CALVINO'S SUBTERRANEAN LANDSCAPE AS GEOLOGICAL CHRONOTOPE AND PLACE OF THE SELF

Abstract

Starting from an analysis of the cosmicomic tale Il cielo di pietra, it is possible to understand, in Bachtinian terms, how the chronotope of the subterrestrial develops in Calvinian poetics and is declined in other landscape features, creating a thread of continuity between the nature of the subterrestrial and the inner geography of the self. In Dall'opaco, the idea of the subterrestrial - understood as an inverted world and the realm of the 'negative' - coincides with the landscape of the writing self. The subsoil, volcanoes, and abysses, as well as Calvino's accompanying imaginary landscape, are implicitly linked to the act of writing: it is necessary to draw in a 'schizophrenic' way on the Saturnine and Vulcan qualities of the dark primordial realms. The geological stratification of the subterrestrial represents - in both an ecocritical and psychoanalytical sense - a map for questioning the geography of the ego, recalling Freud's 'geological and vertical idea of the psychology of the deep, made up of superimposed layers’.