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

Themes

Thematic Journeys Across the Text

Calvino gives each of the 55 cities Polo travels to women’s names and classifies them under 11 themes, such as “Cities and Memory,” “Cities and Desire,” and “Cities and Signs.” He gives each return to the theme an advancing number, never exceeding the value of five. These returns to the same theme are also mathematically determined, as he often leaves a regular or mathematically sequenced gap between cities under the same theme.

The mathematical coherence of these thematic patterns creates an alternative view of the narrative, as Polo organizes his experience in a different manner from the way he narrates it to Khan. A coherent journey or train of philosophical thought can be viewed across a theme. For example, in “Cities and Memory,” Polo ponders the difference between one’s experience of a city and their expectations or memory of it. By Maurilia, the fifth city under this category, Polo concludes that the experienced, remembered, and expected cities are all different places rather than the same one. Themes are concluded and replaced by new ones during the scope of the text. Some of the themes, like “Cities and Signs” and “Cities and Names,” which explore how far cities can be defined in human symbols, have similar preoccupations. However, the introduction of others indicates a turn in the tone of the text; for example, this occurs when the heady topic of “Cities and Desire” gives way to the more sobering “Cities and Death.” That dynamic also emerges in the suffocating notion of “Continuous Cities,” like Trude and Cecilia, which are homogenous and inescapable. This reflects how Polo’s initial enthusiasm for travel is replaced by weariness; it also aligns with Khan’s disenchantment with empire.

However, Calvino’s staging of several alternative routes through the main narrative is also a feature of deconstructionism, a literary and philosophical movement originating in 1960s Paris that critiqued ideas of certainty and identity in texts. In 1967, the French philosopher Roland Barthes wrote “The Death of the Author,” an essay which proposed that on a text’s publication, the author’s perspective was less important than the reader’s. Barthes argued that the reader’s present engagement with the text was the locus of meaning and not the author’s intention. Calvino’s structure lends itself to a prioritization of the reader’s perspective because its multiple narrative threads, each rich in detail and suggestion, will affect each reader in a unique way. While Khan proposes to be such a reader, giving his own interpretation, Polo argues with him, offering an alternative view of the patterns in his thematic journey. This equivocation encourages the reader to appreciate that there are multiple journeys and interpretations through this text and that their own is equally valid. Indeed, Khan and Polo seem to be aware of other consciousnesses that experience and interpret the universe when they question whether they have moved from Khan’s garden and how they know what they know. In the idea that people see two worlds, one of which “exists in the shadow of our lowered eyelids,” the notion of a single, teleological meaning, in relation to life and texts, is overturned (93). Ironically, while the text offers several narrative strands that the reader can take meaning from, it also allows for the possibility that those narratives may be limited or even fictitious.

Longing for Cities and the Search for Utopia

While Polo does not explicitly search for utopia in his journeys, his fantastical descriptions of new cities evoke such idealized notions. The city itself, which succeeds days of wandering in formless wildernesses where nothing excites the traveler’s senses or desire, is a form of utopia. Throughout the text, the approach to the city and the sight of its attractive architecture is the fulfilment of a long-anticipated wish, and everything the traveler initially sees impresses him. For example, Isidora is described as “a city where the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made, where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third” (7). Here, Calvino creates a sensation of abundance and even infinity in the idea of technologically advanced spiral staircases made from seashells that are themselves spirals. This sensation is also evoked in the love-starved male traveler who will always be presented with more women than he can possibly approach. Importantly, the utopian city is usually a place of action rather than repose, corresponding to the lonely traveler’s wish for human interaction. It provides for the traveler what he is lacking.

While the traveler continues to search for pleasure in the cities, this becomes bound up with novelty, so that neither he nor the reader get bored and find repeatedly encountered amusements cloying. This is evident in Polo’s meditation on Hypatia, a city where he must follow misleading signs to encounter the pleasures he seeks. For example, he must forgo the blue lagoon, the typical point of bathing beauties, and seek “the neighing of horses and the cracking of whips” to find sexually available women (41). The novelty of these women’s appearance and approach, as they “mount the saddle, thighs naked,” is a new enticement that stops Polo from feeling that he is repeating the same journey all over again (41). But regardless of the pleasure he experiences in new cities, he still desires to leave and expresses anxiety about whether climbing the citadel’s highest pinnacle will afford him the ship he needs in order to leave.

Polo’s desire not to dwell long in the cities he visits may stem from the fact that he thinks of his native Venice as a utopia that he longs to return to, both in body and memory. While he is absent from Venice, he seeks to keep his memories of the city as pure as he can. He maintains that “memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,” expressing that verbal language, by its metaphorical nature, will distance him from his beloved city (78). However, Venice as a city is not so pure and distinct in its architecture and character that it can be kept apart from Polo’s descriptions of other cities. He confesses that each time he describes a place, he has been speaking of Venice too. Consequently, his use of words about other cities distances him from Venice. Still, by not being able to reach Venice, his nostalgia for the city continues. It remains an idealized place for him and for Khan, who longs to hear of it spoken directly.

The Dystopian Paradox of the Utopian City

From Part 6 onwards, the “Cities and the Sky” strand shows how town planners model their cities according to astral constellations. These earthbound places seek to replicate the patterns of beauty in the sky and become paragons of celestial virtue. This was the case with Beersheba, where the theory goes that “if the terrestrial Beersheba will take the celestial one as its model the two cities will become one” (100). The inhabitants ascribe to this theory when they amass the metals and stones that remind them of the celestial realm. They are also forced to create an underground Beersheba to be “the receptacle of everything base and unworthy that happens to them” (100). While this latter “fecal city” is the host of everything abject, it is the only place that is devoid of the stamp of the inhabitants’ miserly greed (100). Interestingly, all the sky cities in the text are accompanied by enormous piles of waste that become inescapable for both the inhabitants and the traveler. The appetite for novelty, beauty, and pleasure that characterized the early part of the novel has turned and shown its ugly side. While Calvino writes about invented cities, his descriptions of how consumerism and the hunger for innovation results in waste is a familiar trope for the modern reader.

“Cities and the Sky” are swiftly followed by “Continuous Cities,” which exceed the medieval notion of city walls to expand beyond their parameters. The experience of a continuous city is disconcerting for the traveler, who cannot be certain of when he enters or leaves. In Cecilia, he encounters the goatherd, a man who orients himself by rural as opposed to urban symbols like Polo. Both men wind up lost and unable to leave this wasteland as “the places have mingled” and “Cecilia is everywhere” (138). This speaks to modern trends of urban expansion, globalization, and the construction of identical-looking suburbs which homogenize the landscape and blur the former distinctions between urban and rural. Here, Calvino implies that while the scope of human ambition is impressive, when the rush to civilization is thoughtless it can do more harm than good.

Overall, Calvino shows that paradox is inevitable in town planning. A seed of virtue will always rise in corruption, just as a seed of corruption will rise in virtue. This is the dominant idea of “Hidden Cities,” the final theme in Calvino’s book. For example, the city of Marozia is a dual city that is successively presided over by ages of the rat and the swallow. However, one of these extremes contains the other, as “beneath the grim and petty rattish dominion, you could sense, among the less obvious people a pondering, the preparation of a swallowlike flight” (139). The notion of “less obvious people” is an important one, as these more hidden inhabitants are often able to resist the dominant corrupting trend and preside over a different city altogether, one that is hidden from view most of the time (139). These people exhibit the quality of doing “something for the sheer pleasure of doing it,” rather than seeking to become a force by which the waste-laden, greedy city could be redeemed (139).