FINAL ESSAY

Just Visiting

 

It is hard for us to identify ourselves with an external problem. It’s hard to identify ourselves with anything external for that matter. When something is not our problem, as hard as we may try, it is difficult to care. This is a theme that comes up in both Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and the video game “Façade.” This game is similar to all the cities in Calvino’s novel in that the cities are external places to Kublai Khan.

 “Façade” is a video game in which you are the main character. You choose a name for yourself and you see everything as if you were actually playing. It’s like a game in first person. In “Façade,” you play Trip and Grace’s friend. You’re invited to their house. Everything seems to be going well, but suddenly, after all the small talk is over, your character begins to witness a continuing argument between Grace and Trip. They argue over everything. The wine. The decorations. After a while, you start to see that these two are not compatible with one another. You quickly learn that you were the one that introduced them, and you see that the only reason for your being there is their attempt at rejuvenating the spark that was there when they first met. The spark, unfortunately, is long gone. Their marriage is on the brink of ending because they cannot live together. It is too hard. It isn’t your problem though. As much as they’re fighting, you are just a visitor. You are simply observing a situation which you cannot help. Their problems are internal, and they come from the fact that they are not a suitable match. You cannot take this as a reality because it really doesn’t concern you.

Kublai Khan has the same problem the entire time Marco Polo is describing cities to him. He cannot really consider them as a reality because they are external to him. He has not seen them. Because they only exist in Marco Polo’s tales, Kublai spends his time wondering about other things. Also, the cities only exist in the mind. “Everything I see and do assumes meaning in a mental space…” (Calvino 103) Only existing in his head, Kublai is free to do what he wishes with the cities Marco Polo describes to him. At one point, he rearranges the elements of one city and asks Marco Polo if the city he has created exists. At another point, Kublai Khan asks Marco Polo to go out and search for a city that he has dreamed. In the end, Khan realizes how useless all these cities are: “It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us.” (Calvino 165)

I believe this is why Calvino’s novel is called Invisible Cities. They don’t really exist other than in the tales. Their importance is in the ideas they represent and not in their supposed existence. Khan wants to know what his subjects are thinking, what is happening in his empire, what people need. He doesn’t really care about staircases or columns. He could care less about rivers or mountains or churches or ale houses.