Italo Calvino’s Spatial Imagination: Between Intellectual Abstraction and Embodied Experience

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article reassesses the view of Calvino as an eminently cerebral author by recognising the experiential and embodied dimension of his work and dismantling the false dichotomy between abstraction and bodily experience. I describe Calvino’s imagination as spatial (a) because it is grounded in an embodied experience of space, and (b) because he tends to manipulate the material of imagination – ideas, structures, images – as if they were spaces with which narrators and characters interact. Focusing on ‘Dall’opaco’ (1971), I show how the Ligurian landscape impacted Calvino’s cognitive style by inspiring some privileged patterns in making sense of experience. Then, I illustrate how image schemas derived by embodied experience shape narrative structures and strategies of readerly engagement in the cosmicomical tales. My hypothesis is that the lens of enactivism – which understands imagination as manipulation and holds subject-cogniser and the world as entangled and co-constitutive – may highlight some neglected aspects of Calvino’s work.