Italo Calvino tra saggismo e "silenzio" della narrativa. Il caso della «Nota» al «Castello dei destini incrociati» (1973)

This essay suggests an overturned approach to Italo Calvino’s production by placing the figure of the essayist before that of the narrator. In accordance with the educational mission that Antonio Gramsci assigns to the Marxists intellectuals, since the post-World War II period Calvino has clearly understood the importance to build a «new literature» up, but only to make it work for a «new society», as he explains in the Preface to Una pietra sopra (The Stone Above, 1980). Therefore, the creative option is just one among many, and it gets into a crisis when the society brings a new kind of public to the stage, that doesn’t want either to attend the literature of commitment anymore, or to accept politics to act as cultural glue. Since the 1960s, Calvino consequently sharpens his theoretical instruments to restore a dialogue with the post-ideological reader, keeping for sure the conviction that literature is endowed with a cognitive charge not less than other forms of knowledge. Taking advantage of a general crisis of the novel, Calvino shuffles the catalogue of genres, hybridizing fiction and essay writing. This latter is seen as a privileged channel to involve the public in the critical act, without which no literary operation can be meaningful. As an emblematic case study will be analysed Il castello dei destini incrociati (The Castle of Crossed Destinies, 1973), a book conceived to verify the suggestions offered by structuralism and semiotics, and yet a device where literary theory, meta-narration and narration end up finding an original way to value one another.