Marcas extranjeras

In addition to the perceptual and cognitive renewal offered by ascend- ing lightness, Calvino used natural philosophy in general and atomistic physics in particular as tools to investigate reality (Lucretian lightness).15

By positing two modalities of one and the same lightness, I intend to preserve their differences as well as their commonalities. A fundamental parallel between De rerum natura and Six Memos foregrounds a series of oppositions—weight versus lightness, oppression versus freedom, angst versus atarassia—that allow us to compare Epicurus to Perseus. Whereas the latter is an emblem of the critical distance or detachment that allows us to escape the heaviness of the object world, at least in the inner city of our imagination, Epicurus is the bearer of critical reason (ratio) that defeats the weight of superstition (religio). As Lucretius put it: “When man’s life lay for all to see foully grovelling upon the ground, crushed beneath the weight of Superstition . . . , the lively power of [Epicurus’s] mind prevailed . . . as he traversed the immeasurable universe in thought and imagination” (bk. 1, 63–64; 72; 74). In Lucretius’s metaphor, super- stition weighs on humans as an immobilizing threat until it is thrown off: humans are initially crushed under the unbearable heaviness of religio, then they triumph thanks to knowledge. Epicurus is therefore an oppo- nent of the weight that pins humanity to the ground, as Perseus is in his own way. To triumph over psychological angst and reach the higher state of atarassia (i.e., a lack of worry, a sort of lightness), humans must come to understand the nature of things. That is what Lucretius set out to teach us in De rerum natura.

Cosmicomics, written between 1963–64, brings together the two modal-

ities of Calvino’s lightness in several of its visual nuclei. In “Quanto scom- mettiamo?” (“How Much Shall We Bet?”), for instance, the protagonist Qfwfq nostagically recalls the time when its external living space was not saturated and magmatic, but instead differentiated and fl uid: “And I think how beautiful it was then, through that void, . . . whereas now events come fl owing down without interruption, like cement being poured, one column next to the other, one within the other . . . , a doughy mass of events with- out form or direction, which surrounds, submerges, crushes all reasoning” (Cosmicomics 93). To describe such a state of lightness, Calvino turned to

the image of a universe composed of “isolated corpuscles” that were “sur- rounded by emptiness” (Cosmicomics 92). On one of those bygone days Qfwfq had ventured a guess: “You want to bet we’re heading for atoms today?” (Cosmicomics 85).

The hope for a renewed alliance between science and literature, which had progressively grown apart in the nineteenth century, was a constant of Calvino’s thinking and writing. However, beginning in the second half of the ’60s (when pessimism about the atomic age became widespread), the impact of scientifi c discoveries and scientifi c models on the imagination, and on the social and political imaginary, became indispensable for him to reconsider the object world.16 _{Looking back on that period, he would later}

state that he had been searching for a “new avenue” to explore in order to “change our image of the world” and to nourish “visions in which all heaviness disappears” (Six Memos 8). The storehouse through which he was rummaging for indissoluble images of lightness was located precisely in the territory of the sciences, especially atomism.

Just as the temporal arc of ascending lightness is taller and wider than scholars of Invisible Cities and Six Memos have acknowledged, so too Lucretian lightness in Calvino’s fi ction and nonfi ction predated by some thirty years his salute to Lucretius in Six Memos. As early as 1957, when he was working as an editor at Einaudi, he entertained the idea of translat- ing De rerum natura.17 _{A decade later, in an anthology for middle-school}

students coauthored by Calvino, La lettura (Reading [1969]), he translated a passage taken from Lucretius’s poem.18 _{Since at least the ’60s, Calvino}

moved in circles of artists, philosophers, writers, and other intellectuals for whom science and natural philosophy in general and atomism in particu- lar served perceptual, cognitive, and epistemological aims. The tenets of Lucretian physics would be repurposed by Calvino after his own reading of Lucretius and under the infl uence of a diverse range of fi gures: Galileo Galilei, Edgar Allan Poe, Francis Ponge, Ilya Prigogine, Isabelle Stengers, Michel Serres, Primo Levi, Ruggero Pierantoni, Pietro Redondi, Hans Blumenberg, Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Paul Klee, Carlo Emilio Gadda, and modern commentators of Ovid.19

In a 1985 interview with Paul Fournel, Calvino proclaimed that his two

livres de chevet were Lucretius’s De rerum natura and Ovid’s Metamor- phoses.20 _{“I would like that everything I wrote would derive from one or}

the other,” he revealed, “or from both” (qtd. in Fournel 17). Simply put,

Invisible Cities cannot be fully appreciated without acknowledging how

profoundly Lucretius’s moral and physical atomism permeated Calvino’s thinking and writing, just as it shaped the theories and design projects of his Italian and French contemporaries in architecture and urban plan- ning. The quest for a new language in both urbanism and literature in the ’60s turned to atomism because semiotics (and its counterpart, structural linguistics) and Lucretian physics operate according to the same underly- ing principles.

In De rerum natura, the order of the universe (naturae ratio) is based upon the Epicurean principle that nothing can arise from nothing (bk. 1, 150). All things originate from fi xed seeds, or “fi rst bodies” (corpora prima; bk.1, 171), which Epicurus called atoms. Such seeds are the everlasting matter that holds each thing together more or less tightly. It takes different forces to dissolve the contexture of these unions, but nothing can destroy the fi rst elements (bk. 1, 244–47).21 _{Lucretius employs the technical lexicon}

of Epicurean physics, concilio (composition/combination of bits of prime matter) and its opposite, discidium (decomposition/separation of prime matter): “no visible object utterly passes away, since nature makes up again one thing from another, and does not permit anything to be born unless aided by another’s death” (bk. 1, 262–64). The indivisibility (simplicitas) of the atom, and its indestructibility (aeternitas) guarantee Nature’s continu- ous regeneration (bk. 1, 548–50): the fi rst-beginnings set limits to destruc- tion; they survive the corrosion of the object world. Lucretius’s insistence on a continuous, universal rottening, falling apart, fracturing, decaying of all things permeates his entire poem, but it is counterbalanced by the resil- ience and the endurance of the minute, light, and everlasting atom.22

Beyond arguing for the indestructibility and the indivisibility of the fi rst- beginnings, Lucretius argued for their absolute compactness (soliditas). Like the imperceptible substance coming off a ring through wear and tear, how- ever, atoms are invisible to the naked eye. Out there, moving from thing to thing, as experience and induction reveal, these corpuscles or minimal units of prime matter remain imperceptible: “nature,” Lucretius concluded, “works by means of bodies unseen” (bk. 1, 328). Lucretius, I am convinced, inspired Calvino to resort to a lexicon of invisibility so very rich in associa- tions that he made the urban icons invisible in his 1972 novel. “Lucretius set out to write the poem of physical matter,” Calvino would later write, “but he warns us at the outset that this matter is made up of invisible particles” (Six

Memos 8). It was Lucretius’s natural philosophy, moreover, that confi rmed

for the novelist the human imagination’s prominent role in perception, cog- nition, and the forging of an epistemology rooted in the nature of things. It takes an animi iniectus, Lucretius wrote, an act of intuitive apprehension, a mental projection to become conscious of the invisible (bk. 2, 740). Corpo- real, dustlike, eminently light, the invisible is the secret logic of the atomistic universe, relentlessly driven by the passage of this substance from one form into another, an incessant combinatorial motion. The imagination reasons about the object world, triggering an inner or mental visualization, which is the leap necessary to conceive of that which is invisible.23

Refl ecting on the characteristics explained thus far, the Lucretian light- ness of Calvino’s images becomes more legible when the nexus between physics and ethics in Lucretian atomism is taken into account. In Six

Memos, Calvino marshals numerous literary examples in which small, light,

and oftentimes fragile traces assert their endurance against a backdrop of atrocities, heaviness, and petrifi cation, interweaving indirect references to

atomism as he goes. Calvino posited that the apparent compacted heaviness of the world was actually a compound of weightless, mobile corpuscles or particles. From this vantage, which is of great importance to Invisible

Cities, lightness is the outcome of a perceptual and cognitive coincidentia oppositorum, of a convergence of two clashing images from which there

emerges a sign, however small and fragile, of an endurable thinness. This resistance of the minute element, for which Calvino found theoretical sus- tenance in Lucretian physics, dates back to the essays on magma in which he wrote urgently of the need to awaken the individual consciousness, and of literature’s ethical and social dimensions.

From those same years, Eugenio Montale’s poetry stands out as a deci- sive infl uence on Calvino’s Lucretian modality of lightness, as the novelist would later acknowledge in Six Memos.24 _{As was already seen, the entire}

cluster of magma essays is anchored in metaphors of imprisonment, immo- bility, and loss of form such as fl oods, viscosity, volcanic fl ow, sclerosis, etc. Such fi gurative language is not at all removed from Montale’s analogical one. As early as 1959, the fi ction writer acknowledged that in his youth he had drawn his most incisive lesson in ideological and ethical stoicism from the poet.25 _{Montale was the poet of both the “evil that gnaws the world”}

and the irruption of grace that takes readers beyond the imprisoning walls of their existence: both pessimism (imprinted in Calvino’s essays on magma in which fl ood and lava threaten to drown individual consciousness and paralyze human choice) and “the act of will, the Bergsonian élan vital that allows us to nullify the determinism by which we’re hemmed in” (Villoresi 123).26 _{Offered this Montalian dual emphasis, Calvino chooses to empha-}

size, in Invisible Cities and Six Memos, images of ethical and social energy, of miraculous survival.27

Among the various aspects that Calvino admired in Montale’s poetry, one of the most relevant was the poet’s ability to inlay in a hellish scenario what Calvino defi ned in atomistic terms as “the subtlest of elements” (Six

Memos 6), or the faintest traces of hope. Montale’s 1953 “Piccolo testa-

mento” (“Little Testament”), for example, is an “apocalyptic vision” (Six

Memos 6) of the destruction hanging over Western civilization in the tense

ideological and military climate of the Cold War.28 _{Nonetheless, the poem}

offers readers a fl eeting hope, an intermittent spark of introspection and liberation devoid of all religious or ideological dogma. Montale achieved this contrast by uniting the image of “a fearful, hellish monster, a Lucifer with pitch-black wings who descends upon the cities of the West” with the image of “minute, luminous tracings”: a mother-of-pearl trace of a snail, some emery dust from crushed glass and cipria (face powder) (Six Memos 6). Calvino divines a quality of resistance, of survival, in these images of Lucretian lightness, “placed in the foreground and set in contrast to dark catastrophe” (Six Memos 6). Each of these light images is the objective cor- relate of a thought that, however slight, “fl ashes in the night / of my mind’s skull” (“Little Testament” vv. 1–2).29

Knitting together that Montalian legacy and Calvino’s lesson on light- ness in Six Memos makes evident Calvino’s conviction that light literary images—those dotted by “most tenuous traces” (Six Memos 6)—have the power to convey an ethics of nonresignation and elevated political and social awareness. Lightness is, in other words, Calvino’s ethical and social proposal of nonsurrender. The “luminous tracings” mark a fragile way out, detecting a discontinuity in an otherwise homogeneous and invinci- ble compactness and heaviness of prime (and existential) matter. “It’s the sign of another orbit—follow it,” reads Montale’s “Arsenio” (v. 12). This is the tiny crack, slender opening, or barely perceptible loophole signaled in Calvino’s lesson on lightness as he emphasizes the moral value of thin and light literary icons. To pursue and fi nd such small traces requires that read- ers learn how to see (and interpret) anew. Conversely, the reading of light literary images educates the imagination of readers to visually break up the petrifi cation, perceive its heterogeneity, and recognize its instantiations of levity, of unexpected grace.

The “subtlest of elements,” thanks to their material thinness, are actu- ally more resilient than heavy and massive structures. The minute visible trace serves as a springboard to a mental representation of the invisible. It is the visual sign of an alternative to be imagined from subtle elements that reach readers through the literary word. Lucretius founded the mental rep- resentation of the invisible, for example, the motion of atoms, on a sensible representation manifest to the eyes (in this case, particles of dust fl oating in a sunbeam). Analogously, then, it becomes possible to glance the invisible and thus infer the possibility of an alternative to the status quo. Lucretius spoke of “vestigia quaerere” (bk. 4, 705): “searching for the traces.” The search for such a minimal trace, exemplifi ed poetically for Calvino in Montale’s “Pic- colo testamento,” would become through Invisible Cities a literary rendering of the new cognitive and epistemological model that Calvino was testing out between 1969 and 1972 with some of his most relevant interlocutors—Carlo Ginzburg, Gianni Celati, and others discussed later (ch. 3).

Moreover, Lucretian physics made an impression on Calvino’s thinking about the natural and social worlds in other ways, at it did many of the urban planners, architects, and artists discussed in this study. For instance, by his own admission Calvino’s densimetric perception of the material world, or the dialectics between void and rarefaction on one hand and compactness and density on the other, consciously informed several of the tales in Cos-

micomics, The Nonexistent Knight, and other writings.30 _{“[Lucretius] is}

the poet of physical concreteness,” Calvino writes in Six Memos, “but the fi rst thing he tells us is that emptiness [the void] is just as concrete as solid bodies” (8).In contrast to those who explained movement by denying the existence of the void (Plato, Aristotle) Lucretius affi rmed the alternating of matter and void (De rerum natura bk.1, 420–23). Void is everywhere, between one thing and another, and within each and every thing; it is the space in which motion occurs and therefore the basis of all variety. If matter

were packed into a solid mass, any and all movement would be impossible, and the natural and social worlds would remain as inert as stone (bk.1, 341–45). Void allows differentiation within the continuous fl ux of matter. It has, in other words, a vital, generative presence: it defi es petrifi cation and implies variety or multiplicity, a concept fundamental to Calvino’s thinking about the cosmos, the city of the future, and literature.

Paramount to my understanding of Invisible Cities is the spectacular vari- ety of all things theorized and versifi ed by Lucretius. In fact, much of De

rerum natura is dedicated to celebrating the multiplicity not only of the natu-

ral world but of every single thing in it, for several disparate atoms combine to make each thing a unique object (unicum). Calvino dedicated an entire lesson in Six Memos to multiplicity, and both Invisible Cities and Collezione

di sabbia (Collection of Sand [1984]) demonstrate his encyclopedic bent—

his ambition to represent on the written page the tremendous variety of the object world.31 _{The Lucretian concept of variety (or multiplicity) relied on yet}

another principle that would prove to be of enormous signifi cance to Calvino’s combinatorial praxis: nature’s fundamental characteristic is motion. Either free and disengaged from every mass or woven into a composite substance, atoms are incessantly agitated by movement. Infi nite matter roams through- out infi nite space, ab aeterno and in aeternum. Generation and corruption turn on a continual exchange of atoms.32 _{Void and motion are therefore the}

basis of Calvino’s Lucretian lightness. “Lucretius’ chief concern,” Calvino wrote in a passage brimming with self-revelation, “is to prevent the weight of matter from crushing us” (Six Memos 8–9). At the very base of De rerum

natura lay the Roman poet’s conviction that only by accepting the presence

of the void, and therefore admitting the infi nite and unexpected possibilities of the atom, would humans be able to get out from under the existential freight of superstition (bk. 1, 341–42). For Lucretius as for Ovid, Calvino stated, “knowledge of the world becomes dissolution of it compactness”; it leads towards a perception of “all that is infi nitely minute, light and mobile” (Six Memos 8–9).

The value of Lucretian lightness as a vehicle for variety and motion, and therefore an antidote to inertia and paralysis, is evident also in the Galilean roots of Calvino’s allusions to Medusa, which reconfi rm the rapproche- ment of science and literature in Calvino’s thought. His reactivation of the Medusa myth in “Il libro della natura in Galileo” (“The Book of Nature in Galileo” [1985]) and Six Memos was derived from Galileo’s Dialogo sopra

i due massimi sistemi del mondo (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems),33 _{in which the natural philosopher delivered a “eulogy}

of the Earth as something subject to alteration, mutation and generation” (Calvino, “Book of Nature” 87). Calvino singled out a particular passage: “‘I consider that the Earth is most noble and admirable precisely because of the many different ways it endlessly changes, mutates and evolves’” (Gali- leo qtd. in Calvino, “Book of Nature” 88). Galileo feared a petrifi ed, sterile Earth incapable of mobility: “Useless body in the universe, paralysed by

inertia, and in short superfl uous and unnatural . . . , a dead creature” (Gali- leo qtd. in Calvino, “Book of Nature” 88). He “evoke[d] with terror the image of an Earth made of solid jasper or crystal, an incorruptible Earth, as though it had been petrifi ed by Medusa” (Calvino, “Book of Nature” 87).

Reading Galileo’s praise of the Earth’s minimal variation or constant change, Calvino commented: “if one puts Galileo’s passage about the alphabet of the book of Nature alongside this eulogy of the small changes and mutations of the Earth, one can see that the real opposition is between mobility and immobility, and it is against that image of the inalterabil- ity of Nature that Galileo campaigns, conjuring up the nightmare of the Gorgon” (88). Calvino would later convey Galileo’s “nightmare” through the metaphor of paralysis in the essays on magma and through the reac- tivation of the Medusa myth in “Book of Nature” and Six Memos. Here Calvino’s friendship with a Roman professor living in the United States becomes particularly relevant to my interpretation of both Lucretian and ascending modalities of lightness in Invisible Cities. Giorgio de Santil- lana (1901–74) was a historian of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he wrote one of his many pathbreaking studies,

The Crime of Galileo (1955, repub. in 1962). In a 1985 critical review

of Santillana’s Fato antico e fato moderno, Calvino mentions Processo a