Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities tells of the intellectual exchange between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. The narrator Marco Polo gives accounts of fifty five imaginative cities, each taking up from one to a few pages. They engross the solo audience Kublai Khan; and at some point beguile him into deep reflection: the fall of his kingdom and the feeling of loss.
Harold Bloom offers us a concrete summary in his How to Read and Why:
Calvino’s Invisible Cities come in eleven groupings, scattered rather than bunched: cities and-memory, desire, signs, eyes, names, the dead, the sky—as well as thin cities, trading cities, continuous cities, and hidden cities. […]
Nostalgia for lost illusions, loves that never quite were, happiness perhaps only tasted—these are the emotions Calvino evokes. In lsidora, one of the Cities of Memory, "the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third," but alas you can arrive at Isidora only in old age. "You leave Tamara without having discovered it," and in Zirma you see "a girl walking with a puma on a leash." (Bloom, 63)
~
Meanwhile, Bloom thinks the cities are not based on a city on Polo’s mind. To quote him in full: 'Though one can become dizzy keeping all these in mind, it will not do to say that each of these cities is actually the same place' (63).
However, I, among many others, read it differently. In the book, the narrator has given us a self-disclosure. 'Polo said: “Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice' (Calvino, 78). Marco Polo is nostalgic about Venice. Through reshaping the city and narration, Polo, the exhausted traveller, finds relief.
~
One of my favourite cities is Zaira. This is a city of memory, where measurements (height, width, and length) are related to the past events. It is hard to imagine the spatial reality relies on the past to present itself: ‘the height of a lamppost’ is related to ‘the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper’s swaying feet’ (Calvino, 9); or ‘the height of that railing’ signifies ‘the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn’ (9). The past and space are dependent on one another.
If we compare Zaira to the fifth city of memory in the book, Maurilia, where the reminiscence of the past has nothing to do with the present, the connection in Zaira conversely conveys a blissful nostalgia. Maurilia has a kind of sad one; its past is broken off from the present. Or rather, we are not even sure if the past Maurilia is the present one. ‘[D]ifferent cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves (26)’. The postcards depicting the city show it has seen better days; and yet ‘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 postcards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one’ (26-27).
~
It is the nostalgia Bloom talks about. History appears tangible, at some point completely detached as an own entity. Perhaps it also is the sentiment regarding the British Hong Kong for those born in the post colonial period? Or it is just me? I read an article claiming Aaron Kwong had changed the hairstyle climate with his parted hair, which we now often associate with South Korea (link in the reference list). Kwong is undoubtedly charming even to a heteroerotic man. To whom, as well as other Hong Kong cultural products, I attempt to cling as my local pride; yet there is something remote about it, like an ungraspable phantom whose presence you are very aware of and yet fail to claim your own.
Reference list
Aaron Kwong has a big sway on South Korea (written in Chinese)
Italo Calvino. Invisible Cities (1997). Vintage Classics.
Harold Bloom. How to Read and Why (2001). First Touchstone Edition.