«Annullare i confini tra i nostri corpi». Calvino's representation of sex

Abstract

This essay highlights Calvino’s artistic trajectory, which led him to increasingly explicitly portray the sexual act, up to his finest work in this regarde, Under the Jaguar Sun. This collection, focused on the senses, is permeated by explicit sexual tension. This book presents the various tendencies of Calvino’s eroticism, which also characterize other periods of his work: the use of estrangement; the insistence on the idea of fusion and the unrecognizability of the two bodies during intercourse; sexuality as an atavistic element and, at the same time, as a means of knowing the other. All this underscores Calvino’s anthropological interest in the myth of the ancestral origins of human instinct.