Invisible Cities

“I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades’ curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past.”

In describing the city of Zaira, Polo rejects the idea that one can get to know a city through empirical descriptions of its architecture. Instead, he believes that one must see the architectural features in relation to the events that have taken place. Thus, he implies that a city’s essence does not lie in its stony still-life splendors, but in its human life.

“However the city may really be, beneath this thick coating of signs, whatever it may contain or conceal, you leave Tamara without having discovered it. Outside, the land stretches, empty, to the horizon; the sky opens, with speeding clouds. In the shape that chance and wind give the clouds, you are already intent on recognizing figures: a sailing ship, a hand, an elephant.”

This passage conveys that one cannot get to know a city by merely reading its signs. However, the human propensity to look for signs to comprehend the world is such that people look for them in the arbitrary formations of the clouds. Thus, man’s search for meaning is eternal, and the use of the second-person singular imbues the text with a universalizing tone.

“But, obscure or obvious as it might be, everything Marco displayed had the power of emblems, which, once seen, cannot be forgotten or confused. 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 each city and province, the figures evoked by the Venetian’s logogriphs.”

This passage describes how Khan and Polo communicate on a non-verbal level in the emblems that Polo conveys. The simile of grains of shifting sand indicates how the imagery of the cities is perpetually changing. It is as though Khan changes his perceptions of the city along with Polo’s description.

“Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and never will have.”

Polo conveys that despite the wealth of experiences to be gained while traveling, one also accrues an increasing sense of unlived lives and experiences. This is one of many paradoxes in the novel.

“On the map of your empire […] there must be room both for the big, stone Fedora and the little Fedoras in glass globes. Not because they are all equally real, but because all are only assumptions. The one contains what is accepted as necessary when it is not yet so; the others, what is imagined as possible and, a moment later, is possible no longer.”

Polo considers that all visions of city, whether built or planned, are valid when it comes to map representing them. Thus, the beholder will gain an appreciation of the beautiful ideas that were once thought possible, arriving at a true evaluation of the city’s potential.

“With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”

Here, Polo begins an extended metaphor comparing cities to dreams. They have equally emotional reference points, and their outward symbols can conceal their true purpose. The dreamlike nature of cities makes them difficult to comprehend and possess.

“I have come to this explanation: the streams of water channeled in the pipes of Armilla have remained in the possession of nymphs and naiads. Accustomed to traveling along underground veins, they found it easy to enter into the new aquatic realm […]to find new […] ways of enjoying the water.”

This passage is typical of Calvino’s inclusion of classical or historic motifs into modern life. Here, he envisages that the nymphs and naiads of classical mythology who often presided over natural bodies of water, have adapted to fit into modern cities. There is the sense that the essence of cities does not change, and that even with modern technology they retain elements of their ancient souls.

“The twin cities are not equal, because nothing that exists or happens in Valdrada is symmetrical: every face and gesture is answered, from the mirror, by a face and gesture inverted, point by point. The two Valdradas live for each other, their eyes interlocked; but there is no love between them.”

The idea of twin cities reflecting each other, but with no love, introduces the notion that they are critical of one another. Despite being identical, the two cities would wish to define themselves against each other. The inversion within the mirror-image heightens the idea of tension between the two.

“It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions. If such a city is the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we increase the probability that the city really exists […] But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve cities too probable to be real.”

Polo contemplates the possibility of conceiving an archetypal city that is devoid of the quirks that characterize individual cities. However, this standardized city would be too predictable for something as messy and ever-changing as life itself. Therefore, by employing the standardizing metric favored by empire makers, he would have failed in his aim.

“Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia’s inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will last only so long.”

Paradoxically, the inhabitants of the fragile spider-web city of Octavia feel the uncertainty and precariousness of life less than the inhabitants of sturdier cities. Their suspension over the abyss never allows them to forget their imminent mortality. It is the inhabitants of sturdier cities who can periodically trick themselves into feeling invincible, and therefore they experience more uncertainty.

“Melania’s population renews itself: the participants in the dialogues die one by one and meanwhile those who will take their places are born, some in one role, some in another.”

The notion of a dialogue continuing beyond a human lifetime, when a person dies mid-dialogue and is replaced by a newborn participant, is surreal. Yet Calvino refers to the commonplace fact that our roles outlive us. Although dialogues and institutions are human creations, they last longer than the individuals who created them.

“Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased […] Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.”

Polo’s idea that words erase memory’s images rather than describe them indicates the loss in interpretation that occurs in the translation from images to words. Thus, in refraining to speak of his precious Venice, Polo aims to safeguard her images. However, given that he has been speaking of many cities which resemble Venice, the damage might have already been done, as he has already translated some of the city’s images into words.

“Confess what you are smuggling: moods, states of grace, elegies!”

Khan accuses Polo of smuggling ephemeral things out of his travels. The intangibility of moods, along with the feelings of elation and regret, make Khan see Polo as an imposter. However, these entities bring his descriptions of cities to life, rather than the more quantifiable entities that Khan seeks.

“Perhaps all that is left of the world is a wasteland covered with rubbish heaps, and the hanging garden of the Great Khan’s palace. It is our eyelids that separate them, but we cannot know which is inside and which outside.”

Polo and Khan debate how they can distinguish what is real from what is imagined, and what is flourishing from what has declined. These dichotomies also occur in Polo’s descriptions of the cities he has visited, and they seem to form the fabric of reality. Still, the idea of Khan’s palace as a hanging garden makes it seem a refuge from destruction—albeit a hanging one whose security hangs in the balance.

“If this is not your first journey, you already know that cities like this have an obverse: you have only to walk in a semicircle and you will come into view of Moriana’s hidden face, an expanse of rusting sheet metal, sackcloth, planks bristling with spikes, pipes black with soot, piles of tin […] ropes good only for hanging oneself from a rotten beam.”

This passage demonstrates awareness that even as listeners Khan and the reader are not on their first journey and thus flatters them that they know to expect dystopia wherever there is utopia. Moriana’s hidden face is especially devastating, with its harsh industrial materials and suggestion of violence in planks full of spikes and ropes only good for hanging oneself. There is the sense that the bad in Moriana and by extension, the world, makes people especially apt to despair.

“They say that every time they go below they find something changed in the lower Eusapia; the dead make innovations in their city; not many, but surely the fruit of sober reflection, not passing whims.”

The prospect of the dead making innovations in their city is fantastical from a logical point of view. However, this phenomenon references the real-life tendency of academics to innovate in the realm of the dead, by reinterpreting the past to fit into their ideas about the present. Thus, Calvino argues that the past is never permitted to rest.

“It is not so much by the things that each day are manufactured, sold, bought that you can measure Leonia’s opulence, but rather by the things that each day are thrown out to make room for the new. So you begin to wonder if Leonia’s true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity.”

Leonia’s insatiable appetite for the new resembles that of Calvino’s society, as does the inhabitants’ propensity to throw goods away before they become obsolete. The narrator conjectures that there might be some form of purification ritual involved in the discarding of goods, as the consumers attempt to cleanse themselves of their former excesses. However, the irony of this is evident in the mounting pile of objects on the scrapheap.

“At checkmate, beneath the foot of the king, knocked aside by the winner’s hand, a black or a white square remains. By disembodying his conquests to reduce them to the essential, Kublai had arrived at the extreme operation: the definitive conquest, of which the empire’s multiform treasures were only illusory envelopes. It was reduced to a square of planed wood: nothingness.”

Although Khan concludes that the secrets to conquering and maintaining an empire are intrinsic to the game of chess, seeing the wooden square at the foot of the king, black and white like everywhere else on the board, he questions the purpose of his striving. He believes that the treasures of his empire, like a chess win, are also illusory, and he must therefore embark on a new search for meaning in life.

“For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is a city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return.”

Here, Calvino explains the experiential difference between those who enter the city as tourists and those who have no means of leaving. It is as though these are two different cities and constitute the kind of dualism that is present in more designed twinned cities. He believes it is absurd that such cities should fall under the same name.

“The quantity of things that could be read in a little smooth and empty wood overwhelmed Kublai; Polo was already talking about ebony forests, about rafts laden with logs that come down the rivers of docks, of women at the windows.”

While Khan is disappointed at the essential wooden simplicity of his chessboard, Polo asks him to look again and see the life inherent in the wooden composition. This life begins from the forests that provided the wood, to other applications of the material such as mobile rafts of logs. This continues the novel’s motif of duality in all objects, as dead wood contains a remnant of its living self.

“It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.”

Polo maintains that it is not the speaker but the listener who dictates what the latter hears. Thus, Khan’s version will not be shared by anyone else, regardless of whether Polo tells it in the exact same way. This idea echoes the French semiotician Roland Barthes’s notion that the reader is paramount in the interpretation and meaning of a text. It also fits in with the book’s philosophy of encouraging the reader to spot patterns for themselves rather than relying on a didactic approach.

“The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.”

The idea of vague shapes dictating the creation of cities, rather than the other way around, cements the text’s idea of the relationship between cities and human desires. Every dream has a different shape, and humans are compelled to realize such shapes. However, if one day the different types of dream become exhausted, that will be the end of cities too.

“Relegated for long eras to remote hiding places, ever since it had been deposed by the system of non-extinct species, the other fauna was coming back to the light from the library’s basements where the incunabula were kept; it was leaping from the capitals and drainpipes, perching at the sleepers’ bedside. Sphinxes, griffons, chimeras, dragons, hircocervi, harpies, hydras, unicorns, basilisks were resuming possession of their city.”

This passage describes how any attempt to contain an enemy force will inevitably be counterproductive, as the repressed force will gather strength and emerge triumphant. Thus, when the city of Theodora attempts to banish its faunal plagues by killing all animals, it is the mythic animals that emerge stronger and more invincible. The idea of the hydra especially, a many-headed serpent that only acquires extra venomous heads whenever one is cut off, indicates how an enemy, when attacked, only doubles its strength. The allusion to these beasts perching at sleepers’ bedsides indicates that they are creatures of the unconscious, contributing to the characters’ inner torment.