A Study Of Calvino’s Crystal Novels From The Perspective Of Cultural Semiotics

Italian writer Italo Calvino(1923-1985)is one of the world’s most influential writers of the 20 th century.He devoted himself to integrating the art of novel creation and the study of critical theory,and endeavored to show the unlimited interpretable space of literary texts.He regarded the text as a “living organism”,and put forward the concept of “crystal mode” of novel.The crystal novel is a well-structured and orderly text system,and at the same time has a complex self-evolving function.The crystal novel combines the essence of structuralism and deconstructionism,and reflects the infinite,encyclopedic content in a limited form,fully highlighting the systematism,intellectualization and diversity of the text.In the crystal novels,he pays attention to the creation of the “Trinity” space of author,text,and reader.The author and the reader talk to each other and shape each other,they jointly promote the infinite multiplication of meanings.For a long time,in the academic circle,most of the researches on Calvino’s works have been trying to explore the themes and artistic characteristics of his creations,giving a certain evaluation to his works.However,cultural semiotics is to explore the infinite interpretable space of text.Therefore,the main research question of this dissertation is the meaning-regenerating mechanism of texts,thus revealing the reasons for the heated discussions of Calvino’s classic novels.Specifically,this dissertation selects three of Calvino’s most representative crystal novels and divides them into three levels to explain the meaning-regenerating mechanism of texts.The first level is the dialogicity research,the second level is the textual semiosphere mode research,and the third level is the cultural memory research.If the first and second levels are to explore the meaning-regenerating mechanism from the synchronic perspective,the third level is to reveal the process of meaning generation from the diachronic perspective.Based on the above three levels,this dissertation intends to answer the following three research questions: First,how does the author,text,and reader talk to each other in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler? Second,in Invisible Cities,how is the infinite multiplication of textual meaning achieved through the textual mode between “structure and deconstruction”? Third,in The Castle of Crossed Destinies,how do different cultural memories integrate into the text and contribute to the infinite multiplication of textual meaning?The theory of cultural semiotics and its research methods put forward by Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman(1922-1993),famous semioticist and professor of University of Tartu,Estonia,provides a new perspective and an ideal way for in-depth analysis of pluralistic and open crystal novels.According to Lotman,the study of literary texts should be open,multiple and dynamic.Functionalization and intellectualization of the text is the core concerns of Lotman’s cultural semiotic theory,which exactly fits the original intention of Calvino’s creation.Lotman places the text into a macro-cultural system to examine and uses a holistic and systematic research method to explain the meaning-regenerating mechanism of texts.First,there are various heterogeneous substructures in the text or semiosphere.They are not independent of each other,but construct pluralistic symbiosis.“Dialogue” is a prerequisite for the existence of the symbiosis of multiple semiosphere.The dialogue between the author,the text and the reader are one of the most important manifestations of the dialogicity in the semiosphere.Second,the text has a complex hierarchical structure.The heterogeneity,asymmetry,and boundedness of the text keep it in a constant mode of construction within deconstruction and deconstruction within construction.Third,if the text or semiosphere is considered from the diachronic perspective,it has a complicated cultural memory mechanism.Regarding the multi-layered dialogue between the author,the text,and the reader,Umberto Eco(1932-2016),a well-known Italian semiotician,gives a detailed and comprehensive discussion through his interpretative semiotics.In this theory,he fully affirms the active role of the reader,putting forward the “open text” concept,and advocates an appropriate interpretation of the text.Therefore,Lotman and Eco study the structure and dialogicity of the text from different perspectives.They have their own uniqueness,but also merge and complement each other.In view of the above research questions,this dissertation analyzes Calvino’s three novels based on the three theoretical gist of Lotman’s cultural semiotics and in combination with Eco’s interpretative semiotics.Around the three key words of “Game Dialogue”,“Mode Construction” and “Cultural Memory”,three unique mechanisms of meaning regeneration are revealed,thus showing the sense of order,self-compilation and brilliant refraction of crystal novels.The main findings of this research are as follows:First,Through the creation of the metafiction If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler,Calvino not only describes the creation process from the perspective of the writer’s creation,but also creatively describes the interpretation principles of the metafiction from the perspective of the reader’s interpretation.He portrays the reader as the protagonist in the text,and enables the reader in the text to have multiple identities of reading,being read and self-reading,showing the game of dialogue between the author,the reader and the protagonist as well as their inner soul,fully revealing the complexity and contradiction of novel creation.Second,in Invisible Cities,textual meanings are created from the multi-layered and multi-perspective dialogues within the text.Dialogicity,as the meaning generator of the text,is achieved through the infinite extension of the “multi-edged pyramid” mode.Under this mode,there is a complex “boundary network”.The boundary crossing and space-time conversion of each subsystem are very active,facilitating the centripetal movement of the “borders” toward the “center” across the boundary.As for its origin,this mode is deeply influenced by society and culture,and carried historical imprint and cultural memory.Third,in The Castle of Crossed Destinies,there are complicated cultural memory mechanisms.Multiple levels of cultural memory,such as symbols,classic texts,cultural context of the times,and the personal experience of the author,have entered into the textual semiosphere.They collide with each other,talk with each other,and code together,thus realizing the functions of preserving,transferring and creating cultural memories.Therefore,the text constantly generates new meanings.To sum up,this dissertation puts Calvino’s crystal novels under the cultural semiotics of Lotman and Eco,and analyzes the meaning-regenerating mechanisms of crystal novels,which can dig out better their uniqueness and aesthetics,fully expand their interpretation space.Eco himself has publicly stated that he paid tribute to Calvino,author of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler,and emphasized that they have the same views on readers.The artistic exploration of Calvino’s crystal novels really coincides with Eco’s theories,and Calvino is also trying to vividly explain semiotic issues through novel creation,and use art to evaluate art.This can not only deepen the understanding of the theory,but also enhance the aesthetics of the theory,and also avoid the dilemma of artistic aesthetic loss caused by literary criticism.Therefore,this dissertation integrates the interpretation of theory and artistic aesthetics,in order to make the interpretation of the meanings of the novel more diverse and the world more diverse.It strives to broaden China’s literary criticism horizon and explore a new way to interpret literary classics with cultural semiotics.