[In the following excerpt, James discusses Italo Calvino 's The Invisible City.]

Forse del mondo è rimasto un terreno vago ricoperto da immondezzai, e il giardino pensile della reggia del Gran Kan. Sono le nostre palpebre che li separno, ma non si sa quale è dentro e quale è fuori.¹

Keeping in mind that examples are always chosen for their pertinence and not at random, we can let Italo Calvino's novel Le città invisibili stand as an example of a work where postmodernism is both obvious and questionable. As if hesitating on some sort of threshold between the modern and the postmodern, the novel presents a double structure of narrativity and seriality: a story about Kublai Khan and Marco Polo surrounds eleven sets of five cities, grouped in arithmetically arranged series. The seriality of the cities defines the trait we shall treat as postmodern, while the framing device, the narrative of those cities which would put them into a certain perspective, relates to a modern, or in any case pre-postmodern, esthetic of a mise-en-abyme or "narrative context." Whether or not the frame actually recuperates the cities-series into the narrative will determine the final labeling of the novel as modern or postmodern. Our reading will attempt to clarify the necessity of this confrontation and its implications for reading in general.

Each of the nine sections of the book begins and ends in italics with a page or two of conversations between Polo and the Khan. These pre- and postfaces do not constitute a continuous narrative. The fifty-five cities, from a half page to three pages long, are divided among the nine sections, the first and last containing ten cities and the rest five each. There are eleven sets of five cities called, in order of their appearance, "Le città e la memoria," "Le città e il desiderio," "Le città e i segni," "Le città sottili," "Le città e gli scambi," "Le città e gli occhi," "Le città e il nome," "Le città e i morti," "Le città e il cielo," "Le città continue," and "Le città nascoste." In so far as possible each city is followed by one from the next set so that the sequencing forms a pattern of simultaneous forward and reverse movement. Sections 2 through 8 begin with the fifth and last city of a set and end with the first city of a new set. The movement works as follows in the fourth section: from the first to the fifth city, 1-2-3-4-5, the titles read, "Le città e i segni 5," "Le città sottili 4," "Le città e gli scambi 3," "Le città e gli occhi 2," "Le città e il nome 1." Sections 1 and 9 are arranged 1, 2-1, 3-2-1, 4-3-2-1, and 5-4-3-2, 5-4-3, 5-4, 5, respectively, to accommodate the introduction and wrapping up of the series. While each city is doubly named by its position in its set and by its own proper name, the italicized passages are nameless, indicated only by ellipsis dots in the table of contents.

The cities, deployed geometrically as they are among shapeless narrative fragments, can be compared to a sculpture, perhaps one of Don Judd's series of cubes set up at precise distances one from another in a gallery where people may circulate freely around them. A comparison of the cities to postmodern works of art is apt. Functioning according to set theory in mathematics, seriality is a way of making art without concentrating on a object. The art lies in relationships, not in material entities. Where formalist, modernist art seeks meaning in the deterministic relations among a composition's visible elements, the components of a series derive their value by creating their own ever-changing context.² The elements of a series are arranged numerically and no one part leads or takes precedence over any other(s). A systems esthetic functions on différance. Seriality is without paradigm, the "model" itself becoming part of the set.³ Not only has seriality become a mark of the times, but, borrowing from Kuhn's concept of paradigms (not so far from Bachelard's epistémè), Jack Burnham writes that art now is between paradigms (Great Western Salt Works, p. 15). Serial arrangements generated from rules or chance procedures are based on logical operations rather than on the sort of privately invented signs or shapes we have attributed to inspiration or genius. Seriality is numerical; bypassing the ego, it embodies no values of beauty or taste. As used by the arts it is post-humanist. Having abandoned his or her work to the contextualizing of the consumer, the postmodern artist destabilizes the writerreader roles, redefining the artistic experience as a shared one. As we shall see, the roles of listener and teller in Le città invisibili are exchangeable and the problem of narrator and narrated irresolvable. The notion of active reading, the leveling of the roles of creator and critic, necessarily follows in the wake of this change in mental processes. This revolution was necessitated by the end of teleology, that end which was worked out in modernist art with its concern with deaths—the death of God, of literature, of art—and with renewal—the avantgarde and the Poundian imperative "Malte it New. If postmodernist thinking takes for granted the equality of artist and receiver and the ambivalence between creator and creation (see body art, for example), it is only because it has gone through the modernist backing away from representation or reflection of a world engaged in an end-seeking process, away from illusionism and mimesis, into and through the solipsism of self-generation, radical irony and their corollaries of emphasis on form and medium. The formalist aspect of modernism reposes on its urge to find meaning other than in content because the significance of content always stems from its referential function, and reference, always dependent on the metaphorical leap between sign and referent, poses a theology, a faith, necessarily grounded in an ultimate end or purpose.

Postmodernism has abandoned problem solving as a model (if not all models), has ceased the search for unity and/or stability, and has accepted the paradoxical picture physics provides of the universe: a universe whose laws are not laws but projections of relativity not really provable, a universe whose infinity is not eternity. The use of chance and indeterminacy as operators in art reflects these newer axioms of science. The anonymity of systems art and the devaluation of the "look" of things (the art object as fetish) follow from the physicists' disregard for any surface/depth distinction in favor of a knowledge of structure based on the incalculable movements of invisible subatomic particles. The topology of the postmodern rests on the slippery post-moebian surface, twisted in shape, undifferentiated from any depth or well-spring, without beginning or end. The arrangement of Calvino's cities is not one that builds up a story or anything at all except its own system. After Godei's theorem we know numbers can only work if we accept certain unprovable axioms.⁴ But nevertheless they work and seriality has become a concept useful in esthetic contexts where no proof is called for.

The reading of Le città invisibili is complicated by a double seriality, a double undecidability. First of all, the numbers set up a hierarchy of first to last which bears no relation whatsoever to the "story." The arithmetic arrangement misplaces the thematics of the groups—death, continuity, signs, desire, and so forth—by juxtaposing cities of different sets. Number, while belonging to the basics of logic and order, is also on the side of nonsense: numbers do not represent or relate the way that the names of things have meaning. Thus numbers, especially when associated with proper names which are also perceived as having no intrinsic meaning, Malte us uneasy when they are removed from their strictly arithmetic, symbolic terrain and used as ordering devices in a (fictional) context where the meanings of words and actions are overdetermined. Meeting up with a meaningless set of numbers in a novel is an experience of the uncanny which considerably upsets our novel-reading habits. Not accustomed to narrative in serial arrangement, the reader seeks transitions from one city to the next and resemblances among cities of the same rubric. The numerical arrangement of the cities which produces the palindromic aspects mentioned above (the 5-4-3-2-1, the 1-2-3-4-5, the 11 sets of 5 = 55) is symmetrical and unexpandable. The totalizing synthesis of the number system can also turn into a platonic metaphor, a mathesis universalis, which threatens to swallow the "realist" part of the narrative, the part whose rules of reading set up the book as a novel and not theology. In addition to these two types of naming (the thematic names of sets and the numbers which specify or "name" the linear order), each of the cities has its own name, a feminine-sounding name, which belongs to no set or order at all. The normal narrative-reading habit of searching for a mimetically motivated order in an arbitrary system (numbers) sets up a numerology, an intertextuality of finding meaning in numbers and their arrangements. The usual narrative-reading procedure of paronomasia, of reading proper names as common, signifying, nouns, is frustrated by the diversity of names (who can keep the cities straight?) within the named sets. The multiple-dimension grid readings (across the sets, across like numbers, in numerical order) which the seriality of Le città invisibili invites are frustrated by the disparateness, by the lack of connections—the silence—between the cities as well as by the wealth of symbols and emblems each city offers up to interpretation. The hermeneutic enterprise seems to rest in fitting the cities into the surrounding narrative where they are interspliced, that is, interjected artificially by a connection which remains essentially a break.

The seriality of the cities forms an aporia with respect to the narrative. The strict (reversible but not expandable) arrangement flouts the convention that narrative is going somewhere, is approaching an end or resolution. The cities are also holes in any presumed totality of narration. This aporetic position of the cities—at once blockage and lack—results from their seriality and engages postmodern questions about the nature of narrative and representation. If we consider the arbitrariness and perfection of numerical arrangements to be unnatural signs, then the signs used in narration are natural (or at least pseudo-natural) and they ought to recuperate or naturalize the arbitrary signs if the book is to be a novel. There is a tendency simply to disregard the numbers and sets or see them as the author's whim or mimic of a mapping procedure. If, however, we understand seriality to be different and irrecuperable, we acknowledge the aporia, the irreducible gap. By introducing into a novelistic context the use of an element foreign to language, Calvino sets Le città invisibili on the cusp between the modern and the postmodern.

Within the strict grammar of number, the thematic categories of the cities are not static; the individual cities are not examples or cases but nodes in a circulation of the themes throughout the sets. The naming of themes (the repetition of the set titles) retains the role of title and remains apart from the telling of the individual stories. For the reader, the mixture of the phenomenological (eyes, trade, sky), the metaphysical (death and desire), and the ambiguous ("sottili"—thin and subtle), complicates the texture of circulation. The cities refuse to give themselves over to a thematic pattern that would support, replicate, or mirror the numerical pattern. Seen from this perspective, the cities fragment themselves thematically because of the impossibility of reading any coherence into the various sets ("Le città e la memoria" have as much to do with desire as do "Le città e il desiderio"). The cities remain, or better put, are remainders or fragments at odds with their arrangement.

The novel and the city seem to have been born and bred together as products of mercantilism and capitalism. Ihab Hassan notes the postmodernist splintering of the modernist rubric of urbanism according to the multifarious manifestations of the City in the literary and political fictions of today: Global Village, minority movements, urban crime, Hiroshima.⁵ Calvino's cities involve these disparate characteristics; they are deliberate impossibilities, exotic in the sense of never homey, always unheimlich, enticing but foreign. Individual cities mix the beautiful and the ugly, the fanciful and the lugubrious, life and death. Armilla consists only of a set of plumbing and bathroom fixtures (pp. 55-56); Ottavia is a spider-web city (p. 81); Bauci stands on stilts (p. 83); the people of Eusapia have so invested themselves in their fantasies that they have taken to imitating the scenes they have set up in their necropolis (pp. 115-116); in Fillide empty space is the site of imaginary points connected by invisible roads (p. 97); Argia is buried, with earth replacing its air (p. 133). The people of the cities are not characters; they seem more like decorations in a silent tapestry or figures in a myth; in other words, emblems or allegories of those cities they inhabit. The cities do not combine to form a universe or nation or empire (the importance of these politics and their relation to the narrative will be examined subsequently) and even within themselves they are not one. The reading of each city shows it to contain its other. The doubling within the cities takes many forms: Laudomia, (pp. 147-149), is populated by its dead and its yet to be born as well as its living. Andria (pp. 156-157) duplicates the form of the constellations in its sky. Sofronia consists of two half-cities, a carnival and a brick and marble city, the latter dismantled and shipped away in off-season (p. 69). In Isaura "un passaggio invisibile condiziona quello visibile" (p. 28). The double images are often on the rhetorical plane: "Della città di Dorotea si può parlare in due maniere" (p. 17); in Tamara "la città .. . ti fa ripetere il suo discorso, e mentre credi di visitare Tamara non fai che registrare i nomi con cui essa definisce se stessa e tutte le sue parti" (p. 22). If at bottom the cities seem all alike, it is not because they add up to one city but because each must create itself as the paradigm of itself. Seriality permits only succession; there are no causal effects. The cities neither interact nor refer to one another. The doubling within each city denies it a single origin or essence. "A Eudossia .. . si conserva un tappeto in cui puoi contemplare la vera forma della città. . . . Ma allo stesso modo tu puoi trarne la conclusione opposta: che la vera mappa dell'universo sia la città d'Eudossia così com'è, una macchia che dilaga senza forma . . ." (pp. 103-104). Memory and origin are finally confused: Zirma is "ridondante: si ripete perché qualcosa arrivi a fissarsi nella mente. .. . La memoria è ridondante: ripete i segni perché la città cominci a esistere" (p. 27). All these chiastic movements in the reading of the cities replace the linear movements which motivate traditional narrative. The serial arrangement displaces thematics for a rhetorical pattern of non-origin and non-causality. The cities remain incomplete, forever moving from one state to another. "La città ti appare come un tutto in cui nessun desiderio va perduto e di cui tu fai parte," but you are submitting to the power of desire; "la tua fatica che dà forma al desiderio prende dal desiderio la sua forma, e tu credi di godere per tutta Anastasia mentre non nesei che lo schiavo" (p. 20). Such are the consequences of the lure of wholeness.

It is tempting to relegate the cities to the realm of dream. Their discontinuity and disembodiment, the strong currents of desire and fear, and their position apart from the diurnal conversations of Polo and the Khan set them up as experiences from the Other. Dreams, or the desire for dreams, are escapes; the Khan wants to hear of wondrous places of beauty: "E' tempo che il mio impero, già troppo cresciuto verso il fuori, . . . cominci a crescere al di dentro', e sognava boschi di melegranate . . ." (p. 79). But Polo reminds him that "< l >e città come i sogni sono costruite di desideri e di paure, anche se il filo del loro discorso è segreto, le loro regole assurde, le prospettive ingannevoli, e ogni cosa ne nasconde un'altra" (p. 50). The reader is led to consider that all the cities are Kublai Khan's dreams, like Lalage: "Ti racconterò cosa ho sognato stanotte, . . . vedevo di lontano elevarsi le guglie d'una città dai pinnacoli sottili." And Polo replied, "La città che hai sognato è Lalage" (p. 80). Or that perhaps Polo has dreamed the cities. The cities might also be considered dream auguries of the fate of civilization. The overprocreation of Procopia (pp. 152-153), the ecological disaster brought about by a futile frenzy to extinguish pests in Teodora (pp. 164-165), the endless suburban blight of Trude (p. 134), and the throw-away culture of Leonia (pp. 119-121) stretch the Khan's empire into the twentieth century. But Le città invisibili seems hardly to be a cautionary tale built on a well-worn time shift topos. The topology working here is more truly like dream than like fantasy or day dream. The cities are places of desire and interdiction and their only real location is that in their set and in the series of sets. Seriality bears close relation to dream where, as Freud noted, sequence replaces cause and effect as a "logical relation" in the mechanism of dream formation.⁶ Sequence and similarity—rhetorically we could speak of metonymy—define the grammar of dreams. The hesitancy between dream and wakefulness presents a further complication about the consciousness of the participants and the real place of the cities in their story. The possibility of dreams throws the reader off any straight course and forces the reinsertion of all the cities into another realm of mental process. Dream also provides a psychological accounting for a state of aporia and the rhetoric a novel can engage in to represent a simultaneous presence and absence or contradiction in modes of existence.

If the disconcerting numerical arrangement and the possibility that the cities are someone's dreams confuse the way toward interpretation, we must admit that this route has always already been broken up by the multiple deviations of the narrative. Who, we ask at the outset, is telling this story? The several types of narration frustrate the issue. The passages in italics are narrated in the third person, with the dialogue of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan in quotes except in the seventh section where the dialogue is presented dramatically, naming the character at each change of speaker. There is no self-named narrator here, but might we construe Italo's italics as a tease? The telling of the cities is even more complex. Already questioned in the suggestions that the cities are dreams or fictions Polo invents or has heard elsewhere, our certainty that Polo is recounting cities he has seen dissolves when we examine the use of the first person singular. Occurring first in the fourth city, the I debuts with the standard self-effacement of the storyteller: "Inutilmente, magnanimo Kublai, tenterò di descriverti la città di Zaira dagli alti bastioni" (p. 18). Other instances, such as that of Eutropia ("Vi dirò come," p. 70) and that of Ottavia ("Ora dirò come è Ottavia, città-ragnatela," (p. 81) are also ancient devices, performative utterances which both announce their intention and initiate the storytelling. This directness, associated with the topos of sincerity, is undone by a caveat preceding the recounting of Olivia: "Nessuno sa meglio di te, saggio Kublai, che non si deve mai confonderela città col discorso che la descrive" (p. 67). Ipazia, the city which has more first person references than any other, is impossible to read: "Di tutti i cambiamenti di lingua che deve affrontare il viaggiatore in terre lontane, nessuno uguaglia quello che lo attende nella città di Ipazia, perché non riguarda le parole ma le cose" (p. 53). The voyager-storyteller finds that his only sure referent, his self-referent, is thrown into doubt and concludes, "Non c'è linguaggio senza inganno" (p. 54). These aphorisms then recall the novel's incipit, "Non è detto che Kublai Kan creda a tutto quel che dice Marco Polo quando gli descrive le città visitate nelle sue ambascerie" (p. 13), which sets up the cities as lies or metafictions but does not, at the outset, destroy storytelling as a conscious process. The text of the last of the cities and names, Irene, which begins with the name itself whose first letter is / also ends with a repetition of the name and an / telling of further narrative tricks: "Forse di Irene ho già parlato sotto altri nomi forse non ho parlato che di Irene" (p. 132). This / could never be that of Polo because a third-person narrator has already been inserted into the previous paragraph: "A questo punto Kublai Kan s'aspetta che Marco parli d'Irene com'è vista da dentro. E Marco non può farlo: . . . Irene è un nome di città da lontano, e se ci si avvicina cambia" (pp. 131-132). Where does this / who has seen the inside, who has a special knowledge, come from? The confusion about narrators, coupled with the suggestion that a city has multiple names, questions the numerical arrangement as well as the situating role of the italicized passages. It seems that perhaps, after all, the teller of the cities is not Polo but an anonymous "invisible" voice from nowhere.

The question of a narrator becomes crucial where the structure implies two narrators, an outer and an inner, but in the narration itself the unfolding of the cities denies the possibility of containment which a story-in-a-story, a narrative embedding, would provide. What Blanchot has called the narratorial voice ("voix narratrice")⁷ becomes an impossibility in Le città invisibili. The narratorial voice is the voice of a subject that recounts something, knowing who and where it is: a conscious subject who keeps the story under control. Polo might be assumed to be the narratorial voice of the cities if we had not already seen that this cannot be. To this narratorial voice that poetics, in particular narratology, strives to systematize, Blanchot opposes the narrative voice ("voix narrative"), a neutral voice that, paradoxically, speaks from a place where the work is silent. The narrative voice has no place in the work, but neither does it look down upon it—it has no place, simply (Entretien, p. 565). The narrative voice places the fiction it narrates in a non-place, not in the idealistic sense of u-topia, but in the sense of residing in a fictional place, the Unheimlich. This no-place is always outside and missing, and as it cannot be part of the work but is nevertheless there, supplementarily: " . . . the 'it' . . . designates 'its' place both as that where it will always be missing and which therefore would remain empty, but also as a surplus of place, a place always in excess: hypertopie" (Entretien, pp. 563-564). The voicelessness (aphonie) and placelessness of the narrative voice render it mad, radical, unpoliceable: "it is radically exterior, it comes from exteriority itself" (Entretien, p. 565); it is "the most critical which can, unheard, give over something to be heard" (Entretien, p. 567). The breakdown of the first person in the narration of the cities, as well as the serial arrangement—an arrangement which inhibits cogent narration and is not possibly the product of a narratorial voice—hints at the narrative voice which indeed comes from the radical elsewhere. The narrative voice exceeds the stories of the cities, invading the neuter of the surrounding italicized passages. We can no longer consider the Polo-Khan dialogues as a frame surrounding the cities. The possibilities of narrative deception—that the cities told might have no relation to Polo's voyages, for example—escape narratorial control and enrich reading in a sly way that complements the kind of mathematical probability and relativity set up by the serialization of the cities. The no-place of the narrative voice is concomitant with (does not symbolize or allegorize) the instability of substance and the irresolvable problem of telling (who is speaking, listening, inventing?) in a story about a vast empire that is fragmented and doomed to decline.

Polo's assertion at the beginning of the last section, "Chi comanda al racconto non è la voce: è l'orecchio" (p. 143), recognizes the narrative voice's importance in the economy of narration: the emperor Kublai Khan's enterprise is to get Polo to tell and tell and tell because by being the listener he thinks to direct the narration. The Khan means to establish his authority by bringing about (giving place to < donner lieu à >) a narrative that would be identifiable, wherein he could collect the cities of his empire into a connected whole; he tries to force the narrative voice to turn into a narratorial voice. The Khan has to have this sort of narrative because it is the narration which constitutes his empire and power: "Solo nei resoconti di Marco Polo, Kublai Kan riusciva a discernere, attraverso le muraglie e le torri destinate a crollare, la filigrana d'un disegno così sottile da sfuggire al morso delle termiti" (pp. 13-14). The Khan has power over his empire only if he turns it into fiction, even if he does not realize fiction's treacheries.

The telling of the stories, that is the cities, indeed results from Khan's desire to know his empire, when "to know" means "to possess." In the first quote in the italicized narrative he asks: "Il giorno in cui conoscerò tutti gli emblemi, . . . riuscirò a possedere il mio impero, finalmente?" (p. 30). Narrative is the demand for narrative⁸ and it creates the economy, the power structure, of the work. The gap between the narrative and cities—they are not "interwoven" into the narration but exist in their serial elsewhere—is glimpsed by the Khan who at first has to interpret Polo's pantomimes or "logogriphs": "Il Gran Kan decifrava i segni, però il nesso tra questi e i luoghi visitati rimaneva incerto. . . . Nella mente del Kan l'impero si rifletteva in un deserto di dati labili e intercambiabili come grani di sabbia da cui emergevano per ogni città e provincia le figure evocate dai logogrifi del veneziano" (p. 30). The serial arrangement of the cities we read is not at all the description Polo gives Kublai piece by piece, each new piece of information turning the first piece of information about a place into an emblem. Polo's role as storyteller is further ironized within the dialogues: "Il veneziano sapeva che . . . le sue risposte e obiezioni trovavano il loro posto in un discorso che già si svolgeva per conto suo, nella testa del Gran Kan" (p. 33), as the Khan desires to take over the role he has assigned to another. The narrative escapes the totality of a closed form because it keeps on going as long as the Khan wants it to. The phatic motivation of the narrative undercuts the devices of verisimilitude which let the reader trust the representational value of the narration. The empire's winding down turns out to be its excuse for coming into fictional being. Polo invents cities only to satisfy the Khan's need to have evidence of what will inevitably slip away.

At a crucial point, at the beginning of the eighth (and final "regularly" numbered) section, just preceding the city Irene, the Khan comes upon a formula for stabilizing and dominating his empire: "Pensò: 'Se ogni città è come una partita a scacchi, il giorno in cui arriverò a conoscerne le regole possiederò finalmente il mio impero, anche se mai riuscirò a conoscere tutte le città che contiene'" (p. 127). This enunciates the rule of series, a mathematical projection of all possible moves and orders. Here, then, is a logic within the narrative that may justify the serial, number-rule bound arrangement of the cities. But the Khan forgets that chess is played with two kind of rules, the constitutive rules of the game and the unpredictable performative rules of strategy. Likewise, the natural laws of cities render their origins and being chaotic and, because these rules are not numerical or logical, the cities are always out of sight and hand both literally and figuratively.

Al contemplarne questi paesaggi essenziali, Kublai rifletteva sull'ordine invisibile che regge le città, sulle regole cui risponde il loro sorgere e prender forma e prosperare e adattarsi alle stagioni e intristire e cadere in rovina. Alle volte gli sembrava d'essere sul punto di scoprire un sistema coerente e armonioso che sottostava alle infinite difformità e disarmonie, ma nessun modello reggeva il confronto con quello del gioco degli scacchi.

(p. 128)

The serial arrangement is as impossible politically (imperialism is not like chess) as it is poetically (numbers break the rules of novelistic order). The arrangement is perfect, too symmetrical to be human.

The empire fails because it cannot enclose its cities, cannot define or find its property, proper-ness, own-ness, or character. The topology is never geographic, only mathematical becoming rhetorical by virtue of its role as an attempt at empire, at persuasion. The book does not form a narrative whole but exists on two rhetorical levels which constantly slip by each other. These two levels correspond to the modern and the postmodern: the narrative which puts itself into question while seeking to recuperate its fragments into a whole—a dialectized economy of exchange and representation—as opposed to the numerically generated set of separates which do not add up but exist as being relative to one another. To return to the art analogy, we see that these two modes parallel Cubist art and multiple-modular systems: the one fragments a (still recognizable) representation of a whole while the other represents nothing and exists only as a kind of propositional thinking. The narrative of Le città invisibili does not put together a story but interrupts another discourse. Narrative as call for narrative is renewed and cut off at every moment.

To reiterate the essential difference of the two modes of narrative in Le città invisibili and the impossibility of closure or unity is not to deny an interplay which constitutes the force of the novel's significance. The cities' seriality, when related to the philosophical implications of the (lack of) paradigm, loses its numerical sterility and assumes its importance in the movement constituting meaning. Unlike the Khan's atlases which define and predict the emplacement of cities, the narrative voice does not map out the place of the cities; their location as parts of a series is set by the titles of the various sub-divided sets and, like any title or frame, the set names link the work to its outside. The outside here hesitates between the italicized passages which literally surround the cities and the outside of the work, the usual "world," "reality," or field of intertextuality. That which exists between the inside and the outside, the parergonal (as Derrida refers to it, taking up a term used to designate something accessory or subordinated to the main subject in painting and expanding it to "Malte the economy of the abyme"⁹) serves as a reminder of the hesitancy of the place of the text and its outside. Le città invisibili engages a multiple parergonality because the cities are surrounded by their numbers, their place in sets, by the italicized parts, and by the outside symbolized by the covers of the book. Parergonality does not imply sets of multiple parentheses but indeed abolishes context as a means of recuperation or stability and insists on the mobility and unhome-ness of the in-between.

The parergonality of the series—the series' place inside the narration and its external origin—derives from and sets up a problematic of origins. A traditionally thematic reading of Le città invisibili would unhesitatingly point to an origin of the cities in the humanistic themes which seem to motivate the Polo-Khan dialogue: death and desire sublimated as voyage, alienation, the clash of east and west, apocalypse—all emblematized as cities (human constructs) in varying stages of physical, moral, and rhetorical decay. Up-to-date strains of environmental doomsday and 1984 can be heard as poignant leit-motifs of the book, perhaps suggesting that only some new economic order can rescue narrative from the decaying empire of exchangeable signs that modernism spent out.

The way the cities and the narration work as a constant exchange of frames or outsides constitutes a bending in and out such as Derrida calls "invagination": "the inward refolding of la gaine, the inverted reapplication of the outer edge to the inside of a form where the outside then opens a pocket" ("Living on," 97). This operation is not one that begins or has a place of origin but is "possible from the first trace on." Invagination is related to seriality because the model or referent is missing. If the cities are understood as being motivated by an ultimate model or paradigm put forth in the conversations, the novel can be called modern. On the other hand, if the cities invaginate each other, Le città invisibili is postmodern.

An abundance of possible models can direct our reading of Le città invisibili. From the City of God to Metropolis, cities have been used as models and metaphors for man and his constructs. One city, Venice, the place Polo left behind, dominates the Khan's attempt at model building. Polo's repressed, invisible city of origin surely manifests its return in the multiplicity of the cities but also and more significantly in his desire to keep it out of the Khan's empire.

"Ti è mai accaduto di vedere una città che assomigli a questa?" chiedeva Kublai a Marco Polo sporgendo la mano inanellata fuori dal baldacchino di seta del bucintoro imperiale, a indicare i ponti che s'incurvano sui canali, i palazzi principeschi le cui soglie di marmo s'immergono nell'acqua . . .

"No, sire," rispose Marco, "mai avrei immaginato che potesse esistere una città simile a questa."

L'imperatore cercò di scrutarlo negli occhi. Lo straniero abbassò lo sguardo.

(p. 93)

Polo's lie is the basis of an anti-paradigm which directs his telling of the cities: "Per distinguere le qualità delle altre, devo partire da una prima città che resta implicita. Per me è Venezia" (p. 94). The Khan knows that a paradigm does not suffice: "Ma le città visitate da Marco Polo erano sempre diverse da quelle pensate dall'imperatore. 'Eppure io ho costruito nella mia mente un modello di città da cui dedurre tutte le città possibili,' disse Kublai" (p. 75). He needs Polo whose method is other:

"Anch'io ho pensato un modello di città da cui deduco tutte le altre," rispose Marco. "È una città fatta solo d'eccezioni, preclusioni, contraddizioni, incongruenze, controsensi. Se una città cosíè quanto c'è di più improbabile, diminuendo il numero degli elementi abnormi si accrescono le probabilità che la città ci sia veramente."

(p. 75)

Polo disregards the Khan's empirical discourse for the realm of fiction in order to satisfy the need for narration. The emperor may "determine that each of these fantastic places is really the same place"¹⁰ and thus identify with the traditional paradigm-seeking reader, but it remains to Polo's unmodeled imagination to give substance to the work. It is the fictional process, the écriture, which keeps the cities from merging into one: "E Polo: 'Viaggiando ci s'accorge che le differenze si perdono: ogni città va somigliando a tutte le città, i luoghi si scambiano forma ordine distanze, un pulviscolo informe invade i continenti. Il tuo atlante custodisce intatte le differenze: quell'assortimento di qualità che sono come le lettere del nome'" (p. 145). The serial numbering and naming give the cities their individual being and what truth they have: "La menzogna non è nel discorso, è nelle cose" (p. 68).

At the very end of the book, Polo affirms, "la città cui tende il mio viaggio è discontinua nello spazio e nel tempo, ora pi rada ora più densa" (p. 169). The last cities mentioned, "Enoch, Babilonia, Yahoo, Butua, Brave New World" (p. 169), are literary cities Kublai finds ready-made in his atlas, cities whose paradigm is an archetype we all know, "'la città infernale, ed è là in fondo che, in una spirale sempre più stretta, ci risucchia la corrente'" (p. 170). So between the "real" Venice and Dante's fiction of hell lie all invisible cities, those unseen, unknown, and those that emerge from the dreamworld and its seriality. The book, fable and allegory that it is, ends with Polo's moral about escaping the inferno while living it: "cercare e saper riconoscere chi e cosa, in mezzo all'inferno, non è inferno, e farlo durare, e dargli spazio" (p. 170). The giving of space refuses closure and lets the search continue; the cities invaginate Polo and Khan and the narrative they are enmeshed in. The "città che minacciano negli incubi e nelle maledizioni" (p. 169), that is, all the cities, constitute "l'inferno che abitiamo tutti i giorni" (p. 170). The splitting of the paradigm between Venice and the Inferno and their clash within fifty-five cities reaffirm this reinsertion of hell into everywhere and the disappearance of heaven-purgatory-hell and all other hierarchies.

The cities and their telling represent "an apocalyptic superimprinting of texts: there is no paradigmatic text" (Derrida, "Living on," pp. 137-138). A serial text is always going to contain the apocalypse at every moment; rooted in the world of numbers, seriality lies beyond the human. If it seems that the humanist tenor of the last chapter serves to deny the post-humanism of the serial structure, we have only to glance back at the eighth chapter where Kublai Khan seeks unity in the chess metaphor. But he learns that, rather than the paradigmatic inferno, the motivator of the cities' structuring is a Nietzschean conception of "place" or "stance" based on rhetorical awareness. The last paragraph of the opening italicized part of this section is repeated as the opening of the closing part, and in it we see that the chess game, like all the Khan's other strategies of entrapment, escapes his intentions. "Il Gran Kan cercava d'immedesimarsi nel gioco: ma adesso era il perché del gioco a sfuggirgli. Il fine d'ogni partita à una vincita o una perdita: ma di cosa? Qual'era la vera posta?" (p. 139). His desire to seize his empire by reducing it to its structural components only deployed the deconstructive process of rhetoric: "A forza di scorporate le sue conquiste per ridurle all'essenza, Kublai era arrivato all'operazione estrema: la conquista definitiva, di cui i multiformi tesoridell'impero non erano che involucri illusori, si riduceva a un tassello di legno piallato" (pp. 129, 139; page 129 adds in conclusion, "il nulla . . ."—Calvino's ellipsis). Lest the Khan's desperation at the empty end be turned into the platonic satisfaction of having found an essence, he is further surprised to see that Polo is able to go on reading: the planed wood tells of "boschi d'ebano, delle zattere di tronchi che discendono i fiumi, degli approdi, delle donne alle finestre" (p. 140). The Khan's metaphor gives way to Polo's metonymy: "La quantità di cose che si potevano leggere in un pezzetto di legno liscio e vuoto sommergeva Kublai" (p. 140).

On the one hand, then, we find reductionism, the demand for a here and now, for the essential, for possession, and on the other the perpetual delay of understanding, inflation of the stakes, re-reading and re-understanding. The nothingness resulting at the end of the chess game unveils the absence of the paradigm, but the interpretive process can continue examining not the game or its rules but the parergons or supplements without which it could not exist. The invisible cities, like the squares on the chess board, are limited in number but permit, like the plain wood, continuous readings of the perpetual apocalypse that seriality writes within itself.

Seriality, whose order is mathematical, not geographic or human, is a sort of a-economy and as such aids the narrative voice in preventing a closed narrative economy—one regulating the author-reader exchanges—from taking (a) place. The privilege of generation is taken from the paradigm, from the paragon, and transferred to the parergon, the supplement or by-work. The radical exteriority of the narrative voice always destructures what paradigms attempt to enclose. Seriality and narrative voice work together in a logic of the cartouche. A cartouche is a drawn frame on an engraving or a tablet drawn in the form of a sheet of paper (this usually indicated by rolled or curled edges) such as those enclosing titles or legends on maps. The cartouches on Kublai's maps separate the words and the images but turn those words into images. As Derrida reminds us, "The logic of the cartouche is disconcerting, like that of a narration whose site would remain improbable" (La verité, p. 252). This logic tells us that origin is repetition; the paradigm is not the originator, neither producing nor generating because it itself has to be reproduced. The paradigm might as well be a copy or reproduction of one of its own descendents. The series proves this logic: "serial practice trades in the execution of paradigm or the decline of the model" (La verité, p. 235). The seriality of the cities ruins any claim Venice or the Inferno have to being models for any or all the cities. They too become part of the series; there are no paradigms but "paradigm effects" which circulate the parergonal effects continually reinserted into the series.

As soon as the cartouche is no longer in force it cannot claim to tell < réciter > the truth except by giving way < donnant lieu > to the conditions of doubt, it enters into the series as one simulacrum among others. Part of the series without paradigm, without a father. .. . It transforms the paradigm into a paradigm effect (without eliminating it, for there is always some left). (La vérité, p. 255)

In attempting to explain the invisibility of the cities—why they cannot be assigned a place—we have considered two types of discourse which operate by undercutting each other. The cities are arranged in series, a numerical arrangement which stands outside narrative structure, structure which orders fictional events in a more or less realist, human, way. In conclusion we will recall briefly how the two modes tend to recuperate each other and how they fail to do so—to the profit of postmodern fiction. Both novelistic narrative and number are systems which tend toward linearity. In Le città invisibili the series are set up in a closed form. The perfection of numbers represents a threat to always hesitant, always slippery language. The numbers, along with the proper names of the cities, set up a nominalistic system of empty signifiers whose only exchange value or meaning is their place in their own system. Unlike mathematics, where numbers and symbols have to be supported by metalanguage, the number and order of series are self-contained. The conversations of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan somehow contain the series of cities, but they neither contextualize nor economically dominate the cities: no narratorial voice can assign places to the invisible cities within Kublai's empire. The dialogues, while implying that the cities are only examples of those in the vast unknowable empire, constantly question the location and very existence of the cities and the empire. The dialogues, even if they never contain the cities in their narrative structure, use their seriality to put into motion the paradigm effects which are constantly in movement to tell the story. While the novel's putting itself into question can be called a trait of modernism and the serial-modular deconstruction of paradigm postmodern, Le città invisibili rejects categorization. This flight from containment and refusal to follow a pattern tend to tip the literary-historical scale toward the postmodern where definitions and categories will always elude us. Calvin Tompkins recently remarked that "Postmodernism, the term being advanced these days, is no more than a stop-gap, a reminder of the problem."¹¹ If we misread "reminder" as "remainder," I think we come closer to understanding the shift from modernist thinking. The "remainder" keeps in circulation the paradigm effects of modernism that continue to inform our reading of narrative strategies.

¹ Italo Calvino, Le città invisibili (Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1972), p. 110. Subsequent page references will be in the text.

² See Jack Burnham, Great Western Salt Works (N.Y.: Braziller, 1974), pp. 21-22.

³ See Jacques Derrida's study of Titus-Carmel's The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin where he works out this paradox of the model in the series. "Cartouches," in La vérité en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), pp. 213-284. Quotations from this work are my translations.

⁴ Kurt Godei's theorem or "proof," published in 1931, established the undecidability of certain laws and statements. For an exploration of its implications, see Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödei Escher, Bach (N. I.: Basic Books, 1979), especially pp. 17-19. Hofstadter succinctly restates the theorem as, "All consistent axiomatic formulations of number theory include undecidable propositions" (p. 17).

⁵ Ihab Hassan, Paracriticisms (Urbana: Univ. of Ill. Press, 1975), p. 54. It is significant that he proposes modernist "rubrics" (types, categories, unities) and postmodernist "notes" (fragments, incomplete thoughts).

⁶ S. Freud, On Dreams (N.Y.: Norton, 1952), p. 64.

⁷ Maurice Blanchot, "La voix narrative (le 'il', le neutre)," in L'entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), pp. 556-567. My translation. See also Derrida, "Living On: Border Lines," trans. J. Hulbert, in H. Bloom et al, Deconstruction and Criticism (N.Y.: Seabury Press, 1979), pp. 104-107.

⁸ Derrida, "Living On," p. 87 and passim.

⁹ See Derrida, "Parergon," in La vérité en peinture pp. 19-168, here p. 44.

¹⁰ Gore Vidal, New York Review of Books and jacket copy for Invisible Cities, trans. Wm. Weaver (N.Y.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974).

¹¹ C. Tompkins, "Matisse's Armchair," New Yorker, Feb. 25, 1980, p. 108.