Between travellers, winters and cities: two works of Italo Calvino

Abstract

This essay intends to perform a comparative reading between two works of Calvino, Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler, observing their interrupting movements and their instances of overflow. The feature of "successive cancellation" in If on a winter's night a traveler (whose limit is “the cancellation of the world”) can operate as a "false double" of the successive ramifications of Invisible Cities, in its complex allegorization of such infinite territories as memory, desire, symbols, exchanges, the dead and the sky. On traveler’s side we have successive and abrupt cuts that unfold in new decisional operations and new cuts. On the side of the cities, the space covered by the traveler, we have one theme (the city) bending over himself almost geometrically. Between one move and another, the “indicative catalog of existential attitudes that lead to so many other obstructed ways” appears as an impossible horizon of desire, as an ingenious metaphor for something that is in between the traveler’s movement and the immobility of landscape, between the cut and the multiplication, between that which is always changing and that which never changes. The interval that all these features play out is multiplied in the web of absences and excesses of each book, making of the experience of unspeakable and the untranslatability of experience the narrative and poetic strength of these two novels.