The Hierarchal Order of Heteroglossia: from War of Languages to Tautology in Invisible Cities

Giving special privileges to Italo Calvino’s primary sense of vision, a plethora of literary and artistic critics concentrate on the monstrous possibility of the descriptive discourses and imagocentric proposals of his works. However, this study intends to examine three different orders of heteroglossia that are presented in his Invisible Cities. Mikhail Bakhtin sharply distinguishes human sciences from other exact and abstract sciences in terms of the specificity of the former’s object, which is a person, and its distinctive method according to which one understanding is opposed to the other. In spite of these points of differences, the human sciences have a contradictory tendency to reach the two extreme limits of the sciences of nature and mind that is evident in the conversation of this novel’s two major characters – Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. These limits are respectively the consequences of the natural sciences’ reification and the mental sciences’ personification. Accordingly, this paper intends to argue that these characters’ dialogues together with the general narrator’s interferences create a hierarchy of Heteroglossia, ranging from Roland Barthes’ war of languages to Bakhtin’s hybrid construction and then zero heteroglossia or tautology.