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Calvino at a Crossroads: Il castello dei destini incrociati

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Marilyn Schneider
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Abstract

In the two parallel stories that constitute Il castello, some suddenly mute travelers use tarot decks to communicate their horrific tales to one another. Ultimately, the ghostly kings, queens, knights, and other conventional or famous literary characters who inhabit these novellas delimit two “voices” that frequently overlap and even coincide: the narrator-author’s and the spectator-reader’s. The violent chivalric world of war, love, and magic that generates the narrative action also produces a metanarrative dimension that asserts the text’s subject as writing and reading, while simultaneously figuring Calvino’s own writerly persona. The Number One tarot, Il Bagatto (The Minstrel), often images Faust in the fiction but more importantly images the writer, a (Marlovian) Faustian conjurer destined to fail. The ever-changing sequences of the cards allegorize the making of a fiction, while the deck itself allegorizes the plenitude of the finished text, unattainable by its author.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 95 , Issue 1 , January 1980 , pp. 73 - 90
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1980

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References

Notes

1 (Turin: Einaudi, 1973); in English, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, 1976). All citations in the text refer to these editions. Unless otherwise indicated, page numbers refer to both editions. The volume title appears as Il castello; the novella titles as “Il castello” and “La taverna.” In addition to having parallel titles and making parallel use of tarot decks, the novellas are of approximately the same length (50–70 pp.) and have the same number of chapters; each sets the scene with an introductory frame chapter and concludes with an epilogic frame scene that “erases” itself. “Il castello” appeared originally in Tarocchi: Il mazzo visconteo di Bergamo e New York (Parma: Ricci, 1969); an English-language edition by the same publisher came out in 1976.

2 Calvino's journeying into “distant epochs” and “imaginary countries” to relate “unlikely” stories seems no longer to require the self-questioning or justification that it did when the formally neorealist author published I nostri antenati (Turin: Einaudi, 1960), whose Preface contains the above-cited expressions in its first sentence. Since then, Calvino has voiced his penchant for fanciful fiction in Le cosmicomiche (1965), Ti con zero (1967), and Città invisibili (1972), translated into English as Cosmicomics (1968), t zero (1969), and Invisible Cities (1974).

3 See Maria Corti, “II gioco dei tarocchi come crea-zione d'intreccio,” La Battana, 26 (Sept. 1971), 5–20; trans, into French as “Le Jeu comme génération du texte: Des tarots au récit,” Semiotica, 7 (1973), 33–48. On the question of the narrative “now,” see Paul de Man's “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. Charles Singleton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969). In examining the temporal structure of a poem by Wordsworth, de Man observes that “Wordsworth is one of the few poets who can write proleptically about their own death and speak, as it were, from beyond their own graves” (p. 206).

This is possible because “The ‘now’ of the poem is not an actual now, but the ideal ‘now,‘ the duration of an acquired wisdom” (p. 206).

4 E.g. : “La commozione di questo racconto non s'era ancora dissipata …” ‘The emotion aroused by this story had not yet died away …’ (p. 15) or “Il sudore freddo non s'era ancora asciugato sulla mia schiena …” ‘The cold sweat was still damp on my spine’ (p. 25).

5 Note the fusion of forest, tarot deck, and intersecting stories occasioned by the word “questo” ‘this’: not the forest without but “this” one, inside, occupying the same space as “this” tarot deck and each scene of “this” dovetailing segmented story, of which each tale is a unit.

6 That Il castello's last statement is given to Macbeth intensifies the ubiquity of the Faust figure, which I treat at length further on in the essay. For mention of Shakespeare's Macbeth as a direct descendant of Doctor Faustus, see, e.g., Helen Gardner, “The Damnation of Faust,” and Willard Farnham, Introd., in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Doctor Faustus, ed. Willard Farnham (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), pp. 36 and 1. respectively.

7 “IL PADRE. Ecco, signore: forse, preparandole me-glio la scena, attratta dagli oggetti stessi del suo com-mercio, chi sa che non venga tra noi …” ‘THE FATHER. I'll tell you, sir. Who knows if, by arranging the stage especially for her, attracted by the very objects of her trade, she will not come here …‘ (Pirandello, Sei personaggi, Biblioteca Moderna Series, 7th ed. [Milan: Mondadori, 1961], p. 61; ellipsis Pirandello's). Similarly, the chatelaine of “Il castello” continually seeks her husband in new card sequences.

8 Visually, the title analogy persists into the spatial arrangement, where the identification card precedes, and stands apart from, the narrative sequence in “Il castello”; even in the fractured arrangement of “La taverna” it retains its initial, signatory prominence, with only ihe one (minor) exception of Lady Macbeth, whose function is to relate her husband's destiny.

9 Ennio Flaiano, in his posthumous Autobiografia del Bin di Prussia, ed. Cesare Garboli (Milan: Rizzoli, 1974), comments on (he importance of the film image in terms pertinent to Calvino and his tarot mosaic:

É nclle pellicole che ho visto … la vita assumere un ordine formale, strettamenta imbrigliato dalle leggi délia visione. É dunque sugli schermi (e nei quadri), che la vera vita si svolge, e azioni e reazioni si con-densano in ombre e luci, e le filosofie vengono illuminate dalle composizioni, e tutto si svolge come in un sogno prestabilito. (p. 18)

It's in films that I have seen … life assume a formal order, tightly kept in check by the laws of vision. It is therefore on movie screens (and in paintings) that real life takes place, and actions and reactions are condensed into shadows and lights, and philosophies are illuminated by compositions, and everything occurs as if in a prearranged dream. (my translation)

Shortly before “Il castello” appeared, Calvino published a theoretical essay on reality perceived as a discontinuous series of images. See “Appunti sulla nar-rativa come processo combinatorio,” Ntiova corrente, 46–41 (1968), 139–48; trans, as “Notes towards a Definition of the Narrative Form as a Combinative Process,” Twentieth Century Studies, 3 (May 1970), 93–101.

10 Note the absence of time and death in Teresa de Lauretis' list of themes in Calvino's earlier fiction: “desire, rivalry, guilt, the impulse to express and to communicate, the need for self-affirmation but also for belonging, the necessity to make ethical and existential choices” (“Narrative Discourse in Calvino: Praxis or Poiesis?” PMLA, 90 [1975], 415). Death and especially time are given greater roles in Calvino's Città invisibili (1972), a work close to Il Castello both chronologically and conceptually.

11 De Lauretis' essay provides an excellent analysis of structuralist and semiotic elements in Calvino. See, also, Walter Pedullà, “Calvino alla Corte di Lacan,” Il Caffè, 19 (1972), 77–85, for a discussion of the influence of current French thought on Calvino.

12 See Paul de Man's chapter “Ludwig Binswanger and the Sublimation of the Self,” in Blindness and Insight (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), esp. pp. 40–45, passim, for some suggestive remarks concerning notions of suspension related to aesthetic consciousness and the “perfectly self-sufficient” cosmos.

13 Examples of narrative uncertainties abound in both novellas. A random sampling of the first three tales of “Il castello” yields the following: “L'interpretazione di questo passo del racconto non era facile …” ‘The interpretation of this passage in the tale was not easy’ (p. 11); “Non ci restava che azzardare delle conget-ture” ‘We could only venture some guesses’ (p. 12); “L'ipotesi piu probabile che mi occorse (e come a me credo anche ad altri silenziosi spettatori) era che …” ‘The most probable hypothesis that occurred to me(and just as to me also, 1 believe, to other silent spectators) was that …’ (p. 16); “… posô due carte di Spade … accostamento in so difficile da interprctare” ‘… he put down two Swords … a combination difficult to interpret as such’ (p. 22; Weaver, pp. 21–22): “Non so quanti di noi fossero riusciti a decifrare in qualche modo la storia. senza perdersi in mezzo a tutte queste cartacce di coppe e di denari che saltavano fuori proprio quando piû desideravamo una chiara illus-trazione dei fatti” T have no idea how many of us managed to decipher the tale somehow, without getting lost among all those low cards, cups and coins, that popped up just when we were most eager for a clear exposition of the facts' (p. 21).

14 In “Infernal Inversion and Christian Conversion (Inferno xxxiv),” Italien, 42 (1965). 35–41. John Freccero discusses the meaning of the crucified Peter and Dante's Satan, who appears upside down from the perspective of Purgatory and Paradise. Freccero traces the symbolic posture to Plato's Timaeus. Calvino's striking use of the Hanged Man tarot in the Orlando episode anticipates a second striking use of the card in the second novella's “Waverer's Tale,” which contains the allusion to The Waste Land. It is the tarot that is famous for being missing in Eliot's poem: “I do not find / The Hanged Man …” declares Madame Sosostris (i.54–55). Calvino suggests that it may be the card in which she recognizes the drowned Phoenician sailor (p. 62). In Calvino's fiction, The Hanged Man is the waverer; allegorically, he stands for one of the faces of the narrator-writer, the same persona addressed by Eliot's fortune-teller (“Here, said she, / is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor” [t.46–47]). Eliot's note on this passage associates the tarot with Frazer's Hanged God and, more specifically, with Christ, the “hooded figure” in his Emmaus scene (The Waste Land v). The resonances set off by the linking of the two texts merit further attention, though they cannot be sorted in this essay. Also worth more consideration is the importance to both works of the Grail legend. Calvino's castle, for instance, like the Fisher King's, is run-down but still indistinctly elegant, is located in the middle of a desolate forest, and is reached across water.

15 For an extended discussion of the moon's significance, see Mircea Eliade's chapter “The Moon and Its Mystique,” in Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: World, 1958). Another fruitful desert field occurs in “La taverna”; the narrator perceives in the distant background of “dune gialle d'un deserto assolato” ‘yellow dunes of a sun-baked desert’ (in the Star tarot) the sudden sprouting of saxifrage (p. 60), an herbaceous plant that attaches to limestone with its sap.

16 The anthropologist Victor Turner has defined the marginal (or “liminal”) condition represented by a boundary line, an imaginary line that occupies no space, as “a realm of pure possibility” (The Forest of Symbols [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1967], p. 97). The horizon of the moon is in the same category and is, necessarily, “empty.”

17 According to Calvino, one of the powers of folklore is its ability to detail the possible destinies available in life. Especially important is folklore's ability to explain “la sostanza unitaria del tutto, uomini bestie piante cose, l'infinita possibilité di metamorfosi, di ciô che esiste” (Introd., his Fiabe Italiane [Turin: Einaudi, 1956], pp. xx-xxi). With the help of Lucretius, nature's “unitary essence” and the “infinite possibility of metamorphosis” achieve poetic form in Il castello.

18 Orlando and Astolfo present an apparent exception to my statement that cards rather than characters cross destinies. In Calvino's text, however, the two function to construct segments of a poetic vision that together constitute a single voice; Astolfo's role in Orlando's personal destiny is incidental to Calvino's basic purpose. Thus, the episode is not a true exception.

19 Spoken by Mephistopheles (Faustus xix.13–16).

20 Lévi-Strauss lists mist as a symbolic mediator between sky and earth and notes the intimate association in myth of the dew and the game: “the Dew-God may be at the same time the Game-Master …” (“The Structural Study of Myth,” in his Structural Anthropology [Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor-Doubleday, 1967], p. 222).

21 “(Le Bateleur e // Bagatto sono nomi d'oscura origine in entrambe le lingue e il solo loro significato sicuro è per entrambi il tarocco numéro uno)” ‘(Le Bateleur and Il Bagatto are names of obscure origin in both [French and Italian] and the only certain meaning for both terms is the Number One tarot)‘ (Calvino's Note, Il castello, p. 124.) In contrast to the original, the English translation asserts that “As a rule it is interpreted as The Juggler or The Magician” (p. 125). I favor the more inclusive term The Minstrel as the translation, but I generally retain the Italian term because of its inherent obscurity and density of meaning.

22 See Susan Noakes, “Self-Reading and Temporal Irony in Aurelia,” Studies in Romanticism, 16 (Winter 1977), 101–19, for a sensitive examination of temporal (as opposed to spatial) doubling and its implications for textual “self-reading.”

23 More explicitly, “La taverna,” with its disordered use of the tarots and roughness of language and mood (see just its first paragraph: two sentences thirty-one lines long, its staccato syntax strung together by sixty-six commas), is an “inferior” copy of its antecedent, “Il castello,” whose careful patterning of the cards and “elect company” (p. 4) evoke an atmosphere of refinement. The titles alone insinuate the “inferior” status of the second story. More interestingly, the writer as poor imitator is ironized by the uncertain status of the husband and wife (both emblems of the authorial persona): the narrator cannot tell whether they are chatelain-chatelaine or charlatan-maidservant. Finally, the “deteriorization” of the writing is also borne out by the second novella's “labored genesis” (“genesi travagliata”) in contrast to Calvino's ease in composing its predecessor in only a week (Note, Il castello, p. 127). The following paragraph on the second novella makes a case for Calvino's self-inscription into Il castello. As his mode of discourse manifests, he and its narrators speak with a single voice:

Il quadrato con le 78 carte che présenta come lo schema generale della Taverna non ha il rigore di quello del Castello: i “narratori” non procedono in linea retta né secondo un percorso regolare; vi sono carte che tor-nano a presentarsi in tutti i racconti e piu d'una volta in un racconto. Non diversamente, il testo scritto si puô dire l'archivio dei materiali accumulati via via, attraverso stratificazioni successive di interpretazioni iconologiche, di umori temperamentali, d'intenzioni ideologiche, d'impostazioni stilistiche. Se mi decido a pubblicare La taverna dei destini incrociati è soprat-tutto per liberarmene. Ancora adesso, col libro in bozze, continuo a rimetterci le mani, a smontarlo, a riscriverlo. Solo quando il volume sarà stampato ne resterô fuori una volta per tutte, spero. (pp. 127–28)

The square with the seventy-eight cards that I present as the general schema of “The Tavern” does not have the rigor of that of “The Castle”: the “narrators” do not proceed in a straight line or along a regular route; there are cards that reappear in all the tales and more than once in a single tale. Not differently, the written text can be considered the archive of material accumulated little by little, through successive stratifications of iconological interpretations, temperamental moods, ideological intentions, stylistic formulations. If I decide to publish “The Tavern of Crossed Destinies,” it is above all to liberate myself from it. Even now, with the book in galleys, I'm still putting my hands on it, taking it apart, rewriting it. Only when the volume is printed will I keep out of it once and for all, I hope. (my translation)

The energy, self-irony, and hyperbolic imagery of the periodic prose link this passage (and the Note) conspicuously to the fiction in the rhetorical flourish of the second sentence's opening “Non diversamente….” Because these lines are dispersed and modified in the published English translation, I have offered my own.

24 Calvino's “formula” for Agilulfo is “inesistenza munita di volontà e coscienza” ‘nonexistence equipped with will and awareness’ (as stated in his Preface to I nostri antenati, p. xviii).

25 Other examples of anachronistic irony can be found, for example, in both the language and the setting of the “Storia dei regni dei vampiri.” This tale is constructed around the familiar “timeless” (meaning ancient) elements of werewolves, sorceresses, gravediggers, Black Masses, kings and queens, lightning storms, and so on. The terrors of the storm gain an original dimension, however, when a “thunderbolt” may really be an overloaded electric circuit: “… come se il fulmine si sia abbattuto sul castello reale … o uno sbalzo di tensione negli impianti troppo carichi della Grande Centrale abbia annerato il mondo nel blackout” ‘… as if the thunderbolt had fallen on the royal castle … or a sudden change of tension in the overloaded circuits of the Great Power Plant had darkened the world in the blackout’ (p. 87).

One other example, from the “Storia della foresta che si vendica,” also raises expectations of a “Once-upon-a-time” schema: “… tassi e ghiri si crogiolano sugli accumulatori e sui magnet. L'uomo è stato neces-sario: adesso è inutile. Perché il mondo riceva infor-mazioni dal mondo e ne goda bastano ormai i calcola-tori e le farfalle“ ‘… badgers and dormice luxuriate on batteries and magnetos. Man was necessary; now he is useless. For the world to receive information from the world and enjoy it, now computers and butterflies suffice’ (p. 69).

26 The figures are, in effect, erased insofar as marginal tarot reproductions are uniquely missing from the seven pages reserved for this concluding section of the narrator's most intimate “confession.”

27 Eugénie de Montijo wrote about Stendhal that “ ‘M. Beyle est disparu … il a ordonné a son portier de dire à tout le monde qui le demandait qu'il est à la chasse.’ En réalité, il s'est enfermé chez lui en face de son papier blanc, sans permettre d'autre visite que celle de son copiste” ‘ “Mr. Beyle has disappeared … he ordered his concierge to tell everyone who asked for him that he is out hunting.” In truth, he locked himself in his room, in front of his blank paper, without letting anyone visit except his copyist’ (Introd., La Chartreuse de Parme, by Stendhal, ed. Henri Mar-tineau [Paris: Gamier, 1957], p. xi). It is interesting to note the affinity between Stendhal's “hunt” and Cal-vino's “battle”—metaphors, for both authors, of the act of writing. In Il cavaliere inesistente, Calvino created a “Stendhalian paladin” in Rambaldo, who “cerca le prove d'esserci. come tutti i giovani fanno” ‘seeks the proofs of reaching his goals, as all youths do’ (Antenati, p. xvii): by doing, experiencing, achieving. As such, the “Stendhalian” prototype is the antitype of the Calvinian Parsifal, nondoer par excellence.