Sharp cards
Peter Ackroyd
The Castle of Crossed Destinies Ital° Calvino (Secker and Warburg £4.50)
People play card-games with each other because they enjoy winning, but one PlaYs cards with oneself only out of necessitY. Patience, as its name suggests, is positive Buddhist in its emphasis on vacancy and absolute boredom. The Tarot, a gaudy set of cards generally used for prophecy, is more complicated. One look at the eerie figures of the pack — the Popess, the Page of Coins, the Hanged Man — is enough to make it clear that these emblems are so embellished and so abstracted that they have become religious figures of unusual poWer; But the cards also represent early forms 01,. narrative — the story of the past as well as ot the future — and it is in this sense that Ital° Calvino has used them in his latest book His narrative is plain enough to begin with: 'In the midst of a thick forest, there was a castle that gave shelter to all travellers, overtaken by night on their journey • • The castle itself is in a state of shocking disrepair, and all of its inhabitants are mute — European critics will be asking theta' selves, is this an allegory for the state of the novel? Perhaps it is. In any case, the only way in which the travellers can conunt111,,icate is through the cards of a Tarot pac"' They use the fantastical set painted 13Y Bonifacio Bembo for the Dukes of and their stories take on in turn the well and evocative colour of these representations. The first of them, 'The Tale of thel Ingrate', seems at first to admit of a liter° meaning. But very quickly any one-to-olle, relation of the picture to the story gets los' in a maze of possible but conflicting interpretations. As the cards are laid doWn upon the table, other stories begin to intersect with the first until there is no knowiag where one begins and the other ends. A By the time the book is finished, an," Calvino has changed the venue of the rittlao to a tavern, the possibilities sect! exhausted. By some chance juxtapositione all of the familiar narratives have CO forward: Hamlet, Oedipus, Lear, Pars' Macbeth. Roland and Faust jostle agile the columns of gold and green. So t as stories of the Tarot are at least as faMiliarbe the emblems of religious painting, in the sense for example that 'Saint George can." painted without believing too much in hitir2 believing only in painting and not in ,t". theme'. And Calvino believes in his WI1 his not in the stories; as a consequence prose has a peculiarly weightless clua's which the translator, William Weaver, beautifully evoked. Calvino just concerfd himself with the various orders all sequences which he has so assiduously and SO obsessively created out of the cards. But by establishing such a distinctive set of relad°ns, by forming circles and squares and double axes, the threat of disorder is — to use tile old phrase — always on the cards: Roland descended into the chaotic heart of things, the centre of the square of the cards and of things, the point of intersection of all Possible orders.' It sounds like a very long novel , In fact it is as if the necromancer and the clairvoyant, by using the Tarot, can achieve what the novelist always fails to: `. . our elderly neighbour, now that he finds a deck of tarot in his hands, wants to compose again an equivalent of the Great Work, arranging the cards in a square in which, from top to bottom, from left to right and vice versa, all stories can be read, his own included. But the Great Work slips away so easily, since the cards themselves are signs tO be read only in relation to each other. They are, literally, `about' nothing: `The kernel of the world is empty, the beginning of what moves in the universe is the space of nothingness . . Some of the stories in the book culled trotn this knowledge are very elegant, and Calvino's fables seem to be perched precariously beyond the confines of ordinary narrative. In his previous book, Invisible Cities, a traveller returns with stories of eerie and enormous cities which bear some relation to those we know but somehow exist outside ordinary time and space. And si_o it is in this book: the fables which Calvino as rescued from the ultimate chaos of ,n arot-playing are strange mixtures of the ancient and the modern, of solemn mythical the and Calvino himself, pictured as h e King of Clubs and clutching a gigantic 'ellen. The intervention of this card into the game allows Calvin() to enter his main theme which is the fortune of writing.
He
should, in his picture, have been blindfolded — at least temporary blindness Would have saved him from the glare of the scattered cards. A random inventiveness Will easily collapse, one picture changing into another picture. But there is no way of telling `his own' story, since each person's narrative becomes mingled with all the Others thers, and there is no one smart enough to ?ace it back to its origin. If the Tarot represents all all possible lives and possible fates, ren the narrator will eventually come to a complete halt: . . objects and destinies are scattered before you, interchangeable and
u is deluded.'
aenluddheedw,ho believes he makes decjsio ei And so The Castle of Crossed Destinies is egant, tightly constructed and totally sell If-enclosed. The only thing to do is to pack the cards, leave the castle which may or '.;,taY not represent the novel, throw out the Stale pack which is pretty but in the end 'ale and pointless, forget about religion and all of its pagan substitutes, and begin d_ no th e r book. And this, I imagine, is what caivino is now doing: ‘. . . to begin writing again as if I had never written anything
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