MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics provides a playful, anthropomorphized account of the history of the universe told by the ever-evolving narrator, Qfwfq, and as such, it is often classified within the genre of fantasy. However, this common critical classification assumes greater cultural significance when understood within the text’s historical context.

Drawing from Jean-François Lyotard’s designation in The Postmodern Condition that the term ‘postmodern’ refers to “the state of our culture, following the transformations which, since the end of the nineteenth century, have altered the game rules for science, literature, and the arts,” I endeavor to, first, demonstrate that the scientific revolution incited by the formulation of quantum theory in the early twentieth century contributed to this distinctly postmodern cultural transformation. More specifically, the indirect causal relationship between discoveries in the field of quantum physics and the rise of postmodernism manifest in a variety of complex and nuanced ways within postmodernist literature, and I expound upon this relationship by delineating ontological parallels between postmodernist poetics as described by Brian McHale and quantum principles.

With the historical context of the quantum revolution as a backdrop to Cosmicomics, the fantastical vignettes within the book take on a much more significant function: I argue that they provided a means of satisfying the innate human desire to fully understand the world around them at a time when science had proved its own fallibility. As Calvino transports his readers to cosmic events that even scientists cannot fully explain or describe, he provides human-centric stories that, though technically untrue and impossible, make the origins of the universe at once accessible and relatable. Ultimately, Cosmicomics provided a kind of truth at a time when science was no longer able to offer an objective one.