Why a storyteller writes their story?

One starts off writing with a certain zest, but a time comes when the pen merely grates in dusty ink, and not a drop of life flows, and life is all outside, outside the window, outside oneself, and it seems that never more can one escape into a page one is writing, open out another world, leap the gap. Maybe it’s better so. Maybe the time when one wrote with delights was neither a miracle nor grace but a sin, of idolatry, of pride. Am I rid of such now? No, writing has not changed me for the better at all. I have merely used up part of my restless, conscienceless youth. What value to me will those discontented pages be. The book, the vow, the worth are worth no more than one is worth oneself. One can never be sure of saving one’s soul by writing. One may go on writing with a soul already lost.

This answer is a tumble, and Italo Calvino clearly knows best how to perform one. His acrobat in The Nonexistent Knight is too enchanting that we might forget that the novel does not revolve solely around tales of Agilulf, the nonexistent knight and his journey, but also centred on the voice of the tale-teller, Sister Theodora a nun in the covent who includes herself as a woman knight named Bradamante, a love interest of an revengeful knight Raimbaut.

What can poor nun know about the world?

Apparently, a lot, so much that it blurs the boundaries between real life and imagination. The two is only parted a page away, even more and often time, a dusty ink away. Agilulf, the nonexisting, needs to be exist for Sister Theodora, at least in form, name, and ideals. Without him, her story does not move as she wants to. Without him, the ending of Raimbaut who’s searching for Bradamante, which is she herself, could not arrive. It’s a story about a story in the making, in the writing between life happenings.

I read this book years after my first amazement to Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler, which is a meta-narrative of literary world. It brings me spark and joy. It disturbs the way I understand literature and what reading is (less about what it means). And, through The Nonexistent Knight, Calvino once again flicks my head and reminds me the wonder and wander of writing stories. Agilulf indeed appears naturally. He is the protagonist avant-garde, the smartness of conceptual character, the nonchalant figuration of ideals and normativity who clashes and yet becomes a strange fellow to the embodiment of a heroic reality Raimbaut, a quotidian glummy Gurduloo, and a tragic tragedy Torrismund. But Sister Theodora only reveals herself in Chapter Four, where her persona, the periwinkle knight Bradamante, also appears to disturb Raimbaut’s naivety and expose his weakling masculinity. Her presence is not a beginning. It is in the middle of a tale. She is occasionally present, but when the story unfolds, she just disappears.

Sister Theodora/Bradamante’s duality is where mere life and the fantastic become muddled. Routines of the covenant, a job to be retained, a place of discipline. It doesn’t quite matter which kind of war happening; what matters are the pulling of the knightly stories and their bullshit chivalry ideals. The nonexistent knight leaves out the story out of misunderstanding and bad communication (which lmao really). The hero-wannabe wanted to take a revenge only to find out the war is administrative shenanigans of military bureaucracy. And to tell such a story, a woman’s voice and her low-key attitude, witty remarks, and subtle mockery is proper. As she says, “For war can be well fought where there’d a glimpse of a woman’s mouth between lance points.” Her voice is a craft of necessity that becomes an authority of narration. She is the sole tale-teller.

And where does her voice ends? In what page? In which turn? “A page is good only when we turn it and find life urging along, confusing every page in the book.” And, that’s it. We readers are asked to stay in confusion. Life gets in the way, as it says. But it gets in the ways in such means that it shakes our imposed understanding of linear plots and the so-called character development. Disturbance to the narration is as much as important, if not more, as the narration itself. The story here is not to satisfy the attraction of first page and first sentence but to actually end it by starting from the middle only to destroy the artful ending. Are we caught off guard? Are we ready for such an invitation when reading and writing stories are less to find wisdom in consolation but to speed up findings, to rush conclusion and ending, because life after all indeed gets in the way? Where does the writing begin and turn? We only have dusty ink and dashing pen, after all.