Italo Calvino and the energy at “the starting moment”

Abstract

The incipit, as narrative exordium, as the literary structure whereupon Calvino reflects, contains the kernel of a subtle utopia: to find oneself always at the onset, at the creative spot where anything is possible, and wherefrom energies emanate and retreat. The starting point, which stands for the cornerstone of any literary project, becomes an experience that is directly associated with the individual and with his/her social-political action. The incipit might be considered, at the same time – making use of a term from stylistic criticism – a literary archetypal protothema. The “utopian ideal” would consist in the continuous enlargement of this initial energy as for a compact, coherent, well defined, and, still, always-new organism to be shaped. Always more consciously, as the essay Cominciare e Finire [Beginning and ending] from February 1985 poses, such idea  permeates Calvino’s stylistic choices, in his constant trajectories’ alterations, in the horror of being classified within one of the intellectual “cages” of  literary genres.