California Italian Studies

This essay considers Calvino’s Six Memos and other works in the context of the ‘geologic turn’ in contemporary environmental humanities. The introductory section shows how Calvino anticipated key notions now becoming prevalent in this work, including an ontology and ethics that respects “the unity of all things, animate or inanimate” (Memos). The next section, “Worlds Composed of Rocks,” rereads Calvino texts through a geologic lens—it treats “Lightness” through the lens of what Gaston Bachelard calls “the Medusa Complex,” examines geologic elements in the three retellings of the Orpheus myth in The Complete Cosmicomics, and briefly compares Calvino’s “The Stone Sky” to N.K. Jemisin’s recent geo-fiction The Stone Sky. The final section, Words Composed of Rocks, takes up Calvino’s semiotics as expressed in the Six Memos, Cosmicomics, and essays in Collection of Sand. Calvino’s interest in giving voice to natural materials is connected to Serpil Opperman’s notion of ‘Storied Matter,’ Roger Caillois’s ‘writing of stones,’ and Francis Ponge’s prose poems, among other sources. The essay features artworks and photos by the author, reflective of a contemporary merging of critical and creative engagements with literature in producing theoretical work in the geo-humanities.