Our Cities, Ourselve: Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities

Tartar emperor Kublai Khan rules an empire so vast it is invisible to him.  Who better to familiarize him with his empire than the great explorer Marco Polo?  Though he has his doubts about Polo’s observations, Khan is captivated by Polo’s description of more than 50 of his cities, all of which have singular distinguishing features, yet still share a universality that transcends both time and geography. 

One of the first cities Polo shares with Khan is named Isidora, a city of buildings with spiral seashell encrusted spiral staircases that appears to “the foreigner . . . thinking of all these things when he desired a city.”  The foreigner’s desire brings the city into being.  The only problem for the foreigner is that this city is the desire of his youth, but it appears when he is an old man.  Thus Isidora is the city of memory, for “[d]esires are already memories.” 

On the surface, the narrative could be summed up as a consideration of how our perceptions of places and peoples bring them into existence.  Deeper than that though, the narrative explores how language creates existence; how, in fact, narrative communication itself exists.   

Not speaking the same language Polo and Khan initially communicate through gesture and pantomime.  For Khan these become emblems imbued with visual meaning.  Even after Polo learns to speak Khan’s language, Khan continues to see through the emblems.  They continue to shape his perceptions of the cities Polo describes.  The emblems are tangible, he can see their meaning, they are visible, thus carry weight of meaning and knowledge for Khan.  Language is invisible, gestures are not. 

From this point the ways in which Polo and Khan communicate with one another continue to shift.  They move from needing visible language of emblems to invisible language of words back to emblems and then on to a silent communication of no language at all.  Eventually Khan decides that he will describe cities to Polo and Polo will tell him if such cities exist.  Khan has become doubtful of Polo’s perceptions.  They all begin to sound too much alike.

Polo sums up the problem of making Khan see his empire thus, “I speak and speak . . . but the listener retains only the words he is expecting.”  Khan will only be able to see what he allows himself to hear, those ideas he has about his empire that he already covets and exists for him only through language.
Calvino’s novel explores much more than the nature of perception.  It makes us think about the ways in which we communicate ideas, share experiences, remember places and people, or question the nature of existence.  Can we understand the empire in which we live without exploring it ourselves like Marco Polo?  Can we even rely on our perceptions and our memories to make this empire visible to us?

--Dr. Regina Sakalarios-Rogers, Instructor of English, UWF