Spectrum

Taking a break from all those wonderful cities that Marco Polo has described since now I wanted to continue onto Calvino's main story, MArco Polo and Kublai Khan. As I mentioned in my first blog of Invisible Cities has metaliterature in it. This is confusing me right now because I'm not getting what the plot of the story is. Though, I can see how Calvino's style of writing is represented by Marco Polo's way of describing his journeys through cities to Kublai Khan.

By including the dialogues between Marco and Kublai, Calvino is given the chance to intervene as Marco and subliminally show his style of writing. “Kublai Khan had noticed that Marco Polo's cities resembled one another” (Page 28). Showing that Khan notices this, he infers that the reader will also notice the resemblance between a city with another as in metaliterature, Khan is the reader, just like us.

Have you ever had those moments where your explaining something and you are lost for words? Well this happens to Calvino, represented with Marco Polo, when he would much rather show than tell. "But you would have said that communication between them was less happy than in the past: to be sure, words were more useful than objects and gestures in listing the most important things of every province and city... and yet when Polo began to talk about how his life must be in those places, day after day, evening after evening, words failed him, and little by little, he went back to relying on gestures, grimaces , glances." (Page 39). We can see that in some parts when describing the cities he shows us how it is rather than straight up telling us. Ironically, he uses words in order to show us, obviously its the only way. 

It is interesting to see how both these characters behaviors reflect upon Calvino's writing. Put some personality in there and it'll just make it more interesting.