Miguel de Unamuno: "Mecanópolis"
YOU COULD PUT this short story, written in 1913, down to science fiction or speculative fiction were it not for the fact that the author says he was directly inspired by the satire of Samuel Butler's Erewhon. Unamuno (1864–1936), who depicts the same horror of technology in this intense and compressed tale, was a distinguished philosopher and the author of a work on man's ambiguous relationship with God, The Tragic Sense ofLife.
"There sprang to mind the memory of a traveler's tale told me by an explorer friend who had been to Mechanopolis, the city of machines," begins Unamuno's story (translated by Patricia Hart).
Lost in the desert, dying from thirst and weakness, the traveler "began sucking at the nearly black blood that was oozing from his fingers raw from clawing about in the arid soil." He sees something in the distance. A mirage? No, an oasis. He recovers, sleeps, and when he wakes discovers a railway station with an empty train at the platform — no engineer, no other passengers. He gets in, the train departs, and later deposits him at a fabulous city. No people can been seen in the city, nor any life. "Not one dog crossed the street, nor one swallow the sky." But there are streetcars and automobiles, which stop at a given signal. He goes to a museum, which is full of paintings but sterile in mood, and then to a concert hall "where the instruments played themselves."
That he is the only person in the city is a news item in the Mechanopolis Echo: "Yesterday afternoon — and we do not know how it came about — a man arrived at our city, a man of the sort there used to be out there. We predict unhappy days for him."
Among the machines, without any human company, the traveler begins to go mad. This too is an item in the daily paper. "But all of a sudden a terrible idea struck me: what if those machines had souls, mechanical souls, and it were the machines themselves that felt sorry for me?"
In a panic, he attempts suicide by leaping in front of a streetcar, and he awakes at the oasis where he started out. He finds some Bedouins and celebrates his deliverance. "There was not one machine anywhere around us.
"And since then I have conceived a veritable hatred toward what we call progress, and even toward culture, and I am looking for a corner where I shall find a peer, a man like myself, who cries and laughs, as I cry and laugh, and where there is not a single machine and the days flow with the sweet, crystalline tameness of a street lost in a forest primeval."
This remarkable piece of fiction about an imaginary journey combines the rejection of technology that Samuel Butler satirized, the over-civilized life that Richard Burton deplored, the horror of a dehumanized urban world that Thoreau condemned, and the wish to find an unspoiled people in a remote place — an Edenic place of happy humans.
Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities
MOST OF CALVINO'S fictions could be included under the heading "Imaginary Journeys." But Invisible Cities is the most appropriate for an anthology of travel, since the narrator is Marco Polo — a variant Marco Polo, in an extended audience with a variant Kublai Khan — Khan in old age, impatient, combative, at the end of his rule. Marco Polo seems to be spinning out his description of the cities in the manner of Scheherezade, filling the time and diverting the fading emperor.
Dense, playful, paradoxical, and whimsical, the book has inspired a great deal of analysis and some pompous criticism. In general, Calvino's reputation suffers at the hands of his many well-wishers' special pleading. Much of his work is based on elaborate jokes, and the label of magical realism — which is often no more than whimsy writ large — is unhelpful. The structural flaw in the book is that it is a rather formless disquisition and a dialogue, not a narrative of discovery.
But as a set of imaginary journeys to strange cities, it is vastly enjoyable — and it must be enjoyed rather than analyzed or probed, or it will fall apart. The cities have themes — the cities representing memory, desire, signs, eyes; thin cities, trading cities, hidden cities; cities and the dead; continuous cities. Though the book is short, the 164 chapters keep repeating the cities' themes, with variations. Much could be made of the fact that all the cities, more than fifty of them, have women's names — Dorothea, Zenobia, Sophronia, Trude, and so forth. And perhaps these names stand for the siren song that the traveler hears, the romance of far-off places.
The wise observations, travelers' truths, relieve the repetitious narrative: "The more one lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there; and he retraced the stages of his journeys, and he came to know the port from which he had set sail, and the familiar places of his youth." Another: "Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places." This is ingenious and strikes me as true.
In another city, Adelma, Marco sees a vegetable vendor and recognizes his grandmother, and thinks: "You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask." That is an accurate expression of the traveler's imagination, and a polite way of illustrating Sir Richard Burton in Arabia seeing Maula Ali, "a burly savage, in whom I detected a ridiculous resemblance to the Rev. Charles Delafosse, an old and well-remembered schoolmaster."
It is misleading, I think, to look for echoes of Borges in Calvino's work. Borges creates new worlds, yet many of Calvino's cities, for all their exoticism, seem quite familiar. Here is the city of Chloe: "In Chloe, a great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversation, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping." How is this city different from Chicago or Paris?
Other cities are purely satirical — cities where fashion is an obsession; cities that do not begin or end ("Only the name of the airport changes"); cities where memories are traded.
What does it add up to? Certainly it is a critique of travelers' tales and reminiscences about cities, litanies that are no more than variations on a theme. And perhaps these cities, apparently hermetic and separate and far-flung, are the same city, observed or remembered according to a particular mood.
The book — seeming more of a puzzle than it actually is — also tells us a great deal about how we live in cities, how we adapt to new cities, how even the most terrifying cities can be habitable. My own feeling (and it seems to be Calvino's too) is that city dwellers invent the cities they live in. The great cities are just too big to be comprehended as a whole, so they are invisible, or imaginary, existing mainly in the mind. A New Yorker lives in his or her version of New York, creating a city that is familiar and unthreatening, not the enormous, multilayered, and towering place but a particular set of friends, houses, shops, restaurants, theaters, and, crucially, a complex network of routes — streets, trains, and neighborhoods that are safe and supportive. In his book of apparently extravagant fables, Calvino shows us how we accommodate ourselves to the real world.