Seashore Essays

Going back to my family home for the Christmas holidays is a nice opportunity for me to pick up again some Italian classic read a long time ago. This time it was Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, my favourite title by this author, and I think the first book that ever gripped me without being a novel or a collection of short stories. In fact, it is the riskiest of literary enterprises: a collection of descriptions (the part we are most tempted to skip while reading) interspersed with meditative conversations. No plot, and only two characters, if we exclude the brief appearances of the cities’ inhabitants, who breathe into the book’s pages a minimal life, like that of moving pinheads. Yet an odd variety of stimuli catch and hold the reader’s attention.

For one thing, history splits into two dimensions. The first is the one familiar to our imagination, which looks and smells old, and is crowded with objects that went out of use and are now the substance of films and museums. On this side of history, we are in the palace of the Emperor Kublai Kahn, in the thirteenth century, listening to Marco Polo describing his travels across the empire, so vast that the emperor himself has lost grasp of it. The other dimension is accessed through the ‘invisible cities’ that are the subject of Polo’s narrative, but here we are no longer in thirteenth-century China: we enter a surreal world constellated with urban spaces that are imaginary and timeless.

The book begins in Kublai Kahn’s palace, even though the setting is not explicitly described: the old palace is evoked to us readers as if it was already in our memory, as if ‘we’ were all emperors who know what it means to have a great empire which has lost all its appeal to us, seeming no longer ‘the sum of all wonders’, but a corrupt mass with no shape and no end.¹ This feeling of disorientation comes mixed up with the objects, smells and sights of the palace – our palace – full of incense burners, stockpiled scrolls, sealed letters, old globes criss-crossed with rivers and mountain chains, the smell of elephants, and all the charming things that we can imagine fill and surround an ancient, exotic centre of power.

The palace and the empire of Kublai Kahn make up a congested, disorderly, heavy picture. But this picture has a reverse side, or fine watermark, which is usually barely discernible but is brought to the emperor’s attention by Marco Polo’s descriptions. While the material walls and towers of the empire are perpetually crumbling, the territory’s delicate design, apparently no stronger than a spiderweb, is exceptionally resistant, not even vulnerable to ‘the termites’ gnawing’ (IC: 6). The invisible cities visited by Marco Polo are thus the shapes into which this design composes and recomposes itself, and Marco Polo’s skill as a storyteller consists precisely in showing Kublai Kahn a rarefied version of his big, ruinous, opaque territory.

Calvino devoted one of his Norton Lectures to the value of ‘lightness’ in literature. With lightness he means the ability to take some weight off the world by using quick, light-hearted images and adventures – not, Calvino specifies, to shrug off the responsibility of representing the world, but to look at it indirectly so that its weight, while still being carried, loses its power to oppress us. This ‘refusal to look directly’ is what gives an impression of ‘weightless gravity’, and Calvino’s joyful celebration of lightness can easily be related to his most popular fantastic stories, like that of the boy who decides to leave the ground to build his own airy kingdom on trees.²

Yet the invisible cities’ lightness, often made visible by their threadlike or suspended structures, leaves a sense of vertigo. The cities are an imaginative double of Kublai Kahn’s empire, but many of them have themselves a double. A couple of cities are literally composed of two halves, one permanent and the other moveable, continuously dismantled and reassembled somewhere else. Often the description of a city includes or implies a twin city which is a ghostly simulacrum of the first: its past, reported, metaphorical, desired, illusory, possible existence. Behind the simulacrum, the real city can be horrid, dull, or unreachable.

Marco Polo’s indirect gaze is not unlike the way the cities’ inhabitants look at themselves. The city of Valdrada, built all around a lake, doubles into its own upside-down image reflected in the water. Valdrada is designed so that every inch of it, including the buildings’ interiors, have a counterpart in the lake’s mirror. Nothing that the city’s inhabitants do escapes the mirror, and this makes them behave with extreme self-consciousness, their attention completely and obsessively absorbed by their reflected images. No matter how carnal their acts are – Marco Polo vividly depicts bloody murders, lusty love-making – it is only their reflection that counts, which immediately turns those sensual and potentially disturbing scenes into clear, cold, and dignified phantoms (IC: 53-54).

Calvino is perhaps the only author I have encountered so far who can perform this magic: create a narrative which adds flesh, weight to its skeleton and simultaneously subtract them; where concrete objects make up dreamy visions; and a baroque and intricate style weaves light and airy worlds. Kublai Kahn above all things fears the spectre of the ‘infernal city’, and Marco Polo reassures him, at the end, that hell is not a future threat but is already the condition of the living: the key is to find and make space for what, in the middle of hell, is not hell (IC: 165). But when I put the book down I was left with the doubtful impression that hell may not be in the world’s ‘heaviness’, but rather, or equally, in its ‘lightness’.

1. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. by William Weaver (London: Vintage, 1997), p. 5. All quotations and references to the novel are based on this edition, from now on abbreviated as IC. ↩︎
2. Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1985-86, trans. by Patrick Creagh (London: Penguin, 2009), pp. 3-29. ↩︎