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Chapter 2
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Invisible Cities, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Memory, Perception, and Experience
Storytelling, Interpretation, and Control
Cycles and Civilization
Modernity
Summary
Analysis
Kublai Khan begins to notice that Marco Polo’s cities are all similar, as though he’s not traveling between them but instead is just changing elements of one city. He begins to mentally dismantle the cities and reconstruct them. Kublai interrupts Marco and says that going forward, he’s going to describe cities and Marco will say if the cities exist. The first he describes is a city of stairs on a bay. It has a tall glass tank, a palm tree that plays the harp, and a marble table set with marble foods.
By interrupting Marco, Kublai is trying to take control of the conversation so that he can learn how to properly possess all the cities in his empire. Kublai now thinks he knows enough to be able to conjure cities out of thin air, something that, per the logic of the novel, he can’t actually do. He needs some experience of these cities in order to properly describe and understand them.
Themes
Marco interjects that he was just describing that city. Kublai asks where it is and what it’s called, but Marco says it doesn’t have a name or a location. This is because they must not consider imaginable cities that aren’t constructed with a connecting thread or an inner rule. He suggests that cities are like dreams in that everything can be dreamed, but the most unexpected dreams conceal desires or fears. Cities are also made of desires and fears, even if their threads seem secret. Kublai insists that he doesn’t have desires or fears and his dreams are composed rationally, but Marco points out that cities also think that people have composed them rationally—and that doesn’t keep them standing. Cities are delightful because of how they answer a traveler’s questions or because they ask a question, not because of their wonders.
The idea that cities and dreams are both composed rationally, but that this doesn’t get them anywhere is another clue that it’s futile to try to fully make sense of the world and how things fit together. The idea that cities delight people because of the questions they ask or answer turns this back to the individual’s experience and suggests that cities are delightful because they help people understand themselves, not necessarily the cities.
Themes
Cities and Desire. 5. After six days and seven nights, a traveler will arrive in the white city Zobeide. The winding streets describe the city’s founding, in which men from many places all dreamed of chasing a naked woman through a city and lost her. The men all converged in Zobeide and decided to build the city of their dreams—but in Zobeide, they don’t give the woman a way to escape. They all wait for their dream to happen in real life, but none of them ever see the woman again. Eventually, they forget the dream. Other men arrive after having a similar dream. They construct new streets to capture their dream woman. The original men don’t understand what draws people to Zobeide, which is ugly and a trap.
Zobeide adds another dimension to the idea that human desire is normal by showing that, in this case, desire isn’t good—in fact, it’s sinister and predatory, but appealing all the same. However, there is some hope in Zobeide, as the original founders seem to have come to the understanding that their desires are ugly, which indicates that it’s possible to fight back against the ugly parts of human nature—though, possibly, not until it’s too late and places like Zobeide have already been constructed from those desires.
Themes
Cities and Signs. 4. Marco Polo says that travelers always have to deal with changes in language. In Hypatia, the change is a difference in things, not words. He recalls entering Hypatia and wandering through beautiful lagoons. He expected to see women bathing, but he only found crabs eating dead bodies. Feeling cheated, Marco went to ask the sultan. In the palace, he found convicts. He went to the library to find a philosopher. He found him in a playground. The philosopher told Marco, “signs form a language, but not the one you think you know.” Marco realized that he needed to reevaluate how he reads signs. Now, he knows he’ll find beautiful women in the stables, and if he wants to leave, he should go to the highest point of the citadel to wait for a ship—but it might not come, as language is about deceit.
The assertion that language is about deceit ties back to semiotics. As Marco moves through Hypatia, he has to relearn how to read the city in order to find what he wants. This, along with the assertion that language is about deceit, gets at the fact that language, spoken or written, ostensibly has very little to do with what it describes. The word cat, for instance, either written or spoken, looks and sounds nothing like the creature it refers to—rather, people have learned (or have been deceived) to know that the combination of letters, and the sound they make, describes a house pet.
Themes
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Thin Cities. 3. It’s impossible to say if Armilla is the way it is because it’s unfinished, demolished, or enchanted. It has no walls, ceilings, or floors and instead, it only has water pipes, bathtubs, and sinks rising to the sky. Armilla isn’t deserted, however. Young and beautiful women relax in bathtubs or comb their hair in mirrors. The water glistens. Marco Polo has decided that nymphs and naiads inhabit Armilla. They may have driven out humans, or humans may have built Armilla to earn the nymphs’ favor after misusing the earth’s water.
The possibility that people built Armilla to make it up to the nymphs after abusing the earth’s water again pulls the novel into the modern world, as it alludes to climate change, water crises, and pollution. It suggests that at some point, humans are going to have to reckon with what they’ve done to the planet, even if it’s as fantastical as building a city composed entirely of plumbing.
Themes
Trading Cities. 2. In Chloe, everyone is a stranger. Upon meeting someone, people imagine conversations, caresses, and bites—but they never speak or look at each other. Marco Polo describes a scene in which several people converge and something invisible runs through them. Other people arrive. When people end up sheltering from the rain together or listen to music in the square, Chloe’s residents engage in seductions, meetings, and orgies without doing or saying anything. The city is chaste, but it vibrates. Marco suggests that if everyone in Chloe began to live their dreams, all their fantasies and stories about the other people would cease.
The important thing about Chloe is that people continue to conduct themselves silently because, if they were to acknowledge or engage with others, all the stories they’ve been telling themselves in their heads about other people would immediately become invalid and untrue. The only way for them to exist in a perfect world is to do so in their imaginations, as it’s impossible to do it in the real world.
Themes
Cities and Eyes. 1. Ancient people built Valdrada on the shores of a lake. Everything rises up over the lake and travelers see both the real city and the reflected city. Everything that happens in the real Valdrada repeats in its reflection, and residents know that everything they do includes their action and its reflection. They never behave absentmindedly, and lovers and murderers know that the reflection of what they’re doing matters more than what they’re doing. Sometimes the reflection increases an action’s value; sometimes it diminishes it. The twin cities aren’t equal, as they aren’t truly symmetrical. The cities live for each other, but they don’t love each other.
Valdrada’s reflections are a nod to Guy Debord’s work Society of the Spectacle, which proposes that in modern society, images mediate how people experience reality—as in Valdrada, where the images mean more than the actual actions do. This begins to round out the idea that the seemingly fantastical cities actually critique modern society and the world as Calvino and the reader know it, not the world that the historical Marco Polo and Kublai Khan knew.
Themes
Kublai Khan describes a city he dreamed of to Marco Polo. In it, the harbor faces north and the water is black. Boats wait for departing passengers to say a final goodbye to their families on the docks. Everyone cries as the boatman calls the passengers onto the boats. Travelers look back at their loved ones as they board ships further out at sea, and the families watch the ships disappear around the cape. Kublai commands Marco to explore and find this city, but Marco says that he will certainly find it at some point. However, he won’t return to tell Kublai about it, as the city is real and people only ever depart from it.
It’s possible to read Kublai’s imagined city as a representation of the end of his own empire—at which point, Marco suggests, he’s not going to come back to chat with the fallen emperor anymore. That Marco knows he’s going to find it someday suggests that it’s inevitable that an empire like Kublai Khan’s will eventually fall, even if it seems all-powerful at this point.
Themes
