Image, Eye and Art in Calvino

Birgitte Grundtvig

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351563284
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Idiomas

Few recent writers have been as interested in the cross-over between texts and visual art as Italo Calvino (1923-85). Involved for most of his life in the publishing industry, he took as much interest in the visual as in the textual aspects of his own and other writers' books. In this volume twenty international Calvino experts, including Barenghi, Battistini, Belpoliti, Hofstadter, Ricci, Scarpa and others, consider the many facets of the interplay between the visual and textual in Calvinos works, from the use of colours in his fiction to the influence of cartoons, from the graphic qualities of the book covers themselves to the significance of photography and landscape in his fiction and non-fiction. The volume is appropriately illustrated with images evoked by Calvino's major texts.

PART I



Image

chapter 1

Calvino’s Colours

Marco Belpoliti

The first colour which appears in Calvino’s narrative works is the yellow of the sun.¹ In the opening lines of The Path to the Spiders’ Nests, his first novel, published in 1947, the writer describes a narrow, tight and closed space: the alley where Pin lives. We encounter a sensation of heat mixed with cold: ‘Per arrivare fino in fondo al vicolo, i raggi di sole devono scendere dritti rasente le pareti fredde, tenute discoste a forza d’arcate che attraversano la striscia di cielo azzurro carico’ [To reach the depths of the alley, the sun’s rays have to plunge down vertically, grazing the cold walls which are kept apart by stone arches spanning the strip of deep blue sky].² The yellow, or gold, of the sun and the dark blue of the sky are the two colours, probably derived from Montale, that dominate here. The novel contains a duality of colour: on the one hand, the grey world of the alley and in particular of the inn (smoky purple) where the adults whom Pin hangs around with congregate, and on the other the colourful world of the Ligurian landscape, the world of adventure and danger in which Pin soon immerses himself.

Chapter 7 of the novel opens with a description of the colours of the new camp belonging to the partisan group Pin has joined. Mancino, the cook, sends Pin to do the chores, including collecting water from the fountain, and the little boy is delighted to see ‘il cielo, e il mondo, puliti del mattino’ [the sky and the clear morning world] (RR I, 88; The Path, p. 120). Here Pin meets the ‘farfalle montanare dai colori sconosciuti che si librano sui prati’ [mountain butterflies of strange colours meandering over the meadows] (ibid.). In fact, Pin is so enthralled by these coloured apparitions that he keeps Mancino waiting, who heaps abuse on him ‘in tutte le lingue ogni volta che arriva con la bocca piena di sugo di fragole e occhi pieni di svolazzi di farfalle’ [in every language under the sun when he arrives back, with his mouth full of strawberry juice and his eyes dancing with the fluttering of the butterflies] (ibid.).

Butterflies, iridescent insects of shimmering colours, are a dominant presence in Calvino’s imaginary universe, and make important appearances at various points in his work, from The Cloven Viscount in which they take on the features of a Gorgon, to the Female Reader’s butterfly in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller which becomes a symbol of the act of reading itself: lightness set against the weight writing has for Silas Flannery. In the last decade of Calvino’s life, the butterfly itself becomes a symbol of ‘lightness’, and in Six Memos for the Next Millennium it is a figural motif countered by the crab. The butterfly also possesses an ambivalent quality in Calvino’s first book: there the brightly coloured butterflies Pin chased across the mountain meadows of the Ligurian hinterland are juxtaposed with the tattooed butterfly on Mancino’s body, on his ankle, which constitutes the very first appearance of the butterfly in Calvino’s work (RR I, 63; The Path, p. 95).

In The Path, colours relate to three different semantic fields and to three different ‘objects’: people, animals and the landscape. Pin has red and black freckles ‘che si affollano intorno agli occhi come un volo di vespe’ [which cluster up round his eyes like a swarm of wasps] (RR I, 6, 11; The Path, p. 32), an example of the connection between colour and animals within Calvino’s colour-coded world. Even the Germans are described as ‘rossicci’ [ruddy] whilst the Fascists are labelled as a ‘razza bluastra’ [bluish lot] (RR I, 27; The Path, p. 55). Furthermore: one character has ‘red’ arms, Pin’s sister has ‘black’ armpits and is thus nicknamed La Nera for a reason, Pietromagro’s face is ‘yellow’, Cugino’s eyes are blue, Ferriera’s beard is ‘fair’, ‘Red’ is the adjective which characterizes Lupo Rosso’s name, whilst the beards of the other partisans belonging to the contingent are black.

Pin’s world is thus divided between these polarities: city vs. countryside, people vs. animals. During his walks around the partisan camp Pin has ‘scoperte colorate e nuove: funghi gialli e marrone’ [discovered all kinds of coloured things: yellow and brown mushrooms], ‘ragni rossi’ [red spiders] (RR I, 88; The Path, p. 121) and other animals which emerge suddenly from their holes to colour his visual space. But all it takes is for Mancino to call him back and the boy immediately ‘è ripreso dal contagio del peloso e ambiguo carnaio del genere umano’ [is caught up again in the sickness of the hairy, ambivalent charnel-house of humanity] (RR I, 89; The Path, p. 121); from that point on his cruelty against the animal world resurfaces: crickets, little toads, and ants.

Red and black ants are another presence which extends right through Calvino’s work, most prominently in the short story ‘The Argentine Ant’ (1952). The insect which gives its name to his first novel, the spider, is seen however in antithesis to another intensely symbolic creature with which that story ends: the glow-worm. A symbol of light — another theme which crosses Calvino’s visual world — glowworms, Pin tells us, ‘sono bestie schifose anche loro, rossicce’ [are filthy creatures, too, all reddish in colour] (RR I, 147; The Path, p. 185). They are compared to women and their light punctuates the dark with little spots of brightness. In reality, the colour they possess is not that of the sun or the yellow of the stars, but red, the life-colour par excellence, but also the colour of otherness in keeping with a colour-coding of which Montale’s Le occasioni is a prime example: there the moth (analogous to the glow-worm within the symbolic system colour/animal) is described as being a ‘reddish photosphere’.³

The natural world in which Pin lives is identical to the landscape depicted in Ultimo viene il corvo (1949), a collection comprising stories written before, during or just after the period of production of Calvino’s first novel.⁴ Naturally the colour which dominates this book is green in all its various forms and appearances (seaweed, trees, bushes, flowers, and fruit, but also shadows): grey-green, black-green, reddish-green, dark or light green. As well as the green of the vegetable world (and the animal one: the green lizard), and the brown of the earth (ever-present), we also find the blue of the sea in all its different shades, the yellow of the leaves, but also of the eyes, of fabrics and of light itself — that luminous yellow coupled in certain passages with its opposite: a colourless grey or an absence of colour altogether. Set against the green, in keeping with the system of complementary colours in the spectrum, is the red of human faces and hair, of fish and fabrics such as the scarf, and even the red of the hills.

Despite what these examples would suggest, colour is not in fact a frequent presence in Calvino’s writing which has few adjectives and nouns relating to colour and yet the palette of colours which appears in this, his second book, Ultimo viene il corvo, is significant. Even though Calvino is a strongly visual writer, it is his use of adjectives, and synonymic use of nouns, his lexical preciosity together with the use of dialect and specialist terms, which defines the visual fabric of his sentences. Calvino uses splashes of colour, like a painter who gives force to his canvases through unexpected colour combinations, or via light touches of colour distributed sparingly but to great effect.

It is in his descriptions of the landscape, in those moments in which a flash of something in the distance (the sea or the sky) breaks unexpectedly onto the scene, that colour comes to the fore and it is here that we might speak, as Tullio Pericoli does in one of his conversations with him, of Calvino the water-colourist, the writer-painter à la Klee, rather than as an author of frescoes or an oil-painter.⁵ Calvino tends to miniaturize things, preferring the small format and watered-down colours: poetic, figurative perhaps, but always an embodiment of lightness.

In ‘Adam, One Afternoon’ (1949), the Edenic story with which Ultimo viene il corvo opens, the narrative gains its particular character from the colours of the young gardener Libereso’s rose-chafers and those of the other animals (the toad, the green lizard and the ants etc.) which he shows to Maria-nunziata and which, in terms of their visual and symbolic value, are on a par with plants and flowers. The first three stories in the book (‘I Spy ... a Ship Full of Crabs’, ‘The Enchanted Garden’, ‘Man in Wasteland’),⁶ suggest an enchanted relationship with nature, a decidedly positive approach, even if in almost all of Calvino’s stories and novels the negative element is always lurking in ambush — present as a constant undertone, but always set apart.

‘Un bastimento carico di granchi’ [‘I Spy ... a Ship Full of Crabs’] (1947) introduces the pairing of white and black which will assume a privileged position within the author’s colour-coding, whilst in the opening lines of ‘The Enchanted Garden’ (1949) the landscape is defined by the presence of the sea: ‘squame azzurro cupo azzurro chiaro’ [a scaly sea of sombre, clear blue] (RR I, 168; Adam, One Afternoon, p. 19) — this may also be an element Calvino borrows from Montale. Landscape in these stories by Calvino is understood as an opening up of space, a flash of something which breaks into the narrative and whose colouristic dimension strikes the reader: all at once an unexpected and precise splash of colour or brushstroke leaps before one’s eyes, out of the smooth-flowing and even prose of the writer. At times it is developed into an adjectival series (or one which has a comparative function): in the opening pages of ‘The Enchanted Garden’, Giovannino dives into the water and sees a richly coloured marine world — a space which is both inside and outside (RR I, 170; Adam, One Afternoon, p. 21).

The role of colour here is to suggest space as possibility. In Calvino’s early works colour does not simply have a visual value, but represents precisely that notion of ‘l’aprico’ [the sunlit], a theme which will later become the subject of his philosophical story, ‘From the Opaque’ (1971), which is both a point of arrival in terms of the author’s description of landscape and a discourse about the very act of describing, coinciding with the point at which memory takes on a geometric and topological form to mirror the Ligurian landscape.

In ‘Man in Wasteland’ (1946), a story which anticipates and summarizes the themes of ‘The Road to San Giovanni’ (1962) — which Calvino in later years would make the first story in his project for an ‘I-less’ autobiography — we see the young narrator climbing the mountain with his father as the dawn reveals the colours of the world one by one. It is one of the author’s most striking descriptions precisely because time (dawn) and space (the wood) intersect to give life to the gradual appearance of colours: first, the red of the berries (the most energetic of colours), then green (the thousand and one greens of the meadows), and finally the blue of the sea whose light is so striking as to ‘far restare pallido e timoroso il cielo’ [make the sky stay pale and fearful] (RR I, 187).

What is in play here is a kind of display of colours, an apparition in which the gerund ‘scoprendo’, used to describe the action of the dawn in the sentence ‘L’alba andava scoprendo i colori’ [the dawn slowly discovered the colours] (ibid.), suggests that colour also exists in the dark and that the arrival of light lifts the mantle of night to reveal the colours hidden beneath. Moreover, the power of the dawn-light is such that it is as if the far-off land, Corsica, is swallowed up by the light itself to become an ‘ambigua e smarrita’ [ambiguous and lost] space between sea and sky ‘che fa paura guardare perché non esiste’ [which it is frightening to look at because it does not exist] (ibid.).

In these passages of his prose, which verge on poetry, Calvino shows his indebtedness to hermetic poetry and particularly the poetry of Montale, an East Ligurian writer who, as Calvino himself once explained, had revealed to him, a fellow Ligurian but from the western Riviera, the landscape of that region, and had provided him with the appropriate lexis to describe it. It is from Montale — and from the Ligurian landscape — that the principal colours of Calvino’s spectrum derive: blue, yellow and green, but also red and the triadic grouping of white, black and grey.

As in Montale, so in Calvino colour is not simply a visual phenomenon but rather implies a series of symbolic and thematic variations, as well as a whole set of situations, states of mind and philosophical positions vis à vis reality, mankind, the animal world, Nature and destiny. In his first two books at least — The Path and Ultimo viene il corvo — ‘il colore è animale’ [colour is alive like an animal] for Calvino, or lives like a tree, a leaf, a flower, or even a butterfly, a crab, a green l...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Note on the Illustrations
• Le Square
• Introduction
• PART I: IMAGE
• PART II: EYE
• PART III: ART
• PART IV: EKPHRASIS
• Index