Cosmos or Rhizome? Italo Calvino's Rhizomatic World in The Cosmicomics

Abstract

Italo Calvino's extremely popular collection of short stories The Cosmicomics brilliantly elucidates Deleuze and Guattari's defining postmodern notion of rhizome, introduced by them in their collaborative project A Thousand Plateaus. Calvino's portrayed universe does not possess and exude a definite and coherent pattern; rather, it displays a fabric that is relentlessly fleeting and perennially evolving. Although Calvino's The Cosmicomics astoundingly predates A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari's conceptual propositions of rhizome and Calvino's fictional illustrations of the cosmic phenomena in The Cosmicomics nonetheless demonstrate incredible concurrences and similarities. A detailed analysis of the rhizomatic nature of Calvino's cosmic phenomena has strangely escaped critical interventions over the years, despite an abundance of multiple critical responses to The Cosmicomics. Based on these precepts, this article intends to explore the rhizomatic nature of Calvino's The Cosmicomics and its represented cosmos, thereby strengthening Calvino's claims to postmodernity as a writer.