Looking for Mr. Palomar

MYOPIC MODERN HERO; Einstein on the beach without a paradigm; Steven Jay Gould gone off the deep end in search of the gecko and the albino gorilla--the name of this man is Mr. Palomar.

These stories are the 27 labors of Mr. Palomar, held in focus by the farsighted vision of Italo Calvino, each sketch revealing a little more of Mr. Palomar's idiosyncratic view of the world.

Mr. Palomar is near-sighted.

Calvino takes for his instrument a highly unliterary device: that great observation post of modern technological man, the gigantic telescope on Mount Palomar in Southern California. He perches a pair of unsteady eyeglasses on the balding crown of the observatory. The critical mass of our atomic age is passe; we have moved on to critical distance in the what-comes-next age. Middle-aged Mr. Palomar is the clumsy seer. Mr. Calvino is the critic, shooting from the hip the question for scientific man in his midlife crisis--"'What color is your parachute?'...or haven't you got one?"

Mr. Palomar is puppet voyeur of the earthly, the bizarre, the cosmic. Frustrated by the naked breast of a sunbathing woman who misreads his truly beachcombing intentions, confused in his reading of the heavens against a cardboard constellation chart, he shuns both celestial bodies and tanned ones, for the "certainty" in the refraction index of his own clumsy corrective lenses. Like a misplaced, compulsive Descartes, checking the stars to make sure nothing has changed, Mr. Palomar makes rules for himself: he must stick to what he sees.

THE IDEA OF order for Mr. Palomar parodies the ancient trick of looking for guidance in the zodiac:

To locate a star involves the checking of various maps against the vault of the sky, with all the related actions: putting on and taking off eyeglasses, turning the flashlight on and off, unfolding and folding the large chart, losing and finding again the reference points.

Instead of precise instruments and control dials guiding man's ordered observations, Mr. Palomar performs an awkward ritual, blinding himself with his flashlight and fumbling with charts of the heavens. This image is itself the only stable reference point for the Reader, the riveted audience of Calvino's quest. Unbeknownst to Mr. Palomar absorbed in his charts, a little crowd of onlookers gathers, whispering and observing "his movements like the convulsions of a madman." Unbeknownst to the Reader absorbed in the book, Calvino has manipulated him out into the open, where he can observe his Reader, placed among Mr. Palomar's onlookers. The Reader joins Mr. Palomar in Calvino's manipulations.

Mr. Palomar takes us to the zoo in wandering pursuit of order. There, instead of a great white whale at the end of his epic, he stumbles on the world's only albino gorilla, Copito de Nieve, holding an old rubber tire to his chest:

In the enormous void of his hours, Copito de Nieve never abandons the tire...From it he can have a glimpse of what for man is the search for an escape from the dismay of living--investing oneself in things, recognizing oneself in signs, transforming the world into a collection of symbols--a first daybreak of culture in the long biological night...

This is Calvino-speak, a language that is always looking for and talking about language, a model of words to fight the entropy of things. Calvino leaves us with a cozy picture of the outcome of evolutionary time, the image of the modern mind: Mr. Palomar falling asleep holding in his dreams the image of a great white ape holding an old rubber tire.

CALVINO PROVIDES US with no photograph of Mr. Palomar, only a hyper-assemblage of words shifting to reveal observations and insights. If we see faceless Mr. Palomar at all, it is usually by looking through his eyes. We know of Mr. Palomar what we know of the sky-wheeling flock of starlings that he observes,

concentrated over there, in an increasingly thick and crammed vortex, as when a magnet hidden under a sheet of paper attracts iron filings, making patterns that become darker one moment, lighter the next, and in the end dissolve and leave on the white page a speckling of scattered fragments.

Like this flock of birds, Mr. Palomar is himself a whirlwind of observations.

However, what makes the avalanche of observations into a character are the everyday things that he does--swimming, star-gazing, bird watching, and of course shopping:

"Monsieur! Hoo there! Monsieur!" A young cheese-girl, dressed in pink, is standing in front of him while he is occupied with his notebook...in the line behind him everyone is observing his incongruous behavior, heads are being shaken with those half-ironic, half-exasperated looks with which the inhabitants of big cities consider the ever-increasing number of the mentally retarded wandering about the streets.

What better locale for high-speed writing on the symbol-strewn walls of modern culture than in a cheese shop in Paris? Calvino enters wielding pen like bludgeon or scalpel, a bull in a cheese shop, breaking all the codes. He leaves the Reader with a picture of Mr. Palomar, balancing notebook on knee, pen on paper, scribbling down names, sizes, colors, mold formations, as if his frantic doodling could create another map of the stars, a gastronomy of everyday life. Mr. Palomar does take on a persona, and at the same time becomes a recognizable character, when he sonic booms his way out of his secret life back into social reality, disoriented, holding in his head fragments of his wife's shopping list.

THE CHAPTER-SKETCHES of "Mr. Palomar" compose a fancy scheme for all possible permutations of human experience. At the end of the book, Calvino decides to let the Reader in on his secret. He has thrown in an "Index" at the end of a collection of stories. The index looks like a table of contents in which Calvino reveals that what had seemed like a zigzag wandering from beach to shop to zoo is actually a highly formalized pattern. Calvino assigns to each chapter a combination of the numbers one, two, and three, like the combination of a lock. Each number corresponding to a different kind of experience. Yet even as he lets the Reader peek into the control room of the observatory, Calvino is playing games. At the end of this story of a man trying to order the world, Calvino unveils an ordering of the story itself. With a final ironic twist, Calvino presents a mathematical model of the book that is just another set of lenses for the Reader to try on.

Calvino is the zero-sum writer, creating an interconnected world, where for every wording there must be a rewording, though maybe not an equal and opposite one. A word is an event, and, as an event, has repercussions on many levels: if there is a whirlwind of starlings crisscrossing the sky, then there will be a network below of messages along the telephone lines, as Mr. Palomar and his odd friends exchange observations on the birds. Calvino is a great writer because he is a great reader--he reads the world as if it were a book.