The Power behind the Pronoun: Narrative Games in Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Abstract

Looking at the abundance of critical literature on Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler (Iwn) and marveling at the differences between some of the interpretations critics propose, one cannot help wondering what it is about the book that sparks such a variety of reactions. Is it just the usual proliferation of critical commentary that arises once a book has been found worthy of the New York Times Book Review? Although one cannot deny Calvino a certain amount of postmodernist trendiness-after all, we are looking at a novel that investigates the (erotic) properties of reading and writing and gives disciplines of literary theory their money's worth in cunning references to major ideas from Plato to Derrida-Iwn is more than just a collection of smart narrative gimmicks. There is a fundamental unreliability at the heart of the text, which seems to say yes to every critic's question and thus negates them all. This refusal to take sides suggests that we are dealing here with a playful text, a narrative designed to mock the existing order, ringing with what Mikhail Bakhtin describes as the laughter of carnival that asserts and denies . .. buries and revives (12). Granted, the idea of literary play and literature as play is hardly new and has had its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s with the so-called postmodernist writers in America and their European colleagues, such as Calvino and Raymond Queneau, the founder of Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature). However, the ludic strategies Calvino employs in Iwn defy the initial impression of