CAPITULO III: PARTE EXPERIMENTAL
3.2. Análisis de Cianuro en Laboratorio Químico
Much has been written about the relationship between word and image in Calvino’s 1972 work, which represents perhaps the apogee of his “visual writing style.”14 The cities are emblematic, each enhanced by “the space
that remained around it, a void not fi lled with words” (Invisible Cities 38). The discovery of each city’s special quality or defi ning characteristic requires a mental tabula rasa akin to the desert from which the traveler often arrives to the cities. It is a joy to reach Isidora after wandering in the “wild regions” (8), or Dorothea, which evokes desire for the man who has been following the caravan routes through the desert (Fig. 3.1).15 Lal-
age epitomizes the formation of the image in the arid wasteland of Khan’s mind: “in the midst of a fl at and yellow land, dotted with meteorites and
Figure 3.1 Paul Maymont, Ville des sables (City in the Sands). In Michel Ragon, Histoire mondiale de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme modernes. Courtesy of Éditeur
erratic boulders, I saw from a distance the spires of a city rise, slender pin- nacles made in such a way that the moon in her journey can rest now on one, now on another, or sway from the cables of the cranes.”16
The gradual apparition of architectural images had been theorized earlier in Superstudio’s 1969 manifesto, which defi ned human history as “a par- able of formalization, so it is a story of deserts, both natural and artifi cial [interior, mental desert]” (Superstudio 127). In Superstudio’s comic-strip drawings there appears, amidst material and mental deserts, a monolithic square block that gradually divides into smaller and smaller units which then combine to generate the forms of architecture (127–28). Staging a car journey “into the realms of reason” (128), the “artifi cial or interior deserts” (128) of the mind, Superstudio captured the appearance of “light images of dream architecture” (128), “the catalogues of illusions and utopias” (128). Analogously, the emblematic nature of Calvino’s city descriptions kindle the imagination, allowing readers to experience and enjoy the narration of Polo’s imagined journeys: “the descriptions of cities Marco Polo visited had this virtue: you could wander through them in thought, become lost, stop and enjoy the cool air, or run off” (38).
Lynch’s parallel emphasis on the city as an aesthetic object to be looked at, recalled, and enjoyed suggests that the 1972 work’s descriptions were informed by the early wave of what is known today as postmodern urban- ism. Calvino’s thinking on the imagination and literature foregrounds vis-
ibility, which is best understood as the literary correlate of what Lynch
termed imageability, that is, the quality of a city that permits the resident or visitor a clear, legible, and recognizable image of itself.17 Calvino’s Eudoxia
is an invisible city in which a carpet preserves the urb’s design form. As in Lynch’s mental image, the fi gure on the carpet maintains a clarity and vividness impossible to grasp when residents are immersed in the commo- tion of urban life (Invisible Cities 96–97). The novelist called for “clear, incisive” images of the city (Six Memos 55); for cities of a “well-defi ned, memorable, and self-suffi cient form, the icastic form” (92), which implies an attention to what urbanists in the late ’60s called form quality.
According to Lynch, the fi rst criterion of imageability was a form quality characterized by singularity, which renders the urban element “remark- able, noticeable, vivid, recognizable” (Image of the City 105). It is obtained through “fi gure-background clarity: sharpness of boundary . . . , closure . . . , contrast of surface, form, intensity . . . ” (105). The fi gures of Calvino’s cities fulfi ll Lynch’s criterion in that they stand out in the Khan’s vague and formless mental landscape: “in the Khan’s mind the empire was refl ected in a desert of labile and interchangeable data, like grains of sand, from which there appeared, for each city and province, the fi gures evoked by the Venetian’s logogriphs” (Invisible Cities 22). In the Khan’s desertlike imagi- nation, Polo’s cities are the epitome of singularity; their brevitas and their concise poetic tenor endows them with “the power of emblems, which once seen, cannot be forgotten or confused” (22).18
Visibility emerges also from a language that construes space through refer- ences to extension, color, form, spatial relationships, and orientation (Jansen 77). Calvino’s allusions to the shape of the city and its architecture lead us to Lynch’s second criterion of imageability, which he termed form simplicity, or “clarity and simplicity of visible form in the geometrical sense.” Such a criterion is immediately recognizable in several of Calvino’s “colored minia- tures” (Invisible Cities 136). Dorothea, for example, is painted in Calvino’s words as a city in which “four aluminum towers rise from its walls fl ank- ing seven gates with spring-operated drawbridges that span the moat whose water feeds four green canals which cross the city, dividing it into nine quar- ters, each with three hundred houses and seven hundred chimneys” (9). In Hypatia the traveler climbs “the porphyry steps of the palace with the high- est domes,” then crosses “six tiled courtyards with fountains,” and fi nally reaches a “central hall . . . barred by iron gratings” (47). Olivia’s prosperity is icastically sketched in “fi ligree palaces with fringed cushions on the seats by the mullioned windows” (61); and Fedora, as will be seen later (ch. 4), is simply a gray stone metropolis in whose center “stands a metal building with a crystal globe in every room” (32).
Lynch’s third criterion of imageability was continuity, the “repetition of rhythmic interval” (106). The descriptions of the cities, in fact, are divided into nine chapters (ten descriptions in the fi rst and last chapters, and fi ve in the others). Each of the nine chapters is encased within the “frame” of the book, that is, prefaced and followed by a short excerpt of dialogue between Polo and Khan. Their speculations are therefore fragmented and interspersed throughout the book, establishing conceptual affi nities among the frame and the cities. Polo’s reports about the cities are delivered the- matically under nine rubrics; the cities belonging to the same rubric are not only rhythmically encased in a precise geometrical scheme, but also organi- cally connected to each other and to the whole through various intratextual lacings and allusions. Continuity in an urban environment was bolstered by similarity and analogy according to Lynch (106), and the web of relation- ships and echoes between Calvino’s urban icons satisfi es this requirement.
Still another of Lynch’s criteria, names and meanings, pervades the 1972 fi ction. “Names,” Lynch explained, “ . . . strongly reinforce such sugges- tions toward identity or structure as may be latent in the physical form itself” (108). In Calvino’s work, the etymology of the city’s name and the contents of the city’s description are frequently in accord, revealing an intricate grid of analogies and oppositions.19 A few examples will suffi ce:
Diomira, “a city with sixty silver domes, bronze statues of all the gods” (7), conjures its spiritual identity through its name: Dio mira, or “God is watching.” Despina is named after the nymph born to Poseidon (god of the sea) and Demetra (goddess of agriculture), a peculiarity refl ected in the city’s contrasting surf-and-turf nature. Euphemia, the city loved by those who enjoy telling stories about their lives, is a name composed of eu (“well”) and phemí (“to speak or tell”). Aglaura is derived from the Greek
aglaós, meaning “shining” or “resplendent,” creating a strict correspon-
dence between name and content, just as Lynch prescribed, for the name matches what is described as Aglaura’s sporadic revelation of “something unmistakable, rare, perhaps magnifi cent” (Invisible Cities 68).
In order to foster imageability, as it was defi ned by the emerging post- modern paradigm in urban studies, and the reader’s faculty of image making through the literary text, Calvino immerses readers in Marco Polo’s poietic enterprise (Pocci 112). Polo has built up his “inner city” (the city of his imagi- nation) and now trains his interlocutor Kublai Khan in the art of inner vision: he injects views (or mental images), as Barthes defi ned the discontinuous yet contiguous images suggested to the human imagination by Loyola’s Spiritual
Exercises. Polo does not report on travels that he has physically experienced;
rather, he intentionally and rationally conjures up the phantasmata that have become part of his mental patrimony: “perhaps, Kublai thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind’s phantasms” (22).20 These Lucretian
simulacra projected onto the screen of the mind are in fact “rising within
the confi nes of empire” (Invisible Cities 164). It is a mental space that recalls Lynch’s discussion of the mind of city dwellers as the place where a city, like a page in a book, was to be visually apprehended as a pattern of related sym- bols. Arnheim, on the other hand, while working in 1966 on his theory of visual thinking, namely, the ways in which we think through mental images, had connected his refl ections to pre-Socratic philosophy, in particular Dem- ocritus’s theory of eidola (or replicas).21
“Your atlas,” we read in a phrase that conveys a Lucretian reversibil- ity between atomism (res) and language (verba), “preserves the differences intact: their assortment of qualities which are like the letters in a name” (137).22 In lieu of lengthy explanations, this atlas of heterogeneous spaces
investigates the city’s reason for existence and directs the reader’s atten- tion to a multiplicity of urban and social vocations. Thus, visibility at once embodies one of Calvino’s most prized literary principles and defi es the standardization and stultifying homogeneity that were weighing down urban centers as well as urban planning and design during the gestation of Calvino’s novel. In these twin and overlapping contexts, it is of enormous relevance that at the beginning stage of writing, when Calvino was wres- tling with the frame of Invisible Cities, he conceived of Khan as an urban planner and builder: “Khan designs . . . [and] builds cities” (Calvino qtd. in Barenghi, “Gli abbozzi” 81).
Polo’s endeavor is not less demiurgic than if the novel actually reported on buildings built or under construction outside of the novel. Indeed, Khan’s mind approximates that Fryean mineral world to which the images of cities give shape.23 Polo’s poietic enterprise consists therefore in the cre-
ation of worlds.24 He and Khan are said to be overlooking “only the lake of
[their] mind,” harboring “within [themselves] this silent shade” (117). They explore the empire of the imaginary in a fi ctitious space “in the shadow of [their] lowered eyelids” (103). They share with readers an inner space where
“in the midst of the din and the throng, [they] are allowed to withdraw,” and “each time [they] half close [their] eyes . . . to ponder what [they] are seeing and living, to draw conclusions, to contemplate from the distance” (104). This lightness, or detachment, likens them to the inhabitants of Irene, who look down on their city from “the edge of a plateau” (124). Polo’s images are the Lucretian mental projection (animi iniectus) that make humanly possible the cognition of the invisible or what was not immediately visible, in spite of the weight of perceptual automatism. All of this, of course, was one with Kepes’s goal of cultivating the imaginative and visual abilities of city dwellers in order to make urban life more communicative and richer in meaning. It is not by chance, then, that Polo’s mental projections have been credited with establishing an entirely new relationship between language and action (Dombroski and Miller 167) (Fig. 3.2).
An eminent Calvino scholar has rightfully singled out the importance of the mental projection of images induced in the novel’s reader.25 What
has gone critically unremarked, and is no less important, is how resolutely Lynch’s description of the individual’s interaction with the urban environ- ment is refl ected in Calvino’s staging of Polo’s interaction with the world and of the reader’s interaction with the urban images projected by Polo. “Environmental images,” the urbanist explained, “are the result of a two- way process between the observer and his environment. The environment suggests distinctions and relations, and the observer—with great adaptabil- ity and in the light of his own purposes—selects, organizes, and endows with meaning what he sees” (Lynch 6). The mental operation required of Calvino’s readers—the three-dimensional reimag(in)ing of images, archi- tectures, and urban morphologies—constitutes a resemanticization that, once again, has a historical referent in De Fusco and Choay’s calls to resemanticize the language of architecture and urbanism.26 Just like Polo
Figure 3.2 Paul Maymont, Megastructure lunaire (Lunar Megastructure). In Michel Ragon, Histoire mondiale de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme modernes. Courtesy of Éditeur Casterman.
restores meaning to the cities in the novel, so readers too learn to extract the “sign” from the obsolete urban language and to transform it by renew- ing its meaning, inserting it into a new syntax, and ultimately handing it back to its referent.
Beyond visibility or imageability, another quality achieved by the novel’s Lucretian lightness is variety, or multiplicity, which is conveyed through a vast array of urban icons that defy the image-effacing anti-city condemned by the emerging postmodern paradigm in urbanism.27 Such was the sec-
ond benefi t that Calvino hoped to convey to his readers who were learn- ing mode utopique, and here Invisible Cities again draws theoretical and practical sustenance from Lucretian physics: De rerum natura is, fi rst and foremost, a celebration of nature’s variety or diversity.28 Perhaps the most
widely enjoyed aspect of Calvino’s work, variety was also a trait heralded by the very urbanists’ work he was reading while he wrote the novel. Lynch asserted that more variety in design and architectural terms would provide “all [the inhabitants] perceptual material which is congenial to their own particular way of looking at the world” (110–11). Jacobs complained that a dearth of multiplicity and complexity had transformed the urban and subur- ban landscape into an “unnourishing gruel” (7). Indeed, the bulk of Death
and Life addresses “how to accommodate city diversity [diversity of uses,
of relationships, of images, of people] well in visual terms” (Jacobs 229). It should also be remembered how Simoncini railed against Los Angeles’s gray look and its obsessive acentric continuum. In the face of this “evil,” he lamented, even a “place of psychological alienation” like Disneyland becomes an “artifi cial paradise” simply by appearing to offer a bit of variety.29 Sim-
oncini, moreover, exemplifi es how the critical literature on the city in those years itself constituted a hymn to visual diversity, thanks not only to the eye-catching images of utopian cities but also to the frequent illustrations of classical ideal cities and avant-garde cities.30
Generating urban diversity also implied generating a diversity of cities, the absence of which Calvino’s fi ction deemed punishable by death—that is, urban disintegration and sprawling monstrosity: “the catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins. In the last pages of the atlas there is an outpouring of networks without beginning or end, cities in the shape of Los Angeles, in the shape of Kyōto-Ōsaka, without shape” (Invisible Cities 139). Devoid of imageability and multiplicity, Zoe, Penthesilea, and Trude are daunting cities of indivisible existence and mental confusion in which all distinction or separation has been erased.31 At the other end of the spectrum, Calvino
chose Venice as a metaphor for complexity, or “the fi rst anti-Euclidean city,” in his 1974 essay “Venezia: Archetipo e utopia” (“Venice: Archetype and Utopia”; 2688). Just as Lynch had deemed Venice the imageable city par excellence, so Calvino singled out Venice’s “favorable mental climate”: its “special geometry that sparks [the] imagination to travel unaccustomed
paths” (2688). Venice’s “pluridimensional human environment” constituted a bulwark against effacement and sameness: “the extraordinary effect of Venice is truly diversifi cation in the extreme, non-uniformity in a homo- geneous experience” (2689–90). He also mentioned another characteristic of his ideal city: “there is nothing limitless on the level of sensation, space opens and closes before us, always in diverse confi gurations” (2688).
Published only two years after the novel, Calvino’s “Venice: Archetype and Utopia” sheds light on his fi ctionalization of Mumford’s two urban imperatives: a container of multiple dimensions (the macrostructure of
Invisible Cities) and multiple focal points (the microtexts or descriptions
of cities).32 The forms of the visible undergo a relentless transformation in
Invisible Cities, deconstructing the monolithic bulkiness of the city in the
multiplicity of its visual spectacle. (All of this was, it should be remem- bered, in harmony also with Jacobs, who had defended the social value of variety in architecture and of mixed-use zoning.) This Lucretian pulveriza- tion of visible forms begins with the landscapes or topographies on which Calvino’s cities are located (gulfs, hills, plains, riverbanks). It extends to the specifi c shapes of the cities, to their varied architectures and materials, and to the assortment of human types, professions, and trades within them.33
Facing the boredom and sterility conveyed by modernist architecture, especially the “bare, echoing, arid spaces” (MacEwen 13) of its repetitive and rigorously geometrical glass, concrete, and steel buildings now immor- talized by director Michelangelo Antonioni, Calvino insisted on a varie- gated morphology for his urban icons, even indulging in enumerations that might convey an impression of totality. Phyllis, for example, is the city where the eyes “rejoice in observing all the bridges over the canals, each different from the others: cambered, covered, on pillars, on barges, suspended, with tracery balustrades” (Invisible Cities 90). Multiplicity delighted its resi- dents and visitors: “what a variety of windows looks down on the streets: mullioned, Moorish, lancet, pointed, surmounted by lunettes or stained- glass roses; how many kinds of pavement cover the ground: cobbles, slabs, gravel, blue and white tiles. At every point the city offers surprises to your view” (Invisible Cities 90).34
Marshaling a bounty of diverse construction materials must have been especially important to Calvino because the novel delights in fi lling archi- tectural and urban spaces with a dazzling array of materials. Doubtless this was partly in response to the spread of imposing cement apartment buildings that had made modern architecture seem inhuman to urbanists in the late ’60s and early ’70s (MacEwen 14). In addition, the author himself would comment in his chapter on lightness that “the weight of matter [in Cavalcanti] is dissolved because the materials . . . can be many, all inter- changeable” (Six Memos 13). In the novel, Calvino’s urban icons fragment the weight of construction for readers by conjuring the visual aspects and physical sensations of many, interchangeable materials: silver, bronze, tin, and crystal in Diomira; zinc in Zaira; copper and glass in Zora; iron and
lime in Despina; porphyry, majolica, and basalt in Hypathia; alabaster, coral, and glass in Moriana; marble, wood, brocade, glass, and velvet in Clarice; gold, silver and diamond in Beersheba; agate, onyx, chrysoprase, and all the precious stones in Anastasia; tin, plastic, and porcelain in Leo- nia; and clay in Argia. Most conspicuous, within Calvino’s visual indexing of urban and social alternatives, is the absence of cement.
Variety steadfastly challenges the threat of saturation and lack of differ- entiation in social space, as Calvino faces off with a central preoccupation of the era: overpopulation. The demographic explosion was dreaded as much as cementifi cation and urban sprawl. Superstudio’s Continuous Monument,