Calvino to Kiarostami: Shifting Grounds, Inward Looks

In the post-Derridan world where everything is text Italo Calvino wrote as if text is everything. One can easily guess his intellectual kinship with Borges and subterranean influences of those great self-reflective narratives like The Decameron or The Arabian Nights. It is not entirely correct to claim, as has been famously done, that he dreams the perfect dreams for us. The universe he imagines sometimes transcends the world of dreams which, however infinite it might be, still lies within the sphere of human experience -- conscious, subconscious or unconscious. In 'Cosmicomics' or 'The Invisible Cities' he creates sovereign worlds whose inhabitants look down amusingly, condescendingly but never disdainfully, with mischievous glints in their eyes to the hapless world of ours where we are trapped by the indefatigable laws -- of physics, of desires, of dreams or of fictions.

But 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveler' -- probably his most admired work, at least in the English speaking world -- is less of a maverick as it is intricately bound to one of the most inviolable laws of literary world: the co-dependency of the reader-writer relationship. Its ingenuity lies not in marvelous imaginings but its profoundly original meditations on the act of reading as a solitary and difficult attempt -- not without manifold pleasures -- to construct an assuring universe of continuity that is comforting in its diametrical difference from the absurd arbitrariness of everyday life. The novel starts with two Readers -- let us designate them with a capital R; both are voracious readers that enjoy reading for its own sake unlike some other stereotypes in the novel who value a novel only to the extent of materials that it provides for critical dissemination -- starting up a new novel only to discover that it has the first chapter repeated throughout the book. Both rush to the bookstore and get a corrected copy which then turns out to be an altogether different novel. Just when they were drawn in this new novel they discover it is not the novel it is supposed to be but because of a mistake on the part of the translator they are reading a novel translated from a now forgotten language whose only living expert claims that the translation itself is a translation from a falsified version of the original; the falsified version is claimed to be the original by a different author of another forgotten country which was an historical enemy of the first country. Every time they start another novel they always have to abandon it after the first chapter for reasons that continue to get more obscure and strange more the novel progresses. The search for a self-complete narrative puts them at the center of an international conspiracy between text terrorists, a diabolical translator and his organization that now has turned against him, a publishing firm that manufactures novels of a famous author but nobody can differentiate the manufactured novels from the original writings of the author.

The Readers read the first chapters of ten different novels. Between those novels the Calvino voice chronicles their frantic search for the next chapters of the narrative that they had to stop reading at suspenseful moments. Each of those 'first-chapter-of-the-novel' within the novel is written in a different style. And all of them are brilliant pastiches of different literary genre: noir, espionage, political intrigue, romance etc. And if they are read outside the context of this book they stand out as the examples of the best writings every genre has to provide -- assuredly written, full of wisdom and wit. So the readers of Calvino's novel can easily sympathize with the Readers in Calvino's novel for not being able to finish any of these very promising narratives.

It is easy to guess at the obvious abstractions that Calvino presents in the book: reading beyond the restrictions of a singular canonical interpretation, the dynamic nature of writer-reader relationship, the idea of reading itself being an abstraction that the reader constructs to be able to better orient himself while reading a new narrative, the intrinsic anxiety of reading and the release from that anxiety as a self-perpetuating cycle. Calvino's spectacular success in this beguiling novel of ideas rely not only on those abstractions but also his flawless mastery of the narrative craft which he though occasssionally subterfuges -- with an impish grin -- he never rejects. This book is as much about the power of writing as it is about the freedom of the reader from that power.

While reading 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveler' after a long time I wondered if there exists an equivalent in the cinema: a cinema about the director-viewer relationship. Godard, especially Prenom:Carmen, comes to mind. But a relatively closer equivalent in cinema to Calvino's masterpiece can be found in Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami's 'Close-Up'. It does not have the searing poeticism and mystical anguish of 'Taste of Cherry' or the complex social commentary of 'Ten', but is as rewarding a cinema as any of his other movies. It is self-reflective the way 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveler' is. The movie is about the making of a documentary of the trial of a cinema lover who poses as the Iranian film director (and Kiarostami's close friend) Mohsen Makhmalbaf (The Cyclist, Gabbeh) to another cinema loving family and promises to cast the family in his next movie. The poseur himself, like the family, is a great fan of Makhmalbaf and has taught himself about the art of movie making by reading though he never had any practical experience of directing. He stages detailed rehearsals in the family house and enjoys their hospitality. The impostor is caught and brought into trial and the trial is shot in a documentary style for the movie is ostensibly about the making of the documentary. The trial reveals the inherent ambiguity of the impostor’s motives: money or fame or a symbolic gesture regarding the fundamental irreconcilability between art and life or maybe a pure love of cinema as the impersonator claims originally. The movie ends happily, the impersonator meets the real Makhmalbaf, played of course by Makhmalbaf himself, and he is forgiven by all. But the uneasiness of the treacherous questions regarding the imprecise, shifting relationship between the director, the medium and its audience remains embedded as an open, almost pre-articulate question in the movie-goer’s psyche much after he has finished watching Kiarostami’s little gem.