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Chapter 1
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Invisible Cities, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Memory, Perception, and Experience
Storytelling, Interpretation, and Control
Cycles and Civilization
Modernity
Summary
Analysis
Kublai Khan grouses that his other ambassadors warn him of famines and conspiracies, or bring news of turquoise mines. He says that Marco Polo only tells stories, and he asks what the point of his traveling is. Marco answers that no matter what he says, Kublai will see things from the perspective of his palace steps, where they’re sitting currently. Kublai admits that he’s lost in thought, but Marco might as well not travel. Marco knows that Kublai wants to think privately, so the conversation takes place in Kublai’s head. Both men sit silently, smoke pipes, and imagine each other’s questions and answers.
Kublai doesn’t understand that Marco’s travels are what give him the knowledge and the ability to be able to tell all these fantastical stories—in essence, it’s necessary to have some degree of experience in order to be able to most effectively use one’s imagination. Marco’s note that Kublai will always see things from his palace steps speaks to the idea that a person’s perspective influences how they see the world. As an emperor, Kublai will always see things through that particular lens—it’s impossible, per the logic of the novel, for him to truly understand how a layperson sees the world.
Themes
Marco imagines answering—or Kublai imagines him answering—that the more a person gets lost, the better they understand where they’ve been. Kublai imagines interrupting and asks if Marco goes through life looking to the past. Marco either explains or imagines explaining that he always looks forward, but that his past changes depending on where he’s going. In each new city, he discovers a new part of his past. Marco enters a city and sees a man whose life he could live, if he’d made a different decision. He thinks that unreached futures are dead branches of the past. Kublai asks if Marco is traveling to relive his past, which the narrator suggests is the same as asking if he travels to recover his future. Marco replies that through travel, a person recognizes what’s theirs—and all the things that will never be theirs.
Marco asserts here that by traveling, people can come to a better understanding of how they fit into the world, past and present. Marco is able to see all the paths he didn’t take by traveling, as traveling gives him a glimpse of all the ways his life could’ve gone. Further, Marco suggests that all these lives that never happened are part of him, even if he never actually experienced them—essentially, all of Marco’s thoughts make him who he is, not just what he does in actuality. Linking past and future at the end also creates a cycle between the two and suggests that it’s not as much a cycle, but that past and future are, within a single person, one and the same.
Themes
Cities and signs. 5. When a traveler enters Maurilia, residents invite them to look at postcards of the city in the past. The postcards show chickens where the bus station is and a bandstand where the overpass is now. To make the residents happy, the traveler must say that they prefer the city in the postcards to the real one, but it’s a fine line. Maurilia is now a magnificent metropolis, though the old provincial Maurilia was charming—but nobody thought it was charming then.
That nobody thought Maurilia was charming when it was small and provincial speaks to the power of memory and of nostalgia. In Maurilia, the past, as represented by these postcards, seems to hold way more sway for the residents than the magnificent city they actually inhabit. By dwelling on the past, they’re likely missing out on enjoying the Maurilia of today.
Themes
Marco Polo warns Kublai Khan against telling the residents that sometimes, cities rise and fall on the same spot and share the same name. The people might stay the same, unaware. He suggests it’s pointless to fight over whether the new cities are better than the old, since the cities aren’t the same. In the case of Maurilia, the city in the postcard is an entirely different city that just happened to be called Maurilia.
By suggesting that Maurilia is actually multiple different cities, Marco implies that when a city changes so dramatically, it becomes a fundamentally different place. While its past may be a part of Maurilia, the residents’ outlook means that the city is something entirely other than its provincial beginnings.
Themes
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Thin cities. 4. Fedora is a gray stone metropolis and in the center, there’s a building with a crystal globe in every room. Each globe contains a model of a different Fedora that never came to pass. This building is the city’s museum and inhabitants visit to study the globe that best corresponds to their desires. Marco Polo tells Kublai Khan that on his map of the empire, he must make room for the stone Fedora and the tiny Fedoras. All the different Fedoras are just assumptions. The stone one holds what isn’t yet necessary but is thought to be necessary; the small ones contain what once seemed possible but isn’t possible a moment later.
Al though Marco insists that all of these cities—the stone Fedora and the globes—are all Fedora, they’re still all not the same one. Again, this speaks to the way in which people’s perspectives alter how they see the world: in this situation, they see entirely different cities with the same name. The existence of the globes in the first place again suggests that humans can’t achieve perfection, and further, that perfection is different for every person.
Themes
Trading cities. 3. A traveler journeying toward an unknown city wonders what the palace, the bazaar, and the theater will be like. All cities are different, but as soon as a person arrives in one, they can figure out where everything is. Marco Polo suggests that, according to some, this confirms the idea that every person has a formless city in their mind composed of differences. This is all upended in Zoe. In Zoe, a person can sleep, cook, rule, and sell anywhere. Public baths and hospitals look exactly the same. Travelers roam around, unable to discern Zoe’s features. The traveler wonders if Zoe is the place of “indivisible existence,” and if that’s true, why the city exists at all—there’s no line to separate inside from outside.
Zoe speaks to people’s anxieties in regards to telling things apart. Marco suggests that it’s extremely unsettling to not have any rules or delineations of what happens where, indicating that it’s a natural human inclination to want to sort things into neat categories and make them fit. However, this is impossible to do in Zoe, just as in the novel itself, suggesting that while such an urge may be normal, it’s not always fruitful to follow through. No matter what, places that can’t be categorized, to a person intent on categorizing, are unsettling and can’t be understood.
Themes
Thin Cities. 2. Marco Polo describes Zenobia, which is wonderful: houses stand high on stilts with balconies and platforms throughout. Those are connected by ladders and hanging sidewalks. Nobody remembers why Zenobia’s founders did this, and it’s impossible to tell if they’d be pleased with the Zenobia of today, which is certainly bigger and more sprawling than the original plan. However, if someone were to ask a resident of Zenobia to describe the perfect life, the resident will always talk about a city that draws from Zenobia’s basic elements. Marco warns against trying to decide if Zenobia is a happy or unhappy city, emphasizing that these categories are silly. More useful is dividing cities into those that, through their changes, still create desires, and cities where desires destroy the city or are destroyed by the city.
While Zoe turned ideas of what a city should be on its head, Zenobia seems able to somehow please everyone—though again, each resident presumably describes something slightly different, just with the same elements. While Zenobia itself may not be entirely perfect, it’s possible for individual people to find something that feels nearly perfect to them in the city, again showing how a person’s perception and experiences color how they interpret their surroundings.
Themes
Trading Cities. 1. Eighty miles northwest is the city of Euphemia. Traders of seven nations gather four times per year to trade, but they don’t just come to buy and sell. They come for the nightly fires where everyone gathers to tell stories about wolves, sisters, battles, and lovers. Travelers know that when they embark on their long journeys after being in Euphemia and they call up their memories, their memories will have morphed to reflect the stories that others told.
This note about how traders’ memories change speaks to how malleable memory is. Just by hearing someone else’s stories about the same subject matter, it’s possible to begin forgetting one’s own memories, or for one’s own memories to alter significantly. This suggests that in some ways, memory is collective among humanity, not individual.
Themes
At first, Marco Polo communicates by pulling out objects and then moving and crying out. Kublai Khan can’t always figure out how those objects fit into the stories—for instance, a quiver of arrows could signify war, hunting, or an armorer’s shop. What is most interesting for Kublai are the spaces in between what Marco says, as he feels he can wander through Marco’s stories. Eventually, Marco learns the language—though it’s possible that Kublai just learns to understand Marco. Their conversations, however, aren’t as happy, and Marco soon returns to using gestures and sounds. He begins giving the basic information on a city in words, and then describes the rest in a sort of sign language. Kublai responds in kind. Their motions become smaller until they can communicate without moving. Communicating in this way becomes less fun, and Marco and Kublai often sit in silence.
As Kublai and Marco learn to communicate more effectively with each other, they get less and less joy out of communicating at all. In particular, the fact that Kublai feels he can walk within the spaces of Marco’s stories shows that stories can be just as meaningful and compelling as experiencing an event firsthand. And that there are spaces between Marco’s stories allows Kublai to bring his own experiences to the event, rather than receive extremely detailed information that leaves very little room for him to use his imagination. In other words, it’s possible to be too precise when communicating, as it diminishes enjoyment.
Themes
