Italo Calvino's Architecture of Lightness

The Utopian Imagination in An Age of Urban Crisis

Letizia Modena

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136730597
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Italian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This study recovers Italo Calvino's central place in a lost history of interdisciplinary thought, politics, and literary philosophy in the 1960s. Drawing on his letters, essays, critical reviews, and fiction, as well as a wide range of works--primarily urban planning and design theory and history--circulating among his primary interlocutors, this book takes as its point of departure a sweeping reinterpretation of Invisible Cities. Passages from Calvino's most famous novel routinely appear as aphorisms in calendars, posters, and the popular literature of inspiration and self-help, reducing the novel to vague abstractions and totalizing wisdom about thinking outside the box. The shadow of postmodern studies has had a similarly diminishing effect on this text, rendering up an accomplished but ultimately apolitical novelistic experimentation in endless deconstructive deferrals, the shiny surfaces of play, and the ultimately rigged game of self-referentiality. In contrast, this study draws on an archive of untranslated Italian- and French-language materials on urban planning, architecture, and utopian architecture to argue that Calvino's novel in fact introduces readers to the material history of urban renewal in Italy, France, and the U.S. in the 1960s, as well as the multidisciplinary core of cultural life in that decade: the complex and continuous interplay among novelists and architects, scientists and artists, literary historians and visual studies scholars. His last love poem for the dying city was in fact profoundly engaged, deeply committed to the ethical dimensions of both architecture and lived experience in the spaces of modernity as well as the resistant practices of reading and utopian imagining that his urban studies in turn inspired.

1 The Inner City of the Imagination

Utopia and the Ethical Charge of Fiction

“Reality is like a city, and a city is made of houses, and a house is made of walls, and a wall is made of bricks, and a brick is made of granules. And a granule is in itself, it is in the brick, it is in the wall, it is in the house, it is in the city.” Carlo Emilio Gadda, Scritti vari e postumi (752)

“The world you want to live in … is not the world you see but the world you build out of what you see.”

Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination (19)

The year after Invisible Cities was published, during one of Calvino’s monthly trips between France and Italy, the Ligurian writer sat down with Ferdinando Camon at the Einaudi publishing house in Turin (“Colloquio con Ferdinando Camon”). In that 1973 interview and subsequently in written correspondence with Camon, the novelist’s dissatisfaction with thenprevailing models of cultural critique was palpable. Marxism in particular struck him as cranky, uninspiring, perhaps exhausted. Still a wordsmith committed to the Gramscian notion that literature had a social function, that it responded to a collective need (“Colloquio” 2786), Calvino offered his understanding of imaginative literature’s ethical and social potential:

I continue to believe in the appeal to hunger, in the classes that are hungry. If I were a specialist in food production … , I would devote myself to issues concerning how to feed millions of people, which implies changes to the most stubborn of cultural habits… . But, instead, I am a specialist in imaginative and verbal material, and I dedicate myself to the hunger for written words, for stories told, for mythological figures: all stuff that is no less essential than food, as we all know. (“Colloquio” 2787)

It was so necessary, in his view, that he confided in Camon his dream of founding a literary journal aimed at “a new public that has not yet thought about the place literature might occupy among their daily necessities” (“Colloquio” 2786).

Speculations like the ones above may seem at first sight incongruous with Invisible Cities, yet a cursory review of Calvino’s nonfiction from the 1960s confirms his preoccupation with the imagination and the ethical potential of literature in the period preceding his 1972 novel.¹ In the 1962 essay “Usi politici giusti e sbagliati della letteratura,” for instance, he framed literature as one of society’s principal “instruments of self-awareness” (“Right and Wrong Political Uses of Literature” 97). Beyond this, however, there was a direct relationship between literature and the shaping of ethical and aesthetic values, according to the same essay:

But there is also, I think, another sort of influence that literature can exert, perhaps not more direct but certainly more intentional on the part of the writer. This is the ability to impose patterns of language, of vision, of imagination, of mental effort, of the correlation of facts, and in short the creation (and by creation I mean selection and organization) of a model of values that is at the same time aesthetic and ethical, essential to any plan of action, especially in political life. (98–99 [my emphasis])

In another essay entitled “La sfida al labirinto” (“Challenge to the Labyrinth”) published the same year, he invested literature with a generative role in our representations of the object world (122).

As the decade advanced, Calvino became increasingly focused on the mutual imbrications of imagination and cognition. In 1967 he asserted that imaginative literature was valuable when “it becomes a [critique] of the world and our way of looking at the world” (“Cybernetics and Ghosts” 24): literature points out the path to freedom through which humans acquire a critical spirit (25). Literature’s goal, as he articulated it in another essay from 1967, “Per chi si scrive?” (“Whom Do We Write For?”), was to start a critical dialogue about “the established scale of values and code of meanings” (82). Indeed, literature raised individual and collective reflection on the state of society to “a higher level of awareness” by sharpening the “instruments of knowledge, of foresight, of imagination, of concentration” (87). In “Il rapporto con la luna” (“Relationship with the Moon”), also from 1967, Calvino described literature as a vehicle for scrutinizing the given or the obvious, then rethinking it with the imagination, or coming to “think in a new way about many things” (227). One year later, Calvino assimilated literature to “a moral activity” insofar as literature generated, thanks to the imagination, “autonomous figures that may be used as terms of comparison with experience or with other constructions of the mind” (“Two Interviews on Science and Literature” 36).

Well before he sat down in Paris to write Invisible Cities, Calvino had become convinced that the writer’s (and the reader’s) imagination had to free itself from the weight of conventional representation and interpretation in order to devise and visualize images according to the value of lightness.² One of the most difficult and controversial concepts in Calvino’s thought and writing, lightness cannot be fully appreciated when it is severed from his lifelong preoccupation with the imagination and the social role of literature. Admittedly, such an assertion calls into question the bulk of critical readings of works such as Invisible Cities and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Nevertheless, an archaeology of lightness confirms that the latter was the maturation of ethical and aesthetic values born in the ’50s and ’60s, that is, long before the Norton Lectures that would yield Six Memos for the Next Millennium.³ Analyzing those values that are at once aesthetic and ethical illuminates Calvino’s thinking at the middle point—whose maximum expression is Invisible Cities—of a temporal arc that stretches from the preliminaries of lightness to the definitive theorization of lightness in Six Memos. The reappraisal of lightness presented in this chapter recovers its ethical and social imbrications, redefining it as a cognitive and heuristic tool to train readers of fiction to visualize—to develop their capacity for image making—and reimagine society (or the city) and their relationship to it.⁴

That discussion leads in turn to a more profound appreciation of the relationship between lightness and utopia in Calvino’s thinking and writing, one that he shared with many of his contemporaries in French and Italian architecture and urban design (ch. 2). Calvino’s profound engagement with theories of utopia, the imagination, and ethics comes to the fore in this chapter through an analysis of works by Raymond Ruyer, Herbert Marcuse, Jean Starobinski, and Roland Barthes, all of whom were discussing the ethical value of employing literature to construct a visual “logico-fantastic machine” that would reject conventional images and train readers to create their own images (Calvino, “Fine Dust” 252). This training of the imagination was intended to be coterminous with ethics because those newly critical readers would then be able to judge their own reality from a fresh perspective and possess the imaginative capital to hypothesize—to conjecture alternatives to their status quo.

Some of Calvino’s most memorable light images, in fact, expose his readers to a range of unexpected urban hypotheses, whether through a disembodied or dematerialized iconography (ascending lightness) or through an emphasis on light, minute, mobile elements akin to the ancient Roman philosopher Lucretius’s particles or corpuscles (Lucretian lightness).⁵ Lucretius’s De rerum natura (circa AD 100 ), a poem expounding the ethical and physical atomism of the Greek philosopher Epicurus (300 BC), made a profound impression on Calvino’s poetic imaginary.⁶ Indeed, he explicitly traced his literary creativity and his conceptualization of lightness to the physics, ethics, and poetics of De rerum natura. On one hand, the exposure to images of ascending or Lucretian lightness was designed to prompt readers to rethink conventional notions of society; on the other hand, Lucretian lightness in particular became for Calvino an image-making device, or a tool for readers to produce multiple, reversible, rearrangeable utopias within the “inner city” of their imagination. Under the influence of Six Memos, however, the vast majority of Calvino scholars have reduced lightness to the playfulness and self-referentiality of literary postmodernism. To counter this prevailing interpretation, we must ask ourselves the same question that Calvino was asking himself in the late ’60s and early ’70s: how could literature strive for this “inner city,” or as he would later call it, this inner world of lightness?

An Alternative Genealogy of Ascending Lightness

The ethical and aesthetic origins of ascending lightness as Calvino practices it in Invisible Cities and conceptualizes it in Six Memos are to be found in his expressly ideological essays from the ’50s and ’60s, which I call his saggistica del magma, or essays on magma. This group of essays integrates the champion of faith in the ethical function of literature and the theoretician of ascending lightness: Calvino’s enduring engagé approach to society and his à la Perseus modus operandi. The writings stretch from “Il midollo del leone” (“The Lion’s Marrow” [1955]) to “Non darò più fiato alle trombe” (“I Won’t Sound the Trumpets Anymore” [1965]). Included in this cluster are “Natura e storia del romanzo” (“Nature and History of the Novel” [1958]), “Il mare dell’oggettività” (“The Sea of the Object World” [1959]), “Tre correnti del romanzo italiano d’oggi” (“Three Trends in the Contemporary Italian Novel” [1959]), “I beatniks e il «sistema»” (“Beatniks and the ‘System’” [1962]), “La sfida al labirinto” (“Challenge to the Labyrinth” [1962]), and “L’antitesi operaia” (“The Proletarian Antithesis” [1964]). These are the most widely read of Calvino’s essays in Italy, and their exhortatory and ideological intentions have been exhaustively analyzed.⁷ My interest lies elsewhere: in the coherence of their figurative language—in their ensemble of metaphorical and intertextual echoes— which justifies my rubric, for it is in these essays from the ’50s and ’60s that I encounter the earliest images of the enemy of ascending lightness: magma, or petrification.⁸

Although vastly different circumstances interpellated each of his essays on magma, common threads run through them. To begin with, they all highlight the relationship that literature must establish with readers in order to awaken their consciousness concerning objective reality and spur them to envision alternative orders. At the same time, these essays elucidate the rapport between “individual consciousness, will, and discernment” and “the object world” (“Il mare dell’oggettività” 52). Further, they reflect Calvino’s anxiety about the fate of individual consciousness, particularly the intellectual’s: progressively deprived of the ability to perceive and articulate its alterity, or separation, vis-à-vis objective reality, the consciousness of the contemporary writer manifested a “supine acceptance of the world as it is” (“Natura e storia” 51). In so doing, individual consciousness had lost its position of elevation and critical detachment with respect to the object world. From 1958 onward, Calvino increasingly tapped into a geomorphological poetics to represent the relationship between individual consciousness and the world of objects, and to stake out an ethical and social sphere of influence for literature. He consistently resorted to magmatic and alluvial images such as imprisonment, sinking, flood, stickiness, stasis, immobilization, and finally, petrification (through which he would later reactivate the Medusa myth in Six Memos). The essay “Il mare dell’oggettività,” for example, conveys reality as a sea of lava: a “flash flood” (52), a “silent cataclysm” (53) provoke a “drowning in magma” (53); the perception that “an uninterrupted viscosity [envelops] the self and the objects [of external reality]” (54). Literature was also imperiled, according to Calvino’s 1959 essay, for its “point-of-view [was] that of magma” (54).

That very same year, in Il cavaliere inesistente (The Nonexistent Knight), the hilarious squire Gurduloo exemplifies the fusion of the self with the world of objects around him, which the knight of ascending lightness Agilulf successfully dodges. “Gurduloo has gulped down a pint of salty water,” the narrator tells us, “before realizing that the sea is not supposed to be inside him but he inside the sea” (Nonexistent Knight 110). His burlesque plunge into a pot of hot soup is the fictional correlate of an “identification with the external world, with the existential totality undifferentiated from the self” (“Il mare dell’oggettività” 54). “It is the object world that drowns the self; the volcano that spews the flow of lava … is the boiling crater of alterity into which the fiction writer throws himself” (54–55). “All is soup!” Gurduloo shouts from the pot, “with his hands forward as if swimming, seeing nothing but the soup covering eyes and face, ‘All is soup!’” (Nonexistent Knight 54). Agilulf’s critical detachment and elevated consciousness (which would later be conceptualized as lightness in Six Memos) rejects the idea of “the world being nothing but a vast shapeless mass of soup in which all things dissolved and tinged all else with itself” (54). To Gurduloo’s drowning in the sea of external reality, Agilulf reacts vehemently: “why don’t you make him realise that all isn’t soup and put an end to this saraband of his?” (55). He opts for active intervention as an ethical choice: the only way to understand that all is not soup, the knight of ascending lightness affirms, is to get involved in “a clear-cut job to do” (55).

Acutely aware of the widespread magma drowning individual consciousness, Calvino urged readers of “Il mare dell’oggettività” to resist: “let us fight against an unconditional surrender to the world of objects” (55), in order to learn “the means that the object world still offers us to undertake active intervention once again … , which does not accept historical necessity and wishes to alter it” (55).⁹ For Calvino, the “unconditional surrender to the world of objects” was tantamount to renouncing civil society and civilization. It would lead to the total deflation of the “ideal tension” that sustained human agency: the loss of faith in humanity’s ability “to direct the course of things.” In the language of metaphor, it meant the imminent surrender of the individual consciousness to the magma, or undifferentiated sea of objects, of the external world. In the same 1959 essay, Calvino defined this looming threat as “paralyzing” (56), thus anticipating by some three decades Medusa’s harrowing petrification in Six Memos.

In “I beatniks e il «sistema»,” Calvino lamented the barbaric landscape of mass culture. The more the pressures of cultural consumption increased, the more strongly he sensed a paralysis of the imagination and of the ethical dimension: “creative immobility,” “moral tension that … stagnates in the marshland of our daily things-to-do” (102).¹⁰ The social, economic, and cultural landscape was a “labyrinth that we saw closing around us bit-by-bit,” “a uniform surface,” and “we too will be become part of this undifferentiatedness” (103). Two years later, in “L’antitesi operaia,” class consciousness suffers the same fate as individual consciousness, as both are in a sticky tangle: “mass culture is a homogeneous, gelatin-like marmalade” designed to “rein in” antagonistic forces and opinions (132).

In the late ’60s, when Invisible Cities was well underway, Calvino’s poetic proclivity for geomorphological images of stagnation, stickiness, and magma underwent a gradual hardening that parallels the process of progressive calcification in the natural world. At that point, Calvino’s metaphorical language referred not only to a paralysis in critical thinking and imagining, but also to the stasis of words and ideas, which he saw in thickly ideologized formulas that admitted no dialectical movement.¹¹ He began to employ such expressions as “the massive weight and complexity of the world have hardened around us, and they leave no loopholes” (“Fine Dust” 247), which were derived from the geological metaphor of petrification, and which denounced political and cultural immobility.¹² That hardening, or “lethal embrace of that which is solid and immobile” (Saggi 2: 2967), was to yield the image of Medusa familiar to readers of the chapter on lightness in Six Memos. It is not surprising, then, that metaphorical antecedents to petrification surfaced repeatedly in the essays on magma, along with the first images of ascending lightness—the figurative ancestors of Perseus, the other...