The further I delved into If on a winter’s night a traveller, the more confusion and utter nonsense I was forced to make sense of. The more I tried to make connections between the characters, settings and plot lines of each individual story, the more they became disconnected. Even the somewhat familiar and linear story of the two Readers seemed to go off on tangents. The only thing that seemed to draw them all together is the idea of literature itself. The idea that literature is the common meeting place between the completely opposite and distant worlds of readers and writers. In chapter eight, Silas Flannery struggles with the incompatible relationship between himself (a writer) and his reader (Ludmilla). He notes that their incompatibility stems from the opposite nature of their duties as reader and writer, respectively: “reading is a necessarily individual act, far more than writing.”(176) He also notes that, “Only the ability to be read by a given individual proves that what is written shares in the power of writing,” which implies that the reader has more power in the reader-writer relationship (176). This is a possible result of the fact that in the act of reading, a reader transforms what she is reading “into what in her is most personal and imcommunicable” while “whatever [he] writes bears the stamp of artifice and incongruity.”(170)
Nothing seems further apart than the characters of Ludmilla and Mr. Okeda, or Silas Flannery and the Professor who is haunted by ringing telephones, or even ourselves, external readers from the author, Italo Calvino. But what Calvino tries to show us is that all of these things find a common ground in the actual pages of a novel. The shared experience of the story itself, regardless of the role one takes in the process, (reader, narrator, writer, character) is what brings all of these elements together. And in that shared space, as Corrina puts it, “nobody can be sure what is true and what is false.”(212)
Flannery also complains in chapter eight about how he is incapable of writing without injecting part of himself into the story. He cannot help but include his own perspective in some aspect, regardless of how minute, of the story he writes. He wants, instead, to write as if he “were only a hand, a severed hand that grasps a pen and writes…the tellable that nobody tells.”(171) He despises analytical readers like Lotaria because “she has read them only to find in them what she was already convinced of before reading them.”(185) What he is searching for is this common ground between writer and reader; where readers read something he doesn’t know but only because they expect to read something they didn’t know (185). What does this have to do with the novel as a whole? Well for one thing, the novel would be considered successful in the eyes of Flannery, but more importantly, Flannery’s struggles as a writer are not common. Calvino is merely using Flannery’s abstract complaints as a way of showing the reader how much distance there really is between writers and readers, and that it is, again, only in the shared space of the story that writers and readers can meet as equals.