Book Review Article
Italo Calvino, If on a
winter’s night a traveler (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), translation
into English by William Weaver of the original Italian, Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore
THE ACME OF METAFICTION, THE PRIDE OF POSTMODERNISM
Calvino’s tour de force of a novel is actually an
anti-novel, and one of the most creative works about reading and writing
fiction that I have ever read. In order to avoid confusion in this review I
will use “the Calvino novel” when referring to the actual book we hold in our
hands, as distinct from the many other novels that show up in the narrative.
The book begins with a direct address to the reader, who is
you. For purposes of discussion throughout this review, we will call this
reader “Actual Reader.”
“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. Let the world around you fade.
Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others
right away, ‘No, I don’t want to watch TV!’ Raise your voice—they won’t hear
you otherwise—‘I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!’”
This goes on for several pages, during which the reader is
advised on how to find the most comfortable position for reading, how to adjust
the light to avoid eyestrain, etc. Such a beginning suggests immediately that
you the reader are to play an active role as a character in the book. The
direct address to the reader goes so far as to define that reader, to describe
what kind of person he/she is: “It’s not that you expect anything in particular
from this particular book. You’re the sort of person who, on principle, no
longer expects anything of anything.”
Hold it. How can the author/narrator possibly know what kind
of person I, the reader, am? What can he know about any of his readers? We are
soon to discover that the reader addressed here—we will refer to him throughout
this review as “You Reader”—is actually a male character made up by the
narrator. In fact, You Reader is the main protagonist of the book. But this is
not to say that Actual Reader plays no role in the narrative. More on this
later.
Sparking on the pages from the very start are Calvino’s
scintillating imagination and wit. His narrator (let's call him "Calvino") leads You Reader into a
bookstore to buy the book (this book), then spends a whole page classifying
various types of books. E.g., Books You Needn’t Read; Books Read Even Before
You Open Them, Since They Belong To The Category of Books Read Before Being
Written; Books You’ve Been Planning to Read for Ages; Books That Everybody’s
Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them, Too. And more.
The subject of Calvino’s Traveler
is reading and readers. Ancillary, but closely allied to that main subject is
that of writing, especially the writing of fiction. Questions asked or implied
repeatedly: What is a reader? What is reading? Why and how do we read? What is fiction?
What is good fiction and what is bad? What are political attitudes toward
fiction? How do our lives become interwoven with the fiction we read? And many
more.
If on a winter’s night
a traveler was first published in the late seventies of the twentieth
century, when reading and readers of fiction were still, at least relatively,
flourishing. For us who read the book today, forty years later, it may appear
to be a kind of anachronism, since today reading is ever of less importance,
and readers—especially of a piece of fiction as “difficult” as this one—are in
ever shorter supply. Chapter Three begins with a description of the tactile
joys of using a knife to cut the uncut pages of a book as you read—an
experience limited only to older readers of books even in the 1970s, and a
suggestion of how far the modern reader—and the modern non-reader—are from
issues addressed by the narrative.
The scene in the bookstore describes how You Reader selects
the book to be read, picking the book (this book) up, checking the pages to be
assured it is not too long, consulting the blurbs on the back: “Of course, this
circling of the book, too, this reading around it before reading inside it, is
a part of the pleasure in a new book.” About the blurbs: “you scan the sentences
on the back of the jacket, generic phrases that don’t say a great deal. So much
the better; there is no message that indiscreetly outshouts the message the
book itself must communicate directly.”
Of course, at the time he wrote his lines about the shouting
blurbs on his book, Calvino could not have yet known exactly what those blurbs
would shout. On the back cover of my paperback copy we read, among other
things, “A marvelous book,” and “Calvino is a wizard.” Do we believe these enthusiastic
shoutings before we read the book? Of course not. Only the naïve reader
actually believes blurbs on back covers. Few books that are praised as
marvelous in the blurbs will actually turn out to be marvelous. But guess what,
reader? This one, this Traveler,
actually does turn out to be marvelous.
d
Although not titled as such, the beginning of the novel is
actually an introduction. On page 9 the narrator says to the reader, who has
already read almost the whole first, introductory chapter, “So here you are
now, ready to attack the first lines of the first page.” A jolt for the
reader—both You Reader and Actual Reader—but also one more bit of coruscating wit
from the author.
The second chapter has the same title as that of the book as
a whole—If on a winter’s night a traveler—and
it actually does describe a winter’s night and a traveler. We presume that this
is the beginning of a novel, and it is, but only sort of. We start with a train
station, with steam from a locomotive clouding things over. In fact, a cloud of
smoke “hides part of the first paragraph . . . . . . and the pages of the book
are clouded like the windows of an old train, the cloud of smoke rests on the
sentences.” This imagery suggests and foreshadows the haziness that is to be
characteristic of the plot of Calvino’s book as a whole.
We’re in a bar, in a train station buffet, and a traveler whom
we presume to be the protagonist of this whole long book walks into “a setting
you know by heart,” a place with “the special odor of stations after the last
train has left.” Then, suddenly, the man experiencing the station-odor is an
‘I’ narrator. “I am the man who comes and goes between the bar and the
telephone booth. Or, rather, that man is called ‘I’ and you know nothing else
about him…”
Next comes a remark addressed to the reader: “For a couple
of pages now you have been reading on. . . . . . the sentences continue to move
in vagueness, grayness, in a kind of no man’s land of experience. Watch out: it
is surely a method of involving you gradually, capturing you in the story
before you realize it—a trap.” The idea of the reader’s being entrapped in a
narrative is to recur several times later on, is, in fact, a leitmotiv of the
book as a whole.
The ‘I’ narrator in the train station is confused, wondering
what exactly he is doing in the story. He, the traveler, vaguely suspects that
he is here to pass on to somebody the wheeled suitcase he has with him. He
feels not exactly in a story, but in the makings of a story that could veer off
in any direction, according to the whim of the author. He repeatedly tries to
phone someone from a public telephone, hoping to find out what to do next. The
phone rings, no answer. “I know only that this first chapter is taking a while
to break free of the station and the bar.”
A first chapter in a novel, featuring a character whose
ontology is shaky: “I am called ‘I’ and this is the only thing that you know
about me.” He hopes that the action will soon remove him from this train
station and take him elsewhere. He senses that there is some authorial force
behind the narrative that he is in: “By the very fact of writing ‘I’ the author
feels driven to put into this ‘I’ a bit of himself, of what he feels or
imagines he feels.”
So now we pull the author into the book, since any ‘I’
narrator is, at least in part, emblematic of the author himself, the real
writer behind everything. As of this point we have three characters: the
traveler, the reader (You Reader), and the author—but all three are fictitious.
To the extent that there is a plot, here’s how it goes. The
I narrator was to come to the station with his suitcase on wheels, was to
accidentally on purpose bump into another man with exactly the same kind of
suitcase. After saying the password, the second man was to leave his suitcase
with the narrator/traveler and take the other’s suitcase. They were to exchange
suitcases and go their separate ways, but the second man does not show up, and
the traveler is left in a quandary, hanging out as a stranger in a train
station buffet where all the locals know each other.
The rest of the chapter develops this plot, first describing
the locals in the buffet, then mentioning how the local doctor and police chief
are soon to arrive—bets are made on which of these men will arrive first. When
the police chief comes in he murmurs the secret password to the traveler, then whispers
to him that the jig is up: “They’ve killed Jan. Clear out.” The traveler takes
another train, the 11:00 express, departs. End of Ch. 1. Or rather, end of the
short story that bears the title of the book as a whole and is the first of
many short stories to come. These stories will be billed as first chapters in a
succession of novels by various authors, but they are short stories
nonetheless. As for the traveler/spy in the train station, his tale is done,
and he will not appear again in Calvino’s novel. Nor will any of the other
characters from the first story.
d
The second chapter begins with still more direct address to
a you reader (You Reader), who it seems has noticed that certain passages in
the book repeat themselves. “You are the sort of reader who is sensitive to
such refinements; you are quick to catch the author’s intentions, and nothing
escapes you.” Then a revelation: there has been an error in the printing of the
book, and the same pages have been bound inside twice. So begins the SNAFU
theme that will run throughout the rest of the Calvino novel.
Shortly into this chapter it becomes apparent that the
reader addressed as “you” is not really Actual Reader, but a fictitious reader
who was trying to read the story of the traveler in the train station. He (You
Reader) takes the defective book back to the bookstore, where he hopes to
exchange it for a copy with pages correctly bound, but the bookseller informs
him that he had the wrong book. Pages from a novel by the Polish writer Tazio
Bazakbal, Outside the town of Malbork,
had been incorrectly bound into the book about the winter traveler.
You Reader now assumes that the episode he has read came out
of the Polish novel, and since he wants to continue reading that story he buys
a copy of Bazakbal’s book. The bookseller informs him that another reader, a
young woman has done the same, and that she is still in the store. You Reader meets
her, thereby setting up another theme—that of romantic love—which will run
through the remainder of the Calvino novel.
“And so the Other Reader makes her happy entrance into your
field of vision.” The word ‘your’ in this sentence refers to You Reader,
protagonist of the book, but it also makes an oblique reference to Actual
Reader. This double-referencing is rife throughout the book. Other Reader’s
name, we are to discover later, is Ludmilla Vipiteno, and, after You Reader,
she is to be the second most important character in the action of Calvino’s
novel.
At this point we have the story of a reader reading a novel,
but we have in addition the tale of two readers communing as they read the same
novel, or novels. But when he gets his copy of the Polish novel home and begins
reading it, You Reader discovers that in buying the Bazakbal book he has
stumbled into a totally different story. This sets the pattern for the
remainder of Calvino’s Traveler, a
book in which a reader is to read the first chapters of ten different novels by
different authors.
d
Outside the town of Malbork
Although this is a new story in a different novel there is
something familiar about the style: “An odor of frying wafts at the opening of
the page, of onion in fact, onion being fried, a bit scorched . . . Rape oil,
the text specifies.” At the beginning of the first novel there was an intrusion
of smoke wafting over the pages, and here an intrusion of frying grease. The
narrative, here as elsewhere later, will be not only a story, but also to some
extent an account of how a story may be written. In the middle of this scene
setting up the action—describing “our kitchen at Kudwiga” and the people
preparing food—a new ‘I’ narrator (named Gritzvi) suddenly pops up: “Mr.
Kauderer had arrived the night before with his son [Ponko], and he would be
going away this morning, taking me in the son’s place.”
The main action of this first chapter describes a fight
between Gritzvi and Ponko, the boy who had come to live in Gritzvi’s house to
“acquire the techniques of grafting rowans.” Gritzvi will go to live with
Ponko’s people, and there is the sense that they will exchange identities. The
fight involves a kind of I rolled over him, he rolled over me, we rolled over
us: “I had the sensation that in this struggle the transformation was taking
place, and when he rose he would be me and I him.”
“The page you’re reading should convey the violent contact
of dull and painful blows, of fierce and lacerating responses.” In addition to
describing the fight, the narrator tells how the reader should perceive the
fight, which, once again, reminds us that Calvino’s text is, primarily, about reading.
This first chapter of what is supposed to be Bazakbal’s
Polish novel implies that later on the two main characters will exchange
girlfriends as well as places. It also brings in a kind of “Romeo and Juliet”
theme, about family feuds and vendettas among Ponko’s people, the Kauderers,
and his girlfriend Zwida’s people, the Ozkarts.
Next comes another SNAFU. This time some blank pages have
been bound into You Reader’s copy of the Polish book. Now we’re into the
structural pattern that obtains for the entire remainder of Calvino’s novel.
One snafu follows hard upon the heels of the last snafu. You Reader reads what
he thinks is the continuation of a novel whose first chapter he has just
read—only to discover, each time, that he is into the first chapter of an
entirely different novel. Furthermore, the identity and authorship of the book
he had just begun reading is often called into question.
Suspecting that the story of Ponko and Gritzvi is not a
translation from the Polish, You Reader consults an encyclopedia. He discovers
that the place names mentioned are in the once independent European country of
Cimmeria—capital Örkko, national language Cimmerian. Unfortunately, Cimmeria
no longer exists as a country, having been absorbed by other European powers;
its language and culture are now in desuetude.
You Reader phones Other Reader Ludmilla, who confirms that
her copy of the novel also contains blank pages. She suggests that they meet at
the university, to consult with Prof. Uzzi-Tuzzi, a specialist in Bothno-Ugaric
languages, including the language of Cimmerian—“a dead department of a dead
literature in a dead language” is how the professor later is to describe his
place of employment. While wandering around at the university in search of
Uzzi-Tuzzi, confused You Reader seems “lost in the book with white pages,
unable to get out of it.” He comes upon a young man named Irnerio, a friend of
Ludmilla’s who does not read books, who, in fact, has unlearned the very act of
reading. As it later turns out, Irnerio is an artist, who makes sculptures,
statues, pictures out of the books he does not read. This character is
emblematic, perhaps, of what is to happen to words in books in the late
twentieth and early twenty-first century; the words being ever more cramped and
crowded out on the page by pictorial imagery.
When You Reader describes the Cimmerian novel he is
searching for (about Ponko and Gritzvi), Prof. Uzzi-Tuzzi immediately
recognizes it as Leaning from the steep
slope, by Ukko Ahti. He takes the book down from his shelves and begins
translating it aloud from Cimmerian into English—and of course it turns out to
be a totally different story.
d
Leaning from the steep slope
By Ukko Ahti
The ‘I’ narrator of this novel—all of the first chapters of
novels within the novel have ‘I’ narrators—is “convinced the world wants to tell me something, send me messages, signals,
warnings,” premonitions, perhaps, of the end of the world. A different sort of
reader, this narrator is “trying to read in the succession of things presented
to me every day the world’s intentions toward me, and I grope my way, knowing
that there can exist no dictionary that will translate into words the burden of
obscure allusions that lurks in these things.” He makes an effort “to read
between the lines of things the evasive meaning of what is in store for me.”
Written in the form of a diary, this novel has one of its characters, Miss
Zwida, borrowed from Outside the town of
Malbork. This sort of overlapping of themes and characters into new novels
is to happen a few more times.
Chapter Four continues with a discussion of how reading by
yourself differs from being read to. Prof. Uzzi-Tuzzi reads the Ukko Ahti novel
aloud for Ludmilla and You Reader, translating it from the Cimmerian as he
goes. “The text, when you are the reader, is something that is there, against
which you are forced to clash; when someone translates it aloud to you, it is
something that is and is not there, that you cannot manage to touch.” It is
somewhat surprising that here—and in the Calvino novel as a whole—the issue of
how translation can change, or even traduce a literary text is not treated in any detail.
As it turns out, we have only the beginning chapter of Leaning from the steep slope, as the
author Ukko Ahti sank into a deep depression and committed suicide, leaving the
novel unfinished. “Though incomplete [opines Prof. Uzzi-Tuzzi], or perhaps for
this very reason, Leaning is the most
representative work of Cimmerian prose, for what it reveals and even more for
what it hides, for its reticence, withdrawal, its disappearing.”
A question implicit on almost every page of Calvino’s book
is this: What is reading? Ludmilla answers the question several different
times. Here she emphasizes reading as the progression toward some yet unknown
goal: “Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet
knows what it will be…” Another of her thoughts later on: “You dream of
rediscovering a condition of natural reading, innocent, primitive…”
The next novel, Without
fear of wind or vertigo, is said to be the same novel as Leaning from the steep slope, but
written by the same author under a pseudonym, Vorts Viljandi, and written not
in Cimmerian, but in Cimbrian—Cimbria is a different country, a rival in
language and culture to Cimmeria. As Ludmilla and You Reader listen to it being
read aloud at a meeting of feminist students, they soon discover, of course,
that this is a totally different story—involving depravity and revolution in an
unnamed country.
Caught up in a maelstrom of books they have now read
containing only first chapters, Ludmilla and You Reader discuss going to the
publishing house—in an effort to obtain complete copies of the books. At this
point Ludmilla appears to express what may be one of Calvino’s, or his main narrator’s aims:
“The novel I would most like to read at this moment should have as its driving
force only the desire to narrate, to pile stories upon stories, without trying
to impose a philosophy of life on you, simply allowing you to observe its own
growth, like a tree, an entangling, as if of branches and leaves….” Is that a
hint about how Actual Reader is to approach the Calvino novel?
Ludmilla refuses to go to the publishing house with You
Reader, asserting that the boundary between those who make books and those who
read them should not be transgressed. “Otherwise, the unsullied pleasure of
reading ends, or at least is transformed into something else…” Ludmilla, who
sometimes appears to be Calvino’s ideal of the fiction reader, likes to put
emphasis on the pleasures of reading a novel.
Arriving at the publishing house, You Reader meets the go-to
man there, Mr. Cavedagna, who is besieged by authors wanting their rejected
manuscripts back, plus facing a multitude of other problems. E.g., “an edition
of Dostoevsky that has to be reset from beginning to end because every time it
reads Maria now it should read Mar’ja, and every time it says Pyotr it has to
be corrected to Pëtr.”
Mr. Cavedagna is the kind of reader who yearns to escape
from reading. His job involves reading manuscripts all day, but he would like
to go back to reading books he really wants to read. Cavedagna tells You Reader
about a man who is to become a central character in the book as a whole, the
translator Ermes Marana, a fraud and shapeshifter who has convinced the
publisher to publish the novel by Ukko Ahti—in a translation from the Cimbrian.
Eventually Marana admits that he doesn’t know a word of Cimbrian.
Later in the Calvino novel Ermes Marana seems to be the
prototype for the generic quintessential writer of fiction, who can play with
narratives, make things up, toy with the reader’s imagination by entangling it
in artifice. His letters to the publisher Cavedagna—which the latter permits You
Reader to read—are sometimes ordinary business letters, but they also contain
“hints of intrigues, plots, mysteries.” Marana is, among other things,
something of a graphomaniac, who, “in the end becomes embroiled in increasingly
frenzied and garbled volubility.”
At the publishers You Reader finds out that (maybe) Marana
has translated a trashy French novel—by the unknown Belgian writer, Bertrand
Vandervelde—Looks down in the gathering
shadow, and passed it off as a translation from the Cimmerian, or Cimbrian,
or Polish. Cavedagna gives You Reader the manuscript to read.
d
Looks down in the gathering shadow
(Regarde en bas dans l’épaisseur
des ombres
by Bertrand
Vandervelde)
Each of the ten beginnings of novels presented in the
Calvino novel has its own discrete story and its own style. The major themes
and subjects of the Calvino work, however, repeatedly insinuate themselves into
the narrative: the theme of reading, of storytelling, of the writing and
reading of the Calvino novel as a whole. Here, for example, is part of the ‘I’
narrator’s discourse in Looks down.
“It is not impossible that the person who follows my story
may feel a bit cheated, seeing that the stream is dispersed into so many
trickles, and that of the essential events only the last echoes and
reverberations arrive at him; but it is not impossible that this is the very
effect I aimed at when I started narrating, or let’s say it’s a trick of the
narrative art that I am trying to employ…”
And still more: “Having in reserve a virtually unlimited
supply of narratable material, I am in a position to handle it with detachment
and without haste, even allowing a certain irritation to be perceptible and
granting myself the luxury of expatiating on secondary episodes and
insignificant details.”
The two passages cited above apply probably more directly to
the narrator of the Calvino novel as a whole—call him “Calvino”—than they do to
the narrator of Looks down, who is a
mobster more intent on covering up a murder than a writer concerned with his
style.
Of the ten sub-novels whose first chapters are presented in
the Calvino novel, Looks down in the
gathering shadow is the only one in which the original (French) title is provided.
Its plot is one of the most entertaining of the ten short stories that make up
those ten beginnings. I have not remarked much on the literary merits, or
demerits, of the ten short stories—doing so would double the size of this
already lengthy review—but it is worth mention that these stories are teeming
with the charm and sparkling wit that is typical of Calvino’s writing. Here is
part of a hilarious passage from the story “Looks down,” a tale of coitus interruptus resumed.
Some background information: the unnamed ‘I’ narrator, it
seems, has murdered a fellow gangster, Jojo, and must find a way to dispose of
the body. He is assisted by Bernadette, Jojo’s mistress, with whom Jojo was in
the act of copulation when the narrator shot him.
“’Bernadette!’ I cry.
‘What are you doing?’ And she explains to me that when I burst into the room I
interrupted her at a moment when she must not be interrupted; never mind
whether with one of us or with the other, she had to pick up at that same point
and keep on till the end. Meanwhile with one hand she was holding the dead man
and with the other she was unbuttoning me, all three of us crammed into that
tiny car, in a public parking lot of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Wriggling her
legs in contortions—harmonious ones I must say—she sat astride my knees and
almost smothered me in her bosom as if in a landslide. Jojo meanwhile was
falling on top of us, but she was careful to push him aside, her face only
inches from the face of the dead man, who looked at her with the whites of his
widened eyes.”
d
In reading Marana’s
letters in Chapter Six, You Reader discovers that the elusive Ermes Marana is the
representative of OEPHLW of New York (Organization for the Electronic
Production of Homogenized Literary Works). He is trying to persuade a blocked
Irish writer, Silas Flannery, to allow him to assist him in finishing his
works. The purported author of Looks down,
Bertrand Vandervelde, is “a Belgian writer who has been shamelessly plagiarized
by Flannery.”
Marana, furthermore,
has been hired by an Arabian sultan to translate the Vandervelde novel into the
native language of the sultan’s wife, a voracious reader. Suspecting his wife
of conniving with conspirators to overthrow him, the sultan wants to keep her
busy reading. “Marana proposes to the sultan a stratagem prompted by the
literary tradition of the Orient: he will break off his translation at the
moment of greatest suspense and will start translating another novel, inserting
it into the first through some rudimentary expedient . . . . . . the second
novel will also break off to yield to a third, which will not proceed very far
before opening into a fourth, and so on…” So is Marana’s translation the book
that Actual Reader is reading?
“Ermes Marana appears
to you as a serpent who injects his malice into the paradise of reading . . . .
. . here is a trap-novel designed by the treacherous translator with beginnings
of novels that remain suspended.”
Not for the first time
do we get the implication that the writer of a fiction is seeking ways to
entrap his readers. Once again, in describing a specific situation—Marana’s
forestalling the looming revolt against the sultan by keeping his wife reading
a succession of beginnings of novels—Calvino alludes to a situation directly
relevant to his novel as a whole. By this point we are beginning to suspect
that the elusive Ermes Marana is a front man for Calvino himself—or even the trickster
chosen by “Calvino” to narrate his Calvino novel. “Ermes Marana dreamed of a literature
made entirely of apocrypha, of false attributions, of imitations and
counterfeits and pastiches.” Which is an exact description of the Calvino novel
that we Actual Readers are reading. Marana also advocates “a systematic
uncertainty as to the identity of the writer,” so as to “keep the reader from
abandoning himself with trust.”
Among the many
machinations of Marana are his conniving with Japanese publishers to publish
fake works purportedly by the Irish writer of trash novels, Silas Flannery, and
to make money by assisting the blocked Flannery to complete his works. Marana also
hopes to convince Flannery to stop plagiarizing Bertrand Vandervelde. Amidst
the Marana letters, You Reader comes upon a copy of a novel by Flannery and
begins reading it.
d
In a network of lines
that enlace
(by Silas Flannery)
This book’s first
chapter—actually another short story—begins with a long description of a man’s
neurotic reaction to hearing a telephone ring. The man is a university
professor, who is caught up in the ringing of telephones as he makes his
morning jog. In a strange twist of the plot, the telephone-phobic prof ends up
rescuing one of his students who has been abducted, and when he unties her she
thanks him by snarling, “You’re a bastard.”
Chapter Seven returns
to the romantic subtheme of the Calvino novel, and to the love interest,
Ludmilla, whom the narrator addresses directly: “What are you like, Other
Reader [Ludmilla]? It is time for this book in the second person to address
itself no longer to a general male you [You Reader], perhaps brother and double
of a hypocrite I, but directly to you who appeared in the second chapter as the
Third Person necessary for the novel to be a novel, for something to happen
between that male Second Person and the female Third…”
More on the Romantic
Plot. “Reading is solitude . . . . . . One reads alone, even in another’s
presence.” Yet You Reader wants to use a kind of mutuality of reading to get
closer to Other Reader Ludmilla. “You have with you the book you were reading
in the café [Silas Flannery], which you are eager to continue, so that you can
hand it to her, to communicate again with her through the channel dug by
others’ words, which as they are uttered by an alien voice, by the voice of
that silent nobody made of ink and typographical spacing, can become yours and
hers, a language, a code between the two of you…”
The plot now so
advances that the two readers end up in bed together: “Your bodies are trying
to find, skin to skin, the adhesion most generous in sensations, to transmit
and receive vibrations and waves, to compenetrate the fulnesses and the voids.”
And then, somehow inevitably, we get a description of sexual intercourse as
reading: “Ludmilla, now you are being read. Your body is being subjected to a
systematic reading, through channels of tactile information, visual, olfactory,
and not without some intervention of the taste buds. Hearing also has its role,
alert to your gasps and your trills.”
“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.” Part of the reading of
the copulation between Ludmilla and You Reader involves their reading ahead, to
a time when they will live together, will read in bed beside each other—a
situation that comes to fruition on the final pages of the Calvino book.
In the next novel
within the novel, In a network of lines
that intersect—also by Silas Flannery—a man protects himself from the world
at large by constructing a catoptric world of mirrors and kaleidoscopes; and
ends up, apparently, kidnapping his own self. The next chapter, Chapter Eight,
delves into the private diary of Flannery. Using a spyglass from his Swiss
chalet, the blocked writer watches a young woman reading a book on a terrace
below, “the 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…”
“I look at the woman
in the deck chair . . . . . . 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…”
Briefly touched upon
is the idea that writers cannot be genuine selfless readers, inasmuch as in the
act of reading they constantly wonder how certain ideas, certain words or
styles could be appropriated for their own works. “Since I have become a slave
laborer of writing [says Flannery], the pleasure of reading has finished for
me.”
Next, Flannery in his
diary notes broaches a subject that has—as happens repetitively—direct
relevance to the machinations of Ermes Marana and to the Calvino book we are
reading: first lines in novels are teeming with promise, but “the romantic
fascination produced in the pure state by the first sentences of the first
chapter of many novels is soon lost in the continuation of the story . . . . .
. I would like to be able to write a book that is only an incipit, that maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of
the beginning…”
Flannery tries copying
out the beginning of Dostoevsky’s Crime
and Punishment, thinking that the energy contained in that start might
communicate itself to him and spur his efforts to write. Then come more ideas
relevant to major themes: in Marana’s view “literature’s worth lies in its
power of mystification . . . . . . and “the author of every book is a
fictitious character whom the existent author invents to make him the author of
his fictions.” Who has Italo Calvino invented to write the narration of If on a winter’s night a traveler? Sometimes
it appears that his invented narrator “Calvino” is a twin of the trickster
Ermes Marana.
Where does writing
come from? There is a brief episode in which Flannery encounters certain
believers in UFOs. They make the assumption that he, Flannery, is being used as
a conduit by extraterrestrials who hope to get their message out through him:
“He shouldn’t even be aware of it. He would believe that he is writing as he
likes; instead, the message coming from space on waves picked up by his brain would
infiltrate what he is writing.”
Another type of
reading is suggested by Ludmilla’s sister, the feminist activist Lotaria, who
reads her own prejudices into everything she comes across. “She has read
[Flannery’s works] only to find in them what she was already convinced of
before reading them.” When he suggests to Lotaria that he would like readers
with an open mind, she replies that he wants “a passive way of reading,
escapist and regressive. That’s how my sister reads.” Ludmilla actually is not
a totally passive reader, but she would probably agree with the following
quotation from earlier in the book: “All interpretation is a use of violence
and caprice against a text” (p. 69).
Lotaria appears to be
the kind of reader who, alas, may soon—say, by the year 2050—be in the
majority: the reader as un-reader. She uses a programmed computer to read
novels for her and to point out the words most frequently used. From the lists
of words she deduces what the story is about. This suggests to Flannery that
instead of writing his books he could write lists of words in alphabetical
order, then let the computer put them together into a novel.
Flannery dreams of
finding Marana and working together with him to flood the world with apocrypha.
Apocryphal writing is best because “there is no certitude outside
falsification,” and “writing always means hiding something.” This echoes a
message voiced also by Marana, that the only important thing about fiction
writing is the artifice.
You Reader goes to see
Flannery, hoping to find copies of the last two novels he had begun reading:
the one about the professor who can’t stand telephones and the one about the
billionaire who collects kaleidoscopes. Flannery informs him that these books,
published by the unscrupulous Japanese publisher, have been plagiarized from
other authors. In speaking of his own plans, Flannery, once again, echoes
Marana’s notions applicable to the Calvino book as a whole:
“I have had the idea
of writing a novel composed only of beginnings of novels. The protagonist could
be a Reader who is continuously interrupted. The Reader buys the new novel A by
the author Z. But it is a defective copy, he can’t go beyond the beginning . .
. . . . I could write it all in the second person: you, Reader . . . I could
also introduce a young lady, the Other Reader, and a counterfeiter-translator,
and an old writer who keeps a diary like this diary…” The implication here is
that we are reading a book that Flannery has written, but it could also be a
book written by Marana, with help from Flannery and “Calvino”. The
possibilities are innumerable.
d
Flannery gives You
Reader another novel, supposedly one of the fakes, translated from the Japanese,
but it, of course, turns out to be a totally different story. Upon leaving Flannery,
You Reader is off to South America, in search of master counterfeiter Ermes
Marana. On the way there he begins reading the Japanese novel.
On the carpet of [ginkgo]
leaves illuminated by the moon
(by Takakumi Ikoka)
First line: “The ginkgo leaves fell like fine rain from the
boughs and dotted the lawn with yellow.” The ‘I’ narrator, a student working
with a professor at the home of the prof, wants to perceive each of the ginkgo
leaves as it falls, discreetly from every other leaf and from the fall of the
collective whole; he also would like to perceive each leaf by way of the
distance between it and other leaves—the empty air separating them.
He compares this kind of perception to the reading of a
novel: “the things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous
than those it does say, and only a special halo around what is written can give
the illusion that you are reading also what is unwritten.”
“Sometimes,” the narrator adds, “I happen to talk too much
and am unable finally to extricate myself from my tangled reasoning.” If the
Calvino book as a whole has any fault it may be this “talking too much.” The
reader can easily get lost in the maze of volubility and in all the various
entanglements of plot. But, for the most part, Calvino is a master at managing the
garrulousness and complexities of the plot line.
At the beginning of Chapter Nine You Reader is on a flight
to South America, reflecting on a comparison between reading and flying, while
reading the Takakumi Ikoka novel. He arrives in Ataguitania, another imaginary
country, where customs officials confiscate his novel (“banned in
Ataguitania”). The country, it seems, is in a state of revolutionary turmoil,
“where everything that can be falsified has been falsified.” So says a woman
who looks like Lotaria but calls herself Corinna. She has joined You Reader and
gives him a copy of the Japanese novel recently confiscated. Of course, it
turns out to be a different novel.
Next come a series of adventures in police states,
keystone-cop episodes involving revolutionaries, counter-revolutionaries, and
counter-counter revolutionaries. They arrest You Reader and Corinna, whose name
keeps changing as the plot runs on. You Reader ends up in a government jail,
where he is given a novel to read: Around
an empty grave, by Calixto Bandera. The authorities in charge want to
compare the way he reads the book to the way their reading machine reads it.
At this point the narrator behind the whole complicated
business of Calvino’s book (“Calvino” or Ermes Marana?) speaks up: “Reader, you
have found again the book you were reading; now you can pick up the broken
thread; . . . . . . But do you imagine it can go on in this way, this story?
No, not that of the novel! Yours! How long are you going to let yourself be
dragged passively by the plot? You had flung yourself into the action, filled
with adventurous impulses; and then? Your function was quickly reduced to that
of one who records situations decided by others, who submits to whims, finds
himself involved in events that elude his control. Then what use is your role
as protagonist to you?” Once again here, with this direct address to You Reader—the
“hero” of the novel—Calvino or Marana gets in another sideways wink at Actual
Reader. As if to say, “Well, here we are already on p. 218. Aren’t you, Actual
Reader, getting tired of being jerked around yet?”
A page later and poor You Reader is being ravished, while “Calvino”
castigates him: “Reader, what are you doing? Aren’t you going to resist? Aren’t
you going to escape? Ah, you are participating. . . . Ah, you fling yourself
into it, too. . . . You’re the absolute protagonist of this book, very well;
but do you believe that gives you the right to have carnal relations with all
the female characters? Like this, without any preparation. . . . Wasn’t your
story with Ludmilla enough to give the plot the warmth and grace of a love
story?”
d
Around an empty grave
(by Calixto Bandera)
The ‘I’ narrator of this book is sixteen-year-old Nacho
Zamora, and the action appears to take place in Mexico. It begins as the
narrator’s father, on his death bed, tries to communicate some important
information to his son: “I, knowing his tendency to digress, to lard all his
talk with divagations, glosses, parentheses, and flashbacks, was afraid he
would never arrive at communicating the essential thing to me.” As it so
happens, the father indeed dies without having told his son the secret. We’re
not sure how You Reader is feeling at this point, but Actual Reader (me) kind
of feels the same way about the Calvino book, now 222 pages into it: are we
ever going to actually get anywhere?
In Chapter Ten You Reader, held prisoner by the Agaguitanian
authorities, is freed, on the condition that he carry out a spying mission in a
distant country, Ircania, which is, apparently, another police state, modeled
on the Soviet Union. There he meets with Director General Arkadian Porphyrich
[note the Russian name], who controls publication of books in his country and
who shows You Reader a schema indicating attitudes taken by a variety of
countries toward books. These include, among others, “the countries where all
books are systematically confiscated; the countries where there is no
censorship because there are no books, but there are many potential readers;
the countries where there are no books and nobody complains about their absence;
the countries, finally, in which every day books are produced for all tastes
and all ideas, amid general indifference” [this last one, apparently, is a poke
in the eye of the U.S.A.].
Arkadian Porphyrich goes on to make an assertion that became
a sort of truism back when the U.S.S.R. still existed: the written word is held
in the highest esteem by police states, where literary art achieves an
extraordinary authority and readers experience unquenchable cravings for banned
books. In the daylight hours A.P. works in his official capacity as a kind of
censor, but in his leisure time, in the evening, he reads the banned texts for
pleasure.
A.P. also explains to You Reader the relationship between
Ludmilla, the selfless reader, and Ermes Marana, the sly counterfeiter and
trickster who believes only in artifice: “His driving motive was not money, or
power, or ambition. It seems he did everything for a woman, to win her back, or
perhaps only to get even, to win a bet with her.” For Ludmilla reading means
“being ready to catch a voice that makes itself heard when you least expect it,
a voice that comes from an unknown source, from somewhere beyond the book,
beyond the author.” In opposition to this notion, Marana wanted to prove to her
“that behind the written page is the void: the world exists only as an
artifice, pretense, misunderstanding, falsehood.”
Despite Marana’s position as chief artificer and maker of
the action for the narrator “Calvino,” it appears that he loses his bet with
the idealistic Ludmilla. Life and art are not just all make believe. Ludmilla’s
“always curious, always insatiable reading . . . managed to uncover truths
hidden in the most barefaced fake, and falsity with no attenuating
circumstances in words claiming to be the most truthful.”
Even the most omnipotent police censorship has no power over
reading done at this high level of competence: “in the decree that forbids
reading there will be still read something of the truth that we [the oppressive
authorities] would wish never to be read.” Calvino’s ringing endorsement of
true reading and true readers sounds impressive here, although forty years
later we see graphics, pictorial representations, and the overuse of gadgetry
encroaching on the art of reading in ways more effective than the harshest
measures of police states once were. We wonder if Calvino in his day anticipated
what the world of reading literary fiction would come to in the not so distant
future.
Still hoping to read the Bandera novel, Around an empty grave, You Reader asks Arkadian Porphyrich to help
him get a copy in an Ircanian translation. A.P. tells him about a different
novel, “by one of our most important banned authors, Anatoly Anatolin, titled What story down there awaits its end—a
version of Bandera’s novel in an Ircanian setting. As soon as we have seized
it, I will have a copy prepared for you.” You Reader manages to meet with
Anatolin, who passes him part of the book’s manuscript, but government agents seize
and arrest the author before he can pass on the whole text.
d
What
story down there awaits its end
(by
Anatoly Anatolin)
The ‘I’ narrator of the Anatolin novel walks down the main
prospect of a large city, mentally erasing all objects and persons as he walks.
“The last residue of a vanished world blows away”: a bunch of ripe grapes, a
baby bootee, and what appears to be a page out of the novel by Bandera: “a page
that seems torn from a novel written in Spanish, with a woman’s name,
Amaranta.”
The ‘I’ narrator thinks he is erasing the world for his own
private reasons, so that he can remain alone with his good friend Franziska,
but then he comes across “men from Section D,” who thank him for helping them
with their job. These bureaucrats apparently are erasing the world in
preparation for some New World Order and are there to welcome certain new
beings who are coming to replace the old.
The ‘I’ narrator now desperately tries to restore his erasures,
and to get to Franziska before it is too late. “I advance over the frozen crust
toward her. The world is reduced to a sheet of paper on which nothing can be
written except abstract words, as if all concrete nouns were finished.” Just as
an abyss opens before him and the whole world disappears, he makes it to
Franziska, and with their meeting it appears that the almost-vanished world has
been miraculously restored.
The last chapter (Chapter Eleven) begins with another apparent
double message: addressed to You Reader and Actual Reader: “Reader, it is time
for your tempest-tossed vessel to come to port. What harbor can receive you
more securely than a great library?”
“After circling the world from book to book,” You Reader is back
home; he goes to the library, hoping to find there the ten novels whose
beginnings he has read. All of the books, so it turns out, are in the card
catalogue, but none of them is available. Various readers sitting in the
library explain to You Reader how they read books. The first says that he can
read only a few lines before his imagination is lit up, taking him away from
the text on long and fanciful journeys.
Another explains that he reads and rereads the same books over and
over, “but at every rereading I seem to be reading a new book for the first
time.” Furthermore, “the conclusion I have reached is that reading is an
operation without object; or that its true object is itself.”
More readers voice their opinions. (1) “Every new book that I read
comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my
readings” (2) “The moment that counts most for me is the one that precedes
reading. At times a title is enough to kindle in me the desire for a book that
perhaps does not exist . . . the promise of reading is enough.”
The discussion
ends when the seventh reader declares that in ancient times a story could end
only in one of two ways: with a marriage or a death. “The ultimate meaning to
which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the
inevitability of death.” You Reader decides at this point that he wants to end
the story by marrying Ludmilla. And so he does.
d
Chapter
Twelve is a Coda chapter. Here it is in its entirety.
“Now you are man and wife, Reader and Reader. A great double bed
receives your parallel readings.
Ludmilla closes her book, turns off her light, puts her head back
against the pillow, and says, ‘Turn off your light, too. Aren’t you tired of
reading?’
And you say, ‘Just a moment, I’ve almost finished If on a winter’s night a traveler by
Italo Calvino.’”
So ends the anti-novel than may be the greatest twentieth century
book ever written on the theme of readers and reading of fiction. Hunkered down
against the computer age in their bunkers, the last dogged readers of the late twenty-first
century—still holding out against all odds to keep the art of reading literary
fiction operative—may one day look back to this Calvino book as their
inspiration.
Already in the late 1970s, when he wrote this book, Calvino,
fortified by his apparent in-depth study of French semiotics and
deconstruction of text, came up with a multitude of takes on the subject of what
reading is and what writing is—with particular reference to the reading and
writing of artistic fiction. While his prescience is impressive, he certainly
could not have predicted what reading has become roughly forty years later, nor
what it is likely to become by the end of the twenty-first century.
Already in the U.S. today more people read books on digital
devices than on printed pages. This in itself changes the act of reading in subtle
ways. And insidious algorithms, which are intruding into the Liberal Dream of
human free will at a dazzling pace, are already at work on Kindle devices that
can collect data on readers as they read. Already your Kindle can monitor which
parts of a book you read quickly and which slowly, and on which page you take a
break or even abandon the book.
As Kindle devices are upgraded in the near future they will
be able to determine how each sentence you read influences your blood pressure
and heart rate, what made you laugh, cry, or be angry. “Soon, books will read
you while you are reading them.” Be prepared to be read, reader of the
twenty-first century. Information in the last two paragraphs is from Yuval Noah
Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of
Tomorrow, p. 348-49.
Gustav Klimdt, "Tear of Gold"
