#好书推荐计划 #
The Invisible City, like many of Kafka's works, continues to circulate in a pattern of viewer understanding, because it allows us to see the pure form of the legend, the wonderful genre, and the realm of thinking. This novel, together with Kafka's The Great Wall of China, gives new life to literature that we need but no longer deserve or cannot win.
--Harold Bloom, The Short Story Writer and The Works
After reading Calvino's 55 "Invisible Cities", there is a sense of fragmentation of Watching Jiang Wen's film "can't remember the plot" and a philosophical chaos of "not knowing what you want to express, but pointing to a distant place". When you think you're getting close to the truth, you're one step away.
Perhaps Harold Bloom's distance description of the truth in the novel is more precise: "Like Kublai Khan, we don't necessarily believe everything That Marco Polo describes, but we also feel the emptiness of the earth when night falls, hoping to find patterns that will make up for the countless mistakes we make in our lives." ”
The simple understanding is that it is a mirror city, like a silhouette of the inner world.
If you look at the silhouette of a single form, like the underground city Morrough people in the British writer Wells's science fiction novel "Time Machine", living in the dark and damp real world that rules the exquisite sunshine. A real urban desire revealed at the junction of light and dark is like the description of Anastasia in Invisible City:
"If you cut agate, quartz, and chalcedony for eight hours a day, your toil will take shape for your desires, and your desires will shape your labor; you think you are enjoying the whole of Anastasia, but you are nothing more than her slave."
If you look at the silhouettes of 55 invisible cities together, it is like a journey of Tang monks to learn the scriptures, like a legend of the Classic of Mountains and Seas, more like Kublai Khan standing in the perspective of the emperor, brainstorming a city in an ideal country with overseas merchants, and it is a hero on horseback of nomadic people to explore the outside world. Perhaps there is also a suspicion of Kublai Khan in the Harvard History of China, yuan and Mingzhong, who also wanted to conquer the world once like his grandfather Genghis Khan.
Calvino, in the invisible city, turned the outward exploration of the world into symbols, eyes, and memories of the city, and said it through Marco Polo's body:
"O wise Kublai Khan, no one knows better than you that the city itself cannot be confused with the words that describe it."
"If you want to distinguish, there are two other categories: cities that have gone through the vicissitudes of time and continue to let desire determine their own form; the other is cities that are either obliterated by desire or obliterated by desire."
"Then it becomes a natural-sized city, enclosed in the original city: a new city grows in the original city and expands outward."
If I had to do a conference summary of Kublai Khan and Marco Polo's brainstorming by Calvino, it can only be said that in their discussion, they first defined the city as an ecosystem, and perhaps one day nourish strange substances and strange desires that we cannot control, even strange algorithms and rules. But it is soft, encompassing everything in a state of formlessness or invisibility, or tragedy or comedy, or a conflict of tragedy and joy.
If one had to give it a special value, it would be best to use a passage from Calvino's own Literary Machine: "The individual, nature, history: in the relationship between these three elements there is what we can call the modern epic." This relationship between man and nature and history is characterized by freedom, does not contain ideology, and does not do so as man does as a pre-planned (whether transcendent or intrinsic) picture of the world. ”