Calvinoâs treatise of the City
Another comparative experiment.Â
In certain ways, the Invisible Cities are real. Their reality is given outside the chessboard, but they no less comprise the city, and all its meanings. In fact, simply represented as a game of chess, the City lost all meaning. Indeed, the Invisible Cities are pieces of enunciationâdiscourse, memory, narrative, names; and after all, descriptionsâand all meaning resides in discourse. If all of the Cityâs meanings reside in narratives, connections, the activity that is for the city what the speech act is for the language, it is so, nevertheless, not in negation of spatiality and in name of just ideas. On the contrary, the idea of the plan, that subsumes the City to reason, the chessboard, was incapable of containing the cities: the operations of memory, legend, discourse, narrative, interpersonal and personal-spatial relations happen in space and create space; they are spatialising. They happen at the level of lived experience, in the streets and buildings and invisible to the name or the map of the city. Invisible from above the tallest building, where the city-grid and the concrete tops are savoured by the voyeur, the Khan before his illumination.
Michel de Certeau distinguishes the city of the map, or the aerial (above-voyeuristic) view, from that of the city-walker. The city-walker is a co-constructor, participatory in the density of movement and spatialisation that comprises the actuality of the city (or participant in the actuality of movement and spatialisation of the city). De Certeau compares the city to a textânot unlike the wisdom of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, of the cities of names and desires, ultimately conformed as cognitive elements and existing as narratives. Foreign to the chessboard city of the ââgeometricalâ or âgeographicalâ space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical constructionsâ are the practices of space that ârefer to a specific form of operations (an âanthropologicalâ, poetic and mythic experience of space) and to an opaque and blind mobility characteristic of the bustling city. A migrational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned or readable cityâ (MdC 93).
âThe childhood experience that determines spatial practicesâ, that is, the experience initiated with the differentiation from the motherâs body (the motherlandâs matter) and played out as a âjoyful manipulationâ that is an âoriginal spatial structureâ, develops and unfolds as an experience of spatialisation that âcreates within the planned city a metaphorical or mobile city, like the one Kandinsky dreamed of: âa great city built according to all the rules of architecture and then suddenly shaken by a force that defies all calculationsââ (MdC 110). The invisible cities are projections of that which cannot be purveyed by the emperor-voyeur from above the map, the chessboard, or the model city of Kublai Khan (IC 69)**.
Each city is the imaginative experiment of taking a certain city-feature to its extreme.
What are these city-features? They are sometimes the features noticed by an outsider who wanders inâthis book is a reference to the travel narrative genre. They are attributes of cities that, although isolated and described as to sound fantastic, make up each city, any city, on various layers and dimensions. A geography may be described by fixed points in space-- by topographies-- and by networks. A city exists on the dimension of the relationships between the people and between goods, mediated by one another, in the space discoursively designated âone cityâ. A city exists in the narratives and epithets that substitute and make it up in speech, driving people in and out of their spaces. A city exists in its present and its past, that is, the past actualised as memory (for there is one insistence in the book: that, like Heraclitusâs river, the city of the past is not at all the same city of the present, and that which will be named the same in the future). A city exists in the signs which guide the city-walker and create meaning. And it also exists in the form of all the plans and dreams planned and dreamt for its materiality; all the visions of the city are also the city. It exists in fantasies, in incomplete worlds suspended in activities that at the same time epitomise it, and are insufficient for a full reality. It exists in the desires that drive its change and reflect on its material composition. It exists as it is seen by the traveller and as it is not seen by the traveller or its inhabitants, as it may only perhaps be discovered, to which people are strangers-- the underworkings of the city, and non-human lifeforms. That is, the trading city, the city of names, the city of memories, the city of the dead, the city of signs, the city of desires, the city in the skies and in its relationship to the skies, the thin city, the city of eyes, the hidden cities and the continuous city all coexist in different dimensions or planes.
There is a sense in which Marco Polo could indeed have been talking of one City all along his thousand and one descriptions: âEvery time I describe a city I am saying something about Veniceâ. And his addition, âTo distinguish the other citiesâ qualities, I must speak of a first city that remains implicit. For me it is Veniceâ, does not quite correct the literal interpretation of that first statement, as it steers understanding towards the paradox between the oneness, identity of all cities and their infinite variety. A paradox taken up in other conversations of the Khan and the explorer, the former discovering a uniformity of essence in the ideal city and the chessboard, bearing the possibilities for all tokens of the category, and the latter announcing their infinite peculiarity, their repeated capacity for the improbable and unpredictable, their individual presence without which the game of chess loses all meaning.
Each of these cities is a different experience of the City. Maybe that is a why they are all called woman names, taking advantage of the feminine pronomination of the word in the Italian language: a gesture towards their existence as different viewpoints, perceptions, perspectives, mindâs eyes set up on describing a city. Their existence as subjective (subject-made) interpretations; as cognitive creations.
It doesnât matter, one might say it doesnât apply, whether these cities are real or dimensions of real cities; every city is a cognitive construct. The City exists to us only as cognitive construct, yet it is itself, spatiality and materiality, capable of defining a mode of life: in every city, its form determines the mode of existence of its inhabitants; its inhabitants are the as elements of a cityâs greater nature, pulled by the forces of the cityâs workings and rules. The cities exist because Polo and Kublai think them; but without the cities they would not exist. The cities exist while Polo and Kublai do not: but they are there, and they talk.
Cities are emblems, and they are not. Irreducible to invisibilities and names, unconceived and inconceivable without them.
Michel de Certeau writes:
âIn the spaces brutally lit by an alien reason, proper names carve out pockets of hidden and familiar meanings. They âmake senseâ: in other words, they are the impetus of movements, like vocations and calls that turn or divert an itinerary by giving it a meaning (or a direction) (sens) that was previously unforeseen. These names create a nowhere in places; they change them into passagesâ.
âThese constellations of names provide traffic patterns: they are stars directing itineraries. (âŠ) It is much more than an âideaâ. A whole series of comparisons would be necessary to account for the magical powers proper names enjoy. They seem to be carried as emblems by the travellers they direct and simultaneously decorateâ (MdC 104).
But the city is lived in discourse and walk-enunciation. âThese three symbolic mechanisms organize the topoi of a discourse on/of the city (legend, memory and dream) in a way that also eludes urbanistic systematicityâ (MdC 105). If not only in the learned names printed on the mapâand the very name of the city is relativized in some of the accounts in Calvino--, then certainly in memories, traditions, trajectories and traces that provide consistency. And ultimately a cityâs habitability is regulated by credibility and memorability. Conventional rules of believability by which the city (and here the city-woman, the structure itself seems to have control) ââallowsâ a certain play within a system of defined placesâ and ââauthorisesâ the production of an area of free play (Spielraum) on a checkerboard that analyses and classifies identitiesâ (MdC 106). The established belief and the established memory devices make the realisation of the believed outcome or the actual continuity between past and present superfluousâthey replace the actual phenomenon with these representations, as happens in so many of Calvinoâs cities, where the narrator is capable of seeing that the inhabitants, in some way, deceive themselves. Within each city reigns a system of narrative and a corpus of rules; each a grid, a stream, or a myth by which a city writes itself in space and discourse. In de Certeau, as well, is reflected the paradox between the actuality of movement and construction, and the calcifying, supplanting power of names, memories, beliefs, metaphors, projections, symbols, myths. These are words that de Certeau uses in describing the formation of meaning in space, and which correspond so well to the city categories and the processes defining each city in Marco Poloâs travel narratives.
âAs a corollary, one can measure the importance of these signifying practices (to tell oneself legends) as practices that invent spacesâ (107). And this plays out in two levels in Calvinoâs treatise. It applies to each cityâs own narrative; to the reality within each city insofar as they are all sustained by discourse, especially those whose realities relate to plans or desires, to memory, to trade or relationships, to signs, and to names. But it applies on the level of the meditation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, who ask themselves and each other who invents the city, its practices indispensable for the survival of each individual.
The city-walker is a spatialising agent, and each of the invisible cities is a dimension in the multidimensional existence of the City; that is, each is a different subjective apprehension, result of the joyful manipulation of phenomenological elements (objects). Or they are allegories of such space-narratives as described by de Certeau, as the author exposed on the invisible cities of footsteps and symbols under the silent authoritarian grid. Such a manipulation of differentiation and identityâlike the experience of the child learning to separate itself from the surrounding spaceâis performed, as well, by Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, who speak from outside the system but must eventually admit themselves insiders and dependents to it, who question the role of the(ir) subjectivity in creating spaces. They blur the lines between the reality of discourse (of the story, or description told) and of the object of discourse; or rather, together with de Certeau, they call into question the pertinence of those lines.
The cities of Marco Polo are all real imaginations, cross-sections of dimensions of urban experience. One could take up each chapter and read how Italo Calvino writes, in fact, with a magnifying glass or a look into an isolated strain under a microscope, of the real traits of cities, especially in the multi-city experience of the traveller, given to mnemonics, classifications and impressionisms. And that is how, slowly, towards the end, amidst so many imagined cities, there are dialogues about real cities, whose names we recognise, described as they lay in the past or as they will lie in the future of the time of the Khan and of the Venetian explorer. Granada, LĂŒbeck, Timbuktu, Paris, Nefta, Mont-Saint-Michel, Urbino; Cuzco, Mexico, Novgorod, Lhassa; San Francisco, Amsterdam, York, New Amsterdam or New York; the megalopolises of Los Angeles and Kyoto-Osaka, are all taken up in the same fantastic renditions of the dimensional cities of the bookâs main body.
It is so that the italicised dialogues between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan open doors to the interpretation of the woman-named cities. These dialogues distill the paradoxes that emerge in the imagination of these cities; and together with the title they suggest the possibility of another reality, one of the real but invisible cities, constructed by all the invisibilitiesâimagination, ideals, plans, relations, trajectories, memory, affection, death and change, exchange, basic activities of material nourishmentâwithout which no city is conceivable.
Invisible Cities is a treatise, an essay on the components that make the city what it is, to the eyes, to language, and to memory. Exchanges, names, signs, eyes, continuities, hidden realms, thinnesses, desires, describe a city.
**What Italo Calvino has, perhaps, to add to de Certeau, is a certain reality of the imagination. This is not too different from the appearance, the realisation of the unlikely and âimpossibleâ: that which motivates Marco Poloâs model city of exceptions (IC 69). The thin cities seem to be experiences in the fantastic. Different from the cities of desires, where practical plans and visions are carried out or become relics, the thin cities are scarce in realism and reliability; they are loci for human fancy, artistic images.
Cited: Michel de Certeau, âWalking in the Cityâ, in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. pp. 91-110.
