The first volume of Italo Calvino's
Cosmicomics was published in
Italian in 1965, before being translated into English in 1968. The
dates of these publications strike me as particularly interesting
given the timeframe of the readings we have worked with this quarter.
Obviously, our readings were centered around 1966, but the majority
of the texts we read were not published in English until much later.
I am interested in this process of delay in translation and what it
means for questions of simultaneity of arrival, influence, and
response. 1966 seems to me to be a year selected to organize a set of
readings (or more properly a set of authors) that center on the
concept of origin and return. But to treat 1966 as “origin” of
anything in particular (“poststructuralism”) is already
problematic, given both Ecrits
and Writing and Difference
are collections of works from, in some cases, decades earlier.
Likewise, Writing and Difference
already contains a response to Foucault's History of
Madness that would have been
originally given during the process of the composition of The
Order of Things. All of this is
to say that in thinking through the dialogue we have more or less
constructed over the course of the quarter, it makes perfect sense to
import another figure who, in mid 1960s, is thinking through the
problems of writing, knowledge and origin, but through the language
of fiction. My turn to Calvino is not motivated by any comparative
interest, that is to say, this paper will not simply 'read'
Cosmicomics through
Lacanian, Foucauldian, or Derridian 'lenses.' If these latter lenses
enter into discussion it will be to clarify—or to bring into the
language of philosophy (sic?)--thought of origin and return that are
located in and between the stories that comprise the first volume of
Cosmicomics.
First, a few words on Cosmicomics
and my interest in it. I taught “The Distance of the Moon,” the
first and arguably most famous story from Cosmicomics,
in my composition class this quarter. Our class was organized around
the genre 'folklore,' and we treated “The Distance of the Moon,”
and Cosmicomics in
general, as a sort of re-writing of folk-origin stories. Such a
reading goes against the most 'legible' influences on this story in
particular. As Martin McLaughlin writes in his introduction to the
English Complete Cosmicomics,
“The Distance of the Moon” pays “homage to the fact that early
Italian literature is full of descriptions of the Earth's satellite,
from Dante to Ariosto, Galileo and Leopardi, all dear to the author's
heart” (xii). At the same time, the story is a “telluric version
of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth” (xii). Judging from these
readings, origin and return are built into the very conceptual fabric
of the story. The Orpheus and Eurydice myth is particularly
interesting to linger on, as it suggests that the anticipation of
return, of turning back to preview that lost object whose return
promises a return to life, is what ultimately makes return
impossible. After this double loss, too, “Among the Thracians,
[Orpheus] originated/the practice of transferring the affections/to
youthful males, plucking the first flower/in the brief springtime of
their early manhood” (344). This double loss—the loss first of
the origin and then of the return—produces queer attachment for the
first time; attachment that, unlike the “permanent” pledge that
binds Orpheus to Eurydice despite her two deaths, is inherently
“brief” but nonetheless cyclical. A new kind of attachment and a
new mode of fleeting/reoccurring endurance emerges from the
fracturing of permanence. That this new temporality/affection is
linked to poetry is obvious, and from the time of Ovid up through
Derrida and Blanchot to today, “poetry” seems to hold a utopian
possibility. The Orpheus myth reminds us, though, that this
possibility is one that can only emerge from some loss or violence
(whether that be the violence of the letter or the loss that
jettisons the subject into the symbolic, it remains to be decided).
For
Calvino, the loss of the possibility of return seems to occupy a
central theoretical role in the first volume of Cosmicomics
beyond its obvious position in “The Distance of the Moon.” Two
other stories I will be discussing here, “A Sign in Space” and
“All at One Point” are stories that reflect on the origins of
signs and space itself, respectively, that are marked by origins as
moments/places of embarrassment and unretrievable, contested
intimacy. But I do want to begin with “The Distance of the Moon,”
because it, more beautifully than the others, puts 'origin' into
question—not simply as a place of loss, but as something marked by
something like trace. Like the rest of the Cosmicomics,
“The Distance of the Moon” begins with the assertion of a
scientific “fact” that the narrator, Qfwfq, responds to with a
personal anecdote. Here, I argued in my composition class this
quarter, Calvino inverts the logic of creation myths, and reflecting
on this inversion will be helpful for clarifying my interest in
Calvino as a thinker of origin and return.
Without
getting too technical or general, we can say that the logic of
creation myths (those arising 'authentically' from cultures) runs
something like the following. There is a need to understand some
element of the world, and in order to do so connections are drawn
backwards in time between things that are understood 'here and now'
and those phenomena who history and origin are unknown. From this
demand we see the personalities and characteristics of people and
animals transposed into generative mechanisms. Understanding that
such an animal behaves in such a way, and that such a natural
phenomenon as the tides or the seasons function in such a way, a
narrative can be created that links the two together. In this
mythological situation, the present is used to theorize and
comprehend the past. Such logic finds literary
exploration in the late 19th
and early 20th
centuries with the expansion of European colonial powers (and their
attendant literati) into permanent colonies in Africa and Asia, as
well as the emergence of anthropology as a discipline somewhat later.
The English author Rudyard Kipling makes a career of writing 'folk'
fictions of English controlled portions of the Indian subcontinent.
Notable amongst his publications is the volume Just So
Stories for Little Children
(1902), which dramatize a conversation between a narrator and his
“Best Beloved” daughter who frequently interrupts the narratives
with childish questions. For Kipling, these non-European origin
stories, when filtered through the logic of cultural imperialism, are
suited for children. The racist logic here is that the stories of
'primitive' peoples reveal a childlike mind. At the same time though,
the concept of childhood is being solidified in Europe and America—so
a literature specific to children that appeals to the imaginative and
illogical child mind becomes an important cultural institution. The
Just So Stories
function as responses to implicit “why” and “how”
questions—why are there tides? How did the elephant get its trunk?
I contend that this question/response form is a form that the
Cosmicomics implicitly
responds to.
But
whereas Kipling and later writers reify European rationalism through
the production of a primitive/childish literature (through which
civilization and adulthood come into being), Calvino's begins with
the final step (science) and constructs stories that reveal the
tensions, both structural and intersubjective, built into the
apparently objective signs of science. The individual Cosmicomics do
not open with an explicit or even an implied question as Kipling's
Just So Stories do.
Rather, they begin with statements of scientific fact (regardless of
the actual veracity of the fact). Consider the beginning of “The
Distance of the Moon”: At one time, according to Sir
George H. Darwin, the Moon was very close to the Earth. Then the
tides gradually pushed her far away: the tides that the moon herself
causes in the Earth's waters, where the Earth slowly loses energy
(3). Blanchot can help us think
through the difference between what Calvino is doing and what, to
stick with my example, Kipling does in Just So Stories.
Blanchot considers the difference between a statement and a question
and response that apparently convey the same information.
Let us take two modes of expression:
“The sky is blue,” “Is the sky blue? Yes.” One
need be no great scholar to recognize what separates them. The “Yes”
does not at all restore the simplicity of the flat affirmation; in
the question the blue of the sky has given way to the void. The blue
however, has not dissipated. On the contrary, it has been raised
dramatically up to its possibility:
beyond its being and unfolding in the intensity of this new space,
certainly more blue than it has ever been, in a more intimate
relations with the sky, in the instant—the instant of the question
where everything is in instancy. (13)
For
Blanchot, the question introduces a “void” into the proposition,
a void that the affirmative “yes” does not “restore” to the
level of statement. In the “instant of the question,”
“possibility” is brought forth—but in the answer the question
and the possibility of states beyond immediate or apparent existence
“is terminated, closed again by the answer” (13). Thus, stories
like Kipling's, which prolong the “yes” of affirmation over the
course of an 'imaginative' narrative in effect closes off the
creative impulse, the opening instance of the question “why?”.
These stories progress from question to answer, so while they take on
a form of imaginative possibility that exceed simply making up a
story without a clear or even murky “how” or “why,” through
their underlying logic they reject the possibility as both childish
and primitive, reaffirming, ultimately, the primacy of the yes.
Calvino, I think, is doing something different. Calvino begins, in
essence, with the “flat affirmation” of a statement and forces
the question into existence through the creation of a narrative.
Calvino's stories uniformly end with improper endings—with
irresolutions that serve, like the resolutions of Kipling's stories,
as the grounds for experience in general. In a certain sense, we can
interpret Calvino's subversion of the questioning logic as a kind of
critique of scientific positivism, for he essentially positions myths
and scientific explanations on the same plane; both serve to explain
elements of the world to which human knowledge does not have
immediate access. More subtly though, Calvino's stories insist that
even after “flat affirmation” there can only be something
else—some response, some further question, some relation to a time
before the statement and the question were articulated from each
other that can neither be thought nor even intuited. For
Calvino then, the conversation of the Cosmicomics
is not between an old narrator and a young audience in a
traditional sense. To be sure, Qfwfq is as old as the universe
itself, though he experiences multiple periods of youth depending on
the demands of the particular story. Instead, Cosmicomics
presents a series of origins for different phenomena that appear
already formed elsewhere, earlier in time, perhaps in contradictory
modes. If there is no chrono-logic to the Cosmicomics
though, there is a strong emphasis on temporality as
experience of a loss that has already happened, a loss that
instigates the beginning of presence in any conceivable sense.
This
logic plays out with different inflections in the various
Cosmicomics. “The
Distance of the Moon,” for example, can be read as an origin story
for the importance of the moon (in Italian literature, for Calvino),
not of the moon or the tides themselves. This is the origin of a
signification then. In “The Distance of the Moon” it is the
Captain's lost wife who “makes the Moon the Moon,” she who “sets
the dogs howling all night long, and me with them” (19). “The
Distance of the Moon” is thus a story of the experience of loss and
of the transition of significance from one object to another. Calvino
redoubles this narrative experience in the metaphor of the tides. The
driving impetus of the conflict of the story is the Moon's recession
from the Earth. At the story's beginning, the two bodies are close
enough together that Qfwfq and his family are able to clamber up a
ladder on a boat and pass from the Earth's gravitational pull to the
Moon's in order to harvest “Moon-milk” from the Moon's surface.
But, as the scientific overture already informs us, the tides that
the Moon creates will push the Moon away from the Earth. Thus the
energy that passes between two poles—here the Moon and the Earth,
differentiated but not yet differentiated in the way they are
'today'-- is in fact created by the movement of the two poles and
begins to constitute its own force, the tides. The tides are both the
result and the cause of the same difference. They are movement, then,
without beginning or end, that emerges and accelerates from the
smallest point of differentiation.
Movement then
becomes the subject of the story, and its characters and literary
allusions cannot be conceived without reference to this non-polar
movement. Plot itself is driven by the cause/effect of the tide's
pull. The narrative proper begins when Qfwfq says, “this is how the
story of my love for the Captain's wife began, and my suffering”
(10). The introduction of love and suffering at the same point does
not bear comment, but it is interesting to note what “this” Qfwfq
refers to. The paragraphs preceding the beginning of the narrative
portion of the story detail the experience of transitioning from the
surface of the Moon back to Earth and its gravitational orientation.
Qfwfq explains:
This should give
you an idea of how the influences of Earth and Moon, practically
equal, fought over the space between them. I'll tell you something
else: a body that descended to the Earth from the satellite was still
charged for a while with lunar force and rejected the attraction of
our world. Even I, big and heavy as I was: every time I had been up
there, I took a while to get used to the Earth's up and its down, and
the others would have to grab my arms and hold me, clinging in a
bunch in the swaying boat while I still had my head hanging and my
legs stretching up towards the sky. (10)
In these moments of
inverted/suspended gravity, Qfwfq sometimes “ended up by seizing
one of Mrs Vhd Vhd's breasts, which were round and firm and the
contact was good and secure and had an attraction as strong as the
Moon's or even stronger”(10). Love becomes a grounding force within
the non-pull of the space between Earth and Moon. At the same time,
or more properly, later, love is what invests the apparently natural
phenomenon with value, and thus throws it into something like
narrative possibility. Once he begins to love Mrs Vhd Vhd, Qfwfq
realizes that she is in love with his deaf cousin, who in turn is in
love the Moon. Qfwfq imagines at first that his conflict will be
between himself and Mrs Vhd Vhd's husband, the captain of the boat
from which they clamber to the Moon, but the Captain is unconcerned
by Qfwfq's intentions and his wife's love for the deaf cousin.
Instead, the plot progresses through a series of encounters between
the characters where the deaf cousin's aloofness and monomania (in
his love for the moon) persistently foil Qfwfq's attempts to
communicate his love for the Captain's wife. The story's central
crisis precipitates on the first night that the Moon's movement away
from the Earth is detectible. The Moon begins to recede too rapidly,
nearly stranding the deaf cousin and the other Moon-milk harvesters.
Mrs Vhd Vhd is unable to return to the boat because she had attempted
to follow the deaf cousin to his hiding places on the Moon's surface.
Qfwfq leaps from the boat and swims to her through the air, finally
landing on the surface of the Moon to wait out its month-long orbit
with the Captain's wife.
But as the next
encounter with the Earth arrives, Qfwfq realizes that the two bodies
will not pass close enough to pass between. Instead of the
traditional ladders, the boats raise a long bamboo pole, which the
deaf cousin uses, not for rescue, but rather to push the Moon farther
away. Qfwfq recalls, “he wanted to show her to her more distant
orbit. And this, too, was just like him: he was unable to conceive
desires that went agains the Moon's nature, the Moon's course and
destiny, and if the Moon now tended to go away from him, then he
would take delight in this separation just as, till now, he had
delighted in the Moon's nearness” (17). Mrs Vhd Vhd, recognizing
the deaf cousin's intention and through it the impossibility of his
loving her, decides that “if what my cousin now loved was the
distant Moon, then she too would remain distant, on the Moon” (18).
But for Qfwfq there is something formally different about his
dissatisfaction. Rather than losing the object of his desire as the
deaf cousin loses the moon or Mrs Vhd Vhd loses the cousin, Qfwq
loses the network that made his object (Mrs Vhd Vhd) desirable. He
writes,
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. I was eager to return to the Earth,
and I trembled at the fear of having lost it. The fulfilment of my
dream of love had lasted only that instant when we had been united,
spinning between Earth and Moon; torn from its earthyl soil, my love
now knew only the heart-rending nostalgia for what it lacked: a
where, a surrounding, a before, an after. (16)
Mrs Vhd Vhd's
assimilation into the Moon constitutes a return to a new Earthly
order, though the gravitational no-man's-land is replaced by the
howls of dogs and the “slow arpeggios” of Mrs Vhd Vhd's harp
(18). The creation of space as a void, as separation, allows it to be
filled with the significant signs of desire—music and howling.
A
similar motif appears in “All at One Point,” in which the
inhabitants of the universe when it existed as a single point in
space recall their fellow pre-Big Bang resident, Mrs. Ph(i)nko. The
premise of this story is that “Through the calculations
begun by Edwin P. Hubble on the galaxies' velocity of recession, we
can establish the moment when all the universe's matter was
concentrated in a single point, before it began to expand in space”
(43). Calvino turns this
seemingly one directional trajectory into a meditation on the return
to an absolute origin. Qfwfq encounters a fellow single-point
resident, Mr Pbert Pberd, at a bar. The two fall to discussing the
people they have known and whether they will meet any of them again.
Qfwfq reveals, “this theory that the universe, after having reached
an extremity of rarefaction, will be condensed again has never
convinced me. Any yet many of us are counting only on that,
continually making plans for the time when we'll all be back there
again” (45). Calvino draws a connection between personal desires
for homecoming with a possible teleology of the universe, one that
Qfwfq finds unconvincing (though desirable). By doing so Calvino
finds a way to think through origin in general, and indeed this
origin is inseparable from a trace of differentiation whose
realization becomes both time and space.
I'm going to quote
at length the final paragraphs of the story because they cannot be
paraphrased in any meaningful way. Qfwfq reflects on the overwhelming
desirability of Mrs Ph(i)nko:
And all of this,
which was true of me, was true also for each of the others. And for
her: she contained and was contained with equal happiness, and she
welcomed us and loved and inhabited all equally.
We got along so
well all together, so well that something extraordinary was bound to
happen. 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 tagliatelle for you
boys!' And in that moment we all thought of the space that her round
arms would occupy, moving backwards and forwards with the rolling pin
over the dough, her bosom leaning over the great mound of flour and
eggs which cluttered the wide board while her arms kneaded and
kneaded, white and shiny with oil up to the elbows; we thought of the
space that the flour would occupy, and the wheat for the flour, and
the fields to raise the wheat, and the mountains from which the water
would flow to irrigate the fields, and the grazing lands for the
herds of calves that would give their meat for the sauce; 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, at the same time that Mrs Ph(i)nko was uttering those words:
'...ah, what tagliatelle, boys!' the point that contained her and all
of us was expanding in a halo of distance in light-years and
light-centuries and billions of light-millennia, and we were being
hurled to the four corners of the universe (Mr Pbert Pberd all the
way to Pavia), and she, dissolved into I don't know what kind of
energy-light-heat, she, Mrs Ph(i)nko, she who in the midst of our
closed, petty world had been capable of a generous impulse, 'Boys,
the tagliatelle I would make for you!', a true outburst of general
love, initiating at the same moment the concept of space and,
properly speaking, space itself, and time, and universal gravitation,
and the gravitating universe, making possible billions and billions
of suns, and of planets, and fields of wheat, and Mrs Ph(i)nkos,
scattered through the continents of the planets, kneading with
floury, oil shiny, generous arms, and she lost at that very moment,
and we, mourning her loss. (47-48)
After
the first iteration of the tagliatelle utterance the prose descends
into an almost endlessly grammatically deferred sentence. At this
moment that space and time emerge in the history of the universe,
language itself begins to expand both spatially and temporally.
Calvino works to represent what this creation of the concept of space
would entail—beginning with Mrs Ph(i)nko directly working the pasta
dough in her hands, slowly abstracting and moving outward back
through the process of the pasta's production: the flour, the wheat,
the fields, the ecosystem, the solar system, the galaxy and finally
the entire universe all held together by Mrs Ph(i)nko's generous
language. While Qfwfq denies the possibility of the universe
collapsing back to is original spot—to the original experience of
co-containing Mrs Ph(i)nko—memory itself follows such a trajectory,
but inverted (though not quite inverted—not sure there's really a
word for what he does). Qfwfq's memory begins with a single point and
expands outward to encompass the whole universe, though
chronologically the tagliatelle is the final
product of the process of universe production. The beginning is the
end; the beginning is already contained in, anticipated by,
precipitated by the end. But the end is never reached. Mrs Ph(i)nko
dissolves into something unknowable—energy—“lost at that very
moment” that “a generous impulse...a true outburst of general
love” first comes into possibility.
Like
he is at the conclusion of “The Distance of the Moon,” Qfwfq is
left mourning at the “very moment” the woman he desires is
transformed by desire into something else. “All at One Point”
thus reiterate elements of the narrative of “The Distance of the
Moon,” but instead of discovering the origin of sorrow and
consequently of signification, we find here a more original origin at
which point thought and action, sign and space are created in the
same “generous” moment. The purely sexual feminine figure of “The
Distance of the Moon” is transformed into the sensual yet maternal
Mrs Ph(i)nko. Qfwfq writes, “The fact that she went to bed with her
friend Mr De Xuaeaux was well known. But in a point, if there's a
bed, it takes up the whole point, so it isn't a question of going
to bed, but if being there,
because anybody in the point is also in the bed. Consequently, it was
inevitable that she should be in bed also with each of us” (46).
Mrs Ph(i)nko's sexuality is everpresent and all encompassing, but
there is nonetheless a sense of separation. Though she is in
bed with everyone, she only went
to bed with Mr De Xuaeaux. Her erotic energy, what we can call her
desire, is thus directed towards a certain end that maintains the
continuity of all space in the point despite creating separation
within it (those who are going to bed and those who are not). Calvino
creates a primal difference along other lines as well. There is the
“cleaning woman--'maintenance staff' she was called” and the
“family of immigrants by the name of Z'zu” who are marked
respectively by their labor and their ethnicity (though as Calvino
notes, neither of these concepts were meaningful since on the one
hand there is no cleaning to do in a single point and likewise
nowhere to immigrate from). But while the cleaning woman with her
gossip and the Z'zus with their strange ways sow social discord (that
likewise maintains the social cohesion of the other point
inhabitants), Mrs Ph(i)nko and her feminine capaciousness tears
everything apart while attempting to hold it all together. Mrs
Ph(i)nko's innovation is a maternal impulse—care—signaled by her
designation of Qfwfq and the others as “boys.”
But
at the same time this maternal attraction remains inseparable from
her erotic attraction, and it is perhaps this contradiction that
causes the point with its utter subjective saturation to explode.
Qfwfq explains, “With her it was different: the happiness I derived
from her was the joy of being concealed, punctiform, in her, and of
protecting her, punctiform, in me; it was at the same time vicious
contemplation (thanks to the promiscuity of the punctiform
convergence of us all in her) and also chastity (given her punctiform
impenetrability). In short, what more could I ask?” (46-47) The
answer to this question “what more could I ask?” is given by the
creation of literally more, of the 'more' as a concept. Thus for
Qfwfq (if not for Calvino) the feminine provides two modes of
thinking attraction and attachment, and two modes of origin.
Generosity as the first aspect of being, desire as the first aspect
of signification. It is the wanting of Mrs Ph(i)nko through the
desire for the tagliatelle that brings not only the physical elements
of the universe into existence, but also their causal relationality,
their metonymic proximity that makes the universe desirable so
that it can produce the
tagliatelle. This metnonymy is subtended by a primary metaphor,
Tagliatelle for Mrs Ph(i)nko. Though in the case of both
“The Distance of the Moon” and “All at One Point” the primary
feminine metaphor is also
a metonomy. Metaphor gets to the heart of desire though it operates
within the system of metonymy.
