Hybriditales

Abstract

In her essay “On Singularity and the Symbolic,” Carrie Rohman analyzes the way Italo Calvino’s character Mr. Palomar muses, in silent conversations, about the boundaries that separate humans from other animals. Confronted with the enigmatic singularity of an albino gorilla named Snowflake, or with the neat classification of iguanas in a Parisian reptile house, Palomar searches for “an eternal or permanent system, structure, or taxonomy of meaning” (Rohman 73), a recognizable order whose validity would also extend outside cages and boxes. As though challenging the Darwinian evidence of biological continuity with the implicit evocation of a Linnaeus redivivus, Palomar dreams of a nostalgic taxonomy of “fixed” forms able to “resist the flux that undoes them and mixes and reshapes [them]”—forms “separated forever from the others, as here in a row of glass case-cages of the zoo” (Palomar 86). Calvino is well aware that this dream is an artful delusion: were species separated like cages in a zoo, the order of discourse would prevail over the complexity of nature and its ongoing metamorphosis (Rohman 73). Rohman writes, “[Palomar’s] description [of the zoo] points out the exaggerated and ultimately fantastic idea that species are eternally distinct, that species barriers represent some permanent and reliable mode of differentiation. Rather, this passage implicitly exposes the human investment in inviolable and discreet [sic] life-forms. […] Palomar longs for species barriers that are clear and unassailable, but […] such longings are more akin to humanist wish-structures than anything else” (73).