Summary:
Chapter 5
The story returns to the classroom where Lotaria's university seminar is taking place. Lotaria's classmates begin to discuss the story Without fear of wind or vertigo through various academic lenses such as sexuality and economics. In contrast to the students, the reader would like to continue reading the story. Lotaria tells him that they don't have the rest of the story because it has been split between multiple study groups.
Ludmilla and the reader go to a cafe together to talk about their situation. The reader suggests that they go to the publishing house to clarify the misprinting issues and perhaps get full versions of all the stories they've begun reading. Ludmilla again asserts what kind of book she would like to read, saying this time, "The novel I would most like to read...should have as its driving force only the desire to narrate, to pile stories upon stories, without trying to impose a philosophy of life on you" (92). Ludmilla says that the reader should go to the publishing house alone; she won't join him because she thinks seeing how books are created will somehow ruin them for her. Though somewhat disappointed, the reader tells Ludmilla that he will go alone to the publishing house and then they can meet again at the cafe at six to discuss his findings.
At the publishing house, the reader meets an old employee named Mr. Cavedagna. The man is extremely frazzled because he is given all the tiresome and difficult jobs at the publishing house. The reader waits while Mr. Cavedagna attempts to speak to many writers and solve their problems. Finally, the reader approaches Mr. Cavedagna and tells him "I'm a reader, only a reader, not an author" (97), which delights and interests the old man. Mr. Cavedagna admits that even though he reads so much for his job, he misses really reading in the way he was able to as a child. When the reader brings up the problem he and Ludmilla are having, Mr. Cavedagna becomes upset, saying the thought of such disorder spreading through the publishing house gives him vertigo.
Mr. Cavedagna brings up a translator. The reader thinks he means the supposed authors of the books he's read so far—Bazakbal, Ahti, Viljandi—but Mr. Cavedgana shoots down all of these ideas. Finally, Mr. Cavedagna comes up with the name: Ermes Marana. He says that Ermes Marana approached the publishing house saying he was a translator. They hired him, and he began translating the Cimbrian work Without fear of wind or vertigo. However, it became clear part way through the translation of the book that Marana didn't know Cimbrian at all. He had been using the names from the Cimbrian book but translating the rest of the text from the Polish novel Outside the town of Malbork. The publishing house tried to fix the issue by simply switching the title page, but soon discovered that the text of the novel wasn't from Outside the town of Malbork either. Rather, it was translated from a book called Looks down in the gathering shadow by Belgian author Bertrand Vandervelde.
Looking through the book by Vandervelde, the reader can tell it is not the same as any of the books he has started reading so far. Mr. Cavedagna shows him a letter from Marana that philosophically explains why he has been causing such confusion, stating "What does the name of an author on the jacket matter?" (101). Mr. Cavedagna is called off by someone, leaving the reader with the manuscript of Looks down in the gathering shadow. Even though he knows it isn't the book he was looking for, the reader begins to read.
Looks down in the gathering shadow
The story opens with the narrator and a woman named Bernadette trying to get rid of the body of a man named Jojo in a plastic bag. Jojo's head is sticking out when he is put in a single plastic bag, so Bernadette suggests putting another plastic bag on his head. The two characters are trying to get rid of the body by morning. They have already been taking the body around with them for hours, propping him up in the back seat of the car and carrying him with his limp arms over their shoulders as if he is very drunk. The narrator and Bernadette decide to burn the corpse in a forest just outside Paris. As they drive, the narrator thinks about the past lives he has left behind in various countries.
Bernadette realizes that they are almost out of gas, and they must use the container of gas they were going to use to burn Jojo's body to get back to the city. The narrator again reflects on his past, hinting at the fact that the misdeeds in his past lives have sent him escaping from country to country, in and out of prisons, hospitals, and camps. He says that he has tried to take on fake names, but in every place he goes, someone recognizes him as Ruedi the Swiss. He has decided not to run anymore; he wants to stay in Paris where he has a business dealing in tropical fish and a stable life overall. However, he had found out that Jojo knew about his past lives, so he enlisted Bernadette to help kill him. Bernadette had been working with Jojo, but Ruedi convinced her to take his side. They killed Jojo by having Ruedi strike him from behind while he and Bernadette were in bed together.
Speaking directly to the reader, Ruedi says that he has been telling the story in such a disjointed way to give the reader the sense of the many jumbled stories that make up his life. He is leaving out many things because there simply isn't the space to follow every interesting thread tied to the main narrative. In the present, Ruedi is hiding in a shed in a garden, wondering who else from his many pasts is following him. As he hides, he thinks of getting rid of Jojo's body with Bernadette. Ruedi reflects that Bernadette "had got me to rid her of Jojo...in order to put me in his place" (110). While they were in the car with Jojo's corpse in the back seat, Bernadette had straddled Ruedi in the driver's seat and told him that when he had killed Jojo while they were having sex, he "interrupted her at a moment when she can't be interrupted...she had to pick up at that same point and keep on till the end" (111). They have sex while Jojo's body falls on top of them, staring at them with lifeless eyes.
Back in the city, Ruedi and Bernadette decide to throw Jojo's body off a tall building to make it look like a suicide. Ruedi again gives a clue to his past, recounting when a boy came to him asking to buy a crocodile. Ruedi told him that he only sells exotic fish, not larger animals, and asks who sent the boy. The boy says he was sent by Mademoiselle Sibylle, who Ruedi reveals is his daughter. Ruedi is ashamed of his daughter, who works at nightclubs. Ruedi gets more information from the boy: his daughter works at a nightclub called the Nouvelle Titania, run by Madame Tatarescu. Ruedi realizes this is his former wife. He thinks of how he took his daughter with him away from his wife, but she has now reclaimed their daughter and thereby "again had [him] in her power" (114).
Bernadette and Ruedi throw Jojo off a building. They go back down on the elevator, and when the doors open on the ground floor, they are met by three men. They greet Bernadette by name, and Ruedi thinks they look similar to Jojo. They ask to see the plastic bag Ruedi is still carrying, and in it they find one of Jojo's shoes.
Chapter 6
The reader, still in the publishing house, is eager to find out what happens next in the story. Mr. Cavedagna says that there's no way to know where the rest of the manuscript is, since all of Marana's translations have somehow disappeared. He says that they've received many letters from Marana. He allows the reader to look at them, since they can't make any sense of their order or meaning. They are postmarked from all over the world, and it is hard to put them in chronological order because many refer to one another.
Some of the letters have come from Cerro Negro, which the reader guesses is the name of a village somewhere in South America. In one of the letters from Cerro Negro, Marana offers Mr. Cavedagna an offer for a new book called In a network of lines that enlace by a famous author named Silas Flannery. Another letter from Cerro Negro tells of an old man called the Father of Stories who supposedly has recited famous novels word for word without having read them.
In a letter that has come from New York, Marana writes of two organizations called the OEPHLW and the OAP, later revealed to stand for Organization for the Electronic Production of Homogenized Literary Works and Organization of Apocryphal Power. Marana founded the Organization of Apocryphal Power, but, since its founding, it has split into warring factions, the Wing of Shadow and Wing of Light. The OAP now seeks to steal the manuscript Marana has of Flannery's In a network of lines that enlace.
The reader switches his focus to an earlier letter, which gives background on Flannery. Marana writes that Flannery, who has been a prolific writer of popular, fairly low-brow literature, suddenly can't write. This is particularly problematic because he has always been paid advances by publishers and by brands who hire Marana to put their products in their books as a means of advertisement. Flannery has been living in Switzerland, and Marana went to visit him to ask if the OEPHLW can "offer[] him technical assistance to finish his novel" (122).
Marana had originally been sent by the OEPHLW to the Persian Gulf, where he found a Sultana who had only agreed to marry her husband, the Sultan, on the condition she "must never remain without books that please her" (123). This was easy enough at first, but the Sultan began to believe that conspirators had been hiding messages in Western books. The Sultan found out that Ermes Marana could translate into their language, and hired him to move to Arabia to provide his wife with translated texts. The Sultan began to fear that his wife would get dangerously impatient if Marana ever finished a book, so Marana devised the idea to create a long text made up of stories that each break off at the greatest moment of suspense. The reader breaks off his reading of letters here, feeling confusion over Marana's travels and jealousy for his relationship with the Sultana. In the reader's mind, he gives the Sultana Ludmilla's face.
The reader searches through the letters for more information about the Sultana, but finds a reference to another woman. Marana meets a woman reading a book by Silas Flannery, and she tells Marana, "The novels I prefer...are those that make you feel uneasy from the very first page" (126). Flannery also watches a woman through a spyglass on the balcony of his Swiss chalet every day as she reads outdoors. Marana says that she is reading Looks down in the gathering shadow by Bertrand Vandervelde, which upsets Flannery. In an airport in Africa, Marana watches another woman reading with great focus; he thinks that he should tell the OAP that the book they should steal is not the manuscript they took from him but whatever book she is reading. In New York, Marana witnesses another reader who is strapped to a chair and subjected to "the uninterrupted reading of novels and variants of novels" (128). Her attention or lack thereof will determine which novels are put on the market. As the reader reads these accounts, he gives all of the women Ludmilla's face. The reader wonders whether it really is a single woman being described reading outside of Flannery's hideaway and eventually tortured in New York.
The reader learns more about the OAP or Organization of Apocryphal Power. Marana writes as before that he founded the organization but that he lost control of it and it split into two sects. "The sect of enlightened followers of the Archangel of Light" believe that "among the false books flooding the world they can track down the few that bear a truth" while the "sect of nihilist followers of the Archon of Shadow...believe that only counterfeiting, mystification, intentional falsehood can represent absolute value in a book" (129). One day, while Marana was riding in an elevator in New York, a young man stopped the elevator between floors and demanded the manuscript of Flannery's new work that Marana had, calling it a true book. Marana writes that both sects saw Flannery's crisis and the work he was now attempting to produce as a masterpiece. The young man succeeds in taking the manuscript, and tells Marana that they will "liberate our Sister chained to the machine of the Counterfeiters" (131). Marana laughs at him and says there is no machine, only the Father of Stories. The young man is shocked by this.
The reader is conflicted. He wants to find Marana, read In a network of lines that enlace, and tell Ludmilla about all he's discovered. He decides to pursue the last two, going to the cafe to wait for Ludmilla and taking with him the book sent by Marana.
In a network of lines that enlace
The narrator of In a network of lines that enlace is another paranoid, possibly delusional man. His paranoia centers around the telephone; when he hears any telephone ringing, he thinks it is for him. While on a run one day before teaching at the nearby university, the narrator hears a telephone ringing in a house as he passes. He becomes fixated on whether the call is for him, and even opens the gate and goes into the backyard of the house. Unsure what to do, he runs around the house three times. The sound of a dog barking scares, him and he heads back to the road and keeps running.
The narrator knows that he needs to get to the university campus soon to teach his class. He turns around and heads back for his house, but when he passes the same house he finds the telephone is still ringing. He goes around the house again and picks up the phone through the window. On the line, he hears a cold voice telling him that a girl named Marjorie is tied up at a certain address. The voice tells him to come get her or else the house will be burned down. The man circles the house again in a panic and then runs off to campus. He at first thinks that it is none of his business, but then he recalls that he has a student named Marjorie.
He arrives to campus still in his running clothes and without his books. He asks one of his other students whether Marjorie is present, and the student replies that Marjorie hasn't been at school for two days. The professor runs off to the address that was given to him over the phone. The door to the house is open, so the narrator goes inside, climbs the stairs, and enters a dark room. He finds his student Marjorie tied and gagged on a soda. When he releases her, she vomits and then tells him, "You're a bastard" (139).
Analysis:
One of the most important characters in If on a winter's night a traveler, Ermes Marana, is introduced in Chapter 5. The reader discovers that Marana is the cause of the confusion he has been experiencing with mismatched and misprinted stories, titles, and authors. Marana's plotline adds to the theme of translation that was introduced with Professor Uzzi-Tuzii. While Professor Uzzi-Tuzii's scenes in Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrated the difficulty of translation, Marana's meddling in the publication industry demonstrates the power translators wield. Because we put our trust in translators to translate accurately, there is a large impact when they accidentally mistranslate and potential for them to purposefully mislead. Marana capitalizes on the trust put in translators to permanently shake readers' ability to fully connect with the literature they read. It is also suggested that he does this because of Ludmilla, paralleling the reader's own obsession and jealousy over Ludmilla.
Technology's mediation of communication is another key theme in this section of the novel. In the story-within-a-story "In a network of lines that enlace," communication is mediated by the telephone. The fact that the narrator does not know if the phone call is for him calls attention to the limitations of certain forms of communication. Technology also appears in Chapter 6, primarily in the experiments of the OEPHLW or Organization for the Electronic Production of Homogenized Literary Works. The organization seeks to use the reactions of people to digitally generate literature that will keep people's attention. In his vivid description of the organization's experiments, which seem to border on torture, Calvino targets a common fear that machines will be able to replace humans by doing traditionally human work in a more productive or profitable way.
Ludmilla and Mr. Cavedagna express similar beliefs that seeing the process that goes into publishing books can ruin the reading experience. Ludmilla refuses to go to the publishing house, telling the reader, "There's a boundary line: on one side are those who make books, on the other those who read them...Otherwise, the unsullied pleasure of reading ends" (93). Ludmilla's belief is confirmed when Mr. Cavedagna tells the reader, "I've been working for years and years for this publisher...so many books pass through my hands...but can I say that I read? This isn't what I call reading" (97). As an author, and a critically acclaimed one at that, Calvino would have been intimately familiar with the way the publishing process can alter one's experience as a reader.
The main moral of the story-within-a-story "Looks down in the gathering shadow" is that one cannot escape one's past. While Ruedi tries to move countries and change names and professions, people are always able to track him down. Not only that, but Ruedi cannot escape his past in the form of memories. Calvino uses one of the most vivid metaphors in the book to describe one's connection to the past, writing, "The past is like a tapeworm, constantly growing, which I carry curled up inside me, and it never loses its rings no matter how hard I try to empty my guts in every WC, English-style or Turkish" (107). The disgusting depiction shows the narrator's negative relationship with the past, while his reference to different kinds of toilets shows that his preferred method of escaping the past is moving around the world.
The Father of Stories is a crucial secondary character. Ermes Marana says of the mythic man, "many novels published by famous authors had been recited word for word by the wheezing voice of the Father of Stories several years before their appearance...[he] is the universal source of narrative material, the primordial magma from which the individual manifestations of each writer develop" (117). If what Marana says is true, works of literature do not actually come from authors, but are somehow divinely inspired. This depiction of literature is in accordance with Ludmilla's belief in the natural process of writing, but conflicts with the reader's experience at the publishing house seeing the harried and political process of books actually being produced. The introduction of the Father of Stories also lays the groundwork for Silas Flannery's longer contemplation of authorial inspiration in Chapter 8.
