Invisible Cities is an excellent example of the experimental yet accessible quality of Italo Calvino's fiction. The novel has no actual plot and no real character development, being instead a series of dialogues describing a variety of imaginary cities in a travelogue format. But despite its lacking the conventional elements a reader would expect from a novel, Invisible Cities is easy to follow and engages the reader with its vivid descriptions and the way it uses the imaginary cities as a commentary on the modern world.
Invisible Cities is an imaginary travelogue with an unusual, carefully considered structure
The novel is structured as a dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. Anxious to learn of the state of his empire and the places Polo has explored, Kublai Khan asks him to describe his travels. The format of the book is modeled on the historical Marco Polo's travel diaries, and so the novel's Polo provides brief descriptions of 55 cities. All of these places are products of Calvino's imagination rather than bearing any relation to the actual Polo's travels.
At first, the structure of the novel appears to be arbitrary, with no logic as to the order in which Polo describes particular types of cities. But there is a definite progression of themes in Calvino's novel, as it begins with groupings such as "Cities and memory" and "Cities and desire", and concludes with far more ominous categories: "Cities and the dead", "Hidden cities". The sense is of a movement away from immediate, tactile human feeling and the expression of the senses towards the illumination of mysteries, the revelation of what cannot be perceived through the senses alone.
The way Kublai Khan comes to understand Marco Polo reflects how the reader comes to understand Invisible Cities
This mirrors the progression of the understanding between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. When Polo first comes to the Khan's court, he does not speak the Tartar language and so must convey his descriptions of his travels through pantomime and by using objects he has obtained during his travels. At first, this approach is confusing to the Khan, and he is unable to discern exactly what Polo is attempting to describe. But even when he fails to comprehend the specifics, the Khan understands that there is some symbolic value in these pantomimes: "In the Khan's mind the empire was reflected in a desert of labile and interchangeable data, like grains of sand, from which there appeared, for every city and province, the figures evoked by the Venetians logogriphs."
Even after Polo becomes able to speak directly to the Khan, this emblematic system is so engrained in his mind that he returns to it, giving the greatest weight to the first gesture Polo gives in conveying his descriptions or the first object he displays from a city. Through his earlier struggles to comprehend Polo's meaning, the Khan develops a system that allows him a greater comprehension of his empire than anything his other envoys report to him. The symbolic becomes more important than the literal, and the big picture more important than the realistic details.
The cities themselves are symbols rather than realistically depicted places
While the reader does not get an idea of Polo's gestures, since the interaction between the Khan and Polo is conveyed entirely in the interludes and does not enter into the descriptions of the cities themselves, it isn't hard to figure out that the cities are meant more as symbols of the phenomena described in their categories than as actual living, breathing places. The narrative voice Calvino uses for Polo's travelogues is largely impersonal; though he does place himself in the action on occasion, for the most part he speaks of the cities in a dispassionate, distanced voice, rather than in terms of any personal relation to them.
And Polo's narration emphasizes only the geographic qualities of the cities that match their thematic qualities, with the caveat that the qualities of each category blend into each other as the novel progresses, until the accretion means that the cities are all ultimately projections of Calvino's view of the human condition. Some commentators have pointed to environmentalist themes in the novel, to condemnations of urban sprawl and overpopulation, and these parallels to the modern world lend an immediate resonance to Calvino's descriptions. In many respects, the imaginary cities aren't so different from our own.
Invisible Cities reflects Calvino's vision of unchangeable human nature
But Calvino's vision is best summed up by his depiction of the hidden city Olinda: an infinite series of circles, with new construction forever added on to the old, in a process that has existed forever and will continue forever. The processes of memory may be fallible, empires may rise and fall, but human nature remains essentially unchanged, and what we believe to be entirely new is actually just a revival of something old and familiar. Calvino's own method of writing a work of experimental fiction based on the model of a 13th-century explorer's diaries reflects this central idea. At heart, Invisible Cities is about the permanence and stability hidden under an illusion of instability and decay, and the cities themselves say more about these qualities than any human protagonist.
Calvino, Italo: Invisible Cities. Giulio Enaudi, 1972. ISBN 0-15-145290-3.
Paul Brown - Paul Ferrell Brown graduated from the College of William and Mary in 1994 with a B.A. in English literature, and completed his M.A. in ...
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