Man as Memory and Metaphor of Matter: Italo Calvino’s ‘Priscilla’ and the Narration of (Bio)Science

This article investigates the relation between science and narration through the lens of gender and anthropocentrism. By analysing Calvino’s long, ‘biocomic’ triptych ‘Priscilla’ (published in T con zero in 1967) alongside (popular) scientific tales on (a)sexual reproduction, patterns in fictional and scientific storytelling are individuated. The three parts of Calvino’s story, starting from a unicellular organism and ending in the (primordial) sea, tell a remarkably non-anthropocentric tale. Different life forms and sexualities are explored alongside the microbiology of human reproduction. The binary terms and gendered hierarchies through which the meeting of egg and sperm is often recounted in scientific narratives are much less pronounced in ‘Priscilla’. By exploring the posthuman and non-speciesist aspects of Calvino’s story, the entanglement between past and future, pre-human and post-human, human and animal, can be reappraised in a little explored manner in Calvino criticism.