Saturday, April 19, 2014

Literary Speculation - The Aquatic Uncle







    So this week, we discussed in class Literary Speculation, and distinguish between writing in genre and writing that may use elements of genre but that is essentially literary. What was more interesting to me this week was the in-class reading we did, which was "The Aquatic Uncle" by Italo Calvino. What really stood out for me in this short story was the way in which Calvino wrote the short story. Although the main idea of this story, which is about a family who lives on land, but deals with a "crazy uncle" who refuses to come ashore and live with the family on land.

    Calvino based this story off of "The first vertebrates who, in the Carboniferous period, abandoned aquatic life for terrestrial descended from the osseous, pulmonate fish whose fins were capable of rotation beneath their bodies and thus could be used as paws on earth". When I first read that, I thought that it would be a lot of long, scientific names and references, such as time periods and specific land and sea species. However, I was sorely mistaken. The story read more like a friend telling another friend a silly antidote about this crazy thing that happened with his crazy uncle. I was pretty shocked at how easy and enjoyable it was to read, even though he did use some scientific language.

     So, does Calvino write in genre or uses elements of genre but is essentially literary? I'd have to go with the latter than the former. Mostly, I think because he creates a fictitious time, place, and set of characters based off of fact. Besides that, he makes these beings have human qualities to them that I don't think they'd actually have: a tradition of visiting one uncle, thinking about things other then food, shelter and procreating (which, they do think about in the story), the struggle between land and sea...All these plus countless other thoughts are ones I highly doubt the beings during that time in history would actually think about. Overall though, I definitely enjoyed this short story, and would love to read some other works by Italo Calvino.

   

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