August 2009: Italo Calvino: If On A Winter's Night A Traveler

[Stewart]

The chosen book for the inaugural World Literature Forum book group is Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveler (1979).

ABOUT THE BOOK
Calvino's masterpiece opens with a scene that's reassuringly commonplace: apparently. Indeed, it's taking place now. A reader goes into a bookshop to buy a book: not any book, but the latest Calvino, the book you are holding in your hands. Or is it? Are you the reader? Is this the book? Beware. All assumptions are dangerous on this most bewitching switch-back ride to the heart of storytelling.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Italo Calvino was born in Cuba and grew up in Italy. During the war he was a member of the Italian Resistance and joined the Communist Party, although he later left in 1957. One of the most respected writers of our time, his best-known works of fiction include Invisible Cities, If on a winter's night a traveller, Marcovaldo and Mr Palomar. In 1981 he was awarded the prestigious French Legion d'Honneur. He died in Siena in 1985.

We also have a dedicated Italo Calvino discussion thread.

Thinking about it? Why not read this sample from the opening chapter? That should whet your appetite.

Discussion begins August 1st, 2009.

[Stewart]

For those reading the book for the first time, would you care to offer up some impressions? Did you like the book? Was it frustrating, in more ways than one? Did it surprise you by the path it took? And what of those revisiting it: was it less or more enjoyable?

I read the book a few years ago and can remember loving it. I've recently read the opening chapters and have been immediately sucked back into its worlds. What's interesting is how much heavier it seems on a second reading: it makes me wonder how much I missed the first time round.

Rereading the opening chapter (link above) was a joy, not only because it holds up a mirror to myself as a reader, but because it's such a novel piece of writing. The lists that Calvino rhymes off ring true, and while I'd experienced tidbits of metafiction before, this was my first full-length work. (I've since learned the rtechnique is called mise en abîme.)

As we move from the framing device - the story of You - into the opening of the Calvino novel, I just love the way he knits the scene, so that you try to immerse yourself into it but can't because of the reminders that you are reading a book:

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. In the odor of the station there is a passing whiff of station cafe odor. There is someone looking through the befogged glass, he opens the glass door of the bar, everything is misty, inside, too, as if seen by nearsighted eyes, or eyes irritated by coal dust. The pages of the book are clouded like the windows of an old train. It is a rainy evening; the man enters the bar; he unbuttons his damp overcoat; a cloud of steam enfolds him; a whistle dies away along tracks that are glistening with rain, as far as the eye can see.

I'm only a couple of chapters in, as it's a book i want to dip into throughout August. Since it's a book group discussion, and participants would be assumed to have read the book, I see little reason to use spoiler tags.

[Liam]

When I think of this book, I always remember a passage from A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990), which could have served as an epigraph to Calvino’s novel had it been published around the same time:

It is possible for a writer to make, or remake at least, for a reader, the primary pleasures of eating, or drinking, or looking on, or sex. Novels have their obligatory tour-de-force, the green-flecked gold omelette aux fines herbes, melting into buttery formlessness and tasting of summer, or the creamy human haunch, firm and warm, curved back to reveal a hot hollow, a crisping hair or two, the glimpsed sex. They do not habitually elaborate on the equally intense pleasure of reading.

There are obvious reasons for this, the most obvious being the regressive nature of the pleasure, a mise-en-abîme even, where words draw attention to the power and delight of words, and so ad infinitum, thus making the imagination experience something papery and dry, narcissistic and yet disagreeably distanced, without the immediacy of sexual moisture or the scented garnet glow of good burgundy.

And yet, natures such as Roland’s [main character] are at their most alert and heady when reading is violently yet steadily alive. (What an amazing word “heady” is, en passant, suggesting both acute sensuous alertness and its opposite, the pleasure of the brain as opposed to the viscera—though each is implicated in the other, as we know very well, with both, when they are working.)

Further thoughts and impressions forthcoming—

[Stewart, would it be OK if I just posted my old paper on Calvino? It’s around 4-5 pages, with quotes].


Cheers,
L

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by Liam

[Stewart, would it be OK if I just posted my old paper on Calvino? It’s around 4-5 pages, with quotes]

Sure. It would be good to read.

[Beth]

Are you disappointed? Let's see. Perhaps at first you feel a bit lost, as when a person appears who, from the name, you identified with a certain face, and you try to make the features you are seeing tally with those you had in mind, and it won't work. 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.

Finished If On A Winter's Night a Traveler just over a week ago and have been puzzling on it ever since. I took a push/pull ride with the novel, being drawn and delighted by the first half of each chapter, then scrambled all over the place as the words veer into uncharted corners. I love the notion of the greedy reader and of course that self recognition. I haven't experienced meta-fiction prior to this novel. Part of me wants to attempt an understanding. But maybe a savvier slice realizes that I've been had in something of a joke on Calvino's part and I should just laugh along. Do you think he had fun designing such an experience for the reader?

[Beth]

Originally Posted by Liam

When I think of this book, I always remember a passage from A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990), which could have served as an epigraph to Calvino’s novel had it been published around the same time:

A bit of possible serendipity as I picked up Possession from the library where I'd gone to return Winter's Night. At the check out, I couldn't part with the Calvino for another few weeks and renewed it. Both novels came home together.

[KevinfromCanada]

I had started Calvino twice before and never finished it -- not so much abandoned, as overlooked. In some ways the structure tends to encourage this (it looks to be a book that can be set aside for a couple of days). This time, I read through in two sessions and found it to be a most rewarding work. I did find that my previous efforts had value, since it meant I wasn't scratching my head in the first few parts of the book. In a way I am agreeing with Stewart's impression about the second reading revealing a greater depth.

I'm afraid Liam is going to have to explain why he thinks the Byatt quote applies. While she does seem to be at her most opaque there, I can't see a connection with the Calvino -- and, while I did like Possession and have read it a number of times, I don't think there's much comparison between the two books.

What I did find interesting as a comparison, perhaps because I had read it so recently, was Gilbert Adair's The Death of the Author. Adair may be a little bit tongue in cheek when his narrator's theory proclaims that what the author meant is irrelevant because it is the work that "means" -- Calvino, meanwhile, is basing his whole hypothesis (as an author) on the non-relevance of his fictional authors.

In the final analysis, that is what I found most appealing and rewarding about this book. The deliberate -- and for me successful -- effort to focus the book on the Reader and, as the novel progresses, ask more and more of that Reader creates a unique impression. (That's another way in which I disagree with Byatt comparisons -- she is very much a storyteller, Calvino in this book is what I would call a "storyenroller", almost a guide to the experience, rather than its director.)

[beelzebubbles]

The fitful stops and starts didn't bother me. I read most books as if they are a meta-fiction in style. By that I mean, I rarely read them from beginning to end. Instead I dip into them at random to discern whether it is worth it to go on or because things are slowing down in the spot where I have abandoned the original story line.

I am about half way through and I must say that I am enjoying the story of the two readers but not the books they are reading. I think that is because of the way the author inserts the himself in those narratives and forces us even further away from them. If I am reading something sentimental and the author says and now here is where you cry or this is sentimental tripe that you are enjoying (though he doesn't do it quite that baldly), I feel as if the reader is being judged or made to feel as if he is being conned. I guess I don't like being made to feel like a dupe.

It's fiction. A vast amount of fiction is an emotional con game. That is often why we indulge. We want to feel scared or romantic or smart. Case in point the letters of the pathological lying translator. In this instance, the reader feels as if he is in on the joke rather than being the butt of the joke. The author doesn't keep us at an uncomfortable remove from the absurdist world of the publishing company or the madcap translators' alleged adventures and we feel as if we are in on the joke.

I guess my problem is that I feel that I know what he is telling me; so why would I want to read a book that is constantly removing itself from my grasp unless it's illusions and questions and sleight of hand were more rewarding than this one's are?

Still I am only part way through, maybe I will change my mind in the end.

I have to say it is very aptly titled as I can never remember it: an ineffable title for the story of an ineffable fiction.

[KevinfromCanada]

Originally Posted by beelzebubbles

I am about half way through and I must say that I am enjoying the story of the two readers but not the books they are reading. ...

I guess my problem is that I feel that I know what he is telling me; so why would I want to read a book that is constantly removing itself from my grasp unless it's illusions and questions and sleight of hand were more rewarding than this one's are?

Still I am only part way through, maybe I will change my mind in the end.

For what it is worth, b., that is pretty much exactly where I was at that stage in the book. I am glad that I persevered, but you might reach a different conclusion (that's what makes these collegial reading projects interesting, after all).

[KevinfromCanada]

Originally Posted by Stewart

Sure. It would be good to read.

Liam: Please do post your essay. It already looks to me that you and I have a different take on this book (maybe a wrong conclusion on my part) and I would be quite interested in reading your thoughts. Do you think you might also tell us how long ago it was that you wrote it and whether a reread has changed any of your opions?

[Colette Jones]

Originally Posted by beelzebubbles

I am about half way through and I must say that I am enjoying the story of the two readers but not the books they are reading.

Exactly the same here. I have considered just reading the alternating chapters and ignoring the [sections of the] books the readers are reading. Would I miss much?

[Liam]

I had to write a short paper on Calvino in Fall 2005 (up to you to figure out how old I was at the time, ), using at least one critical text (I settled on Barthes) and one other work we read in class (I chose Peter Greenaway's film The Pillow Book, which was shown to us at the end.) We read Francesca Duranti's short novel (quoted at the end) right after Calvino.

The Pleasures of the Text: Literature and Sex in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler

I want to describe the Body as a Book
A Book as a Body
And this Body and this Book
Will be the first volume.
—Peter Greenaway: The Pillow Book

…

There is a great passage in Dante’s Inferno that positively overflows with poetic and erotic sensuousness. Having encountered the souls of Paolo and Francesca languishing in the void, the Poet wishes to know what sin they could have possibly committed to be damned so. Francesca eagerly tells him her story:

But if there is indeed a soul in Hell
to ask of the beginning of our love
out of his pity, I will weep and tell:
On a day for dalliance we read the rhyme
of Lancelot, how love had mastered him.
We were alone with innocence and dim time.
Pause after pause that high old story drew
our eyes together while we blushed and paled;
but it was one soft passage overthrew
our caution and our hearts. For when we read
how her fond smile was kissed by such a lover,
he who is one with me alive and dead
breathed on my lips the tremor of his kiss.
That book, and he who wrote it, was a pander.
That day we read no further.

(Canto V, Lines 121-35)

Books, it seems, have always had the strange power to inspire and to “corrupt.” Sometimes, the thin line dividing inspiration and corruption gets blurred, turning a work of art into a piece of pornography and a piece of pornography into a work of art: for “print and flesh are both equally attractive” (Greenaway 70). In If on a winter’s night a traveler, Calvino’s metaphor of reading as an act of lovemaking has yielded, it seems, a number of different definitions. “Reading is solitary,” the narrator informs the Reader, when the latter visits Ludmilla’s apartment for the first time. “One reads alone, even in another’s presence” (143). One is lost, that is, in a world to which no other person can be granted a rightful entrance. The text, very much like the body, “declares its subject. [It] is an end and not a means. [The] text signifies. Communicates. Shouts. Protests. Subverts” (214). The reader seems to be in perfect agreement, as he “cut[s] [his] way through [his] reading as if through a dense forest” (40).

The Reader enjoys, Calvino seems to be saying, responding violently to the text; in his impatience to cut through the volume’s uncut pages, he expresses pleasure and determination; he savors the thought of penetrating the text’s secrets (31). Sometimes, the process of reading is even compared by Calvino to a violent rape: “The text, when you are the reader, is something that is there, against which you are forced to clash” (66). Sexual thoughts and fantasies seem to overtake the Reader’s consciousness completely after he is granted permission to enter the place where the Other Reader lives: “Would you like to penetrate her shell,” the author asks him, as the Reader goes through Ludmilla’s books and kitchen utensils, “insinuating yourself among the pages of the books she is reading?” (143). Given the fact that sex does, ironically, ensue later on in the chapter, we can answer the question with confidence: Yes, he does.

Would the Reader even have gotten into the situation he finds himself in at the end if it were not for the presence in the bookstore of Ludmilla? “The pursuit of the interrupted book, which instilled in you a special excitement since you were conducting it together with the Other Reader, turns out to be the same thing as pursuing her, who eludes you in a proliferation of mysteries, deceits, disguises…” (147). Woman and book become one, the text becomes flesh, and the skin becomes paper.

Ludmilla, we are told, is being “read” by the Reader. Her body is “being subjected to a systematic reading, through channels of tactile information, visual, olfactory, and not without some intervention of the taste buds” (150). The Reader is rapturously losing himself in the text. “What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most,” the narrator adds a little later, “is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space” (152). In other words, it is both through love and through reading that Mystic Oneness is reached. The Reader, however, comes to that conclusion much-much later, when, after being sent on a mission to an imaginary totalitarian state, he experiences a pang of pleasure upon learning that even the country’s most ferocious censor is not above squirreling away some of the books he professes to like, proving, once more, that in actuality, everyone is a reader of some kind, one way or the other. The Reader, too, becomes, by the end of the narrative, a text—an open book for Ludmilla to read.

“Print and flesh” become equally attractive indeed—as the novel ends, we are granted a last (and somewhat voyeuristic) glimpse into the Reader’s imminent sexual happiness with Ludmilla; his—to use a Roland Barthes term—bliss. What we are shown here is a true marriage of minds, which is somewhat undermined by the fact that earlier, the narrator explicitly states that “though the quests for meaning and pleasure can be momentarily fulfilled, they can never be completed—that they are, indeed, the very evidence of our inability to find happiness” (Washington xxiii). The Reader and Ludmilla do, in fact, share a “great double bed,” but each one has his/her own side, his/her own bedside lamp, and finally, his/her own book. The hope that a certain “communion of inner rhythm” could be reached through “a book’s being read at the same time by two people” (122) is never realized.

In that, If on a winter’s night a traveler truly is a postmodern text, in which every conceivable assumption is shattered and where pleasure is extracted from deconstruction: “Pleasure in pieces; language in pieces; culture in pieces. Such texts are perverse in that they are outside any imaginable finality” (Barthes 51). What Ludmilla ultimately has to be content with is the Reader’s profile looking away from her, and what is a profile, as Francesca Duranti says, “if not the face of someone looking at someone else?” (32).

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.

Calvino, Italo. If on a winter’s night a traveler. New York: Everyman’s Library, 1993.

Dante. The Inferno. Translated by John Ciardi. New York: Signet Classics, 2001.

Duranti, Francesca. The House on Moon Lake. Harrison, New York: Delphinium Books, 2000.

Greenaway, Peter. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover: A Screenplay. Paris: Dis Voir, 1990.

Washington, Peter. Introduction. If on a winter’s night a traveler. By Italo Calvino. New York: Everyman’s Library, 1993.




L.

[KevinfromCanada]

Originally Posted by Colette Jones

Exactly the same here. I have considered just reading the alternating chapters and ignoring the [sections of the] books the readers are reading. Would I miss much?

In my opinion, yes. Then again, given my proven record on opinions....

[Liam]

Liam: Please do post your essay.

Speak of the devil. I was trying to upload it for the last 30 min.

how long ago it was that you wrote it

November 2005. (I was born on Aug 2nd, 1984. So yeah, my 25th birthday is tomorrow).

The class was called Metafiction/Metafilm and we read some truly awesome books. The films were French, for the most part, although our Prof also showed some Greenaway and Almodóvar.



L.

[KevinfromCanada]

Originally Posted by Liam

Speak of the devil. I was trying to upload it for the last 30 min.

Thanks for posting it, Liam. As I suspected, it is an interpretation that I do not share -- but I can follow the logic of your opinion. Given that a number of participants in the forum are still reading the book, I'll leave it at that for now, but we can return later.

Have a happy birthday.

[Liam]

Originally Posted by KevinfromCanada

Have a happy birthday.

Thanks!

As I suspected, it is an interpretation that I do not share

And you don't have to--ah, the beauty of the reader-response theory!

Forgot to mention, when Calvino's book first came out, a lot of critics referred to it as a coitus interruptus: he keeps feeding you all these marvelous stories, but Scheherazade-like, leaves out the ending. (Well, the latter actually postponed the ending until the following evening, Calvino suspends it indefinitely). And that was exactly what our Professor himself had called it--a short and pleasurable fuck that never has its climax.



Cheers,
L

[KevinfromCanada]

Originally Posted by Liam

As the Killer told the Blonde, Think...

I think it is time that I said goodbye to the World Literature Forum. My notion of forum says that it is a place for debate -- and that those who state opinions have a rationale for them. "Think" -- or "I am babbling again" -- seems a little deficient.

Best wishes to all who stay here.

[Liam]

Originally Posted by KevinfromCanada

I'm afraid Liam is going to have to explain why he thinks the Byatt quote applies.

I guess I was thinking about it in terms of the paper I wrote back in 2005: in my interpretation, Calvino's book was, first and foremost, about the pleasure or pleasures of simply reading. Following the story. Savoring the language. Etc.

Byatt complains that not many writers write about these pleasures, and yet Calvino's novel is an obvious exception.

I was also trying to compare Roland, in Possession, to the two Readers in Winter's Night. There are some instances, when they read the books that they cannot find endings to, where they come across as almost possessed by the story. It's like their own lives cease to matter for the time being, and there's only the Story.

Does this make sense to anyone?

What do you think, Kevin?


And yes, I agree, Calvino and Byatt are two different kinds of storytellers, even when they appear to be "alike."


Cheers,
L

[Flower]

Im also half way through the book.

To me its rather annoying. The only thing which keeps the book together are the two readers. And Im guess that hopefully there will a point at the end of the book, to why we must read all these small stories that never ends?

[matt.todd]

Flower, I, too am about halfway through the book. And while it is a little frustrating to be constantly pulled in and out of narratives, I'm kind of enjoying it. As beelzebubbles said up thread, though, I do think the continuing Reader story is more interesting than the snippets, but we'll see how I feel later.

Also, is it just me, or is Calvino pastiching certain authors in each of the stories? So far I get Graham Greene for the first one, and Halldor Laxness for the second. The third I have no idea.

Too much of a stretch? Am I reading far, far too much into it?