Reading a Postmodernist novel: If on a winter’s night a traveller

Shreyasi Mitra

 

Contrary to my fears, Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller is quite an enjoyable novel, despite being a typical postmodernist fictional work. Postmodernism is a very diffuse and sometimes confusing term, with each creative person moulding it in their own way. I deliberately used the term ‘creative person’, because postmodernism encompasses all departments of life–be it painting, music, sociology, architecture, history and of course, literature as poetry, fiction or short story.

The idea of postmodernism is obviously time-bound by the idea of modernism. If the first half of the 20th Century was dominated (excuse me for using this term, which is anathema to both modernists and postmodernists) by great writers, particularly T.S. Eliot, W.B Yeats, W.H. Auden, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, to name a few. These writers, who suffered the cataclysmic psychological trauma of two World Wars, were mainly searching a form which could rebuild human society in more acceptable terms. To quote Eliot, the society appeared like a wasteland, where the modern man was trying to piece out “a heap of broken images” into a comprehensible whole (Eliot “The Wasteland”)

Postmodernists did not accept any single meaningful idea of reality or truth. Nevertheless, Calvino while being true to his concept of postmodernism, in his apparently chaotic conglomeration of facts and figures, presents his readers with an enjoyable experience.

J.A Cuddon characterises postmodernism as having an inclination for “parody and pastiche”, blurring the earlier watertight division between ‘high’ art and ‘low’ art (533). Here, Calvino does create a pastiche and challenges the real (or the elusive) reader to take it as they will.

Fed as I was with Roland Barthes’ The Death of the Author which proclaimed the supremacy of individual readers, I was not surprised to be confronted with the Calvino’s first sentence,

“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveller” (1).I felt that a friendly relationship would develop between the reader and the narrator.

Here the challenge starts, when I discovered that the unnamed, elusive Reader, whom I foolishly thought to be myself, cannot seem to progress reading ten novels by supposedly ten different authors, beyond their first chapters. In his quest to find out the identity of the author and the complete stories, he meets the Other Reader, Ludmilla. The Reader’s search for coherence mirrors his own relationship with her. Although he never finds the remainder of the novels, he creates his own happy ending with Ludmilla.

This novel by Calvino, originally published in Italian in 1979 in the post-war, post-Mussolini period, is seemingly anti-domination in its construction. Stepping aside from the conventional narrative in either third or first person, Calvino uses the second person narrative. The voice of the narrator seems to suggest to the Reader inside the book, and to some extent, the reader outside the book, what the best course of action would be, instead of imposing any fixed opinion on us. This approach reminds me of Raymond Queneau’s  A Story As You Like It, where the reader gets the choice of reading a story of either three alert peas or three big skinny beanpoles or three middling mediocre bushes, and consequently, choose one of the two options presented in each line throughout the stories to reach the outcome (55-56).

According to biographical details, Calvino was a member of the French literary group Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or ‘the primer of potential literature’) founded by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Thus it is not surprising that Calvino would be inspired by the various experimental practices in literature developed and honed by this group of mathematicians and writers.

In an earlier novel by Calvino, Invisible Cities, the Contents page appears meticulous and mathematical. It also allows the reader to read the book either in a linear fashion, following the chapter numbers, or thematically, in a non-linear fashion. Therefore, it is not surprising that the chapter arrangement in his next novel, If on a winter’s night a traveller, would follow a unique pattern as well. As in his earlier novel, Invisible Cities, Calvino allows his readers the option of skipping the unnumbered chapters as and when they want, without detracting from the pleasure of reading.

However, the unnumbered chapters contain the stories from genres like mystery to historical romance to thriller to Japanese erotica, to apocalyptic dystopian fiction, that break off at the climax every time, much to the reader’s disappointment. Interestingly, in its totality, the journey begins and ends with the Reader reading Calvino’s eponymous book. Our role as readers is to decide whether we wish to focus on the novel as gestalt, the organic whole, or regard the individual fragments as the crux of the narrative. Towards the end of the book, we finally realize that we can knit the names of the ten incomplete novels into a coherent introduction of another story, as:

If on a winter’s night a traveller, outside the town of Malbork, leaning from the steep slope without fear of wind or vertigo, looks down in the gathering shadow in a network of lines that enlace, in a network of lines that intersect, on a carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon around an empty grave—what story down there awaits its end? (Calvino 258)

I personally feel that the book becomes even more enjoyable, if we consider it in its entirety. The multiple extracts from the novels are merely digressions. The story of the Reader is more important than finding the remaining fragments of the ten stories, or even discovering the true identity of their authors, if they exist at all.

In fact, Calvino includes clues in the numbered chapters, to keep us guessing the theme and style of the story that is about to emerge in the following chapter. Most of the time, the Other Reader, Ludmilla expresses her desire to read a particular type of genre, and the author fulfils her wish with a befitting story. Let me cite two such instances.

In chapter [3] of the book, Ludmilla tells the Reader , “…Still I wish the things I read weren’t so solid you can touch them; I would like to feel a presence around them, something else, you don’t quite know what, the sign of some unknown thing…” (Calvino 46). Here Calvino makes Ludmilla express a typical Postmodernist writer’s view about touching the elusive. In the following chapter, ‘Leaning from the steep slope’, we are given a taste of the first chapter of a mystery novel, which evokes suspense through setting and mood.

Again in chapter [7], Ludmilla says that she likes books “where all mysteries and the anguish pass through a precise and cold mind, without shadows, like the mind of a chessplayer” (Calvino 157). But life is not a game of chess. That is where a postmodernist novelist can play an elusive game with his readers.  The story following chapter [7] is titled ‘In a network of lines that intersect’. The megalomaniac protagonist of the story says, “Speculate, reflect: every thinking activity implies mirrors for me” (Calvino 161). He has a room full of mirrors, where his multiple reflections apparently help him strategize and expand his fraudulent business.

Here the author appears like a genie, conjuring the exact kind of stories his reader wishes to read. The author figure in the narrative, Silas Flannery, almost appears as an alter ego of Calvino himself, who like Flannery, had not produced any work for a long time. At one point, Flannery actually writes in his diary that there are only two ways to satisfy himself and his readers; either to write a unique book which would convey the whole Truth through itself, or settle for a book which would have the essence of all the books of all the authors of the world could ever write. This immediately makes us, as readers, conscious of the fact that Calvino has attempted the latter idea in the book we are currently reading.

Calvino denies us of a proper ending to any of these stories, perhaps implying that the readers have the power of reading and choosing their own preferred ending of the stories. He was personally influenced by Roland Barthes’ essay The Death of the Author, published in 1967, while writing this book. He was perhaps also familiar with Michael Foucault’s essay What is an author?

We are inclined to associate Calvino’s approach with Barthes’ idea of how a text may be completed by the readers according to their predilections. To illustrate this idea, he includes a fable from the Koran, where the scribe Abdullah instinctively completed a half-finished sentence uttered by Mohammad, the Holy Prophet, and in doing so, blamed himself and became an atheist. According to Flannery, the scribe failed to realise that his collaboration and understanding of the language was necessary for Allah, because only language has the capacity to express and capture the meaning of life. Therefore, the Reader of the narrative does just that, as he chooses to marry Ludmilla.

However Postmodernism denies the reader his authority. There are several allusive or elusive—both are applicable in this context, readers. Thus we find the Reader, who wants to read a book completely, and the Other Reader, Ludmilla, who remains engrossed in one book after the other, without bothering about the external circumstances. Lotaria, Ludmilla’s sister, uses technology to categorize the commonly used words in a book and form her own interpretations from these words themselves. There is also Irnerio, the Non-reader, who uses books for creating sculptures instead.

The book also raises the issue of the position of the author, as discussed by both Foucault and Barthes in their critical works. In the narrative, the Reader’s quest is complicated by a certain shady translator, Ermes Marana, who not only makes fake copies of books which never existed, but also intends to spread books written by advanced machines which would follow complicated algorithms to copy any author’s style. Along with the Reader, we get caught up in the elaborate simulacra of books, but at the same time, we enjoy the individual stories, keeping our curiosity about their origins at bay. As a result, the function of the author is reduced to a disembodied hand, merely capturing the essence through the medium of language, not trying to dominate the reader in any way.

The question however remains, whether Calvino succeeds in killing the influence of the author completely. I feel that it is not so. Any piece of writing can never remain free from the influence of the author’s ideological beliefs or their historical position. Even in an experimental work such as If on a winter’s night traveller, the very reader-centric attitude points to Calvino’s time period in the history of literature.

I consider this book to be extremely fascinating. The construction and arrangement of the chapters, along with the exploration of various themes and the discourses stimulate the readers intellectually. The novel is never preachy or unnecessarily obtuse. Without imposing my interpretation on others, I believe that the essence of the novel lies in uncovering the mystery, connecting the dots, and revelling in the discovery of having “almost finished If on a winter’s night a traveller by Italo Calvino” (260). More importantly I feel the readers’ satisfaction lies in the numerous interpretative patterns open for them. To quote from the book itself,

The moment I put my eye to a kaleidoscope, I feel that my mind, as the
heterogeneous fragments of colors and lines assemble to compose regular
figures, immediately discovers the procedure to be followed: even if it is only
the peremptory and ephemeral revelation of a rigorous construction that comes
to pieces at the slightest tap of a fingernail on the side of the tube, to be replaced
by another, in which the same elements converge in a dissimilar pattern (161).

 

 

Works Cited

 

Calvino, Italo. “Contents.” Invisible Cities. Translated by William Weaver, Vintage Digital, 2010.

Calvino, Italo. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Translated by William Weaver, Vintage, 2015.

Cuddon, J. A. “Postmodernism.” The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 5th ed., Penguin, 2014, pp. 552–553.

Eliot, T. S. “The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land.

Queneau, Raymond. “A Story As You Like It.” Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature, by Warren F. Motte, Dalkey Archive Press, 1986, pp. 55–56.