Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures: Word and Image in the Work of Italo Calvino by Franco Ricci (review)

humanities 545 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 when they were at the helm. To conclude that Axworthy and his team did much the same thing is the most accurate interpretation of, and ultimate tribute to, Axworthy=s legacy for Canada and the world. (JOHN KIRTON) Franco Ricci. Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures: Word and Image in the Work of Italo Calvino University of Toronto Press. x, 344. $65.00 Several critics have discussed Calvino=s obsession with the eye and its mediating functions, but no one has followed up this awareness and teased out its theoretical ramifications the way Franco Ricci has. He argues that Calvino=s concept of narrative is image-based, and that the nature of Calvino=s artistic endeavor is ekphrastic. He uses ekphrastic in the broader sense that Calvino >privileges the spatial, synchronic, sense-based modelling of reality rather than a narrative steeped in temporal exigencies. He has steadily moved away from a narrative that interprets events (time) towards a narrative that promotes description and aspires ideally to a natural relation between the word and its signified.= Looking at Calvino=s career as a whole, Ricci argues that his trajectory >moves from a joyous affirmation of the world as language (the early war tales, including Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno) to language as iconic representation (the cosmicomic tales), to an eventual dynamics of movement and play ... that hovers between the arts.= As Ricci makes plain, Calvino hovers between literature and art in more than one sense. As a boy, he was interested in drawing, and as a young man, he developed a lifelong liking for Saul Steinberg=s linear fantasias. His journalistic writing on art was his testing ground for theories, for working out new ways of seeing and for processing what one sees, internalizing it or reprocessing it through writing and loosing it again into the culture for others to internalize and reprocess, thus weaving the threads of culture. He was faced by an absolute gulf between paintings and words, and delved into various ways of understanding our sense of correspondence between these incompatibles. Sometimes his mental exercises resemble those of Loyola=s Spiritual Exercises. He tests borders in >@La pittura illustrata@: Quattro favole in cornice= on works by Valerio Adami much as he had done much earlier in >L=avventura di un fotografo.= In Ricci=s account, Se una notte d=inverno un viaggiatore becomes >a dialogue between the descriptive (painterly) aspirations of the author and his theoretical (writerly) self.= Ricci explicates patterns in which Calvino goes from word to image, from image to word, from chaos to order and back, and from painted stories to novel spaces, all letting Calvino lead us to >revel with him in that space where the word-image dance may take place.= One wishes that this book had been better proofread, and the index done with more care. On page 4, one finds >svilupppi,= on page 10, two errors in 546 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 the same line, >Sanfgirolamo= on page 121, >tact= where he means tack (203), >trasmettteva= (290) B to give a random sampling. Ricci should have consulted someone who knew Kipling=s Kim. Calvino=s reference to Kim travelling India >col vecchio Lama Rosso= is translated >with the old man Red Blade,= rather than with the old Lama (priest) of the Red-Hat sect. The index may shake my faith more than that of others, since all the errors I found concerned my own listing: I appear on page 26, not 23, as stated in the index; I appear unindexed on page 152, and the bibliography lists something of mine not caught by the index, so I cannot find where it might have been referred to. Other entries, checked at random, were where they purported to be. Such errors do not really undercut one=s sense that this is a well-argued book that brings out some of Calvino=s strangeness and gives very persuasive labels to its characteristics. Ricci felicitously claims that >as a storyteller [Calvino=s] prose attempted to explore the black hole that...