SOURCE: “Language and Literary Discourse: Le cosmicomiche and Ti con zero,” in Italo Calvino: Writer and Critic, Longo Editore, 1981, pp. 49–65.

In the following essay, Cannon scrutinizes Calvino's use of language and literary discourse in Le cosmicomiche and Ti con zero.

Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving. … I seem to speak, it is not I, about me … And at the same time I am obliged to speak. I shall never be silent. Never.

Samuel Beckett

With Le cosmicomiche (1965) and Ti con zero (1967), Calvino continues the genealogy of mankind begun in I nostri antenati by returning to the origins of the universe. Both texts are narrated by one Ofwfq, a chameleonic character who alternately appears as a one-celled organism, a dinosaur, and an unspecified amphibian. Each chapter or story is an account of some crucial, transitional moment in the history of the universe: the formation...