Everything Old is New Again: Tradition in Calvino’s

(Calvino’s) materials are as modern as the new cosmology and as ancient as folktales, but whose themes are love and loss, change and permanence, illusion and reality, including a good deal of specifically Italian reality. Like all fine fantasists, Calvino grounds his flights in local, palpable detail…A true postmodernist, Calvino keeps one foot always in the narrative past of Boccaccio, Marco Polo, or Italian fairy tales—and one foot in, one might say, the Parisian structuralist present; one foot in fantasy, one in objective reality…I urge everyone to read Calvino at once…not only because he exemplifies my postmodernist program, but because his fiction is both delicious and high in protein (Barth, p. 70).

While Barth may believe that Calvino ought to represent his postmodernist program, the evidence that postmodernism has more democratic appeal than modernism is slim. Is Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow any less difficult or more democratic in its appeal than Joyce’

I detest this contemporary trend to destroy the traditional hierarchy of genres. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is not only a novel, it is a hyper-novel, a novel developed to the 10th degree. It has much in common with my Italian Folktales because its effect is created by the sense of the storyteller’s abundance, by the pleasure of the sheer proliferation of stories (Wood, p. 24).

Is it a coincidence that the final incipit, before the male reader and Ludmilla marry, is a take-off on the Arabian Nights tales, perhaps the oldest known collected fairytales? By placing this particular incipit so close to the culminating scene between the male and female readers, Calvino seems to be drawing special attention to the fairytale form.

Shortly before his death, Italo Calvino began writing a series of lectures on writing, published posthumously under the title Six Memos for a New Millennium. The lectures discussed “certain values, qualities or peculiarities of literature that are very close to my heart, trying to situate them within the perspective of the new millennium” (Memos, p. 3). The qualities he treats are lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity. It is the quality of multiplicity that is generally perceived as his most postmodernist, the need for complexity and/or innovation. He wrote:

Some topics in this essay:
Night Traveler, Italo Calvino, Arabian Nights, Replenishment” Barth, Memos Millennium, Female Reader, Jane Eyre, York City, Folktales Calvino, Italian Folktales, winter’s night, winter’s night traveler, night traveler, italo calvino, male reader, girl boy, direct address, books read, twentieth century, john barth, italian folktales, possibilities mutation unifying, sheer proliferation stories, infinite possibilities mutation, introduction italian folktales,