Invisible Cities

Invisible Cities (Italian original: Le città invisibili ) is the title of a classic 1972 book by Italo Calvino. The initial translation German by Heinz Riedt appeared in 1977 Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich, and at the same time in the publishing world and people, Berlin ( GDR ). Unlike the original, she was wearing the generic name " Roman". Recompiling Burkhart Kroeber is published by Hanser, 2007.

Content

A recountable " action " in the usual sense, there is in this book is not, and it is also - is different than sometimes claimed - not a novel (at least has its author never called it that, and the original was never referred to as such ), but a singular, is blocking against all generic piece of literature. It consists of 55 short texts, miniatures on the type of prose poems, of which occupy the shortest only a half, the longest less than three full pages, embedded in a kind of narrative framework, but rather is a description of the situation or game arrangement as a narrative: Marco Polo, the great Venetian travelers to Asia in the late 13th century, reports the aging Mongol ruler Kublai Khan, founder of the yuan Dynasty and thus Emperor of China, in cozy evenings in his palace to Kambaluk ( = Beijing), in which cities he on his inspection trips has come through the extensive empire. Each of the 55 texts sketched with a few words one of these ( fictional) towns, each with a specific geographical, historical, social or general human situation in a poetic image and hold each named with a woman's name. What initially as a gallery hingetuschter delicate, filigree images forms, almost like the recall Paul Klee and Salvador Dalí in linguistic form, condenses more and more of a nightmarish panorama of a risk of decay and ruin world that is increasingly similar today. Thus, Kublai Khan at the end of the question whether not " all in vain " is, " if the last landing place can only be a hell City and the flow down draws us there in an ever closer spiral". What Marco Polo the now famous answer are:

Form

The resulting book belongs in Paris in Calvino's " combinatorial " phase, which had been suggested by the experimental literature of the " Ouvroir de littérature potential " ( Oulipo ), but went far beyond mere formal experiments. The arrangement of the 55 cities images follows a sophisticated pattern: In nine chapters, each on and discharged with a piece of the " story within a story ", eleven rows are presented of five cities, each numbered according to the pattern " The cities and ... 1" to " the cities and ... 5" and cyclically intertwined, thus resulting in a structure reminiscent of a distance by the classical Versschema of Italian poetry: that of rhyming tercet in Dante's Divine Comedy, which these also - certainly not by chance - the fact points out that there are currently nine chapters, has divided the cycle into the Calvino, corresponding to the nine circles of hell in Dante, and that he explicitly speaks of hell at the end of the last chapter.

Thus, for this book, which is certainly Calvino's most poetic, most likely as a modern- broken " Weltpoem " define with distant echoes of Dante. Calvino himself said this once - tiefstapelnd - in an interview with The New York Times: " I ​​think I've written something like a last love poem to the city, in a moment in which it becomes increasingly difficult to experience it as a city. "

The table of contents that Calvino has made aware at the beginning of the book, makes with the nine chapters arranged in eleven crossed rows of five city descriptions - here supplemented by the names of cities - the " combinatorial " structure significantly:

Interpretive approaches

Mechthild store looks in their analysis of the dialogue between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo as a central element. Both have a " orientation in the world. The Emperor and the Ambassadors are representatives of different classification systems. " (P. 31). The emperor tried the cities of his kingdom to bring in a rational order, and his attempt ends in the void (ibid.). Marcos search follows a narrative, narrative structure. He looks for the "perfect " city, " Non - hell in the middle of hell." " For Marco does not remove the non- hell, the ideal city, as the end point of the dialectical process, the hell on. Different, however, as for Adorno, there are at Calvino a truth in untruth, just the non- hell in hell. Postmodernism thus continues through the verdict of modernity across that "all art secularization of transcendence " [ ... ] was. In the picture of the perfect city a moment of subjectivized eschatology lights up. Thus, postmodernism creates a new playful freedom of the monolithic pessimism of modernity. " (P. 42)