I’ve sort of been dreading this one, but it’s the only thing remaining on my short fiction list that I own. Three years ago I wrote up my interpretation of Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler.
Calvino can be strange and highly symbolic, but that book’s meaning jumped out at me with little effort. He had constructed a condensed history of critical theory through the story.
I had a vague familiarity with Cosmicomics, so I knew it would be harder.
The Premise
The stories all feature or are told by a character named Qfwfq. Each story starts with a tidbit of science such as:
Situated in the external zone of the Milky Way, the Sun takes about two hundred million years to make a complete revolution of the galaxy.
The story that follows is usually related to this somehow. The collection as a whole can be read as a symbolic retelling of the history of the universe. Calvino has taken real science and created mythologies that actually fit the data.
But it’s more than that.
The stories often have a moral to them or a symbolic quality. They aren’t just fictionalizations of the events of the early universe. They’re almost parables like classic mythology.
He’s achieved something odd with these.
The collection came out in 1965, fairly early in Calvino’s career, and well before the highly experimental If on a winter’s night a traveler.
Calvino believed realism to be dead, and these stories mark his foray into a new type of fiction. He held on to pieces of realism but incorporated highly fantastical elements.
That’s enough of an overview, let’s dig into my favorite story to see these elements at work.
All at One Point
“All at One Point” is a story about the Big Bang. More specifically, it’s about the time when the universe existed in a single point.
The beginning of the story comically plays with the idea that “we were all there.” On a scientific level, this is obviously true. Every atom in the universe existed in the singular point “before” the Big Bang. This includes every atom in our bodies, so we were physically there.
Calvino cleverly takes this statement to its extreme form and personifies us as actually existing at one point. The narrator, Qfwfq, says, “…having somebody unpleasant like Mr. Pber^t Pber^t underfoot all the time is the most irritating thing.”
The story spends quite a bit of time in a Flatland-type thought experiment.
Through humorous interactions, Calvino teases apart a lot of odd ideas about what it actually would mean to collapse the universe to a single point. For example, one couldn’t count how many people were there, because that would require pulling apart, no matter how slightly.
One family, the Z’zu, got labelled “immigrants.” This, of course, makes no sense, because there is no such thing as outside or inside the point. There is no such thing as before or after the point. Time only started at the Big Bang. So the family couldn’t have come from somewhere else.
The humor in this surface-level reading of the story is already worth it, and I won’t spoil any of the other awkward moments shared by these people from all occupying the same point.
Then the story turns its attention to Mrs. Ph(i)Nk_o. She is one of the Z’zu, the family everyone hated. But she’s different. She is pure happiness and joy, and no one can say anything bad about her.
In an act of epic generosity, despite what people say about her family, she says:
Oh, if I only had some room, how I’d like to make some tagliatelle for you boys!
That’s what causes the Big Bang. The universe is made and expands and the Sun and planets and everything. It all happened because of a true act of selflessness and love. The phrasing of the final paragraph is very moving. I won’t quote it here, because I think it must be read in context to be appreciated.
Themes
The theme, when condensed to a pithy phrase, is something like “love can make universes.” It sounds really cliche and cheesy, and I think this is one of the things that makes these stories so brilliant. In the moment of reading, they feel profound and fresh.
Calvino’s use of vivid space imagery takes you on a grand journey. These cliche themes are the same that one can find in all the great ancient stories.
They only feel tired when done in modern stories. By creating his own mythology, Calvino is able to revisit these sorts of themes without embarrassment.
For these articles on short fiction, I do want to return to the question:
Why short?
In other words, does great short fiction have a genuine uniqueness to it, or is it essentially the same as a novel, just shorter?
I think here we can definitively say that this type of writing can only work in short stories. Even expanding one of these to a novella-length would be too much.
These stories each revolve around a conceit and a theme. The conceit would grow tiresome if done for too long. I cannot imagine a novella of jokes about everyone existing on top of each other.
They would lose their impact.
Final Thoughts
What excites me about Cosmicomics is that this is the first thing I’ve read this year that I feel this way about. I could imagine the novellas I’ve read and even Cthulhu working as full novels.
They wouldn’t be as tightly written, but they’d still work. The very nature of Cosmicomics is that they are short stories. I’m glad to have finally found this.
I should stipulate, though, that one can read the entire collection of stories as a novel: an autobiography of Qfwfq’s life and fictionalization of the history of the universe.
This is also an interesting and unique aspect because almost every short story collection I can think of has separate, unrelated stories. This full collection should be read together to get the best experience.
Other Short Fiction Articles:
- Daisy Miller
- The Awakening
- The Red Pony
- Breakfast at Tiffany’s
- The Call of Cthulhu
- Interpreter of Maladies
- Tenth of December
