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.