Invisible Cities

- by Italo Calvino

   So far, this is my favorite text that we have studied. It is amazing how Calvino uses the book to describe entire landscapes and cities to us, without any set narrative voice aside from the italicized conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan.
To me, this book is all about displacement. If displacement is indeed being forced to view a situation from the point of view of an outsider, then this story perfectly illustrates that concept. Marco Polo, having traveled to the court of Kublai Khan, has chosen to displace himself out of his normal surroundings of Venice, while Kublai Khan himself feels very displaced from his empire, stating that when you are an emperor, everyone is a stranger.

Calvino's book explores the idea of: how do you know and understand a place? Is it by the people? Or perhaps a place can be understood by its archetecture and what that shows about the people that live there rather than vice versa. In any case, if this entire book is in fact a story aabout one city and all the different perspectives of that one city, then it seems that the point is to say that the more you know, the more you know you don't know. In other words, Kublai Khan, who ruled over these cities which Marco Polo told him about had never seen them except through Polo's words. Without the explorer to tell him tales of the cities, Khan would have remained ignorant of them. Through hearing about a few cities, Khan realized how much he did not know of within his own empire.

Through the reflections of Marco Polo and the thoughts of Kublai Khan, this book emphasizes the idea of universal displacement; that no matter how powerful or learned someone is, it does not matter where they are or where they have been. The truth is that everyone feels displaced within their own situations, and this feeling changes how they see certain situations in the same way that Marco Polo's forced displacement within these 'cities' changed his perspective of them.