Form vs. Content

This time, while I was reading, I tried to concentrate on finding a pattern. Somehow this led me back to the Table of Contents page in which I repeatedly looked at the titles and numbers. There are nine units and within each unit, there is a section with a number beside it. After a closer inspection, we see that there is an orderly sequence of 54321. Is there a reason why Calvino did this? Of course there is. Even reading just a page of the Invisible Cities, anyone will realize that for every word (or action) Calvino takes, there is a meaning behind it. In this case, I tried to figure out what was the meaning behind the use of the index.

Like I said before, this book has several ways of reading the text – reading in order, through topics, or through the number. I think Calvino is trying to use this as an example that humans all have different perspectives and interpretations as well as a use of metaliterature. For example, just like he states on page 28 “even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey,” Calvino shows that this book is always going to be a book no matter what. However, the meaning of the book changes every time we try to read it differently (in a different order).

There is also another thing that I noticed about how the index contrasts greatly with the textual content within the book. The index is an extremely rigid and formal outline structure while the content is very flexible and creative. This is when I realized what the “Form and Content” that Mr. Tangen always writes on the board next to Topic was about. It’s about the opposition between form and content that seems to emphasize a rich contradiction in the conception of the book.

Now, I know that there is a reason why Calvino did this, yet I’m not too sure. My guess is that this is another one of his ways to explain more about the world and human characteristics – what he’s been trying to do throughout this entire book. It shows how our world always consists of “rational” and “irrational” elements. One example is the human mind. I remember how we once watched a video during English class about how the human brain works. It’s divided into two main parts – the rational side and the emotional side. These two sides of the brain are constantly fighting to take control. I think this can relate to the Invisible Cities in that the opposition of form (rational) and content (emotional) shows the necessity of both of these things in order to interpret the book, or to understand the world.

Suspicious Female Names

After reading about 15 chapters or so, I realized that of the cities mentioned in the book – Leandra, Olivia, Tamara – have feminine names. I didn’t want to assume that the rest of the cities mentioned will have feminine names too so I skimmed through every chapter and indeed, the cities were named after girls.

Why were women names chosen for these cities? I have a few different theories on this particular question.

1.    Women are usually associated with “beauty.” When a new city is created, when people live there, when the architecture is straight up mystical, one cannot stop but think just how plain beautiful the city is. This imagery just does not fit if the name was a guy’s.

2.    The cities could be named after females due to the concept of women giving birth to a new life. Cities themselves give birth to life. In a literal sense, cities are a place where many people live and reproduce. In a figurative sense, I believe it’s stating that while reading this book with the descriptions of the cities, one must take a step further into a deeper depth of imagination in order to interpret the novel. Thus, this book basically tells us how the readers need to create whole new level of imagination in order to perceive the meaning of it someway.

3.    The cities itself are men’s dreams – desires and fantasies. I think it’s a hint of sexism in that it shows the power of man’s imagination to develop a utopian environment where he can control everything around him, including women. After all, it’s Marco Polo who is telling the story and we don’t even know if the cities exist or not. If it was all his imagination (which he claims it is towards the end), it simply illustrates a male traveler that is attempting to satisfy his desires. The hint of sexism is further proven when after reading pretty much the entire book, there were only around three times (I think) that a woman actually appeared and talked. However all these times, the women were viewed more as sex objects or passive/background noises. For example, in Diomira, the traveler hears a women cry “ohh!” as if of sexual pleasure or in Armilla, the traveler watches women taking a bath. I believe overall that this just shows how women play an essential role in male fantasies.

Endless Cycle

The Invisible Cities talk about various different things about life in general to human nature to how we live our lives to the book itself. It’s hard to write down all what I analyzed so I decided that I should write down one thing that I saw as a recurring throughout the novel – continuous uniformity. “Kublai Khan had noticed that Marco Polo’s cities resembled one another” (page 43). I think one of the things that were noticeable with this literature while I was reading it was that there was no sense of movement or process. I was always left with the same type of mood or feeling of stagnation because there are no actions or actual plot involved. The sense of familiarity in each of the cities most definitely does not bring about the excitement of new sensations through change, but we are instead left with the numbness of repetition. This can be related to our world in that it is always going to be repetitious, continuous, and uniform just like the descriptions of the cities.

Stories of the “Cities and Signs” also specifically talk about how the signs of the city repeat themselves. This can be applied to human nature, which hopefully if I’m right, was the intent of Calvino (to express his thoughts on human nature). His view can perfectly be exemplified through the city of Olinda. He describes about the infinite series of circles, with new construction forever added on to the old, in a process that has existed forever and will continue on forever. The process of memory may be fallible, which is represented by the falling and rising of the empire. However, human nature will essentially always remain unchanged. What we believe to be entirely new is just a revival of something old.

This can also be seen as a metaliterature in that he is using these cities and their resemblances toward each other as an analogy to his novel. I think the repetitious descriptions of the cities have an underlying message about Calvino’s style of writing. Maybe Calvino uses recurring motifs or recurring literary devices – obviously, I’ll have to read it for the fourth time to find these though.

A Story within a Story

I was expecting a simple collection of short descriptions of cities that would take me about three hours to read. Wrong. I’m only a quarter done and that itself took me about 3 hours. This book has so much meaning in it that I can’t even describe how complicated it is. I literally had to read each sentence three times until I could go on.

To begin with, it took me about 30 minutes to even decide how to read the book. Looking at the Table of Contents, I could at least see three different ways of reading it – in chronological order (from beginning (page 1) to end (page 165)), in numerical order (read all the 1’s first, then the 2’s, etc), or in title order (read all sections titled “…..” then all of “Cities and Memory,” etc). After much contemplation, I finally decided to choose the third way of reading it. I think this was the best choice for me because I was able to understand what was actually going on in the “story” instead of suddenly being confronted by a bunch of city descriptions.

When reading all of the “…..” for the first time, I somewhat understood the literal meaning of the book. These were all the dialogues between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. Every time Marco Polo comes back from his travels, Kublai Khan invites him to his palace so that he can hear about the descriptions of the cities and know more about his falling empire.

The second/third time I read it, a few things grabbed my attention. First, the communication between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan was interesting because at first, Marco Polo did not even speak the Tartar language. Instead, he used pantomime and items collected throughout the travels in order to communicate with Kublai Khan. Obviously through this, Kublai Khan was not able to clearly understand what Marco Polo was trying to understand. However, even without understanding the details and such, he was still able to recognize that there was something symbolic and meaningful behind each of the actions Marco Polo took. However, even when Polo learns how to speak Tartar, Kublai Khan does not necessarily listen to the literal, realistic details that Polo states. He instead starts imagining things in his own mind “Now, from each city Marco described to him, the Great Khan’s mind set out on its own, and after dismantling the city piece by piece, he reconstructed it in other ways, substitution components, shifting them, inverting them” (page 43). Considering the fact that Kublai Khan represents the readers and Marco Polo symbolizing the author, the way Kublai Khan comes to understand Marco Polo illustrates the way the readers come to understand the Invisible Cities. At first, we aren’t exactly sure what Calvino is trying to convey and even towards the end when we get the hang of analyzing, each reader interprets and comes to a different conclusion due to one’s imagination. I think this is a prime example of metaliterature – a story within a story.

Another thing that I noticed quite often was the imagination of the two characters. “At this point Kublai Khan interrupted him or imagined interrupting him, or Marco Polo imagined himself being interrupted…” or “All this is so Marco Polo could explain or imagine explaining or be imagined explaining…” (page 28). These ways of conveying things bring about the theme of Imagination and Perception. This is further proven when questions such as if Marco Polo is making up these stories about the “invisible” cities or if Kublai Khan is imagining the whole conversation between him and Marco Polo come up. Imagination is key to reading this book. The beautiful physicality of the descriptions gives you limitless pressure and depth – it’s strange and mysterious enough that one can come up with multiple meanings through the use of imagination. This goes along with theme of perception. Marco Polo tries to make Kublai Khan understand why he’s describing the cities the way he does. He wants Kublai Khan to imagine a circumstance to their current one and filter the cities through his own perceptions. This is, once again, another example of metaliterature in that Calvino wants the readers to perceive this book in our own points of view due to the distinction of each of our imaginations.

Life Lessons

I feel bad for constantly declaring Dawkins as a pessimistic person. All my views on him have changed ever since Chapter 11, but Chapter 12 is what completely swayed me.

Chapter 12 presents us with the Prisoner’s Dilemma and Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a problem game that demonstrates why two people may not cooperate even if it is in both of their best interest to do so. These participants will always tend to choose Defect because they don’t have trust in each other. The Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is pretty much exactly the same as the Prisoner’s Dilemma but it is repeated between the same two individuals for a number of rounds. This way, the result would be different – both individuals would most likely choose Cooperate because there’s always the next round. Thus, the Tit-for-Tat strategy is used in this game – a strategy known as the “equivalent retaliation.”

Unlike all those times when Dawkins stated his pessimistic view on these survival machines that barely have any control of themselves, his game theory approach offers us with a basis of optimism about people.  Regardless of initial conditions, climate, and the current dominance of nasty strategies, the analogy we can draw between this and human behavior is that a nice but tit-for-tat strategy can cross the “knife-edge” and never go back.   Obviously, this cannot be applied 100% to humans; however, it’s a useful outline in examining the patterns of an altruistic behavior. Despite the fact that genes struggles for continuance and maintenance of itself, altruism can achieve this continuation through reciprocation – those who are nice enough to cooperate will make others cooperate with them in return.

Also, there's another thing that we need to take a look at in this chapter. That is the matter of trust. Dawkins demonstrates how important trust between individuals is through all this game demonstrations. Without trust, nothing can be done. No one will cooperate. The game will become a mess; the players will feel unsure, not exactly sure what they should do. This is exactly the same in life. Trust is the key to life.

There is Hope

Humans are selfish. This is a fact that Dawkins was able to prove through his selfish gene theory. It even runs in our genes. Yet, Dawkins takes another step to talk about the culture side of human beings. He introduces us to the memes (who knew this word came from him?). Meme is an element of culture that gets passed down from one generation to another (but not genetically). Examples include fashion, music, catch phrases, etc. I’m sure many of you heard about “internet memes” especially now because there are the email forwards, instant messages, webpage links, etc for the memes to travel instantly. Memes are a way for people to transmit social memories and cultural ideas to each other – a mind-to-mind connection. If you still don’t understand what it is, just think of all those Chuck Norris jokes on the Internet. That’s a perfect example.

Example of a Meme

So typical of Dawkins, he immediately compares memes with genes. Just like genes, memes also have their own selfish side to them (although it’s not like they have any emotions). However, they have that instinct for survival. Memes compete with each other so that their idea would last longer, would become more popular, etc. They are the new replicators. Similar to genes and any other replicators, they need the “longevity, fecundity, and copying-fidelity” (194).

So are we just these gene and meme machines who can’t even control ourselves? Are we after all just controlled by something we cannot take over?

For those of you who want to believe in the good of human beings, there is still hope.  Dawkins clarifies that just because our genes or our human nature tell us that we are selfish people, it doesn’t mean we actually are. Ultimately, it is us who create who we are. Even the scientist who I believe to be extremely pessimistic seems to agree with me! “We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators” (pg. 201). 

SELFISH

“A pack of hyenas can catch prey so much larger than a lone hyena…” “Spiders cooperate in building a huge communal web.” “Emperor penguins conserve heat by huddling together” (pg. 166). Dawkins begins Chapter 10 with some examples that prove his theory of altruism. He believes that animals perform what seems to be “selfless acts” to help others; however, in reality, they are doing it to benefit themselves. He examines apparent altruistic animal behavior and attempts to explain it solely in terms of the benefits gained by a selfish gene. He expands into an analysis of reciprocal altruistic relationships, where both benefit from the relationship.

Nonetheless, what I wanted to concentrate on was humans – us. Dawkins uses the examples of the animals and applies it to the minds of human beings. He zooms into the level of our own bodies and suggests “we are gigantic colonies of symbiotic genes.” As much as my heart desires to argue against this, I can’t help but think that it might actually be true. We help others to benefit ourselves as well. Look at our society. Most high schoolers nowadays only do community service – help the old people, the people in need, constructing houses for homeless people – just because they need the hours or it would look good on their transcripts. Celebrities offer donations for countries in need just to improve their reputations. Although I want to believe that there are people who perform altruistic things purely for the fact that they care about others, I think Dawkins completely smashed my hope that real selfless people do exist. He does this by connecting everything with genes – he gives a clear explanation that seems so reasonable through science. Honestly, I’m not a science person and I never believed that genes had much to do with who you are. Dawkins proved me wrong, but this only presents an appallingly pessimistic view of human nature. It makes life seem utterly pointless. I cannot present any arguments to refute his point of view…but I want to believe. I want to believe that humans have complete free will and they choose to be nice and help others. 

Our genes do not control us. Dawkins seems right in almost everything, but I think he forgot about something. Human nature changed...it definitely changed from those times when we lived only to survive. We don't think about survival nowadays – it seems to come to us naturally. Thus, maybe our genes are connected to the past, but we have moved on. We are no longer "survival machines;" we are humans – humans with feelings.

KEY WORDS:

• Altruism (n) = the belief in or practice of disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others
• Aggregation (n) = collection: several things grouped together or considered as a whole
• ‘Domain of Danger’ = the area of ground in which any point is nearer to that individual than it is to any other individual
• Predator (n) = an animal that that naturally preys on others