Purpose of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winters Night a Traveller.

What does the novel add up to? What is it about? What values does it express?

You must discuss the novel’s exploration of postmodern devices and concepts, its deliberate ambiguities (or even contradictions) and its tone.

You need to show your knowledge of the whole novel, and address the above issues.

Italo Calvino’s If on a winters night a traveler is a postmodern novel which is self-conscious of the literary and reading process. It is considered postmodern because it seeks to over turn the dominant discourses in reading which are the authority of the traditional, silent, dictatorial author and the concept of a single objective meaning determined by the author. Calvino demystifies the authority of the author in the novel through the use of metafiction structure and the multiplicity of authors which make the reader aware and critical of the fiction and the author. Calvino presents reading as a subjective process through the multiplicity of reading and deliberate ambiguities which develop the idea of multiple interpretations.

Calvino uses self-reflective metafiction to make the reader aware that the novel is purely artificial. If on a winter’s night is a fictional novel about a Reader’s attempt in finding closure of the fiction novels he has partly read. The novel explores the literary process in writing a novel, as the Reader encounters the writing philosophies of Silas Flannery and Ermes Marana, and the reading process as the Reader encounters different types of readers as he travels the world seeking closure. In exploring the literary and reading processes, the novel self-consciously draws attention to its status as being fiction and provides a self critique the fundamental structure of narrative, exploring the boundaries between fiction and reality. The main metafiction narrative of the novel is written in the second person, using the pronoun “You.” By addressing the reader directly, making him aware he is reading a work of fiction, Calvino breaks the boundaries between the author and the reader, bringing the author down from Foucault’s “panoptic tower” which controls the novel. The effect is that the reader is liberated from the illusion of reading and is more critical of the author in guiding the direction of the story. Calvino undermines the authority of the author as he uses self reflective metafiction to make the reader aware of the literary process and the structure of narratives and techniques used to convey the author’s message.

The multiplicity of authors in the novel demystifies the authority of the author because there is no single controlling voice in the novel which dictates where the story is heading or what it means. Calvino uses metafiction to make the reader aware of the presence of the author, but he also has several different authors to further obscure a single message in the novel. While including several references to himself in the novel, Calvino reflects two different shades of himself in the characters Silas Flannery and Ermes Marana. Excerpts from the fictional author Silas Flannery are references to Calvino’s own desires. Silas states “I have had the idea of writing a novel composed only of beginning of novels” which ironically is what Calvino has done in If on a winter’s night. However, Marana the translator is also constructed in Calvino’s own image. Marana is described as desiring “a literature made entirely of apocraypha, of false attribution, of imitations and counterfeits and pastiches.” Calvino also uses the metafiction structure and pastiches described by Marana in the novel. Calvino deliberately does not elevate on above the other. Instead he uses these characters as different shades of himself to reflect different writing strategies and plans for narratives. The effect of the multiplicity of authors is that there is no single author in the novel controlling how the narrative should be planned, but that there are a variety of different ideas for a narrative, undermining the concept of an absolute style of fiction narrative.

The multiplicity