LITERATURE: If on a winter’s night… – Writing to expectations

In Chapter 8 we get a closer look at the supposed author of the book(s) that our Readers seek, and that is Silas Flannery. He is a mysterious figure, and one of the most intriguing as Calvino uses him to speak directly to the writer/reader of his book.

Previously, we’d learned that Flannery was going through a slow production time in his writing, and he found himself watching a young woman through a spyglass as she read, hoping that she was indeed reading his own work.  This chapter takes it further and poses some amazing trails (there’s that damned hypertext again!):

Idea for a story.  Two writers, living in two chalets on opposite slopes of the valley, observe each other alternately.  One of them is accustomed to write in the morning, the other in the afternoon.  Mornings and afternoons, the writer who is not writing trains his spyglass on the one who is writing.

One of the two is a productive writer, the other a tormented writer.  The tormented writer watches the productive writer filling pages with uniform lines, the manuscript growing in a pile of neat pages.  In a little while, the book will be finished: certainly a best seller–the tormenter writer thinks with a certain contempt but also with envy.  He considers the productive writer no more than a clever craftsman, capable of turning our machine-made novels, catering to the taste of the public; but he cannot repress a strong feeling of envy for that man who expresses himself with such methodical self-confidence.  It is not only envy, it is also admiration, yes, sincere admiration; …(p. 172)

Shades of Danielle Steel and J.K. Rowling!  It is the author’s traditional angst; that there be a dividing line between writing for the public or writing for oneself.  And why does the damn public have such shallow expectations anyway?

And here’s the flip side:

The productive writer watches the tormented writer as the latter sits down at his desk, chews his fingernails, scratches himself, tears a page to bits, gets up and goes into the kitchen to fix himself some coffee, then some tea, then camomile, then reads a poem by Holderlin (while it is clear that Holderlin has absolutely nothing to do with what he is writing), copies a page already written and then crosses it all out line by line, (…)

(…) The productive writer has never liked the works of the tormented writer; reading them, he always feels as if he is on the verge of grasping the decisive point, but then it eludes him and he is left with a sensation of uneasiness.  But now that he is watching him write, he feels this man is struggling with something obsure, a tangle, a road to be dug leading no one knows where; at times he seems to see the other man walking on a tightrope stretched over the voice, and he is overcome with admiration.  Not only admiration, also envy; because he feels how limited his own work is, how superficial compared with what the tormented writer is seeking.  (p. 173)

Don’t you just love it? And Calvino doesn’t leave it there, with the self-doubt of every author in his own way, but he continues along this path as each author spies upon the young woman reading, each imagining giving her his own manuscript, and Holy Hypertext, Batman! — the implications and possibilities of her reaction.

Calvino intrudes too upon the mind of the reader, the simple enjoyment of reading unfettered by the demands of writing.

This is a long chapter, but one where pieces are fitting together in the story of the two readers and the odd book(s) they seek to read.