Anand 1

Rachit Anand
How long are you going to let yourself be dragged passively by the plot?
(Calvino, 1998, p.218)
The Politics of Literature in Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller
I. Introduction
Plot and literature are the two strings that thematically tie up the ten fragmentary
stories and a meta-story that constitute Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveller. This
paper would read this novel alongside Calvino's 1976 lecture "Right and Wrong Uses of
Literature" to enquire into the politics of the form of this novel.
This paper will argue that Calvino's use of the personal pronoun "you" in the novel is
a pointed political act, which works at three levels. Firstly, in a Brechtian fashion it alienates
the reader from the plot of the novel in order to make him/her aware of the fact that they are
just reading a novel. Secondly, through the course of the meta-narrative it compels the reader
to view himself/herself as a consumer of plots at a larger level. It goes to the extent of
challenging the reader to de-involve himself/herself from the thick of the plot and question
their presence in the mechanics of the "mystification" of plots. Thirdly, it exposes the
mechanics of novel writing to the reader. Like a tour guide, Calvino takes the reader through
the mind of the writer who is constructing a plot, this comes out most poignantly in the first
of the ten stories "If on a winter's night a traveller".
This paper will further argue that these affects are pre-mediated in order to train and
educate the reader's imagination against the labyrinth of plots and stories, which surround
readers in the forms of advertisements, billboards, movies, television soaps etc. The narrator

Anand 2

of this novel presents only two choices before his created reader: either to wake up from the
"mystification" of these plots or to become an "accomplice" in it. In doing so the narratorial
voice, which is always guiding the character-reader (the reader in the novel), becomes his
conscience and a moral voice within, which tells him right from wrong. This narratorial voice
needs to be seen as a political move which calls for a re-establishment of some ethics of
literature.
II. Reading If on a Winter's Night a Traveller
The novel opens with a chapter which addresses the reader directly, telling him that he
is about to start reading Calvino's new novel. It suggests the reader to find a comfortable
position where he would not be disturbed by outside presences and it goes to the extent of
suggesting that the reader keeps cigarettes handy so that he does not have to go out looking
for them while reading the novel. Then the narrator takes the reader through a bookstore and
categorizes various books under headings such as, "Books You Have Been Planning To Read
For Ages", "Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case". Going through all
these categories the created reader reaches the stack of new books and chooses Italo Calvino's
If On A Winter's Night A Traveller. At this juncture, there erupts two readers and perhaps
even two writers. A reader who the narrator is addressing (character-reader) and the other
reader who is actually reading the novel (actual-reader) and the writer who is constantly
guiding the character-reader through the meta-narrative and the second writer who is
simultaneously creating the character-reader in the text for the actual-reader.
This duality of the writer function is literalized in the first story, when the narrator
says, "...the sentences continue to move in vagueness, grayness, in a kind o no man's land of
experience reduced to the lowest common denominator. Watch out: it is surely a method of
involving you gradually, capturing you in the story before you realize it a trap" (Calvino,

Anand 3

p.12). Calvino, the author, is warning the actual-reader against the mechanics of storytelling.
He is making him aware that this vagueness is a trope that writers use to keep the reader
suspended. However, the reader stays suspended but with an awareness of his problematized
condition. The narrator goes on to say, "Or, perhaps the author still has not made up his mind,
just as you, reader, for that matter, are not sure what you would most like to read..." (p.12).
This suddenly opens up the story in a way where the reader and the writer are put at the same
pedestal of not knowing what's going to happen next.
This trope is a play, which allows the reader to view the frame of the novel from two
levels simultaneously: one as a reader and the other as a writer. In his essay, "Levels of
Reality in Literature", Calvino explicitly marks out various levels of reality that literature
deals with and in this novel he bares open the different levels for both the readers. The
created reader, however, remains trapped one level below the actual reader and their lies the
crucial distinction between the two. The reader in the novel gains awareness that he is reading
the novel but he is not aware that he is also a character in another novel, the one that the
actual reader is reading.
This distinction between Calvino's invented reader and the actual reader (one more
level removed) opens up the question of which reality is more real? In the conclusion of the
above-mentioned essay, Calvino addresses this point; he says that "...literature does not
recognize Reality as such, but only levels. Whether there is such a thing as Reality, of which
the various levels are only partial aspects, or whether there are only levels, is something that
literature cannot decide" (Calvino, Levels, p.120).
This aspect of the levels of reality in literature establishes that no distinction between
the basis of the real-ness of levels of reality of the reader in the text and the actual reader can
be established within the framework of literature; there can only be levels but which level is

Anand 4

more real, is something that we cannot decipher. The character-reader in the novel is then put
on a chase of finding the second half of the story that he was reading. The actual reader
climbs on to his back traversing bookstores, publishing houses and even continents in order
to find the end of the story that they were reading together but they keep running into
different stories, which in turn are also left incomplete.
While put on this hunt together, these two readers are still not the same. The narrator,
who is exposing the mechanics of novel-writing, keeps this trick under wraps till the very
end. The trick is that in the process of his search the invented reader also becomes a character
for the actual reader and while the invented reader keeps running into unfinished stories, the
actual reader has the advantage of following the meta-narrative concerning the invented
reader itself.
This trick ensures that the actual reader is passive and active at the same time, he is
aware of his condition as a reader of unfinished stories but he isin the framework of the
novelnot aware of his condition as a passive reader of the meta-narrative. However, the
novel inches towards that awareness with each passing story. With each chapter, the trick of
arousal with no climax becomes more and more sexual and self-evident. Each story involves
a potential sexual encounter, which is left incomplete. The arousal of the characters in the
stories begins to parallel the arousal of the invented reader as well as the actual reader who
are both hoping to find some sort of climax that is deferred endlessly.
Towards the end of the novel, the narrator finally announces his goal by comparing
the reader to a machine, which holds the potential to read, analyse and judge any written text.
Much like Lotaria's computer, which can judge a novel on the basis of the words that reoccur
in it, the reader becomes an accomplice in judging the novel by helping the censor board in
the dystopic police regime. His reading of a novel is compared to that of a computer program

Anand 5

in order to judge the efficiency of the program. At this point, the narrator asks, "But do you
imagine it can go on in this way, this story? No, not that of the novel! Yours! How long are
going to let yourself be dragged passively by the plot?" (Calvino, 1998, p. 218). This suggests
that the reader's search for plots, the insatiable need to know what happens next can be
reduced to the function of a computer program, and if the reader goes on this way then the
computer might one day begin to duplicate the act of reading.
However, Calvino does not leave this thread hanging in a world of post-structural
absurdity, where all signs are equally meaningless and arousal will be indefinitely deferred.
He opens the possibility in front of the reader of not being an accomplice in the general
mystification of signs and signifiers. In "Calvino and the Value of Literature" Lucia Re
argues,
The fundamental difference between Calvino and the neo-avantgarde is that the neoavantgarde does not believe that literary research and literary discourse in and of
themselves are capable of generating or uncovering values, while for Calvino literature's
value is unique in that there is a particular intelligenza del mondo ("an under-standing of
the world") that literature and only literature can give us. "It is all a matter" Calvino
continues in his 1963 letter of response to Guglielmi of what one is looking for in
literature.
(Re, 1998, p.125)
The character-reader does not accept this deference at this point; he violently begins
to un-dress Lotaria-Shiela-Ingrid-Corinna's disguises. In response to Lotaria's revolutionary
claim that "counterpower must infiltrate the mechanisms of power in order to overthrow it."
The reader says, "It's no use your camouflaging yourself, Lotaria! If you unbutton one

Anand 6

uniform, there's always another uniform underneath" (Calvino, 1998, p.218). After going
through various layers of disguises the character-reader finally reaches "a pair of breasts". For
the reader he has finally reached the climax, but Lotaria cries that the body is also a uniform.
She immediately negates all differences between the body and the various layers of uniforms
that she was wearing; she calls the body an armed militianegating any possibility out of the
mirage of plots and disguises.
However, she throws herself at the reader, offering him an end to his search for a
climax. The narrator keeps warning the reader, it says, "Reader, what are you doing? Aren't
you going to resist? Aren't you going to escape? Ah, you are participating...." It even tries to
unravel Lotaria's intentions behind the act, it says, "You know very well that this girl always
acts with her head, what she thinks in theory she does in practise, to the ultimate
consequences.... It was an ideological demonstration she wanted to give you, nothing else..."
(Calvino, 1998, p.219).
This act of giving oneself totally into the need to uncover and satiate one's desires by
the flow of the plot is the central theme of this novel. The character-reader gives himself into
an ideological trap set up by Lotaria, which momentarily proves her point that even the body
is a uniform and no matter how many layers one sheds one can never reach the essence of an
object.
For the character-reader, an invisible photographer defers the climax yet again. But,
the meta-story of the reader goes on nonetheless. The actual-reader who is reading the novel
is still hanging by the thread of the character-reader's search for the end of the unfinished
stories that he has read so far. The search culminates in a library, the narrator says, "What
harbour can receive you more securely than a great library?" (Calvino, 1998, p.253). But the

Anand 7

reader is unable to find a final climax in the great temple of books either. However, he finds
something else, in an interview to Greogory L. Lucente, Calvino says,
At a certain point I still had a great many questions left in regard to reading, to various
types of reading, so I massed them all together in the chapter set in the library, in which I
made up a kind of encyclopaedia on the art of reading. (Lucente, p.248)
The character-reader gets into a dialogue with various readers in the library about the very act
of reading. And, there begins to flow many different perspectives on why a person reads. The
fourth reader says, "Every book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that
is the sum of my readings." (p.255). While another reader says, "my gaze digs between the
words to try to discern what is outlined in the distance, in the spaces that extend beyond the
words 'the end'" (p.256). This dialogue between various readers truly takes an encyclopaedic
turn, where various possible reasons for reading are listed one after another. And amidst this,
the character-reader discovers his own motivation for reading. The seventh reader dismantles
the very need for an end for all those stories; he interrupts the reader and says, "Do you
believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? ... The ultimate meaning to which
all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death." (p. 259). Here
comes the first instance of an essence of a story/plot, something that remains intact in all
stories and that strings together all the stories for the reader and potentially for the actual
reader too. The ten stories and the meta-story meet at this common juncture. The characterreader stops for a moment, reflects upon these words, and then in a flash decides to marry
Ludmilla (the other you in the novel).
At the very end of the novel, the character-reader and the actual-reader merge together
once and for the last time when the reader tells his wife (Ludmilla), "I've almost finished If on
a winter's night a traveller by Italo Calvino" (p.260). In that last line of the book, both the

Anand 8

readers finally fuse together into one entity as the novel ends for both the readers at once.
And more importantly, with the use of a narratorial manoeuvre, the narrator's umbrella of
guidance, which till now just had the invented reader under its shed, grows beyond its
primary use and covers the actual reader too, who too has just finished reading If On a
Winter's Night A Traveller by Italo Calvino.
III. The Right Political Use of Literature
This journey, from the unfinished plots that the reader keeps encountering to finally
discovering the essence of all plots strings these stories together into one meta-narrative. The
character-reader is not desperate to uncover plots like disguises anymore; he realizes that
there are only two potential ends of all plots and stories: continuity of life or inevitability of
death. This resolution of the character-reader opens a door to understanding the training of
the mind that Calvino argues for in his essay, "Right and Wrong Political Uses of Literature".
He says,
[But] there is another type of influence that literature can exert.... This is the ability to
impose patters of language, of vision of imagination, of mental effort, of the correlation of
facts, and in short the creation (and by creation I mean selection and organization) of a
model of values that is at the same time aesthetic and ethical, essential to any plan of
action, especially in political life. (Calvino, 1997, p.99)
Seen from the perspective of this influence, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller can be read as
the story of the influence that literature has on the character-reader in the novel. He goes
around looking for ends to the stories in order to satiate a need to please himself, which may
be explained by Calvino's description of the (wrong) use of literature in our society, he says,

Anand 9

"in our permissive society it feels that it [Literature] is being used merely to create occasional
pleasing contrast to the general ballooning of verbiage." (Calvino, 1997, p.96)
The character-reader goes through a process of discovering not just the dual nature of
all plots but also the mechanics of writing itself. It is a self-reflexive imagination, which the
text bestows upon the reader. This trained imagination allows the character-reader to decipher
the layers of reality within which the text is intermeshed. In this process, it is not just the
intended reader but also the actual reader is made aware of the process of reading and the
layers of reality, which constitute a text.
This awareness has its roots in not just aesthetics but also in politics. It is a politically
charged awareness that all social structures and institutions can also be read as texts where
similar levels of realities also exist. In the essay, Calvino says, "Politics, like literature, must
above all know itself and distrust itself." (Calvino, 1997, p.100)
IV. Politics of the Awareness of Plot
The knowledge and distrust of oneself and one's desires immediately creates two
vertical levels within the person: one that the person currently acquires and the other that the
person can aspire for. The form of Calvino's novel is highly politicized which ensures that the
person travels from the first stage to the second. It is the politics of refinement of the self by
distrusting oneself and one's desires, which can only be attained by first gaining knowledge
of one's innermost desires. Luce Re argues,
For Calvino, the choice of a literary form, what he calls a "style," is not only a moral
choice, but also a political one. The formal complexity of style cannot limit itself to the
imitation or duplication of the labyrinth, and above all it cannot, should not advocate

Anand 10

resignation, surrender to the labyrinth. Attempting to master the labyrinth for Calvino
means also attempting to find a way out of it. (Re, p.124)
The process of finding a way out of the labyrinth, then, forms the core of Calvino's
politico-aesthetic style, which reflects in the journey of the character-reader in this novel. The
reader goes from being lost in the labyrinth of unfinished plots and stories to finally realizing
the one true plothis own.
In the concluding section of the essay, Calvino says, "When we become aware of our
disease or our hidden motives, we have already begun to get the better of them." The
character-novel is blindly driven by his desire to finish atleast one of the stories that he reads;
to uncover the plot and reach a climax. His attempt to have a sexual encounter with Lotaria
can also be read in this light. He gives into his desires without questioning them or even
identifying them. However, in the library, he finally becomes aware of his "disease" and
consequently he gets the better of it too. The novel ends in a reader's paradise where the male
reader and the female reader are now married and "a great double bed receives their [your]
parallel readings."

V. Conclusion
This reading of Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller draws two seemingly
contradictory conclusions. Firstly, it brings to the surface the links between the act of reading
and desire. That we read something only out of an urge to uncover what lies beneath and once
that pleasure is attained, we abandon the text and move on. Secondly, and in direct
contradiction to the first point, it shows us that there are only two possible ends to every

Anand 11

plot/story/text and the only wisdom that one can attain, is to accept this fact and live in the
hope to alter our maniacal state of being.
What remains unanswered is that why it is necessary to abandon this need for plots?
The hierarchy that Clavino draws moves from "a" particular state to the "knowledge" of that
particular state. However, he does not qualify the problem with being in that state. In "Right
and Wrong Political Uses of Literature", he calls that state a "disease" and in the same
sentence he implies that all of us are contaminated by that disease. If that axiom is accepted,
then the act of curing oneself from that disease would mean to attain an inhuman status
(different from the rest). Much like the narrator of Calvino's novelwho keeps directing the
reader about what he should and should not do, and together they form one entity which
constitutes action in the novelthis framework requires one to split oneself into two parts:
the disease and the cure.
When the reader is about to finally give into his desire, the narrator, like his
conscience, reminds the reader:
Reader, what are you doing? Aren't you going to resist? . . . You're the absolute
protagonist of this book, very well; but do you believe that gives you the right to have
carnal relations with all the female characters? . . . Wasn't your story with Ludmilla
enough to give the plot the warmth and grace of a love story? ... It's natural for you to want
to get even, after you have followed events of pages and pages with passive resignation,
but does this seem the right way to you? (Calvino, 1998, p.219)
Throughout the novel, the narrator acts like the reader's conscience, the entity within a person
which tells one what to do and what not to do in a given situation. The narrator leads the way
while the reader follows. This development of a person's conscience is the right use of

Anand 12

literature that Calvino argues for in his essay "Right and Wrong Political Uses of Literature"
and demonstrates in If On a Winter's Night a Traveller.

Works Cited
Calvino, Italo. If On A Winter's Night A Traveller. Trans. William Weaver. London: Vintage
Books, 1998.
. "Right and Wrong Political Uses of Literature" The Literature Machine. Trans.
Patrick Creagh. London: Vintage Books, 1997: 89-100

Anand 13

. "Levels of Reality in Literature" The Literature Machine. Trans. Patrick Creagh.

London: Vintage Books, 1997: 10"1-121
Lucente, L. and Calvino, Italo. "An Interview with Italo Calvino". Contemporary Literature,
Vol. 26, No. 3, Autumn, 1985: 245-253.
Re, Luce. "Calvino and the Value of Literature" MLN, Vol. 113, No. 1, Italian Issue, Jan.,
1998: 121-137.