Essay: Plagiarising Invisible Cities
I wrote this essay a few years ago not too long after graduating from university where I studied Philosophy. I just recently dug it out after having more or less forgotten about it, and decided to publish it in the state I had left it in, which is more or less the finished article.
It’s fairly light on any sort of literary criticism, and contains some (also very gentle) personal details of my time moving between Edinburgh and Glasgow. Strangest of all in the essay was a line I attempted to draw between the analytic focus of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow and a lyric from a Randy Newman song about Karl Marx, which I can’t even begin to unpack so I cut it.
To me, it now reads as something of a primer on the sorts of ideas I was interested in at that time (and which still interest me now), and which form the basis of a very ambitious piece of composition that I allude to in the essay, which as it happens I am still working on, but that’s another story.
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino was published in 1972 and saw its first English translation in 1974 by William Weaver. The novel consists of 9 chapters of 55 literary landscapes of imagined cities each displaying unique and fantastic qualities, sorted according to their relevance to one of 11 categories, including Cities & Memory, Cities & Names, and Thin Cities. These cities are described to the Chinese emperor Kublai Khan by the traveller Marco Polo, whose dialogues form interludes between the book's main chapters.
Calvino's method is philosophical, distilling each city into its essential properties, but as philosopher he is anything but dogmatic. Considered in their individuality, the cityscapes may reveal starkly distinct and unique identities, but taken as a whole reflect a more holistic, Wittgenstinian approach, displaying their subtle relationships and shades of a rich spectrum in which everything resembles everything else in some way, but no single thread unites the whole.
I was first introduced to Italo Calvino through IC in Autumn 2015, having graduated from the University of Glasgow in Philosophy with Music Composition and subsquently returned home to Edinburgh. When I first moved through to the other city I remained homesick for a while; even my pleasant surprise at Kelvingrove park's beauty drew more on surprise than pleasure, and to the extent that I found things to appreciate about my place of study I did so with a feeling of compromise.
From my first year spent pining for my home and its admittedly more picturesque prospect, to a later appreciation of Glasgow on its own terms - Sauchiehall St bisected by a motorway, the middle of nowhere in the centre of town - the ideas which dominated my extracurricular thinking were typified by a preoccupation with place at a distance. It was this line of enquiry I planned to follow in an ambitious piece of writing and composition in the relative comfort of my family home in Edinburgh, my academic duties for the time being fulfilled, and as a result of which I added IC to my reading list for research.
The first sentiment I expressed in response to IC was that it was the book I wished I had written, and not only in the apparently greedy sense of coveting its authorship, but sincerely to the extent that it echoed thoughts and ideas I had myself explored, the very ideas I wished to develop in my own writing. Every page produced new insights, no less valuable for the persistent feeling that I had once before thought almost as far, or tentatively grasped for ideas like those I was now reading expressed so clearly.
I didn't wait to finish the book once before before hungrily extracting its contents as I went, scribbling references as I came across sentences that resonated with my own fantasies of home (a place that admits only too well of mytholigisation) and fusions of literature and philosophy that rounded off the sharp edges of my strictly analytic critical training.
In addition to transcribing its passages verbatim, and more loosely adapting its ideas in my own writings (or rather, in my defence, using Calvino's writing as a signpost towards more lucid expression of ideas I had already harboured), I also hazarded a pastiche or two of IC's cityscapes. All this despite a warning from a friend and ex-tutor who had had a go at the same exercise and found them 'trite'.
One such piece survived my amateur's self-scrutiny to make it into writing. The idea actually came to me while at university, before I had read Italo Calvino. I was on the uphill portion of Gibson St in the student hub of the west end, where ongoing construction work had created something of a bottleneck. A white van belonging to the construction workers and a big lorry were at a standstill. Crossing the road between them enclosed on both sides by the towering vehicles, as if darting down one of the city centre's much-eschewed lanes, I imagined a settlement born ad hoc from such circumstances, whose citizens - drivers - submit to the immobility of a massive traffic jam and open their vehicles as homes, as places of business and leisure, only to disperse suddenly, gradually, as the roads clear.*
Another idea, of a city seen exclusively in the reflections of its ubiquitous mirrors (which I believed to have come to me while wandering along Victoria Terrace, its framed views and my caffiene-heightened state encouraging such fantasy) progressed no further than conceptualisation; upon reading IC for the second time - only a matter of months after having finished it - I realised that this city already existed. Its name was Valdrada, and Marco Polo had discovered it before me.
Family resemblances between the book and my own thoughts, then, ran in two directions; I both read Calvino's cityscapes and felt some concordant resonance, and fabricated such relations by my unconscious plagiarism. In the case of the mirror city, I even imagined anew Calvino's very own examples of lovers and murderers as subjects in the city's reflected images. Although I insist that it is the prima facie innate quality to Calvino's imagined cities that delayed recognition of my crime - that his cities are recognisable places - I don't greatly suffer from a counterfeiter's guilt. Indeed, Khan makes the very same error during one of his audiences with the traveller, when his attention lapses and he interrupts Polo to describe to him a city which turns out to be the very same his servant was just describing as the emperor dozed.
From my recognition in IC of ideas independently discovered by myself, to those I only imagined to have their origin in my own creativity, I am tempted to appeal to the fundamental nature of the concepts in terms of which Calvino defines his cities - that IC represents an exhaustive account of the forms cities may take. It is only my firm belief in the real origin of ideas and the fluid, ultimately unguided development of actual cities, places and language that stops me short - a world view also nurtured by IC, certainly more so than at the University of Glasgow where continental philosophy was only mentioned as a punchline, and Wittgenstein was only properly introduced so late into your degree as not to encourage students to abandon Philosophy altogether.
The entirety of space between these two opposing views is that which IC's truthworld inhabits; even apparently fundamental presuppositions are merely played with. Of the many systems of thought and world views traded in by Calvino, no single one holds precedence. In a faux-Socratic fashion, Calvino leads you by the hand through one dialecticical labyrinth after another, and then, at the point of reaching his destination, laughingly turns on his heel and sets off in an opposite direction, continually dragging you behind.
Now all too intimately familiar, ensared even, with the book, it was my turn to pass it on to a friend of mine, a fellow composer and writer. I had already been singing its now-repetitious praises for months, but in the middle of last year, with a gap in his reading list, he would take the opportunity to follow up my recommendation. I went looking on the bookshelves at home for a spare copy I could pass on to him, but devoid of a healthy suspicion of new books he went and bought his own copy, one in the series of omnipresent Vintage Classics. I hope he's learned his lesson, for he at least recognised the excessive boldness of its blurb, repeating a claim I had heard made before, and which I received now with little hospitality:
“[Italo Calvino] is actually describing one city: Venice.”
The passage responsible for this rumour is one of the intervalic dialogues between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. After supposedly exhausting his store of tales from foreign kingdoms, the traveller is confronted with the accusation that he has omitted one city in particular, of course, Venice. Marco Polo concedes the charge, but offers the following consolation.
"Everytime I describe a city I am saying something about Venice."
However unproblematic that may appear, he shortly qualifies his statement.
"To distinguish the other cities' qualities, I must speak of a first city that remains implicit. For me it is Venice."
I might cite another line of Polo's from an earlier dialogue, to argue for the perspectival nature of the distinct cities imagined by the writer and his readers.
"It is evening. We are seated on the steps of your palace. There is a slight breeze. [...] Whatever country my words may evoke around you, you will see it from such a vantage point."
Still elsewhere, he says of the city Irene (“a city seen in the distance”, having that much in common with every other foreign land, none of which is perhaps ever truly visited in the course of the novel but merely conjured in memory),
"Perhaps I have spoken only of Irene"
These few passages alone jointly suffice to give a reader license for the sort of basic interpretation that some editors would evidently rather embargo. IC is no more a book ultimately about Venice, evidently so dear to Marco Polo and of course Calvino, than it is one about Kublai Khan's "first city" or indeed yours or mine, however much I too read only one name in its chapters.
How such a piece of subjective analysis comes to form the blurb, practically the cover of the book, remains a mystery. Even if it were true, its inclusion would be a spoiler! If false, then it represents some spite on the part of the sleeve towards its contents. The blurb even includes a quote of Gore Vidal's, that “of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult, and in the case of a marvelous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant.” It would be perhaps uncharitable to say that its irony was lost on the blurb's writer; I prefer to suggest that they took Vidal at his word and elected to tell an outright lie about the book instead. Indeed, the existence of such versions might be rendered somehow appropriate if they had had the exceedingly bad taste to carry their publication to Calvinian proportions of unreliablity, but alas, this piece of misinformation does damage in direct proportion to its singularity.
Though IC is anything but a monotonous read, it does not obviously assume the trajectory of a typical novel; if it is ever in the business of building tension, such is resolved within a page or two by the confines of its form, and the cities so share their importance within the novel as to deny the possibility of a conclusive tale, a destination. A book of its sort would betray itself, however, if it did not produce exceptions, as well as rules. Within the first two chapters, we are met with 5 installments on the theme of Cities & Memory. Also in early abundance are those on Cities & Desire, Cities & Signs, but as the pages turn, memory and desire fade, signs obscure. Almost precisely halfway through the book, chapter 5 concludes with the first entry entitled Cities & the Dead, and with each successive chapter, death only proliferates.
There emerges a sense that we are travelling through centuries with these tales, and arriving in an inhospitable near-present. The final chapter of the book takes on an unfamiliar tone, less reflective and idealist in concern, more urgent and ominously prophetic. Cities - once looking to the stars for guidance - whose every action now produces inalterable effects upon their skies. Cities that expand indefinitely, yet cannot house their "polite", vacant-eyed citizens other than by cramming them in by the dozen to a single room. People and places, through their multiplication, lose their magical qualities, become indistinguishable.
Calvino abandons speculation for his farewell demand, that to avoid these most apocalyptic visions, we must "learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space." We must make room in the world for those with brighter conceptions of its future, indeed, we must make room for other worlds. To strike a rather less apocalyptic tone, hearing a native Glaswegian once so deny their city's richness as to describe its West End as merely "like Edinburgh", it occured to me that an appreciation of a place's multitudes is the very least IC might do for many readers.
If we take seriously the clue that Calvino recognises something of material significance in the expression of human concepts - that concepts are things created rather than discovered - we may interpret the trajectory of the novel not as moving through time from memory to prophecy, but as a scattered series of ways we might imagine our world, cities we could build. That Calvino concludes on a less than idealistic note, then, may be nothing more than a momentary nightmare in a night of dreams, which alone has the force to awaken.
I have since reread IC yet again and don't doubt that I will continue to, and yet every time I read it, the passages which stand out to me are different, the notes I make are different, for I've changed, and the book has changed. This is just as well, for it keeps my notes fresh. I continue to write what I read, as new entries make their way into my notes, old ones are retired. I may erase a ghost-writing of a particular passage only to revive it the next day. In my obsessive copying-down and crossing out I do risk rendering its passages meangingless through their isolation, but this danger is avoided only by the inevitability that I should eventually rewrite the entire book one way or another, a vocation in which I have here endeavoured to begin in earnest.
* I recently read a really beautiful short story by Julio Cortazar in which almost exactly this scenario is played out, though in a less fantastical fashion. It's called The Southern Thruway and having read it I feel even more vindicated in not having seen my own story through.