The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Italo Calvino · fifty-five cities in nine chapters, with the dialogues of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan · Einaudi, Turin, 1972 · scored on Calvino’s Italian, read from knowledge, with William Weaver’s translation (1974) for sense and quotation; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Philosophical fable as atlas; frame tale, prose poem and dialogue on knowledge in one book
Mythos
The traveller before the king, whose tales are all the king knows of his realm; the celestial and the infernal city; the empire that cannot be possessed whole
Phase
The audiences of a traveller with an emperor late in his empire’s decline, with no dates and no journey shown
Presentation
Fiction; nine chapters, each opened and closed by a dialogue of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan set in italics; fifty-five cities, most of a page or two, each with a woman’s name, in eleven series of five entering and leaving in a staggered order
Register
From the exact physical rule of each city to the courtly, philosophical and intimate turns of the dialogues
Scale
Two speakers, fifty-five cities and an empire
Governing Proposition
Marco Polo describes to Kublai Khan fifty-five cities of his empire, each with a woman’s name and an exact rule of its own, while the Khan, whose empire is passing, tries to possess the whole by its pattern. The wager of the book is that a city is the relation of a mind with space, memory and desire, that every account of elsewhere is an account of home, and that a book built as a numbered grid can show why an empire, or a world, is known only in combinations and never whole.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
In the first dialogue Marco Polo does not yet know the Khan’s language, and he reports on the cities of the empire with gestures and with objects. Kublai Khan, whose empire is passing, knows his own dominions only through what this traveller tells him. That is the book’s frame and its oldest pattern: the teller before the king, whose tales are all the king knows of his realm. It is Scheherazade’s position, turned into a dialogue about whether the tales are true, and whether a man who reports by signs has seen what he reports.
Between the dialogues stand the cities. There are fifty-five, each given a woman’s name: Diomira, Isidora, Zaira, Despina, Valdrada, Octavia, Ersilia, Baucis, Leonia, Eusapia, Trude, Penthesilea, Cecilia and the rest. Most run a page or two. Each states a rule in its first sentences, gives an image that embodies the rule, and turns at the end. They fall into eleven series of five, under titles repeated each time: Cities and Memory, Cities and Desire, Cities and Signs, Thin Cities, Trading Cities, Cities and Eyes, Cities and Names, Cities and the Dead, Cities and the Sky, Continuous Cities, Hidden Cities.
The book has nine chapters, each opened and closed by a dialogue set in italics. The first and last chapters hold ten cities, the seven between hold five, and ten and thirty-five and ten make fifty-five. The series enter and leave in a staggered order, each new series beginning as an earlier one completes: the first chapter gives Memory 1; then Memory 2 and Desire 1; then Memory 3, Desire 2 and Signs 1; and so on, the numbers within a chapter descending, until the scheme runs symmetrically to the close. Read in the order of the chapters it is one book; read series by series it is another.
Movement II
Zaira, among the cities of memory, is not its stones. It is the relations between its spaces and the events of its past, which it holds “like the lines of a hand”. That is the first law of the book, and every city obeys it: a city is the relation of a perceiving mind with space, memory and desire, and it is made of the wants and fears of those who see it. A description of a city is also a description of the one who describes it.
Zobeide was built from a dream of a woman chased through streets. Other cities are patterned on the heavens, or are cities of the dead, or of trade, or of names. The tones run from whimsy to dread, and the law holds through them all. Within a series a city sometimes restates the paradox of its neighbour in a new image, and several of the cities of desire and the thin cities turn on the same reversal; the book can spare a few of its cities more easily than its scheme can spare a place.
In the frame, Polo concedes that each city he describes says something about Venice. The admission changes every city already read: the atlas of the empire becomes a portrait of one city, seen from fifty-five sides, by a man far from home. Every account of elsewhere is an account of home. Whether all fifty-five cities are Venice, and whether Polo has travelled at all, the book does not say, and the questions have stayed open.
Movement III
Octavia is the spider-web city. It hangs by ropes over an abyss, and its people know the net will last only so long. The rule is stated, the image embodies it, and the turn at the end lands on what the inhabitants know. A page is enough for it.
Valdrada is built on a lake, and doubled in its mirror, so that every act in it is performed twice. Baucis stands on stilts, and its people never come down. Ersilia is abandoned, and what remains of it are its strings. Each city is an exact physical rule made strange, and each is a small elevation: nearly every city in the book is one.
Eusapia, among the cities of the dead, copies the living, until no one knows which city copies which. The elevation is cool and crystalline, a wonder more than a transport, and each height is a page long; the book builds no summit across its structure until the last dialogue. The women whose names the cities bear are not persons, and the cities are not lived in by anyone the book follows. The only persons are the two speakers.
Movement IV
Kublai wants to possess his empire whole, and he tries to possess it by its pattern. He reduces it to a chessboard, and the chessboard, reduced far enough, comes down to a single square of planed wood. Power that would know its empire as a whole finds the pattern empty. The myth of imperial knowledge is built into the frame, and so is its failure.
Polo takes the empty square and reads it. From the single square he gives the history of the wood, and the forest it came from. Where the emperor found nothing, the traveller finds a world, because he looks at the particular and not at the pattern. It is precise description becoming thought, and it is the book’s answer to its own scheme: the grid that orders fifty-five cities can be read as an empty square, or as a forest.
In another dialogue Polo answers the Khan: “Without stones there is no arch.” Five words carry a poetics. The arch is the scheme, the symmetry of the series rising and falling across nine chapters; the stones are the cities, each one particular, each one exact. The book contains its own theory of knowledge in these exchanges, and its form enacts the theory: a symmetry the content disputes, a whole that exists only in its parts.
Movement V
The last series are the continuous cities and the hidden cities. Leonia throws away its refuse every day, and every day the refuse grows, until it surrounds the city like mountains. Trude is a continuous city too. The modern city, without edges, choking on what it discards, is already the inferno. These are the cities of waste, and they read as more pertinent now than when they were written.
Kublai’s atlas includes cities not yet founded. The empire is dissolving, and the scheme runs symmetrically to its close; whether the symmetry is order, or a mask for the dissolution, the book leaves open. The final dialogue rises to a moral grandeur the rest has held back, and it builds Dante’s distinction into the book’s last judgment on the living city: the inferno is not a place to come but the city of the living as it is.
The book ends on what to do in it. In Weaver’s English the last words turn on finding who and what, in the midst of the inferno, “are not inferno”, and giving them space. Whether that is despair or a moral charge is argued still. The traveller who began by reporting with gestures ends by naming the one task a description of the world can set: to find, in the city that people make by what they want, remember and discard, what in it is not the inferno.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and it meets two kinds of necessity. The architecture compels the count: eleven series of five, entering and leaving in a staggered order that rises and falls across nine chapters, so that removing a city breaks a figure the book is built on. The frame is required outright: without Polo and Kublai the cities are prose poems; with them they are an argument about knowledge, power and description. The test bites on meaning. Within a series a city sometimes restates its neighbour’s paradox in a new image, several Cities and Desire and Thin Cities turning on the same reversal, and three or four cities could go without the book knowing less. Necessity is total in the form, and what the content could spare weighs as much as what the form forbids.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. A city is not its stones but the relations between its spaces and the events of its past, which it holds “like the lines of a hand”, and it is made of the desires and fears of those who see it. Every account of elsewhere is an account of home: Polo concedes that each city he describes says something about Venice. Power that would know its empire whole reduces it to a pattern and finds the pattern empty. The modern city, continuous and choking on its refuse, is already the inferno. Held three tenths below the bar because most of the disclosure is of perception and mood, delivered as paradox, its truths of the idea more than of the articulated human condition, and the moral truth of the close is one passage.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Height and frequency both count, and the frequency is high: nearly every city is a small elevation, an image made exact and strange. Octavia, the spider-web city, hung by ropes over an abyss, whose people know the net will last only so long. Valdrada, built on a lake, doubled in its mirror so that every act is performed twice. Baucis on its stilts, whose people never come down. Ersilia, abandoned, leaving only its strings. Eusapia, the city of the dead, which copies the living until no one knows which copies which. The final dialogue rises to a moral grandeur the rest holds back. Held in the low eights because the elevation is cool and crystalline, wonder more than transport, each height a page long, and the book builds no summit across its structure.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Myth is built, in two layers. The frame is the oldest pattern of story: the traveller before the king, the teller whose tales are all the king knows of his own empire, Scheherazade’s position turned into a dialogue about whether the tales are true. Kublai’s empire in decline and his wish to possess it whole carry the myth of imperial knowledge, and its failure. The cities are archetypal forms of the city, the celestial and the infernal, the city of the dead, the city that is a map, the city built from a dream of a woman chased through streets, and the close builds Dante’s distinction into its judgment on the living city. Held two tenths below the bar because the figures are emblems more than persons, and the particular, though exact, is invented rather than lived.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The inheritance: Marco Polo’s Il Milione, the frame tales of the Arabian Nights, the imaginary cities from More’s Utopia to Borges’s invented worlds, and the prose poem. The turn is to make a book that is neither novel nor collection: a combinatorial atlas, its order generated by a numerical scheme, in which the frame interrogates the stories and the cities are thought experiments rather than tales. The stake was real: Calvino had been a neorealist and a writer of fables, and here gave up plot, character and narrative continuity. Held three tenths below the bar because the ground had been cleared, by Borges above all, and by Calvino himself in Cosmicomics (1965) and the combinatorial tarot of The Castle of Crossed Destinies (first published 1969): the swerve continues a turn already in progress.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The numbered grid is the instrument of the book’s claim that an empire, or a world, can be known only as a set of combinations and never as a whole: read in the order of the chapters it is one book, read series by series it is another, and the reader becomes Kublai, trying to master the atlas by its pattern. The italic dialogues are the second instrument. They question the cities as they are told, so that the book contains its own theory of knowledge, and the admission about Venice, made in the frame, changes every city already read. The staggered entry and exit of the series gives the whole a symmetry the content disputes. Held below the top because some cities, taken singly, are containers for a paradox rather than forms of it.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence first, over fifty-four years. The book is returned to in more fields than almost any novel of its decade: in literary study, where its structure has been diagrammed and argued many times; in architecture and urbanism, where it is read and taught as a theory of the city; in the philosophy of perception and in the study of empire and description. Its questions stay open: whether all fifty-five cities are Venice; whether Polo has travelled at all; whether the scheme’s symmetry is order or a mask for the empire’s dissolution; whether the last word is despair or a moral charge. A single city yields on return as the frame shifts around it. Held below the top because part of the yield is the pleasure of the scheme, and the semantic depth, though wide, sits at the level of the idea.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The field is Italian literature of the 1970s and, through translation, the European novel of its decade. The intrinsic force is real: the book showed that a work of fiction could be organised by a combinatorial scheme without becoming a game, that a frame could be the theory of its own stories, and that the city, the subject of the realist novel, could be treated as pure form and still disclose. What holds it below the bar is that its formal method was taken up in later fiction more as an emblem than as a practice, and that its widest reach lies outside the field it entered. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became one of the most read Italian works of its century abroad, it entered the curricula and the vocabulary of architecture and urban design, and it stands with Borges among the sources of the postmodern novel of ideas.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Survival is weighed over fifty-four years, on what is shown. The text survives whole, as published, and has been in print in Italian and in Weaver’s English throughout. Presence is wide and continuous, and unusual in that it crosses disciplines: read and taught in literature, assigned in schools of architecture and planning, translated very widely, and used again and again by composers, artists and designers. Its surface is fixed to no moment: there is no period furniture, and the cities of waste read as more pertinent now than when they were written. It falls short of the widest presence because its readership, though broad, is not the mass readership of the most widely read novels of its age, and five decades demonstrate less than the centuries behind the summit.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Judged on Calvino’s Italian as far as Weaver carries it; the Italian sentence is neither credited nor charged. The command is of exactness and of arrangement. Each city is a finished piece: a rule stated in the first sentences, an image that embodies it, a turn at the end. Fifty-five pieces in eleven series across nine chapters are arranged without a visible join, and the dialogues shift register from the courtly to the philosophical to the intimate. The chessboard passage, in which Polo reads the history of the wood from a single square, is precise description becoming thought, and “Without stones there is no arch” puts a poetics in five words. Charged, and held two tenths from the higher marks: the cities’ turn on a paradox becomes a formula in places, the elegance is sometimes ornament, and the women’s names serve as labels, not persons.
Score: 8.5 / 10
One law governs the whole: a city is the relation of a perceiving mind with space, memory and desire, and every description is also a description of the describer. Take the two most distant elements: Zobeide, the city built from a dream of desire, and Leonia, the city that throws away its refuse every day until the refuse surrounds it like mountains; or a single square of wood on the Khan’s chessboard and Kublai’s atlas, which includes cities not yet founded. They obey the same law: the city is made by what people want, remember and discard. The tones run from whimsy to dread, the scale from one square of wood to the whole empire, and the law holds. Held below the top because the range is of ideas and tones within one prose form, not of worlds as unlike as a novel can hold.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Judged on what a short book of fifty-five cities holds. Consciousness: perception, memory and desire, the subject of most series. Commerce, in the trading cities. Death, in the cities of the dead. The sky, in the cities patterned on the heavens. The state and empire, in Kublai and his decline. History, as the empire’s passing and the cities’ layers. The natural order, in the continuous cities and their waste, and in the wood of the chessboard. Language and signs, in the cities of signs and names. They are integrated through one figure, the city, and held, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what the form abstracts: the family, labour as lived, love between persons and the individual life are absent or emblematic, and there are no persons but the two speakers.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.8, then The Living Form and The Inner Law at 8.7. Fifty-four years in print in Italian and English, with a presence that crosses from literature into architecture and design; a numbered grid that is the instrument of the book’s claim that an empire is known only in combinations; and one law, that a city is made by what people want, remember and discard, holding from a single square of wood to the whole empire.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.4, held by what the form abstracts: the family, labour as lived, love between persons and the individual life are absent or emblematic, and there are no persons but the two speakers. Among the counted axes, The Inevitable, The Unconcealment, The Sublime and The Swerve at 8.2: cities that sometimes restate their neighbours, a disclosure delivered mostly as paradox of perception, heights that are cool and a page long, and a turn already in progress in Borges and in Calvino’s own earlier books.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.7, The Made at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four axes: The Imperishable at 8.8 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep and Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 fall two tenths short, and The Unconcealment and The Swerve at 8.2 three tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.2, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.4. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.3, stands below it as well.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Italo Calvino’s Le città invisibili, published by Einaudi, Turin, in 1972. It is scored as one book: fifty-five cities and the frame dialogues of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, in nine chapters, as published. Every axis is judged on Calvino’s Italian, which was not in hand and is not quoted. Translation · William Weaver’s Invisible Cities (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1974), the English through which the book’s sentences are known here, used for sense and for the three English phrases quoted on this page; its English is not charged to the work. The rhythm and sound of Calvino’s Italian prose are beyond this reading and are neither credited nor charged; the construction, the scheme and the frame carry over whole, and the sentence is weighed only for exactness of image and placing, which carries across translation. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, the count of chapters, series and cities was made from knowledge of the book’s architecture, and no quotation was checked against a file. Cities are paraphrased, and the series titles are given in Weaver’s English. Facts that could not be verified, among them the page count, are not given.