ABSTRACT
Calvino's book is about the pleasures and frustrations of reading; it is, therefore, a text about texts and our relationships to texts. In fact, at first glance anyway, it is a book about the necessary fragmentation of texts - the absence not just of a metanarrative, but of anything that might be complete enough to be a narrative at all. But being a postmodern novel, or perhaps not being a postmodern novel, If On a Winter's Night a Traveller is a more tricky entity. It only seems to be about the pleasures of reading and the delicate stimulation caused by the interchangeability of texts. Even without its epistemological vacuousness, this vision of postmodern therapy misses most of the interesting advances produced by postmodernism itself. The discovery is not that reality is constituted in language - a fact known to everyone, or at least to all the old, high-culture modernists from whom non-elitist, instantly accessible postmodernists distance themselves so avidly.
