I am admittedly not far into this book – the gold tassel is sticking now out of page 40, chapter 3 – but thus far I was most struck not by Calvino’s directly meta observations about the nature of writing and its artifice (amusing and informative though they were), but rather by the fight scene that takes place between Ponko and Gritzvi (I). Hence the grammatical nightmare that is my title. Gritzvi does not make an appearance in Outside the Town of Malbork until about two pages in, and when he does appear he does so in the form of “I”, not of Gritzvi. I heads down into the kitchen, I explains his situation, and I sits around in his room, staring at his old belongings as the fellow Ponko subsumes what once he was.
Perhaps the reader now suffers a bit of existential confusion. Was there not an I just a moment ago at a train station pub, carrying a suitcase, waiting for a man he would shortly learn was dead? What happened to him? Our new I loosely and indirectly references his old self, and of the reader’s relation to that old I, remarking that in reading Outside the Town of Malbork, perhaps “you sensed that… everything was slipping through your fingers” (there is even a mention that perhaps the reader’s confusion is a fault of the translation from Polish, inadvertently comical given that the book itself was originally written in Italian). I then proceeds to lapse into an odd sort of dual character. He is at once the narrator’s “I,” to which is ascribed all of the characteristics typical to our usual understanding of narration and the first person perspective, while simultaneously he is also Gritzvi, I, a character in Outside the Town of Malbork, who is forced to essentially erase his own existence and begin anew elsewhere. This I is also not a true I, in that it is the narrator summarizing the content of Outside the Town of Malbork, not relaying it verbatim. Perhaps there is no I in Outside the Town of Malbork, but the narrator presents the story such that it seems there is.
There is a weird parallel between the erasure of the “I” and Gritzvi’s loss of identity. The narrator’s “I” is struggling to reconcile the inherent amorphousness and meaninglessness of his existence (passing from one I to the next without rhyme or reason, as I tends to do from story to story and book to book), while Gritzvi looks on with despair and regret as he is forced to leave his home for reasons that are kept purposely obscured. We know only that there is a feud between the Ozkarts and the Kauderers, and that Gritzvi is not a Kauderer, and that apparently he is trading places with Ponko, and supposedly everything will be all right because of it. Though not for Gritzvi. Gritzvi latches on to the fragments of the life he has to leave behind, not necessarily because they are important to him, but because they give him an identity – much like the narrator’s I, which latches on to the characters it becomes in order to establish itself as an entity to which the reader can relate.
It wasn’t until about halfway into the fight with Ponko that I noticed that something was wrong. It was about 2 AM and I realized that something had happened to the previous I. It sort of snuck up on me. I was reading the fight, and there was embedded in the exchange of crushing blows a brief discussion about the inadequacy of descriptive language in actually describing what the author, the I, and the character all intend to describe, and I realized that the I that existed before never had any substance in the first place (as much substance as fictional characters can have), being entirely the vehicle of the author through which he relayed the events of his own fictional book. That I was a device, not a character, although he posed as a character, and I suppose he counts as one anyway. In any case, it seemed to me that that I was now fighting with this thing Ponko, which I suppose was a representation of a character and a representation of the ghostly immateriality of narration against which the constructed narrator must fight to maintain his identity, futile though such a fight may be. When a reader moves from one I to the next, what happens to I? When I dies, does I become a new I? It certainly seems that way.
We don’t even know Gritzvi’s name until the end of the chapter, by which point the narrator’s “I” and the I of Outside the Town of Malbork have fused together into something singular. It is interesting to note that one of the themes of the previous I’s chapter, erasure, melts into this one rather seamlessly.