Castle of Crossed Destiny by Italo Calvino
Calvino, Italo. The Castle of Crossed Destinies [1969]. Trans. by William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1977.
Italo Calvino was elected to the Oulipo in 1973 (the first Italian in the group), yet this work, written previous to that time, testifies to his interest in structure and constraint. In the “Notes” at the end of the volume Calvino writes about tarot cards and the genesis of the work. He claims that for “years” he was obsessed with trying to read stories in the tarot cards, starting with random cards before moving on to a more deliberate consideration of the order of the cards. The cards become a “machine for constructing stories”. From this he constructs the two sections that make up this book: “The Castle of Crossed Destinies” and “The Tavern of Crossed Destinies”.
“The Castle” tells the story of a group of people who meet in a castle in the woods. They are all travellers and find themselves together in the hall unable to speak. Through the use of a deck of cards they tell their stories to each other. (Of course the connection to Boccaccio and Chaucer is unavoidable.) The framing sequence is narrated by one person who tells us the story of the telling of the various tales. Instead of creating the tales with cards and then telling us those tales, Calvino recreates the construction of the tales themselves. The narrator tells us what card the teller puts down, and the narrator interprets the card through its image and the body language of the teller. He explicates the reading of the tales. There is no surety, only interpretation.
The tales themselves are often rather lackluster. Broadly narrated tales of knights, ladies, alchemists and such (a Faust-like story, a Roland story). Sadly the telling is of more interest than the tale in this case. Throughout the text, the tarot cards involved in the tale are illustrated in the margins, though it would have been nice to see full-color to-scale illustrations of them, as the two depicted on the cover have a lot of added detail that the tiny reproductions lack, detail that the narrator uses in his interpretation. In the end, the cards form a large grid with the 12 tales criss-crossing each other.
“The Tavern” takes on a different color than “The Castle”. Here the telling of the tales (the placement of the cards) is not so explicitly narrated. The framing tale is almost identical, except that the travellers are in a tavern. This time the narration, the telling, and tale blend together, overlapping and obscuring the specific choice and placement of the cards. Even the illustrations in the margins seem off: cards are shown that are not mentioned, cards are not shown that are mentioned. The final grid does not easily coincide with the order the cards were used in the tales.
The tales in the second section are rather familiar: Lady MacBeth, Oedipus, Justine (from Sade), Hamlet, Faust, Parsifal all retold with the cards, but they still lack narrative interest. At one point the narrator tries to tell his tale and the cards really lose their place, with the narrator discussing Saint Jerome and the lion and putting paintings together to tell stories, as well as a section on Saint George.
I have to consider this book as a noble failure of an experiment. The use of tarot cards to create narratives is certainly nothing new (what else is fortune-telling), but the idea of creating fictional prose from them is an idea that has a certain freshness to it. Using the cards as a machine for writing stories makes the writing also a process of reading. The cards must be interpreted before the act of writing. This is what we see in the first section of the book (the section I found the stronger of the two), and it is an introduction, a early sortie into the field, a starting place for future use.
If you haven’t read Calvino, this is not the place to start. I’d recommend one of his more well known works: Marco Valdo, Invisible Cities, or If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler…
Tags: Constraint, novels
Entries RSS
No comments
Jump to comment form | comments rss [?]