Memory, Perception, and Experience Theme Analysis

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.