And So We Thought: There is a universe of ideas in ‘Invisible Cities’

In “And So We Thought,” Daniel Xu ’29 explores creative works, both in their content, but also in how they relate to broader media and societal ecosystems. 

Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques. This review contains spoilers.

Imagine this: It is a lazy Thursday morning on the West Coast. You’re lounging in some black leather chair with a rip on one arm, dress shirt (and maybe a suit, if you’re really into it) untucked. Just enough to still look presentable for the Big Guns. The croissant you nabbed from the office kitchens lies, two bites in, on a folded napkin. Steam rises lazily from your chipped coffee mug.

You check your watch: It’s seven past ten. You frown. No one is late to a meeting with you, you with your Stanford-educated background that has allowed you to rise so quickly up the ranks of Google, or McKinsey or whatever corporation whose ivory tower you’ve ascended.

Just as you stand up to leave, the subject of your meeting bursts in. He is disheveled, hair uncombed, wafting in with a touch of mint toothpaste he didn’t quite rinse out this morning. He is lugging bags and bags of artifacts you’ve never seen in your life. He wears a strange and unknown garment, splattered with splots of bright and blotchy colors. You rule an empire, with all of the wealth and prestige and authority that such a title entails. He is nothing but a messenger, an emissary, a tour guide through your kingdom of riches. And then the man starts speaking. 

You stare. Sit down. Endlessly. Entranced.

And so you may begin to understand how Kublai Khan felt in the opening pages of Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities.” The Khan has tasked the wandering merchant Marco Polo with chronicling all the cities within his vast empire. 

And chronicle Polo does, painting images of a myriad of fantastical worlds and uncanny metropoles to the aging Khan. There is Euphemia, where weary merchants stoop to trade away memories beneath the eyes of the equinox and solstice alike. Anastasia, where the infinity of desire enslaves you to the frenzied creation of pleasure. Hypatia, where ships dock at the pinnacles of citadels, where graveyards house the best music.

Halfway through the novel, however, we learn, as the Khan does, that Polo isn’t actually describing various cities across the Khan’s empire, but rather Venice — over, and over and over again. Each new city is a retelling of Venice, and all of the grudges, corners, street vendors and love affairs it houses. 

This is the central tension of “Invisible Cities”: How can the Khan, or us as an audience, for that matter, ever hope to understand Euphemia or Anastasia or Hypatia, or the cities Polo speaks of? And what of Venice? Even Polo, the chronicler, seems to have his doubts about the latter. 

“Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it,” Polo says. “Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.”

As the novel progresses, Polo and the Khan’s conversations grow increasingly abstract. Do they sit together sipping tea, or are they still immersed in the bazaars and bloody battlefields, brought together only in the lake of the mind? Do the cities that Polo describes even exist, or can he only ever experience them as an extension of Venice? The Khan attempts to capture each city as trinkets on a chessboard, only to realize that at the deepest levels of abstraction; there is once more nothing left but wood and the color of the squares.

One of the beating hearts of “Invisible Cities” is the treatise it drafts between the mind and the world. Kublai Khan, in his genuine desire to do real good, despairs at the notion of the infernal city. 

The Khan has, as Calvino puts it, “[arrived at the] desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy, sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing.” 

The Khan, in his inability to separate this reality of empire from his ideal one, is constantly searching for mental metaphor — whether that be as chess pieces, Polo’s stories or his own dreams about an unburdened, unbloated city. 

Polo, however, reminds us that the purpose of the mind isn’t to change reality; it’s to discern it. The “inferno of the living,” as he calls it, is more than the Khan’s abstract fear; it is “not something that will be,” but “what is already here… where we live every day, that we form by being together.” 

The power of the mind, then, lies in the ability to distinguish inferno from that which is not. To truly discern what is Euphemia, or Anastasia, or Hypatia or what is Venice. This is what the mind offers us on a basic level. Perhaps more curiously: To find the newborn quince tree and liberate it from the rotting carcasses of its elders, to wander through the fields of desires and fears that compose a city, to find a pattern subtle enough to escape an empire destined to crumble. That is the power of the mind. 

Since its publication in 1972, “Invisible Cities” has become revered as a staple of postmodern literature. But more just standing as a masterpiece of a specific literary era, Calvino’s novel might be the masterpiece. Recall that when Polo spoke of the various cities, he was speaking of Venice, over and over and over again. On a very metacognitive level, the book itself is an inversion of that idea: When one speaks of “Invisible Cities,” they speak of memory. Of death. Of time and permanence and power and culture. 

Over and over and over again.

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