Talking From Experience

   After reading the big "twist" in which Marco Polo tells Khan that he is talking only about Venice and that his cities doesnt exist but his ideas do. He also says that He is describing from Venice, more specifically from his memories. The thing that shocked me most is that i had already erased both Kublai Khan and Marco Polo from the stroy and just replaced them with myself and Calvino. So when I read this I saw that Calvino was actually talking from experience. He is talking about things he has been through and saw, he obviously hasn't gone to the cities he describes but he has been through the things the city means. This quote from an interview before writing Invisible Cities exeplifies the two most key concepts of the writing in the book: Metaliterature and memory analysis.

 "I began doing what came most naturally to me – that is, following the memory of the things I had loved best since boyhood. Instead of making myself write the book I ought to write, the novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I myself would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic."

  In the last sentence he completely explains his use of Kublai Khan and of metaiterature by seeing and writing the book from both a writers perspective (Marco Polo) and as a reader's perspective (Kublai Khan). In the previous acknowledges the importance from memories and how he can draw them with a present persepective to achieve an analysis with endless conclusions that vary on the moment you analyze them. To understand the book a level deeper we must see where it came from, where the memories originated. The key to this is in the first sentence. Following Freudian principles childhood tends to leave the strongest and resiliant scar in memory, both conciously and uncounciously.

  I will not atempt to psyco-analyze Calvino because I have not studied four years of neurology and psychology and because I would just scratch a surface of what would be the ocean frozen over.