Test gestáltico visomotor para niños (Bender-

In Italian post-WWII literature, examples of works exploring the matters of openness and

Nothingness are to be found in Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco’s novels.84 _{The two works by}

Calvino discussed in Chapter Two, Le città invisibili and Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore, are filled with references to both openness and Nothingness. One may argue that these two themes constitute the fundamentals of Calvino’s works. The conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan centre upon imaginary cities that Polo describes without the use of words. He reports to Kublai Khan through gestures, unarticulated words the emperor does not (literally) comprehend and ostented objects. Their communication is made of empty, yet multi-significant words, which change meanings depending on Khan’s perceptions. The whole narration(s) of Le città invisibili focuses on the idea that verbal, gestural and ostentational communication is open to manifold interpretations. This idea is exemplified in the following passage:

The links between one element and another of the story did not always prove to be evident to the emperor; the objects could mean different things: a quiver full of arrows showed now the approach of a war, now the abundance of game, or an armorer’s shop; an hourglass could mean the passing of time or the one that has passed, or the sand, or an hourglass-making workshop.

But what was making each fact or news reported by his unarticulated informant

precious to Kublai was the space surrounding them, a void unfilled by words. 85

82 _{As discussed in Note 23 of Chapter Three, the term ‘hermetic secret’ has been coined and adopted by Umberto Eco in:}

Umberto Eco, ‘Sovrainterpretare i testi’ in Interpretazione e sovrainterpretazione, ed. Stefan Collini (Milano: Bompiani, 2004), 57-80.

83 _{Eco, Interpretazione e sovrainterpretazione, 43.}

84 _{Both Calvino and Eco, as already mentioned, were colleagues, collaborators and friends of Italian composers,}

particularly of Berio. Their influence on operatic production is therefore obvious.

This passage not only encloses the thematics of openness and Nothingness, but also demonstrates Calvino’s awareness of their being synonyms: in Le città invisibili openness and Nothingness co-live and respectively generate each other. While Kublai Khan realises that an hourglass generates a multiplicity of significations, he at the same time understands that it is within that multiplicity that ‘a void unfilled by words’ opens. The openness of significations is reflected in

the Nothingness of the void and vice versa.86

A similar concept is enclosed in the vision of Franciscan friar Guglielmo da Baskerville, one of the principal characters of Eco’s Il nome della rosa (The name of the rose, 1980). Guglielmo preached that ‘the beauty of the cosmos is given not only by the unity in the variety, but also by the

variety in the unity’.87 _{However Il nome della rosa, differently from Le città invisibili, does not}

centre upon a narration-of-imagination, but it is ‘a novel [...] halfway between a theological and a

crime novel’.88 _{In this work, the themes of openness and Nothingness govern both the overall}

narration and the details that compose facts and ideas. The title itself Il nome della rosa encloses

these themes. It recalls the nominalist89 _{motto placed at the end of the novel, when the Benedictine}

novice Adso da Melk asserts that things exists inasmuch as they are names. His words are:

I leave this writing, I do not know whom for, I do not anymore know what about: stat

rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus. 90

The Latin quote tells us that we cannot grasp the essence of the world’s things, because they exist as open-entities that hide behind meaningless names. The idea the names (words) are open- signs that change meaning depending on interpretation is also presented right at the beginning of the novel, when Adso da Melk says ‘I set about to leave on this fleece my testimony [...], as if I were to

86 _{For Calvino the open property of the world’s things is, however, to be intended in a perspective of idealistic}

positivism, not of mere indeterminateness. This is to say that his works do not focus on the emptiness of the openness, but on the multiplicity of the void. What matters to him is exploring ‘the space surrounding each fact or news’ (Calvino,

Le città invisibili, 37), not defending himself from the ‘moving army of metaphors’ (Nietzsche, Verità e Menzogna in Senso Extramorale, 131). We find such idealistic positivism in the words that conclude the description of the city called Dorotea: ‘that morning in Dorotea I felt there was no good of life I could not expect. [...] But now I know this is only

one of the many ways that opened to myself that morning in Dorotea’ (Calvino, Le città invisibili, 9).

87 _{Umberto Eco, Il Nome della Rosa, 63rd ed. trans. Simone Spagnolo (Milano: Bompiani, 2012), 24.}

88 _{Antonio Gnoli, ‘Eco “Così ho dato il nome alla rosa”’ in La Repubblica.it. <http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/} archivio/repubblica/2006/07/09/eco-cosi-ho-dato-il-nome-alla.html> (accessed 25 May 2013).

89 _{Nominalism is a philosophical doctrine maintaining that abstract concepts, general terms, or (Platonic) universals}

have no independent existence but only exist as names.

90 _{Eco, Il Nome della Rosa, 503.}

The Latin sentence ‘stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus’ translates as ‘the primordial rose [by now] exists [merely] inasmuch as name [through its name], naked names are all that we have’.

leave to posterity signs of signs, so that on them the prayer of deciphering can be exercised’.91 _{In Il}

nome della rosa, openness and Nothingness are not only the thread of the entire work, they also

have the purpose of questioning the essence of truth. As Adso says, friar Guglielmo was moved ‘by

the suspicion [...] that the truth were not that manifesting in the present moment’.92 _{Truth, as Eco}

quotes from Medieval German, is held in the very openness of the Nothing: ‘Gott ist ein lautes

Nichts, ihn rührt kein Nun noch Hier’.93 _{Thus the truth, the essence of things and the openness of Il}

nome della rosa, unavoidably converge in the Nothing, in that no-place that, at the end of the novel,

Adso projects himself into:

I will sink in the divine darkness, in a mute silence and in an ineffable union, and in this sinking every equality and inequality will be lost, and in that abyss my spirit will lose itself [...] I will be in the simple foundation, in the silent desert where one never saw diversity [...]. I will fall in the silent and uninhabited divinity where there is no work

[opus] nor image. 94