I'm
here today to speak with one of the most incisive literary critics of
the 20th century, Gilbert Sorrentino, about Italo Calvino's phenomenal If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.
GR: Thanks for taking the time, Gil.
GS: My pleasure, Glenn.
GR: Simple question for starters: What makes this novel so special?
GS: If on a winter’s night a traveler, Calvino’s version (and antiversion) of the nouveau roman,
fits the conditions for “proper art” proposed by Dedalus/Joyce: “The
mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.” It is a
wonderful piece of work, labyrinthine and convoluted, informed by a
deadpan humor and pastiches, imitations, and parodies of an entire
battery of modern and postmodern literary techniques.
GR: And, of course, we have those striking first pages where Calvino speaks directly to you, the reader.
GS: Ah, yes. It begins with an almost conventional storyteller’s address to the reader: “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.” We immediately see
that “Italo Calvino” is somebody other than the author, and as we read,
discover that “you” is not the usual foil, the time-honored figure to
whom the narrator tells, in the first or third person, his story.
GR: Please say a bit more about how Calvino’s uses the “you” in the context of his narration.
GS:
“You” is the second-person protagonist of the novel; and he is, above
all other things, a reader. What he does, or wants to do, in chapters
that detail his adventures, is read. The chapters dealing with “you”
alternate with the chapters that he is reading; but through error,
carelessness, chance, design, conspiracy, these chapters (ten of them)
are not from the same book; they are the first chapters of ten different
books, and each breaks off at the point of crisis or suspense: they are
cliff-hangers.
GR: What do you think Calvino is up to here?
GS:
What is Calvino up to? I think that he is doing what the practitioners
of the contemporary novel have been doing for a least a quarter-century,
putting into practice an idea succinctly stated - in 1923! - by the
formalist critic, Victor Shklovsky: "The ideas in a literary work do not
constitute its content but rather its material, and in these
combinations and interrelations with other aspects of the work they
create its form." The "content" of Calvino's novel is precisely the
material from which he makes the form that we hold in our hands as this
book.
GR: Wow! Does this mean Calvino leans on the conventions of more traditional novels?
GS:
This novel's splinterings, ambiguities, contradictions, distorted
mirror images, thematic variations, off-key fugues are so absolutely
representative of objective reality as the linear, plotted, sequential
narrative of the conventional novel, the latter as much an invention,
and as totally artificial as the nouveau roman, and with the equivalent relation to objective reality: none.
GR:
I suppose it gets back to readers' expectations of how a novel should
use the everyday world, things like a real city or country, as the
setting and have characters move about in that reality.
GS: We
have learned over the years, to read the signs that a Dickens or a
Conrad use, but they are only signs, manifestations of invented
techniques. The books in which they are deployed use "ideas" as
"material" just as Calvino does (or Beckett, or Robbe-Grillet). That we
insist that Dickens' "ideas" constitute his "content" is our
problem and critical failings. His novels are as strange and as
artificial as the one under review. Calvino's novel more bluntly insists
that the world of the book equals the world of the book. If, as
Mallarmé says, "everything in the world exists to end in a book," then
"everything" must stand for material, to be used by the writer to make forms that are those of literature, not reality.
GR: That's quite something. Could you say a few words about Calvino's game plan as you see it?
GS:
Calvino's strategies are so numerous that I can do no more than point
out a few of them: The first person narrators of the ten chapters from
the ten different novels are different, yet they all have curiously
similar affinities and problems; the protagonist-Reader, "you," has
adventures that seem, at times, to be blurred reflections of the
adventures of the ten narrators; a writer, Silas Flannery, who has
(perhaps) written one (or two, or none) of the chapters that "you"
reads, keeps a diary in which he writes: "I have had the idea of writing
a novel composed only of beginnings of novels. The protagonist could be
a Reader who is continually interrupted," and so we read a novel by
"Italo Calvino" in which a novelist considers writing the novel in which
he already exists; the Reader meets six other readers to whom he tells
his difficulties in continuing the novels he has begun.
GR: That's amazing. And there's more, I suppose.
GS:
Oh, yes. To the ten titles he adds another, suggested by the
conversation, a "relic of some childish reading," that he feels should
be included in the list, then gives the list to one of other readers,
who reads aloud:
If on a winter's night a traveler, outside
the town of Malbork, leaning from the steep slope without fear of wind
or vertigo, looks down in the gathering shadow in a network of lines
that intersect, on the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon around
an empty grave-What story down there awaits its end?-he asks, anxious to
hear the story.
GR: And at this point, what does he judge is happening here?
GS:
He thinks that this is the first paragraph of the novel that "you"
would like to continue but cannot find. "You" protests that these are
but titles, to which the other replies: "Oh, the traveler always
appeared only in the first pages and then was never mentioned again - he
has fulfilled his function." This is precisely what happens to the
traveler in "Calvino's" first pages, except that the traveler is not
"Calvino's" traveler, but a character in a novel that a character in a
novel has been reading.
GR: Fantastic! Sounds like Calvino has constructed a novel as Chinese box puzzle.
GS:
All that and then some. This is a brilliant work of great imaginative
power and artistic authority. With it, Calvino has, in Shklovsky's
phrase, "ripped things from their ordinary sequence of associations."
GR: Thanks so much, Gil, for your rip-roaring analysis. Mind if I post this interview as part of a Goodreads review?
GS: Sure, go right ahead.
Gilbert Sorrentino, 1929-2006
Italo Calvino, 1923-1985
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