'Invisible Cities' and the Tower of Babel

 by Dawn Sands

Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1563

“Perinthia’s astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations were wrong and their figures are unable to describe the heavens, or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters.”

Thus concludes Marco Polo’s description of the fictitious city of Perinthia, as relayed to Kublai Khan towards the conclusion of Italo Calvino’s 1972 novella Invisible Cities. Translated from Italian by William Weaver, the book follows the narration of explorer Marco Polo, as he details to the emperor the intricacies of fifty-five cities which he has encountered on his travels. Over the course of the book, it becomes evident that many of the cities Polo describes are a physical impossibility — Maurilia, haunted by the ghosts of a past and future self; Octavia, the ‘spider-web city’ constructed of tightropes and chains set over a great chasm; Leonia, filled with twentieth-century commodities such as refrigerators and radios highly anachronistic to the era in which the historic Marco Polo lived — and an ambiguity unfolds as to whether these places are drawn from reality at all or whether they are simply a figment of Polo’s imagination. In passages of dialogue which punctuate the descriptions of cities, Kublai interrogates Polo about this, only to be met with questions that run deeper, that ask about existence and memory and corporeality and the extent to which any of these concepts can truly be communicated, even if their nature is definitive.

The quotation at the beginning of this article is taken from Polo’s impression of the city Perinthia, devised and constructed by astronomers to ‘reflect the harmony of the firmament’. Polo relates how the project results in disaster: ultimately, in Perinthia ‘guttural howls are heard from cellars and lofts, where families hide children with three legs or with six heads’. As I was reading this passage, the suggestion that ‘all their calculations were wrong and they are unable to describe the heavens’ instantly reminded me of the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel: the people, who at that time shared a single language, decide to build a tower so high that it reaches to the heavens, and in response, God makes everyone to speak in different languages, rendering the construction of the tower impossible and forcing everyone to scatter. In the Bible, it is a demonstration of the power of God over mankind and a reminder of the stark differences between the capabilities of the two — human efforts are struck down as soon as a language barrier arises, while God, who transcends language, remains omnipotent through the change. Language and communication are significant themes throughout Invisible Cities, and the question of whether words serve to aid or hinder communication is explored extensively, alluding to the Tower of Babel story in many ways.

 

It is implied in Invisible Cities that there are multiple methods through which Marco attempts to communicate the nature of the cities to Kublai Khan: ‘newly arrived and quite ignorant of the languages of the Levant,’ the narrator states, ‘Marco Polo could express himself only […] with gestures, leaps, cries of wonder or horror, imitating the bay of the jackal, the hoot of the owl’. Even when Marco does glean enough of the language to be able to verbally relay what he has seen to the emperor, he often lapses back into ‘mute commentary’, establishing ‘a new kind of dialogue’ formed of a combination of words, gestures and movements. For this reason, therefore, it is impossible to tell when reading each passage by what means Marco communicated these details to Kublai, especially as there is no indication of whether the descriptions are even structured in chronological order — the nature of their communication is ambiguous throughout. Communication and symbols are themes found in many of the cities, too: in Hypatia, a world in which common conventions are subverted and various symbols are discovered in their place, a man in a library cryptically tells him that ‘Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know’. It appears that both through the nature of his own communication and the sorts of communication he tells of through tales of these imaginary cities, Marco Polo wishes our — and Kublai’s — perception to remain nebulous and open to interpretation. The fact that the majority of the readers of this book have encountered it in translation adds a further dimension to this concept: there is much discourse among readers and writers as to what extent translations must stay true to the original text, and how much scope there is for individual interpretation, but in the case of Invisible Cities such conversations become arbitrary — if much of the book already turns nonverbal communication into written prose, then language becomes completely fluid and there is no limitation to mediums through which the essence of Polo’s cities might be represented. Each passage maintains the same style of writing, and there are even common trends which can be noted in the narration, such as sentences which appear to mirror themselves (e.g. ‘The new fact received a meaning from that emblem and also added to the emblem a new meaning’). The question of who this narrator (who often utilises the first person) may be is arguably an unanswerable one — it is unlikely to be Marco Polo himself, given that he so often abstains from using words when communicating these cities to the emperor, implying that even individual passages can be viewed as self-contained acts of translation.

Are Polo’s cities in themselves, therefore, a sort of Tower of Babel, an attempt to fathom the celestial in a way that is ultimately unable to be communicated? It would appear that when Polo delves into metaphor and the surreal it is not for the purposes of rhetoric, attempting to drive a particular message — except the message that there is no true reality if imagination can feed into the corporeal in ways we almost believe. This places the reader, therefore, the interpreter — Kublai Khan, the great king trying to build an empire that parallels that of the gods — in the position of a construction worker on the Tower of Babel, trying desperately to build in the midst of what they do not understand. It is unclear whether the reader is even intended to form an interpretation eventually, or whether the book dooms them to an eternity of grasping at threads of a possible metaphor in a heavenly city until they realise it is something they were never supposed to understand. The final extract of dialogue in the book ends with Marco giving advice to a troubled Kublai Khan — ‘Seek and learn to recognise who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space’. At first, this quotation, though powerful, does not particularly seem to align with other themes pervading the novella — except perhaps the concept that nothing truly aligns; we make meaning where there is meaning to be found, tie together what can be tied together, and ultimately leave the Tower unconstructed.

The places described in Invisible Cities are not just invisible, but impossible — just as the Tower of Babel is. They can be imagined, but given the vague and diverse ways in which they are communicated, to us as readers and especially to Kublai Khan in the book, they are nebulous enough that each one of us will imagine them differently and come away with an entirely different impression of what they are like, reflecting the dispersion of languages at the Tower of Babel. It is not easy to draw conclusions from the book, and the reason for this is evident, if we view it from the same angle as we view the Tower — something unfinished, uncommunicable and untranslatable, built to represent something impossible to understand; and we, as readers, are those trying to construct it from vastly different perspectives, our methods — just as those of the astronomers who built Perinthia in Invisible Cities — ‘utterly unable to describe the heavens’.