Fleshy Narratives!

Excess, elaborate descriptions of human feelings and all those gushy, lovey-dovey statements are the fleshy attribute to traditional fiction. In stripping away the inessentials and pealing off every useless word one by one, we will begin to see the bones of a work of literary art. This is precisely what postmodern fiction does. Instead of hiding the structure with the unnecessary extras, postmodern fiction "bares instead its structural bones, brings them to the surface, and retires" (page 34, Living by Fiction, Dillard). This can be far more difficult to do than traditional fiction. One must land upon a nearly perfect form and execute it immaculately for postmodern fiction to work. Traditional fiction can skip planning a form and structure and cover it up with beautifully written sentiments.

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino is a perfect example of postmodern fiction. The structure, as I have mentioned in previous posts, is astounding. The mathematical pattern of the section numbers, the sine wave or cityscape that arises from these numbers, the well written, yet short, descriptions of cities placed in a well planned order. If he had written with any other form or chosen any other structure for the book, he very well would have failed and been forgotten over the years. To return to the bodily description of postmodern fiction, the bones would be his mathematical structure for the book which is shown so clearly. (What I find even more interesting is that, even if one should miss this structure while reading Invisible Cities for the first time, they will lose no respect for the writer. The style of writing is so easy to read, allowing one to simply flow through the pages with ease, shows his genius.) The poetic writing style is like the torso, the center of the structure or bones. Not to sound too cliche, but the beauty of his writing is in perfect contrast to the mathematical, more harsh structure of the book. This supports the structure and gives it more interest. The conversations between Kublai Kan and Marco Polo are the soft, light flesh making the book into a novel, creating a sense of time. This flesh isn't near thick enough to hide the bones. It is extremely thin, only thick enough to hold the bones together.

Invisible Cities has been my favorite reading and I am sad to watch it slowly pass over the horizon. I now, however, begin to dust off Othello and open the crisp pages to read it once again. I am sure many posts will come as I delve into the mind of Shakespeare!

Le Città Invibili

Of course, I found the structure of the table of contents of Invisible Cities to be extremely creative. I loved the idea that it was a cityscape. So, after the question today about the table of contents in Italian, I started searching for a picture. What I managed to find made me a little disappointed. I found on wikipedia a summary of the book in Italian and it included the full table of contents in Italian. (Click here to see what I found.) I was disappointed because the text looks to be much less city-like. It is far more "flat" on the ends. The middle could still be considered a city-scape, but the first and last sections ruin it for me... The lengths of the names of the chapters are all far more similar than those in English.

Check it out and let me know what you think!!

Invisible Cities

(My analysis of the book is a true stream of conscienceness that may appear random at times. I jump from idea to idea in pure excitement over everything one can gather and interpret from Calvino's work and I will probably being adding more soon enough.)

Calvino uses interesting transitions in his novel Invisible Cities. The transition I found most obvious was actually one of the first. At the end of Cities & Memory 2, Calvino says "Desires are already memories." (page 8.) The section directly after that, curiously enough is Cities & Desire 1. It is quite obvious Calvino is trying to tie the two sections together here and he does so quite obviously. I feel this proves the idea that one cannot read the sections out of order. If you try to read all of the City & Memory sections without reading everything in between, you will be lost and unable to fully comprehend the point. To understand the idea of desire, you will in turn better understand the idea of memory, and so on.

Calvino also uses a very noticeable pattern. The numbers of the sections go as follows: (1), (2, 1), (3, 2, 1), (4, 3, 2, 1), (5, 4, 3, 2, 1)... The pattern is a constant rise and fall of numbers. When the book itself is turned sideways and opened to the table of contents, this pattern forms a visual cityscape. The changing lengths of the titles, rising and falling, act like the buildings of a city on the horizon. This number pattern therefore not only makes the novel more cohesive by allowing the sections to flow together better, but also allows the reader to find this visual phenomena of text.

Calvino, in describing the cities, at times appears to not be talking about a city at all. The names he chooses to use are all female names and in occasional passages, it truly appears that he is describing a person. The section of Anastasia was the one I first truly noticed this in. Although Calvino constantly mentions that he is discussing a city, the words he uses feel like descriptions of a woman or love. "... for while the description of Anastasia awakens desires one at a time only to force you to stifle them, when you are in the heart of Anastasia one morning your desires waken all at once and surround you" (page 12.) This passage could easily be a description of a person falling in love with another person. On either side of the passage is the word "city" which pulled me back down to reality and kept me in tune with the passage in its entirety. But while these words floated through my mind, I couldn't help but drift into a daydream of an alternative, more beautiful meaning.

As I stated in my previous post, I also enjoyed thinking about the idea of looking at things again and again from all different angles and seeing something new each time. I found it so very interesting when I learned all the descriptions were of a single city. As always, I drifted into another "mental rant." This one was about how I had experienced this idea of multiple views. New York is one of my favorite cities. I have been there so many times, stayed in different hotels, and been in different buildings. Each view and angle is always just ever so different. There is the bustling, loud, fun times square and then there is the quiet, solemn spot where the twin towers used to stand. When describing the two areas, it would sound as if I was describing different cities, but both descriptions are necessary to explain to someone who had never been to New York before what it is really like.

Looking at Cities...

After reading Invisible Cities, I began to think about how a person sees a city. I immediately thought of this video I had seen last year in one of my art classes. It may seem odd that I made a connection between the two seemingly very different things, but I found a strange and maybe useless conclusion in my mind. Both the novel and the video show how people can see a city with perfect accuracy only when they look at it from different angles. In the video, we see a man with a very unique ability to recreate a city exactly how it is, with every detail shown perfectly. To do so, he needed to take a helicopter ride, seeing each building and street from many different angles and heights. In the novel, we see this when Marco Polo describes the cities with the exact count of chimneys or miniscule details such as that. He shows us how looking from different angles, we can see things we would have never noticed before. We realize this when he tells us all the"cities" he described are all really one city. I found both of these to be very intriguing and enjoyed finding a connection between the two!!