Invisible Cities

"This is one of my favorite books ever. I’m tempted to give a lot of theory-based background to it – where it fits in the postmodern oeuvre and all that – but honestly it doesn’t even need to fit within a framework. Calvino was a secondary member of the Oulipo crowd and he was into the structuralist idea that constraint breeds creativity…and he was totally right! This book is a travelogue of imagined cities that its protagonist, Marco Polo, has visited. If you read it straight through, it just seems like the author has come up with fifty-five really wacky and fantastical ideas for cities. Upon the second or third reading, you get the sense that it’s following a pattern, that the themes and the elements involved in these cities are following some kind of internal logic. Indeed, that’s true. The book is hinged on this arrangement of themes like earth, air, thinness, and death. The order of each city follows a beautiful pattern, but you need to zoom out to see it. A little bit like Maze , you have choices about how you consume this work. I’m such a fan of this idea that you need constraints to produce really excellent work. Boundlessness doesn’t often result in very interesting fiction. And you get the sense that in the ’60s and ’70s, European writers were allowing themselves to be multimodal, and were rejecting ideas of what fiction could and could not be. There wasn’t a lot of intellectual heft required to make that shift. As a result, some of these cities feel like they came out of those retro sci-fi magazines from the ’40s—they’re just wacky. Others are heartbreakingly poignant. There’s a city called Irene, and that city and its meaning play a role in my next novel. The description of that city is an emotional gut punch. I return to this book all the time. I teach it when I’m doing lectures on hypertext fiction and interactive storytelling. It’s a great example of interactivity in the form of a ‘traditional’ analog novel. Calvino is using this hidden narrative system to interact with you across decades. It’s so fun."

"It has different layers. The set-up is that Kublai Khan has conquered this vast empire; an empire so large that he, sitting at the centre of it, cannot know all the many parts of it. He can’t visit them, he can’t see them, and if he goes to one part all the other parts have changed. So he sits there at the centre of his empire and Marco Polo travels around and visits the various cities and comes back and describes them to Kublai Khan. As you read it, you realise that, in fact, these cities are very narrowly described. There are short lyrical descriptions which conform to categories. There are cities of the dead, floating cities … and within these categories the cities are described in terms of one thing. So one of the cities of the dead is actually underground, a grave city. Another one is a city composed entirely of plumbing. One of them is a city in two parts – one part is the law courts, the ministries, the mayor’s office; the other is the circus, the fairground, the amusement park. And every year the permanent part of the city stays the same and the temporary part moves along. So once a year the mayor’s office and the law courts are dismantled and moved to another city… Then you realise that on another level Marco Polo is simply describing his own city, Venice, the only city he really knows. He is describing different aspects of the same generic, universal city, a city for all times and all places, as if they were many different cities. And then there’s a third level, and on this level things get literal again, which is relevant to what we’re talking about. Because what Calvino is saying is, that in order to control an empire what you need are two, completely contradictory, mutually cancelling qualities. What it requires of you is the ability to imagine, to fantasise – but also to know the real facts of what is going on. You can’t get by with the facts alone, because you cannot possibly know them all, and so you need great imaginative power, but neither can you get by with imagination alone, because you must know what people are actually thinking. All empires are doomed to fail for this reason. Their rulers are either overwhelmed in detail or betrayed by the failure of their imagination."

"Oh God. Well, officially it’s Marco Polo describing the cities of his travels to Kublai Khan. It’s been opined that every city he describes is a version of Venice, but I think that doesn’t really work. They seem to me to be marvellous imaginative fantasies, which sometimes reproduce states of mind. There are 40 or so cities described, all entirely imaginary I think, and that’s what’s so magical about them. But there are passages that are suggestive of something, and nearly always of the way memory works. It’s a very hard book to describe, because the cities are never just a description of a place. They all mirror states of mind and being. Of course, Polo’s travels in China have also been questioned as to their truth, although I believe he did go. But as far as I can see, Marco Polo’s travels in the realm of Kublai Khan are not much echoed here. It’s more been felt that the cities are versions of Venice. Some of them – cities on water – very well could be, but others not at all. I think it’s purely a kind of gimmick, the structure that Calvino’s chosen, that they should be recounted in this fabulous way, from a fabulous traveller like Polo to a fabulous Khan like Kublai. It’s all in the realm of quasi-myth. I chose it for its sheer imaginative quality. I loved it almost as an extension of the travel book in the mind – the travel book that has no responsibility to where it has been because it hasn’t been anywhere real, it’s been in the realm of ideas and images. Yes, it’s remarkable. It does have that element of the concrete, or the illusion of it, so you do think sometimes that perhaps a city is out there somewhere, although clearly most of them can’t possibly be. As far as I know, Calvino didn’t travel widely or have any great fascination with the further world. It’s entirely an interior journey. It’s terribly difficult to express something you’ve experienced, and get it down onto the page. And I don’t know any travel writers who don’t find it terribly difficult. I’m always very suspicious of a person who says “this poured out of me”. It’s a great romantic fantasy, but it doesn’t happen. They’re all hard worked at. Leigh Fermor’s manuscripts are covered in corrections, it’s nothing but corrections. And I know I have to struggle like hell. You start with the notebooks, and they seem to make sense. Mine are always very impressionistic, and you think that will probably do. But it doesn’t – it’s not in sentences, it doesn’t convey what you want sequentially. Huge question. It would be ridiculous to suppose it hasn’t changed. The era of geographical exploration has clearly gone. Travel writers can’t bring back, or imagine they are bringing back, knowledge that’s of any empirical use for the society where they have come from. You can’t pretend that you’re exploring, or finding the new, in any old-fashioned or Victorian sense. All that has been denied the modern travel writer, in the sense that the modern world is so accessible – you can Google up whatever and see the same things, up to a point, that the travel writer has seen. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It does throw back the onus on the writer himself. On his perception, his ideas, his experience. Travel writing increasingly has to be well-written by a person you want to travel with, to see things through their eyes rather than through your own. And there’s nothing that replaces experience on the ground. You can look at a screen forever, but nothing replaces what you are receiving when you’re actually there. That can’t be duplicated. There’s no virtual stuff for that. And it’s that experience which you’re transmitting onto the page. Also, it’s true that most of the world is accessible to easy travel, but quite a lot of it isn’t. I did a journey in the early 70s which is virtually impossible to do now – in eastern Turkey and Iran, then northern and southern Afghanistan, and around Kashmir, northern Pakistan. We’re not conditioned very well for the dangerous, maybe less well than the Victorian who had that explorer mentality. We don’t have that mentality, partly because things are so easy to Google up. There’s a reluctance to acquire them by any harder way. The other thing is that the world’s changing all the time. It’s never seen once and for all, it has to be interpreted again and again, like Dante’s Divine Comedy . One of the possibilities for the modern travel writer is to look under the surface, interpreting what you find. You can Google up the image, but you can’t explore for yourself the society that is inhabiting the area. And increasingly, with a superficially Westernised world, a travel writer can find what is real under that superficial Westernisation. As you know, in a way China hasn’t been Westernised, it’s sort of sinicised the West. And one finds that again and again – things that look superficially like us are not, underneath, like us at all. That’s one of the great benefits of a travel book. It exposes what seems apparent to be just a veneer."