Chapter 15 Gossamer in the Sky - Reading Italo Calvino

[Tarot card] A group of strange-looking people went through a dense forest and came to a mysterious castle.And this time travel is at the cost of everyone losing their ability to speak—people sitting around the dining table suddenly find themselves deaf and deaf.But each of them has a strong desire to confide in others.At this time, probably the owner of the castle, took out a deck of tarot cards and put them on the table. There were seventy-eight cards in this deck, each of which was printed with precious miniature paintings, including kings, queens, knights, Menservants, cups, seals, swords and clubs, etc.He indicated that everyone who is willing to tell their own story can tell their own story to others through the patterns on the tarot cards.The patterns on the cards can act as one or even several roles and different meanings—in different combinations, they represent different roles and different meanings.So the game started, with these seventy-eight cards, they respectively told about "the heartbreaker who was punished", "the alchemist who sold his soul", "the bride who was punished to hell", "the tomb robber", "because of love". And crazy Orlando", "Astolfo on the moon" and other strange stories.

This is Calvino's novel "The Castle of Crossed Fate". In "The Restaurant of Crossed Fate", he continued to use this deck of cards.Those who lost their words because they traveled through the dense forest rushed to the cards that could express the stories in their hearts, and told such strange stories as "The Hesitating Man", "The Forest of Vengeance", "The Surviving Knight", "The Vampire Kingdom" and so on. s story. The seventy-eight cards that can be combined arbitrarily seem to be omnipotent.It can completely replace language, complete the expression of all things, all events and all meanings in this world, and it is so fluent that people present can understand it.

No matter which group or series they are, they will always intersect at one point, that is, at one point, they show that they have a common destiny. The combination principle of "restaurant" is different from that of "castle". Italo Calvino also wanted to write "Motel Crossing Fate".But instead of using Tarot cards, I borrowed a comic strip from a newspaper.Those who are too scared to speak because of a mysterious disaster in the motel can only point to the pictures of the comic strips and tell others: each of them tells a different route, or jumps to tell, or presses the vertical button to tell others. Speak in lines, or by horizontal lines, or by slashes.

Calvino is one of the most original writers I have ever read.Before that, I thought that Borges, Nabokov, Grasse, and Milan Kundera were all writers who belonged to the category of "unconventional" writers.But after reading Calvino's book, I realized that Calvino is the real novelist.Every time he writes a work, he almost deliberately devises some tricks, which are completely unexpected and meaningful.I don't know any other writer in this world who has worked tirelessly throughout his life to come up with things that people have never heard of and imagined.These tricks are definitely clever tricks, some genius fantasies, and great wisdom that people can't match.

I always had the feeling that Calvino was a writer in paradise.For us, his work is like a bible.His words are some mysterious symbols, and under the surface, there are always some mysterious meanings.We are experiencing a reading experience that we have never had before.His words test our IQ.He takes us into a world that doesn't seem to exist.This world is so weird that it makes people feel unbelievable.We always have a question: Is there a hidden world behind the state we usually see?This world has another logic, another set of movement methods, and another language of its own? Not the novels we usually see──

Kublai Khan's empire was vast and boundless.He can't inspect all his cities one by one, and he doesn't even know how many cities there are in his world.So he entrusted Italian traveler Marco Polo to inspect these cities on his behalf, and then described them to him one by one.This basic fact is false. Now Kublai Khan sat down with Marco Polo.Marco Polo began to talk about the cities he saw—strictly speaking, not the cities he saw, but the cities he imagined.In terms of format, the novel uses two fonts.One typeface presents the dialogue between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, and one typeface purely represents the city depicted by Marco Polo, which has many fragments.These fragments are all self-contained.We can read them as beautiful prose, and the dialogue between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo in the intermission is full of poetry and philosophy, just like the lines of Shakespeare's plays, very wonderful.

These cities can only be in heaven, not on earth.They are beautiful and full of fairy tales: "a city on steps, in a half-moon-shaped bay, where the hot wind often blows. . . . A glass pool as high as a cathedral, for people to watch the swallow fish swim and leap A palm tree, whose leaves are blown by the wind, makes the sound of a harp; a square, with horseshoes surrounding marble tables, covered with marble tablecloths, and marble food and drink." Another city, this one "white in the moonlight, where the streets are entwined like balls of thread".The city was built to reproduce what people saw in their dreams.Another city, and this one was very strange: no walls, no roofs, no floors, just a forest of pipes, each ending in a faucet, shower head, siphon, or overflow.The scene suggested that the plumber must have finished his work and left before the mason arrived, when in fact the mason never showed up.This is a painting with strong postmodernism.Another city, this city is mysterious: there is a carpet in the city, and if you look carefully, you will find that the city is reflected in this carpet, exactly.Let's look at another city, its name is Biersabea.The inhabitants of this city believed that there were in fact three Bersabellas, besides the one on earth, and the other in the sky, a city of gold, with silver locks and diamond gates, all inlaid with carvings.Another one is underground. ...

The book has nine chapters, describing a total of fifty-five cities. All numbers in the book are metaphorical and symbolic. These are "invisible" cities.They are the product of the imagination of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan.These two men are visionaries, passionists, and poets at the same time.They sat there, wide open.Kublai Khan imagined further in Marco Polo's imagination, and likewise, Marco Polo expanded his imagination to a wider space in Kublai Khan's imagination.Kublai Khan was originally a listener, but he often forgot his role and interrupted Marco Polo: You stop, let me tell you about the city you saw.

A city as light as a kite, as transparent as a lace, as transparent as a mosquito net, as a leaf vein, as a handprint...these cities continuously appear in their imaginations.They show the luxury and richness of the empire, as well as the luxury and disorganization of the empire. At dawn, Marco Polo said, Your Majesty, I have described to you all the cities I know.But Kublai Khan said, no, there is another city you didn’t mention—Venice.Marco Polo laughed, what do you think I've been talking about?Of all the cities I have described for you, there is Venice. The work finally returns to a heavy and intriguing theme.This theme is set for all the mighty great kings in the world: when he gains everything in this world, he loses everything at the same time; the greatest soul is also the most empty soul.

Perhaps what interests us the most in Calvino's writing is not the thought, but the poetic, fairy-tale, playful, unrestrained talent and so on.The unique form naturally attracts our attention. "The Castle with Crossed Fate", "The Ant of Argentina"... These works have given us a revelation: the novel not only has great possibilities in content, but also has great possibilities in form—even The possibilities are endless.This possibility is as big as a tarot card, and there are endless variations. Making a big fuss about form is the difference between Calvino and ordinary novelists.All his life he pursued innovation in the form of novels.He wants to make his novels different from one another in form, and the form of each one is unique.In his view, it is entirely possible to do so.If he hadn't died in 1985 and lived today, how many new and original forms of fiction would he have given us?

Of course, that doesn't mean he's great.Because, a novelist who does not spend his mind on the form, but only concentrates all his attention on the thoroughness of living experience and the profoundness of thought in his works, is equally great.In those ancient and classic novel forms that have been used for a long time, they still reached an admirable novel realm.This is like a diamond in the crown, whether it is wrapped in a handkerchief or placed in a wooden box has no effect on the value of the diamond itself.However, we should pay attention to the fact that some forms are inseparable from content, as the aestheticians say, they are "significant forms".These forms should be discussed separately.Maybe some works of art can be more intuitive: Those sculptures that seem to be only forms, in our perception, are they content or form?We cannot separate the two.What was the purpose of building the Egyptian pyramids in the first place? All modern speculations are just guesses.I thought it was pointless to speculate -- unless those scientists were trying to get something out of it.Because in my opinion, when it appears in our field of vision, it is pure.We don't want to know its content at all—what it is used for, because, as a form, it has already caused a strong spiritual shock to us, and its content has become boundless and bottomless.Our conclusion: Great form is also great content. Calvino's form itself is a refinement of the way of being.These forms of it are always silently explaining something to us - about the various characteristics of existence. These forms also help Calvino to transcend the limitations of experience.He may have realized that if only to present the world of experience, the traditional novel form may be the most appropriate form, and it is enough.But Calvino does not want to stop and be satisfied with the world of experience.He wants people to have new experiences, which cannot be satisfied by the normal world of experience.He must find and try some new forms, and then develop his description in the new space brought about by these new forms.So Marco Polo and Kublai Khan sat together, so we felt a different kind of sunshine and moonlight, a different kind of city and flow of people, a different kind of wind and rain and vegetation in the virtual world.We linger in such a world, feel the spirit and breath of the new world, and look back at the experience world at the same time, then we will suddenly find that the deepest understanding of experience is completed in this illusory world. [Gossamer of Skyrim] Italo Calvino admired the following passage: Her spokes were made of spiders' feet, her hood her grasshopper's wings, her lanyard her spider's thread, her neckband the watery moonlight, her whip her cricket's bones, and her bridle the gossamer of the sky. It comes from Shakespeare's play "Romeo and Juliet".Italo Calvino wants to use this text to say a word: light. He said: "After forty years of writing fiction, exploring various paths, conducting various experiments, it is time to define my work. I suggest this definition: 'My work is often to lighten the weight , Sometimes try to reduce the weight of characters, sometimes try to reduce the weight of celestial bodies, sometimes try to reduce the weight of cities, first of all, try to reduce the weight of the structure and language of the novel.'" He appreciates "lightness" very much, as far as his reading memory is concerned, We talked endlessly about those historical materials about light: In Greek mythology, Dursius cut off the head of the banshee Medusa, relying on the lightest matter in the world - wind and cloud; In the literary and artistic creations of the 18th century, there are many images floating in space, and almost all the light objects in the world are described-flying carpets, flying horses, and gods flying out of lights; The famous Italian poet Ugenio Montale wrote in his "Short Will": the crystal traces left by the snail crawling / the shining debris that the broken glass turned into; There is a long series of light images in the pens of Italian Romantic poets: flying birds, women singing in front of windows, and transparent air.Among them, the moon, which "always conveys a sense of lightness, suspension, tranquility and seductiveness", appears frequently;  … Similarly, we see this text in Calvino's own novel: "... two people are quiet and motionless, watching the smoke from the pipe slowly rise. The small cloud, sometimes blown away by a gust of wind , sometimes suspended in the air. The answer lies in that cloud. Marco watched the wind blowing away the clouds, and thought of the fog covering the mountains and seas, once it dissipated and the air became dry, distant cities would appear.” "Lightness" is Calvino's key to open the door of the world and the door of literature.He is very confident that this word is the true meaning he realized after experiencing a long life and a long creative career.He told us that he found a solution to the world and literature. We can also take this key to open Calvino's literary world── Italo Calvino gave almost all the text to fantasy, but what is fantasy?Fantasy is a kind of lightness. When a person sits under a big tree, lies on the grass, or sits on the seaside and fantasizes, his body will lose weight and become as light as a thin paper, or simply lose weight completely.He will feel that everything in the world is light, including mountains and rivers.Everything can flutter.This is why people often make such a metaphor: spread the wings of fantasy. The sense of flying produced by fantasy is fascinating. In Calvino's view, the essence of literature is a kind of fantasy, therefore, it is also a kind of lightness.He seldom faces the reality, and makes imitative tracing.His gaze is towards the sky and nothingness, and his world is formed in bold weaving and bold interpretation.When critics call "The Path to the Spider's Nest" a realistic work, I think it is probably from the spirit of the work, not from the situation and story of the work.In the fantasy, the Viscount was divided into two halves and still alive, swarms of ants were rampant in Argentina, and incredible cities appeared in the clouds. Behind fantasy is experience, knowledge.But once we enter the fantasy state, we don't seem to be able to directly and concretely experience experience and knowledge.They are there to function naturally, and we feel as if we have the ability to create out of thin air.First a little, then, at some point, a little bigger.Fantasy seems to have a spontaneous power of reproduction.The frequency of reproduction is short, two in one life, three in two, and countless in three. Brand new worlds appear in a cloud of smoke all of a sudden. Throughout the process of fantasy, we always appreciate the light and elegant feeling of coming to the spring after drunkenness, dream and serious illness. In Calvino's consciousness, the world of literature is born in clouds, moonlight and mist.Only such a world can fully express our understanding of reality. Calvino does not deny the observation of reality.But he explained his way of observation with light words.The reality that lies right in front of us is huge and heavy.It constitutes a powerful attraction for ordinary people, so that they cannot look away and see anything else.People think that the heavy things are meaningful, and they think about the heavy things, and they are distressed, sad, and worried.Those writers in China who focus on the country and the great cause of the nation and focus on the major issues, major events, and major issues that ordinary people will pay attention to are on the dividing line between the important and the light, and Calvino. Writers parted ways and went their separate ways. When analyzing the legendary Perseus, Calvino said that his strength lies in "always refusing to observe directly". We all have this experience: the things standing in front of us all have the characteristics of squareness, bulkiness, huge size, and difficulty to push.Large, but they do not necessarily have content, and may, on the contrary, be empty and stiff, even dying or already dead. We seldom see Calvino in a positive attitude.His gaze is not facing the same direction as ours.Calvino is precisely not interested in what is easy to attract our attention.And those things that we ignore, just aroused his great attention.Lightness that is ignored by ordinary people; it is because of lightness that we ignore it.Italo Calvino sees what we don't see.Sighs, shimmers, feathers, and flying catkins, all these small and delicate things, in his opinion, contain the deepest meaning. To be more precise, Calvino does not completely think that what is observed positively is purely meaningless, but—in his view, it is a foolish thing to introduce positive things into novels—this There is no sense of art in this thing itself.From the story of Perseus cutting off the head of the banshee Medusa, he put forward the point of view of "reflection" (or "refraction"): when Perseus cut off Medusa's head, he did not look directly at the banshee. face, but her image is reflected through the bronze shield.This is a very wonderful metaphor.It shows us the process of art production: art does not directly face the object to be written, but the image obtained by refraction.This is the so-called artistic treatment. To refract the heavy and gigantic is to transform the heavy into light—the heavy into light and shadow. "The world is turning into stone." Italo Calvino said that the world is "stonening".We cannot bring the petrified world into our work.We cannot move.Writers do not compare strength, but smartness and wisdom, and smartness and wisdom are both light.Calvino's experience comes from his creative practice—in creative practice, he often feels the contradiction between himself and the world in front of him.He didn't think he could turn them -- and even if he could manage to turn them, it wouldn't make much sense.Grinning and staring to turn something that cannot be turned, this image cannot stand up to aesthetics. In the end, Calvino praised light from the perspective of the difficulty of existence. "Literature is a survival function, a search for relief, a function of repetition in life." Italo Calvino let games enter his novels.We have no doubt that Calvino is a serious writer with ideological ambitions, but there is a desire to play in his bones.In his view, novels are playing tarot cards.He expresses this desire in each of his novels.It's a deranged card: Italo Calvino writes that a reader is reading Calvino's novel, but the reader finds that the Calvino's novel he bought is inexplicable. The bookstore wanted to change a copy, but after checking the bookstore owner, he told him a ridiculous thing: he compared Calvino's novel with a novel called "On the Outskirts of Marburg" by the Polish writer Bazakbal. mixed together. Calvino seems to have lifted the heavy yoke of the classical novel.The stone becomes a "floater" that floats freely in the air. "If I were to choose a mascot for myself going into the 20th year, I would choose the image of the philosopher and poet Cavalcanti leaping lightly and suddenly from the heavy earth." Regrettably, Calvi Nuo failed to live to twenty years. [The little girl who was sold with the pear] Calvino has always had a soft spot for fairy tales, and he calls himself the Green of Italy.And I think his fairy tales—as far as I am an adult and someone with literary experience—are better than Grimm's fairy tales.After all, Grimm's fairy tales are aimed at children, so it is unavoidable to be childish and a little artificial, while Calvino's fairy tales come from folklore. After collecting them, he tried his best to maintain their appearance and narrative method as folk literature. It seems more natural and simple. We saw two thick fairy tales.This is what Calvino spent several years collecting from various regions of Italy.There are quite a few of them, and they are exquisite.They should be included in Chinese textbooks for primary and secondary schools in all countries in the world. Once upon a time, there was a man who had a pear tree, which could harvest four large baskets of pears every year, just enough to give to the king.One year, only three baskets of pears were harvested.He could not fill the fourth basket, so he filled it with his youngest daughter, and covered it with pears and leaves. Fairy tales almost always begin this way.It takes us to a distant time from the beginning, and it takes us to a world that is absurd but does not make us feel fake at all.We have made a contract with fairy tales: fairy tales are about things that cannot happen at all.This contract is made through the mother or nurse as early as we are infants.We like it, because it gives us a quiet, a state.These seemingly simple words have enduring vitality and can be extended indefinitely.When the words created by the writers died soon, these naive and even somewhat formulaic words from the folk were handed down from generation to generation.Why don't we ask: why?Maybe there is something behind these words-the eternal spirit of human beings, the eternal hope and the infatuation and romance that will never repent?The form itself of fairy tales may be the product of basic human desires.We have reasons to believe that if novels and dramas will die one day, fairy tales will still exist as before. Of course, it is Calvino who understands fairy tales best, not us. It is better to say that Calvino is a fairy tale writer than a novelist.His novels are carried out in the mode of fairy tales, which are fairy tales written for adults. A person grows up gradually from a child.For him, fairy tales have gradually lost their charm, because they seem too simple after all.This man is now facing a chaotic society.There are no princesses and princes, treasure caves and golden temples in this society, not even witches and pirates.This person may still be thinking about Andersen and Grimm for his offspring: he wants to tell the fairy tales of Andersen and Grimm to his children.And when telling these fairy tales, he may be completely indifferent.He wants his children to live in a holy fairy tale world.However, he himself was exhausted physically and mentally because he lived in the turbulent current of the mundane world.He will feel that those fairy tales are of no benefit to him now, except that they can help him recall his childhood and obtain a temporary tranquility, they are almost of no benefit to his survival. Italo Calvino decided to write fairy tales for grown-ups.He knows that we like fairy tales, but fairy tales like "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Grandma Wolf" can no longer satisfy us. He has inherited the basic spirit and basic techniques of fairy tales, but he has complicated the content, human nature and theme, and expanded the scale.He did not completely abandon the format of fairy tales, but in his written world, these formulas were concealed, leaving no traces. He still retains the allegory of fairy tales. The immortality of fairy tales probably lies in their allegorical nature. The so-called allegory refers to those issues that have been paid attention to since the beginning of human history and even exist in the world outside of human society.They are the basic propositions of this world and are enduring.It is about the material world as well as the spiritual world.It is God's will, it is a law, it is an unsolvable contradiction and problem.These problems will be presented and verified again and again in the future history.These questions are also mysterious, often in the dark, silently foreshadowing the future for us.These questions have nothing to do with era, regime, nation, and fashion. All of Calvino's works are allegorical.When we read his words, there will always be a strange and even a little scary feeling.When a group of people suddenly lose the ability to speak and can only speak with tarot cards, when the viscount was split in two and returned home one after another, when Marco Polo and Kublai Khan We all experience it when Khan writes about cities of all kinds.Calvino seldom applies his words to a specific social landscape. The setting of "The Path to the Spider's Nest" is real: the fascist war.But I think it is very doubtful to define it as a work of realism.At the beginning of the novel, it is in the fairy tale world.The stories, scenes, and atmosphere are all fairy tales, and the spirit behind the words is allegorical. There are a few other writers like Calvino: Kafka, Borges, García Márquez. Allegory is the highest state of the novel. Fairy tales and poems should be twin sisters.Calvino's fairy tales for adults are poetic, which we will understand when we read his first lines.Prose has the realm of prose, and poetry has the realm of poetry.We can't tell the difference between them, but we can all understand them.We know what the realm of poetry refers to.It has nothing to do with the world, nothing to do with the present, that's for sure.It is also certain that it is related to heaven and earth, and to divinity.It should be regarded as prose poetry, as we have said above: Marco Polo and Kublai Khan are two poets, first-class poets, romantic poets.Marco Polo presented Kublai Khan with poems and nothing else, and his conversation with Kublai Khan was a conversation between poets.Should be considered a long poem. If we compare fairy tales and poems, we will find their consistency in rhythm and melody.Rhythm and melody are related to rhyme and repetition.This is the fairy tale "Three Cabins"── There was a poor woman. When she was dying, she called her three daughters to her side and said to them: "My children, I will die soon, leaving you to live alone. After I die, you will go to your relatives. Uncle, let them build a hut for each of you, and you three sisters will take care of each other. Farewell." Then he died.The three girls left the house crying.They went on the road and found an uncle who was a straw mat maker.The eldest daughter Katerina said: "Uncle, our mother passed away. You are a kind uncle. Can you build me a straw mat house?" The straw mat maker uncle built a straw mat house for her.The other two daughters continued on the road and found an uncle who was a carpenter. The second daughter Julia said: "Uncle, our mother has passed away. You are a kind uncle. Can you build me a wooden house?" She built a wooden house.Only the youngest daughter, Marietta, was left. She continued on the road and found an uncle who was a blacksmith.She said to him: "Uncle, our mother passed away. You are a kind uncle. Can you build me an iron house." The blacksmith uncle built an iron house for her. Although they are not the same house, as far as they are all houses, it is a kind of repetition.All the following stories are also carried out according to the format of repetition. This is Haizi's poem "Facing the Sea, Spring Blossoms"── Be a happy man from tomorrow on Feed the horses, chop wood, travel the world From tomorrow, care about food and vegetables I have a house, facing the sea, spring is warm and flowers are blooming Starting tomorrow, communicate with every relative tell them my happiness That happy lightning told me i will tell everyone Give every river and every mountain a warm name Stranger, I also bless you wish you a bright future May your lover be married May you find happiness in this world I just want to face the sea, the spring is warm and the flowers are blooming Some verses are repetitive, though not absolute repetitions.We love repetition and look forward to another repetition after the first repetition.Because, repetition produces a melody that lingers for three days.The melody is in a resonant relationship with our heartbeat, the rhythm of life, the ups and downs of emotion and the oscillation of pleasure, so that we feel a kind of dizzy pleasure. The melody brings us back to the light state appreciated by Calvino, and we will float off the ground in the melody. Calvino used "repetition" many times in his fairy tales for adults.Numbers are implied, and these numbers have a multiple relationship.The book has nine chapters, and the dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan is eighteen times, which happens to be a multiple of nine.A large number of chapters in the book have the same title, and are divided into eleven types, including "City and Memory", "City and Desire", "Small City", "City and Sky", and its format is poetry rather than novel. Another feature of fairy tales is the disappearance of the boundaries between man and nature, and the harmony between them.In the fairy tale world, people, vegetation, and animals are indistinguishable from each other.A prince might be a lion, and a princess might be a fruit on a tree.Man is a cloud, a raindrop, a ray of light, a bird.Conversely, clouds are people, raindrops are people, light is people, and birds are people.The companions of people are often not people, but vegetation and animals. "The birds were flying around his bed." After the death of the old Viscount Ayulfo, "all the birds perched on his bed, as if flying and landing on a tree trunk floating on the sea."The girl Pamela "put her braids on her head, took off her clothes and took a bath in the small pond with her ducks" ()... Man and nature have a very friendly relationship.There is a warmth here, a childlike innocence, a kindness, and a pure love. Fairy tales have pictures from fairy tales: The army marches, and with them flocks of white storks, flying low in the still air; ( ) A pear tree is in the backlight of the exposure, Kazuki's pears - only half of the pears on the right are left; () ... Italo Calvino has depicted a large number of fairy tale pictures for us.I was imagining: what would happen if a painter turned these words into paintings in the future?