If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1979

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1-Interlude 2

Chapter 3-Interlude 4

Chapter 5-Interlude 6

Chapter 7-Interlude 8

Chapters 9-12

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Themes

The Act of Reading

From the novel’s opening sentence, the narrator of If on a winter’s night a traveler explicitly draws the audience’s attention to the act of reading. The novel exemplifies metafiction, in which a novel’s narration is self-aware. The narrator knows he’s directly addressing the novel’s audience, and the story starts and ends with a declaration of the audience starting and ending the novel. Unusually for fiction, the narrator makes the audience aware of their role in the novel by using a second-person singular pronoun. The Reader is the novel’s protagonist; the Reader is the audience, addressed as “you” throughout the text. Even in this sense, however, the novel creates an abstract blur between metafiction and traditional fiction. The narrator may be addressing you, the audience, but eventually develops the character of the Reader in the broadest sense, describing the Reader as a single male who enjoys reading. The Reader becomes obsessive over the incomplete stories and falls in love with Ludmilla, also known as the Other Reader. The act of reading becomes a bilateral direction of travel: As the audience reads the novel, the novel reads the audience, transforming the Reader from a generic pronoun into an imagined member of Calvino’s book-buying demographic. The audience, like the Reader, obsesses over the act of reading as each novel is snatched away from them at a moment of literary intensity.

The act of reading broadens beyond the specific. The Reader and the Other Reader function as the protagonist and the romantic interest in a traditional storytelling sense. They represent these archetypes but express them through a literary lexicon. When they have sex for the first time, for example, their bodies become texts. They read each other like they read a novel, consuming each other’s physical form urgently and intensely. After the frustration of their literary exploits, they’re bound together by the act of reading to the point that they must read one another to progress. In the novel’s later stages, the interplay between the physical form and the act of reading becomes an example of revolutionary praxis: A body is a novel, waging war against a state apparatus by telling a story of revolution and counterrevolution. The act of reading isn’t limited to books or the audience; reading can be a revolutionary or romantic act, depending on the text that is being read or disseminated.

Reading is more than just the interpretation of words. Writing and translation are important to the reading process, because they determine the words that the writer and translator permit readers to see. Silas Flannery is an example of how reading influences writing. He watches a neighbor as she reads; he imagines her character and envisions her reading one of his novels, which influences what he writes. Similarly, when Lotaria explains her analytic process, Silas Flannery comes to a halt because he’s unable to write something for a computer to read. Ernes Marana functions similarly in his role as translator. He’s eventually revealed as a fraud: he doesn’t translate novels; he simply substitutes other novels instead. He doesn’t read or translate. He doesn’t even provide the right books. Instead, his fraud affects the act of reading by withholding the true stories from the audience (and the characters). The act of reading isn’t individualistic. It’s the product of a competing universe of subjective experiences.

The Power of Words

Calvino grew up in the shadow of Italian fascism. He fought against the fascist regime during World War II and experienced firsthand how authoritarian regimes manipulate the written word as a means of social control. Near the end of If on a winter’s night a traveler, the interplay between state power and words becomes more explicit. For example, Marana writes to burnish the power of an African authoritarian, while the Reader is sent on a mission to an authoritarian state in South America to retrieve a copy of a banned novel from the state police department. The Reader enters the country of Ataguitania with a copy of a banned novel and is sent to prison, then he’s sent to the country of Ircania to collect a different banned book from a different authoritarian regime. Different states ban different books for similar reasons, determining what they permit citizens to read and share as a way to influence the ideological terrain of the captive society. The inherent implication of banning books and sharing banned books is that these books have a power that goes beyond the obvious. Words are more than just collections of letters. The authoritarian implication is an example of semiotics, in which words have a power beyond their obvious meaning. Words, the Reader discovers, are more powerful than he ever imagined.

The Reader’s conversation with Porphyrich hints at a broader, international belief in the power of words. Porphyrich labels the global conspiracy the Spirit, a vague word that implies a transcendental power (and, ironically, exemplifies the power of words to imply transcendence). While the Spirit and the examples of international cooperation may seem positive in their intent (at least as Porphyrich describes them), the Reader fundamentally mistrusts the censorship and authoritarianism that the police officer describes. This menacing power reaches another level in the Chapter 7 story In a network of lines that intersect, in which an individual has the power to delete anything that displeases him. In doing so, he creates an empty, unsatisfying void. This cultural, social void is the implied consequence of any authoritarian censorship that bases its authority on the power of words.

The novel creates tension through the addictive power of an unfinished story. Both the Reader and Lumilla purchase a novel, only to discover that they aren’t able to finish the story. The initial printing error propels them into a complex world of paranoia, deception, authoritarianism, art, and stories. At each turn, the Reader begins a story and then feels compelled to reach the end. Without the catharsis of a story’s resolution, the Reader feels unsatisfied. The lack of satisfaction results from the denial of the denouement in any of these stories. If words weren’t powerful, the Reader would abandon his journey. Instead, he finds himself propelled around the world, undertaking secret missions, in a desperate desire to know what happens. The stories that the Reader explores have various genres. The shared trait between them all is that they lack an ending; the power of words becomes a compulsion, pushing the Reader out of his comfort zone and into new and dangerous places because he feels a fundamental urge to reach the end of the stories that he has started. Structurally, the power of words becomes an ironic foundation for the entire text. The story moves toward an ending by denying endings to its protagonist. The power of words moves the audience through the novel in a literary sense, just as the narration moves the Reader through the novel. Words, even their absence, reveal their power through the ability to move the audience and the characters forward through a story.

Archetypal and Structural Recurrence

Eternal recurrence is a philosophical concept in which time is caught in a constant loop of infinite repetition. In literature, this can be expressed in the form of archetypes and ideas that are repeated across genres, movements, and novels. If on a winter’s night a traveler is pointedly aware of its position as a novel—in particular, a novel by famed Italian writer Italo Calvino, a man with a playful reputation for experimental fiction—in the realm of metafiction. The novel is about novels, and an expression of this self-awareness is in the many examples of recurrence throughout the text. One of the clearest examples is the use of character archetypes. The novel is composed of many sections of other novels, many of which follow the same format. The male first-person narrator and a sympathetic female counterpart become romantically involved. In the main text, these figures are the Reader and Ludmilla. In the story following Chapter 2, Outside the town of Malbork, the narrator flirts with Madame Marne. In the story following Chapter 8, On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon, the narrator falls in love with Makiko. Even in the text of the main chapters, women other than Ludmilla function as romantic interests for the Reader. The Reader meets a woman who closely resembles Ludmilla but shifts through identities so often that the Reader refers to her as Corinna-Gertrude-Ingrid. Her function is an expression of literary recurrence, in which romantic archetypes echo across different texts as though they’re a fundamental expression of human nature and human desire.

To reinforce the theme of recurrence, If on a winter’s night a traveler applies it to the novel’s structure, as well as the structure of the individual stories. As an analogy, Irnerio describes how he makes his artwork out of other stories (or books). The audience sees only the beginning of this process, as he gathers novels from Ludmilla’s shelves. The final piece of art is never shown to the Reader because the construction process is more important than the art itself. Irnerio’s art mirrors the novel’s structure, which is made of the openings of many novels. Each of these individual stories is read by the Reader, who is forced to finish each story at a moment of literary intensity. The idea repeats across the novel, motivating the Reader to seek out more stories.

The idea of recurrence wasn’t new. On several occasions, the characters reference the classic book 1001 Arabian Nights, a collection of stories that employs a framing device in which a woman tells her husband a story each night to delay her execution. Likewise, the denial of catharsis wasn’t new. Instead, the framing device of If on a winter’s night a traveler is an example of literary recurrence, in which the structure of novels echoes across the ages. Calvino may have a reputation as an innovative and playful storyteller, but his own novel—in which he’s the narrator—is aware of its place in the pantheon of literary recurrence, employing and inverting similar structures in an experimental manner.