Invisible Cities

Given that I write a lot of book reviews these days, I feel the need to state that this is Not a review of Invisible Cities. It is, nonetheless, personal lit-crit or a commentary on interesting themes that I noticed in the story. It may seem odd for a theology blog to engage this particular story, but I assure you it fits well with many of my past themes. 

This book, however, is what I consider to be an important work of literary art. I believe genuine art must be flexible enough to never be pinned down by one person’s interpretations, so my hope is to not discourage further engagement with the story, but rather the opposite.

As a brief synopsis, Invisible Cities is set in a fictional time and place with real historical characters: Genghis Kahn holding captive the renowned explorer Marco Polo with plans of executing him. Yet there is a catch to Polo’s captivity in that so long as Polo can keep Kahn fascinated with telling him detailed stories about all these cities that Kahn has conquered, though never bothered to visit, then Kahn will never get around to killing him. Thus, Polo tries to endlessly keep the stories going. Though Kahn is never quite sure whether he is being told the truth or not, it works. Khan is captivated by his descriptive stories of exploration.

At face value this entire book can look like a wonderful use of language moving interchangeably between poetry and prose with lots of ingenious word plays, and it definitely is, but it is also more.

There is a moment late in the book where Polo is traversing the countryside pastures, set between the cities, and Polo stops to exclaim that the pastures all look the same. But a shepherd nearby condemns Polo’s blindness to its wonderful differences. This pointedly sets juxtapose what Polo had been pointing out to Kahn about the cities. So, what I see is a possible counternarrative being brewed by Calvino calling forth sight to what the world has become blind to.

To borrow from another book to help make this point, in Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow, the character Jayber is reflecting on his own invisible hometown and says, “Thousands of leaders of our state, nation, entire administrations, corporate board meetings, university sessions, synods and councils of the church have come and gone without hearing the name Port Williams. And how many such invisible, nameless, powerless little places are there in this world? All the world, as a matter of fact, is a mosaic of little places invisible to the powers that be. And in the eyes of the powers that be all of these invisible places do not add up to a visible place. They add up to words and numbers.” (p.139).

For me, this sums up what Calvino is at least indirectly pointing toward with Kahn's faulty understanding of place. To what degree he might have actually been saying this I cannot say. But if nothing else, Invisible Cities does seem to be a long meditation on difference; specifically difference among those who refuse to ever discover it. Those who cannot see it, power being especially guilty of this, mark all its conquests as being contained by a one-dimensional sameness to be enumerated among its own possessions. It is colonization and colonization is the work of control by creating sameness, but it does so with the consequences of eradicating beauty, choking life and robbing the world of its meaning. 

Yet in the process of this book, Calvino may just be recovering the language that undoes such spells of contentment to this.