In his story collection, Cosmicomics, Italo Calvino writes, “When space doesn’t exist having somebody unpleasant…underfoot all the time is the most irritating thing” (43). He writes this in all seriousness, with hardly a wink or a chuckle. Oh, there is a sense of play about it, of course; the whole experiment of Cosmicomics is born from the concept of play, but “play” is not necessarily the same as winking and chuckling playfulness; there is also (and in literature, there is especially) the architectural, the structural concept of play, as in: the architect designed a significant amount of play into her skyscraper to compensate for the heavy gusts of wind at high altitudes; as in: the amount of looseness in a thing; the whole experiment of Cosmicomics is born from this play, this looseness with reality, but it is not joke, nor is it a clever trick performed with a beautiful assistant, a black box, and a hack-saw—it is not a cavalier looseness; more than that, it is a looseness that reveals, if only for a moment, a new perspective on the real.

In a story entitled “The Distance of the Moon,” the narrator introduces his cousin, the Deaf One, as a man more adept than anyone else at leaping from the ocean to the moon and back again, and a man more adept at finding those spots on the moon with the best milk. “The job of extracting lunar milk was child’s play to him…There were places, for example, that he touched merely for the fun of touching them: gaps between two scales, naked and tender folds of lunar flesh” (6-7). The description of the cousin’s milk extraction process is erotic, and the concept of play that Calvino applies here does little but titillate, but in the next paragraph, Calvino writes:

The soil of the Moon was not uniformly scaly, but revealed irregular bare patches of pale, slippery clay. These soft areas inspired the Deaf One to turn somersaults or to fly almost like a bird, as if he wanted to impress his whole body into the Moon’s pulp…On the Moon, there were vast areas we never had any reason or curiosity to explore, and that was where my cousin vanished; I had suspected that all those somersaults and nudges he indulged in before our eyes were only a preparation, a prelude to something secret meant to take place in the hidden zones. (7)

And there it is, the moment where the reader has to take another look at what’s happening in the text. Up until then, Calvino’s sense of play seems merely playful, but with that paragraph, he gives his reader a beautiful glimpse of something real and true, not of a person skipping off to the dark side of the moon, but of those wistful glances we all give to that amorous couple on the other side of the room as they simultaneously set their drinks on the credenza and disappear into the darkness of the back lawn. If this is his aim, should Calvino have written that scene instead? Should he have addressed the sensation of romantic wistfulness head on? Perhaps. But is there not more power—more magic—in approaching that sensation (or any sensation) loosely, in giving his reader the truth at the very moment they expect more fiction?

Perhaps this is overstating. Perhaps his decision to write narratives that run fast and loose with reality is little more than a way to overcome what John Barth once described as the literature of exhaustion—or as Calvino writes in another story, entitled “A Sign in Space”:

…from all the worlds anybody who had an opportunity invariably left his mark [but] it made no difference, because through the signs a continuity had been established with no precise boundaries any more. In the universe now there was no longer a container and a thing contained, but only a general thickness of signs superimposed and coagulated…there was no longer any way to establish a point of reference. (38-39)

Which is to say that Calvino’s collection demonstrates that, even in a literature of exhausted possibilities, it is still possible to surprise even the most jaded readers; after all, who could predict the arc of a story that begins, as one of Calvino’s does, “One night I was, as usual, observing the sky with my telescope. I noticed that a sign was hanging from a galaxy a hundred million light-years away. On it was written: I SAW YOU” (127)?

Whether his intent is to use poetic fiction to wake his audience to a beautiful truth or to simply escape the narrative expectations of the modern reader, Calvino’s decision to treat reality loosely opens his readers to the magic of experimental literature, a magic which is, simply put, a method to venture beyond the possible.