At the end of Italo Calvino's novella The Baron in the Trees, Cosimo, who
travels only from tree to tree and never comes down from the world that he
prefers to the world that presses its claims, finds himself near death. A
host of noisome courtiers and curious peasants swarm under the canopy of the
forest, waiting for him to submit to gravity's insistence. At the final
moment, when all seems done and he must fall, an air balloon flies over the
forest, trailing a rope. Guido makes one last leap. He catches the rope and
disappears.
Calvino was a writer who preferred to disappear. He did not enjoy talking
about himself, finding that the facts of life were a kind of Medusa's stare,
as he puts it in his essay Lightness, published in 1985.
He used his fiction to escape himself, and the weight of the world. This was
not by any means escapism; it was his answer to the eternal question: What
is reality?
Calvino began as a political writer and journalist. He was born in San Remo in
1923 and published his first novel in 1947. The Path to the Nest of Spiders
is socio-realism - the one and only book of that kind that he wrote - and
the only work of his that he regretted. When a writer regrets something that
he or she has written, if it is fiction, it is always, paradoxically,
because the piece of work feels untrue.
The Path to the Nest of Spiders engaged with and represented Calvino's own
postwar world, and he was hailed as a writer who would use literature in the
service of political reality. He became an instant success. Yet Calvino's
instinct was elsewhere; he felt that social realism, as a literary method,
had exhausted its resources - something obvious to the great Modernist
innovators such as Joyce, Woolf, Eliot and Pound, Faulkner and Hemingway,
but repudiated by a later generation dazzled by the atomic bomb, the
seductions of communism and the populism of the new media of film and
television.
The energetic remaking of every kind of creative expression - painting, music,
literature - that had happened after the First World War was not repeated
after the Second World War. A kind of “utility test” became the standard
method of judgment. In the Soviet Union it was obvious that creativity, like
everything else, had to be in the service of the State. In the free West,
art was expected to be in similar relation to the emerging social and
political reality. Imagination, experiment, playfulness, beauty, the
personal search for meaning that every artist must follow, had a suspect and
self-indulgent feel.
In Europe the architecture of Le Corbusier and the Brutalism of the 1950s -
rebuilding the bombed-out prewar landscapes in steel and aggregates - were a
template for the inner landscape, too. Postwar life would be planned,
orderly, public, democratic, functional, transparent, high-rise, concrete.
That human beings are made of a more impressionable material, and are more
labyrinth-minded, chaotic, creative - at once full of insight as well as
incredibly stupid - was not going to be taken into consideration by the
planners and politicians of the new world order.
But art has always been a home for those parts of the self not codified by the
desires of others, or corralled by political expediency. Calvino was a
passionate believer in art as a force that could unite the disparate parts
of the self - and thereby work to heal society. He thought that the
civilised business of living together in peace and co-operation depended on
endless creativity, not increasing control. He was on the side of
imagination, not pamphleteering. For him, literature as a force going
forward, postwar, would be a literature that could encompass everything -
science, history, politics, fantasy, but would be in thrall to none of
these.
Literature itself, through the particular medium of language, could unscroll
the inside of the mind. The concrete world of present reality was only a
part of the space-time of the mind and should not be allowed to pose as the
whole.
Calvino was brave because he sat down to write what interested him - not what
might interest other people. He had a day job in a publishing house, and he
sought neither celebrity nor wealth. He was the extreme other of the
creative writing course wannabe.
He loved the short fictional form, which was a kind of mathematical equation
to him, but he liked to go on playing with the same ideas, so the
Cosmicomics themselves are short, but the whole series, reprinted in full
here for the first time, is several hundred pages long and was written on
and off through most of the 1960s. In Cosmicomics the splendid and
boisterous anarchy of Cervantes and Voltaire couples with the stripped-back
beauty of the double helix.
The writing explodes with the pleasure of its own creation; cliffs made of
zinc, a pole to poke at the Moon, Manhattan gleaming like the bristles of a
brand new toothbrush - and meanwhile the Moon has been thrown into a
scrapyard under the Brooklyn Bridge. The Moon stories in Cosmicomics were
written against the background of the space race, but it never concerned
Calvino - as it did, for instance, C.S. Lewis - that landing on the Moon
would rob us of the Moon as an imaginative icon. Calvino's Moon could not be
captured - she is Galileo's Moon that rewrites the history of the Cosmos,
and the moon of the hopelessly in love Cyrano de Bergerac, one of Calvino's
own favourite writers. The fantastic and the factual are always mixed
together in Calvino, and such is the power of the writing that it is not
always possible to say which is which.
Cosmicomics, with its ancient Big Bang dwarf Qfwfq as the narrator, unravels
the beginning of life and fuses Sixties sci-fi with the extravagant atomics
of a much more ancient Italian writer, Lucretius. The reader does not need
to know that Calvino is using De Rerum Natura, and its glorious conceit of
life's beginnings as a series of ideas randomly colliding with each other,
causing a cascade of creativity and chaos, where a cauliflower might just as
easily have become the dominant life form on Earth. If the reader does pick
up Lucretius, the pleasure is multiplied - pretty much like the
cauliflowers.
That's the kind of writer Calvino is - yet his multilayered narratives are
never showy in that dismal post-modern way of meta-text verbiage, rather
they are winged. As a reader you can choose in which direction you want to
fly.
Calvino has influenced the kind of fiction that likes to play with multiple
realities without beating a retreat into a weak fantasy world. No one can
read Angela Carter or David Mitchell without thinking of Calvino. Salman
Rushdie is enthusiastic in his naming of Calvino as a major influence on his
work, as am I. In fact, after I published Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit in
1985, the year of Calvino's death, and I was being urged towards more of the
same, it was thinking of Calvino's own determination to work in his own way,
and of Qfwfq, that gave me the courage to write The Passion, my own version
of Venice, history and the intersecting narratives of time and loss.
But it is not only that Calvino was able to free up the direction that postwar
fiction could take. His radical use of the short form, found here in
Cosmicomics and most powerfully in his extraordinary set of fictions,
Invisible Cities (1972), is the direct ancestor of the flash fiction in
vogue now and toyed with by Dave Eggers and the McSweeney crowd.
Even really bad novels, such as Twilight, the teenage vampire series by
Stephenie Meyer, use the micro-chapter as pioneered by Calvino (and also by
the French experimentalist Georges Perec). Maddening but true - like calling
an anodyne car Picasso. But in a consumer culture even literature gets a
makeover.
Certainly, Faulkner was working towards simple structural brevity and
lightness in his magnificent novel As I Lay Dying (1930) but Calvino's own
inner urgent necessity, away from any weight of narrative, took him farther
than Faulkner towards the potential of spinning tiny bytes of text all at
once and leaving the reader, not the narrative or the writer, to hold
everything together mentally, and in movement. This, he felt, was real
realism, because science had knocked out the weighty Newtonian Universe to
reveal a world made of nothing at all. The endlessly dividing atom is empty
space and points of light. If it all sounds post-modern - that is, relative,
fragmentary, shifting - it is, but because Calvino is a great writer it is
also satisfying and solid, in the curious way that art allows.
There is a fear now, voiced by neuroscientists such as Susan Greenfield and
Norman Doidge, that by training the brain on the concrete - vocational
education, the simple reward system of video games and mass entertainment,
the simplification of language towards information and away from metaphor -
that we are breeding dull, mechanical people who cannot manage abstract or
conceptual thought and who are baffled by imagination. “Reality” is becoming
seriously unreal.
Calvino, of course, predicted this in his 1974 essay A Utopia of Fine Dust.
Reading his inventions is becoming something of a reality check in itself.
The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino, trans Martin L. McLaughlin
Penguin Classics, £20, 304pp Buy
the book
