The Non-Existent Knight by Italo Calvino

First published:Il cavaliere inesistente, 1959 (English translation, 1962)

Type of work: Fable

Time of work: During the reign of Charlemagne, 768-814

Locale: France

Principal Characters:

• Charlemagne, the King of the Franks
• Agilulf, a non-existent knight
• Raimbaut, an idealistic youth who desires to avenge his father’s death
• Torrismund, a young, cynical knight
• Bradamante, the Amazon who loves Agilulf and is loved by Raimbaut
• Sister Theodora, the narrator and author of the story

The Novel

As its title suggests, Italo Calvino’s The Non-Existent Knight is a work of fabulation. It begins, simply enough, as a comic fable, a parodic satire on the medieval romance and all that that literary form implies about heroes, holy wars, and chivalric ideals. It soon becomes apparent, however, that, for all of its comic brevity, Calvino’s novella is more complex and far-reaching than its opening pages suggest. Gradually, characters are added and authorial intrusions begin to break the narrative flow, until it becomes clear that the subplots and digressions constitute integral and parallel parts of the larger whole. Calvino’s simple story becomes a narrative mare’s nest, the untangling of which may be, if not quite impossible, ultimately beside the point, as the reader comes to understand that the tale being told is of no more, and no less, importance than the postmodern tale of its telling.

The novella opens with Charlemagne reviewing his troops shortly before they are to do battle against the Saracens in one of a seemingly endless, and perhaps pointless, series of holy wars. At the end of the review comes Sir Agilulf, a non-existent knight: nothingness within a suit of pure white armor. It is not his non-existence that makes Agilulf unpopular with the other knights but his scrupulous attention to all military and chivalric rules. He does manage to gain one follower, the youth Raimbaut, who is intent on avenging his father’s death by killing the Saracen Isohar in battle. Raimbaut is very nearly disabused of both his idealism and his desire for revenge when he actually experiences the absurdity of battle conducted according to Calvino’s burlesque set of chivalric codes. These rules include a Superintendent of Duels, Feuds, and Besmirched Honor, as well as interpreters to translate oaths and insults for the benefit of all the besmirched knights and Saracens who are not bilingual.

The temporary defeat of the Saracen army—in Calvino’s tale everything is temporary—signals the real beginning of his fabulous story. It is at this point that another fatherless knight, Torrismund, not only besmirches Agilulf’s honor but also undermines the already problematic existence of this non-existent knight when he reports that the royal virgin whom Agilulf saved fifteen years ago, in the act for which he was made a knight, was not a virgin but rather Torrismund’s mother.

With Torrismund’s disclosure and Agilulf’s subsequent consternation, the tale becomes, in the narrator’s words,"a mess of crisscrossing lines” as the various parallel stories branch out. Agilulf goes in search of what he hopes is a virginal Sophronia, expecting in this way to prove that he is what he claims to be: a non-existent knight. Torrismund, the self-proclaimed bastard, goes in search of his non-existent father, one of the knights of the Holy Grail. Raimbaut goes in search of the Amazon Bradamante, who has herself gone in search of the only man she believes she can ever love: Agilulf, a man who does not exist.

As these narratives flow from a common center, they eventually return to it. Agilulf finds Sophronia, rescues her in the nick of time, and leaves her in a cave while he goes to fetch Charlemagne, to vouch for his honor, and a midwife, to vouch for Sophronia’s virginity. Meanwhile, Torrismund has found the knights of the Holy Grail, who turn out to be considerably less than his idealistic vision of them; intent upon the sacred vision, they perpetrate all kinds of violence on those whom they consider less pure. Abandoning his quest for his father, Torrismund wanders the world, eventually arriving at the cave, where he falls in love with Sophronia. They become lovers, and Torrismund does not discover who she is until Agilulf returns. In despair over his incest, Torrismund plunges into the woods only to return a moment later, realizing that because she was a virgin until a moment ago she could not be his mother. This revelation comes too late for Agilulf who, unable to bear his shame, becomes truly non-existent. He bequeaths his armor to Raimbaut, who is then mistaken for Agilulf by Bradamante. She makes love with Raimbaut, with her eyes closed, and discovering her mistake, disappears. She returns in the last chapter, as Sister Theodora discloses her true identity, or, rather, the other half of her double identity: She is Bradamante. That disclosure occurs just as Raimbaut arrives at the convent on horseback to take her away.

The Characters

It should hardly come as a surprise that in a work in which the plots are so numerous and so bizarre, characterization and, indeed, individual characters should play a decidedly secondary role. Moreover, because The Non-Existent Knight is so clearly a work of fabulation rather than realism, its minimally drawn characters are necessarily sketched along allegorical lines. Agilulf,for example, is quite simply “the non-existent knight,” the proof that “in Charlemagne’s army one can be a knight with lots of names and titles and what’s more a bold warrior and zealous officer, without needing to exist!” Lacking a sense of irony, he is chained to the letter of the law and to whatever is literally true, or, rather, to whatever is believed to be literally true. He is, in short, the complete realist, and, paradoxically, the character in the novella who is least touched by physical reality.

Although “a model soldier,” Agilulf is understandably “disliked by all.” Although it is true that “he exists without existing,” he is nevertheless the story’s most memorable character and thus the proof of Calvino’s, and Sister Theodora’s, powerful imagination. As something of a joke, Charlemagne assigns Agilulf a squire who is his complete opposite, “a man without a name and with every possible name,” Gurduloo, to choose but one of his appellations. He is a figure whose name and being change according to whatever his immediate environment happens to be. Gurduloo exists but does not know that he exists, whereas Agilulf does not exist and believes that he does. They represent the poles between which an identity must be found: protean formlessness and empty rigidity.

The remaining characters comically and unsuccessfully try to work out compromises with their similarly divided selves. Raimbaut, for example, burns with the desire to avenge his father’s death, but his efforts to do so only lead him to realize how rigid and absurd is the chivalric code by which he wishes to live. Torrismund is equally divided, being in some ways the innocent Raimbaut’s double and in other ways his opposite. Torrismund is cynical about war and about Agilulf, whom he judges a baseless fiction: “Neither he exists nor the things he does nor what he says, nothing, nothing at all.” The reader might agree, until it becomes clear that this non-existent knight forms the substance of the novella. Just as the reader must necessarily, and provisionally, believe in Agilulf’s existence, as well as his non-existence, so Torrismund finds it necessary to believe in his own baseless fiction about the purity of the knights of the Holy Grail, a belief and a fiction he must eventually come to reject. Finally, there is Bradamante, who was driven “to the life of chivalry due to her love for all that was strict, exact, severe, conforming to moral rule and...exact precision of movement,” though Bradamante is herself a slattern. Bradamante is not only divided within herself but also double, both a character in the story and, as Sister Theodora, its teller. This point is withheld by the ever-intrusive Theodora until the last two pages of a novella that is itself divided and double, its narrative flow disrupted by Theodora’s frequent “authorial” comments which, in effect, add to the tale being told the tale of its telling.

Critical Context

Having begun his career as a writer of neorealist fictions, Calvino gradually turned to the writing of postmodern fables, such as Le citta invisibili (1972; Invisible Cities, 1974) and Il castello dei destini incrociati (1969, 1973; The Castle of Crossed Destinies, 1977). Important in its own right, The Non-Existent Knight takes on added importance when read as a transitional work or, better, the Calvino work that perhaps best embodies the twin sides of his genius: his preoccupation with social themes and his later preoccupation with a more nearly pure literary performance, an art of nonreferentiality. The Non-Existent Knight is so satisfying a work largely because Calvino’s social consciousness and growing love of postmodern playfulness support and deepen each other, proving, as Bradamante and Sister Theodora do as well, the compatibility of apparent opposites.

Bibliography

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

Cannon, JoAnn. Italo Calvino: Writer and Critic, 1981.

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

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