Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

I don’t remember how I discovered Italo Calvino. Someone must have recommended him to me. It may have been during the two years while I was at UCLA in the early 1980s. I know that Richard Raphael, a friend and fellow composition student urged me to read One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I eventually did but only years later. It was Richard Raphael who also turned me on to Einstein on the Beach, which was a revelation to me. His girlfriend at the time, later wife, later ex-wife, Sherri, got me to read Virginia Woolf. So it’s very likely that it was Richard or Sherri who introduced me to Italo Calvino.

Invisible Cities may have been the first Calvino I read. It was published in 1972, translated to English in 1974. Soon I had read, Baron in the Trees, Castle of Crossed Destinies, The Cloven Viscount, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler…, The Non-Existent Knight, and the collection of short stories: Cosmicomics. Calvino’s imagination excited me. Calvino’s expansion of what a novel could be inspired me, similar to what Glass and Reich were doing for music. And like Glass, but especially Steve Reich, Calvino was able to contain the free flights of his inventiveness within logical structures which both prevented his fiction from descending to anarchy, while also, maybe paradoxically, providing a firm foundation from which to set his constructions free.

I didn’t love all his books equally. I found the second-person perspective of If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler… irritating as it forced me into imagining myself in a heterosexual relationship. The Castle of Crossed Destinies was a little too-constrained by its ingenious structure (a layout of tarot cards). But I loved Cosmicomics, to the point of imitating it in my own short fiction. And I loved Invisible Cities.

Invisible Cities appears now in my book diary because I read it again over the last few days for the first time in years. I was looking for something to read I already had in the house. I’ve been thinking about Marco Polo lately because he and his travels form a germ of an idea for the novel I’ve been thinking about writing when I finish work in a few months. I had also just read Joseph Brodsky’s travelogue of Marco Polo’s hometown, Venice, called Watermark. And although Brodsky doesn’t mention Marco Polo, he does mention Calvino.

Invisible Cities is as wonderful as I remembered. It’s called a novel, though a short one, merely 165 pages. There is no plot. There are only two characters: Marco Polo, and Kublai Khan. The novel is simply the two of them, sitting in the evening on the porch of one of Kublai Khan’s palaces, as Marco Polo one by one describes the cities he has visited as he travels the Mongol empire. The cities are fantastical: a city constructed only of water pipes, a city built on the shore of a lake so that the city is entirely reflected, a city hung on a cord stretched beneath two mountain peaks, a city that grows from the center constantly pushing the older parts of the city further and further out. Marco Polo’s description isn’t just the facts of each city, he includes the feelings, the motivations and goals of the inhabitants, and philosophical musings about the implications of each strange city. It’s prose, but with the quality of poetry. It’s called a novel, but it has the effect of reading a book of meditations, or the Tao Te Ching. I was often reminded of Chuang Tzu’s dream of being a butterfly and not knowing which existence was real. Often Calvino’s conclusion is to blur the distinction between model and copy, between what exists in the mind and what exists in the world, but realizing that material things can also only be experienced by thinking, memory and language.

The structure of the novel is precise. Marco Polo describes exactly fifty-five cities. Calvino divides the cities into eleven types, five each: Cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and signs, thin cities, trading cities, cities and eyes, cities and names, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, continuous cities, hidden cities. Each type of city is numbered by its order of appearance, 1 through 5. After an opening chapter of ten cities which introduces the first four type of cities: 4 of memory, 3 of desire, 2 of signs, 1 thin city, alternating, there then follows 7 chapters of five cities each: the fifth and last instance of one, then the fourth of the next, and so on, until presenting the first instance of a new type. The final chapter, number nine, mirrors the beginning chapter, closing out the last instances of the remaining cities. One more element, the display case for the collection of cities, is that each chapter begins with a scene of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan talking together, and each chapter ends with them talking again.

But the taxonomy is not so exact as that might seem. Several cities could be placed just as accurately in a different category. Memory combines with desire, signs become names. Calvino returns again and again to similar themes: the inability of words to convey experience, impermanence, futility, ambiguity. We learn in the scene at the end of the first chapter that Marco Polo doesn’t know the language of the Khan and that he has been describing the cities we just read “only with gestures, leaps, cries of wonder and horror, animal barkings or hootings, or with objects he took from his knapsacks–ostrich plumes, pea-shooters, quartzes–which he arranged in front of him like chessman” (p. 21). In the final scenes the chessman motif comes back with Polo and the Khan communicating through actual chess pieces, and then, equally well with just the chessboard. But in the scene at the beginning of the second chapter we are told that Marco Polo and the Khan don’t speak at all, that the dialogue is only in their minds, “That is to say, between the two of them it did not matter whether questions and solutions were uttered aloud or whether each of the two went on pondering in silence, In fact, they were silent” (p. 27) Still later, we learn that “The foreigner had learned to speak the emperor’s language or the emperor to understand the language of the foreigner. But you would have said communication between them was less happy then in the past: to be sure, words were more useful than objects and gestures in listing the most important things of every province and city–monuments, markets, costumes, fauna and flora–and yet when Polo began to talk about how life must be in those places, day after day, evening after evening, words failed him, and little by little, he went back to relying on gesture, grimaces, glances” (p. 39). For a novel so entirely filled with such precise and beautiful language, Calvino is quite despairing of words.

Every city is given an Italian woman’s name, as though Marco Polo is speaking not of adventure but of romance. The cities exist timelessly. There is much description of trades and crafts that might belong to the historical Marco Polo’s thirteenth century, but he also describes cities with subways and airports. I was pleased to see Los Angeles predicted among the catalogue of cities that don’t exist yet, but will, until “every shape has found its city” (p. 139). But truthfully, as the Khan eventually surmises, Polo is speaking of only one city. After a long evening of describing every city he can remember he stops with the dawn, complaining that he has exhausted his inventory, “Sire, now I have told you about all the cities I know.”

“There is still one of which you never speak.”
Marco Polo bowed his head.
“Venice,” the Khan said.
Marco smiled. “What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?” (p. 86)