SOURCE: “Love and Annihilation in Calvino's Qfwfq Tales,” in Critique, Vol. 30, No. 1, Fall, 1988, pp. 59–68.

[In the following essay, Gery surveys the major themes of Calvino's Qfwfq tales in Cosmicomics and t zero.]

In “Without Colors,” one of the twelve stories in Italo's Calvino's Cosmicomics, Qfwfq, the narrator of the stories (as well as of the first seven stories in their companion volume t-zero), describes in great detail the transformation of the earth's surface from what was once a colorless, silent, dull, and rocky planet without air or water to its more recent form with its “pea-green lawns where the first scarlet poppies were flowering” and with “those canary-yellow fields which striped the tawny hills sloping down to the sea full of azure glints” (Cosmicomics 59–60). As is the case with all the Qfwfq tales, though, what is remarkable about “Without Colors” is that Qfwfq recounts this massive and slow change in the context of his own individual past, and it serves as the backdrop for his love affair with Ayl, a woman who, like Qfwfq, is adapted to this primordial landscape. Early in the story, as Qfwfq runs along the “very uneven terrain” of his world “in the absence of color,” he first distinguishes Ayl, whom he can barely see, only as “a kind of colorless flash running swiftly,” and all he can make out of her appearance are “two flattened glows” serving as eyes (52). Yet he immediately falls in love with her, because to Qfwfq, the colorless Ayl is beautiful.

At first Qfwfq tries to appeal to Ayl by demonstrating their similarities in substance, as opposed to the rocks, and by pointing out the beauty of the faint glimmers around them. But light, color, and sound all threaten Ayl's very existence. Only colorlessness and darkness can preserve her for Qfwfq: “Night fell,” he says, “the first I had spent not embracing a rock,” yet even the light of the stars tends “at every moment to erase Ayl, to cast doubt on her presence” (54).

The critical difference between Qfwfq and Ayl is each's ability to survive change. Always changing, Qfwfq is forever “seeking a new world beyond the pallid patina that imprisoned everything,” whereas Ayl is the “happy inhabitant” of silence and “visual neutrality” (54). She cannot and will not adapt to the inevitable transformation of the earth into a place of color, because for her a world with color means the loss of her colorless self. Despite Qfwfq's relentless searching for her after she disappears into “the bowels of the earth” to escape the birth of color and sound above, despite Qfwfq's own fascination with this new world of color, a world he deems “finally worthy of Ayl's beauty” (57), Ayl herself resists change and ultimately Qfwfq loses her to it. Only afterwards does he recognize her intractable identification with the world without color, but when he does, suddenly the new world with color seems

so trivial to me, so banal, so false, so much in contrast with Ayl's person, with Ayl's world, with Ayl's idea of beauty, that I realized her place could never have been out here. And I realized, with grief and fear, that I had remained out here … and that Ayl's perfect world was lost forever, so lost I couldn't even imagine it anymore.

(60)

“Without Colors” embodies three ironic perceptions characteristic of Calvino's Qfwfq tales: (1) our present world, one that at first may appear more appealing than its predecessors, is rendered as an unimaginable and terrifying future to those who live in what may strike us as a desolate past; (2) Qfwfq, the Protean survivor of the distant past into the present, has only survived by adapting to change, an ability which requires of him the desire always to become what he is not, rather than to protect or preserve what he is (Fontana 147);¹ and (3), the very nature of love, in this case Qfwfq's love for Ayl, can only be understood through the annihilation of what each character is: Qfwfq thinks that only the world of color is “worthy of Ayl's beauty,” but to show that world to her he must, in fact, lie to her in order to lure her to the earth's surface; she, in turn, refuses to give herself up to that world; yet whether she does or she doesn't, the inevitability of the earth's changing to a world of color renders her “lost forever,” even beyond Qfwfq's imagination. (A further irony here, of course, is that Qfwfq's telling of this tale actually disproves that Ayl is lost beyond imagination. Indeed, what distinguishes Qfwfq as a fictional consciousness is precisely his ability to survive annihilation by imagining the meaningful existence of that which he is not.)

Stories of a loss in the past, creating the possibility for the present's coming into being, appear throughout Cosmicomics. For instance, in the book's opening story, “The Distance of the Moon,” Qfwfq is found in pursuit of the elusive Mrs. Vhd Vhd all the way to the moon, yet despite that once he gets there with her “everything exceeded my most luminous hopes” (14), for Qfwfq to remain on the moon indefinitely becomes a form of “exile”: “The fulfillment of my dream of love had lasted only that instant when we had been united,” he tells us, but “torn from its earthly soil, my love now knew only the heartrending nostalgia for what it lacked: a where, a surrounding, a before, an after” (14). Not so for Mrs. Vhd Vhd, though. Her only desire is “to become the Moon, to be assimilated into the object of that extrahuman love” (14). Unable to give himself up to his love, Qfwfq instead is “driven by a natural power that ordered me to return to the Earth” (16), so he goes home. Yet upon his return, whenever the moon is full, like the dogs around him, he finds himself howling for Mrs. Vhd Vhd, the one who “makes the Moon the Moon” but who will forever be apart from him.

Similarly, in “All at One Point,” in which all matter and life are concentrated into a single point in space, it is the desirable Mrs. Ph(i)Nk_o (portrayed by Calvino as something like an Italian mama) who through her “generous desire to make her companions spaghetti unleashes the forces of the universe” (Adler 42), thus “initiating at the same moment the concept of space and, properly speaking, space itself, and time, and universal gravitation, … making possible billions and billions of suns” (Cosmicomics 47). But the moment Mrs. Ph(i)Nk_o lovingly makes such a universe possible, she herself is “lost” to its very multiplicity, while the ever adaptable Qfwfq survives the universe's expansion, only to mourn the loss of the one everyone loved.

Later stories, such as “My Aquatic Uncle” and “The Dinosaurs,” further elaborate on these two kinds of personal annihilation. In the former tale, in which Qfwfq loses the beautiful Lll to his fish uncle, he concludes with a statement of admiration for those creatures in the evolutionary process who resist transformation or even evolution itself, those who like the duck-billed platypus or the dinosaur belong exclusively to some distinct past or future epoch and whose conviction to their own way of being is such that they have “discovered a way to remain immobile through the centuries” (82). Creatures such as Lll, with such deep commitments to who they are, “all had something that made them superior to me, sublime, something that made me, compared to them, mediocre,” confesses Qfwfq. “And yet,” he adds, “I wouldn't have traded places with any of them” (82). Why not? Because for Qfwfq the commitment to wholeness guarantees a being's eventual extinction, and he wants to survive. On the other hand, for Qfwfq to survive evolutionary change involves a different, yet equally devastating self-annihilation, the loss of the self as it is absorbed into the process of change.²

Such a dichotomous view of personal annihilation—whether through a refusal to adapt to change or through change itself—seems a Romantic paradigm, at least in part. As Ernest Fontana writes, “For Calvino, the universe is characterized by change and transformation, new beginnings, but none of these is final or fixed” (148). Nevertheless, he adds,

transformation also brings loss, separation, and, consequently, desire. … Although the superceded configurations of matter are absent, they survive as memories, as nexuses of desire, love, and myth. That which becomes absent is as wonderful as that which becomes present.

(148)

With his evolutionary drive, the Protean Qfwfq desires that which is absent, whether it is that which is lost or that which has yet to become. His is a “(doomed) desire for wholeness,” which, as Marilyn Schneider has noted, “has preoccupied Calvino since his early writing” (94). In Schneider's view, though, this desire for wholeness has les to do with romantic love than with a more generalized “quest for wholeness”:

The erotic relationships illustrate the tentions of desire as an internal psychic force and as a way of perceiving reality. They also allegorize the writer's relationship to his writing. In short, the sexual factor is broadly metaphoric and mythic.

(94)

Another Calvino critic, Jo Ann Cannon, takes a somewhat different, though equally meta-narrative approach to the significance of Qfwfq's sexual desire, when she writes,

although the protagonist's pursuit of the same woman for several millenia suggests a certain coherence in the character, his changing form … reminds us that the name is in fact pure convention. The thematic devices unmask the absence of a stable sign or persona in the text. … Qfwfq is in fact the epitome of a grammatical persona; the only thing which Qfwfq's numerous reincarnations have in common is their exercise of language.

(52–53)³

Though both these critics are right to delve into the structuralist and semiotic nature of the Qfwfq tales, both the technique of the stories and their preoccupation with human-like relationships strongly suggest they have a basis in something more than their own allegorical or metaphysical language. In discussing Calvino's method of composition, Sara Maria Adler describes how he lets his ideas evolve freely in the course of writing simply for “the pleasure of starting out with an idea and letting it evolve according to the logic of his imagination” (15). And although such a technique may result in a “tendency toward repetitiveness” (18) in both Cosmicomics and the later book t-zero, through the course of the tales Calvino's ideas about love and annihilation gradually evolve away from a strict concern with personal annihilation through self-transformation toward a concern with self-annihilation through evolution, a concern more deeply rooted in biological than in ontological thinking. After all, a primary intent of these twenty-one tales seems to be a “humanizing of biological and physical theory” (Fontana 153), particularly attested to by Calvino's overt use of epigraphs for each story taken from his eclectic readings in physics, astronomy, and genetics.

That is not to suggest that the Qfwfq tales do not lend themselves to semiotic analyses. But underneath such analyses, what is so appealing about these tales, I think, especially to readers living in an age of potential nuclear annihilation, is their unique combination of the imagined annihilation of species and the imagined extension of some aspect of the self beyond such annihilation. As it develops through Cosmicomics and t-zero, Qfwfq's conception of love slowly evolves from love expressed as simple self-annihilation of the other to love expressed as the urge to evolve, the urge to produce (whether literally or figuratively) a new being which, in its coming into being, supercedes its own progenitor—thus rendering its own progenitor without meaning while it carries within itself the history and will of that parent.

Three examples from t-zero best substantiate this shift from love as a romantic urge to love as a biological one. In “Crystals,” the third tale in the book, Qfwfq at first professes to a love of order, not as is commonly held as a “repression of the instincts,” but as the opposite. “In me,” he says, “the idea of an absolutely regular world, symmetrical and methodical, is associated with that first impulse and burgeoning of nature, that amorous tension—what you call eros—while all the rest of your images, those that according to you associate passion with disorder, love with intemperate overflow—river fire whirlpool volcano—for me are memories of nothingness and listlessness and boredom” (t-zero 31). yet as with most of the female characters in Cosmicomics, what attracts Qfwfq to Vug in “Crystals” is her very opposition to his ideas about order and time: Whereas Qfwfq can imagine a future world of “slow uniformed expansion” by the crystalline logic that appeals to his sensibility, Vug “already seemed to know that the law of living matter would be infinite separating and rejoining” (36). As Vug persistently tries to get Qfwfq to admit that “real order carries impurity within itself, destruction” (37), he stubbornly resists her. But this story ends not with the personal annihilation of one character or the other; instead, by their merging in the end, though both characters succomb, neither is lost. Everything surrounding Qfwfq at the story's close is crystalline yet imperfectly so: “The victory of the crystals (and of Vug),” he concludes, “has been the same thing as their defeat (and mine)” (38). The crystals neither exist any longer nor disappear altogether; they simply evolve into something else.

In similar fashion, both the penultimate tale “Blood, Sea” and the final tripartite tale “Priscilla” build toward “a finale that doesn't conclude” (92). In “Blood, Sea,” the primordial background is the time before life had evolved into its present stage of individuated bodies, the time when all living cells mingled freely with each other. The story opens in the present with its four characters—Signor Cécere, Jenny Fumagalli, Zylphia, and Qfwfq—going for a weekend joyride in a Volkswagen that is headed for disaster. En route, however, sitting in the back seat with the alluring Zylphia, the ever adaptable Qfwfq starts thinking back on their ancient past, when he and Zylphia as cells swam happily in that “sea where living creatures were at one time immersed,” but which “is now enclosed within their bodies,” as the tale's epigraph says (40). For Qfwfq, during that glorious evolutionary stage, “this business of having the vital element in common was a beautiful thing inasmuch as the separation between me and Zylphia was so to speak overcome and we could feel ourselves at the same time two distinct individuals and a single whole” (46). Because of his current love for Zylphia and his strong distaste for Signor Cécere and Jenny Fumagalli, Qfwfq wistfully recalls his once powerful desire in that premorphic state to reproduce with Zylphia, in order “to multiply our presence in the sea-blood” (47) and to oppress the undesirable presence of the others. Yet in thinking through the logic of this desire to reproduce, Qfwfq comes upon a paradox:

… from the moment when blood becomes “our blood,” the relationship between us and blood changes, that is, what counts is the blood insofar as it is “ours,” and all the rest, us included, counts less. So there was in my impulse toward Zylphia, not only the drive to have all the ocean for us, but also the drive to lose it, the ocean, to annihilate ourselves in the ocean, to destroy ourselves, to torment ourselves. …

(49)

In their present, embodied state, Signor Cécere's risky maneuvers with the Volkswagon constitute for Qfwfq (and for Calvino) a false risk, because the only potential outcome is a violent crash, a crash which indeed occurs but which can only result in “a false return to a sea of blood which [can] no longer be blood or sea” (46) but merely “a number in the statistics of accidents over the weekend” (51). Real annihilation of the self occurs only through the perpetuation of some other coming out of the self—just as the evolutionary perpetuation of bodies has separated one individual's sea-blood from another's and has rendered forever obsolete the chance of returning to that earlier phase, “because our present inside once it is poured out becomes our present outside and it can no longer return to being the outside of the old days” (50). The auto crash kills only the four joyriders, not their entire species, whereas Qfwfq's amorous pursuit of Zylphia (and hers of him) will ultimately lead to the annihilation of who they are and the generation of a new state of being.

The most detailed and thorough explanation of Calvino's intricate paradox of love and annihilation, however, appears in “Priscilla,” Qfwfq's account of evolving from a single-celled organism to a cell which reproduces sexually.⁴ This story, which is more of an exposition than a narration, divides into three parts—“Mitosis” (single-cell reproduction), “Meiosis” (the self-diminishing through its awareness of the other), and “Death” (the loss of the self); however, it is significant that the longest section is Part I, “Mitosis,” before the character of Priscilla appears, because it is in that section where Qfwfq concerns himself with love and desire exclusive of any particular object. Part I begins:

… And when I say “dying of love,”—Qfwfq went on,—I mean something you have no idea of, because you think falling in love has to signify falling in love with another person, or thing, or what have you, in other words I'm here and what I'm in love with is there …, whereas I'm talking about the times before I had established any relationships between myself and anything else, there was a cell and the cell was me, and that was that.

(t-zero 59)

From this point forth, Qfwfq describes his own feelings as he systematically develops from simply being a cell, to being aware of being a cell, to becoming aware of time and space around him (or it, since at this point he has no sexual identity), to feeling simultaneously “satisfaction and the burning desire to do something with space” (63), to developing a “love for this elsewhere, this other time, this otherwise, silent and void” (64), to entering a state of desire that he assiduously explains is not the result of a state of lack but a growth from a state of satisfaction (66), to feeling a desire for movement, and finally, to needing “to stretch to my full width” (69), in order to fill the void around him (or it). Yet at that climactic moment in which Qfwfq finally reproduces himself into two cells, according to his own genetic code, he discovers he is both fully himself and not himself at all (69).⁵

Genetically speaking, in single-cell reproduction, even though a cell reproduces an exact likeness of itself, it does so by splitting into two so that the original cell itself is no longer there. Consequently, neither of the two cells produced is “parent” to the other. During this process of splitting, Qfwfq can only survive, as he says, through a “sense of plurality” (72), because although his genetic stamp is carried on, his awareness of himself as a nucleus has disappeared, and

at the same moment I realized that my moving out of myself was an exit of no return, without possible restitution of the me that now I realize I'm throwing away without its possible restitution to me ever, and then comes the death agony that precipitates triumphantly because life is already elsewhere. …

(72–73)

Despite this certainty of self-annihilation coming from substantial change, however, for Qfwfq “what matters is the moment when wrenching yourself from yourself you feel in a flash the union of past and future” (74). As a being capable of complete transformation, unlike the rest of us, Qfwfq can experience humanly both the prehistoric past and the apocalyptic future, but what he most celebrates is the moment of their union: that essence of life that survives individual death, self-annihilation, even the annihilation of species or genera in the evolutionary process from single-celled existence toward sexual reproduction and, ultimately, human life. (At the close of “Mitosis,” he abruptly reminds us of this connection when he refers, in a seemingly off-hand manner, to his chance encounter with Priscilla Langwood “coming toward me from the void of the elsewhere” in her “red coat little black boots bangs freckles” [74].)

In “Meiosis,” as he reflects on his desire for Priscilla, whether as a “maternal cell,” a woman, or even a female camel, Qfwfq acknowledges that for each sexual being, life is created by the tension between “a general past to which all individual pasts refer but which no matter how far you go back doesn't exist except in the form of individual cases” (80), on the one hand, and each individual encounter in the present, on the other—an encounter which Qfwfq may have a sense of as “an impulse toward the afterward” but which, more precisely stated, is “the final action of the past that is fulfilled through us” (81) and that inevitably becomes the unknowable past of those who are born after us. In other words, Qfwfq concludes that his desire for Priscilla is in itself meaningless, since it is not a fusion of two independent beings but merely “a juxtaposition of two distinct bodies”: “Nobody was lost in the other,” he complains, “nobody has given in or has given himself; the two cells now one are packaged together but just as they were before: the first they feel is a slight disappointment” (81). “Void, separation and waiting, that's what we are,” he adds later (82), and still later,

it's pointless for us to run, Priscilla, to meet each other and follow each other: the past disposes of us with blind indifference. … We were only the preparation, the envelope, for the encounter of pasts which happens through us but which is already a part of another story, the story of the afterward: the encounters always take place before and after us, and in them the elements of the new, forbidden to us, are active: chance, risk, improbability.

(84)

There is anything but a romantic or inflated sense of self-importance in this passage. What Qfwfq (and Calvino, I suspect) have stumbled upon, in an attempt to tell a love story about two cells, is the necessity of telling that story within its larger genetic context, even beyond individual consciousness, in order to provide meaning to the individual life. Even if we cannot be certain whether we are the consequence of “the sum of dominant characteristics of the past,” or we are “what descends from the succession of defeated characteristics” (82), even if our lives themselves are “not free” though “surrounded by freedom” (84), and even if our individual existences “are only meeting places for messages from the past” (85) so that love is nothing but “the encounter of two individuals who don't exist” (85)—what Qfwfq finally deduces is that the reason for our own absence (or uncertainty of our presence) is our integration, our utter entanglement, with a past we cannot know, as well as with a future we can only imagine but for which we will only serve as an unknowable past.

Not only despite that, but because our existence is, at best, “an interval of void” at moments “grazed by the wave which continues to renew combinations of molecules and to complicate them or erase them,” each individual love story “cannot be separated from the story of all the rest of what exists, and therefore from the story of what doesn't exist and, not existing, causes what does exist to exist” (85). As we discover with Ayl, Mrs. Vhd Vhd, Lll, Vug, Zylphia, and others in the Qfwfq tales, individual self-annihilation in the past has created the condition making possible some new combination “in the temporal and spatial distribution of living cells,” and in the present, our own certainty of dying, of not remaining unchanged (as uncertain or unknowable as the nature of that change may be) assures us “that something happens or has happened or will happen which involves us directly and—I would dare say—happily and totally” (86). We may not know what role we play in living, nor whether we have already played it, nor what unimaginable consequences our role may effect, but the fact of the uncertainty of our very existence proves for Calvino its function: We engage in love not to gain our own immortality (since we cannot even be assured of our own independent existence, let alone its continuity beyond our lives), but to create the possibility for that which is not us but which depends on us for its potential to survive us.⁶

As paradoxical as it seems, our own annihilation is the best course to follow to guarantee the existence of something afterward, to the extent that “what doesn't exist … causes what does exist to exist.” Such annihilation, though, is not a self-aggrandized urge to transcend this existence toward some other, but a more modest endeavor. For Qfwfq, “dying of love” is finally a biological and metaphysical necessity for the continuity of life and the survival of consciousness, human or otherwise. And for me, in reading Calvino, the significant irony is that real self-annihilation in love is neither selfless nor self-destructive so much as it is acting in concert with what, in any other context, would be recognizable as the instinctive nature of all life to abide, to preserve that part of itself which is both itself and not itself, to carry on.

Notes

1. Ernest L. Fontana does a good job of analyzing the Protean nature of the Qfwfq of Cosmicomics in his piece “Metamorphoses of Proteus: Calvino's Cosmicomics.” He defines Qfwfq as “the continuity, the undifferentiated Protean urge that endures so long as matter endures. Like Proteus, none of his transformations is final, none of them exhaustible of his creative plentitude” (147).

2. The end of the story “The Dinosaurs,” where Qfwfq comes upon his own son by the “Half-Breed,” best demonstrates this total loss of self. As the last dinosaur, Qfwfq is not even recognized for what he is by the villagers or “New Ones,” who call him “The Ugly One” yet continue to spin all sorts of horrific legends about the supposedly “extinct” dinosaurs. “Our extinction had been a grandiose epilogue, worthy of our past” (109), Qfwfq says, and “I knew that the more Dinosaurs disappear, the more they extend their dominion … in the labyrinth of the survivors' thoughts” (111). But when he questions his own son, whom he secretly considers “so perfect, so full of his own Dinosaur essence” (112), about his identity, the innocent son unknowingly responds, “What a question! Everybody knows that: I'm a New One!” Having thus been entirely annihilated as a dinosaur, through biological as well as psychic erasure, Qfwfq sees he has no choice but to go to the nearest train station and to go to another evolutionary state.

3. Ten pages later, Cannon adds, “Le cosmicomiche and Ti con zero are permeated by a kind of nostalgia for a prelinguistic or pre-semiotic era distinguished by the presence of things rather than the absence inherent in the notion of sign” (63). I would argue, however, that it is less “a kind of nostalgia” than a logically yet imaginatively developed mental exercise in the creation of such a prehistoric era through a narrator who operates on the assumptions of a linguistic era.

4. Marilyn Schneider provides an etymological interpretation of the name of “Priscilla” for the other, or feminine, force in this story: “As a diminutive of Prisco, the name carries its Latin sense of anteriority; more specifically, anteriority to the turbulent Scylla of classical myth,” the beautiful sea nymph loved by Glaucus who was transformed by the jealous Circe into a sea monster—thus combining “sirenic attraction and violent destructiveness” (94). Nonetheless, even with this explanation, Part I of the story remains “pre-Priscilla,” as it were.

5. Evidently, this section of “Priscilla” embodies exactly Georges Bataille's description of single-cell reproduction, as quoted by Calvino as the first of a series of epigraphs preceding the story (t-zero 55–56).

6. This dependence is most clearly demonstrated in Part III of “Priscilla” (“Death”), where Qfwfq points out the evolutionary paradox in which single-celled organisms—which are able to produce exact likenesses of themselves—have strangely come to be dependent for their environment on organisms that reproduce sexually and are, therefore, slated for annihilation: “So the world of the eternals,” he says, “has been incorporated into the world of the perishable, and their immunity to death serves to guarantee us our mortal condition” (t-zero 91).

Works Cited

Adler, Sara Maria. Calvino: The Writer as Fablemaker. Potomac, Maryland: José Porrua Turanzas, S. A. Studia Humanitatis Series, 1979.

Calvino, Italo. Cosmicomics. Translated from the Italian by William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1968.

———. t-zero. Translated from the Italian by William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1969.

Cannon, Jo Ann. Italo Calvino: Writer and Critic. Ravenna, Italy: Longo Editore, 1981.

Fontana, Ernest L. “Metamorphoses of Proteus: Calvino's Cosmicomics.” Perspectives on Contemporary Literature 5 (1979): 147–54.

Schneider, Marilyn. “Calvino's Erotic Metaphor and the Hermaphroditic Solution.” Stanford Italian Review 2:1 (Spring 1981): 93–118.