La dimensione temporale nella narrativa e nella saggistica di Italo Calvino

The article is to be considered as an attempt to approach the concept of time and its various manifestations in Italo Calvino's narrative and essays. The proposed form of analysis (with the intention to acknowledge both the incorporeal, conceptual, as well as the organizational, practical side of the phenomenon) begins with setting out the characteristics of Calvino's notion of memory which gains the appearance of a subjective volatile remembrance, open and flexible, highly different from the traditional, self-contained and unified idea of the past. Furthermore, such an approach is to be extended on the idea of History as fragmentary and incomplete: a variety of single, subjective interpretations. The crises however leads to a new idea of literature, which could be described as reversible, decentralized and tending to evoke within the reader, a multitude of ideas and associations. Such a practice is achieved in Calvino's narrative through discursive, allegorical concepts, as well as the use of cognitive constructions (that tend to embrace the multitude, within its variety, in a unique, combinatory structure). The second part of the article regards the aspect of temporal organization of a narrative discourse and deals with three, contemporary time dimensions: the time of the narrative, the time of the lecture and the time of the discourse. The relations that take place between the singular times provoke various effects on the rhythm, as well as on the rapidity of the narrated actions. The description is followed by an examination of diverse time-accelerating or time-indulging strategies, as well as the digressive time proliferation.