Memory, Identity, and Travels in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities: Reflections upon the Gravedigger’s Cart

• Main Authors: Lin, ChihWei, 林志瑋
• Other Authors: Liao, PingHui
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2003
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/11339506627500956029

碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 外國語文學系 === 91 === This thesis aims to read Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities in light of exotic images of Oriental cities Marco Polo presents together with his memory’s images of Venice. As Polo travels to the Far East within Kublai Khan’s Tartars Empire and its invisible cities, travel has become one of the metaphors the traveler applies to represent his urban experiences. It makes the listening emperor indulge in memory of the glorious past of his empire when Polo represents the cities with metaphors, such as desires, dreams, or women. The cities stand for the Khan as emblems of geopolitical conquests. The invisible cities of the past with glory and grace are lost and no longer to be retrieved. The present is unsatisfactory. In the latter part of his narration, the corrupted images of the city, or the invisible cities, indicate the fact that Kublai Khan’s empire is crumbling. But the Khan refuses to accept the truth. Polo’s journey is to reveal to Kublai Khan that the Tartars Empire is no longer a glamorous gem. In the journey, the traveler looks back at the beautiful images of the past. The traveler is like the gravedigger who digs the grave and dialogues with the past. He is inspired and enabled to see what makes the cities invisible. Representing the banal present condition of the urban, Polo at the same time criticizes it and hopes that the Khan might awaken from his dreams so that the empire can gain ground. In Invisible Cities, Calvino concerns more with Polo’s origin/roots than his travels to the Orient/routes. The Venetian traveler, being unsatisfied with the present of the empire that is falling apart, describes it with memory’s images of the past. Polo escapes to the memory of the glorious past and tries to seek a solution, looking back at it, in hope that the future can regain the lost grace or stop crumbling for “the old century is dead and buried” and ”the new is at its climax. The city had surely changed, and perhaps for the better” (Calvino 154).