Postmodern Temporality in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities

Italo Calvino's treatment of time and temporality is one of the major aspects of his fictional writing. One of his most successful novels Invisible Cities, though famous for its containment of the writer's neorealist experimentations, still deals with the notion of time and temporality. It is evidently seen from Marco's inability to provide to his recounted stories a coherent chronological pattern. We can recurrently notice, during the narration, a continual blurring between the traditional distinctions between past, present and future in a scenario where they overlap into each other such that these temporal zones remain potentially indistinguishable. This overarching theme of many of Calvino's writings, though has been recognized in the past in the form of mainly passing references, particularly in the context of Invisible Cities, still needs more critical attention through the new and innovative theoretical templates offered by postmodernism. Based on these premises, this article intends to examine how Calvino in this novel showcases his decisive break from the traditional notion of chronological time and completely adheres to the non-chronological temporal theories offered by postmodernism.