Zen as everyday praxis

Abstract

In Italo Calvino’s works, dialectical oppositions engender a creeping sense of nervous tension, which this article retraces in its multifarious narrative forms. Contextually, this study addresses the relevance of Calvino’s encounter with Zen praxis as an alternative to nerve-wracking dichotomous choices, towards a harmonious fusion of opposites. Palomar (1983), Calvino’s last major work of fiction, serves as a prism to restore to the author’s writing the cross-cultural dynamics of East-West dialogues and to illuminate the fruitful potential of the interaction between Zen and psychoanalysis. A Zen reading of Palomar shows that Calvino not only reflects on the outward appearance of the real in order to understand it, but allows his own work to be transformed by the thoughts that sustain this process of understanding, thus making the book, and in particular its end, a mystical fusion of theory and practice and of Western analytic rationality and Eastern meditative experience.