Cosmic·Ego·Text ——A Interpretation Of Calvino’s The Castle Of Crossed Destinies

Calvino is world-renowned for his continuous explorations of fictions’ narrative ways. Among his fictions, The Castle of Crossed Destinies express these explorations’ impulsive force and vanguard character perfectly. Different from his previous works which reflect reality by using fairy tales and myths elements, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, the beginning of post-stage works, puts the philosophic core in the stable and regular form. On the one hand, the forms of the post-stage works are more and more substantial; on the other hand, the themes are more and more metaphysical. From the perspective of profound connotation, the later works has two tendencies:one aspect is revealing the macroscopic universe consciousness, the other aspect is exploring microscopic ego and writing. For the former, it refers to Invisible Cities and Cosmicomics; for the latter, it relates to If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler and Mr. Palomar. Nevertheless, The Castle of Crossed Destinies contains the two aspects.This thesis is divided into four chapters. The first chapter is the basis of the whole paper, an analysis on the construction of cosmic image from the point of the tarots cards. Previous studies on the relationship of the tarot cards and the text is often just incidentally mentioned, however, in this paper, I try to analyze the deep connection between text and the tarots. Tarot Spreads is more than a symbol of cosmic image. Its sources of legend determine the themes of most stories, and the nature of divination decides the narrative style, the prototype image is directly related to inner meaning of text. Furthermore, tarot array perfectly achieved the "crystal model", which is very important in Calvino’s poetics on novels, who calls himself "crystal group". The construction of crystal model has three methods:arrange the external form exquisitely, maintain internal tension and self-generative force. If the crystal model represent the external form of the tarot array in this paper, then the presentation of inner core mainly based on the spatial image. The spatial images of cosmic mainly has two types:forest image and castle or tavern image. The former signifies the adventures to the unconscious mind and the space where the stories happened; the latter meant alternative order and the space where the stories were told.The second chapter elaborates the cosmic order symbolized by the tarot array from the macro level, which is the cycle of destruction and rebirth. The Castle of Crossed Destinies is not only fantasy novel, but also cosmic fiction., which created by Calvino’s extraordinary imagination, whose references can be equivalent to the universe. On the basis of fantasy, those tragic endings of stories, especially the reshuffle of tarot cards in the two novels, symbolize the destruction of cosmic order, which involves the chaos of many aspects including the relationships between man and man, human and the nature. The destruction is expressed by intertextuality, which means lots of familiar pre-texts used in the text. This kind of destruction appears in all the later works. However, like the tarot reshuffle and re-arrangement, the favor of "destruction" is the result of the meaning "rebirth" in its own. Therefore, Lucretius is an increasingly important role in the story, whose atomic theory is the basis of giving into the whole novel. Tarot is equal to the atomic, which both produce various kinds of forms through continuous permutation and combination. Then matter and vois, destruction and rebirth are from opposition to unification, meanwhile, the universe is from "disorder" to "order".The third and fourth chapter are illustrated from the micro level, which both are based on the main section of the novel:I Also Try to Tell My Own Story. Chapter three focuses on Calvino’s self-spirituality. On account of the extensity of mind, and in order to correspond to the preceding chapter, the psyche is called microcosmic. Calvino always concerns the two opposite aspects of things. The formation of the division sense is closely related to his character, growth environment and personal experience (including political career). The image of Faust, the alchemist, which appears in both two novels, is a symbol of Calvino, who try to integrate the two opposites. Emphatically from the view of the core image of the alchemy and Jung’s psychology theory of alchemy, this chapter analyze "the full self" that Calvino try to complete. This is also reflected in the Calvino’s interpretation on the museum collection, Saint Jerome and Saint George.The fourth chapter mainly analyze Calvino’s writing anxiety and depression. The story,I Also Try to Tell My Own Story, is an interpretation of self-spirituality, also an interpretation of writing. The text shows a feeling of anxiety, which mainly manifested in two aspects:the plight of literal expression and self-deriving of image. The former is mainly expressed in the contradiction between language and silence, the latter is embodied in the stereotyped mode of thinking. The respectively solution of the two anxious problems are:using dreamer’s murmuring and self-doubt type of language style to expand the capacity of text; as Jung called "the illusion work", tarot cards can simulate the readers’ contemplation with the meaningful and self-deriving prototype images.Therefore, The Castle of Crossed Destinies involved in two aspects:macro cosmic and micro cosmic, whose segmentation is cosmic, self and text. Overall, the contradiction of the destruction and rebirth in the universe, corresponds to the contradiction of the division and integration in self-spirituality, the contradiction of language and silence in text. The efforts to integrate the two opposites reflects Calvino’s pursuits:"order, diversity".