As a young reader in the early 21st century, I first encountered Italo Calvino as a consequence of that kind of good luck that is brought about by having good friends. A former romantic partner reached out and informed me that they had a book recommendation—later that same day I had purchased a copy of If on a winter’s night a traveler, probably Calvino’s most well-known and well-regarded novel. Like much of Calvino’s work after the 1950s, it’s a postmodern formal experiment—it asks the reader to tolerate a plot that never resolves into its denouement. Over and over again the reader is hooked into a new sequence of exposition, rising action, and the introduction of (usually psychosexual) tension and conflict, only for a metafictional contingency to break apart the narrative unity, forcing the novel’s protagonist (who is, by virtue of the novel’s second-person formal design, also the reader of the novel themselves) to investigate the cause of the disruption and struggle to regain the narrative thread and coherency.
That novel is as frustrating as it sounds. But it’s also endearing and thought-provoking, asking political questions about the aesthetic and epistemic effects of market-driven publishing and the editorial and academic institutions involved in that enterprise. It is also an early artistic attempt to grapple with the cultural effects of the computer in the context of McLuhan’s famous maxim: the media is the message. As a young, bookish person experiencing my own bildungsroman in the early age of social media and the hegemony of digitally networked information technologies, the opening chapter of If on a winter’s night a traveler resonated deeply with me as the protagonist (and through the protagonist, myself) experienced the various pleasures and pains associated with the act of wandering around a bookstore looking for something to read. Thinking about it now, I’m reminded of the NHK segment on South Korean bookstores that are converting their operations into a kind of bar/cafe/bookstore hybrid in an attempt to benefit from the nostalgia for bookstores and printed media. Calvino was asking “What does it mean to read books in the era of the computer?” several decades in advance of many of the sharpest cultural critics of today.
After If on a winter’s night a traveler, I chased down Calvino’s other major works. One of my personal favorites is his collection of short fiction—The Complete Cosmicomics. Written over the course of several decades and a fascination of Calvino’s right up until the moment of his death, the Cosmicomics are a series of experiments in science fiction that are, as the name suggests, both cosmic and cosmological in scope and content but also highly comic in tone. As a literature instructor at the university I would often assign this collection—students variably loved and hated it, a split that I would learn was in fact a mark of great fiction.
This website, however, is most directly inspired by Calvino’s famous work Invisible Cities. This novel—a genre that the book only barely fits in, and even then mostly only as a matter of convenience since, if it’s not a novel then what else could we call it?—is a series of micro-fiction vignettes, often less than a page long and rarely more than three. These vignettes are descriptions of cities, narrated by a mythic representation of the explorer Marco Polo, who has been tasked with exploring, documenting, and reporting back to the emperor Kublai Khan regarding the nature, business, and goings-on of his empire.
What I love most about Invisible Cities is the way that, despite the fact that its two ostensibly main characters are legendary figures from antiquity, Calvino is not writing a Great Man narrative about either of them. The two figures are, by and large, banished to the periphery of the novel—they are only present in very short framing sections, during which they have brief but thoughtful discussions about the value of Marco Polo’s travels and the kinds of information he returns back to Kublai Kahn.
Rather than the novel demanding the reader to immerse themselves in a person or persons, the novel asks the reader to immerse themselves in places. A great litany of places, an infinite array of places that Marco Polo describes as having impossible geometries and arcane cultural practices and habits. These short vignettes are all various attempts to answer a question: What kind of truth about a place can be captured in language, in writing? A separate and related question: What kinds of truths do we as travelers take away from the places that we visit? And so Marco Polo’s descriptions are pseudo-riddles about the prosaic and mundane, the everyday yet spiritual and aesthetic realities of the average person in the world. This is part of what I think is meant by the quote that is on the homepage of this website: “The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.” Our experiences are only narrow slivers of the places that we visit—as much as we may see and do while we are traveling, we still leave so much of the place behind. And, as Calvino’s novel suggests, we may be even more at risk of this when we focus too much on the Great Things and People of the places that we visit. There is a real risk that, in getting so caught up with the “must sees” that we in fact fail to see the place we are visiting at all.
Just as important as the content of the novel is the tone of Invisible Cities—while the Cosmicomics are dominated by a comic tone that occasionally veers into the dramatic or sinister, the dominant tone of Invisible Cities is one of loss and mourning. In particular, the loss of the novel is that kind of loss that is the natural result of the passage of time and the erosion of mountain and memory. Marco Polo recites his descriptions of the cities he has visited knowing that upon his return that city may be completely different, or gone altogether. It is almost as if the cities are conjured and made real only by Polo’s recitation of them, they are nothing pulled from nothingness in the act of narrative creation, and they return to nothingness when Polo inevitably moves on to the next vignette.
The combination of these aesthetic features of Invisible Cities reminds me a great deal of what Leonard Koren—the avant garde artist and designer—has said about the concept of wabi sabi. According to Koren, wabi sabi is an aesthetic sentiment that comprehends the beauty and significance of rustic, everyday life as well as the fundamental progression away from and back towards nothingness that defines the existence of things (including people). There is a great deal of wabi sabi, I think, in Invisible Cities. And so, as I begin the project of this website, I can think of no more appropriate place to return to than Japan. I’ll be spending the next three months there, and I hope what I share with you here will live up to the standard set by Calvino’s Marco Polo.
