Contrary to the view of Calvino as a writer divided between sociopolitical concern and escape into fantasy, his works point to an unambiguous poetics in which this apparent dichotomy is in fact a dialectic process. His stylistic and narrative experimentations, from the “neorealist” mode to allegorical and mathematical fictions, and to self-reflexive narrative, disclose a precise ideological intent: to propose ever-changing models of reality, to question each form as it is produced, to explode every narrative system so a new one may be created. By means of lexical and syntactical deformation, of shifts from one semantic code to another, of ironic metalinguistic references, and by the use of special subcodes (e.g., the comic strip), Calvino breaks down the conventional barrier separating high literature from popular culture, opens to question the whole of literary tradition, and exposes the paradoxical nature of writing (écriture) in the dialectics of signification.