Italo Calvino: A Traveller in a World of Uncertainty

‘The thing I’d like most in the world’, says the reader in Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979), ‘is to make clocks run backwards.’ And understandably so. Written after a period of creative uncertainty, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller is a profoundly – even wilfully – disorienting work. It starts in a familiar enough way, with you, the reader, settling down to read Calvino’s latest novel. But you soon realise something’s wrong. The printers have not only messed up the pages, but got Calvino’s book mixed up with a completely different one. Put out, you go back to the bookshop to exchange it for another copy, only to be given another novel entirely – and for precisely the same thing to happen again. And again. Soon your head is spinning. You’re not sure of anything anymore. Who could blame you for wanting to turn the clock back to before all this confusion began?

For Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller was symptomatic of the challenges facing the writer in the late 20th century. In a world of growing uncertainty, of nuclear weapons and political instability, it was only natural to seek refuge in the past. But this raised some troubling problems. What is the past? Is there a past? How do we perceive it? Can we perceive it? And what should you do if it slips from your grasp?

Past as progress

Calvino’s instincts had been pragmatic at first. Born in Cuba in 1923, he was the child of two botanists and had been raised to place reason above all else. He took it as axiomatic that the truth of all things existed independent of the observer, and that it could be apprehended. The laws which governed the growth of flowers, the productivity of crops, even the colour of petals, were there for the taking. And the same was true of history. Provided you approached the past in a suitably ‘scientific’ manner, its essential truths could be discovered and the ‘laws’ of society disclosed.

Such a ‘scientific’ view of history was much in vogue in postwar Italy. It was not, however, apolitical. In the lead-up to the 1946 election, the Communist Party seemed to be on the verge of power. Particularly in major industrial centres such as Turin, where Calvino enrolled to study in 1941, dialectical materialism was in the ascendant. This postulated that the engine of historical change was class struggle, and that human societies moved inexorably from feudalism to capitalism, and from socialism to communism. When approached ‘scientifically’, therefore, history was, in effect, a catalogue of progress.

Like many young writers of the day, Calvino was not unsympathetic to this. During the war he joined the Italian Resistance as a member of the communist Garibaldi Brigade and fought in the mountains of Liguria. But his attachment to communism was more a matter of convenience than conviction. As he later admitted, he had only joined the communists because they seemed ‘the most active and organised’ of the anti-fascist organisations. By temperament, he was more of an anarchist. And as the war ground on his conviction in the communists’ ‘scientific’ claims began to waver. He struggled to reconcile his experiences of the bitter, confused fighting with either the Marxists’ faith in progress or their belief that class struggle really was the motor of change.

Calvino’s first novel, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests (1947), offered a subtle, if idiosyncratic, response to the Marxist conception of history. Modelled in part after Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, it sought to explore the contradictions and frustrations of the Resistance through the eyes of an adolescent named Pin, who joins a band of partisans after stealing a German sailor’s gun.

As was to be expected, Calvino drew a sharp distinction between the objectives of communist partisans and the fascist Black Brigades, and did so in terms which would have been familiar to any Marxist historian. Whereas the Black Brigades sought to perpetuate existing forms of oppression, the partisans were trying to accomplish ‘positive history’ – that is to say, the destruction of oppression.

But at the level of motivation, things aren’t quite so clear-cut. Unlike many other contemporary ‘Italian Resistance novels’ – such as Elio Vittorini’s Uomini e no (1945) – which tended to depict partisans as heroic figures, struggling against an enemy who is fundamentally and irreconcilably different, Calvino’s work treats both groups as essentially the same. Each is just as motley as the other: a rag-tag bunch of loners, cheats, and cuckolds. They are not fighting for any ideals. Few, if any, of them are ‘true’ communists or fascists; most don’t even know what those words mean. Rather, they are fighting simply because of an ‘inner frenzy’ – a sense of burning injustice common to all, yet unique to each of them. One is unhappy in love; another has lost his farm; another is out to avenge a slain brother. It was just a matter of chance whether someone joined one side or the other.

The implication of this is telling. Although Calvino left room for the notion of truth and ‘progress’ he was nevertheless convinced that ‘positive history’ was made not by class struggle per se, but by the accidental accretion of personal motivations. There are no great ‘causes’ here. Love, hatred, vengeance: ‘That, and that alone, is history.’

Past as fable

When the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in 1956 Calvino’s fragile attachment to communism finally crumbled, and with it the remains of his ‘scientific’ worldview. All of a sudden, the present had become dark and frightening. The very idea that history had a ‘direction’ had become ridiculous. The past was not a story of progress at all, even one mediated by individual motivations. Rather, it was a ‘world of symbols’ – a fable of man’s weakness. And by treating it as a fable, Calvino believed, it would be possible to see that truth all the more clearly.

This was precisely what Calvino set out to show in Our Ancestors (1960). A collection of three short novels, it represented a radical shift away from the (qualified) realism of The Path to the Spiders’ Nests. Superficially modelled after Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and Voltaire’s Candide, they treated the past in the same way as folk stories and romances. Each is set at an identifiable moment in the past: The Cloven Viscount during the Ottoman wars; The Baron in the Trees during the age of Napoleon; and The Nonexistent Knight during the reign of Charlemagne. They contain recognisable historical details and figures, but nevertheless exist in a realm of fantasy.

Here, the world is alarming, even to those living in it. Only by abandoning it altogether – like the baron in the trees – can you see it clearly. If humans are the motor of history, then they are even more conflicted than Calvino had previously assumed. In each person there is a Manichean tension between good and evil, each of which is sufficiently incomplete as to be essentially indistinguishable. It is, in fact, impossible for anyone to be truly good. Virtue – as Agilulf, the non-existent knight shows – exists only in the abstract. The moment anyone tries to assume its mantle, they invariably fall short.

Past as confusion

It was hardly an encouraging view and in time Calvino became dissatisfied even with this conception of history. It was not that he thought any more (or less) positively of human nature. Rather, he came to doubt that his experience of the past was stable enough even for fables.

After moving to Paris in 1967 Calvino’s encounters with political unrest and the literary Oulipo movement robbed him of any remaining certainties he may have had. He began to feel there was no rhyme or reason to anything. There was just confusion. Indeed, given the polarised nature of public discourse, he couldn’t even be sure that he was witnessing the same things as everyone else. Even language itself seemed unstable. And if this was true of the present, what did that say about the past?

In Invisible Cities (1972) Calvino confronted this head-on. An avowedly post-modern work, it is ostensibly framed as a discussion between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, during which Polo describes a series of imaginary cities, all of which are ultimately revealed to be Venice, the city he has left behind. Here, Calvino appears to suggest that human beings, far from being uncomprehending, flawed actors in a wider historical drama, are more like travellers in a fog, moving forward gingerly, able to guess what lies ahead only with reference to what has gone before. The present is merely a web of symbols, evoking memories of the past; and the past our only framework for understanding the present.

The only problem is that our perception of the past – like our experience of the present – is unstable. It changes with every step we take, precisely because we change too. It is impossible to be sure that our memories of something today are the same as they were yesterday, or will be tomorrow. And the more unstable our past becomes, the more fragile our own sense of self becomes, too.

Past unwritten

This leaves an uncomfortable question: if the present is uncertain and the past elusive, where can anyone find a stable footing? For Calvino, perhaps the only possible answer is in writing books. As he explains in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, when you read a book you can decipher, parse, translate it using grammars and dictionaries. But when you write a book, you are also trying to convey a whole range of meanings and allusions which exist between the lines, which can never be captured in written language, only lived. All books are therefore unfinished. And their finished nature means that, in a sense, they continue in the beyond – waiting for a completion that never comes. Their very imperfection, their ‘wordless language’, assures their eternity. An eternity which Calvino unquestionably deserves.  

• Born 15 October 1923, Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba

• Died 19 September 1985, Siena, Italy

• Notable works The Path to the Spiders’ Nests (1947) l Invisible Cities (1972) l If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979)

Alexander Lee is a fellow in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick.