But whatever the drug, this collection of short stories surrounding the obvious use of tarot cards to write stories or re-write common tales or to lay down the structure of alchemy or to just have a plain ole good time is a concept I can love in pure concept terms, and do, but just how much did I love this exact work? Some parts were fun and funny and the deep story concepts were really rather cool, Ah, to be drunk with a pack of tarot cards. But whatever the drug, this collection of short stories surrounding the obvious use of tarot cards to write stories or re-write common tales or to lay down the structure of alchemy or to just have a plain ole good time is a concept I can love in pure concept terms, and do, but just how much did I love this exact work? Um. moreĪh, to be drunk with a pack of tarot cards. The world clearly makes more sense if it is read from the upside down position. Why would Calvino do a thing like that? Is there any meaning in his ambiguous mutation of the functionality of art and literature? This is quite the opposite of what Hofmann did in his literary description of Brueghel's The Parable Of The Blind, turning the description of the painting into a long episode - connecting the brush strokes by adding interpretation and meaning. Literature like painting? Lessing, in his Laokoon, defined literature as a sequence of episodes and painting as one important moment in focus, and in a way, Calvino has managed to merge these two ideas into a sequence of defining moments minus the connecting tissue of narrative context. We meet Faust, King Lear, Macbeth, Oedipus and many others while the narrator tries to find his own story in the cards.
Literature jumps in to fill the gaps in the visual narratives. Ut pictura poesis, claimed Horace in his Ars Poetica, but is it really true? Calvino seems to agree with the idea in the beginning, but his stories crumble and disappear in the artistic arrangements he is imagining while looking at the multiple meanings each card contains.ĭifferent stories are interlinked, and give the cards new potential for interpretation. Since Antiquity, visual art and literature have been compared and evaluated according to their respective expressive power. Is that possible?Įven Leonardo da Vinci needed words and writing to make the statement that he thought painting was a superior art form compared to literature. In sequence after sequence, the cards are arranged to tell the stories of the characters, showing their passions,their hopes, their dreams and their losses. How are you to share if you can't speak? They let Tarot cards speak.
His protagonists, including the narrator, discover that they are mute.
Calvino would hardly be Calvino if he didn't give the project his own twist, complicating matters to the point of impossibility. Imagine Calvino setting out to create a Boccaccio or Dante situation, a setting in which travellers meet in an obscure forest and have time to spend on a storytelling adventure. How are you to share if you can't speak? They let Ta Is a picture worth a thousand words? Is a picture worth a thousand words? And if so, does it tell a story? Imagine Calvino setting out to create a Boccaccio or Dante situation, a setting in which travellers meet in an obscure forest and have time to spend on a storytelling adventure.