The Complete Cosmicomics Read online

  Contents

  Introduction

  A Note on the Translations

  Cosmicomics

  The Distance of the Moon

  At Daybreak

  A Sign in Space

  All at One Point

  Without Colours

  Games Without End

  The Aquatic Uncle

  How Much Shall We Bet?

  The Dinosaurs

  The Form of Space

  The Light-Years

  The Spiral

  Time and the Hunter

  PART ONE: More of Qfwfq

  The Soft Moon

  The Origin of the Birds

  Crystals

  Blood, Sea

  PART TWO: Priscilla

  I. Mitosis

  II. Meiosis

  III. Death

  PART THREE: t zero

  t zero

  The Chase

  The Night Driver

  The Count of Monte Cristo

  From World Memory and Other Cosmicomic Stories

  The Mushroom Moon

  The Daughters of the Moon

  The Meteorites

  The Stone Sky

  As Long as the Sun Lasts

  Solar Storm

  Shells and Time

  World Memory

  From Cosmicomics Old and New

  Nothing and Not Much

  Implosion

  A Rewritten Cosmicomic Story

  The Other Eurydice

  About the Author

  A Note on the Translations

  This edition corresponds to Claudio Milanini’s comprehensive edition of the cosmicomic tales, Tutte le cosmicomiche, published in 1997. It contains the two volumes translated by William Weaver, Cosmicomics (1968) and Time and the Hunter (1969), the four stories translated by Tim Parks (‘World Memory’, ‘Nothing and Not Much’, ‘Implosion’ and ‘The Other Eurydice’), from Numbers in the Dark (1995), plus seven newly translated tales from La memoria del mondo e altre storie cosmicomiche (1968; ‘World Memory and Other Cosmicomic Stories’). The two volumes translated by William Weaver were originally published in America; for this edition, minor changes have been made to anglicize the text and standardize presentation, together with minor emendations to a sentence in certain stories (‘At Daybreak’, ‘All at One Point’, ‘How Much Shall We Bet?’, ‘The Dinosaurs’, ‘The Form of Space’, ‘The Light-Years’, ‘The Soft Moon’, ‘Blood, Sea’, ‘Mitosis’, ‘Meiosis’, ‘The Night Driver’ and ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’) to reflect the original Italian.

  Introduction

  Italo Calvino (1923–85) is best known in the English-speaking world for two kinds of fiction: his historical fantasy works of the 1950s, collected in the trilogy Our Ancestors (1960), and the semiotic and metafictional experiments of the 1970s, particularly the highly successful Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979). He chose these genres as radical alternatives to the realist narratives that he had embarked on as a young writer and which he regarded as the norm for Western fiction. But the ‘cosmicomic’ stories that Calvino began to write in 1963–4, although less well known in the Anglo-American world, were if anything even more original than any of the other kinds of narrative he produced. For a start, he invented this new genre himself: each ‘cosmicomic’ tale begins with a statement of a (genuine or apocryphal) scientific hypothesis, usually regarding the cosmos, and this is then followed by a first-person narrative, recounted by the unpronounceable but irrepressible protagonist, Qfwfq. Qfwfq has been described as a ‘cosmic know-all’, since he was present at all the key moments in the history of the universe from the Big Bang onwards, and his comic colloquialism undercuts the potential seriousness of the scientific themes. The neologism invented by Calvino encapsulated two ways in which traditional realism could be expanded: by a cosmic content and by a comic mode of writing. The cosmicomic stories are also significant because this new vein of writing initiated the second half of Calvino’s career: in the twenty years from 1943 to 1963, he had alternated between the realism (initially neorealism) of his first fictions—including his debut novel, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests (1947)—and the historical fantasy of Our Ancestors; but his first ‘cosmicomic’ volume, Cosmicomics (1965), inaugurated the second two decades of more experimental writing.

  Despite the fact that these stories are less well known than others, Calvino clearly considered this genre a significant and fertile space for literary experiment, as he continued to use the form for the next two decades, publishing a total of thirty-four tales in all. The first volume to be published—Cosmicomiche (1965; ‘Cosmicomics’), which later won the Asti d’ Appello Prize—contained twelve fictions; the second collection—Ti con zero (1967; ‘T zero’, translated as Time and the Hunter)—contained eleven new stories, and both books were translated into English by William Weaver in the late 1960s. A little-known third collection—La memoria del mondo e altre storie cosmicomiche (1968; ‘World Memory and Other Cosmicomic Stories’), a volume not available commercially—offered twenty fictions in all, twelve from the previous two collections and eight new pieces (seven of these new items are translated here for the first time into English; the other new 1968 tale, the title story, was translated by Tim Parks as ‘World Memory’ in the 1995 collection Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories). By 1968, then, Calvino had written thirty-one cosmicomic stories. Just before his untimely death, aged sixty-one, he put together an almost complete collection, entitled Cosmicomiche vecchie e nuove (1984; ‘Cosmicomics Old and New’) and containing thirty-one tales; but for this volume he deselected two stories (‘World Memory’ and ‘Shells and Time’) and in their place inserted two new pieces specially written for the 1984 edition: ‘Nothing and Not Much’ and ‘Implosion’. In 1980 he published a variant of one of the 1968 tales, ‘The Stone Sky’, giving it an alternative title, ‘The Other Eurydice’ (although in fact the story must have been written about ten years earlier since it had appeared first in English translation in 1971). This rewrite and the last two tales written in 1984 brought the total of cosmicomic tales to thirty-four (all three of these later stories can be found translated by Tim Parks in Numbers in the Dark). A posthumous Italian volume containing the complete thirty-four stories appeared in an authoritative Mondadori edition as Tutte le cosmicomiche (1997; ‘The Complete Cosmicomics’), edited by the Italian expert on these tales, Claudio Milanini. This English volume corresponds to Milanini’s comprehensive edition: it contains the two volumes translated by William Weaver, the four stories translated by Tim Parks, plus seven newly translated tales, offering the English-speaking reader the chance to savour Calvino’s entire output in a genre he cultivated for two decades.

  Genesis

  Why did Calvino write the cosmicomic stories? The main reason was that he felt that realist fiction was exhausted and that the writer had to turn elsewhere for inspiration. For Calvino in the early 1960s this place was science, initially books on the origins of the universe which created images in his head, including the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Raymond Queneau’s Encyclopédie de la Pléiade. His ambition in inventing this new genre was that literature should keep pace with the enormous progress being made in scientific research. The fact that he wrote the vast majority of them in the five years between 1963 and 1968 and that these were the years when the ‘space race’ between the USA and the Soviet Union was at its peak explains the prominence of space and planetary science in the tales. Another probable source of inspiration was the volume of science fiction tales that Primo Levi was putting together in the early 1960s: Calvino, Levi’s editor at the publishing house Einaudi at the time, had commented enthusiastically on these stories, which would be published in 1966 as Storie natur
ali (‘Natural Histories’, translated into English in 1990 in The Sixth Day and Other Stories). However, although some critics have talked of the cosmicomic tales in terms of science fiction, Calvino was keen to point out that his stories were very different, indeed the opposite of the traditional form of the genre: whereas the latter usually dealt with a dystopian future, with human protagonists pitted against other forces and creatures, his cosmicomic tales were set mostly in the remote past, at the dawn of the universe, with a protagonist, Qfwfq, who was clearly not always human. This was a typical example of Calvinian reversal of the reader’s expectations of a genre.

  Calvino was a notoriously eclectic writer, however, and one should not look for just one source of inspiration for any of his tales. Indeed his own semi-serious list of literary and visual influences on the cosmicomic stories is lengthy but probably not exhaustive: ‘Cosmicomics are indebted particularly to Leopardi, the Popeye comics, Samuel Beckett, Giordano Bruno, Lewis Carroll, the paintings of Matta and in some cases the works of Landolfi, Immanuel Kant, Borges, and Grandville’s engravings’ (Calvino’s blurb from the publication of the first four cosmicomic tales, in Il Caffè, November 1964). One other source for these fictions, according to Calvino, was the work of the philosopher Giorgio de Santillana (1902–74), whose lecture ‘Ancient and Modern Ideas of Fate’, given in Turin in 1963, struck Calvino mainly for its idea that the great cosmological myths were both the predecessors and the equivalent of modern science. Calvino wanted ancient cosmogonic myths to combine with the latest theories, the concrete images of the one counterbalancing the abstraction of the other.

  The subject matter of the stories can be divided into four main strands:

  The Moon, which appears in the first story in each collection (‘The Distance of the Moon’, ‘The Soft Moon’) but also elsewhere (‘The Mushroom Moon’, ‘The Daughters of the Moon’).

  The Sun, stars and galaxies (‘At Daybreak’, ‘A Sign in Space’, ‘All at One Point’, ‘Games Without End’, ‘The Form of Space’, ‘The Light-Years’, ‘As Long as the Sun Lasts’, ‘Solar Storm’, ‘Nothing and Not Much’, ‘Implosion’).

  The Earth (‘Without Colours’, ‘Crystals’, ‘The Meteorites’, ‘The Stone Sky’, ‘The Other Eurydice’).

  Evolution and time (‘The Aquatic Uncle’, ‘How Much Shall We Bet?’, ‘The Dinosaurs’, ‘The Spiral’, ‘The Origin of the Birds’, ‘Blood, Sea’, the ‘Priscilla’ trilogy, ‘t zero’, ‘The Chase’, ‘The Night Driver’, ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’, ‘Shells and Time’, ‘World Memory’).

  Cosmicomics

  The first volume begins with a tale of landing on the Moon, ‘The Distance of the Moon’, partly reflecting the major scientific obsession of the time, but also paying homage to the fact that early Italian literature is full of descriptions of the Earth’s satellite, from Dante to Ariosto, Galileo and Leopardi, all dear to the author’s heart. Calvino himself was fascinated by the Moon and had offered a highly evocative description of its effects in ‘Moon and Gnac’, from another collection, Marcovaldo, published in 1963. This literary dimension, which cross-fertilizes the scientific content, is also present in a story such as ‘Without Colours’, which tells how the Earth’s atmosphere allowed colours to be perceived, but is also a telluric version of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth: Qfwfq plays Orpheus, while his beloved Ayl refuses to follow him up to the Earth’s now colourful surface, preferring instead the grey darkness inside the Earth. Calvino was so haunted by the myth that he subsequently rewrote this tale twice. First he reversed it in ‘The Stone Sky’ (1968) and then he produced a variant of this story, ‘The Other Eurydice’ (1971). In ‘The Stone Sky’ Qfwfq plays not Orpheus but Pluto, the god of the underworld, who is desolate when he loses his beloved Rdix (her name both suggests ‘radix’ or ‘root’ and ‘Eurydice’) to the Greek minstrel. In this tale the author defamiliarizes our notions of ‘extraterrestrial’ and ‘superficial’, for Qfwfq/Pluto uses both adjectives to describe us miserable creatures who merely inhabit the Earth’s surface not its core. In ‘The Other Eurydice’ the main difference is Pluto’s even more embittered attack on what men have done to the Earth, and a bravura central passage describing the plutonic cities that the god of the underworld planned to build in the Earth’s core, each one a ‘living-body-city-machine’ (p. 396), a world of silence and Earth music, which would accomplish in a second what it has taken centuries of sweat for man to achieve. The reader can enjoy comparing Calvino’s variations on this theme, and can observe in that evocation of the cities in the centre of the Earth the germs of the major work that was to follow the cosmicomic stories, Invisible Cities (1972).

  Literary themes surface more briefly elsewhere in Cosmicomics, such as the allusion to Balzac’s Les Illusions perdues in ‘How Much Shall We Bet?’, the character Lieutenant Fenimore, whom Qfwfq tries to shoot at the end of ‘The Form of Space’ (reflecting the subject matter of James Fenimore Cooper’s most famous work, The Last of the Mohicans), and the appropriate mention of Herodotus, the ‘father of history’, in ‘The Spiral’, which has as its central theme the emergence of time and history. Apart from these literary tales, the first collection also contains some stories in which Calvino reflects on literature itself. One of the most significant is ‘A Sign in Space’, where, apart from the comedy of Qfwfq leaving his naïve first sign in the universe in order to recognize it the next time he passes by, there is also the serious reflection on how signs are still the system we use to communicate, especially the written word: it is no accident that the date of composition of the story (1963–4) coincides with the beginnings of the new science of semiotics. But the tale also refers to something more personal: that first sign, which Qfwfq leaves in space and which causes him such embarrassment when he comes back millions of years later to find it utterly simplistic and out of date, reflects also Calvino’s attitude to his own first novel, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests. Written in 1947, the novel was actually in the forefront of the author’s mind at this time since in the same months he was writing ‘A Sign in Space’ he was also composing his lengthy 1964 preface to The Path, in which his own embarrassment and remorse regarding this earlier work are apparent. Similar metaliterary allusions are to be found in ‘The Dinosaurs’, where the outmoded creatures are equated with the old writers who have failed to move ahead with the times and are still writing in the old, realist way.

  Along with the more serious literary reflections, there is also plenty of comedy in the stories: perhaps the most ‘comic’ cosmic tale here is ‘The Aquatic Uncle’, in which Qfwfq’s old uncle, N’ba N’ga, refuses to leave his pond to follow the other fish in developing into land mammals, insisting that this evolutionary thing will never catch on. Similar comic deflations of potentially portentous themes are in evidence elsewhere; for instance, in ‘All at One Point’, where the Big Bang and the creation of space are attributed to the wonderfully named Mrs Ph(i)Nko, who is seized by a generous urge to make tagliatelle for everyone. The basic technique throughout is to let Qfwfq’s colloquial tone as a narrator offset the great cosmic events he describes to his family as if he were an elderly relative reminiscing about the good old days. The names of all the characters are meant to suggest scientific formulae but with a comic twist.

  Another constant ingredient mingling with science in the stories is desire—indeed one of the desired females, Ursula H’x in ‘The Form of Space’, is partly a cosmicomic version of Ursula Andress, star of the 1965 film She—and many of the tales, starting with the first one, are love stories. In a number of these stories the female embodies the elusive, yearned-for opposite of the male protagonist and the structure of the tale is often a love triangle with two males competing for a female other (‘The Distance of the Moon’, ‘Without Colours’, ‘The Aquatic Uncle’, ‘The Form of Space’). Calvino was well aware of the major role played by desire in the evolution of Western fiction, and combined this basic narrative structure with the new ‘scientific’ content in most of the ta
les in Cosmicomics. Even in the last tale, ‘The Spiral’, Qfwfq is the first mollusc to construct a spiral shell and is driven to do so by his desire to mate with a female mollusc. The collection is thus framed by desire as the key motive force of the universe, and is not simply a univocal work about science and evolution. This last story is not placed where it is by accident: it is the most ambitious tale of this first collection both in terms of its tripartite form and in its content, for Qfwfq notes that by forming the shell this tiny creature also invents our very notion of time. The series of twelve stories thus moves from the Moon to molluscs, and this evolutionary theme provides a fitting end to the collection (the last words are ‘without shores, without boundaries’, p. 151) and points towards the thematics of the second collection of cosmicomic stories.

  Time and the Hunter

  Calvino’s second collection won the prestigious Viareggio Prize in 1968, but in the context of the social upheaval of the times the author refused to accept the award. The eleven pieces in Time and the Hunter form a symmetrical volume, consisting as it does of four more stories about Qfwfq, then a trilogy of tales about a single cell, entitled ‘Priscilla’, and a concluding section of four tales of deductive logic. ‘The Soft Moon’ is the first of the four Qfwfq tales. Although the title reminds us of the title of the opening Moon story in the first collection, the story itself is quite different—about a past that is also a present and a future, with its setting a futuristic New York (Calvino’s favourite city would also form the backdrop of ‘Crystals’ and ‘The Daughters of the Moon’). Here too science is mingled with literature, in that the notion of the Moon falling to Earth owes much to a famous poetic fragment by Giacomo Leopardi, in which the Moon lands on a field and turns black like spent coals, a motif also taken up in ‘The Daughters of the Moon’, from the third collection, World Memory and Other Cosmicomic Stories. But other media are evident in a story such as ‘The Origin of the Birds’, in which Qfwfq recounts his meeting with the Queen of the Birds in verbal summaries of a series of cartoon strips. Calvino’s visual imagination had always been stimulated by the economy and immediacy of cartoons and some of his early stories were indebted to this medium (as indeed was ‘The Mushroom Moon’, from World Memory, clearly inspired by the Popeye cartoons). At one point when Qfwfq jumps on to the planet of the birds, he sees fishes with spiders’ legs, worms with feathers, all the potential but discarded forms that the animal kingdom could have developed, but did not: here the visual stimulus comes not from cartoons but from Hieronymus Bosch’s nightmarish paintings. This interest in an alternative visual medium for narrative would eventually lead to Calvino’s highly experimental The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973), where the Tarot cards are actually produced in the margin alongside the narrative text. The last story in this first section, ‘Blood, Sea’, is about cells rather than about more complex beings, and thus effects a transition to the tales of the second section, which are all about cellular organisms. In ‘Blood, Sea’ Qfwfq is a cell inside a passenger of a car on an Italian motorway: the final description of the car crash that ends the tale is given in a virtuoso sentence, which constitutes a verbal homage to yet another visual medium, the contemporary Jean-Luc Godard film Weekend (1967).