After much discussion in class and further reading on my own, is it safe to stress that I still have no idea what is going on in this story? Or, is that Calvino’s motive? Just as blind people presumably hear better, is our blindness towards the plot intended to magnify the structure of the novel? It was William S. Burroughs’ The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin that made me attempt to “cut up” the novel through this didactic process:
“Cutting and rearranging a page of written words introduces a new dimension into writing enabling the writer to turn images in cinematic variation. Images shift sense under the scissors smell images to sound sight to sound kinesthetic” (91).
Despite Burroughs’ focus on the written word, I thought it would be beneficial to focus on the implied word. Following our class discussion last Wednesday, I began reading this book through the navigation of the page’s structure (e.g. the importance of teeter-tottered chapters) rather than the prose itself. While Johanna Drucker’s article last week introduced the Accordion books as those that, “…have the advantage of creating a seamless continuous surface which is also broken up into discrete, page-like units (140),” I wonder if the Accordion codex has to physically resemble the Accordion instrument. Calvino’s book, composed of the dichotomous numbered chapters and titled chapters, functions just as a verbal Accordion. Calvino plays the book just as the instrument, squeezing the obscurity into the titled chapters and releasing the clarification during the numbered chapters. It is that area of breathing and clarification that allow the readers to parallel their interpretation with the narrator’s. In Chapter four, Calvino implicates that the obscurity of his text is so overwhelming due to the precision of analysis:
“During the reading there must be some who underline the reflections of production methods, others the processes of reification, others the sublimation of repression, others the sexual semantic codes, others the sublimation of repression, others the sexual semantic codes, others the metalanguages of the body, others the transgression of roles, in politics and in private life” (75).
Is anyone else overwhelmed by all those roles? Precisely why Calvino employs the “you” POV for his numbered chapters, the tasks of analyzing a novel are too arduous for one person, or “I” (thank you for being the first author I’ve read to realize that, Calvino). The defining details for one person may be considered extraneous for another person. To consult Burroughs again, the cutting up method allows readers to interpret a piece in a way they did not or could not before. The “you” is the knife that slices through the pages and words to present an innovative and collaborative way of perception. Chapter eleven allows the reader to explicitly see the importance of linking unity with fragmentary and individuality with collectivity,
“In the spreading expanse of the writing, the reader’s attention isolates some minimal segments, juxtapositions, of words, metaphors, syntactic nexuses, logical passages, lexical peculiarities that process to possess an extremely concentrated density of meaning” (254).
Ashley indicates in her post that, “I do not think that the other characters view books as unchangeable, for they all get something different out of it, which may not be what the author intended.” I completely agree with her. With this novel so laden in structure, setting, and character variation, the consistent “you” in the numbered chapters acts as the novel’s colander. Once the disorder from the previous titled chapter has been strained, the reader is left to digest his or her own details.
Very insightful way to look at If on a Winter’s Night using Drucker and Burroughs’ ideas metaphorically. Calvino called his ten incomplete chapters “incipits”—a Latin word meaning “it begins.” Historically, nameless books, poems, and musical works were titled according to their incipit—to their first line. Calvino plays with this incipit idea (stretching it out, so that an entire chapter serves as the it begins referent), and undoes it as well (none of the chapters are actually named according to their opening lines). The effect of interspersing the incipits with other text does indeed seem to be a kind of accordion. It’s a fascinating musical and visual metaphor to apply to Calvino’s work.
This is an incredibly interesting write-up to go through. Many thanks for posting this and please come up with more articles such as this.