Power and Russian Dolls

I don’t know if a matryoshka doll is a good metaphor for metaliterature. Maybe not, but metaliterature has a sort of “matryoshkan” feel to it, because its writings about writings, like a doll inside a doll.   Let’s say Invisible Cities is a three doll Matryoshka, meaning we have three levels of understanding the book. The first doll, the big doll containing the other two, is  literal understanding. We see Marcopolo telling Kublai Khan about the cities he has visited, cities are cities, Marco Polo is Marco Polo, and Kublai Khan is Kublai Khan. Then there’s a second understanding on these objects. Maybe Marco Polo represents something else, and so do Khan and the cities. In the second doll, (figurative understanding) Marcopolo is the representation of knowledge, and hence power, because his words control the actual power which is Khan. And the cities are the way to control Khan, meaning the way to power. And in the third doll now relates directly to the reader. The reader is Kublai Khan, and the writer Marco Polo. The cities are life, and what we understand in this next level, is that the world is just as the writer portrays it, meaning he has control over our world, and yet the reader was infinite power of interpretation.

“At this point Kublai Khan interrupted him or imagined interrupting him, or Marco Polo imagined himself interrupted…”

This sentence proves that the reader can never be sure of the writer’s intention and the writer can never guess what the reader will think. This is because when we read we look at the story from a vantage point

“My gaze is that of a man meditating, lost in thought--I admit it.”

Therefore, we use our memories to recreate what the writer portrays. So our relationship with the text is very private. The writer is impotent towards our interpretation, and it can never go ahead of everybody to guess what people might get out of his writing. “…the emperor wanted to follow more clearly a private train of thought; so Marco's answers and objections took their place in a discourse already proceeding on its own, in the Great Khan's head.”

Upon understanding this, the story takes an entirely different turn. We are now reading about reading. Italo Calvino was writing about writing. Inside the third matryoshka is ourselves, and now we have to figure out how the meaning of the book applies to our life. 

Zaira-Bogotá

Comparing Zaira and Bogota is quite irresistible. As soon as I read that the invisible city consists on “relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past” I thought about my own city, and how this description applies perfectly to it. My father once said Bogota is an old man. He didn’t explain any further, but with time I have come to understand this metaphor thoroughly. Much like Marco Polo’s signs and emblems, this metaphor became primordial to me when attempting to understand the city, because as said in the book “emblems,…once seen cannot be forgotten or confused.”

Therefore, Bogota is like Zaira because “the city however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the antennas of the lightning rods… every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.”

We see this in the streets of Bogota, where things are ever changing, but space is absolute. The buildings on the streets, publicity and bars might have changed, just like an aging man’s skin wrinkles. However, the streets- the space- where memories locate remain. The man’s body is the streets, superficially changing, but in essence the same. In Bogotá there are few places today you can walk by and are exactly the same they were twenty-five years ago. But every street is a setting for infinite memories. “A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past.” Same case applies for Bogota. Bogotá is a nostalgic old man, whose memories are distant and beautiful because he was young in them. Every citizen has a special relationship with space, and no matter how much it has changed, it can still see it as it rests in its mind. My mother, an especially nostalgic woman, has often flashbacks while driving, where she sees the streets of Bogotá as they were in her youth. This goes to proof that everyone has its own version of Bogotá. To understand this city, we must look at its past.