Literature as Combinatory Game:

Italo Calvino’s
The Castle of Crossed Destinies

JoANN CANNON

Although Italo Calvino does not belong to the Italian literary

movement known as Sperimentalisrno, his works are undoubtedly
among the most truly experimental to come out of Italy in the last
decades. Since the publication of his first, “neo-realist” novel, The
Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947), Calvino has experimented, in his
highly original and fantastic manner, with a variety of literary models:
the “conte philosophique” in The Baron in the Trees (1957), the
medieval romance in The Nonexistent Knight (1959), and science fic-
tion in Cosrnicornics (1965) and t zero (1967). The Castle of Crossed
Destinies (1973), one of Calvino’s more recent experiments, is a tour
de force in which all of the myths and fictions of Western
civilization-the stories of Faust, Parsifal, Oedipus, Roland, and Don
Juan-are brought into play. The novel is composed of two texts:
“The Castle of Crossed Destinies” and “The Tavern of Crossed
Destinies.” Each text is a collection of tales framed by a conventional
device.
In the framing story of “The Castle of Crossed Destinies,” a group
of travellers, having lost their way in an enchanted forest and taken
shelter for the night in a castle (or inn), decide to while away the time
by telling stories. By setting his tale in a castle in an enchanted forest,
Calvino informs the reader that he is entering into a patently fictional
universe. Like Scheherazade or the writer-protagonist of Borges’ “The
Secret Miracle,’’ Calvino’s characters are “suspended in a journey
that had not ended nor was to end.”’ The wayfarers, caught in the
atemporal realm of fiction, have been mysteriously deprived of the

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power of speech. They must resort to a deck of tarot cards to “tell”
their tales.
The narrator of the first story within the frame, “The Tale of the
Ingrate and His Punishment,” begins by choosing the card which most
closely resembles him and placing it on the table. The narrative un-
folds as the “player” lays down a sequence of cards, which is
reproduced in the margin of the text. The text itself, i.e.;the written
word, is a reading of the cards on the part of the narrator of the fram-
ing story. Because the number of cards at their disposal is limited to
seventy-eight (in the fifteenth-century Visconti deck that Calvino em-
ploys), the five players or narrators who follow the first must construct
their tales in such a way as to intersect with the cards already played.
By the end of the sixth tale, when the entire deck has been played, the
arrangement of cards resembles a crossword puzzle composed of cards
rather than letters.
In the final story of the first text, entitled “All the Other Stories,”
the narrator makes a startling discovery: “the stories told from left to
right or from bottom to top can also be read from right to left or from
top to bottom, and vice versa, bearing in mind that the same cards,
presented in a different order, often change their meaning, and the
same tarot is used a t the same time by narrators who set forth from the
four cardinal points” (41). The narrator then produces six “new”
stories through the reverse reading of the stories already on the table;
thus, for instance, “The Tale of Astolpho on the Moon,” when read in
reverse, becomes the story of Helen of Troy. The narrator has dis-
covered that the system is indeed a structural one. The stories are not
mere aggregates of isolated elements with a fixed meaning; rather,
they are made up of elements whose meaning is determined by their
relationship with the other elements in the system. The slightest
variation in the configuration of the elements produces an entirely new
story.
With only two more stories to be read in reverse, the narrator ad-
mits that it is only a desire for some kind of symmetry which compels
him to complete the design: “What is left me is only the manic deter-
mination to complete, to conclude, to make the sums work out” (46).
Calvino expresses a similar desire to have done with his project in a
“Note” to the texts. Speaking of the difficulties he encountered in
composing the second text, he says that he was a t one time tempted to
renounce the entire project, which was, after all, “an operation that
made sense only as a theoretical hypothesis” (128). He maintains that
he is only publishing the text to free himself of it.
The theoretical hypothesis to which Calvino refers and which sub-
tends the entire work is that fiction is produced through the combina-
tion of a limited number of prefabricated elements subject to fixed
rules of associaton. The hypothesis is, of course, not original with
Calvino; Greimas, Todorov, and Bremond have attempted to isolate
the minimal units of fiction and the laws governing their combina-
tion.’ The structural analysis of narrative has evolved from Vladimir
Propp’s formalist analysis of the Russian folktale. After examining
various previous attempts to describe the folktale scientifically and
suggesting t he reasons for their failure, Propp proposes a
morphological study of the component forms of the tale. Departing
from the observation that, although the names of the dramatis per-
sonae change from one tale to the next, the functions or actions perfor-
med by them is constant, Propp infers that one may study the folktale
“according to the functions of its dramatis personae. ’?’ Propp isolates
a relatively limited number of narrative functions (thirty-one) which
constitute the fundamental components of all Russian folktales. Each
individual tale is composed of a certain number of these basic units
and is subject to fixed rules of combination. Propp’s analysis, as well
as the structural studies of narrative inspired by him, unquestionably
lie at the heart of Calvino’s texts.
Calvino’s use of the tarot cards as a narrative code is a device
which “lays bare” the combinatory process through which fiction is
produced. The seventy-eight tarot cards are equivalent to the minimal
units or fictional universals of narrative and lend themselves par-
ticularly well to Calvino’s project.‘ The chivalric characters represen-
ted in the tarot cards are devoid of what Propp calls secondary charac-
teristics, such as psychological attributes, which are irrelevant in the
structural analysis of narrative based on functions. The actions depic-
ted in the tarot cards, again borrowed from the chivalric genre, also
lend themselves to be categorized in a finite number of functions.
Calvino underlines the functional simplicity of his tale from the first
pages of the novel, when he lists its constitutive ingredients: “after en-
tering the forest I had faced so many trials, encounters, apparitions,
duels, that I could no longer order my actions or my thoughts” (3).

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Trials, encounters, apparitions, duels-these are the minimal units
from which fiction is produced, the stuff from which all stories are
made.
In its extreme form, the conception of the production of literature
through the combination of predetermined elements has been
criticized for reducing the text to a kind of formula. Does Calvino’s
conception of the combinatory nature of narrative impoverish the fic-
tional text? Calvino himself answers that it does not, for he draws a
parallel between modern fiction and the primitive oral tales of the first
tribal narrators, whose repertory of prefabricated elements-“to be
born, to die, to couple, to sleep”-was indeed limited. While all fiction
is based on just such a catalogo limitato, the catalogue allows for
“limitless combinations, permutations, and transformations.”s
Narrative, like the primitive folktale, is characterized by the paradox-
ical interplay between the uniformity of the system and the mul-
tiplicity of its manifestations. In the preface to a collection of Italian
folktales, Calvino has pointed out the dual nature of the tale, “its
secret property; its infinite variety and infinite repetition.”6 Such
duality, which is characteristic of all structural systems, had been ob-
served in the Russian folktale by Propp, who contrasted the ((amazing
multiformity, picturesqueness, and color” of the folktale with ((itsno
less striking uniformity, its repetition.”’
Calvino himself insists upon the first of these characteristics, the
tale’s diversity. He also compares storytelling with a game of chess, an
image frequently employed by structuralist theoreticians (Saussure
often cites it in describing the functioning of la langue, that linguistic
system which allows one to generate discourse). Calvino writes: “We
know that, just as no chessplayer can live long enough to exhaust the
combinations of the possible moves of the thirty-two pieces, so not
even in a life which lasted as long as the universe would one be able to
play all the possible games.”RThe tarot cards in Calvino’s novel func-
tion in precisely the same manner: although finite in number, they
allow for limitless combinations. Like the chessplayer or the reader of
tarots, the writer can never exhaust the possibilities of fiction.
Although all narratives are implicit in a finite narrative code, the
combinatory potential of the system is inexhaustible. Perhaps the
writer is, as Calvino suggests in The Castle of Crossed Destinies,
similar to the juggler or conjurer “who arranges on a stand a t a fair a

86
certain number of objects and, shifting them, connecting them, in-
terchanging them, achieves a certain number of effects” (105); but no
matter how many combinations the writer arranges on his table, not
all possibilities are realized. Calvino is fascinated by the idea of un-
realized possibilities implicit in all systems. In the sixth tale of “The
Castle of Crossed Destinies,” Astolpho is instructed to journey to the
moon not to recover the phial containing Roland’s lost wits, as in
Orlando Furioso, but to find “an endless storeroom” which “preserves
in phials placed in rows . . . the stories that men do not live, the
thoughts that knock once a t the threshold of awareness and vanish
forever, the particles of the possible discarded in the game of combina-
tions, the solutions that could be reached but are never reached. . . . ”
(37).
Calvino’s obsession with the elements which are not used,
although implicit in the system, is again apparent in the final chapter
o f t zero, “The Count of Monte Cristo,” a rewriting or reinterpretation
of the Dumas novel. Both the narrator, Edmond Dantes, and Faria are
searching for a way to escape from the Castle of If. Toward the conclu-
sion of the story, the scene shifts from the castle to Dumas’ desk, on
which the pages of his manuscript lie: “two assistants (Auguste Ma-
quet and P. A. Fiorentino) develop one by one the various alternatives
that depart from each single point, and they furnish Dumas with the
outline of all the possibile variants of an enormous supernovel; Dumas
selects, rejects, cuts, pastes, interp~ses.”~Both Dantes and Faria hope
to find the key for their escape in the pages on Dumas’ desk, but they
differ crucially in their modus operandi, as Dantes himself points out:
“Faria has set his heart on one page among the many, and he does not
despair of finding it; I am interested in seeing the accumulation of re-
jected sheets increase, the solutions which need not be taken into ac-
count. ’””
The theme of the supernovel or the infinite book is one dear to
another writer who, like Calvino, is fascinated by the combinatory
game and its application to literature. In Borges’ “The Garden of the
Forking Paths,” a title echoed in that of Calvino’s The Castle of
Crossed Destinies, Yu Tsun learns the secret of his illustrious an-
cestor’s joint enterprise: to write a book and to construct a maze. As
Tsun’s victim, Stephen Albert, explains, the book and the labyrinth
are one and the same: the Garden of the Forking Paths (the maze)
“was the chaotic novel itself. . . . In all fiction, when a man is faced

87
with alternatives he chooses one a t the expense of the others. In the
almost unfathomable Ts’ui Pen, he chooses-simultaneously-all of
them. . . . In Ts’ui Pen’s work, all the possible solutions occur, each
one being the point of departure for other bifurcations.”” Ts’ui Pen’s
infinite book is like the supernovel of The Count of M o n t e Cristo, com-
posed of discarded variants and unrealized possibilities: each reflects
the infinite and inexhaustible potential inherent in the combinatory
process by which fiction is generated.
Both Borges and Calvino, however, qualify their conception of
literature as a combinatory game. Borges maintains that “if literature
were nothing but verbal algebra, anyone could produce any book sim-
ply by practicing variations.”12 Calvino seems to entertain such a
prospect when he speculates on the possibility of supplanting the
author by a literary automaton. Rejecting the Romantic myth of the
author as creative genius, Calvino suggests that “the writer is already
a writing machine,”” but he does not mean that all possibile combina-
tions produced by the “writing machine” are of equal value: “yes,
literature is a combinatory game which follows the possibilities im-
plicit in its own material, independently of the personality of the
author, but it is a game which a t a certain point is invested with an
unexpected significance and which puts into play something of
supreme importance to the author and the society to which he
belongs.”I4
To illustrate his point, Calvino introduces E. H. Gombrich’s
analysis of the relation between the combinatory process and the un-
conscious in art, an analysis which takes its departure from Freud’s
study of jokes:

Freud maintains that one derives pleasure from the pun or the play
on words by following the possibilities of permutation and transfor-
mation implicit in language; . . . at a certain point among the many
possible combinations of words with a similar sound, one becomes
charged with a special significance,so as to provoke laughter. . . . the
juxtaposition of concepts which one arrives at casually, unexpec-
tedly, unleashes a preconscious idea.”

Calvino applies Gombrich’s analysis of the pun to the combinatory

game of literature: although one might put a literary automaton to
work generating all the possible fictions, only certain combinations
would be invested with significance.

88
 Calvino introduces the figure of the reader as the one who invests
the literary product with meaning: “the decisive moment in literature
will be reading . . . the work will continue to be born, to be judged, to
be destroyed and continually renewed upon contact with the eye of the
reader.”Ifi Literature is inexhaustible not only because the system,
symbolized in The Castle of Crossed Destinies by the deck of tarot
cards, can generate an infinite number of combinations, but also
because a single variation, a single story, can never be exhausted by
the reader. Borges, who, like Calvino, stresses the reader’s importance
above the writer’s, says “a book is more than a verbal structure . . . a
book is a dialogue with the reader. . . . That dialogue is infinite.”17
Calvino’s conception that reading is dominant in the creation of
fiction is underlined in the very structure of The Castle of Crossed
Destinies. As already indicated, the tarot cards represent the story it-
self, which is relegated to the margins of the text. The written text is
actually an interpretation or reading, in an active sense, by the
narrator of the framing story, but that reading is by no means
privileged. When a storyteller bearing a marked resemblance to the
Knight of Cups places that card on the table, the narrator-reader
prefaces his reading of the card with “we thought we understood that
. . . ’’ ( 6 ) . Later readings are qualified in similar fashion: “our fellow
guest probably wished to inform us . . . ” (7). In “The Tale of the In-
grate and His Punishment” a single card, Justice, is given three possi-
ble readings (12), for the possibility of alternative readings is always
implicit. Such ambiguity is not the same as that encountered in a
novel by Henry James, where the reader must depend on a narrative
reflector who is flawed or unreliable.I8 In The Castle of Crossed
Destinies the narrator becomes a reader who constantly reminds us
that no single reading is exhaustive.
By incorporating the activity of reading into his novel, Calvino
dramatizes the literary text as a dialogue. The text can no longer be
seen as a receptacle of a predetermined and unequivocal meaning: “if
it were really true . . . that the meaning is concealed within the text it-
self, one cannot help wondering why texts should indulge in such hide
and seek. . . . meanings in literary texts are mainly generated in the
act of reading; they are the product of a rather difficult interaction
between text and reader and not qualities hidden in the text.”Ig
In another of Calvino’s novels, Invisible Cities (1972), we are
again reminded of the role which the reader plays in generating mean-

89
ing. The novel takes the dual form of a dialogue between Kublai Khan
and Marco Polo and a catalogue of all the cities in the Khan’s empire.
In one of the many exchanges between the two protagonists, the Em-
peror asks Polo: “When you return to the West, will you repeat to your
people the same tales you tell me?” And Polo replies:

I speak and speak . . . but the listener retains only the words he is ex-
pecting. The description of the world to which you lend a benevolent
ear is one thing; the description that will go the rounds of the groups
of stevedores and gondoliers on the street outside my house the day of
my return is another. . . . It is not the voice that commands the story:
it is the ear.“’

The activity of reading, as dramatized in The Castle of Crossed

Destinies through the juxtaposition of the tarot cards and the written
text should not be confused with a related activity, interpretation,
defined as “any substitution of another text for the present text, any
endeavor which seeks to discover, through the apparent textual fabric,
a second more authentic text.”“ Reading is also a kind of substitution
of the original text by another text, but reading and interpretation dif-
fer on the status of the text itself. Inasmuch as interpretation makes
the substitute “more authentic” than the original, it renders the text
superfluous. Reading, on the other hand, always returns to the text:
“The conception of the text as palimpsest is not alien to reading, but
instead of replacing one text by another, reading describes the relation
of the two. For reading, the text is never other it is multiple.”’L Such
multiplicity of the text by virtue of the infinite possibilities of reading
is laid bare in Calvino’s work.
Calvino’s emphasis on the activity of reading reflects a shift
characteristic of contemporary continental literary criticism. The ef-
fect of the post-structuralist reorientation is “to stress the active,
productive nature of reading and writing. . . . Interpretation is not a
matter of recovering some meaning which lies behind the work and
serves as a centre governing its structure; it is rather an attempt to
participate in and observe the play of possible meanings to which the
text gives a c ~ e s s . ” ’ ~
Calvino’s insistence on the impossibility of exhausting literature
is particularly significant in light of the recent critical debate concern-
ing structuralist and post-structuralist analyses of literature. Calvino
has undoubtedly drawn on structuralist theory in The Castle of

90
Crossed Destinies; the novel has even come under attack for the
“excessive-almost didactic-evidence of its theorectical origin^."^'
To the extent that he exposes the structural underpinning of narrative
in his use of the tarot cards, Calvino seems to be laying himself open to
the charge often levelled at structuralist critics-that while at-
tempting to isolate the fictional universals which constitute
“literariness,” they reduce the individual text. But Calvino, much like
the critics striving to move “beyond structuralism,” stresses “the
heterogeneity of readers and He is not interested in reducing
all texts to an abstract model of “literariness”; rather, from the in-
variable model he moves toward the infinite variants which the model
generates and the infinite possibilities of reading those variants. In the
last paragraph of the final tale of the novel, we see the heroine “peer-
ing a t every movement of the foliage of this wood, . . . at every turn of
events in this pattern of tales, until the end of the game is reached.
Then her hands scatter the cards, shuffle the deck, and begin all over
again” (48). Italo Calvino, hinting a t the inexhaustible potential of fic-
tion, concludes his tale with an opening towards as yet unrealized
stories.

SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY

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 ’ Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, trans. William Weaver (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), p. 6. Subsequent references are to this edition. The
novel was originally published as Il castello dei destini incrociati (Torino: Einaudi,
1973); the first text, “The Castle of Crossed Destinies,” appeared in Calvino’s Tarots:
The Visconti Pack in Bergamo and New York (Parma: Ricci, 1969; trans. 1976). A
parole incrociate is a crossword puzzle.
See A. d. Greimas, Semantique structurale (Paris: Larousse, 1966); Tzvetan
Todorov, Grammaire du Decameron (The Hague: Mouton, 1969); and Claude Bremond,
Logique du recit (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973).
’ Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1968),
p. 20.
a Maria Corti, “Le jeu comme generation du texte: Des tarots au recit,” Semiotics,
7 (1973). 36.
Italo Calvino, “Appunti sulla narrativa come processo combinatorio,” N u o m
Corrente, 46-47 (1968), 139-48 (my translation).
Italo Calvino, ed., Fiabe Italiane (Torino: Einaudi, 1956), p. xi.
Propp, p. 21.
* Calvino, “Appunti sulla narrativa,” p. 141.
” Italo Calvino, t zero, trans. William Weaver (New York: Collier Books, 1970), p.

157.
I” Ibid., p. 158.

I ’ Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones, trans. Emece Editores (New York: Grove Press,

1962), pp. 97-98.

‘ j Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions, trans. Ruth t.C. Simms (Austin: Univ. of
Texas Press, 1964). p. 164.
I ’ Calvino, “Appunti sulla narrativa,” p. 142.

‘IIbid., p. 146.

I ’ Ibid.. p. 143.

”’ Ibid., pp. 145-46.

’’ Borges, Other Inquisitions, p. 163.
I “ Wayne C. Booth, T h e Rhetoric ofFiction (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961),

pp. 339-74.
I q Wolfgang Iser, “Indeterminacy and the Reader’s Response in Prose Fiction,” in

Aspects of Narratiue, ed. J. Hillis Miller (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1971), p. 4.
:’’ Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1974), p. 135.
i I Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977). p. 238.
l1 Ibid.

Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975), p. 247.
11 Contardo Calligaris, Italo Calvino (Milano: U. Mursia, 1973), p. 102.

”’ Culler. p. 242.

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