Part One of this article can be found here.

PART II

One of the ultimate strengths of fantasy, as well as fiction (more so genre fiction), is the use of the fabricated and the imagined. Folktales similarly use this alluring mode and technique (yet there is evidence to suggest that these stories were very real to the people first creating and telling them) whenever their words recall or conjure a monster, wizard, chimera, or any imagined figure associated with the supernatural and the fantastic that can only take form in a dream or the imagination.

Certainly, we can say that, in a story about a hero fighting a monster, everything is fictional, every part is a piece in a structure to support the art; however, it is the monster that is more so the fabrication, more artificial, because it comes from the idea of something that can never exist and does not exist except in the confines of the story and the imagination. The monster can be said to be artificial because it is simply not from an evident natural world human beings can study or understand; and yet, the human brain spawned the idea of this monster, so it is constructed in the natural world but somehow still nonexistent, and, thus, artificial.

In the world of the monster, where the monster hypothetically exists in this story, is the monster natural?

If monsters existed, would they be works of nature?

If those who wrote or read the folktale believed in the monsters and the magic happenings, are those constructs artificial?

A challenge occurs when reexamining or modernizing folklore or fabliaux.

Not only is beauty marred by the moralizing of folklore, but folktales are equipped by design with a tone of lecturing that enfeebles symbolism.

It is then the work of the reader, or a critic, to determine for themselves what is the monstrous, what is the unnatural.

From a certain point of perspective, it can be seen how a monster (an airborne horse, a dragon, or a hideous sorceress) acts as a token of the artificial because of the uncanny portent they inspire in the reader (or listener), of how the monster changes their environment, of how they stand against destiny and what is expected, and of how they stand against a human protagonist or alleged hero.

When a hominid audience believes that monsters, devils, and faeries are all part of the real milieu and living alongside human beings, then that audience accepts that supernatural things are natural bodies creating inhuman deviations on the human social order.

Is it not natural for devils to lie, to tempt, to disease, and to destroy?

Today’s humankind has proven devils and fabled creatures to be chimerical.

Theists, observant theologians, or devout Neopagans might disagree.

In a fantastical universe where anything is possible, where is the artifice?

Could the synthetic lie in where a rôle or structure subverts a designed or preordained function?

Creating falsehoods. Flouting limitations.

Defiance.

Punishment? Vengeance?

If the folktale is read as truth, then an abomination or a monster or a magical entity, and even magic itself, can only be recognized by human beings as artificial in a subjective manner: an otherness compared against and different from the human animal.

If human lives are seen as non-natural, a critic might estimate that the monstrous is aught that is not believed by the reader or not embraced by the protagonist.

That methodology establishes a writer–reviewer–reader dynamic by which art is evolved and made more artificial.

That leads to an infinite ocean of imaginable interpretations.

A mountain of the absurd.

The folktale becomes a shared link connecting a community to decide on a communal reality or a communal interpretation.

At some former point, humans decided they no longer needed folklore to tell them about the world. There was no magic outside the mind.  

In a modernized reevaluation of folklore, glyphs of artifice may walk in the form of all that which cannot exist in the material human arena.

Perhaps it is human thought that is artificial too, the thoughts that are capable of imagining and believing in places and beings better than what can be examined in the dissatisfying real world.

Humans are obsessed with their creations, with improving reality, with escape from reality, with improving artifice.

There are scientists who want to use artificial intelligence to create artworks (Ward AI Can Now Produce Better Art Than Humans. Here’s How.).

“The Sorceress’s Head” has much of contrivances throughout. One might even say it is one of its central themes.

Does the story not start with a sort of artificial birth? The king of the beginning of this tale has been unable to have a child, for some reason. He just never had one. Instead of continuously trying to naturally have one, he makes a wish to a voice, which appears only when he goes to pray. The voice asks what kind of child he wants. After the king makes his decision, one appears for him, a girl. Yes, the girl was birthed by the queen, but this does not feel altogether human or natural. Marginally, the whole process is vaguely like that of a changeling, with regards to the fact that the child was produced or provided supernaturally, and the fact that the child will end up causing a type of replacement (replacing the king with the boy). On the other hand, perhaps the king went insane, heard an auditory hallucination, and then coincidentally fathered a child without any aid from supernatural forces. What if the reader assumes the king secretly found out the girl was not actually his child? Is the old man with the flying horse the true grandfather? That is for the reader to contrive, but we will never really know.

The relationship the king and queen have with their daughter is artificial, because they almost never visit her, and they keep her locked away; that is no true, healthy relationship. The sorceress and the dragon are artificial phantasms of the imagination: monsters. The flying horse is artificial, because it is imaginary to the reader. There is a king who has built new mansions; certainly, those are constructions of artifice. The special eye shared by the two blind women provides a special, artificial kind of sight. The hero must look at the sorceress’ reflection, and a reflection can be said to be artificial, because it is not truly what is desired. The sorceress has the power to turn living beings to stone, turning her victims into unnatural objects that mimic the natural world.

These pieces of the non-natural and the grotesque are what give beautiful soul and spirit to the story. The artificial sets free the imagination and the longings of a heart wishing to transcend this vulgar existence.

But there is no end to the examples which might be quoted from the Romantic and Decadent writers on the subject of this indissoluble union of the beautiful and the sad, on the supreme beauty of that beauty which is accursed. (Praz p. 31) 

After all, the story does say, “Now this sorceress was so hideous that all who laid eyes on her turned to stone, and the old king was certain that would be his grandson’s fate” (Calvino et al. “The Sorceress's Head” p. 305). We also get blind women in a palace garden, and we get a dragon. From these (sorceress, blind women, dragon), the story is giving us a taste of delicious and defiled beauty that is all the more marvelous for its exquisite abnormality and imperfections that in some ways are superior to anything of the natural or the real. The dragon, a sublime and extraordinary being (who meets a sad, dirty fate), is ultimately beautiful because of its surreal, fantastic quality and its awesome dreadfulness.

CONCLUSION

Folktales do not only have to be read as traditional warnings from long ago. We can examine them as we do any kind of art piece. We can connect with them, make them a part of us, and put pieces of us in them. Especially if folktales are meant to travel and to evolve, then they need to be experimented with.

“The Sorceress’s Head” may not look like all that much, but it evokes feelings and fixtures of adventure, the growth from boy to man, the regrets and absurdity of combat and of revenge, and of humankind’s struggle with the natural world and with destiny. This tale can be seen as a fantasy story about fabrications. It is escapism and a yearning for transcendence, and it is so much more. Nevertheless, reinterpretation, legitimacy, the artificial—these concepts, among others, are at play together in a work such as this.

Elegant shades of intimate exegeses fecundate when a work stimulates the subjective and irrational realms. The dreamy and the hyperreal can collide to engender an escapade with limitless symbolism.

Fantasy storytellers may wish to explore and talk about things that are far better and far more beautiful and far more sublime than anything in the real world. The terrors of the real world do not hold the beauty that terrors in a fantasy do.

Italian folklore is splendid and powerful, like the land and old culture from which it springs. Even a silly little retelling of a transmuted myth, like “The Sorceress’s Head,” can reveal itself to be enchanting and profound. Folktales like this one are especially prescient and pertinent to anyone with Italian ancestry. “The Sorceress’s Head” shows a family torn apart by treachery, tyranny, separation, and vendetta. One could say that this is a story about revenge. And it is a story about reclaiming a lost home. Or, is it a story about the ill consequences of mob rule? Is it not the congregated subjects who tell the king what kind of child to ask for, who tell him to imprison her? At the conclusion of the tale, are readers witnessing the development of a new monarchy? Who will hold the right to rule when the ruling family is at odds with itself? The tale as a whole is evocative of how the Italian identity itself has been shattered by a longstanding, disgraceful grudge between northern and southern identities, a grudge that is but one viper, among a head of many others, in a medusan curse paralyzing Italian autonomy and liberty.

POSTSCRIPT

Dear readers,

I am he—Matthew Pungitore—the author of this unconventional essay-article: “ITALO CALVINO’S RETELLING OF “THE SORCERESS’S HEAD”; KEYS OF ABSURDISM, ARTIFICE, EXPRESSIONISM, AND SYMBOLISM.” This postscript is something of a non sequitur. There are times when a writer or artist wants to share thoughts digressing yet homologous to the artistic meanwhile of creating.

Whilst I had been out walking one day (it had happened during the death throes of a lugubrious summer), in the hours between late morning and high noon, I came across some sort of artificial waterway, or maybe a weir, or a wee waterfall (it was almost like some kind of manmade channel moving water from a pond down towards some other direction), and I was glad to be getting good exercise and rays; although, I do not enjoy being flambéed by sunshine. I started thinking about the benefits from nature and the benefits of artifice. I had seen clearly how this structure had the power to move a natural force.

What about the sunlight? What was it doing to me, besides allowing me to see? Colleen Moriarty says, “When exposed to the sun, your skin can manufacture its own vitamin D” (Moriarty, “Vitamin D Myths 'D'-bunked”). Moriarty’s words might appear to be no big news, yet this also inadvertently reveals how boring the real process is. Humans just bring about their own vitamins, as if they were sleeping in the lazy flesh all along? That’s not as fun as the light actually becoming one with flesh to generate something totally new together.

The ways of the real world can never suffice nor provide deeper meaning beyond mundane interpretations of biochemical processes. The romantic mysticism is gone.   

Teaching can sometimes be like sunlight: it might give illumination and energy, but there is nothing living within the beam, and the student must generate their own learning, and syphon vampirish that rude heat from what is being experienced to forge weapons and armor out of an experience. In this instance, teaching is no affectionate endowing of sacrosanct pyx or calyx of gnosis. What is there is but a complex transfer of energy to be drained; one unlocks hidden potential within the insolent body.

Thus, one can only be said to have been taught if there is memory to make a record, but a lot of what we call teaching, beyond just communicating facts and data, is in truth allowing a cognition to make its own discoveries. On the other hand, learning can be accidental, subliminal, or prearranged.

There are many who have manufactured tricks to create propaganda and brainwashing, like poisonous radiation, but are such methods in truth works of teaching, or are they machinations of domination? Is bondage a kind of education? Is memorization alone an act of autodidactic education? Is a wound a teacher? Omen?  

Yet if to teach is to demonstrably relay information and facility and conditioning to another, then Homo sapiens (altogether prosaic, mimetic organisms) do not ostensibly implant skill or information—save the acts of fecundation, gestation, and parturition—human beings can only invent stories, lessons, to recount. Everything is storytelling. Ruins as jaded as a jaundiced woodland reflected in a plaintive pond.

Matthew Pungitore graduated with a Bachelor of Science in English from Fitchburg State University. He volunteers with the Hingham Historical Society. The town of Hingham, Massachusetts is where he was brought up, and he has lived there for many years. Matthew is the author of The Report of Mr. Charles Aalmers and other stories, Fiendilkfjeld Castle, and Midnight's Eternal Prisoner: Waiting For The Summer.

If you’ve liked what you’ve read here, check out some of Matthew Pungitore’s writings at his BookBaby author-page.

Contact him at: matthewpungitore_writer@outlook.com

WORKS CITED

Birkhead, Edith. The Tale of Terror A Study of the Gothic Romance. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015. Print.

Calvino, Italo. "Notes." Ed. Italo Calvino. Trans. George Martin. Italian Folktales. Trans. George Martin. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980. pp. 715–757. Print. Hardcover. Jacket design by Louise Fili.

Calvino, Italo, et al. “The Sorceress's Head.” Italian Folktales, translated by George Martin, by Italo Calvino, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980, pp. 304–308. Print. Hardcover. Jacket design by Louise Fili.

Miller, Laura. “Minor Magus.” The New Yorker, 28 Nov. 2004. Web. Accessed September 13, 2021.

Moriarty, Colleen. “Vitamin D Myths 'D'-bunked.” Yale Medicine, Yale Medicine, 15 Mar. 2018. Web. Accessed September 10, 2021.

Praz, Mario. The Romantic Agony. Translated by Angus Davidson. Foreword by Frank Kermode. 2nd ed. London: Oxford University Press, 1970. Print.

Ward, Tom. “AI Can Now Produce Better Art Than Humans. Here’s How.” Futurism, Futurism, 7. 8. 17. Web. Accessed September 12, 2021.