Arquitectura

The Cloven Viscount, published in 1951, marked a clear shift in Calvino’s writing style. This short novel later became the first installment of the Our Ancestors trilogy. Readers observe this odd mixture of traditional fable and grotesque comedy in sharp contrast to his earlier neorealist fiction. There were—and still are—conclu-sions that it is a simple allegory of a soldier who, literarily split into two halves, becomes a complete man again. Behind the straightfor-ward arc of the plot, however, lies a critical examination of conven-tional morality and the disintegration of modern society.

We only know the tale’s narrator as the cloven viscount’s nephew, a seven- or eight-year-old boy at the mercy of the adult community.

The boy, observing his world through wholly innocent eyes, begins his account with his uncle traveling through Bohemia, en route to fight in the Turkish wars of the 17th century. Medardo, who at this stage is also naive, is accompanied by his squire, Kurt, who has seen his share of war and can answer Medardo’s numerous questions. He explains to the viscount some of the gruesome sights they pass, such as the tangled heaps of vulture carcasses and human bodies. The first day of battle finds Medardo scared and regretful that he decided to fight. He is immediately unhorsed, then runs straight into a cannon-ade that hits him square in the chest, slicing his body in half. One side inexplicably remains alive, and field doctors, fascinated with this medical miracle, stitch him up and send him back to his village of Terralba.

Everyone gathers around the castle entrance to welcome the fall-en soldier, including Medardo’s nanny, Sebastiana, and his aged father, Aiolfo. Much to their shock, they find that Medardo—at least what is left up him—has returned as a wretch. He shuns all greetings and retreats to his room. As an official welcome, Aiolfo sends a trained shrike from his aviary to enter a window of Medardo’s room.

The viscount kills the bird and throws it out the window. The next morning Aiolfo finds the carcass and observes that his son has ripped off all the major body parts on one side—a masochistic prac-tice that Medardo will soon perform on many animals and plants.

Heartborken, Aiolfo falls ill and dies the next day.

Medardo eventually ventures away from the castle, followed by the people of the court. Behind him the viscount leaves a trail of a dead frog, a melon, and mushrooms—all hacked in half. He hands the mushrooms to the narrator, who has strangely remained innocu-ous until this point in the tale. Sebastiana believes that Medardo’s destruction is proof that his evil half has returned from the war. In the next scene, in which a group of robbers are brought before him, Medardo proves Sebastiana right. Instead of delivering the custom-ary lenient punishment, he orders the robbers, the injured parties, and the constables who failed to prevent the crime all to their deaths.

Despite the havoc wreaked by the viscount, the boy manages to enjoy life. His favorite pastime is assisting Dr. Trelawney, the court physician and a former shipmate of Captain Cook. The idyllic scenes in which the boy and Trelawney roam the countryside, catching will-o’-the-wisps for scientific study, stand in sharp contrast to the rest of this macabre story.

The members of Medardo’s court continue to suffer from his tyranny. Master Pietrochiodo, the court carpenter, is burdened by guilt after following orders to construct gibbets and other instru-ments of torture. After Sebastiana suffers facial burns from a fire, Medardo mistakes the marks on her face for leprosy and sends her to Pratofungo, a village reserved for lepers. Dr. Trelawney, a carica-ture of the modern physician, refuses to examine Sebastiana because he is repelled by illness. Disappointed that Trelawney fails to defend the nanny, the boy looks for friendship elsewhere, marking the end of his naive love for his older friend. He soon meets Esau, a young boy living among a nearby colony of Huguenots. The religious group is another target of Calvino’s satire, in this case of religious folly.

The leader of the Huguenots, Ezekiel, is given to delivering absurd exhortations about the importance of hard work and the imminence of God’s wrath.

With his typical aggressiveness, Medardo declares his intention to wed Pamela, a rustic maid, who as one might expect has her reser-vations. The story receives a jolt with the return of the other half of Medardo. He has also survived the cannonade blast, but unlike his other half, he is entirely good. Hereafter, the two characters are referred to as the Good ‘Un and the Bad ‘Un.

Virtue and vice compete through the actions of Medardo’s two halves, who also clash for the hand of Pamela. The Good ‘Un’s moral rectitude turns out to be just as repugnant as the Bad ‘Un’s brutality: he chastises the lepers for their sexual escapades—their only source of joy—and aggravates Ezekiel and the Huegenots with his instructions to lower their crop prices for the sake of the poor. By this point, Calvino’s character study has turned out to be not the expected rehashing of the Jekyll and Hyde theme, but instead a deconstruction of traditional morality.

The Bad ‘Un decides that the other half must marry Pamela and arranges a wedding with the girl’s mother. The Good ‘Un, ignorant of the Bad ‘Un’s plans, has the same intentions and arranges a wed-ding with her father. When Pamela discovers that there are to be two weddings, she decides to have it on the same day, letting chance dic-tate whom she will marry. Both men show up for the ceremony, and to decide whom the husband will be, they agree to hold a duel, dur-ing which the Good ‘Un and Bad ‘Un suffer mortal wounds. Dr.

Trelawney sees their injuries as the perfect opportunity to stitch the two sides together. In a fantastic turn of events, Medardo becomes whole again, marries Pamela, and they begin a family.

After The Cloven Viscount was published, Calvino admitted to leading critics down the wrong path by disguising his ambiguous story as a simple allegory. The tale’s conclusion remains true to the author’s vision, as the once-naive narrator now pokes fun at the tra-ditional fairy-tale ending: “Some might expect that with the Viscount entire again, a period of marvelous happiness would open, but obviously a whole Viscount is not enough to make all the world whole.” The narrator, moreover, has no desire to stay in the town, even with its rehabilitated leader. When Captain Cook’s ship reach-es the shore to retrieve Dr. Trelawney, the boy regrets not being able to leave with him. Instead, he remains stuck in Terralba and “this world of ours full of responsibilities and will-o’-the-wisps.”

L I S T O F C H A R A C T E R S I N

The Cloven Viscount

Medardo, the Viscount of Terralba, suffers a cannon blast during battle that splits his body completely in half. Both remaining halves miraculously survive and return home—one half (the Bad ‘Un) is entirely evil; the other (the Good ‘Un) is entirely good. With their respective malice and sanctimonious preaching, the two halves remain a burden to the townspeople until the court doctor stitches them back together, whereupon the Viscount becomes a complete individual once again.

The narrator, Medardo’s young nephew, tells the story from the innocent perspective of a child. He enjoys roaming the countryside, collecting will-o’-the-wisps with his friend, Dr. Trelawney, and remains content even during the terror that ensues with the Bad

‘Un’s return.

Dr. Trelawney, the English court physician, is a former shipmate of Captain Cook. He is an enthusiastic student of nature, yet his aver-sion to sickness makes him a useless doctor.

Pamela is the sensible shepherdess whom both halves of Medardo wish to wed. Always true to her earthy personality, she remains unexcited about the prospect of marriage.

Sebastiana is the faithful old nurse to the Viscount and one of the worst victims of the Bad ‘Un’s wrath. She is the first to observe that it is Medardo’s evil half who has returned from the war.

Ariolfo, the former Viscount of Terralba, leads a relaxed life train-ing the birds from his aviary. Upon learntrain-ing that the trials of war have turned his son into a monster, he falls ill and dies immediately.

Master Pietrochiodo is the court carpenter caught between the instructions of the Bad ‘Un, who commissions only gibbets and instruments of torture, and the Good ‘Un, who designs multi-tasked devices that are impossible to make.

Ezekiel is the overzealous leader of a Huguenot colony that has recently escaped persecution in France. He overworks his people to

prevent what he fears is God’s imminent wrath through famine and plague.

Esau is Ezekiel’s son and the narrator’s friend. He demonstrates the ineffectiveness of his father’s preaching in his desire to drink, steal, and commit every sin he can think of.

Kurt, the experienced squire of Medardo during the Turkish wars, appears only in the opening chapters. He dutifully answers Medardo’s numerous questions on their way to battle.

C R I T I C A L V I E W S O N

The Cloven Viscount

J. R. W

OODHOUSE ON THE

N

AIVE

V

ISION

[J. R. Woodhouse is Professor of Italian at Oxford University and author of Italo Calvino: A Reappraisal and an Appreciation of the Trilogy. He also helped edit Building the Text: Architecture as Metaphor in Late Medieval and Early Modern France. In this excerpt, he discusses the naive perspective of the young narrator and its impact on the story.]

Calvino’s awareness of the value of naive vision is well illustrated by the care with which he describes the Jim Hawkins type of narrator in Il visconte dimezzato. Apart from the allusions to the leper-colony and the likeliness which this adds to the boy’s character, Calvino goes into great detail in Chapter V to explain why the boy is as free as he is and also to explain the eccentric nature of Dr. Trelawney and the boy’s peculiar relationship with him. Calvino has evidently gone to some trouble to make the youngster’s visit to Pratofungo as plau-sible as posplau-sible. Why should the young boy want to risk his life despite the traditional attitudes of the villagers to the lepers?

Basically he has the child’s curiosity to investigate the unknown and the forbidden. This is a characteristic underlined throughout the book, but by itself it would not be enough to drive him to Pratofungo. The exile there of the nurse Sebastiana provides him with a good motive, however, for since her departure the boy has begun to feel the complete lack of affection and emotion in his life and wants to know her fate, see her again. The lepers have a contact with the outside world, Galateo, who could conceivably have helped the narrator with information; but again Calvino’s care has success-fully sidetracked this possibility, because Galateo is so tired of hav-ing the village boys pelt him and yell at him (from safe distances) that he is utterly indifferent to the present anxious pleas about Sebastiana, treating the narrator as one of his usual tormentors and ignoring him completely. So the narrator is forced by circumstances and careful plot-construction to make his own way to Pratofungo.

Calvino also uses the naive narrator in Il visconte dimezzato to evoke very successfully the delight which youth can take in the flora and fauna of the neighbourhood. The enchantment which one feels at the nipotino’s idyllic landscape is similar in many ways to Torrismondo’s delight in the fauna and flora of Curvaldia. In the case of the young boy, here Calvino very often evokes the sights, sounds and scents of boyhood for their purely lyrical effect. The verisimili-tude of the naive narrator is well established, and perhaps nowhere better than in this relationship of his with the leper-colony at Pratofungo. The boy’s entire life seems to be lived in the open air, and the book is, of course, full of the usual allusions to a Riviera-like countryside around Terralba. Natural beauty and naivety are used in this novel more than any other to highlight horror. In the earlier part of the book, the horror of the old battlefields has already been put into relief by the contrast between Medardo’s innocent questions and the blasé nature of Curzio’s informative, if macabre, replies. But more subtly later on, the young narrator undergoes several alarming experiences, the horror of which is heightened because of his extreme youth, because of the contrast between the wholesome and friendly countryside and the horror it conceals. There is a hint of the horrors of the leper colony of Pratofungo half-way through Chapter V, when the child juxtaposes the beautiful weather and scenery, his own feeling of well-being, with the advent of Galateo the leper and the general fear which he inspires in the Terralbans:

L’ora piú bella veniva quando il sole era alto e il mare d’oro, e le galline fatto l’uovo cantavano, e per i viottoli si sentiva il suono del corno del lebbroso.

This is a semiprophetic description for the little boy, because at the beginning of Chapter VII, when he begins his search for Sebastiana, nature surrounds him with scents and sights, varieties of scented shrubs, disarming to the reader, as to the narrator himself.

But suddenly he sees a leper get up from a hiding-place in a patch of thyme, calls out to him, and finds other figures rising all around him.

The country idyll had become a nightmare in a very few lines of dra-matic narrative:

M’accorsi allora che il pomeriggio di sole era pieno di lebbrosi sdraiati, nascosti nei cespugli, e adesso si levavano pian piano nei loro chiari sai, e camminavano controluce verso Pratofungo . . .

The boy’s attempts to escape from the surrounding lepers almost bring him into horrifying contact, and in his anxiety to avoid them he finds himself being led slowly, but implacably, back to the lepers’

huts. Here again his verisimilitude is well brought out, when he crouches to make himself small, to avoid the lepers and also what is evidently one of their sexual orgies, though to his innocent eyes it is a group of men throwing themselves on women:

Non capii bene cosa successe poi: uomini e donne si buttarono gli uni adosso agli altri e iniziarono quella che poi appresi doveva essere un’orgia.

Mi feci piccino piccino . . .

The whole episode, anyway, is one of contrast between idyll and hor-ror. The lepers who capture the narrator are called giardinieri; the song with which they taunt him is apparently equally innocent, “Il pulcino senza macchie, va per more e si macchiò!” But beneath the rosemary and peppermint scents is a horror which makes us want to wash our hands. His childlike curiosity has led him into this predica-ment, and his joy at seeing Sebastiana again is mixed with despair at the knowledge that she has grasped him with her (apparently) infect-ed hand, and has certainly infectinfect-ed him in turn.

The lepers are constantly present in the young narrator’s thoughts, and perhaps more than any other aspect of the book, his reaction to the lepers illustrates his naive outlook, and makes his existence more authentic.

—J. R. Woodhouse, Italo Calvino: A Reappraisal and an Apprecia-tion of the Trilogy, (Yorkshire, England: University of Hull Public-ations, 1968): pp. 61–63.

C

ONSTANCE

M

ARKEY ON THE

E

XISTENTIAL

C

HOICE [A former peer of Calvino’s, Constance Markey was origi-nally an instructor at Loyola University and now teaches Italian at DePaul University. Author of Italo Calvino: A Journey Toward Postmodernism, she has also published arti-cles in Italica and Italian Quarterly. In this excerpt, she describes the protagonist Medardo’s existential dilemma, which she argues is also prevalent with the other protago-nists of the Our Ancestors trilogy.]

In Visconte, for example, a presumably straightforward dialogue on life’s choices begins. And again, in a typically existential vein, alternatives are weighed and considered carefully, and again the res-olutions are precarious. For each novel of the trilogy, at least from a philosophical view, has been provided with an ending as patched together as is Uncle Medardo’s body at the close of Visconte. Each story has a finish appropriate to fantasy, but which has been effec-tively designed to put the lie to facile or conventional moralizing.

For that reason all of them eventually raise more questions than they provide answers, and this inquiring attitude is typical of all Calvino’s work.

In Visconte, for example, the narrator introduces the reader to Uncle Medardo’s two halves and what appears on the surface to be a rather obvious approach to choosing by means of a simple allegory about good and evil. Or at least, as we mentioned earlier, that is how many critics saw the novel, above the author’s own protests. Calvino himself, however, has always viewed the novel with more caution.

For him Uncle Medardo’s two halves, rather than representing any concepts so tidily opposed as good and evil, actually represent two equally dismal, but contrasting slices of “disumanità.” For him, he insists, “il problema del bene e male,” at least in its traditional Victorian sense, never even entered his mind, “neanche per un min-uto” (Pref., I nostri, xiii and xi–xiii).

This last perspective on his work, vehemently expressed by the author, is only recently coming to be shared by others as well. The American novelist Gore Vidal, for example, comments on the absence of clearly defined moral issues in our author, stating quite simply that “there is no Christian sense of good and evil in Calvino.”

Another recent critic, Gatt-Rutter, elaborating on the same theme, phrases his thoughts more negatively when he says there is no per-ception of evil or “moral wrong doing” in Calvino, and hence no moral judgments.” Elementary as these observations may appear today, in the light of Calvino’s current works, they bear repeating. In the denial of a priori values, Christian or ethical, as inferred by the author himself in his discussion of Visconte, we already see the over-whelming presence of a gloomy contemporary, often existential, per-spective. This point of view espouses a morality where black and white norms, definitive choices in the Christian sense, are

obvious-ly inconceivable. It further embraces, as we have shown, a world where in the absence of God or the comfort of reason there abides only gray confusion and doubt.

In Visconte, therefore, the dialogue between the interrogating nar-rator and the other characters over which of Uncle Medardo’s two

In Visconte, therefore, the dialogue between the interrogating nar-rator and the other characters over which of Uncle Medardo’s two

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