An Anatomical Dissection of Calvino’s ‘If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler’

Everything about If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, published in 1979 — from its dust jacket to its spine to its pages, lined with print — attests to its being a novel. Only, it doesn’t read like one. The sensation of reading it is like that of being in a bright dream, in which one awakens from a dream, when in reality, the dreamer continues to sleep. At another level, it’s like that of standing in front of a funhouse mirror that distorts tomes, and tosses out all the rules and conventions of a novel. This is not the kind of book one reads on a train because reading it makes one feel they’re in an illusory realm, where time decelerates and the hands of the clock move too slowly. If it’s hard to follow it, it’s because of design, which is challenging, yes, but also distinct and delicious.

By the time I made it to the end, I’d read a collection of ten novels, all incomplete, all left on a note of great suspense. As in the Christopher Nolan-directed movie, Inception (2010), where the honcho of an energy conglomerate is transported into a many-leveled dream, so in this book, the reader is forced to hop from one book to the next. Those are crosshatched with a parallel novel, divided into a dozen numbered chapters. The two sets are connected: each numbered chapter tells the story of how the reader arrives at the next book, and has baked into it, a clever trigger; each book, in turn, exudes a whiff of what’s to follow. Together, they make this book whole.

Its protagonist is the Reader, the person who’s both reading the book and the one being read. It begins: “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.”

Its titular story is about a man who arrives at railway station, where he’s to hand over a Samsonite-like piece of luggage to a stranger. The plot breaks off on a cliffhanger, due to a “printer’s mistake”. The Reader realizes he’s got a defective copy, which has, in essence, 30-odd pages, and the rest of it, repetitions of the same.

He goes to the bookstore to complain. He’s told, “Through an error of the bindery, the signatures of that book became mixed with those of another new publication, the Polish novel, “Outside the town of Malbork,” by Tazio Bazakbal. It dawns on him then that the book he was reading isn’t the one he thought it was –the one by Calvino — but a Polish novel. So, he decides to pick up a copy of a brand-new book from a pile.

But when he begins to read book No. 2,by Bazakbal, he observes it has nothing in common with book No. 1, by Calvino. This is about a boy who leaves a farm. The names of places in it, oddly, aren’t Polish, at all. The Reader consults his atlas and encyclopedia. The region it describes, he learns, belonged to an independent nation called Cimmeria, which existed in the interwar period, but the young state was erased from the map in the in the territorial grabs between its two powerful neighbors. With the outcome that Cimmerian culture and language had no development.

This too, is a faulty copy, a series of alternating two blank pages and two printed pages, all the way to the very end.

The Reader and the Other Reader, Ludmilla — whom he’d met at the bookstore — go to the one-man Department of Bothno-Ugaric Languages and Literatures at the university to investigate. It turns out that book No. 2, by Bazakbal, is, in fact, a Cimmerian novel by Ukko Ahti, the sole work left by this promising writer. But it has a different title: “Leaning from the steep slope”. Luckily, the professor owns the slim volume. As it hasn’t been translated into any other language, he reads it to them, translating extempore. It’s about a man who lives on a pension, and buys a grapnel for a woman he’s taken a shine to.

Disappointingly, that book, too, is truncated. After that incipit, Ahti sank into a depression, and killed himself, the professor tells them.

Calvino takes an activity as abstract and solitary as reading and makes it the object of a devilishly geeky intrigue, which amalgamates the flavors of a thriller and jigsaw puzzle. Dragged from one broken plot to another broken plot, the Reader arrives in the Latin American nation of Ataguitania, where nothing is as it seems: from cabs to cops, everything and anyone is a fake. He’s told: “Once the process of falsification is set in motion, it won’t stop. We’re in a country, where everything that can be falsified has been falsified: paintings in museums, gold ingots, bus tickets. The counterrevolution and the revolution fight with salvos of falsification: the result is that nobody can be sure what is true and what is false, and the political police simulate revolutionary actions and the revolutionaries disguise themselves as policemen.”

At the airport, book No. 8 is impounded. He’s hauled to jail. The female leader of a shadowy agency that clandestinely circulates banned books thrusts another book at him: “Around an empty grave” by Calixto Bandera. Beneath book No. 9 is book No. 8. Apparently, disguise is the only mode of circulation for books in this country, where the most draconian form of censorship is enforced. A legitimate copy of book No. 9, by Bandera, is on catalog at the prison library. But what he comes across on the shelves are a “few tattered, worn quires”. When the Reader complains about this to the librarian, all he gets is a speech on how the regime employs versatile “reading machines”, which can: judge the merit of a novel; store it in an electronic format, much like an e-reader; and print it out on rolls of paper, much like a print-on-demand publisher, typically, in “edulcorated” editions.

The book’s magnificently labyrinthine structure has its roots in an esoteric Parisian literary laboratory, of sorts. In 1967, Calvino moved to Paris, where he stayed, off and on, for 15 years. During his time there, he hung out with literary theorists, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes, and with intellectual circles around publications such as Tel Quell — a French avant-garde magazine — and the Oulipo (short for “OUvroir de LIttérature POtentielle.”)

Founded in 1960 by Francois de Lionnais, a chemical engineer by training, and Raymond Queneau, a poet, Oulipo’s philosophy connected two seemly mismatched areas of study: math and literature. A collective of numerate writers and writerly arithmeticians, the group, which was active in France in the ’60s and ’70s, formulated unorthodox structures of writing, prompted by the world of numbers. Calvino was among its members. In the essay, “How I Wrote One of My Books”, which published in volume No. 20 of La Bibliothèque Oulipienne, in 1982, he explained that he’d based If in a Winter’s Night a Traveler on the “semiotic square”, a concept borrowed from the noted semiotician, Algirdas Greimas.

Postmodernism seeks to disrupt the grand narrative, and expose the artifice of writing. Dissected, its innards revealed, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, resembles geometry:

Chapter I is represented by a single square, with four coordinates: R, B, r, and b.

R——B

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b ——r

The living (male) Reader (R) reads the physical book (B).

The physical book (B) tells the story of the Male Reader in the book (r).

The Male Reader in the book (r) doesn’t succeed in reading the book in the book (b).

The book in the book (b) doesn’t tell the story of the living Reader (R).

The reader in the book (r) pretends to be the living Reader (R).

The physical book (B) would like to be book in the book (b).

Chapter II, a notch more complex, has two squares; Chapter III, three squares; Chapter IV; four squares; Chapter V; five squares; Chapter VI, six squares; Chapter VII, six squares; Chapter VIII; five squares, Chapter IX, four squares; Chapter X, three squares; Chapter XI, two squares; Chapter XII, one square.

Around the middle, the volume begins to wander into technical territory. In a series of letters to the publisher, Eames Marana, a polyglot translator, relates his misadventures in his attempts to procure an eagerly awaited new novel from a reclusive Irish writer named Silas Flannery, living in Switzerland. After perilous peregrinations, in which a “sawed-off Tommy gun” was directed at him, and his plane is hijacked by a band of book pirates to a dictatorial African republic, he bragged, he dutifully delivered it to the Organization for the Electronic Production of Homogenized Literary Works or O.E.P.H.L.W., headquartered in Wall Street.

This is where the novel will be completed. “Our computers,” he writes, “would be capable of completing it easily, programmed as they are to develop all the elements of a text with perfect fidelity” to the writer’s style and “conceptual models”. Having brought it to New York from Switzerland, he described what he saw in its “control room”: a “reader is soldered to the chair at the wrists”, and the electrodes and wires of an encephalogram are fastened to her head and temples to record her brain waves as she reads a string of novels, cranked out by computers. They measure their effect on her concentration. If the reading attention reaches certain highs, with some continuity, the product is launched on the market. If, on the contrary, the concentration flags and shifts, it’s rejected; its elements, broken up and repurposed in other contexts. In this literary factory, novels are assembled and reassembled.

Fortunately, today, books, still aren’t made this way, although a tiny bit of journalistic content is. Last year, The Associated Press turned to a content-generating tool called Wordsmith to generate its reports about college sports. At the time Calvino was writing this book, nearly 40 years ago, computers were only beginning to pop up here and there, let alone make deep inroads into the field of publishing. But that he could foresee that one day, they would, is nothing short of prescient.

One of the characters, Lotaria, is writing a dissertation on the Flannery oeuvre. But she doesn’t read any of his works. She feeds them to a computer, which, within a very short time, skims a text, and enumerates all the words contained in it, in order of how often they appear. This allows her to complete a reading, while saving her enormous time. Once the computer displays the lexical inventory, she heads for the words, richest in meaning, to get a fairly good notion of the book. She sounds remarkably like a scholar of the emergent field of digital humanities, an area of research that examines disciplines like renaissance literature through lines of coding.

Flannery is hiding from his literary agents, who can’t wait to lay their hand on his new work, and advertising agents who’d like his characters to wear certain brands of apparel and fruit juices, today, aka, “product placement”.

The convolution extends into science-fiction now. Flannery stirs out as little as possible. One day, when he’s out for a walk on a mountain trail, he runs into a party of boys that are arranging some pieces of canvas on a meadow to form geometric patterns. When he asks them what they’re for, they tell him they’re markers for passing flying saucers. They’ve heard that extraterrestrials will convey a message, encoded in Flannery’s new work. He’ll write knowing that his thoughts are his own, but in reality, they’ll be dictated by aliens.

What gives? “The secret spring that set [this book fraud] in motion [is] the jealously of the invisible rival who came constantly between [plotter] and [the object of his love], the silent voice [that spoke] to her through books.” He, therefore, came up with a brilliant plan to thwart her effort at reading. He “dreamed of a literature, made entirely of apocryph”. “He went on sowing confusion among titles, authors’ names, pseudonyms, languages, translations, editions, jackets, title pages, chapters, beginnings, ends, so that she would be forced to recognize those signs of his presence.” If the identity of the writer was kept uncertain, “perhaps externally, the edifice of literature would not have changed at all, but beneath, in the foundations, where the relationship between reader and text is established, something would have changed forever.” To that end, he founded of the Organization of Apocryphal Power or OAP, a mysterious bibliophilic sect that steals manuscript.

Trotting the world from book to book, the Reader returns to the city from which he’d set out. He goes to the local library to look for all the titles he’s not been able to read ’til the end. There’re all there, on the record, but none are obtainable. Yet, his quest is complete.

Chapter XII concludes with a single square:

R—–B

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n —- AL

The Reader (R) is finishing the book (B).

The Female Reader (L) has exited the book.

The Reader switches off the light.

The Female Reader approaches the Reader in the dark (n).

The Reader and Female Reader lie down together.

Life goes on. The physical book ends there.

In a note, at the end of his manual, Calvino lets out a little secret: that each of the incomplete novels was written, employing a selection of “Oulipian constraints”. Which of them, the reader has to work out. Could it be a “pangrammatic lipogram”, a text written with every letter of the alphabet save one, such as “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog”, which omits “S”?