Correspondence No. 10: The City of Dreadful Night, a long poem by James Thomson // Invisible Cities, a short novel by Italo Calvino
Cities have always inspired thoughts beyond the strictly urban, and today’s two works illustrate this. The fact that both of them are essentially plotless, and that characterization is basic, highlights their meditative, intellectual nature – two very contrasting essays on “cities of the mind.”
Thomson’s poem has had a notable, if somewhat subterranean, influence on modern literature. Many of the more dire and atmospheric evocations of urban life owe something to it. Thomson was an alcoholic, depressive and insomniac who probably fit the stereotype of the poet as a man unfit for life better than any other poet has. The city that he constructs out of his own mind is a reflection of his lonely, perpetually melancholy state.
The poem’s 21 individual sections (preceded by a “Proem” that sets the gloomy tone) form a series of meditations on how melancholy manifests itself. The mood is unrelenting. The sun never shines on this city as its denizens walk about lamenting their lot. A sermon preaches the consolation of suicide rather than the redeeming power of God. The city has no name, nor do the denizens – this lack of proper names contributes to the sad anonymity of everything.
Nonetheless, Thomson pays a lot of attention to the geography of the city. He describes the river, the public squares, the grand houses, and even “a suburb of the north.” These provide a setting and contribute to the overall mood. Most likely, the atmosphere of Thomson’s city is based on Victorian London where he lived, although its topography is quite different.
Turning from Thomson to Calvino is like emerging from a dungeon into a bright sunny day. Calvino goes wild with the names. In addition to our two historical protagonists Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, he gives each of his invented cities a woman’s name. The list of names resembles a roll call of the student body at a slightly exotic girls’ school – are you there Irene, Eudoxia, Chloe, Zora, Euphemia, and (newly homeless) Melania?
The structure of the book is simple on the surface and complex when you look closer. Superficially it’s a record of conversations between Marco Polo the Venetian traveler and the Emperor Kublai Khan, in which Marco describes the cities he has visited. The complexity lies in the mathematical rigor beneath the surface (you can find a description and chart of it here).
“Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice,” says Marco Polo. But is he really? The city of Trude has an airport, not something Polo’s 13th-century Venice could have boasted of. The city of Sophronia has a rollercoaster and a Ferris wheel. Descriptions of the terrain, architecture, and layout of various cities are impossible to harmonize with the Venice that actually existed at the time. This may be the biggest trick that Calvino plays: the notion that there is some commonality uniting all these cities.
Thus Calvino and Thomson both create cities of the mind, places that have never existed on earth, having the same relation to real cities as fictional characters do to actual people. But one work is an exercise in sameness, darkness, and the creation of an unvarying depressive mood, while the other actually captures, in its poetic way, the wide variety of actual urban experience.