Invisible Cities

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1972

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Parts 1-3

Parts 4-6

Parts 7-9

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Symbols & Motifs

Maps and Chess Games

Kublai Khan’s maps and chess sets are a motif that demonstrates his attempt to control the lands he has conquered by trying out ruling strategies from a distance. One of Khan’s atlases depicts “the terrestrial globe all at once and continent by continent, the borders of the most distant realms, the ships’ routes […] the maps of the most illustrious metropolises and of the most opulent ports” (124). In addition to giving an exhaustive account of the world known at the historic time of Polo and Khan’s meeting, it also shows cities of future civilizations “which neither Marco nor the geographers know exist” (124). Still, Polo opines that Khan’s atlas “preserves the differences intact,” which runs counter to experience of travel, whereby “differences are lost: each city takes to resembling other cities,” and their significance and hierarchy shifts in a cloud-like manner (124). The theoretical nature of the map is a metaphor for Khan’s empire and for the centralizing forces that would seek to control meaning. Instead, Polo’s journey makes nonsense of the empirical quest to define lands and borders.

While maps are a symbol of Khan’s wish to gauge the extent of his territory, the game of chess, with its pieces representative of courtiers and intricate rules, indicates his desire to find a formula for ruling. His theory is that “if each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains” (109). Khan’s fantasy that he could learn all the rules for winning chess games, and by extension cities, indicates that his conquest could be eternal, even from a distance. However, as he embarks on a chess match, keeping Polo playing endless games instead of being out there discovering the actual lands, he finds that the purpose of the game eludes him. In finding that the chessboard is merely a wooden square, Khan concludes that no joy or meaning comes from distant contemplation without engagement. However, Polo finds some meaning in the chessboard materials when he contemplates “ebony forests […] rafts laden with logs that come down the rivers” and the “women at the windows” who contemplate them (118). Here, Polo creates meaning from the haphazard yet randomly interconnected events that occur in real life, away from the rules of the game. Again, this is Polo’s attempt to deconstruct the systems of empire and meaning-making that Khan seeks but is disenchanted with.

The City of Venice

Polo’s native city of Venice is the persistent motif that underpins descriptions of other cities. The architectural features of Venice appear in the canals and lagoons mentioned in several cities, while the idiosyncratic duality of this carnival city built on water, which exists both as a structure and as a reflection, appears in the many duplicate cities that Polo visits. This is especially the case in the primary city Valdrada of “Cities and Eyes,” which is built on a lake. There, “nothing exists or happens in the one Valdrada that the other Valdrada does not repeat, because the city was so constructed that its every point would be reflected in its mirror” (45). The idea that the reflected images in Valdrada’s lake matter more than the actual events taking place also corresponds to Venice, which has become legendary for its reflected life as opposed to its real one. On a further level, this corresponds to Venice’s reputation, which exceeds its reality. The idea of a lack of love between the reflected and real Valdradas indicates Polo’s belief that the expectation or imagistic memory of a city is located in a different place than its reality. Venice, which each year sinks further into the water and will eventually be lost to the sea, is also the primary inspiration for the Thin Cities narrative strand, which describe fragile civilizations like Octavia, a city made of spiderwebs, or Ersilia, a city whose thread-like communications will outlive its structures. Venice and the Thin Cities act as a heightened metaphor for the inevitable decay and decline of all civilizations.

However, Venice also becomes a constant in Polo’s restless travels, as it is the city which remains “implicit” in his psyche and the one which he compares all other cities to (78). He tells the emperor that he was always talking about Venice, despite not mentioning the name. However, his refusal to explicitly grant the emperor’s wish and describe Venice accurately indicates Polo’s exertion of will and autonomy, despite his subjugated status as Khan’s ambassador and subject. Just like the colonized subjects that Khan cannot fully control because they think differently from him, Polo’s Venice becomes a place of resistance to the singular teleological definition that is essential to the colonialist project. Interestingly, the fact that Venice is a real-life city, whereas the others are invented, is a metaphor for the fictitious quality of Khan’s colonialist possession.

Women and Cities

Women and notions of the feminine are a consistent motif throughout Polo’s journeys. Most prominently, the cities are given women’s names, many of which sound classical or Italian in origin, given that they end with an ‘a.’ The cities in Khan’s empire bear recognizably human names like Tamara and Cecilia, making the connection between cities and womanhood especially potent. Moreover, the paradoxes of beauty and ugliness, and of hope and disappointment, inherent in all these feminized cities reflect outdated patriarchal clichés about feminine capriciousness and changeability. Writing in 1970s Italy, the middle-aged Calvino addressed an audience who might have reached this conclusion without questioning it. The femininity of the cities redoubles the traveler’s masculinity, as their location in a fixed space contrasts with the male explorer’s itinerancy.

As the female characters within the cities are gives no names or opinions and are merely there for the male traveler to objectify and use at his own pleasure, they ascribe to the feminine cliché of passivity, while he is active. Such binaries make Polo’s perspective a supremely masculine one, which precludes female and nonbinary readers from identifying with him. However, on another level the paradoxes and inconsistencies of the cities affect their diversely gendered inhabitants; thus, Calvino writes about the unreliable nature of humanity as a whole.

While Venice is a real city and the cities Polo travels through are invented and given women’s names, the cities are symbolic of Venice, which took its name from Venus, the Roman goddess of beauty and love. Throughout the ages, this portside watery city was also a common site of sex work, thus amplifying the connection with feminine sexuality. The sense that the weary traveler will be reinvigorated by contact with floods of procurable women on entering the city is common to Venice as well. The repeated description and expectation of “young and beautiful ladies bathing” in multiple cities links women and water, amplifying the connection to Venice (40).