{"id":10872,"date":"2025-06-10T16:45:05","date_gmt":"2025-06-10T20:45:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/beloved-italian-childrens-book-author-gianni-rodari-on-creativity-and-the-key-to-great-storytelling-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-06-10T16:45:05","modified_gmt":"2025-06-10T20:45:05","slug":"beloved-italian-childrens-book-author-gianni-rodari-on-creativity-and-the-key-to-great-storytelling-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/beloved-italian-childrens-book-author-gianni-rodari-on-creativity-and-the-key-to-great-storytelling-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Beloved Italian Children\u2019s Book Author Gianni Rodari on Creativity and the Key to Great Storytelling \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

I was eight when I first grasped the power of storytelling. One night, my mother presented me with a book titled Telephone Tales<\/em><\/a>, published the year she was born. Night after night, page after page, it cast an enchantment, but it was one particular story that kept me up. \u201cThe Air Vendor\u201d was a cautionary fable about a man who devised a way to bottle and sell air, until everyone on Earth had no choice but to become his customer in order to keep breathing. <\/p>\n

Just a few years earlier, young idealists high on the dream of democracy \u2014 my parents among them \u2014 had finally torn down Bulgaria\u2019s forty-year dictatorship, only to watch the tyranny of capitalism replace the tyranny of communism, one kind of propaganda supplanting another with a sudden explosion of storefronts selling every imaginable commodity, bottling water and branding bread, packaging things in shiny tinfoil emblazoned with words like \u201chappiness,\u201d \u201chealth,\u201d and \u201clove.\u201d <\/p>\n

I read \u201cThe Air Vendor\u201d over and over, delighting in the shimmering sentences, shuddering at the logical progression I sensed between the reality I was living in and this fantastical world of breath for sale. I knew nothing about politics, but I could tell that someone with a deep heart and a sensitive mind was trying to warn us about something menacing, to invigorate our imagination so that we may envision and enact a different course. I knew nothing about the author, except that he had died just a few years before I was born and that his name was Gianni Rodari<\/strong> (October 23, 1920\u2013April 14, 1980).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Gianni Rodari in his classroom<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I now know that he was born on the shores of an Italian mountain lake in the wake of the First World War and that he was eight himself when his father, a baker, died suddenly. There is no record of what happened, only that the young boy took solace in solitude and music. He sang in the church choir, mastered a small orchestra of instruments, and dreamt of becoming a professional musician. <\/p>\n

But then he discovered Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Dostoyevsky and Novalis (\u201cbooks written with the passion, chaos, and satisfaction that are a hundred times more fruitful for one\u2019s studies than a hundred years of school,\u201d he would later recount); discovered Dadaism and Futurism, the German Romantics and the French Surrealists; discovered the symphonic power of ideas and imaginative literature, the way language can liberate and words can empower. <\/p>\n

Although he never stopped playing his violin, he became a professional storyteller instead, his work touching generations in a living testament to his American contemporary Maurice Sendak\u2019s insight that great stories have \u201cthe shape of music.\u201d<\/a> <\/p>\n

Having worked as an elementary school teacher since was only a teenager, having watched his country\u2019s spirit shatter under the fist of fascism, Rodari yearned for a way to unite his passions for philosophy, teaching, and justice. And so he started writing stories, songs, and poems for children, insisting over and over, in subtle and sensitive ways, on the human capacity for independent and imaginative thinking. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

One early spring in his early forties, he was invited to conduct a week of workshops on storytelling for about fifty kindergarten, elementary, and high school teachers \u2014 a week he would later remember as one of the happiest of his life. Tasked with distilling everything he knew about what makes a great story based on his fifteen years of teaching and writing for children, he suddenly remembered a notebook he had kept many years earlier under the title Notes on the Fantastic<\/em>, sparked by a sentence he had read in a book by Novalis: <\/p>\n

\n

If there were a theory of the fantastic such as there is in the case of logic, then we would be able to discover the art of invention.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Storytelling, Rodari realized, was a system for organizing thought into imagination, the way grammar is a system for organizing words into ideas. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Within a year, he had distilled what he presented at the workshop into a dazzling, deeply original book he titled The Grammar of Fantasy<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>), only now available in English with enchanting illustrations by Matthew Forsythe<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Examining the structure of folk tales and the function of fairy tales, drawing on Tolstoy and Hegel, on the Brothers Grimm and Scientific American<\/em>, Rodari explores the inner workings of the imagination and its relationship to logic, the way it bridges the real and the ideal through fantasy, the way it makes our lives not only livable but worth living.<\/p>\n

Noting that he is making no \u201cattempt to establish a fully fledged \u2018theory of the fantastic,\u2019 with rules ready to be taught and studied in schools like geometry,\u201d that he is not seeking \u201ca complete theory of the imagination and invention,\u201d Rodari offers:<\/p>\n

\n

I hope that this small volume will prove useful to all those who believe it is necessary for the imagination to have a place in education, who have faith in the creativity of children, and who know the liberating value of the word. \u201cAll possible uses of words for all people\u201d \u2014 this seems to me a good motto, with a nice democratic sound. Not because everyone is an artist, but because no one is a slave.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Not unlike the \u201cgrammar of animacy\u201d needed for rewilding our relationship to the natural world<\/a>, a grammar of fantasy allows us to animate our inner world with the natural wildness of the imagination. And, like all grammar, it is built of words and the reactions between them in the laboratory of the mind. Rodari considers the process:<\/p>\n

\n

A stone thrown into a pond sets in motion concentric waves that spread out over the surface, and their reverberation has different effects, at varying distances, on the water lilies and the reeds, the paper boats and the fishermen\u2019s buoys. Each of these objects was standing on its own, in its tranquility or sleep, when awakened to life, as it were, and compelled to react and to enter into relationship with one another. Other invisible reverberations spread into the water\u2019s depths, in all directions, as the stone falls and brushes the algae, frightens the fish, and continually causes new molecular agitations. When it finally touches the bottom, it stirs up the mud, hits the objects that had been resting there, forgotten, some of which are now dislodged, while others are covered once again by sand.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The word stone<\/em> itself dislodges fragments of his own past, and he is suddenly transported to a stony sanctuary on the cliffs of an Alpine lake he used to bike to with his violin and his friend Amadeo, who always wore a long blue coat through which the outline of his own violin could be seen. They would \u201csit in a cool portico, drinking white wine and talking about Kant\u201d \u2014 and already we have a story sparked by a single word. <\/p>\n

Observing that he has invented many stories starting with just a single word, Rodari writes:<\/p>\n

\n

Any randomly chosen word can function as a magic word to unearth those fields of memory that had been resting under the dust of time\u2026 The fantastic arises when unusual combinations are created, when in the complex movements of images and their capricious overlappings, an unpredictable affinity is illuminated between words that belong to different lexical fields.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

At the center of his grammar of fantasy, however, are not individual words but an embodiment of the combinatorial nature of creativity<\/a> he calls the fantastic binomial<\/em> \u2014 the felicitous combination of two contextually distant words that becomes a prompt for storytelling by requiring you to invent a shared context and a conversation between. \u201cWords belong to each other,\u201d Virginia Woolf half-whispers in the only surviving recording of her voice<\/a>. Through the fantastic binomial, we become the authors of that belonging and make language not a vehicle of information but an instrument of the imagination. Rodari describes the fertility of these fantastical word-pairings:<\/p>\n

\n

One electrical pole is not enough to cause a spark; it takes two. The single word \u201cacts\u201d only when it encounters a second that provokes it out of its usual tracks to discover new possibilities of meaning. Where there is no struggle, there is no life. <\/p>\n

This is due to the fact that the imagination is not some hypothetical faculty separate from the mind: it is the mind itself in its totality, which, applied to this or that activity, always makes use of the same procedures. And the mind is formed by struggle, not by tranquility.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

A certain distance between the two words is necessary. One must be sufficiently strange or different from the other, and their coupling must be fairly unusual, for the imagination to be compelled to set itself in motion to establish a relationship between them and construct a (fantastic) whole in which the two elements can coexist.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

The fantastic binomial creates a kind of riddle \u2014 to figure out how these two words can belong together \u2014 and riddles are a classic element of the fairy tale. Rodari considers why they are so compelling to children:<\/p>\n

\n

[Riddles] represent the concentrated, almost emblematic form of their experience of conquering reality. For a child, the world is full of mysterious objects, incomprehensible events, and indecipherable figures. Their own presence in the world is a mystery to be clarified, a riddle to be solved, and they circle around it with direct or indirect questions. Knowledge often occurs in the form of surprise.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It may be that the most deadening effect of growing up is our incremental preference for certainty over surprise, which ends up keeping us a safe distance from alive \u2014 life, after all, is an experiment that continually confounds our hypotheses, and it is on the hubris that we know more than life does that we most regularly break our own hearts. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days<\/em><\/a>, also available as a stand-alone print<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Noting that an active imagination is just as essential for making art as it is for making scientific discoveries and making daily decisions in even the most mundane regions of life, Rodari insists that \u201cthe creative function\u201d belongs equally to all of us, that all human beings \u201chave the same aptitude for creativity, with whatever differences exist between humans in this domain revealing themselves to be largely a product of social and cultural factors.\u201d He considers the defining features of the creative mindset:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cCreativity\u201d is\u2026 thinking that is capable of continuously breaking the patterns of experience. A \u201ccreative\u201d mind is one that is always on the move; always asking questions; always discovering problems where others find satisfactory answers; completely comfortable in fluid situations where others sense danger; capable of making autonomous and independent judgements (even independent from parents, teachers, and society); and one that rejects everything that is codified, preferring to reshape objects and concepts without allowing itself to be hindered and inhibited by conformism. All of these qualities manifest themselves in the creative process. And this process \u2014 listen up! listen up! \u2014 always has a playful character, even if we are dealing with \u201cstrict mathematics.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Echoing Einstein \u2014 \u201cIf you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales,\u201d<\/em> he reportedly told one mother<\/a> who wished for her son to become a scientist. \u201cIf you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.\u201d<\/em> \u2014 Rodari adds:<\/p>\n

\n

The mind forms a whole. Its creativity must be cultivated in all directions.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

Fairy tales are useful to mathematics, just as mathematics are useful to fairy tales. They are also useful for poetry, music, political engagement \u2014 in sum, they are useful for everyone, and not just for the dreamer\u2026 They\u2019re in service of the complete human being. If a society based on the myth of productivity (and on the reality of profit) needs only half-formed human beings \u2014 loyal executors, diligent imitators, and docile instruments without a will of their own \u2014 that means there is something wrong with this society and it needs to be changed posthaste. To change it, creative human beings are needed, people who know how to make full use of the imagination.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In the remainder of the book, Rodari goes on to explore the importance of turning mistakes into catalysts for invention and pathways toward deeper truths, of telling stories that break taboos in order to liberate us from the social hypocrisies of conditioned shame, of \u201cdeforming\u201d existing words into fantastical new ones in order to \u201cmake words more productive\u201d by bending and broadening the possibilities within them so that we may bend and broaden the possibilities within ourselves \u2014 something of which the word marginalian<\/em> is an example, and something children do naturally as a form of play, but which has the serious consequence of encouraging nonconformity in them. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Complement The Grammar of Fantasy<\/em><\/strong><\/a> with Dutch art historian Johan Huizinga on play and the making of civilization<\/a> and Maurice Sendak on storytelling and creativity<\/a>, then revisit Nobel-winning Polish poet Wis\u0142awa Szymborska on fairy tales and the necessity of fear<\/a> and J.R.R. Tolkien on the psychology of fantasy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Illustrations by Matthew Forsythe courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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