Last Night was a Rhizome: Italo Calvino and Breaking Reality with Serf Fiction
I have spent the past two to three years of my life being Sydney’s biggest Italo Calvino shill. Anyone who has been unlucky enough to be cornered by me at a party will know this. My modus operandi goes thusly: one, identify a victim—someone sympathetic towards continental philosophy and attendant veins of literary wankery—and position myself on an approach vector. Two, engage target with a tentatively inquisitive, “Have you read much Italian fiction?” This is a relatively neutral line of questioning, a conversational dipping of the proverbial toe in the water. Three, launch an all-out Calvino strike:
“Dude you have to read If on a winter’s night a traveler bro it’s awesome it’s like this postmodern thing where there are like twelve different novels in it and it’s kind of in second person tense dude it’s crazy metafictive.”
“Invisible Cities is like a bunch of vignettes about—get this—imaginary cities and also- wait also listen to this… it’s narrated by Marco Polo as he tells these stories to Kublai Khan bro isn’t that sick!!!”
“I’ve actually got an Italo Calvino tattoo, wanna see?”
“Literally forget DFW man, Calvino is like the LeBron of fiction.”
I acknowledge that these efforts have probably done irreparable damage to the Italian author’s reputation in my general social circle. Whenever I try and convince someone to read Calvino, I am usually met with a blank response; my very patient friends and less patient acquaintances clearly don’t appear to share my stimulant-fuelled enthusiasm for abstract postmodern fiction. Those with an affinity for fiction which is (ugh) “readable,” or worse, “coherent” are mainly perplexed by my love for the guy, and the more politically minded can be much more explicit about the pointlessness of Calvino’s endeavour, questioning the value of lit-theory brainrot in a world that appears to be falling apart around us.
This critique is certainly compounded by the perception that this mode of literature is written for a class of overeducated and overgrown literary theory douchebabies brandishing service medals awarded for intellectual wounds sustained during the Theory Wars of the 70s, clinging to pristine Of Grammatology (1967) paperbacks while hatefucking Harold Bloom anime body pillows. Judging from the popularity of writers like Sally Rooney and Ocean Vuong, or the growing influence of autofiction in our literary landscape, it seems that many are hungry for stories about ‘real people,’ narratives reproducing our individual lives, experiences, and identities so that we can understand our place in modernity better.
However, I think that Italo Calvino’s work, and more broadly, fiction of his kind of anti-realist or metafictional style, is the type of writing we urgently need in our disintegrating world. When we wake up every day in a world characterised by self-reproducing structures of subjugation, abjection, and outright oppression, how can we see fiction that is realistic or logical as being able to inspire and envision change? You cannot really dismantle the world when your fiction only looks to depict it as it is. Realist fiction can only describe or reproduce the logic by which our world operates, and as such it can only pathologise and prognose existing conditions of existence. By exploring the play of language in abstraction, using the metatextual and anti-realist endeavours of authors like Calvino, we can imagine a world beyond the one we live in. To look to a future, we’ve got to go abstract.
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Let me sketch out a definition of this style of writing, which I’ll call anti-realist fiction. (I am clearly avoiding the term postmodernist in a doomed attempt to skirt the David Foster Wallace associations.) Italo Calvino’s fiction is largely characterised by a kind of metatextual play, where the focus is on questions of textuality and form. For instance, his novel If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979) opens with the line, “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.” The narrative (if you could call it that) follows You, the reader (hello!), as you read the first chapter of twelve separate novels. How metafictional.
Calvino is often named in the canon of playfully abstract prose, brought up alongside authors like the inimitable Jorge Luis Borges or the GOAT of literary theory nerd fiction, Umberto Eco. This kind of fiction, which is often lazily and reductively termed ‘postmodernist,’ tends to be at odds with a conventional Anglophone understanding of valuable prose fiction; many of us view ‘good’ writing as prose containing deeply fleshed out and convincing characters, lovingly crafted settings, and as a project of depicting and understanding the complexity of human experience. Calvino generally fails if his writing is judged against these criteria. In his main body of work, where he writes in this metatextual or ‘postmodern’ manner, characters can feel like plot devices before real people, the world of the text is ambiguous, and Calvino seems more concerned with abstract questions of language and textuality before addressing lived and felt human experiences.
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‘The Nonexistent Knight’ (‘Il cavaliere inesistente’) is my favourite of Calvino’s novellas, and the one I think best demonstrates the allegorical, anti-real qualities that allow for the dismantling of social reality. Included in Calvino’s collection Our Ancestors (1962), ‘The Nonexistent Knight’ is one panel of a triptych of narratives where Calvino writes allegorical fables, toying with the medieval romance genre in bizarre and hilarious ways. The eponym of the novella is Agilulf, a knight in Charlemagne’s army who literally does not exist; there is a pristine suit of armour, a bevy of titles, and an ironclad high-school-prefect-like commitment to the chivalric code, but no entity to inhabit them. When Charlemagne, reviewing his knights, comes to Agilulf, he asks the knight to draw up his visor, to reveal himself, but as the Carolingian Emperor comes to see, “The helmet was empty. No one was inside the white armor with its iridescent crest.” The novella follows Agilulf and a small band of characters around him as they navigate the chivalric strictures and social structures of a medieval period characterised by a tension between the abstract and the visceral, between chivalrous knights with titles and nameless and illiterate serfs.
As an example of anti-realist fiction, ‘The Nonexistent Knight’ is not a novella concerned with fleshing out the deep personal experiences of its characters, or the coherent functioning of a real-feeling narrative world. Calvino’s characters are, like the characters in the Lais of Marie de France (12th century) or the chivalric romances of Chrétien de Troyes (12th century), essentially stock characters with limited internal lives and personalities, more reminiscent of the allegorical stick figures populating Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590) than they are of real people. The narrative of ‘The Nonexistent Knight’ might be disparagingly compared to a morality play, one of Aesop’s fables, or a Biblical parable; literary forms we see as foreign to our modern idea of fiction.
The world of ‘The Nonexistent Knight’ is illogical; we have a knight who does not exist yet is still somehow present, an illiterate peasant named Gurduloo who can imitate every animal except for the human, and a narrator who openly admits that they are reconstructing the narrative they are telling from events outside of their perspective. This illogicality precludes the novella from being either realist or escapist, in its incongruence with the reader’s interpretive framework. Because unexplainable, illogical things happen, the world of ‘The Nonexistent Knight’ draws attention to its own textuality, its inconsistency and abstract artificiality. However, this allegorical play is how we can see ‘The Nonexistent Knight’ as a text that resists modern reality. Because things don’t make sense, because we are aware of the fictional nature of this textual world, we have a kind of fictional non-space in which to play with new ideas. The illogical and unrealistic nature of Calvino’s novella lets us use it as a kind of crash-dummy test course, where we can test out conceptual and ethical possibilities.
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In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari identify similar characteristics in the fiction of Franz Kafka, proposing that these illogicities, the refusal to simply reproduce existing features and functions of the world, are indicative of writing in what they call a “minor literature”. Minor literature, for Deleuze and Guattari, is distinct in that it resists reproducing and depicting the identities and categorisations of the majority. Instead, writing of this type deterritorialises boundaries and borders drawn by the dominant social structure, refusing to propagate these existing structures of knowledge and being. As anti-realist fiction does, deterritorialised literature exists in an illogical ambiguity outside of the formalised territories of conventional literature and knowledge. Where conventional fiction and narrative is tree-like, branching out from points of meaning in a hierarchical root-stem relations, this kind of literature functions as rhizomatic organisms like potatoes or grass do, where there is no centre, no root-stem relation, only a horizontal distribution with an undefined beginning and end. Deleuze and Guattari describe how the rhizome of minor literature is a “principle of multiple entrances,” which “prevents the introduction of the enemy, the Signifier, and those attempts to interpret a work that is actually only open to experimentation.”
Like the work of Kafka, ‘The Nonexistent Knight’ exists in a minor literature of deterritorialisation. Calvino’s textual world refuses an arborescent form of logic which would deem the very notion of a knight who doesn’t exist as illogical, paradoxical, or nonsensical. These impossibilities, like Gregor Samsa’s transformation into a bug in Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915), deterritorialise the work and detach it from logic of root and stem, more closely resembling the nonsensical web of the rhizome. For Deleuze and Guattari, this condition is what allows for the creation of the new, and where the political radicalism of minor literature is. When the world of the text refuses the reproduction of the conditions of majority (for lack of a better term, the status quo of reality), the illusion of the individual subject falls away; we can only understand the text as an assemblage, as belonging to a connectivity that is necessarily social and political. The “cramped space” of minor literature “forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics.”
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So what point am I trying to make, besides saying that realist writing is like a tree and anti-realism like Calvino is rhizomatic, like grass? It may feel antithetical to say, but this abstract and illogical type of writing is in fact the type of writing that allows us to imagine a new future. We should all be touching grass, as the saying goes. Deleuze and Guattari highlight other examples of minor literatures and minor languages, like James Joyce and Samuel Beckett writing as Irish authors, or the play of African American vernacular, both within the colonising majority force of the English language. Dismantling the structures of the majority requires us to deterritorialise these structures, undermining the language, literature, and organising principles of the majority and operating outside its logic so that we can institute new concepts. Realist fiction only reproduces our existing conditions, providing us with a logical progression through the world with beginning and end. To envision a future, we instead need a map that offers us a myriad of entrances and exits, a rhizome that resists a fixed interpretation and the calcification of our social structures.
I don’t intend this as a takedown of writing which reflects the world in which we exist. We should always be reading and writing things about our lives and experiences. However, I wish to suggest that to make an omelette, we have to abstract a few eggs. My love for Calvino is not because he offers a specific political program for change, but rather that he refuses to reproduce the existing structures of our reality. There is an optimism in reading him, an opening-up to future possibilities that I don’t find in realistic fiction. The deterritorialisations, the incongruencies and nonsenses which can only happen in an abstracted kind of fiction, are the fissures in our world that let in the possibility of a new future.
When Agilulf mistakenly believes he has lost his knighthood due to a perverse technicality of the chivalric code, he runs into the woods. His armour is found in a pile, with Agilulf, the nonexistent knight, having ceased to exist. He ‘dies’ when he believes his title is gone, but the young Raimbaut, who follows Agilulf through the novella, takes up his armour and dons it. For the possibility of a future, we need to be able to deterritorialise so we can reterritorialise; we must be able to deconstruct the armour that clads our structures for the possibility of reconstructing it in a new form. We can only initially conceive of the new through the nonsensical and the illogical, and our fiction should do the same.
Designed by Portia Love