Book Review: Invisible Cities
There are two sides to every city
Intro
“Very large social units are always, in a sense, imaginary. Or, to put it in a slightly different way: there is always a fundamental distinction between the way one relates to friends, family, neighbourhood, people and places that we actually know directly, and the way one relates to empires, nations and metropolises, phenomena that exist largely, or at least most of the time, in our heads.”
— David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything
Isidora is the city of dreams, replete with “spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made,” but there’s a catch: one finds Isidora in old age, barren of the youth that would complete the fantasy. Despina resembles a ship to those who arrive by desert and a camel to those who come by sea. Zemrude rewards those who look up with “window sills, flapping curtains, fountains,” but woe to those whose gaze meets the ground, where the “gutters, the manhole covers, the fish scales, wastepaper,” ossify a moment of despair into an unshakeable malaise. In Ersilia, the residents stretch strings between houses to represent their relationships, and when the web has grown sufficiently dense, they disassemble their city and begin all over in a new location, leaving behind a monument of threads.
These are a few of the cities found in Italo Calvino’s late-career novel Invisible Cities, which became one of his most popular books. The story is premised upon a series of encounters between Kublai Khan, 13th century Mongol emperor, and his foreign emissary Marco Polo, who expounds on life in cities across the vast empire. These two figures really did share such a relationship, and The Travels of Marco Polo documents the explorer’s years at the court of Kublai Khan. While Marco Polo’s eponymous book has received some scrutiny from historians, Invisible Cities thumbs its nose at the entire travelogue genre by parading one fantastical city after another before the reader.
Kublai understandably becomes suspicious that his emissary is peddling tall tales. Dodging Kublai’s attempts to catch him in a lie, Marco remains in his employer’s good graces through strategic flattery and — more importantly — their unbelievable mode of communication. Literally: you don’t quite believe what Calvino tells you about their conversations. Ostensibly, when Marco delivers his early reports, he doesn’t even speak Kublai’s language. Nonetheless, he demonstrates a talent for capturing the essence of distant cities that distinguishes his reports from the dry accounts of Kublai’s ambassadors.
Marco Polo could express himself only with gestures, leaps, cries of wonder and of 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 chessmen. Returning from the missions on which Kublai sent him, the ingenious foreigner improvised pantomimes that the sovereign had to interpret: one city was depicted by the leap of a fish escaping the cormorant’s beak to fall into a net; another city by a naked man running through fire unscorched; a third by a skull, its teeth green with mold, clenching a round, white pearl . . . But, obscure or obvious as it might be, everything Marco displayed had the power of emblems, which, once seen, cannot be forgotten or confused.
Eventually, Marco masters the language, but the interlocutors find that spoken language, while useful for naming distant monuments, impoverishes their conversations when it comes to capturing a city’s zeitgeist. Marco reverts to “gestures, grimaces, glances,” establishing a shared nonverbal repertoire with the emperor, until this too loses its appeal, and the two prefer to conduct their conversations remaining “silent and immobile.” This arrangement gives rise to preposterous exchanges:
[B]etween 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 . . . Marco Polo imagined answering (or Kublai Khan imagined his answer) that the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there . . . At this point Kublai Khan interrupted him or imagined interrupting him, or Marco Polo imagined himself interrupted, with a question such as “You advance always with your head turned back?” . . . All this so that Marco Polo could explain or imagine explaining or be imagined explaining or succeed finally in explaining to himself that what he sought was always something lying ahead . . .
The two spend so much time communicating telepathically, that Marco makes an insightful comment late in the book, and Kublai is surprised that he speaks the language fluently! Despite the striking absence of spoken language in these interactions, Invisible Cities attends throughout to language and its relationship with memory and perspective. To appreciate the role of language and Calvino’s interest in the reliability of his characters, we must turn to the book’s…
Historical Context
“Instead of attempting to substitute art for life, city designers should return to a strategy ennobling both to art and to life: a strategy of illuminating and clarifying life and helping to explain to us its meanings and order — in this case, helping to illuminate, clarify, and explain the order of cities.”
— Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Invisible Cities was first published in 1972 against a backdrop of linguistic fervor in philosophy and the rise of post-structural literary theory. The linguistic turn in philosophy had been underway for decades, but the term was only popularized a few years prior. JL Austin had introduced speech act theory in the 60’s, and Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, a seminal work in philosophy of language, was published the same year as Invisible Cities. Linguistic relativity was losing steam in the 60’s among linguists, but Poststructuralism was in full swing: Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, and Julia Kristeva had all begun to explore semiotics at this time. In 1974, Jacques Derrida famously declared “il n’ya pas de hors-texte” (there is no outside-text), which might serve as a sort of informal motto for Invisible Cities, whose unreliable descriptions of cities are punctuated by equally unreliable meta-dialogues with the narrator.
Calvino displays his familiarity with semiotics by focusing on “Cities and Names” and “Cities and Signs,” peppering his cities with icons, indexes, and symbols, the three types of signs in semiotics. A sign, simply put, is something that stands for something else. How does this “standing for” arise? For an icon, there is a similarity between the sign and its meaning; for example, René Magritte’s famous painting, The Treachery of Images, disclaims that it is not a pipe — it is just an icon of a pipe; the form resembles what it signifies.
For an index, the relationship between the sign and its meaning is forged through repeated co-occurrence in similar contexts; for example, we learn through experience that smoke indexes the presence of fire. Finally, a symbol’s relationship with its meaning is arbitrary and culturally determined; for example, the sounds /paɪp/ represent a handheld apparatus for smoking tobacco to English speakers. Why those sounds? Who knows! But we go along with it.
Consider Tamara. Approaching the city, you notice various indexes: “a print in the sand indicates the tiger’s passage; a marsh announces a vein of water; the hibiscus flower, the end of winter.” Within the city, icons advertise businesses: “pincers point out the tooth-drawers house; a tankard, the tavern; halberds, the barracks; scales, the grocer’s.” Completing the triptych, the name “Tamara” is itself a symbol of all the city contains.
Is it strange for an Italian author to be acquainted with the litany of French theorists named above? On the contrary, Calvino moved to Paris in 1967, where he met semiotician Roland Barthes and joined the literary group Oulipo. To this day, members of the group adopt mathematical constraints like palindromes, lipograms, Graeco-Latin squares, knights tours, and permutations to inspire their writing. Invisible Citiesbelongs firmly to the Oulipo tradition, which is seen most clearly in its…
Structure
“Conquering the world on horseback is easy; it is dismounting and governing that is hard.”
— Genghis Khan
The book is divided into nine sections, each of which covers five cities, except for the first and last sections, which cover ten, for a total of 55 cities, each of which has a woman’s name. Each section is framed by intercalary conversations between the emperor and explorer. The cities are evenly distributed across 11 categories, and every section but the last culminates in the introduction of a new category. These categories are:
- 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
Marco Polo never explicitly names these categories, which invites the reader to ask whether they are an outside architecture imposed by the author or whether Marco’s character is aware of the categories, and Calvino is merely clueing in the reader. The arrangement of the categories follows an endearing geometric pattern that Wikipedia kindly visualizes for us:
Granted, we have many degrees of freedom for manipulating this material into other structures, but I suspect Calvino planted other relationships for the reader to discover. So, at risk of sounding like a numerology crank, let’s indulge in a bit of…
Overthinking
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
— Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Two primary motifs in the book are duality and perspective. Many of the cities are dual in the sense that they have two faces: Valdrada sits above a lake, such that “the traveler, arriving, sees two cities: one erect above the lake, and the other reflected, upside down.” Calvino even considered admitting “Twofold Cities” as its own category. Calvino also teases at the challenges of reconciling different perspectives. In Moriana, for example, a mere turn on one’s heel is all that separates a city where “dancing girls with silvery scales swim beneath the medusa-shaped chandeliers” and a desolate landscape of “rusting sheet metal, sackcloth, planks bristling with spikes, pipes black with soot…” You get the idea.
Just as different visitors experience different Morianas, and Kublai understands his cities differently from Marco, skepticism toward an objective perspective also implicates the reader — there is no outside-text! All of this means it’s not a stretch to suggest that each city belongs not just to one category, but two. That is, if you look from a different angle, a city that is nominally “Thin” might start to look mighty “Hidden,” and this would be continuous with Calvino’s emphasis on duality and perspective.
Here is my tentative dual-classification:
Some of these connections are made explicit. Zenobia, for example, is ostensibly a thin city, but in its telling, Marco claims there are two kinds of cities: “those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it.” Hmm… sounds like Zenobia might have something to do with desire. Other assignments are more tenuous.
According to my schema, each city belongs to two categories for a total of 11C2 = 55 cities. Is this too conspicuous to be coincidental? Not at all. For any odd number of categories X, there exists some number of cities X*Y such that XC2 = X*Y. Here’s a quick proof:
So the fact that we can neatly assign each city to two categories is very weak evidence that Calvino intended this duality. But recall that Calvino belonged to the mathematically literate Oulipo group, which dabbled in combinatorics. The work to which Oulipo owes its inception is Raymond Queneau’s Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, a set of ten sonnets, with each line printed on its own strip of paper, yielding 10¹⁴ unique poems. Mathematician and Oulipo member Claude Berge wrote a book on combinatorics, Calvino features in the Wikipedia page on combinatory literature, and now we have papers like these.
Indeed, Calvino stated:
A city is a combination of many things: memory, desires, signs of a language; it is a place of exchange, as any textbook of economic history will tell you — only, these exchanges are not just trade in goods, they also involve words, desires, and memories . . . this is a many-faceted book, and there are conclusions throughout its length, on each of the faces and along each of the edges . . .
These “edges” might be visualized as the edges of a complete graph with 11 vertices, each of which represents one of the book’s 11 categories. I’ll spare you — I’m not labeling the edges and vertices, but you can imagine.
Another piece of evidence suggesting that Calvino intended such a combinatorial classification for the reader to discover is the total of 11C3 = 165 pages in the book! Is this a coincidence? I think not! I suspect that Calvino intentionally manipulated his chapter lengths to achieve this number, and that he left behind some fingerprints in the process of deliberately truncating and expanding his chapters to target his 165-page total.
Consider the distribution of lines in every chapter:
Does that almost look… bimodal? Let’s zoom in:
A smoking gun! The typical page in the book fits 27 lines, so his chapters seem conspicuously tailored to fit on exactly one or two full pages — what we would expect to see as the product of a strategic shortening and lengthening process around these thresholds.
And our eyes doth not deceive us! At least, we are unlikely to see this distribution if chapter length was drawn from a normal distribution in Calvino’s head. When we exclude the last chapter, which clocks in at an unusual 121 lines, we find marginally significant results for a Shapiro-Wilk test (p = 0.07504) and a Skewness and Kurtosis test (p = 0.0576), which test for normality.
This analysis is extremely tentative; it’s hamstrung by our small sample size of 73 chapters (55 cities and 18 conversations), and if we exclude the second-longest chapter as well, our results are no longer significant. Ultimately, the “true” distribution of chapter length — absent any manipulation to achieve a certain page length — might not be normal at all. Maybe there are ~1 page cities, and there are ~1.5 page cities, and there are ~2 page cities, so chapter length naturally produces an empirical distribution like the one we see here. Ideally, we would collect a corpus of chapter lengths from books in the same reference class (prose poems? Italian fiction?) and run a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test to assess whether Calvino’s book departs significantly from this better-informed prior.
It would also be nice to get our hands on a copy of the original Italian to confirm length-parity, but I haven’t been able to find it online. We can, at least, assume that the book’s translator William Weaver expressed Calvino’s vision with high fidelity: Invisible Cities was Weaver’s fifth translation for the author, and the two spent dayscollaborating, despite Calvino’s taciturn disposition.
Perhaps one could also find 11C4 = 330 or 11C5 = 462 attested in the book,¹ but I’ll leave these exercises to future readers with too much time on their hands and a penchant for…
Questioning Cities and Answering Cities
“Every ghetto, every city, and suburban place I been, make me recall my days, in New Jerusalem.”
— Lauryn Hill, Every Ghetto, Every City
During one of their verbal cat-and-mouse exchanges, Kublai accuses Marco of neglecting Venice, his hometown. Marco replies, “Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice,” because “To distinguish the other cities’ qualities, I must speak of a first city that remains implicit.” Kublai parries, then why not begin by telling about Venice? To which Marco characteristically responds, “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.” The power of language to efface memories appears throughout the book. Aglaura, for example, boasts a rich history, but its mythologized past obscures the present such that “everything previously said of Aglaura imprisons your words and obliges you to repeat rather than say.” The true city, “in the lack of words to fix it, has been lost.” (These is just one of the many cities that reflect Kublai and Marco’s conversations.)
In one dialogue, Kublai and Marco conclude that they must be figments of the imaginations of people in the empire: else the people in the empire would be figments of their imaginations, undermining the premise of their leisurely talks! Marco sums up, “Then the hypothesis must be rejected. So the other hypothesis is true: they exist and we do not.”
Despite the danger it poses to memory and existence, language can also identify (and reify?) slippery bits of truth. Kublai has a more important motivation than entertainment or reconnaissance in his encounters with Marco. The emperor has grown disillusioned with his empire, with its “endless, formless ruin,” corruption, and decay. “Only in Marco Polo’s accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites’ gnawing.”
What exactly is this pattern? Calvino refrains from telling us outright, but through Marco’s cities, Kublai glimpses its structure:
Kublai reflected on the invisible order that sustains cities, on the rules that decreed how they rise, take shape, and prosper, adapting themselves to the seasons, and then how they sadden and fall in ruins. At times he thought he was on the verge of discovering a coherent, harmonious system underlying the infinite deformities and discords . . .
It is this harmonious system that quells Kublai’s nihilistic questioning about his empire. Marco explains, “You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.” If you look hard enough, you might glimpse the pattern as well, the conclusions that Calvino promises are waiting on the book’s edges and faces.
Even if you are not a soul-searching emperor, you too might harbor some questions that cities can answer. For example, Paul Graham asks what cities demand of ambitious people: New York values wealth; Boston, intelligence; Silicon Valley, power; LA, fame; DC, connections; Paris, style; etc. You might consider your own city: what does it value? Is it a thin city? A continuous city? Maybe it’s both, depending on how you look at it.
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Acknowledgements
“If I last-strawed you on 8th Avenue, well, you’re the only motherfucker in the city who can stand me.”
— St. Vincent, New York
I am grateful to Alex for recommending this book (and others) during a lovely walk through our own city, and to Claire, Andrés, and Jack for their statistical acumen.
Footnotes
- 165 * 2 = 330, so there are 330 tops and bottoms of pages. The property that 2 * XC2 = XC3 only holds for X = 11.
