Italo Calvino\'s Narrator in \"The Distance of the Moon\"

Italo Calvino's short story "The Distance to the Moon" has as its central theme the idea of attraction: both the scientific idea of gravitational attraction, and the far less scientific idea of sexual attraction that comprises the central love-plot of the story, among the narrator Qfwfq, his deaf cousin, the ship's captain Vhd, and his wife Mrs. Vhd. However the two central threads -- that of fanciful science fiction and that of a doomed love-story -- are tied together by the story's style of narration. In some sense, Calvino is writing a parody of an anthropological account: we are told at the opening that "old Qfwfq" narrates this tale about a time "the rest of you can't remember, but I can" (Calvino 1). As a result the scientific fact -- that in the earth's geologic past, the moon was closer to the planet -- is collapsed with the fake mythology of the folktale, and the story's style of narration thus links together our collective understanding of science with our collective understanding of human history through an oral tradition.

The idea that Calvino is trying to evoke a kind of prehistoric human society would seem to be implicit in the comically unpronounceable names of the characters. The fact that the story contains a little girl named "Xlthlx" is a deliberate joke for the reader: the collection of letters that comprise the name is so unfamiliar in any language the reader is likely to know (since it is hard to think of any languages which, like the names in the story, lack vowels entirely) that we have to assume a historical distance and foreignness to the setting that emphasizes the temporal distance between the reader and the supposed historical setting of the story. This normalizes the strange central fact of the story, wherein the moon is close enough to the earth that it can be approached by a tall ladder. The connection, however, with folk-tales is made clear when the reason for climbing to the moon is given: "to collect the…moon-milk…like a kind of cream cheese" (Calvino 2). Calvino relies on the reader's familiarity with the folk-tales, still current in 2014, that the moon is made of "green cheese" -- here, he extends the basic scientific fact (that the moon was once closer to the earth) and provides a vaguely plausible-sounding scientific rationale for this bit of fanciful mythology about the moon.

Of course, the connection between science and folk-tales is found in the idea that each comprises a kind of collective knowledge on the part of society. Obviously there is a big difference between the two, because science is fact and folk-tales are fiction. But the narrator's consistent use of "we" -- to narrate the history of this supposed society of the past -- seems to collapse the distinction between fact and fiction. In part, the story uses "we" because it tells the story of a mythical society in which all members seemingly (including women and little girls) are engaged in the same effort to collect moon-milk, presented as a mash-up of fishing, engineering, and agriculture. But the social relations are undercut by the love-relations between the characters, where the captain's wife (who plays the harp) is fixated on the narrator's deaf cousin (who cannot hear her harp, and who is particularly skilled at climbing to the moon), while the narrator is fixated on the captain's wife. These interconnections -- which almost permit the narrator to escape to the moon with Mrs. Vhd, until he realizes that the fulfillment of this dream only leads to his wish to return to earth -- end up turning love-affairs into a kind of cosmic mythology, in the same way that Greek myths do. When Mrs. Vhd remains on the moon at the end, she becomes an almost mythical figure -- and the narrator remains to give an account of scientific fact (the moon used to be closer) but also a personal and mythological account (of his lost love who remained on the moon).