A Postmodernist View: Methods of Subversion in Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter's Night a Traveller

Abstract

Postmodernism has allowed literature to reinvent itself by calling everything into question. Without the restrictions imposed by the classical canon, authors like Borges, Eco, Nabokov and Calvino have had the opportunity to experiment and to explore different ways of subverting the literary tradition. This paper discusses the ways in which Italo Calvino aims to redefine the roles of author, reader and plot in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. At first, the analysis shows how the Italian writer marks the importance of the reader and of the act of reading, and how he tries to undermine the author. The reader becomes a character in the novel and the reading of the novel turns into its plot, while the identity of the author of the novel becomes redundant to the story. The essay also examines the ten different narrations Calvino includes in his main plot as a way of subverting the narrative conventions of the novel. His attempt at making a classification of the texts would normally register as a nonfictional work but the author decides to insert it into his fictional writing. Italo Calvino ultimately uses his methods of subversion to draw attention towards the construction of the plot and other para-textual and meta-textual elements of the novel that might otherwise be ignored in a simple interpretation of its story.