Definitely one of the cat-and-mouse games between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo is him trying to pin down just what is real in the stories. He wants to totally possess his lands not just through conquest but also through knowledge and understanding of them. Some of the tales may be baloney but not all. After all, even if Marco Polo is just associatively spinning tales GPT style, his “training data” inputs had to come from somewhere. Going meta, we the readers holding this absurd book are in the position of k.k. and Calvino the writer is m.p.
Invisible cities is fundamentally postmodern. Calvino is constantly putting forward that he is writting about imaginary cities, which are both literrary tricks, conceptual allegories, references and products of the story teller own experience. This is true of all fiction but here it's laid bare.
