California Italian Studies

In 1965 Calvino wrote “The Spiral” and positioned it as the final story of his Cosmicomics. Both the story and its title-word seemed to him a landing point for his corpus, and, during the years that followed, he never changed his mind. “The Spiral” also marks the exact midpoint of his journey because Calvino made his debut as a writer in 1945, with the war just ended, and his death came unexpectedly forty years later in 1985. In turn, the essay “Calvino makes the shell” presented here is the central chapter of, and has given its title to, my new book on Calvino (Calvino fa la conchiglia, 2023, pp. 366-385). The aim of this book is to consider Calvino’s whole self-construction as a writer: his texts, his life, his encounters, his places, his travels, his readings, his ideas—in a word, the development of a style unique in the world of literature. In this essay, “spiral” is a key word and image in a key story. “The Spiral” is, in fact, autobiographical, even if the narrating “I” is named Qfwfq. It can be read as a fictional account of Calvino’s mind and body as written by Calvino himself, and it can be deciphered as an autobiographical text even if the narrating “I” appears as a mollusk stuck to his primordial reef. In its fifteen pages, “The Spiral” tells a tale about the construction of a self, a constant narrative theme for Calvino and the inspiration for my book’s subtitle “The construction of a writer.” The essay, here translated into English by Jim Hicks, will show that those five words point to two sequences of events, each grafted onto the other. The first concerns what Calvino was constructing through his writing; the second considers the choices, the necessities, and the contingencies by which he constructed—or accepted that a great variety of circumstances would construct—his public persona as a writer.