Modernity Theme Analysis

Despite the beautiful passages within Invisible Cities—and despite the only two characters being from the 13th century—the world that Invisible Cities presents is neither entirely beautiful nor a historically accurate reflection of the world as it was hundreds of years ago. Instead, the novel depicts an attempt by the powerful (as represented by the emperor Kublai Khan) to understand how the modern world came to a state that, the novel suggests, is horrific, out of control, and in many cases, meaningless. Especially given Calvino’s philosophical and political leanings—he was an avowed atheist and a lifelong communist, though not always associated with a particular party—Invisible Cities reads as much as a scathing condemnation of capitalism, greed, and the ills of the modern, urbanized world as it does a meditation on imagination and storytelling.

At first, the vignettes of cities that Marco Polo creates seem purely magical. Cities float above water, have gates and buildings built of precious metals and gemstones, and are centers of trade and connection between people from different places. However, in the city Anastasia, Marco gives his first clue that he’s not just spinning beautiful tales—Anastasia is a place of desires, but a place where people can never actually partake in their desires while somehow, mysteriously, feeling content. This, Marco explains, makes Anastasia’s residents slaves to the city. Following Anastasia, which Marco describes in the first chapter, the cities get increasingly darker and more disturbing. In the city Zobeide, men who dream of a woman escaping them arrive to construct the scene of the chase in the city, hoping to one day capture the woman in their dreams. In Octavia, a city suspended above the ground, residents are resigned to the fact that their ropes won’t hold forever—one day, the city will crash to the ground. By creating increasingly darker landscapes after showcasing vignettes that are beautiful and seemingly perfect, Calvino draws upon a novel he mentions by name in Marco and Kublai’s final conversation: Thomas More’s Utopia. Utopia parodies and critiques exploration and expansion in pursuit of building a utopia, something that both Utopia and Invisible Cities suggest can never actually exist. It’s telling, then, that even in Calvino’s admittedly imaginary cities, there are none that read explicitly as utopias—even the human mind, he seems to suggest, is incapable of coming up with something that’s wholly perfect.

Following the novel’s midpoint, at which point Marco Polo admits that he’s talking about his home city of Venice, Invisible Cities begins to feel increasingly modern and less obviously fantastical. At this point in the novel, Calvino begins to take issue with the trappings of the modern world, from overcrowding and the suburbs to what he suggests is the constant fight to throw off oppressive systems—presumably, capitalism, greed, and corruption. Building off of the optimism and beauty expressed in the first chapter, Marco introduces the city of Perinthia. The city was founded by people who calculated everything perfectly in order to mimic the stars and the gods—but, within a few generations, the city is populated by monsters, and the founders are left to question whether they were wrong (and the monsters are a product of human error) or whether they were right (and humanity is naturally monstrous). Other cities find themselves trapped in a cycle of freeing themselves from nasty rats, and only some succeed—only to fall back, at some point, to being overrun by rats. Perinthia is suggestive of both urban overcrowding (in it, Marco mentions that the particularly monstrous are kept in overfull closets) and the idea that overcrowding and its consequences come from the belief that humans are right to build and multiply with abandon, something that Calvino suggests may not be correct.

In Trude, Marco gets off the plane and remarks that he wouldn’t know he was in a place different from where he came from if there hadn’t been a sign—everything, from the people to the buildings, look exactly the same. Meanwhile, in Penthesilea, Marco finds that the suburbs are so extensive that he can never reach the actual city, nor can he ever leave. With these two cities in particular, Calvino seems to lament that places are losing their individuality and, in time, every place in the world will look exactly the same—something that he implies is a product of the modern, capitalist world.

In all of these horrific cities, as well as in Kublai Khan’s empire that he so desperately wants to properly control, civilization seems bloated and unwieldy—and figures like Kublai seem less and less suited to the task of saving humanity from itself. Despite the bleak outlook of many of the cities and of Kublai himself, Marco Polo’s narration nonetheless suggests that there are several things people can do to reckon with the ills of the modern world. In addition to telling Kublai to always look for the beauty in people and in places, Marco’s positive tone and his focus on the cities that are trying to break free and better themselves—even if he knows they’ll eventually be subjugated again—suggests that it’s always good to fight for a better world, no matter how bleak the current world may seem.