What's In a Name? A Seventeenth-Century Book, Detective Fiction, and Calvino's Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore

Abstract

This essay examines Italo Calvino's novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveler as the author's experiment with the conventions of the classic detective fiction formula. Calvino launches two parallel investigations: the epistemological one carried out by his protagonist, the Reader, and the ontological one carried out by us, the readers. The two investigations, the essay argues, come together at the moment of the novel's denouement, but where in traditional detective fiction this occurs at the end of the narrative, in Calvino's it is hidden in the center. Numerous clues interspersed throughout the novel (as are many red herrings as well) lead to some of the keys to Calvino's game of cloak and dagger, the most significant being in the names of the protagonists. Chief among these is that of Ermes Marana, whose connection to a homonymous writer of the seventeenth-century brings to light issues of authenticity and authorship.