Abstract
In Italo Calvino’s novel, Invisible Cities,1 alternating with the discourses of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan are descriptions of the cities which the Venetian had visited, both within the empire of the great Tartar and its neighbouring realms. Displayed like pieces of jade, delicately chiselled and beautifully translucent, these cities tease the mind with a rich variety of meanings. They are ‘women, past moments, doctrines, jokes, things’.2 The sites where past and present are juxtaposed or overlap, they are memory and its capacity to preserve, order and remake as well as to deceive and stultify. They are different ways of talking about the art of fiction.
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Notes
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (London: Picador, 1979). All page references included in the text are to this edition.
John Updike, ‘Metropolises of the Mind’, in Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism (London: André Deutsch, 1984) p. 462.
Margaret Laurence, ‘Sources’, in William New (ed.), Margaret Laurence (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1977) p. 13.
Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel (London: Macmillan, 1964). All page references included in the text are to the New Canadian Library Classic edition (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982).
See, for example Clara Thomas, ‘The Novels of Margaret Laurence’ (1972), rpt. in New (ed.), Margaret Laurence, pp. 55–65; Sara Maitland, ‘Afterword’, in Virago edition of The Stone Angel (London: Virago Press, 1987) pp. 265–72.
Cf. Robert Kroetsch’s comment: ‘your image of the stone angel … stone and angel. They suggest all the oppositions we are caught up in, and that of roots and motion is only one’, in ‘A Conversation with Margaret Laurence’, in Robert Kroetsch (ed.), Creation (Toronto: New Press, 1970) p. 55.
W. B. Yeats, A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1937) p. 277.
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© 1990 Shirley Chew
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Chew, S. (1990). ‘Some truer image’. In: Nicholson, C. (eds) Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Margaret Laurence. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10092-7_3
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