Relaciones Interpersonales

Having looked at the philosophies and models of the imagination that infl u- enced Calvino in the late ’60s and early ’70s, we are now better prepared to grasp Calvino’s intertwining of ethical and utopian tensions and potentialities

in the urban icons of Invisible Cities. “To see a possible different world,” Calvino wrote, “that is already made and in operation 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). Calvino maintained his faith in the visual training offered by utopia, and he emphasized the visual contributions of the “logico-fantastic machine” to the mind, a visual and visualizable qual- ity that abstract theory lacked. Within this framework, the visualization of alternative societies was a process every bit as necessary as “‘scientifi c’ politi- cal thought” (“Fine Dust” 249). In other words, political and social utopias or visionary projections—images of alternatives ways of living—were just as powerful as political and social theorizing, or philosophizing:

There still comes a moment when we have to ask ourselves whether that step ahead toward the scientifi c method has not had its losses as well—which is to say, whether along with all the paper scenarios for utopia we have not lost something invaluable. Utopia conceived of its aim, a regenerated world—and indeed, saw it—in terms of its outward results: a city, a way of living together, a whole body of ways of behav- ing; whereas the scientifi c theory was to be conceived—and, indeed, stated—in terms of philosophical discourse, abstract and a lot harder to verify. The materialism of the visionaries has far more body to it than that of the philosophers. (“Fine Dust” 249–50)

In the very same period, it is worth noting, Roland Barthes proposed a simi- lar comparison between utopia and political science in his essay on Fourier, proclaiming the superiority of images to theory: “perhaps the imagination

of detail is what specifi cally defi nes Utopia (opposed to political science);

this would be logical, since detail is fantasmatic and thereby achieves the very pleasure of Desire” (“Fourier” 105).

The notion of utopia as a speaking picture, to which Calvino returned, is at the origins of the genre. As early as 1595, Sir Philip Sidney empha- sized the value of utopia by coupling it, in Defence of Poesie, with poetry (both were “speaking pictures”) and ranking “them both above philos- ophy and history as more persuasive . . . than a weighty philosophical argument” (Manuel and Manuel 2). For his part, Calvino established an affi nity between the work of poets and that of utopians, in “Controller” when he remarked that Eugen Dühring’s nineteenth-century disparage- ment of Fourier as a “social alchemist” should in the late twentieth cen- tury be considered a “happy metaphor” (“Controller” 234). Alchemical experiments to which Fourier’s utopianism was derisively compared in fact consisted primarily in the art of transformation, Calvino pointed out: “as such, it establishes a relationship of affi nity with the work of artists and poets, in their manipulation of linguistic and mythical material in the hope of managing by their means to ‘change life’” (234). Calvino hinted at the work of poets as an alchemical task, as a transformation of the

object world, in his fi ction from the ’60s and ’70s constructed around the use of tarot cards, in which alchemy, inner metamorphosis, and transfor- mation of (literary) matter are combined.69 _{With Invisible Cities, Calvino}

chose to take part in contemporary political, social, and aesthetic con- troversies through visual architectural and urban design proposals rather than theoretical or abstract interventions.

In that period of urban, and more broadly, social upheaval, while search- ing about for a form of aesthetic and ethical commitment, Calvino came across a text that was to become a classic of literary criticism in North America: the Canadian Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957). In his critical review of Anatomy of Criticism entitled “La letteratura come proiezione del desiderio” (“Literature as Projection of Desire” [1969]), Calvino was particularly struck by Frye’s section “Essay on Ethical Criti- cism: Theory of Symbols,” in which archetype is engaged as “a typical or recurring image” (Anatomy 99). In his critical review, Calvino expressed his fascination for the city as organizing metaphor, or archetype, a motif that was to have enormous implications for the novel he was then writing. Yet, there are other ways in which Frye’s work impacted the narrator’s novel, hitherto neglected by Calvino’s scholars. Frye approached fi ction (or “poetry,” as he called it, following Aristotle) as “one of the techniques of civilization” (Anatomy 99). His defi nition of fi ctional literature as a “social fact and a mode of communication” (99) was to be of great inter- est to Calvino, as it showed him the way to insert literature “into the context of human activity” (“Literature as Projection” 51). This was, as the Italian put it in his critical review, a concern “still dear to [Calvino’s] heart” (51). Indeed, as an activity with ethical and social ramifi cations for human civilization, literature effectively gained social agency through Frye’s formulation.

The signifi cance of Frye’s delineation of literature as a form of ethical and social commitment to Calvino’s fi ctional intervention in the urban crisis shall be discussed later (ch. 3). Here I wish to pause on the relation- ship between civilization, or what Frye defi ned in his renowned study as “the process of making a total human form out of nature,” and what impelled it: desire, or “the energy that leads human society to develop its own form” (Anatomy 105). Calvino quoted this defi nition in his review- essay (“Literature as Projection” 50), and it was to become a concept of great urgency in his 1972 novel. Poetry is a verbal hypothesis, in its social aspect, of the “vision of the goal of work and the forms of desire” (Anatomy 106). Work is the effi cient cause of civilization, and just as work projects a desired form onto nature, so imaginative literature too in its social and ethical aspects is an effi cient cause of civilization, that is, it is part of the “process of making a total human form out of nature” (Anatomy 105). Not only do these words remind us of Calvino’s own, in the interview with Camon cited earlier, but they are also underscored in Calvino’s review-essay in which he claims to have recognized the true

value of Fyre’s book, and more broadly of imaginative literature, by read- ing this very passage (“Literature as Projection” 51).

Nonetheless, it must be acknowledged that Calvino extrapolated from Frye’s “desire” a stridently utopian component that Frye had never intended, one that served as a support for the Italian’s own excursions into the utopian potential of imaginative literature. “Desire,” Calvino wrote in his critical review, “in literature fi nds forms that enable it to project itself beyond the obstacles met on its way, . . . based as it is on the unlivable situation of the present and the drive toward the concept of a desirable society” (“Litera- ture as Projection” 52). Fiction, in the archetypal territory of dreams, “tries to illustrate the fulfi llment of desire” as well as all repugnant obstructions to its fulfi llment, according to Frye (Anatomy 105–06). However, in this dialectics of desire and reality, of fulfi llment and repugnance, Calvino bent the Canadian critic’s words to supply his own ethical and social contingen- cies. Whereas Frye had referred to the desire for “fertility and victory” (Anatomy 106), Calvino wrote in his review of a “desirable society” (“Lit- erature as Projection” 52). Frye had expressed repugnance for “drought and enemies” (Anatomy 106), whereas Calvino expressed repugnance for the “unlivable situation of the present,” then “repugnance in opposition to the framework of existing institutions” (“Literature as Projection” 53). The reviewer’s own poetic license twisted Frye’s literary and archetypal anatomy into a social and political anatomy, injecting a vigorously utopian element into Frye’s dialectics of dream and reality. In sum, he read Frye’s categories metaphorically when it suited him and applied them to the press- ing urban and social crisis of his own day.

Having acknowledged this elegant sleight of hand, we now arrive at a vastly different reading of the utopian contours of the novel Calvino was working on at the time he reviewed Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism: an inter- pretation that connects the refl ections matured through his reading of Frye to those he absorbed from Fourier’s utopian projections. Indeed, I fi nd a striking parallel between Calvino’s speculations on the imagination and utopia in his Fourier essays, Frye’s emphasis on the value of literature and the imagination in The Educated Imagination (1964), and the Canadian’s explicit statements on utopia in “Varieties of Literary Utopias” (1965).

In 1971, Calvino wrote of the best way of “using utopia” (“Controller” 221), or making it relevant to contemporary culture. He concluded that even the most unfeasible utopian model was meritorious insofar as it continued to exercise its power of uncompromising opposition to reality. Its foremost redeeming value lay in its recalcitrant nature: utopia remained “infl exible to all conciliation, radically opposed not only to the world around us but also to the inner conditioning that governs our attribution of values” (222). As long as the concept of utopia preserved “our ability to desire a different kind of life, and our very way of looking at the world” (222), it had to be regarded “as a total way of looking that sets us inwardly free to free our- selves outwardly” (222). Utopia for Calvino was something to think with,

not just something to think about. Similarly, Frye had lamented the “paral- ysis of utopian thought and imagination” in his 1965 essay on fi ctional versions of utopia (“Varieties” 29). It was time to recognize once again, he inveighed, “the real strength and importance of the utopian imagination, both for literature and for life” (31). The Italian and the Canadian agreed, then, about the critical reactivation of utopia, and just as Calvino cautioned against valuing utopia primarily as a description of a future society, so Frye asserted: “utopian thought is imaginative, with its roots in literature, and the literary imagination is less concerned with achieving ends than with

visualizing possibilities” (“Varieties” 31 [my emphasis]). Frye deemed “uto-

pian thinking” (“Varieties” 31) benefi cial for present day society, because it entailed an invaluable “effort at social imagination” and it trained readers to identify the constructed nature of social forms (32).

Yet, perhaps the most striking similarity between Frye’s and Calvino’s respective speculations concerns the ideal place of utopia. For Calvino, utopia was “a total representation” that “frees us inside to make us capable of free- ing ourselves outside” (“Per Fourier, 2: L’ordinatore” 281).71 _{Frye’s thought}

coincided with Calvino’s, as the Canadian qualifi ed utopia as an internal

strength, and Calvino designated it as an inner city, or imaginative conjec-

tural tool that increased the person’s perception and consciousness of reality, and of alternatives to reality. The legacy of Plato can scarcely be overstated here. Referring to Plato’s Republic (bk. 9, 319-20), Frye reminds his readers: “the Republic exists in the present, not in the future. It is not a dream to be realized in practice; it is an informing power in the mind” (34 [my emphasis]). As Frye puts it, “it is good discipline to enter [utopian thinking] occasion- ally” (36), as it “clarifi es [one’s] standards and values” (36). Calvino’s think- ing on utopia was itself informed by Plato’s Republic: “Utopia” should be approached “not as a city that can be founded by us but that can found itself in us, build itself brick by brick in our ability to imagine it, to think it out to the ultimate degree; a city that claims to inhabit us, not to be inhabited” (“Fine Dust” 252). The very fact that material attempts to achieve Fouri- erian societies of Harmony had inevitably failed was irrefutable evidence, for Calvino, that mode utopique was about visualization and cognitive exercises, not material results. Enlarging “the sphere of what we can imagine” was a social necessity for Calvino, and imaginative literature should develop in readers a utopian mentality, which shifted the attainment of utopia from the public sphere to the private. This meant emphasizing the constructive rather than the descriptive aspect of utopia. Frye’s pronouncement on utopian lit- erature confi rmed this: he endorsed Plato’s idea that utopia should be “an element in the liberal education of the individual free man, permitting him a greater liberty of mental perspective than he had before” (“Varieties” 37).

In 1964 Frye linked the paralysis of the utopian imagination to the dearth of formal education in the humanities, which created an imaginative defi - ciency in citizens (Educated Imagination). He lauded the pedagogic poten- tial of images in a passage that brings to light still another affi nity between

the Italian novelist and the Canadian literary and cultural critic. As was observed earlier, Frye asserted that visions of utopia permitted “greater liberty of mental perspective” (“Varieties” 37) and aided in “visualizing possibilities” (31). Here it should be added that such a power inhered not exclusively in images of utopia, for Frye, but in literary images overall. Frye goes back to the idea that desire motivates civilization because it is desire that, in the “dialectic between necessity and freedom” (Educated Imagina-

tion 20), functions as a creative force in shaping the environment: “desire

to bring a social human form into existence: cities, . . . , civilization” (22). “So we begin to see where the imagination belongs in the scheme of human affairs,” the critic writes, “it’s the power of constructing possible models of human experience” (23). On this ground, according to Frye, humanistic and scientifi c cultures converged, for the imagination was the capacity to create a “mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience” (23). This was fundamental in the sciences for practical reasons because “without a constructive power in the mind to make models of experience, get hunches and follow them out, play freely around with hypotheses, and so forth, no scientist could get anywhere” (“Varieties” 95).

A few months after publishing his review-essay “Literature as Projec- tion,” Calvino wrote a letter to Mario Boselli dated October 1969 (Let-

tere 1940–1985 1061–62), which bears witness to his belief that literature

should operate as projection beyond the obstacles met in what he considered an unlivable and repugnant present. Confronting the impossibility of direct participation in such a society, Calvino articulated the belief that the most viable contemporary form of literature had to narrow the distance between the humanities and the sciences, be based on conjectural projections, and serve as a tool for developing the individual imagination and consciousness. It is a posture wholly in keeping with Frye’s, and one that implied a creative building of theoretical models or, as Calvino put it, autonomous logico-fan- tastic machines. The ethical and social aim of constructing invisible models of alternative societies was, he wrote Boselli, that of making visible “the stress points in empirical reality, that is, those in which the operations of

history can fi nd a breach through which to advance” (Lettere 1062). Later,

Calvino’s unstinting ethical and social engagement emerged again in a letter he wrote to Falaschi dated 4 November 1972, revealing the novelist’s per- during insistence that there were possible exits, through fi ction and through the imagination, from the negativity of neocapitalism (Lettere 1180–81). In 1973, clearly discomfi ted by the interviewer Camon’s accusation that Invis-

ible Cities was riddled with negativity and counter-Enlightment thinking,

Calvino restated his faith in “the use of a formalized, deductive, structural model,” which he considered “a necessary operative instrument, whether as a scheme of the present or as a projection of the future (or utopia or proph- ecy) to oppose to the present” (“Colloquio” 2796). This was the only ideo-

logical discourse that Calvino could still believe in, for it literally centered

As Calvino developed the concept of utopia as an inner city or Fryean inner strength, he continued to write Invisible Cities, itself a logico-fantas- tic machine generating micro urban models where logic both serves image making and provokes a renewed vision of city life. The ethical and social contours of the imagination that Calvino elaborated in those years have gradually come to the foreground in this chapter. It remains to be seen Bar- thes’s sustained infl uence on Calvino during that period helped to shape his thinking on utopia, the imagination, and literature.