The essayism present in If on a winter’s night a traveler, by Italo Calvino: a theory of reading, in a metafiction novel

Abstract

This study proposes a reflection on how the thinker Italo Calvino show, in If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979), a theory of reading. In this novel, while the writer narrates the attempt of the character called Reader to finish the reading of a book, he also speculates about the reader and the reading. Among the many possibilities of analysis of this work, bearing in mind its multiplicity, here is focused the exhibition, in the text itself, of the process of writing of the novel and its fictional nature. The clipping chosen has its relevance justified by the proposition of Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and simulation (1991): the “promise” (because had not yet been revealed at the time of this publication) of the third category of simulacra, in which there is no longer the isolation of fiction and theory, and the lack of distinction between the imaginary and the real would pave the way for the presentification of the metatechnique; this category is perceived in the work studied and it is, according to Baudrillard, what can still interest us. If on a winter’s night a traveler, because it is a space of metafictional articulation, is a fruitful environment for interaction between fiction and theory, and it is, therefore, even more productive to the debate on the figure and the function of the reader. It is precisely the metafictional aspect related to the reader’s figure and to its activity which is tracked in this text that the writer himself called hyper-romance. For this reason, it identifies and analyzes some distinctive aspects of this work as: how to read, types of books, the art of not-read, reader and reading; and so the literary object of study is also part of the selected theoretical corpus. To the fictional and theoretical production of Italo Calvino, the theoretical constructs of Wolfgang Iser and Jorge Luis Borges are added, for the comprehension and analysis of that literary text, with the focus on the central themes developed here: reader and reading.