If on a winter's night a traveler Literature and Language Quotes

Right away, Calvino tries to confuse the boundaries between the world inside the book and your real life. In this sense, the words you're reading on the page start to get blocked by the steam rising from the same train they're describing. Trippy, right? The relationship between words and the supposedly "real" things words refer to will continue to catch you throughout the novel.

Okay, so can language communicate some sort of physical "reality" to us? You'd have to be a semiotics genius to have a super-theoretical conversation about it, but let's at least take a look at what Calvino thinks. In this passage, the speaker suggests that words might actually destroy the things they're talking about more than describe them. How could words possibly do this? Well, because in a book, the words are all you've got. If you had the real thing in front of you, you wouldn't have your nose buried in a book. The book assumes that the things it describes are absent while you're reading. You convinced?

Irnerio says that the secret to teaching oneself how not to read is to stare at words until all you see is black scribbles on a white background. This reminds your brain that there is nothing naturally meaningful about the words you read. For all your eyes care, what you're reading could look like (*&%^&$&%$(&^(%&. It's only after your brain adds its own interpretation that words mean something. This quote develops the idea that some void-like silence lurks beneath all words. It's a void that you can almost see if you stare hard enough... keep staringstaringstaringstaring… anything yet?

Professor Uzzi-Tuzii is translating a book from a dead language by a dead author. Shmoop can dig that, but he has way more to say on the matter. The prof insists that there's a connection between books and an essential silence that lies beneath their words. He thinks that this silence is somehow connected to the death that awaits all of us as mortal creatures. Especially at this point in the novel, we're meant to be a little confused, don't worry.

The dear professor Uzzi-Tuzii expands on his theories concerning what (if anything) reading is able to communicate to us. Here, he's responding to Ludmilla's insistence that there is something about a novel that obviously "exists." Yes, he admits, books are real physical "things." But lying beneath their thinginess is something invisible and unsayable that all humans measure themselves against. It might be some sort of perfection that human beings aren't fully able to understand. For example, you might know in your mind what a perfect circle should look like, but it's impossible to find one in the real world that's truly perfect. Plato would be proud.

While visiting Mr. Cavedagna at the publishing house, you come to understand that on the production side of things, people have a unique perspective on the relationship between books and readers. Authors might be real people with real hang-ups, but on the publisher's desk, the authors are just names that refer to other books (and maybe certain styles of writing). The author is actually destroyed by his or her existence in print, since this existence on a book's cover actually overshadows and erases him/her as a real person. Yeah, not the most motivational thought for people who are thinking about becoming writers.

Irnerio, who's taught himself not to read by reducing language to its basic physical shape, has taken this idea to the next level through his artwork. He uses books to make things like sculptures, and neglects the fact that these books were created for the purposes of reading. There is consistency here between his art and his teaching himself not to read. As you find out later, Calvino takes this absurdity one step further, saying that there is a photographer who has taken pictures of Irnerio's creations and plans on putting them together in—you got it—a book.

The fifth reader at the library suggests that when he reads, there is an ideal book in his mind that sets the bar for his current reading. He doesn't know exactly what this book is because it's actually an ideal book that doesn't (and can't) exist. He has a vague awareness of what it would be like, though, and this is why he can hear an echo of it, just before the echo is lost.

He goes on to add, "'In my readings I do nothing but seek that book read in my childhood'" (21.10). Like Mr. Cavedagna, this reader believes that at some unknown point in the past, he was innocent enough to read a book with no expectations to limit his reading. This half-remembered encounter with the "ideal" story is what feeds his desire to read for the rest of his life.

Um, what? Let's break this down. The seventh reader who speaks at the library suggests that instead of focusing on a story's opening (like much of Calvino's book does), he feels that it's the end that counts. This is just the kind of claim that you, the normal Reader, can get behind.

But the other reader takes it in a different direction than the one you'd expect, saying that he's not looking for your average ending, but "the true end, final, concealed in the darkness." By this, he could mean the sort of final ending that each book wishes it could give you but can't, since there will always be more books to read.

Or maybe, just maybe, the reader is talking about the ending of reading itself, the end of language, or even the end of the world. Because in the end, why do we all keep talking? It's because we're never able to express something with total perfection; there's always that little bit of a gap (or something like a remainder when you're doing long division) that keeps us going.

Or is this all just a pile of nonsense?

Want a quick rundown of how Calvino talks about language in If on a winter's night a traveler? Just take a gander at this passage. Throughout its pages, the novel has spoken about how words never fully capture meaning in the way we want them to, and so we keep on talking into the future. This continuation of speaking is the part of language that refers to the "continuity of life" ending of stories, which is usually symbolized by a marriage.

But as Calvino reminds us, there is another face to this same coin: the face of death, which will reach us when language itself goes silent. (Ominous, we know.) We don't know when that day will be, but it seems unlikely that language will continue being spoken into infinity. So as language continues going, it does so with the awareness that somewhere in the future, the ultimate end is coming. This is what is represented by the other ending of stories: death. It also refers back to the "the true end, final" that the seventh library reader mentions (21.12). It's like some sort of language apocalypse.