The Cloven Viscount by Italo Calvino

First published:Il visconte dimezzato, 1952 (English translation, 1962)

Type of work: Fable

Time of work: The late eighteenth century

Locale: Terralba, a small state on the Italian coast

Principal Characters:

• Viscount Medardo of Terralba, a young Italian nobleman
• The Narrator, a young boy of seven or eight, Medardo’s nephew
• Dr. Trelawney, a shipwrecked English physician living in Terralba
• Pamela, a young peasant girl

The Novel

Medardo, the young Viscount of Terralba, goes off to fight the Turks, and in his first battle is blown apart by a cannon shot. The right-hand side of his body is saved by doctors, and Medardo returns home, half a man. Soon it is evident that Medardo’s bad nature controls his maimed body. He tears apart one of his aged father’s pet birds, and the old viscount soon dies. He tries to poison his nephew with deadly mushrooms. Medardo roams through the countryside, destroying things by halves: Pears are lopped in two as they hang on the trees; frogs are slashed in two as they sit by ponds.

The narrator and Dr. Trelawney, a shipwrecked English doctor, watch the Viscount as his actions grow more depraved. Medardo burns part of his own castle, and when Sebastiana, his old nursemaid, is scarred from the flames, he uses this as an excuse to exile her to Pratofungo, the seaside village of lepers. There seem to be no depths to which Medardo’s evil half will not sink.

During one of his destructive rides through the countryside, the Viscount sees the young and beautiful Pamela tending her goats and ducks, and he falls in love with her. Yet even this passion is distorted in him. His messages to her to arrange meetings are such grisly mementos as halved bats and split jellyfish.

The other portion of the cloven viscount now returns to Terralba. This half is all good and soon embarks on a round of virtuous deeds: saving the narrator from the bite of a deadly spider, mending the sparrows maimed by the Medardo, and generally amazing people with his acts of goodness. Inevitably, he meets and falls in love with Pamela.

“The Good ’Un” and “The Bad ’Un,” as the two halves of the Viscount are known to the people of Terralba, have a series of clashes which culminate at the marriage ceremony of Pamela and the better half of Medardo. A duel is arranged and the Viscount battles himself to a bloody draw. Dr. Trelawney quickly binds the two parts together, and Viscount Medardo is once again a single man, a normal mixture of good and bad.

The Characters

The characters in The Cloven Viscount seem, at times, to be strictly stock figures: the good and the bad Medardo, symbolizing man’s divided nature; the artless but beautiful goat girl, Pamela; the naive young narrator, painfully discovering maturity; and the shrewd old nursemaid, unlettered but wise in the ways of the world.

In part, Italo Calvino is deliberately playing with these figures, arranging them in their expected postures to play their required roles. This is not un-usual in a novel largely concerned with symbols and their use. On one level,then, the characters are themselves symbols, not realistic individuals.

This is true most obviously of Viscount Medardo, who spends most of the novel split into two parts, one of them thoroughly evil, the other unbearably good. Neither half of the cloven viscount would actually be able to exist in real life. This unreality allows Calvino to impress upon the reader that neither unadulterated evil nor good is possible in human lives. While this might seem a truism hardly worth mention, let alone elaboration, history might argue otherwise.

Calvino underscores this point further by the description of two communities which exist on the fringe of Terralban life: the Huguenots who live on the heights of Col Gerbido, and the lepers who inhabit Pratofungo. Each of these societies is flawed. The Huguenots have been separated from the rest of the world and their comrades for so long that they have forgotten all the essentials of their religion and no longer mention their faith at all, for fear of heresy. They have reduced their lives to an endless round of cheerless work rather than risk even inadvertent sin. The lepers, on the other hand, do nothing but make music and love throughout the day and night, forgetting their condition through constant revelry. Just as Medardo is split in two, so these communities divide the human condition in an arbitrary and untenable fashion.

Apart from the Viscount, most of the characters in the novel retain their stereotypical nature. The two exceptions are the narrator and Dr. Trelawney. The narrator, Medardo’s nephew, grows in maturity and understanding throughout the work. By the end of the novel, the narrator has become more whole and unified, a development which parallels that of his uncle. The difference is that the young boy’s metamorphosis is both more gradual and more realistic. This is fitting, because the young observer-narrator provides a factual, even unromantic, viewpoint on the fantastic events of The Cloven Viscount.

Dr. Trelawney also changes during the novel. At first he is detached, indifferent to the people around him, interested only in his abstract and impractical experiments. Significantly, his chief concern during much of the book is capturing will-o’-the-wisps from graves. As events unfold, however, Dr. Trelawney gradually returns to practicing medicine and involving himself with the human condition. He, like all the other characters in the work, moves from a fragmented, isolated existence to a more unified, coherent life.

Critical Context

The Cloven Viscount is similar to other works by Calvino, such as Il barone rampante (1957; The Baron in the Trees, 1959) and Il cavaliere inesistente (1959; The Non-existent Knight, 1962). Three characteristics unify these books: They are about a past based on reality, yet transformed by imagination; they present fantastic events in a straightforward style; and they are concerned with the opposition of artifice and reality, symbol and fact.

These are themes and techniques which also appear in other works by Calvino, along with a rich fund of understated humor based on shrewd observation of human life. Beneath the wit, beneath the dazzling artistry, beneath the double-edged symbolism, however, Calvino’s works have a profound and deeply rooted concern with the passions and problems of human life. The Cloven Viscount is a work about a number of subjects, but at its core it is concerned with people, how they live, how they make contact with one another, and how they grow and accept life.

When the young narrator of The Cloven Viscount hears that Dr. Trelawney is leaving with the famous Captain Cook, he rushes to the harbor: “But already the ships were vanishing over the horizon and I was left behind, in this world of ours full of responsibilities and will-o’-the-wisps.” This combination of hard fact and fantasy, of duties and dreams, is characteristic not only of The Cloven Viscount but also of all Calvino’s works, and it is his witty yet essentially serious exploration of these themes that makes him an enjoyable and an important author.

Bibliography

Andrews, Richard. “Italo Calvino,” in Writers and Society in Contemporary Italy: A Collection of Essays, 1984. Edited by Michael Caesar and Peter Hainsworth.

Calvino, Italo. The Uses of Literature, 1986.

Carter, Albert Howard. Italo Calvino: Metamorphoses of Fantasy, 1987.

Olken, I.T. With Pleated Eye and Garnet Wing: Symmetries of Italo Calvino, 1984.