So, although the book masquerades as a travelogue, it is a fairly transparent pretense. The characters of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan spend a lot of time discussing whether they exist or not, eventually deciding that they probably don’t, and if they do, they may not be Kublai Khan and Marco Polo at all. Toward the end of the book, they take on an anachronistically modern character otherwise, they are mostly dreamlike and occasionally fantastic or possibly supernatural. Instead, the cities represent insights, or moods, or ways of seeing the world. The cities are not real ones, and no information is given about their location, their population, the buildings they might contain. The reader is not intended to take this seriously, however. The conceit is that Marco Polo is describing his travels to Kublai Khan, giving a short explanation of the essence of each city that he has seen. In any case, although it’s in prose, it reads like poetry. Maybe I just read it at the right moment. I really liked this one, though I’d say I enjoyed it more than any of his books I’ve read so far. I keep reading Italo Calvino books, and I often don’t feel like I like them as much as I should, and I’m not sure why. New York: Semiotext(e).Author: Italo Calvino (translated by William Weaver) Seriality and Narrativity in Calvino’s Le cittá invisibili. Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative. The Italianist 8 (1): 56–65.įoucault, Michel. Italo Calvino’s Le Città Invisibili and ‘La Sfida Al Labirinto’. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.įerraro, Bruno. New York: Columbia University Press.Įco, Umberto. London: The Athlone Press.ĭeleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Ravenna: Longo Editore.ĭeleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Ĭannon, JoAnn. Calvino’s “maps” converge with theories that emphasize openness, decentered-ness, multiplicities, and multivocality.īarthes, Roland. In this essay I focus on Calvino’s narrative strategies in Invisible Cities and his attempt to map the invisible. As Andrew Gibson (1996) claims, the narratological imaginary has always been haunted by dreams of geometry, like maps with perfectly straight lines, like the cartographers’ dream of a map equal to territory. Consequently, maps are related to narratives, and narratology to cartography. The metaphor of the map opens up the texts, enabling different points of entrances that, like cities, become infinite storehouses of citations, echoes and references, crosses and recrosses. Hence, we repeatedly encounter the metaphor of a map that contains in itself this painful ambiguity and that brings up the possibility of interplay between reading and navigating, walking through the city and reading the city, between the reader and the traveler. Semioticians feast on the city stroll since everything opens up in textual tapestry: texts of streets texts of movies, television programs, and magazines texts of towers, bridges, dark and desolate blind alleys. Cities are like a text, full of different intersections, points of view, intentions, desires cities form plans, structures they are the complex layering of power, from its most general pre-textual forms to the ideology of the city plan or text itself. The density and complexity of the life and fabric of cities cannot be easily mapped because there is an immense concentration of diverse hybridity. Maps, cities, and narratives are always interrelated and interconnected.
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