Word: polos
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...distinctness apart from any form or reality to be distinguished--which is a familiar part of language as a system of abstractions from the world. At the same time, it is a parable about distinctness itself, based on another impossibility: a total negation of distinctness. "But why, then," Marco Polo asks, "does the city exist? What line separates the inside from the outside, the rumble of wheels from the howl of wolves...
...even if Calvino's description is alive to the senses, it remains arbitrary and unreal. It is as though, even as Marco Polo describes fifty-five out of all the cities that ever were and ever will be, Calvino chooses his images out of an infinity of possibilities, all equally sharp, all equally life-like. And when he tells of murderers who "plunge the knife into the black veins of the neck and more clotted blood pours out the more they press the blade that slips between the tendons," it is only for the sake of allegory--vivid, but purely...
Each of Calvino's parables comes from a single mold, and so do each of Marco Polo's cities. As the catalogue progresses, anachronisms begin to creep into the explorer's narrative, and his empire begins to expand outward in time as well as space. Kublai Kahn discovers this...
...cities Marco Polo describes are only aspects of a single, perfect city that cannot be approached directly, but only by piecing together the fragments of imperfect cities...
...CITIES is an allegory for the mind. Its language, imagery, patterns create a sense of grace and lyricism seldom found in modern realistic fiction, but the joys and the sorrows of this book are cerebral ones, except twice. Once, almost in spite of Calvino's coolly allegorical portrait, Marco Polo expands, just for a moment, into a human character. The emperor has asked him why, in all his tales, he never speaks of Venice, and the explorer responds in restrained, formal language...