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Also it implies that these tales seem strange and magic on their surfaces. This hyperawareness of strangeness, in contrast with making strangeness have a veneer of normalcy when talking about different people and places to the 'other' Khan, is obviously not shared with the Marco Polo of Invisible Cities.
The Calvino cities seem to hover in thin air, normal or not, as Polo weaves his web of stories that may or may not be true. There is no urgent 'must' of convincing the reader or Kublai Khan, rather the cities are conjured up through the genius of the author, and the artful nature of storytelling, although Marco Polo's memory is not trustworthy even while "things can be discerned better at a distance" in time as well as in space (Calvino 98). Memory, time, alternative spaces, all are equally foreign countries.
The main rhetorical joining strategy in Calvino is merely the use of the frame tale, with no sense of chronology or linear narration or urgency for telling the stories. Despite Polo's protest, the stories about the cities themselves are fairly disconnected and disparate. Calvino's Polo catalogues the cities under different headings, but there is no mention about the struggle to get to the city, or an attempt to locate the city in a specific country. In fact, the structure of the work seems to eschew such temporal grounding. The only...
The possibly false may have some value, and the truth may be found within false tales of cities. When Khan asks why Polo does not mention Venice, Polo shrugs and says that all cities make him think of Venice, thus Venice is present in all of his recognitions.
This instability of reality highlights Khan and Polo pretend to some extent that the cities are 'real' as when Khan says he will describe some cities himself and Polo will tell him if the cities are in fact real. Such a plasticity of truth would have been unacceptable in the tone of Polo's true chronicles. But given the historical questioning of the facts of Polo's actual narrative, Calvino's work may actually highlight the greater truth -- that when confronting the other, our memories and our eyes both cannot be believed.
Works Cited
Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.
Polo, Marco. The Travels: Marco Polo. London: Penguin, 2004
Works Cited
Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.
Polo, Marco. The Travels: Marco Polo. London: Penguin, 2004
Marco Polo The Venetian trader and adventurer Marco Polo was an exceptionally astute observer as he traveled the caravan routes to China, Tibet, and India, and then returned by sea over twenty years later, with tales of countries few people in Europe had ever seen before. His brother and uncle had travelled there in 1260-65, then returned again four years later, and reported on their meeting with the Kublai Khan at
If it isn't demons, idols, and black magic, it's sex -- the most repressed impulse in the Western-Christian tradition. During and after his time in the court of Kubla Khan, one notices an increased tone of rationality in the narrative. Less exoticized details of the life of people in the Orient begin to emerge, such as food and clothing habit, but the earlier sensationalism is not lost entirely -- perhaps
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Western Civilization The world has always progressed through those adventurous in spirit that were not afraid to brake barriers, to confront established rules and to keep seeking new territories, be it in the fields of science, religion, law, or the physical world. The period of Renaissance that started and flourished in Italy and then spread throughout the rest of the continent changed world views and challenged the traditional at every level.
Christopher Columbus, Mariner by S. Morison. Samuel Morison turned a personal life interest into a passion as he studied the life and journeys of Christopher Columbus. Morison believed that given the expedition which Columbus undertook, and the misinformation on which he based his journey that Columbus qualifies as one of the greatest explorers and sailors of all time (Morison, p. 4). While the modern view of Columbus has been rewritten and