The Oulipian Constraint Pt 3

On its face, Invisible Cities is a recounting of a conversation between Marco Polo and Kubla Khan about a constellation of cities spread across his almost unthinkable empire. The Great Khan is melancholic at not being able to experience all that his success has given him, so he enlists Polo to be his storytelling travel guide. Beneath what in modern times would be one of the stranger podcasts ever, though, is an exploration of memory and desire that feels vast and alive despite the page count, and it’s easy to believe after a few times reading it that you never pick up the same version twice.

Calvino’s connection to the Oulipo movement is most obvious in his work The Castle of Crossed Destinies, the plot for which he created via Tarot card flips, but Invisible Cities is a spiritual relative to the group in almost every way. The cities are clumped into categories referencing Calvino’s own organizing structure for them during their writing, and they each bear a woman’s name. Their descriptions are feverish and vivid, and although you know right away that they aren’t actual places in our world, their descriptions start to erode your confidence over time that they aren’t real.

Time also has its own governing structure here, where the future redefines or perhaps even changes the past. At one point, Kubla Khan asks Marco Polo ‘Does your journey take place only in the past?’ Polo responds that everything he’s described,

In quantum mechanics this is called retrocausality, and scientists are starting to give the topic a lot more attention recently. My summary of what they mean by it would suck and I’m incredibly tired while writing this, so I’m going to let you check out this Vice article from March on it instead if you want any details. There’s a language based explanation around the way we speak that hints at this possible reality as well, and when I’m more awake I’m happy to pass along what I know about it.

Most literary chonks have agreed that Invisible Cities is an impossible work to categorize, and after reading it a few times the closest I can get is to say that it’s extremely-surrealist prose poetry. I don’t see it so much as a book I read at one point as it’s a book I’m always reading over indeterminate intervals and I’m not even confident that the book really ends or that their conversation is ever really over. In fact the only take away I’ve ever had from it is that afterwards I find myself deeper in odd places like I’ve just been peppered with meteorites. Read it or don’t, but my vote is you give it a try. I can’t say exactly what you’ll find there but I can promise that it will be something you won’t find anywhere else.