“American Lectures” by Italo Calvino as commentary on the novels Invisible Cities and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

Abstract

“American Lectures” (Six Memos for the Next Millennium) are well established in the minds of readers as a testament of Italo Calvino addressed to posterity. The course of lectures prepared by the writer for delivery at Harvard University in 1984 was the last work from his pen. In his last book, Calvino identifies several features of literature that are of particular value. Thanks to their mind-stimulating cognitive functions, these features, according to the writer, will help future generations cope with the dangers that are inherent in the language of media with its vague concepts and in visual promotional images that clog our imagination. “American Lectures” not only allow us to look at the history and theory of literature from an unexpected angle, but also shed light on Calvino’s own creative path. The reflections contained in the lectures are primarily related to the search for new mechanisms for creating a literary work, which occupied the writer in his last, “combinatorial”, period. In his lectures, Calvino reflects on speed, which is equivalent to agility, mobility, ease of storytelling, which above all are characteristic of oriental fairy tales. Calvino’s novels Invisible Cities and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler are like The Thousand and One Nights thanks to a frame composition capable of accommodating a potentially infinite number of inserted short stories. As in The Thousand and One Nights, in the novel Invisible Cities the plot of the frame is built on the relationship between the narrator and the ruler. By contrast, in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler the engine of the plot is the art, borrowed from Scheherazade, of interrupting the story at the climax of the unfolding plot. In addition, according to the ideas contained in the lectures, a large form made up solely of beginnings actualizes the potential of the novel as a genre that concentrates its power precisely at the beginning of the narrative. Both novels considered here are in line with the writer’s experiments with the form of “map-novel” or “hyper-novel”, capable of accommodating a potentially unlimited number of images and plot combinations.