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.