The implications of imagery in if on a winter's night a traveler.

• Main Author: Chin, Ji Xiang.
• Other Authors: Terence Richard Dawson
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Literature::English
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/38727
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

In a 1984 interview with Gregory L. Lucente concerning authorial intention and literary self-consciousness in relation to his two metanovels, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979) and Palomar (1983), Calvino remarks that “we [writers and readers] cannot do without interpreting, without asking ourselves what something means, without embarking on an explanation” (Lucente 250). Defining reading as “directed creation”, Satre’s essay on “Why Write?” likewise reminds readers to “collaborate in the production” of writer’s works by intervening through interpretation and re-invention in deciphering a text (McLaughlin and Coleman 23, 24). In Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Calvino insists that the true value of Literature resides in the autonomous strength of the literary signs of images and language and that his works “originate in images and not in ideas” (Web; Ragusa 195). I will thereby study the imagery in Traveler and its implications on the trichotomous relationship between author, reader and character. With the imperative conditions of ambiguity and mutability present from the start of the novel, I will prove that Calvino’s textual self-reflexivity of the primary acts of reading and writing functions as an extensive representation of the volatility of the human experience, that which is constituted by one’s identity, consciousness and memory.