Calvino's Imagination

       Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, is a book about Marco Polo’s voyages and Kublai Khan the Mongolian emperor and grandson of Genghis Khan. The plot of the book is what is italicized. The rest of the chapters are like short stories. They don’t seem to relate, they are short, concise and very detailed.

Before starting the book I became a detective. I was trying to decipher the meaning  the pattern of chapters had, looking for a clue word I guess that would make the book meaningful. I wrote down on a piece of paper each chapter’s title: Cities and Memories, Cities and Desires, Cities and Signs, and finally Thin Cities. I listed the name of the city in each chapter and the number of the chapter. I thought maybe D.I.Z.Z D.A.D T.Z. I. (initials of the city names) would actually mean something. I realized it meant nothing. But then I thought… Why were the chapters arranged in that particular order? Does it mean anything?

I usually never read the summary in the back of a book so that I don’t ruin the story. This time I did. I just felt it would help me understand. Before, I asked myself: what does the author mean by INVISIBLE? My first assumption was that by invisible the author meant imaginary, nonexistent. As I read the summary I was surprised with something I read. "Soon it becomes clear that each of these fantastic places is really the same place". How could this be possible? All the descriptions of the cities are completely different, they even have different names. Then I realized maybe my inference was true. Maybe these cities are imaginary. While I was reading the pages we had to I found evidence to support my idea.

“Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.” (19)

        By this the author means that memory is not needed because it only reproduces images and symbols from the past. This is evidence that by invisible Calvino means imaginary. Memory keeps images alive but it also creates and distorts reality. While you may try to remember something exactly as it is, the recreation is not exact therefore you are imagining and inventing things that aren’t actually what the place or object is like in reality. Unless you have a photographic memory it’s not possible to recreate something by memory exactly as it is.     

“Perhaps, Kublai thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind’s phantasms.” (22)

        This is another piece of evidence. The zodiac is based on imaginary stars that “affect” your behavior and your character, it is not real but people believe in it. When Calvino uses this phrase he is saying that Kublai thought that the empire was just pure imagination, it was a recreation of the mind. What the travelers told him about their journeys was a false creation, was based on useless memory, it was not real.

Vocabulary: Phantasms: something that you imagine you see but that is not real.