The Fantastic and Postmodern Fiction of Calvino

Abstract

After 1965, Calvino understood and created literature as a combinational game. He viewed literary tradition as a rich field from which he could readily draw in order to create arbitrarily combined motifs, themes and methods for his narrative work. The collection, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, and the novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, are especially typical of this approach with their multiple narrative levels, characters and actions, and their particular kind of narrator, who is not included in the events narrated. – Also characteristic of Calvino’s narrative style is his tireless search for different narrative possibilities and experimentation with language. The fantastic, though never dominant, is one of the many narrative approaches present in Calvino’s rich and erudite mode of writing. He introduced it into his prose at the same time as postmodern narrative techniques. One of the central hypotheses of the article is that the fantastic element in Calvino is most evident in his postmodern work. This is hardly surprising, since both the fantastic and the postmodern are typical of the antinomies between ordinary and extraordinary ways of perceiving the world. In the article, using the theoretical apparatus of Tzvetan Todorov and Amaryll Beatrice Chanady, I apply their criteria in order to identify the fantastic in the multi-layered web of Calvino’s prose, and to locate those points where the fantastic and postmodern overlap, combine and cross-fertilize. – For in his rich narrative opus, Calvino recognizes and develops many fantastic elements: from abusing those that serve the development of the story, to a unique kind of science-fiction. A hypothesis concerning the simultaneous existence of the fantastic and post-modern in Calvino’s prose is confirmed especially in a short story collection, Cosmicomics, in which the author develops a unique science-fiction genre enriched by postmodern approaches and ideas from semiotics, cybernetics, and communication theory. The presence of fantastic elements is somewhat less pronounced in his later work. In the collections, Invisible Cities and The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Calvino takes a continued interest in semiotics, semantics, and combinational games, as well as in contemporary discoveries in the fields of communications studies and poststructuralism. He successfully transplants these ideas onto the lively terrain of narrative imagination. Fantastic elements can once again be detected in the novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler in the form of a novelistic dimension that belongs in the category of the fantastic, or even of science-fiction.