- 1 Teresa de Lauretis, "Calvino e la dialettica dei massimi sistemi," Italica , 53, 1, 1976, pp. 64-65 (...)
- 2 Brian McHale, "Telling Postmodernist Stories," Poetics Today, 9, 3, 1988, p. 555.
- 3 Anna Botta, "Calvino and the Oulipo: An Italian Ghost in the Combinatory Machine?", MLN, 112, 1, 19 (...)
- 4 Dani Cavallaro, The Mind of Italo Calvino, Jefferson, NC, and London, McFarland & Company, 2010, p. (...)
1Interest in Italo Calvino’s work The Castle of Crossed Destinies (Il castello dei destini incrociati, 1969) may have reached its peak in the 1970s and 1980s, in the age of high postmodernism, when the methodological episteme was modelled mostly on the meticulous study of the text’s non-linear form, predominantly on the relationship between the overlapping segments of narrative and the arbitrariness of the tarot cards representing the specific mute narrators of each tale. A remarkable integral overview of the work’s structure, the deck’s meanings, the literary plots involved, as well as its relation to the accompanying piece, The Tavern of Crossed Destinies (La taverna dei destini incrociati, 1973), can be found in Marilyn Schneider’s 1980 paper “Calvino at a Crossroads: Il castello dei destini incrociati,” whereas as early as in 1976, Teresa de Lauretis highlighted Calvino’s study of relevant structuralists like Propp, Strauss and Jakobson, which resulted in a change imposed on the fixed rules of sign systems, be it the langage or the tarot – the signification was altered when the storytellers changed the card order, and even more so when the other narrators interpreted the same cards differently, although on completion of the first half of the text all the cards were already laid on the table.1 In his influential survey essay “Telling Postmodernist Stories,” Brian McHale placed Calvino within a group of authors fascinated “with the systematic exhaustion of narrative possibilities,” alongside Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec; such writers, McHale succinctly puts it, often generate texts “from the systematic combinations of a limited number of elements.”2 Anna Botta discovered Calvino’s long-standing passion for texts that could dispense with the author, “that spoiled child of ignorance,” from a time before joining the experimental Parisian group Oulipo, and that “give a place to a more thoughtful person who will know that the author is a machine.”3 Dani Cavallaro dedicated an entire chapter to this book in his volume entitled The Mind of Italo Calvino, where he emphasises the author’s shift “from the structuralist notion of system to the poststructuralist image of structurality,” focusing on the not so obvious fact that the narrative left out a vast number of unrealised potentialities, “a deluge of alternative absent signs.”4 In a paper that ends on a more optimistic note than Cavallaro ascribes to the Castle, Gretchen Busl asserts that rather than presenting the impossibilities of the sign system to convey the fullness of the human experience, Calvino ventured into the restorative process of supplying the folktale narrators with a broadened spectrum of interpretation:
- 5 Gretchen Busl, "Rewriting the Fiaba: Collective Signification in Italo Calvino's Il castello dei de (...)
By creating new juxtapositions of recognizable words and images, the storyteller enriched his primitive language, just as Calvino intended to enrich literary language by forging as yet unimagined connections between existing signs.5
- 6 Bruce Morrissette, "Post-Modern Generative Fiction: Novel and Film," Critical Inquiry, 2, 2, 1975, (...)
2Our analysis will combine some of Vladimir Propp’s folktale functions with certain precepts of the Parisian literary group established in 1960 by a collective of French mathematicians and writers, known as Oulipo – Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature), the most famous of whom included Queneau, Perec and François Le Lionnais. Although Calvino was admitted to their ranks in 1973, by this time he had acquired a number of combinatory techniques that approached the creation of literary machines in that the text, once set in motion by the reader, generated meanings through various explicit or implicit instructions or through its very structure which shunned linearity. Bruce Morrissette claims that any sort of artistic intentionality constitutes a kind of generator, as does the adherence to the typical recurrent forms of rhyme, spelling, phonics, stanzas or cantos. He classifies the Oulipo generators as either reductive or proliferative, the former eliminating parts of texts, excluding letters from the alphabet or restricting the vocabulary, and the latter offering numerous opportunities for the emergence of new plots that are the consequence of a multiple rearrangement of the “prototypical” one.6 Italo Calvino’s “literary machine” certainly falls more under the proliferative heading, as one series of cards is interpreted in two or three different ways depending on the direction of “reading” and on the cards’ unique syntagmatic combinations in all the four main directions.
3 The aim of this paper is to offer a developmental overview of the plot of the novel (also definable as a novella, or a collection of such narratives) as it progresses from the first to the sixth narrators, and to offer insights into the operating rules of Calvino’s combinatorial narrative. Due to a different set of rules in The Tavern of Crossed Destines, e.g. freedom for a character to cross the rows or columns diagonally or even skip some over, we will leave the “companion piece” aside, as it is not only a work published years later, but it also features a noticeably different deck of cards, called the Tarot of Marseille, unlike the Castle’s earlier Visconti–Sforza deck.
- 7 Italo Calvino, Una pietra sopra, Milano, Mondadori, 2002, p. 202.
- 8 ibid., p. 203.
- 9 Busl, op. cit., p. 798.
- 10 Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, trans. Weaver, William, London, Vintage Books, 2010 (...)
4 The origin of the idea for writing the novel dates back to the year 1967, when Calvino attended the successful conference Cibernetica e fantasmi, where he delivered a lecture later named “Appunti sulla narrativa come processo combinatorio”; the work, included in his 1980 essay collection Una pietra sopra, treats the primaeval human need to tell stories, all of which have a limited number of actants and functions, and the difference between various folktales is brought about by their “unlimited combinations, permutations and transformations.”7 Along those lines, he also considered the most recent examples of the nouveau roman to be “reducible to a certain number of syntactic-rhetorical combinations,”8 and did not find any unbridgeable gap between the ancient fireside narration and the most sophisticated fictional experiments of the twentieth century. In addition, he participated in a seminar conducted by Paolo Fabbri in 1968, centering on the relation between cartomancy and narrative functions, which incited him to think that the tarot deck could be used as a macchina narrativa combinatoria,9 i.e. that stories could be constructed by means of this extralinguistic system of signs and their combinations. When we add the possible influence of Gertrude Moakley’s 1966 monograph, The Tarot Cards Painted by Bonifacio Bembo for the Visconti–Sforza Family, a detailed study of the mid-15th century tarot deck intended for the Italian aristocratic couple, it is reasonable to conclude that it was in this corpus that Calvino found the most fertile ground for his combinatorial aptitude, Fabbri’s incentives in card reading, and the self-confessed fixation on this narrative form: “I publish this book to be free of it: it has obsessed me for years. I began by trying to line up tarots at random, to see if I could read a story in them.”10
5 A few words about the tarot deck that the author drew upon would be in order, since the Visconti–Sforza pack has not come down to us in a complete form: there are four missing cards, those being the Tower, the Devil, the Knight of Coins and the Three of Swords, so Calvino marks the first two with blank spaces on the table, taking it for granted that the narrators use them normally, he reconstructs the Knight of Coins after other decks where the card survived, and he never uses the Three of Swords. A regular deck of tarot cards consists of ten numeral cards and four court cards (Page, Knight, Queen, King) for each of the suits (Cups, Swords, Clubs, Coins), making the number 56 for the so-called Minor Arcana; there are 21 tarots proper (triumphs), with a usually unmarked card named the Fool, which adds up to 78 cards in total. Calvino stresses in the “Note” following the main text that he does not inscribe almost any mystical, symbolic, astrological, cabalistic or alchemistic meaning in the deck:
There are very few traces of all this in the present book, where the cards are ‘read’ in the most simple and direct fashion: by observing what the picture portrays and establishing a meaning, which varies according to the sequence of cards into which each individual card is inserted.11
- 12 Michael Dummett and John McLeod, A History of Games Played with the Tarot Pack: The Game of Triumph (...)
6A very high authority on the history of tarot cards, Sir Michael Dummett, confidently disperses any illusion that the cards were invented for fortune-telling or occult clairvoyance, since it was not until the 18th century that the use of them for divination became widespread in Bologna and France: “Their association with the occult originated exclusively in France; neither it nor their use for fortune-telling was propagated in print until 1781.”12
- 13 Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, p. 126.
- 14 ibid.
- 15 Italo Calvino, Una pietra sopra, p. 213-214.
7 It would be worthwhile to engage in a deeper study of Calvino’s own veracity regarding the process of making the Castle, since the testimony written post festum does not have to be entirely accurate. The author states: “I thought of a book, and I imagined its frame: the mute narrators, the forest, the inn; I was tempted by the diabolical idea of conjuring up all the stories that could be contained in a tarot deck.”13 Relying first on pictures, then on words to tell the tales, Calvino admits that the earliest narrative in the published novel did not originate before all others: “I first constructed the stories of Roland and Astolpho [Tales 5 and 6], and for the other stories I was content to put them together as they came, with the cards laid down.14 All this goes to show that the author followed the same line of argument as in his “Appunti” essay, where he states that the ancient childish play of combining motifs into various narratives may cause the things to click into place and one of the combinations obtained through the combinatorial mechanism itself “becomes charged with an unexpected meaning or unforeseen effect which the conscious mind would not have arrived at deliberately.”15 Naturally, the complex meaning of these segments of a literary machine would have to comply with the readers’ fundamental experience, since combining contiguous motifs into a coherent whole in narrative differs greatly from writing metaphysical poetry, where one archiseme is often enough to connect two disparate phenomena, like William Cartwright’s juxtaposition of blood and mills: “Motion, as in a mill, / Is busy standing still.”
- 16 Rens Bod, A New History of the Humanities, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013, p. 328.
- 17 Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Scott, Laurence, Austin, University of Texas Pre (...)
8 Considering that this book rests primarily on images, which in turn spur the narratorial imagination to produce different stories from different points of view, it would not be possible to make a verbatim application of Vladimir Propp’s typology and structure of the folktale. In his research, he divided the recorded tales into the smallest narrative units, which he called functions, often interchangeable with the term narrateme. For example, the sentence “the villain collects information about the victim” is a narrateme.16 In Propp’s view, the names of the dramatis personae may change, e.g. the king, prince, Ivan, daughter-in-law, but their functions remain the same across multiple narratives. Calvino’s tales intersect with each other, and as they go in different directions, and the course of action changes, so do the meanings of the same elements, i.e. the cards. Not predicting Calvino’s experiment, Propp does not say anything about the reverse or perpendicular order in which the Italian author’s stories appear, but he is aware of the influence of the syntagmatic grid on the series of actions: “An action cannot be defined apart from its place in the course of narration. The meaning that a given function takes on in the course of action must be considered.”17
9 It is an incontrovertible fact that Calvino envisaged the rectangular shape of the deck distributed before he started writing the work, even if we do not wholly embrace his afterthought on constructing Tales 5 and 6 first – the narrative begins from the other corner of the table. For an easier understanding of the analysis, we are providing below the reproduction of the fully laid-out pack, with all the enunciators in the margins (12 court cards, used by the mute narrators), and the entire rectangular field of the narrated events.
Fig. 1. The final card layout of The Castle of Crossed Destinies, p. 40
10Even before he sat down to sequence the cards, Calvino had to face several limitations, the first of which is purely historical: the Sforza–Visconti deck now lacks four cards – the Tower, the Devil, the Knight of Coins and the Three of Swords, and he could not do without such important cards as the first two, which are members of the Major Arcana. As far as the Knight of Coins is concerned, that card had to appear either as a narrator in the margin or a character from a tale, so that all the sixteen face (court) cards would find their places in the spread. Further on, there are three face cards on each of the four margins, making up a total of twelve credible narrators. Of those twelve cards, there are three pages, three knights, three queens and three kings, which is a conspicuous example of prearranged symmetry. Not having all the cards at his disposal, Calvino could not fill a rectangle so as to complete the first row below the three upper margin cards and the row above the three lower margin cards (and a pip card in the bottom right-hand corner, the Seven of Clubs). A schematic diagram with row numbers will be of more assistance in the analysis of the arrangement of the filled and unfilled spots in the system:
Fig. 2. A simplified view of the deck with numbered rows
11As we can see in the diagram, one pip card undermines the exquisite symmetry of the imagined deck, and it extends beyond the domain of the narrated to lie side by side with the card of one of the subsequent narrators – the fact that the Queen of Clubs closes the text of the Castle is also relevant to a construction with so much geometrical regularity in its essence. All the other eleven face cards ambivalently govern two columns or two rows of cards, since they straddle either formation and can weave tales with two possible beginnings. The author does not hide his intention to create a two-dimensional pictorial narrative form. He writes in the “Note”:
- 18 Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, p. 124.
The result is a general pattern in which you can ‘read’ three stories horizontally and three stories vertically, and in addition, each of these sequences of cards can be ‘read’ in reverse, as another tale.18
12Altogether, there are 73 cards on the table when the deck is exhausted, with these left unused: the Four of Cups, the Five of Swords, the Three of Coins and the Three of Clubs, one from each of the four suits. The actual deck lacks the Three of Swords, and that may be a plausible reason for the exclusion of the other two cards with the number Three. The other three missing cards were indispensable for the narrative, even at the price of reconstructing the Knight of Coins. The four empty slots in rows 1 and 8 limit the vertical narrators in their possible governance of columns 3 and 6, and in a more fundamental way, they preclude the upper and lower horizontal narrators from any conclusive storytelling which would go across the rows in question. The very contact of all the narrators (except the Queen of Clubs) with two rows or columns exemplarily supports Propp’s claim that the place of an action within the narrative sequence gives the action its proper meaning. In a text whose most striking semantic characteristic is polysemy, this potential ambivalence in movement entails a necessary shift in the structure and cognition of a given narrative.
- 19 ibid., p. 9.
- 20 ibid., p. 16.
- 21 ibid., p. 10.
- 22 ibid., p. 27.
13All the tales in the novel are made up of three types of cards: court cards, pip cards (members of the Minor Arcana) and the cards of the Great Arcana, the 22 elements the tarot is so famous for. The court cards depict acceptable human characters of courtiers at various levels of dignity, and the Major Arcana cards either feature humans, like the Hanged Man, the Fool or the Emperor, or anthropomorphic phenomena, like Temperance, the Sun, Justice or the Wheel of Fortune. Even Death is presented in the shape of a human skeleton with a bow and arrow. The pip cards are shown to possess a wide array of arbitrary traits, and their extensible meanings proliferate visibly under the command of diverse narrators. Thus, the Ace of Cups in the first tale can be interpreted as a fountain in the forest, which increases passion between a young man and a girl,19, but in the second tale can also be interpreted as the Fountain of Life, “the supreme goal of the alchemist’s search.”20 The first two groups can safely fall within Propp’s category of dramatis personae or characters, as all of them show human or humanlike agency, and in combination with different cards of all the three types, they exhibit ever new motifs and grow into narratemes with a decidedly divergent dynamic propelling each of the tales. For example, the Knight of Swords in the first tale may mean that the groom has left his own wedding feast and pursued an unknown enemy,21 but in the fourth tale, the card means a stern archangel that addresses a question to the tale’s narrator, who comes within arms’ reach of the World, the greatest of the Arcana.22
14 The direction of the narratives leaves no doubt that the author had planned the final layout of the deck meticulously, albeit with a lot of obstacles in the way:
And so I spent whole days taking apart and putting back together my puzzle; I invented new rules for the game, I drew hundreds of patterns, in a square, a rhomboid, a star design; but some essential cards were always left out, and some superfluous ones were always there in the midst.23
15Although Calvino’s own image of the cards laid out on the table is an accurate representation of the narrators’ cumulative work, the paper will present each new tale as the novel unfolds, and afterwards a summary will be given of the specificities of the major narratemes against Propp’s comprehensive grid of functions. The difference between the decks is irrelevant for the analysis of Calvino’s text in its phases – the photographed cards were designed by Julius Berkovsky and appended to his 2002 book The Tarot – An Ancient System of Symbols (the Serbian translation appeared in 2020), and the deck follows the Marseille iconographic tradition.
16The first tale is told by the Knight of Cups, and its first half goes down from the sixth card in row 1 (the King of Coins) to the bottom-placed Seven of Clubs. There the ungrateful knight leaves the dishonoured maiden who helped him when he was hanging upside down; the main narrator notices: “At this point it was clear that a second part of the tale was beginning, perhaps after a lapse of time.”24 Now the tale shifts to the left and starts from the Empress (the fifth card in row 1), again going down to the fifth card in row 8, the Eight of Swords, when the fierce Maenads tear him to pieces. In short, this tale must be read downwards, since its halves begin on top of the deck of cards.
Fig. 3. Tale 1
17The second tale begins from the right margin, and the King of Cups starts off from the Ace of Cups in row 7, heads far left to the Two of Coins, and advances into row 6, whose first card is the Devil – in a boustrophedon mode of writing, the story now goes to the far right and ends with the card Temperance:
Fig. 4. Tale 2
18The third tale now sets off from the bottom margin, and the Page of Swords takes the Six of Clubs (the second card in row 8) and goes upwards through column 2 to the Six of Cups, then moves left to column 1 (the Four of Coins), the point from which the narrative goes down all the way and finishes with the Four of Swords:
Fig. 5. Tale 3
19The fourth tale, that of the Page of Coins, departs from the left margin, and zigzags through rows 3 and 2; after column 4, it is not quite clear which card comes before which, but it is certain that the tale ends with the Nine of Clubs, the eighth card in row 3:
20Fig. 6. Tale 4
21If we make a diagrammatic presentation of the initial progression of the four tales (in their first halves), a well-ordered vectorial structure appears:
Fig. 7. A simplified diagram of progression, Tales 1 through 4
22Now comes the section Calvino claims to have engineered first, where the readers encounter the Fool for the first time; from the left, the King of Swords unravels his tale to the right in row 4, ending with card 8 in the row, the Arcanum Force, as Roland is mowing down the Saracen enemies; similarly to the technique in Tale 1, but this time horizontally, the narrator starts a new paragraph and continues his story across row 5 to the far right card, which shows the insane paladin strung up by his feet as the Hanged Man25:
Fig. 8. Tale 5
23Tale 6 brings the number of cards in the “rectangle” to an end, as it features the Knight of Clubs, who begins his story by throwing down the Ace of Swords as the fourth card in row 8, then continues upwards to row 1, where he adds the Nine of Swords and turns left with the Hermit card; from there, he goes down through column 3 all the way back to row 8, the third card of which is significantly the Ace of Coins – it serves as the Moon for the narrator, who turns out to be Astolpho, in search for Roland’s lost reason:
Fig. 9. Tale 6
24Another formal feature of the final layout strikes the eye, and it is visible in the third and sixth columns: they are not the paths taken by the vertically structured narratives, and in this truncated form, they may function as buffer zones between the vertical tales, showing the strictly determined geometry of the original plan. In addition, these columns do not show a single card of the major Arcana, and there is only one court card included, the Page of Clubs in row 4, column 6.
25Taken all together, there are as many as 36 cards where the narrators’ “destinies” cross paths, and in the first six tales, each of the cards serves as the link in a chain for exactly two stories, which is enabled by the above-mentioned vectorial square, with its prearranged clockwise and clockwork symmetry: each new story’s beginning overlaps with the previous story’s near ending – with the exception of the Seven of Clubs in the extreme bottom right – and the ending of Tale 4 neatly covers the near beginning of Tale 1 when the figure comes full circle. We will illustrate the arbitrariness of the cards’ meaning with examples that belong to these shared tetrads of elements in order of their appearance within the plot.
26For the purposes of problematisation in the analysis of the crucial narratemes, we will cover the five crucial four-card “nodes” or intersections of tales – the overlapping segments of Tales 1 and 2, Tales 2 and 3, Tales 3 and 4, Tales 4 and 1, and Tales 5 and 6. One narrateme consists of at least two cards that interact with each other’s connotative meanings and with the broader context of the entire sequence. Based on the purely sequential criterion, we may say that one of the pairs is usually human or anthropomorphic, and if neither is, there is a human or anthropomorphic card preceding the impersonal pair and propelling the action within the limits of human agency and believability.
- 26 Vladimir Propp, op. cit., p. 39-40.
- 27 Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, p. 15.
- 28 ibid., p. 16.
- 29 ibid., pp. 17-18.
- 30 Vladimir Propp, op. cit., p. 29.
27As we know, Tale 1 demonstrates an interruption in the form of the transition from the bottom of column 8 to the top of column 7, so the lower four cards of the narrative do not share a contiguous sequence: the Arcanum Temperance stands for a country maiden who helps the hero when he is turned upside down, and the Ace of Cups signifies a fountain that intoxicates him with amorous passion. The motif of a sylvan maiden may structurally correspond to Propp’s Function XII, or the helper,26 although the capillary parody of folktales is seen as early as in the first tale, when the hero abuses the girl and leaves her ungratefully. When Tale 2 opens, the Ace of Cups represents the Fountain of Life, since the narrator’s “melancholy face”27 shows almost no signs of carnality. The second strand of Tale 1 includes the Two of Swords, which in that context means that the hero meets a fierce Amazon ready to go to battle. The Popess Arcanum signifies (in all likelihood) the high priestess of Cybele, who announces the hero’s imminent dismemberment for his offence of the country maiden. This narrateme does not bear too much resemblance to folktales, since it features an analepsis with a long reach, and does not show a strong bond between the motifs like the previous pair. In Tale 2, the Popess incarnates an expert in alchemy, one of the forest women dealing with “philters and magic potions”28; again we can see an example of Propp’s Function XII, which makes for a strong motivic bond. When he comes almost to the ending, the alchemist arrives at the gates of the City of Gold, where the Two of Swords symbolises armed guards blocking the way to the devil in any disguise, and the maiden symbolises Temperance, a somewhat abstract and far-fetched connection. The middle of Tale 2 is told in a regular sequence, from the second and first cards in row 7 via the first and second cards in row 6, which brings up a more solid sequence of motifs: on meeting the Juggler in the woods, the hero sees the man’s ability to produce gold (the Seven of Coins), and the Two of Coins announces a barter, commerce between the two parties; very logically, the first card in row 6 is the Devil – and the number 6 fits in well with this ominous appearance – so the evildoer obtains Faust’s soul, which is represented by the Star card, a young girl-like Psyche illuminating “the shadows with her light.29” In terms of structuralist folklore, the devil’s demand for the hero’s soul may be seen as an embodiment of Function VI, when “the villain attempts to deceive his victim in order to take possession of him or of his belongings.”30 As opposed to the relatively weaker motivation of three pip cards in a row, these two offer a more plausible connection.
28 Tale 3’s meaning is again determined by its opposition to the previous tale, and the Seven of Coins now has a far more subdued significance for the storyteller (the Page of Swords); it may be a faint glimmer in the forest that draws him to a clearing, where he passes by the Star, a maiden holding a taper in the woods. The motivation between this and the previous card (the Seven of Coins) leaves something to be desired, because this pair does not influence the plot too visibly. The story goes up to rows 3 and 2, where the Two of Clubs represents the possibility of choice (the main narrator is not very convinced), and the Eight of Coins may mean a hidden treasure; however, the hero chooses love offered by the woman (the preceding Queen of Swords). Soon enough, the first card in row 2, the Pope, signifying St. Peter, forbids the woman from entering Paradise; she turns out to be a rotting corpse (Death), to the hero’s utter disgust. This is a fine example of Propp’s function II, when the hero is issued an interdiction, or in here, it is the hero’s love interest who receives it. Close to the narrative’s ending, the character discovers that his newly found love is actually a doomed bride, taken away to the netherworld by the Devil, who does not care two pence (the Two of Coins) for her arms and armour. The character of the devil thus performs two functions: in Tale 2, he strikes the irreversible bargain with the hero, and in Tale 3, he abducts another protagonist.31 The motivation is noticeably more powerful in the earlier tale, where an anthropomorphic card supplies the narrateme with more denotative value.
29 Tale 4 has a slightly more complicated dynamic, since it often changes rows – it starts from the Death card, on the grounds of the narrator’s grave-robbing activity, and continues with the Pope, with an explanation of this combination’s meaning:
- 32 Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, p. 25-26.
If this young man was really a grave-robber, he must have gone to cemeteries in search of the most illustrious graves, the tomb of a Pope, for example, since pontiffs descend into their graves in all the splendour of their trappings.32
30Unlike the previous tale, this one establishes a weaker bond between the character cards, having in mind the unacceptably corrupt “hero,” which again demonstrates a generally poorer motivation in the sequences used by a new mute narrator. When the fourth storyteller continues to the second card in row 2, it is interpreted as his use of two levers (the Two of Clubs) for a raid into the papal tomb (the Eight of Coins, in row 3). This pair of cards furnishes a more believable narrateme, given the intrinsic value of a relatively high pip card from the Coin suit. Due to the reversed order of the Pope and Death in Tales 3 and 4, different potentialities are realised in the respective storylines: in the former, the card character issues an ban, whereas in the latter, he is utterly powerless before a common page who exceeds even the carnivalesque limits by descending to abominations. The intersected “square” ends with the overlapping four cards from Tales 4 and 1, where the Knight of Swords is an archangel offering the grave-robber riches, power or wisdom at the gates of the City of the Possible. When he chooses Coins (riches), he gets Clubs and crashes to the ground from the tree in the cemetery. A narrateme like this lacks plausibility and swerves into the fantastic, where almost anything is possible. On the other hand, Tale 1’s pip cards, the Ten of Coins and the Nine of Clubs, click neatly into place with its narrator’s situation: a young nobleman comes into a considerable fortune upon his father’s death (the King of Coins) and ventures into a forest. Again, the original deployment of the cards supplies the reader with a more convincing story.
- 33 ibid., p. 30.
- 34 ibid., p. 33.
- 35 ibid., p. 34.
31Tale 5 performs a unique function in the text in that it completes the number of cards lying on the table: the narrator, the King of Swords, begins his story from row 4, introducing the missing cards in the row, from card 3 to card 6 inclusive, and he repeats the action in row 5, with the remaining cards in the analogous positions. His tale, told first in row 4, then continued in row 5, intersects with Tale 3, but perpendicularly, so that he does not tell his events in reverse order from any pair of cards from that tale. In Tale 3, the Ten of Swords was just a secondary motif, a possible barrier of the archangels, who were blocking the doomed bride’s entrance to heaven, but in Tale 5, this card resolutely represents the spectacular details of mediaeval battles, quite in keeping with the narrator’s identity of Roland. The second card in row 4 stands in connection with the previous two, since the Queen of Swords impersonates Angelica, which convinces all the participants that “Count Roland was still in love with her.”33 Given the fact that the tales that go through columns 3 and 6 do not overlap with any other tales, it is acceptable to think that Calvino reserved the cards that were the most pregnant with meaning for the very centre of the table: the Chariot and Love (cards 4 and 5 in row 4), and the Moon and the Fool (cards 4 and 5 in row 5). All of them belong to the Major Arcana, and it is safe to claim that if any narrator suits the role of the fool, it is the one posing as Roland. The chariot is driven not by a king, but by a queen, in whom Roland sees his beloved Angelica, but does not realise that she was previously united with Medoro in a forest. The Page of Clubs, card 6 in row 4, illustrates Angelica’s taste in men – a youth of the entourage, slender, coy as a girl, not the sword-wielding warrior. The end of Roland’s first strand crosses paths with Tale 1, and the Sun symbolises a cupid in flight who took away Roland’s sanity, unlike the Sun in Tale 1, where the same card was interpreted as the hero’s unknown child; the Arcanum Force in Roland’s tale corresponds well to the knight’s blind rage in battle against the Muslim invaders, and in Tale 1 the card stands for a brute who attacks and humiliates the tale’s main character. When it is semantically analysed, the same card has decidedly different meanings due to its syntactic position, and it even denotes two levels of relevance and quality: the hero and the opponent. Row 5 intersects with Tale 3, but in Roland’s story, the Five of Clubs means the crash of the uprooted trees, and the Seven of Swords has a more noticeable importance – the sword Durendal was hung on a tree – than in Tale 3 (the Seven of Swords is the future arms of the maiden, and the Five of Clubs is a dubious path through the forest). The fourth card in row 5, the Moon, represents a nymph with a mad look, and by extension, the Moon as a planet conquered by Earth. The next card bears enormous relevance to the entire company: Roland, in a savage state, his reason gone, descends into “the chaotic heart of things, the centre of the square of the cards and of the world, the point of intersection of all possible orders.”34 The Three of Cups symbolises a phial in which his reason was kept, but is now overturned. On Roland’s trail comes Justice with Charlemagne’s knights, and he is finally caught and left hanging perhaps for therapeutic purposes. Paradoxically, he declares: “Leave me like this. I have come full circle and I understand. The world must be read backward. All is clear.”35 As Calvino’s text reaches its conclusion, the implausibility of his narratemes increases and deviates from the solid logic of folktales, which almost never show a completely insane protagonist – we may claim that the Hanged Man at the end of Tale 5, suspended upside down, functions as a parodic comment on traditional folktale narration, where the place in a sequence is firmly fixed.
32 The author had reserved some of the most significant cards for the tale of Roland (swords, clubs, and as many as eight of the Major Arcana cards), so that the reader can take his word that some of the narratives were prearranged, which entailed a considerable degree of restraint in the rest of the stories. Thus, Calvino availed himself of the proliferative generators with regard to at least twofold meanings of every card, but he also had to comply with the reductive element of their unique arrangement. Moreover, the close proximity of four pairs of the Major Arcana furnishes this particular tale with a clearer meaning as to who may be narrating it – even without the title, it would be easier to identify than, for example, Tale 1.
33 Tale 6 only introduces four new cards, two in row 8 and row 1 respectively. The fourth card in row 8 is the Ace of Swords, a clear indicator of chivalry, above it stand the Emperor and the Nine of Cups – Astolpho (the narrator) has been summoned by Charlemagne to help Roland find his sanity, a storyline into which the Fool and Love fit readily. The Arcana named the World and the Tower also follow the important battles and sieges of renowned Frankish cities and territories, the Nine of Swords denotes more warfare, and the Hermit stands for Merlin the wizard. Astolpho ascends to the Moon on his Hippogryph (the Chariot), where he meets the Juggler, who acts in the capacity of a poet. He replies when Astolpho asks if the Moon is filled with sense or if it is just an arid desert, where every journey ends in “the centre of an empty horizon?”36
34 The structure of Tale 6 exhibits a good deal of symmetry, visible in the two aces which open and close the narrative and build important details into the story; there is also a synecdochical correlation between the Tower and the World. Further on, in column 4, a credible apocalyptic narrative can be woven with as many as six of the Major Arcana cards, making it the densest row or column in this respect. The fact that it rounds off the first six tales (which all have the card-adding capacity) may speak in favour of a climactic movement of all these tales, which lends support to Calvino’s version of the book’s origin.
- 37 ibid., p. 37.
- 38 ibid., p. 41.
- 39 ibid., p. 45.
35 It is not strange that the other six characters (or eight characters, as some contend for a narrating card already laid down) tell their tales in a much more confused and more condensed manner than the first six do. In the section “All the Other Tales,” each narrative has to wade through strips of cards already fixed, so the Queen of Coins begins her tale from the centre of the upper margin and comes into an open collision with Astolpho – he is identified as manipulating the Nine of Swords and the Hermit,37 but so is she: “…already placing at his path’s destination the Hermit and the Nine of Swords…,”38 which can be accepted only if we believe in the characters’ cartoonlike essence. She proceeds downwards like Helen of Troy, intersecting with motifs of love, siege, Zeus and the Trojan Horse (the Knight of Clubs). From the right margin comes the Queen of Cups, who delves into the story of Roland in reverse order, and parallelly above, the King of Clubs runs through his story to the left, and finally defeats Death, so no one may die any more. The Knight of Coins begins in the top left margin, and introduces himself as a former Pope, who has beent to war, where the massacres made him ask God why this was permitted. Naturally, the Devil replies that he shares the souls with Him, so they do battle by means of the Two of Clubs. As if this uproar were not enough, the Queen of Swords appears from the rectangle (the second card in row 4), introducing herself as the “Joyous Goddess of destruction, who governs the world’s ceaseless dissolution and restoration.”39 The endless war in the universe permeates the greatest bodies and the tiniest corpuscles, and not even the spirits or atoms can be spared, so the game finally spirals out of control. Such a turn of events may lead us to assume that Calvino had to contend with serious reductive factors in his creative process, because such a neatly ordered grid offers the highest degree of veracity in its first reading. The arbitrary change of direction is the most conspicuous difference between the postmodern novel and Propp’s views of immutably ordered functions in folktales, and it can serve as an immanent parody on the semantic potential of each of the cards, which undermines the linear reading of the canonic folktale genre to the point of producing enigmatic, even cartoonlike multidirectional fabrications and improvisations.
36 The last segment of this chapter shows some metaleptic traits, since the main narrator seems to straddle both worlds, trying to tell his tale and filling in the rectangle with two more court cards. The penultimate card is the Page of Cups, who is likely to be the host in the castle, and who departs from the bottom of the left margin. The host was amply rewarded by the devil, who hinted at a magic coin-producing cup hidden in the castle; the host ventured into the city and the forest, where the Popess served as a high priestess of a Bacchic ritual. The cup was finally found as the Ace of Cups, from where bare-footed Temperance replenished her pitcher. Finally, the entire narrative ends when the Queen of Clubs unwinds her tale, from the bottom to the top of column 7: a young schoolgirl tells the abbess of a convent (the Popess) that she will challenge the captain of the invading army (the Knight of Swords) to a duel (the Two of Swords), and he even falls in love with her and is crowned at the wedding. However, her in-laws order her murdered, but she overpowers the brute and ties him upside down. She conceals herself as Temperance, or a castle maidservant – she regularly pours wine for the guests, and the interpretation of the very last card (the Two of Cups) leads us to believe that she is setting a table for her husband and herself in the quiet of their home in the woods. We may hypothesise that Calvino dented the potentially perfect symmetry of the card layout by introducing the Seven of Clubs as the supernumerary card in Tale 1 in order to announce the position of the last narrator, the Queen of Clubs, whose syntactic surroundings denote a traditional mediaeval literary device known as the explicit.
37 To conclude, we can see that the first half of the novel is an outstanding example of the detailed planning of the change in meaning of most cards by way of theirs changes in position. This feature is more prominent in the human or anthropomorphic characters, as they govern the narrative and offer an array of characteristics that are credible when inscribed into a suitable context, e.g. the cloak in the Sun card in Tale 1 may belong to the hero (the Knight of Swords), but it is not even mentioned in the use of the same card in Tale 5 – the landscape could be a reference to invaded France. The mutual influence of one card on another is strongest when the cards are contiguous – it even functions backwards – but Calvino wisely abstains from assigning them much value across four or five slots, since that would undermine the logic of linear progression, despite the fact that the inventive stories are read horizontally and vertically, from left to right as well as from right to left. The most meaningful narratemes consist of two human or anthropomorphic cards, like the Devil and the Soul, the Pope and Death, and especially the four central cards, the Chariot, Love, the Moon and the Fool. Occasionally four cards may function as a narrateme if they are assembled in a cluster, but the most common combination is one human or anthropomorphic card plus one pip card. The more narrators there are after Tale 6, the less order and narrative possibilities the fixed structure offers, and it is understandable why the author joined all those “hasty” narratives into one textual segment – a tale could endure one palimpsest with a different order of its elements, but telling a third story with the same cards proves to be noticeably less feasible and more confabulatory, with less believability as even arguments ensue over the cards’ meaning. The cards do not furnish enough potential motifs, details or features to be aptly used for a third time without a major loss of narrative functionality.
