Italo Calvino (1923–85) travelled to Japan in the autumn of 1976. Thereafter, his work shows an increasing fascination with Japanese literature and Zen Buddhism, even as he adds Japanese works to the bookshelves of his library in Rome. This is the first study to restore to the author’s writing the dynamics of East-West dialogues, addressing Japanese gardens and temples, but also literary and artistic expressions, as the spaces through which Calvino developed a landmark feature of his distinctive cultural ecology: a renewed awareness of the interdependency between human and other-than-human forms of life and communication.
Claudia Dellacasa is Lecturer in Italian at the University of Glasgow.
‘As the title shows, the book does not merely aim to uncover Calvino's Japan, or Calvino's (real and mental) travels in Japan, but offers a portrait of Calvino and Japan, whereby both parts of the title carry the same weight. All chapters shift from Calvino to Japan, offering a broad scope that includes Zen, Buddhist, and Taoist belief systems as well as Japanese architecture, gardens, art, and writing. Paying detailed attention to the explorations and ruminations that Calvino dedicated to the country, both through his well-stocked Japanese library and his travels to Japan in 1976, Dellacasa's volume provides intriguing philosophical, literary, and existential reflections that manage to avoid Manichean discussions in terms of black and white, wrong or right, East and West... There is little doubt that Dellacasa's volume enriches Calvino scholarship for its surprising, refreshing, and creatively precise outlook on the multifarious engagements of Calvino with human and non-human environments.’ — Elio Baldi, Annali d'Italianistica42, 2024, 513-16
Contents:
i-xii, 1-203
Italo Calvino and Japan: A Journey through the Shallow Depths of Signs Claudia Dellacasa Complete volume as single PDF
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17-48
Chapter 1: Zen Perspectives on Calvino’s Environmentalism Claudia Dellacasa doi:10.59860/ip.c158de5
1.1. Cross-species (Dis)harmonies within Calvino’s Trajectory — 1.1.1. Literature as Natural Philosophy: Towards a Theoretical and Creative Holism; 1.1.2. Calvino’s View of Japanese Entanglements; 1.1.3. The Remains of the Harmony: Dialectical Interactions in Palomar. 1.2. Matters of Perspective in Japanese Traditions — 1.2.1. The Holism of Japanese Gardens; 1.2.2. Cross-species Interdependencies and Identifications in Calvino’s Japanese Books.
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49-80
Chapter 2: Calvino’s Semiotic Journey through Japan: Between Language(s) and Silence Claudia Dellacasa doi:10.59860/ip.c26822c
2.1. Calvino’s Silences and the Languages of Other Beings — 2.1.1. Stepping Stones towards Speaking the Unspeakable; 2.1.2. Calvino’s Semiotic Travels in Japan; 2.1.3. Palomar between Words and Silence. 2.2. The Sound of Silence in Japan — 2.2.1. Buddhist Deconstructions of Linguistic Hierarchies; 2.2.2. Literary Expressions of Silent Non-conceptuality.
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81-110
Chapter 3: Japanese Impressions in Calvino’s Images of the Void Claudia Dellacasa doi:10.59860/ip.c37760f
3.1. Valences of the Void in Calvino’s Works — 3.1.1. Variable Nuances of the Void between the 1950s and the 1970s; 3.1.2. The Role of Japan in Calvino’s Evolving Weak Structuralism; 3.1.3. Palomar’s Empty Self Ranging over the Appearance of Things. 3.2. Space for the Void in Japan — 3.2.1. Declinations of Space and Distance in Japan; 3.2.2. Philosophical, Artistic, and Literary Conceptualisations of the Void in Japan.
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111-142
Chapter 4: Time Is a Time Is A-time Is Non-time: Calvino and the Temporal Paradoxes of Zen Claudia Dellacasa doi:10.59860/ip.c486a56
4.1. Time in the Evolution of Calvino’s Works — 4.1.1. Different Forms of Narrative (A)temporalities; 4.1.2. Visualisation of Temporal Paradoxes in Japanese Wooden Temples; 4.1.3. Cosmic Time in Palomar. 4.2. The Shapes of Time in Japan — 4.2.1. A Threefold Path towards Satori: Observation, Abstraction, and Enlightenment; 4.2.2. Temporal Cycles and Porous Chronology in Japanese Architecture, Poetry, and Prose.
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143-172
Chapter 5: Deadly Meaningful, Meaningless Zen: Calvino’s Representations of the Unrepresentable Claudia Dellacasa doi:10.59860/ip.c595e9d
5.1. Death as Absent Presence in Calvino — 5.1.1. Death and Deaths in Calvino’s Creative Trajectory; 5.1.2. Calvino and Zen: A Path towards the Overcoming of Immanence; 5.1.3. A Zen and Posthumanist Reading of the Ending of Palomar. 5.2. Death as Present Absence in the Japanese Tradition — 5.2.1. Overcoming Death in Zen Buddhism and Zen-informed Gardens and Architecture; 5.2.2. Death in Japanese Poetry and Prose.
The themes explored in Calvino’s later work are more-than-human perspectives, languages and silence, void, time, and death. Calvino’s interest in such themes may have been gestating for some time, but it is clear, as this book hopes to have shown, that his direct contact with Japanese culture represents the point at which they begin to predominate, as opposed to exerting a marginal influence.
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Bibliography entry:
Dellacasa, Claudia, Italo Calvino and Japan: A Journey through the Shallow Depths of Signs, Italian Perspectives, 62 (Legenda, 2024)
First footnote reference:35 Claudia Dellacasa, Italo Calvino and Japan: A Journey through the Shallow Depths of Signs, Italian Perspectives, 62 (Legenda, 2024), p. 21.
Subsequent footnote reference:37 Dellacasa, p. 47.
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16 August 2024 • 216pp