Beyond the Safe Zone

Of all the hopeless tasks I have ever set myself, perhaps the most quixotic has been my attempt to persuade undergraduate historians to read fiction. In my experience the average student is pretty well allergic to the idea that they might ever venture beyond the safe zone of their set reading, let alone engage with something that (as they sometimes put it) ‘isn’t even true’. They may accept in principle the idea that fiction might in some vague and abstract sense prove personally enriching, but to suggest to a world-weary undergrad that a specific novel might have direct relevance to the actual topic they happen to be working on is to invite, nine times out of ten, a look of blank incomprehension.

A few years ago I tried, and I think entirely failed, to persuade a class of second years that because Jane Austen’s Emma is ultimately about a failure of intelligence, a careful reading of it would improve their own understanding of decision-making in the lead-up to the Iraq War. They weren’t buying it. Even my appeal to a higher authority – I had gleaned that reading of Emma from an essay by an impossibly august professor of international relations at Yale – could not persuade them that the story of a headstrong young woman diligently gathering and then hopelessly misanalysing intelligence might usefully illustrate certain more recent instances wherein flawed preconceptions had led to faulty conclusions. I was not much more successful in persuading a room of impressionable first years that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength might serve them well as useful commentaries on mid-twentieth century debates about science and society. If it weren’t for the fact that I actually quite like my students, and would therefore never call them such names, I might almost say that most of the time I end up casting literary pearls before swine. Yet for all the discouragements, I persist, and the pearl that I cast most often, particularly at those wonderful, rare students who ask genuinely perceptive questions, is not Emma (great though it is) but something far slimmer and – I would argue – more ambitious: Invisible Cities (1972) by Italo Calvino. It has the most straightforward of premises. Marco Polo is regaling his host Kublai Khan with descriptions of cities he says he has visited. These are delivered as gnomic reflections, none of which stretches over more than a couple of pages and some of which fit into a single paragraph. These accounts are framed by similarly brief glimpses of the interactions between the traveller and the emperor as they sit together and imagine distant cities. You cannot, then, get lost in the plot: in Invisible Cities only the cities themselves ever prove labyrinthine. So how best to read it? It depends, I suppose, on the sort of journey you envisage for yourself. You could consume the whole thing in one breathless evening, in which case it would take on the character of a fever dream, with successive glimpses of fantastic cities settling upon one another like snow, eventually forming a layered collage of two men’s thoughts. Alternatively, you could read it slowly over many weeks, mulling a passage or even a sentence at a time, in which case each chapter would become a profound prose poem of its own, an unfolding series of oracles on the nature of memory. I have read it both ways in my time, and both have their advantages. Now, though, I prefer to pass through the book like a true traveller, letting the journey itself set the pace, sometimes hurrying breathlessly onwards to the next vista, sometimes lingering to absorb fully a new or familiar sight. One of my favourite sights in Invisible Cities is Octavia, the spiderweb city, suspended between two precipices with a great void yawning beneath. Octavia’s inhabitants tread carefully on the narrow catwalks, and they know that the web of ropes and chains that holds their city together cannot do so forever. It is a beautiful city. It is an impossible city. It is also, in an important sense, every city. Here, as in so many of the places Marco Polo conjures up, the thing that is most fantastical is also the thing that is most true. It turns out that what may be fiction speaks directly to life. Apt, therefore, that the chapter on Octavia begins memorably with the line, ‘If you choose to believe me, good.’ Kublai Khan is not entirely sure he does believe his guest. He presses him, cross-examines him, extracts the occasional concession that perhaps the real theme being explored in all these strange, beautiful accounts is not so much ‘the city’ as the fickle interplay of memory and imagination. In time the great Khan realizes, as we readers come to realize, that for Marco Polo all cities are ultimately Venice, his distant home. Neither he nor we can escape from our own ‘first city’, the place of origin that remains implicit in all our subsequent travels. Every experience we have is shaped by what we have previously known, and even our efforts to imagine something completely ‘other’ have to differ from something. Partly for this reason, another thematic undercurrent to the book is the immense difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of true communication with another human being. In fact the dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan may not be a dialogue at all. I worry that that last paragraph makes the poor book sound like some cute postmodern game. Perhaps it is. But maybe that’s no bad thing. Games are supposed to be fun, and like good fiction they can make us feel (and therefore understand) things that the dry recitation of fact alone would otherwise struggle to depict. Though Italian, Calvino was a part of the French ‘Oulipo’ movement, whose members delighted in inventing elaborate structures for their work, and in so doing produced clever, playful novels that reward (but do not demand) close and thoughtful reading. Challenges and patterns abound in Invisible Cities, and there is a joy to be had in realizing, for example, that the names given to the cities – Clarice, Hypatia, Chloe and so on – are far from accidental, just as there is a satisfaction in pondering, long after you have closed the book, the anachronisms (radar antennae, underground trains, a munitions factory) that crop up like veiled hints throughout the text. At any rate you do not need to be a fully paid-up fan of postmodern scholarship (I assure you I’m not) to be able to appreciate Calvino’s achievement. Rather, have faith that if the prose ever veers into the realm of the obscure, it is only with good reason. (A case in point: on p.29 of my edition, we learn that ‘If existence in all its moments is all of itself, Zoe is the place of indivisible existence.’ It all seems very obscure – until you catch an echo of, say, T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, smile to yourself, and press on to the next city.) Memory being fickle, I don’t remember when I first read Invisible Cities, but it must pre-date my having started keeping a diary, for in its earliest appearance there it is already marked ‘R’, for ‘reread’. That means I was almost certainly a mere sixth-former when I first encountered it, in William Weaver’s subtle, delicate translation. It may even have been one of the ways in which my past self began to imagine what it would be like to study history as a vocation. What I do know is that the next time a student asks me a good question about how – or if – we can really study the past, and I find myself stumbling through an explanation of the historian’s clumsy dance between the particular and the general, I am pretty sure I know which book I will reach for. I know I risk encountering yet another blank face, but on the off chance that they take me at my word and read it, they will come across a passage that has shaped much of my thinking:

Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone. ‘But which is the stone that supports the bridge?’ Kublai Khan asks. ‘The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,’ Marco answers, ‘but by the line of the arch that they form.’ Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: ‘Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.’ Polo answers: ‘Without stones there is no arch.’

Here, I will tell them, is the sum of the historian’s craft. Here is a deep meditation on the inter-relation of past and present, place and experience. Here is a writer grappling with what it is to discover, and the challenge of imparting that discovery to another human soul. Here, in short, is a book you really should read. If you choose to believe me, good.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 79 © Richard Brown 2023