The Groundless Landscape of Time: A Deleuzian Reading of Calvino's Invisible Cities
Date Issued
2016
Date
2016
Author(s)
Tsai, Shan-ni
Abstract
The structure of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities corresponds to the two main characters’ views which are reflected by the two parts of the novel’s design. While Kublai Khan initiates the dialogue depicted in the frame to look for a general pattern for his empire, Marco Polo responds with many disparate stories. Between the two, a landscape of Invisible Cities emerges. In accordance with the unfolding of the stories created by the two opposed characters, the landscape is both monist and pluralist. This thesis explores how the landscape links up and recreates monism and pluralism by examining the time of Story in the novel. In the light of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of time, the novel is read to foreground a time of Story that constantly unveils aspects of itself and unfolds into a multi-layered landscape. The landscape is revealed in several stages in the novel: when Kublai’s totalizing monism is undermined in the dialogue with Polo, the stories of the cities with disparate durations told by the foreign traveler form a landscape of time as a whole. Being the most plural, the whole makes monism and pluralism indistinguishable. Such a landscape is later doubly reflected by Kublai’s atlas containing pure differences and Polo’s stories achieving local consistencies between disparate details; monism and pluralism thus fold each other and become a pluralist monism and a monist pluralism. These two modes reveal two distinct aspects of the time of the self-becoming of stories, making monism and pluralism aspects of each other instead of contraries. This thesis examines these aspects of the groundless landscape of time unfolded by the stories to discuss the problem of monism and pluralism in the novel.
Subjects
Italo Calvino
Invisible Cities
Gilles Deleuze
monism
pluralism
time
Story
Type
thesis
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