SOURCE: “Science and Imagination in Calvino's Cosmicomics,” in Mosaic, Vol. 15, No. 4, December, 1982, pp. 47–58.

[In the following essay, Hume investigates the role of science and perception in the stories that comprise Cosmicomics and t zero.]

The stories that make up Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics and T Zero are generally regarded as dazzling and bizarre little fantasies which grow out of scientific propositions.¹ Critics and reviewers have tried to relate them to science fiction, but Calvino's stories lack that form's speculative interest in how humans would respond to technologically defined situations.² Most readers so delight in the narrator's virtuoso dance through galaxies and life forms that few have asked any questions about what—if anything—Calvino may have intended with these jeux d'esprit.

Calvino is one of the few sophisticated writers who are interested in science and its effects on our minds, rather than just its influence on our material expectations and social patterns. Among his apparent aims in these stories is the desire to challenge the adequacy of science to serve as our only interpreter of the phenomenal world.³

What makes this challenge unusual is its lack of theological impetus. The inability of science to see the evidence of God's handiwork through its microscope is not an issue. Calvino accepts the Godless universe. He delights in forcing very ordinary forms of “human” consciousness to face the full scientific complexity of this universe. He raises questions about meaning in life and death, and offers answers that owe nothing to religious doctrine. In short, Calvino starts these cosmic vignettes by accepting science, but goes on to insist that we must augment the revelations of science if our view of the universe and of ourselves is to give us a sense of meaning. We need to experience the cosmos imaginatively as well as analytically.

“The Origin of the Birds,” in T Zero, is unusually explicit in its contrast of imaginative and scientific modes of perception, though the conclusion Calvino reaches in this one story is more pessimistic than those of his other stories. As usual, he starts with a scientific fact, recorded in dry, scientific notation: “The appearance of Birds comes relatively late, in the history of evolution, following the emergence of all the other classes of the animal kingdom. … This is the only exception to the successive appearance of animal groups progressively more developed in the zoological scale” (TZ, pp. 14–15). This evolutionary anomaly prompts Calvino to imagine the emotions of the world's inhabitants when the first archeopteryx-like creature appears: “we were looking at the bird full of amazement—festive amazement, with desire on our part also to sing, to imitate that first warbling, and to jump, to see the bird rise in flight—but also full of consternation, because the existence of birds knocked our traditional way of thinking into a cocked hat” (p. 16). In this first narrative situation, Calvino spoofs scientific as well as social outlooks:⁴ “the ideas that governed our world had come to a crisis. What everyone had thought he understood before, the simple and regular way in which things were as they were, was no longer valid; in other words: this was nothing but one of the countless possibilities” (p. 23). Like the world of traditional mathematics at the evolution of non-Euclidean geometries, the realm of number theory at the announcement of Gödel's Theorem, the world of Newtonian physics faced with Relativity Theory, the society of the narrator, Qwfwq, finds the shattering of traditional verities an uncomfortable process for all but the rare, questing soul. Qwfwq himself is drawn toward the bird. He follows it and reaches a dizzy brink on which he stands in the old, known world and gazes toward a new world inhabited exclusively by what he once would have called monsters. The first part of the story thus reaches a vision of two worlds, an epiphany in a high place.

Qwfwq enters this world of cosmic novelty and finds beauty in the new forms, both abstractly and, more immediately, in the feminine form of Org-Onir-Ornit-Or, with whom he attempts to elope. Like characters in a fairy tale—a form Calvino has worked with a great deal⁵—they are pursued, she is recaptured, and he is deported to his old home, which now seems a wasteland to him, even though it has changed, for birds are now not only accepted, but all the rage. They are the new science, and old U(h), who had vehemently denounced their appearance, now believes birds to be “the only truth of the world. He had taken to interpreting the birds' flight, trying to read the future in it” (p. 24). Qwfwq seeks his lost love, makes his way to Or's land, is imprisoned, and then is offered marriage by Or, now queen of the birds. It all seems to be heading for a fairy tale ending, with no meaning beyond the story and no apparent intellectual issue.

But Calvino changes his mode again. From the world of a satirized conservative science, and from the world of fairy tale, he now moves to the world of visionary experience. Qwfwq wants to understand the ecstatic “feathery flutter of iridescent images” that threaten to overpower his rational faculty. He realizes with horror that Or intends to make him “safe” by destroying his memory of the past. He struggles against this psychological remolding, which was to have taken place as they consummated their marriage. For a moment, he achieves a synthesis, a holistic vision which includes his world and hers: “For a fraction of a second between the loss of everything I knew and the gain of everything I would know afterward, I managed to embrace in a single thought the world of things as they were and of things as they could have been, and I realized that a single system included all. The world of birds, of monsters, of Or's beauty was the same as the one where I had always lived, which none of us had understood wholly” (p. 26). But the world of Or, of the imagination, is too powerful and jealous. Qwfwq again loses Or, this time for good: “What I've told you is all I can reconstruct. … But are they real birds, these ones that have remained in our midst? The more I observe them, the less they suggest what I would like to remember. (The last strip is all photographs: a bird, the same bird in close-up, the head of the bird enlarged, a detail of the head, the eye. …)” (p. 27).

Qwfwq's experiences suggest a range of possible visions, and hint at man's troubles in grasping them. His moment of oneness gave him all that his old scientific outlook could give him, as well as all that the world of imagination could afford him, of iridescent images. But he can no more hold on to the vision than he can prolong the orgasm which raises him to this moment of synthesis. Blasted by the forces from the imaginative side of his being, Qwfwq is left playing with the broken shards of memory. From them, he creates a symbol for both science and art that evokes an unusual pathos. Working with photographs, he constructs a changing collage of details. All the vividness and life that is “bird” is reduced to what the camera can record: frozen two-dimensional fragments, with no movement, no consciousness, no unity. Not just his imaginative but his scientific experience as well proves incapable of sustaining a living picture. Only by uniting the two can one begin to understand the changing and dynamic universe.

How Calvino approaches the problem of achieving such integration will be the next concern, but we should keep in mind a key contrast suggested by this story: one can try to make love to the object of one's vision, or one can photograph it. We should further note the compromise mode for describing this experience which Qwfwq works out; he describes the episodes as frames in a comic strip, a form that allows Calvino to involve him in such reflexive, “strange loops”⁶ as spreading paste on one corner of a frame, having a bird fly through the frame and stick in the paste, and then having the bird fly off, dragging Qwfwq behind and thus transporting him again to the otherwise unattainable land of the birds. This verbal cartoon strip is in truth a weird and wonderful integration of photograph and iridescent image.⁷

In scientific endeavor, one tries to use language denotatively, to restrict words to single, unambiguous meanings. Scientists think in terms of finding how some process works: what causes the change from first phase to second, and second to third. Normal science (to use Thomas Kuhn's term) is possible for experimenters because they believe in the existence of solutions to the puzzles they study and work in circumstances that admit of as few variables as possible, confident through faith in causality that the desired end can be achieved.⁸ Avoidance of ambiguity and faith in cause and effect are primary characteristics of scientific thinking.

Such rigorous circumscription and deliberate limitation are necessary if scientific handbooks are to be filled with reliable tables. But causal logic is not our only, or indeed our primary, way of thinking. Association is our most encompassing mode of perception, and it supplies us with metaphor and simile. Association enriches through addition. A metaphor multiplies shades of meaning, attracts associated ideas for comparison. It may produce “over-determination” of meanings, or introduce an ambiguity whose creation of tension in the reader's mind can deepen the effectiveness of the work of art. What Calvino does is integrate the causal and associative modes of perception and celebrate the richness that comes of marrying these two forces. He insists that we go beyond normal science and argues for associative enrichment as an enlightening adjunct to science. He establishes an array of possible associations by running his scientific facts through rhetorical amplification and extension. He puts science through hoops, and demonstrates its ability to serve any number of functions.

One such function is situational metaphor. In “The Form of Space,” three parallel lines through space are traced by a human triangle: Qwfwq, Ursula H'x and Lieutenant Fenimore. Ursula shows no interest in the males. Qwfwq longs feverishly for her and sees in Fenimore a hated rival. The psychological stasis implied by their interrelations is well embodied in the parallel lines, whether those lines remain forever parallel, or whether, in a non-Euclidian world, they meet, or whether—as Qwfwq muses—the lines are really the letters of handwritten script, constituting the script of a cowboy shoot-out scenario. The scientific concept is pressed into service here as a means of interpreting some foolish patterns often seen in human behavior, but these immortal embodiments of our folly in turn remind us to visualize more clearly than we normally do the implications of parallelism. They force us to see it from our limited human perspective, and to assimilate it in new ways.

Science is a philosophical pun in “The Distance of the Moon.” The actions of the story depend on the effects of the law of gravity which are felt by Qwfwq and his friends during that strange time when earth and moon were in such close proximity that one could leap from one to the other. The pun involves an equation between physical and human forces. The forces of gravity exert their pull; so do the attractions and repulsions generated within the group by their intrigues, loves and jealousies. The moon's forces guide their outer lives; the loves and jealousies control their inner, and manage to keep the social group functioning despite the potentially devastating change of the moon's withdrawal. A variety of early philosophers, including Neoplatonists and Christians, imagined the universe to be physically held together, the elements bound in place, by “love.” Boethius talks about love as a cohesive and binding force in his Consolation of Philosophy (II, m. 8; IV, m. 6). Dante ends Paradiso with his vision of the love that moves the sun and all the stars. Such early cosmologists pictured love as a literal force, a preposterous notion to today's scientist, until one translates “love” as “attraction.” Suddenly we recognize our own universe, ruled indeed by mysterious forces of attraction and repulsion. In his play on various forces of attraction, Calvino manages to twit science about its own intellectual forerunners; he reminds us to interact with our world with levity as well as gravity; and he shows in action those forces that give our lives meaning.

Science enters human relationships as the basis for game or for more serious rivalry in several of the Cosmicomics stories. In “How Much Shall We Bet?” Qwfwq and Dean (k)yK wager on such far off events as which planet around the sun will have an atmosphere, or whether Arsenal or Real Madrid will win a soccer match. In this game-context, Calvino can push science from those events which can logically be predicted to the sorts of individualities which defy scientific logic's modelling or predicting. In “Games without End,” Qwfwq and Pfwfp discover new hydrogen atoms in accordance with the steady state hypothesis. But they go on to create new, fake atoms out of “photoelectric radiations, scrapings from magnetic fields, a few neutrons collected in the road” (CC, p. 65). The creation of such new, rather unstable elements, and the assembling of new galaxies, which Qwfwq and Pfwfp use to hotrod around the universe, represent productive and imaginative acts, yet are carried out by two young thugs as part of their efforts to outdo each other. By seeing science in such hands, which is to say by such seriously playful association, we learn something about science as a human activity.

A scientific theory or fact also fuels rivalries in “Without Colors,” “Crystals” and “The Soft Moon.” In “Crystals,” the central hypothesis is that the world might have cooled in such a fashion that each element would have separated out and become a huge, pure crystal. Qwfwq prefers his crystals as large and orderly as possible; Vug likes hers flawed and varied. Qwfwq realizes that her kind of disorder makes possible the world he takes for granted, including technology: “As I look around I see nothing but perturbations of the order of the atoms: luminescent tubes, TV, the condensing of tiny silver crystals on the photographic plates. … From the transistor comes the sound of a saxophone” (TZ, p. 38). In this story, Qwfwq plays the role more obviously associated with science and its passion for order, but he reminds us of how useful the flaws can be, even within the ordered realms of science and technology. Science strives for the elegant proof, the law that admits no exceptions. Yet the major advances in science come from work on the stubborn exceptions, the flaws in the orderly theoretical equations, the data that seem irreconcilable until we find which of our assumptions is faulty. The furthest development of Vug's world would be entropy; the result of Qwfwq's would be frozen stasis. Only in an unstable balance between these tendencies can life exist. Science in this story is a pawn in the war between the sexes, as it also is in “The Soft Moon.” But beyond the scientific and human dialectic, Calvino seems, allegorically, to be pushing for accommodation between two extreme views: balancing them, he implies, creates dynamic music, a higher harmony. He ends “Crystals” with reference to some Thelonius Monk jazz—a balance between repeated pattern and variation. Calvino does not treat science as the villain, but urges man to place it in a context that expands its possible meanings and uses.

In several stories, the scientific fact is associated with joy, wonder and love. “Mitosis” is an exquisite projection of a quasi-orgasmic love-death in which the cell experiences an instant of holistic vision encompassing a dual self before division and fragmentation of that vision ensue. “At Daybreak” invites us to respond to the awesome moment of first light. In “All at One Point,” the moment before the big bang is Calvino's scientific focus, and his enrichment of this hypothesis leads him to an ultimate love. Mrs. Ph(i)NK₀ is the generous, easy-going feminine force who makes bearable the tenement-like life they lead as all are squashed together at one point.

It was enough for her to say, at a certain moment: “Oh, if I only had some room, how I'd like to make some noodles for you boys!” And in that moment we all thought of the space that her round arms would occupy, moving backward and forward with the rolling pin over the dough … we thought of the space that the flour would occupy, and the wheat for the flour, and the fields to raise the wheat … of the space it would take for the Sun to arrive with its rays, to ripen the wheat; of the space for the Sun to condense from the clouds of stellar gases and burn; of the quantities of stars and galaxies and galactic masses in flight through space which would be needed to hold suspended every galaxy, every nebula, every sun, every planet, and at the same time we thought of it, this space was inevitably being formed.

(CC, pp. 46–47)

Her nurturing love brings into existence the universe we know—hers is truly the love that moves the sun and all the stars. She is translated into Qwfwq knows not what kind of energy-light-heat, and all her admirers mourn her loss and secretly look forward to the recontraction of the universe, hoping that it will return them to the paradise of her presence and love. With this feminized creation myth, Calvino not only makes the scientist in us wonder at the inconceivability of the big bang; he also reminds us of the wonder to be found in fields of wheat and in human love. He invites us to enjoy the scientific hypothesis, and to picture it, but he also encourages us to derive from it a kind of paradisal joy.

Officially, scientists try to avoid contaminating their knowledge with wild associations. In linking the factual to the human, the emotional, the beautiful and the trivial, Calvino is pushing the associative into partnership with the causal modes of thought. This may seem quixotic or pernicious, but we should remember that within the framework of science itself, the major discoveries and breakthroughs—as opposed to routine puzzle solving—usually come from associative thinking, and from the insights offered by metaphor or symbol, and from the subconscious linking of disparate elements. A famous example of such an associative leap is Kekulé's dream of the ouroboros, which led him to the ring structure of benzene. In 1865, he had vainly been trying to come up with a plausible structure for C₆H₆. Then, one day, while dozing before a fire, he pictured atoms whirling, turning into a snake with its tail in its mouth, and was inspired to hypothesize a ring structure.⁹ Similarly, Maxwell's ideas on thermodynamics came together as he conceived of his metaphoric demon. Sudden insight from the realm of the everyday is manifest in Archimedes' bath, Newton's apple and Einstein's clock tower and tram. Henri Poincaré describes several apparently unheralded blinding flashes of insight, and notes that only much later could he see the analogy which had provided him with the requisite paradigm. The association which made his mathematical discoveries possible was unconscious.¹⁰ Arthur Koestler quotes Poincaré, and discusses such moments of insight as they have been recorded in many scientific realms. He sees as common to most of them hidden analogies, likenesses, that emerge when the mind instantaneously superimposes two disparate fields of thought. Calvino flaunts his creation of such unheralded associations. His resulting insights may be more in the areas of human understanding, or in the sociology of science, than in science itself, but through his juggling act, we see science gaining relevance to our lives. He offers a poeticization of science, not instead of ordinary science, but in addition to it.

Calvino insists that we should augment the scientific way of thinking because that way is by definition limited. Its products are of necessity circumscribed, just as the static elegance of Euclidian geometry cannot be expected to figure the volume of irregular solids. He feels that both creativity and vision, the two aspects of imagination, are lacking within the world projected by scientific thought.

Creativity takes many forms in Calvino's stories. Qwfwq's mythologizing of the moon, and his bringing alive the world of “dead” matter are quasi-literary creative efforts. “A Sign in Space” shows creativity in Qwfwq's orgy of signmaking. For all that it grows out of his furious rivalry with Kgwgk, this discovery of signmaking will make all communication—including scientific—possible. “All at One Point” celebrates Mrs. Ph(i)NK₀'s creation of the universe for those she loves. “Games without End” wryly puts scientific creation—new matter, new galaxies—in the hands of adolescent hoods, to be the toys with which they express their rivalry. According to Calvino, much of creation arises from basic emotions: rivalry, jealousy, desire to distinguish oneself, desire to attract a mate, disappointed love. Any of these commonplaces can call forth a frenzy of creative actions which somehow add to the universe, change it, make more possible, bring into existence something new. Qwfwq greatly admires the new: “The Aquatic Uncle” shows his puppy love for a being who had evolved more than any of the others around; “Without Colors” dazzles him with the advent of color, while his love, Ayl, flees the novelty; he admires birds when they first appear. Qwfwq's many metamorphoses testify to Calvino's enjoyment of newness for its own sake. Calvino's fictive world shows novelty coming forth out of messy emotions, not out of the restrained and disciplined activities that relate to science. But these activities may benefit and be made creative by contact with the imaginative and wild side of the mind. Qwfwq and Pfwfp may create their new atoms out of spite, but create they do. The deaf and dumb cousin of “The Distance of the Moon” is both scientific and imaginative; he knows the moon, understands her secrets and finds her milk better than any of the others. But his virtuosity shows itself as a sportive love, not as a laboratory investigation.

Perhaps Calvino sees creation as only indirectly linked to scientific thinking because of the nature of that thinking. Science causes man to make himself into an observer, and demands objectivity, impersonality and passivity. Any personal and human reactions must be rigorously suppressed. Yet the attempt can never be fully successful. As corollary to the uncertainty principle, we know that beyond a certain point, observation and the observer may affect the natural behavior of the thing observed. Experimenters trying to determine the basic components of atoms affect the movement of those components. Anthropologists observing primitives are themselves non-normal irritants within the social body, and produce aberrant behavior. Psychologists helping patients interpret experience impose their own frame of values. Preparing samples for an electron microscope changes their nature. These and many other instances make clear that the scientist as entirely objective and non-interfering observer is a misconception, and Calvino plays with this tension between the ideal and the reality. But even though a scientist cannot achieve pure objectivity, the disciplined striving he subjects himself to does isolate him to some extent—to his detriment and sometimes to his subject's. This partial isolation can make human reactions stunted and imperfect.¹¹

Calvino offers vision as a means of reconciling scientific and imaginative thinking. Vision is the flash of insight which enables contradictory phenomena to fall into a harmonious pattern. Vision transforms the unknown, and makes it part of a larger order. The intensity, duration and inclusiveness of Calvino's visionary insights vary, and most are undercut by some emotional ambivalence. The revelation of “A Sign in Space”—that space is a general thickness of signs and ultimately unknowable—might almost be a vision of defeat, were it not a genuine advance in Qwfwq's understanding. The vision in “Mitosis” exists for so short an instant, and is annihilated so totally by the completion of cell division, that it creates no lasting understanding. “The Origin of the Birds” moves us with the pathos of vision smashed. Along with Qwfwq however we retain our belief that the vision of wholeness and continuity did exist, did bring everything—the might-have-beens and the real—into a continuous whole. Qwfwq affirms the validity and reality of the vision, even if he cannot recapture it.

“The Spiral” creates a more lasting composite of fact and insight, and may well be one of Calvino's finest moments, for its proffered vision remains open-ended. The whole story is a philosophical pun on the meaning of vision. In this tale, Qwfwq is a mollusk: “For the majority of mollusks, the visible organic form has little importance in the life of the members of a species, since they cannot see one another and have, at most, only a vague perception of other individuals and of their surroundings. This does not prevent brightly colored stripings and forms which seem very beautiful to our eyes (as in many gastropod shells) from existing independently of any relationship to visibility” (CC, p. 141). Out of a natural mystery—color produced by the blind—Calvino weaves a variation on his usual story: Qwfwq, in love, turns creative to identify himself for his lady friend. Slashing across this expected pattern, however, is a flash forward in evolutionary time to the present, and Qwfwq presents us with a slice of life as seen from a beach. He includes the tourists, the ice-cream truck, the encyclopedia volumes being delivered, the passenger on a train, the queen bee swarming, the daughter of an observatory keeper reading a film magazine about a Cleopatra movie.

According to Qwfwq, this infinitely visible world was called into being by his primordial urge to make color with which to impress his mate. His loves have multiplied along with the colors.

I look around, and whom am I looking for? She is still the one I seek; I've been in love for five hundred million years, and if I see a Dutch girl on the sand … there she is: I recogize her from her inimitable way of raising one shoulder until it almost touches her cheek. I'm almost sure, or rather I'd say absolutely sure if it weren't for a certain resemblance that I find also in the daughter of the keeper of the observatory, and in the photograph of the actress made up as Cleopatra, or perhaps in Cleopatra as she really was in person … I am certain I recognize her in a female gull and a moment later I suspect that instead she's an anchovy, though she might just as well be any queen or slave-girl named by Herodotus … I am in love with each of those girls and at the same time I am sure of being in love always with her alone.

(pp. 148–49)

Eyesight makes this rich and complex world possible. After surveying this sensual largesse, Qwfwq returns to his original mollusk form and condition, despondent because other life forms—but not mollusks—are developing eyes:

all of a sudden, around us, eyes were opening, and corneas and irises and pupils: the swollen, colorless eye of polyps and cuttlefish, the dazed and gelatinous eyes of bream and mullet, the protruding and peduncled eyes of crayfish and lobsters, and bulging and faceted eyes of flies and ants. … The inexpressive eyes of the gull examine the surface of the water. Beyond a glass mask the frowning eyes of an underwater fisherman explore the depths. Through the lens of a spyglass a sea captain's eyes and the eyes of a woman bathing converge on my shell, then look at each other, forgetting me. Framed by far-sighted lenses I feel on me the farsighted eyes of a zoologist, trying to frame me in the eye of a Rolleiflex. At that moment a school of tiny anchovies, barely born, passes before me, so tiny that in each little white fish it seems there is room only for the eye's black dot, and it is a kind of eye-dust that crosses the sea.

(pp. 152–53)

Qwfwq can comfort himself only with the notion that he has foreseen these developments and to some extent caused them.¹² He ends with a romantic image of himself and his loved one mirrored in each other's eyes, the reflections stretching out to infinity. No zoologist can catch that in his Rolleiflex.

Notice that man as observer—with binoculars, face mask, camera and naked eye—tried to stand back and watch. But mere watching, here shown to be a kind of voyeurism, can do nothing with the mystery of Qwfwq's color. Nor can the observation see the longings that brought his creative effort about. The more the watchers focus on him, the less likely they are to see or sense the creative network of relationships which link him to those elements of our modern world which he describes in his flash forward. At best, the observers may be able to catalog his physical life cycle. Scientific man tries to stand back and watch, whether the world is his oyster, or an oyster, his world. Qwfwq sees, not just in the sense of neutral perception, but in the sense of joining himself to the world. He loves those living fragments of the world which bear even the faintest traces of the eternal feminine, and he longs to give of himself to each manifestation. Thus guided by the mysteries of sexual polarity, he feels related by love or rivalry to all living creatures.¹³

This sexualizing of the cosmos is the basis for Calvino's ultimate alternative to mere observation. Making love to the universe is his aim, and seeking union with it leads to vision. We see such a breakthrough, literally during sexual union, in “The Origin of the Birds.” Qwfwq refers to his perception of a kind of sexuality in the glorious harmony of crystals, and in the moon in “The Distance of the Moon” and “The Soft Moon.” Making love demands mutuality, interaction, a striving for oneness and harmony. The ensuing vision does not annihilate consciousness, but extends it, as in “The Origin of the Birds” and “The Spiral,” where consciousness expands to embrace all the world. Science can create an encompassing pattern, an interpretation of the phenomenal world. But this scientific “whole” has a flaw, the separated and isolated consciousness of the observer. Calvino urges that human consciousness, through imaginative play, strive to become one with the world, to discover itself to be part of a seamless whole. His emphasis on reintegration may be meant to go beyond the common poetic desire for an “unfallen” state in which consciousness is not alienated from the rest of mind and matter.

Current attempts to test Bell's Theorem seem to confirm that the principle of local causes is false: that the universe, contrary to appearances, consists of unbroken wholeness which in some sense was synchronized by the Big Bang in such a fashion that something happening in one “part” can affect that which happens in another “part” simultaneously. Wolfgang Pauli and C. G. Jung speculated on the apparent identity of certain psychic and physical phenomena, and on the possibility that discovery of the universe, especially through mathematical formulas, is a discovery of self, a projection of the mind through numbers.¹⁴ Not only does Calvino offer us an intimation of this unity (see his version of supradeterminism in “How Much Shall We Bet?”), he also suggests how we can improve our sense of that oneness. Science made a start by turning humans outward from themselves. Imagination is what Calvino offers as our means for helping us complete the circle, for helping us integrate ourselves with what we see and for helping us learn to love as well as to observe.¹⁵

Notes

1. Le Cosmicomiche and Ti con zero were both published by Einaudi (Turin, 1965, 1967). William Weaver's English translations first appeared in 1968 and 1969, and both were issued as Harbrace Paperbound Library editions in 1976. Quotations are from these paper editions, and are identified as coming from Cosmicomics (CC) or T Zero (TZ). Qwfwq does not narrate all of the stories in T Zero, but most of them clearly belong to Calvino's cosmicomical vein.

2. Donald Heiney discusses Calvino's stories as science fiction (projected onto the past instead of the future) in “Calvino and Borges: Some Implications of Fantasy,” Mundus Artium, 2 (1968), 66–76, and “Calvinismo,” Iowa Review, 2 (Winter 1971), 80–87. Reviewers, though they make the connection with science fiction, tend to rush to assure the readers that Calvino is not “real” science fiction, but something much profounder. See such reviews as those in Library Journal, 15 November 1968 and 1 September 1969.

3. This point is recognized by Antonio Illiano in “Per una definizione della vena cosmogonica di Calvino: Appunti su ‘Le Cosmicomiche’ e ‘Ti con zero’,” Italica, 49 (1972), 291–301, when he remarks in passing: “A tratti la parodia raggiunge apici di ludicro divertimento barocco (come quando Qwfwq gioca con gli atomi o quando gioca a far volare le galassie), che può sottintendere una radicale sfiducia nella scienza come metodo assoluto per comprendere la realtà e il bisogno di reconoscere alla letterature e all'ingegno un maggior potere di comprensione e di conoscenza.” (p. 295). (“At times, the pardoy reaches heights of hilarious baroque entertainment (such as when Qwfwq plays with atoms, or enjoys making galaxies fly), which can imply a radical distrust of science as an absolute method of understanding reality, and can also imply the need to acknowledge in literature and imagination a greater power of comprehension and intellectual grasp.”) But Illiano concerns himself with Qwfwq as antihero, with the intrusion of the humorous into the intellectual, and with the tension between alienation and parody—literary rather than scientific concerns.

4. Francesca Bernardini Napoletano comments on the parodies of scientific dogmatism in “The Origin of the Birds” and “The Soft Moon” in I Segni Nuovi di Italo Calvino da “Le Cosmicomiche” a “Le città invisibili” (Rome, 1977), esp. pp. 33–35.

5. J. R. Woodhouse analyzes Calvino's revitalization of the fairy story as a literary form in “Italo Calvino and the Rediscovery of a Genre,” in Italian Quarterly, 12 (1968), 45–66. Just published in English is Calvino's Italian Folktales (Fiabe italiane (1956), a concrete expression of his attraction to the form.

6. This is one of the terms used by Douglas R. Hofstadter to describe points at which art, music and mathematics take off into the irrational via paradox. See Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York, 1979).

7. Teresa de Lauretis analyzes this use of comic strip as one of the many subcodes of discourse which Calvino explores, in “Narrative Discourse in Calvino: Praxis or Poiesis?” PMLA, 90 (1975), 414–25.

8. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Vol. 2, no. 2, 2nd edn. (Chicago, 1970).

9. Carl Jung analyzes Kekulé's dream of the ouroboros in Man and his Symbols (New York, 1964). In a later chapter in that compilation, M.-L. von Franz lists and discusses many such non-rational moments of scientific breakthrough (see especially pp. 306–10).

10. Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation: A Study of the Conscious and Unconscious in Science and Art (1964; New York, 1967), especially Part Two, Chapter Five, “Moments of Truth,” pp. 101–20.

11. The isolation I am talking about here is not precisely the same as the psychological and political alienation seen (especially in Calvino's earlier stories and novels) by several critics, although the two are perhaps interrelated. See Illiano, and also Woodhouse, “Fantasy, Alienation, and the Racconti of Italo Calvino,” Forum for Modern Language Studies, 6 (1970), 399–412.

12. Contardo Calligaris, in Italo Calvino (Milan, 1973), p. 93, sees Calvino as debunking anthropocentric prejudice in having Qwfwq display gastropodicentrism. Though this is undoubtedly part of what Calvino is doing, he is also concerned with insisting on the importance of non-causal, non-logical networks of relationships.

13. John Gatt-Rutter, in “Calvino Ludens: Literary Play and its Political Implications,” Journal of European Studies, 5 (1975), 319–40, thinks the terms in which Calvino sexualizes the universe to be dishonest: “He [Calvino] sees the universe as love, but as a love that is sex-based, limited to desire, and therefore essentially procreative. But nature's prolific procreation implies either over-population or predation. The corollary of love is death, usually nasty. This predatory, destructive aspect of the universe (whether physical, organic or human) is something that Calvino prefers not to see in Le cosmocomiche [sic]” (p. 335). What he fails to appreciate is that Calvino's concern is not to celebrate sex, but to use it as a metaphor for an attitude toward all that makes up the non-I. One must seek union with and make love to the cosmos, not just observe it.

14. For a discussion of the Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen thought experiment, and for its implications as implied by Bell's Theorem, see Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics (1979; Bantam edition, 1980), pp. 281–317. Aniela Jaffé discusses the speculations of Wolfgang Pauli and C. G. Jung in Man and his Symbols (see n. 9).

15. I owe special thanks to my colleague Thomas J. Knight, who brought both scientific and literary expertise into play as he worked to improve my arguments. I would also like to thank my colleague Alfred A. Triolo for help with Italian.