Motives For Metaphor: Literacy, Curriculum Reform, and the Teaching of English

4. “Other Formulations”: Reading and Writing the Fragmentary Text

 “ OT H E R F O R M U L AT I O N S ” Reading and Writing the Fragmentary Text “The dream: to know a foreign (alien) language and yet not to understand it: to perceive the difference in it without that difference ever being recuperated by the superficial sociality of discourse, communication or vulgarity; to know, positively refracted in a new language, the impossibility of our own; to learn the systematics of the inconceivable; to undo our own ‘reality’ under the effect of other formulations, other syntaxes; to discover certain unsuspected positions of the subject in utterance, to displace the subject’s topology; in a word, to descend into the untranslatable.” Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs I    most celebrated novels, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (), Calvino creates a narrative structure that places the act of reading itself at the center of attention. As a writer who revels in complicated fictional patterns, Calvino accomplishes this metatextual feat through two unusual techniques—first, by designating the second-person protagonist of his book as, quite simply, “the Reader,” whose adventures we follow from one chapter to the next; and second, by interrupting these chapters with ten different texts that the Reader reads, all of which are themselves interrupted just as they reach their moments of greatest tension. Since both the Reader and the woman he pursues (whom Calvino comically and problematically names “the Other Reader”) can be read as metaphors for actual readers reading Calvino’s book—indeed, the opening statement of the text discloses: “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler”—every  line from beginning to end implicitly calls for readers to self-consciously examine their own habits and proclivities in response to the text. In this sense, the Reader (Calvino’s character) is thoroughly entangled with, and potentially displaced by, readers themselves, whose own stories of reading help compose the plot of this supremely reflexive text. Yet while Calvino’s novel contributes imaginatively to the study of reading,¹ his book might also be productively approached as an experiment in fragmentation—one that has much to teach us about the possibilities for a curriculum in English studies. The ten separate narratives that the Reader encounters in If on a Winter’s Night are each written in different narrative styles and by supposedly different “authors”; but what is most intriguing—and, for the Reader, most frustrating—about all of them is that each is terminated before reaching its conclusion. The first story has been defectively bound at the printer’s and must be returned to the bookstore; another was never finished by its writer, who committed suicide; another is partly read aloud in a discussion group and then set aside; and so on. After reading or hearing the opening pages of each story, the Reader goes in search of the pages that follow, only to be lead to another story altogether. What he accumulates, in other words, is a series of fragments—bits and pieces rather than whole stories. Similarly, the interruptions that so often intrude upon the tale of the Reader himself (for Calvino alternates this tale with those of the texts that the Reader reads) remind us of the fragmentary status of the novel itself, for by inserting fragments of other texts into the supposedly unified narrative of the Reader, we see that this larger narrative is likewise composed of fragments whose seams would ordinarily be covered over by the author. I hasten to indicate, however, that though poststructuralist literary theory might claim that Calvino’s novel takes its readers straight into the abyss of language—where, as Paul de Man has remarked of readers in general, they are forever left in “suspended ignorance” (Allegories )— my interest in his book concerns the ways in which its fragmentary structure manages to sustain rather than deconstruct the fictions it generates . While the fragment is often approached as a sign that the writer has lost control over his or her discourse—or at least that the writer has admitted that the subject at hand is too difficult to grasp except in smaller pieces—the striking architecture of If on a Winter’s Night sug-  •    gests that Calvino uses fragmentation not to confess defeat at the hands of language but to construct a discursive pattern considerably...