The ethical and aesthetic origins of ascending lightness as Calvino prac- tices it in Invisible Cities and conceptualizes it in Six Memos are to be found in his expressly ideological essays from the ’50s and ’60s, 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: Calvino’s enduring engagé approach to society and his à la Perseus modus operandi. The writings stretch from “Il midollo del leone” (“The Lion’s Marrow” [1955]) to “Non darò più fi ato alle trombe” (“I Won’t Sound the Trumpets Anymore” [1965]). Included in this cluster are “Natura e storia del romanzo” (“Nature and History of the Novel” [1958]), “Il mare dell’oggettività” (“The Sea of the Object World” [1959]), “Tre correnti del romanzo italiano d’oggi” (“Three Trends in the Contemporary Italian Novel” [1959]), “I beatniks e il «sistema»” (“Beatniks and the ‘System’” [1962]), “La sfi da al labirinto” (“Challenge to the Labyrinth” [1962]), and “L’antitesi operaia” (“The Proletarian Antith- esis” [1964]). These are the most widely read of Calvino’s essays in Italy, and their exhortatory and ideological intentions have been exhaustively analyzed.7 My interest lies elsewhere: in the coherence of their fi gurative
language—in their ensemble of metaphorical and intertextual echoes— which justifi es my rubric, for it is in these essays from the ’50s and ’60s that I encounter the earliest images of the enemy of ascending lightness: magma, or petrifi cation.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 “individual consciousness, will, and discernment” and “the object world” (“Il mare dell’oggettività” 52). Further, they refl ect Calvino’s anxiety about the fate of individual consciousness, particularly the intellectual’s: progressively deprived of the ability to perceive and artic- ulate its alterity, or separation, vis-à-vis objective reality, the consciousness of the contemporary writer manifested a “supine acceptance of the world as it is” (“Natura e storia” 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 geomorpho- logical poetics to represent the relationship between individual conscious- ness and the world of objects, and to stake out an ethical and social sphere of infl uence for literature. He consistently resorted to magmatic and alluvial images such as imprisonment, sinking, fl ood, stickiness, stasis, immobili- zation, and fi nally, petrifi cation (through which he would later reactivate the Medusa myth in Six Memos). The essay “Il mare dell’oggettività,” for example, conveys reality as a sea of lava: a “fl ash fl ood” (52), a “silent
cataclysm” (53) provoke a “drowning in magma” (53); the perception that “an uninterrupted viscosity [envelops] the self and the objects [of external reality]” (54). Literature was also imperiled, according to Calvino’s 1959 essay, for its “point-of-view [was] that of magma” (54).
That very same year, in Il cavaliere inesistente (The Nonexistent Knight), the hilarious squire Gurduloo exemplifi es the fusion of the self with the world of objects around him, which the knight of ascending lightness Agilulf successfully dodges. “Gurduloo has gulped down a pint of salty water,” the narrator tells us, “before realizing that the sea is not supposed to be inside him but he inside the sea” (Nonexistent Knight 110). His burlesque plunge into a pot of hot soup is the fi ctional correlate of an “identifi cation with the external world, with the existential totality undifferentiated from the self” (“Il mare dell’oggettività” 54). “It is the object world that drowns the self; the volcano that spews the fl ow of lava . . . is the boiling crater of alterity into which the fi ction writer throws himself” (54–55). “All is soup!” Gur- duloo shouts from the pot, “with his hands forward as if swimming, seeing nothing but the soup covering eyes and face, ‘All is soup!’” (Nonexistent
Knight 54). Agilulf’s critical detachment and elevated consciousness (which
would later be conceptualized as lightness in Six Memos) rejects the idea of “the world being nothing but a vast shapeless mass of soup in which all things dissolved and tinged all else with itself” (54). To Gurduloo’s drown- ing in the sea of external reality, Agilulf reacts vehemently: “why don’t you make him realise that all isn’t soup and put an end to this saraband of his?” (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 affi rms, is to get involved in “a clear-cut job to do” (55).
Acutely aware of the widespread magma drowning individual conscious- ness, Calvino urged readers of “Il mare dell’oggettività” to resist: “let us fi ght against an unconditional surrender to the world of objects” (55), in order to learn “the means that the object world still offers us to undertake active intervention once again . . . , which does not accept historical neces- sity and wishes to alter it” (55).9 For Calvino, the “unconditional surrender
to the world of objects” was tantamount to renouncing civil society and civilization. It would lead to the total defl ation of the “ideal tension” that sustained human agency: the loss of faith in humanity’s ability “to direct the course of things.” In the language of metaphor, it meant the imminent surrender of the individual consciousness to the magma, or undifferenti- ated sea of objects, of the external world. In the same 1959 essay, Calvino defi ned this looming threat as “paralyzing” (56), thus anticipating by some three decades Medusa’s harrowing petrifi cation in Six Memos.
In “I beatniks e il «sistema»,” 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 ethi- cal dimension: “creative immobility,” “moral tension that . . . stagnates in the marshland of our daily things-to-do” (102).10 The social, economic,
and cultural landscape was a “labyrinth that we saw closing around us bit-by-bit,” “a uniform surface,” and “we too will be become part of this undifferentiatedness” (103). Two years later, in “L’antitesi operaia,” class consciousness suffers the same fate as individual consciousness, as both are in a sticky tangle: “mass culture is a homogeneous, gelatin-like marma- lade” designed to “rein in” antagonistic forces and opinions (132).
In the late ’60s, when Invisible Cities was well underway, Calvino’s poetic proclivity for geomorphological images of stagnation, stickiness, and magma underwent a gradual hardening that parallels the process of progressive calcifi cation in the natural world. At that point, Calvino’s met- aphorical 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 “the massive weight and complexity of the world have hardened around us, and they leave no loopholes” (“Fine Dust” 247), which were derived from the geological metaphor of petrifi cation, and which denounced political and cultural immobility.12 That hardening,
or “lethal embrace of that which is solid and immobile” (Saggi 2: 2967), was to yield the image of Medusa familiar to readers of the chapter on light- ness in Six Memos. It is not surprising, then, that metaphorical antecedents to petrifi cation surfaced repeatedly in the essays on magma, along with the fi rst images of ascending lightness—the fi gurative ancestors of Perseus, the other (and apposite) mythological character enshrined in that chap- ter on lightness. The coherence of Calvino’s thinking and poetics in this area is rather stunning. Perseus and his thrust upward represent the desired relationship between the writer and the world in the twenty-fi rst century (Six Memos), a prescription ubiquitous, as has been shown, in his essays from the ’50s and ’60s. Likewise, the symbolic nimble leap of the poet and philosopher Guido Cavalcanti, protagonist of Boccaccio’s Decameron (vi, 9), represents the twenty-fi rst-century writer’s ethical and aesthetic need to rise above the weight of the world (Six Memos 17), escaping historical necessity, an analogy drawn repeatedly in the essays on magma.13
My genealogy of ascending lightness as an ethical and aesthetic value reconstructs it as a continuum spanning nearly three decades and including
Invisible Cities as its middle point. By reinstating the ideological and poetic
continuities between the essays on magma and Six Memos, we arrive at a radically different understanding of ascending lightness, which shaped the visual nuclei and the distanced or estranged perspective of Invisible Cities, as I demonstrate later (chs. 3 and 4). This critical revision of ascending light- ness places in bold relief Calvino’s idea that fl eeing from the sea of the object world was crucial to preserving the alterity of the individual consciousness, that is, the self’s powers of imagination and critical thinking. Ascending lightness has its roots, then, in his insistence on safeguarding at all costs “the dialectical opposition between subject and object” (“La sfi da” 118), on “taking a step beyond, reacquiring historical distance, declaring oneself
different and distinct from the bubbling matter” (“Il mare dell’oggettività” 59). The “fl owering of consciousness,” or of “choice,” was transfi gured as a rising above the “human jam spread over the squalid edges of the city” as Pasolini managed to do according to Calvino, “elevating himself some centimeters above the level where the daily push-and-shove goes on uninterrupted” (59). Already in 1959, this critical detachment or ascend- ing lightness underpinned Calvino’s agenda for an ethically and socially empowering fi ction: authors needed to transition from “the literature of the world of objects to the literature of consciousness” (59).14
The need for a cultural tool with which to train ourselves to break free from historical necessity—from the homogenizing and oppressive conven- tions and constraints of the external world—preoccupied Calvino in the essays on magma. Indeed, in his defi nition of imaginative literature as a “gnoseologico-cultural labyrinth” (“La sfi da” 122), I position Invisible Cit-
ies, a work that both maps the complexity of reality and instills in readers
the tools to envision their own elevation above the sea of the object world, the preservation of the self as distinct and different from the objects that threaten to annihilate it. Such literature should turn back, Calvino hoped in 1962, “the lack of belief in the determining power of culture” (“La sfi da” 123). By training readers to imagine or envision alternatives to a given situ- ation, the “literature of consciousness” (“Il mare dell’oggettività” 59) could not point to an exit sign, but it could suggest to them “the best positioning to fi nd their own way out” (“La sfi da” 122).
In 1971, Calvino lauded utopian literature for training readers in vision- ary thinking: “a total way of looking that sets us inwardly free to free ourselves outwardly” (“Controller” 222). By opposing activism to apathy, creative powers to stultifying clichés, utopian literature fosters the ascend- ing modality of lightness exemplifi ed in the aforementioned Cavalcanti’s “vaulting on nimble legs over a tombstone,” which Calvino describes as “a visual image of lightness that acquires emblematic value” (Six Memos 17). Fused with the image of Perseus, the vaulting of the poet-philosopher sum- marizes the value of ascending lightness: that is, Calvino’s partiality both for disembodied, dematerialized images and for a detached and elevated point of view (Modena, “I contorni”). In another essay on utopian litera- ture written while he was working on his 1972 novel, one affi rmation in particular leaves no doubt that ascending lightness was for him an ethical and aesthetic project: “to see a possible different world . . . is to be fi lled with indignation against a world that is unjust and to reject the idea that it is the only possible one” (“Fine Dust” 248).
I have proposed that since the late ’50s, Calvino believed the writer’s ethical and social engagement turned on a dialectics of magma and eleva- tion, of negation of individual consciousness and affi rmation of individual consciousness, which would be theorized as a dialectics of petrifi cation (Medusa) and lightness (Perseus) in Six Memos. Perseus’s fl ight on the clouds (or the writer’s ethical and social charge to raise above the level of
reality) enacts that very elevation as the clouds represent the destination and vehicle for a renewed perspective of the object world. From the late ’50s to the late ’80s, it is clear that Calvino affi rmed the value of ascending lightness as an antidote to stasis or petrifi cation, as a perceptual and cogni- tive vehicle, and as a device to guard against resignation—to restore our “strength to change the face of reality” (Six Memos 27).
MINIMAL TRACES AND THE ETHICS OF THE