Invisible Cities

RAN writes here
I came across something on Calvino and I pasted here the part on Invisible Cities.
You could browse this book online actually.
BOOK INFO:
Understanding Modern European and Latin American Literature

Author:	Weiss, Beno.
Publication:	Columbia, S.C. University of South Carolina, 1993

P147 starts my quotation:

The historical Marco Polo describes his travels ranging from the Polar Sea to Java, from Cathay to Zanzibar and to Japan, and in so doing he reveals (makes visible) a world hitherto relatively unknown (invisible) to western Christendom. Calvino's cities, however, are invisible in a different sense inasmuch as they are imaginary both to Polo and the emperor, who readily acknowledges that the Venetian is presenting him "truly a journey through memory"; that although his accounts are "most precise and detailed" (22), his "words and actions are only imagined," and he is just "smuggling moods, states of grace, elegies!" (98). Actually, as Polo discloses in his description of Olivia, one of the "Cities and Signs,'' the city should never be "confused with the words that describe it," even though there might be a connection between the two (61). This may explain inalthough at times they also make use of mime, grimaces, glances, props, and the game of chess with its inexhaustible potential for different moves on the board. "If each city is like a game of chess," muses the emperor, "the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains" (121). The game, which represents "the invisible order that sustains cities," reflects also the emperor's melancholy at not knowing all of the vast possessions he has created but which are now irrevocably disintegrating and, similar to the pieces on the chessboard, are falling in ruins. Worse still is that the game's purpose is eluding the khan, who, by ''disembodying his conquests to reduce them to the essential," understands that his empire like the game of chess is reduced "to a square of planed wood:

nothingness" (123). But then the ingenious Polo points out to the khan that the chessboard is inlaid with two different woods, that the square on which his

		enlightened gaze is fixed was cut from the ring of a trunk that grew in a year of drought: you see how its fibers are arranged? Here a barely hinted knot can be made out: a bud tried to burgeon on a premature spring day, but the night's frost forced it desist. (131)

		Calvino was to comment years later that when he wrote these words it became clear to him that his "search for exactitude was branching out in two directions," that he was searching for "the reduction of secondary events to abstract patterns" coupled by a wish to express with words "the tangible aspect of things as precisely as possible" 70 Throughout the dialogues the younger man strives to help his master understand the "invisible order" that regulates human existence (122), and to teach him to give a new sense to his life "by challenging the evil forces in his domain and by insuring the safety of whatever is just."71 Polo shows him that a basic design exists, but that it is so complicated that it cannot be understood by logic alone. Accordingly, the invisible order that rules our existence, as well as that of cities, is like the logic (or illogic) that gives order to dreams: With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspective deceitful, and everything conceals something else. (44) All the cities are different and very distinct from one another.72 Whatever continuity they have does not reside in their composition but rather in beingmere images, shadows, of one unmentioned city: Venice. There is a clear parallel between Calvino's Invisible Cities and Borges's "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," inasmuch as "the central scheme" of the latter "is an extraordinary mirror-game of successive levels of the unreal." Therefore, it could be argued that as Borges's story is only ''nominally about an imaginary book," so Calvino's novel is only nominally about one city, Venice, and the, invisible cities represent various levels of the unreal in a similar mirror-game. 73 When the khan wonders why Polo never speaks to him about the city of Venice, the ambassador replies: What else do you believe I have been talking to you about? . . . Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice. —When I ask you about other cities, I want to hear about them. And about Venice, when I ask you about Venice. —To distinguish the other cities' qualities, I must speak of a [preexisting]74 city that remains implicit. For me it is Venice. (86)75