Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [182]
Rustichello reveals Marco as volatile, high-strung, self-dramatizing, and subject to endless mood swings. He captures Marco’s nonstop rush of memory and language, as well as his addiction to overstatement. Marco’s naïveté shines through undiminished, especially the sense that he never met a ruler he did not admire wholeheartedly. The Marco of the manuscript talks too loudly and quickly; he likes to throw his voice, and to mimic whenever he can. Unlike many compulsive talkers, he rarely repeats himself, and he is fully aware that he is spinning one of the greatest stories ever told. Beneath the lively surface of the narrative a different Marco can be glimpsed: a person of lucid intelligence, phenomenal memory, and, if he relied on records kept in China as he tells his story, attention to detail. Although he gives in to the passions of the moment—hero worship of Kublai Khan, fascination with the countless women who cross his path—he is rarely fooled in the long run, but remains skeptical. The impulsive sensualist grows into a seeker after truth and spiritual fulfillment, goals that prove to be far more elusive than the profitable trading that is the basis of his livelihood. With his quicksilver intelligence, Marco constantly evaluates the sights and people he encounters, and he tries to make them comprehensible to his readers. Like any diligent reporter, he takes care to furnish the who’s, what’s, and where’s of his story, but he is much weaker on the when’s, for he does not provide a true chronology of his decades in China, with the exception of his voyage into and out of Asia. Rather, he assembles thematic descriptions of places he visited or heard about, studded with anecdotes and bits of history that he picked up along the way.
The impassioned storyteller is never less than chatty, and often rises to great heights of eloquence as the recording angel of vanished civilizations. If this narrative as rendered by Rustichello is anything like the tales Marco spontaneously told his Genoese captors, it is easy to understand why they were transfixed. Marco’s hybrid persona, part Venetian, part Mongol, imparts a distinctive flavor to his account; no other record of a pilgrim’s progress through China matches his zest, his profusion of data, and his imaginative sweep.
No storyteller ever had a surer sense that an audience would materialize, prepared to hang on every word. Marco exudes confidence that he is writing for the present, and for history; his chronicle seems, among other things, an obvious bid for fame, a stratagem to perpetuate his name. If that indeed was his goal, he succeeded perhaps more than he imagined, for “Marco Polo” has become synonymous with travel both real and metaphorical, and the peaceful exploration of the unknown.
Throughout the brief chapters of his account, Marco displays an exaggerated sense of self. He places himself center stage during the great events of his day—battles, court intrigues, scandals—when the historical record often shows that his role was minor or nonexistent: that he was more onlooker than actor. Nevertheless, his penchant for self-aggrandizement, which is startlingly apparent compared with the self-effacing tone of accounts left by other travelers