SOURCE: “Fantasy, Alienation and the Racconti of Italo Calvino,” in Forum of Modern Language Studies, Vol. 6, No. 4, October, 1970, pp. 399–412.

[In the following analysis of I racconti, Woodhouse shows how alienation is one of the dominant themes in Calvino's fiction.]

The controversial aura which surrounds almost everything which Italo Calvino has done or written since he was awarded the Premio Riccione in 1947 for Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (Turin, Einaudi, 1947) has continued until the present day. The verdict of 1947 was controversial, and again in 1968, in the competition for the Viareggio prize, the verdict hung upon the vote of one judge. Calvino won, but he refused the prize on the grounds that its acceptance simply helped shore up an outmoded institution, the literary prize!¹ In the intervening twenty-one years, Calvino's work has always been greeted with a host of conflicting critical opinions. Perhaps no aspect of his work has met with more controversy than the alliance of his fantastic imagination with his commitment to society, for the emphasis on fantasy has sometimes led critics to believe him frivolous, while his more obviously realistic stories have simply served to underline the apparent conflict. Throughout his literary career, Calvino has always been interested in the problems of alienation. Consistent with his theories he has shown a great preoccupation with the need for the artist and writer to communicate with their fellows without isolating themselves, almost as specialists in their own right. In order to communicate with a wide audience, however, Calvino's work has, by definition, necessarily had to have popular appeal. This attitude again produces a portrait of the intellectual abandoning commitment for popularity, when his aim is precisely that of presenting a committed message in popular terms. My purpose is to show how Calvino's exotic techniques are particularly effective in convincing his reader of the injurious effects of alienation. It should be further explained that the word fantasy has been deliberately chosen for the title of this essay in preference to such terms as surrealism or impressionism. For, though surrealism or impressionism may be used to describe certain aspects of Calvino's output, to employ those terms accurately would be to limit Calvino's imaginative creations to a particular school, while to use them in the sense of fantastic or imaginative would be a failure to define terms only too often found in contemporary critics of Calvino.

Of all the problems which affect modern urban and industrial society, the most serious and all-embracing are those which may be loosely grouped under the head of alienation. Since Rousseau first noted the fragmenting effects of trade, commerce and industry upon man's traditional social units, many subtle variations on his notion of estrangement have evolved. The Falrets made alienation into a medically certifiable disease; Marx added political and sociological overtones which reintroduced Rousseauistic thought in an industrial situation, and Freud's notion of isolation added other psychological meanings to the phenomenon. During the past twenty years, alienation has become increasingly a preoccupation of a host of experts, including sociologists, doctors, welfare workers, and, not unnaturally, writers, and alienation is a problem which is evidently a major preoccupation in Calvino's study of mankind. Indeed, many non-literary essays of his concern the specific type of alienation which affects the worker or the specialist.² His is a comprehensively modern view of alienation, not restricted to one category by political, medical or psychological definitions, and in his work one is astounded by the remarkable variety of nuances in his treatment of the phenomenon which inspires him. Without necessarily attempting to define a word which is developing new meanings daily, I should like to point to the Rousseauistic scale of personages running through Calvino's work, and ranging from the naive and ingenuous type of personage, who is one with nature, to the depersonalised mind which creates new scientific discoveries, which are inexpressible except in terms of mathematical formulae. Between these two extremes, between Zeffirino, the boy hero of “Pesci grossi, pesci piccoli,”³ and Qfwfq, personified formula of Le cosmicomiche (Turin, Einaudi, 1965) and Ti con zero (Turin, Einaudi, 1967), there emerge a host of characters who provide subtle variations on the theme.

The breakdown in man's relationship with his fellows or his environment is often an inner, psychological event, inexplicable except in the rather intangible terms of the subject's repressed feelings. Often, too, the environment may become so distorted from its former state that the unfortunate individual, not yet conditioned to accept the change, feels ill at ease. In either case the phenomenon of alienation is concerned with distortions of reality brought about either by thought processes or by physical changes in one's environment. The two are often inseparable. What in the twentieth century is explained medically and psychologically was, in the absence of scientific verification, formerly explained mystically or superstitiously. The borderline between the imagination and the condition of alienation may be seen therefore as a very thin one. This essay is an attempt to show how a great writer blends reality and fantasy. For convenience, I have chosen I racconti as my subject, for the collected short stories are a rich and concentrated compendium of thirteen years of writing (1945–1958), but my theme could as easily have been illustrated from any number of Calvino's stories or novels. By juxtaposing fantasy and reality in this way, it will be possible to see how the one aids the other, thus lending weight to a wider thesis that even at his most fantastic, Calvino can be most engagé.

Ernst Fischer in his exciting study, The Necessity of Art (Penguin Books, 1963), faces the traditional marxist dilemma of alienation and society:

In the alienated world in which we live, social reality must be presented in an arresting way, in a new light, through the “alienation” of the subject and the characters.

(p. 10)

It is almost as though Calvino had taken some such advice to heart at the beginning of his literary career, for the social reality which he describes, and particularly the very real problem of alienation, is presented in such an arresting way and such a new light that critics have found it hard to pin a specific label on any part of his output. Vladimír Hořký in a clear and objective account of the Racconti, sums up the traditional difficulties well:

Di fronte ai Racconti di Italo Calvino, uno dei più significativi e originali scrittori contemporanei, la critica letteraria italiana sembra un poco imbarazzata. E' la sua opera realistica, o non è che una evasione nel mondo fantastico e irreale? Questa domanda—quanto ne sappiamo—s'impone frequentemente all'interesse dei critici, i quali danno spesso risposte diverse, se non opposte.⁴

One answer to the problem is that Calvino's work does vary from reality to fantasy, but that would be a facile answer which does not take into account those novelle which cannot be so readily categorised. Particularly when Calvino is treating of alienation, I believe that his imagery and his language become more and more fantastic until the apparent paradox is reached where the most real and fundamentally human situation is expressed in fantastic, sometimes surrealist, terms. Calvino steers a course between realism and fantasy, and though he may occasionally emphasise reality, as he does in La giornata di uno scrutatore (Turin, Einaudi, 1963), this is rare, and his bubbling humour and scintillating imagination more often predominate. Calvino explores the imaginative possibilities of aspects of modern living. I believe that this exploration has been a constant preoccupation of Calvino's, and that the same attitude which characterises his work in I nostri antenati (Turin, Einaudi, 1960), is also present in Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno and in Ti con zero. In some novels or short stories imagination may play a dominant part, so that reality in Il cavaliere inesistente has to be filtered through a form which approaches allegory, while in “Andato al comando” (I racconti, Turin, Einaudi, 1961, pp. 54–59), reality plays a more important role. But I believe that there is a continuity between the earliest novelle and the latest Ti con zero, a continuity which is not fragmented by so-called differing attitudes in the intervening work of Calvino. Elsewhere I have tried to show that the catalyst in the blending process of reality and fantasy may be found in Calvino's study of the fairy story and of folklore.⁵ If my appraisal of Calvino‘s work is a true one, then many of the divergent opinions as to Calvino's achievement during his literary career would be reconciled by that explanation. It is a well-known fact that attempts to label his work have used an enormous variety of epithets which include such conflicting terms as realistic and fantastic, neorealist and Rabelaisian, rationalist and magical, Rousseauistic and Ariostesque, as well as fabulous, impressionist and surrealist. Such descriptions might well be applied to individual and isolated stories, but I believe that his very nonconformity has produced a type of writing which rarely bears comparison with that of any other novelist. It is a type which does reflect the interest of an engagé intellectual concerned with expressing social issues in an exciting form, though even in his engagement Calvino presents the critic with difficulties of definition.⁶ The marxist rejects him as too unorthodox, even uncommitted, while the bourgeois critic sees him as extremely left-wing. Hořký's essay has an obvious ideological bias. He can suggest that for some time after 1956: “… le premesse positive dello sviluppo ulteriore di Calvino erano smorzate da un vacillamento politico” (op. cit. p. 72), yet even Hořký admits that despite Calvino's neglect of wide-ranging, socially important themes in Gli amori difficili, here is a cycle of stories which contain a criticism of bourgeois moral decadence and the exaltation of a more wholesome, working-class family life. Calvino himself has something to say about the tedium of exhortatory literature which has tended to tag along behind practical philosophies.⁷ His aversion to such propaganda more than explains his own penchant for the exciting and the interesting in literature. Again, R. Barilli, in his perspicacious study of I racconti, declares that Calvino may not be called engagé in a commonly accepted political or social sense because of the Rousseauistic and anarchist ideals expressed in I racconti. He goes on to say:

Appunto perché in possesso di una natura decisamente aliena da ogni struttura ideologica che pretenda aggiungersi all'ilare e curioso gioco dello sguardo, Calvino è stato in grado di entrare tra i primi in rottura col clima fittizio e pesante del nostro neorealismo postbellico.⁸

Calvino has certainly produced enough essays of a non-literary type to illustrate his own brand of commitment. This is not the place to elaborate on the theme, but it should be made clear that Calvino is concerned with almost every aspect of social life and that his work deliberately expresses important issues in a form accessible and palatable to a vast audience, ranging from the barely literate to the cultivated intellectual. The intellectual content of Le cosmicomiche, for example, ranges from authentic scientific theories on the cooling of the earth's crust to hypotheses on the future of the galaxies; yet all are presented by a character whom everybody can recognise—a know-all, a strip-cartoon personage with infinite possibilities of manipulation by his creator. This attitude is wholly consistent with the sentiments expressed as long ago as 1955 in Calvino's essay “Il midollo del leone” (in Paragone, 66, 1955), in which he deplored the type of writer who failed to have a regard for his reader, strongly declaring his own intention of satisfying the curiosity and needs of his fellows:

E' sempre con curiosità speranza e meraviglia che il giovane, l'operaio, il contadino che ha preso gusto a leggere, aprono un libro nuovo. Sempre cosí vorremmo che venissero aperti anche i nostri.

(“Il midollo del leone”, cit., p. 31)

And the same notion was still strong during his tour of America in 1960, culminating in the statements of “Main Currents in Italian Fiction Today” (Italian Quarterly, 13–14, 1960). During the course of that essay, he emphasised the need which he as a writer felt for energy and for humour in his work, and stated: “Reality as I see it daily no longer gives me images full of that energy which I like to express” (p. 13). Not without reason, Calvino has, from the very beginning of his career, been compared to Ariosto, for both his energy and his humour. It is a comparison which he himself is fond of, and again from the essay in Italian Quarterly, there is a further statement which casts light upon his use of fantasy and reality elsewhere:

He [Ariosto] teaches us how the mind lives by fantasy, irony, and formal accuracy; how none of these qualities is an end in itself but how they can become part of a conception of the world and help us to evaluate human vices and virtues.

(Op. cit., p. 14)

Calvino is aware that he stands alone, outside any particular school of literature,⁹ and I believe that by concentrating on Calvino as an innovator in the field of novel and short story, many apparently conflicting opinions may be reconciled and paradoxical critical statements may seem more meaningful than they appear on the surface. Not only will this follow, but also the apparent variation in content, form and style, actually in the early short stories will seem more logical. The variation, too, between those stories and the seemingly metaphysical speculations of Ti con zero, a variation which has led to such a host of different interpretations of Calvino as an artist, may be shown to be less illogical. In this way I should hope to resolve the sort of critical judgement which itself seems paradoxical. G. Pescio Bottino, for example, refers puzzlingly to La nuvola di smog with the words: “il surrealismo è più realismo che mai.”¹⁰

This, indeed, is one of the obvious and glaring contrasts in critical judgements, the juxtaposition of realism and surrealism. In germ, this judgement also lies at the root of comment upon Calvino's commitment (equated with realism) and frivolity (equated with surrealism) in such a work as the trilogy. I believe that the contrast is often reconcilable by an appeal to Calvino's position as a committed writer, for the fantastic image is often a pointed way of uncovering an anomaly in society. By showing the bizarre or ridiculous aspect of an action or a situation, the committed writer achieves his aim more effectively than he would by open condemnation. Calvino's message in favour of wholesome, uninhibited life has been carried to an enormous audience in a dozen countries, thanks to the trilogy, which is condemned by some as frivolous. On the other hand, how many now read the more “serious”, realistic and outspoken Giornata di uno scrutatore disliked by critics and public alike for its obviously polemical nature and its cerebral qualities, and lacking in all the qualities which made I nostri antenati such a success?

There are many spectacular examples of Calvino, the committed writer, producing an unreal image and situation by looking at a traditionally chivalrous and idealised situation with a realist's eye. A good example is that of the half-armed knights in Il cavaliere inesistente in I nostri antenati (Turin, Einaudi, 1960), just risen from bed:

… pareva che quel cozzar di ferro fosse come un vibrare d'elitre d'insetti, un crepitio d'involucri secchi. Molti dei guerrieri erano chiusi nell'elmo e nella corazza fino alla cintola e sotto i fiancali e il guardareni spuntarono le gambe in brache e calze, perché cosciali e gamberuoli e ginocchiere si aspettava a metterli quando si era in sella. Le gambe, sotto quel torace d'acciaio, parevano piú sottili, come zampe di grillo; e il modo che essi avevano di muovere, parlando, le teste rotonde e senz'occhi, e anche di tener ripiegate le braccia ingombre di cubitiere e paramani era da grillo o da formica.

(p. 18)

The fact that the above piece of fantasy was published and in vogue during the period of office of F. Tambroni, provides Calvino's critics with further support for the theory that this was not committed writing.¹¹ I have elsewhere tried to show why Calvino uses that form and what his serious intentions are. In the passage above, Calvino is lending weight to the notion that armour, uniform, militarism have a dehumanising effect, but the image, too, is important to him. The paradox in the trilogy seems to be between frivolous content and serious intent. Calvino had virtually denied in the preface to I nostri antenati that here was a direct allegory. What is certain, however, is that while there may not be any consistent symbolic intentions on Calvino's part, the characters and situations which he conjures up are open to inevitable symbolic interpretations by his readers, and the bizarre humour and irony he uses put into relief the grimness or fatuousness of life's reality.

When Calvino examines the phenomenon of alienation in the Racconti, his imagery becomes more and more fantastic. The more real the problem of alienation, the more vicious the disregard for human values and social units, the greater the chasm between members of society or between man and his natural environment, then the more unusual his imagery becomes. Alienation is a very present reality, causing at times tangible hardship and violent mistrust among men, and the disruption of nature's harmonious miscellany; and because of the often grim reality which alienation implies, the unreal and fantastic nature of some of Calvino's description may seem paradoxical. The paradox seems to be exaggerated by Calvino's desire to make his stories into real divertissements which serve the double purpose of amusing and educating.

For the sake of concision and convenience, I propose to take up again what was earlier called a Rousseauistic scale of personages. The scale begins with the character so integrated with nature that, like a wild animal, he can hardly tolerate the society of his fellow humans, and ends with the sophisticate who cuts himself off from nature, family and colleagues, intent only on making the most of a financial speculation. Two things should become clear from this examination. The first is that Calvino's fantasy very often becomes more bizarre as alienation becomes more acute; the second, that despite alienating and fantastic elements, the resilience of the human spirit is constantly brought to the fore. Particularly in those circumstances where man cannot choose his environment or his way of life, his natural instincts and enjoyments break through to overcome the conditioning of his artificial surroundings.

At the one extreme of the scale, then, is Zeffirino, the boy portrayed in the first of the Racconti, “Pesci grossi, pesci piccoli”:

Zeffirino finché si trattava di mare e di pesci era il piú in gamba; invece, in presenza di persone, riprendeva quella sua aria a bocca aperta e balbuziente.

(pp. 11–12)

The undersea environment in “Pesci grossi, pesci piccoli” provides the unreal background as the boy's huge cyclopic mask-eye gulps down (ingoiare) shadows and colours. A ballet of minute fish swimming with military precision passes through light and shadow adding point to their fellow swimmer, for when Zeffirino is fully equipped with his underwater fishing gear, ready to plunge into his non-human element, he takes on many of the characteristics of a fish:

Con quel muso di vetro e l'antenna per respirare, le gambe che finivano da pesce, e in mano quell'arnese un po' lancia un po' fucile e un po' forchetta, non somigliava piú a un essere umano.

(p. 10)

Zeffirino's great redeeming feature is the wholehearted enthusiasm with which he pursues his sport, and the uninhibited enjoyment which contrasts so vividly with the melancholic inertia of Miss De Magistris. But Zeffirino is obviously a character with limits, a simple character in every sense of the word. Costanzina in “Uomo nei gerbidi” is a similar type, one with nature, understanding and sympathising with nature's phenomena, harmonising with her surroundings. Asked for news, she ignores for the moment the “real” world (which is torn by World War II) to describe fairy-tale aspects of nature:

Ieri notte ho visto i leprotti lassú saltare sotto la luna. Ghi! Ghi! facevano. Ieri è nato un fungo dietro la rovere. Velenoso, rosso coi punti bianchi. L'ho ucciso con una pietra. Una biscia, grande e gialla, a mezzogiorno è scesa per il sentiero. Abita in quel cespuglio. Non tirarle pietre, è buona.

(p. 236)

But the most startling effect of this natural character is produced when he is brought into contact with society, especially with bourgeois society as in the case of “Pranzo con un pastore.” In this story the realism of the narrative, as the family try to make the goatherd feel at home, is embarrassingly true to life. The bizarre note is struck by the ease which the boy feels in the presence of the family's poor demented daughter. The author comments that the patronising friendliness of his mother and the strange camaraderie of his father had little effect in bridging the gap between the two worlds. Lunacy in fact is a more effective link:

Forse aveva finalmente trovato qualcosa che entrava nei suoi schemi, un punto di contatto tra il nostro ed il suo mondo. Ed io mi ricordai dei dementi che s'incontrano spesso tra i casolari di montagna e passano le ore seduti sulle soglie tra nuvole di mosche e con lamentosi vaneggiamenti rattristano le notti paesane.

(p. 258)

There is much irony, too, in the attitude of the silent brother Marco, who, despite his silence and impoliteness, makes contact with the goatherd. Giovanni here, Zeffirino, Libereso and Costanzina seem to be survivals from a bygone age when country lore and close affinity with nature was the rule rather than the exception. In some earlier age, these characters, one feels, would have been accepted as a natural part of their natural environment, but in the twentieth century, their different attitudes make them seem peculiar to their fellow humans. Not only do they seem peculiar, but the artist Calvino depicts them deliberately as part of the natural background which they love so well. Often, however, the effect of political propaganda on the young channels their natural energies into viciously unnatural activities. In particular Calvino evidently feels that fascist propaganda conditioned the young to cultivate those adolescent illusions which preserve fanatically nationalist tendencies.¹² In his trilogy Calvino has helped to destroy the appeal of such illusions, particularly the illusions which surround the glamour of the knights' armour or the modern soldiers' uniform. The uniform crops up in “L'entrata in guerra,” as an alienating force, dividing the young narrator from the poor people who need his assistance. In “Gli avanguardisti a Mentone” the sacking of the abandoned house by the uniformed youth illustrates the effect of the military environment on young people. The boys, with the exception of the narrator, are taken over by animal instincts. Duccio is an energetic thirteen-year-old enthusiastically sacking an old mansion and presenting a weird picture as he crams stolen property into his jacket and sweater:

Pigliava le cose dai cassetti, se non gli servivano le buttava per terra, se sí, le ficcava nella cacciatora: giarrettiere, calzini, cravatte, spazzole, asciugamani, un vasetto di brillantina. A furia di cacciarsi roba nella cacciatora s'era fatto una gobba quasi sferica; e ancora ficcava sciarpe, guanti, bretelle sotto il maglione. Era gonfio e pettoruto come un piccione, e non accennava a smetterla.

(p. 290)

The scavenging qualities of Duccio give him the appearance of the great scavenger of Italy, the pigeon. Another deliberately amusing picture is created in “Le notti dell'UNPA,” when the two boys dress up in gas masks, and are again transformed into non-human forms, ants seen through a microscope:

Cosí, con le teste trasformate in quelle di enormi formiche viste al microscopio, ci esprimevamo in muggiti inarticolati e giravamo semiciechi per gli androni della scuola …

(pp. 305–306)

Once again we are back to the Zeffirino image, but here, during the war, there are sinister undertones to the humour and a criticism of the loutish behaviour which disguise brings, which were never present in the earlier “Pesci grossi, pesci piccoli.” The alienating effect of war and the nightmare situations which war creates are evidently a major preoccupation with Calvino, and in the trilogy that preoccupation reaches a climax. It is interesting to see a blend of idyll and realism, involving one of these naive characters and showing the inanity of war, in the short story “Un bel gioco dura poco.” In that story Giovannino and Serenella, his playmate, are primarily created to put into relief the horror and brutality of war, while in “Il giardino incantato,” they serve to emphasise the boredom of a spoilt rich boy. But Libereso, for example, in “Un pomeriggio Adamo,” is so close to nature that his love of insects fascinates and yet horrifies the serving-girl he is trying to impress. His final surprise “gift” to her is an insect and animal ballet in her kitchen:

Su ogni piatto messo ad asciugare c'era un ranocchio che saltava, una biscia era arrotolata dentro una casseruola, c'era una zuppiera piena di ramarri, e lumache bavose lasciavano scie iridescenti sulla cristalleria. Nel catino pieno d'acqua nuotava il vecchio e solitario pesce rosso.

(p. 27)

Libereso, Giovannino, Zeffirino and the others, it has been noted, harmonise with the background which they love so well. In this extreme form of self-identification with nature one sees an exaggeration of another type of character, the type who has a burning desire to approach nature but who is prevented by circumstances beyond his control from achieving his aim. Often the educated outsider, returning to his former home in the country, feels that there is a barrier between him and nature. Here is alienation in a new and personal sense, not necessarily attributable to any marxist approach, but one which is more bitter or more nostalgic because of its personal character. The true harmony between man and nature is described in the short story “La strada di San Giovanni,”¹³ where the old ideals are seen as rapidly disappearing, as the father grows older. The father in that story is again at one with nature, controlling his small-holding and directing nature into the channels he desires, but at the same time maintaining the harmonious miscellany of fruits and plants which keeps nature lush and exciting. He does not succumb to the profit motive, in other words to the carnation houses, the acres of glass and concrete which were destined to take over the Ligurian riviera in the post-war years. A regret that such a life is not possible for the young educated son of the proprietor is a recurring theme in the Racconti. In germ one finds it in “L'occhio del padrone,” in which the owner's son, sent to oversee his father's work-people in the fields, feels the immense distance which separates him from the contadini and from the land. He lacks even the brutal, masterful relationship which his father has with his farm and his workers. The dilemma is put into relief by the unreal image of an eye detached from the body:

… il figlio del padrone era fuori di tutto questo, staccato dalle vicende della terra. L'occhio del padrone. Era solo un occhio lui. Ma a che serve un occhio, solo un occhio, staccato da tutto? Non vede nemmeno.

(p. 246)

The son in that story spends months away from the farm in distant cities. His physical return to the land is a psychological return to his childhood memories of the farm, but the conclusion of the story shows him looking at his land …“ e capiva che le sarebbe sempre rimasto disperatamente straniero” (p. 249). The rich man's son is able to return and find his nostalgic illusions shattered, the poor worker, unable to leave his urban environment, ironically, keeps his illusions intact. Marcovaldo in his ability to see and find nature in the barren streets of the great city is the reverse of il figlio del padrone.

Man's life as a city dweller has been radically changed in post-war years even from what it was in the first half of this century. City centres are becoming more and more the location of bureaucratic offices and commercial houses and less and less centres of habitation. The notion of city-dweller once implied in cittadino is more and more giving way to the notion of a bureaucratic unit, impersonal, taxable, rateable and finally expendable. Contadino, on the other hand, still has a warm ring and implies friendliness, human contact and a life more at harmony with nature, though the hardships of the farm labourer's life are constantly being brought before the public gaze. Calvino explains the barrenness and sterility of cement and concrete by making it the backcloth for an industrial worker who has the same delight in nature as the farm labourer, the same awareness of nature's miracles. But the worker has to satisfy his aspirations either by enjoying the few meagre manifestations of nature around him, or by enjoying the self-delusion of artificial substitutes for natural phenomena. For Michelino, Marcovaldo's young son, raised entirely in an urban environment, the sight of a forest was unknown, though the concept had been implanted in him by his reading of fairy stories. Driven by cold to look for wood for the family fire, his brother and he find an urban forest:

Ai lati dell'autostrada, i bambini videro il bosco: una folta vegetazione di strani alberi copriva la vista della pianura. Avevano i tronchi fini fini, diritti o obliqui; e chiome piatte e estese, dalle piú strane forme e dai piú strani colori, quando un'auto passando le illuminava coi fanali. Rami a forma di dentifricio, di faccia, di formaggio, di mano, di rasoio, di bottiglia, di mucca, di pneumatico, costellate da un fogliame di lettere dell'alfabeto.

(p. 168)

Marcovaldo, though he is really unaware of his own stubbornness, tenaciously clings to beliefs and instincts deep in his soul, only lightly covered by the conditioning of industrial and urban society. He hunts, but his prey is a rabbit which has recently escaped from a laboratory, and which is injected full of dangerous bacteria. Marcovaldo longs for a night in the open air in another story, “La panchina,” but after a bizarre night's adventures, he goes wearily to work. The contrast between his aspirations and the daunting artificiality of his environment is well brought out in this last story by the irritating yellow traffic light which almost takes on a fretful human character of its own as it is contrasted with the serenity of the moon:

La luna col suo pallore misterioso, giallo anch'esso, ma in fondo verde e anche azzurro, e il semaforo con quel suo gialletto volgare. E la luna, tutta calma, irradiante la sua luce senza fretta, venata ogni tanto di sottili resti di nubi, che lei con maestà si lasciava cadere alle spalle; e il semaforo intanto sempre lí accendi e spegni, accendi e spegni, affannoso, falsamente vivace, stanco e schiavo.

(pp. 190–191)

The traffic light is irritating and because Marcovaldo is unused to it, it helps to keep him awake. Not so the advertising sign in the short story “Luna e GNAC.” This is surely one of the most brilliant illustrations of how the inhabitants of a poor city quarter are conditioned to accept an incredible modification in their lives as a natural part of everyday (or everynight) life. The very opening of the story is surreal: “La notte durava venti secondi, e venti secondi il GNAC” (p. 197). The GNAC is the final syllable of COGNAC on a neon sign, and as its intermittent flashing causes the poor people to live in a night which lasts for twenty seconds at a time, all six members of Marcovaldo's family are in some way influenced to change the normal pattern of life by the electric phenomenon. Even local cats have their love-life conditioned by the twenty-second intervals. The story is crammed with surprising descriptions, perhaps the most spectacular being Marcovaldo's first awareness of the stupendous change in his environment when the sign is first broken:

… la cappa del cielo s'alzò infinitamente stellata su di loro. Marcovaldo … si sentí come proiettato nello spazio. Il buio che ora regnava all'altezza dei tetti faceva come una barriera oscura che escludeva laggiú il mondo dove continuavano a vorticare geroglifici gialli e verdi e rossi, e ammiccanti occhi di semafori, e il luminoso navigare dei tram vuoti, e le auto invisibili che spingono davanti a sé il cono di luce dei fanali. Da questo mondo non saliva lassú che una diffusa fosforescenza, vaga come un fumo.

(pp. 199–200)

Marcovaldo, like some of Calvino's figli del padrone, recognises in the return of night, the return of something “natural” from bygone days, “provava una nostalgia come di raggiungere una spiaggia rimasta miracolosamente soleggiata nella notte” (p. 200).

The brilliantly witty scenario is woven through with surreal images, emphasising not only the estrangement of man from his natural environment, but also the worker's ironical acceptance of the rival firm's neon sign which replaces the original COGNAC. The mysterious figures (of electricians) seen in silhouette on the roof opposite Marcovaldo's apartment help to emphasise in a manner worthy of Kafka, the brooding anonymity; here, that of the big business interests. The GNAC is part of an impersonal cipher which may be seen as representing the impersonality of commerce.¹⁴ The historian who a hundred years hence studies an Italian newapaper of today, will need a glossary of abbreviations to explain the great modern organisations which envelop themselves in anonymity, their names merely ciphers to denote a mysterious power. Significantly, perhaps, Calvino refers to them in the passage quoted above as geroglifici, for they are the new sacred letters of our technological, industrial society. For many people in Britain E.R.N.I.(e) is a new god of plenty, representing the monthly possibility of beatitude. For Whitehall bureaucrats and politicians N.E.D.(dy) and N.I.C.(ky) are the gods invoked to cure economic evils. Ciphers like Gil, U.N.P.A., and the incredible E.P.A.U.C.I., also make frequent appearances on Calvino's pages. Marcovaldo's GNAC is an extension of the impersonal cipher.

It would be tempting to dwell at length upon the Marcovaldo stories, for in them, more obviously than elsewhere, Calvino's attitude to the alienated city-dweller is most clearly and surrealistically illustrated. But it would be unprofitable, for Calvino is at his most fabulous and surrealist and yet so obviously is dealing with the alienated city-dweller or worker that further illustration would be using weighted scales to prove a point. But taking a less obviously bizarre story, “La gallina di reparto,” one can see the inhuman situation of the old turner, Pietro, illustrated in a similarly fantastic way. Pietro represents the Marcovaldo figure at his workplace. He too is aware of the slight manifestation of nature which is allowed into the factory and of the possibilities of enticing Adalberto's hen to lay for him. His imitation of Tommaso, in putting down grain for the hen, calls to mind the countryman in Tommaso, “Non immemore delle sue origini contadine, il collaudatore aveva subito valutato le doti produttive del volatile …” (p. 203). But it is the effect of industrial slavery upon the life of Pietro which is more important to my theme here. Pietro has so many operations to do on his machine that his thoughts on private human affairs are disjointed by the mechanics of his job:

Se a mag … (alza la leva!) … gio mio figlio sposa la figlia di quel barbagianni … (ora accompagna il pezzo sotto il tornio!) sgomberiamo la stanza grande … (e facendo i due passi) … etc.

(p. 206)

Despite the dehumanising effect of his work, Pietro's human ingenuity succeeds nonetheless in keeping his train of thought personal and logical. Crushed by the burden of working four machines at one time, Pietro's mind is still resilient enough to adapt itself to the extraordinary conditions and to have a few split seconds of private thought between working intervals. Pondering on such resilience, the author puts his comments into a comparison which at first glance would seem incongruous:

Cosí il moto delle macchine condizionava e insieme sospingeva il moto dei pensieri. E dentro a quest'armatura meccanica, il pensiero a poco a poco s'adattava agile e soffice come il corpo snello e muscoloso di un giovane cavaliere rinascimentale s'adatta nella sua armatura … cosí si dispiegava e snodava il pensiero di Pietro in quella prigione di tensione nervosa, d'automatismo e di stanchezza.

(p. 206)

The story of “La gallina di reparto” is unreal. A hen, suspected of carrying messages between one worker and another, is killed by the management. The story is one which provokes laughter by its irony. It maintains its audience's interest by the ludicrous logic which leads to the hen's death. The images used to add excitement are often fantastic. And yet this is a story which Hořký includes in the comment:

Calvino si serve di situazioni eccezionali per rendere più chiaro il problema fondamentale, tipico: l'impossibilità di vivere felicemente nella società capitalista.

(Op. cit. p. 71)

That fundamental problem, rendered palatable, readable, interesting in such stories as “La gallina di reparto,” illustrates what Calvino aims at in most of his literary output, to instruct and amuse.

The most outstanding example of an alienated character in the Racconti is Quinto Anfossi in La speculazione edilizia, a story which even Carlo Salinari allows to be committed.¹⁵ Here the realism of events is dominant. Humour is reduced to a minimum. Indeed, Calvino may well look upon La speculazione edilizia as failing in his dual aim of exciting and informing. Nevertheless, the old unreal imagery is occasionally present, lending weight to the distance which separates person from person, or person from nature or work. Caisotti, despite his grossness, seems naive and child-like to Quinto on their first meeting, but the qualities which appeal to Quinto are also accompanied by a physical appearance which foreshadows Caisotti's more menacing role:

… da quell'immagine d'un Caisotti bambino di cinque anni restava escluso l'incombere dello squalo, o dell'enorme crostaceo, del granchio, quale egli appariva con le spesse mani abbandonate sui braccioli della poltroncina. Cosí con alterni sentimenti, Quinto procedeva nelle trattative.

(p. 452)

Quinto is still inclined to take a kindly view of Caisotti at a much later stage of the negotiations:

“Pare Daniele nella fossa dei leoni”, ma questo modo di pensarlo nella parte della vittima non gli dava nessun divertimento: aveva bisogno di vederlo come un leone, riottoso e selvatico, e loro tutti una fossa di Danieli intorno a lui, tanti Danieli virtuosi e accaniti come aguzzini, che lo punzecchiavano con forcute clausole contrattuali.

(p. 482)

The animal imagery is effectively developed with the figure of Caisotti, but other people in the story develop animal characteristics. Angerin, for example, is the brutalised workman whom Caisotti has brought in from his own village, and who sleeps on the ground (come una bestia), walks like an ape (con quel passo da orango), and obeys like a trained dog (un cane ammaestrato) (p. 503). But though there may be occasional flashes of the unreal image or hints at a former humour, “La speculazione edilizia” is less fantastic than the other Racconti, and points the way rather to the coldness of La giornata di uno scrutatore than to the incredible adventures of I nostri antenati.

It has been possible to select only a few of the Racconti for illustration here, and from those only a few illustrative passages. But from these I hope it will be possible to see how Calvino's imagination and his engagement are linked inseparably. The purpose of that link has been stated earlier. Let Calvino from his essay in La generazione degli anni difficili (Bari, Laterza, 1962) have the final word, as he describes one of his two great objects in life:

… la passione per una cultura globale, il rifiuto della incomunicabilità 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 generale che è 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.

(p. 86)

Notes

1. For an excellent account of this year's awards at Viareggio as well as a justification for Calvino's action, see Paolo Bugialli's article in Il corriere della sera, July 13th, 1968.

2. A theme elaborated in my Italo Calvino: a reappraisal and an appreciation of the trilogy, Hull University Publications, 1968.

3. In I racconti, Turin, Einaudi, 1961, pp. 9–16. (Quotations will henceforth be from this edition.)

4. Vladimír Hořký, “I Racconti di Italo Calvino”, Acta Universitatis Carolinae, Philologica, No. 2, Prague, 1961, p. 69.

5. “Italo Calvino and the rediscovery of a genre”, Italian Quarterly, XII-45, University of California, Los Angeles, 1968.

6. F. Grisi, Incontri in libreria, Milan, Ceschina, 1961, ignores the narrowly political concept of engagement to sum up Calvino's attitude well:

   Nella letteratura contemporanea volta per volta scrittori “impegnati” son stati indicati e riconosciuti in Pavese, Vittorini, Cassola, Pomilio, Rea, Calvino e pochissimi altri, quasi per sottolineare in essi non solo una nuova classe, ma per delineare una partecipazione completa dello scrittore alla civiltà del suo tempo. (p. 81)

   Grisi's review is a good answer to the criticism of R. Barilli (see below).

7. “Philosophy and Literature”, Times Literary Supplement, September 28th, 1967, p. 871.

8. R. Barilli, La barriera del naturalismo, Milan, Mursia, 1964, p. 217.

9. I must add that Calvino should rightly be regarded as participating fully in a multitude of issues and problems, literary and otherwise, which affected post-war Europe. In this sense he does not stand alone. But in the essay in Italian Quarterly he mentions the difficulty of assigning his work to a particular school (op. cit. p. 4).

10. G. Pescio Bottino, Calvino, Florence, La Nuova Italia, 1967, p. 81.

11. Carlo Salinari's review of Il cavaliere inesistente in Vie nuove, January 9th, 1960, is a good example of such criticism.

12. Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, Turin, Einaudi, 1964, is full of hints as to the pernicious nature of fascist propaganda. Even the young individualist Pin is affected by the atmosphere:

    In fondo anche a Pin piacerebbe essere nella brigata nera, girare tutto bardato di teschi e di caricatori da mitra, far paura alla gente e stare in mezzo agli anziani come uno dei loro, legato a loro da quella barriera d'odio che li separa dagli altri uomini.

    There are further allusions at page 132.

13. In I maestri del racconto italiano, ed. E. Pagliarani and W. Pedullà, Milan, Rizzoli, 1963.

14. In his introduction to Marcovaldo ovvero Le stagioni in città. Turin, Einaudi, 1968, Calvino remarks upon the impersonality of Marcovaldo's employers:

    Ancora piú indeterminata è la ditta, l'azienda dove Marcovaldo lavora: non riusciamo mai a sapere che cosa si fabbrichi, che cosa si venda, sotto la misteriosa sigla “Sbav,” né cosa contengono le casse che Marcovaldo carica e scarica otto ore al giorno. E' la ditta, l'azienda, simbolo di tutte le ditte, le aziende, le società anonime, le marche di fabbrica che regnano sulle persone e sulle cose del nostro tempo. (p. 7)

15. Carlo Salinari, loc. cit.