The Engaged Intellectual: Calvino's Public Self-image in the 1960s

Abstract

This article analyses Calvino's editing of his autobiography as a thinker and an artist from the late 1950s through the 1960s. By creating and then reaffi rming the perception that change had occurred within continuity, Calvino successfully established the criteria by which his works have been judged, thus guiding readings and exegeses of his works and perpetuating his image of a coherent, committed intellectual. Integral parts of this strategy are the complex literary games for which Calvino is well known. One such game centres on his contention that works of fi ction and also of non-fi ction transcend and exist independently of their authors: he, the empirical author, and the narrating voice he uses in his non-fi ctions and fi ctions are not one and the same. Such games are of a piece with Calvino's refusal of authority over his writings and of the need to defl ect responsibility for their content away from himself. These games are also re-occurrences of regressive behaviour learned in childhood, a behaviour that had served Calvino as a means of escaping identifi cation and responsibility for his actions. An analysis of this strategy presents us with the paradox of an author who both promotes a public self-image of social commitment and refuses responsibility for the infl uential role played by his writings in the development of Italian and Western literature over the second half of the twentieth century.