Time, Space and Human Experience: A Heterotopian Analysis of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities

Abstract

The dialectic tension between space and time has always manifested in literature. The postmodern times reimagined and reanalyzed the society’s spatial structure and customs. Michael Foucault coined the term “heterotopia” to describe regions outside of society’s customary constraints. These regions are physically or socially separated from the rest of the community and are frequently accompanied by a sense of otherness or distinction. Heterotopia are counter sites to all the other real sites that can be found within a culture which are “simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (Foucault 3). It not only juxtaposes “different spaces and locations that are incompatible with each other,” but also forms a “pure symmetry of heterochronisms” (Foucault 334). Italo Calvino’s postmodern novel Invisible Cities uses various ways to explore the notion of heterotopia philosophically. This paper seeks to examine the various heterotopias and their purposes in the postmodern novel Invisible Cities. It also seeks to present the service of literature as a mirror to reflect the postmodern times’ social, spatial, and cultural transformation.