An Empire of the Mind

IN THE WANING light of the imperial sun the great Kublai Khan listens to the words of a young explorer from Venice. The Khan's dominions have grown in scope and compass out of understanding, their diverse, unimagined wonders lost in last formlessness. As Marco Polo describes the fantastic cities he has visited in his wanderings, his words are a dam against despair. The emperor hopes to discern in them, "through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites' gnawing."

This is Italo Calvino's seventh novel and his third to be published in the United States, and it is a work at once beautifully expansive and delicately proportioned. Marco Polo's catalogue of cities comprises a collection of short, formulaic prose poems, interrupted at regular intervals by descriptions of the explorer's discourse with the emperor in his garden. The catalogue is itself carefully ordered, with the cities drawn in always-changing sequence from eleven categories: 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 and hidden cities. Memory, desire, language, form in time and space, all are threads that wind their way through Marco Polo's narrative, slowly revealing the form of the one real City.

ZOE IS THE CITY of indivisible existence. Most cities differ from one another in the form and order of their buildings, but "as soon as the stranger arrives at the unknown city and his eye penetrates the pine cone of pagodas and garrets and haymows ... he immediately distinguishes which are the princes' palaces, the high priests' temples, the tavern, the prison, the slum."

This--some say--confirms the hypothesis that each man bears in his mind a city made only of differences a city without figures and without form, and the individual cities fill it up.

This is not true of Zoe. In every point of the city you can, in turn, sleep, make tools, cook, accumulate gold, disrobe, reign, sell, question oracles. The traveler roams all around and has nothing but doubts he is unable to distinguish the features of the city, the features he keeps distinct in his mind also mingle.

This is a parable about language and about abstraction. For an instant Calvino confronts the reader with an impossibility--a notion of distinctness apart from any form or reality to be distinguished--which is a familiar part of language as a system of abstractions from the world. At the same time, it is a parable about distinctness itself, based on another impossibility: a total negation of distinctness. "But why, then," Marco Polo asks, "does the city exist? What line separates the inside from the outside, the rumble of wheels from the howl of wolves?"

The shape of Calvino's parables is a constant. Each embodies some philosophical conceit, some paradox of perception or memory, and each finds form in a peculiar kind of physical description. The invisible cities bulge with imaginative and very specific detail: Chloe is peopled by "a girl twirling a parasol on her shoulder," "a woman in black, showing her full age, her eyes restless beneath her veil, her lips trembling," "a young man with white hair," and "two girls, twins, dressed in coral." In Eusapia, a city of the dead.

the clockmaker, amid all the stopped clocks of his shop, places his parchment ear against an out-of-tune grandfather's clock; a barber, with a dry brush, lathers the cheekbones of an actor learning his role, studying the script with hollow sockets: a girl with a laughing skull milks the carcass of a heifer.

But even if Calvino's description is alive to the senses, it remains arbitrary and unreal. It is as though, even as Marco Polo describes fifty-five out of all the cities that ever were and ever will be, Calvino chooses his images out of an infinity of possibilities, all equally sharp, all equally life-like. And when he tells of murderers who "plunge the knife into the black veins of the neck and more clotted blood pours out the more they press the blade that slips between the tendons," it is only for the sake of allegory--vivid, but purely iconic all the same.

Each of Calvino's parables comes from a single mold, and so do each of Marco Polo's cities. As the catalogue progresses, anachronisms begin to creep into the explorer's narrative, and his empire begins to expand outward in time as well as space. Kublai Kahn discovers this.

The catalogue of forms is endless until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.

The cities Marco Polo describes are only aspects of a single, perfect city that cannot be approached directly, but only by piecing together the fragments of imperfect cities.

INVISIBLE CITIES is an allegory for the mind. Its language, imagery, patterns create a sense of grace and lyricism seldom found in modern realistic fiction, but the joys and the sorrows of this book are cerebral ones, except twice. Once, almost in spite of Calvino's coolly allegorical portrait, Marco Polo expands, just for a moment, into a human character. The emperor has asked him why, in all his tales, he never speaks of Venice, and the explorer responds in restrained, formal language:

Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased. 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.

And again when he describes Eudoxia, a city that could be a parable for Calvino's novel of parables. Eudoxia is a city seemingly without form, but whose true shape is preserved in a certain intricately woven carpet, just as Calvino's empire preserves some semblance of our own. According to an oracle, "questioned about the mysterious bond between two objects so dissimilar as the carpet and the city," one has a god-given form, and the other is "an approximate reflection, like every human creation."

The inhabitants of Eudoxia, of course, assume that the carpet is ideal and harmonious, while the city is the approximation. But the traveller from Venice sees the other possibility as well:

that the true map of the Universe is the city of Eudoxia, just as it is, a stain that spreads out shapelessly, with crooked streets, houses that crumble one upon the other amid clouds of dust, fires, screams in the darkness.