The Complete Cosmicomics Read online

  The second section, entitled ‘Priscilla’, consists of three tales, ‘Mitosis’, ‘Meiosis’ and ‘Death’, the first term referring to the division of cells within asexual reproduction, the second to cell division within sexual reproduction. ‘Death’ amounts almost to a history of the world in five pages, beginning with the first drops of life on Earth and ending with the links that extend from DNA to man’s technological achievements in machines and computers. All three tales of this second section are in a sense one tale, since they have one overall title, ‘Priscilla’, and instead of having three individual epigraphs, the whole section begins with four pages of quotations from embryologists, computer experts, philosophers and Galileo. This structural ambivalence between the one story and the three reflects the thematics of the tales themselves, which deal with the development from monocellular to pluricellular beings.

  The four stories that constitute the last section in Time and the Hunter are not really cosmicomic tales, but rather fictions inspired by mathematics and deductive logic. The narrator of the first of these, the title story ‘t zero’, is called simply Q, who thus represents a transition from the earlier Qfwfq tales to the last three stories in which the narrator is not named at all. The formula t0 expresses the point of time which marks the beginning of Q’s speculations about whether his arrow, A, will hit the lion, L, leaping on him before t0 becomes t1, t2, t3, etc. The idea derives from one of Zeno’s famous paradoxes, that an arrow in flight is actually stationary, since if space is infinitely divisible, then the arrow is always above just one piece of ground. While ‘t zero’ was largely concerned with time, the second tale in the series, ‘The Chase’, concentrates more on space, and if that first deductive tale alluded to the elementary nature of all narrative, a man facing a challenge, this one is written in the vein of a sophisticated thriller, as the first-person narrator tries to escape from his would-be killer by driving into the gridlocked city centre. The penultimate story, ‘The Night Driver’, is one of Calvino’s most revolutionary narratives, eliminating as it does characters, landscape (the action takes place by night) and plot. Again mathematics informs this story: the first-person protagonist, though not named, is presumably called X, since he tells us he is driving from A to B, where he hopes to meet his lover, Y, but is afraid that his rival, Z, will get to Y before him. Here Calvino tries to reach a degree zero of writing where everything anthropomorphic has been erased from the tale apart from the love triangle. The story is innovative in its attempt to integrate the clarity of mathematics with the ambiguity of literature (one of the ideals of the Parisian group OULIPO, Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or Workshop of Potential Literature, of which Calvino was a member), and in its allusions to information theory and semiotics. The concluding tale, ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’, owes its position to its embracing of the many other themes in the rest of the collection as well as to its greater length and complexity. It is in effect a brief rewriting of Alexandre Dumas’s famous novel, but centring on the contrast between the Abbé Faria’s empirical attempts to escape from the Château d’lf and Edmond Dantès’s preference for theory and deductive logic: Dantès concludes that the only way to escape the condition of prisoner is to understand mentally how the perfect prison is structured and then compare it with the one where he is currently detained in order to find the loophole. The thematics of the prison-labyrinth are indebted to similar ideas in Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges, but the notion of the loophole reflected Calvino’s own notion that all the great totalizing systems of our time (those of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud) still contain gaps. The final sentence suggests but does not guarantee an exit from the labyrinth, but it was a conclusion that Calvino found optimistic and regarded as his gnoseological testament.

  World Memory and Other Cosmicomic Stories

  The third volume of cosmicomic tales was never translated in a single volume in English. The twenty pieces (twelve from the previous two collections and eight new ones) are divided into five sections of four stories each, the title of each section articulating the ambitious, global scope of the work: ‘Four Stories on the Moon’ (‘The Distance of the Moon’, ‘The Mushroom Moon’, ‘The Soft Moon’, ‘The Daughters of the Moon’); ‘Four Stories on the Earth’ (‘Without Colours’, ‘The Meteorites’, ‘Crystals’, ‘The Stone Sky’); ‘Four Stories on the Sun, the Stars, the Galaxies’ (‘At Daybreak’, ‘As Long as the Sun Lasts’, ‘Solar Storm’, ‘Games without End’); ‘Four Stories on Evolution’ (‘The Aquatic Uncle’, ‘The Dinosaurs’, ‘The Origin of the Birds’, ‘Shells and Time’); ‘Four Stories on Time and Space’ (‘World Memory’, ‘The Chase’, ‘The Night Driver’, ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’).

  Calvino claimed that this was the cosmicomic volume that he had wanted to write from the start, since it was a more ‘organic’ work than the previous two, the titles of the five sections suggesting comprehensive coverage. The first two stories, ‘The Mushroom Moon’ and ‘The Daughters of the Moon’, are linked in inspiration to previous tales such as ‘The Soft Moon’, while, as we have seen, ‘The Stone Sky’ is a rewrite of ‘Without Colours’ from the first collection. ‘The Meteorites’ contains one of the first mentions of the theme of order, disorder and rubbish, an obsession that looks forward to Invisible Cities, while ‘As Long as the Sun Lasts’ is the most humorous tale in this series. But perhaps the most interesting story here is ‘Solar Storm’, a fiction that mixes scientific theory with allusions to some of Joseph Conrad’s most famous novels. Conrad had been a favourite author of Calvino ever since his university thesis on the Anglo-Polish writer in 1946.

  In the story Qfwfq is the captain of the steamer Halley, returning towards Liverpool, when it is caught in a magnetic storm occasioned by Rah, daughter of the Sun and the captain’s aerial lover, who wraps herself round the foremast, invisible to the rest of the crew. Although the ship’s name obviously alludes to Halley’s comet, it also comes from the protagonist of Conrad’s 1902 story ‘The End of the Tether’, Captain Whalley, whose wife used to live on board with him, and who makes one last voyage on a Liverpool-built ship, trying to conceal his increasing blindness from the crew. In addition to this text, there are also clear echoes of two other Conrad tales. The opening movement from calm sea to electric storm owes something to a similar shift in the crucial third chapter of Lord Jim (1900), a novel Calvino knew well since he translated the first ten chapters of it into Italian. The other Conrad text lurking beneath this tale is Heart of Darkness (1899): the description of Rah gripping the foremast, with her hair flying in the wind, and the folds of her drapery blending with the sky, is a clear echo of Conrad’s description of the African woman who appears at the climax of the novel, a passage quoted in its entirety and commented upon more than once by Calvino in his thesis. Apart from these textual echoes, the main themes of the story are also Conradian: ships, compasses, radios and maps all epitomize rationality and control, while Qfwfq’s statement that he never departed from the line of conduct he had set himself is not just the articulation of a quintessentially Conradian ethic, but the phrase ‘with Rah on my back’ (p. 358) is in Italian (‘con Rah addosso’) a pun on the Anglo-Polish author’s name. The reader can also enjoy in the second half of the tale counting the allusions to other classics of English literature (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen) in cameo form. ‘Solar Storm’, one of the last tales to be written in the five years between 1963 and 1968, is not just another cosmicomic fiction but a minimalist rewriting of fundamental Conrad narratives and a mini-pastiche of nineteenth-century English classics. Once again, it is clear that the cosmicomic stories are inspired as much by literature as by science.

  One of the last two tales, ‘Shells and Time’, is an extension of ‘The Spiral’, but taking the discourse about time further: shells may have in a sense created time, but they too are superseded by the sand which eventually settles on them, since sand-time deposits layers of other shells on them. The final lesson is that m
an’s history is like the mollusc’s: archaeological findings show that what has been lost to man is the hand of the potter who made the vase, the pronunciation of the scribe who wrote the manuscript, the flesh of the mollusc that secreted the shell. The other story, ‘World Memory’, stands apart from all the other cosmicomic tales, notably in its lack of scientific epigraph, the absence of Qfwfq from the story, and in its cosmic but not comic tone. Set in an unspecified future, the tale is narrated by the outgoing director of an institute which is cataloguing for posterity information about every human, plant and animal in the world; but for the information to be manageable it has to be reduced to a meaningful minimum. The phrase in the centre of the tale used to define humanity at the moment of its extinction shows the much broader perspective that these tales have: ‘What will the human race be at the moment of its extinction? A certain quantity of information about itself and the world . . .’ (p. 368).

  Cosmicomics Old and New

  In 1984 Calvino collected almost all of his cosmicomic stories in an anthology which, like World Memory and Other Cosmicomic Stories, was never translated into English as a separate volume. The work is divided into four parts: first, fourteen tales on evolution, the Earth, the Moon and the Sun, entitled ‘The Memory of Worlds’, and consisting of most of the stories from the first four sections of World Memory; then eight pieces on the universe, in a section called ‘Chasing Galaxies’, containing six stories from Cosmicomics plus the two new tales written for this collection, ‘Nothing and Not Much’ and ‘Implosion’; a third part entitled ‘Biocomics’, consisting of five tales (‘The Spiral’, ‘Blood, Sea’ and the ‘Priscilla’ trilogy); and a fourth section, ‘Deductive Stories’, comprising the final four narratives from Time and the Hunter. The two new tales, ‘Nothing and Not Much’ and ‘Implosion’, naturally show some differences from the stories of the 196os. The first one opens with a cutting from the Washington Post declaring that the universe came into existence in an infinitesimal fraction of a second. Qfwfq of course remembers both the nothing that preceded the Big Bang and all that emerged from it (the universe, time, space, memory); he describes the ‘sense of invincibility, of power, of pride’ accompanying this ‘vertiginous expansion’ (pp. 377–8), but in the end he comes round to the point of view of his female antagonist, Nugkta, and sees the universe as flawed and fundamentally unstable, a system in collapse, therefore gravely inferior to the perfection of nothing. That description of the universe as a bungled construction, crumbling away on all sides, and the final sentence on the slaughter that takes place daily on our planet reflects Calvino’s own more pessimistic outlook on the world at the start of the 1980s. ‘Implosion’ was one of the last fictions that Calvino wrote, though it was developed from an earlier piece on black holes that he had written but excluded from the volume Palomar (1983). Exploiting his favourite poetics of contrast, Qfwfq initiates his musings on black holes by parodying Hamlet’s great soliloquy: ‘To explode or to implode . . . that is the question’ (p. 384). The conclusion of the whole tale—‘Any way time runs it leads to disaster . . .’ (p. 388)—also reflects Calvino’s dystopian vision in what were to be his last years. However, although readers of Cosmicomics Old and New will notice the gradual darkening of Calvino’s outlook from the 1960s to the early 1980s, they will also appreciate the way Calvino expanded the frontiers of fiction by making his own literary discourse embrace science (physics, embryology, DNA, computing theory), mathematics, philosophy and the visual arts (paintings, cartoons, cinema, architecture). The main thrust of his poetics was constantly to raise the target which literature sets itself: he challenges literature to describe the indescribable, from macrocosm to microcosm, from the Big Bang to the division of cells.

  The cosmicomic tales are in one sense a product of their time, the 1960s, but in their cosmic content and ambition they try to move beyond such temporal limitations: it is significant that starting with Cosmicomics Calvino breaks his habit of placing the date of composition at the end of his books, as though to confirm the irrelevance of contemporary history to a narrative that occupies itself with larger and more significant swathes of time. Nor was it an accident that some critics compared these stories with the abstract, geometric narrations of nouveau-roman writers such as Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922–2008). But although these fictions may be less well known than others, they represent a crucial phase in Calvino’s own development as a writer, as we see in them the seeds of later works such as Invisible Cities and The Castle of Crossed Destinies. Drawing from different media, his works have also had considerable influence on other art forms. If Invisible Cities inspired architects and visual artists, the cosmicomic fictions have been taken up by musical artists. Two important musical works have so far emerged: Giovanni Renzo’s operatic version of ‘The Distance of the Moon’ (1996), inspired by the Moon music in the first cosmicomic story, and Jonathan Dove’s of ‘The Other Eurydice’ (2001), which provides the Earth music mentioned in that tale. These operatic spin-offs are a tribute to the creative force of these stories; indeed the latter work is highly appropriate in that one of the very first operas, Monteverdi’s L’Orefo (1607), was based on the myth of Orpheus. The continuing validity of the cosmicomic project for the author himself is also demonstrated by the fact that during the course of his last summer, in 1985, Calvino made a little note of the topics of three book projects he wanted to give priority to in the future: ‘The Senses’, ‘Objects’ and ‘Cosmicomics’. There is still, in fact, in Calvino’s archive a drawer full of newspaper cuttings concerning scientific discoveries. As I write this introduction, a news item today talks about the fact that thanks to recent technological developments we can now hear the sounds the planets make as they revolve. Had Calvino still been alive today we could almost imagine his next story beginning: ‘Sounds!—exclaimed Qfwfq—Of course we heard the sounds of the planets! Deafening they were, but not without a certain variety . . .’

  This translator wishes to thank for their valuable help Esther Calvino, Peter Hainsworth, Christopher Holland, Claudio Milanini, Catherine, McLaughlin, Mairi McLaughlin, Claudia Nocentini, Andrew Smith, Elisabetta Tarantino.

  Martin McLaughlin

  Oxford, November 2008

  Cosmicomics

  The Distance of the Moon

  At one time, according to Sir George H. Darwin, the Moon was very close to the Earth. Then the tides gradually pushed her far away: the tides that the Moon herself causes in the Earth’s waters, where the Earth slowly loses energy.

  How well I know!—old Qfwfq cried—the rest of you can’t remember, but I can. We had her on top of us all the time, that enormous Moon: when she was full—nights as bright as day, but with a butter-coloured light—it looked as if she were going to crush us; when she was new, she rolled around the sky like a black umbrella blown by the wind; and when she was waxing, she came forward with her horns so low she seemed about to stick into the peak of a promontory and get caught there. But the whole business of the Moon’s phases worked in a different way then: because the distances from the Sun were different, and the orbits, and the angle of something or other, I forget what; as for eclipses, with Earth and Moon stuck together the way they were, why, we had eclipses every minute: naturally, those two big monsters managed to put each other in the shade constantly, first one, then the other.

  Orbit? Oh, elliptical, of course: for a while it would huddle against us and then it would take flight for a while. The tides, when the Moon swung closer, rose so high nobody could hold them back. There were nights when the Moon was full and very, very low, and the tide was so high that the Moon missed a ducking in the sea by a hair’s-breadth; well, let’s say a few yards anyway. Climb up on the Moon? Of course we did. All you had to do was row out to it in a boat and, when you were underneath, prop a ladder against her and scramble up.

  The spot where the Moon was lowest, as she went by, was off the Zinc Cliffs. We used to go out with those little rowing boats they had in those days, round and flat, made of
cork. They held quite a few of us: me, Captain Vhd Vhd, his wife, my deaf cousin, and sometimes little Xlthlx—she was twelve or so at that time. On those nights the water was very calm, so silvery it looked like mercury, and the fish in it, violet-coloured, unable to resist the Moon’s attraction, rose to the surface, all of them, and so did the octopuses and the saffron medusas. There was always a flight of tiny creatures—little crabs, squid, and even some weeds, light and filmy, and coral plants—that broke from the sea and ended up on the Moon, hanging down from that lime-white ceiling, or else they stayed in midair, a phosphorescent swarm we had to drive off, waving banana leaves at them.