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In 1967 Calvino moved to Paris, and in the French capital he witnessed the general strike of May 1968. Meanwhile, the student movement at Italian universities unfolded between 1967 and 1968, spreading thereafter to the labor sector and society at large, leading up to the so-called “hot autumn” of 1969 (Ginsborg, ch. 9). Although the student movement in Italy was marked mainly by its rejection of authority and its embrace of the Marx- ist struggle, it should not be forgotten that radical architecture and urban planning were also thoroughly studied and debated at prestigious schools of architecture, like in Venice (Ginsborg 306). During that brief stint of social agitation and countercultural euphoria, Calvino sketched a social utopia in a novel that was to remain unfi nished.49

Although it is tempting to conclude that the prominence of Marxist thought in those tumultuous months rekindled his interest in utopia, for quite some time already Calvino had been reading across the disciplines to understand the relations between utopia and the imagination, approaching utopia as a visual and cognitive exercise for the present rather than a fan- tastic speculation about the future. His interest in utopian projections and representations actually dates back to the period in which he confronted his own ideas about utopia with those expressed in The Manifesto of the

Communist Party (1848). Under the rubric of “Critical-Utopian Social-

ism and Communism,” Marx and Engels discuss the systems of Saint-Si- mon, Fourier, and Owen, and dismiss them useless fantastic scenarios that impede progressive historical development. “For years,” Calvino would later explain, “I felt it was a serious lacuna that Marx refused to predict what socialist society would be like; it took me a long time to understand that this was a principle inherent in his method” (“Fine Dust” 250). The Marxist “‘Do Not Enter’ sign on the road to utopian projects,” as Calvino labelled it, was intended to prevent escapism and a dispersion of revolution- ary energy. Later, after the socialist society came into being, it was sup- posed to block out all visualizations of a society different than the existing revolutionary one.50 _{At the end of the ’60s, Calvino refl ected on the need to}

challenge the mind with visible utopian projections and attributed a “lust for prefi guration that we have been carrying with us for ages” (“Fine Dust” 251) to that Marxist denial.

It was no coincidence, then, that an interest in revisiting utopia pervaded French culture in the ’60s, as if they could not resign themselves to aban- doning it. “Now that the outlook for capitalist culture revolves around an image of catastrophe,” Calvino wrote, “concentrating all its fantasies on it (the foreseeing, preventing, or administering of catastrophe), this is when we choose to revisit utopia. But why? And in what frame of mind?” (“Fine Dust” 251). An earnest attempt to answer these questions might begin by scrutinizing Calvino’s speculative panorama in the late ’60s and early ’70s, paying particular attention to the melding of utopia, the imagination, and literature. In numerous essays Calvino addresses, implicitly or explicitly, the ethical value of literature and of the imagination and, more pointedly, the utopian potential of literary images. There are nonetheless two privileged sites in which the ethical charge of imaginative literature crosses over into utopia: the fi rst is Calvino’s “La letteratura come proiezione del desiderio” (“Literature as Projection of Desire”), a critical review of Northrop Frye’s

Anatomy of Criticism that Calvino wrote in 1969. The second is a triptych,

written between 1971 and 1973, inspired by the 1971 Italian translation (suggested and supervised by Calvino himself) of Théorie des quatre mou-

vements (Theory of the Four Movements [1808]) and Le nouveau monde amoureux (New Amorous World [1816]) by the French utopian Charles

Fourier. During the period between 1969 and 1973 Calvino’s reading of Frye and Fourier made him speculate on the interplay of the imaginative faculty, ethics, and utopia, and to forge a validation for fi ctional literature that would prove crucial to Invisible Cities.51

In the late ’60s, when Calvino was living in France and occasionally visiting Italy, Fourier’s thought experienced a revival in Paris (Cappello 231). New Amorous World was published in 1967, and his oeuvre was pub- lished in twelve volumes between 1966 and 1968. A bizarre and ingenious spirit, Fourier was a cutting critic not only of his time’s social structures but also, and it matters most to us, of its mental structures. One of the

most infl uential readers of Fourier was Raymond Queneau, who had pub- lished in 1955 his “Dialectique hégélienne et séries de Fourier” in which he argued that Fourier had infl uenced the development of Marx and Engels’s dialectical materialism (Cappello 237). Queneau’s study triggered a wave of critical reinterpretations of the utopia known as Theory of the Four

Movements by infl uential fi gures including the French semiotician Roland

Barthes.52 _{Calvino was thoroughly familiar with these studies and loved}

André Breton’s Ode à Charles Fourier (1945). He was also keenly aware that the rediscovery of Fourier affected not only artists and authors but also architects, and like many of these, Calvino viewed Le Corbusier’s La cité

radieuse as an attempt to embody the phalanx.

He therefore enthusiastically supervised Einaudi’s 1971 translation, Teo-

ria dei quattro movimenti, Il nuovo mondo amoroso, e scritti sul lavoro l’educazione, l’architettura nella società d’Armonia, and fi red off “Per Fou-

rier” (“For Fourier”), a trio of essays intended to introduce Italian readers to Fourier’s thought. The fi rst, “Per Fourier, 1: La società amorosa” (“On Fourier, I: Brief Introduction to the Society of Love” [1971]), announced in L’espresso the publication of Teoria dei quattro movimenti. The second and longer essay, “Per Fourier. 2. L’ordinatore dei desideri” (“On Fourier, II: The Controller of Desires” [1971]), introduced the Einaudi edition, and for my purposes it is crucial to restore the meaning of ordinatore lost in Eng- lish translation: the French ordinateur, a cybernetic system (or combinatory machine) to sort any number of combinations. The third and fi nal essay, “Per Fourier, 3: Commiato: L’utopia pulviscolare” (“On Fourier, III: Envoi: A Utopia of Fine Dust” [1973]), was published just after Invisible Cities, as the opening entry (then entitled “Quale utopia?” [“Which Utopia?”]) in Alma-

nacco Bompiani 1974 (Bompiani Almanac for 1974), a volume dedicated to Utopia rivisitata (Utopia Revisited). In this last essay, Calvino recalls: “in

the years around ’68, I took it into my head to read Fourier, and to read him as one reads a poet, a novelist, or a moralist—that is, to lay one’s hands on a system of moral fantasy” (“Fine Dust” 254).

Fourier had invented a “multicolored, multiform world,” according to Calvino, who was then working on Orlando furioso and thus reminded readers that Fourier was considered “the Ariosto of utopians” in his own day (“Controller” 220). It was almost certainly Fourier who provided the immediate inspiration for the formal and epistemological structures of Invis-

ible Cities and, more broadly, Calvino’s reinterpretation of the discourse

on utopia, for the French utopian opened the Italian author’s imagination and reasoning to new possibilities for imaginative literature. Fourier’s goal in 1808 was to counteract the “political ignorance of the Civilized Man” (Theory 3) by removing “humanity’s philosophical cataracts” (276), thus sharpening the individual’s ability to envision political and social alterna- tives. Such an endeavor implied exploring possible human relationships beyond the limitations and obstacles of contemporary civilization, which allowed only a regimented series of passions. To give expression to all of

passion’s potentialities, Fourier freely created a harmonic world based on a process of combinatorial play and motion comparable to atomistic phys- ics, in which minimal units join together thanks to motion and void.53 _The

process echoes that through which Calvino expresses and simulates differ- ent urban experiences, human relationships, and desires in Invisible Cities, whose narrator seems to want to obtain, like Fourier, “the greatest number of effects with the least number of resources” (Théorie 31).

Analogously, through Fourier, Calvino began to refl ect on the dialectics of unity and multiplicity. Although Fourier’s combinatory of passions con- verged in a whole, he chose to make of this totality “the source of the mul- tiple,” as Maurice Blanchot wrote in a study that Calvino read (8). As such, it continuously generates subdividing paths rather than yielding a synthesis. In Invisible Cities, the dialectics of unity and multiplicity is immediately leg- ible in the unity of the theme (the city) and the kaleidoscopic fragmentation of urban icons, on one hand, and on the other, in the rapport between the assumed and tacit ideal city (Venice) and the multiplied simulacra through which Polo attempts to grasp it.54 _{That Fourierian dialectics was the culmi-}

nation of Calvino’s lifelong cognitive and literary preoccupations.

Calvino’s trio of Fourier essays reveals how and why he derived from the French philosopher a convincing justifi cation for literature. First and fore- most, the novelist heralded Fourier’s decision to elaborate a working theory for a new harmonic world that rejected all claims to the hegemonic and the normative. Thereafter, Calvino drew attention to the fact that, in Fourier’s oscillation between the concrete or practical and the ethereal or abstract, he availed himself of literary devices to ensure that his utopian projection would not be fl attened into a literal reading. Fourier preserved an imagina- tive contrivance in order to verify possibilities and potentialities, for exam- ple, whether or not it was possible to imagine a society where everyone was free and all desires were fulfi lled. Calvino recognized how fundamental this training of the imagination was to individual and social consciousness, even claiming that he had come to recognize the ethical and social utility of fi ction—the individual awareness and public good served by imaginative literature—by reading Fourier’s utopian philosophy as fi ction.55 _Drawing

from Fourier’s insistence on visualization, Calvino began to think about utopia as a heuristic mental mechanism to postulate alternatives, to oppose the sterility of a cataract-like vision.56 _{He began to conceptualize a con-}

temporary relevance for utopia, not as the representation of a liberated, ideal society, but instead as an instrument to feed the mind images (or

phantasmata; “Fine Dust” 252). “Fourier’s work,” observed Calvino, has

“ceased to be read as a handbook for the foundation of a new society, while continuing to function as a test of our ability to think and ‘see’ the freedom of all and sundry, to give meaning and stringency to limitless satisfaction of our desires” (“Controller” 243).

Equally signifi cant, Calvino’s re-visioning and rethinking of utopia went hand-in-hand with his quest for lightness. He established a link between

the creation of mental images and lightness in literature insofar as develop- ing the “inner city” (see “Fine Dust” 252), or mental world, of the imagi- nation would enable readers to overcome the heaviness of referentiality, or the object world they lived in everyday. As he wrote in Le Monde in 1970, while wholly occupied with his work on the Invisible Cities, lightness and the imaginative faculty were inextricably linked, as phantasy and the fan- tastic “imply a detachment, a levitation, the acceptance of a different logic based on objects and connections other than those of everyday life or the dominant literary conventions” (“Defi nitions of Territories: Fantasy” 72 [emphasis mine]).

Within this context, Invisible Cities should be viewed as a selection of mental exercises to develop in readers a healthy propensity for visualiza- tion, following on the Fourierian (and later, Marcusian) formulation of écart

absolu, a deviation that corresponds to the atomistic clinamen and is trans-

lated as “absolute rejection,” “absolute divergence,” or “absolute separation” in Theory of the Four Movements. Voicing discomfort with early industrial society in 1835, Fourier had called for a utopian method based on écart

absolu: the wholesale rejection of political, social, and moral conventions,

assumptions, and theories.The tried and true could never lead to any useful discoveries.57 _{Fourier’s methodological concept was to signifi cantly impact}

French culture during Calvino’s residence in Paris. Indeed, in December 1965, André Breton called his last exhibit, the eleventh Exposition International de Surréalisme at the Galerie L’Oeil in Paris, Écart Absolu, under the aegis of Fourier.58 _{In the same period Roland Barthes expressed how Fourier’s rule}

of invention was one and only one: to address the “absolute new . . . in order to preach what Opinion holds to be impossible” (“Fourier” 88). Similarly, Calvino appropriated Fourier’s method of the écart absolu and applied it to the imaginative faculty while voicing his repugnance for “the unlivable situ- ation of the present” (“Literature as Projection” 52). In Paris, the city that he would later defi ne as the city of “surrealist vision,” unique in its “particular way of appreciating the power of images” (“Hermit in Paris” 173), he wrote: “the autonomous logico-fantastic machine is something I like insofar as (and if) it serves some real need: the need to enlarge the sphere of what we can imagine and to introduce into our limited range of choices ‘absolute rejec- tion’ by means of a world thought out in all details according to other values and other relationships” (“Fine Dust” 252).59

Calvino insinuates relationships between Fourier, écart absolu, and ascending and Lucretian modalities of lightness that are best approached by turning briefl y to other Fourierian strands of utopian thought in Calvino’s milieu that were to shape Invisible Cites. Raymond Ruyer delved into the possibilities of a contemporary role for utopia in one of the most infl uential French studies, L’utopie et les utopies (1950). Ruyer defi ned mode utopique (roughly, “utopian mentality” or “utopian method”) as a “mental exercise on lateral possibilities” (9), an intellectual and spiritual training that he con- sidered very valuable from the educational point of view (114) (Fig. 1.1). In

the chapter “Valeur Positive de l’Utopie,” he associated mode utopique and what I call ascending lightness, the latter understood as a distancing from the petrifying heaviness of contingent reality to expose the “mechanism of things and institutions” (124). The utopian exercise or mentality “will create the necessary distance between the free man and tyrannical massive- ness of the present” (124), words that strongly echo Lucretius’s own in De

rerum natura. Ruyer emphasized that mode utopique freed the individual

consciousness to soar above magmatic reality, as Calvino would have put it, and to challenge the idea of absolute necessity: “a free people is one who can still imagine something other than what is” (124). In so doing, the French philosopher defended the inestimable value of the “creative imagina- tion,” which grants an individual a privileged vantage for critique (124). It is the cognitive perspective made possible by distance—the very su un altro

piano, or “on another plane,” that Calvino was to theorize in Six Memos.

Functioning along the lines of mode utopique, the intellect comprehends reality more deeply, yet more lightly: “to comprehend a fact, an event, is to fl y over it without being absorbed by it, without implicitly considering it an absolute, immutable. It is to see the lateral possibilities” (Ruyer 9). It is, from Calvino’s perspective, to not become Gurduloo.

Ruyer injected into French utopianism the concept of the utopian men- tality as “mental experimentation” (13): a procedure that atomizes reality and changes all the minimal parts that can be changed, highlighting the prime elements. This mental exercise involves a “rupturing of the custom- ary combinations” (17) and thereby denies each and every “arbitrary con- nection” (19). Ruyer’s concept of utopia as a fractioning and combinatorial mental method, a severing of conventional links in order to attain unusual combinations or masses, takes us back to Lucretian lightness. By exposing the arbitrariness of reality, the utopian exercise on lateral possibilities offers grounds for both imaginative invention and critical engagement. Ruyer’s

mode utopique distinctly overlaps with Calvino’s concept of ascending

lightness in the essays on magma, that is, developing the individual’s criti- cal awareness of reality and capacity for envisioning political and social alternatives, and with the Lucretian lightness of “the autonomous logico- fantastic machine” from his third essay on Fourier (“Fine Dust” 252).

Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), one of the leading radical theorists and political activists of the ’60s and ’70s in both the United States and Europe, was fundamental to that period’s conceptualization of the imagination as an instrument of consciousness raising. Einaudi, for which Calvino was work- ing while he lived in Paris, published Italian translations of Marcuse’s major works throughout the ’60s.60 _{Marcuse’s ethical confi guration of the imagina-}

tion reverberated throughout the countercultural movement. The 1968 stu- dent movement in France, for instance, asserted the conjectural power of the imagination to transcend the poverty of existence and radically transform society. In a vein by now familiar to us, Marcuse argued that the “great refusal” was the only possible way to escape the paralyzing status quo and to understand latent individual and social potentialities. Moving away from the scientifi c infl exibility of orthodox Marxism, Marcuse embraced Fourier’s refl ections on utopia and promoted the idea of the dynamic imagination as a productive force to challenge conformity and unidimensionality and to visu- alize alternatives that had not yet been realized. What was the role of art in all this? Art was the revolutionary weapon that provided a new language, Marcuse argued, rooted in the idea of the imagination as a cognitive faculty capable of unfi xing social and political institutions.61

Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955) achieved critical and popular acclaim in America and Europe in the ’60s. In it he set forth a relationship between art and utopia that impinges directly on the cultural milieu in which Calvino was living and writing, and one that is analogous to Calvino’s think- ing on the “prison of representations” (“Fine Dust” 249). Just as it was for Calvino, utopia for Marcuse consisted in the mind’s ability to imagine lateral

possibilities to a Medusa-like reality. The imagination was paramount inso- far as it preserved traces and images of freedom ostracized within the object world. “In its refusal to accept as fi nal the limitations imposed upon freedom and happiness by the reality principle, in its refusal to forget what can be, lies the critical function of phantasy” (Eros and Civilization 135).

Marcuse rescued the concept of utopia from its classical meaning and revi- talized its function in contemporary times in An Essay on Liberation (1969), translated by Einaudi the very same year. Utopia should not be intended as a “no place” devoid of historicity, “but rather that which is blocked from com- ing about by the power of the established societies” (4). He envisaged “uto- pian possibilities . . . in the technical and technological forces of advanced capitalism and socialism” (4). With Calvino he approached visualized alter- natives to the status quo as a valid form of political thought. For both, art was the medium through which the power of the imagination was expressed. While Calvino posited utopia as a mental strength or an inner city, Marcuse hoped for a transformation “in the infrastructure of man (itself a dimension of the infrastructure of society)” (Essay on Liberation 19). This precondi- tion would develop an “imagination free to project and design the forms of a human universe without exploitation and toil” (Essay on Liberation 19), setting up the passage “from Marx to Fourier” (22).

Ruyer’s and Marcuse’s respective philosophical speculations hint at the broader countercultural context for the nexus of utopia, imagination, and literature that preoccupied Calvino during the years leading to Invisible

Cities. As was explained earlier, utopia was urgently relevant for Calvino

insofar as it could provide “images of fantasy” (“Fine Dust” 249) to the