Calvino's Fictions

Hume seeks the stable core of Calvino's imagination, and analyzes the "unmistakeable accent" that unites his disparate creations. Partisan fighting, air pollution, science, gold-leafed tarot cards, novelistic genres: such variety of subject has fostered study of individual works or simple chronological description. Hume identifies Calvino's major fantastic structure - his metaphysic of particles and flux, his granular concept of reality, his many images of engulfment, his models and microcosms - and traces the metamorphoses of such images throughout his novels and stories. The cosmicomical tales, with their focus on science, are seen as crucial to the development of the symbolic mindscapes that made Calvino a major international writer. Calvino died before arriving at any satisfactory solution to the problems of relating the "I" to the "not-I", but Hume derives from his later works a philosophy based on the creation of likenesses, of internal microcosms that permit us to mirror the macrocosm. These interior pictures form part of a mental gallery, and provide the basis for "inward civilization", a way of defining the self that does not involve tyranny over others.