What's In a Name? A Seventeenth-Century Book, Detective Fiction, and Calvino's Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore

Abstract

This essay examines Italo Calvino's novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveler as the author's experiment with the conventions of the classic detective fiction formula. Calvino launches two parallel investigations: the epistemological one carried out by his protagonist, the Reader, and the ontological one carried out by us, the readers. The two investigations, the essay argues, come together at the moment of the novel's denouement, but where in traditional detective fiction this occurs at the end of the narrative, in Calvino's it is hidden in the center. Numerous clues interspersed throughout the novel (as are many red herrings as well) lead to some of the keys to Calvino's game of cloak and dagger, the most significant being in the names of the protagonists. Chief among these is that of Ermes Marana, whose connection to a homonymous writer of the seventeenth-century brings to light issues of authenticity and authorship.

Keywords:

• authorship
• Calvino
• detective fiction
• flaneur
• forgery

Notes

1. The original working title for the book was in fact Incipit. In a letter dated 1 January 1978, Calvino wrote, “Si chiama Incipit, il protagonista e’ il lettore, in seconda persona, il lettore cerca di leggere un romanzo che l'appassiona ma la lettura s'interrompe sempre per qualche ragione e quando va per rimettersi a leggere trova un altro romanzo che l'appassiona ancora di piu’, e il libro contiene anche inizi di romanzo….” (Lettere 1359–60).

2. “The psychological person,” writes Calvino in describing the work of the “Tel Quel” group, “is replaced by a linguistic or even a grammatical person, defined solely by his place in the discourse” (Uses 7).

3. All translations from Lettere are mine.

4. For this, I am indebted to Professor Santiago Rubio-Fernaz at the University of San Diego.

5. Milanini makes brief reference to Giovanni Marana in a footnote in his book.

6. Geller and Nimmer, citing Robert Darton (The Literary Underground of the Old Regime, [Cambridge, MA, 1982] chs. 4–5): “in France, jurisdiction over the book trade and theater progressively shifted from the church, university and local notables to royal beaurocracy. By the 17^th century, the French Crown imposed both state-directed censorship and state-granted printing and theatrical privileges. Printing privileges typically granted specific publishers … monopolies to print and sell designated works for limited terms …” (17).

7. The proliferation of unauthorized editions concurs with Geller and Nimmer's subsequent statement that “… the sovereigns of Europe could not tame the growing commerce in books. The French provinces, not favored with royal monopolies largely granted in Paris, harbored renegade printers and peddlers of banned or copied books” (18).

8. Around 1681 the Stationers Company repealed the 1662 Licensing Act and allowed copyright to be owned by its members. This would explain the case with which authorship was claimed and titles changed. See <http://www.intellectual-property.gov.uk/resources/copyright/history.htm>.

9. Even Daniel Defoe was swept into the “Turkish Spy” phenomenon. In 1718 he published Continuation of the Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy.

10. Calvino's own diffidence toward translators was notorious. Mewshaw reports the following exchange with Calvino after commenting on Invisible Cities: “… he [Calvino] asked, ‘Do you read Calvino in Italian or in translation?’ ‘Translation,’ I admitted. It was the first time I had ever heard a writer refer to himself in the third person. ‘Then you have never read Calvino’” (13).

11. Marana's participation in these groups could well be a reference to Ted Nelson, coiner of the word hypertext, who created Project Xanadu. With this, Nelson wanted not only to store multiple versions of texts on computers but also to give computers the capability of creating texts from existing ones.

12. The gesture is reminiscent of Flaubert's characters of Bouvard and Pecuchet, in the homonymous novel discussed.

13. See Baudelaire's poem “Les sept vieillards,” in which the poet sees seven old men, really repetitions of the same one. Benjamin makes reference to the poem in his discussion of the flaneur.