An Empire Full of Metaphor

Invisible Cities

The first time I stumbled upon the book Invisible Cities, when it was used in the video essay “Searching for Disco Elysium”, I didn’t really take notice of it. [1] [1], [2] The book played a secondary role, it was used to highlight an aspect of the titular game Disco Elysium, so it was perhaps unsurprising that it didn’t strike me as something remarkable. However, that changed when I read the essay “Two Concepts of Legibility”. [3] It used Invisible Cities in a similar way, to make a point about the legibility of software, which made me wonder if there was something special about it. Why was it that two very different essays, one about media critique and the other about philosophy of software design, could use it so effectively?

Invisible Cities is a short story collection about the conversations between the merchant Marco Polo and the emperor Kublai Khan. In order to better understand the countless cities in his empire, the emperor has employed Marco Polo to report about them from his travels. One of these cities, he says, is built precariously, every building hanging from ropes in a ravine; in another city you will be met with faces you’ve known for years, but belong to complete strangers; in Maurilia the inhabitants are nostalgic for some image of the city’s pre-industrialized past; and in Thekla they want to avoid its destruction, so they never finish its construction. Like this, each short story tells the tale of one of Polo’s reports, highlighting the most noteworthy or memorable aspects of each city.

It would be tempting to summarize it as a book about cities — that is after all what the title and the contents suggest — but I think that would be to miss the inhabitants of the city for its architecture. Invisible Cities doesn’t seem to be about the cities. Yes, each short story describes a unique city with all its quirks, but these quirks only serve to highlight the inconsistencies between them. Some cities are set in medieval times, while others contain buses and cars; some stories feature fantastical elements, while others seem to be very grounded in reality; some cities’ traditions seem fairly normal, while others are nonsensical. Indeed, Polo and Kublai too question the reality of their situation in one of their conversations:

POLO: Perhaps this garden exists only in the shadows of our lowered eyelids, and we have never stopped: you, from raising dust on the fields of battle; and I, from bargaining for sacks of pepper in distant bazaars. But with each time we halfclose our eyes, in the midst of the din and the thong, we are allowed to withdraw here, dressed in silk kimonos, to ponder what we are seeing and living, to draw conclusions, to contemplate from the distance.

Instead of looking at the inconsistent concrete, the reader is encouraged to look past the cities, see through them, and find the metaphors that hide inside. The cities are, after all, invisible. But, a metaphor doesn’t have any meaning in isolation, and that is precisely what these metaphors are: lacking in connection and incomplete. All metaphors are metaphors for something else, but the metaphors in Invisible Cities lack this other part that would make them whole. They live in cities without substance where the only citizens are themselves, that is to say, they are unfinished — but only until a reader comes along and reads the book. The metaphors aren’t isolated anymore because the reader brings their own connections, the missing parts, from their own lives to give the metaphors meaning. In this way the reader completes the metaphor by relating it to their own lives.

This interaction is mutual: the incomplete metaphor can give meaning to something else. The cities they live in are half empty, so the essayist can fill in the rest with what they choose. The cities are invisible so they can be contrasted to anything else. Instead of completing the metaphor with elements from their own lives, the essayist can use the incomplete metaphor as a jumping-off point for further comparison and imagery. The Invisible Cities provide an empire full of abstract metaphors, each of which can be used by the essayist in a wide number of situations to enhance their own works.

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