Literature as re-representation: Calvino and the encyclopedic novel

Abstract

In Calvino’s works, the best fruits of contemporary scientific and anthropological disciplines become transferred to the field of literature, and challenge existing generic conventions in different ways, thereby creating experimental hybrids between non-fiction and fiction. Clearly, Calvino’s stated preference for the short story derives from its flexibility, since it is simultaneously open to genres such as non-fiction and fiction. Furthermore, the short story does not exclude the novel. On the contrary, by using the short story the novel sews together a network of representations and possible parallel universes, thus shaping a kind of network novel. This form of network novel, consisting of real and possible worlds, seems to be the best way of sustaining an encyclopedic re-description of the world and its potentialities. Additionally for Calvino, the best representation of this interdependent multiplicity is the city; his work’s deepest impulse is a new cultural map ranging from the geographic and scientific to the economic and philosophic, instituting a re-representation of the world in the conditions of the new hyper-environment made of space and knowledge. The very idea of the network novel suggests both a map and a continuity between episodes and fragments, inhabited by a kind of a network human being who is capable of stitching together their own fragments and properly holding the multiplicity.