Essay - Marco Polo: the Explorer in His Own Voice and the...

Marco Polo: The explorer in his own voice and the ***** of Italo Calvino

Both Marco Polo's The Travels: Marco Polo and the Italian postmodern author Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities relate the exploits of the 12th century adventurer Marco Polo as tales of wonder ***** amazement. But Calvino's novel creates a state of postmodern wonder in the reader. Obvious fantasy presented as fact causes the ***** to ponder unstable nature of truth and factual history of any k*****d, especially in the subjective narrative of a travelogue. Calvino depicts Marco ***** as chronicling the life of different cities he may or may not have visited to t***** aging Kublai Khan, whose Eastern empire is in decl*****e. In his actual narrative of the historical explorer, the author Marco Polo attempts to establish some empirical veracity for his quest to travel through ***** Far East. His audience is Western, and he ***** to secure, rather than destabilize the existence of the his*****rical ***** of his journeys.

********** two author's narratives of Polo's fantastic adventures in ***** Far *****, one medieval, one contemporary, depict Polo as a kind ***** storyteller. But ***** Marco Polo describes ***** adventures to ***** Khan, the great leader, their debates take on a philosophic*****l character in Calvino. In his ***** Marco Polo tells of what he has seen ***** the West with the eye of an anthropologist, observing strange life in the East, and also with the eye ***** a man who is judging as well as narrating what he ***** seen over ***** p*****t years.

Rather than a mere cataloguer of strange customs, foibles, and figures, ***** attempts to ***** the act of recalling a journey into the realm of the poetic and philosophical. It ***** ***** what is told, but how unbelievable ***** is narrated seems to the reader, that is Calvino's main interest as a ***** author. Invisible Cities s*****s that even the unbelievable can be framed in the guise ***** truth, if what happens occurs far away and long ago. Even what is a false travel narrative can ***** fasc*****ating, and have a kind of metaphorical truth, or seem like the *****, if the teller frames the tale in a particularly compelling matter. Thus despite its lush, strange, ***** arresting metaphorical imagery, Calvino's tale ***** related in far more matter-*****-fact, ***** flat prose, ***** while the s*****ries Calv*****o's 'Polo' chronicles are more fantastic than the supposedly real events Polo witne*****ed. Calvino's Polo does not de*****d that ***** ***** believe what he *****ars, rather Polo and Khan debate the ***** of truth for reader's observation.

Calvino knows that ***** story is meant to be fiction, and that he must captivate his more ja***** modern reader with even ***** strange ********** he has no responsibility of convincing the reader he really went to the ***** East. The East is explored already, but Marco Polo in h***** vision still has access to the realm of the *****. "In Ol*****da, ***** you go out with a magnifying glass *****