Response to If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

             Not unlike Invisible Cities with its post-modern approach and complex narration, Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is a piece of meta fiction.  The novel questions, at its heart, the meaning of writing.  It does so by exploring the implications and limitations of writing and language.  Calvino includes the beginnings of ten stories as a way to demonstrate to the reader the impossibility of a single, universal meaning—following suit with his post-modern approach to literature.  But it is really in his chapters in which he addresses the readers that Calvino’s complexity of narration is made more evident.  One of the most interesting concepts that Calvino introduces is the value of a piece of work after it is written.  In chapter eight, Calvino seems to be saying that the art of writing is restricting: “all the elements that make what I write recognizable as mine seem to me a cage that restricts my possibilities…if I were only a hand, a severed hand that grasps the pen and writes…Who would move this hand?” (Calvino 171).  Here Calvino questions the written world in comparison to the unwritten world: “the book should be the written counterpart of the unwritten world” (Calvino 172).  He feels restricted by his writing because it can be tied back to him.  His published writing has created for him an identity to which all future writing will be held accountable.  The idea of “a severed hand” questions the relationship between author and work—creator and art.  Calvino seems to be saying that there is a certain value in an unfinished work, hence the title of the novel “IF on a Winter’s Night a Traveler,” and his inclusion of ten unfinished stories.