Embodiment and the Cosmic Perspective in Twentieth-Century Fiction

Marco Caracciolo

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000088854
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In dialogue with groundbreaking technologies and scientific models, twentieth century fiction presents readers with a vast mosaic of perspectives on the cosmos. The literary imagination of the world beyond the human scale, however, faces a fundamental difficulty: if, as researchers in both cognitive science and narrative theory argue, fiction is a practice geared toward the human embodied mind, how can it cope with scientific theories and concepts— the Big Bang, quantum physics, evolutionary biology, and so on—that resist our common-sense intuitions and appear discontinuous, in spatial as well as temporal terms, with our bodies? This book sets out to answer this question by showing how the embodiment of mind continues to matter even as writers— and readers—are pushed out of their terrestrial comfort zone. Offering thoughtful commentary on work by both mainstream literary authors and science fiction writers (from Primo Levi to Jeanette Winterson, from Olaf Stapledon to Pamela Zoline), Embodiment and the Cosmic Perspective in Twentieth-Century Fiction explores the multiple ways in which narrative can radically defamiliarize our bodily experience and bridge the gap with cosmic realities. This investigation affords an opportunity to reflect on the role of literature as it engages with science and charts its epistemological and ethical ramifications.

1 Strange Spaces

Our exploration begins with three narratives where space takes center stage: the dimensionless void occupied by the narrator of Italo Calvino’s “All at One Point,” one of the stories collected in the volume Cosmicomics and first published in 1965; the atomic terra incognita charted by Ray Cummings’s The Girl in the Gold Atom (a classic science fiction story from the 1920s, belonging to the subgenre of “space romance”); and the diminutive world of the protagonist of Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man (originally published in 1956). I choose these narratives as the focus of this first chapter because, already in Gibson’s formulation (discussed in the introduction), spatial scale is the most straightforward illustration of cosmic realities—that is, realities that elude the intermediate world.

As Brian Stableford and David Langford (2019) write in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, one “of the commonest fantastic devices in literature and legend is the alteration of scale.” Whether the protagonist encounters extraordinarily short or tall people (as in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels [1726]), or whether the protagonist him- or herself undergoes an alteration in size (as in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland [1865]), the question of scale has fascinated writers well before the twentieth century. This fascination is partly explained by the emotional and cultural connotations of “small” or “large”—two basic concepts that tend to be bound up with value in human societies. Thus, for instance, Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 50) identify the conceptual metaphor “significant is big,” which straightforwardly maps size onto importance and is at the root of many linguistic expressions. Shifts in scale are more than a matter of physical size: they are conducive to a form of conceptual perspective-taking whereby what we normally regard as irrelevant or insignificant rises to prominence—or, conversely, the importance of our human-scale world is quite literally downsized. In the Divine Comedy, for instance, Dante has a vision of the Earth from “space” (in Dante’s astronomy, the sphere of the fixed stars) and compares it to an “aiuola” or “little patch of earth”:

L’aiuola che ci fa tanto feroci,

volgendom’ io con li etterni Gemelli

tutta m’apparve da’ colli a le foci.

The little patch of earth that makes us here so fierce,

from hills to rivermouths, I saw it all,

while I was being wheeled with the eternal Twins.

(“Paradise” XXII, 151–53)¹

The metaphor shrinks the Earth to something small and trivial, and in so doing conveys a celestial perspective on human struggles. The same conceptual mechanism underlies Swift’s satire of human society, or Carroll’s fantasy world—even though the cultural meanings and frames of reference brought into play by these works are significantly different. In my guiding texts for this chapter, it is science—not Dante’s theology or Swift’s human nature—that inspires a shift in scale. While this interest in the infinitesimally small is a common theme in twentieth-century science fiction, I have chosen to focus on three narratives that offer vastly different, and complementary, variations on this theme. These stories by Calvino, Cummings, and Matheson take place on scales ranging from an ideal zero—the dimensionless space of Calvino’s short story—to the infinitesimal but still material space of The Girl in the Golden Atom, ending with the macroscopic, but rapidly diminishing, world experienced by the protagonist of The Shrinking Man. The question of spatial scale is foregrounded through a dialog with scientific cosmologies, or an imaginative version thereof: the theory of the Big Bang (in Calvino) and the physics of the extremely small (in Cummings and Matheson).

Scale has been discussed extensively in recent debates on literature’s engagement with the Anthropocene: climate change brings into view significant discontinuities between everyday experience and planetary phenomena such as global warming (Woods 2014; T. Clark 2015). These discontinuities are perhaps best illustrated by our lack of phenomenological awareness of how our choices contribute to climate change, which highlights a gap between embodied actions (such as regularly driving a car to work) and conceptual knowledge of those actions’ environmental impact. The intermediate world and the Earth system function on scales that are not only profoundly different but also, in significant ways, incommensurable. The goal of my discussion is to show how literary narrative may bridge this gap by projecting our experience of physical environments onto scalar levels that resist human phenomenology, because it is this kind of cognitive leap that is required to understand the multiscalar complexity of the climate crisis. Indeed, Calvino, Cummings, and Matheson challenge readers’ familiarity with the intermediate world even as they appeal to bodily patterns typical of this world. Their challenges are not equally radical, as we will see, but a degree of bodily defamiliarization is present in each text. In this way, this chapter begins illustrating and deploying in close readings the categories proposed in the introduction; it thus constitutes a conceptual laboratory for the book as a whole, and will float a number of ideas that are to be developed and systematized in the following chapters.

In the Beginning

In the beginning was a feeling of being packed like sardines—or this, at least, is the simile that captures the situation before the Big Bang in one of Calvino’s Cosmicomics, “All at One Point”:

Naturally, we were all there—old Qfwfq said—where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?

I say “packed like sardines,” using a literary image: in reality there wasn’t even space to pack us into. Every point of each of us coincided with every point of each of the others in a single point, which was where we all were. In fact, we didn’t even bother one another, except for personality differences, because when space doesn’t exist, having somebody unpleasant like Mr Pber^t Pber^d underfoot all the time is the most irritating thing.

(2009, 62; emphasis in the original)

This passage illustrates many of the conceptual tensions underlying Calvino’s “cosmic” narratives. Pace the narrator, the simile “packed like sardines” is emphatically not a “literary image.” It—and its equivalent in the Italian original, “pigiati come acciughe” (1984, 157)—are extremely common, perhaps even clichéd expressions that have little to do with literary inventiveness. Yet, by displacing this phrase to a situation that is anything but mundane, this short story manages to infuse the simile with new life. This process closely resembles what linguist Guy Cook (1994) calls “schema refreshment”—namely, how certain linguistic constructs can afford new perspective on stereotypical knowledge. Note also how the narrator comments on his choice of terms, increasing the simile’s salience in readers’ experience of the text. It thus becomes more difficult to consider this expression as a mere linguistic device; we are invited to take the characters’ feeling (and the situation evoked to convey that feeling) at face value, imagining what it must be like to be tightly packed in this way. Recent work in psycholinguistics gives us reason to think that the comprehension of similes like Calvino’s may foster a specifically embodied mode of reading.

In an intriguing experiment on embodied responses to metaphorical language, psychologist Raymond Gibbs (2013) asked two groups of blindfolded participants to walk toward a marker in front of them. The 128 participants had previously seen the marker, and they had to mentally estimate their distance from it. Before starting to walk, one group heard a short narrative of around 70 words containing an embodied metaphor for a romantic relationship: “Your relationship was moving along in a good direction” (2013, 364). “Moving along” is an embodied metaphor because it maps a relatively abstract state of affairs (two people being romantically involved for a certain time) onto a much more concrete scenario of physical movement along a path. The second group heard exactly the same narrative, with the words above replaced by the nonmetaphorical statement “your relationship was very important to you” (2013, 366). Each group was divided into two subgroups: one heard a story with a positive ending (with the relationship continuing to move “along in a good direction”), while the other heard the story with a negative ending (with the relationship eventually failing).

The results were complex but showed a significant interaction between the ending of the story and the time and distance walked by the participants: if the story included an embodied metaphor and had a positive ending, the participants reliably walked for a longer time and distance than when they listened to a story that did not include the metaphorical statement (despite having a positive ending). By contrast, if the story had a negative ending, the participants walked consistently for a shorter distance if they heard the metaphorical statement than if they didn’t. This interaction suggests, according to Gibbs, that participants tended to mentally re-enact the metaphor, drawing on the same neural resources that are involved in actual walking. This phenomenon is known as “embodied simulation” (Gallese 2005) or, more specifically, as “motor resonance” (Zwaan and Taylor 2006). Put simply, the idea is that re-enacting the metaphor prompted participants to walk in ways congruent with the story’s ending: the simulation, Gibbs suggests, led them to walk for a longer distance if the relationship also continued moving (metaphorically), whereas if the relationship came to a halt, participants tended to cover a shorter distance. The study shows—along with many other convergent studies in psycholinguistics (see Introduction)—that linguistic comprehension, and particularly the comprehension of metaphorical language, relies on schemata drawn from the domain of embodied experience.

Could this apply to Calvino’s “packed like sardines” as well? Linguistically, this is a simile and not a metaphor—as we’ve seen—but the underlying conceptual mechanism is fundamentally the same: the simile maps an abstract, and almost unimaginable, state of affairs (how there was no space and time prior to the Big Bang) onto a household object (the sardine can) that evokes a sense of firmness and compactness.² The difference is that the simile, as an explicit comparison (introduced by words such as “like”), is even more likely to call readers’ attention to its own embodied qualities—an effect doubled by the narrator’s self-conscious comment about the “literary image” he or she is using.³ This strategy has an interesting consequence. In Gibbs’s study, embodied simulation in response to the “moving along in a good direction” metaphor remained unconscious—a fleeting pattern of brain activation that had behavioral effects (people walking for a longer or shorter distance) but probably did not emerge in the participants’ consciousness. By contrast, in Calvino’s short story the simile may well give rise to a consciously embodied experience as a result of schema refreshment. Esrock (2004) has already offered a perceptive account of sensorimotor patterns and readers’ involvement in another story collected in Calvino’s Cosmicomics, “The Form of Space.” What my analysis of “All at One Point” adds to Esrock’s discussion is an appreciation of how embodied responses to Calvino’s language push readers out of their anthropocentric comfort zone: they get a sense of what it is like to be “packed in there like sardines” through paradoxical identification with a nonhuman object.

Seemingly, we are in the vicinity of what Ian Bogost (2012) calls “alien phenomenology.” Bogost’s work is part of a larger movement known as object-oriented ontology, which is part of the nonhuman turn discussed in the introduction. Bogost’s 2012 book explores the provocative thesis that things—like a can of sardines—should be given serious attention in philosophy, because there is a sense in which we can think “with” objects and even take their perspective on the world. Bogost’s phenomenology is not just alien because it deals with things but alienating because it challenges an ontological landscape—our own—based on the dichotomy between (human) subjects and (nonhuman) objects—with the latter being seen as inert and passive. Calvino’s image of the can of sardines in this primordial situation works along lines similar to Bogost’s alien phenomenology: it invites readers to empathize with a thing, which is used as an equivalent for a certain feeling of being “all at one point” in time and space. Several commentators have toyed with this posthumanist reading of Calvino. Serenella Iovino, for one, writes that in the Cosmicomics

Calvino expresses at the same time the contingency of the human as a cosmic agent and the vast, a-subjective and an-individual [sic, “a-individuale” in the Italian original] narrativity of things considered in their evolutionary becoming, from atoms to planetary forces.

(2014, 131; my translation)

Iovino further acknowledges that this strategy is fundamentally anthropomorphizing. In Calvino’s stories, cosmic phenomena are given recognizably human faces and voices: they gossip and bicker like nosy neighbors; they have personalities and all-too-human flaws.

The strangeness of Calvino’s operation cannot go unnoticed: in order to decenter the human and open up imaginative perspectives on the “alien” world of matter, his narratives inject a human element into nonhuman realities. Isn’t this a counterintuitive move? Why should the flight from anthropocentrism be accompanied by the projection of human traits and features onto nonhuman entities? Jane Bennett argues as follows: “We need to cultivate a bit of anthropomorphism—the idea that human agency has some echoes in nonhuman nature—to counter the narcissism of humans in charge of the world” (2010, xvi). Anthropomorphization comes so naturally to us because we are limited beings, and imagining what is beyond us necessarily involves building on familiar frames of reference. When coupled with cosmic phenomena, the human can function along the lines of a contrast agent in medical imaging, with reversed roles: in order to reveal certain areas of the (human) body in X-ray photography, we need to ingest or inject chemicals such as iodine or barium. Conversely, to approximate nonhuman phenomena in our imagination, we need to infuse them with human qualities. This is what Calvino does in the Cosmicomics. But the medical analogy is not coincidental—for the human body itself is key in this process. Indeed, anthropomorphization is more than a generic appeal to readers’ familiarity with cultural practices and expectations regarding human societies: it employs patterns arising from somatic experience, and at least potentially it employs readers’ bodily experience itself.

The simile “packed like sardines” fulfills precisely this function: this enigmatic point in time/space before the Big Bang is conceptualized by way of a sardine can. However, the so-called “ground” of the simile (the actual similarity involved) is a feeling that we can only imagine through prior experiences of having our bodies pushed against other bodies, or objects, in a confined space. This feeling builds on a cognitive mechanism, as we’ve seen, known as embodied simulation. Thus, anthropomorphization in Calvino’s Cosmicomics is not just a projection of conceptual features; it consists in a projection of bodily schemata and feelings that put us in touch with cosmic realities, resulting in a form of cosmic perspective-taking. (“In touch” is, of course, another relatively conventionalized embodied metaphor.) Because these realities are incompatible with human embodiment (how can bodies exist without time and space?), the embodied ground of the simile is completely incongruous—an incongruity fr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Living within Narrow Limits
• 1 Strange Spaces
• 2 The Cosmology of Everyday Life
• 3 Sex and the Cosmos
• 4 Posthuman Time Faces the Hard Problem
• 5 Bodies from Outer Space
• 6 The Wide, Wide Cosmos
• Coda: And So What?
• References
• Index