1 The Inner City of the Imagination
Utopia and the Ethical Charge of Fiction
âReality 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.â Carlo Emilio Gadda, Scritti vari e postumi (752)
âThe world you want to live in ⌠is not the world you see but the world you build out of what you see.â
Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination (19)
The year after Invisible Cities was published, during one of Calvinoâs monthly trips between France and Italy, the Ligurian writer sat down with Ferdinando Camon at the Einaudi publishing house in Turin (âColloquio con Ferdinando Camonâ). In that 1973 interview and subsequently in written correspondence with Camon, the novelistâs 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 (âColloquioâ 2786), Calvino offered his understanding of imaginative literatureâs 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. (âColloquioâ 2787)
It was so necessary, in his view, that he confided in Camon his dream of founding a literary journal aimed at âa new public that has not yet thought about the place literature might occupy among their daily necessitiesâ (âColloquioâ 2786).
Speculations like the ones above may seem at first sight incongruous with Invisible Cities, yet a cursory review of Calvinoâs 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 âUsi politici giusti e sbagliati della letteratura,â for instance, he framed literature as one of societyâs principal âinstruments of self-awarenessâ (âRight and Wrong Political Uses of Literatureâ 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. (98â99 [my emphasis])
In another essay entitled âLa sfida al labirintoâ (âChallenge to the Labyrinthâ) 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 âit becomes a [critique] of the world and our way of looking at the worldâ (âCybernetics and Ghostsâ 24): literature points out the path to freedom through which humans acquire a critical spirit (25). Literatureâs goal, as he articulated it in another essay from 1967, âPer chi si scrive?â (âWhom Do We Write For?â), was to start a critical dialogue about âthe established scale of values and code of meaningsâ (82). Indeed, literature raised individual and collective reflection on the state of society to âa higher level of awarenessâ by sharpening the âinstruments of knowledge, of foresight, of imagination, of concentrationâ (87). In âIl rapporto con la lunaâ (âRelationship with the Moonâ), 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 âthink in a new way about many thingsâ (227). One year later, Calvino assimilated literature to âa moral activityâ insofar as literature generated, thanks to the imagination, âautonomous figures that may be used as terms of comparison with experience or with other constructions of the mindâ (âTwo Interviews on Science and Literatureâ 36).
Well before he sat down in Paris to write Invisible Cities, Calvino had become convinced that the writerâs (and the readerâs) 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 Calvinoâs 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 Winterâs Night a Traveler. Nevertheless, an archaeology of lightness confirms that the latter was the maturation of ethical and aesthetic values born in the â50s and â60s, 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 Calvinoâs thinking at the middle pointâwhose maximum expression is Invisible Citiesâof 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 visualizeâto develop their capacity for image makingâand 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 Calvinoâs thinking and writing, one that he shared with many of his contemporaries in French and Italian architecture and urban design (ch. 2). Calvinoâs 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 âlogico-fantastic machineâ that would reject conventional images and train readers to create their own images (Calvino, âFine Dustâ 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 hypothesizeâto conjecture alternatives to their status quo.
Some of Calvinoâs 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 Lucretiusâs particles or corpuscles (Lucretian lightness).5 Lucretiusâs 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 Calvinoâs 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 âinner cityâ 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 â60s and early â70s: how could literature strive for this âinner city,â 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 â50s and â60s, 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: Calvinoâs enduring engagĂŠ approach to society and his Ă la Perseus modus operandi. The writings stretch from âIl midollo del leoneâ (âThe Lionâs Marrowâ [1955]) to âNon darò piĂš fiato alle trombeâ (âI Wonât Sound the Trumpets Anymoreâ [1965]). Included in this cluster are âNatura e storia del romanzoâ (âNature and History of the Novelâ [1958]), âIl mare dellâoggettivitĂ â (âThe Sea of the Object Worldâ [1959]), âTre correnti del romanzo italiano dâoggiâ (âThree Trends in the Contemporary Italian Novelâ [1959]), âI beatniks e il ÂŤsistemaÂťâ (âBeatniks and the âSystemââ [1962]), âLa sfida al labirintoâ (âChallenge to the Labyrinthâ [1962]), and âLâantitesi operaiaâ (âThe Proletarian Antithesisâ [1964]). These are the most widely read of Calvinoâs essays in Italy, and their exhortatory and ideological intentions have been exhaustively analyzed.7 My interest lies elsewhere: in the coherence of their figurative languageâin their ensemble of metaphorical and intertextual echoesâ which justifies my rubric, for it is in these essays from the â50s and â60s 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 âindividual consciousness, will, and discernmentâ and âthe object worldâ (âIl mare dellâoggettivitĂ â 52). Further, they reflect Calvinoâs anxiety about the fate of individual consciousness, particularly the intellectualâs: progressively deprived of the ability to perceive and articulate its alterity, or separation, vis-Ă -vis objective reality, the consciousness of the contemporary writer manifested a âsupine acceptance of the world as it isâ (âNatura e storiaâ 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 âIl mare dellâoggettivitĂ ,â for example, conveys reality as a sea of lava: a âflash floodâ (52), a âsilent cataclysmâ (53) provoke a âdrowning in magmaâ (53); the perception that âan uninterrupted viscosity [envelops] the self and the objects [of external reality]â (54). Literature was also imperiled, according to Calvinoâs 1959 essay, for its âpoint-of-view [was] that of magmaâ (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. âGurduloo has gulped down a pint of salty water,â the narrator tells us, âbefore realizing that the sea is not supposed to be inside him but he inside the seaâ (Nonexistent Knight 110). His burlesque plunge into a pot of hot soup is the fictional correlate of an âidentification with the external world, with the existential totality undifferentiated from the selfâ (âIl mare dellâoggettivitĂ â 54). âIt 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 himselfâ (54â55). âAll is soup!â Gurduloo shouts from the pot, âwith his hands forward as if swimming, seeing nothing but the soup covering eyes and face, âAll is soup!ââ (Nonexistent Knight 54). Agilulfâs critical detachment and elevated consciousness (which would later be conceptualized as lightness in Six Memos) rejects the idea of âthe world being nothing but a vast shapeless mass of soup in which all things dissolved and tinged all else with itselfâ (54). To Gurdulooâs drowning in the sea of external reality, Agilulf reacts vehemently: âwhy donât you make him realise that all isnât soup and put an end to this saraband of his?â (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 âa clear-cut job to doâ (55).
Acutely aware of the widespread magma drowning individual consciousness, Calvino urged readers of âIl mare dellâoggettivitĂ â to resist: âlet us fight against an unconditional surrender to the world of objectsâ (55), in order to learn âthe means that the object world still offers us to undertake active intervention once again ⌠, which does not accept historical necessity and wishes to alter itâ (55).9 For Calvino, the âunconditional surrender to the world of objectsâ was tantamount to renouncing civil society and civilization. It would lead to the total deflation of the âideal tensionâ that sustained human agency: the loss of faith in humanityâs ability âto direct the course of things.â 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 âparalyzingâ (56), thus anticipating by some three decades Medusaâs harrowing petrification in Six Memos.
In âI beatniks e il ÂŤsistemaÂť,â 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: âcreative immobility,â âmoral tension that ⌠stagnates in the marshland of our daily things-to-doâ (102).10 The social, economic, and cultural landscape was a âlabyrinth that we saw closing around us bit-by-bit,â âa uniform surface,â and âwe too will be become part of this undifferentiatednessâ (103). Two years later, in âLâantitesi operaia,â class consciousness suffers the same fate as individual consciousness, as both are in a sticky tangle: âmass culture is a homogeneous, gelatin-like marmaladeâ designed to ârein inâ antagonistic forces and opinions (132).
In the late â60s, when Invisible Cities was well underway, Calvinoâs 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, Calvinoâs 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 âthe massive weight and complexity of the world have hardened around us, and they leave no loopholesâ (âFine Dustâ 247), which were derived from the geological metaphor of petrification, and which denounced political and cultural immobility.12 That hardening, or âlethal embrace of that which is solid and immobileâ (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 lightnessâthe figurative ancestors of Perseus, the other...