Mr Palomar goes shopping: Eros and morphology in Italo Calvino

Abstract

The role of the desiring body is considered with particular reference to Calvino's last completed work of fiction, Palomar, which can be seen as a reconsideration by Calvino of the various routes to knowledge, the epistemological dichotomy of mind and the senses. The sensual experience of food as a displaced account of the desiring body constitutes for Palomar the absolute, that which is finally irreducible to system or theory. Palomar's project, which is to restore the relationship between individual perception and the natural world, finds its nexus - or perhaps its nemesis – in a Parisian delicatessen.