Under the Rule of the Great Khan: On Marco Polo, Italo Calvino and the Description of the World

God made the numbers,
all else is the work of man.

              THE NUMBER
          WERE IT TO EXIST
otherwise than a scattered hallucination of agony
    WERE IT TO COMMENCE AND CEASE
welling up yet denied and closed when in view
         at last
through some widespread profusion of rarity
    WERE IT TO BE CIPHERED

evidence of the sum if only there is one
           WERE IT TO ILLUMINATE

It had to come to this. On his deathbed Marco Polo was asked whether he had to change his accounts of Asia. Put in a rough figure, a perfectly idiomatic one at that, the answer was no, he had not told one half of what he had seen. So, let us be literal here, and above all, let us be naughty and keep up the spirit of defiance. What was it, this one half and a bit, which was never told?

Polo studies are, quite clearly, not our frame of reference, given the question we ask. Mind you, we exploit the map checks, the fieldwork, the archival sifting, the philological reconstructions carried out by Polo scholars. Without having worked for our assumptions, we simply imply the point of arrival of an entire subject, the we do have a problem expressed by those in the know.

The text. We do not have the text. The original manuscript is lost. Perhaps, the original manuscripts are lost. Nobody, in fact, can exclude there having been more than one attempt at the book. The copies of the copies. The surviving non-original manuscripts form a complex contradictory system of accretions and deletions (the work of the agents of textual corruption: the copyists, the translators, the illustrators) on what for us is the absence of the original. The title. Description of the World? Wonders of the World? Travels of Marco Polo? Il Milione? Or even, just the once, The Romance of the Great Khan? Each takes, surely, a different slant, a different appeal to the reader from the protean book. But within its bounds, past the title lines, one and one only, quite frequent term of reference: 'the book,' with something of a capital b.

The author (small a). Polo and/or Rustichello. Therefore: the authors. The latter, a kind of ghost-writer on this occasion; otherwise, a writer of epic romances in his own name. The former, a merchant, a Venetian, a subject of the Khan for some seventeen years; above all, not a writer, despite some basic travel-noting. Hence, the mismatch in expertise in that Genoa prison that brought the two together in 1298, the discontinuity in the authorial intention. What were the terms of the collaboration is unknown, but chances are that Rustichello produced the rhetoric, the amplifications, the epic, the fakes that give Messer Marco his place in Mongol history, and Polo the original bundles of loose reports, perhaps an interim primitive pre-text, an unaided first attempt at the Book.

The Asian experience, i.e., the original mystery. Suppose the three Polos—father, uncle and Marco—spent an x number of years in Western or Middle Asia, doing little or no commerce, disappearing from all records, gathering information on Further Asia in order to return with a message, an envoy to the West, in shape of the best available record of a continent they had not crossed. You have a master plan, and an absurdity. Suppose instead our trio reached China, spent a y number of years allegedly at the service of the Khan, doing little or no commerce, never making it into any local record, gathering information on the host continent in order to return with a message, an envoy to the West, in the shape of a geography of the greater part of Asia. You have got less of a master plan, and less of an absurdity, as the project could have...