IS CALVINO POSTMODERN? RE-READING IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT A TRAVELLER

There has been a considerable amount of debate whether the famous Italian writer Italo Calvino belongs to the modern or the postmodern narrative tradition. The author of this article claims to establish Calvino as a postmodern author by examining his magnum-opus If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller in te light of Roland Barthes’ famous notion of the death of the author. The text, with its all-pervasive ubiquity, is no more seen as an entity that is the sole creation of the author-god, the uncontested creative genius. The author remains no more than a “shaman” (as Roland Barthes would have it), a mediator through which the infinite play of language precipitates into the text. In this arena of shifting perspectives, it is also found that it is not the author who renders meaning to the text; rather, it is the reader who gives meaning to the text through his act of reading. The text therefore slips out of the dictatorial hands of the author and generates its own meaning which is deciphered and interpreted by the reader.