If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979) by Italo Calvino: A Critical Analysis

For those with an amorous affair with books, this novel may perhaps be the ultimate love-

teller to the reader. Told alternately in second and third persons, the book is a fascinating

exploration of the relationship b/w the author and the reader. Flawlessly composed, the novel

weaves together seemingly unrelated tales, all of which relate directly to you, the reader. At

its core is an ingenious concept the likes of which could have only come from the

unparalleled imagination of Calvino.

In its most poignant moments, the novel makes of feel being a part of some infinitely

complex system of self-awareness. It sends you into a whirlpool of self-reflection where the

book folds in on itself and implodes. Particular parts make you see oneself from the

protagonist’s point of view, while other parts let you witness yourself reading about yourself

reading. The novel thus gives one a very curious feeling that one has never experienced

before with any other book.

If On a Winter’s Night is a marvel of ingenuity, an experimental text that looks longingly

back to the great age of narration.

In one sense it is a comedy in which the two protagonists, the Reader and the Other Reader,

get married, having finished If On a Winter’s Night. In another, it is a tragedy, a reflection on

the difficulties of writing and the solitary nature of reading.

All the while the Reader and Ludmilla try to reach, and read, each other.

The novel is dazzling, vertiginous and deeply romantic.

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.” Calvino
Calvino’s anti-novel is about the efforts of two of his characters- The Reader and Ludmilla-

to read ten very different novels. They are never able to get to the second chapter of any of

them; nor are the actual readers of this novel who share their puzzlement and frustration.

Finally, the two marry and settle down to read in bed a novel called If On a Winter’s Night by

Italo Calvino.

Calvino here shows that the nvoel, far from being a dead form, is capable of endless

mutations.

Calvino is an Italian (born in Cuba)

The Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947)

The Cloven Viscount (1952)

Cosmicomics (1965)

The Uses of Literature – collection of essays.

The first chapter and the odd numbered chapters are in the second person, and tell the reader

what he is doing in preparation for reading the next chapter.

The even numbered chapters are all single chapters from whichever book the reader is trying

to read.

Thought thee novel is assiduously meta-fictional, its assays are preternaturally acute, and

playful to boot.

If On a Winter’s Night

Metafiction – Patricia Waugh

Haroun and the Sea of Stories – Rushdie

The beginning of a narrative is called incipit.

If On a Winter’s Night is

1. A frame tale

2. A trap story

3. A second person narrative

4. Based on mise-en-abyme (endless reflection) structure (self-reflexive metafiction)

(Dian Elam’s subtitle –Ms en-abyme – endless woman)

5. 12 numbered chapters and 10 incipits.

6. Structure more important than story.

7. Characterized by perpetual interruptions.

8. The character as a rendezvous for the reader and the writer.

9. Stories interconnected by some threads.

You – Reader

Ludmilla – other reader

Irnerio – non-reader, artist

Lotaria – the scholar critic

10. The novel itself is the vertigo of reading, vertigo of existence.

Terry Lowell – Consuming Fiction

Pierre Macherey – Theory of Literary Production

His term – symptomatic reading

Mileu Kundera – The Art of the Novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

11. Every act of reading is an act of violence on the text – Paul de Man, Umberto Eco,

Susan Sontag all expressed this idea.

12. The whole world is a void which we try to fill by creating bridges called narratives.

“Beneath every word there is nothingness.” Vertigo is the realization of this void.

13. Ludmilla says that the post-modern novels must have

“The desire to narrate, the desire to pile stories upon stories without trying to impose a

philosophy of life upon you, simply allowing you to observe its growth, like a tree, and

entangling, as if of branches and leaves.”

14. “The author was an invisible point from which the books came, a void travelled by

ghosts, an underground tunnel that put other worlds in communication with the chicken coup

of boyhood.”

OEPHLW – Organization for the Electronic Production of Homogenized Literary Works.

It later had a sub wing called OAP – Organization for the Apocryphal Power.

15. Every book is suigeneris. And hence every work is apocryphal – in that it is falsely

attributed to belong to a period or an author.

16. Are there many books? Or only one Book?

17. Reading is a discontinuous and fragmentary operation. It is an operation without

object or its true object is itself. The book is an accessory aid, or even a pre text (both context

and existing before the text). The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two phases –

the discontinuity of life and inevitability of death

18. A typical post-modern novel.

The Unresolvable Plot - Elizabeth Dipple