Hacker News Reader

Comment by voz_ | Hacker News Reader

I adore Italo Calvino. Even his less popular works, like The Baron In The Trees, move me. Invisibile Cities, If on a winter’s night a traveler, are even better. That being said, I almost feel like this author is taking him too seriously. Like Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, and many other authors, I think Calvino is mostly... having a laugh? If that makes sense. The overwhelming feeling across all the works is absurdity. For example, take the author's view of Invisible Cities.

> What explains the mutability of Marco Polo’s cities? A quarter of the way through the tales we learn that Marco Polo has no knowledge of Asian languages.

That's not it, I think. It's the fact that Marco Polo is bullshitting, and Kublai Khan knows it, and does not care. The whole point is that this guy is a borderline fraud, weaving tall tales, but no one cares because the stories are good. Its a comedic absurdist view, a mirror held up to fiction, basically asking, "who cares?"

View on HN

>It's the fact that Marco Polo is bullshitting, and Kublai Khan knows it, and does not care. The whole point is that this guy is a borderline fraud, weaving tall tales, but no one cares because the stories are good. Its a comedic absurdist view, a mirror held up to fiction, basically asking, "who cares?"

I never quite thought Marco Polo was bullshitting, per se, but rather revealing aspects of a city (perhaps even the same exact city, or all cities, for that matter) that are otherwise left unexamined.

Each city is an allegory for a different literary trope or storytelling technique. The fact that they all blend together is a commentary on how story elements get recycled.

I'll have to read up on literary tropes as I'm having a hard time picking out which ones are being explored in some of the stories. For example, the city of "Armilla" is described as being nothing but a series of pipes topped with sinks, toilets, bathtubs, etc. To me, Marco Pollo (and Calvino) are forcing the reader to think of a mostly invisible system that is a _huge_ component of any city: plumbing.

There is a fairly strong argument to be made that the entire book is just a love letter to Venice. From the wikipedia:

In one key exchange in the middle of the book, Kublai prods Polo to tell him of the one city he has never mentioned directly—his hometown. Polo's response: "Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Cities

I don't think that Invisible Cities usefully reduces down to "talking about a specific city". It talks all about cities, how people live in them, see them from the outside, etc. To say that it's just "all about Venice"—like the back of the book does—flattens the book in a way that takes away everything interesting about it.

Or maybe better put: it's clearly not literally all about Venice, since the cities as described do not (and can not) exist. So why make it figuratively all about Venice?

Have you been to Venice?

Yes, I have.

This reminds me that there is reference to "Armilla" also in Kundera's "Unbearable Lightness of Being": Even though the sewer pipelines reach far into our houses with their tentacles, they are carefully hidden from view, and we are happily ignorant of the invisible Venice of shit underlying our bathrooms, bedrooms, dance halls, and parliaments.

The underpinning of the story is algorithmic, as mentioned elsewhere by others, Calvino was in Oulipo which existed to explore algorithmic art.

Here’s a chart someone made: https://www.deviantart.com/monkeelino/art/Invisible-Cities-M...

That’s the Oulipo algorithmic underpinning, I don’t know if it makes for commentary or just is.

I don’t think he’s bullshitting, I think all of them are true. They all are Venice in ways Calvino saw it. The point about language is that Polo and Khan aren’t even actually able to communicate the dialog as written, they don’t understand each other verbally.

I felt more Borges (inward turning, selfseriousness) than Vonnegut (having a laugh?) from Invisible Cities. But I agree, the author here seems to take it a step further. A good reminder to check out some of his other stuff - thanks :)

I'm inclined to agree. Invisible Cities is introspective and reflective.

Perhaps "Cosmicomics" is a better example of the author having a laugh.

I loved both tho.

Cosmicomics is great!

Agreed! They are fantastically fun, poignant, and quite overlooked compared to some of his other works.

I get why you'd include him in the "having a laugh" group, but I don't really get that from Vonnegut, overall. The most-uplifting I usually find him is on par with Camus' "Myth of Sisyphus", so a kind of dark, existentialist sort of uplifting. Even most of his "jokes" are a pretty big downer when you think about it, and much of the time he's not telling jokes at all (Mother Night or Deadeye Dick or Galapagos or Bluebeard have humorous and absurd parts, but I'd not characterize the overall effect as funny or absurd, at all—the humor's so you come away with "well, that's life" and not "Jesus, I guess I should go kill myself")

>the humor's so you come away with "well, that's life" and not "Jesus, I guess I should go kill myself"

Exactly. "So it goes."

Yes, I could see that, but then you read Hocus Pocus, Pearls Before Swine, Cat's Cradle, and realize that, maybe, those serious books... are still humorous but in their own why? I do concede the point that some of Vonnegut's work is darker, and the humor is harder to find (perhaps akin to Catch-22s Snowden chapters, rather than say, Orr or The Anabaptists Chaplain's Wife). I think I probably got a strong feeling of this as the last Vonnegut I read was "Armageddon in Retrospect" which was almost a Sedaris like read. Or maybe I am misremembering. Either way, yea, Vonnegut is perhaps a stretch there :)

Italo Calvino was a part of Oulipo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo), a group of French and Italian writers and mathematicians who would purposefully invent constrained writing techniques for fun. One was that you could only use the language from McDonald's ads to tell a story. Another was an entire 300 page novel written without the letter e. They very much were having a laugh and enjoying the playfulness of language as a group.

Yeah, I think it's very clear that Calvino is having a blast sending his reader on a ludicrous "fetch quest" type conspiracy of misunderstanding in, "If on a Winter's Night a Traveller..."

Definitely one of the cat-and-mouse games between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo is him trying to pin down just what is real in the stories. He wants to totally possess his lands not just through conquest but also through knowledge and understanding of them. Some of the tales may be baloney but not all. After all, even if Marco Polo is just associatively spinning tales GPT style, his “training data” inputs had to come from somewhere. Going meta, we the readers holding this absurd book are in the position of k.k. and Calvino the writer is m.p.

It's a metafictional device.

Invisible cities is fundamentally postmodern. Calvino is constantly putting forward that he is writting about imaginary cities, which are both literrary tricks, conceptual allegories, references and products of the story teller own experience. This is true of all fiction but here it's laid bare.

Not sure if this is spurious, but I remember reading somewhere that James Joyce was heard just cackling in his room for most of the time he wrote Finnegan's Wake.

Calvino was a member of oulipo. Other than Vonnegut (whom I admire too), he had a concept of literature as art. You should take him serious.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com