A story about a story

At first I wasn't able to analyze the blog making sense. I already knew everything they said was figurative, but my question was how do I analyze it? In class they explained to us what was meta literature. It is a story about a story and through this concept it is all easier to underatand.

In the book we found out something, the characaters aren't reall characters if you think of meta literature. The truth is that Kublai Khan is the audiencr and Marco Polo is the author (Italo Calvino). For example we hace this quote: "Yes, the empre is sick, and, what it is worse, it is trying to become accustomed to its stores." (pg. 59). In here Marco Polo is talking to the emperor of the tartars and there are to ways to take it literally or figurativelly. We can assume that when he sayd this it is really Italo talking about the book.

As Calvini writes the story in way he explains what the story is about. Invisible Cities is all about the connections between the writer and the reader.

Where am I?

When I was reading a book, there was nothing I thought that I could really connect it to. While reading Mariana Villa's blog, Dreams or Reality? I made the connection, Inception. It is impressive the resemblence they have, and it's just not one thing, but the whole plot. One of the things they have in common is that in Invisible Cities, there's a story about a story and in Inception there's a dream within a dream. Mariana made a point that I hadn't really catch on to in the book, is that theres a confusion between what's real and what's not. Even though we already have clear that the cities that Marco Polo is describing to Kublai Khan are fictional, one has a hard time really knowing what's real and what's not.

There's something special about Calvino, and that's the way he describes. The cities are so specific from the people that live there, to the color of the bathroom wall, one gets confused. His way of describing makes you feel the cities are real. Here comes inception again. In the movie when putting someone into a dream there's a point when you go to deep that you can't recognize wether you are in dreaming or in reality. They call it the limbo in the movie, in the real world it means when you are not either dead or alive, but in a space at the middle. Now it all make sense when Marco Polo explains he was describing Venice, sometimes I felt he got lost between reality and what he was trying to describe to Khan, he went to limbo. He got lost between Venice and imagination. 

What happened to him is what happened to Ariadne. She was a graduate architect, and was recruted to design the dream escapes of what they called inception. The first time she went into the dream she was amazed, she could defy gravity and the laws of physics, she could do what every arquitect would dream to do. The same happened to Marco Polo (Italo Calvino) realizing this, the freedom to do whatever he wanted, to explain to the emperor of Tartars his vast empire, he went above and beyond. He didn't just get lost between what was real and what was *bs*. All the cities explained seemed to be from a mind with no boundaries, and someone who lives Another thing I noticed was what I mentioned in my previous blog, The City Code, and that was that some of Marco Polo's cities were brought into life through memory. He made a city that he had dreamed of, or maybe something that already existed like how I mentioned with the city of Isidora. This same characteristics of building from memories appear in the movie, and usually constructing from memory is not good. And why is this? Because constructing from things that you already know is an easier way for one to loose grasp between what's real and what 's a dream. That can happen in Invisible Cities, and this can be the reason why Marco Polo and Kublai Khan lost theirs.

The City Code

In the book, Italo Calvino tells a story about a story. How Marco Polo, the explorer, describes the cities he visited in his expedition to Kublai Khan, emperor of the Tartars. "Kublain Khan does not necessarily believe everything on his expeditions but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian" (pg.5)

Invisible Cities' explanations of the city are practically imagining the imaginable. Some times when Marco Polo is describing the cities I thinks he is inventing them. For example in the city of Isidora "He was thinking of all these thing when he desired a city" (pg.8). This exact city is part of the segment of the book called Cities and Memories. A crazy though came into my mind, maybe some of the cities are built from memory, the memory of the traveler. As well in the description of Isidora says the following: "The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age". If you analyze the cities it doesn't seem like the young Venetian is really talking about the cities exactly, but about the moments he had during the exploration. And with this city it seemed like it was a flasback, or as he was constructing the cities from past expeditions or times. I assumed this because of the ways he used to describe it, as the "city of his dreams" and how he says he dreamed it as he was young but really was there in his old age.

Every city has their own way to be described. But there's one question: Is the description literal or figurative? and what is Italo Calvino really trying to portray through this book?