An Epistemology of the Senses

...and a rock musician wakes amid the wreckage of an orgy—sleeping bodies, beer cans, drums—and looks in vain for the girl he slept with, about whom all he can remember is her smell...

...Even the rare and spicy dishes are described in such passionate detail (in the precise and elegant English of William Weaver's translation) that they virtually come alive...

...The narrator's "I" migrates almost casually between the Parisian man of the world, the prehistoric man-beast and the rock musician, as if to show that the role of scent in the erotic chase is always and everywhere the same...

...The knowledge specific to each sense is apparent only when we are deprived of the others, and a new world is then revealed by the single sense that is not quite the same one we know with all five...

...Suggestive as that is, the king is never more than a kind of pretext for the parable, an "everyking" imprisoned in an unspecific "everypalace...

...Calvino gives us an epistemology of the senses, or rather, he invents worlds in which a system of knowledge must be elaborated from a single sense alone...

...You feel yourself in the presence of an idea being worked out, not in a world fully imagined...

...The work that prompts this hope, Under the Jaguar Sun, is a collection of three stories written between 1972 and the author's death in 1985...

...The chiles en nogada, for example, are "reddish brown, somewhat wrinkled little peppers, swimming in a walnut sauce whose harshness and bitter aftertaste were drowned in a creamy, sweetish surrender.' It is Calvino's success in making the reader share his characters' sensuous pleasure in the food that makes plausible the connection between eroticism and ritual sacrifice, and that compels our attention in the last extraordinary sentence: The lovers, sitting in a restaurant on the banks of a river, feel themselves "assimilated ceaselessly in the process of ingestion and digestion, in the universal cannibalism that leaves its imprint on every amorous relationship and that erases the lines between our bodies and sopa defrijoles, huachinango a la vera cruzana, and enchiladas...

...Perhaps the experience of smelling is simply a more fugitive one than tasting and less accessible to language (the vast literature on food and wine certainly dwarfs that on perfumes), for although Calvino's descriptions of scents are nearly worthy of Joris Karl Huysmans', they aren't as vivid as the galaxy of tastes in the opening story, and the narrative personae are too insubstantial...

...The final piece, "The Name, The Nose," while a clever conceit, seems overly schematic...

...Later, eating a dish called gorditas pellizcadas con manteca ("plump girls pinched with butter"), the narrator realizes the subterranean connections between the "cannibalism" of his meal and his erotic stirrings, and that "only by feeding ravenously on Olivia [would he] cease being tasteless to her palate.' The meal is a kind of re-enactment of the post-sacrificial feast: "I concentrated on devouring, with every meatball, the whole fragrance of Olivia—through voluptuous mastication, a vampire extraction of vital juices...

...Whereas for Hemingway and Huysmans the senses were chiefly avenues of pleasure, however, for Calvino (despite his luxuriant descriptions of these pleasures) they are above all ways of knowing, paths to wisdom...

...As much as anything, his subject was the need we have not merely to live in a place already given but to reimagine that place for ourselves...

...Three tales are interwoven: a Parisian gentleman searches for a woman he danced with at a masked ball, whom he can identify only by her perfume...

...With Calvino, so absorbed by the recurrent theme of imaginary worlds, this process was more than usually explicit...

...The two subsequent stories are slighter, though far from dull...

...In the case of Italo Calvino the illusion is particularly apt: Perhaps he has not died at all but has simply slipped across the border to another of those imaginary worlds from which he brought us regular news for more than three decades...

...a man-like animal hunts for the scent of a particular female on the savannah...

...free-lance critic The appearance of a posthumous book allows us to enjoy the illusion that, although the author has died, he continues to send us his production from some celestial study where he is still busy writing...

...The palace is a weft of regular sounds, always the same, like the heart's beat, from which other sounds stand out, discordant, unexpected...

...As in the other stories, the real protagonist here is the sense itself, but only in this first story does Calvino give us individualized human characters as well...

...In the title story, a couple traveling in Mexico explores the ancient ruins, the colonial architecture, and the hot and elaborate local cuisines—all with a feverish intensity...

...They learn that anything not taken by vultures was consumed by the priests in a ritual meal...

...In each case the elusive scent of the female mingles finally and disturbingly with the smell of death...

...The universe he calls into being in Under the Jaguar Sunmay not always be as compelling as the one in his brilliant If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, or his recent Mr...

...The second, "A King Listens, " is aparable, rather in the manner of Kafka, about a king who cannot leave his throne and therefore can know the world outside his throne room only by listening to the sounds that come to him through the floor, the walls, the air...

...The original title of the first story when it was published in FMR in 1982 was "Sapore Sapere": "Taste [is] Knowledge...

...Palomar, or his great fairy tale The Baron in the Trees, yet it is still lovely and provocative and superior fiction...

...But until and unless Calvino chooses to imagine his way back across the boundaries that separate whatever world he now inhabits from our own graying globe, we shall have to be grateful for these fragments, sent like encouraging salutes to those of us he left behind...

...We live in a different and poorer world since Calvino died: a world deprived of the possibility of being imagined again by Italo Calvino...

...Each is dedicated to a different sense: taste, hearing, smell...

...Under the Jaguar Sun—at least in the first section, and in parts of the other two—brings to mind not just Huysmans' protagonist, Des Esseintes (in his novel Against the Grain), reveling in symphonies of scents and sights in his villa at Fontenay, but also Hemingway's precise and evocative renderings of sense impressions...

...The exotic food stimulates a kind of culinary eroticism that parallels their sexual relationship, at the moment otherwise dormant...

...Reviewed by Alan Wade Fiction writer...

...The incomplete works published since his death are small consolation for an enormous loss...

...Sight and touch were apparently to follow, and the whole, according to a note by Calvino's wife, was to have been enclosed within a larger narrative framework...

...One sort of carnal knowledge (came = meat) begets another, as this culinary revelation leads finally to the sexual consummation that has eluded the couple since the trip began...

...Every powerful writer creates a world for his readers, and thereby reinvents them as characters in that fiction...

...As a result, the erotic equation is less powerful and surprising...

...When they visit the excavations at Monte Alban, Olivia, the narrator's companion, presses the guide to explain what happened to the remains of the sacrificial bodies...