Memoir of the Universe
RASMINSKY, JUDITH SKLAR
Memoir of the Universe COSMICOMICS By Italo Calvino Translated by William Weaver Harcourt, Brace & World. 153 pp. S3.95. Reviewed by JUDITH SKLAR RASMINSKY Assistant Editor, Harper & Row;...
...I didn't have any...
...fish, dinosaur, blob, or what have you, he is always human too...
...Thus in Cosmicomics problems of language converge with problems of science, and again there is paradox...
...Calvino refuses to take the language, or the ideas and things it represents, for granted...
...It sets him off on reminiscences that transform the most difficult scientific material into wholly personal matters—putting us right into the middle of the scene...
...And he tells all, in wonderfully gossipy detail...
...For its tales are not set in the future, nor do they postulate a different technology or ecology...
...Although Qfwfq is appropriatcly mollusk...
...and in either case, the whimsy and imagination of Cosmicomics are irresistible...
...contributor, "Commonweal" This is an utterly delightful book, and completely unique...
...It seems likely, for instance, that a scientist would enjoy the physics more than I—he would certainly understand much more...
...There are actually two kinds of stories in this collection, those based on physics and those on biology...
...It could perhaps be classified as science fiction, but not in the usual sense...
...They tend to distort accepted ideas, twisting them around so that they can be played with, and much of the pleasure of reading them comes from recognizing the distortion...
...It's hard to explain because if I say sign to you, you immediately think of a something that can be distinguished from a something else, but nothing could be distinguished from anything there...
...But in both cases, Calvino gives his reader a new view of an old subject...
...The resulting paradox is the central subject: How do you talk about something that has not existed before and for which you have no vocabulary...
...The basic assumption of these stories is that a mind has always been present to interpret the doings of matter...
...In "The Aquatic Uncle," Qfwfq, who is already an amphibian on land, loses his fiancee, a more evolved amphibian, to his great uncle, a fish...
...The first usually deal with complex philosophical and scientific questions...
...It is science as Classic Comics, science as lived by human beings, if, of course, human beings had been around to live it when it all occurred...
...Hnw, the one who later became a horse, and us little ones...
...We always know exactly what things look and felt like ("Pitch-dark it was, old Qfwfq confirmed...
...that is, I didn't know I had one...
...Does space exist, independent of signs...
...I couldn't say I'll make it the same or I'll make it different, there were no things to copy, nobody knew what a line was, straight or curved, or even a dot...
...Calvino's narrator, Qfwfq, has been around forever—before there was space, fight, heat, color, or form...
...Whether one prefers the physical or the biological story is a matter of taste and background...
...no, it was too cold out there...
...Instead, they are fiction based on science, fiction that uses scientific phenomena as a springboard for creating an ingenious philosophy of science, written in the first person...
...and what they were doing at the time of any given story ("I think I've told you before the way we lived on the nebulae: it was like lying down, we were flat and very still, turning as they turned...
...He observes the limits of the event he is describing with a careful, crazy, invigorating logic: "What sort of sign...
...In "All at One Point," for example, Qfwfq describes what it was like when every point of all the material that forms the universe, including all the people, coincided...
...If it takes 200 million years for the galaxy to rotate, and 200 million years is Earth time, and there is no Earth—how much time does it take the galaxy to rotate...
...It is Bishop Berkeley all over again...
...or a protuberance or a cavity...
...Form...
...Were eyes created by images, or were images created by eyes...
...On the other hand, the stories based on biology have the character of parable: Although they are about fish or dinosaurs, they tell us a good deal about human thought and behavior...
...who was there ("We were there as usual, with Father and Mother, Granny B'bb, some aunts and uncles who were visiting, Mr...
...This curious perspective—from the inside, as it were—makes science deceptively easy to understand...
...or rather I didn't know you could have one...
...He was present when the moon moved away from the earth, when fish came onto land, when dinosaurs became extinct...
...From Qfwfq, the dry abstract stuff of textbooks which Calvino uses to introduce each story is merely a cue...
...Cosmicomics is, as a matter of fact, a memoir of the universe...
...Not that we were lying outside, you understand, on the nebula's surface...
Vol. 51 • December 1968 • No. 25
