An Exercise on Invisible Cities

I asked my students, who are currently reading Invisible Cities by Calvino, to work in groups to answer a few questions--challenges might be a better word--in order to approach a better understanding of this intriguing exercise in postmodernism. Invisible Cities is a book that requires readers to find their own conclusions--or not. The "point" of the book, which I was asked to give as if there were a single easy answer, is really the process of reading and thinking about its content with a mind that is willing to engage in the exercises of thought that the book requires. Am I crazy, you might ask, for teaching this in a sophomore-level course? Perhaps not.

The book is framed within the context of Marco Polo describing to Kublai Khan the cities in the Khan's empire. The relationship between the two is one aspect of the text, but the cities are infinite and fascinating. They are categorized as "Cities and Desire," "Cities and Memory," "Cities and the Dead," "Trading Cities," "Cities and the Sky," "Hidden Cities," and "Cities and Signs," to name a few. Within these categories are cities with names that repeat, but not within a single category, and each category is composed of 5 cities.

For one of their questions--or challenges--I asked the pairs of students (I have a small class) to do the following:

Pick 2 of the “categories” of cities (“Continuous Cities,” etc.) and explain what that category means according to the cities within the category. I will ask the groups to pick one at a time so that no 2 groups will have the same category. HINT: This must be a bit more complex than “Cities that go on forever.” You’re not just defining, you’re explaining.

They will post their explanations on the course web site, which is contained within a wonderful interface called Moodle. There are 5 groups, and 11 categories, so to make certain that all categories were represented, and to provide an example of sorts, I posted the following on our course "glossary":

Continuous Cities

The "Continuous Cities" of Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino may be found in chapters 7, 8 and 9, and occur on pages 114, 128, 146, 152, and 156 of the text. They have the names Leonia, Trude, Procopia, Cecilia, and Penthesilea.

The city of Leonia renews itself daily by discarding and replacing all of its possessions from the day before, while the possessions themselves accumulate beyond the boundary of the city and threaten to crush the city. The neighboring cities, meanwhile, await the destruction of Leonia in order to expand into their territory.

The city of Trude resembles all other cities, which are also Trude. From the suburbs, to the downtown, to the languages and goods, Trude is like all other cities, and all other cities are like it, perhaps because it IS all other cities, and all other cities are it, and they all combine to make one Trude, which has nothing unique.

The city of Procopia is one that Marco Polo has visited on numerous occasions, watching year after year as the once bare and agrarian landscape became filled with identical people who displace the features of the landscape itself and eventually fill the landcape, the window out of which Polo looks, and even the room in which he lodges.

In the city of Cecilia, Polo encounters a goatherd who does not recognize the city, but recognizes the green places in between, while Polo himself knows only the cities and not the lands that connect them. In long intervening years, Polo travels other cities and continent, but happens upon the same goatherd, who has never been able to leave Cecilia, and realizes that he, too, has remained within the city, going deeper and deeper, because Cecilia has mingled with all other places and is now everywhere.

The city of Penthesilea is contrasted with cities that have definite borders through which you pass and realize that you are now inside and no longer outside of the city. It is a city into which you continue, always on the outskirts, until you are heading out of the city through its outskirts. Neither the traveler nor those who work there know where the city is, other than that it is not where they are, and is perhaps further on. You wonder "whether Penthesilea is only outskirts of itself, " whether "outside of Penthesilea . . . an outside exist(s)," whether the entire world, like Penthesilea, is a limbo that you are constantly trying to pass through in order to get in or out.

The "Continuous Cities" call into question the nature of cities, asking specifically whether any given city or cities has/have a beginning, a middle, and an end, whether they are not all the same either because of expansion of the city, its people, its rubbish, its boundaries, or because every city is like every other city in its endless monotony. The continuity among cities is stressed, and makes individual cities as indistinguishable from each other (because all are one) as they are from their own rubbish, monotony, inhabitants, surroundings, or outskirts.