Disappear into the Material

Disappear into the Material:If on a Winter's Night a Traveler through the Lens of Affect Mengni Kang (bio) According to Todorov, the fantastic genre lasts as long as a certain hesitation between the uncanny and the marvellous, or, between laws of reality and new laws of nature, exists (41). In the reader, this hesitation manifests as an oscillation between fascination and an urge to comprehend. In Jan Alber's words, one has to accept that something inexplainable is happening, on the one hand, and try to apply real-life knowledge to make sense of it, on the other hand (56). Italo Calvino's novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (henceforth IWNT), presents such hesitation in a more mundane way. Rather than having a character "shot in half, aloft in trees, or lacking in physical body," the work explores "the inners lives of the characters" (Carter 61–2; my emphasis). For IWNT, the futility in working out a rational philosophy to deal with reality, and the perpetual existence of mysteries and dangers, are embodied in distinct textual features rather than "imaginative details" (Carter 62). The novel is an example of Calvino's play with representations of reality via the structural complexity (Tinkler 62). Examining IWNT in terms of unnatural narratology helps us better understand its experimentation in form and effects on readers. According to unnatural narrative theories, the unnatural either denotes "physically, logically, or humanly impossible scenarios or events" (Alber 25), or refers to contraventions of the presuppositions of nonfictional narratives and the practices of realism (Richardson, Unnatural Narrative 3–5). Unnatural [End Page 51] works often give rise to the effects of disconcertedness, alienation and defamiliarization (Richardson, Unnatural Narrative 18; Alber 42), which haunt the reading process yet can't be easily pinned down by our "experiential backgrounds" (Caracciolo, The Experientiality of Narrative 57). As Frederic Jameson points out, experience is contingent in modern times, and we are suspicious of its authenticity (34). Unnatural narratives, flaunting their antimimesis and fictionality, underline what Jameson calls a divorce between "lived experience and the intelligible," between "the existential and the meaningful" (33). These narratives cue readers to "create cognitive frames or scripts that transcend their real-world knowledge" (Alber and Richardson 5), or adopt a method of interpretation different from real-life situations (6).1 Calvino's work destroys the illusion of realism by disrupting the boundary of fiction and reality from the outset—"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler" (IWNT 3). As the narrative proceeds, the protean "you" narration and tangled narrative levels further create metaleptic effects, challenge readers' cognitive architecture, and cause interpretive difficulties. Confronted with multiple readings on different levels, readers can only "disentangle" but not "decipher" them, "range over but not pierce them" (Watts 708), because they are always "in the midst of the text" and stuck in "fragmentation and disorder" (Sorapure 705). To comprehend such force of encounter which baffles cognition, I believe it will be conducive to draw on the concept of affect. To introduce affect is to explore how IWNT gives rise to affective responses that elude readers' intellectual control and the effects these responses exert on interpretive activities. The word affective is derivative of affectivity, which, as Giovanna Colombetti points out, is broader and deeper than the emotions and moods, as it is what grounds them or makes them possible: "without the primordial capacity to be affected, no specific emotions and moods would appear" (2). The affective dimension is essentially the bodily dimension; it highlights the primordial bodily participation in human experience. Taking this as a point of departure, I make a distinction between affect and emotion on the affective front. Deleuze and Guattari differentiate "affects" from "feelings or affections," contending that the former refers to no reference or object: they are "beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived" (164; original emphasis).2 For them, the effects of affect [End Page 52] can be described as "a state of becoming (167), or a "zone of indiscernibility" (173). Brian Massumi further explains the distinction. According to him, emotion is "the capture and closure of affect

Aesthetics · Affect (linguistics · Art · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Presupposition · Sociology · Uncanny · Digital Games and Media · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · History · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Philosophy

• Affect Theory and Literary Criticism

  Open Access•Stephen Ahern•Emotion Review•2024

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