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Chapter 6
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 insists that it seems like Marco Polo hasn’t left the garden and hasn’t had time to visit the places he describes. Marco says that everything he sees and does takes place in a calm mental space and he exists on a river and in Kublai’s garden at the same time. Kublai says he’s not sure he’s in the garden either; he might be conquering more territory. Marco suggests that the garden only exists in their dreams and they haven’t stopped fighting or trading, but when they close they eyes, they can think. Kublai suggests that they’re actually two beggars digging through garbage they think is treasure and drunk on bad wine. Marco suggests that maybe what’s left of the world is a wasteland of garbage and Kublai’s garden. Their eyelids separate the two places, but they can’t know what’s inside and what’s outside.
As Kublai and Marco’s conversation begins to break down into these theoretical exercises, it again suggests that these exercises, while interesting and entertaining, are somewhat pointless in terms of actually making sense of the world. However, important to this exchange is Kublai’s suggestion that he and Marco are beggars, as this shows that he’s taking to heart Marco’s belief that they can’t be sure of what’s actually happening. Rather, they can try to interpret events, but they can’t ever come to a truly solid conclusion.
Themes
Cities and Eyes. 5. When a traveler crosses the river and the mountain pass, they’ll come to Moriana. It has alabaster gates, coral columns, and villas of glass. Girls dance beneath chandeliers. Return travelers will know that cities like this have an opposite side: walking in a semicircle will bring a person to an expanse of rusting metal, spiky planks, sooty pipes, and ropes only good for hanging oneself. To move from one to the other makes the city seem like it continues in perspective. Instead, the city has no thickness and, like a sheet of paper, exists as opposites—a person can only look at one side at a time, and can’t separate the two.
The first part of Moriana’s description recalls some of the first cities detailed in the novel, which seemed more clearly delightful than the bleaker cities that follow. When Marco asserts that all beautiful cities have a dark side, however, it makes it clear that even those early cities weren’t entirely good. Rather, all cities and places have a dark underbelly that’s an intrinsic part of them, no matter how wonderful and good they may seem on the surface.
Themes
Cities and Names. 4. Clarice is a glorious city with an awful history. It has decayed and recovered several times, but it always keeps its original version as the ideal model. Decadence gives way to plagues and slowly, survivors emerge like rats to loot but, like birds, want to nest. People take things to use them differently, such as using curtains as sheets or funerary urns as plant pots. This creates a “survivors’ Clarice,” and even though there are hovels, Clarice’s splendor is still there—just different. That in turn morphs into a new city, and people move in who didn’t know the old Clarice. As this happens, Clarice is destroyed—despite its wealth, it feels alien.
Ascribing both rat and bird imagery to the exact same people suggests that just as cities always have a dark side, so do humans—there’s always an inclination to be hopeful, and an inclination to be greedy and gluttonous. The way that people in Clarice begin to reuse items suggests that as time passes, they get further and further away from who they once were. This begins a cycle of renewal and decay, showing again that civilization is bound to repeat itself again and again.
Themes
People put shards of the original Clarice under glass so they can use them to remember the old city. The city continues to grow and change as the name stays the same. Each new Clarice shows off items from the old Clarices and now, nobody knows when the tops stood on the columns, since those tops functioned as tables for a while and now are in a museum. People believe that there was an original Clarice, but there’s no proof. The only thing they know for sure is that they shift and shuffle the same number of objects. It’s possible that Clarice has always been nothing more than a collection of broken objects.
Here, Calvino positions the museums of Clarice in much the same way he positions the people in Baucis, who looked down from the sky to contemplate their own absence. It’s impossible in both cases to know what the past was actually like, and because of that, it’s impossible to know what the cities are actually like in the present.
Themes
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Cities and the Dead. 3. To make the transition to death less abrupt, the inhabitants of Eusapia constructed an identical city underground. They take their corpses there to continue their activities. Plenty of people want a new life in death, so there are lots of duchesses and bankers. There’s a hooded group of brothers who take the bodies to the Eusapia of the dead. The brothers exist among the dead, and rumor has it that some are dead and continue to go up and down. Every time they go down, they find that the dead have made new innovations. The living do what they can to keep up with the dead and so the living Eusapia is a copy of the dead Eusapia. Some say that the dead built the living Eusapia in their image. They say that in Eusapia, it’s impossible to tell who’s alive and who’s dead.
The two identical Eusapias recall Valdrada, the city of reflections. In Eusapia, as in Valdrada, the reflection seems to matter more than what people actually do in life, and there’s a constant struggle to mimic or try to better what’s happening in the reflection. Eusapia takes this a step further than Valdrada does, however, by suggesting that it’s impossible to tell which city came first, given how interconnected they are. This, in turn, suggests that humans’ reliance on image and imitation will result in being unable to tell reality from fiction at some point.
Themes
Cities and the Sky. 2. In Beersheba, people believe that there’s another Beersheba in the sky that’s virtuous. If Beersheba would look to the version in the sky, the cities would become one, with silver locks and diamond gates. Beersheba’s residents collect precious metals and stones because of this. They also believe that there’s another Beersheba underground that contains everything vile and unworthy. They constantly try to diminish anything that resembles this lower city. Some imagine a city with trash everywhere; others imagine that there’s a thick sludge that flows down from the sewers, creating a city out of human waste.
People in Beersheba strive to be like the city in the sky while scorning the city below them. This suggests that the way people behave hinges largely on how they perceive their own position. The differing opinions of what the lower Beersheba looks like are, notably, different, but both options are made of refuse—the vile part is the part that humans reject.
Themes
Marco Polo says that there’s an element of truth to all of this—there is a celestial and an infernal city. However, the residents are wrong about the infernal city, as authoritative architects designed it and it functions perfectly. Beersheba doesn’t know that its only good times are when it lets go. The city also contains a planet that glitters with riches that are enclosed in broken umbrellas, candy wrappers, and eggshells. This is the Beersheba in the sky and it’s only happy when the residents of Beersheba defecate—only then are the residents not greedy and calculating.
The revelation that the lower Beersheba was designed on purpose suggests that within Beersheba, the goal is to scare people rather than give them something to strive for. This is made even clearer when Marco notes that the celestial Beersheba is also made of garbage—all versions, in essence, are disgusting and not worth striving for.
Themes
Continuous Cities. 1. Leonia changes itself every day. People wake on fresh sheets, wear new clothing, and pull food out of brand new refrigerators. Everything from yesterday, from light bulbs and newspapers to pianos and dinnerware, sits outside in bags for the garbage truck. Marco Polo says that one must measure Leonia by what it throws out rather than its opulence. It’s questionable whether the city enjoys new things or whether it enjoys discarding things. People welcome street cleaners like angels, but nobody wonders where the refuse goes. As Leonia expands, the garbage piles outside the city rise higher and the trash breaks down more slowly. Leonia’s trash would take over the world if other cities weren’t fighting for space for their garbage. There could be a landslide at any time. It could destroy Leonia, allowing other cities to expand and take its place.
Leonia is a clear critique of consumer culture and the huge amount of stuff that people in the modern world own, thanks to a capitalist system that encourages constant purchases. The novel positions this, too, as a cycle, suggesting that as civilizations rise, they eventually get to this point where the goal is to acquire new things and get rid of the old, regardless of the consequences. However, the possibility of a landslide makes it clear that there will be consequences, be it Leonia’s demise or the rise of the other cities also fighting for space—which in this case are reminiscent of other empires waiting to rise.
Themes
Marco Polo suggests that the garden overlooks the lake of their minds, while Kublai Khan adds that they both hold this conversation within if they’re actually out trading and fighting. Marco suggests that the opposite could also be true: the soldiers and sailors might exist only because he and Kublai are thinking of them. They discuss what other people might exist because they think of them. Kublai admits he never thinks of porters or washerwomen, so Marco says they don’t exist. Kublai isn’t sure this exercise works, since they need porters and washerwomen to luxuriate in the garden, so Marco declares that everyone else exists and that he and Kublai don’t. Kublai insists that they’ve proved that if they were here, they wouldn’t exist. Marco notes that they’re here anyway.
Marco’s final point is that no matter what conclusions he and Kublai might come to about the contours or particulars of their existence in the garden or outside of it, the fact remains that they’re still here having this conversation. No matter what kinds of philosophical thought or logic they apply to their situation, they still perceive that they’re here, telling stories and listening to them, and this belief that they are here in the garden makes it so that they can’t comfortably come to conclusions that refute that.
Themes
