Post-Print Fiction

After having finished reading If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, I couldn’t help but think whether Italo Calvino was a tormented or productive writer. In the scene in Chapter eight where the productive writer observes the tormented writer, the productive writes notes that he has never liked the works of the tormented writer because  “he feels that he (the tormented writer) is on the verge of grasping the decisive point, but then it eludes him and he is left with a sensation of uneasiness.” (Page 174) In the same way, towards the end of each story that is within the novel we feel that right as Calvino is about to reach a point where he provides us with answers, he suddenly cuts the story short, leaving us feeling uneasy.

Judging by Calvino’s past you can say that at around the time he wrote If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, he was in a dark place, therefore, making him a tormented writer. In 1966 his mentor, Elio Vittorini, had passed away, which left Calvino as he described in an “intellectual depression.” But Calvino is no stranger to this feeling as he struggled to write his second book, and after his first novel was published his three later books were considered to be defective. All of this on top of having experienced World War II and the Fascist Party are only slight glimpses as to why Calvino might have been a tormented writer.

Within the same scene the productive writer admits that he admires the tormented writer because “he (the productive writer) feels how limited his own work is, how superficial compared with what the tormented writer is seeking.”(Page 174) Calvino’s works such as If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is not the conventional novel that we are accustomed to where there is a single plot within the novel; instead it is something much deeper and creative. It takes you into ten different worlds as opposed to just one, and it allows the reader to alternate between his or her self and the character of “You.” By creating the novel in such an interesting and innovating way, Calvino is clearly seeking for something more than just the average novel, therefore, further classifying him in to the category of the tormented writer.

While, I argue that Calvino was a tormented writer it could also be said that he was a productive writer as after all he was able to successfully complete this novel. How many drafts it took to him though to complete the novel? How long did it take him to write it? These are two questions that I feel that if I had the answers to would help me classify Calvino as a productive or tormented writer.

Diverging from the subject of tormented and productive writers, maybe it isn’t so much that Calvino is either or, but more so that his novels are creatively different and intricate because that is Calvino’s style of writing – it’s who he is, and as his readers we should have been able to associate his style of writing with his proper name. In What is an Author? Foucault notes that the author’s name “is a proper name” – “it has indicative functions: more than an indication, a gesture, a finger pointed at someone, it is the equivalent of a description.” (Page 105) I took this to mean that there is a certain association with the author’s name more than just simply having the name of Italo Calvino.

The name Italo Calvino has many associations with it, one being that he is known for writing different stories within one novel such as he did in Invisible Cities and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Because there is this association with Calvino’s name, there is the question of whether he wrote If on Winter’s Night a Traveler the way he did because he was truly tormented, productive, or is the way that he simply wrote. Perhaps these three alternatives helped build the ultimate composition of the novel. Will we ever know the truth behind the composition of this novel?  The answer is probably not as Calvino was also, as evidenced by the novel, associated with mysteriousness.

Calvino demonstrates the power of the writer in If on a winter’s night a traveler.   The reader is treated to a performance in which the author challenges the conventions of the novel.  First, there is the structure of the book itself, which does not merely progress from chapter to chapter, building a story, but rather utilizes two parallel threads to pull the reader along: the numbered chapters, and the titled chapters.  Calvino also breaks the invisible wall between story and reader, bringing the reader into the story, even while the reader is uncertain what constitutes the story.

Reading the table of contents may provide a clue as to what the author intended to accomplish with this novel: the chapter titles themselves, read in sequence, convey a sense of one looking down on a town from above, and asking, “What story down there awaits its end?” Perhaps Calvino wishes the reader to be cognizant of how a shift in perspective, or a whim of the author, may change this story, or any story.

The author deconstructs the relationship between reader and novel.  He writes in Chapter Three, “The novel you are reading wants to present to you a corporeal world, thick, detailed.”  The action comes to life to the point of directly affecting his character the reader.  For example, after Chapter One, at the start of the chapter titled “If on a winter’s night a traveler,” we do not encounter the literal beginning of a novel, but rather we are told about the beginning of the novel that the reader is viewing: “The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph.”  We, the readers, are not reading a novel; rather, we are reading about other readers reading stories, and the action described alternates between these worlds.  In Chapter Four, Ludmilla states that “Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.”  Calvino seems to relish using this uncertainty to entertain his readers.

“What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space” (156).

Is it a “conventional” love story? Hmmm. I think it is a question worth some analysis and discussion. In terms of the conventional aspects, if the elements of the narrative are viewed from the perspective of motivation; then, yes, the novel is conventional in the following ways: One, the desire for oneness or an erasure of boundaries and the separations of humanness are definitely evident. But in this book, it is the desire to erase boundaries between the writer and the reader. They are the lovers. Bonded by a common space – the book – or the text, which provides the entry-way for the two to interact. Calvino writes that Ludmilla’s body is being read, like a book (155).

Two, there is the process or adventure of bringing about this desired closeness. Just like the “you” is thwarted in his attempts to enter into this hallowed ground with Ludmilla, (eventually successfully consummating the relationship); so the writer is struggling to reach his reader, communicate effectively and enter into a kind of oneness with his audience.

Thirdly, there is the tension of isolation within community. The writer is isolated as he spies on the reader through his telescope. The reader is isolated in her experience of the book: “Reading is solitude” (147). It is solitude, even when the two are together. The dynamic of the intimacy between writer and reader, could be arguably more intimate than the act of lovemaking. When the reader enters the space of the book, just as the lover enters the space of their lover, it is another dimension, defying the flow of regular time and creating its own character. The comparison of the two relationships is, I believe, at the center of the novel and supports the case for the Calvino novel being a love story.

 

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.

While reading Burroughs’ piece about the “cut-up” method of creating poetry it triggered a few revelations in my head about what art and creativity is all about.

My first reaction upon hearing that the cut-up method is essentially the act of dissembling and reorganizing pre-existing text and poetry was a bit condemning. How could such work be called art or poetry? The end result  isn’t tireless reworking of sentences and stanzas, or a careful scrutinizing of any potential misplaced or misused word. In the end, the result is spontaneous — a spontaneous reproduction of another’s work.

But, after further consideration, I think my primal frustrations led me to a deeper understanding…

I first understood that my frustration was similar to gazing at art hanging in modern art exhibits. You know, the ones on the top floor of gallery’s holding magnificent portraits and landscapes by Renaissance masters. The ones where it looks as though someone tossed three buckets of paint on an empty canvas and called it a day. Ya, that same frustration.

Why is it this guys scribbles are hung on the wall of a museum and mine didn’t even make it on the refrigerator?

It was after connecting these two experiences that I realized maybe I’ve been concentrating too much on comparison and quantifying an end rest. Surely art and the creative process is more than just what gets to hang on the gallery wall.

I think in the case of “cut-outs” and I would guess with modern art as well, the process is really the key. After all, if I had to lump all “art” into one easy-to-define term, I would say that all art is really about seeing things differently. Whether that means painting a Picasso, a Monet, writing Canterbury Tales, or smearing some paint on a canvas.

The artist poet who creates “cut-out” poems may not be Pushkin, but then again, who am I to talk? I at least have an admiration for the creativity and resourcefulness of the individual who sees new poetry in a jumbling of old text. Just because I may not admire the artist for their prose, doesn’t mean I can’t respect and enjoy what they’ve created, even if what’s been created is really a re-creation.

Art isn’t just about creating something new, but using your own lens to creatively see something new in an object or creation.

Throughout Italo Calvino’s novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler, he contemplates and tries to understand is what is important about books and why people continue to read.  He does not just emphasize that what is inside a book is important but he also looks at the actually book itself.  As the short stories continue to change titles and authors, Ermes Marana asks “does the name of an author…matter?” (101).  Ludmilla goes so far to say that authors themselves do not matter either because she finds that “the real [author] never corresponds to the image” she has formed in her mind (186).  Other characters also suggests that writing a book in a different language can alter the power of the text like Ukko Ahti who supposedly found “the Cimbric language” gave him “his genuine inspiration for [his] novel” that the Cimmerian language did not (75).

Not only are the books important, but why people read, the different reason why they do so, is also important.  In the novel, Professor Uzzi-Tuzii, suggests that reading “is always this:…a solid material object which cannot be changed” (72).  However, 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.  Silas Flanner believes Lotaria has only read books “to find in them what she was already convinced of before heading them” (186).  Lotaria also explains that she see books only as “the recording of certain thematic recurrences, certain insistences of forms and meaning” (186).  She does not have to read the entire book to understand it but counts the number of times certain words appear to gain an overall idea of what the book is conveying.

Readers at the end of the novel all have different ideas about reading as well.  One reader actively reads and can only be interested in books if he “cannot follow it for more than a few lines” because “the text suggests” to new thoughts (254).  Another reader finds reading as a way to find “revelations and illuminations” (254).  They read because they desire something that they are trying to find.  It may be that all their books lead “to a single book” or they search for “a book that perhaps does not exist” (256).  What are main reader realizes through his journey of novels that never end is something different.  He wants to “read only what is written…to connect the details with the whole” but he “especially likes books to be read from beginning to end” (256-257).  One reader suggests to him that stories end in either death or marriage.  And after the main reader has gone through his journey, he decides to end his story by marrying Ludmilla.

As Seferina points mentions in her post, I share a profound respect and admiration for the way Calvino is able to examine and experiment with the relationship between writer and reader.

I never assume I will addressed by the writer. Maybe because it is discomforting by nature or because I am just so ill-accustomed to its use, the second person narration really pushed me away. I wanted a fast, linearly moving story. I was getting a list of orders and an examination of my thoughts and behaviors as a reader.

Still, as I read more and started to understand Calvino’s devices a bit more, I also began to appreciate what he was doing. In the same way an artist creates something to be not merely seen, but experienced, a writer is after a similar experience with the reader. It really does feel as though the artist is next to us at the gallery, staring at the painting, or, in the narrative sense, next to us, on the couch as we read the book.

While it may sound creepy, or in the least — discomforting, I appreciate the consideration. By commenting on our reading behaviors, expectation and frustrations, naming them and expounding them, he acknowledges the essential role a reader plays. He even mentions in the novel, difficulties and errors in the printing process, as well as a debate on translation (Cimmerian Vs. Cimbrian). All of these elements, which can, in any novel, present barriers between a writer and the readers, are addressed by Calvino.

Calvino addresses reader assumptions in the following lines:

“I’m producing too many stories at once because what I want is for you to feel, around the story, a saturation of other stories that I could tell and maybe will tell or who know may have already told on some other occasion…” (109)

Calvino alludes to the fact that readers are inundated with stories read and experienced which inform their experiences as a reader.

Calling the novel, metafiction definitely characterizes the way the novel is very self-aware. Aware of itself and also aware of its relationship with the reader, both proving the existence of the important relationship the reader and writer share and simultaneously testing their limits.

I read “Who is Reading” before If on a winter’s night a traveler, so I really connected the idea of the authorial audience in the narration of Italo Calvino’s novel.  Calvino opens the novel by addressing his audience with second person narration.  He shapes his hypothetical audience by actually writing how they are acting, stating how “you” is sitting or acting at the bookstore.   He is even aware that different people are reading his novel and provides multiple possibilities.  However, Calvino also proposes another way to look at his audience.  He also implies that he does not need to understand his audience because to know who his reader is, “would be indiscreet to ask” (32).  What he believes counts is “the state of your spirit now” which he could never be able to articulate for his entire audience (32).  I think by assuming certain things about the audience allow Calvino to manipulate and direct us throughout the novel.

One of the ways he manipulates us is by ending the stories at their climax.  It always left me wanting more, just like the reader in the novel.  Even after Calvino set up the pattern, going in-between the two readers and the stories they were reading, I always became entranced by the stories that I almost forgot they were going to leave me hanging.  But by leaving the stories at their climax and not finishing them, I think it also allows the reader to fill in their own ending of each story.

I also connected the first story, If on a winter’s night a traveler, as how I was beginning the novel.  The character is at a railway station where the tracks go on “as far as the eye can see” like the reader is starting a new journey into the novel (10).  And you as the reader do not know where the story is going to lead.  The people at the station “close the fans of cards against their chest” because they are not going to tell you were the story is going (10).  The only way to find out is to continue reading where Calvino directs you.

            First, I wanted to say that I agree with what cmckenz7 said about how Calvino’s novel is more about reading rather than writing. It seems like there is a definite method to the author’s crazy narration. However, it is very relevant to point out the author’s awareness and understanding of how readers process the information that is given to them. For instance, just when I started to ask myself what the hell I was reading, Calvino states, “What kind of book did they sell you, anyway?” (26). He knows when you are getting confused, so he often chimes in with reviews of what is going on. After “You” are at the bookstore, trying to return the book, and the clerk says they can get you a new book, the author or narrator comes back and says, “Hold on a minute. Concentrate.” It’s as if Calvino knows he is losing your attention for a moment, so he pulls you right back in.

             Personally, I love the way the author is able to do this. I found it very difficult to keep myself from reading this entire book in one sitting. I’m sure that other readers would disagree, particularly, one of the novel’s primary characters Ludmilla. It seems she represents the readers who would find this book frustrating. She says, “I prefer novels…that bring me immediately into a world where everything is precise, concrete, specific. I feel a special satisfaction in knowing that things are made in that certain fashion and not otherwise, even the most commonplace things that in real life seem indifferent to me” (30). She appreciates the most conventional novels, novels that can guide her into a new world, but in a way that she is familiar with. This novel is rather the opposite of “concrete” and “specific.”

            Still, Calvino does state, “there are themes that recur, the text is interwoven with these reprises, which serve to express the fluctuation of time” (25). On recurring “themes” and “reprises,” I kind of feel like there are parallels between Ludmilla and the female character in Learning from the steep slope. The female character from the LFSS asks the male character to purchase a grapnel for her (63). She explains, “I dare not do it myself, because a young lady from the city who shows interest in a crude fishermen’s implement would arouse some wonder.” Now jump to chapter 5 where Ludmilla instructs “You” to go to the publishing company on “your” own. She explains, “There’s a boundary line: on one side are those who make books, on the other those who read them, so I take care always to remain on my side of the line” (93). So, there is this theme of boundaries recurring throughout the novel, not just regarding gender classes, and the line between readers and writers, but also the boundaries that the author is breaking within his style of writing.

Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler is, in my opinion, a very conventional love story complicated only by narration. This idea may at first seem absurd or even contradictory if one considers this novel to be a convoluted mesh of unrelated story after story paired with fragmented bits of a narrator’s prolific stream of quandaries and consciousness. I certainly viewed it as such for quite a few chapters, and I throughly despise this novel for what I would call its “tedious narration.” But whether or not I like or dislike this novel is irrelevant. What matters, I would think, is what we as readers can or can’t collectively draw from this novel. Did we all discern the same thing about “You” and “I” and Ludmilla? Why not? What disagreements might arise when one student decides there is one narrator and another decides there are multiple? How do we decide authority in this novel? Who gets to make that decision? Does it even matter that any of us understand or purport to understand what is “going on” in this novel? Is this simply a novel meant to be “different” so the author can feel like a special little snowflake? Maybe. Maybe not. I suspect those of you reading this can deliver a gradation of answers.

I found the following quotation to be resonant of my experience with this novel:

“To read properly you must take in both the murmuring effect and the effect of the hidden intention, which you (and I, too) are as yet in no position to perceive. In reading, therefore, you must remain both oblivious and highly alert” (Calvino, 18).”

I tried to make sense of what I was reading from the start, tried to pinpoint key characters and ground myself in something more “solid,” but that ended up being a futile effort until I encountered the character Ludmilla. The entire story felt like a murmuring of hidden messages that I could hardly keep track of, let alone attempt to deduce some greater meaning. Up to that point, I assumed the narrator’s “You” and “Reader” referred to me, that the narrator was trying to include me as a character in the story. But I am not a “young gentleman” interested in a girl named Ludmilla. It was at that point (see pages 29 and 45) that the “You” and “Reader” became gendered and I was comfortably able to disassociate myself with those titles. “You” became just another character in this novel, no different than Ludmilla. I might as well have given “You” a name. Perhaps William or Thaddeus or some other ridiculous trapping to distance him from me. The same can be said of the narrator, “I.” “I” could be Bob the narrator or Fred the narrator or something like that. The point I am trying to make is simply that these are still just characters in a novel. “You” is just a figure attracted to Ludmilla and trying to make sense of a series of unrelated books. The core of this novel (as far as a I have read, which is only to Chapter 6) seems to be a love story between a man and a woman. I hardly find that aspect of it to be unconventional. Perhaps that is just a simplification, but it is certainly how I have made sense of the novel so far.

We are used to encountering narratives that transport us to a fantasy world where we forget we are reading and become oblivious or unaware of the writer’s techniques and use of language. In fact, we need to force ourselves to go back and see how the author achieved certain effect on us; because the process was smooth, all we experienced was the ultimate result of the literary work  moving us to feel in a certain way.

In this book we experience a forced detachment from the narrative as the author constantly summons our consciousness and makes us step out of the story by addressing us as “you, reader,” referring to specific sentences and paragraphs, noting the use of certain techniques the author seems to master, and at times confusing us as of which narrator is addressing us or is it the author himself who confronts us now? At moments the work seems presumptuous by assuming that it has our complete interest, which it does (see page 12, only paragraph).

These particularities in the work leave some uncertainty as of what is the purpose of the writer. Obviously he is not just satisfied with the act of telling us a good tale. He demonstrates excellent abilities to tell a story and engage the reader. Every new story awakes a new fascination and a desire to find out more about the characters, but then the author makes us jump into the reflection on the act of writing, reading and producing books. In this situation, as a reader, I feel like addressing him also and ask: what are you doing? Are you going to leave me hanging with all these stories you have introduced and now I am dying to see developed? Is this book going to be worth anything if you don’t put it all together and give me some closure? Why are you so fixated on keeping me aware of my function as a reader and yours as a writer?

Probably that is his whole purpose: to make me reflect on the very act of writing and reading and the beauty of creating this connection among us two strangers and then among all the readers, also strangers discovering a common ground. Maybe in the end all that matters is that we establish that connection and it doesn’t matter if the stories have an ending because the mere act of reading and writing is the only basis of such connection. But it could be that precisely the opposite applies and that unless a story has a meaning and a closure then the connection is broken or has no significance.

On the other hand, I wonder how is this book different from any other collection of short stories, besides the fact that no story has an ending as far as I have read. Is this an experimental novel? And if it applies to our subject matter in Engl. 400, then this “weird writing” the professor has selected for this class is not a new thing. How does it apply to a digital and technology friendly movement in the development of the book as we know it? Maybe it is the very fact that addresses the relationship between writers and readers, and how it can be approached to maintain currency.

Seferina Liriano

As an English major, when I begin to read a book I also begin to analyze it. Upon reading Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, I felt somewhat silly in attempting this process. The internal reader, or initial narrator, instructs me, the external reader, in the reading/analyzing process (and is borderline bossy in doing so). Before reading the actual stories (If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Outside the Town of Malbork etc), the internal reader tells the external reader how to approach reading these stories, from picking it out of many other books in the bookstore, all the way down to the precise body position I should place myself in: “you rest your temples against your hands, curled into fists”(7). Originally, I was (somewhat irrationally) defensive of this other reader telling me what to do. But as I kept reading, I noticed that the internal reader had good reason for telling me what to do, as he seemed an expert on all things concerning reading. He knows the countless categories of books, “the Books You Needn’t Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading…the Books You’ve Been Planning To Read For Ages, the Books You’ve Been Hunting For Years Without Success” to name a few(5).We can see he knows about the process of manufacturing books when he becomes enraged at the misprint in his copy of If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler (25). He even tells the external reader what to analyze and pay attention to within the actual story when he notes that “what counts are the physical details that the novel underlines.”(35)

What this leads me to believe about this book in general is that it is a type of metafiction. It seems to be a book that is more about reading than writing, since it seems to celebrate the reader more than the writer. True, the internal reader is celebrating the writer and the stories, but the external reader is more emotionally invested in the internal reader than the characters of the stories. I am more concerned with whether or not the internal reader finds Ludmilla more than I am concerned with Gritzvi’s background information or future.

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.

           Trap: “Any device, stratagem, trick, or the like for catching a person unawares” (Dictionary.com). As I began reading the novel If on a Winter’s Night, by Italo Calvino, I would define myself as trapped, a word the author mentions throughout Chapter 1. The use of 2nd person throughout the section really took me off guard, as I am not used to reading a piece of literature in that fashion. I felt like I was on a personal basis with the narrator, as if he or she knew me; it was like having a one-way conversation. “You are at your desk, you have set the book among your business papers as if by chance; at a certain moment you shift a file and you find the book before your eyes, you open it absently, you rest your elbows on the desk…” (7). This passage, along with most of the first Chapter, seem to be subtle commands.

        The narrator talked a great deal about distractions and other things that would get in the way of concentrating on reading, but I found that because of that, my mind didn’t wander away from what I was reading. The narrator talked about how the television usually blares in the other room, so you should close your door, but I found myself not thinking about whether the television was on in the other room or not, because the matter was being addressed as I read. It felt as if someone was controlling not just my thoughts, but me. As I read, I pictured some kind of movie, where a person’s mind was overtaken, and someone was speaking to them within, telling them what their every move, every thought would be.

          This idea of a sense of being controlled was even stronger for me as I transitioned into the section If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. The narration switches to 3rd person but the idea of being trapped and controlled prevailed. Page 14 of the novel was the biggest contributor to these feelings. Phrases like “I only know,” “the people from whom I am to receive instructions,” and “I am a subordinate,” give way to my assumptions that the narrator knows not what they are to do, and they are inferior to someone, who is indefinitely in control.

        I also came to wonder if the author purposely ended things short, giving the reader leeway in making assumptions or finishing conclusions about the stories and the characters themselves. To begin with, the title doesn’t even sound finished: If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. If on a winter’s night a traveler what? I think that leaves a lot of open area for the reader to see what the traveler is doing throughout the story, rather than just judging and interpreting what they think they should read due to a title. The characterization of the characters seemed to me, to also be left up to the reader: “The author… decided to call the character ‘I’ as if to conceal him” (15). It seemed to me that “I” was almost hidden in every aspect, like thoughts, feelings, physical descriptions, and left up to me to determine who he or she was.

           Thus far, the reading has greatly captured my attention, although it has been a lot different from my “normal” read. However, I have enjoyed it because of that, and can’t wait to finish the rest.