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| Italo Calvino |
Italo Calvino puts magic, the breaking of everyday rules, at the center of his notion of fantasy. Why is magic a feature of fantastic tales? What purpose does it serve?
"Fantasy," he said, implies “a detachment, a
levitation, the acceptance of a different logic based on objects and
connections other than those of everyday life or the dominant literary
conventions.”
The magic is there, in other words, to let us sever ties with our everyday world and habits and ways of thinking. Cut loose, we can drift in the tale, in a way we otherwise wouldn't.
But for Calvino, this is not escapism in a bad sense--in the sense that we're looking to shrug off responsibility for life, or to deny its reality. Yes, in fantasy you as a reader don't confront “the problem of believing or explaining.” But that's because you come to it expecting this levitation: “the pleasure of fantasy lies in the unraveling of a
logic with rules or point of departure or solutions that keep some surprises up
their sleeves.”
The impulse behind all this? Intellectual play. Like myth, it lets us recombine the elements in our world, which may entertain or just might clarify what the world is, and what we are within it.
Italo Calvino, “Definitions of Territory: Fantasy,” Le Monde, August 15, 1970; transl. Patrick Creagh, 1986.
Reprinted in: David Sandner, Fantastic
Literature: A Critical Reader (Praeger, 2004).
Ah, great to read about Calvino, one of my favorite writers. I like what he says here about fantasy allowing us to come to it expecting not to worry over questions of explanation or belief. Fantasy, it seems to me, lets us escape our disbelief, our fear of being foolish, and also the ordinary burdens of belief. I also like the idea you conclude with, this notion that by this game of intellectual play we can clarify what our presence in the world means.
ReplyDeleteThanks for these thoughts, Edward. The need to "escape our disbelief" is such a peculiarly modern problem, I think, which might be why fantasy has been so popular. And yes, agreed, that last part is key.
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