[In the following essay, Hume considers Cosmicomics a turning point in Calvino's fiction, maintaining that the author finds his narrative voice and cosmic vision with the stories in this volume.]

According to the calculations of the physicist Alan Guth of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the universe originated literally from nothing in an extremely brief fraction of time: a second divided by a billion billion billions. (From the Washington Post, 3 June 1984)

Secondo i calcoli del fisico Alan Guth, dello Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, l'Universo ha avuto origine letteralmente dal nulla in una frazione di tempo estremamente breve: un secondo diviso per un miliardo di miliardi di miliardi. (Dal Washington Post, 3 giugno 1984)

(“Il niente e il poco”, 209)

With this paraphrase of the Washington Post, Calvino commences one of his latest cosmicomical stories, “Il niente e il poco,” found only in Cosmicomiche vecchie e nuove. Most of the cosmicomical tales open with a scientific incipit, just as most feature Qfwfq as narrator. Like the majority, this one uses a very limited cast of characters—here, Qfwfq and a non-speaking female named Nugkta. Their differences of opinion disturb Qfwfq. He rhapsodizes over the new ‘something’ burgeoning up out of nothing, while she prefers the austere ‘nothing’ that preceded it. Qfwfq hastily alters his views to those he attributes to his innamorata, but he turns coat in vain. She too reverses her values. In the final paragraph, he refers to ‘today’ as an era of frozen peas, nylon curtains, and computers, and remarks:

There is a secret that only Nugkta and I know: that however much is contained in space and time, it is only the little generated from nothing, the little that is and yet might not have been, or might be yet thinner, more meagre and perishable. If we prefer to say nothing about it, either good or ill, it is because we could only say this: poor, frail universe, offspring of nothing, all that we are and do resembles you.

c'è un segreto che solo Nugkta e io conosciamo: che quanto è contenuto nello spazio e nel tempo non è altro che il poco, generato dal niente, il poco che c'è e potrebbe anche non esserci, o essere ancora più esiguo, più sparuto e deperibile. Se preferiamo non parlame, né in male né in bene, è perché potremmo dire solo questo: povero gracile universo figlio del nulla, tutto ciò che siamo e facciamo t'assomiglia.

(p. 215)

A typical cosmicomical story, it grows out of the unimaginable: consciousness prior to and during the Big Bang. Other narratives take wing from the first light, the first bird's song, the first sign. Mythological fables that these are, they spin tales of origins, and uncover the hidden traces of those origins in our tangled present. They also lay the foundations for Calvino's ‘cosmic vision’ or metaphysic, a combination of elements that sets his fictions apart from those of other writers, and separates the pre-cosmicomical works from the rest of his creations. Earlier fiction—Smog, A Plunge into Real Estate, The Argentine Ant, and The Baron in the Trees—deal with pollution and politics, real-estate speculation, pest control, and history. With Cosmicomics, he throws those subjects out as if they were junk in an attic. In this [essay], I shall argue that he had finally found a means to articulate problems that seemed to him more basic, and had conceived of an effective mise-en-scène for exploring them. In these stories we witness the birth of a new fictive universe and the forces being harnessed by writing it into existence.

His discovery consists of a metaphysic that fits his private apprehensions. The eye and I confront particle and paste, and attempt to maintain the separation of the minimal units while arranging them in some regular pattern. The physical properties of particle or minimal unit and flux constitute one component of this cosmic vision. In the earlier fictions, Calvino had explored different, more personal versions of this clash between forces: his protagonists struggled not to be swallowed up by ruinous building costs, by hordes of ants, by constricting social rules, by threatening female powers. By transferring such tensions from the realm of individual action within society to the realm of cosmology and science, Calvino manages to externalize this anxiety. His sidereal language (as Grisi calls it) lets him borrow scientific objectivity and abstraction for scrutinizing human problems. By thus formalizing anxiety, he can explore it.

Particulate reality is one component of cosmic vision; the other is Calvino's new protagonist-narrator. The earlier works try various combinations of observer and agent, none of them able to release much narrative dynamism. We get nameless narrators, immature narrators, or characters marginal to the action such as Cosimo's brother or Medardo's nephew. With Qfwfq, Calvino achieves a first-person presence, with all the passion and engagement that that can give. At the same time he makes the noisy young Qfwfq remote by placing him in the dim past, by filtering him through an older Qfwfq, and by filtering that persona through a phantasmal scribe or creator who refers to Qfwfq in the third person: ‘Qfwfq recalled’, ‘Qfwfq explained’, ‘Qfwfq narrated’, ‘old Qfwfq confirmed’. The third person is confined to these italicized expressions—one per story—the merest fingerprint of authorial artifice. These two removes permit Calvino the distance between consciousness and actions that evidently appealed to him for its impersonality, but the first remove, youth to age, lets him combine the vivid experiences of the one with the reserve of the other. The younger Qfwfq effervesces ardently at the slightest excuse, while his older self subtly withholds full support from those excesses. Meanwhile, the faint authorial presence reminds us that both old and young Qfwfq are constructs.

An abstract setting filled with wonder and strange beauties

a narrator who plunges into life, but is so non-human that we do not import novelistic assumptions about psychology to our responses

a narrator twice distanced, so we do not lapse into simple-minded identification

relative freedom from the baggage of history and society and psychology

freedom from the values and myths imposed by others

The cosmic vision achieves all of these and electrifies Calvino's writing. Compared to earlier work, these stories glisten with excitement. They project uncluttered confrontations between consciousness and cosmos.¹ True, Calvino never entirely answers the questions raised by this confrontation, but he permanently eschews the conventional material of fiction from this time forth—history, politics, society, personal relationships, and the like. Therefore something about this configuration continued to satisfy him, and set its stamp on later work. Symbolic landscapes shorn of society and history constitute much of his trademark. The later works freely admit his dissatisfactions and frustrations, but Calvino no longer seems puzzled. He knows what questions he wants answered, and knows what obstacles impede his quest.

How do we find or create meaning in a material universe? Since we rely on no single fashion, he must go further: what various systems does humanity use? how effective are they? and how defensible are they, intellectually speaking? Naturally the cosmic setting imposes limits on the investigation; so does Calvino's own set of values. Neither one nor the other predisposes him to explore long-standing love relationships or religion or passionate devotion to any cause. None the less, his newly found combination of setting and point of view satisfied his demands for a way of investigating this relationship between the I and the not-I.

What his investigation turns up is several public and private means of creating or finding meaning, means such as rivalry and creation. The various means add up to no tidy sequence, no spectrum of more and less effective mental constructions, for they all work for some people under some circumstances. Hence, whether he likes them or not, he scrutinizes and memorializes them, and these will be discussed in the first part of the chapter.

Calvino tried to get beyond these superficial social answers by pursuing two other lines of thought. Following one, he acknowledges the centrality of desire to all that we strive for (including meaning), and looks at the nature of that force. Following the second, he asks why we cannot be satisfied with the myths of meaning provided by science, our prime structure for linking consciousness with matter. These will occupy parts two and three of the chapter. Finally, I shall delineate the effects that finding cosmic vision had on Calvino's fiction. The symbolic dimensions enlarge dramatically. He learned much about the openness of fiction, its ‘potential’ quality, its multiplicity, from his cosmicomical experiments.

In short, I am arguing that these fictions triggered in Calvino a major crystallization of values, a new vision, and a set of metaphysical assumptions. Without understanding these changes, we will fail to see the developments in later fictions that stem from them. Furthermore, once we understand what happened here, we will be able to make a more satisfying intellectual bridge between the early stories and the later metafictional masterpieces.

NOT ‘MEANING’ BUT ‘MEANINGS’: MAKING SENSE OF THE COSMOS

Given Calvino's enchantment with patterns, meaning for him often manifests itself as a formal design that enables him to make inferences and find applications. A successful meaning-structure would encompass the individual and make the individual feel at one with the universe. Alienation, loneness, separateness: these are the hostile conditions the pattern must overcome. They undermine an individual's sense of friendship, the ability to communicate, the feeling of welcome; they destroy any sense of esteem in one's own eyes and the eyes of others. Most of Calvino's narrators exhibit some form of separation from society. Some, like Cosimo, struggle to maintain their distance, while others, like the narrator of Smog, are unhappy in their alienation. Their achieving a sense of meaning would reduce or eliminate the gap between self and society; or between their ideal picture of self and the actuality; or between self and the universe. For most of his protagonists, Calvino assumes that integration would bring happiness, or at least sober contentment, a sense that one's actions were worth their pains, a sense of satisfaction—literally satis, enough, the impossible goal of Goethe's Faust. For others, Cosimo in particular, integration would mean subjugation, so meaning has to be sought outside the normal pattern of society.

As suits Calvino's admiration for the patterns of science, he appears to agree with Boethius that one's emotional life ought to have the same regularity and orderliness and beauty as the cosmos.² Life has not obliged him with such Boethian harmony, however, so Calvino contents himself in the cosmicomical stories with studying human struggles to align the self in meaningful ways with the orderly cosmos. Some of his characters derive their sense of meaning from four elements of everyday life: interaction with the community, sexual longing, male rivalry, and physical labour pitting self against matter. Other characters bridge the gap between self and cosmos with three less commonplace activities: creation, geometrization, and vision. At no point does Calvino reject any of the possibilities; he writes to explore, to find options, not to prescribe a single solution. The richness of these stories lies partly in the wide array of possibilities that he offers us—at least the seven I shall discuss, and possibly others as well. In this tactic of considering multiple partial solutions rather than one global answer, we find him using a pulviscular or particulate approach—lots of little solutions to match bits of the problem.

Calvino's picture of community interaction is repellent and reflects dissatisfaction with that solution, but he endows it with undeniable power to create a sense of meaning. In “The Distance of the Moon,” the characters shield themselves from the cataclysmic physical events by submerging themselves in intrigue, argument, lust, and the communal activity of gathering moon milk. In “At Daybreak,” Calvino stresses the habitual nature of such familial responses. When something goes wrong, as Qfwfq notes, one automatically assumes that Granny Bb'b is somehow responsible, and reproaches her. The neurasthenic mother cries that she had known all along that something was wrong; huffy father is caught in his usual bind between bossing his wife and children and being bossed by his mother. These jostling personalities might have disported themselves against a background of war or poverty or election-day politics. Calvino chooses, however, to match them against the coalescence of matter and the first light. The family strategies are thus defined by the story as strategies to protect its members against the universe, and to make sense of their experiences with the matter in agitation around them. We find similar ongoing bickering in “Fino a che dura il Sole,” “The Aquatic Uncle,” “The Light-Years,” and “The Dinosaurs.”

Unpleasant though such jostling and quarrelling may be to contemplate, we note that Qfwfq's families are never cowed, despairing, or psychically enervated. The tensions generate energy that keeps family members going and also limit their awareness and fear of the universe. Calvino grants the effectiveness of this strategy, but shows how the negative emotions prevent the characters from noticing the bizarre loveliness of physical events. Such folk buy their freedom from fear and from the problems of meaning by denying themselves wonder, amazement, and awe. Ignoring matter is the normal response in Western literature; by visualizing the material world so spectacularly, Calvino insists that we acknowledge what we filter out by such a tactic.

Sexual longing, as part of the reproductive cycle, provides one of our most reliable sources for meaning. When Qfwfq is ensorcelled by Ayl or Lll or Ursula H'x or Nugkta, he is thoroughly engaged with the universe. He tries to show its beauties to his love. He gloats over new developments. His innamorate never see eye to eye with him in these enthusiasms, but Qfwfq seems happiest when trying to share his bedazzled enchantment at what matter is doing: “Without Colors,” “Il niente e il poco,” “Crystals,” “Il cielo di pietra,” “The Aquatic Uncle,” and “The Form of Space” all permit him this intense commitment. Because such engagement would not last much beyond physical consummation, we rarely see Qfwfq succeed in his courtships.

Rivalry offers another simple way of making sense of the universe. Qfwfq and Pfwfp start by trying to best each other in collecting new hydrogen atoms, then create and race galaxies in a frenzy of one-upmanship. When Kgwgk vandalizes Qfwfq's first sign, Qfwfq floods space with false signs, that he may gloat over Kgwgk's boorish inability to distinguish true from false. Qfwfq also daydreams a cowboy shoot-out with Lieutenant Fenimore. Unattractive though the rivalries are, they undoubtedly engage Qfwfq strongly with life, and under their spell, he creates signs, atoms, galaxies, shells, and causes eyes to come into being.

Physical struggle with matter itself is another traditional solution Calvino explores. Trying to build something from matter, or sort it, or clean it away, can all give a sense of meaning if such work has clearly defined goals. In “I meteoriti,” Qfwfq tests the housewife's source of meaning by tidying away detritus fallen from the sky. In “The Soft Moon,” Qfwfq helps in the herculean effort that demanded millennia to clean away the lunar glop attracted by Earth's mass, and seems more self-confident as a result.

Calvino stresses novelty so much in these stories that creation is a major avenue to a sense of meaning. When Qfwfq brings something new into the world—eyes, signs, time—or even when he witnesses something new like the first light, his enthusiasm endows such moments with a thrilling aura, even when the results are quite different from his expectations. Qfwfq's extruding a shell produces eyes in one story (“The Spiral”), time and history in another (“Le conchiglie e il tempo”). Courtship of Mrs Ph(i)Nk_o produces the universe, but no consummation.

Closely related to the intellectual kinds of creation is the impulse to geometrify, to make abstract patterns and enjoy their symmetries as a kind of meaning. Qfwfq as mollusc is involved in some such creation in “Le conchiglie e il tempo,” and he grasps desperately for pattern in “Crystals,” “Il cielo di pietra,” and “Tempesta solare.” In the last, Qfwfq is a steamship captain, following shipping routes with magnetic compass and radio signals. He cleaves to the patterns much as one sticks to regulation dance steps, enjoying the conventions and feeling satisfied at having negotiated the steps without making a mistake. Calvino's most extensive experiment with geometrification as a means of controlling experience, however, comes in an earlier work, The Nonexistent Knight. In the cosmicomical stories, pattern-making is freely undertaken, limited only by one's own vision, and usually harmless. The patterns may become dangerous if imposed on other beings, but in these tales, the designs are elegant and usually satisfy aesthetic rather than practical demands, except in so far as relating oneself to the universe is deeply practical.

Mystic vision, or at any rate Vision-with-a-capital-V, is yet another mode of making the universe meaningful. Calvino describes two kinds. One, triggered by love, is holistic and embracing. Mrs Ph(i)Nk_o in “All at One Point” launches such a vision of the universe in the minds of her admirers: from her nurturing impulse to make tagliatelle comes the world of wheat, veal, rain, the sun and stars, and gravitation—in short, the universe. The second sort radiates less happiness, for it stems from rivalry. Qfwfq and Pfwfp see their enmity multiply out along the curves of space. Similarly in “The Chase,” hunters and prey proliferate.

These are the answers Calvino tries when looking at the individual and the cosmos. He shows that these answers can work, indicates how they achieve their effect and exposes their weaknesses and boundaries. None, however, seems to satisfy Calvino himself.

COSMICOMICAL DESIRE

These gaps between self and society, self and one's own ideal, self and the universe all engender enormous currents of desire. Superficially, such flows take sexual form; Qfwfq chases one female elemental after another, and his urgent sensuality flavours many of the stories. At a deeper level, however, such female objects seem secondary to more revenous cravings for meaning.³ As one goal in these stories, Calvino seems to have sought to determine how such desire functions within the economy of human endeavours.

René Girard offers a useful paradigm for the workings of desire in his Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Broken promises (of happiness, success) proffered by parents, society, or God lead to a sense of self-hatred, alienation, emptiness. One fails to live up to the ideal and assumes oneself to be at fault. The emptiness causes one to imitate some person or ideal, often someone who seems exempt from the sense of loneness. When copying the model, one longs for those objects desired by that model, and often enters into direct rivalry for them. Such yearning for the object is triangular, involving as it does the mediator as necessary stimulus. Hatred, jealousy, and envy may ensue, and one envisions the rival as a villain, bereft of normal human feelings or insecurities. Girard points out that the desire to make oneself over into somebody else is tantamount to death, so such triangular desire rests on a strong undercurrent of death-wish. In Girard's key texts—the Quixote, The Red and the Black, and several novels by Dostoevsky—renunciation of such triangular desire is possible. True unmediated desire is also possible, and one may achieve profound peace by recognizing the inauthenticity of a triangular desire. Girard distinguishes between the ways that authors handle this subject. ‘Novelesque’ authors recognize the inauthenticity and expose it; romantic authors are unable to see that the passions they admire are second-hand and unoriginal.

Several cosmicomical stories vibrate with Girardian triangular desire, “The Form of Space” and “The Night Driver” for instance. Lieutenant Fenimore is self-confident, vulgarly bold (at least in Qfwfq's superheated imagination), and set apart by military uniform as somebody with a sense of purpose. Their rivalry for Ursula H'x evokes from Qfwfq all the symptoms specified by Girard: the extremes of jealousy and envy, the sense of helplessness, and the projection of the rival as an inhuman monster. “The Night Driver” shows a more urbane form of triangular relationship, with less evidence that the narrator envies and imitates Z. However, he admits that he would find reunion with Y meaningless were Z comfortably at home and uninvolved. The female, Y, is thus not an authentic object of desire if her presence can be so easily rendered meaningless. As Girard points out (1976: 21), inauthentic objects of desire are often forgotten in one's engagement with the mediator and the peripherality of such objects declares itself in such moments of forgetfulness.

In “The Aquatic Uncle” and “The Distance of the Moon” Calvino dissects the mediated nature of such desires in true novelesque fashion. Qfwfq loses his proto-reptilian girlfriend, Lll, to his reactionary, fishy uncle, N'ba N'ga. We realize that Lll is more status symbol than true love. Qfwfq admires her for her terrestriality, for the degree to which she and her family seem to have distanced themselves from aquatic life. In his snobbish urge to be what he is not, he exhibits all the marks of triangular desire. When we ask why terrestriality attracts him, we find it tied to prestige, territory, and the chance to become someone important. Regrettably for Qfwfq's self-confidence, his uncle is just such a personality with presence. Given Qfwfq's many chronicled attempts to stand out from others, we deduce that such self-definition is one of his most durable longings. Qfwfq denies that he would trade positions with the various impressive presences he has met through the eons: the duck-billed platypus, a dinosaur who survived into the Cenozoic age, a crocodile. His very denial, though, signals that he has thought of such exchanges. He projects onto these powerful entities a fullness and self-assurance which he, in his emptiness, envies.

His longing to be someone who stands out shows up in “The Spiral” and “A Sign in Space.” The inauthenticity of his crush on Mrs Vhd Vhd is revealed during their sojourn on the moon: stranded with his idolized, sexually experienced older woman in what ought to have been a rutty adolescent's daydream, Qfwfq finds that he can think of nothing but Earth.

It was the Earth that caused each of us to be that someone he was rather than someone else; up there, wrested from the Earth, it was as if I were no longer that I, nor she that She, for me.

(“The Distance of the Moon,” 14)

Era la Terra a far sì che ciascuno fosse proprio quel qualcuno e non altri; quassù, strappati alla Terra, era come se io non fossi più quell'io, né lei per me quella lei.

(“La distanza della Luna,” 113)

His threatened identity and sense of self, in the crunch, outweigh his amorous desires. The young Qfwfq, who howls with the dogs (thus imitating yet something else in his longing for the lady-as-moon), is rarely authentic in his loves; Old Qfwfq, however, who turns the experiences into mythological fables, is a powerful poet aware of the callowness of his young self.

Calvino's insights parallel those of Girard on the subject of male rivals and Qfwfq's repeated longings for inappropriate females. Qfwfq's lovers almost always disagree with him, and as they rarely exhibit the least doubt, their confidence undermines Qfwfq's own search for certitude. According to Girard, the masochism growing from self-hatred is responsible for such misplaced affections (1976: 282–4).

In all these stories, Qfwfq clearly feels that he would find meaning if his wants were met, but Calvino undercuts this assurance with contrary evidence. Qfwfq may desire crystalline order in “Crystals,” but would lose Vug and her spontaneity. In “La memoria del mondo,” the unnamed narrator wishes his love recorded as a perfect relationship, and sets about murdering anyone whom he thinks to have been his wife's lover, and then deletes them from the ultimate record of reality. Qfwfq as plutonic ruler at Earth's core loses Rdix (Eurydice) because he will not accept her ideals of surface and noise. By maintaining his orderly or colourful or disorderly ideal, he loses its binary opposite upheld by his innamorata, and loses her as well.

Qfwfq's moments of peace or visionary joy often accompany the renunciation of a desire. He gives up passing judgement on the universe in “Il niente e il poco,” and expresses wonder and pity at its frail contingency. The ecstasy in “The Origin of the Birds” shows Qfwfq forgetting his lady while consummating their marriage because he suddenly gains a more authentic desire; his shift of attention is temporary, but in that moment of authentic quest, he momentarily finds a vision of meaning. He reaches serenity in “The Light-Years” when he gives up hope of winning the admiration of onlookers. There are other moments of ecstasy stemming from different sources; Calvino does not expressly link all such moments to the ceding of inauthentic desire. None the less, the Girardian relationship seems to lurk under the surface of many such moments.

Calvino's analysis of desire differs forcefully from Girard's in two respects. One is the matter of wishing to become like another. For Girard, transformation of self is just a disguised death-wish; for Calvino, such metamorphoses offer genuine alternative existences. Gery calls such imagined survival beyond annihilation of self an escapist fantasy of the nuclear age. Catalano, however, identifies one transformation that is emphatically not a displaced death: writing permits Calvino to transform himself to books and thereby survive death—a process detailed in “Death.”

Another, more profound difference between the two: Calvino does not accept Girard's solution to these endless desires. Girard authenticates the desire to transcend if one attaches oneself to God. Cervantes, Stendhal, and Dostoevsky all accept this ultimate solution. Calvino does not even consider it, a notable omission considering the widespread success of the religious solution to the problem of meaning. Throughout his career, however, Calvino only fleetingly refers to religion and never explores it seriously. He seeks meanings that derive from the exercise of reason, not faith, and obviously hopes that satisfying some forms of desire would create a sense of meaning. He succeeds in showing the ubiquity of desire, and its compelling power as a source of our longing for meaning, but finds only individual and temporary answers to the problem of meaning that such desire poses.

SCIENCE AS MEANING-GIVING STRUCTURE

As a story, science gives us a past: the Big Bang, life emerging in the sea, the dinosaurs. Through its powers of prediction, it gives us a future: control. We adhere to the codes of scientific method and go through the rituals of duplicating results that will permit us to advance understanding. We smother personal impulses in order to develop our objectivity. In the end, what we understand can be technologically exploited. As Jürgen Habermas has argued, if control were not the aim, scientific knowledge as we think of it would have taken quite a different form.⁴ Consider the effects on a culture's science were that society's goal defined as personal happiness or stoic tranquillity. Science is not a universal, but something heavily contingent upon the rest of the culture.

Enthusiastic though he is about science, Calvino is not uncritical. Olga Ragusa (1983: 198) praises his cosmicomical tales as marking ‘a kind of final acceptance—in all its consequences—of the Copernican revolution, an inversion in values that Mattia Pascal (and with him Pirandello) had still considered a disaster for mankind but that Calvino is able to dominate with a buoyancy reminiscent of the apparent ease with which space exploration succeeded in finally putting man on the moon’. The buoyancy and acceptance are there, but so too is awareness of ‘all its consequences’. Calvino deconstructs some of science's most cherished myths even while revelling in the wondrous images begotten by its theories.⁵

His enjoyment of the images comes across most vividly in the stories of origins. His Big Bang in “All at One Point” unforgettably humanizes the inconceivable, and lets Qfwfq make sense of the material world. Once Mrs Ph(i)Nk_o becomes the heat-energy-light of the universe, Qfwfq is residually in love with everything that she has become. First light, first unicellular organism, first sign: these are wonders Qfwfq invites us to appreciate.

Control in science, as elsewhere, has unavoidable political overtones. Calvino seems to have preferred science as an art for its elegant equations and vivid pictures capable of arousing wonder. When science impinges on the political sphere, he clearly found it threatening to the extent that we put it to dangerous uses.

We are shown the political and social drawbacks of scientific prediction in “La Luna come un fungo” and “The Soft Moon.” In both, a scientist gleefully predicts a major change, and proves right—up to a point. However, neither Sibyl nor Inspector Oo of the Observatory extrapolate quite correctly; Sibyl does not foresee the millennia of toil and the destruction of her culture that will result from the lunar glop. The inspector mistakes the emerging moon for the first continent, and strands himself on the barren satellite. The validity of science as prime narrative for explaining reality suffers from such miscalculation. In the case of “La Luna come un fungo,” the rest of the prediction causes science to lose further face.⁶ Cities, commerce, skyscrapers, glittering marquees, and bejewelled celebrities come to pass as forecast, but are they any improvement on the aquatic pastoral world? Qfwfq grumbles at their tinsel insubstantiality, their inability to give any authenticity to life. Admittedly, his discontent is presented as an idiosyncratic dissatisfaction; the simpleminded Flw is extremely happy with the glitz and glitter of the technologized future.

In “Le figlie della Luna,” Calvino exposes the hidden costs of science and technology. The high-tech society of an ur-New York discards everything upon first evidence of wear or damage. Everything is spanking new except for the crumbly, maculate moon, a bit of undesirable flotsam overhead. Unable to endure this visible monument to decay, the inhabitants pull the moon down on to an automobile graveyard. Calvino criticizes technology for allying itself to sterility and mindless perfection, because this alliance deprives us of untameable luxuriance, of sexuality as a sultry mystery, and of beauty as something other than cosmetic artifice. The consumer society also discards and marginalizes humans, who are forced to live amidst the refuse in the junk-yard. When the lost Dianas reappear on the renewed moon, the sterile society disintegrates. In what might be a joking allusion to Shklovsky's definition of art as the means of making us see the stoniness of the stone, Calvino shows that stony moon in detail, and then demonstrates that the raddled ruin has more to offer than we had first surmised.

The connections between science and power or control come out most clearly in “How Much Shall We Bet?” and “Tempesta solare.” In the former, control is etherealized as money won through the wagers, though we never learn whether the money actually changes hands or is simply a means of keeping score. The reality of power is partly, but only partly, denied: Qfwfq grumbles that (k)yK won the title of Dean through intrigue, and that if it had anything to do with seniority, he, Qfwfq, would be just as entitled, ‘though of course it doesn't mean anything to me’ (‘solo che io non ci tengo’). This asseveration of Qfwfq's, like so many, fails to convince. His huffiness and defensiveness suggest some longing for the power of the title, if only for his ego's sake. The power is there, even if the two gamblers make little evident use of it.

Actual tyranny emerges in “Tempesta solare” when Qfwfq takes the vicar to meet Rah, an aurora borealis. Like Lewis Carroll's Alice squeezed into a room after drinking from the magic bottle, Rah must curl up in a barn because she is too large to fit elsewhere. When they enter, she is stroking a Rutherford coil as if it were a cat. Qfwfq congratulates himself on this domestic scene. She is bored at the confinement, but ‘Look how she has changed: when she arrived, she was a fury; who would have guessed that I could live with a tempest, restrain her, tame her?’ (‘Guardate com'è cambiata: quand'è arrivata era una furia, chi l'avrebbe detto che sarei riuscito a convivere con una tempesta, a contenerla, a domarla?’ (p. 152). Rah at large is one of Calvino's most magnificent female creations, yet Qfwfq somewhat uncharacteristically can think only in terms of taming and controlling and reducing her. When she departs, he laments her loss principally because he had planned to make from the instrument fragments and ‘pulviscolo di vibrazioni’ other instruments that would permit him to control and understand solar flares. He wants control and power, and science and technology are his means to that end. We rarely think of power over a natural force as a tyranny, but by humanizing the aurora borealis, Calvino insinuates awareness of the tyrannous in the scientific goal of control.

Calvino also suggests that science as structure for experience provides us with the somewhat contradictory code: we must strive for objectivity but may feel a passionate love for science that excludes other concerns. Such narrow vision and lack of human commitment can make science dangerous. In “The Distance of the Moon,” the deaf one is a highly idealized and stylized scientist who adores the object of his research, and no ill effects result. Inspector Oo, however, hands the fruits of his labours over to the Pirate Bm Bn with the archetypal denial of social responsibility, ‘sono un tecnico’. He does not care how his predictions are used so long as he can make extrapolations and be recognized as an official scientist of the regime.

By putting the four lunar stories together, as Calvino does in La memoria del mondo and Cosmicomiche vecchie e nuove, he exposes another weakness in the scientific narrative. The four versions of the moon's development are mutually exclusive, but elements in each have been taken seriously by respected scientists at one time or another as hypotheses of lunar genesis. Qfwfq participates in all of them, so by thus grouping the stories as fragments of Qfwfq's biography, Calvino slyly implies that all are true. He impossibly legitimizes them all as our geological prehistory. Calvino thus teases us with the tenuous relationship between scientific hypothesis and reality, and with the unstable and erratic development of scientific theory. How happy can we feel about meaning derived from matter in the form of science if the next generation will invalidate our scientific narrative? Moreover, even while he deftly undoes scientific histories, Calvino seems, here and elsewhere, to uphold science as the best story about matter which we have found so far, best in terms of its power to explain, but best too for its daring and vivid scenarios. By creating these bizarre tales, he shows us the virtually untapped power of science to generate story through such extraordinary images as the moon being torn from the Pacific basin.

To round out Calvino's views on science, we might note that he explores science as a narrative in the incipits to the cosmicomical stories, and each of those fictions is, in a sense, a reproof to the scientific narrative style. Something is lacking in the dryly ‘objective’ pictures, something that makes us sensitive to the wonder.

Most writers considering an extant system of meaning either accept it or attack it; Calvino prefers to look at both its strengths and weaknesses. The strengths here seem to be wonder and elegance, the myths of origin, the power of the protocols, when followed, to produce desired results. The weaknesses are a specious coherence, wavering correlation between theory and material reality, and potential for political misuse. When coupled to a deft, vivid imagination, science liberates us; when meshed with tyrannous impulses, it implicates us in illegitimate control of others. Calvino usually shows his science-literate characters like Sibyl and Inspector Oo as narrow and obsessed creatures, not beings with a full range of human concerns, but he also shows very few such specialists. Possibly this reflects his awareness of the small percentage of people who derive their sense of meaning from science, and warns us that the failure of human imagination shown by a few such scientists may have disastrous implications for all.

When we view the cosmicomical stories as enquiries into the nature of meaning and the modes of finding meaning open to us, they prove rich and complex. However, they proffer no easy answers, and indeed no single answer. Even as Calvino believes only in a ‘pulviscular’ utopia, so too he seems to prefer a ‘pulviscular’ answer, something broken into particles, each one matched to a minor situation or to an individual at a particular time. We find here clouds of possibilities, and our problem is to find some that work for each one of us some of the time.

All told, Calvino explores many modes of engaging oneself with life. Desire is most central because it creates the longing for meaning as well as offering some ways of satisfying that longing. When Qfwfq is in hot pursuit of some goal, be it a female or an ideal, he feels engaged and suffers little from alienation or lack of purpose. Finding a means of keeping desire alive seems central to Calvino's outlook when he thinks in cosmicomical terms. He seems very aware that short-term desires, once satisfied, refuse to function in a meaning-giving fashion, and long-term desires either die of inanition or, once satisfied, leave a formidable emotional gap. Science—in its limited but mostly admirable way—avoids these pitfalls because the desire to know everything can never be met, but there are countless short-term goals, units of knowledge to be acquired. In his later works, particularly Mr. Palomar, he will explore the observative habit of mind necessary to make such a scientific sense of meaning operate.

EXPANDING UNIVERSE, EXPANDING FICTIONS

In addition to describing various kinds of search for meaning, Calvino learned to write what might be called literature of multiple meanings—one result of his myth-like settings. William Righter makes a relevant point when discussing the function of myth in literature: ‘the importance of myth in a “demythologized” age is not simply to provide us with the now missing sense of an ultimate frame of reference, but to provide an area of almost deliberate uncertainty as to what such frames might possibly imply.’ (1975: 96–7) ‘Deliberate uncertainty’ and ‘imprecise intelligibility’ (as Righter later calls it) invite multiple readings. Calvino's early works had relatively close horizons and local scenes and hence little imprecision or uncertainty; from Cosmicomics on, that changes. This expansion of the fictional meaning structures is my next concern.

Certain legends with mythic content have had astonishingly long lives. Each successive generation can reread the story to suit its own needs because of this openness of form and imprecise intelligibility. Orphic writers may stress their bard's power over beasts, trees, and stones; his trip to the underworld (land of the dead, dark night of the soul, insanity, dystopia); his dismemberment at the hands of intoxicated maenads (including his mother); or the prophetic powers of his severed head. Generations of Western writers have brought into the foreground different elements in the story to serve diverse ends: Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes the first; Nerval, Rilke, and Mallarmé the second; Thomas Pynchon and Ihab Hassan the third; Russell Hoban and Jerzy Kosinski the fourth—to name only a handful. This openness of form leads to contrasting poetic creations and to very different readings of any single work. I mention Orpheus because Calvino himself has written in an Orphic vein in the cosmicomical stories and elsewhere; one finds much the same spread of emphases in Oedipus fictions too. What I wish to delineate here, though, is the way in which Calvino's stories open themselves to many kinds of reading. Their structures invite us to attach meanings significant to us. Their ‘deliberate uncertainties’ invite at least two kinds of mythological approaches, and also metafictional readings, political and historical understandings, and ‘American’ as well as ‘European’ allegorizations. To my way of thinking, this expansion of horizons and expansion of symbolic richness was what transformed Calvino from being not just an Italian or European man of letters, but a figure on the international literary stage.

A few of the fables are mythological in a classical sense. Heiney (1971) notes that Orpheus, Pygmalion, and Endymion are being rewritten, with all the enrichments that such recycling implies.⁷ Milanini (1990: 108) sees traces of Demeter and Diana as entering via well-known surrealist images.

Less commonplace, however, is a second kind of mythological identity. One is reminded of myth in the first place because so many of the stories describe origins: the first light, the first sign, the Big Bang. One can read many of the cosmicomical tales as mythological fables. How did fish move up on land? How did dinosaurs die out? How did colours enter the world? These in turn can be enjoyed as sophisticated modern recasting of a primitive form. Or, if one ignores the differences between a primitive oral mythology and an authored artifact, one can apply structuralist techniques derived from Lévi-Strauss's Amerindian studies. The binary oppositions found in most of the stories consist of the I versus the not-I, or self versus cosmos as the primary dichotomy, but secondarily male versus female, for the Other is significantly feminine for Qfwfq. The repetitions consist of Qfwfq's launching himself against the universe time and time again, seeking to satisfy desire and achieve satisfaction. The mediation—that which represents the sacred in this cosmos—is metamorphosis or change. Metamorphosis largely replaces death in this mythology, and offers us one way of transcending it.⁸

The cosmic setting, because free of specific connections to our world, is open to allegorical readings. Numerous critics, responding to this openness, have obliged us with metafictional readings. “A Sign in Space” speaks of Calvino's need for ‘new signs’ when he looked at his previous work, particularly the neo-realist fictions (Terracini). “The Dinosaurs” represents a rejection of the nouveau roman (the new ones) but also admits to having outlived neo-realism, and to wanting something fresh (Pedullà, 1968). Qfwfq's extruding his shell to attract a female mollusc in “The Spiral” allegorizes the relationships among writer, text, and audience, and Qfwfq of “Il cielo di pietra” is defending a writer's interior values against those of action in the exterior world (Bernardini Napoletano, 1977: 96–108). Mapping the labyrinth in “The Count of Monte Cristo” corresponds to writing fiction (Boselli, 1969), and Calvino's own “Sfida al labirinto” supports the reading of Dantès as modern writer, producing literature that maps that labyrinth with an eye to possible escape. Such metafictional readings are most elaborately developed by Rocco Capozzi, who sees all the cosmicomical stories as concerned with such self-referential matter, especially those tales that reflect Calvino's preoccupation with old and new, tradition and novelty. “The Origin of the Birds” satirizes the Italian critics, and “L'implosione” celebrates two modes of being: implosion and explosion—terms derived from Barilli and others, who used them to describe ‘two opposing forms of expression of writers and artists’ (Capozzi, 1989: 79).

Nor is the cosmic setting the only stimulus for multiple readings. So is the suggestive strangeness of Qfwfq himself. Despite Cannon's assertion (1981: 53) that the only unity to these stories is the strictly grammatical persona of Qfwfq, others have seen Qfwfq as an entity capable of development. Di Felice traces a Piaget-like evolution of mental powers for coping with experience, and her observations were triggered by Bouissy's likening Qfwfq to the hero of a Bildungsroman, with all that that implies about growing up and becoming adult. In contrast, Ernest L. Fontana (1979) argues against such a developmental vision and insists that the fables are arranged randomly because Calvino's universe is ever-changing and never fixed; there is no teleology, no real beginning and no end. Since these arguments are not based on the final life-time arrangement, they are at best limited to the original collections, but the accumulating diversity testifies to the openness of the abstract symbolism of these little mythological fables.

Yet another kind of reading to emerge from these suggestive structures is based on traditional literary topoi. Stories pitting old against new reflect the ongoing struggles of those forces whose avatars include ancients vs. moderns and classicism vs. romanticism. Play with the literariness and even the letters of a text are analysed by Biasin (1985) for “The Form of Space.” We find the hoary assurance that literature can grant immortality being delivered with a new twist in “Death.” “La memoria del mondo” pits the ‘happy ever after’ topos against computer data-gathering in order to make us see the damage done to some minds by trite fictional formulas.

We have already seen how these stories can be read as a complex comment on science as the meaning-structure and myth of our era, and I have argued elsewhere that the stories also comment on the interplay of science and imagination (Hume, 1982). In addition to science, however, we find readers invoking politics and history as grids for explaining these stories. This is especially true when old ways are contrasted to new.

Qfwfq as dinosaur remembers his folk as lords of the earth: ‘if you were a Dinosaur in those days, you were sure you were in the right, and you made everyone look up to you’ (“The Dinosaurs,” 97) (allora essere dinosauro si aveva la coscienza d'essere nel giusto, e ci si faceva rispettare (“I dinosauri,” 21)). The saurian's stance is that of an aristocrat bemoaning the old days; or that of someone in the power structure of an empire fallen on hard times. When teaching the story to American students, I find they identify the dinosaur-narrator with the expansive American of the 1960s, given to conspicuous consumption and spend-thrift, ‘gas-guzzling dinosaurs’. Any of these work reasonably well within context. The Old One and New One dichotomy, to American students, also makes sense in terms of those from the Old Country and their Americanized offspring who speak only English. I doubt very much that Calvino had these American identifications in mind, but this proves my point, namely that the stories have an open enough structure and landscape that readers can relate to them on the basis of all kinds of backgrounds.

The same kinds of referents apply to “At Daybreak” and “The Aquatic Uncle,” where we find tension between an older generation whose values are rural while their grandchildren are city folk concerned with the newest fashions rather than the old ways. “Il niente e il poco,” with its pity for the fragile contingency of the ‘something’ can be read as the narrator looking at the fragile, contingent political order to come out of the chaos of World War II; after berating that order for its flaws and weaknesses, he feels compelled to forgive the faults when he looks at the ‘nothing’ and the forces of chaos that are its antecedents and possible alternatives.

I have explored these multiple readings at such length to make a point. The cosmicomical stories differ in a fundamental fashion from earlier Calvino fictions, and that difference stems from the abstract, symbolic setting so open to possible meanings.

Calvino accomplishes a great deal with these little stories. He found a narrative stance that satisfied his desire for something more centrally active than mere bystander, but not just first-person protagonist, with the demands that would have made for more psychological depth. He reaffirmed the experience of his earlier fiction that conventional social and political answers to the question of meaning would not satisfy him. Sex, social interaction, rivalry, and physical labour do help establish links to the cosmos, but not links he could trust. Desire loses its tension too easily; social interactions work by narrowing one's horizons; rivalry leads to ugly behaviour; and the physical labour with matter becomes less interesting than the matter itself. Vision is delectable, but comes in unheralded flashes and cannot be tamed and expanded. Geometrization is shown to rely on dangerous rigidities, but Calvino will continue to explore this option in later fiction. He also continues, by the nature of his enterprise as writer, to explore creativity as a method of achieving a sense of meaning.

By ingeniously stripping his material to the barest essentials—a self and a universe—he was able to see why conventional answers seemed inauthentic to him. Given our craving for meaning and the sense of dissatisfaction which is its symptom, he probed desire in some depth, and came to realize through these stories that he was unlikely to find a truly fulfilling answer. Indeed, he found that desire unfulfilled may be as close as one can get to the feeling of engagement that reduces the need for abstract meaning. The only way he found for perpetuating that sort of commitment was pursuing a superficial series of goals—Qfwfq's innamorate—or the more cerebral set of infinitely unfolding goals set by science. In his later fictions, he will explore other large systems like science—literature, empire—other networks that break down into innumerable particles or lesser goals that point toward a larger order.

He also learned how to write with sufficient symbolic resonance that his stories rose above whatever specific issues were engaging him, and became open to multiple readings. Hence, the title for this chapter: Cosmogony, Cosmography, and the Cosmicomical Stories. These little short stories—thirty-four in all (if you count the “Priscilla” stories as three)—represent a cosmogony in the sense that a new fictive realm is born, a fictional landscape new to everyone and a new configuration of values specifically within Calvino's canon. In that they document the coming into being of both the physical cosmos and of this literary cosmos, they are cosmographies. An act of the gods and the act of a chronicler: Calvino has achieved both.

Notes

1. Lack of clutter is relative. Gatt-Rutter rightly points out that Calvino carries unconscious baggage. ‘Too many of the stories in Le cosmicomiche give the stamp of agelessness and a presumed universal value to what are merely the typical behaviour patterns, the trivial mores, of Italian domesticity and courtship at the decline of the second Christian millennium’ (1975: 334). Similarly Lucente notes that ‘Despite the illusion of timelessness that Calvino's science fiction occasionally fosters, these objects [of satiric treatment] turn out to exist not in an atemporal void but in the discourse of society itself, and more specifically, in the social and intellectual debates of the Italian 1960's’ (1983: 30).

2. See the Consolations of Philosophy I.5 prosa and II.8 metrum for Lady Philosophy's statements that Boethius longed for some such consonance between mind and cosmos. Boethius is arguably present elsewhere in these stories. His theories of ‘love’ or ‘attraction’ being the forces of the cosmos seem to be being played out in the gravitational and sexual attractions of “The Distance of the Moon.” Anca Vlasopolos indeed argues for a very Boethian Calvino when she identifies Love as the prime mover and first agent in these stories.

3. Briosi sees this desire as an abstract Sartrean state of longing for the Other.

4. Discussed by Richard E. Palmer (1977: 368).

5. For a more gloomy rendition of Calvino's doubts about science, see Illiano; for an analysis that links the scepticism about science and scientific determinism to all of Calvino's other scepticisms, see Lucente (1983).

6. Critics who comment on the ways that Calvino undercuts science are Bernardini Napoletano, Carter, and Lucente (1983).

7. Calvino produced a version of “Il cielo di pietra” that is even closer to the classical myth; its narrator is Pluto instead of Qfwfq. I have not found an Italian version; the English is “The Other Eurydice.”

8. See Hume (1984) for such a structuralist analysis. For the particular structuralist approach used, see Edmund Leach (1973: 317–30).