ROBERT RUSHING
ITALO
CALVINO IS AMOST CERTAINLY the most discussed
Italian writer of the latter twentieth century, having fared particularly well
in the English-speaking world. Calvino criticism in English typically produces a
monograph and a couple dozen articles per year, covering discussions of utopia,
fantasy, postmodernism, hypertext, landscape, and, most recently, the role of
the visual in his fiction, from cinema and painting to ekphrasis (see Belpoliti
and Ricci). Those discussions of Calvino are also not infrequently comparative
in nature, indicating the degree to which Calvino has been adopted as one of the
few Italian mainstays of modern “world literature.” There are, however, some
notable lacunae in Calvino criticism: in particular, there is a certain penury
of psychoanalytic criticism. As Kathryn Hume pointed out in 1992, “oddly little
has been done to analyze the psychological substrates” in Calvino’s writing,
apart from an occasional invocation of Lacan “with regard to the mirror images
in Invisible Cities.”
However, this lack of psychoanalytic criticism is perhaps not so odd after all.
For much of his career, Calvino was a highly cerebral writer, at times almost
mechanical in his approach, especially in the works that were most directly
related to his activities with OuLiPo, the workshop on logic and literature led
by Raymond Queneau. His characters, especially after his earliest works, rarely
have psychological depth, and Calvino himself cultivated with great success an
ironic distance from his own work. For many readers, this rigorous ironic
distance has a depersonalizing effect that discourages a consideration of
psychic mechanisms at work in the text. (This impersonality reaches what may be
its maximum effect in the Cosmicomics, short stories based on scientific
concepts ranging from astrophysics to evolution, in which the characters are
identified by mathematical formulae rather than names.)
Of all of Calvino’s works, Le cittŕ invisibili (Invisible Cities)
has attracted the most psychoanalytic attention; among his writings it gives the
strongest sense of hovering, as Calvino writes in “Cibernetica e fantasmi”
(“Cybernetics and Ghosts”), on the “orlo estremo del dicibile” (extreme edge of
the speakable). Later in the same essay, Calvino identifies this space as
adjacent to the unconscious —“l’inconscio č il mare del non dicible” (the
unconscious is the sea of the unspeakable)—whose absolutely fundamental role, he
argues, is to oppose those cerebral, mechanical, combinatorial characteristics
which stand in the way of psychoanalytic criticism. So how and where does
Calvino’s writing approach this “sea of the unspeakable”?
In emphasizing the relative paucity of psychoanalytic approaches to Calvino, I
don’t mean to overlook Lucia Re’s substantial analysis of the Imaginary and
Symbolic registers in Calvino’s Path to the Nests of the Spiders, and in
particular her discovery of the murder of the protagonist’s sister hidden “in
the interstices of the text,” a murder that propels the protagonist, a young boy
named Pin, out of his repetitive returns to the Imaginary world of the spiders’
nests and into the Symbolic, into history. What I find particularly interesting
about this reading is that it renders visible at least two patterns that will
return repeatedly in Calvino’s later works: first, the young subject poised on
the threshold between childhood and adulthood, and similarly poised to leave
behind the world of literature, a “scene” that is repeated at the end of each
novel in the trilogy I nostri antenati (Our Ancestors); second,
and of more interest for this article, the loss of woman as a kind of
foundational moment, a marker of the subject’s entry into history. The presence
of this second scene in Calvino’s “cosmicomic” stories from the late 1960s is
nothing less than obsessive, and this repeated staging of the loss of woman
might be seen as a kind of latent or unconscious hostility, a desire to return
to a pre-Oedipal world free of the anxiety that accompanies sexual difference.
This is how Re (correctly, I believe) perceives the ending of Path to the Nests
of Spiders. This is also substantially the story that Teresa de Lauretis tells
in “Through the Looking-Glass: Woman, Cinema, and Language” in her discussion of
Zobeide, one of the Invisible Cities that also stages the disappearance of woman
as the moment that precipitates the male subject into history: “in Calvino’s
seductive parable of ‘human’ history, women are absent as historical subjects.”