Reconciliation Between the Author and the Reader in Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller

Abstract

This paper explores how Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller makes an exceptional occasion to gestate the multi-layered notion on the act of reading through the presence of the reader as a character within the novel. In the first place, the dynamic structuring of the novel and the presence of writer as well as the reader and constantly being aware of the process of creation of the novel strongly indicates that the world of fiction is a make believe world and the plot and narrative are planned actions or simply an illusion. In another level, the reader’s strong fictional and real presence acts to demonstrate both the possibility of reconciliation between the author and the reader, and the reality and the illusion. This paper draws largely from Linda Hutcheon’s conceptualization on paradoxes of metafictional narratives and the typology of such narratives and also incorporates Patricia Waugh’s study on metafictional works as a complex experience. This paper argues that Italo Calvino makes the novel playful by showing the contrast between the fictional world of the novel and the process of its construction. Calvino involves the readers to witness the process of making of the novel itself making them co-creators of the book. The complexities, ambiguities and absurdities that come with the act of reading novel actually show that the metafictional technique has multiple attributes which provides the enriching experience of reading.