seeks instead to potentialize latent codes. Indeed, rather than merging disciplines, Calvino's work demonstrates that as signifying practices, verbal and visual arts are not as discrete as their historical institutionalization would suggest. Calvino revealed his intuition of the strong ties between the verbal and the visual in the early fifties, with his attraction for writer-painters. As in his critical writings on literature from the same period, the author was laying the ideological construction of future projects. Although he found it difficult to reconcile literature with the seemingly transparent realism of the visual arts, his exploration of these aleatory moments constitute the brief epiphanies that led to new meaningful contexts in the sixties and seventies. By asserting the ascendancy of

The World's Seamless Web 215 process over product, Calvino joined the postmodern debate that accepted the notion that there is 'a continuum between the skills'35 needed to decipher verbal and visual codes of representation. Meaning resided in reading/viewing, not in texts. Having come to see images as signs, they became less a replica than a transformation of the real, what Mitchell would call the 'deceptive appearance of naturalness and transparence concealing an opaque, distorting, arbitrary mechanism of representation, a process of ideological mystification.'36 The desire to contextualize images within a reading scheme, to provide these 'messages without a code/37 as Barthes called photographs, with a verbal narration, posits another interesting issue. By consciously combining verbal and visual texts, Calvino is re-visioning (in the sense of seeing or visiting again) and re-writing (in the sense of doubling a previously experienced encounter) his own meta-iconographic projects. This re-inscription of self is less than a casual sequence. The perspicacious habit of re-casting known literary topoi into novel combinations is part of Calvino's praxis of fictionalization.38 The practice can also be traced, however, to the method the author praised in Loyola's Spiritual Exercises. In these exercises, we recall, the believer is helped to shape himself on the pattern of the Saviour through consistent re-visitation of self and regular repetition of conditioning practices. In similar fashion, Calvino 'imitates' examples from the art world he considers worthy of imitation in order to divine the process of their generation, to capture the repetitive praxis that leads to their ideation, execution, and completion. His dedication to the task is distilled into narrative residue. What is interesting is that Calvino resorts (as we shall see) to a Cartesian exemplary rather than a didactic mode of exposition. When seen from this vantage, it is easy to understand that painters and their methods provide still another cultural exemplum, one more possible form of allocutionary fiction. Perhaps further insight may be gained from the enticing essay-interview Turti ad arte.'39 In this prolonged and enticingly rich conversation, Calvino and the artist Tullio Pericoli discuss issues of personal style, artistic canons, imitation and, most revealingly, artistic pilfering. As a statement of a personal poetics, Calvino cites authors and painters as fonts of personal inspiration and sources for material. The authors from which Calvino either learned or borrowed (William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Ippolito Nievo, Robert Louis Stevenson), in the present context, is negligible. After all, Pericoli comments,

216 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures this is a type of stealing that paradoxically enriches both the robber and the robbed. Calvino is in agreement: lo ho sempre avuto coscienza di prendere dei prestiti, di fare degli omaggi, in questo caso fare omaggio a un autore significa appropriarsi di qualcosa che e suo. (1805) I have always been conscious of borrowing, of rendering homage, in this instance rendering homage to an author means taking something that is his. Art, in other words, is born of other art. Borges receives special mention by Calvino as an accomplished writer-thief, as does Bouvard et Pecuchet, an unfinished novel by Gustave Flaubert. Calvino speaks of rewriting or remaking as the method behind three of his works: L'Orlando furioso (copying Ariosto's style in prose), Le citta invisibili (reimagining Polo's Milione), and // castello dei destini incrociati (in which he recounts the tales of Faust, Parsifal, Amleto, Macbeth, and King Lear). The theme of rewriting and borrowed inspiration leads the discussion to the question of incipits and Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore: Nel mio libro insomma propongo, come uno dei tanti esercizi che si possono fare, quello di prendere un inizio gia dato e cercare di svilupparlo in un altro modo. (1810) In my book I propose, as one of many possible exercises, that of taking an already given beginning and attempting to develop it in another manner. From Pericoli's vantage, Calvino's borrowings are to be regarded as a matter of semiotic integration. The author's works reveal a Kleeian disposition towards the creation of visual worlds that have never existed but which could be recuperated from the world's debris. Quoting from 'L'Origine degli Uccelli/ he reminds the author that the theme of this tale is the recovery of forme che il mondo avrebbe potuto prendere nelle sue trasformaizoni e non aveva preso, per un qualche motive occasionale o per un'incompatibilita di fondo: le forme scartate, irrecuperabili, perdute. (1802)

The World's Seamless Web 217 forms the world could have taken in its transformations but instead hadn't taken, for some casual reason or for some basic incompatibility: the rejected forms, unusable, lost.

Just as Klee searched for new visual forms, permutations of the seeable and the designable, Calvino, according to Pericoli, uses parole come 'lo scrivibile' e 'il narrabile' (Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore), mostri una conchiglia nell'atto della sua 'figurazione' ('La spirale'), fai sviluppare una storia dalla combinazione interdipendente delle immagini (// castello del destini incrociati) e concludi il racconto 'Un segno nello spazio' scrivendo: 'tanto era chiaro che indipendentemente dai segni lo spazio non esisteva e non era mai esistito.' Anche il foglio del pittore non esiste come spazio finche' non vi si traccia il primo segno di matita. (1802-3) words like 'the writable' and 'the narratable' (If on a winter's night a traveller), you display a shell in its act of 'figuration' (The Spiral'), you allow a story to develop from the interdependent combination of images (The Castle of Crossed Destinies) and you conclude the short story 'A Sign in Space' by writing: '... it was clear that, independent of signs, space didn't exist and perhaps had never existed.

Calvino responds by recalling that in classical art the idea of stealing did not exist because style was a matter of public domain, a model to duplicate, an ideal to be achieved. In our own period, the habit of intertextual exchanges is not without pitfalls. To write by emulating others is inevitably an encyclopedic exercise that paradoxically leads to nothingness. Mimicking Flaubert, Calvino quips, 'ce qe je voudrais faire, c'est un livre sur rien' (1803; 'what I would like to do is write a book about nothing'). Then he adds that this is a procedure dear to the avant-garde, both literary as well as pictorial. The painters Calvino mentions in this exchange are of particular interest to my argument. The author defends a similarity of purpose as the guiding principle or attraction behind his admiration for certain painters. Picasso is defined as a 'straordinario ladro, e' il Mercurio della storia della pittura, perche' e' 1'uomo che conclude un universo di storia della pittura e che si impadronisce e commenta e sintetizza i mondi formali piu' diversi' (1805; 'an extraordinary thief, he is the Mercury of the history of painting, because he is the man that con-

218 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

eludes a universe of the history of painting and who takes possession and comments and synthesizes the most diverse of formal worlds'). In 'Vittorini: Progettazione e letteratura' we recall, Picasso was a mago bianco ... [che] continua a 'trovare' rapporti tra le forme del mondo e le forme del linguaggio artistico ... dove gli stiliemi gia sperimentati trovano sistemazione in una sintesi quasi rapsodica. (137) white magician ... [who] continues to 'find' relationships between the shapes of the world and the shapes of artistic language ... where the already experimented styles find their place in a rhapsodic synthesis.

It is Calvino's observations on Paul Klee, however, and his fascination with the methods of the Swiss painter, that are most revealing. Klee is an artist 'che ha una grande forza genetica, che in ogni quadro apre delle strade e certamente ci sta ad essere derubato. E uno che si da in pasto all'arte futura' (1804; 'who has a great genetic force, who opens new venues in each of his paintings and expectsto be robbed. He gives himself as food to future art'). Calvino's observations suggest a pattern. All of his works should be seen as elements presented in a series of repetition. Like ripples in a pond, the reader finds buoyant words and images that have been invented or borrowed, interpreted or recast as signs that we recognize as Calvino. It is only through their place in these series that all the individual signs acquire a shared semiotic function. This function amounts to highlighting the patterns of parallelism the author uses and reuses to create, disassemble, and recreate semantic relationships. For our purposes, the underlying pattern integrates the verbal inspiration he gleans from his readings, and the visual memories and observations he receives from viewing art. We are not dealing with a unilateral referential relationship but with a multilevelled relationship from sign to concept, back to sign, to invention, to verbal communication with pregnant sign types. The key to all of this is Calvino's love of painting. Significant are the artists Picasso, Steinberg, Escher, Magritte, and Klee, whose work he chose to illustrate his book covers. Klee, however, holds special sway over the author: Hai detto giusto che Klee e per me molto importante. La pittura mi e servita sempre come spinta a rinnovarmi, come ideale di invenzione libera,

The World's Seamless Web 219 di essere sempre se stessi facendo sempre qualcosa di nuovo. In questo senso il nome di Klee mi pare fondamentale. (1806) You are correct in saying that Klee is very important to me. Painting has always driven me to renew myself, has been an ideal of free invention, of remaining the same by doing something new. In this sense Klee seems to me to be fundamental.

We no longer need to envisage the integration of painting into Calvino's work as some mysterious transformation of visual signs into verbal ones. Their shared semiotic integration is part of art's shared exemplifying function. It would be interesting to examine Calvino's short stories as works adopted from the realm of art, to find the parallelism between, say, the cosmicomic tales and the works of Matta, Grandville, Escher but especially Klee, for instance, or the heraldic trilogy and Picasso. Why not read / racconti as visualizations of many of Steinberg's symbolic sketches, Le citta invisibili as oneiric architectural visualizations, fifty-five tarot minitiatures of a new Venetian atlas? Why not, in other words, capture the visual shape of Calvino's pictorially inspired art? Hunt, as he states regarding Klee, for Tanatomia seconda, 1'anatomia segreta, il disegno dietro il disegno' (1807; 'a secondary anatomy, a secret anatomy, the design behind the design'). This is no infringement on proprietary high codes. A visual addendum to a verbal text does not secure a definite interpretation. It may, however, allow us to 'carpire un segreto nascosto' (1807; 'extort a hidden secret'), to provide a further relay that may complement the verbal index and extend its influence towards unfathomable reaches.

Chapter Six

Painted Stories and Novel Spaces

And I look upon a Picture with no less Pleasure (I mean a good one, for ill Painting is a disgrace to the wall) than I read a good History. They both indeed are Pictures, only the Historian paints with Words, and the Painter with his Pencil. All other Qualifications are common to them both, and they both require the greatest Genius and Application. Leon Battista Alberti1

One finds the poet in the painter and the painter in the poet. Viewing the works of the great masters is as useful to a writer as reading the great words of an author is for the painter. Denis Diderot2

The writer looks at the painter's work trying to translate their message into something he would like to communicate. Italo Calvino3

On the cover of Una pietra sopra, Calvino's official public adieu to the past and opening to the future, is a sketch by Saul Steinberg, one of Calvino's favourite artists. An alligator is pursued by a knight, who is in turn pursued by a giant boulder. The sketch could be a parodic enactment of the Sisyphus myth; it has the same look of eternity. Yet this drama is overtaken by mundane irony. The infinity of blank space surrounding the figures renders their travail a matter of interdependent survival, making this a myth of both sacrifice and apotheosis. The sketch also acquires a further significance after our previous discussion of St Jerome and St George.

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As we recall, Calvino blends the characteristics of these two saints, the contemplative saturnian hermit St Jerome and the active mercurial knight St George, into a singular tormented existence. Their respective active and contemplative lives are distilled into the model of knighthood. A knight's armour provides a way of steeling oneself against external vicissitude. It is transformed by the author into a sort of existential prison. Likewise, the hermit's tranquil facade belies a restless interior tenacity that cannot impose itself upon the external world captured, as it is, behind the mask of solitude. Their actions hold no import. The hermit turns towards civilization but cannot change its course; the knight saves civilization from dastardly reptiles but is merely acting out a knightly routine. If we are to believe the author, the Steinberg scene represents a settling of personal accounts with his past. He is at peace, having placed a rock upon that past, una pietra sopra. But if we return to two other knightly figures from Calvino's past, the forecast is less bright. The cloven viscount, a knight of sorts, best illustrates the superficial symmetry the young author believed would lead to an intense totality. After expressing a much more intellectually based epitome of control and personal indulgence, a disillusioned Agilulfo, the non-existent knight, disappears, leaving his intellectual queries and mathematical configurations suspended, as it were, in thin air. St George, our third knight of dragon-slaying lore, fares no better. He is made to turn inwards towards his own interior struggle, while St Jerome, the spiritual knight, is forced to turn outwards and realize his futility. This facing of one's personal trials is the lion's marrow of the author's enterprise. Our woeful Steinberg knight, therefore, is out to slay the demon we all carry within - the self divided between action and contemplation, between creation and routine. The real pathos of the scene, however, is reserved for the pursued beast, the (un)willing essential catalyst. The beast (an image real or imagined) is part of the self that is ever present, an interior psychology that Calvino now wishes to judge. And so, only seemingly oblivious to the giant boulder (the world) that is about to trample him, the knight (Calvino) ventures forth, maintains his objective, is intent on pursuing this plot line to its predestined end. A man working within a man-made construct, that world is about to crush him, for reality is incumbent, no longer held at bay by the screen of literature. Nevertheless, the hapless knight continues to chase his prey, all the while (un)aware(?) of the greater powers that condition his now ludicrous efforts.

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In the brief introduction to the text, a weary author places this past behind him. He distances himself from the 'personaggio che prende la parola in questo libro' (viii; 'the person who speaks in this book'), asking the reader to interpret the 'perplessita sistematica' ('systematic perplexity') that accompanies the writer of the collected articles along the slippery slope of a predetermined trajectory. The 'tracciati di rotta da seguire' (vii; 'markings along the route to follow') have been reduced to this one statement, to this introductory 'disegno complessivo' ('inclusive design'). Just as the knight's options have been reduced to an unswerving decline, the author's act of forming 'programmi generali' ('general programs') and 'piani d'operazioni' ('levels of operations') no longer completes his encyclopedic vision of the evolving world. In a more detailed and discarded preface to the volume, the author confessed an awareness that by the mid-sixties the world had changed: 'non avrei piu saputo dire dove stava andando' ('I would no longer be able to say where it was headed').4 Consequently, Calvino would change his way of writing. The desire for order is real, it is heartfelt, and it is perdurable. The plot line, of both his personal and professional life, however, now assumes a very new act of imagining the world. The moment of seeing this picture on the collection's front cover is the heralding of the end of personal anachronisms. No longer a Qfwfqian reifier of worlds, the author must find accommodation within the world of encroaching and menacing reality. Characteristically, he will change route and rethink his strategies in order to sustain his own survival. Literature provided the safe haven, the game to be played, a mise en abyme exercise that operated ever more selfconsciously as it sought to perpetuate itself. And so the artist and the author freeze the knight and the writer in their tracks in order to observe them (themselves) in their proper place in time and space ('fermarli al loro posto nel tempo e nello spazio'). This near equation of the acts of drawing and writing becomes a parallel process of equal importance to the actualization of a new inner world of subjectivity and imagination. Calvino's attempts to appropriate the visual arts into his writing are an effort to define his own literal presence after having laid to rest, whether abstractly or figuratively, his own defamaliarized, dematerialized image of Self. Writing and Painting In this chapter I examine Calvino's writings on artworks - not, how-

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ever, the writings on sculpture, historical artefacts, or collected paraphernalia that inspired the author to capture the powder of a disintegrating world, to catalogue and save it in neat little vials like the collector of sand in Collezione di sabbia (that would require another book-length study). Instead, I will concentrate solely on his descriptions of painted art, and on writings of considerable length and import. The writings discussed have been collected in Romanzi e racconti III in the section titled 'Guardando disegni e quadri (1976-83, 1977-85).' They have been classified as stories rather than essays. Further, much briefer creative notes and introductions to art displays have been collected in Saggi II in the section titled 'Immagini e teorie.' This section is divided into writings on cinema, the figurative arts, science, and anthropology. What is immediately apparent is the author's lifelong attention to matters considered peripheral to literature. To read his brief introductions to art books, brochure notes for exhibitions, and thoughts on painters and paintings is to retrace a process of maturation and unfolding diegetic potential. Calvino eventually embraces painting as a long lost love, and indeed, as an investigative mode or method of observation; painting seems to fulfil the author's ekphrastic desire with contemplative harmony. Calvino's attention to the narrative potential of his idiosyncratic diversions, however, is focused in the years between 1976 and 1985. As intellectually engaging and anthropologically amusing as all of these writings on the arts may be, they strike, like the drawing of the forlorn knight, at the heart of the contradictions Calvino perpetuates. In his creative writings, a short circuit had always interrupted the union of his fragmented protagonists into a unified narrative voice. A sign of his supreme modernity, the author preferred to shadow their moves with painful and debilitating wisdom rather than animating them with action. He remained inexorably bound to his characters and was the inevitable spokesman of their woes. The same situation is installed with these writings on art. Calvino chose to condemn himself to replicating the ekphrastic envy of his characters. In essence, just as his protagonists are unable to act because they prefer to see and contemplate reality, it is not possible for Calvino to effectively act upon the painting. He is not their maker and cannot change their colours. He is not a painter; he cannot paint the images he so craves. This does not stop him, however, from attempting to experience the painter's enterprise by describing his own sensations. Driven to explore one more dimension of writing, one more level of literature,5 one more sensual

224 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

craving, he draws the spectator's attention to the function of imagination itself in animating and dynamizing the pictorial elements he describes. Typically, Calvino chose his artists well, opting for those who permitted him to establish a rapport of complicity, of equal intellectual standing. When seen in this perspective these writings are another attempt to connive new narrative possibilities. Calvino is broaching a style, encouraging a deeply felt impulse, giving in to the emotional impulses he esteemed in the rationality of Charles Fourier6 but which he kept at bay with his studied stoicism. For purposes of my argument, assume that paintings are types of texts that use non-linguistic sign systems. This rather broad interpretation allows Calvino to create particular effects with the visual surface before him and to generate possible stories. Thus, while the paintings present distinct traits that render them recognizable as belonging to a particular artist's unique style, Calvino corroborates these traits into his own style and sequential logic of events. His written text is a supplement that exists both inside and outside the picture frame. If we construe this text as something that completes the 'incomplete' image, then this heralding of traces, the pressing down, in a sense, of one text upon another, becomes something more. The more, or supplement, is the homology Calvino creates between his sentences and the deeper structures of the visual text. When considered within the corpus of Calvino's work, these texts present salient characteristics that identify this homology: rhythm, description, point of view, accumulation of detail, and cerebral game playing form the basis of the predictability of a recognizable Calvino style. But are these narratives? The mere fact that the author uses words to tell his story does not lead to an absolute answer. Also, pointing out correspondences between any of these characteristics and, say, passages of // cavaliere inesistente, the construction of story in Cosmicomics, or the use of game playing in // castello dei destini incrociati does not imply a logical line of correspondence. The homology, instead, rests upon the assumption of a common logical intellectual basis. This is not to suggest any equality between the texts but rather that when the verbal and visual texts are juxtaposed, once the individual texts become a text (an intertwining of signifiers), its reading becomes a singular event. This suggests that a new cognitive process is at work. While the search for a logical line of correspondence between the visual and the verbal may not reveal moments of succession or interrelation, I would suggest that

Painted Stories and Novel Spaces 225

one cannot fully understand Calvino's renowned creative metamorphoses without coming to terms with the implications of his eventual turn to paintings for inspiration. Calvino's mental mappings of the space of artworks do not really exist as independent texts. They are not an iconography. As his imagination ranges beyond the field the paintings allegedly illustrate, the stories he relates are determined by the way in which he links points of perception in the paintings, turning them into a narrative site that gives space to his highly personalized mode of looking. The typology of this space is grounded, typically, in sensuality. The same is true of his creative writings. Never one to remain fixed, Calvino's purview ranged beyond the description of minutiae towards the lateral and vertical implications of his gaze. Just as the imaginary places fathered by the images on these canvases hurl the reader beyond the framed space and into a realm where sensory effects depend on the semantics of the prose, his narratives have spawned interpretations that supplant hermeticism in favour of indeterminacy. Even so, in all cases, space is presented as a visual labyrinth. Though Calvino's narrative mapping serves to carefully explore surface areas, it does not permit escape. He may be trapped, like the hapless Dantes, within his own strategies, but his descriptions, engaging as they are, range beyond the threshold of the frames, explode the confines of the elaborate visualizations he conjures. Calvino's writings on art are tales of a seeing, triggered by seeing, generating contemplations about seeing. But it is a seeing differently within circumscribed parameters. It is an exploration of possible venues of conjecture. They are necessarily autobiographical anecdotes of pure subjectivity predicated first on a symbiotic mutuality with the chosen artist, and second, on the possibility of installing what Michael Fried calls a situation of 'theatricality'7 between himself, his writing, and the visual text. This implies a notion of art as a performative act that necessitates the mixing of visual and verbal codes. Yet Calvino's creative interventions do not appropriate the works into the world of narrative but work instead to give them an added narrative momentum. The fact that Calvino writes where the artist painted exposes his craft as a fiction about something out there. He is a writer and is medium bound. The emphasis, then, is on the gesture, the selfexposure that reveals the copy in mirroring symmetry, that emulates a visual style, thus embedding his text within the culture that informs the paintings.

226 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

Calvino is both the spectator, the viewer entitled to an opinion and an imagination, and the narrator, the agent who relates the experience. Mieke Bal calls this function localization, and in this sense the author is a focalizing agent who sees and by seeing, causes to be seen.8 He asks the reader to look and by looking, to travel along with him, to find the detail in the visual field that accompanies the narration. The effect is a transposed view in which the union between the reader and the author occurs somewhere between the verbal and the visual text. One has the impression of thinking like Calvino, of seeing with his eyes. The images before us may not resemble his words at all, yet the reader-viewer is induced to create the same visual impression that sparked Calvino's imagination, to search for the logical lines of correspondence even where none are immediately apparent. Thus lady's shoes become the imposing hulls of ships, a shirt collar a volcanic crater. Words allow the author to compromise the medium of painting by reducing it to rhetoric. This activity moves between different levels of imagining. On the one hand, the words elicit an altered image in the mind of the reader. The viewer then tries to fit the image on the canvas with the image conjured in the mind. In effect, the reader is at the mercy of the narrator, yielding the floor to the focalization, simultaneously seeking to uphold his end of the bargain, eagerly adapting his vision to see what the words say. The focalizer is very powerful here; if he were not, the reader would tend to react to the content with mistrust. By accepting the narrative ploy and the verbal-visual game, the reader-viewer sets his own power aside. Calvino has tightened the bond between narrator and reader. To say the least, the narrative impressions override the visual; the readerviewer is led through the paintings by the details he chooses. Focalizer and narrator are thus one and the same. His autonomous and fantastic hypo-story creates and conditions the new shared hypertext, a bonding Calvino has sought since the beginning of his career. Calvino has a literary model in mind when viewing these paintings. His commentary creates stories that respect accepted conventions of narrative. There are beginnings and endings, events, confrontations, and resolutions. Characters are invented, situations are conjured to promote a temporal flow where none exists. To the basic fabulaof the paintings, Calvino lends a structure. One has the impression that he makes a physical survey of the data before him, weighs potential avenues of development, then selects the typology that bests suits the subject. For Domenico Gnoli, for example, there is great attention to detail; particulars are the motivating force, an imaginative perspective drives

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the narration. For De Chirico, on the other hand, the tenor is surreal, the vision is elliptical. The ease with which Calvino passes over depicted objects and between canvases is characteristic of De Chirico's repetitive and fluid style. The artist's spatial opposition between finite/ infinite, familiar /strange, is ably expressed by Calvino's embedding of a spirit of intrepid, yet disquieting, adventure. The artist Valeric Adami requires a text as blatant and strident as the neon dreams depicted on the canvas. Calvino's exercise, then, is not so much to express himself as to learn to express the attitude, style, and flavour of the visual artist in words. Since action is characteristically at a minimum in Calvino stories, in these pieces description is typically raised to a dominant textual form. In his stories, the protagonists normally see things but ascribe erroneous features to the reality they perceive. They contemplate, but can never act upon, their surroundings. In these descriptions the motivation is quite different but the results are similar. Beginning as acts of description, Calvino's motivation is to narrativize the painted space, to make it say something through his words. The resulting narration, however, alters its appearance. In both instances the motivation is subjective, the tendency is to project a sensitive, solitary, and compulsive spectator who over-determines his responses. This is textually indicated by phatic queries. These questions, in turn, are a result of looking, itself a motivated act that doubles the ante of the exercise since the restricted quality of the field of vision is emphasized. The reader, though a secondary player, plays an important role in the effort since he is the appointed ideal viewer, able to enhance the painting's expression via the verbal telling. This strategy allows for the two texts to develop a new hyperreality together. As readers we too motivate our looking. We look at the paintings head on and up close. Our eyes scan the canvas, darting to find those points of perspective that validate Calvino's readings, eager to supply missing details, and we are pleasantly surprised when we find them, when we are able to configure the new imagery. The words effectively touch the images, running alongside the scenes in a liminal but exclusively private space. The painted images definitely take flight in the new hypertext, becoming animated in a way reminiscent of cinema. The result is a type of riddle or rebus, a kind of 'which came first' attitude achieved through the active participation of the reader-viewer. For Laura Mulvey these types of enigmas 'offer the spectator the lures and pleasure of decipherment, while demanding active participation and work in creating the text's mean-

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ing/9 The two texts come to have a mutually reinforcing role within the specific context of the combinatory game. The words play a Foucauldian role, 'supporting pegs and yet termites that gnaw and weaken.'10 The images play a supporting role, a foil, like the tarot cards in II castello del destini incrociati, for the author's pitched imagination. In essence, the discourses resemble one another at the same time that they negate their very existence as discourses that have become interchangeable communicative strategies: a virtual hypertext. But the verbal, we know, can never replace what it describes, just as the image may only conjure conjectures without fixed foundation. Where do they converge? Perhaps Magritte can provide a clue. 'Only thought,' says Magritte, 'can resemble. It resembles by being what it sees, hears or knows; it becomes what the world offers it/11 From brief commentaries on art exhibitions to introductory notes to volumes of art, Calvino's intent blossoms into stories to read set alongside stories to see. Invariably this growing interest helped the author resolve the six-year silence that separates the pessimistic ending of La taverna dei destini incrociati and the reverie of the opening lines of Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore. We have already seen how this last novel was first conceived as a visual tableau. The point is relevant here for it shows that Calvino's views on writers and painters, readers and spectators have changed. Just as readers and writers exchange places in Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, so to the writer posits the possibility of changing roles with the painter in these writings. Calvino's sense of symmetry demands no less. If reading is a kind of intercourse, then writing of painting is a game of interartistic jouissance achieved through the slippery medium of language. In this way, he hoped to recast interpretation in the mold of a semi-serious, ever-expanding, verbal/visual hypertext; the type of text he adumbrates in the 1959 'Risposte a 9 domande sul romanzo' ('Answers to 9 questions on the novel'), in which a young author defines the novel as 'un'opera narrativa fruibile e significante su molti piani che si intersecano' (a narrative work that can be enjoyed and signify on many different planes which intersect).12 In essence, his ambition was to rise above the monolithic strategies and Utopian fantasies of his peers, to move beyond glossographies and investigate how we make sense of the world. We now turn to Calvino's creative writings on art. These will be examined in chronological order in order to recognize the growing sophistication and personal comfort the author brings to bear before the visual texts.

Painted Stories and Novel Spaces 229 Valerio Adami

The words Calvino uses to fabricate stories from visual texts exalt the self-conscious play of arbitrary relationships between signs, written and otherwise. After all, a sign's surface is just that and that is all it is. This being the case, Calvino allows himself the privilege of acting the role of Cartesian observer of the world, placing the self as spectator first, and narrating intelligence second. This voyeuristic stance becomes the stage for any and all interpretations. To delve beyond the self, beneath the surface layer of meaning ensconced within visual parameters, would menace the entire perceptual process with endless pedantry and lock discourse within language, and nothing but language. When Calvino imagines a visual story to accompany an artwork, these hybrid texts distort the world into symmetrical patterns (words) and graphic designs (images) that present an orderly context or 'narrativita figurativa' (figurative narrativity) which, according to the author, wishes to be 'nel punto in cui convergono gli sguardi'13 (at that point in which sight converges). Sounding very much like a modernday Leon Battista Alberti, sight for Calvino becomes the principal route through which subsequent systematic thought is based. The power of vision is manifest above all in the formal composition of surfaces, bodies, planes, colours, and lines; lines that establish a triangular perspective point that is monocular, transcendental, and universal because it is first and foremost mathematical. The exercise posits a revamping of narrative categories according to a semantic that interprets the word beyond language: the eye registers, the mind records, the intellect contemplates, the artist deliberates. The special virtues of this ekphrastic exercise are clarity and visibility; the style must contrive to bring about seeing through writing, reading, drawing. The exercise thus posits a revamping of word and image categories according to a personal semantic that interprets the world beyond language: the eye registers, the mind records, the intellect contemplates, the artist deliberates. Calvino experiences the world as a visual cornucopia; 'pero,' he confides while describing the monocular Palomar, 'lo deve pensare attraverso le parole'14 (but he must conceive it through words). One of the sites where the author's sight meets art to create one of his potentially infinite spaces of interpretation is in the brief rendering of four of Valerio Adami's paintings entitled '"La pittura illustrata:" Quattro favole in cornice.' The unsigned introductory note to the

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magazine version (typical of Calvino's self-effacing editorial style), reads: Queste fiabe sono state ispirate all'autore da alcune opere di Valeric Adami esposte a Milano dal 2 ottobre in una personale dell'artista. Giudichi il lettore se rappresenta meglio il narratore con la parola o il pittore con i colon. (154, my emphasis) These fables were inspired by several works by Valeric Adami exhibited in Milan from 2 October by the artist. Let the reader judge whether the narrator represents better with his words or the painter with his colours.

The provocative note comes to the rescue of the wary reader with a semiotic model that offers a way of relating to the interarts dialogue. Renato Barilli's brief comment is refined, enticing, and delicate: Le quattro favole esopiche da lui abbinate all'ultima produzione di Adami... ne sono in sostanza un'interpretazione allegorica, una messa in cifra, sulla scoria di una sostanziale simpatia e affinita reciproca ... (154, my emphasis) The four Aesop fables linked to Adami's latest productions ... are in substance an allegorical interpretation, a statement of accounts, on the heels of a substantial sympathy and a reciprocal affinity.

Even at this early juncture, the reader has gathered that a storytelling priority is about to engage him in a reciprocal discourse. Calvino's purpose is to create an interactive narrative rather than provide an ideological interpretation of the paintings. Similar to the Derridian project in The Truth in Painting,16 Calvino is writing around painting, using the canvases as a launching pad for his own speculative program. Yet his stories also map the limits of the canvas's communicability by testing the borders between verbal and visual shades of meaning without distorting the artist's original signature. The stories enabled by Adami's images thrive on a literary imagination that invites itself into the frame and then legitimizes the intrusion by remaining faithful to the artist's brush strokes. What, indeed, is to be read verbally? What literally? Is Calvino's text a counterfeit or a likeness, a commentary or a supplement? Each of these questions requires that we engage with the pro-

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cesses that engender the hypertext. This allows the reader to adjust to the norms by which the hybrid text is to be judged. No one would claim that Adami's works are literal representations. His illustrations are bright, neon-coloured cartoons filled with detached objects and disjointed poses that beg interpretation. The depicted subject is never the text by itself. There is instead a reaching for an outside signifier that Calvino joyously provides, pushing meaning beyond the austere mats and towards recognizable, though often distorted, remnants of familiar reality. While the essentiality of the images remains, it is changed and enjoined in an intratextual dynamic of constantly shifting meanings; 'thought-signs,' Merrell calls them: performances, inventions of and in the mind that hope to achieve the status of real sign events.17 The most seemingly naive depiction may be displayed with chromatic energy, might suffer distortion and dismemberment by intersecting lines that traverse the space of the canvas. These lines and coloured spaces push new thoughts, create new stories and novel nuances that violate reason by uncovering pockets of possible meaning and by revealing the interstices that allow thought to enter the frame and re-dimension traditional painted spaces. These contrived compositions thus tell stories much like a piece of zero-degree writing that exploits the visual energy of its signifiers by exploding and imploding their original meaning. The resettled pieces remain as shards that must be reassembled in order to divine a possible meaning. The perspective is as much poetic as it is technical. The figures in the drawings seem to be caught in the midst of a terrible grief or suffering. Their bodies are disproportionate, as if they had become the object of their own nightmares rather than the effect of an ironical virtuosity, of a self-absorbed, well-practised style. The reiterated motifs are expressed in a crescendo of simple and overlapping consistency. The silent stares, the disjointed stances, the knobby joints, the resonant linearity and pure geometry, all combine to create an Adami universe of the modern Everyman that is both victor and victim. Before proceeding with an analysis of Calvino's text, let me establish a retro-toposensibility with a short story from the fifties 'L'avventura di un fotografo' (1955; 'The Adventure of a Photographer').18 I will use this short story as an initial point of reference to approach Adami's art. In many of Adami's works there is a return, albeit deconstructed and overrun with countersignatures, to the posed subject. Calvino speculates on the same notion in the 1950s short story. Antonino explores

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photography by setting one kind (the posed) against another (the spontaneous). He thus speculates that 'occorreva ritornare ai personaggi in pose, in atteggiamenti rappresentativi della loro situazione sociale e del loro carattere, come nell'Ottocento' (39; 'it was necessary to return to posed subjects, in attitudes denoting their social position and their character, as in the nineteenth century'). The female subject, we recall, is disseminated in a complex double movement of loss and rediscovery that turns the figure of the women into a conquering object. His silence is her victory. She has stilled temporality with her alluring gaze. She is the victor, the conquering female image. The intratextual game that ensues reinforces the undermining danger of framed silence. This same silence permeates the frames of Adami's serenely posed subjects as they linger on the canvas, detached from all contingent demands, yet bound by extrinsic motives. Their postures are undermined by their surroundings. Strident hues, cut-out pop-out-like scenarios surround their indifferent bliss. They seem, to use Calvino's words in 'L'avventura di un fotografo,' 'spettrali, un po' lattiginose, separate da ogni contingenza nello spazio e nel tempo' (40; 'ghostly, a bit milky, deprived of every link with space and time/ 227-8). To add to this effect Adami's caricatures wear masks, their features grotesquely distorted, their postures captured in moments of insignificant random disorderliness. Again, Calvino's words may provide some insight. Speaking of Antonino he states that in order to free himself from conventional photography that attempts to reveal the moment, doveva seguire la via opposta: puntare su un ritratto tutto in superficie, palese, univoco, che non rifuggisse dall'apparenza convenzionale, stereotipa, dalla maschera. La maschera, essendo innanzi tutto un prodotto sociale, storico, contiene piu verita d'ogni immagine che si pretenda 'vera'; porta con se una quantita di significati che si riveleranno a poco a poco. (40) he had to follow the opposite path: aim at a portrait completely on the surface, evident, unequivocal, that did not elude conventional appearance, the stereotype, the mask. The mask, being first of all a social, historical product, contains more truth than any image claiming to be 'true'; it bears a quantity of meanings that will gradually be revealed. (228-9)

This is precisely the effect of Adami's characters. Their attitudes, par-

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ticularly in drawings such as 'Le retour du fils prodigue/ 'Metamorfosi/ and 'Accouplement/ to name a few examples, hold strictly to forms, bulks, colours. Their ironical re-presentation as deconstructed assemblage re-invents their meaning by questioning their cultural permanency. Adami asserts their status as cultural icons while simultaneously debunking their privilege through liberal associations, thus enhancing their enigma through charged simplicity: Era come nei sogni, penso Antonino, contemplando seppellito nel buio quell'improbabile tennista filtrata nel rettangolo di vetro: come nei sogni quando una presenza venuta dalla profondita della memoria s'avanza, si fa riconoscere, e poi subito si trasforma in qualocosa d'inaspettato, in qualcosa che prima ancora della trasformazione gia spaventa perche non si sa in che cosa potra trasformarsi. (41) It was like a dream, Antonino thought, contemplating from the darkness in which he was buried that improbable tennis player that filtered into the glass rectangle: like a dream when a presence coming from the depth of memory advances, is recognized, and then suddenly is transformed into something unexpected, something that even before the transformation is already frightening because there's no telling what it might be transformed into. (230)

More often than not the images are naked, abjuring all metaphor, symbol, story or invention, yet surreptitiously invited by Adami to generate some untold story. Their dismembered bodies, floating and rearranged body parts (usually hands) endow the canvases with a plotlike continuity that extends them beyond the canvas and into narrative time. Their faces give up meaning immediately, even if that meaning is fractured, blurred, or otherwise obscured by the unconventionality of the painter's process. Like the photographer of Calvino's story, Adami perhaps wishes that it would be possible to recognize in his paintings le immagini mezzo appallottolate e stracciate e nello stesso tempo si sentisse la loro irrealta d'ombre di inchiostro casuali, e nello stesso tempo ancora la loro concretezza d'oggetti carichi di significato, la forza con cui s'aggrappavano all'attenzione che cercava di scacciarle. (45) the half-crumpled and torn images, and at the same time to feel their

234 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures unreality as casual, inky shadows, and also at the same time their concreteness as objects charged with meaning, the strength with which they clung to the attention that tried to drive them away. (235)

Against the merciless razor-sharp neon vision of Adami, Calvino juxtaposes personal musings held together by a playfully ironic allegory that lightly brushes against the visual images that are the source of his inspiration. This semiotic heterogeneity spawns a tension between indexical and iconic sign functions, loading their semantic potential to create super-dense symbols. The first thing Calvino does is read the paintings as individual icons within a larger narrative text. Towards this end, he names his text 'Quattro favole d'Esopo per Valerio Adami' and baptizes the individual paintings with perlocutionary titles: 'Ma una voce poco fa ...' for 'Edipo e la Sfinge'; 'La linea disse alia mano ...' for 'Esopo-Epigramma'; 'E il piede rispose ...' for Tirosmani-La malinconia'; and 'Allora il blu salto su ...' for 'Blu.' The discrepancy between the original names and Calvino's titles is reflected in the author's reading of the visual text. These narratives remain quite faithful to the painted scenes while elucidating their storytelling potential. The painting 'Sturm und Drang/ though not narrativized by Calvino, is emblematic of the series. The painting is divided into three, perhaps four, visual frames, and eight different colour planes. It is set against a solid, pitch-black background; a grey-blue structure resembling a cathedral whose facade contains a face occupies the middle ground; an observer-spectator is in the foreground. The figure looks to the left towards a disembodied hand that is probably on the same plane as the figure since it is the same colour (colour in these paintings marks depth). The hand holds a style and is apparently drawing something on an unseen canvas. This canvas is out of our range of sight, but we can imagine the edge of the real canvas as the edge of the imaginary one. In fact, the index and little finger of the hand rest on this limen, the style's point becoming the point of contact between the seen (scene, the canvas) and the unseen (unscene, the hidden canvas). Being at the edge implies an awareness of an outside, of an audience. The posture of the vertical hand holding a style suggests to me a theatrical gesture that engages the viewing audience into potentializing a speculative discourse. What Mieke Bal labels 'the verbality of the visual' is thus literalized within and without the occlusive frame.19 Adami's mixing of visual and verbal codes in many of his works, his

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insertion of paper, pens, books, and writing implements, is an invitation to literary critics to bring their analytical tools to an appreciation of the visual arts. The artist invites the spectator to be perceiver, creator, and disseminator of meanings in an open exchange of signifying practices. Any meaning, in these terms, however, is never separable from the images. In Adami's art there is a simultaneous assertion and denial of borders; a new relation is thus installed that provides the perfect vehicle for Calvino's expansive project. No longer hampered by the debilitating stare of images looking back at him, Calvino has reached an important theoretical juncture. Fully in tune with the critical developments in the field of visual poetics, he extends his contact with the visual arts within a new writing praxis that centralizes the word and image relation. It is the surface of these paintings that interests the author, the intersection of lines that inspires his imagination. Content follows form and becomes secondary to the well-wrought image. Recall that the book Calvino considers 'un modello di narrazione' ('a model of narration') is Pinocchio precisely because 'ogni personaggio ha un'evidenza visiva e un'inconfondibilita di linguaggio ('each character has a colourful visual presence and an unmistakable language'). Calvino begins his narratives with the painting 'Esopo-Epigramma.' Like our painting paradigm, the canvas is divided into three planes: a pitch-black background, a light blue middle ground, and a foreground occupied by an angelic/demonic figure peeling an apple. A hand emerges from the right edge of the canvas. Only the first two knuckles are visible. Between index and middle finger protrudes a style; two sheets of paper cascade from the finger tips. Characteristically, Calvino begins his observations at this point of juncture, at the limen between the painted and unpainted worlds. The ostensible subject of his gaze is the foregrounded hand, while Adami's central concern is the winged creature. At first glance one would equate size with importance. The figure's head is turned towards the hand, however, drawing the observer's attention to the invasive anomaly. What is the hand proffering? Why does it catch the creature's attention? Calvino's text assumes the subject of the painting to be off canvas. His inventive description exploits Adami's meta-artistic ploy and again focuses on the discrepancy between what is seen (scene) and the unseen (not in the scene). One particular feature of the painting's foreground encapsulates this ambiguity. The head of the creature is large and central; it floats, isolated, at a right angle to the body. This face is

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the same colour as the apple held gingerly in the flesh-coloured hands. The protruding hand, however, is of a lighter shade of blue. It enters the painting from a position in front of the creature. A forward-sloping diagonal is formed between the sloping downcast eye and the hand, which we now realize is on a frontal plane of its own. The hand thus establishes an illusion of depth that forces a formal emphasis upon itself as subject of the painting. The directionality of this diagonal, forward and to the right, is crucial to the semantic thrust of Calvino's text. When scanning the picture, a hierarchy is established that mimics the way we read, from left to right. Still, the larger, predominant figure is on the left. Our eye saccades, or eye movements, constantly return to this figure, repeatedly cutting across each referential slice of the painting in a triangular pattern that includes eye, hand, and apple, and that mimics, again, the physical act of reading and suggests a dialogue between these emblematic figures. Calvino's interpretation of the painting disrupts the normal eye saccades over the painting, promoting a reading that foregrounds the disjointed series of symbols. The directions his reading takes do not follow the normal triangular saccades just described but depart on a completely different tangent: La linea un giorno di stance di obbedire alia mano che la faceva correre avanti e indietro sulla tela a suo capriccio. One day the line tired of obeying the hand that obliged it to run to and fro over the canvas at its whim.

The de-scription would seem to have nothing to do with the painting. Rather than relating the scene through a possible story that the figures suggest through their disposition on the canvas, Calvino departs on an entirely different and personal tangent. He concentrates on the smaller figure, the hand, highlighting its intrusive quality, playing off the incredulous expression of the large central character but never referring to it. It is as if the figure were there merely to witness the incredible conversation that ensues between the drawn line and the drawing hand: La linea decise di giocare d'astuzia. Disse alia mano: 'Io mi tendo e m'adagio e mi attorciglio su me stessa e mi divarico solo perche il tuo gesto leggero e risoluto mi fa esistere. Come posso dimostrarti la mia

Painted Stories and Novel Spaces 237 riconoscenza? O mano, vorrei rendere omaggio alia tua forma complicata e perfetta, obbligare il mio linguaggio filiforme a dire la ricchezza delle tue virtu.' Lusingata, la mano le rispose: 'Se davvero lo vuoi, t'aiutero.' (414) The line decided to play a game of wits. It said to the hand: 'I extend myself and lie myself down and I wind myself around myself and I spread myself only because your light and resolute gesture allows me to exist. How may I demonstrate my gratitude? Oh hand, I would like to render homage to your complicated and perfect form, to oblige my filiform language to express the richness of your virtue.' Flattered, the hand responded: 'If you really want to, I will help.' The painting is no longer just the mediator of meaning, it is also the beginning and end of a narrative fullness that initiates an alternative semiosis. The continuous field of meaning on the canvas is thus translated into a differentiated sign system.21 Though the figures on the canvas are represented literally (they are what they are, believe it or not), the verbal text invites us to see and picture them figuratively. They have been endowed with a narrative character and are actors in a moral fable with a beginning, a middle, and a sardonic ending: E la mano s'immedesimo nel disegno d'una mano ... La linea adesso esultava: era lei a imporre alia mano i movimenti che doveva fare; era lei linea che spiegava alia mano che cos'e una mano. Ma una mano disegnata non esaurira mai le possibilita d'essere della mano che disegna ... Bisognava disegnare un'altra mano, poi un'altra, un'altra ancora. La mano non sapeva piu smettere di disegnare mani, di cercare se stessa nelle infinite combinazioni di linee ... La linea era sicura d'essere lei ora a condurre il gioco, perche aveva catturato la mano nel groviglio dei suoi mobili contorni: non s'accorgeva d'essere manovrata e coartata piu di prima. La mano era sicura d'aver stabilito un rapporto con la multiforme essenza di se stessa: non s'accorgeva che ora senza la linea non saprebbe piu d'esistere. (414) And the hand identified itself with the design of a hand ... The line exalted: it was she that imposed the hand's movements; it was she the line that explained to the hand what it meant to be a hand. But a drawn hand can never exhaust the possibilities of being of the hand that is drawing ... It was necessary to draw another hand, then

238 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures another, and another still. The hand could not stop itself from drawing hands, of searching for itself in the infinite combinations of lines ... The line was sure that now it was she conducting the game, because she had captured the hand in the tangle of its unstable contours: it was not aware of being manoeuvered and coerced more than before. The hand was sure it had established a rapport with the multiform essence of itself: it was not aware that without the line it would no longer exist.

This story semantically contradicts the unique minimal categories of the painting. It is the visual narrative on the canvas that invites such mobile flights of imagination. The moment the story is finished it begins to function as a new, independent text. But whose? The hand speaks, the line controls. It is the hand that determines both our spatial orientation and our verbal response. It holds the pen, but the pen draws the line, writes the words. The pen, which first became protagonist in a Guido Cavalcanti sonnet quoted by Calvino in 'La penna in prima persona/ acquires a new, critically self-aware language that heralds the way for untamed figurative presumptions: Ogni linea presuppone una penna che la traccia, e ogni penna presuppone una mano che la impugna. Che cosa ci sia dietro la mano, e questione controversa: 1'io disegnante finisce per identificarsi con un io disegnato, non soggetto ma oggetto del disegnare. O meglio, e 1'universo del disegno che si disegna, che si esplora ed esperimenta e ridefinise ogni volta. (295) Every line presupposes a pen that traces it. And every pen presupposes a hand holding it. What lies beyond the hand is a debated question: the I who draws is identified with a drawn I, not the drawing's subject but its object. Or rather, it is the universe of drawing that draws itself, explores, tests, and redefines itself each time.

The focus is now on the opposing stare between the creature and the hand, the hand and the pen, the pen and the line. Success or failure informs our reaction to the existential word-image drama being played out. Calvino's meta-descriptions emphasize the rectilinear quadrants of the painting while at the same time engendering a microcosmic description that moves off the canvas and into the realm of conjecture. Without examining the three other paintings and stories invented by Calvino, it is fair to say that the common denominator uniting this visual suite with the attendant series of writings is the author's focus

Painted Stories and Novel Spaces 239 on the term line. The image of the line is loaded with semantic potential. It is a unifying concept that unites Calvino's entire opus, a product, as it is, of lines drawn to form words, lines that emanate from the mind and connect - in an Albertian sense - with external reality.22 Writing and reading are linear activities, strings of replete signs connecting to form a temporal sequence. Once the story comes to an end and a fabula is constructed, the reader may re-figure the line into a braided continuity. The linear sequence is broken up; contrasts, anomalies, repetitions, absences, and contexts are generated and interlaced into interminable meanings. The line becomes dense, overflows its temporality and assumes spatial contours. This is the dynamic at work in Calvino's approach to Adami; it is the process that occurs when he views a painting. Having perceived the spatial message, he is tempted to review it, to reread and reassemble it, in essence creating a new image. The alternative story Calvino perceives always assumes an organizational attitude and is permeated with his own experience. The image of the line allows the narrator to be both within and without the story, to literally stand within the paintings rather than simply understanding them. Though it delimits a zone of meaning, this meaning is always permeable and ultimately dissolves the distance between subject and object. Calvino considers the line at the heart of his personal conception of his own mind (recall his affinity with the paintings of Arakawa), and drawn lines appear in many of his stories. They form a filigree design of spider webs; outline the edge of Agilulfo, are the non-existent knight's white armour; arrange themselves as fresh prints on snow in Marcovaldo; are the vital lines of demarcation, the cell walls that contain both the inside and outside of matter in Cosmicomics; form an unending spiral in the short story 'La spirale;' become the shifting cityscapes of Marco Polo's invisible cities; are the suspended plot lines that go nowhere in Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore. These narrative lines successfully bridge the mature author's moments of protean creation, the young Calvino's passion for drawing and his admitted affinity with the carefully circumscribed and provocative compositions of the artist Saul Steinberg. In his sketches, Steinberg replaces the problem of language with the semantic space of linear cognition: II mondo e trasformato in linea, un'unica linea spezzata, contorta, discontinua. L'uoma anche. E quest'uomo trasformato in linea e finalmente il padrone del mondo, pur non sfuggendo alia sua condizione di prigioni-

240 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures ero, perche la linea tende dopo molte volute e ghirogori a richiudersi su se stessa prendendolo in trappola. ('La penna in prima persona/ 298) The world is transformed into line, a single line, broken, twisted, discontinuous. Man too. And this man transformed into line is, in the end, master of the world, though he cannot escape his condition as prisoner, because, after many scrolls and curlicues, the line tends to close in on itself and entrap the man-line. The resulting paradox is not easy to dismiss for Calvino. If it is a commonplace in poststructuralist thought that it is language that sees and not the eye, that the world is rooted in linguistic structure, then his forays into the world of art essentially efface the writer placing him within the figural logic of the visual compositio. Comparing writing to painting becomes another game whose lure he willing extends: II mondo disegnato ha una sua prepotenza, invade il tavolo cattura cio che gli e estraneo, unifica tutte le linee alia sua linea, dilaga dal foglio ... No, e' il mondo esterno che entra a far parte del foglio:... No, e la sostanza del segno grafico che si rivela come la vera sostanza del mondo ... (295) The drawn world has an aggressiveness of its own, it invades the desk, captures anything alien to it, joins all lines to its own line, overflows the page ... No, it is the outside would that enters and becomes part of the page ... No, it is the substance of the graphic sign that is revealed as the true substance of the world ... Within this word-bound cosmos seamlessly creeps the painterly mode of pictorial expression. This is why Calvino is so attracted to Galileo Galilei, a scientist whom he believes 'meriterebbe d'esser famoso come felice inventore di metafore fantasiose quanto lo e come rigoroso ragionatore scientifico' (298; 'should be just as famous for being a felicitous inventor of fanciful metaphors as he is for being a rigorous scientific thinker'), should be appreciated for shaping the visual reception of the written structure of his own historical reception. By borrowing a metaphor from Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems Calvino pays silent tribute to one of his genetic authors. In the Dialogue Galileo draws a colourful literary analogy to explain the earth's movement around the sun. In 'La penna in prima persona' Calvino explains the metaphor in the following fashion:

Painted Stories and Novel Spaces 241 Una nave parte de Venezia per Alessandretta: s'immagini sulla nave una penna che lasci il segno del suo percorso in una linea continua che si prolunghi attraverso il Mediterraneo orientale. (II lettore puo immaginare una penna grande come il timone della nave, che traccia la sua linea sul mare di carta; oppure una lunghissima striscia di carta che attraversa il Mediterraneo e scorre sulla coperta della nave in movimento, sotto una piccola penna che vi marca la sua esile scia d'inchiostro.) (298) A ship leaves for Venice bound for Alexandretta: imagine on the ship a pen that traces the course in a constant line that stretches across the eastern Mediterranean. (The reader can imagine a pen the size of a ship's rudder, drawing its line on a sea of paper; or else a very long strip of paper that crosses the Mediterranean and unrolls on the deck of a moving ship under a little pen that leaves its slender wake of ink.) Then he quotes Galileo: Quando dunque un pittore nel partirsi dal porto avesse cominciato a disegnar sopra una carta con quella penna, e continuato il disegno sino in Alessandretta, avrebbe potuto cavar dal moto di quella un'intera storia di molte figure perfettamente dintornate e tratteggiate per mille e mille versi, con paesi, fabbriche, animali ed altre cose, se ben tutto il vero, reale ed essenziale movimento segnato dalla punta di quella penna non sarebbe stato altro che una ben lunga ma semplicissima linea. (299) When therefore a painter upon leaving the port had begun to draw upon a paper with that pen, and had continued the design up until he reached Alexandretta, he would have been able to retrieve from the motion of that pen an entire story of perfectly drawn and outlined figures in thousands and thousands of styles, with cities, farms, animals and other things, if all of the true, real and essential movement drawn by the point of that pen had not been other than a very long and simple line.

The true line ('la vera linea'), Calvino continues, is not on paper but lies in the figurative movement of the hand of the painter, in the gesture of the artist. This invisible line traced upon the absolute space of the heavenly firmament is chartable in the capricious motion of the pen: lo non ho che dir altro, ed era mezzo astratto su quel disegno, e sul pensare come quei tratti tirati per tanti versi, di qua, di la, in su, in giu,

242 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures innanzi, indietro, e'ntrecciati con centomila ritortole, non sono, in essenza e realissimamente, altro che pezzuoli di una linea sola tirata tutta per un verso medesimo, senza verun'altra alterazione che il declinar del tratto dirittissimo talvolta un pochettino a destra e a sinistra e il muoversi la punta della penna or piu veloce ed or piu tarda, ma con minima inegualita. E considero che nel medesimo modo si scriverebbe una lettera, e che questi scrittori piu leggiadri, che, per mostrar la scioltezza della mano, senza staccar la penna del foglio, in un sol tratto segnano con mille e mille ravvolgimenti una vaga intrecciatura, quando fussero in una barca che velocemente scorresse, convertirebbero tutto il moto della penna, che in essenza e una sola linea tirata tutta verso la medesima parte e pochissimo inflessa e declinante dalla perfetta drittezza, in un ghirigoro ... (299-300) I have nothing else to say, and I was well-nigh transported with that delineation, thinking how those strokes drawn so many ways, hither, thither, upward, downward, forward, backward, and interwoven with thousands of turnings, are not essentially or really other than small pieces of one sole line drawn all one way, and with no other alteration than the shift of the straight line sometimes a shade to the right and to the left, and the movement of the tip of the pen, now faster and now slower, but with the minimum unevenness. And I consider how in the same way one would write a letter, and how these more fanciful writers, to show the lightness of their hand, without lifting their pen from the page, in a single line draw with a thousand turns a charming interweaving, if they were in a boat sailing rapidly, would convert all the movement of the pen, which in essence is a single line drawn in the same direction and very slightly inflected of departing from perfect straightness, into a curlicue ...

Calvino finds Galileo's admiration for the artistic gesture and praise for the absolute idea of line a harbinger for the genius of Saul Steinberg: La metafisica della linea assoluta e le inesauribili acrobazie del gesto grafico: cosi Galileo annuncia la cometa siderea Steinberg che traccia la sua orbita attraverso il cielo di carta. (300) The metaphysics of the absolute line and the inexhaustible acrobatics of the graphic gesture: thus Galileo heralds the sidereal comet Steinberg, who traces his orbit across the sky of paper.

Painted Stories and Novel Spaces 243

Another of Calvino's favourite artists, Kandinsky, had actually written an ode to line, 'O linii/ in a study entitled 'Little Articles on Big Questions.'23 The artist's purpose is to demonstrate how a line becomes a picture. In words very similar to those used by Calvino in 'La squadratura/ Kandinsky writes: First the short stroke, the tie or the hyphen Second, the long stroke, the dash

The painter is drawing attention to the aesthetic object as artifice. From these signs, now ensconced within two fields, literary and artistic, the reader is to extrapolate a meaning. There follows a blank page, then Kandinsky continues the verbal/visual paradox with a long straight line:

Kandinsky writes: 'Line experiences many fates. Each creates a particular, specific world, from schematic imitation to unlimited expressivity. These worlds liberate line more and more from the instrument, leading to complete freedom of expression' (425). Against this background, Calvino's foregrounding of the self-conscious line in these fables takes on fuller dimensions. The attraction to the hegemony of line is consonant with his lifelong dedication to rigid programs and self-imposed aesthetic projects. The polarization of aesthetics that he admired in Brechtian dialectics,24 as well as the solicitation of audience in Brecht's theatre,25 lies at the core of the author's linear ideology. This line of reasoning implies a parallelism between issues of words and images, time and space that Calvino addresses in terms of a struggle between line and colour. In the Valeric Adami painting whose title is a colour, 'Blu' ('Blue'), Calvino engages in a word and image paragone that debates issues of time and space. Calling his text 'Allora il blu salto' su ...' ('And then the blue sprang up ...'), he speculates how a horizontal line in the painting si vantava d'essere lei la padrona dello spazio: 'Da quando il pittore m'ha tracciata, questo quadro non e piu una superficie di tela ma un mondo in cui ogni cosa puo trovare posto. lo sono la riva del mare, io sono 1'orizzonte della prateria, io sono un paesaggio lontano, io sono 1'angolo tra il

244 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures suolo e la parete, io sono il gradino del tempio, io sono la linea che separa 1'alto e il basso, il vicino e il lontano ...' (416) boasted that she was the master of space: 'Ever since the painter drew me, this painting is no longer the surface of a canvas but a world in which everything may find its place. I am the ocean's edge, I am the field's horizon, I am a distant landscape, I am the angle between the floor and the wall, I am the temple's stair, I am the line that separates high from low, near from far...' Line is a temporal agent, dictating story, generating action. Colour, on the other hand, is spatial; it promotes opacity, stasis; and calm. While line weaves the thread that moves narration, colour is anecdotal; it may dissuade from central issues: Una superficie dipinta in blu interruppe il suo discorso: Ti sbagli, sono io che, a seconda di come mi situo, apro al quadro la distesa delle onde, o il cielo della notte, o 1'ombra sinistra d'un muro cieco ... Io sono il paesaggio, tutti i paesaggi, anche quelli che stanno dentro 1'animo degli uomini, la tristezza, il sollievo ...' (416-17) A surface painted in blue interrupted his discourse: 'You are mistaken, it is I that, depending upon where I situate myself, open the canvas to the expanse of waves, or the night sky, of the sinister shadow of a blind wall ... I am the landscape, all landscapes, even those that are within man's soul, sadness, pleasure...' Once figures are created, however, the discourse becomes discontinuous, borders are fringed, traditional boundaries are crossed. The line penetrates its own essence, suffering nuance: Ma le figure del quadro si lasciavano attraversare dalla linea orizzontale come da una discontinuity che le trasformava in modo inquietante ... (417) But the figures in the painting allowed themselves to be traversed by the horizontal line as if by a discontinuity that transformed them in a disquieting fashion... Colours are overtaken by the figures, losing their consistency,

Painted Stories and Novel Spaces 245 e giunte in prossimita della superficie blu vi si estendevano sopra ma anche sporgevano da dietro al suo margine inferiore, come se non volessero ammettere che si trattava d'uno sfondo. (417) and having arrived in proximity of the blue surface they extended themselves above but also stuck out from behind its inferior margin, as if they did not wish to admit that this was really a background. Both line and colour become indignant: 'Che fate?' Protestavano la linea e il blu. 'Non sapete trovare il vostro posto nello spazio? cos'e questa mancanza di rispetto per le dimensioni, e punti cardinali, lo zenit e il nadir?' (417) 'What are you doing?' The line and the blue protested. 'Can't you find your place in space? What is this lack of respect for dimensions, cardinal points, zeniths and nadirs?' But the figures have already usurped the aesthetic landscape, causing a rethinking of narrative content and visual design: La linea orizzontale e il campo blu rimasero un po' soprapensiero, silenziosi. Poi: 'II tempo sono io che lo creo/ disse la linea, 'io separo le stratificazioni dell'inconscio, unisco i lembi della memoria ...' E il blu: 'II tempo e fatto solo di strati di colore in cui gli oggetti sono immersi ... (417) The horizontal line and the blue field remained in thought, silence. Then: 'I am the one that creates time/ said the line, T separate the layers of subconscious, I unite the borders of memory ...' And the blue: Time is made up only of those layers of colours in which objects are immersed ... The space-time continuum has been loosened. By extrapolating these ideas from the painting Calvino posits a synthesis of abstract notions that are sometimes easier to perceive directly than to justify in language. Adami's visual fusion of time and space frees syntax. The holophrastic potential of the figures created in the simultaneity of space-time by line and colour is the artistic corollary of Calvino's attempts at multiple points of view narration. Just as the canvases sug-

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gest an overlapping of fact and dream that lead to contemplation and silence, Calvino's narrative is imbued with an aftermath of silence. In both it would seem that an event, unknown and unspeakable, has occurred. Some of Adami's paintings do, however, contain noise or words. In 'Edipo e la Sfinge' ('Oedipus and the Sphinx'), a structural resemblance between linguistic and visual models reinforces the canvas as a dwelling place for multiple meanings. As the words assume a physical materiality they are transported beyond their normally accepted semantic field. In 'Ma una voce poca fa ...' Calvino installs a familiar metaphysical opposition: Una parola scritta in un quadro di Valerio Adami trattava i colori con alterigia. 'Chi guarda il quadro e obbligato a leggermi, mentre a voi vi vede solamente.' 'E qual e la differenza?/ chiesero i colori. 'Noi non sappiamo cosa sia questo leggere. Per noi, tu sei un elemento del quadro come gli altri.' (417) A written word in a painting by Valerio Adami treated colours with haughtiness. 'Whoever looks at the painting is obligated to read me, while he only sees you.' 'And what is the difference?/ the colours asked. 'We do not know what reading is. For us, you are an element of the painting like all the others.'

Does speech ultimately freeze arbitrary signs into a logocentric spatial fix (the phone), or can writing (ecriture) recast the non-being of voice into being? 'Leggere/ spiego la parola scritta, 'e quando guardandomi si pensa al suono di me stessa parlata. Cioe la vista conta in funzione dell'udito.' (417) 'Reading/ explained the written word, 'is when you look at me and think of the sound of me as spoken. That is, vision is a function of hearing.'

Calvino is focusing on functions, on difference. In this paragone he considers the presence of logos, the spoken word, over the presence of graphic, the graphic sign:

Painted Stories and Novel Spaces 247 Ne naque una gran lite; per stabilire chi avesse ragione, decisero di sottoporsi al giudizio della voce. (418) A great argument developed; in order to establish who was right, they decided to submit themselves to the judgment of voice. Before being trapped in a Derridian snare, the author, like the nimble figure of Guido Cavalcanti in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, adroitly leaps over the argument and reveals a lighthearted spirit: La voce, quando ebbe di fronte il quadro, per prima cosa lesse la parola scritta, pronunciandola con tono neutro e secco. Tutto qui?/ dissero i colori. Ma la parola si pavoneggiava: 'Si, vi pare niente? Vorrei sentire un po' se riesce a leggere voi.' La voce si dispose a leggere i colori. Tutti tesero 1'orecchio. La voce restava in silenzio. 'Ecco, cosa v'avevo detto ...,' diceva la parola scritta, sprezzante. La voce si concentre ancora sui colori, tossicchio, aspiro, poi fece vibrare una nota, modulo un accordo, intono un motivo senza parole, emise un trillo, un solfeggio, prese a cantare a gola spiegata. (418) The first thing the voice did when it had the painting before it was read the written word, pronouncing it with a neutral and dry tone. 'Is that it?' the colours said. But the word boasted its own cleverness; 'If it seems nothing to you I would like to see if you are able to read.' The voice began to read the colours. Everyone stretched their ears. The voice remained silent. There, what did I tell you .../ the written word said disparagingly. The voice concentrated itself once again on the colours, it coughed, inhaled, then vibrated a note, modulated a chord, emitted a trill, a solfeggio, it began to sing in full voice. The perception of confinement and coercion calls for agile strategies of release, also called a lateral dance. The production of a third term decomposes the argument and, in this case, foregrounds heterogeneity by undermining stability. Borders collapse as reader, painter, author, and argument are disseminated and reassembled into the dissolving

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project. Just as Adami's austere visual non sequiturs produce a momentary disorienting effect, Calvino's verbal meaning is stopped in its tracks and becomes more circumstantial than it is conventional. As the words and images hang together in a Foucauldian heterotopia, both become related elements of a new signing whose impact has just begun to dawn. Domenico Gnoli If for Calvino the ability to think originates in the mind's ability to transform the world into images, then perhaps there can be no better image of the author than that of impish provocateur, of intelligent prankster, one who sets disorienting hermeneutical traps for the reader all the while reserving a tactical emergency exit ('varco') for himself. This exit is the linguistic sign, masterfully couched within a wellwrought phrase. Language can stand in for depiction precisely because images can perform communicative acts, can be as eloquent as verbal utterance. An occasion for such a provocative stance revelation is provided by Domenico Gnoli's still lifes. Gnoli's paintings, 'Still-life alia maniera di Domenico Gnoli/26 emanate from a profoundly isolated, intimately private vision of things. The title 'alia maniera' (in the style of) signals that each canvas is a personal reflection that incorporates external stimuli, readdressing their otherness into epiphanic moments of personal revelation. At the same time, it is as if the painter were afraid to violate the depicted objects, as though the objects were mere visual reflections of some circumscribed, as yet fully unchartered, and perhaps misunderstood, outside dimension. This ambivalence fosters a formal encounter with the depicted objects; they must not be grazed by anything but vision. This indifferent/interested spectator stance produces a highly personalized dialogue that allows the artist to express his ideas through the silence, stasis, inarticulateness of the objects. Time and space are totally eliminated from the canvas as Gnoli's total concentration on the object renders time immobile and space around the object redundant and superfluous. When looking at these paintings, one is immediately taken by their realness. In his effort to transform a world predetermined by a specific socio-historical milieu, Gnoli provides the viewer with more visual information than is normally apparent or semantically relevant. His paintings represent what can usually be seen in a single glance with

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the time and space of the canvas equalling the time and space of the viewing. Yet, when taken to its logical extremes, portraying such a harmonious Aristotelian unity leads to paradoxical results. The single moment of time portrayed within the unified setting and from a single vantage point causes viewers to stop and linger, as it were, on our own time. We stop and contemplate, inspecting details, conjuring behindthe-scenes notions of what, in effect, we are not allowed to see, imagining what may not even exist. For this reason, though any interpretation is a short-circuited process that occurs within the frame of each painting, nothing stops the viewer from reaching behind the painted stage. It matters little whether or not these intellectual peregrinations are true, for 'what defines realism is not the origin of its model but its exteriority in relation to the language which expresses it.'27 Any enlightened interpretation cannot help but plumb the depths of these objects and discover unexpected visual connections. It is at this point that the viewer becomes actively intrusive. A willing accomplice to the visual game, his wandering eye becomes prehensile, haptic, drawn close to the thing, touching, stroking, caressing, absorbed into the unusually thick paste of Gnoli's art. The objects are both a pretext for expression and the material expression of an idea. Each canvas is a visual study of bourgeois values. As in Morandi's paintings, the perception of the objects renders them indispensable symbols of a social ethic. (On another level, there is no pre-text; the canvas is its own referent.) The formal disposition of the objects is anything but casual. The proximity of the gaze, the keen attention to detail, the forms themselves speak of an inclusionary ethic that spills over into the area beyond the frame. The close-up stance thus actually defines the absence, the unseen presence of the surrogate surroundings. Each object becomes an emblem, a paradigm of a well-worn reality that, though invisible, is felt through the texture of the familiar details. It seeps onto the canvas, loading the images with definitive sociocultural connotations. The richness of the image resides in the depth of the viewer's willingness to explore the canvas texture. This world without humans is nevertheless poignantly marked by their passing. Traces of humanity are found in the folded sheets, wellmade beds, ironed pillowcases, buttoned shirts. As possessions they do not extol the romantic majesty of their absent owners, as would the sword of King Arthur or the sling of David. Rather, these anti-heroic objects are islands of occasional usage; they are ordinary miscellaneous pieces apparently as shallow as their narrow depth of field. All reveal

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traces of a human presence now absent, of gestures long passed. What the paintings propose, then, is tightly woven. The symbol is translated into essentiality, while the seemingly insignificant object suspended in time is reinterpreted and placed into a new spatial context. The constituent elements are in this manner reinvented, recycled, recast into a new context. A comparison can be made with medieval art. In medieval art the picture plane is organized hierarchically, with the most important subject always in the centre, lesser objects arranged in a receding order around the governing motif. In Gnoli, the object overwhelms the canvas, the semantic weight of the motif being transmitted through sheer magnitude. The alleged relationship of the object to the viewer, crucial to the subjectivity of medieval perspective, is reinstated in the overblown and highly particularized detail. Are there parallels between the two contexts? Perhaps Calvino is attracted to the works of Gnoli because he finds qualities that remind him of his own prose, his ideology, his vision of the world. Gnoli's paintings, like Calvino's stories, capture precise moments of vision, perfectly stilled moments in time. As in Palomar, it would seem that looking is the only authentic mode of existence. As gestures are frozen even thought becomes static, spatialized within precisely delineated frames of reference. Space for both artists is thus at a premium. There are no grand vistas, no recognizable landscapes beyond the immediate, wilfully crowded stage around the main players. There is simply no room. Once vision is all-encompassing, the parameters for movement become highly focused. Speculative associations become lateral and bounce off one another but never lead anywhere. Gnoli's buttons lead to other shirts and buttons just as Palomar's cheeses lead to other pastures and cheeses, and one wave recedes to make way for another. Like the storyteller in 'Cibernetica e fantasmi/ Calvino's inventive prowess is surpassed only by the passion to perform imaginative somersaults. The inside becomes outside, the private becomes public and knows no bounds. Both Gnoli and Calvino fully possess the objects they construct on their blank canvases and their operations are not dissimilar, since both insist on a subjective presence that is transformed into the distilled essence of the thing visualized. In Gnoli, feeling seeks expression in physical terms; the relationships between objects and their users are alluded to by iconic circumstance. Emotional response is drawn from the viewer by the muted colour, the lighting, the tight composition. His thick paints develop textual surfaces that express a great sensibility for the tactile possibilities of paint. Gnoli edits the

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objects accordingly, affording the greatest touchability in areas most expected. This renders the objects artless, more real. In essence, Gnoli is adapting narrative conventions - the close-up, exclusion or editing of action, lingering focus, suspension of time - by highlighting particulars. Similarly, the texture of Calvino's prose often engages the reader in prolonged stasis. The techniques used to create debilitating proximity in literature (point of view, minute description, intentional cropping, etc.) are those of the minimalist artist. There are no grand panoramas in Calvino's universe, no distant mountain peaks or verdant plains. Symptomatically, the compositional fabric of Calvino's tales always places the figure of the spectator at the centre of the frame: each scene spreads out around the protagonist, who becomes entrapped within a collage of circumstances seemingly beyond his control. The stature of the protagonists literally diminishes; they seem lost within the frame of the tale. Since these characters are not omniscient but are instead caught up within a network of their worlds, they often seek haven in restful scenes as, for example, at the end of each and every tale in Gli amori difficili, or in longer stories such as La formica argentina. In these situations there is an increase of visual denouements with characters, and this occurs in all of Calvino's short stories. The characters are simply left looking. The ending of La nuvola di smog is especially pertinent: lo ormai avevo visto, e non avevo niente da dire ... i campi dove le donne come vendemmiassero passavano coi cesti a staccare la biancheria asciutta dai fili, e la campagna nel sole dava fuori i suo verde tra quel bianco, e 1'acqua correva via gonfia di bolle azzurrine. Non era molto, ma a me che non cercavo altro che immagini da tenere negli occhi, forse bastava. (81) By now I had seen, and I had nothing to say ... the fields where the women passed with baskets as if harvesting grapes, and picked the dry linen from the lines, and the countryside in the sun gave forth its greenness amid that white, and the water flowed away swollen with bluish bubbles. It wasn't much, but for me, seeking only images to retain in my eyes, perhaps it was enough. (160)

As in children's fantasies, but especially in children's drawings, these final visual impulses serve to set up a new figure-ground relation. In the fictive world of the child, objects need not necessarily follow norms

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of colour, size, or composition. The figures eventually find a space that is not invasive or threatening. They may now exist unmodified by their context, untouched by the world and, at least momentarily, find peace. Where Gnoli fills these peaceful spaces with colour and detail, zooming in on objects until they totally envelop the canvas, Calvino's precisely delineated parameters envelop his characters in an intellectual word embrace. This closeness creates both distance and compassion. Both artists are also drawn to detail. We see how the eye haptically lingers, reaches out to touch, feel, explore, and appropriate the object into new and unusual surroundings. Compared to the details, all else seems transient, unworthy of note. A painted scene, a narrated event is appreciated for the patterns of its details, for the new shapes that arise from their descriptions. Gnoli achieves this end by daubing thick coloured tempera paste on the canvas with a spatula. An impasto of sand adds a deepened dimension to the waves and eddies that represent exactly what they are supposed to be. Calvino achieves similar ends by layering words in designs that spiral around the single-minded idea at hand. The effect is a thick prose that envelops the reader within its overlapping folds. The Otherness takes on a full range of phenomenological possibilities as the ideas become transparent, readable signs - an imagetext. By using a descriptive style that layers verbal detail, Calvino erects a verbal labyrinth for the reader, trapping him within the mise en abyme of his descriptions. The reader is tricked into seeing what the author has pictured. In Gnoli, it is the texture of the material itself, of the painted medium, the porosity of terra cotta, the flimsiness of papier mache, that sustains the game. In Calvino, the cogency of the words, the preciseness of syntax, are meant to display a similar sensorial (visual-tactile-olfactory) excitement. For Gnoli, clarity is the function of linearity and conciseness, where even the contour of a thing may become the thing itself. Such is the nature of buttons and shirt collars. In Calvino, the repetition of schemata produces similar feelings of depth and confusion between visual/verbal signs. For both artists, then, depth is achieved through layering; the essence of the object is suffused in depicted detail. Both strive not for duplication but for perfect symbiosis between the idea and the visualverbal icon. Both freely and consciously manipulate the elements of perceptual experience into new paradigms that also affirm that there is no measure that cannot be further divided, no detail so slight that scrupulous exactitude cannot proliferate into elegant graphism. In Calvino the smallest hiatus of space and time seems to disappear as he moves

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from the general to detail, then to details of detail. Writing becomes vision, simultaneity. There is no event, no observation, no measure which cannot be divided further, which cannot sustain another sign. In the later Calvino all that exists is the self-perpetuating detail. Yet one must not forget the mise en abyme perspectives of the non-existent knight, the meticulously delineated items of Dr Trelawny, the surrealistic retentiveness of La formica argentina, or the intricate musings of his misappropriated characters of Gli amori difficili. The young Calvino rejected any notion of inspiration that was not based on direct observation. Indeed, in a period of history hot with idealism, even his ideology was matter based, constructive, never prone to flights of ideological fantasy but grounded in materialist parameters of value. Because reality, for both artists, is an entity waiting to be interpreted, new meanings, be they realistic, impressionistic, fantastic, or surreal, lurk in the wings of seemingly innocent images and events. What is more, because these subtle nuances are difficult to prise out, they are always valued over interpretations that fall into one's lap. In these cases Calvino collapses meaning into the words he uses to depict the object, while Gnoli infuses meaning into the thick paints employed to engineer the object. In both cases, style is a pretext for a display of spatial virtuosity. There is indeed a parallel between the two artists' narrative techniques. If we examine the verbal text that accompanies the paintings, we find that Calvino has invented narratives that are anything but mimetic. Rather, the prose exhibits a jouissance, a sheer delight and reverie of expression fuelled by a self-propelling energy. As with the inventive play that characterizes his rapport with Valeric Adami's works, Calvino's text allows a new signification to enter the visual text from the outside, with the result that the image no longer passively mirrors a pre-existing reality but functions as a site that produces an unexpected meta-picture. Subsequently, the frugality and parsimony of Gnoli's visual imagery triggers an immediate discursive response on the part of the author. Each narrative cluster of experience provides an insight into the richness of the author's complex perceptual skills. As the images are parsed into their minimal units - a collar, a button, a pillowcase, shoes - the seemingly innocent details in the paintings become pregnant symbols that expand the original threshold of the canvas into unexpected directions. Semantic transformation is limited solely by the spectator's ability to see what he believes. There is no absolute line of demarcation between semiotically real worlds and fie-

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tion. In this sense, both real and imagined are forever incomplete and indeterminate. Both lie in wait, pending interpretation. It is indeed possible to imagine readings of these paintings that do not attribute features beyond the immediately perceived colours of Gnoli's art. It is also true that some parts of the images (shadows, halfopened buttons, turned-down bed covers) are more discursively charged than others. The painting 'II guanciale' (The pillow'), for example, solicits hidden layers of narcissistic fictions interned within the text: Cio che il guanciale puo accogliere - sonno, sogni, insonnia, amori, malori, morti, nascite - non si legge sulla sua superficie, che esprime solo una tersa serenita priva di rughe. (429) That which the pillow can accommodate - sleep, dreams, insomnia, loves, illness, deaths, births - cannot be read on its surface, which only expresses a terse serenity absent of wrinkles.

Calvino captures these latent narratives and builds a new potential mental context: Chi sostiene che il guanciale e bianco in quanto appartiene al paesaggio notturno, ne piu ne meno che la luna, non tiene conto di quanto allegra possa esserne la vista alia piena luce del giorno, appena lo si scopra scostando il copriletto. Fresco e candido e paffuto, s'affaccia al capezzale, come per dire che durante 11 giorno il re del letto e lui, lui il padrone di quella distesa liscia e soffice. (429) Those who maintain that the pillow is white because it belongs to the nighttime landscape, neither more nor less than the moon, do not take into account the possible joy it feels at the sight of the full light of day, as soon as it is uncovered, pulling back the bedspread. Fresh and candid and plump, it looks out from the head of the bed, as if to say that during the day he is the king of the bed, he is the master of that smooth soft expanse.

Images which seem to be exhausted by their own self-conscious materiality are charged with new semantic relevance by the verbal text. Take, for example, this description of Gnoli's 'Giro di collo' (The shirt collar'):

Painted Stories and Novel Spaces 255 Alcuni credono la camicia stirata d'origine vulcanica, per via dell'anfiteatro tondeggiante che s'innalza al termine della distesa piatta: si tratterebbe d'un antico cratere spento, e le pendici trangolari che s'estendono in direzione della pianura sarebbero il risualtato del raffreddamento improvviso d'una colata di lava. (426) Some believe the pressed shirt to be of volcanic origin because of the roundish amphitheatre that emerges from the flat plain: it is an ancient spent crater, the triangular slopes which extend in the direction of the plain are the result of the sudden cooling of lava flows.

Gnoli's paintings inaugurate perceptions that declare a loyalty to the image within the frame while asserting an autonomy that resides within the narrative frame of the viewer's imagination. The risk is that the verbal text may stand out as a message on a separate base, a detachable superstructure that risks arbitrariness. The message may be seen to emanate from the words themselves rather than from the images. Calvino overcomes this possible irrelevance by soothing the transition between the two semantic fields. The collar is indeed a recognizable cultural icon loaded with significance, and Gnoli may indeed intend an ideal viewer response. Calvino's perceptions, on the other hand, emanate not from the cut of the cloth but from a perceptual mode for generating meanings that refuses to allow sign systems, especially competing ones like words and images, to dwell in isolation: Altri, senza pronunciarsi suH'origine, insistono nel ritenere 1'anfiteatro un lago disseccato. Questo presuppone che la camicia fosse un tempo ricca d'acque, le quali provocando inondazioni e successivamente ritraendosi avrebbero formato la vasta pianura alluvionale. (426) Others, without pronouncing themselves on sources, insist that the amphitheatre is a dried-up lake bed. This presupposes that the shirt was once rich with water, which through successive inundations and recedings, formed the vast alluvial plain.

Calvino jests with his reader: La camicia non assomiglia a niente, sfugge alle figure del linguaggio. (427-8)

256 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures The shirt does not resemble anything, it escapes the figures of language.

But it is at this very moment that the wily craftsman unrolls a new litany of witty remarks: trattandosi di camicia a righe, non si puo non soffermarsi su queste striature cromatiche rettilinee, parallele, in senso longitudinale ... (428) speaking of pinstriped shirts, it is impossible not to mention these chromatic streaks, rectilinear, parallel, in a longitudinal sense ...

Not everyone achieves Calvino's super-imaginative perceptive reading upon viewing these paintings. Yet, as Bryson observes, 'it is just when discourse is made to feel effort, when it has to go out of its way to convert the figural into the discursive, that the effect of the real is enhanced.'28 Calvino is a literary artist of enormous cunning. He uses the language of science, geography, art criticism, and literature with ironical aplomb. Thus, each cluster undoes while it augments the effect of its visual predecessor. Progressively, the reader loses his bearings. What began as a charged description of excitement before the images becomes a comical parody of one's own gullibility, as, for example, in a description that backs onto the original image in 'II bottone' ('The button'): I rapporti tra il bottone e la distesa morbida di stoffa in cui affonda le sue radici filiformi - prato erboso se e lana, o fitta stuoia di fibra sintetica non sono definibili con certezza ... (424) The relationship between the button and the soft expanse of material into which it sinks its filiform roots - grassy lawn if it is wool, or dense mat of synthetic fibres - are not definable with certainty ...

Then the reader is moved to ruminations that create their own selfsufficient imaginary space: II bottone, al tramonto, raccoglie le ultime luci sulla sua superficie liscia ma non puo trattenerle dallo scorrere, giu per la lieve convessita, verso il bordo rilevato dove un'ala d'ombra sta in attesa, pronta a inghiottirle. I riflessi luccicanti che nelle ore del giorno hanno cullato il bottone nell'illu-

Painted Stories and Novel Spaces 257 sione d'essere specchio e di poter accogliere nella sua imperturbabile circonferenza 1'immagine tumultuosa del mondo, alia sera si smorzano e restituiscono il disco alia sua solidita opaca. (422) The button, at sunset, gathers the last rays of light on its smooth surface but cannot stop them from flowing down the slight convexity towards the prominent border where a wing of shadow lies in wait, ready to swallow them up. The glistening reflections, which during daylight hours have lulled the button into thinking it was a mirror capable of gathering within its imperturbable circumference the tumultuous image of the world, in the evening are extinguished, thus returning the disc to its opaque solidity.

The effect is a language that sweeps the reader away on a voyage of (un)controlled sensibility: E' 1'ora in cui una ritrovata certezza potrebbe ripagare il bottone della perdita di splendori fluttuanti e ingannevoli: se non potra essere mondo, sara bottone, come e sempre stato ed e, modellato in un eterno presente. Ma gia un'altra ambizione lo prende; quella di sfoggiare le striature della sostanza cornea e la traccia impercettibile lasciata dal ruotare del tornio: le prove insomma della nobilta di chi ha avuto per madre la natura vivente e non lo stampo della plastica sorda e inanimata. Per scorgere questi dettagli, c'e un momento in cui la luce non si riflette piu sul disco ma e diffusa ancora nell'aria del crepuscolo. Ecco, forse adesso. No: toppo tardi! Gala il buio. (422) It is the hour in which a rediscovered certainty could repay the button for the loss of fluctuating and deceptive splendours: if it cannot be the world, it will be button, just as it always was and is, modelled in an eternal present. But already another ambition captures it; that of displaying the corneal streaks and the imperceptible traces left by the turning of the lathe: the proof, that is, of the nobility of one who has had living nature as a mother not a deaf and dead plastic mold. In order to perceive these details, there is a moment in which light is no longer reflected on the disc but is diffused in the air of twilight. Here, perhaps now. No: too late! Night is falling.

These, I feel, are some of Calvino's most libidinous passages. The language is so palpable, the effect so entertaining that the reader

258 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures readily succumbs to the author's mesmerizing dance. The multiple images conjured by Calvino's vivid imagination drive the verbal text further and further from the reality of the paintings, breaking away from the control of the subject and into the autonomous reality conjured by the dominating verbal sign. At the same time, the verbal text seduces the gaze of the reader to see what he designs behind the mind's eye. In a sense, the words conjure phantom-paintings that arise from the colours and shapes on the canvas but unfold beyond the horizon of the reader's perception. Word and image are in full thrall, as is the collusion between writer and reader. Since Calvino's words imbue the paintings with enormous vitality, a new mental picture emerges from the canvas and presides over it with carefree abandon. Indeed, the descriptions are often more vivid and unquestionably more lively than the paintings themselves. Here is Calvino's rendition of 'La scarpa da donna' ('Lady's shoe'): E dal livello del suolo che lo sguardo deve partire se vuol rendersi conto di com'e la scarpa; la ragione della sua forma (causa e fine) e la necessita d'appoggiare al terrene tacco e punta, e nello stesso tempo d'innalzarsi, di staccarsene, di contrapporsi a quanto vi e laggiu di polveroso, di fangoso, di caduto in basso; e per questo che la linea slanciata, la superficie luccicante, la consistenza leggera sono sue qualita non accessorie ma essenziali ... Detto questo, possiamo abbandonarci aH'ammirazione che il tacco merita: meraviglia di statica e di modulazione di linee, eleva dal suolo un fusto sottile che salendo si dilata e nello stesso tempo s'inclina all'indietro; le sue nervature si divaricano e si cabrano lievemene con la snellezza d'una palma inarcata dal vento e 1'esilita d'un gambo di calice che sostiene la coppa tondeggiante o parapetto di poppa dell'alta nave. In superficie il tacco e sostenuto, se lucido, dai riflessi verticali che ne accentuano 1'altezza; interiormente, dal temperamento imperioso e puntiglioso, pronto a calcare tutto il peso sull'esigua area d'appoggio, ma con la leggerezza e la crudelta rapida e indifferente del pungiglione d'un insetto o del becco d'un uccello. (424-5) The eye must begin at ground level if it wishes to understand what a shoe is: the reason for its shape (cause and effect) is the necessity to lay on the ground both heel and toe, and at the same instant to raise itself, to set itself apart from everything down there which is dusty, and muddy, and fallen; for this reason the slender line, the shiny surface, its light consistency are not accessory qualities but essential ones ... This said, we may

Painted Stories and Novel Spaces 259 abandon ourselves to the admiration that the heel merits: marvel of stability and modulation of lines, it raises from the ground a thin shaft that dilates outward as it rises while at the same time inclining backwards; its nerves separate and move gently outward with the slenderness of a palm swaying in the wind and the thinness of the base of a chalice that supports its roundish cup or the bulwark of a high ship. On the surface the heel is supported, if shiny, by vertical reflections that accentuate its height; in its interior, of irresistible and punctilious temperament, ready to press down all the weight on that exiguous area of rest, but with the lightness and the rapid and indifferent cruelty of an insect's sting or a bird's peck.

The passage is simultaneously mimetic and high-flown, engineeringly rational while decadently precise. The banal heel assumes connotations of an indispensable reality exquisitely embellished by the turgid prose of Calvino. As word and image meld they produce a visual hieroglyph that imparts a romantic concomitance of sorts that is able to capture the nuances of a woman's feet in a plastic description. Calvino's transformations of painting into discourse are not so much descriptions as they are narrative opportunities just waiting to be imagined. They are part of that natural score the tribal Shaman performs in his quest for stories, second-order semiotic systems in which natural signs are transformed into a mythical signified. As such, their construction is a macchinare, a plotting that actively engages the interlocutor in a process of trickery, confusion, deception, and machination, pushing the discourse beyond the lineal (where the reader passively observes) and into the realm of spatiality (where the reader actively seeks corroboration in the painted image). To read the text is to question one's previous assumptions about the images; to imagine the new images is to follow Calvino's plotting techniques to their blissful conclusion. In this process of iconographic re-presentation Calvino seems to have escaped the prison house of linguistic restraint and achieved a functioning marriage between visual perception and verbal recognition. By engendering a new lexically based shape to painted forms, he places himself at one remove from reality, sheltered (like Suor Teodora in // cavaliere inesistente, the narrative image of the hermit St Jerome), but not hindered, by a veil of literature. The paintings act as Rorschach inkblots. Their optical consistency, because they are real though not unlike Bradamante's imagined map, suggests interpretation but avoids control.

260 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

For Calvino, the process is similar to the rigorous architecturing and plotting of invisible cities, the spiralling of matter into an intelligible DNA strand by the conch, the inventive geometrization of early dawn by the non-existent knight. In these instances, the author is modulating space in order to formalize a conceptual design of continuous process. There can be no end to spatial manipulation when so much power is invested in the infinite possibilities of patient and reverent description. The difference is that here, unlike in the descriptive passages cited, the images are physically present before the reader's eyes. We, too, as avid and willing readers-viewers, conjure up the phantasm of Calvino's imagination. If the author's intentions were to faithfully recreate verbal versions of the paintings, he would not distort them within the eiditic space of his text. These pieces are games, fascinating attempts at artistic plenitude that satisfy both the writer's need to saturate the word with a visual presence and the reader's curiosity to see, literally, the source of that inspiration. On both sides of the communication model satisfaction is consummate. Calvino is thus at home within the tranquility of Gnoli's silent paintings. As his words intertwine with the images, they perforate their solidity, creating new visions through a new montage of the elements depicted. One senses the urgency of the author's need to give shape to his colourful perceptions, to structure his random thoughts into a telling that coaxes the reader into seeing what he imagines. The entire exercise is more than a simple equating of visual technique with literary description. If it is possible to speak about the transferral of real, multidimensional space onto the two-dimensional surface of a painting, then it should be possible to speculate about achieving similar results in literature by toying with the spatial and temporal relations of the describing subject vis-a-vis the described event.29 In Calvino's work, and this is the crux of my argument, the focus is on the production of meaning and not the object of the meaning. It is precisely this focus on codification that places meaning in the figural camp, away from the potency of the discursive. Though denotation may articulate the image, the connotation of the images serves to strengthen the verbal text to the point of credibility. As readers of both texts, we believe the extrapolations engendered by Calvino because we reinforce their articulation by filling up the images with the new (in)visible meanings. In this way, that which is discursive and that which is figural fuse to become a verbal/visual unit, a hypertext, that

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occurs at the edge of the visible image and at the beginning of the modelling word. Giorgio De Chirico City And what should I love if not enigma?

Giorgio De Chirico30

In the spring of 1983 Calvino visited an exhibition of Giorgio De Chirico's metaphysical paintings at the art gallery at Beaubourg, Paris. Perhaps originally intending to write a Salon review in the critical tradition of Diderot or Baudelaire, Calvino did not indulge in Salon art criticism or iconography but instead transformed the gentlemanly genre into an exquisitely playful voyage inside the paintings of De Chirico. During his visit the author collated the images in the paintings into a running narration that rendered the exhibition a contextual sequence. This rethinking cast the visual images into a verbal-visual (and audio, since the text was also read by Calvino at the Centre Georges Pompidou) performance. Yet, far from being merely derivative of De Chirico's metaphysical images, Calvino wove a personal tale that incorporates personal perceptions and feelings. More than an interpretation, the resulting text is a solemn meditation that cuts across the paintings and links the images into a new spatial (visual) and temporal (narrative) construct. In essence, Calvino generated a new cognitive map which follows the order of the exhibition while establishing categories of experience that answer to a new and novel linear discourse. Calvino's most ambitious composite text was published in the glossy art magazine FMR in 1983. Its title, "Le citta del pensiero' (The Cities of Thought'), echoes the metaphysical ground of De Chirico's painted cityscapes and Calvino's own hyperreal metacities of Le citta invisibili.31 In 'Le citta del pensiero' the visual and silent immediacy of the paintings is translated into a patterned symphony of word-filled impressions. Similarly, the verbal text enjoys a splendid visual complement. This symbiosis unites the two modes of expression in a composite discourse that resides somewhere between both texts. As readers of this hybrid discourse we follow the process, eagerly seeking the images in the paintings that both fix and liberate the words in the verbal text. We too generate, beyond Calvino's first impressions, a

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new order of meaning. Yet when we embark upon this voyage of discovery, what do we discover? Are we reading words or observing images, or both? Are we developing a story or experiencing a polyvalent event? Indeed, the paintings exist (and have existed) without Calvino's verbal captioning. What of Calvino's text? Is it merely a dependent impression of the paintings or is it an academic transcription of a highly personal memory of a viewing? In other words, has Calvino transcended the aesthetic object or remained bound to its metaphysical implications? Let us begin our discussion by examining De Chirico's enigmatic project. De Chirico was the first modern artist to have used the term metafisico (metaphysical) metaphorically to characterize a certain type of spectral, visionary, and cosmic relationship with reality32 (qualifiers often used to describe the narrative of Calvino). More specifically, the term is applied to a series of his paintings that share the following properties (any of which, again, could be applied to Calvino's narrative): (1) each is a direct representation of De Chirico's mental world and vision; (2) the canvas is used as a free space for liberally distributing objects; (3) these objects are essentially nominal, that is, they appear to be listed rather than integrated into a whole; (4) any association between objects is made through visual links and co-textual markers that may or may not be logical; and (5) multiple vanishing points allow the reader to experience the elements of the painting in any chosen order. These highly idiosyncratic paintings appeared between 1915 and 1919, a time when physical reality was being rendered unintelligible, indeed unimaginable, by abstruse theories in the fields of psychology, relativity, and quantum mechanics. The interrelationship of light, space, and time eluded even the most sophisticated, as scientists presented a discomfited public with an ever-growing array of unrecognizable forms. If we accept the fact that scientific inquiry at the beginning of this century violated everyday experience as well as common sense, then it is easy to assume that the concepts of science had outdistanced the language necessary to build the requisite mental images to communicate these theories simply. The effects of the new theories, architecture, psychology, and reality were imaginatively explored by the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century. The silent icons painted by De Chirico may thus be interpreted as the artist's response to the altering of the physical world by scientific theories that immersed culture in a maelstrom of concepts which, for the most part, could not even be verbalized. Like images in search of verbalization, the subversive power of

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De Chirico's representations silently revealed the inability of language to translate adequately their visionary import.33 Perhaps only now may we recognize a complementarity between these images and the transcendental insight that allows the artist to visualize what others do not even imagine. Perhaps Calvino's 'Le citta del pensiero' could be seen as a bridge spanning the inward and invisible mental dichotomy in brain functions (space/time, word/image categories) that De Chirico intuited as having been short- circuited by scientific relativism.34 And so, while semantic links between images are evident everywhere on a variety of levels in the paintings - from colours to parallelepiped shapes, repeated images, and leitmotifs to topographical links (columns, arches, trains, clocks) that merge, intersect, and disappear only to reappear in a different frame - there are no syntactic links; there is no sentence structure. Structure is provided by the Calvino text that unites the paintings in a linear narration. In an interview with William Weaver, Calvino stated: 'From time to time when I reread books I read during my adolescence and young manhood, I am surprised to discover a part of myself that I seemed to have forgotten, though it has gone on acting inside of me. A while ago, for example, I reread Saint fulien I'Hospitalier of Flaubert, and I recalled how much the story, with its view of a world of animals like a Gothic tapestry, influenced my early fiction.'35 This quotation supports the generally held view that Calvino's early fiction is fantastically grotesque in texture - a world inhabited by foreboding animals and Disney-like gnomes - and sustained by comical plots. It is also worth noting, however, that these animals appear, to Calvino's mind, as if disposed 'like a Gothic tapestry.' This phrase points to a visual context that has often been overlooked by commentators of the early works of Calvino. Fantasy (from the Greek word 'phantasia') places an emphasis on seeing, on making visible, on imagery as the construction of alternate visions that may take the form, at times, of 'a Gothic tapestry.' With this in mind, the closing paragraph of Flaubert's Saint Julien I'Hospitalier becomes especially pertinent. After a tale of endearing folk myth, scenes of violently conflicting emotions, and exaggerated medieval piety, Flaubert concludes: Et voila 1'histoire de saint Julien-l'Hospitalier telle a peu pres qu'on la trouve, sur un vitrail d'eglise dans mon pays.36 And here is the story of St Julian Hospitaler more or less as one sees it on a stained glass window of a church in my town.

264 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

It seems that Flaubert had no difficulty entering the Gothic fantasy world of the stained glass window in order to weave his own tale from its bold outlines and uncomplicated faith. It also seems that Calvino's interest in Flaubert's tale may be traced to his own proclivity towards visually determined fantasy images as a tool for narrative impact. The FMR suite thus owes something to Flaubert's tale, a story inspired by the stained glass window in the north aisle of Rouen Cathedral. Just as Flaubert's story is not a faithful reading of the images in the glass but a reading of faith extrapolated from the thirtyodd coloured glass panels, Calvino's story is also not a figural depiction of De Chirico's paintings but a de-canting of his own impressions before the visual texts. Indeed, the author provides relatively bare and selected visual details which hardly seem to discriminate one painted canvas from another. Instead, he recombines their constituent elements in rhapsodic freehand. Not only does Calvino reveal the silence of the paintings, he revels in their solid austerity, erecting 'un edificio stabile e necessario'37 ('a stable and necessary edifice'). The process offers him the space to observe and to describe, to find 'nello scrivere un modo di realizzarsi chiarendo sensazioni, impressioni, idee/38 ('in writing a way to realize himself by clearing up sensations, impressions, ideas'), an occasion or pretext 'per tendere o tentare diverse corde del proprio stile'39 ('for casting or trying different notes of one's style'). Calvino's words surreptitiously meander through the city, melding with the purity of De Chirico's classical forms and the sanctity of his colours. The two artists, it can be said, meet Virtually' in a new metaphysical space generated from their common tendency to view reality from a predetermined vantage point that privileges geometrically inspired patterns. As in any new relationship, their individual uniqueness grows together and achieves a visual/verbal interface that proceeds with a volition of its own. While Calvino's reading does not change the physical program of the exhibition's compositional decorum, it does offer a new possible spin. Now the paintings are sequential. Calvino's story has a beginning, 'Non so come sono arrivato qui' (396; T don't know how I arrived here'), and an ending, 'Alle volte penso che andando avanti sempre piu nel cammino che questa citta mi indica, arrivero a ricomporre qualcosa che s'e spezzato' (405; 'At times I feel that by continuing on the path indicated to me by this city, I will succeed in piecing together something that was broken'). The story is couched between images of water, 'Non ricordo cosa c'e fuori, forse un mare quasi nero da cui affiorano squame di mostri' (396; T don't recall

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what lies outside, perhaps a nearly black sea, its surface broken by the scales of monsters'), ending at the seashore, 'Da tempo tutti i cavalli sono fuggiti dalla citta e si aggirano sulle spiagge deserte' (406; 'Some time ago all the horses fled the city to run up and down the deserted beaches'). The city has become an island. Within its fluid shoreline, with all its sensual and life-giving connotations, is a rigidly sculptured, engineeringly precise city. Perfect piazzas, symmetrical arches, immobile statues line the metropolitan grid. The stark architecture is interrupted, forbiddingly penetrated, by dispirited human shadows: 'Da ogni parte mi giri, continue a veder quei due signori laggiu in fondo. Saranno sempre gli stessi...' (398; 'Wherever I turn, I keep seeing those two gentlemen over there. Will they always be the same ones ...'); 'Certo in queste piazze puoi incontrare figure ieratiche, rigide come manichini, con teste a clava o a uovo, senza volto' (401; 'Certainly in these squares you can meet hieratic figures, rigid as mannequins, with heads shaped like clubs or eggs, faceless'). Trains traverse the spaces between the green-coloured horizons with nowhere to go: 'II treno con la nuvola di fumo bianca e come la vela bianca della nave sul mare oscuro'; 'La locomotiva fischia e fuma, ma le stazioni sono vuote'; 'Anche il treno e murato, non sa dove andare, corre tra muri e arcate di gallerie' (403-4; 'the train with its cloud of white smoke is like the white sail of the ship on the dark sea'; 'the locomotive whistles and smokes, but the stations are empty'; 'Even the train is immured, it doesn't know where to go, it runs between walls and tunnel arcades'). Clocks are weighed down with temporality - 'Gli orologi mi avvertano che il tempo scorre ancora, minuto per minuto' (403; 'the clocks warn me that time keeps passing, minute by minute') - underwriting the protagonist's listlessness: 'Anche il tempo e un altrove che mi esclude, murato come sono dentro un istante sempre uguale' (403; 'Even time is an elsewhere that excludes me, immured as I am in a never-changing moment'). The city is a meeting place. On the one hand it is a no-man's land residing somewhere between the rational and the irrational: 'Siamo in una citta da vivere a occhi aperti, una citta della veglia, dove 1'attenzione si posa uniforme e costante sulle cose, come la luce, impassibile' (402; 'We are in a city to be lived in with open eyes, a wakeful city, where one's attention alights uniformly and steadily on things, impassively, like the light'). On the other hand, the interface between De Chirico's images and Calvino's writing is conciliatory; it provides a precarious haven: 'La citta del pensiero non suggerisce pensieri d'una specie o d'un'altra, ne' obbliga a riflettere sulle apparizioni e gli incon-

266 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

tri che in essa occorrono, o a indagare i suoi misteri' (401; The city of thought does not suggest thoughts of a certain kind, nor does it oblige one to reflect on the appearances and encounters that occur in it, or to investigate its mysteries'). Instead, 'Questa citta e fatta per accogliere il pensiero, per contenerlo e trattenerlo senza che si senta costretto' (399; 'This city has been created to welcome thought, to contain and entertain it without feeling any obligation'). Though the painted city has been reconfigured to suit Calvino's emotional re-constructions it remains, despite its verbal captions, conspicuously silent precisely because Calvino's text is fraught with uncertainty and hesitancy: Non ricordo quali passioni o turbamenti offuscavano il pensiero fuori di qui; ho dimenticato la parte di me stesso che ho lasciato lungo il cammino; solo alle volte mi prende il sospetto che la mia iniziazione mi sia costata troppo cara, ma non so valutarne ne i guadagni ne le perdite. Alle volte penso che andando avanti sempre piu' nel cammino che questa citta mi indica, arrivero' a ricomporre qualcosa che s'espezzato; alle volte invece mi pare che sia stata consumata una separazione definitiva. Ma separazione tra cosa e cosa? Questo non lo so. (405) I don't recall what passions or disturbances darken thought outside this place; I've forgotten that part of myself that I left along the way; only at times am I seized by the suspicion that my initiation has cost me too much, but I have no way of evaluating either the gains or the losses. At times I think that by continuing to go forward on the path indicated to me by this city, I'll succeed in piecing together something that's been broken; at other times it seems to me that a final separation has been accomplished. But separation between what and what? This I don't know.

The images and the words are similar not only in terms of themes and iconographic motifs but in their relation to reality. No longer isolated one from the other, Calvino's words and De Chirico's images have become co-extensive in time through the relationship installed by Calvino. The use of nouns such as 'treno ... orologio ... scacchiera ... labirinto ... citta ... carciofi ...' ('train ... clock ... chessboard ... labyrinth ... city ... artichokes ...') and verbs such as 'annettere ... si scambiano ... sto vagando ... offuscavano ... sbarra ...' ('to annex ... to exchange ... I am wandering... they obscure ... to block ...') promote intuitive associations with what the reader sees. Figurative language builds up into metaphor in phrases such as 'rigidi manichini... torna 1'ombra a sbar-

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rarle la via ... la locomotiva fischia e fuma, ma le stazioni sono vuote ... questo labirinto di vie e piazze ... il treno e murato, non sa dove andare ... questi oggetti che incontro sul mio cammino, come fossero i veri abitanti della citta ... spazi siderei delle idee ...' ('rigid mannequins ... the shadow returns to bar the way ... the locomotive whistles and smokes, but the stations are all empty ... this labyrinth of streets and squares ... the train is immured, it doesn't know where to go ... these objects that I encounter along the way, as if they were the true inhabitants of the city ... sidereal spaces of ideas ...'). The movement of the language assumes qualities analogous to the images on the canvas. The course of the words works to suggest a duration in linear time through the paintings by creating an interlocking pattern with prepositions such as 'a ... da ... in ... sopra ... fra ...' ('at... from ... in ... above ... between ...'). The uncertain nature of the place is expressed through adverbs such as 'fuori... dentro ... attraverso ... forse ... probabilmente ... eternamente ... lentissimo' ('outside ... inside ... across ... maybe ... probably ... eternally ... slowly ...'); while a foreboding quality is imparted with the adjectives 'trepidante ... melanconica ... vaghi... solitari... abbandonati...' ('trembling ... melancholic ... vague ... solitary ... abandoned ...'). The original modernist frame that distanced the viewer has thus dissipated, replaced by a permeable border of words. The images discussed by Calvino are divided by no intervening frame, no dividing diagonal lines, no specifically ordained areas of thought. This stream of consciousness flow is unlike anything in Calvino's repertoire. Indeed, the verbal images are so elliptically presented that it is impossible to gain access to meaning without the visual text. The contexture is thus different from the original theme of De Chirico because it is dependent upon the point of view that Calvino ascribes to the paintings and the way he perceives them. Calvino's introspective monologue uses the functional language of narrative in order to activate a dialogue between paintings, text, and reader. Yet, 'Le citta del pensiero' could also be considered a dialogue, as we have seen, since the newly hatched interrelation of the visual and verbal signs is felt as a tension which is not necessarily bound to either text but that somehow exists in a space between them. For this reason, the significance of Calvino's verbal text does not germinate out of a direct ontological relation or resemblance between images seen and the referents used to describe them. As in the Flaubert tale, meaning does not emanate from referentiality but is instead a measure of a semiological process as Calvino enters the paintings and

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extends their emotional impact onto his own world with the emotional corroboration of De Chirico. Interpretation is thus a function of a relationship predicated by the artworks and mediated by a storyteller, in this case, Calvino. De Chirico's figures seem to strike chords in Calvino. He recognizes in their forms internally codified formulas which in turn kindle into meaning deep-seated personal feelings. The resulting invention, or inter-vention, is pinned to the canvas only at certain points. In other words, the paintings serve as an emotive catalyst while the verbal text becomes a record, or history, of a unique and personal exegesis. 'La verita e presto detta' (397; The truth is quickly told')/ Calvino's narrator states, 'da quando sono entrato in questa citta, la citta e entrata in me; dentro di me non c'e posto per nient'altro' ('ever since I entered this city, the city has entered into me; there is no room inside me for anything else'). The subsequent tale is both a quest of self-discovery and a voyage of creative analogy. One senses Calvino's desire to project ever-dawning aspects of himself in the images before him. Instead of being an end in themselves, the words stand as a clue to something else. By picturing the story through the images in the paintings, Calvino has externalized the body of his own experience into the patterns before him. The verbal text has become more than a transcription of data from the visual medium. This painting-writing unit seems to work both to illuminate Calvino's feelings and to complement the painted images, notwithstanding their separation in real time. In this way, the visual text receives a verbal dimension while the verbal text becomes pictorial. Once we have characterized this writing as pictorial it is easier to understand how the relationship between characterizing what we consider depictive in painting and descriptive in writing becomes reciprocal. For Calvino, a writer is able to represent what he sees because the elements of vision and the rules for verbal description should be the same. Following scientific procedures and the use of carefully crafted schemata that follow mechanical (writing) and psychological (impressionistic) skills, Calvino plays with what he sees in the world as if it were a constructed picture (or text), analyses it, records his impressions, then invents a means of conveying this impression to the reader.40 This writing process is structured, moves in temporal moments, and relies upon intense visual contact. Whether manifesting itself through relentlessly self-conscious and analytical visual vignettes in Palomar,41 the megalomaniac categorizations of the totalizing narra-

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tivity with which Calvino approaches the world in Collezione di sabbia,42 or the destructive aim of the maurauding youth in the short story 'Ultimo viene il corvo/ Calvino's narrative experiments have privileged a haptic touching (Gandelman) with the eye. This visual experience is a subjective affair and springs entirely from Calvino as interested spectator. As such, the pattern has two intertwined aspects. In the first place, there is a sense that whatever Calvino gazes upon will retain a residue of its old existence: 1'orizzontalita e un piano continue, la verticalita e fatta di element! isolati: torri, fari, ciminiere. In cima alle torri sventolano bandiere appuntite, stendardi, orifiamme d'ogni colore ... (398) horizontality is a continuous plane, verticality is made up of isolated elements: towers, lighthouses, chimneys. From the tops of the towers flutter pennants, standards, oriflammes of every colour ...

While retaining their materiality, however, these objects 'come to life' under the author's scrutiny and assume connotations that augment or even alter their pictorial circumstance. Their meaning has been vicariously extended into pluri-probable narratives: se e per una festa, e soltanto lassu che essa vien celebrata; qua sotto tutto tace. O sara per indicare ai naviganti da che parte tira il vento? Ma quaggiu non vola neanche un granello di polvere; solo 1'alto cielo e trascinato dalle correnti. D'altronde non si vede anima viva sulle torri, dalla base alia vetta. (398) if they are for a holiday, only up there is it being celebrated; here below everything is silent. Or might it be to show mariners in which direction the wind is blowing? But down here not even a speck of dust is blown; it is only the high sky that is moved by the breezes. On the towers, however, one does not see a living soul, from base to top.

The second aspect is a figurative one. By coming to life, qualities of the described objects begin to influence the surrounding environs, emotionally embellishing its contours, influencing the reader-viewer because of an ineluctable economy: Piazze, vie, spianate s'estendono davanti a me ostentando un'apparente

270 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures accessibility come a dire: siamo lisce e sgombre, percorretemi. Chi potrebbe diffidare del loro invito? (398) Squares, streets, esplanades stretch before me displaying an apparent accessibility, as though to say: we are smooth and open, walk on us. Who could be suspicious of their invitation?

The answer is quick in coming: Solo un agorafobo. Forse 1'agorafobia e un contagio che questa citta trasmette a chi vi arriva senz'essersi premunito. (398) Only an agoraphobe. Perhaps agoraphobia is a contagion that this city transmits to those who arrive in it without being forewarned.

The pattern continues as Calvino's voyager-protagonist is psychologically affected by the objects within his gaze: anch'io ne soffro, devo dire, da quando mi trovo qui: gli spazi vuoti mi paiono ardui da attraversare; preferisco strisciare dietro gli spigoli degli edifici, tra i pilastri dei portici, senza avventurarmi allo scoperto; tanto piu che non saprei dove dirigermi. (398) I too am afflicted with it, I must say, ever since I've been here: the empty spaces seem to me to be hard to cross; I prefer to creep along the edges of the buildings, between the pillars of the arcades, without venturing into the open; all the more since I wouldn't know which way to go.

As images are unbound from their context through the fiction of animation (the train now races between the paintings), a necessary crossing occurs between vision and imagination, between source and imagination. Calvino's words wrap around De Chirico's paintings, conflating their individual spaces, rendering them dynamic, setting up a narrative that endows them with a logical, even purposeful, direction. In 'Le citta del pensiero' this process is polarized as the reader's gaze is constantly shifting between the different media of the text. The more closely one examines the paintings expecting them to depict the words (and vice versa), the more active and vivid the experience. The texture of each reading will thus vary according to the idiosyncracies of each

Painted Stories and Novel Spaces 271

reader and of each newly generated hybrid text. The boundary between the media is thus removed to a considerable degree with interpretation depending entirely on the external circumstances of the reader's emotional and volitional interrelation with the texts. This is why 'Le citta del pensiero' may ultimately be considered a dialogue. As De Chirico's monologue transposes into a Calvinian dialogic speech act, the reader becomes the active agent, the medium, that permits an interface between these two palettes of specific values that have become what Bakhtin calls a 'heteroglossia/43 This dialogization lies somewhere on the boundary between vision and perception. But beyond the seductive naturalness of Calvino's use of iconic terms and the epistemological displacements operating on the representational dimensions of 'Le citta del pensiero,' can we determine what Calvino wants us to see and understand? To begin with, unlike the usual unfolding of verbal and imagistic patterns the reader sees in the mind's eye while reading, in this narrative the pictures to be imagined are already present. In an ekphrastic move similar to that of placing the Visconti tarot deck alongside the verbal text in // castello del destini incrociati, in the FMR edition of 'Le citta del pensiero' Calvino invites the reader to consider the sources of inspiration. The reader is informed in a prefatory note that Alcuni mesi fa, a Parigi, durante una mostra al Beaubourg, Italo Calvino lesse questo suo viaggio nelle silenziose citta di Giorgio de Chirico. Le immagini, che accompagnano qui il Corso del Testo, corrispondono alle diapositive che accompagnarono allora la sua lettura. (44) Several months ago, in Paris, during a visit to an exhibit at the Beaubourg, Italo Calvino read an account of his voyage through the silent cities of Giorgio De Chirico. The images, which here accompany the flow of the text, correspond to the slides that accompanied his reading on that occasion.

This preparatory exercise effectively reverses the medieval amanuensis practice of illumination of a verbal text with images, since the descriptive spatiality inherent to the inner world of fiction is here laid out before the reader's eyes and serves as an antecedent for illumination of the images with words. This being the case, the public meaning we generate out of Calvino's private interpretation is something that we 'see' or 'notice' only at the moment that we understand the idiosyn-

272 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

cratic correspondence the author establishes between his own words and the eccentric images of De Chirico. As in metaphysical painting, meaning is indicated through an artificially installed relation rather than through substance. What then, we may finally ask, is Calvino perceiving? Is it De Chirico's metaphysical interpretation of perceived reality: the plazas of Torino, his father's studio? This would render Calvino's text a representation of a representation, something which, in Platonic terms, is ultimately unsatisfactory. Or is his verbal text a descriptive account of private imagination? In this case, the impressions are solely those of Calvino; the reader must remain aware of the distinctive perceptual (point of view and tense of the moment reported) and psychic structures (relationship and attitude) peculiar to Calvino. The author's rethinking of De Chirico's paintings constructs a self-conscious notion of self that is implied in the re-sequencing of images with text. This self, though formed in and of language in a Lacanian sense, is actualized through the female object, the visual image. Gender difference is thus both theorized and actualized in a single act of pictorial incorporation. Verbal and visual interaction thus offer a new meaning and reference, a visual writing that works to create a new space for the subject in a world of postmodern liminality. The juxtaposing of these two enigmatic texts, De Chirico's imagocentric canvas and Calvino's logocentric page, permits us to appreciate the entire suite as a single sign system and not two disparate and aesthetic categories. Examining this suite as a sign system allows us to rise above the simplistic idea of painting as a record of perception. Norman Bryson reminds us that in the Discourses Sir Joshua Reynolds speaks of the 'scraping away' of perception in favour of the ideal of the abstracted form. The discarding of objective reality in favour of an artificial construct or sign is, for Reynolds, a precondition of high art. By considering painting as an 'art of the sign/ which, according to Bryson, 'is to say an art of discourse/ painting is not marginalized as a viewed and detached object but is implicated within the flow of signs that comprise social formation.44 As culturally co-extensive sign systems, there should be no difference between words and images that is given for all times beyond 'the inherent natures of the media, the objects they represent, or the laws of the human mind.'45 Calvino, too, we have seen, considers visual images as signs to be relocated within the social domain and has approached these, as well as other paintings, as self-referential systems of signs. By incorporating

Painted Stories and Novel Spaces 273

the painted visual sign within society's codes of printed verbal signatures, Calvino expands the constraints of the verbal medium ('Non credo che il mondo sia soltanto pensiero o linguaggio' ['I do not believe that the world is only composed of thought or language']) while empowering a relocation of the image at the centre of verbal discourse about the self ('E 1'occhio scruta il caos del mondo/ 3). This permits the elaboration of new combinations of signs, be they verbal or visual, into innovative discursive formations. The juxtaposing of De Chirico's paintings and Calvino's text effects just such a change in the existing boundaries of interarts discourse. This is an important theoretical conjuncture, since it foregrounds the representation of difference as an aesthetics of compromise. Just as De Chirico transformed dried biscuits into mysterious visual landscapes, Calvino experimented with transforming painted images of pillars, buildings, and plazas into enigmatic verbal descriptions.46 Calvino's transcription of De Chirico's visions may now be read as a conduit between a site dense with perception (the paintings) to one avid for it (the writer's blank page), between a painter venturing to locate a self and a writer striving to consolidate one. By utilizing this newly opened channel for his own ends, the paintings become a supportive structure for Calvino's imagination, dreams, and perceptions. It is unlikely that there is a congruence between the mental states of De Chirico's originally idiosyncratic gaze and Calvino's subsequent selfmotivated perceptions. De Chirico's is an abstracted, metaphysical representation of a particular state of modernist awareness. Calvino's text, on the other hand, is an attempt to organize the perceptions obtained from these paintings into an imaginative response that is both compliant and self-reflexive.47 The 'empty' signs are filled with meaning through the voyeurism of the re-placed seeing subject. It is much more productive, then, to read both the paintings and the verbal text as an interactive sign system that embroiders perceptual and imaginative components. Both Calvino and De Chirico create images with their respective artistic codes; both inspire the imagination with the different syntax of their languages. It may be suggested that both are attempting to defy the silence behind and within their respective languages by extending their descriptive potential. De Chirico's paintings are a proving ground for his metaphysical manner. Thus each still life, each scene, shows De Chirico at play with the very notion of 'still life' and painted scenery. This is done by proliferating a visual language that articulates the incongruities between the animate

274 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

and its anxiety-provoking depiction as inanimate. The paradigm of Calvino's reading of the paintings is the narrative response (the imme•diate discourse about the paintings) and the extemporized memory (a reprise of his thoughts before the paintings). In this sense, Calvino's discourse is a history, an impression, a retrieved memory of the event of his reading of the paintings. Moreover, his statements create a text which is ultimately not subordinate to the painted images but achieves a dynamism of its own through the paintings. The synchronic, nonsequential relationships of the images are thus recast in a diachronic temporal sequence and become features of a reading-viewing event. The text of 'Le citta del pensiero' can now be read as a chart of Calvino's own personal trial. From his search for a path that led to an oasis of tranquility amidst the war to these overtly personal and reflective meditations of a spiritual self-image, perhaps this suite's importance lies simply in the process of its revelations. Indeed, it is the extension of the self's disclosure that sustains the written text and strings the paintings together. It is as if Calvino's entire vital drama collapses upon his words with De Chirico's images looming before the verbal confession like emblems of guilt and sorrow. The multimedic 'Le citta del pensiero' crowns Calvino's lifelong search for patterns of inquiry and representation that allow the interpenetration of personal revelation with public meanings. In early tales, the young author was burdened by notions of style and theme and struggled with the exuberance of his own imagination. In more mature works, subjectivity was projected onto perceived reality, rendering it incorporeal. Why? Because Calvino's disembodied characters (the viscount, the nonexistent knight, Qfwfq, and a coterie of absent protagonists) and pluriprobable discourses were more in harmony with his evolving multidimensional and disseminated core, which he wished to remain hidden, behind codified screens. His identification with the metaphysical images of De Chirico forms a tie between these existential thresholds, the fearless public sign of a solvent private identity. De Chirico's images speak to Calvino, positioning him as interlocutor and allowing him to participate in and temporarily diffuse the text of his self as it redefines itself in culture. They call forth a web of memories, fantasies, and rationalizations that lurk behind a haunting exorcism. This interpellation allows Calvino to become the subject of another's discourse without being destroyed (co-opted) by it. By desiring and identifying with the images on the canvas, Calvino's relation to them is articulated in terms of absorption and self-loss. But the

Painted Stories and Novel Spaces 275

painted images are also presented as desiring the spectator. Without Calvino's interpretation they remain inert, confusing. It would seem that both image and spectator require something beyond themselves to become individual and complete. For such subjects, only the moment of absorption offers the illusion of presence, only the diffusion as narrativized subject grants the idealization of self-creation. Yet, by identifying culture with spectatorship and images Calvino is faced with the inevitable consequence of effectively not existing without them. Palomar's death in the final sequence of Palomar may now be interpreted as a possible metaphor for the author's absence from representation, or, more appropriately, a metaphor for his absence from a culture that defines itself as visual representation. This death in the text indicates that in a print culture, and even more emphatically in a society governed by spectacle, ways of knowledge are embodied in the cultural values of graphic and painted images. Calvino muses upon the ramifications of this turn of events in 'La penna in prima persona' when he states that for the artist, as for the writer, 'la mortecancellatura e fatta della stessa sostanza della vita-disegno, un movimento della penna sul foglio' (295; 'death-erasure is made of the same substance as drawing-life, a movement of the pen on the page'). To disappear is to reveal the absence of everything outside the imagocentric purview of the dominant culture. Ultimately, then, to survive is to generate a self that is both process and product. Though he is unable to relive the intellectual process that generated the images,48 or share in the tactile knowledge of the canvas,49 Calvino envies the painter50 and interprets the visual product to his own ends. The traditional conflict between words and images has been recast in terms of an unremitting creative tension between the demands of visual perception and the cognitive (in this case, verbal) media used to give body to our fantasies. This amounts to a new conception of temporality and spatiality in the observing-reading subject. Logophiliac as well as imagophiliac impulses have thus been channelled into an undifferentiated reading experience. The texts have met to form one conceptual space, a composite, coordinated double image, a new heterotopia.

Conclusion: A New Point

of Departure

And hence, in art, every space of touch in which we can see everything, or in which we can see nothing, is false. Nothing can be true which is either complete or vacant; every touch is false which does not suggest more than it represents, and every space is false which represents nothing. John Ruskin1

omnis mundi creatura quasi liber et pictura nobis est in speculum Alano delle Isole2

Guiding my moves was the desire to save all stones in a single story that was also my story. Italo Calvino3

In 'L'avventura di un miope' (The Adventure of a Nearsighted Man') Calvino describes a character whose values, valuations, and validations hinge around what he sees: Amilcare Carruga era ancor giovane, non sprovvisto di risorse, senza esagerate ambizioni material o spiritual!: nulla gli impediva, dunque, di godere la vita. Eppure s'accorse che da un po' di tempo questa vita per lui andava, impercettibilmente, perdendo sapore ... s'annoiava. Alia fine capi.' Era lui che era miope. (Gli amori difficili, 71, my emphasis) Amilcare Carruga was still young, not lacking resources, without exag-

Conclusion: A New Point of Departure 277 gerated material or spiritual ambition: nothing, therefore, prevented him from enjoying life. And yet he came to realize that for a while now this life, for him, had imperceptibly been losing its savor ...he was bored. He finally understood. The fact was that he was nearsighted. (272-3)

Human instincts are context driven. To touch or taste one needs to be close, to make physical contact with whatever the environment presents. Odours and sounds, on the other hand, can be in the undergrowth and do not require immediacy. But vision is the liberating sense. It rushes up mountain slopes, probes outer space, travels across time. The beholder's eye opens wide to the fullness of life and is the conduit (Calvino believed) of consciousness itself. For Amilcare Carruga the spectacle of the world has been reduced to the immediate parameters of his own self-centredness. For Patrick Trevor-Roper, author of The World through Blunted Sight,4 extraordinary artists enter the world with a unique way of seeing. These 'myopic personalities' have an interior life that is different from others, a purview of life that pivots around a closeup world, around things that can be viewed at close range. The focus of Amilcare's life is seeing; he spends the better part of his days concerned about seeing, about being seen and consequently, he is obsessed with his external image. The trajectory of Calvino's literary axiology suggests a similar myopic world picture. Calvino wished to render the world into a spectacle, to make visible the sensations of the world as they touched him. His characters are all picture makers, seeing subjects, beholders in the broad sense that trace their lineage to Henry James. Their visual acuteness and steady eye make them perfect metaphors for literary representation. His search for a suitable syntax, for verbal equivalents, for unrelenting signifiers is a meticulous focusing gesture: a singular mind's eye, that abstract seat of imagining, that rushes a thousand readers' eyes to the same magic spot. There is more to seeing than just seeing, however. The external image is a trip wire for emotive responses and intellectual musings. When we see something, an entire continent of senses awaken to appraise the new sighting. Imagine the reaching gaze of the myopic Amilcare, of the myopic writer. Calvino's myopia is expressed through a polarity of stable terms that are either/ or object constrained: I and Other, soul and body, inside and outside, private and public, space and time, images and words. These are the paradigms that have fuelled the metabolism of the author's narrative engine and nurtured the essence of his characters' fictional being. These are the issues that form the basis of his critical essays.

278 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

At the heart of both Amilcare's life and Calvino's literary life is the self-conscious, but more importantly, the sustained scrutiny of world where value is derived from visual contact. The nearsighted man's dilemma is existence reduced to its primary terms: to see and to be seen, to observe and be observed. The writer's preoccupation is to write and to be read. What is really at issue in both instances is a dimension pertinent to the human valuing experience and it touches, in short, on normative relations that can be skewed in favour of entirely personal preferences. Humans are creatures with a 'predator's eyes,'5 but we are also 'born to be looked at in the spectacle of the world.'6 Just as Amilcare, in spite of himself, resists the Other's conditioning gaze by wearing aesthetically exaggerated eyeglasses that literally erase his presence, Calvino resists critical mitigation by couching his narrative projects within rule-bound, theoretically prescribed, and esoterically rational writing experiments. This allowed him to act as if emotivism7 were absent from his writings, as if he too were unreachable, untouchable, invisible. Paradoxically, yet most characteristically, the author is most succinct, clear, stoic, indeed most detached, when eloquently describing his own ethos: Posso dire che scrivo per comunicare perche la scrittura e il modo in cui riesco a far passare delle cose attraverso di me, delle cose che magari vengono a me dalla cultura che mi circonda, dalla vita, dall'esperienza, dalla letteratura che mi ha preceduto, a cui do quel tanto di personale che hanno tutte le esperienze che passano attraverso una persona umana e poi tornano in circolazione. E per questo che scrivo. Per farmi strumento di qualcosa che e certamente piu grande di me e che e il modo con cui gli uomini guardano, commentano, giudicano, esprimono il mondo: farlo passare attraverso di me e rimetterlo in circolazione. Questo e uno dei tanti modi con cui una civilta, una cultura, una societa vive assimilando esperienze e rimettendole in circolazione.8 I can say that I write to communicate because writing is the way in which I allow things to pass through me; things that reach me through the culture that surrounds me, from life, from experience, from the literature that has preceded me, to which I give that bit of personality that all the experiences that pass through a human person and then return into circulation possess. This is why I write. To make myself an instrument of something that is certainly much larger than myself; this is how men observe, comment, judge, and express the world: by allowing it to pass through me

Conclusion: A New Point of Departure 279 and then place it back into circulation. This is one of the many ways in which a civilization, a culture, a society lives by assimilating experiences and replacing them back into circulation.

Calvino is describing a sanguine neo-pragmatist, a clear-headed intellectual attempting cultural reconstruction. This anti-foundationalist and anti-transcendentalist discourse insinuates closure loops that revolve around his own purview. His positions wish to make a difference rather than a novel point. For example, in 'Com'era nuovo il Nuovo Mondo' (Collezione di sabbia, 'How New was the New World') Calvino reads European impressions of the new world in several paintings inspired by the accounts of the first explorers. The painters' depiction of the first-hand accounts of the explorers were lax in precision yet visually rich in value-loaded impressions. Bearded Indians model European pants, elephants stand alongside toucans, an allegorical nude representing America rides an armadillo. These capricious metaphors can be attributed more to the painter's culturally myopic mind's eye than to a faithful rendition of an unknown chronicler's account. Nevertheless, these painted impressions made a difference. It was not so much the newness of the discovered lands that attracted the attention of the painters but the station, possible or otherwise, of each new artefact within the accepted classificatory system of their time. America was envisioned through didactic allegory. How else could one visualize what the chroniclers were reporting if not by inventing images that satisfied their personal terms of reference? Like Amilcare Carruga, these chroniclers and painters were conditioned by exaggerated external lenses. On the one hand, these lenses extend a communicative incompatibility, a difficult existence that verges on invisibility; on the other, stolid European lenses conditioned history, promoting visible substitutes that concealed images that would have been politically dangerous. What this stance reveals, however, are internal prejudices and modes of intrusive behaviour that inhibit transparency. In both instances, artists reshuffle the flotsam and jetsam of the world to create new personal renderings that condition public opinion. It is an illusionist's trick; the same bricoleur Calvino woefully compares himself to in La taverna del destini incrociati is the magisterial mediator between the text (visual or verbal) and the aesthetic act of world formation. Calvino intentionally situated himself at the limen of the porous interface between man and environment. From youthful musings on

280 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

goats to wondering whether it were possible today to see a new world, the constant shifting of boundaries of thematic and stylistic experimentation allowed him to develop new realms of fictional meaning that cut through the stolid surface layers and got to the gist. In this same article, he wondered whether man yet possessed the cultural competence to objectively divine difference, to record polysemy without engendering metaphor? Were we able to scartare dalle mente tutte le immagini che siamo abituati ad associare all'aspettativa d'un mondo diverse (quelle della fantascienza, per esempio) per cogliere la diversita vera che si presenterebbe ai nostri occhi? (15) erase from our mind all the images to which we are accustomed to associating with the expectations of a different world (those of science fiction, for example) in order to capture the real diversity the world would present to our eyes?

Since we are all conditioned to notice only that which is immediately identifiable as part of our world, to see, Calvino conceded, only the surface (as interminable as it may be), it is entirely possible that 'un Nuovo Mondo ci si apre tutti i giorni, e noi non lo vediamo' (15; 'a New World opens itself to us each day, and we do not see it'). Because of Western culture's natural bias towards a figural rather than interpretative appreciation of visual imagery, it is not surprising that for most spectators images are meant to be seen, not read. Calvino claims that reading is a pragmatic process that highlights image manufacturing as the organizing concept of aesthetic experience. He therefore writes, to borrow a phrase Bryson uses to describe the prose of Diderot, 'as though language were purely fenestral,'9 as if everything were meant to be seen. Whether his writings attempt to mimic the thought processes that either accompany perception (Palomar), or follow the meanderings of flights of the imagination (the cosmicomic tales), the crispness and preciseness of his prose allow the reader to see the virtual spaces and consume the textual pleasure of literary potential. This is the transparent Calvino, the author without conditioning lenses, who wishes to write as if he were tabulating aloud, depicting scenes with his verbal brush. In this respect, he anticipates cyber-centric theories of reading, extending far beyond traditional roles of word and image relations. There is also a bespeckled Calvino who, like Amilcare Carruga, laments the opacity of language, an author who realizes that

Conclusion: A New Point of Departure 281

language is not a reflector of reality but often an autonomous generator of independent signification that cajoles him into illusory states of expectation and fulfilment, bliss and disappointment. Calvino oscillates between these two persons at the beginning of his career, attempts to reduce the world to language in the middle part of this career, and moves towards imaginative opacity in the later stages of his career. This trajectory reflects a growing concern for an alliance across the arts that he interprets initially as an enthusiasm for culture, but which eventually becomes a more focused appreciation for the sensuous properties of the literary medium and its potential for narrative picturability. From his earliest writings Calvino tried to put into social practice the notion of efficient, concise, and intellectually responsible communication. Kim's unexpected ruminations on language in // sentiero dei nidi di ragno are a sign that the young author is already wrestling with the process of representation. Scientific precision is needed but is perhaps unreachable, at least at this early stage of his career. But the thought is there, the need is recognized. Having realized that the sign is always an alterity, he attempted to control its intrinsic incoherence with patterns that generate a manageable order out of malleable chaos. By operating on the flux of Nature, individual objects emerged from the fog. Once these objects were perceived, minutely scrutinized, and expertly described experience assumed a structured presence, sensations were controlled, a world-view and a self, tentative and Promethean, was constructed. Such a utopia, however, is ultimately impossible to achieve. To reach a pellucid language where there is no obstacle between the heartbeat and the mind, where perception and emotion unite to provide a simultaneity of visual impression is to die, like Palomar, within the limpid confines of pure thought. It is important to realize that this is precisely how far Calvino's expressive crisis went. Calvino's most personal revelations of self are to be found in his descriptions: Calvino does not put himself into the utterance but into the object itself. It is the chosen object that becomes the replete sign pregnant with reflected subjectivity, it is the spatial integrity of the represented object that provides the cohesion that created the monocular, transcendental eye. Amilcare does not exist without his glasses; he is nothing more than an Albertian focal point. When faced with the extremity of the white page, Calvino, like his ancestors, the Viscount, the Baron, Agilulfo the non-existent knight, does not exist and disap-

282 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

pears, self-alienated within the self-effacing intransigence of the selfreflexive sign. Given the proper visual conditions, however, Calvino blissfully extemporizes a breathless panoply of inextricably entwined political, moral, aesthetic, scientific, and social images. Every belaboured word, every conceived image carries an exhortation about how to consider, in detail, humanity's visual patrimony. In these instances he is, like a modern-day discoverer, exploring new worlds from his own privileged vantage. This is why Calvino was never a neorealist writer, nor were his social satires in any way ironic documents of reality. He was not a pop scientist, never a theorist. His search for purity and preciseness of expression is instead symptomatic of a personal lifelong uneasiness with a chaotic reality which he gilds first with ideology, then with fable, fantasy, science, literary strategies, finally shrouding his valuations with silence. The subtending strategy is his love for the recuperative and regenerative powers of literature. As he states in 'Cibernetica e fantasmi': La letteratura continuera a essere un luogo privilegiato della coscienza umana, un'esplicitazione delle potenzialita contenute nel sistema dei segni d'ogni societa e d'ogni epoca: 1'opera continuera a nascere, a essere giudicata, a essere distrutta o continuamente rinnovata al contatto dell'occhio che legge. (172-3) Literature will continue to be a place of privilege within the human consciousness, a way of exercising the potentialities contained in the system of signs belonging to all societies at all times. The work will continue to be born, to be judged, to be destroyed or constantly renewed on contact with the eye o the reader. (16)

As readers we are privileged, uniquely situated to perceive the text and build a new perceptual model from the verbal information given. The new text is never static but is literally consumed by our reading; it has the ability to remain a constantly potential and evolving site of meaning. It is this potential relationship that is most important for our author. This posture is crucial for an understanding of Calvino's most painterly novel Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, since it is an attempt to render the multitude of levels of reality (past, present, myth, dream, reminiscence) as a jocular game of visual play. The text's inherent sense

Conclusion: A New Point of Departure 283

of strangeness, of hidden reality, of multidimensionality, proposes a logic of associations that bridles against readerly expectations while simultaneously fostering new ones. This compelling reader's game produces a disorientation in the viewer insofar as it does not correspond to any common space of experience, yet, as signifying others we ensure the visual/verbal interaction, we enact the event by accepting our role. Our performance as readers is thus dialogic precisely in this give and take between the visual imagery that the verbal text generates. While there is room for manoeuvering, our reading is restrained by the conditioning effect of the author's strategies that hover between the permeable borders of verbal/visual colloquy. Yet if Calvino had been openly dependent upon the good-natured and skilled visualizing attributes of his readers, in Palomar he seems especially intent on proving the impossibility of following his lead. In a story such as 'La spada del sole' ('The sword of the sun') the writer's ability to show the reader what to visualize is negated by Palomar's failure to identify with outside space: La spade [di luce] esiste solo perche lui e li; se lui se ne andasse, se tutti i bagnanti e i natanti tornassero a riva o solo voltassero le spalle al sole, dove finirebbe la spada? Nel mondo che si disfa, la cosa che lui vorrebbe salvare e la piu fragile: quel ponte marino fra i suoi occhi e il sole calante. II signor Palomar non ha piu voglia di nuotare; ha freddo. (17) the sword [of light] exists only because he is there; and if he were to go away, if all the swimmers and craft were to return to the shore, or simply turn their backs to the sun, where would the sword end? In the disintegrating world the thing he would like to save is the most fragile: that seabridge between his eyes and the sinking sun. Mr. Palomar no longer feels like swimming; he is cold. (15)

Palomar seems forever destined to remain an outsider, a stranger, a peripatetic voyager. For this reason, although his focus often seems maniacal and relentlessly obsessive, the passion is never satisfied. One never senses the satisfaction of being enriched by perceptions but only drained by the constant flow of information that assaults the senses. The reader is left staring at a blank page. Vision thus performs various functions in Calvino. It may be haptic, reaching out to touch the world, rendering it familiar. It may be archeological, classifying objects, categorizing reality into neatly packaged

284 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

units. Vision may dissect the world, rendering it more intelligible. These functions may assume different points of view but the stance is always one of willed innocence, of detached cognizance, of bewildered wonder. There is no plenitude in materiality, no replenishment that extends beyond the immediate moment. At the end of Palomar the protagonist postulates his own death in order to extend momentary gratification into infinity. 'Se il tempo deve finire, lo si pud descrivere, istante per istante, - pensa Palomar, - e ogni istante, a descriverlo, si dilata tanto che non se ne vede piu la fine.' Decide che si mettera a descrivere ogni istante della sua vita, e finche non li avra descritti tutti non pensera piu d'essere morto. In quel momenta muore. (128) 'If time has to end, it can be described, instant by instant,' Mr. Palomar thinks, 'and each instant, when described, expands so that its end can non longer be seen.' He decided that he will set himself to describing every instant of his life, and until he has described them all he will no longer think of being dead. At that moment he dies. (126)

Calvino's words both solicit and prohibit any utterance of death, artistically subordinating the intent to an imaginary discourse that conditions their meaning within the frame of a written text that cannot perish. Whatever the image was originally meant to convey, it has been transformed into a new verbal-visual hypertext. Temporally, this image of death recalls its moment of genesis and creation and, like a memorandum, is rooted to a static posture that nevertheless evolves in memory. That is simply the nature of literature. At the same time, it lives within a proleptic space that resides in future reader's memory, exactly the type of second existence engendered by Calvino's verbal text. This produces a semantic charge that resembles cinematic montage, what Eisenstein calls a third sense. At this point, the image begins to generate meanings of its own from within the moribund context and independent of Palomar's verbal monologue. Though the images set up an intertextual discourse of their own, they never break free of the frame itself, saturating the world with visual plenitude. But surely, even vision, like other senses bemoaned by Calvino, may end, in which case the human species, and reality, anthropomorphically perceived, ends. Interestingly enough, after Palomar's seeming disruption of the visual-verbal cycle, there is no real end to the world:

Conclusion: A New Point of Departure 285 sul globo terrestre devastate e deserto sbarcano gli esploratori di un altro pianeta, decifrano le tracce registrate nei geroglifici delle piramidi e nelle schede perforate dei calcolatori elettronici; la memoria del genere umano rinasce dalle sue ceneri e si dissemina per le zone abitate dell'universo. (128) on the terrestrial globe, devastated and deserted, explorers from another planet land; they decipher the clues recorded in the hieroglyphics of the pyramids and in the punched cards of the electronic calculators; the memory of the human race is reborn from its ashes and is spread through the inhabited zones of the universe. (126)

For all its visual myopia the human race is reaffirmed, indeed avenged, by a verbal medium that has assumed purely visual aspects (human memory that begat verbal literary memory that begat visual digital memory that reaffirms human memory ...):10 Certo si puo anche puntare sui dispositivi che assicurano la sopravvivenza almeno d'una parte di se nella posterita, classificabili soprattutto in due categoric: il dispositive biologico, che permette di tramandare alia discendenza quella parte di se stessi che si chiama patrimonio genetico, e il dispositive storico, che permette di tramandare nella memoria e nel linguaggio di chi continua a vivere quel tanto o quel poco d'esperienaza che anche 1'uomo piu sprovveduto raccoglie e accumula. Questi dispositivi possono anche essere visti come uno solo presupponendo il suseguirsi delle generazioni come le fasi della vita d'una singola persona che continua per secoli e millenni... (127-8) Of course, it is also possible to rely on those devices that guarantee survival of at least a part of the self in posterity. These views can be divided into two broad categories: the biological mechanism, which allows leaving to descendants that part of the self known as the genetic heritage; and the historical mechanism, which grants a continuance in the memory and language of those who go on living and inherit that portion, large or small, of experience that even the most inept man gathers and stores up. These mechanisms can also be seen as a single one, considering the succession of generations like the stages in the life of a single person, which goes on for centuries and millennia ... (125-6)

All that remains is a verbal flow of words. Palomar has discovered that

286 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

language only represents itself to itself as language. For all the allure of words, his attempts to control the fleeting image and with them the world are doomed to failure: Forse il vero risultato a cui il signer Palomar sta per giungere e di far correre le onde in senso opposto, di capovolgere il tempo, di scorgere la vera sostanza del mondo al di la delle abitudini sensoriali e mentali? No, egli arriva fina a provare un leggero senso di capogiro, non oltre. L'ostinazione che spinge le onde verso la costa ha partita vinta: di fatto, si sono parecchio ingrossate. Che il vento stia per cambiare? Guai se I'immagine che il signor Palomar e riuscito minuziosamente a mettere insieme si sconvolge e frantuma e disperde. Solo se egli riesce a tenerne presenti tutti gli aspetti insieme, puo iniziare la seconda fase dell'operazione: estendere questa conoscenza all'intero universo. (9-10, my emphasis) Is this perhaps the real result that Mr. Palomar is about to achieve? To make the waves run in the opposite direction, to overturn time, to perceive the true substance of the world beyond sensory and mental habits? No, he feels a slight dizziness, but it goes no further than that. The stubbornness that drives the waves toward the shore wins the match: in fact, the waves have swelled considerably. Is the wind about to change? It would be disastrous if the image that Mr. Palomar has succeeded painstakingly in putting together were to shatter and be lost. Only if he manages to bear all the aspects in mind at once can he begin the second phase of the operation: extending this knowledge to the entire universe. (7-8)

The proliferation of images only breeds chaos. One cannot help but sense a kind of professional despair. One must live in the memory of happier days, the adventurous visionary prose of the cosmicomic tales. It is indeed difficult to endanger entities that remain suspended in space and beyond time and become, like Qfwfq 'un segno, un richiamo, un ammicco' ('a sign, a remembrance, a wink'). Palomar attempts such a stance. He is presented as a physicalist, sensually experiencing the world outside the mind as Aristotelian materiality. Unlike Qfwfq, however, Palomar is consumed with pseudo-intellectual angst. It is easy to imagine the character at the beach; references to the ocean abound. Taking his cues, perhaps, from Stephen Dedalus, also at seaside, Palomar asks why materiality must be embodied at all. Is there really a need for physical correlates to the sign? Just as Stephen closes his eyes, imagining a world deprived of his own embodiment, so too

Conclusion: A New Point of Departure 287

Palomar conjectures a world without his presence. Stephen is deprived of his ambition because the elimination of the visual world returns unerringly in the palpability of the sounds which envelop him more strongly than before. Palomar succeeds in overstepping the bounds of his own temporality. He postulates a future time when the world, now bereft of writing, of time-bound narrative, is visited by extraterrestials. All that remains are ill-worn vestiges of a once thriving culture. They would read the essence of the perished civilization in hieroglyphics, the image, like Chinese characters, of the concept wrapped in its own presence as sign. It is not the word that survives the ages but perforated computer cards, nor does the image fare any better. Instead, Calvino envisages a preternatural state of perfect communication embodied in the plenitude of a pre-Babel icon. This episode signals the death of Calvino's writing within the limits imposed by the sign. Had he lived, I feel his writing would have regained a youthful exuberance that revelled in the excitement of unabated sensuality. Indeed, the impulse that drove Palomar to disembody his essence, to transform himself into an invisible sign, is the same urge that propelled Calvino to attempt to find plenitude behind the temporality of the word and within the spatiality of the painted image. It is Palomar who discovers that time and space are merely alternate modes of the same interpretation, that the mind is the locus of temporal-spatial relations. His sensory experimentation with the semiotic relations between thought and world thus depend, like the interartistic arguments we have examined, upon the semiotic relation between art and extra-artistic reality. Calvino's turn to painting may now be seen as a polysemous act of intertextuality. His sensually textured writings are an attempt to use an interlocking system of cultural signs in order to open up and unfreeze rigid boundaries. Based on perception and observation, his descriptions steadily build into a metaphysical interpretation. His primary interest is to investigate what can be done with words and how they serve both observation and experience. A controlling, cautious author does not allow the reader a free reign through the paintings. By deciding how much information to give and in which direction to proceed, Calvino ensures a guided reading through both the paintings and his own experience. But of course. Calvino delights in displaying a virtuosity of imagination. He is firmly anchored within the canonical terms of the text; the author observes, the reader reads. Infinity exists only within prior constraints, and although any number of readings is pos-

288 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

sible, they must not deny the text's generative mandate. In practical terms, this means that any theory of unlimited semiosis fights against pre-existent truth. Yet, there can be no doubt that Calvino's relentless rethinking and altering of culture invites the reader to become a transparent accomplice to his inexhaustible intellect. As a sophisticated and multidirected program of cultural expansionism, his ambitions are not only to examine the world at its necessary juncture with the word but to expand the conception of what is narratable and traditionally outlined as fiction. Indeed, whether interpretative, theoretical, or creative, Calvino's writings have everything to do with ensuring the persistence of literature within culture. This authorial sense of openness and unlimited possibilities redefines the authorreader paradigm within a context of dedication to the craft and ebullience in the experience of reading: 'La letteratura non e la scuola'11 ('Literature is not a school'). It is instead a laboratory where reader and writer join to shift the boundaries between the known and the knowable, a grand experiment that extends the boundaries of ontological possibilities. Obsessed by modern form and postmodern liberty, Calvino placed human experience in a metaphorically extended place called narrative spatiality. For this reason, his narrative is not necessarily sequential, nor is it connected to temporal exigencies. Recalling a formerly unpopular commentary on Calvino, this narrative is indeed based on things.12 It concentrates from its incipient stages on objects, series, and events that have a visual quality. From his earliest critical writings Calvino shows that to be human is to occupy a place that is clearly delineated by external signposts. In this world, things have a power-laden presence that lies waiting for human perception to discover and acquire them. From Pin's pistol to Trajan's column, there is a compulsive contemplation of objects that renders their materiality deceptively sensual, their presence deceivingly childish. The nest of spiders in // sentiero des nidi di ragno is an Ur image of the author's narrative potential. Its multilayered galleries, hidden recesses, dark mysteries, and natural potential provide all the space the author will ever need to generate his tales. Indeed, the nest is a metaphor for logic, order, and rationality. The destruction of the nest, of the mental image of the nest as haven, the aperture of absence created by the fascists, will forever haunt the author: Questi sono i miei posti, - dice Pin. - Posti fatti. Ci fanno il nido i ragni -1 ragni fanno il nido, Pin? - chiede il Cugino.

Conclusion: A New Point of Departure 289 - Fanno il nido solo in questo posto in tutto il mondo, - spiega Pin. - lo sono 1'unico a saperlo. Poi e venuto quel fascista di Pelle e ha distrutto tutto. Vuoi che ti mostri? - Fammi vedere, Pin. Nidi di ragni, senti senti.Pin lo conduce per mano, quella grande mano, soffice e calda, come pane. - Ecco, vedi, qui c'erano tutte le porte delle gallerie. Quel fascista bastardo ha rotto tutto. Eccone una ancora intera, vedi? II Cugino s'e accoccolato vicino e aguzza gli occhi nell'oscurita: Guarda guarda. La porticina che s'apre e si chiude. E dentro la galleria. Va profonda? Profondissima, - spiega Pin. - Con erba biascicata tutt'intorno. II ragno sta in fondo. (191-2) These places are mine, down here. Magic places. Spiders make their nests here.' 'Do spiders make nests, Pin?' This is the only place in the whole world where they do,' explains Pin, 'and I'm the only person who knows it. Then that Fascist Pelle came and mucked eveything up. Would you like me to show you?' 'Yes, show me, Pin. Spiders' nests, really.' Pin takes him by his big hand, soft and warm as bread. There, you see, here there were lots of doors into their little tunnels. That Fascist swine broke them all up. Here is a complete one still, do you see?' Cousin has knelt down nearby and is peering into the darknesss. 'Look, look, a little door that opens and shuts. And a tunnel inside. Is it deep?' 'Very deep/ explains Pin, 'with bits of grass stuck all round the sides. The spider is at the end.' (141-2) This mise en abyme image of honeycomb galleries, intersecting tunnels, and the silent, sitting, observing spider, is perhaps the most meaningful and beautiful in Calvino's work. In the preface to // sentiero dei nidi di ragno Calvino, sounding a lot like Qfwfq in 'Un segno nello spazio/ states: 'la mia storia cominciava a essere segnata, e ora mi pare tutta contenuta in quell'inizio' (17; 'my story was beginning to be written, and now it seems to me all contained in that beginning'). The many levels of which Calvino speaks in 'I livelli della realta in letteratura' ('Levels of Reality in Literature') in Una pietra sopra are already present here in the partisan woods. The nest is a beacon, a haven in the woods that ensures solitude and provides constancy. Yet, the nest is also in constant transformation; each tunnel never leads to the same destina-

290 Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures

tion twice. In a sense, Calvino never left the spider's haven. Each of his stories is a redrawing of the map of this intricate, filigreed universe. He has transformed a childhood obsession into an adult phenomenology that expresses both initial strangeness and mature familiarity and fills its space with the residue of life's artefacts. From his earliest days as a colour reporter for L'Unita to his tourist days in Mexico, Calvino amassed a wealth of information and hard facts that he sheltered within his personal lair and eventually kneaded into his narrative. In 'Cibernetica e fantasmi' Calvino speculated on the interrelatedness of things. The world, he stated, already exists, passively awaiting the magical skills of the tribal shaman (the spider) who re-assembles the elements of nature and weaves them into a silken story. The human capacity to animate the world into narratives where 'ogni parola acquistava nuovi valori e li trasmettteva alle idee e alle immagini da essa designate' (165; 'each word acquired new values and transmitted them to the ideas and the images it designated,' 5) is a process peculiarly satisfying to the author. It is in the process of inventing ancestors, the construction of invisible cities, the creation of speaking tarot cards, the depiction of the visual tableaux of Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore and the negation of such bliss in Palomar that Calvino finds pleasure. It is in the traditionally rival medium of painting, however, that the author eventually finds artistic plenitude. The textual strategies of Calvino's repertoire allowed him to progressively fine-tune his perceptions to an all-encompassing visual totality. By drawing inspiration from painting, by re-utilizing recognizable cultural icons, Calvino narrativized the phantasm onto the page. As early as // sentiero del nidi di ragno the author insisted on the re-combination of finite entities: 'la spiegazione di tutto e in quella macina di cellule in moto, non nelle categoric della filosofia' (138-9; 'the explanation for everything is to be found in the grinding moving cells of the human body, and not in philosophic speculation'). Much as the 'strade assolate e polverose' ('sun drenched and dusty roads') of Don Quixote were waiting for someone to 'write them,'13 so too the world's images were re-thought and re-assembled into a verbal-visual mosaic. By assimilating his writing to the painterly arts, Calvino enticed the reader to reread his texts, to re-con-figure his images, to join him in the interstices between the words he wrote and the images he pictured, to revel with him in that space where the word-image dance may take place.

Notes

Introduction 1 Italo Calvino, 'Visibility/ in Six Memosfor the Next Millennium, trans. Patrick Creagh (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 94. 2 Italo Calvino, / libri degli altri: Lettere 1947-1981, ed. Giovanni Tesio (Turin: Einaudi, 1991), 350. 3 Italo Calvino, / nostri antenati (Turin: Einaudi, 1960). 4 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). See chap. 6, 'Passive Synthesis in the Reading Process,' where he discusses, perception, ideation, meaning, and significance as stages of comprehension. 5 From the Introduction to the Lucretius passage T granelli di polvere' used in the anthology edited by Giambattista Salinari and Italo Calvino entitled La Lettura 3: Antologia per la scuola media (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1974), 162. 6 (Turin: Einaudi, 1996). 7 Narratology: Introduction to The Theory of Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). 8 Calvino scrittore appartato ha fiducia nella letteratura/ interview with Raffaele Crovi, L'Avvenire (20 July 1969): 5. 9 (New York: Cornell University Press, 1980). 10 Aristotle, De Anima II, trans. W.W. Hett (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957); Leonardo Da Vinci, Paragone: Poetry and Painting, ed. A. Phillip McMahon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956); Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966); Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Moulton (1757; Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968); G.E. Lessing, Laocoon: An

292

Notes to pages 8-11

Essay upon the Limits of Poetry and Painting, trans. Ellen Frothingham (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969); E. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939). 11 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953); J. Derrida, Applied Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985) and The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); R. Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954) and Towards a Psychology of Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); J.M. Kennedy, A Psychology of Picture Perception (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1974); M. A. Hagen, ed., The Perception of Pictures (New York: Academic Press, 1980); J.E. Hochberg, 'Pictorial Functions and Perceptual Structures/ in Hagen, Perception of Pictures; E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (London: Phaidon Press, 1961), and Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976); Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to the Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merril, 1968); WJ.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986); M. Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); M. O'Toole, The Language of Displayed Art (London: Leicester University Press, 1994); Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); Michael Ann Holly, Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image (New York: Cornell University Press, 1996). 12 See all Barthes's writings but esp. 'Is Painting a Language?' in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985) and Image - Music - Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977). 13 This is the case with congresses that addressed the issue of cinematic influences on Calvino (see Lorenzo Pellizzari, L'avventura di uno spettatore: Italo Calvino e il cinema [Bergamo: Lubrina, 1990]) and issues of science and literature (see Giorgio Bertone, ed., Italo Calvino: La letteratura, la scienza, la citta [Geneva: Marietti, 1988]). At the latter congress Letizia Lodi summarized Calvino's writings on painting in 'I colori della mente: Italo Calvino: scritti sulle arti (1970-1985)': 141-55. This brief survey, however, provides no critical commentary. 14 Giorgio Ficara, 'La scuola di Palomar/ alfabeta 72 (May 1985): 5. 15 Part of a rubric in L'Unita (Turin) titled 'Gente nel Tempo' (17 November 1946): 3. 16 For Mitchell the issue is quite clear:'... from the semantic point of view, from the standpoint of referring, expressing intentions and producing

Notes to pages 11-13 293 effects in a viewer/listener, there is no essential difference between texts and images and thus no gap between the media to be overcome by any special ekphrastic strategies. Language can stand in for depiction and depiction can stand in for language because communicative, expressive acts, narration, argument, description, exposition and other so-called "speech acts" are not medium-specific, are not "proper" to some medium or other. I can make a promise or threaten with a visual sign as eloquently as with an utterance.' See Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 160. 17 Barthes states that 'to depict is to unroll the carpet of the codes, to refer not from a language to a referent but from one code to another.' See S/Z (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 55. 18 Italo Calvino, The Written and the Unwritten Word,' trans. William Weaver, New York Review (12 May 1983): 38-9. 19 See S/Z, 56. 20 Italo Calvino, 'E 1'occhio scruta il caos del mondo,' interview with Costanzo Costantini, // Messaggero (13 December 1983): 3. 21 Italo Calvino, 'II midollo del leone,' in Una pietra sopra (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), 3-18 at 18. 22 In 1972 Calvino wished to begin a new journal with the collaboration of Guido Neri, Carlo Ginzburg, and Gianni Celati. The project was to be innovative and to develop new discourses that promoted an interarts interface: 'una rivista a larga tiratura, che si vende nelle edicole, una specie di "Linus," ma non a fumetti, romanzi a puntate con molte illustrazioni, un'impaginazione attraente. E molte rubriche che esemplificano strategic narrative, tipi di personaggi, modi di lettura, istituzioni stilistiche, funzioni poetico-antropologiche, ma tutto attraverso cose divertenti da leggere' ('a magazine with a large circulation, sold in kiosks, a type of "Linus" but not a comicbook, serial novels with many illustrations and attractive pagination. And many columns that exemplify narrative strategies, types of characters, ways of reading, stylistic conventions, poetic and anthropological functions, everything, however, done in an entertaining manner'). See Ferdinando Camon, // mestiere di scrittore (Milan: Garzanti, 1973), 181-201 at 191. 23 Italo Calvino and Tullio Pericoli, 'Furti ad arte,' In occasione della mostra di Tullio Pericoli intitolata 'Rubare a Klee/ (Milan: Edizioni della Galleria il Milione, 1980). Now in Saggi II, ed. Mario Barenghi (Milan: Mondadori, 1995), 1801-15. 24 Nelson Goodman describes the difference between differentiation and density by using the example of a graduated and ungraduated thermometer. In the former, every position is given a definite meaning on the scale. In an

294

Notes to pages 13-18

ungraduated thermometer, however, every position is approximate, determined by relations within a system. In such a system, there are no unique, single readings but instead markers loaded with semantic potential. See Languages of Art, 148-75. 25 See esp. 'L'uomo che chiamava Teresa,' 'Solidarieta,' 'La pecora nera,' and others now collected in Prima che tu dica 'Pronto' (Milan: Mondadori, 1993). 1: From Word to Image 1 As quoted by Leonard Shain in Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light (New York: Quill, 1991), 402. 2 'Vivo in un'epoca sovrasatura di teorie e di discorsi astratti, e quasi per reazione cerco di basarmi su cose che vedo, su oggetti, su immagini.' Italo Calvino in an interview with Giulio Nascimbeni, 'Sono un po' stance di essere Calvino/ Corriere della sera (5 December 1984): 3. 3 Quoted by Calvino in the Introduction to Gli amori difficili (Milan: Mondadori, 1970), xv. 4 For an introduction to this topic see Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). 5 See W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986), 100. 6 This is the title of his fascinating study The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973). Though often critical of visualization, the critique sheds light on the integration of visual and verbal literacies. 7 For Robert Scholes, 'Delight in design and its concurrent emphasis on the art of the designer, will serve in part to distinguish the art of the fabulator from the work of the novelist of the satirist,' Fabulation and Metafiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 3. 8 Several past studies (see Bibliography) have focused on the figurative imagination of Calvino. More recently, however, the trend has been to investigate Calvino's innate propensity towards the creation of a visual method. These include: 'L'occhio e 1'idea/ in Giorgio Falaschi, ed., Italo Calvino. Atti del convegno internazionale (Milan: Garzanti, 1988); Letizia Lodi, T colori della mente. Italo Calvino: scritti sulle arti/ in Giorgio Bertone, ed., Italo Calvino: La letteratura, la scienza, la citta' Atti del congresso nazionale di studi di San Remo (Geneva: Marietta, 1988); Marco Belpoliti, L'occhio di Calvino (Turin: Einaudi, 1996). 9 The complete title of the article is 'Cibernetica e fantasmi (Appunti sulla

Notes to pages 19-37

295

narrativa come processo combinatorio)/ originally a delivered lecture, collected by the author in Una pietra sopra (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), 164-81; see 170-1. The translation is from Italo Calvino: The Uses of Literature: Essays, trans. Patrick Creagh (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 3-27 at 13. 10 Italo Calvino, 'Che testa/ L'Espresso (11 October 1981): 163-4. 11 Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers 2 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1932), 158. 12 Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation between Modern Literature and Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 33. 131 briefly explore the notion of Calvino as ultimate editor of himself and of his work in Difficult Games: A Reading of'I racconti' by Italo Calvino (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1990). See chap. 1. 14 Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric, 5. 15 Murray Abrams in The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953) provides a good introduction to this vast topic. 16 Album Calvino, ed. Luca Baranelli and Ernesto Ferrero (Milan: Mondadori, 1995), 143. 17 Album Calvino,181. 18 See the Introduction to Fiabe Italiane (Milan: Mondadori, 1993), 15. 19 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to Literary Genre trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1973), 33. 20 Kathryn Hume, Calvino's Fiction: Cogito and Cosmos (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 21 Italo Calvino, Racconti fantastici dell'ottocento (Milan: Mondadori, 1983), 9. 22 Todorov, The Fantastic, 110. 23 See Ricci, Difficult Games. 24 The Dialogical Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 25 This theme is discussed in chap. 4 of Ricci, Difficult Games. 26 Though not the subject of this study, Calvino writes of his love affair with film in 'L'avventura di uno spettatore,' now in La strada di San Giovanni. See also Lorenzo Pellizzari, ed., L'avventura di uno spetttore: Italo Calvino e il cinema (Bergamo: Pierluigi Lubrina Editore, 1990). 27 Collected in Italo Calvino, Prirna che tu dica 'Pronto' (Milan: Mondadori, 1993), 37-43. 28 The seminal discussion concerning the political ramifications of the use of words versus images is by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), trans. Edward A. McCormick (Balti-

296 Notes to pages 37-54

29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43

more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). According to Lessing's highly political essay, words produce progressive moments in evolving time while images coexist in a static time-bound space. For this reason, the greatest 'strength' of art is to be found in active word-bound and objective narratives and not in visually depicted subjective imagery. By extension for Lessing, descriptive passages that stop the narrative flow of action should be avoided. These articles are now collected in Italo Calvino, Saggi I and II, ed. Mario Berenghi (Milan: Mondadori 1995), and include 'Umanesimo e marxismo' (1946); 'Marxismo e cattolicesimo' (1947); 'Abbiamo vinto in molti' (1947); 'Ingegneri e demolitori' (1948); 'Saremo come Omero!' (1948); 'Letteratura, citta aperta?' (1949); 'La letteratura italiana sulla Resistenza' (1949); and 'Necessita d'una critica letteraria' (1950). 'Saremo come Omero!,' Saggi 1,1483-7 at 1484. Both quotations are from 'Abbiamo vinto in molti' in Saggi 1,1476-9 at 1478. The ideas are expressed in Alberti's On Painting, trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966). Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 234. Collected in Prima che tu dica 'Pronto,' 72-8 at 72. Quoted from Erich Heller, Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern German Literature and Thought (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1957), 74. Frangois Wahl, quoted by Calvino in the Introductory Note to Gli amori dijficili, xv. This was one of the first critical complaints launched against Calvino, a criticism launched by Renato Barilli in La barriera del naturalismo (Milan: Mursia, 1964). John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 18. The term ekphrasis is part of the formal terminology of classical rhetoric as found in the progymnasmata, a series of school-book exercises designed to train the student in rhetorical skills. Aristotle, 'On Dreams,' in Parva Naturalia, trans. W.S. Hett (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), 251. Mitchell, Iconology, 3. Quintillian, Institutio Oratoria. See esp. VI.II 29-31. In his Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing comments on the poverty of pictorial expression by defining the generic difference between poetry and painting, that is, words and images. Lessing's arguments institute an aesthetic mind set where action and time are endemic to literature, with description and space relegated to

Notes to pages 56-69 297

44

45 46 47 48

49 50

the visual arts. 'Action became henceforth the watchword of German poetry ... Movement and action were henceforth to characterize the lyrical effusions of the heart... the great epoch of German poetry ushered in by Lessing opens with a movement, the very name of which breathes this spirit: it is the period of 'Sturm und Drang'; its master genius id Goethe.' A. Manann, Lessing's Laokoon (Oxford, 1878), xxvi. Quoted by McCormick, trans., Laocoon, xxviii. Italo Calvino, 'La penna in prirna persona (Per i disegni di Saul Steinberg)' now in Una pietra sopra, 294-300. Calvino's conception of line is discussed again in chap. 6. For a more complete analysis of these tales, see chap. 4 of Difficult Games. Italo Calvino, 'The Written and the Unwritten Word/ trans. William Weaver, New York Review of Books (12 May 1983): 39-39. See Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 11. OuLiPo, a Paris based avant-garde workshop of mathematicians and writers that included Noel Arnaud, Marcel Benabou, Jacques Bens, Claude Berge, Andre Blavier, Paul Braffort, Ross Chambers, Stanley Chapman, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Duchateau, Luc Etienne, Paul Fournel, Latis, Francois Le Lionnais, Jean Lescure, Harry Mathews, Michele Metail, Georges Perec Raymond Queneau, Jean Queval, Jacques Roubaud, and Albert-Marie Schmidt. Formed by the French writer Raymond Queneau, the group experimented with the materials of literature and mathematics. Calvino attended many sessions and published what he considered OuLiPoian works. The major works include: // castello dei destini incrociati (The Castle of Crossed Destinies); 'Prose et anticombinatoire'; 'Piccolo Sillabario illustrate'; Se una notte d'inverno viaggiatore (If on a Winter's Night a Traveller), which contains 'some oulipien elements.' He also translated Queneau's Les Fleurs blues. See oulipo: atlas de litterature potentielle (Paris: Gallimard, 1981). Franco Ricci, The Quest for Sonship in La citta invisibili and La Strada di San Giovanni/ Forum Italicum 29 (1) (1955): 52-75 at 53. 'Italo Calvino. Je ne suis pas satisfait de la litterature actuelle en Italic' (I am not at all satisfied with current literature in Italy), Gazette de Lausanne 127 (June 1967): 30; quoted from Romanzi e racconti II, 1347.

2: From Image to Word 1 'Ogni atto relative al rubare, copiare, rifare, mutare, stravolgere, citare, leggere con intenzioni ludiche da sicuramente piacere.' 'Furti ad arte,' Saggi II, ed., Mario Berenghi (Milan: Mondadori, 1995), 1811.

298 Notes to pages 69-71 2 'E il piacere infantile del gioco combinatorio che spinge il pittore a sperimentare disposizioni di linee e colori e il poeta a sperimentare accostamenti di parole.' 'Cibernetica e fantasmi/ 177. 3 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973) 4 WJ.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 53. 5 In 'Literature and the Other Arts/ Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1970). 6 For a discussion of the evolution of cognitive systems see Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). 7 See Jan Mukarovsky, The Word and Verbal Art, trans, and ed. John Steiner and Peter Steiner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); J. Malek, The Arts Compared (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1974); T. Wolf, The Painted Word (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975). Recent studies seem committed to allowing the political issues of gender and power to gain centre stage. Among the following, W.J.T. Mitchell remains committed to allowing the disciplines interact without conditioning biases. A short review of current thoughts on word and image relations would include: M. Bakhtin, The Dialogical Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980); Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976); Wendy Steiner, ed., Image and Code (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981); Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation between Modern Literature and Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); W.J.T. Mitchell, ed., The Language of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), Mitchell, Iconology, Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Mieke Bal, Reading 'Rembrandt': Beyond the Word-Image Opposition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991) and The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually, trans. Anna-Louise Milne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), to name only a few. 8 Foucault, The Order of Things, 9. 9 Though Lessing is credited with imposing these aesthetic restrictions, much the same sort of thinking was evident before his time. Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper Shaftesbury had issued a formal attack on the mixing of temporal and spatial representation in painting some fifty years earlier. In his view, the painted canvas could not represent narrative action without becoming absurd. The logic of painting demands that it should involve 'a

Notes to pages 71-9

299

single instant' or 'point of time.' See Second Characters or the Language of Forms, ed. B. Rand (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1914). 10 For Iconology see note 4 above; Picture Theory, note 7. 11 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 44. 12 Ibid., 11. 13 See Joseph Francese, Narrating Postmodern Time and Space (Albany: SUNY University Press, 1997) and E. Leube's article 'Sul rapporto tra letteratura e arti figurative nelle ultime opere di Italo Calvino/ in Letteratura e arti figurative, 3:1201-9. 14 For both uotations consult Ruth Webb, 'Ekphrass Ancient and Mdern: The Invention of a Genre/ Word and Image 12 (1) Qan.-Mar. 1999): 7-18 at 8. 15 The terminology is from Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 55. 16 Ibid. 17 Italo Calvino, 'E 1'occhio scruta il caos del mondo,' interview with Costanzo Costantini, // Messaggero (31 December 1983): 3. 18 Ibid. 19 I agree wholeheartedly with Rocco Capozzi who, in a seminal essay on the cosmicomic tales states: 'My contention is that Cosmicomics (1965) and t zero (1967) show how in the early 1960s Calvino, rather that undergoing a complete break with the past (some Italian critics speak of his rottura), is actually arguing that writers and literature must change (must evolve) in order to keep up with the times, and moreover, that evolution does not imply a break in continuity. The cosmicomic stories show that Calvino draws on theories of semiotics, of structuralism, and of ars combinatoria, primarily to search for new expressions of ludic performances. That is, he literally uses various disciplines (including mathematics and science) in order to experiment with new means of entertaining his readers.' See 'Cosmicomiche vecchie e nuove: Keeping in Tune with the Times,' in Franco Ricci, ed., Calvino Revisited (Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1989), 65-84 at 66. 20 Capozzi 'Keeping in Tune with the Times,' 67. 21 From the cover of Le cosmicomiche. 22 See Wendy Steiner, 'Sergej Karcevskij's Semiotics of Language/ in L. Matejka, ed., Sound, Sign, and Meaning (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Materials, 1976) for a discussion of Karcevskij's treatment of sign asymetry. 23 This terminology is used by Nelson Goodman to describe images that are so loaded with semantic potential that no single feature may be isolated as unique, distinctive character. Meaning depends, instead, on the flow and relation of the images in a continuous field. 'Repleteness is thus distinguished both from generality of a symbol and from unlimitedness of a

300 Notes to pages 80-91 scheme, and is indeed entirely independent both of what a symbol denotes and of the number of symbols in a scheme.' See Languages of Art, 230. 24 See II caffe 12 (4) (1964). 25 See 7 libri degli altri: Lettere 1947-1981, ed. Giovanni Tesio (Turin: Einaudi, 1991), 535-7. 26 Emilio Carroni, La semantica delle arti (Roma: Officina, 1963). 27 In The Written and the Unwritten Word,' trans. William Weaver, New York Review of Books (12 May 1983): 38-9 Calvino discusses issues of phenomenology, mimesis, abstraction, and reading as methods for approaching the world with language. 28 See C.W. Ogden and LA. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938) for a discussion of these theories. 29 Elizabeth Dipple, The Unresolvable Plot (New York: Routledge, 1988), 104-5. 30 Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation between Modern Literature and Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 117. 31 See Rosamund Tuve's fascinating article 'Imagery and Logic: Ramus and Metaphysical Poetics/ Journal of the History of Ideas 3 (October 1942): 365-400. 32 Cesare Parese,'// sentiero dei nidi di ragno/ L'Unita (26 October 1947). 33 Quoted in Allen Thiher, Words in Reflection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 99. 34 Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 27. 35 Luca Fontana, 'Italo Calvino,' City Limits (20-26 September 1985): 78-9 at 79. 36 Alexander Stille, 'An Interview with Italo Calvino,' Saturday Review (March-April 1985): 36-9 at 39. 37 Mitchell discusses the parameters of pictorial texts that 'include the beholder' in Picture Theory, chap. 3. 38 An excellent discussion of sight, perception, narrative, and the analogy to memory is Lew Andrews, Story and Space in Renaissance Art: The Rebirth of Continuous Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 39 Steiner, Colors of Rhetoric, 129. 40 The collection of short stories is, of course, the unfinished Sotto il sole giaguaro. In typically postmodern fashion, these stories take their cue from Denis Diderot's Lettre sur les sourds et muets a I'usage de ceux qui entendent et qui parlent (Letter on the Deaf and Dumb for the Use of Those Who Hear and Who Speak), where he suggests assembling five persons, each of whom would only have one sense. The matching of the arts to the sense to which it presumably appealed (painting to the eye, music to the ear, sculpture to the

Notes to pages 91-103 301 touch) was part of the aesthetic systems of the late eighteenth century. Calvino believed literature to be the art that embraced all others, and his incursions into the sister arts of music, painting, and sculpture imply both the following of his own inner creativity and his ambition to change literature. Oeuvres completes de Diderot, ed. Jules Assezat (Nendeln: Liechtenstein, Kraus Reprint, 1966), 352-3. 41 Calvino addresses the same issue in the short story 'L'avventura di una sciatrice.' See my Difficult Games: A Reading of'I racconti' by Italo Calvino (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1990), chap. 4. 42 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978). 43 The terms ekphrastic hope, ekphrastic envy, and ekphrastic fear are used by Mitchell to designate the writer's stance with respect to the visual other. The dynamics of the word and image interaction places literary and graphic texts in complementary (hopeful), subaltern (envious), or spiteful (fearful) liaisons. The writer begins by fantasizing that language can make us see, envious of the visual power of images. The tables turn as soon as the differences between the visual and verbal might be suspended and the image actually realized. Hope and envy turn to fear as this realization stills the pen of the writer, fixed as he is by an image that looks back. See all of Mitchell's writings but esp. 'Ekphrasis and the Other,' South Atlantic Quarterly 91 (Summer 1992): 695-719, or the chapter by the same title in Picture Theory. For excellent accounts 'from the image's point of view,' see Michael Ann Holly's Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image (New York: Cornell University Press, 1996) and James Elkins, The Object Stares Back (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). 44 Krieger, Ekphrasis, 10. 45 Indeed, the same foreboding image of the staring eye is found at the end of the short essay 'Palomar e Michelangelo' now in Saggi II, ed. Mario Berenghi and Bruno Falcetto (Milan: Mondadori, 1993), 1991-3 at 1993. 'Ma forse non saranno occhi umani ad apprezzarla e goderla. Forse un gigantesco insetto sta guardandoci da lontano affascinato. La nostra bruttezza rifrangendosi nelle sfaccettature d'un enorme occhio d'insetto si ricompone in un disegno d'assoluta perfezione.' (But perhaps it will not be human eyes to appreciate and enjoy it. Perhaps a giant insect is watching us from afar, fascinated. Our ugliness, refracted in the facets of a giant insect eye, is re-composed in a design of absolute perfection). 46 See note 16 of Introduction. 47 / libri degli altn, 540-2 at 541. 48 Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1954), 76.

302 Notes to pages 104-11 49 Interview with Constance Markey, 'Italo Calvino: The Contemporary Fabulist/ Italian Quarterly 23. 88 (Spring 1982): 77-85 at 85. 50 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 43.1 shall return to Alberti in later chapters. 51 This is a work composed by Alberti between 1431 and 1434 in which he sets forth a series of sightings of Rome along with a method for surveying them. 52 Tl gatto e il topo,' La Repubblica (24-25 June 1984): 21-2. 53 Andrews, Story and Space, 38. 54 See Michael Baxandall for a discussion on compositio and istoria in Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350-1450 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). 55 Discussions concerning optics were a hot spot of debate in Renaissance circles. Whether the world was understood at a single glance ('per lo primo aspecto') or via a more attentive and contemplative perception ('per intuitione') provides continuing debate today. Today we speak of mental pictures being assembled, over time, in the processing centres of the human brain, in the imagination. These observations, however, were anticipated by the Arab authority Ibn-al-Haitham, or Alhazen (c. 96-1038). See Andrews, Story and Space, esp. chap. 3. 56 See G.E.M. Anscombe, Intention (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957). 57 For a discussion of representational intentionality see Richard Wollheim, 'What the Spectator Sees/ in Norman Bryson, M.A. Holly, and K. Moxey, eds. Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 101-50. 58 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 156 59 Albert Howard Carter III, Italo Calvino: Metamorphoses of Fantasy (Ann Arbor: UMI Press, 1987), 101. 60 'Scrivere e una gran fatica. E 1'aver scritto che da soddisfazione, non 1'atto di scrivere in se' (Writing is a great chore. Having written gives satisfaction, not the act of writing in itself). 61 'Un altrove da cui guardare 1'universo/ an interview with Daniele Del Giudice in Paese Sera (7 January 1978): 3. 62 One need only remember the many aphorisms that animate both his critical essays and creative writings to understand the lion's marrow that nourishes the author's stance with respect to creativity: 'Bisogna saper limitare le proprie aspettative' ('It is necessary to limit one's expectations'); 'Alle volte bisogna saper restare soli, e 1'unico modo per far capire che le cose che contano non sono quelle' ('Sometimes it is necessary to know how to remain alone, for this is the only way to make others understand that often, what matters is not what they think matters'); 'Per me il sistema funziona

Notes to pages 113-23 303

63

64 65

66 67

68

se si sa che e qualcosa di mentale, un modello costruito con la mente e che va continuamente verificato con 1'esperienza' (Tor me the system works if it is known to be something mental, a model constructed with the mind and which is continuously verified with experience'); 'La chiave, o la si ha partendo da casa o non si trova' ('One either has the key before leaving home or never find it'); 'Resta fuori chi crede di poter vincere i labirinti sfuggendo la loro difficolta' (Those who believe that they can defeat labyrinths by escaping their difficulty remain outside of them'). This is the final line of the Note in The Castle of Crossed Destinies, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 123-9 at 129. Significantly, it does not appear in the Italian version. Francese, Narrating Postmodern Time and Space, 73. In 'Perche' leggere i classic!,' L'Espresso (28 June 1981): 58-68, Calvino, after giving fourteen criteria that define what he considers to be a timeless classic, suggests reading the same classics repeatedly in order to constantly (re)discover and exhaust their limitless potential. Both of these paintings are in Album Calvino, 274-5 and 277 respectively. The line is from Dante (Pnrgatorio XVII.25) quoted by Calvino in the essay on 'Visibility' in Six Memosfor the Next Millennium, trans. Patrick Creagh (London: Vintage, 1996), 81. Italo Calvino, 'La squadratura,' Introduction to Giulio Paolini, IDEM (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), vii-xiv.

3: Variations on a Theme 1 'Descrivere un oggetto familiare puo sembrare la cosa piu facile del mondo. Invece, provate a mettervi a guardare una cosa qualsiasi, un orologio, una bicicletta, o anche oggetti piu semplici come un temperino, un paracqua: vi accorgerete che se si vuol rendere conto anche del piu piccolo particolare, i poi dei particolari d'ogni particolare, bisognerebbe scrivere pagine e pagine. L'importante, naturalmente, e cogliere 1'essenziale: anche gli oggetti, come le persone, hanno delle caratteristhche che li distinguono da tutti gli altri...' La lettura 3: Antologia per la scuola media, ed. Italo Calvino and Giambattista Salinari (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1974). See Preface. 2 'Credo che oggi ci sia ... un recupero dei dati visivi nella letteratura, un cercare di esaurire gli oggetti in un inseguimento che non ha mai fine, perche la vertigine dell'infinito pud coglierci anche andando sempre piu nel dettaglio e non soltanto contemplando 1'universo. In an interview with Walter Mauro in Ttalo Calvino: ovvero 1'impossibilita di fare romanzo.' Forum Italicum 25 (2) (1991): 205-10.

304 Notes to pages 123-36 3 A revealing self-interview titled 'Se una sera d'autunno uno scrittore ...' in Europeo (17 November 1980): 84-91. See p. 86. 4 Italo Calvino, Sotto il solegiaguaro (Milan: Garzanti, 1986). 5 See the short story 'Ricordo di una battaglia/ collected in La strada di San Giovanni (Milan: Mondadori, 1990), 75. 6 See the Calvino commentary written to the art catalogue Baj: Dal generale al particolare on the occasion of the art exhibition held at Forte di Bard, Val d'Aosta, 5 July-30 September 1985. 7 'Inchiesta/ Paradosso 5 (23-24) (September-December 1960): 11-18 at 12. 8 Klee's conception of painting as a formal activity of intellecutal visualization is part of the rationalistic strain in his theories that, to my mind, attracted Calvino to the artist. See Klee's diaries and notes from theory courses held at the Bauhaus. 9 See 'La luce negli occhi,' in Collezione di sabbia (Milan: Garzanti, 1984), 121-6 at 125. 10 Italo Calvino in L'Espresso (11 October 1981): 163-4. 11 Interview with Calvino by Ferdinando Camon, // mestiere di scrittore (Milan: Garzanti, 1973), 181-201 at 183. 12 Ferdinand Camon, // mestiere di scrittore (Milan: Garzanti, 1973), 183. 13 Calvino, La strada di San Giovanni. 14 See Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 236. 15 See my article 'The Quest for Sonship in Le cilia invisibili and La strada di San Giovanni' Forum Italicum 29 (1) (Spring 1995): 52-75. 16 Pietro Citati, 'I sensi di Calvino/ Corriere della Sera (17 June 1980): 3. 17 Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gb'del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Random House, 1979), 686. 18 La lettura 3: Antologia per la scuola media, ed. Calvino and Salinari. See Preface. 19 Quoted by Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350-1450 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 85. 20 'Italiani, vi esorto ai classici/ L'Espresso (28 June 1981): 58-68; now in Perche leggere i classici (Milan: Mondadori, 1991), 11-19; See also Saggi II, ed. Mario Berenghi (Milan: Mondadori, 1995), 1815-24. 21 Walter Mauro, 'Calvino al crocevia fra realta e favola/ II Tempo (20 February 1984): 3. 22 The exercises included mythos (fable), diegema (the exposition of an action), chreia (the description of a person), gnome (the construction of declarative statements), anskeue (the refutation of an argument), kataskeue (proving an

Notes to pages 136-46 305 argument), koinos topos (a discourse on evil), en komais (an encomium), psogos (an invective), synkrisis (comparison), ethopoeia (the imitation of character), ekphrasis (bringing things into view), thesis (presentation of law). See Apthonius, Readings in Classical Rhetoric, ed. Matesen Rollinson Sousa (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 281. 23 Gianni Vattimo, 'La letteratura contro la TV/ L'Espresso (27 May 1990): 96-7. 24 For a better understanding of the relationship of the praxis of literature as a metaphor for personal healing see James Hillmann, Healing Fiction (New York: Station Hill Press, 1983), x. 25 'Se una sera d'autunno uno scrittore ...' 90. 26 Collected in La strada di San Giovanni. 27 'Chichita Calvino: La memoria de un escritor/ El Pais (7 April 1991): 2. 28 'Calvino mio marito: Interrista con la mogli Chichita mentre esce, posthumo, Sot to il sole giaguaro/ interview with Enrico Filippini, in La Repubblica (14 June 1986): cultural supplement. 29 Gerald Grow, The Writing Problems of Visual Thinkers/ Visible Language 28 (2) (Spring 1994): 135-1 at 140. 30 Ibid., 141. 31 A short story in Prima che tu dica 'Pronto' (Milan: Mondadori, 1993). 32 A fascinating analysis of the often misshapen byproducts of writing by visual thinkers is Mina P. Shaughnessy's study Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). 33 See chap. 1 of my Difficult Games: A Reading of'I racconti' by Italo Calvino, (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1990). 34 See Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). 35 From an interview with Daniele Del Giudice published in Paese Sera (7 January 1978): 3 now collected in Italo Calvino, Eremita a Parigi: Pagine autobiografiche (Milan: Mondadori, 1994), with the title 'Situazione 1978,' 208-16. Seep. 210. 36 'Sono stato stalinista anch'io?' originally published in La Repubblica (16 December 1979), now in Eremita a Parigi: Pagine autobiographiche (Milan: Mondadori, 1994), 217-25. See p. 225. 37 Interview with Calvino in // caffe 4 (1) (1956): 16-18. See p. 16. 38 'Sono un po' stance di essere Calvino/ interview with Giulio Nascimbeni, in Corriere della Sera (5 December 1984): 3. 39 Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses (New York: Random House, 1990), xvii. 40 From an interview with Felice Froio, Dietro il successo. Ricordi e testimonianze

306 Notes to pages 147-57

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

49 50 51 52

di alcuni protagonisti del nostro tempo: quale segreto dietro il low successo? (Milan: Sugarco, 1984), now in Eremita a Parigi, 249-63. See p. 259. See Tavese: essere e fare/ now in Una pietra sopra (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), 58-63 at 58. See Claude Gandelman, Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 5. For Descartes, 'the blind ... see through their hands'; see Rene Descartes, 'Discours I,' in La dioptrique (1902), 85, my translation. Gandelman, Reading Pictures, 5. 'Definizioni di territori: il fantastico,' Una pietra sopra, 215-16 at 215. See Italo Calvino, 'Che testa!' L'Espresso (11 October 1981): 163^. Renato and Rosellina Balbi, Lungo viaggio al centre del cervello (Rome: Laterza, 1981). In The Holographic Universe (New York: Harper, 1991), Michael Talbot, using the holographic model discovered by the physicist David Bohm and neurophysiologist Karl Pribram speculates upon the holographic nature of memory, perception, and ultimately reality. Ibid., 52. Michel Foucault, Foucault Live (Interviews, 1966-84), ed. Sylvere Lotringer, trans. John Johnston (New York: Random House, 1989). Kathryn Hume, Calvino's Fictions: Cogito and Cosmos (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 45. In II cavaliere inesistente Calvino experiments with tactile feedback by asking the reader to run fingers beneath the page in order to feel the grooves he wished he could in-scribe on the page to de-scribe the scene. As the mind imagines the fingertips performing such a function and the senses feel the ridges and associates these sensations with the surface of the described object, Calvino has created a virtual reality. Another way to stimulate physical interaction with the text would be to ask the reader to take a knife and enjoy the once 'fuller' and more tactile experience of reading with a 'tagliacarte' (32; paper cutter) in Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore. Graphic signs, verbal signs, and invisible signs and the imagination are discussed by Calvino, as we shall see, in 'La penna in prima persona (Per i disegni di Saul Steinberg).'

4: Verbal Order to Visual Chaos 1 Questa e una vocazione profonda della letteratura italiana che passa da Dante a Galileo: 1'opera letteraria come mappa del mondo e dello scibile.' Italo Calvino in 'Due interviste su scienza e letteratura/ L'Approdo letterario

Notes to pages 157-67 307

2

3 4

5

6

7 8 9

10

11

(January-March 1968), now in Saggi I, ed. Mario Barenghi (Milan: Mondadori, 1995), 229-37, see 232-3. 'Noi abitiamo 11 spazio dell'aria, scandiamo il tempo col virbrare delle ali. Cos'altro vuol dire: essere?,' risposero quelle fragile creature. Tu, piuttosto, sei soltanto una forma messa li a segnare i limiti dello spazio e del tempo in cui noi siamo.' 'II tempo su di me scorre: io resto,' insisteva la fortezza. 'Voi sfiorate soltanto la superficie del divenire come il pelo dell'acqua dei ruscelli.' E le effimere: 'Noi guizziamo nel vuoto cosi come la scrittura sul foglio bianco e le note del flauto nel silenzio. Senza di noi, non resta che il vuoto onnipotente e onnipresente, cosi pesante che schiaccia il mondo, il vuoto il cui potere annientatore si riveste di fortezza compatte, il vuoto-pieno che pud essere dissolto solo da cio che e leggero e rapido e sottile.' Italo Calvino, 'Le effimere nella fortezza,' Collezione di sabbia (Milan: Garzanti, 1984), 83. 'II viandante nella mappa,' Collezione di sabbia, 24. Order Out of Chaos is the title of a book by Ilya Prigognine and Isabelle Stengers (New York: Bantam, 1984). Calvino had read the book and liberally used its ideas. To create enargeia is to use words to yield so vivid a description that they dare we say literally? - place the represented object before the reader's (hearer's) inner eye. This is as much as a verbal artist could hope for: almost as good as a picture, which in turn is almost as good as the thing itself.' See Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of The Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 14. These writings are collected in Italo Calvino, Romanzi e racconti III, ed. Mario Berenghi and Bruno Falcetto (Milan: Mondadori, 1994), in the section 'Poesie e invenzioni oulipiennes' (1962-64,1972-83). See Michael Rifaterre's Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 4. Italo Calvino, Marcovaldo ovvero le stagioni in citta (Turin: Einaudi, 1966). See my article The Quest for Sonship in Le citta invisibili and La strada di San Giovanni' Forum Italicum 29 (1) (1995): 52-75 for a discussion of this homunculus. Claude Gandelman states that 'one could easily claim that troubled times times of mannerism, expressionism, revolution - privilege the cortical vision over normal apperception.' Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 77. Ibid., 78.

308 Notes to pages 168-75 12 'La lima d'ombra di Joseph Conrad' originally published L'Unita (15 June 1947), now in Saggi I,808-10. See p. 808. 13 Italo Calvino, Tesi di laurea in Letteratura Inglese: Joseph Conrad/ University of Turin, 1946-7. See p. 88. 14 See Martin McLaughlin, Italo Calvino (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998) for an extremely insightful and comprehensive philological survey of Calvino's writings. His chapter on 'Calvino's style' is an especially useful examination of the author's variants, alterations, and alternations. 15 Italo Calvino, 'I capitani di Conrad,' Saggi I, ed. Mario Berenghi (Milan: Mondadori, 1995), 814-19 at 815. 16 A revealing confession of the author's struggle between the images of revolution and the reality of historical necessity, the female and male sides of any intellectual coin, is the penetrating 'Sono stato stalinista anch'io?' La Repubblica (16-17 December 1979), now in Saggi II, ed. Mario Berenghi (Milan: Mondadori, 1995), 2835-42. Especially interesting is the author's use of the words 'quadro,' 'maschere,' 'schermi,' 'fotografare,' 'memoria' ('picture,' 'masks,' 'screens,' 'to photograph,' 'memory'). 17 Jean-Paul Sartre states that there are 'two distinct selves in us: the imaginary self with its tendencies and desires - and the real self. There are imaginary sadists and masochists, persons of violent imagination. At each moment our imaginary self breaks in pieces and disappears at contact with reality, yielding its place to the real self. For the real and the imaginary cannot coexist by their very nature. It is a matter of two types of objects, of feelings and actions that are completely irreducible.' In Psychology of Imagination (London: Rider, 1950), 165-6. 18 Tn principio e rimmagine/ with Sandra Petrignani and published posthumously in // Messaggero (19 September 1986): 5. 19 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 139. 20 This is the central thesis of Teresa De Lauretis's article 'Narrative Discourse in Calvino: Praxis or Poiesis,' PMLA 90 (1975): 414-25. 21 See T segni alti' an Introduction to Fausto Melotti's Lo spazio inquieto (Turin: Einaudi, 1971): 91. Now in Saggi II, 1970-1. 22 Writing under the pseudonym Enea Traverse, Calvino, in a publicity note published in the Bolletino di informazioni culturali (10 January 1948), narrates a visit through the Einaudi publishing house. Describing the passage from the practical world of numbers to the imaginative world of writers, he states: 'Per una scaletta a chiocciola fuggiamo dalla selva dei numeri coi quali non siamo mai andati molto d'accordo' ('Climbing a spiral staircase

Notes to pages 176-8 309 we escape the forest of numbers with which we have never really gotten along'). See Album Calvino, ed. Luca Baranelli and Ernesto Ferrer (Milan: Mondadori, 1995), 95. 23 Maria Corti, // viaggio testuale (Turin: Einaudi, 1978), 5. 24 The entire quotation is worth noting and follows: Tn un romanzo molto costruito e che segue determinate regole ci puo essere uno scatenamento di fantasia maggiore che in una prosa informale. Una delle immaginazioni piu vorticose e irrefrenabili dell'inizio del nostro secolo, Raymond Roussel, procedeva ponendosi delle stranissime regole. Per esempio cominciare un romanzo con una frase e poi costruire una frase completemente diversa cambiando solo alcune lettere e ponendola come meta finale del romanzo. In mezzo a questi due punti faceva succedere tutto quello che gli passava per la mente, ma sempre tenendo ben presente quel fine. In questa idea che gli obblighi possono essere di stimolo all'immaginazione e stata teorizzate in Francia, da un gruppo fondato da Raymond Queneau, di cui faceva parte anche Georges Perec, e di cui faccio parte anch'io, una particolare poetica. II gruppo si chiama Topificio di letteratura potenziale,' Oulipo (ouvroir de litterature potentielle). E un tipo di poetica che si contrappone a quella del surrealismo che invece credeva nella scrittura automatica, credeva nel case. Mentre io non ho il culto del caso. Credo che dal caso non si tiri fuori niente di buono.' See interview with Petrignani. (In a highly constructed novel that follows predetermined rules there may burn a greater outpouring of fantasy than in an informal prose. One of the most vertiginous and irrepressible imaginations from the beginning of our century, Raymond Roussel, used to proceed by restricting himself with the strangest of rules. He would begin a novel with a phrase and then construct a completely different phrase by changing several letters and placing the new phrase at the end of the novel. Between these two points he would place anything that happened to come to mind always cognizant, however, of that ending. The idea that obligation may stimulate the imagination was theorized in France by a group founded by Raymond Queneau, of which Georges Perec and I myself were both a part. It is a particular poetics. The group was called 'the workshop of potential literature,' Oulipo (ouvroir de litterature potentielle). It is a type of poetics that counterbalances surrealism that instead of believing in automatic writing, believed in chance. I do not have a cult for the unpredictable. I believe that no good ever came by chance.) 25 Italo Calvino, 'Se una notte d'inverno un narratore,' Alfabeta (8 December 1979): 4.

310 Notes to pages 178-91 26 See The Quest for Sonship.' 27 See Italo Calvino, 'Se una notte d'inverno un narratore/ 4. 28 Italo Calvino, 'A Emilio Garroni, Roma, 26 October 1965,' in I libri degli altri Lettere 1947-1981, ed. Giovanni Tesio, 535-7 at 536 (Turin: Einaudi, 1991). 29 'Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore,' in Romanzi e mcconti II, ed. Mario Berenghi and Bruno Falcetto, 1381-1401 (Milan: Mondadori, 1994). 30 I quote from 'La squadratura' because, as we shall see, it is an integral part of Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore. 31 I am referring to Roland Barthes's seemingly prophetic 1968 announcement of 'the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.' See The Death of the Author,' reprinted in Image - Music - Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142-8 at 148. 32 'La squadratura,' xiii. 33 'La squadratura/ x. 34 Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation between Modern Literature and Painting (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), 141. 35 Wendy Steiner quoting Edward Casey, Truth in Art,' Man and World 3 (November 1970): 351-69. 36 W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 43. 37 Cesare Segre, 'Se una notte d'inverno un romanziere sognasse un aleph di dieci colori,' in Teatro e romanzo. Due tipi di comunicazione letteraria (Turin: Einaudi, 1984), 169. 38 See 'Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore,' in Romanzi e racconti II. 39 The typical rhetorical moves that occur in the contest between word and image have an almost ritual familiarity because they repeat, in the context of a debate over sign-types, the age-old quarrel between nature and culture.' Mitchell, Iconology, 78. 40 Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 163. 5: The World's Seamless Web 1 'La morte cancellatura e fatta della stessa sostanza della vita-disegno, un movimento della penna si foglio.' Italo Calvino, 'La penna in prima persona (Per i disegni di Saul Steinberg),' in Una pietra sopra, 294-300 at 295. 2 'Non ci sono dubbi che le parole scritte sono parole scritte e che il buio della notte non e altro che il nero del calamaio.' Ibid. 3 Floyd Merrell, Peirce, Signs, and Meaning (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), xi.

Notes to pages 191-203 311 4 'Raccontare e come ballare' is the title of a piece by Cesare Pavese collected in Saggi letterari (Turin: Einaudi, 1951), 295-7. 5 W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 98. 6 Originally 'L'uomo di fronte a disegni segreti,' in Corriere della Sera (18 September 1975): 3; now in Saggi II, ed. Mario Berenghi (Milan: Mondadori, 1995), 1991-2. 7 Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 28. 8 Ibid. 9 See Giordano Bruno, On the Composition of Images, Signs and Ideas, trans. C. Doria, ed. D. Higgins (New York: Willis, Locker and Owens, 1991), 15. 10 In La strada di San Giovanni (Milan: Mondadori, 1990), 43-71. 11 I am borrowing the often-quoted phrase from Cesare Cases, 'Calvino e il "pathos della distanza!"' in Maria Corti and Cesare Segre, eds., / metodi attuali della critica in Italia (Turin: Edizione RAI, 1970), 53-8. 12 Tl realismo italiano nel cinema e nella narrativa/ Cinema nuovo 2.10 (1 May 1953): 262. 13 Tl gusto dei contemporanei/ Quaderno numero ire: Italo Calvino (Pesaro: Banca Popolare Pesarese, 1987), 9. 14 'Cinema and the Novel/ in Italo Calvino: The Uses of Literature, trans. Patrick Creagh (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 74-80. See p. 75. 15 Di fatto non c'e altro fine se non quello di tirar fuori dalle potenzialita pittoriche tutto il possibile. Questo vale anche per la letteratura. Italo Calvino, Tullio Pericoli: Furti ad arte,' Saggi II, 1813. 16 Italo Calvino, 'Natura e storia del romanzo,' Una pietra sopra (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), 33. 17 See the interview Ttalo Calvino' by Maria Corti in Autografo 2.6 (October 1985): 47-53 at 48. 18 'La vedova di Calvino ricorda: "Viveva soltanto per scrivere,"' in // Tempo (20 September 1985): 18. 19 See 'Diario americano 1959-1960,' in Eremita a Parigi: Pagine autobiografiche (Milan: Mondadori, 1994), 26-138. 20 These have now been collected in Saggi II. 21 See 'Reinhard/ in Saggi II, 1967-69. See p. 1967. 22 In 'La generazione degli anni difficili,' in Eremita a Parigi, 167-79 at 179. 23 From the outset, Calvino's creative writings have been affected and influenced by his writings on critical, scientific, social, and cultural issues. An

312 Notes to pages 204-15 interesting study would map this trajectory and provide concrete examples of Calvino reading himself. 24 Italo Calvino, 'Vittorini: Progettazione e letteratura/ Una pietra sopra, 127-49. 25 'Per Arakawa' was written for an exhibition of Arakawa's works at the Galleria Blu, Milan, 26 November 1985 to 15 March 1986. Now in Saggi II, 20015. Citations are from this text. 26 'Per Sebastian Matta' for the exhibition 'Matta. Un trittico ed altri dipinti,' Galleria 1'Attico, Rome, 10 November 1962; now in Saggi II, 1964-1965. 27 See the interview with Felice Froio, 'Dietro il successo/ now in Eremita a Parigi, 249-63 at 255. 28 These writings have been conveniently collected in Saggi II. 29 Mitchell, Iconology, 98 30 'Litografie di Levi,' in Gli Amanti, Galleria del Pincio, Rome (23 March 1955); also in // contemporaneo (26 March 1955): 9; now in Saggi II, 1961-2. 31 Text was written for the exhibition 'Baj: dal generale al particolare' held at Forte di Bard in Val d'Aosta, 5 July 1985 to 30 September 1985. Subsequently published in La Repubblica (20 July 1985). 32 Introduction to // sentiero dei nidi di ragno (Turin: Einaudi, 1947), 10. 33 Linda Hutcheon, 'Postmodern Border Tensions,' Style 22 (2) (1988): 299-323 at 300. 34 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973). 35 E.H. Gombrich makes this point in 'Image and Code: Scope and Limits of Conventionalism in Pictorial Representation,' in W. Steiner, ed., Image and Code (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), 11-42 at 17. 36 Mitchell, Iconology, 8. 37 Roland Barthes, Image - Music - Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 43. 38 This museum of literary forms to be endlessly recast into novel combinations signals the end of a linear, progressive conception of history. See Renato Barilli, 'Calvino, Arbasino e la poetica della riscrittura,' in Tra presenza e assenza: Due modelli culturali in conflitto (Milan: Mursia, 1974): 252-67. 39 In the previously cited piece 'Furti ad arte,' we are informed in a prefatory note that the conversation between writer and painter was held on occasion of the exhibit by Tullio Pericoli entitled 'Rubare a Klee.' The exhibit was held at the II Milione Gallery, Milan, May through June 1980. Published in the exhibition catalogue (Milan: Edizioni II Milione, 1980). Now in Saggi II, 1801-15.

Notes to pages 220-8 313 6: Painted Stories and Novel Spaces 1 Leon Battista Albert!, L'architettura (De re aedificatoria), ed. and trans. G. Orlandi (Milan: Mondadori, 1966), 608-11. 2 'Si ritrova il poeta nel pittore e il pittore nel poeta. La visione dei quadri dei grandi maestri e tanto utile per uno scrittore quanto lo e, per un artista, la lettura dei capolavori/ Denis Diderot, Pensieri sparsi sulla pittura, la scultura e la poesia per continuare i 'Salons' (Palermo: Centre internazionale studi di estetica, 1996). 3 'Lo scrittore guarda le opere del pittore cercando di tradurre cio che esse gli comunicano in qualcosa che vorrebbe comunicare lui.' Italo Calvino, 'La squadratura/ vii. 4 Italo Calvino, 'Sotto quella pietra/ now in Saggi I, ed. Mario Berenghi (Milan: Mondadori, 1995), 399^05. 5 In 'I livelli della realta in letteratura' Calvino speaks of literature's special nature as a tool that discovers the levels of its own possible realities: 'Se esista la realta in cui i vari livelli non sono che aspetti parziale, o se esistano solo i livelli, questo la letteratura non puo deciderlo. La letteratura conosce la realta dei livelli e questa e una realta che conosce forse meglio di quanto non si arrivi a conoscerla attraverso altri procedimenti conoscitivi. E gia molto' ('Whether there is such a thing as Reality, of which the various levels are only partial aspects, or whether there are only the levels, is something that literature cannot decide. Literature recognizes the reality of the levels, and this is a reality [or 'Reality'] that it knows all the better, perhaps, for not having come to understand it by other cognitive processes. And that is already a great deal.) In Una pietra sopra (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), 310-23, at 323. Calvino's writings may be seen as a tool that constantly seeks these possible levels and, in so doing, extends them. 6 Calvino's essays were collected by the author in Una pietra sopra. They include 'Per Fourier I. La societa amorosa' (The Amorous Society') (1971); 'Per Fourier II. L'ordinatore dei desideri' (The Organizer of Desires') (1971); 'Per Fourier III. Commiato. Utopia pulviscolare' ('Farewell. A Dusty Utopia') (1973). 7 Michael Fried, 'Art and Objecthood,' in George Dickie and Richard Scalafani, eds., Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology (New York: St Martin's, 1977), 438-60. 8 Mieke Bal discusses issues of focalization in Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), chap. 7. 9 Laura Mulvey, 'Magnificent Obsession,' Parachute 42 (1986): 6-12. See p. 7.

314 Notes to pages 228-39 10 Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, trans. J. Harkness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 38. 11 Ibid., 46-7. 12 Italo Calvino, 'Risposte a 9 domande sul romanzo/ Nuovi Argomenti 38-39 (May-August 1959): 6-12. Now in Saggi I,1521-9. See p. 1525. 13 Italo Calvino, 'La colonna Traiana raccontata/ in Collezione di sabbia (Milan: Garzanti, 1984), 95-6. 14 'Calvino al crocevia fra realta e fabula/ 3. 15 Italo Calvino, '"La pittura illustrata": Quattro favole in cornice/ L'Espresso (5 October 1980): 154-9. Now in Romanzi e racconti III, 414-18, with the title 'Quattro favole d'Esopo per Valeric Adami: The individual texts are also renamed. 'La linea disse alia mano' becomes 'La mano e la linea'; 'E il piede rispose' 'I piedi e la Figura'; 'Ma una voce poco Fa' 'La parola scritta, i colori e la voce'; 'Allora il blu salto su'; 'La linea orizzontale e il colore blu.' 16 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 17 Floyd Merrell, Peirce, Signs, and Meaning (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 78. 18 The author considers this short story a "'messa in racconto" (come dire "messa in scena")' (a 'story staging' [as opposed to a 'theatrical staging']) of a short newspaper article, 'Le follie del mirino/ // Contemporaneo (Rome), 30 April 1955. The citation is from the Introduction to Gli amori difficili (Turin: Einaudi, 1970). 19 Mieke Bal, 'Reading Rembrandt': Beyond the Word-Image Opposition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). See Introduction. 20 See the interview with Maria Corti, Ttalo Calvino,' Autografo 2.6 (October 1985): 47-53, now in Eremita a Parigi: Pagine autobiografiche (Milan: Mondadori, 1994), 272. 21 For Nelson Goodman, the difference between the essences of media lies in the way signs function. Painted and verbal texts both deal with signs, both can be read as either differentiated or continuous symbol systems. See Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976). 22 Alberti believed that rays, ministers of vision he called them, emanated from the eyes and touched the surface of an object enclosing it within their grasp. On the far side of the object, the lines of sight converge once again. The centric ray between the far point and the initial ray emanating from the eye is both temporally and spatially linked, establishing the vanishing point of perspectival representation. To paint a picture of the 'seen' Alberti

Notes to pages 243-63 315

23 24 25 26

27 28 29

30

31

32

33

imagines a veil or plane halfway between the object and the eye upon which is a pyramid of lines, that emanate from the eye, and compose the vision. The originality of Alberti's insight is its power to actively alter the world, to change its aspects at will, through a simple, though regulated and consistent, change of perspective. See On Painting, esp. Book One. See Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, vol. 1, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay (Boston; G.K. Hall, 1982), 421-7. Italo Calvino, Tilosofia e letteratura,' now in Saggi I,188-96. See 191-2. Italo Calvino, 'I livelli della realta in letteratura.' Italo Calvino, 'Still-life alia maniera di Domenico Gnoli/ Franco Maria Ricci 13 (May 1983): 35-44. Now in Romanzi e racconti III, 422-9, with the title 'Quattro studi dal vero alia maniera di Domenico Gnoli.' Quotations are from this text. Roland Barthes, Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 198. Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 15. See Boris Uspenskij, A Poetics of Composition: The Structure of the Artistic Text and Typology of Compositional Form, trans. Valentina Zavarin and Susan Wittig (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). 'Et quid amabo nisi quod aenigma est?' Giorgio De Chirico in Autoritratto (Greenwhich: Coll. S. Resor, 1911), as quoted by Giulio Paolini in IDEM (Turin: Einaudi, 1975). 'Le citta del pensiero,' FMR 15 (July-August 1983): 44-52. Now in Romanzi e racconti III, ed. Mario Berenghi and Bruno Falcetto (Milan: Mondadori, 1994), ed. 397-406, with the title 'Viaggio nelle citta di De Chirico.' Quotations are from this text. The English translation, published in the English edition of FMR is titled 'De Chirico City: The City of Thought.' Giorgio De Chirico states that metaphysical painting should be seen as 'representation totale des necessites spirituelles dans des limites plastiques -pouvoir d'exprimer le cote spectral des choses - "ironic."' (a total representation of spiritual necessities expressed within plastic limits - it can express the spectral side of things - 'irony'). See 'Petit Dictionnaire des Annees Heroiques 1907-1917,' XXeme Siecle 26 (2) (May 1966), 97. Right/left brain asymmetry is well known today and has been convincingly demonstrated by neuroscience. It is generally known that while each hemisphere cannot be fully divided according to discrete functions, brain commissurotomy dramatically highlights those routines normally best carried out by each side. With this in mind, image and word cognition is only a small parcel of the tasks that group themselves under the distinct categories

316 Notes to pages 263-4

34

35 36

37

of right-hemisphere/left-hemisphere dominance. Characteristics of the right brain include being, metaphor, music, concepts of spatiality, images; those of the left include doing, abstraction, number, concepts of temporality, words. Images and words thus appear to substitute each other as we process information. In order to bridge the apparent gap, a transformative leap must be made between verbal sequencing that occurs in time and depicted categories that extend in space. Because of the jarring incongruities of metaphysical art, verbal language was challenged into relinquishing its stronghold on the description of the paradoxical and unsettling hues of the new reality. It is as if images and words had been dissociated from their usual network of physiological relations and reverted to the sterility of primitive one-sided hemispheric brain specialization. De Chirico seemed to have understood that the physical tricks of the unseen universe could only be explained by blatantly confounding the viewer with conflicting values about space and time. This is why the presence of a supportive grounding that would establish a link between the propped-up images and the outside world is totally lacking in the paintings. Though elements and figures 'look' stable and 'seem' to be taken from life (the columns, trains, statues, and piazzas), the need for external support to rationalize their existence suggests that they exist because of this separation from logocentricity, because of their totalizing status as image, as spatial construct, as presentations from the right side of the brain with no capacity for external referents. Quoted from William Weaver, 'Calvino: An Interview and Its Story,' in Franco Ricci, ed., Calvino Revisited, 17-31 at 28 (Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1989). Gustave Flaubert, Trois Contes (Paris: Gamier, 1988). The introduction to this text offers insights into the iconic sources of inspiration for the tale, the stained-glass mosaic of the Cathedral of Rouen. The mosaic is also mentioned in the unpublished passages of Madame Bovary: 'J'ai meme oublie, reprit-il, de montrer a Monsieur deux vitraux fort remarquables: 1'un representant la vie de Saint Julien 1'Hospitalier, et 1'autre des mariniers qui vendent du poisson ...' (T also forgot, he began again, to show the gentleman two greatly remarkable windows, one representing the street of St. Julian Hospitaler and the other fisherman selling fish...'). Quoted from Madame Bovary, Ebauches et fragments inedits, vol. 2, ed. Gabrielle Leleu (Paris: Conard, 1936), 294. Most interesting for my argument, however, is Flaubert's critical source of inspiration, E.H. Langlois, L'Essai sur la peinture sur verre (Paris: Edouard Frere, 1832). Calvino speaking of the difference between painting and literature in previ-

Notes to pages 264-72 317 ously unpublished pages of 'La squadratura' now in Romanzi e racconti II, ed. Mario Berenghi and Bruno Falcetto (Milan: Mondadori, 1992), 1383. 38 Calvino explaining his personal need for the process of description in 'Osservare e descrivere/ La lettura: Antologia per la Scuola Media, ed. Italo Calvino and Carlo Salinari (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1969), 364. 39 See the notes compiled by Mario Barenghi, Bruno Falcetto, and Claudio Milanini that accompany the original Calvino texts in Romanzi e racconti III, 1253. 40 It is interesting that Hyppolite Taine, in his Philosophie de I'art (Paris: Hermann, 1964), at the height of Realism, admonishes that literature not represent reality as if it were a photograph but instead should express the sum total of reality's relationships and dependencies; their logic, in other words, just as in paintings. 41 In the interview 'E 1'occhio scruta il caos del mondo,' by Constanzo Constantini (// Messagerro [31 December 1983]: 3), Calvino, speaking of Palornar, states: 'Ho voluto scrivere come un tempo disegnavano i pittori.' 42 The descriptions in Collezione di sabbia, however, often are not narrative at all but informative, often playful, reportage. One glimpses the 'man' rather than the author in many instances. 43 The conceptualization of a locus where the polyphony of social and artistic forces shape discourse is discussed in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980). 44 Norman Bryson, 'Semiology and Visual Interpretation/ in N. Bryson, M.A. Holly, and K. Moxey, eds., Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation (Great Britain: Icon Editions, 1991), 61-73 at 62. 45 In W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 49. But there is another level at which the texts interface. Though their specific contexts obscure any connection to each other, both deal with a feature of experience, the visual, with traditionally oppositional values: words and images. Though it is not my intention to discuss the historical conflicts or the contemporary attempts at reconciliation between these two canons of value, I do agree with Mitchell when he states that 'there is no essential difference between poetry and painting, no difference, that is, that is given for all time by the inherent natures of the media, the objects they represent, of the laws of the human mind;... the paragone or debate of poetry and painting is never just a contest between two kinds of signs, but a struggle between body and soul, world and mind, nature and culture' 49. Though displaying disparate characteristics, the medium used is not an aporia to these two separate acts of seeing, but instead engenders

318 Notes to pages 273-5

46

47

48

49

50

a common semiotic space between the two. Both visual and verbal texts seem to share the same paradoxical consistency. 'In un volume dell'editore Ricci sul pittore Domenico Gnoli, ho descritto quattro oggetti: un bottone, una camicia da uomo stirata, una scarpa da donna e un guanciale. La maggiore difficolta 1'ho incontrata nel descrivere il guanciale, nel trasformare il guanciale in un paesaggio' ('In a volume published by Ricci on the painter Domenico Gnoli, I described four objects: a button, a man's ironed shirt, a woman's shoe and a pillow. The major difficulty that I encountered was in describing the pillow, in transforming the pillow into a landscape'). 'E 1'occhio scruta il caos del mondo,' 3. In Edward S. Casey, Imagining: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), the discontinuities between the acts of perception and imagination are viewed as so disparate as to lack any points of contact with each other. For my purposes, the indistinguishable nature of these acts in certain experiences allows us to proceed from a vantage of continuity. The criteria for a discussion of this visual-verbal suite thus cannot rest solely on a cross-referral of perceptions that imply similar chronologies of imaginative experience. In place of such transcendental comparisons it is more productive to use codes of recognition that allow an examination of the suite as a new construct. In this manner, a special continuity is installed between perceiving and imagining that extends the aesthetic experience from its initial perceptual basis onto an imaginative plane. Calvino writes: 'La mente del pittore si muove leggera nella nuda astrazione, ma se si dirige sulla pluralita delle cose corpose viene presa dalla vertigine della polverizzazione e dello sparpagliamento' (The mind of the painter moves lightly amidst nude abstraction, but when it is directed towards the plurality of corporal things it is taken by vertigo of pulverization and scattering'). See 'La squadratura,' IDEM (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), xiii. Calvino could very well have imagined himself as another Flaubert (already cited in the course of this study) who was attracted not only to stained glass windows but also passionately involved with the 'feel' of statues: T looked at nothing else in the gallery. I returned to it several times and at last I kissed the armpit of the swooning woman who stretches her long marble arms towards Love. And the foot! The head! The profile! May I be forgiven. It was my first sensual kiss in a long while. It was also something more; I kissed beauty itself. It was to genius that I dedicated my ardent enthusiasm.' Gustave Flaubert, Oeuvres completes (Paris: Louis Conard, 1910) 9:44; quoted in Fred Lict, Canova (New York: Abbeville, 1983), 272. 'Lo scrittore guarda il mondo del pittore, spoglio e senza ombre, fatto solo

Notes to pages 275-90 319 di enunciati affermativi, si domanda come potra mai raggiungere tanta calma interiore' (The writer considers the world of the painter, naked and without shadows, composed only of affirmative statements, and wonders how he could ever reach such interior calm'). In 'La squadratura/ vii. Conclusion: A New Point of Departure 1 John Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. 1 (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1935), 183. 2 Quoted by Umberto Eco in // nomedella rosa (Milan: Bompiani, 1980), 31. 3 'A guidare i miei gesti era il desiderio di salvare tutte le storie in una storia che fosse anche la mia.' Italo Calvino, 'L'ultimo canale tv,' originally published in La Repubblica (3 January 1984), now in Prima che tu dica 'Pronto' (Milan: Mondadori, 1993), 294-302 at 298. 4 Patrick Trevor-Roper, The World through Blunted Sight (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988). 5 Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses (New York: Random House, 1990), 229. 6 Michael Ann Holly, Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image (New York: Cornell University Press, 1996), 21. 7 Emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative and all moral judgements are nothing but expressions of personal preference, attitude or feeling. These are evaluative in character 'no matter what their avowed theroretical standpoint may be. Emotivism has become embodied in our culture.' See Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 21. 8 Intervista con gli studenti di Pesaro (Pesaro: Banca popolare pesarese, 1987), now in Album Calvino, ed. Luca Baranelli and Ernesto Ferrer (Milan: Mondadori, 1995), 239. 9 Norman Bryson, 'Semiology and Visual Interpretation' in Bryson, M.A. Holly, and K. Moxey, eds., Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 61-73 at 57. 10 The film Until the End of the World by Wim Wenders, interestingly enough, postulates the same 'vengence' of the word over image. 11 'Per chi si scrive? (Lo scaffale ipotetico)/ Una pietra sopra (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), 159-63 at 162. 12 Renato Barilli first baptized Calvino's narrative as a 'narrative of objects' in 'I racconti di Calvino/ in // Mulino 7 (2) (August 1959): 160-6. 13 From the last essay, appropriately, in Una pietra sopra, 'I livelli della realta nella letteratura/ 310-23 at 319.

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Bibliography

Primary Texts All works cited below were published in Turin by Einaudi except where otherwise indicated. Calvino's complete works are also available in Mondadori paperbacks. Fiction II sentiero del nidi di ragno (1947). Ultimo viene il corvo (1949). // visconte dimezzato (1952). L'entrata in guerra (1954). Fiabe italiane (1956). // barone rampants (1957). La nuvola di smog e La formica argentina (1958). I racconti (1958). // cavaliere inesistente (1959). / nostri antenati, with Note (1960). La giornata d'uno scrutatore (1963). La speculazione edilizia (1963). // sentiero dei nidi di ragno, with Preface (1964). // barone rampante, Preface and Note by Tonio Cavilla (Letture per la scuola media, 1965). Le cosmicomiche (1965). Marcovaldo, ovvero le stagioni in citta (1966). Ti con zero (1967). La memoria del mondo e altre storie cosmicomiche (1968).

322 Bibliography Gli amori difficili (1970). Le citta invisibili (1972). // castello dei destini incrociati (1973). Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore (1979). Palomar (1983). Cosmicomiche vecchie e nuove. Milan: Garzanti, 1984. Sotto il sole giaguaro. Milan: Garzanti, 1986. La strada di San Giovanni. Milan: Mondadori, 1990. Prima che tu dica 'Pronto.' Milan: Mondadori, 1993. Tutte le cosmicomiche, ed. Claudio Milanini. Milan: Mondadori, 1997. Non-Fiction Tesi di laurea in Litteratura Inglese: Joseph Conrad' University of Turin, 1946-7. 'Gente nel tempo.' Rubric that ran in L'Unita (Turin, 1946-8). 'II realismo italiano nel cinema e nella narrativa.' Cinema nuovo 2.10 (1 May 1953): 262. 'Correnti del romanzo italiano d'oggi.' Liceo - Ginnasio di Stato G.O. Cassini. Annuario Commemorative, 123-33. San Remo: Societa per Az. G. Gandolfi, 1960. La lettura 3: Antologia per la scuola media, ed. Italo Calvino and Giambattista Salinari. Bologna: Zanichelli, 1974. 'Se una notte d'inverno un narratore.' Alfabeta (8 December 1979): 4. 'La pittura illustrata: Quattro favole in cornice.' L'Espresso (5 October 1980): 154-9. Una pietra sopra (1980). Terche leggeri i classici.' L'Espresso (28 June 1981): 58-68. 'Che testa.' L'Espresso (11 October 1981): 163-4. 'Still-life alia maniera di Domenico Gnoli.' Franco Maria Ricci 13 (May 1983): 35-^4. Racconti fantastici dell'ottocento. Milan: Mondadori, 1983. CoUezione di sabbia. Milan: Garzanti, 1984. 'Comment j'ai ecrit un de mes livres.' Actes semiotique - Documents 6.51 (1984). Baj: Dal generate al particolare. Commentary to the art catalogue on the occasion of the exhibition held at the Forte di Bard, Val d'Aosta, 5 July-30 September 1985. 'II gusto dei contemporanei.' Quaderno numero tre: Italo Calvino. Pesare: Banca Popolare Pesarese, 1987. Lezioni americane. Milan: Garzanti, 1988.

Bibliography 323 Sulla fiaba, ed. Mario Lavagetto. Turin: Einaudi, 1988. / libri degli altri. Lettere 1947-1981, ed. Giovanni Tesio (1991). Perche leggere i classici. Milan: Mondadori, 1991. Eremita a Parigi. Pagine autobiografiche. Milan: Mondadori, 1994. Enciclopedia: Arte, Scienza e Letteratura (Special Issue of Riga/ vol. 9), ed. Marco Belpoliti. Milan: Marcos y Marcos, 1995. The Collected Works These volumes were published in Milan by Mondadori in the series T Meridiani': Rornanzi e racconti I, ed. Mario Berenghi and Bruno Falcetto; Preface by Jean Starobinski (1991). Romanzi e racconti II, ed. Mario Berenghi and Bruno Falcetto (1992). Fiabe Italiane, Preface by Mario Lavagetto (1993). Romanzi e racconti III, ed. Mario Berenghi and Bruno Falcetto; Bibliography by Luca Baranellli (1994). Note: Calvino's fictive musings on artworks are contained in this volume. Of interest to this study: 'Altre citta' (per Cesare Peverelli)'; 'Parafrasi (per Lucio del Pezzo)'; 'II silenzio e la citta (per Fabio Borbottoni)'; 'Viaggio nelle citta' di de Chirico'; 'II crollo del tempo (su alcuni disegni di Saul Steinberg)'; 'Quattro favole d'Esopo per Valerio Adami; Essere pietra (per Alberto Magnelli)'; 'Quattro studi dal vero alia maniera di Domenico Gnoli'; 'II ricordo e' bendato (per Leonardo Cremonini)'; 'Ricevimento al castello di Bardbaj (per Enrico Baj).' Saggi I and II, ed. Mario Barenghi (1995). Note: All of Calvino's writings on art are collected in vol. 2 and include: 'Litografie di Levi' (1955); 'Carlo Levi, un discorso totale' (1962); 'Per Sebastian Matta' (1962); 'Reinhoud' (1969); T segni alti (per Fausto Melotti)' (1971); 'Una mostra di William Turner' (1975); 'La squadratura (per Giulio Paolini)' (1975); 'Palomar e Michelangelo' (1975); 'Gli uccelli di Paolo Uccello' (1977); Tl pieno e il vuoto (per Aizenberg)' (1982); 'Histoire du chevalier parenthese (per Albrecht Altdorfer)' (1984); 'Per Arakawa' (1985). Also of interest to this study are: 'La penna in prima persona (Per i disegni di Saul Steinberg)' (1977); 'Furti ad arte (conversazione con Tullio Pericoli)' (1980). Album Calvino, ed. Luca Baranelli and Ernesto Ferrer (1995). Selected Interviews Ttalo Calvino,' by Italo Calvino responding to a questionnaire. // caffe' 4 (1) (1956): 16-18.

324 Bibliography Tavese fu il mio lettore ideale/ by Roberto De Monticelli. // Giorno (18 August 1959): 6. Inchiesta: 'Italo Calvino/ by Italo Calvino responding to a questionnaire. // Paradosso 5 (23-24) (1960): 11-18. 'Italo Calvino: Sono nate tre nuove tendenze nella nostra narrativa in questo decennio/ by Renzo Tian. // Messaggero (26 July 1960): 8. 'Calvino scrittore appartato ha fiducia nella letteratura/ by Raffaele Crovi. L'Awenire (20 July 1969): 5. 'La chiave e il cerchio/ by Claudio Marabini. La chiave e il cerchio: Ritratti di scrittori contempomnei, 233-^42. Milan: Rusconi, 1973. 'Italo Calvino: Dal paese di Kublai Khan/ by Mario Lunetta. Sintassi dell'altrove: Conversazioni e interviste letterarie. 81-4. Florence: Antonio Lolli Editore, 1978. 'Un altrove da cui guardare 1'universo/ by Daniele Del Giudice. Paese Sera (1 January 1978): 3. 'A Master of Enchantment/ by Jim Miller with Elaine Sciolino. Newsweek (17 November 1980): 104-5. 'Se una sera d'autunno uno scrittore .../ self-interview by Italo Calvino. Europeo (17 November 1980): 84-91. 'Come Snoopy anch'io mi sono perso/ by Italo Calvino responding to a questionnaire. Tuttolibri (13 June 1981): 1. 'Italo Calvino: The Contemporary Fabulist/ by Constance Markey. Italian Quarterly 23.88 (Spring 1982): 77-85. 'E 1'occhio scruta il caos del mondo/ by Costanzo Costantini. // Messaggero (31 December 1983): 3. 'Sono un po stance di essere Calvino/ by Giulio Nascimbeni. Corriere della Sera (5 December 1984): 3. 'Calvino al crocevia tra realta' e favola/ by Walter Mauro. // Tempo (20 February 1984): 3. 'An Interview with Italo Calvino/ by Gregory L. Lucente. Contemporary Literature 26 (3) (1985): 245-53. 'La vedova di Calvino ricorda: "Viveva solo per scrivere.'" // Tempo (20 September 1985): 18. 'Italo Calvino/ by Maria Corti. Autografo 2.6 (October 1985): 47-53. 'Scrivo perche' non so fare altro: Un'intervista inedita con Italo Calvino/ by Giancarlo Capecchi. La Nazione (12 August 1986): 3. 'In principio e rimmagine/ by Sandra Petrignani. // Messaggero (19 September 1986): 5. 'Calvino mio marito: Intervista con la moglie Chichita mentre esce, postumo, Sotto il sole giaguaro,' by Enrico Filippini. La Repubblica (14 June 1986):

cultural supplement.

Bibliography 325 'Esquivo y silencioso: La viuda de Italo Calvino recuerda su vida con el novelista/ by Roberto Cotroneo. El Pais (1 April 1991): 2-3. 'Italo Calvino: ovvero 1'impossibilita di fare romanzo/ by Walter Mauro. Forum Italicum 25 (2) (1991): 205-10. Translations in English Fiction Adam One Afternoon. Trans. Archibald Colquhoun and Peggy Wright. London: Minerva, 1992. Cosmicomics. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968. Difficult Loves. Trans. William Weaver, Archibald Colquhoun, and Peggy Wright. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984. If on a winter's night a traveller. Trans. William Weaver. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Denny s, 1981. Invisible Cities. Trans. William Weaver. London: Seeker & Warburg, 1974. Italian Folktales. Trans. George Martin. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980. Marcovaldo or The Seasons in the City. Trans. William Weaver. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Denny s, 1983. Mr. Palomar. Trans. William Weaver. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1985. Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories. Trans. Tim Parks. London: Vintage, 1996. Our Ancestors. Trans. Archibald Colquhoun, with an introduction by the author. London: Minerva, 1992. The Castle of Crossed Destinies. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979. The Path to the Nest of Spiders. Trans. Archibald Colquhoun. New York: Ecco Press, 1976. The Road to San Giovanni. Trans. Tim Parks. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993. The Watcher and Other Stories. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971. Time and the Hunter. Trans. William Weaver. London: Picador, 1993. tzero. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969. Under the Jaguar Sun. Trans. William Weaver. London: Vintage, 1993. Non-Fiction Italo Calvino: The Uses of Literature: Essays. Trans. Patrick Creagh. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.

326 Bibliography The Literature Machine. Trans. Patrick Creagh. London: Seeker & Warburg, 1987. Six Memosfor the Next Millennium. Trans. Patrick Creagh. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. The Written and the Unwritten Word.' Trans. William Weaver. New York Review of Books (12 May 1983): 38-9. Secondary Works Abrams, Murray. The Mirror and the Lamp. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953. Ackerman, Diane. A Natural History of the Senses. New York: Random House, 1990. - L'architettura (De re aedificatoria). Ed. and trans. G. Orlandi. Milan: Mondadori, 1966. Alberti, Leon Battista. On Painting. Trans. John R. Spencer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966. Andrews, Lew. Story and Space in Renaissance Art: The Rebirth of Continuous Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Anscombe, G.E.M. Intention. Oxford: Blackwell, 1957. Apthonius. Readings in Classical Rhetoric. Ed. Matesen Rollinson Sousa. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. Aristotle. De Anima II. Trans. W.W. Hett. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957. - 'On Dreams.' In Parva Naturalia. Trans. W.S. Hett. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936. Arnheim, Rudolph. Art and Visual Perception. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954. - Towards a Psychology of Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. - Visual Thinking. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Assezat, J., ed. Oeuvres completes de Diderot, vol. 1. Paris: Freres Gamier, 1875. Bakhtin, M. The Dialogical Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. - The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually. Trans. Anna-Louise Milne. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 2nd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. - Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999. - Reading 'Rembrandt': Beyond the Word-Image Opposition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Bibliography 327 Balbi, Renato, and Rosellini Balbi. Lungo viaggio al centra del ceruello. Rome: Laterza, 1981. Baranelli, Luca. 'Un ricordo di Italo Calvino/ Annali delta Facolta di Lettere e Filosofia dell'Universita di Siena 17 (1996): 355-64. Barenghi, Mario. 'Italo Calvino e i sentieri che s'interrompono/ Quaderni piacentini 15 (1984): 127-50. - 'Gli oggetti e gli dei: Appunti su una metafora calviniana/ Sequenze novecentesche per Antonio De Lorenzi, 197-218. Modena: Mucchi, 1996. Barilli, Renato. La barriera del naturalismo. Milan: Mursia, 1964. - 'Calvino, Arbasino e la poetica della rescrittura.' In Tra presenza e assenza: Due modelli cultural! in conflitto. Milan: Mursia, 1974. - 'I racconti di Calvino/ // Mulino 7 (2) (August 1959): 160-6. Barlow, Horace, et al. eds. Images and Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Baroni, Giorgio. Italo Calvino. Introduzione e guida allo studio dell'opera calviniana. Storia e antologia della critica. Florence: Le Monnier, 1988. Barthes, Roland. Critical Essays. Trans. Richard Howard. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972. - Image - Music - Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. - Ts Painting a Language?' In The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985. - S/Z. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. Baxandall, Michael. Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350-1450. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. Belpoliti, Marco. Storie del visibile. Lettura di Italo Calvino. Rimini: Luise, 1990. - 'Al contatto dell'occhio/ Nuova corrente 39.110 (1992): 357-72. - 'II foglio e il mondo. Calvino, lo spazio, la scrittura (prima parte),' Nuova corrente 40.112 (1993): 355-78. - Tl foglio e il mondo. Calvino, lo spazio, la scrittura (seconda parte),' Nuova corrente 41.114 (1994): 215-42. - L'occhio di Calvino. Turin: Einaudi, 1996. Benussi, Cristina. Introduzione a Calvino. Bari: Laterza, 1989. Berger, John. About Looking. New York: Pantheon, 1980. - Ways of Seeing. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. Bernardini Napoletano, Francesca. / segni nuovi di Italo Calvino. Da 'Le cosmicomiche' a 'Le citta invisibili.' Rome: Bulzone, 1977. Bertone, Giorgio, ed. Italo Calvino: la letteratura, la scienza, la citta. Atti del convegno nazionale di studi di Sanremo. Genoa: Marietti, 1988.

328 Bibliography Biasin, Gian Paolo. The Surface of Things, the Depth of Words.' In Franco Ricci, edv Calvino Revisited, 157-70. Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1989. - 'Under Olivia's Teeth: Italo Calvino, Sotto il sole giaguaro,' The Flavors of Modernity. Food and the Novel, 97-127. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Bonsaver, G. 'Cities of the Imagination: Traces of Italo Calvino in Jeanette Winterson's Fiction/ The Ralianist 15 (1995): 213-30. Bonura, Giuseppe. Invito alia lettura di Calvino. Milan: Mursia, 1972. Borges, Jorge Luis. Obms Completas, 3 vols. Barcelona: Emece, 1989. Boselli, Mario. 'II complesso stile calviniano,' Nuova corrente 30.109 (1992): 189-98. Botta, Anna. 'Calvino and the Oulipo: An Italian Ghost in the Combinatory Machine/ Modern Language Notes 112 (1997): 81-9. Brunette, Peter, and David Wills, eds. Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Bruno, Giordano. On the Composition of Images, Signs and Ideas. Trans. C. Doria, ed. D. Higgins. New York: Willis, Locker and Owens, 1991. Bryson, Norman. Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983. Bryson, N., M.A. Holly, and K. Moxey, eds., Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation. New York: Harper Collins, 1991. Burke, Edmund A. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origiti of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Ed. James T. Moulton. 1757; Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1968. Calligaris, Contardo. Italo Calvino. Rev. ed. Milan: Mursia, 1985. Camon, Ferdinando. // mestiere di scrittore. Milan: Garzanti, 1973. Cannon, JoAnn. Italo Calvino: Writer and Critic. Ravenna: Longo, 1981. - Ttalo Calvino: Mr. Palomar and Collezione di sabbia,' Postmodern Italian Fiction: The Crisis of Reason in Calvino, Eco, Sciascia, Malerba, 95-115. Toronto: Associated University Press, 1989. - 'Cosmicomiche vecchie e nuove: Keeping in Tune with the Times.' In Franco Ricci, ed., Calvino Revisited, 65-84. Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1989. Capozzi, Rocco. 'Mitopoiesi come ripetizione e differenza: Cosmicomiche vecchie e nuove/ Studi novecenteschi 15.35 (1988): 155-71. Carter, Albert Howard, III. Italo Calvino: Metamorphoses of Fantasy. Ann Arbor: UMI Press, 1987. Cases, Cesare. 'Calvino e "il pathos della distanza/" Patrie lettere, 160-6. Turin: Einaudi, 1987. Also in Maria Corti and Cesare Segre, eds., I metodi attuali della critica, 53-8. Turin: Edizioni RAI, 1970. Casey, Edward S. Imagining: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976.

Bibliography 329 - Truth in Art/ Man and World 3 (November 1970): 351-69. Celati, Gianni. Talomar, nella prosa del mondo/Nwoua corrente 34.100 (1987): 22-42. Cerina, Giovanna. 'L'eroe, lo spazio narrative e la costruzione del significato. Lettura di Ultimo viene il corvo di I. Calvino/ Dalla novella rusticale al racconto neorealista, 115-53. Rome: Bulzoni, 1979. Citati, Pietro. 'I sensi di Calvino.' Corriere della Sera (17 June 1980): 3. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness with The Congo Diary, ed. Robert Hampson. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995. - 'Nel laboratorio di Calvino (da lettere inedite)/ Strumenti critici n.s. 5.63 (1990): 137^6. Corti, Maria. Testi o macrotesto? I racconti di Marcovaldo/ Strumenti critici 9.27 (1975): 182-97. - // viaggio testuale. Turin: Einaudi, 1978. Corti, Maria, and Segre, Cesare, eds. I metodi attuali della critica in Italia. Turin: Edizione RAI, 1970. Cottafavi, Betto, and Maurizio Magri, eds. Narratori dell'invisibile. Simposio in memoria di Italvo Calvino. Modena: Mucchi, 1987. Daros, Philippe. Italo Calvino. Paris: Hachette, 1995. Da Vinci, Leonardo. Paragone: Poetry and Painting. Ed. A. Phillip McMahon. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956. De Chirico, Giorgio. Autoritratto. Greenwhich: Coll.S. Resor, 1911. Deidier, Roberto. 'Figure del labirinto: appunti sui boschi di Calvino/ Otto/ Novecento 17 (1) (1993): 153-62. - Le forme del tempo. Saggio su Italo Calvino. Milan: Guerini Studio, 1995. - 'Narrative Discourse in Calvino: Praxis or Poiesis/ PMLA 90 (1975): 14-25. De Lauretis, Teresa. 'Reading the (Post)Modern Text: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler/ In Franco Ricci, ed., Calvino Revisited, 131-45. Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1989. De Nicola, Francesco, ed. Italo Calvino scrittore anche per la scuola. Atti del seminario di studi aggiornati (Chiavari, 2 marzo 1991). Lavagna: Serigraf, 1994. Derrida, J. Applied Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. - The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987. Descartes, Rene. 'Discours I.' La dioptrique. 1902. Diderot, Denis. Oeuvres completes de Diderot, Ed. Jules Assezat. Nendeln: Liechtenstein, Kraus Reprint, 1966. - Pensieri sparsi sulla pittura, la scultura e la poesia per continuare i 'Salons/ Palermo: Centro internazionale studi di estetica, 1996.

330 Bibliography Dini, Andrea. 'Calvino al Premio Riccione 1947,' Paragons 524-6 (1993): 33-59. Dipple, Elizabeth. The Unresolvable Plot. New York: Routledge, 1988. Eco, Umberto. // nome della rosa. Milan: Bompiani, 1980. - The Role of the Reader. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979. - A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979. Elkins, James. The Object Stares Back. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. Falaschi, Giovanni, ed. Italo Calvino. Atti del convegno internazionale. Milan: Garzanti, 1988. Feinstein, Wiley. The Doctrinal Core of If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.' In Franco Ricci, ed., Calvino Revisited, 147-55. Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1989. Ferraro, Bruno. 'II castello dell'If e la sua struttura in Le citta invisibili,' Letteratura italiana contemporanea 22 (1987): 95-113. Ferretti, Gian Carlo. Le capre di Bikini: Calvino giornalista e saggista 1945-1985. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1989. Ficara, Giorgio. 'La scuola de Palomar.' Alfabeta 72 (May 1985): 5. Flaubert, Gustave. L'Essai sur la peinture sur verre. Paris: Edouard Frere, 1832. - Madame Bovary, Ebauches erfragments inedits. Paris: Louis Conard, 1936. - Oeuvres completes. Paris: Louis Conard, 1910. - Trois Contes. Paris: Gamier, 1988. Fontana, Luca. 'Italo Calvino/ City Limits (20-6 September 1985): 78-9. Foucault, Michel. Foucault Live (Interviews, 1966-84), ed. Sylvene Lotringer, trans. John Johnston. New York: Random House, 1989. - The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1973. - This is Not a Pipe, trans. J. Harkness. Berkeley: California University Press, 1983. Francese, Joseph. Narrating Postmodern Time and Space. Albany: SUNY Press, 1997. Frasson-Marin, Aurore. Italo Calvino et I'imaginaire. Geneva and Paris: Editions Slatkine, 1986. Freedberg, David. The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989. Fried, Michael. 'Art and Objecthood.' In George Dickie and Richard Scalafani, eds., Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology. New York: St Martin's, 1977. Gabriele, Tommasina. Italo Calvino: Eros and Language. London: Associated University Presses, 1994. Gandelman, Claude. Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Gombrich, E.H. Art and Illusion. London: Phaidon Press, 1961. - 'Image and Code: Scope and Limits of Conventionalism in Pictorial Repre-

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332 Bibliography Kemp, Martin, ed. Leonardo on Painting. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Kennedy, J.M. A Psychology of Picture Perception. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1974. Krieger, Murray. Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1962. Lacan, Jaques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton, 1978. Langlois, E.H. L'Essaie sur la peinture sur verre. Paris: Edouard Frere, 1832. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Poetry and Painting. Trans. Ellen Frothingham. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969. - Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Trans. Edward A. McCormick. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Luebe, Eberhard. 'Sul rapporto tra letteratura e arti figurative nelle ultime opere di Italo Calvino.' Letteratura e arti figurative 3:1201-9. Licht, Fred. Canova. New York: Abbeville, 1983. Lindsay, Kenneth C, ed. Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982. Lodi, Letigra. T colori della mente. Italo Calvino: scritti sulle arti.' In Giorgio Bertone, ed. Italo Calvino: La lettura, la scienza, la citta atti del congresso nazionale di studi San Remo. Turin: Einaudi, 1996. Lucente, Gregory L. 'Un'intervista con Italo Calvino,'Nuova corrente 34.100 (1987): 375-86. Maclntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1981. Malek, J. The Arts Compared. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1974. Manann, A. Lessing's Laokoon. Oxford, 1878. Matejka, L., ed. Sound, Sign, and Meaning. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Materials, 1976. May, Rollo. The Cry for Myth. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991. McCormick, Peter J. Modernity, Aesthetics, and the Bounds of Art. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. McLaughlin, Martin L. 'Calvino's Visible Cities,' Romance Studies 22 (1993): 67-82. - Italo Calvino. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. Melotti, Fausto. Lo spazio inquieto. Turin: Binaudi, 1971. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo. 'L'arco e le pietre (Calvino, Le citta invisibili)/ La tradizione del Novecento, 406-26. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1973.

Bibliography 333 Merrell, Floyd. Peirce, Signs, and Meaning. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1997. Mitchell, W.J.T. ed. Applied Iconology: Essays in Verbal and Visual Representation. Dartmouth: School of Criticism and Theory, 1990. - 'Ekphrasis and the Other,' South Atlantic Quarterly 91 (Summer 1992): 695-719. - Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. - The Language of Images. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1974. - Picture Theory. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994. Motte, Warren F. Telling Games,' In Franco Ricci, ed., Calvino Revisited, 117-30. Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1989. Mukarovsky, Jan. The Word and Verbal Art. Trans, and ed. John Steiner and Peter Steiner. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. Mulvey, Laura. 'Magnificent Obsession,' Parachute 42 (1986): 6-12. Nava, Giuseppe. 'Calvino e il fantastico,' Paragone 42.502 (1991): 49-64. - 'La geografia di Italo Calvino,' Paragone 38.446 (1987): 21-39. Nemerov, Howard. The Painter Dreaming in the Scholar's House. New York: The Phoenix Bookshop, 1968. Ogden, C.W., and LA. Richards. The Meaning of Meaning. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938. Olken, I.T. With Pleated Eye and Garnet Wing: Symmetries of Italo Calvino. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984. Ong, Walter J. The Presence of the Word. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967. O'Toole, M. The Language of Displayed Art. London: Leicester University Press, 1994. Palmieri, Pierre. Tl sistema spaziale del Barone rampante,' Lingua e stile 32 (1988): 259-70. Panofsky, E. Studies in Iconology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939. Paolini, Giulio. IDEM. Turin: Einaudi, 1975. Pavese, Cesare. 'Raccontare e come ballare.' Saggi letterari, 295-7. Turin: Einaudi, 1951. Peirce, Charles S. Collected Papers 2. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1932. Pescio Bottino, Germana. Calvino. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1967. Pellizzari, Lorenzo, ed. L'Avventura di uno spettatore: Italo Calvino e il cinema. Bergamo: Lubrina, 1990. Ponti, Annalisa. Come leggere 'II sentiero del nidi di ragno' di Italo Calvino. Milan: Mursia, 1991. Prigognine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. Order Out of Chaos. New York: Bantam, 1984.

334 Bibliography Re, Lucia. Calvino and the Age of Neorealism: Fables of Estrangement. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Ricci, Franco, ed. Calvino Revisited. Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1989. - 'De Chirico City: Calvinian Ambulations/ Modern Language Review 91 (1996): 78-93. - Difficult Games: A Reading of 'I racconti' by Italo Calvino. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1990. - 'Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures.' In Franco Ricci, ed., Calvino Revisited, 189-206. Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1989. - The Quest for Sonship in Le citta invisibili and La strada di San Giovanni/ Forum Italicum 29 (1) (1995): 52-75. Rifaterre, Michael. Semiotics of Poetry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. Roelens, Nathalie. L'odissea di uno scrittore virtuale. Strategic narrative in 'Palomar' di Italo Calvino. Florence: Franco Cesati, 1989. Ruskin, John. Modern Painters. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1935. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Psychology of Imagination. London: Rider, 1950. Scholes, Robert. Fabulation and Metafiction. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986. Segre, Cesare. 'Se una notte d'inverno un romanziere sognasse un aleph di dieci colori,' In Teatro e romanzo. Due tipi di comunicazione letteraria. Turin: Einaudi, 1984. - 'Se una notte d'inverno uno scrittore sognasse un aleph di dieci colori/ Strumenti critici 13.39-40 (1979): 177-214. Sgarbi, Vittorio. Gli immortali. Milan: Rizzoli, 1999. Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley, Cooper. Second Characters or the Language of Forms. Ed. B. Rand. New York: Greenwood Press, 1969. Shapiro, Meyer. 'Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art,' Semiotica 1 (1969): 223^42. Shaughnessy, Mina P. Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Shlain, Leonard. Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light. New York: Quill, 1991. Steiner, Wendy. The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation between Modern Literature and Painting. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982. - ed. Image and Code. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981. - 'Sergej Karcevskij's Semiotics of Language.' In L. Matejka, ed., Sound, Sign, and Meaning. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Materials, 1976. Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1954. Stille, Alexander. 'An Interview with Italo Calvino,' Saturday Review (MarchApril 1985): 36-9.

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Name Index

Ackerman, Diane, 146 Adami, Valeric, 20,213, 227, 229^8 Agilulfo, 150-1,160-1,164,167,172, 221, 281 Alberti, Leon Battista, 8, 39,104-5, 220, 229, 239,314 n.22 Andrews, Lew, 302 n.55 Anscombe, G.E.M., 292 n.ll Arakawa, Shusaku, 206-11, 213 Ariosto, Ludovico, 110 Aristotle, 49, 279 Arnheim, Rudolph, 8,129 Artaud, Antonin, 204 Augustine, Saint, 8,119 Baj, Enrico, 125 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 29 Bal, Mieke, 7, 226, 234 Balbi, Renato, 127,149 Barilli, Renato, 43, 230 Barthes, Roland, 8,11,12, 74,184, 215 Baudelaire, 261 Beckett, Samuel, 204 Belpoliti, Marco, 7, 294 n.8 Berger, John, 44

Bertone, Giorgio, 294 n.8 Blake, William, 15 Borges, Jorge, 77,216 Botticelli, Sandro, 115 Brecht, Berthold, 201 Bryson, Norman, 256,272,280,292 n.ll Bradamante-Suor Teodora, 50, 52, 53-6,87,150,259 Buonarotti, Michelangelo, 192-3 Burke, Edmund, 8 Butor, Michel, 204 Caesar, Julius, 131 Camon, Ferdinando, 128 Capozzi, Rocco, 78, 299 n.19 Carpaccio, Vittore, 115,117-18,120 Carroll, Lewis, 82 Carruga, Amilcare, 276-81 Carter, Albert Howard III, 110 Cattaneo, Carlo, 131 Cavalcanti, Guido, 238, 247 Cecchi, Emilio, 131 Celati, Gianni, 99, 293 n.22 Celine, Louis, 204 Cezanne, Paul, 204

338 Name Index Chagho, 80 Citati, Pietro, 130 Conrad,' Joseph, 42,131,132,168, 170-1 Corti, Maria, 175 Dante, 59, 60,80,138 Dantes, Ekmond, 150-1,158,167 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 44,186 Dedalus, Stephen, 286 Derrida, Jacques, 6, 230 De Chirico, Giorgio, 213,227,261-75 De Hollanda, Francisco, 192 De Lauretis, Teresa, 174 Delle Isole, Alano, 276 Diderot, Denis, 91,105,220,261,280, 300 n.40 Dipple, Elisabeth, 82 Diirer, Albrecht, 105,115 Eco, Umberto, 85,194 Einaudi, Luigi, 131 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 100 Escher, Martin, 218-19 Falaschi, Giorgio, 294 n.8 Faulkner, William, 215 Ficara, Giorgio, 10 Flaubert, Gustave, 190, 216-17,263, 267,316 n.36,319 n.49 Fontana, Luca, 86 Foucault, Michel, 17,71,152,214 Fourier, Charles, 224 Francese, Joseph, 73 Fried, Michael, 225 Gadda, Carlo Emilio, 131, 204 Galilei, Galileo, 84,131, 240-2 Gandelman, Claude, 147,269,307 n.10

Garroni, Emilio, 81,179 George, St, and Jerome, St, 113,115, 117-18,120-1, 220-1,259 Ginzburg, Carlo, 293 n.22 Giorgione, 115 Gnoli, Domenico, 213,226,248-61 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 40 Goodman, Nelson, 8, 293 n.24,299 n.23,314 n.21 Gombrich, Ernst, 8,33, 292 n.ll Gramsci, Antonio, 137 Grandville, J.J., 219 Grow, Gerald, 140 Hagen, M.A., 8 Hagstrum, Jean H., 294 n.4 Heidegger, Martin, 185 Hemingway, Ernest, 131 Hermogenes of Tarsus, 134 Hochberg, J.E., 292 n.ll Hofstadter, Douglas R., 129,130 Holly, Michael Ann, 8, 292 n.ll Horace, 70 Hume, Kathryn, 23 Hutcheon, Linda, 214 Ignatius Loyola, Saint Iser, Wolfgang, 5, 291 n.4 Joyce, James, 204 Kafka, Franz, 201 Kandinsky, Wassily, 204, 243 Kennedy, J.M.A., 8 Karcevskij, 79 Khan, Kublai, 107-9,186 Kim, 168-72, 281 Kipling, Rudyard, 169,170 Klee, Paul, 126,216,218-19,304 n.8

Name Index 339 Krieger, Murray, 61, 97, 292 n.ll, 307 n.5 Lacan, Jacques, 55, 67,93,147, 272 Lautreamont, 33 Lessing, Gotthold E., 9, 37,71,142, 295 n.28, 296 n.43, 298 n.9 Leopardi, 10, 72 Leube, Eberhard, 73 Levi, Carlo, 212 Lodi, Letizia, 292 n.13, 294 n.8 Loyola, St Ignatius, 137-^45 Lucretius, 6, 79, 80,131,150,152 Lyotard, Francois, 85 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 131 Maclntyre, Alasdair, 319 n.7 Magritte, Rene, 214, 218, 228 Malek, J., 298 n.7 Manganelli, Giorgio, 124 Matta, 219 Mauro, Walter, 134, 303 n.2 McLaughlin, Martin, 308 n.14 Medusa, 25, 24,48, 59,96-7,121 Melotti, Fausto, 174-6 Melville, Herman, 131 Mercury, 117 Merrell, Floyd, 191, 231 Messina, Antonello da, 115 Miller, Henry, 204 Mitchell, W.J.T., 8,17, 52, 71-2,95, 185-6, 215, 292 n.16, 301 n.45, 317 n.45 Mondrian, 204 Montale, Eugenic, 204 Morandi, Giorgio, 204 Mukarovsky, Jan, 298 n.7 Mulvey, Laura, 227 Nabokov, Vladimir, 85, 39

Neri, Guido, 293 n.22 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8 Nievo, Ippolito, 215 Ormea, Amerigo, 50 O'Toole, M., 292 n.ll Ovid, 79,150,152 Palomar, 19,38,45,47,49-50,77,151, 167,193, 213,229,250, 268, 275, 283-7 Panofsky, Erwin, 8 Paolini, Giulio, 186-7 Pavese, Cesare, 84,191 Peirce, Charles S., 19,80 Pellizzari, Lorenzo, 295 n.26 Pericoli, Tullio, 69, 215-17 Perseus, 46 Petrarca, Francesco, 10 Petrignani, Sandra, 309 n.24 Picasso, Pablo, 201-2,204-6, 217-18 Pierantoni, Ruggero, 126 Pin, 49,168, 288-90 Pinocchio, 201, 235 Pisanello, Antonio, 115 Plato, 8 Pollock, Jackson, 204 Polo, Marco, 38,49-50,63, 85,105-9, 186 Ponchiroli, Daniele, 201 Ponge, Francis, 135 progymnasmata, 73 Queneau, Raymond, 85 Quintillian, 52 Qfwfq, 49,51-2, 54,63-4, 77-9, 81-2, 92-9,152,162,173,211,286,289 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 272 Riegl, Alois, 147

340 Name Index Riffaterre, Michael, 162 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 131 Ruskin, John, 276 Salinari, Giambattista, 131, 303 n.l Santischi, Madeleine, 63 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 308 n.l 7 Saturn, 117 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 80 Scholes, Robert, 294 n.7 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 39 Segre, Cesare, 186 Serafini, Luigi, 76 Shaughnessy, Mina P., 305 n.32 Starobinsky, Jean, 138 Steiner, Wendy, 19,84, 90,185 Steinberg, Saul, 213,218,220-1, 242 Stevens, Wallace: and 'Anecdote of the Jar/ 103

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 46, 215 Stille, Alexander, 86 Talbot, Michael, 306 n.48 Themerson, 80 Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti), 115 Todorov, Tzvetan, 24 Trevor-Roper, Patrick, 277 Uccello, Paolo, 115 Vattimo, Gianni, 136 Vittorini, Elio, 204-6 Wahl, Francois, 3,5,6,14-15,42,80 Wellek, Rene, 70 White, Hayden, 39 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 8 Wolf, T, 298 n.7

Subject Index

body; and disembodiment, 43, 223; as map, 167; as text, 178 cinema, 195; and Calvino, 195-200; and writing, 35,197-9 description, 17; as collage, 39; as method, 135, 227; as process, 19 eidolon, 6, 49,127 ekphrasis, 5-6, 20, 49, 52, 61, 73, 79, 86, 87,102,104,164,165, 229; definition, 73, 134, 296 n.39; envy, 22, 121, 223, 301 n.43; ecstasy, 99; fear, 17, 50, 96, 99, 109, 130, 301 n.43; hope, 25, 95, 50, 95, 99,100,109, 301 n.43; incompetence, 49 enargeia, 52,160

exercise; writing as, 8,112, 124, 136, 140 exercises de style, 83 eye; as consciousness, 277; and looking, inner, 29, 136, 277 fabula, 9, 226

fantasy, 18, 59,143,148-9,153,156; images, 85; visual, 26

father, 62; and language, 63-4; and son, 67 focalization, 226 haptic vision, 37,147,188, 252,283 heterotopia, 214, 275 homunculus, 158,168,170 icon, 19; Peirce, 19-20 image: as concept, 84,179; Calvino as, 153; cinema and, 199; definition, 69; female, 232; as inspiration, 4-6,15, 72,101,127,173-4,189-90,191; mental, 17, 258; passive, 6, 251; real, 17,101,176, 254; self, 57,184, 192 imagetext, 252 imagocentrism, 8-9,19,108 labyrinth, 144,157,171; of words, 53 line: as border, 30, 239; as image, 239-40; and the mind, 208-9, 239; painted, 190,210,236-8,243-5; and painters, 33,243; plotline, 56; as protagonist, 236-8, 243-5; and writing, 241 literature: definition of, 64

342 Subject Index logocentrism, 8,19,47; desire, 61; and graphic, 246; logos, 246 maps, internal, 167; as metaphor, 157-9,174,176; and mind, 206-8; and narrative, 161,175; as narrative strategy, 204, 259-60; and painting, 206-7, 225 Medusa, 48,59, 96-7; and Perseus, 45,121 metaphysical painting, 262 mind: and painting, 208-10; and vision, 210 Nature, 10 Neorealism, 32, 78 Newtonian physics, 26 Other, 252, 278; female, 48-9 OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle), 14, 62,89,106,144, 162, 297 n.48 painting: as inspiration, 204,268; and literature, 184-91, 282; love of, 3, 201; as sister art, 70-1 Perseus, 46 photography, 43-7, 49 Pin, 49, 288 Pinocchio, 201 progymnasmata, 73,312 n.39,320 n.22 reader: ideal, 154-5 science, 18 scoiattolo: writer as, 7 senses, 91; hearing, 93; vision, 8,17, 74; and synesthesia, 78; and writing, 211

space: and culture, 16-17; and time, 245 spatiality, 17, 56, 250; and description, 35 spectator, 42, 227,234; and culture, 72; as reader, 107; stance, 105,197; as writer, 226 'La squadratura/ 186-90 surrealists, 33 surreality, 30,35 Tel quel, 83 temporality, 17,56 time: and space, 15,245 varco, 248 virtual reality, 18,152,155-6 vision, 124; detached, 43; haptic, 37, 147,188,252,283; and mind, 210; optic, 147; and painting, 225; as process, 152, 283 visual other, 130 voyage: as cognition, 194, 257; as narrative strategy, 174-5,177 voyeurism, 9, 229 white page: as canvas, 39 word: active, 6, 285; as game, 181-2; and illustration, 90, 270; and image, 6,11,14,17,54,58,71,78-9, 100,107,121,171-3,185,211,259, 299, 315 n.33; as image, 16, 76, 246-7; and reality, 21,44,82,92, 103,129,142; versus image, 44, 75, 128,179, 200,255 writing: act of, 6, 8,23, 31, 64,113, 144, 222,268, 278; as eskesis, 14556; as intercourse, 55; as map, 159; and re-writing, 215-6; as silence, 59; and visualization, 126,148, 272

Title Index

'Alba sui rami nudi/ 165 Album Cahino, 115,116,117,192 Gli amori difficili, 32,150, 251, 253 'Anch'io dico la mia/ 115 'Andato al comando,' 28,166 'Autobiografia di uno spettatore,' 194 'L'avventura di una bagnante,' 82-3 'L'avventura di un fotografo,' 43,2313 'L'avventura di un lettore/ 59 'L'avventura di un miope,' 276-9 'L'avventura di un poeta,' 50, 59 'L'avventura di uno sciatore,' 59 'L'avventura di uno spettatore/ 197-8 // barone rampante, 52, 75 'Un bel gioco dura poco,' 155 'II bosco degli animale,' 28 'Buon a nulla/ 36 'Campo di mine,' 43, 99 'Le capre ci guardano,' 10 // castello del destini incrociati, 85, 89, 92,106-10,113,116,120,144,150, 216,224,228,271,279 // cavaliere inesistente, 30-1,42, 50, 52, 87, 89,150,159, 224, 259

'Che testa/ 18,149 'Cibernetica e fantasmi/ 18,23,32,92, 143, 207,250,290 'Cinema and the Novel/ 200 Le citta invisibili, 50, 57,63, 68,85, 92,106-9,144,150,178, 216,219, 261 Collezione di sabbia, 9-10, 76, 85,158, 194, 210,223, 269 'Come un volo di anatre/ 165 'Correnti del romanzo italiano d'oggi/ 203 Le cosmicomiche, 51, 68, 77-8, 84,143, 224 Cratylus, 8 'Dal terrazzo/ 104 'La distanza della luna/ 80 'La fame a Bevera/ 166 Fiabe italiane, 126 'I figli di Babbo Natale/ 90,162 'La forma dello spazio/ 162-3 La formica argentina, 57,104,141-2, 251, 253 Turti ad arte/ 13 'II gatto e il poliziotto/ 28

344 Title Index La giornata di uno scrutatore, 43,62,68, 80,150 Guardie e ladri, 198 'Luna e Gnac/ 87-8 Marcovaldo, ovvero le stagioni in citta, 32,155 'Meiosi/ 150 La memoria del mondo, 77,143 'II midollo del leone/ 12,15,75,137 'Mitosi/ 150 'Morte/ 150 'Natura e storia del romanzo/ 210 / nostri antenati, 5,12,27, 28,31,42, 62,68,107,189, La nuvola di smog, 43,50,150-2,251 Palomar, 10,12,40,57, 85,92, 99, 104-5,136,153,149,150,158,250, 283, 284,290 Taura sul sentiero/ 28 'La penna in prima persona/ 56,211 'La poubelle agreee/ 138 Prima che tu dica 'Pronto,' 37,142 I racconti, 18,28,58, 59, 67,219 Racconti fantastici dell'ottocento, 26-8 'Reinhard,' 206 'Ricevimento al Castello di Bardbaj/ 213 Romanzi e racconti III, 144, 223 Saggi 11,223 Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, 20,43,56, 58,89,92, 98,113,153, 156,158,163,177-8,180,184,185, 186,197, 209, 216, 217, 228, 239, 282, 297 'Senza colori', 51

'Un segno nello spazio,' 80-1,173, 217 // sentiero dei nidi di ragno, 9, 21, 23, 34,50, 57, 62, 79, 93,149,158,168, 172, 281,288,290 'La sfida al labirinto,' 62 Six Memosfor the Next Millennium, 27, 29,45, 72,117,127,129,137,152, 194, 247; 'Lightness,' 8,155; 'Quickness,' 8; 'Visibility/ 8, 72,127,148,153; 'Multiplicity/ 142 Sotto il sole giaguaro, 124,142,146, 156, 'La spada del sole/ 283 La speculazione edilizia, 43,62 'La spirale/ 57,99-103,106,150,217, 239 The Spiritual Exercises ofSt Ignatius, 89,90,137,145-8,153,212 'La squadratura/ 121-2 La strada di San Giovanni, 129 'La strada di San Giovanni/ 62-5, 128 'Sul tappeto di foglie illuminate dalla luna/ 58 Ti con zero, 18, 77,143 Tutti in un punto/ 78,156 'Gli uccelli/ 64, 81,86,89, 92-9,216 Ultimo viene il coruo, 67,165 'Ultimo viene il corvo/ 24, 210,269 Una pietra sopra, 5,48,220-2, 289 'Uno dei tre e ancora vivo/ 28 'Vento in citta/ 141 // visconte dimezzato, 4,12,21,52,53 'Vittorini: Progettazione e letteratura/ 201 The Written and the Unwritten Word/ 11,61, 74,125,196