[This is the second
part of my two-part article on Italo Calvino, my report on his novella, If
on a winter’s night a traveler. Readers who haven’t read Part 1 are urged to
go back and read it as it contains some background on this remarkable writer. It may help illuminate some of what I have to
say about the book.
[“I
feel suspicious about writers who claim to tell the whole truth about
themselves, about life, or about the world,” said Calvino shortly before his death.
“I
prefer to stay with the truths I find in writers who present themselves as the
most bold-faced liars. My goal in writing If on a
Winter’s Night a Traveler, a novel entirely based on fantasy,
was to find in this way a truth that I would have not been able to find
otherwise.”
I, for one, feel grateful that he pursued
this instinct. Like his Neo-realist
writing after World War II, however, Calvino’s fantasies are not undirected
flights by any means. An unnamed
interviewer asked him : “The struggle between
the man trying to be organized amidst randomness seems to be a theme that
pervades much of your work. I’m thinking especially of If on a Winter’s Night and the
Reader, who keeps trying to find the next chapter of the book he’s reading.”
[Now, here’s my own opinion.]
(13 December 1988)
If, as English
playwright and essayist Sir Richard Steele wrote at the turn of the eighteenth
century, reading is the mind’s exercise, then Italo Calvino’s works are at
least mental aerobics and his If on a winter’s night a traveler (translated
by William Weaver; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981) may be an entire decathlon
for the mind. Calvino’s 1981 novel is,
among other things, about reading as action.
For the Italian writer, who’s made the tale his vehicle and the
fantastic his countryside, reading’s not at all a passive occupation, but a
very active one, requiring great energy and attention and considerable effort
on the part of the reader. While the
writer and even the publisher often struggle to make a book, according to
Calvino, it’s the reader who must do the most work—and on whom the act of
reading has the profoundest effect.
The
specific action to which Calvino most often likens reading is traveling. Books are worlds or universes, and reading’s
a voyage into each new creation and from one to the next. “I prefer novels,” one of his characters
explains, “that bring me immediately into a world where everything is precise,
concrete, specific” (30). Later, another
character describes his experience being read to: “Now, around you, there is no
longer the room of the department, the shelves, the professor: you have entered
the novel . . .” (69).
Calvino
demonstrates his notion of reading as journeying by creating a novel that’s
actually the beginnings of ten separate books by ten different fictional
authors. Between each of these incipits,
as he calls them, we follow the ordeal of the Reader, whose name, like the
identities of each story’s narrator, we never learn, as he tracks down the rest
of each novel he’s begun but can’t finish.
As each of the novels evokes various far-flung worlds—a small European
town, an East European city, a Japanese estate, a Latin American village, and
so on—so does the Reader travel from bookstore to university to publisher to
author to translator, “circling the world from book to book” (253). His travels take him to Switzerland, Central
America, and several imaginary places where books and reading are controlled by
the state and fought for by underground organizations. He encounters radical supporters of such
strange associations as the Organization of Apocryphal Power (OAP) and the
Organization for the Electronic Production of Homogenized Literary Works
(OEPHLW). He’s even attacked by a young
gang who believes he holds the text of a book unknowingly dictated to its
author by extraterrestrials. The trail
of unfinished novels has been laid, the Reader learns, by a mysterious translator,
Ermes Marana, who’s flooding the world with incomplete works with false titles
attributed to the wrong authors. As soon
as the Reader thinks he’s found the continuation of his last interrupted story,
he not only discovers that it’s a different book from the one he’s left off,
but that the one he was reading isn’t the one he thought he was reading at
all. Thus, he’s led on a treasure hunt
into the world of reading, writing, and publishing.
But the
Reader, who’s addressed in the second person throughout to make it clear that
each of us is Calvino’s “reader,” also journeys into life as a result of his
reading. When he discovers that the
first novel he’s bought, Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler,
has been bound together with only the same first sixteen pages repeated, the
Reader returns to the bookstore to replace the defective copy. [To avoid confusion from here on, the full
title If on a winter’s night a traveler will refer only to the fragment
within the larger novel; the whole work will be referred to by the abbreviated
title, If on a winter’s night. ~rick]
There he meets the Other Reader who’s come for the same reason. Together, between the interrupted readings,
the Reader and the Other Reader, whose name is Ludmilla, search for the
completions. The Reader’s voyage into
reading literally changes his life as he and Ludmilla grow closer as a result
of the search. “This hunt excites you,”
the Reader realizes, “because you’re pursuing it with her, because the two of
you can experience it together” (93).
It’s
inevitable that the Reader and Ludmilla make love since Calvino equates reading
with this other act as well: “What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each
other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from
measurable time and space” (156). It’s a
different kind of voyage, and when the Reader and Ludmilla take it they
experience it as a reading: “Ludmilla, now you are being read. Your body is being subjected to a systematic
reading . . . . And you, O Reader, are
meanwhile an object of reading: the Other Reader now is revealing your body as
if skimming the index . . .” (155).
In
fact, Calvino acknowledges the relationship of reading and lovemaking in his
own life. In an interview with author
Francine du Plessix Gray in the New
York Times Book Review he says, “. . . I want to constantly add to
the image that my reader has of me. That
is like being a good lover, that is definitely an erotic relationship.” The relationship’s not always kind; it may even
be sadistic, according to Calvino. When
the narrator of Looks down in the gathering shadow, one of the
fragments, shoots his enemy Jojo dead, he has interrupted the man’s lovemaking
with Bernadette who becomes the narrator’s accomplice. The interrupted lovemaking, like the ten
interrupted novels, must be picked up at the point where they left off. Bernadette finds her completion with the
narrator, though the Reader does not find his; the sexual climax is reached,
but the narrative climax never is. Calvino admits, “In this new novel I may be a
more sadistic lover than ever.”
Having
followed the tortuous path of his reading-inspired adventure, the Reader
finally returns to his native city. In
the library, trying again to locate the ten unfinished books, he joins a
discussion of reading with other readers.
One asserts, “In ancient times a story could end only in two ways:
having passed all the tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they
died” (259). Unable to finish the novels
he’s started—all the library copies are unavailable, too—the Reader understands
how his own story must end: “You decide you want to marry Ludmilla” (259). The act of reading, having affected the
Reader’s life at each turn, now effects its ultimate life change, still in
terms of reading: “Now you are man and wife, Reader and Reader. A great double bed receives your parallel
readings” (260).
Like
readers, the worlds created by reading aren’t passive, either. Books and the worlds they create are living
entities, too. Describing Cavedagna, the
publisher whose works have led the Reader on his chase into life, Calvino notes
that “he sees books being born and die every day” (101). Ludmilla’s ideal books, for instance, are
produced “as a pumpkin vine produces pumpkins” (189): naturally, growing as if
from their own source. The illusion for
her that these worlds are sui generis must not be disturbed by contact
with the book-makers, the authors or publishers. Authors, to be sure, have no existence for
Ludmilla outside the books themselves.
When she meets one, she explains, “You are two separate persons, whose
relationships cannot interact. . . . I
have no doubt that you are concretely this person and not another . . . but the
one who interested me was the other, the Silas Flannery who exists in the works
of Silas Flannery, independently of you, here. . .” (191-92).
Still,
though the worlds of the books and the real worlds of the Reader and Ludmilla
may be separate but parallel, they do occasionally meet, at least in Calvino’s
cosmos. First, each of the novels the
two encounter share common elements which bind them together. Each is the start of an adventure, tinged
with danger and malevolence, and in each the narrator or main character, a man,
pursues a woman for whom he undergoes some violence or threat of violence. According to Calvino, “The existence of a
mysterious, unnamed danger . . . exists in all my favorite American and British
novelists. . . .”
In If
on a winter’s night a traveler, the first incipit, a man sits in the
café of a railroad station. Gradually he
learns of a vague conspiracy by “the organization,” possibly involving a spy
whose place he seems to have taken. He’s
approached by the mysterious Madame Marne, but before he can learn anything
about her or the conspiracy, he’s ordered out of town under threat of arrest.
In On
the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon, an erotic Japanese novel, the
narrator’s trapped by unexplained circumstances in the estate and employ of Mr.
Okeda. Attracted to both Mr. Okeda’s
wife and daughter, the narrator’s caught by Mr. Okeda making love to the wife
while observed by the daughter. The
incident, rather than provoking Mr. Okeda to immediate violence, places the
narrator deeper in the master’s power with less hope of escape.
Similar
twists occur in each of the ten stories begun by the Reader and Ludmilla. Tying them to the lives of the two searchers,
Calvino has fashioned like circumstances for his Reader. With each step in pursuit of the lost novels,
guided by Ludmilla at each juncture, the Reader becomes increasingly involved
in more and more fantastic adventures.
Rescued from arrest for importing a banned book into one totalitarian
state, he’s protected by an underground that’s itself a conspiracy inside a conspiracy
inside a conspiracy. Imprisoned in
another dictatorship where the books he seeks are banned, he’s enlisted to
perform a secret mission in an opposing dictatorship where books are also
controlled. Books, it seems, are living
things, and reading can be quite dangerous.
To make
the connection between the stories and the Reader’s life the more clear,
Calvino’s included in many of the novels he begins direct references to the act
of reading. If on a winter’s night
begins, for instance, this way:
The
novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston
covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first
paragraph.
Throughout
this section, Calvino refers to “you, reader,” this time with a small ‘r’ to differentiate
him or her from the Reader of the larger novel.
The interconnection of this story and the life of the small-r reader is
constantly being reinforced by self-conscious references such as:
Watch
out: it is surely a method of involving you gradually, capturing you in the
story before you realize it—a trap. Or
perhaps the author still has not made up his mind, just as you, reader, for the
matter, are not sure what you would most like to read . . . (12).
. . . then
a kind of weariness settles on her, perhaps only the shadow of their weariness
(or my weariness, or yours) (19).
. . .
it isn’t clear whether I really say it or would like to say it or whether the
author interprets in this way the half sentence I am muttering (21).
Several
of the other novels include similar, though less striking references to the act
of reading and reminders that what we are reading is, in fact, a written
story. In the second novel, Outside
the town of Malbork, Calvino even invokes the translator:
Here
everything is very concrete, substantial, depicted with sure expertise, or at
least the impression given to you, Reader, is one of expertise, though there
are some foods you don’t know, mentioned by name, which the translator has
decided to leave in the original . . . (34).
Here
again, Calvino reminds us of our status as Reader, which he now spells with a
capital ‘R’ to further blend the lives of the Reader, the narrator, and us:
. . .
perhaps I am thinking this only now, or it is only you, Reader, who are
thinking it, not I . . . (38).
He also
reminds us again that we are reading, not living this experience:
The
page you’re reading should convey this violent contact of dull and painful
blows . . . (39).
In In
a network of lines that enlace, another fragment, Calvino makes the same
point, keeping us alert to the fact that, though reading is an act, it’s
not the same act as that which we’re reading:
The
first sensation this book should convey is what I feel when I hear the
telephone ring: I say “should” because I doubt that written words can give even
a partial idea of it . . . (132).
Calvino
explains this tactic in the Times interview: “My principal idea was to
write a book in which the reader would not be reading the text of a novel but a
description of the act of reading per se.” Taken together with this technique, the
interstitial chapters, particularly the early ones before the Reader’s
adventure gets underway, show how Calvino sets up this description. The opening chapter begins this way:
You are
about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a
traveler. Relax. Concentrate.
Dispel every other thought (3).
The
rest of the opening is a step-by-step depiction of the process of getting ready
to read, from choosing and buying the book to finding the right place and
posture to read it to getting in the right frame of mind. Eventually, Calvino projects the final
moments as the Reader sinks into the story:
So here
you are now, ready to attack the first lines of the first page. You prepare to recognize the unmistakable
tone of the author. . . . Here, however,
he seems to have absolutely no connection with all the rest he has written, at
least as far as you can recall. . . .
But then you go on and you realize that the book is readable nevertheless,
independently of what you expected of the author, it’s the book in itself that
arouses your curiosity; in fact, on sober reflection, you prefer it this way,
confronting something and not quite knowing yet what it is (9).
Even
after the first disappointment, discovering that If on a winter’s night a
traveler is incomplete and, in fact, actually a Polish novel called Outside
the town of Malbork, Calvino describes pleasure in starting the new book,
which the Reader hopes will be the rest of Outside the town of Malbork. This book’s been bound with uncut pages, and
Calvino describes the sensual joys of slitting them: “The pleasures derived
from the use of a paper knife are tactile, auditory, visual, and especially
mental” (42). Even the frustration of
finding that this new book, not the novel it was supposed to be either, is also
defective, doesn’t negate the physical, emotional, and intellectual pleasures
of reading.
In
fact, the innate stimulation of the act of reading—coupled as it is in the Reader’s
mind with Ludmilla—drives the Reader into the experience of life and the world
of books. Reading itself is erotic,
believes Calvino. His wife reports he
told her, “Literature was the only aphrodisiac . . . .” “Reading is a possession,” responds Calvino,
“a march toward a possession. It has
many degrees of eroticism. It can be a
caress or a complete intercourse.” In If
on a winter’s night, Calvino leads the Reader—and the readers—on just such
a march toward possession. Of course, he
never promises that we’ll reach our destination; as he’s already told us,
Calvino can be a sadistic lover.
While
exploring reading as an action, Calvino touches extensively on the work of the
writer and less substantially on the function of the publisher. Cavedagna, the publisher, is only a conduit
for books to the readers. The writer of
one of the novels, Silas Flannery, however, expounds on writing at some length,
but the process of creating the book is oriented toward the reader and geared
toward what happens to the book when the reader gets hold of it. Chapter 8 of If on a winter’s night,
subtitled “From the diary of Silas Flannery,” begins with a scene Flannery sees
out his window:
In a
deck chair, on the terrace of a chalet in the valley, there is a young woman
reading. Every day, before starting work,
I pause a moment to look at her with the spyglass. In this thin, transparent air I feel able to
perceive in her unmoving form the signs of that invisible movement that reading
is, the flow of gaze and breath, but, even more, the journey of the words
through the person, their course or their arrest, their spurts, delays, pauses,
the attention concentrating or straying, the returns, that journey that seems
uniform and on the contrary is always shifting and uneven (169).
In
describing how the woman reads, Flannery reinforces the idea that reading is
action, indeed more than action, a life force:
. . . I
say to myself that the result of the unnatural effort to which I subject
myself, writing, must be the respiration of this reader, the operation of
reading turned into a natural process, the current that brings the sentences to
graze the filter of her attention, to stop for a moment before being absorbed
by the circuits of her mind and disappearing, transformed into her interior
ghosts, into what in her is most personal and incommunicable (169-70).
Flannery
is obsessed with the reader and what she’s reading:
At
times I convince myself that the woman is reading my true book, the one
I should have written long ago, but will never succeed in writing . . . (170).
He’s so
obsessed, in fact, that he concocts an elaborate scenario in which two writers,
one tormented and one productive, are each convinced that the absorbed woman in
the deck chair is reading the other’s work.
Both writers set out to write a novel in the style of their rival in
order to please the reader. Flannery
imagines several conclusions to the episode, each one a different failure in
the eyes of the reader on the terrace.
Calvino’s
apotheosis of the act of reading is, to be sure, a game, not a lecture or even
an essay. His device, in what he calls
“a hypernovel, a novel developed to the 10th degree,” is to “play cat and mouse
with the reader.” The novel’s
fundamental scheme is that the reader “realizes with a shock that he’s not
in control, that it is always I, Calvino, who is in total control of the
situation.” Whenever we—not to mention
the Reader—think we know where we’re going next, we end up someplace
unexpected.
In the
last full chapter, for instance, the Reader’s returned home and goes to the
library to find the books he’s been trying to read. All the books are listed in the library’s
collection. but each is unavailable for various reasons—one’s at the bindery,
another checked out, another stolen, and so on.
While he’s waiting in vain, he observes other patrons reading, each in a
different and idiosyncratic way. The
reader gets into a discussion with seven men about reading. As if in commentary on If on a winter’s
night, one reader remarks, “The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me,
. . . even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me
whole universes, which I can never exhaust” (254). Another responds, “. . . At every reading I
seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. . . . I experience different and unexpected
impressions, and do not find again those of before” (255). When another reader admits, “At times a title
is enough to kindle in me the desire for a book that perhaps does not exist”
(256), it’s almost ironic, for the ten titles of Calvino’s fragments, plus an
eleventh title added to the list by one of the readers, form the opening
sentence of yet another book:
If
on a winter’s night a traveler, 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?--he asks, anxious to hear the story.
Though
Calvino’s exploration of reading sometimes gets convoluted and dense, the
pleasure of the game he’s set up and the extraordinary diversity of the novel
fragments he’s created for us make the winding, twisting, endlessly surprising
path well worth following to its inevitable, but unforeseeable end.
“Well,
what are you waiting for?”
[In that same interview
I cited earlier, Calvino affirmed:
It is true that in the past, say over
the past ten years, the architecture of my books has had a very important
place, perhaps too important. But only
when I feel I have achieved a rigorous structure do I believe I have something
that stands on its own two feet, a complete work. . . . It can be said about If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler that it could not have existed
without a very precise, very articulated structure. I believe I have succeeded in this, which
gives me a great satisfaction. Of
course, all this kind of effort should not concern the reader at all. The important thing is to enjoy reading my
book, independently of the work I have put into it.
[It’s undeniable
that If on a winter’s night a traveler is tightly structured, even tough it seems
haphazard when a reader first gets into it.
What defies my comprehension, since I’m not a writer of fiction, is how
Calvino managed to keep all the apparently random events of the novel straight
in his own mind. I’ve been known to use
an outline to keep the elements of a complex piece organized—but I can’t even
conceive of an outline for If on a winter’s night a traveler.
Such a rigid and formal form could never contain such a free-flowing and
seemingly formless piece of writing as this book. And yet, it’s not hard to follow—or even to
enter. Indeed, it pulled me in almost
from the very start. As frustrating as
the reading interruptus was, it was equally enticing to see what
Calvino could come up with next. ]
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