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Regional Medievalisms: The 23rd Annual Conference on MedievalismPostmodern Medievalisms

Andrew MarzoniM.A. Candidate, English & American LiteratureNew York [email protected]

Paper Length: 2877 words

“Medieval Pretext and Structural Oppositions in The Nonexistent Knight”

This paper examines The Nonexistent Knight, the concluding novella of Italo Calvino’s trilogy, Our Ancestors, as a postmodern fairy-tale which uses medieval tropes and pretext to express Calvino’s structuralist views of literature and authorship. The novella focuses on Agilulf, a knight in Charlemagne’s army who, as the title suggests, is nothing more than a decorated suit of shining white armor. Agilulf is forced to prove his legitimacy when his position is questioned by the knight Torrismund, while Raimbaut, the story’s young hero, rides through Europe after his beloved Bradamante, a beautiful Amazon enamored by the nonexistent knight. As the three knights’ quests come to intertwine, the story’s narrator, the cloistered nun Sister Theodora, reveals her true identity as Bradamante, and the previously supposed ingenuity of the narrative comes into question.

In his introduction to Our Ancestors, the 1960 publication of the trilogy of which The Nonexistent Knight, preceded by The Cloven Viscount and The Baron in the Trees, is the last installment, Calvino advises his reader to simply take pleasure in the fantastical irreverence of The Nonexistent Knight, admitting that he would approve of any interpretation of the stories in the trilogy offered by the reader. Thus, Calvino encourages his reader to describe – rather than find empirical meaning – in the text through the clear system of binary oppositions afforded to him through the use of medieval archetypes. In the novella’s tongue-in-cheek, medievalist musing on the nature of modern existence, Calvino asks Barthesian questions about literature’s supposed reality and the writer’s function in attempts to represent the world.

Andrew Marzoni

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20 May 2008

Medieval Pretext and Structural Oppositions in The Nonexistent Knight

In his 1973 essay, “Dreaming of the Medieval,” Umberto Eco writes that “we are

at present witnessing, both in Europe and America, a period of renewed interest in the

Middle Ages, with a curious oscillation between fantastic neomedievalism and

responsible philological examination.”1 Eco then argues that in discussing medievalism in

the modern world, it is necessary to identify “which Middle Ages one is dreaming of,”

offering a list of ten different modern appropriations of the Middle Ages: as pretext,

ironic revisitation, a barbaric age, a site of Romantic musing, a philosophical and

religious ideal, an age of national identities, a site of decadence, a site of philological

reconstruction, a model of tradition, and an expectation of the Millennium.2 In which

way, then, does Italo Calvino “dream of the medieval” in his 1959 novella, The

Nonexistent Knight? One would be inclined to read the story of Sir Agilulf Emo

Bertrandin of the Guildevern and of the Others of Corbentraz and Fez – an empty suit of

armor in Charlemagne’s army who performs his knightly duties by “will power”3 – as an

ironic revisitation of the Middle Ages, especially considering that Eco himself comments

that Calvino “filters everything through humor…[which] is also a form of

embarrassment.”4 But the classification, “ironic revisitation,” requires characters who “do

not believe in the grotesque period they inhabit,”5 a criterion of disbelief certainly

incompatible with Agilulf’s “faith in our holy cause.”6

Eco offers various examples of what he sees as ironic medievalism, including

Ariosto and Cervantes, who “revisit the Middle Ages in the same way that Sergio Leone

and the other masters of the ‘spaghetti Western’ revisit nineteenth-century America, as

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heroic fantasy, something already fashioned by the early Hollywood studios,” as well as

Rabelais, who “no longer believed in the Paris he was telling of,” and the characters in

Monty Python movies.7 Calvino’s Agilulf, however, as Charlemagne comments upon the

knight’s disappearance, “was a fine soldier,”8 who, because of his lack of a physical

body, is able to stay chaste even at the bidding of the seductive Priscilla to “loosen the

sword from its scabbard.”9 In fact, it is Agilulf’s strict adherence to the ideology of

medieval knighthood combined with his bodiless existence which makes him such a

representative, valiant knight: he is a crusading automaton, a medieval robot who

necessarily believes in the world he inhabits as, indeed, it is all that he knows.

Agilulf and his omnipresent, chameleonic squire Gurduloo (also known as

Gurduroo, Gudi-Ussuf, Ben-Va-Ussuf, Ben-Stabul, Pestanzoo, Bertinzoo, Martinbon,

Omobon, Omobestia, the Wild Man of the Valley, Gian Paciasso, Pier Paciugo, and a

multitude of other identities) are the only characters in the novella, it seems, that can be

seen as anachronistic or “unreal” (despite Calvino’s treatments of later developments

such as chivalry and modern romance). Gurduloo, like Agilulf, is a man of rules;

however, the squire’s actions are based upon convolution rather than logic, ridiculousness

rather than creed: “When he sees a butterfly flutter by, Gurduloo at once urges his horse

after it, thinking himself astride not the horse but the butterfly, and so wanders off the

road and into the fields.”10 Calvino establishes this rift between the two characters clearly,

contrasting Agilulf in writing, “[m]eanwhile, Agilulf goes straight ahead, following his

course,” however, the reader is encouraged to consider them as a kind of team, as

Gurduloo continually “finds himself again beside his master on the main road.”11 These

two characters – the novella’s most absurd – are clearly to be seen together in their

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opposition to Raimbaut and Torrismund, the two knights whose respective quests

intertwine with that of Agilulf, lover-heroes whose much more conventional identities are

highly compatible with their medieval setting. In establishing the fact that the revisitation

of the past in Calvino’s medievalist novella is much more than an ironic treatment of the

Middle Ages, it is perhaps more enlightening to consider the Middle Ages in The

Nonexistent Knight as a pretext for musings on not only the nature of modern existence,

but, as JoAnn Cannon argues, “literature’s inability to represent an external reality.”12 By

using medieval character tropes to provide his reader with an inescapable structural

schematic of his characters’ relative oppositions – all contained within an identity-

shifting, supposedly ingenuous narrative – Calvino expresses his own critical views of

literature through his treatment of Agilulf and Gurduloo, the two characters whose

inability to incorporate themselves into mainstream society, i.e. reality, provides a

platform to question the place of literature in the modern world. However, he does this

without working within the limits of any single one of Eco’s categorical medievalisms.

The Nonexistent Knight is the final installment of the trilogy, Our Ancestors –

published as a whole in 1960 – following the 1952 The Cloven Viscount, the story of

Medardo of Terralba, an Italian nobleman whose moral and physical halves are split in

two by a strategically fired cannonball in a war with the Turks, and the 1957 The Baron

in the Trees, which tells the tale of the eighteenth-century Baron Cosimo Piovasco di

Rondò, who exiles himself to a life in the arboreal world. Interestingly, Calvino, a

renowned fabulist, published his collection of retold folk literature, Italian Folktales, in

1956, while still resuming work on his trilogy, not at all evident of any divergence of

interests, as the terms “fable,” “folktale,” or “fairy tale” are all generic classifications

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which could be applied to each of the novellas of his trilogy. Cannon connects Calvino’s

interest in fables to the ideas the writer shared with French structuralism, with which he

was associated in a number of ways, most notably through his involvement in the Oulipo

group: “inasmuch as the true fairy tale is the product of a collective endeavor and never

the property of one author, it exemplifies Calvino’s conception of the impersonality of

literature.”13 Indeed, Calvino’s ideas are strikingly similar to those of Roland Barthes,

who describes writing as “that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips

away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body

writing.”14 Similarly, Calvino’s offers an explanation of the ancient craft of fabulist

narrative as “a kind of geometry of story-telling which invariably offered a set of

balances and correlatives,” in which the author simply organizes “the narrative line of all

formulated discourse”15 – a view of narrative production which, in Calvino’s opinion,

“remain largely unchanged today.”16 It is interesting, then, that Calvino should prompt

such questions of authorship in The Nonexistent Knight, which, of the trilogy’s novellas,

is most explicitly invested in the world of the Middle Ages, and as Cannon points out, the

novella which most “openly questions the ability of literature to act as signifier for an

external signified.”17 It is my contention that the use of medieval tropes aids Calvino, the

storyteller, in assembling structuralist “combinations and permutations of all the

characters,”18 whereby to question literature’s supposed reality and the writer’s function

in attempts to represent the world.

Before discussing how this structuralist fairy tale is arranged into a system of

binaries, it is important to identify the peculiar nature of Calvino’s narrator. In the fourth

chapter of the novella, the story’s first-person narrative voice identifies herself:

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I who recount this tale am Sister Theodora, nun of the order of Saint

Colomba. I am writing in a convent, from old unearthed papers or talk

heard in our parlor, or a few rare accounts by people who were actually

present. We nuns have few occasions to speak with soldiers, so what I

don’t know I try to imagine. How else could I do it? Not all of the story is

clear to me yet. I must crave indulgence. We country girls, however noble,

have always led retired lives in remote castles and convents . . . What can

a poor nun know of the world? So I proceed laboriously with this tale

whose narration I have undertaken as a penance.19

The reader is thus introduced to a naïve, unprofessional writer, whose later admissions of

the difficulty of storytelling – “This tale I have undertaken is even harder to write than I

thought”20 – come rather unsurprisingly. In fact, her unorthodox and very non-medieval

methods seem to come as a direct result of her naïveté: “To help my tale it would be

better if I drew a map . . . Then with arrows and crosses and numbers I could plot the

journey of one or other of our heroes.”21 Thus are Sister Theodora’s narrative

eccentricities excusable – especially considering the complexity of the story she sets out

to tell – until the final chapter of the novella, when the young knight Raimbaut, in search

of his beloved Bradamante arrives at Sister Theodora’s convent. The narrator is then

forced to confess: “Yes, my book. Sister Theodora and the Amazon Bradamante are one

and the same.”22 Not only has the reader heretofore been deceived, but Sister

Theodora/Bradamante’s self-professed inability to recount the stories of Agilulf,

Raimbaut, and Torrismund through language is now rendered inexplicable, as she is a

first-hand observer of and active participant in all that she recounts.

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J.R. Woodhouse, in a study of the Our Ancestors trilogy, writes of Calvino’s

urging of writers to engage in society:

. . . he calls upon the modern writer to commit himself, take political sides,

and, if necessary, compromise himself politically; and through the modern

writer, he calls upon modern man to do the same. According to Calvino

only by living life in society to the full, engaging in life’s polemics and

struggles . . . can one understand what life is about.23

It follows, then, that Sister Theodora, the cloistered nun, is unable to represent reality

through literature because she and the other nuns with whom she lives “have had no

experience,” Calvino cheekily points out, “[a]part from religious ceremonies, triduums,

novenas, gardening, harvesting, vintaging, whippings, slavery, incest, fires, hangings,

invasion, sacking, rape and pestilence.”24 Bradamante, the beautiful Amazon and object

of Raimbaut’s quest, however, fulfills Calvino’s criteria of a successful writer. Though

she ultimately fails to provide Agilulf and Gurduloo, “who have no rationale,”25 with

meaning, her success as narrator lies in her descriptive power. In expressing her inability

to accurately depict Raimbaut’s journey through language, “reading into it the paladin’s

progress,” Sister Theodora/Bradamante claims to draw a map of “the gentle countryside

of France, and proud Brittany, and the English Channel surging with black billows, and

high Scotland up there and harsh Pyrenees down here, and Spain still in Infidel hands,

and Africa mother of serpents.”26 Cristina Bacchilega considers this imaginary map in

conjunction with the “rigidly schematic architecture” of The Nonexistent Knight, seeing

the binary oppositions within the novella as a similar kind of map.27 Though the narrator

is unable to interpret her story, she is at least able to offer a description through the

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oppositions drawn between Raimbaut and Torrismund – the two young knights of the

novella – and Bradamante and Sophronia – the two comically inappropriate nuns – who,

as Calvino writes in his introduction to Our Ancestors, “are diametrically opposed

metaphors respectively of love as conflict and love as peace.”28 In simply describing the

stories of Agilulf, Raimbaut, and Torrismund, Sister Theodora/Bradamante, can thus be

seen as a kind of structuralist narrator, as Calvino states in a 1985 interview,

“Structuralism seeks to give a description of the text, of the phenomenon, which is not

the same as an interpretation.”29 It is the nature of this very description, through the

novella’s inherent system of oppositions, which leads to the expression of Calvino’s

rejection of a mimetic view of literature in The Nonexistent Knight, preferring literature

as “something that could and would intervene in reality.”30

In illustrating the binary structure of The Nonexistent Knight, Bacchilega argues

that though Gurduloo and Agilulf are structurally opposed, their opposition “serves a

static frame-like function,”31 that is, the other characters’ actions revolve around the

distinction between the nonexistent, substancelessness of Agilulf’s decorated suit of

armor, and the universal everythingness of Gurduloo’s character. Indeed, Raimbaut and

Torrismund are made foils via Agilulf. Torrismund of Cornwall is introduced to the

reader when he challenges Agilulf’s entitlement to the status of knight, claiming that

Sophronia, “the King of Scotland’s virgin daughter,”32 cannot be a virgin, as she is

Torrsimund’s own mother. Agilulf is thus compelled by Charlemagne and his own sense

of duty to seek out Sophronia, and prove that she truly is a virgin, while Torrismund also

takes leave of Charlemagne’s army and seek out the Knights of the Holy Grail, by whom

he believes he was collectively sired. Meanwhile, Raimbaut, though a would-be

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apprentice of Agilulf, harbors unreciprocated feelings of love for Bradamante, who is

herself in love with the nonexistent knight. So when Bradamante leaves Charlemagne’s

army in search of Agilulf, Raimbaut follows her, involving himself in Torrismund’s

initial challenge. Similarly, Bradamante and Sophronia are opposed by extension, being

the respective beloveds of Raimbaut and Torrismund. Furthermore, Agilulf facilitates the

consummation of Torrismund and Sophronia’s pseudo-incestuous love, as his bequest of

his armor to Raimbaut causes Bradamante to fall in love with the young knight. But

Agilulf’s intervention in both instances is passive: his absence is what allows Torrismund

to deflower Sophronia, and his ultimate disappearance results in Raimbaut’s assumption

of his place in Bradamante’s affections. Agilulf, then, acts upon the world without truly

being a part of it: he is unable to reflect reality because he lacks consciousness.

Gurduloo, on the other hand, reflects too much: in the presence of ducks he

repeats “Quà…quà…quà,” and in the presence of frogs, “Gra! Gra! Gra!”33 The world is

absorbed in Gurduloo, rather than the other way around, as he consistently confuses

himself with the environment around him, such as when he tries to make soup eat him

while intending to eat soup, or when he successfully buries himself with soil, instead of

the grave he was instructed to fill in. Barthes writes, “[t]he author performs a function,

the writer an activity . . . the author is the man who labors, who works up his

utterance . . . and functionally absorbs himself in this labor, this work.”34 I argue, then,

that Agilulf, who disappears into the spirit world when the two knights’ quests are

complete, serves the function of the author in Calvino’s discourse on literature within the

novella, while Gurduloo, the writer, plays a much lesser role.

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Jack Byrne points out that at the end of the novella, Agilulf’s final actions express

a “need for order, like the little man who has never walked on a crack in the sidewalk for

forty-three years,”35 which is surely compatible with Calvino’s view that “the fact of

writing implies an order”36 – as the author’s impact upon reality is complete, he

disappears and literature remains. Further, Calvino’s description of the ancient

storyteller’s process reveals his predilection towards order: the storyteller “was obliged to

delve into the whole kaleidoscope of nouns, verbs, subjects and predicates gliding

endlessly towards and away from each other,” eventually resulting in “a kind of geometry

of story-telling which invariably offered a set of balances and correlatives.”37 This

“geometry” not only brings to mind the reconciliation of diverging plotlines and

possibilities of a harmonious future at the end of The Nonexistent Knight, but a

geometrical structuring – much like a map – of the characters and incidents of the novella

around Agilulf. In his disappearance, literally physical (if an invisible essence filling out

a suit of armor can be said to be physical) and metaphorically authorial, the nonexistent

knight restores order to his medieval world, revealing that world’s underlying structure,

and leaving literature as evidence.

“The Middle Ages,” Eco writes, “are the root of all our contemporary ‘hot’

problems, and it is not surprising that we go back to that period every time we ask

ourselves about our origin.”38 Thus, considering Calvino’s concern with [French]

structuralism and ideas of the author, literature, and their relationships with reality –

especially in later novels such as The Castle of Crossed Destinies and If on a winter’s

night a traveler…39 – it should come as no surprise that Calvino, the reputed fabulist,

should use medieval pretext to explore these issues, essentially offering his readers

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another appropriation of the Middle Ages not mentioned by Eco: a kind of structural

medievalism. Agilulf, the knight whose “helmet was empty,”40 seems to serve as the

perfect metaphor for structuralist notions of the author: “the hand, cut off from any

voice.”41 Furthermore, Calvino writes that the author is “an anachronistic character, a

messenger and moral dictator although his own moral conscience is something primitive

and inadequate; the author, in short, is in charge of a machine without knowing how it

works.”42 What better way is there to describe Agilulf, the nonexistent knight, who

advises Raimbaut, saying, “I keep to the rules. Do that yourself and you won’t make a

mistake?”43 By isolating Agilulf from the world around him – a world of diametrically

opposed, systematic structures – Calvino tells the tale of a nonexistent knight (albeit

through a narrative frame which fails to provide a mimesis of reality) who acts upon the

world rather than reflecting it, and then “dissolve[s] like a drop in the sea.”44

Notes

1 Umberto Eco, “Dreaming of the Medieval,” Travels in Hyperreality, trans.

William Weaver (Orlando: Harcourt, 1986) 64.

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2 Eco 68-72.

3 Italo Calvino, The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount, trans.

Archibald Colquhoun (Orlando: Harcourt, 1962): 7.

4 Umberto Eco, Adelaida Lopez, and Marithelma Cosa, interview, trans. Donald

Tucker and Adelaida Lopez, Diacritics 17.2 (1987): 51.

5 Eco 69.

6 Calvino, Nonexistent Knight 7.

7 Eco 69.





12 JoAnn Cannon, “Literary Signification: An Analysis of Calvino’s Trilogy,”

Symposium 34.1 (1980): 11.

13 Cannon 12.

14 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen

Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977): 142.

15 Italo Calvino, “Notes Toward a Definition of the Narrative Form as a

Combinative Process,” Twentieth Century Studies 3 (1970): 93.

16 Jerry A. Varsava, “Calvino’s Combinative Aesthetics: Theory and Practice,”

The Review of Contemporary Fiction 6 (1986): 11.

17 Cannon 11.

18 Calvino, “Notes” 93.

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23 J.R. Woodhouse, Italo Calvino: A Reappraisal and an Appreciation of the

Trilogy (Hull: University of Hull, 1968): 33.


25 Woodhouse 8.


27 Cristina Bacchilega, “Calvino’s Journey: Modern Transformations of Folktale,

Story, and Myth,” Journal of Folklore Research 26.2 (1989): 90.

28 Bacchilega 90.


30 Italo Calvino and Gregory L. Lucente, “An Interview with Italo Calvino,” trans.

Gregory L. Lucente, Contemporary Literature 26.3 (1985): 250.

31 Calvino and Lucente 248.

32 Bacchilega 90

33 Calvino, Nonexistent Knight 24-6.

34 Roland Barthes, Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston:

Northwestern UP, 1972): 144.

35 Jack Byrne, “Calvino’s Famous ‘Ancestors’: The Viscount, the Baron, and the

Knight,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 6 (1986): 52.

36 Calvino and Lucente 253.

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37 Calvino, “Notes” 93.

38 Eco 65.

39 Anna Botta, “Calvino and the Oulipo: An Italian Ghost in the Combinatory

Machine?” MLN 112.1 (1997): 82.


41 Calvino, “Notes” 96-7.


43 Barthes, “Death of the Author” 146.


Works Cited

Bacchilega, Cristina. “Calvino’s Journey: Modern Transformations of Folktale, Story,

and Myth.” Journal of Folklore Research 26.2 (1989): 81-98.

Barthes, Roland. Critical Essays. Trans. Richard Howard. Evanston: Northwestern UP,

1972.

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---. “The Death of the Author.” Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York:

Hill and Wang, 1977. 142-8.

Botta, Anna. “Calvino and the Oulipo: An Italian Ghost in the Combinatory Machine?”

MLN 112.1 (1997): 81-9.

Byrne, Jack. “Calvino’s Famous ‘Ancestors’: The Viscount, the Baron, and the Knight.”

The Review of Contemporary Fiction 6 (1986): 42-53.

Calvino, Italo, and Gregory L. Lucente. “An Interview with Italo Calvino.” Trans.

Gregory L. Lucente. Contemporary Literature 26.3 (1985): 245-53.

Calvino, Italo. “Notes Toward a Definition of the Narrative Form as a Combinative

Process.” Twentieth Century Studies 3 (1970): 93-101.

---. The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount. Trans. Archibald

Colquhoun. Orlando: Harcourt, 1962.

Cannon, JoAnn. “Literary Signification: An Analysis of Calvino’s Trilogy.” Symposium

34.1 (1980): 3-12.

Eco, Umberto. “The Return of the Middle Ages.” Travels in Hyperreality. Trans. William

Weaver. Orlando: Harcourt, 1986. 59-86.

Eco, Umberto, Adelaida Lopez, and Marithelma Costa. Interview. Trans. Donald Tucker

and Adelaida Lopez. Diacritics 17.1 (1987): 46-51.

Varsava, Jerry A. “Calvino’s Combinatory Aesthetics: Theory and Practice.” The Review

of Contemporary Fiction 6 (1986): 11-8.

Woodhouse, J.R. Italo Calvino: A Reappraisal and an Appreciation of the Trilogy. Hull:

University of Hull, 1968.

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