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Sedimenting stories: Italo Calvino and the extraordinary strata of the Anthropocene

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Abstract

In this essay, I suggest to read the sedimenting phases of the Anthropocene by using the oeuvre of Italo Calvino as an imaginative companion to geological processes. Exploring his early writings, I try to show how literature captured the environmental processes preparing the Anthropocene, thus providing—like a sort of “narrative stratigrapher”—a gradual disclosure of this new post-geological epoch. At the same time, I also invite one to see how Italy was the material text in which the Anthropocene was being inscribed. If apocalypse means revelation, this literature will be therefore apocalyptic in the real sense, co-emerging with the Italian as well as global landscape of the “Great Acceleration” and evolving with the ecological parable of the Anthropocene, from its “Golden Spike” to what we see in and around us today.

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Notes

  1. On this point, see LeMenager (2017, forthcoming).

  2. The definition of literature as “seeing instrument” is in Adamson (2001, p. 145). See also Adamsons (2016a).

  3. On apocalyptic narratives and their importance for the environmental humanities, see Rigby (2015).

  4. See also Iovino (2015) and Iovino and Oppermann (2014a, pp. 9–10). On material ecocriticism, see Iovino and Oppermann (2014b).

  5. For an articulated explanation of cultural ecology, see Zapf (2016a, b).

  6. On the relationship between material ecocriticism and cultural ecology, see Iovino (2012, pp. 61–64) and Zapf (2016b, pp. 81–88).

  7. On this chronological attribution, see Ruddiman (2003).

  8. Details at http://www.quaternary.stratigraphy.org.uk/workinggroups/anthropocene (1 November 2016).

  9. See Zalasiewicz (2016). On mass extinction, see among others Dawson (2016), Heise (2016), and Kolbert (2014).

  10. On this point, see Serpil Oppermann’s article “The Scale of the Anthropocene: Material Ecocritical Reflections,” forthcoming in the journal Mosaic. Clarifying the role of material ecocriticism in the interpretation of the Anthropocene as a “storied” material-semiotic dimension, Oppermann writes: “To counteract [the] disorienting framing of the Anthropocene, material ecocriticism reads the world through its narrative agencies that are thick with material-discursive archives of survivals and extinctions, always confounding the human. […] Rethinking the storied expanse of the Anthropocene makes us more perceptive to climate patterns, chemical compounds, geological formations, and myriad other material agencies that are never silent”.

  11. See for example Haraway (2015) and Moore (2013).

  12. On this point, see De Lucia (2013), Settis (2012), Cederna (2013), and Iovino (2016).

  13. See for example Turco et al. (1983). See also UNSCEAR (2010).

  14. For an ecocritical interpretation of this novel, see Iovino (2011).

  15. See on this point the classical essay of Antonio Cederna, I vandali in casa (1956).

  16. Letter to Goffredo Fofi, 30 January 1984, in Calvino (2000, p. 1511) (my translation).

  17. See Lowe et al (2000).

  18. See also Castello (undated).

  19. My gratitude to Domenico Scarpa for this otherwise inaccessible fascinating detail. The invasion and the means adopted to confront it had been carefully described in 1923 by the entomologist Guido Paoli in his memoir La formica dell’Argentina: Descrizione, costume, mezzi di lotta. Istruzioni e decreti. As Castello (undated) writes: “Il primo maggio del 1923, in una sorta di stato di emergenza, la Città di Sanremo pubblica un fascicolo a cura del ‘Consorzio Obbligatorio di difesa contro la Formica Argentina’ in fondo al quale compare il Decreto Ministeriale del 24 Luglio 1922 (Gazzetta Uff. n. 173) che OBBLIGA la distruzione della formica scientificamente denominata Iridomyrmex humilis, nonché un Decreto del Prefetto Cotta della Provincia di Porto Maurizio per la precisa delimitazione del territorio di Sanremo, ove la sorveglianza è per legge obbligatoria, dato il rischio che i fiori e le piante della Riviera, destinate a tutta Italia, diventino veicolo di espansione”.

  20. See Giraud et al (2002) and Wild (2004).

  21. See Morton (2016), p. 49.

  22. In Italian, the incipit of this tale reads: “Se volete [second-person plural] credermi, bene” (Calvino 2001, vol. II, p. 421).

  23. D. Haraway and Anna Tsing, “Tunneling in the Chthulucene,” plenary session at the Eleventh Biennial ASLE Conference “Notes from Underground: The Depths of Environmental Arts, Culture and Justice”. Recorded on 25 June 25 at the University of Idaho, Moscow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkZSh8Wb-t8 (5 November 2016).

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  1. Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and Modern Cultures, University of Turin, 10124, Turin, Italy

    Serenella Iovino

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Iovino, S. Sedimenting stories: Italo Calvino and the extraordinary strata of the Anthropocene. Neohelicon 44, 315–330 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-017-0396-7

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