In his 1967 essay “Cibernetica e fantasmi” (“Cybernetics and Ghosts”), Calvino addressed combinatory (rooted in the centuries-old ars combina-
toria) and its potential relevance to literary creation: “the relations between
the combinatory game and the unconscious within artistic creativity are at the center of an aesthetic theory among the most convincing currently in circulation” (“Cibernetica” 220). A year before Calvino’s “Cibernetica,” it should be remembered, Gérald Genette, who had explicitly compared the alphabet to the table of periodic elements, brought to the fore Jorge Luis Borges’s liaison between atomistic combinations and literary works in “L’utopie littéraire” (126). The Italian author underscored the possibility that out of countless combinations of words one might suddenly emerge with “an unexpected meaning” that the writer would not have reached consciously (“Cybernetics” 21). This semantic discontinuity, or breaking up, paralleled for Calvino and many of his contemporaries the atomistic approach to the material world: “the world in its various aspects is increas- ingly looked upon as discrete rather than continuous” (“Cybernetics” 8). Two years later, in “La macchina spasmodica” (1969), Calvino emphasized the importance of reducing complexity to minimal and mobile units inserted in a combinatorial play: a method that, conveyed by literature, allowed “us to enter into the endless intricate world of the possible” (“Macchina” 253) and produce a combination signifi cant for society and for the individual at a particular historical moment (“Cybernetics” 22).43
As Calvino observed in “Usi politici giusti e sbagliati”: “the cultural hin- terland of Italian literature was undergoing a complete change. Linguistics,
information theory, the sociology of the mass media, ethnology and anthro- pology, the structural study of myths, semiology, a new use of psycho- analysis, a new use of Marxism: all these became instruments habitually employed to dismantle any literary object and break it down into its com- ponent parts” (“Right and Wrong Political Uses of Literature” 92). Russian formalism, French structuralism, and semiotics all grew out of the logic of discontinuity that was shared by combinatory and Lucretian physics alike. As Calvino observed shortly before turning to Invisible Cities, that logic consisted in reducing an immense variety to a combination of certain fi nite quantities. By the late ’60s, then, Calvino had already developed his combinatorial, scientifi cally grounded conception of reality. Moreover, he had transposed the atomistic principles of composition and decomposition into literary praxis: through the variation, combination, serialization, and exclusion of elements, narrative inserts the homogenizing object world into a rush of generative clusters of signifi ers, continuously giving rise to new words, ideas, and images.
It was precisely in that context that another tenet of Lucretian physics, a swerve or deviation of atoms (clinamen; Lucretius bk. 2, 216–24), became central to Calvino’s description of cities in his 1972 novel.44 According to
both Epicurus and Lucretius, in nature one little atom is able to break out of its vertical downward trajectory and deviate ever so slightly from the straight course. It then hits another atom and triggers a chain reaction of corpuscles hitting and bouncing off each other, which causes them to bunch together and create new masses. The concept of clinamen greatly appealed to Calvino (and had seduced a youthful Karl Marx) because it implies the possibility to swerve from determinism and introduce human agency into the course of events.45 Psychological as well as physical movements are strictly material
according to De rerum natura. The impulse of motion forms inside the will (animus), which is composed of atoms and which directs the mind (anima). Thus, in order to swerve from implacable necessity, a mental clinamen must fi rst occur, which thereafter translates into the physical impulse of motion and the physical swerve (Meadows 31–32, 76).
Calvino explicitly remarked on the convergence of physics and ethics in this tenet of atomism in an analysis of how Isaac Newton’s science popu- lated the imaginary of eighteenth-century fi ction writers: “even when laying down the rigorous mechanical laws that determine every event, [Lucretius] feels the need to allow atoms to make unpredictable deviations from the straight line, thereby ensuring freedom both to atoms and to human beings” (Six Memos 9). By the same token, Calvino was unfl inchingly convinced that the proliferation of weight-defying images during the eighteenth cen- tury (ingenious ways to reach the moon, for example, or fi gures suspended in air) was directly connected to Newton’s laws of attraction and gravity. “One might say,” Calvino writes, “that in Newton’s theories, what most strikes the literary imagination is not the conditioning of everything and everyone by the inevitability of its own weight, but rather the balance of
forces that enables heavenly bodies to fl oat in space” (Six Memos 23). It was, precisely and paradoxically, that rigorously material and scientifi c enchainment that provoked the imagination of artists and authors to defy Newton’s laws, searching about for ways to escape the decree of fate, as it were. Calvino’s embrace of the clinamen and gravity-defying literary images can help us to grasp the challenge that several of the urban icons in his 1972 novel (as well as urban design projects from Italy and France) posed to architectural and urban-planning paradigms and conventions in an age of urban crisis, and the love that postmodern architects profess for
Invisible Cities today. His is an iconography that depicts inventive ways to
swerve from the infl exible laws of nature and culture.
By the late ’60s, then, Calvino’s hope for the individual consciousness to rise above external reality was already explicitly linked to the combinatory literary process and its potential to provide readers and writers a sort of literary clinamen. The association between clinamen and creativity implied the analogy between a deviation of atoms from the vertical, nongenerative trajectory and a signifi cant combinatorial composition or massing. Thus Calvino also developed the idea of writing as a sort of clinamen, an idea that included both the micro-combinatory operating within a literary work and the macro-combinatory inhering in the history of literature with each work constituting a minimal unit.46 When literature operated as a clinamen
(when it provoked unexpected meanings), it bore the marks of ascending and Lucretian lightness. It freed itself, in fact, of a weight, of the uncritical ballast that weighs down literature when it merely rubberstamps (crystal- lizes or petrifi es) what already exists (“Cybernetics” 23–24).47
In this regard, it is of great importance to recall Calvino’s admiration for the French poet and philosopher of science Michel Serres, “author of
Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy [Hermès ou la communication],
interpreter of Leibniz and Lucretius” (Calvino, “Ilya” 2043). Roughly a decade after Calvino’s “Cibernetica,” Serres identifi ed the clinamen as the generator of the difference or discontinuity necessary to interrupt the invariable chain of iteration, sterility, determinism, and sameness (or iden- tity), in La Naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrèce: Fleuves et
turbulences (1977). The clinamen wrought change, or a breaking up of
“the reign of the same,” for “the repetitive is redundance . . . [a]nd identity [i.e., sameness] is death” (Hermes 100). Homogeneity or continuity led to a poverty of being so dire that Serres pronounced: “The Same is Non-Being” (100).48 In the clinamen, Serres saw “the fi rst evolution toward something
other than the same” (100).
Four years after the publication of Serres’ Naissance de la physique dans
le texte de Lucrèce, Calvino would use the Lucretian clinamen as a meta-
phor for creativity, the fertile ground attained by deviating from the known, in a 1981 contribution to Oulipo’s Atlas de littérature potentielle (Calvino,
Romanzi e Racconti 3: 1242). The same year, moreover, Georges Perec’s
friend of Calvino’s for many years, maintained that a literary work always needed a clinamen, that is, an infraction of the rules, to vitalize writing as well as reading: “the clinamen responds to the desire to prevent the system from closing in on itself, to create a breach within it” (Bertelli qtd. in Perec, “Entretiens” 11). Perec cited the example of Paul Klee (Perec, “Entretien” 202), one of Calvino’s favorite artists, whom he defi ned as “the ideal of free invention” (Calvino, “Furti ad arte” 1806). Klee affi rmed in 1956 that creative freedom should be based on a “deviation with respect to the basic norms of construction” (La Pensée créatrice 71). In this sense Invisible Cit-
ies constitutes an incentive to swerve from conventional literary and urban
design. Inserted into a rigid, suffocating system (architectonic or literary), the clinamen shatters its immobility, dissolves its petrifi cation.
Since the late ’60s, then, Calvino saw in the tenet of Epicurean and Lucretian atomism a metaphor for the deviation of literature from the pas- sive ratifi cation of the existing order to a new literature conveying critical thinking to society: this is the “road to freedom opened up by literature” (“Cybernetics” 24). This path to liberty open to imaginative literature is directly related to Calvino’s thinking on utopia and the imagination. It is embodied in Invisible Cities, whose conjectural logic dynamizes urban studies by refusing “to see things and say things the way they have been seen and said until now” (“Cybernetics” 23–24).