Strange fate that of Italo Calvino, storyteller, intellectual, publisher. His fortune is a strange story. This is how an expert like Mario Barenghi summarizes the graphic between fluctuations and waves, whose volume Italo Calvino has been on the kiosk since Friday, October 13th together with the “Corriere della Sera”. The lines and the margins, one hundred years after the writer’s birth (Cuba, 1923 – Siena, 1985): “More or less, for about three decades, starting with the dazzling debut of The Path of the Spider’s Nest, Calvino was considered brilliant, but atypical, if not marginal, writer: an excellent and talented narrator, but not very representative of the values and trends of the national literary panorama. Then, in a relatively short space of time – roughly between If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979) and the posthumous American Lessons (1988) – it became a great classic of late 20th century fiction.” At this point, Barenghi continues , Calvino, as the absolute dominator and almost sole author of the school, has become the polemical target of those who confront him with this or that of his contemporary authors, who were perhaps classified earlier than him. and then landed in a kind of cone of shadow.
It is the interruptions and fluctuations of the canon: those that fascinate literary sociologists and that also stimulate the simple reader, moved by pure passion, to think. Calvino was someone who put his hands deep into the workshop of storytelling, into the laboratory of storytelling. At the beginning, shortly after the war and the resistance, he mixed an almost oral language and orchestrated a story that, with decisive consequences, takes the perspective of a child lost in history and in the adult world. It is exactly the brilliant success of “The Road to the Spider’s Nest” (1947) with the little pin. Many years later, Calvino returned to this world and explained its creation and meaning in a famous foreword from 1964. The stories, Calvino says, were on everyone’s lips in the immediate postwar period, a lot of oral tales offered to people Writer who took possession of them, mixed them with his own, revised them. It was a kind of “desire to tell” to which the author added his own taste for storytelling and his own craft. “It was Pavese,” notes Calvino in the 1964 foreword, “the first who spoke about me in a fairy-tale tone, and I, who had not noticed it until then, knew it only too well from that moment on, and I have tries to confirm the definition.
Following Pavese’s intuition, Calvino had now immersed himself in the sea of fairy tales of our tradition with the collection (Italian fairy tales) published in 1956. In the very dense introduction to the volume, the collector-narrator said at a certain point: “I believe: fairy tales are true.” Then he spoke of the “catalog of fates” and again of the “infinite possibility of metamorphosis of the existing.”
We are already close to a special experience: that of an operator who combines and weaves stories together, inviting the reader to lose himself in the meanderings of the book, perhaps with a wink to semiology and structuralism. Then it will be necessary to quote a famous work – from the essayist Calvino, which must always be taken into account in dialogue with colleagues, friends, even delicate interlocutors (e.g. Fortini mentioned by Barenghi), as well as the letter writer entitled “Cybernetics and Ghosts” (notes on storytelling as a combinatorial process) from 1967. It impresses today with certain expectations of artificial intelligence, of the storytelling entrusted to machines, but is also full of references to an evolving poetics : the one who wants to lead to the castle of crossed fates and when a traveler on a winter night. For example, it says: “Let’s see how I react psychologically when I learn that writing is just a combinatorial process between given elements: Well, what I feel instinctively is a feeling of relief, of security.” He is Calvino , a reader and admirer of Borges, a master actually quoted in the American Lessons. In the last of them, the diversity of fictional worlds is praised, which are perhaps the revelation of an unimagined depth of ours: “Every life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a selection of styles where everything can be done again and again mixed and rearranged in all sorts of ways.”
There is a thin thread of continuity and development between the beginnings of The Spider’s Nest Path and this author-combiner of stories. But if I had to quote a title, just a Calvinist title, I would think of the long story The Cloud of Smog (1958), in which an “I”, a subject, is clearly visible and placed in front of the cloud of gray, that lies over his life in which he is ordinary and anonymous and confronted with the chameleonism of a power that presents itself as a medicine for the evils that it itself creates. It is perhaps the first thing I read from Calvino that still remains in my memory: “There are those who condemn themselves to the grayness of the most mediocre life because they have had pain and bad luck; But there are also those who do it because they were luckier than they thought possible.