On Singularity and the Symbolic: The Threshold of the Human in Calvino’s Mr. Palomar

Italo Calvino’s representation of animal ontology in Mr. Palomar, particularly in his discussion of the albino gorilla and the iguana, is rare in its complex and deeply philosophical portrayal of the captive animal and its relationship to human epistemologies. Calvino’s text provides a simultaneous acknowledgment of animal difference and of the homologous relation humans and animals have to the object both through language and outside of language. In two brief sections, Palomar theorizes the subjective experience of an isolated gorilla, considers the construction of zoos as they attempt to mimic the putative stasis of “species,” and experiences the essential inhumanity of time that binds us to other animals. Palomar’s narrative invokes the threshold or limit of human abilities to know, and it emphasizes various ahuman, creaturely modalities that decenter the Cartesian human and destabilize the human/animal barrier. Moreover, Palomar’s complex relation to nonhuman animals challenges even some of the most recent posthumanist critiques of ethical philosophy by troubling the question of animal alterity. This text therefore narrativizes several of the most significant ethical questions that have emerged in recent theory about the discourse of species in humanism.

There is a kind of humanism central to the protagonist’s quest in this novel that repeatedly employs the other animal as its point of reference. Mr. Palomar’s somewhat singular motivation in the text is to reduce the world’s complexity to its “simplest mechanism” in order to eliminate ambiguity and vague feelings.¹ He tries to fashion an exacting narrative of meaning that he can eventually extend “to the entire universe,” which he believes will mitigate the anguish he often feels when confronted with incoherence and with that which escapes calculation (8). There is clearly a hyper-Cartesianism at work in Palomar; he attempts to unify the entirety of the universe’s workings with one rational formula upon which he can always rely. The number of creatures that appear among his musings is noteworthy: tortoises, blackbirds, geckos, starlings, penguins, and giraffes occupy his attention, in addition to the gorilla and the iguanas that I will focus on here. When Palomar considers that the blackbirds’ behavior is quite similar to that between himself and his wife, we learn that the “discrepancy between human behavior and the rest of the universe has always been a source of anguish. The equal whistle of man and blackbird now seems to him a bridge thrown over the abyss” (27). In other words, the place of the human among other creatures is one of Palomar’s recurring considerations and becomes central to his general quest.

Also recurring in Palomar’s universe is the contemplation of captive animals, particularly zoo animals. This emphasis is compatible with several moments in the novel that explore what we might call the making-cultural of materiality. Readers of the novel will recollect, for instance, the fascinating section titled “The Cheese Museum,” in which Palomar marvels at the “presence of civilization that has given it [the cheese] its form” (73). He understands the cheese shop as “a dictionary; the language is the system of cheeses as a whole”; the food items signify in multivalenced ways to the human consumer (74). Indeed, these discussions of food extend to animal flesh—goose fat and beef carcasses—whose cultural meanings present contradictory and troubling responses in Palomar as he scrutinizes how humans make meaning in the process of turning animals and their by-products into food.

This interest in the making of cultural meaning resonates with the presence of zoo animals in Calvino’s text. We will return to this question occasionally in the essay, but it is important to note here that the zoo highlights the need for narrative, order, and the construction of human meaning systems in relation to other animals. In his classic essay “Why Look at Animals,” John Berger observes that “animals are always the observed. . . . They are the objects of our ever-extending knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power, and thus an index of what separates us from them.” ^2...