Disclaimer: This post was originally written in Chinese and translated into English by GPT-5.2.
Italo Calvino (1923–1985) was a renowned Italian novelist and one of the important writers in the contemporary world literary arena. Calvino’s creative individuality is distinct; his works are often novel in form and unlike one another, with a highly variable style. The course of his life’s writing embodies a high degree of self-conscious theorization and practicality, exploring the possible limits of novelistic techniques and writing space, and thus he enjoys the reputation of being a “writer’s writer.” For the reasons above, together with the series of achievements he personally attained in novel writing, Harvard University invited him in 1984 to deliver the Norton Lectures (covering various creative theories including literature, music, painting, etc.). The Six Memos for the Next Millennium (also translated as American Lectures), written in response, is a theoretical summary of his lifelong commitment to various practices of novel creation, and to some extent also reflects the characteristics of his own works.
The trilogy Our Ancestors consists of three novels: The Cloven Viscount (1952), The Baron in the Trees (1957), and The Nonexistent Knight (1959). It runs through the entirety of the writer’s creative process in the 1950s and is undoubtedly the most important collection of novels from Calvino’s early period of literary creation, also centrally embodying the author’s literary self-consciousness already formed in his early writing. In a 1984 interview with Gregory L. Lucente, Calvino already acknowledged the claim that literary self-consciousness began to become important in this book, and provided examples for each of the three novels, focusing mainly on the means of expression or instrument of expression in fiction writing[1]. This means that, for the writer himself, literary self-consciousness may refer more to matters at the technical level of novel creation; but clearly, the thematic coherence of the three novels can also be regarded as an important manifestation of literary self-consciousness. As Calvino once pointed out when speaking of the intent behind creating this book, “I wanted to make them a trilogy about how people achieve selfhood,” and “this story represents three stages on the road to freedom”[2]. “Achieving selfhood” is the commonality in thematic implication across the three novels, while “three stages” indicates their differences beyond that commonality—this is literary self-consciousness.
However, a work’s theme is the soul of the entire work. To treat the thematic coherence of the three novels simply as a manifestation of literary self-consciousness while neglecting a concrete discussion of these themes is probably an oversimplification. A concrete discussion of the themes helps reveal the deeper spiritual connotations hidden behind literary self-consciousness—namely, what this article calls modern people’s self-consciousness. In other words, a form-focused literary self-consciousness and the thematic pursuit of “self-realization” should in fact be the external forms of manifestation of this modern self-consciousness; in essence, they are unified. As an important writer of the twentieth century, Calvino is no longer merely an individual existence; he more strongly reflects the spirit of the age in which he lived. This is the point of departure and foothold of this article.
II. Literary Self-Consciousness
Some scholars have long started from the genre of the works and pointed out the trilogy’s borrowing from fairy tales in its creation. For example, all three novels take nobles such as a viscount, baron, and knight as protagonists, use European society in the feudal era as the temporal background, and use natural environments such as castles, villages, and forests as the story setting, embodying a typical Western fairy-tale coloring[3]. Calvino is considered “Italy’s most original, most creatively talented, and most interesting allegorical writer”[2]. His trilogy is naturally not an ordinary fairy tale for children to read, but rather a fairy-tale novel or allegorical novel—this is a kind of transcendence of the fairy-tale genre.
Using the narrative mode of fairy tales to express profound themes, in Calvino’s words, is a kind of “lightness,” a kind of lifting heavy weights as if they were light. He said: “I’m not saying to escape into a world of fantasy and irrationality, but that I should change method, and look at this world from another angle.”[4]. This “looking at the world from another angle” concerns the question of the novel’s means of expression and instrument of expression, and is undoubtedly the so-called literary self-consciousness mentioned above. This article intends to explain this from three aspects: the book’s dual images, the narrative voice, and the coherence of themes.
(I) Dual images
Fairy tales often simplify novel characters and plots in order to accommodate children’s cognitive characteristics and receptive capacity. The method of simplification generally dualizes human affairs and ethics into opposing categories such as right and wrong, true and false, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, human and beast, etc., strengthening contrast effects to facilitate readers’ reading and understanding.
The trilogy also has the above characteristics. In The Cloven Viscount, Medardo joins the war between Austria and Turkey with passionate enthusiasm, but unexpectedly is hit by a Turkish cannonball on the battlefield and is split into two halves: the right half is extremely bad and commits every evil; the left half is extremely good and performs every good. In The Baron in the Trees, Cosimo cannot bear the dull and hypocritical family life; finally, because he refuses to eat the snail dish made by his sister Battista, he resolutely climbs into the trees, and from then on never sets foot on the ground for the rest of his life, constructing on the unfree world of the ground a utopia in which he can do as he pleases. In The Nonexistent Knight, as an ideal-type perfect knight, Agilulf has only a suit of armor; inside it is empty, without a shred of flesh and blood. He neither eats nor sleeps, does everything in an orderly fashion, and has very notable military merits, yet he is haunted by the fact that he “does not exist,” to the point that in order to defend his knightly identity he will pay any price; in the end, due to a misunderstanding, out of anxiety over self-identification, he disappears and becomes a truly “nonexistent knight.” In addition, in an amusing contrast to him is Agilulf’s squire Gurdulù. This person imitates birds when he sees birds and imitates beasts when he sees beasts, losing subject consciousness and self-consciousness and behaving in a muddle. Charlemagne comments: “That commoner lives without knowing his existence, while over there my guard thinks he lives and yet he does not exist… they’re just the pair!”[5]
Medardo being split into two halves is a typical image of a “good–evil” dual opposition; Cosimo’s refusal to suppress his will and his pursuit of freedom and self-perfection in the trees forms a “freedom–unfreedom” dual opposition with those under the trees; Agilulf himself is a contradiction of “both existing and not existing.” He has a strong conscious awareness of living and stubbornly pursues personal impact; with other mediocre, inaction-prone people—especially Gurdulù—he forms, in the ontological sense, a dual opposition of “name–reality” (or “existence–essence”) separation. Thus, even though all have the feature of dual opposition, this feature becomes increasingly abstract and atypical across the three novels. As for why the writer uses this way to depict characters, Calvino himself explained: “Split, maimed, incomplete, at war with oneself—this is modern man; Marx called it ‘alienation,’ Freud said it was ‘repression,’ the ancient harmonious condition has been lost, awaiting the emergence of a new wholeness.”[6] Using the fairy-tale model of dual images to reflect social reality and the human condition, and ultimately having it all serve the theme of self-realization—this is precisely the spiritual connotation of Calvino’s literary self-consciousness; further discussion will follow below.
(II) Narrative voice
Narrative voice refers to the voice of the narrator of the novel’s story (voice of narrator). When Calvino was interviewed by Gregory L. Lucente, he used the narrator’s voice to illustrate the literary self-consciousness embodied in the trilogy. He said that, as in The Baron in the Trees, in The Cloven Viscount the first-person narrator “I,” as the source of the narrative voice, is not the protagonist but a lateral or secondary character—this is a method of embedding the whole narration in another discourse. This aspect of narration is even more important in The Nonexistent Knight[1].
Indeed, without exception the trilogy uses an “I” who plays a secondary role in the story—respectively: Medardo’s nephew, Cosimo’s younger brother, and Agilulf’s pursuer (Bradamante or Teodora)—as narrator to tell readers the story in the novel. Moreover, in all three novels, readers can strongly feel the narrator’s voice. For example, the second sentence at the beginning of The Cloven Viscount is “My uncle, the Viscount Medardo di Terralba,” and throughout the narration afterward, “my uncle” is used from time to time to refer to the protagonist Medardo. Similarly, the first sentence at the beginning of The Baron in the Trees is “The day my brother Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò sat with us for the last time was June 15, 1767,” and afterward “my brother” is also often used to refer to the protagonist Cosimo. Different from the former two, the narrative voice of The Nonexistent Knight is delayed until Chapter Four (“I who tell this story am Sister Teodora”), and after it appears, at the beginning of each subsequent chapter it emphasizes its existence as storyteller by describing the writing scene (the monastery) of “writing” this novel, leading readers to mistakenly believe that “I” is a narrator outside the story. But in the last chapter of the novel, “I” suddenly announces that she is Bradamante in the novel, creating a strong contrast in reader expectation. In short, although they are only minor figures in the novel, the narrators of the three novels all have a strong sense of presence—outwardly manifested as a strong narrative voice.
Strengthening the internal narrative voice of the story helps dilute the sense of presence of the external creator of the story, namely the author, making the text more open and more conducive to inviting readers into the story to make personal judgments, thereby simultaneously enhancing the interactivity between reader and text. Because the narrative voice coming from a character within the story means the narrative perspective is a limited internal focalization, not an omniscient zero focalization, and cannot be fully trusted, readers can also, like the narrative voice, make personalized judgments and understandings of the nature of the story and the characters. This is a breakthrough in modern novel narration against the traditional situation in which the author dominated and readers passively received, after twentieth-century Western literary theory proposed reception aesthetics emphasizing the author’s exit and the reader’s entrance. Calvino consciously accepted this theory and successfully applied it to his own novel creation early on. For example, in The Baron in the Trees, “I” repeatedly says: “Now I am going to present this story as Cosimo told it in many different versions; I keep the one with the richest detail and the least logical confusion. Although it can be certain that my brother added many subjective conjectures when recounting his adventures, and I, lacking other sources of information, always try as much as possible to use his exact words.”[5] This warns readers not only not to rely excessively on the narrator’s account, but also not to rely excessively on the protagonist’s claims, and to make more independent judgments. The narrator of The Nonexistent Knight further offers a rationalized explanation of the possible narrative limitations in the novel, providing advance justification for the occasional phenomenon of boundary-crossing perspectives (i.e., suddenly shifting from limited internal focalization to omniscient zero focalization), which goes one step further than the former in openness: “We nuns have very few opportunities to talk with soldiers; for those things I do not know I try my best to use my imagination—what else can I do? I do not know every little detail of this story very clearly; you should forgive me for that… how much can a poor nun know about worldly affairs?”[5] Another point worth noting is that in The Cloven Viscount one still cannot find similar narrative-voice reminders about the truthfulness of the narration. This shows that in the process of creating the trilogy, the writer’s literary self-consciousness was also in a process of continuous strengthening.
(III) Coherence of themes
As noted above, the trilogy thematically points to the issue of modern people’s self-realization, but the three differ markedly in how they present this theme. Medardo is unexpectedly split by a cannonball into an extremely good half and an extremely bad half; after each undergoes a period of worldly experience, they unexpectedly join together again, ultimately becoming a complete individual who is “neither bad nor good, endowed with both good and evil,” and also becoming wiser. After Cosimo begins living in the trees at twelve, he persists all along, until at sixty-five he grabs a hot-air balloon and rises into the sky—“this is a non-individualistic perfection achieved through personal self-choice and unswerving effort”[2]. Agilulf has the name of existence (knightly identity) but not the reality of existence (external bodily form); this split between name and reality makes him suffer anxiety about proving his existence, and in the end, due to a misunderstanding—or the illusoriness of honor—even the original name of his existence becomes nothing. Meanwhile his squire, Gurdulù, has an existing bodily form but lacks the consciousness of existence; this split between name and reality also makes him lack existence in the true sense. This means that existence in the true sense is a unity of name and reality. Bu Weicai believes that these three novels design three different ways of “self-knowledge”: the knight’s “confirming one’s own existence,” the viscount’s “seeking one’s own wholeness,” and the baron’s “reaching perfection through free choice”[6], which may be consulted.
From the relationship among the three, The Cloven Viscount explores good and bad, good and evil at the ethical level; The Baron in the Trees explores self-choice and perfection at the social level; The Nonexistent Knight explores the split between name and reality of existence at the philosophical level. If ethical-level discussion is conducted within the social framework, then philosophical-level discussion clearly goes beyond the entire social framework and questions the essence of human existence; the relationship among the three should be progressive step by step. Because ethics itself is a derivative of society: wherever society exists, there are norms and constraints of ethical institutions; but when a person can completely set aside all social norms and climb into the trees, start anew, and build, according to an ideal form, a utopia opposed to real society, this is a transcendence of the original ethical system. Philosophical-level discussion, moreover, does not fully confine itself to humans’ social attributes, but also takes into account humans’ natural attributes; this restores the essence of what makes humans human and is a further deepening of social-level discussion. It can be seen that as Calvino’s creation of the trilogy continued to progress, his thinking about the problem of human self-realization also became deeper and more comprehensive; such deeper and more comprehensive thinking is naturally inseparable from the writer’s clear literary self-consciousness. This is exactly the same as the conclusions of the previous two sections.
III. Self-Actualization
Self-actualization, as a psychological term, became popular in post–World War II humanistic psychology, mainly marked by the philosophical revolution triggered by Abraham H. Maslow’s 1954 publication Personality and Motivation. There is a famous saying in the book: “What a man can be, he must be.” This refers to a desire for self-fulfillment, or a tendency to realize one’s potential self. This is self-actualization[7]. This definition of self-actualization matches the trilogy’s themes perfectly, and since the trilogy was mainly created in the mid-to-late 1950s, as a writer with a high degree of theoretical self-consciousness, Calvino could not have been wholly unaware of it.
However, the shift in psychology from behaviorism, which previously focused on external mechanical movement, to humanism, which focused on human psychological needs, and the contemporaneous emergence of Calvino’s literary self-consciousness in expressing the theme of self-actualization, were not accidental, but had a profound historical background—namely Western society’s concern with subjectivity.
(I) Concern with subjectivity
Calvino’s novel writing began after World War II, with The Path to the Nest of Spiders in 1947 as the beginning and ending with Palomar in the mid-1980s. As an individual, Calvino’s novel writing is naturally rich in the writer’s personal creative individuality; but as a historical individual, together with other related writers before and after him, Calvino represented a brand-new literary phenomenon: literary creation as a whole increasingly turned to关注 the individual’s subjectivity rather than society’s objectivity, and expressed this through various novelistic forms such as stream of consciousness, psychoanalysis, neo-realism, and various postmodern methods of representation, and so on.
This phenomenon is sometimes also regarded as a manifestation of literary self-consciousness, but this kind of literary self-consciousness, in the modern sense, is very different from the humanism of the European Renaissance, the rationalism of the Enlightenment, or the “discovery of the human” in China’s Wei-Jin and Northern and Southern Dynasties. The immediate reason for the difference lies in the differences in the epochal self-consciousness behind each period; the fundamental reason lies in the different “historical–social–cultural” conditions of each period. Since entering modern society, in the face of liberated material productive conditions and increasingly massive social organizations, people on the one hand live in a materially affluent society where desires are stimulated and the commodity economy develops unprecedentedly, and on the other hand also live in a spiritually unstable society of colliding desires, crisis of faith, ethical reorganization, and alienation of human nature. Coupled with the upheavals of colonialism, imperialism, and especially the two world wars in the overall world pattern, the above spiritual instability has been further amplified—particularly in economically developed European and American countries with superior material conditions. This is also the historical impetus for the early formation and development of existentialist philosophy, psychology, modern novels, modern art, and so on in these places.
Modern people’s self-consciousness differs from earlier forms in that modern people’s main problem is no longer whether to affirm superficial, directly felt human desires, but how to face or realize human desires that are fully stimulated by reality yet simultaneously highly repressed, distorted, colliding, split, shattered, and alienated—this lies in a deeper spiritual domain not easily and directly perceived. The status of the individual as a subjective individual, a spiritual individual, and a psychological individual—not merely a desiring individual—is emphasized more seriously here. For modern people, society is no longer a simply orderly, rationally conforming traditional world, but rather an absurd and chaotic modern world in which reason has gone bankrupt. Philosophy is the concentrated embodiment of the spirit of an age. As a philosophy that flourished after World War II, the historical development of existentialist philosophy provides a spiritual thread for the formation of modern people’s self-consciousness.
The Danish religious philosopher and psychologist Søren Kierkegaard is generally regarded as the father of modern existentialist philosophy. As a reaction against Hegelian philosophy, he believed that only actual things and individual entities truly exist, rather than endless abstract concepts. For personal self-fulfilling, the individual and subjective dimensions in human life are the most important, because humans themselves are supreme moral entities, and thus need not perfect themselves by integrating into larger, more abstract organized entities; what matters most to them is simply decision-making. In the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger further developed this idea, arguing that existence is from the beginning a shared and social one, so the key problem for people is how to become individuals, to find an authentic mode of personal existence; therefore we must make choices, even though we have no certainty about the results, and any meaning in the end is something we give them. Jean-Paul Sartre was influenced by Heidegger’s thought and propelled existentialism’s real popularity in Europe. He emphasized that individual freedom is innate and fated, with no alternative: existence takes priority over essence; essence does not exist and needs to be self-created. Therefore we must establish basic rules for our lives, create our own values, and determine our personality; in other words, we create ourselves. Humans possess total choice of oneself, which is more dramatized than Heidegger’s position[8].
These views, in the postwar 1940s and 1950s, spread rapidly throughout European society. In the period’s journals and magazines, among intellectuals, in various artistic creations such as poetry, novels, theater, and film, and even in places like nightclubs, the presence of existentialist philosophy often appeared, and has continued to this day[8]—truly a miracle in the history of philosophy. Overall, existentialist philosophy emphasizes self-choice and self-fulfillment, which is closest to the theme of The Baron in the Trees; The Nonexistent Knight’s search for proof of one’s own existence indicates the importance of the individual and still follows the theoretical premise of existentialist philosophy; The Cloven Viscount, where Medardo’s bodily halves are unexpectedly split and rejoined, seems not strongly related to existentialist philosophy, but in fact existentialism’s rapid twentieth-century development was based on the background of rapid social development and the joint alienation and splitting of society and human nature—precisely the phenomenon The Cloven Viscount attempts to expose, as the novel says at the end: “but it is clear that a single whole viscount is not enough to make the whole world whole”[5].
In sum, concern with subjectivity is the natural result of modern people’s self-consciousness formed in the twentieth century. This concern can be manifested in many aspects: the emergence and popularity of existentialist philosophy, the proposal of humanistic psychology, the formation of literary self-consciousness in the modern sense, and literary creation’s pursuit of the theme of self-actualization, and so on. With respect to the literary self-consciousness and self-actualization that this article focuses on, these two can in fact be unified in one consciousness: the modern people’s self-consciousness embodied in the trilogy.
(II) Self-actualization and its predicament
The discussion in the previous chapter mentioned several times the common theme of self-actualization in the trilogy, but in fact the connotations of this theme are far more complex than previously explained, and even not as simple as Calvino said: “I wanted to make them a trilogy about how people achieve selfhood,” “this story represents three stages on the road to freedom”[1]. Because the three novels clearly do not point out specific methods for achieving selfhood or reaching freedom in three stages, and the writer-knight likewise keeps pondering. This reflects the writer’s deep concern for personal subjectivity.
After Medardo is split into two “good and evil” halves, the evil half first returns to Terralba and madly takes revenge on the world: he angers his father to death; ungratefully drives the wet nurse to the leper village; has people build gallows, abuses severe punishment, and cruelly executes many innocent townspeople; he also uses various means to split all surrounding objects into two halves, and once even deliberately gives “me” poisonous mushrooms and has “me” fry them in oil, showing no mercy to children. After the good half returns to Terralba, he does good everywhere, strives to repair the harms the other half has caused society, yields whenever he can, persuades people to do good whenever he can, and in the end even nearly hands over his beloved Pamela to someone else for the sake of the other half’s happiness. Yet these two half-people who go to the extremes of good and evil both admit that their incomplete selves were better than their complete selves. The evil half says: “If everything could be split in two, then everyone could be freed from the bondage of that stupid concept of wholeness. I used to be a whole man… I thought I saw everything clearly, but in fact I only saw the surface. If you become half of yourself… though you lose half of yourself and half of the world, the half that remains will be a thousand times deeper and more precious.”[5] The good half also says: “That is the advantage of being half a person: understanding the suffering of everyone in the world because of their own incompleteness, understanding the defects formed by everything because it is not fully complete. I used to be whole, and I did not understand these truths then… not only I am torn and incomplete; you are too, everyone is. Now I have a benevolence I never experienced when I was whole: sympathy for all incompleteness and insufficiency in the world.”[5] The meaning here is thought-provoking: ① Because incomplete persons are limited by their incompleteness, they cannot understand the meaning and superiority of wholeness in the true sense. In the author’s view, so-called wholeness is the compatibility of good and evil; both extreme goodness and extreme evil are problematic. ② So-called incompleteness is not only bodily deficiency; it can also be spiritual deficiency, and more often the latter. The universality of spiritual deficiency metaphorizes the spiritual devastation and absurd predicament modern people suffer in modern society. A reasonable inference from ①② is: ③ This is an incomplete society and world, and this incompleteness will persist. For one cannot expect everyone to have Medardo’s experience, and “a single whole viscount is not enough to make the whole world whole.” But in an incomplete society and world, how can a person’s wholeness and its maintenance be possible? In addition, Medardo’s unexpected process from incompleteness to wholeness is highly accidental—how can it be called a conscious self-actualization? Finally, if those who possess both good and evil are considered to be potentially whole persons, then how are ordinary people who possess both good and evil yet are spiritually deficient to realize their wholeness of self? These are the predicaments that The Cloven Viscount encounters when discussing self-actualization at the ethical level, and the writer does not point readers to a way out.
Cosimo’s self-choice to climb into the trees is clearly more subjectively agentic; therefore the free, spiritually rich, all-encompassing civilized life he constructs in the trees is more positively colored, and his self-perfection aligns more with the proactive ethos of existentialist philosophy. Thus Calvino explicitly pointed out: “In The Baron in the Trees there is a road to wholeness, a non-individualistic perfection achieved through personal self-choice and unswerving effort.”[2] The epitaph Cosimo writes for himself is also quite unrestrained: “Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò—lived in the trees—always loved the earth—rose into the sky.”[5] Even so, this path of self-actualization still has many predicaments. First, the fundamental reason Cosimo climbs into the trees and spends the rest of his life there lies in the overly dull and hypocritical family environment; the immediate cause is the prompting of his sister Battista’s snail dish. But whether fundamental or immediate, the psychological mechanism of Cosimo’s climbing into the trees is fear and anxiety about others controlling his life; it is an avoidance of some negative factor, not necessarily entirely a positive, active pursuit. Second, Cosimo’s initial behavior of climbing into the trees may not be without a sense of pique; for example, in Chapter Five he says to Viola with no little boasting: “Do you know from when on I never came down from the trees?” This shows the immaturity and impurity of his initial self-choice. Third, if living in the trees is to avoid the alienation imposed by the world on the ground, then absolutely avoiding one’s feet touching the ground, shunning it as if it were terrifying—how can that not be seen as another tangible constraint and alienation of oneself? Thus in the novel’s end, the elderly Cosimo also sighs: “For many years I lived for some ideals even I cannot explain clearly, but I did one good thing: living in the trees.”[5] But like his claim that “whoever wants to see the earthly world clearly should keep the necessary distance from it”[5], this may also be a rationalization of his own behavior after climbing into the trees in a fit of pique, and may even contain elements of self-deception. Finally, the writer’s fundamental contradiction lies in Cosimo’s ambiguous relationship with society. On the one hand, after climbing into the trees Cosimo refuses to come down, formally breaking completely with the ground society; but on the other hand, he freely and broadly participates in various social affairs and interacts with all strata of society, still living a civilized life in the trees and relying on the accommodation and obedience of those on the ground. On the one hand, Cosimo’s transcendent detachment makes his rule-bound younger brother admire him; but on the other hand, the brother prevents the next generation from contacting the elder brother, effectively cutting off kinship ties. The novel’s ending is even more suggestive: Cosimo disappears into the sky holding onto a hot-air balloon, and thus his inexplicable ideals also collapse from then on; “the tangle was untied, the thread straightened, and in the end ideals and dreams were turned into a string of meaningless words—this counts as finished writing”[5], and Cosimo-like figures are considered to have disappeared from the world. All this shows Calvino’s subconscious nihilistic attitude toward self-actualization; the writer is not without reservations about the rationality and possibility of this way of self-actualization.
The Nonexistent Knight is the novel in which the writer pushes his subconscious nihilistic attitude toward self-actualization to the extreme; the nihilistic attitude here is the split between name and reality. The novel’s story takes place in an era “when the world had not yet become chaotic.” In this era, “cases where name does not match reality are not rare—names, thoughts, forms, institutions, all of them. And on the other hand, this world is also filled with many things, phenomena, and people that have neither name nor characteristics.”[5] As manifested in Agilulf, he possesses the qualities an ideal knight ought to have, pursues perfection and truth, and has strong self-consciousness, yet he lacks the flesh-and-blood body that ordinary people have—while his squire Gurdulù is exactly the opposite. Agilulf envies the shell of the corpse yet knows he can never obtain it; this unattainability makes him devote all his energy to maintaining his sense of existence—that is, his identity, personality, and dignity as a knight. He fights bravely, reports impeccably, is neither exaggerated nor self-congratulatory, always objectively and accurately safeguarding his merits. Although he has no body and cannot dine, he still solemnly participates in banquets, sits upright, and conducts all behavior strictly according to the standards of knightly identity. He cannot interact normally with women or have sex, yet is reluctant to admit it; relying on eloquence and wit he skillfully maneuvers, spends a night safely with the strongly desirous Priscilla, and is considered full of manly spirit. Most importantly, to respond to Torrismondo’s questioning of his knightly identity, he spares no cost, travels long distances, endures countless hardships, and seeks out Princess Sofronia whom he once rescued to prove his own existence… Yet such a knight ultimately disappears forever due to anxiety and bewilderment over identity recognition. In addition, “Agilulf Emo Bertrandino can undoubtedly be called an imitation soldier; but everyone unanimously recognized him as an annoying fellow.”[5] The paradoxical nature of Agilulf’s attempt to prove his existence lies, on the one hand, in his having the name of existence (knightly identity) but not the reality of existence (external bodily form), and on the other hand in his binding the proof of his own existence together with other people’s recognition. This produces an eternal disharmony of “self-recognition—others’ recognition,” ultimately making the meaning of his existence entirely nihilistic. Modern people live in a massive modern society; barriers between people deepen day by day, everyone becomes extremely small, social status is almost invisible, yet the need for communication and mutual affirmation deepens. People’s sense of existence is bound up with others’ recognition, so modern people live in a predicament of anxiety over identity and meaning; the meaning of life becomes faint, and self-actualization is even more elusive.
IV. Conclusion
In his interview with Calvino, Gregory L. Lucente pointed out an important phenomenon:
According to the views of some critics, not only your works but also the works of other writers have begun to have an awareness of literary self-consciousness, and an awareness of this “narcissistic love” in literature. This phenomenon constitutes a refusal to directly face the everyday reality of society—more precisely, in literary terms, it is a distancing from social representation.
Calvino agreed with this claim and pointed out: “As is well known, so-called objective representation of social reality is in fact not always objective… After experiencing that initial stage of believing in some objective realism, I soon understood that in order to express certain things, including those related to Italian society, it is necessary to look within oneself or to use certain representations that in the traditional sense might not be realistic in order to present the social mechanism.”[1] This abandoning of the traditional norm that literature should represent social reality, and turning instead to new means of expression to reflect society and intervene in reality, is an important content of Calvino’s literary self-consciousness. Taking the Our Ancestors trilogy as an example: these three novels borrow the form of fairy tales and, through dual-opposed character images, profoundly allegorize the real predicament of modern people in modern society—personality splitting, alienation, incompleteness, imperfection, spiritual confusion, and anxiety—and on this basis offer deep reflection on the three stages by which people realize the self. Although this reflection cannot point readers to a clear implementation plan, it nonetheless reflects the writer’s high concern for the subject of self-actualization; such concern is concern for the human as subject. Critics of Calvino’s era linked Calvino’s awareness of literary self-consciousness with an awareness of literature’s “narcissistic love,” in fact pointing out that the literary self-consciousness that emerged after the twentieth century, no matter what form of expression it borrows, has increasingly carried a kind of subjectivity consciousness—this is the meaning of “narcissistic love.” That is to say, in the discourse system of this article, the literary self-consciousness embodied in the trilogy and the theme of self-actualization are mutually unified, and unified in the modern people’s self-consciousness behind them. And this is precisely a new literary phenomenon that has appeared since literature entered the twentieth century, worthy of repeated attention.
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