t zero by Italo Calvino

Review by The Quarterly Conversation

I.

In chemistry, t zero is the point at which the experiment starts. If an experiment is not planned correctly it will fail, so the time before t zero is crucial. The time after is as well; the whole point of an experiment is to see what will happen. Thus “t zero” is an apt title for this collection of Italo Calvino’s short stories: the stories are experiments concerned with before and after, and they draw heavily on science.

The stories in t zero were first published in 1969, and followed Calvino’s first collection, Cosmicomics. This second collection is both a continuation of and a step beyond the first. In Cosmicomics, Calvino took some aspect of the cosmos–for example, the Big Bang, or the cooling of the Earth–and retold it in terms of a fable that blends the modern with the archaic.

Simarly, the stories in t zero are fantastic tales that draw heavily on the history of the Universe and the Earth. The difference is that whereas the stories in Cosmicomics are radiant stars, full of mischievous energy and strange characters, the stories in t zero are more like infinitely compressed black holes. Most of the collection’s stories pick a single point in time, t zero, and add layer after layer around this moment, compressing the initial t zero deeper and deeper.

The first and last stories in t zero are the collection’s two oddballs. “The Soft Moon” has by far the most traditional narrative structure in the collection, and “The Count of Monte Cristo” abandons the rest of the collection’s immersion in science for a story of more purely literary bent.

“The Soft Moon” is a fanciful telling of how continents came to exist atop the Earth’s mantle–they were pulled off of the molten moon:

That was when we heard the first crack of a lunar meteorite falling to the earth: a very loud “splat!,” a deafening noise and, at the same time, a disgustingly spongy one, which didn’t remain alone but was followed by a series of apparently explosive splashes.

The story playfully contrasts the narrator’s anxiety over the dissolving moon off of the haughty tone of his friend, who regards the moon as a lesser entity that could never harm the Earth. As the first story in the collection, it is somewhat misleading, as it implies the rest of the stories will be like those in Cosmicomics.

Instead, the stories in t zero are far more similar to “The Count of Monte Cristo.” In this story, Edmund Dantes, jailed within the Chateau d’If, secretly recruits the Abbe Faria into his plans of escape:

[t]here exists a perfect fortress, from which one cannot escape; escape is possible only if in the planning or building of the fortress some error or oversight was made. While Faria continues taking the fortress apart, sounding out its weak paints, I continue putting it back together, conjecturing more and more insuperable barriers.

If Faria can dig more quickly than Dantes can create imaginary barriers, the path to freedom will be forced to reveal itself. The story consists of a highly cerebral elaboration of this premise, in which Dantes augments his imaginary fortress with more and more complex arrangements, eventually bringing in his creator, Alexander Dumas, as well as Napoleon.

II.

The other nine stories in t zero are told with virtually no interaction between characters, in fact with virtually no characters whatsoever. These stories start from a given moment, and then ideas, possibilities, and (sometimes) plot elements are slapped on haphazardly like so much clay. The stories are long, labyrinthine monologues in which the narrator seems more concerned with mentally examining the ramifications of a certain idea than telling a story. The following excerpt is typical:

If the latter of these alternatives is correct, from the space-time point where I now am there expends a bundle of possibilities which, the more they proceed in time, the more they diverge, conelike, toward futures which are completely different from one another, and each time I find myself here with the arrow and the lion in the air will correspond to a different point X of intersection in their trajectories . . . –”t zero”

This method makes for stories that are sometimes dizzying and tedious, and sometimes dizzying and exhilarating. It is as though Calvino has purposely chosen to ignore that piece of advice that everyone who has ever taken a creative writing course has heard “show, don’t tell.” For instance, the entire narrative breadth of “t zero” is the momentary interval in which a hunter has shot his arrow at a lion; Calvino doesn’t even say if the hunter hits the lion or not. Instead, the story is an abstracted discussion of the possible futures and pasts surrounding this momentary t zero.

In “t zero,” this approach leads to a failed story that reads like the inner ruminations of a philosophy grad student. The narrator’s metaphysical extrapolations get increasingly complex until they read like a sort of nightmare version of the old high school algebra word problem. The story becomes so convoluted and mathematical that it is unreasonable to expect us to keep everything in our head–a story that requires graph paper is not my idea of a good one.

In other stories, however, Calvino’s approach works beautifully. “The Chase,” a story of a car chase in gridlocked traffic, includes the kind of quirky good humor that such an outlandish premise allows, and provides a surprising amount of suspense. Calvino still gets in his metaphysical speculation, but, like a good assistant, it aides the plot instead of getting in its way.

Similarly, “Blood, Sea” works despite having a plot that is nothing more than an uneventful car ride that ends in a wreck. Via the four characters in the car, Calvino explores the implications of the idea that when all creatures lived in the oceans, blood existed on the outside, as the sea (which brought marine life both oxygen and nutrients). The car wreck’s bloody conclusion plays a central part in this idea, lending Calvino’s metaphysics both suspense and a surprise ending.

III.

What sets the narratives in t zero apart from other stories is an extreme sense of compression. Consider this excerpt from “The Count of Monte Cristo”:

Faria digs; he penetrates once again into the cell of Edmond Dantes; he sees the prisoner from behind, looking as usual at the sky through the slit-windows; at the sound of the pick the prisoner turns: it is Napoleon Bonaparte. Faria and Dantes-Napoleon together excavate a tunnel in the fortress. The map of If-Monte Cristo-Elba is drawn in such a way that by turning it . . . the map of Saint Helena is obtained: the escape is reversed into an exile beyond return.

Like a transparent map being folded up, liberation is superimposed on exile, Dantes protrudes into Napoleon, and Faria digs both out of the Chateau d’If and into Saint Helena. The above moment occurs near the end of the story with the intensity of falling through a trap door. Throughout the story, Calvino has led readers to believe that Dantes, Napoleon, the Chateau d’If, and Saint Helena are all different entities, but suddenly they all collapse into one another.

Compression such as this is common in t zero, and it often comes as suddenly and as violently as in the above excerpt. In all the stories, Calvino doubles back time after time, continually discovering new elements which he then proceeds to incorporate into the story. It is like trying to predict if your friend will break up with his girlfriend, and then discovering that he is sleeping with your sister, and then discovering that his girlfriend doesn’t mind, and then discovering that a meteorite will hit the Earth tomorrow.

Calvino rarely announces his additions as new; they simply pop into being, and even the narrator doesn’t seem to notice. This means that most of the action in these stories occurs in one moment, the t zero. Consequently, the stories in t zero aren’t told in terms of time, but in terms of items and ideas: The premise implicit in a single moment is extrapolated to a logical conclusion; the narrator then returns to the moment he has just discussed, where something new awaits, and the implications of that new element are jammed into the framework that the narrator just got through constructing.

The stories literally evolve right before the readers’ eyes, yet, like the Tower of Babel, every time they stray too far from the beginning the collapse back down, only to be built again in a radically new way. Each time the tower falls, the compression into the initial t zero is reinforced.

IV.

It is fair to ask if the stories in t zero are really stories at all. Like Borges, Calvino created unconventional narratives often lacking in true characters, and the stories collected in t zero are among Calvino’s least conventional with the weakest characters.

In lieu of plot and characters, Calvino seems to be bringing to the forefront the part of a story that an author is normally most desirous of hiding: the actions of creation. Whereas most authors try out possibility after possibility, eventually discover the final narrative, and present only that, Calvino’s stories in t zero consist of him trying out possibilities. Thought after thought is tried and rejected until, sometimes, one wins out.

The stories are most satisfying when Calvino provides a clear resolution and when he takes care to clean the story up enough that it does not twist in on itself like a pile of spaghetti. That is to say, the stories are best when the narrative voice is the strongest, when there is a helping hand to guide us through the mess and whisper hints as to the meaning of it all.

In other words, the stories are best when they combine “Algebra and Fire” (to quote John Barth borrowing from Borges). Without a strong narrative voice, the stories simply become metaphysical exercises, and difficult ones at that. Perhaps that makes them “failed stories,” analogous to the “failed stars,” those odd collections of swirling gas that never quite get themselves together enough to ignite. When these stories work, however, they are like stars collapsing into black holes, and then exploding out again into stars, which then collapse, and then explode, and back and forth again and again. These fireworks are well worth the time.

Articles by The Quarterly Conversation

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