Parallel infinities: Playing on time in Italo Calvino's 'Invisible Cities'

Because writers and readers are embedded within the cultural contexts of the act of reading, interpretations are colored by affective associations with these contexts. Calvino uses a chessboard to schematize his combinative process of the art of storytelling. This model of dramatic conflict, similar to programming binary oppositions, plays on aesthetic indeterminacy and parallels historical conflicts on the battlefield. If a reader resists proliferating "play" on a battlefield of conflict, that is, resists the role of implied reader, particularly in relationship to a postmodern reading or call of attention to a text's rhetorical construction, then the reader becomes engaged at intersections or a cross play of temporal indeterminacy. The aesthetic indeterminacy a reader encounters in response to the marketing of narrative---to the "rhetorical romance" of its readers---is further embedded in temporal ambivalency that the context or infinite background of conflicting existential assumptions effects.; A reader's response at aesthetic crossroads translates the ephemeral times storytellers construct within the material time in which rhetorical narratives are embedded. Sustaining play on the rhetorical drama or make believe eclipses the background dramas interfacing with an imaginary void of time used to foreground spinning time into narratives.; The way a writer spins virtual times by playing on an imaginary void of time has parallels with mass marketing popular culture and with war propagandas. The crossroads of conflict that Calvin uses to situate his combinative play are symptomatic not only of historical conflicts within which playing on time alternates between memory and fantasy, and then again between rhetorical text and reader, but also of deeper discord between the civil war of the human race with itself and religious beliefs. At their best, beliefs assume hope for healing relationships bound in conflict and address the heart of storytelling. Both assumptions of void and of belief recede into infinities that differ about what individuals and cultures believe are their sources of power---and thus their re-sources. Attempting to read the cross play of conflicts---of rhetorical conflict embedded within existential indeterminacy---does not transcend or resolve aesthetic indeterminacy, but it does allow for choice, other than blind repetition, in reading reflections on the chessboard's "game" of war.