[Khan Lee, "Red, Green and Blue" (Vancouver Art Gallery, 2017). Foto Rb]
That Italo Calvino anticipated posthuman concerns is a
matter that has recently sparked much interest in Calvino’s scholars. As
Serenella Iovino maintains, from the trilogy Our Ancestors of
the Fifties until Palomar
in the Eighties there is an underlying reference to matters of borders in
Calvino’s narrative and, more specifically, to the borders of the “human”.
Iovino states that in Calvino “rather than being a fixed essence in its purity,
the human is indeed a porous category of ‘becoming’, open to hybridization and
negotiations” with other species, inanimate beings, technological artefacts.[1]
Given
the multiple definitions of “posthumanism” within the humanities’ debate, I
should clarify that, with the term “posthuman subject”, I refer to the new
vitalistic, unbound, relational being that emerged in post-modernity following
the loss of centrality of the human. This is a subject that defies the
traditional epistemology grounded in the centrality of the human and in the
primacy of consciousness and language over inert matter. In this new scenario,
inert matter, animals and technological artefacts negotiate their agency with
the human. In this context, borders and boundaries between the human and
non-human world become blurred.
Based
on these premises, the purpose of my article is not to prove that Calvino
anticipated posthumanism, which has already been done, but rather to link his
prefiguration of posthumanism in the Fifties to his adoption of a narrative
model of the 18th century which - at the precise moment when
humanism was canonized - managed to challenge the very foundation of it. I am talking
about Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of
Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767).
All
of Calvino’s narratives of the trilogy Our Ancestors can
be seen as displaying a strong interest towards the boundaries and limits of
the human, but especially The Baron in the Trees
(1957) and The Non-Existent
Knight (1959). In the latter, a shiny armour acts and lives without a body
in it, thus Calvino seems to give agency to an inanimate object. In The Baron in the
Trees, a boy climbs up a tree and lives in the treetop for the rest of his
life without ever getting down once. Cosimo Piovasco becomes therefore a
hybrid, half monkey and half human, who defies the law of gravity and all
possible rules of social conduct through his decision of living on a threshold,
sustained by a pure act of self-determination.
What
makes the The
Baron in the Trees particularly interesting for Calvino’s scholars is that
it is also his conceited intellectual autobiography and therefore is a fitting
text to explore Calvino’s ideological and political positioning, as well as his
poetics.
If
we accept that Calvino’s reflections on posthuman topics started more or less
around the mid-Fifties, it does not seem to be a coincidence that The Baron in the
Trees is set in the time of Enlightenment, in the 18th century.
It seems perfectly becoming of Calvino’s playful and analytical mind that as he
set to reflect upon, and possibly challenge, the principles of humanism, he
decided to set his novel precisely in the time when humanism consolidated
itself: “It was on the fifteenth of June, 1767, that Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò,
my brother, sat among us for the last time”.[2]
It
is in the time of Enlightenment when the humanistic conceit of human primacy
that has shaped Western consciousness took hold and grounded itself in the
Cartesian cogito: Cogito
ergo sum. The Cartesian cogito, first formulated in Discours de la method
(1637) and then in Meditationes
de prima philosophia (1641), posits the centrality and omnipotence of the
human, his ability to rule the irrational chaotic ontology of passive matter
and give it a shape and a voice through linguistic articulation. Thus the
Cartesian cogito validates man’s centrality and his superiority over other
beings in light of his ability to reflect upon the self and express identity
through language. Within this paradigm, human language is the tool to signify
this progressive tension to perfectibility through creation of knowledge and
also to assert the dominance of the human subject over what is deemed to be
inert matter: the environment, non-human animals and, up to a certain point,
the female subject.[3]
From
this viewpoint, we could be led to believe that The Baron in the
Trees suggests a celebration, rather than a condemnation, of the Cartesian
principle. The protagonist, Cosimo Piovasco, decides to colonize an area of the
world in which no other human beings had permanently set their homes, thus
exemplifying the ability of the human to dominate nature and matter by an
effort of self-determination. It is the primacy of thought and will-power over
nature. It points to the perfectibility of human beings.
However,
Cosimo will be precisely the one to question this paradigm when, at the time of
the French Revolution, proposes his own project of ecumenical constitution with
posthuman undertones:
“Cosimo,
by the way, had at that time written and published a ‘Constitutional
Project for a Republican City with a Declaration of the Rights of Men, Women,
Children, Domestic and Wild Animals, Including Birds, Fishes and Insects, and
All Vegetation, whether Trees, Vegetable, or Grass.’ It was a very fine
work, which could have been a useful guide to any government; but which no one
took any notice of, and it remained a dead letter”.[4]
Also
- and this is the crucial aspect enabling us to link The Baron to Tristram Shandy -
at the end of the novel the narrator Biagio reveals the fictional nature of the
story we have just read. After Cosimo ends his life carried away by two aeronauts
on a hot-air balloon, Biagio stares at the mesh of leaves and branches which
had been the stage of Cosimo’s existence, and notes:
“Ombrosa
no longer exists. Looking at the empty sky, I ask myself if it ever did really
exist. That mesh of leaves and twigs of fork and froth, minute and endless,
with the sky glimpsed only in sudden specks and splinters, perhaps it was only
there so that my brother could pass thorugh it with his tomtit’s tread, was
embroidered on nothing, like this thread of ink which I have let run on for
page after page, swarming with cancellations, corrections, doodles, blots and
gaps […] surrounding buds of phrases with frameworks of leaves and clouds, then
interweaving again, and so running on and on until it splutters and bursts into
a last senseless cluster of words, ideas, dreams, and so ends”.[5]
Calvino/Biagio
addresses the reader directly and disrupts his suspension of disbelief using
what generations of scholars after the Russian Viktor Shklovsky have called
“defamiliarization effect” or ostranenie.[6] Essentially, Calvino calls a spade a
spade, and a tale a tale. He warns the reader that Cosimo’s story was a fiction
and that his life was none else than a thread of ink.
In
addition, and interestingly so, the thread of ink observed by Biagio is not a linear
and straight one, as could be expected of a narrator who deemed himself a
supporter of the “straight line”;[7] instead, it is a wandering, windy and
intermittent line similar to the scribble drawn by Sterne upon completing
volume VI of his Tristram
Shandy. What follows are two drawings of the line accompanied by the
narrator’s comment:
“I
am now beginning to get fairly into my work; and by the help of a vegetable
diet, with a few of the cold feeds, I make no doubts but I shall be able to go
on with my uncle’s Toby story, and my own, in a tolerable straight line. Now,
These
were the four lines I moved in through my first, second, third and fourth
volumes. In the fifth volume I have been very good, the precise line I have
described in it being this:”[8]
Why is it so interesting for us that Calvino was thinking of Tristram Shandy as one of his models? More to the point, why is this so important in relation to the posthuman discourse which Calvino seems to undertake through The Baron in the Trees?
We
can say that around the time in which the new “species of writing”, that is the
novel, was born, the majority of novelistic texts seemed to be intent at
demonstrating the authenticity of the Cartesian principle, “I think therefore I
am”. If one thinks of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
and Richardson’s Pamela
and Clarissa,
these are all Bildungsromans centred on the idea of self-examination or
self-reflection. The identity of the subject is built through reflection upon
his/her actions and thoughts, and is expressed through a linear,
chronologically sound and reasonably rational account.
Instead,
Sterne’s novel is a masterpiece of procrastination and digression. After the
first two volumes in which the author expresses his opinions and attempts to
recount Tristram’s story, the protagonist is not even born! Indeed, Tristram Shandy’s
account emphasized
“how
individual existence was crucially linked to experience and duration, the
individual being no longer conceived as a stable moral and social fact, but as
the result of a progress and a series of exchanges. The Cartesian Cogito was
replaced by a new proposal: ‘I experience myself in time, therefore I
am’”.[9]
In
other words, in Tristram
Shandy, despite the domineering stamina of the narrating voice,
subjectivity is seen as elusive, hence the gap between thought and action is
constantly underlined. Dragged away by his opinions, “Tristram is a creature of time prior to
being a creature in
time”,[10] that is Tristram is subject to the
tyranny of his own senses and “fancies” through which his identity manifests as
fluctuation, instability and procrastination. Thus Sterne’s squiggly line
symbolizes the limits of the Cartesian cogito in the struggle between man and
pen…
Equally,
when Calvino emphasizes at the end of his novel that Cosimo’s subjectivity is
no more than a thread of ink whose existence is no longer certain, what he does
is to challenge the primacy of man and his ability to dominate existence, human
and non-human, through language.
What
is indeed remarkable is that neither Calvino seems to acknowledge Sterne as one
of his models at these early stages, nor he adopts in The Baron in the Trees
any of the distinctive features of Sterne’s digressive narrative style.
However, as I demonstrated elsewhere,[11] by the time Calvino wrote The Baron in the
Trees, published in 1957, he had either read Sterne’s novel in the English
original or had just read the manuscript of the Italian translation published
by Einaudi in 1958 with a foreword by his friend Carlo Levi.
In
essence, Calvino’s adaptation of the Tristram Shandy’s
invention in The
Baron can be gleaned in the adoption of a suspended dwelling for his
protagonist Cosimo. Like his ancestor Tristram, who commits himself to the
constant procrastination of his narrative time and lives in the dimension of an
unlimited duration, Cosimo also chooses to spend his entire life in the
obstinate seclusion of his own existence-in-time where he can experience his
own “becoming”.
In a
sense then, whilst adopting a straight line in his narrative, Calvino seems to
playfully accept the challenge which Sterne throws at the end of volume VI,
when the narrator announces that he is about to give an account of his uncle
Toby’s love affairs in a reasonably straight line, and adds:
“Pray
can you tell me, - that is, without anger, before I write my chapter upon
straight lines - by what mistake - who told them so - or how it has come to
pass, that your men of wit and genius have all along confounded this line, with
the line of GRAVITATION”.[12]
Despite
his conscious adoption of a straight narrative line, Calvino invents a
character - an autobiographical one - which represents a constant challenge to
the law of gravity and, like Tristram, exists in his own posthuman space and
time.
[2] I. Calvino, The Baron in the Trees, translated by Archibald
Colquhoun, Orlando, Harcourt Brace, 1976, p. 3.
[3] On this topic, see at least R. Braidotti, The Posthuman,
Cambridge, Polity Press, 2013. Also, by the same author, Nomadic Theory: The
Portable Rosi Braidotti, New York, Columbia University Press, 2011.
[4] I. Calvino, The Baron in the
Trees, p. 205.
[5] Ibid., p. 217.
[6] First coined by Shklovsky in 1917, the concept
of ostranenie
is illustrated in V. Shklovsky, Theory of Prose,
Normal, Dalkey Archive Press, 1998.
[8] L. Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, edited with an introduction and notes by Ian Campbell
Ross, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 379-380.
[9] “‘That
Infinite Variety of Human Forms’: Modern Identity and Portraiture in Enlightenment
England”, in Life Forms in the Thinking of the Long Eighteenth Century,
edited by Keith Michael Baker and Jenna M. Gibbs, University of Toronto Press,
2016, pp. 97-98.
[10] G. Alfano, L’umorismo
letterario. Una lunga storia europea (secoli xiv-xx), Roma, Carocci, 2016, p. 112. This
book is a recent ground-breaking investigation of the root of humour and its
mercurial subject, which Alfano traces all the way back to Petrarch.
[11]E. M. Ferrara, Calvino e il mare dell’altro, Napoli, Magma, 1999;
digital edition 2008, http://www.euromedi.org/home/azioni/pubblicazioni/cultura/calvino/
[12] L. Sterne, Tristram Shandy,
p. 381.
