If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“It is obvious that I am a subordinate.”

The narrator likewise uses “I” to refer to himself and acknowledges his diminished role within the text. Rather than just talking about his role in the context of this single story, the narrator declares his subordinate status, which is true of the entire novel. The narrator is subordinate to the broader idea of literature, to the abstract notion of books and fiction that he’s trying to explore. Like the man in the station, awaiting instruction, the narrator floats above the prose, searching for his purpose among the strangers in the audience, latching on to any codes, phrases, or snatches of information that might provide shape and meaning to existence.

“What you thought was a stylistic subtlety on the author’s part is simply a printers’ mistake.”

The narrator comments on the idea of misunderstanding, in which the Reader—whom the narrator has already praised as quick and insightful—mistakes a printing error for some kind of philosophical statement. The repeated paragraphs aren’t a deliberate attempt to convey an artistic point but simply an error. This “printer’s mistake” comments on the ironic capacity of the human mind to mistake the innocuous for the profound, to project meaning onto a random series of disjointed events. Even if the error contained no meaning, the narrator hints, meaning exists in that the Reader explored the possibility.

“Perhaps it was also the fault of the translation, you told yourself, which may very well be faithful but certainly doesn’t render the solid substance those terms must have in the original language, whatever it may be.”

Early in the novel, the narrator introduces the idea of translation as a flattening of language: An essence of the words’ original meaning is lost and, in the new language, something else is implied. A word contains implicit cultural and semiotic connotation that a translation can never truly convey beyond the word’s denotative meaning. The narrator chooses not to translate certain words in the Chapter 2 interlude, Outside the town of Malbork, for example, allowing them to remain in the original language even when the work is in translation. The act of translation obscures some original meaning but adds something new, an idea that foreshadows much of the Reader’s adventures later in the novel.

“We are the poor stepchild of living languages.”

Professor Uzzi-Tuzii explains the nature of his field of study to the Reader. He’s an expert in the Cimmerian language and in Cimmerian literature, neither of which exist any longer because Cimmeria itself no longer exists. Since no one wishes to study such a dead subject, the professor presents himself and his department as the “poor stepchild” (51) of languages. They’re unloved; part of the family yet not fully part of the family, looking at the schools of living languages and envying their vivacity and interest. Nevertheless, the Reader’s interest in the Cimmerian language sparks light into the subject through the act of reading.

“I understood that the object contained a message for me, and I should decipher it: the anchor, an exhortation to attach myself, to cling, to delve, to end my fluctuating condition, my remaining on the surface.”

The narrator of the Chapter 3 interjected story, Leaning from the steep slope, struggles with social interactions. During one of his faltering conversations with Miss Zwida, she implies that she wants him to purchase a grapnel for her. Rather than understand the subtext of her words, however, the narrator treats them like a piece of literary analysis. The hidden message is one of symbolism and figurative speech, in which the narrator acts as if Miss Zwida is using the request to define the relationship between herself and the narrator. He reaches the right conclusion via a contrived route, thus commenting on the efficacy of literary analysis.

“Though incomplete, or perhaps for this very reason, Leaning from the steep slope is the most representative work of Cimmerian prose, for what it reveals and even more for what it hides, for its reticence, withdrawal, its disappearing.”

Cimmerian is the perfect language for the novels that the Reader discovers. These novels are defined by their lack of an ending. Cimmerian as a language and the Cimmerians as a people have come to an end; their future is unknowable because they were obliterated before they reached a satisfying conclusion. The use of the Cimmerian language creates a neat parallel to the Reader’s dilemma, in which the language vanishes before it can be truly understood.

“The fences that every night billposters of various factions cover with manifestos that are immediately soaked by the rain and become illegible because of the absorbent paper and the cheap ink.”

Words have an impermanent quality, as revealed in the revolutionary zeal of the Chapter 4 interlude, Without fear of wind or vertigo. To the people writing the manifestos and the billposters, the words are powerful, inspirational revolutionary slogans. By the morning, however, the perpetual rain has soaked the words into nothingness. Words that can seem important enough that they have the power to alter history are just as easily rendered illegible by something as natural and as common as rain. Language itself battles against the eroding forces of time and nature, facing an uphill struggle to impart understanding to a fellow person.

“‘The novel I would most like to read at this moment,’ Ludmilla explains, “should have as its driving force only the desire to narrate, to pile stories upon stories, without trying to impose a philosophy of life on you, simply allowing you to observe its own growth, like a tree, an entangling, as if of branches and leaves…’”

Ludmilla’s comments about the type of novel she’d most like to read is an example of ironic metafiction. The idea of stories piled on top of stories mirrors the structure of If on a winter’s night a traveler, suggesting that the novel she wants to read is the one in which she herself is a character. Additionally, the sentence’s complex syntax and the way the ellipsis leaves the sentence without a definitive ending foreshadows the novel’s structure, turning Ludmilla’s desire for a certain type of novel into an analogy for the novel itself. She may regret her wish.

“You can foresee all possible situations.”

Bernadette tells Ruedi that he can “foresee all possible situations” as they try to dispose of Jojo’s body, yet they’ll be immediately stopped by the unexpected intervention of a group of people who closely resemble Jojo. The narrator—Ruedi, in this section—learns that he’s a master of the future, yet the text subsequently undermines this omniscience. Thus, it likewise undermines the omniscience of the novel’s main narrator. While the narrator may be in control of the text, he doesn’t control the story and—writing in the present tense—exercises no agency or dominion over future situations. The future remains unwritten.

“You glance through the papers, seeking an explanation, but you find mostly the bragging of Marana, who gives himself credit for diplomatically arranging the agreement by which Butamatari, having disarmed the commando and got hold of the Flannery manuscript, assures its restitution to the author, asking in exchange that the author commit himself to writing a dynastic novel that will justify the leader’s imperial coronation and his aims of annexing the bordering territories.”

Marana is a cynical man who doesn’t invest literature with any transcendent power. A pragmatic, self-interested person, he exploits literature and readers for money. This cynicism is turned back against him by a person who is well aware of the power of the written word and compels Marana to write a book that justifies the brutal authoritarianism of a dictator, thus forcing Marana to confront the inherent power of his words if he wants to remain alive. Butamatari clearly invests the written word with power, and to save his own life, Marana must accept the power of the literature he creates.

“Unless it is the same Marjorie.”

Across the various stories and narration, different characters emerge that perform the same function. These archetypes are nearly universal: Many stories feature a male first-person narrator or a feminine object of romantic interest that closely resembles Ludmilla. These literary echoes across unrelated texts hint at a unifying objective truth about reality. However, in keeping with postmodernism, the novel contradicts this by reveling in subtle, subjective differences. The Marjorie who is tied up in the house is similar yet different to the women who are tied up in other stories, literally and metaphorically. They’re bound together by their similar function in the story as much by their differences.

“When this book is printed, I’ll use it for another work, lots of works. Then they’ll put them in another book, and so on.”

Irnerio is a self-confessed nonreader. He has no interest in the content of novels, yet he can’t escape the broader fascination with the act of reading that permeates the story. Although he doesn’t read, he uses books to create art of his own. His art is physically built from other art, similar to how If on a winter’s night a traveler is a story built from other stories. Existence, like Irnerio’s art project, is a collective of interconnected stories that are remade and remodeled into something new.

“At the moment when you most appear to be a united voi, a second person plural, you are two tu’s, more separate and circumscribed than before.”

Unlike modern English, the Italian language has singular and plural second-person pronouns. Tu is the second-person singular, and voi is the second-person plural. When the Reader and Ludmilla join, they merge from two distinct second-person singulars into a “united voi” (154). Their relationship brings them together, the sexual act combining their identities to the point that the narrator’s mode of address must change to accommodate the briefly unified identity.

“There’s only one person who can tell us the truth: the author.”

The Reader and Ludmilla discuss the strange reality in which they find themselves. Together, they decide that the only definitive source of truth is “the author” (160). They inherently trust the narrator’s reliability but, in the context of a postmodern novel, can’t presume this reliability. The narrator is invested in the text, making himself a character and directly addressing the audience by breaking the fourth wall (See: Background). The characters are willing to place their trust in the author to certify reality, though the novel itself has demonstrated that this trust may be misplaced. Ironically, the narrator is subtly warning the audience that he can’t be trusted.

“Is she a prisoner with me? Is she my prisoner? Is she my prison?”

The relationship between the prisoner, the guard, and the prison alludes to the relationship between the reader, the author, and the novel. The metafiction of the novel blurs these lines to the point that the protagonist—who is also the audience—can’t fully delineate the boundaries of reality. In the circular logic of this metafictional world, the description of the protagonist is being read by a character in another novel, which is being read by the Reader and narrated by the narrator.

“The real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.”

The irony of Ludmilla’s statement is that she’s a character in a novel, discussing her opinions of the very person who is writing her. Her theory of the author creates an ironic distance between herself and her creator, an urge to never know the person who shapes the realities of the novels she enjoys. Her theory is based on a postmodern understanding of objective unknowability, in which people’s perceptions of the world are based on limited, subjective knowledge and thus never can be complete. Ludmilla never wants to meet an author because she doesn’t want to challenge her subjective understanding of the world.

“I have had the idea of writing a novel composed only of beginnings of novels. The protagonist could be a Reader who is continually interrupted.”

Of all the various narrators who take over the role during the course of the novel, Silas Flannery most closely resembles Italo Calvino: Flannery is an author, one who has an idea that closely resembles the premise of the novel that the audience is actually reading. Flannery’s idea of continuously interrupting the reader is, ironically, contained within a story that are likewise interrupted.

“The only thing you know for sure is that her function in your story is similar to Lotaria’s, so the name that fits her is Lotaria, and you would not be able to call her anything else.”

Throughout the novel’s interjected stories, characters are subject to the idea of recurrence. Similar people fulfill similar functions in similar situations. Ludmilla, for example, is the Reader’s love interest and is the Other Reader, reflecting his interest in literature and stories. Her sister, Lotaria, is Ludmilla’s antithesis, contradicting and debating Ludmilla at every turn. When the Reader is trying to determine the role of new people, he understands their roles through their dissent toward Lotaria; thus, she solidifies Ludmilla’s function in his immediate story. Roles, functions, and characters recur across time, space, and narrative voids.

“The body is a uniform! The body is armed militia! The body is violent action! The body claims power! The body’s at war! The body declares itself subject! The body is an end and not a means! The body signifies! Communicates! Shouts! Protests! Subverts!”

The human body is just another type of book, something to read, enjoy, and use. Earlier in the novel, Ludmilla and the Reader have sex. Their intercourse is presented through a literary lens, in which they read each other’s bodies. When the Reader delves deeper into the conspiracy, however, he discovers the political function of bodies as revolutionary texts. Each body tells a story; bodies can enforce state laws (like the police) or they defy them (like the revolutionaries). Everything, including the physical body itself, is a story to tell and retell.

“I wonder whether ‘son’ is the appellative an older woman always uses in addressing a youth or whether instead it means what the word means.”

According to semiotics literary theory, the meaning of words derives from the interplay between the signifier and the signified. The signifier is the word itself or, any material thing that signifies it, like a facial expression or an image; it’s the explicit meaning, or the denotative meaning. The signified is the deeper meaning, the abstract ideas associated with its usage, or the implicit, or connotative, meaning. The narrator comments on this, wondering whether the word “son” (226) can mean more than just the relationship between a parent and a male child. The narrator is pursuing a deeper meaning in everything, searching for substance and significance in the signified, abstract, and subjective understanding of the world.

“Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.”

The state exploits the inherent power of words as a means of social control. Rather than simply banning books, police states consider the written word crucial: They assume that controlling it permits the control of information (and thus social behavior). The Reader—and, by proxy, the audience—is forced to reckon with the relative lack of power; the Reader’s pastime becomes a mechanism of authoritarian control, when all the Reader wants to do is to finish his story.

“But the brains of the conspiracy, the Cagliostro of counterfeits, always eluded us.”

During his lifetime, Cagliostro—the pseudonym of Guiseppe Balsamo—was known throughout the courts of Europe as a magician and an adventurer. After his death, however, the elaborate stories of his life were gradually revealed as false. Whereas the name Cagliostro was once associated with magic and glamor, it came to represent fraud and fakery. The Cagliostro archetype comes to define Marana: He embodies a recurrence of a man who once promised a great deal but built his reputation on fraud and deceit. The lineage of function from Cagliostro to Marana is an example of recurrence across time and literary space.

“The world is reduced to a sheet of paper on which nothing can be written except abstract words, as if all concrete nouns were finished; if one could only succeed in writing the word ‘chair,’ then it would be possible to write also ‘spoon,’ ‘gravy,’ ‘stove,’ but the stylistic formula of the text prohibits it.”

After the destruction of the world, everything can be rebuilt using language. The words used to reconstruct this world will, however, fundamentally be changed. The word chair might return, but the concept of chair will be altered by its previous eradication. Words convey signified and abstract meaning that isn’t built into the word itself but is projected onto the word by society. Language can be rebuilt, just like the world, but both will be fundamentally changed by this rebuilding process.