Hi, Joe, I don't know, maybe you've seen straight through to Calvino's "formula," such that the technique is too obvious to you or something like that. But you also say that you have trouble getting a "firm footing."
I doubt that my wide reading (it's not _that_ wide) has that much to do with my enjoying it. I've talked to "genre sci-fi" fans who like it, too. The first thing that struck me was that the narrator qfwfq talks nothing like one would imagine a mathematical formula to talk; instead he sounds usually very human, complete with friends, relatives, adversaries, everything. And he sounds human and familial in that "Italian" way which one gets from the novels of Italo Svevo (_The Confessions of Zeno_, _The Further Confessions of Zeno_). Much of Calvino's qfwfq writing is about humanity, cast into those cosmic terms which so many of us regard as ultimate but cold and inhuman. They're like folktales for adults, though children could appreciate at least some of them, I think. Anyway, it is "fantasy" writing in terms of our contemporary science-influenced world-picture, rather than of past world-pictures. Sort of the way television's _The X-Files_ was based on contemporary popular fears and paranoias rather than (like television's old _The Night Stalker_) on popular fears and paranoias dragged from past centuries into the present. (For "adults-only" folk tales read Angela Carter, e.g., _The Bloody Chamber_. Some of her werewolf tales, really about sexuality, especially female sexuality, were woven together into a movie _The Company of Wolves_ which unfortunately was advertised as if it were a standard werewolf movie, so it disappointed its audiences.) Calvino also collected Italian folk tales into a book _Italian Folk Tales_ which was meant to be for Italian what _The Brothers Grimm_ collection is for English. I haven't read it, but I take it that Calvino's immersion in that project considerably influenced his writing. Best, Ben ----- Original Message ----- From: "Joseph Ransdell" To: "Peirce Discussion Forum" Sent: Friday, June 30, 2006 3:46 PM Subject: [peirce-l] Re: Sinsign, Legisign, Qualisign - help! In response to me saying:. >Maybe I should add that I find it difficult to believe that anyone has >actually been able to read all of the way through Calvino's practical joke of >a book! Ben says: It's also difficult to believe that anyone eats all the way through a rich, multi-layered Italian pastry. And yet, we do (usually). Kidding aside, I have literally no idea why Joe says it's difficult to believe that anybody could read all the way through it. Too much coherence? Too much mix of coherence and incoherence? Now, it's fun to try to work a certain amount of seeming incoherence into one's writing. Conversations, for instance, don't have to be written as give & take where speakers understand or even address each other's previous remarks in any direct way. It's a literary technique, or challenge, which one sees here and there. REPLY: Good point, Ben, and incoherence certainly is not always bad. Maybe it is the mix, as you suggest, but reading that whole book -- instead of just dipping into it now and again to see if one can find firm footing (which I never could) -- seems to me rather like reading the same joke told in many different ways. "Shaggy dog stories": do you remember when they were all the rage as avant garde humor? -- they are fun heard once, though it seems to depend upon the realization that it is just a shaggy dog story and funny because of its pointlessness, i.e. because you recognize it as a practical joke comparable to having the chair jerked out from umder you when you are trying to sit in it. But to listen to variations on the same shaggy dog story knowing that it is a shaggy dog story for 135 pages? It makes me suspect that there is a sense to it that I am missing and you are picking up on, being more wiedely read than I and in the relevant way. Well, I do seem to remember owing a copy of _t zero_, too, but I probably jmissed the point to it, toom since I remember notihng about it except the title! But I'll give it a try -- maybe -- if I can track it down. Joe --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber [email protected]
