If on a Winter’s Night a Theorist . . .

Abstract

My title borrows its beginning and its rhythm from another, very famous one: that of Italo Calvino's novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. Calvino's sentence continues within the book, and I shall turn to that sentence later. But I must first continue my own, since it contains the whole premise of this essay and names its relation to the question of literary history, especially to the sense that literature constructs its own past and produces its own history. Here's how the completed sentence might go--although there could be several variants: If on a winter's night a theorist, living in Paris at a time when structuralism was beginning to seem too closed and too abstract, too permanent and universalizing, wanted to turn to history, although he still had the reservations about history that had made him a theorist in the first place, what sort of history might he find, and how would he represent it? If the theorist was also a writer of fiction, that is. In imagining Calvino as this potential theorist, I'm not thinking metaphorically, but only allowing theory an element of play and doubt it is sometimes (falsely) assumed not to have. And the first thing this theorist did, although we didn't learn about it until well after the novel was published (and even then he wasn't keen to spread the news in Italy) was to give theory a large place in his book, so that, I take it, the turn to history would have somewhere to turn from. After the fact, in an essay called Comment j'ai ecrit de mes livres, published in La Bibliotheque Oulipienne in 1983, Calvino explained that the twelve numbered chapters of the book--there are also ten chapters with thematic titles--followed a scheme based on the semiotic square of A J Greimas: see in particular Du Sens, pp137 ff, Calvino said. (1) essay opens with a table of contents that is a diagram of squares increasing in number from one to six and then decreasing from six to one: a triangle on its side. Each chapter of the essay lists the propositions that make up the sides of the squares, as for example: reader who is there is reading a that is there that is there relates the story of the reader who is in the reader in the does not succeed in reading the in the that is there does not relate the story of the reader who is there (3) We can take this essay as an elaborate joke or a straightforward confession of method, and there are a number of more interesting alternatives, but I'm not going to linger over them, since my purpose here is not to talk about Calvino the theorist, only about the theorist's arrival at literary history. I shall only say that the neutral, propositional prose allows for some wonderful aphorisms: The real is hidden among the apocrypha (10); It is difficult to find a in a house filled with books (11); The world will never be a book (15). Greimas himself thought well enough of the theory to republish it in Actes Semiologiques, although he discussed it in terms that make us wonder quite what it was he was thinking well of. Calvino, he said, was un auteur tres peu securisant, who placed himself au dela des evaluations du serieux et du frivole, avec serenite et soupcon de sourire. Rien ne serait plus faux que de chercher a homologuer, par exemple, la presentation carreiforme de son texte avec quelque theorie ... du carre semiotique. This sounds pretty categorical, not to say square, but Greimas also asserts his own belief in Calvino's conviction implicite in an of quantifies, his sense that le seul langage fournissant l'alphabet pour une lecture intelligible du monde est celui de l'etendue nombree et mesuree. (2) Calvino's own use of the word alphabet in the novel is rather mournful about the chances of a bodily semiology, but doesn't give up on them entirely, invoking the signs that are on the frontier between you and usage and habits and memory and prehistory and fashion, all the codes, all the poor alphabets by which one human believes at certain moments that he is reading another human being (123-24) (tutti i segni che stanno sui confine tra te e gli usi e i costumi e la memoria e la preistoria e la moda, tutti i codici, tutti i poveri alfabeti attraverso i quali essere crede in certi momenti di star leggendo altro essere umano (155)). …