Epilogue: A Comparative Palimpsest of Urban Plenitude and Difference

Abstract

As Benjamin Linder (this volume) and other readers of Invisible Cities have rightly noted, Italo Calvino’s novel seems to produce a shock of recognition for the prototypical understanding of a given city, every city known as well as represented, and of the very experience of living in, traveling through, or even imagining them. The novel’s mathematical and symmetrical structure and its elusive sensual suggestiveness combine to make it a highly multi-generative text at different levels and scales. And serious implications arise for all urban scholars for devising a comparative framework from the novel. The challenge, however, would be to stabilize Invisible Cities’ multi-generative suggestiveness and to focus on just one or two clusters of urban experience that might then be contrasted across different cities or even within different sectors of the same city. And so, for example, what might spatial traversal and the means of locomotion open for us with respect to such experiences in different cities or within them? More importantly, how are spatial traversal and the means of locomotion to be understood as a morphology of forms, that is to say, as subject to the kind of structuralist and poststructuralist analyses we are accustomed to in the study of narrative?