Italo Calvino as Author/Game-master in If On a Winters Night a Travele

Italo Calvino as cause/Game-master in If On a Winters Night a TravelerIn an interview conducted in January 1978, maven year before the publication of his brisk If on a winters wickedness a traveler (Iget), Italo Calvino responded to a header about his future writing plans with these words What I keep unmannerly is fiction, a storytelling that is lively and inventive, as well as the more ruminative kind of writing in which narrative and essay fail one (Calvino, Hermit in Paris 190). Calvino created this very display case of fiction in Iown, a novel that consists of a metafictional narrative that frames the beginnings of ten unique novels. This type of structure allows Calvino to satisfy his needs as a storyteller, and at the same time it allows him the opportunity to insert his own thoughts and opinions on theories of reading and writing. at last we have the sense that this is a novel where Calvino is in total auctorial control, not only in the sense that he controls the cha racters, the plot, the structure of the novel, etc., only when also in the sense that he controls us as readers of the novel. He does so by creating a novel that is a game, complete with realistic reality-like settings where his characters act out their adventures with seemingly little control over their own destinies. Calvino acts as the ultimate game-creator/game-master who controls both the characters he creates and the real players of this game-like novel, the readers. As readers we become caught up in Calvinos playful language and his narrative tricks, but on another level we are subject to Calvinos metafictional discourse. As the true readers of Iown we cannot cut off the sections of the novel that deal with aspects of writing, authorship, and publishing in ways th... ...Ombra lunga dellautore, trans. William Hanley (Milano Feltrinelli, 1999). http//www.public.asu.edu/dgilfill/texts/benedetti.shtml.Calvino, Italo. Hermit in Paris. (New York Pantheon, 2003).- - - -. If on a winters night a traveler, trans. William Weaver. (San Diego Harcourt Brace, 1981).Carter, Albert Howard III. If on a winters night a traveler Fantasy and Reading. Italo Calvino Metamorphoses of Fantasy. (Ann Arbor UMI, 1987) 125-137.Cotrupi, C. Nella. Hypermetafiction Italo Calvinos If on a winters night a traveler. Style. Vol.252 (Summer 1991) 280-292.Fink, I. The Power Behind the Pronoun Narrative Games in Calvinos If on a winters night a traveler. Twentieth Century Literature. Vol.371 (Spring 1991) 93-105.Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction The guess and Practice of Self-Concious Fiction. (London Methuen, 1984).