Greetings, Other Readers!

I’ve just finished the chapter Without fear of wind or vertigo, and Italo Calvino’s storytelling has introduced a series of questions and critiques of the reading process that are vital to our understanding of authorship and readership. Coincidentally, these themes continue what we addressed in my last English Honors course, Reading, Rhetoric, and Embodiment with Professor Eve Wiederhold. In Dr. Wiederhold’s course we learned the methodologies of reader-response criticism and feminist theory, which Calvino appears to be drawing on when he forces us to examine the nature of reading, the choices of the Reader, the presence of the Author, and the interactions with Other Readers that inevitably shape the way we see a text. At this point, Calvino is just beginning to introduce gender issues into the story of You and Ludmilla, and I am excited to see how Calvino develops and expands on this compelling form of literary criticism. Calvino keeps bringing up the problem of translation and how it effectively rewrites a text based on one reader’s interpretation; this is an issue we addressed in Wiederhold’s course and something that Canadian author Margaret Atwood has concerned herself with for some time. While searching for a piece Atwood wrote on the subject, I instead found this article where she discusses what happens when reader subjectivity meets ebooks. Could be relevant to this course later on, or at least worth looking over.

Here are some questions Calvino’s text presented to me:

To what extent is Italo Calvino the author of all of these stories? While there are a series of ‘fictional’ authors (at least to my understanding, they are fictional), it seems to me that Calvino is the real author here and there is no mistaking that. Narratively, Calvino is able to introduce us to several different stories each with different authors; however, in my mind, I am unable to forget that Calvino is the real master of the craft, and at least for me, that somewhat muddles his project. As far as making us think about issues of authorship, Calvino is successful, but to me it would be even more provoking if there were several different stories in here that actually were authored by different people, and Calvino simply assembled them into his novel (this same issue is brought up in House of Leaves). Who, then, would be this story’s real ‘author’? How can stories have multiple authors, and to what extent should we acknowledge multiple authors and their different contributions to a text?

Another question…what is the ‘story’ here? Is it necessary to define the words ‘story’ and ‘narrative’? Calvino himself offers several different potential definitions. For example, on page  72:

“…there is a thing that is there, a thing that cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the lead of the dead…”

To me it seems that the story is about you and Ludmilla, and your reading experiences. While the interposed short stories are all interesting, I’m waiting to see if any plot-level connections are formed between them. I’ve enjoyed reading them (mainly because of Calvino’s brilliant handle on language and metaphor), but to me it seems that if they were removed from the book I might get the same understanding of ‘you’ and Ludmilla’s struggle with the complexities of readership and authorship.

Perhaps these questions will be answered as I read on, or read the articles assigned with this week’s reading. If not, hopefully we’ll examine them in class.