The Real/Illusory World of Italo Calvino: A Postmodernist Reading of The Castle of Crossed Destinies

English

Italo Calvino is one of the most prominent writers of postmodern Italian literature. Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies presents itself as a classic specimen of postmodern fiction by portraying the themes of the destabilisation of binary oppositions and the defiance to the modernist endorsement of the unity of reason and coherence of logic. What this novel of Calvino presents, instead, is a world where the pre-existing boundaries and dividing lines between different Manichean binary oppositions are perpetually faltering and where seemingly illogical and incoherent worldviews are offered as possible alternatives to the so-called logical and coherent existence. Inspired by the celebratory endorsement of a de-regulated, disordered and de-structured condition of existence by postmodernism, Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies experiments with a correspondingly unusual narrative technique (typical of postmodernism) that creates a chaotic and de-regulated fictional world where heirarchies, distinctions and boundaries are purposefully transgressed and where the defining conceptual frameworks of The Enlightenment like logic and reason are thoroughly shattered.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.