Calvino's The Castle of Crossed Destinies: storytelling with tarot cards
The Visconti tarot and the Tarot of Marseilles in Italo Calvino's book: how the figures on the cards become tales of Orlando, Faust, Hamlet and Macbeth.
A group of travellers crosses a forest and takes refuge in a castle. Seated at table, they realise they have lost the power of speech. To tell their adventures they lay out a tarot deck on the table, composing with the cards a sequence that the others must interpret. This is the premise of The Castle of Crossed Destinies, the narrative experiment that Italo Calvino published between 1969 and 1973.
Two decks, two books
The first part came out in 1969 in an elegant Franco Maria Ricci edition devoted to the tarot cards illuminated for the Visconti and Sforza families in the fifteenth century, largely attributed to Bonifacio Bembo and now divided between Bergamo, New York and private collections. In 1973 Einaudi published the complete volume, which added The Tavern of Crossed Destinies, built instead on the popular cards of the Tarot of Marseilles.
Calvino himself explained in his closing note that the idea also came from a paper by Paolo Fabbri on cartomancy as a language, presented at a seminar held in Urbino in 1968. There the discussion was about how the figures on the cards could work as narrative signs. Calvino was not interested in the divinatory value of the tarot, but in its capacity to generate stories.
A combinatorial machine
The book is built as a combinatorial game. The cards, laid out in rows and columns, intersect: the same figure can appear in the story of several narrators and change meaning according to the direction in which it is read. In the end the table forms a square in which all the stories coexist. In those years Calvino was frequenting the Oulipo, the Parisian group exploring formal constraints in writing, which he joined in the early 1970s.
Orlando, Faust and Macbeth
Ancient and modern stories emerge from the cards. In the Castle we meet the alchemist who sold his soul, Orlando mad for love, Astolfo on the moon and the doomed bride; in the Tavern Calvino retraces the stories of Parsifal, Faust, Hamlet, Lear and Macbeth. The Popess, the Magician, the Tower or the Devil become characters and situations, while the World and the Wheel of Fortune mark the turning points of destiny.
The writer, too, enters the game. In a chapter of the Tavern entitled I Also Try to Tell My Tale, the narrator looks for his own story among the cards and reflects on the craft of writing, measuring himself against the images of painters who portrayed Saint Jerome in his study and Saint George fighting the dragon. Writing thus appears as an endless combining of figures that already exist.
Cards freed from prediction
The Castle of Crossed Destinies shows a use of the tarot very different from the occultist one. For Calvino the deck is a repertoire of images that European culture has charged with meanings over the centuries, and for this very reason it can become a machine for storytelling. The figures on the cards, released from the task of foretelling the future, give the reader back the pleasure of interpretation.
The book has had a considerable influence outside Italy as well, among writers, semioticians and artists interested in storytelling through images. It also helped introduce the Visconti tarot, masterpieces of Lombard illumination, to a wide public, showing how an object created for play can become an archive of collective memory.