Invisible Cities is structured as a fictional conversation between the real-life historical figures Marco Polo, a Venetian tradesman, and Kublai Khan, the emperor of the Mongol Empire. Over the course of the novel, Marco leaves to travel the empire and returns to tell Kublai about different cities in the empire, all of which are named after different women. However, Kublai begins to suspect that Marco is making his cities up and indeed, Marco reveals midway through that he’s speaking always and only of his home of Venice—the cities he describes to Kublai are, as the novel’s title suggests, entirely imaginary. As a travel novel of sorts, even if that travel takes place only in the characters’ imaginations, Invisible Cities pays close attention to the ways in which travel and experiencing new things influence how a person sees the world, ultimately suggesting that a person’s perception of their surroundings is subjective and individualized, informed entirely by their memories, perspective, and experiences—in Marco’s case, his memories of Venice.
The novel is clear about the fact that, as far as Marco Polo is concerned, everything from cities to objects exists because of memories. Several cities, like Zirma and Procopia, change depending on how a person remembers them. Zirma, Marco suggests, exists because people repeat their memories of it over and over again in their minds. In Procopia, he talks about being in a hotel room with 26 versions of himself—presumably, every version of himself that’s ever been there before. Procopia’s quirk of making real a person’s past selves suggests that whenever a person travels somewhere they’ve already been before, they invoke and must contend with who they were when they were there before. In other words, a person’s experience of a place is, without exception, filtered through what they remember of it (and of themselves) from the last time. The novel also implies that a person’s memories are subject to change as they engage with other people. In Euphemia, travelers share personal stories with each other—but upon leaving the city, they find that their personal memories of past events or experiences have shifted thanks to the stories they heard from their fellow travelers on the same subject. This indicates that memory as a whole is extremely subjective and very susceptible to change—in other words, memory is wildly unreliable, as almost any experience can change what a person remembers.
At the same time, Invisible Cities suggests that, in addition to memories influencing a person’s experience of a place, the choices they make while there can have just as much of an impact. This happens in the frame story—the third-person conversations between Marco and Kublai that bookend each chapter—as well as in the cities that Marco describes to Kublai in the first person. As the novel progresses, the conversations between Marco and Kublai become more and more focused on how they’re interacting with each other, or even if they’re interacting with each other—it’s possible that, like the cities, the dialogue between Marco and Kublai is entirely imagined, even within the world of the already fantastical novel. In cities such as Moriana and Irene, Marco’s interpretation of the location depends on how he does or doesn’t choose to interact with it. In Zemrude, the city looks different depending on whether a person chooses to look up to the sky or down to the dirty streets, while Marco refuses outright to go to Irene—he knows it from afar, and he suggests that if he were to enter it, it would become a different city entirely and may even deserve a new name. Especially in the case of Irene, wherein Marco has the choice to simply avoid the place altogether, the novel suggests that people have some degree of control over how they experience the world. In other places, though people may technically have control over whether or not they go there, what they find when they arrive is guaranteed and outside of the individual’s control. Marco suggests that ultimately, everyone in Zemrude ends up looking down, indicating that enough time somewhere will inevitably lead to disillusionment and pessimism.
Importantly, the fact that Marco admits that all the cities he speaks of are all imaginary and, in fact, are iterations of Venice doesn’t diminish his assertion that memory and experience influence how he sees them. Indeed, it’s possible to read Venice (and in that sense, every city in the novel) as a stand-in for any city, in which it’s possible to find everything from love and wonders to horror and shattered dreams. Marco Polo himself functions as any traveler, discovering the world and how he fits into it as he explores the globe. No matter where a person goes, the novel suggests, they will always be accompanied by past experiences and influenced by the choices they have made before.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Memory, Perception, and Experience ThemeTracker
Memory, Perception, and Experience Quotes in Invisible Cities
Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories.
The wares, too, which the vendors display on their stalls are valuable not in themselves but as signs of other things: the embroidered headband stands for elegance; [...] Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse, and while you believe you are visiting Tamara you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her parts.
“It is evening. We are seated on the steps of your palace. There is a slight breeze,” Marco Polo answered. “Whatever country my words may evoke around you, you will see it from such a vantage point, even if instead of the palace there is a village on pilings and the breeze carries the stench of a muddy estuary.”
It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old post cards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one.
“Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.”
“Or the question it asks you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx.”
Even when lovers twist their naked bodies, skin against skin, seeking the position that will give one the most pleasure in the other, even when murderers plunge the knife into the black veins of the neck and more clotted blood pours out the more they press the blade that slips between the tendons, it is not so much their copulating or murdering that matters as the copulating or murdering of the images, limpid and cold in the mirror.
For everyone, sooner or later, the day comes when we bring our gaze down along the drainpipes and we can no longer detach it from the cobblestones. The reverse is not impossible, but it is more rare: and so we continue walking through Zemrude’s streets with eyes now digging into the cellars, the foundations, the wells.
Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia’s inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will only last so long.
There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence.
For some time the augurs had been sure that the carpet’s harmonious pattern was of divine origin. The oracle was interpreted in this sense, arousing no controversy. But you could, similarly, come to the opposite conclusion: that the true map of the universe is the city of Eudoxia, just as it is, a stain that spreads out shapelessly, with crooked streets, houses that crumble one upon the other amid clouds of dust, fires, screams in the darkness.
For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene.
And Polo answers, “Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents. Your atlas preserves the differences intact: that assortment of qualities which are like the letters in a name.”
Was the oracle mistaken? Not necessarily. I interpret it in this way: Marozia consists of two cities, the rat’s and the swallow’s; both change with time, but their relationship does not change; the second is the one about to free itself from the first.
“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
