Reading as Play

Cover of Italo Calvino's novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveler / Photo by Riho Kroll on Unsplash

In 1938, the influential Dutch historian Johan Huizinga published his fundamental work, Homo Ludens. By then, games and play were far from new concepts. Dice games, for instance, have existed for as long as humans have recorded their activities. But Huizinga introduced a fresh perspective: he wasn’t merely interested in analyzing play as a component of culture. Instead, he argued that play is intrinsic to culture itself. Culture, he asserted, possesses the very character of play. [1], [2]

Let’s pause and consider:

What makes something a game?

A game typically involves rules and a defined goal. It also requires an element of make-believe or pretend - a shared understanding that makes the rules meaningful to the participants, who join in voluntarily. [3]

Now, think of early 20th-century modernist art movements like Dada and surrealism. These movements, driven by a desire to deconstruct traditional norms, embraced methods that resembled games more than conventional art-making.

Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919-20 [4]

The Dadaists, for example, devised techniques to create nonsensical forms. They made collages from newspapers, books, and everyday images or experimented with sound poetry by mixing noises and words. They also embraced cut-up writing techniques, crafting texts by randomly cutting and rearranging sentences from books, documents, or newspapers. During Dadaist performances, these fragments were shuffled and reassembled into new texts - the more absurd, the better.

Surrealists employed a similar approach, often referred to as automatic drawing or writing. [5]

Inspired by the desire to explore the subconscious, they created under hypnosis or the influence of drugs, attempting to bypass conscious control and reveal hidden truths.

It’s amusing to think that, without the art world’s endorsement of Dadaism and surrealism as legitimate art, we might view these activities today as nothing more than adults playing quirky games.

Huizinga’s argument, however, is broader. Play didn’t become integral to culture only with the rise of modernist movements in the late 19th century. Instead, play predates culture and has always been a fundamental part of it. The act of pretending - a cornerstone of play - is essential to the creative process in art.

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Forty years later (almost), Italo Calvino published If on a Winter's Night a Traveler - a novel that's nearly impossible to summarize without delving into a myriad of details. This difficulty might be considered the first challenge Calvino presents to his readers.

The novel is often described as a story about reading itself. French literary theorist Roland Barthes, famous for declaring the "death of the author", is frequently cited as one of the major influences behind the ideas in the book. These interpretations are valid and widely accepted. [6]

For the purposes of this article, however, let’s consider the novel from a different angle: as a literary game.

“Literature is a combinatorial game that pursues the possibilities implicit in its own material, independent of the personality of the poet.” (Italo Calvino), [7]

In this quote, taken from one of his lectures, Calvino aligns with Barthes’ idea that the author’s personality is irrelevant. The reader becomes the central player, decoding the text presented to them. This highlights the playful nature of literature - whether we’re reading a straightforward classical novel or a complex, multi-layered postmodern work.

Barthes argued that a text is made of multiple writings. This multitude stems from the plurality of readers. Each reader has both the freedom and authority to interpret the text, making sense of it as they see fit. [6]

So far, we’ve explored the theoretical foundation of Calvino’s novel. But what’s remarkable is how Calvino doesn’t stop there - he incorporates play into the very structure of the book itself.

The story’s framework is a kind of game: part maze, part role-playing adventure. The reader is cast in the role of a detective, navigating the labyrinthine plot. The labyrinth - a game in its own right - is a fitting metaphor for the novel’s deliberately perplexing and layered structure. Calvino’s goal is to challenge the reader, and he does so masterfully.

Mariolina Salvatori, a scholar of Calvino’s work, emphasizes the playful nature of the narrator in the story:

“The ‘I’ that says ‘you’ in the very first line of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is, it does not take long to discover, a ‘ludic’ I, one that, to make the game worth playing, requires a complementary ‘ludic’ attitude in whoever accepts the challenge to play; the alternative to playing with the I is to be played by the I, like the Lettore, the Lettrice, and the various other readers/characters in the novel.” (Mariolina Salvatori), [8]

The reader follows Lettore (the Reader who is the character in the book) on a journey to recover the missing pages of various novels. But the game, of course, is rigged.

Despite Barthes’ declaration of the death of the author, Calvino ultimately retains control over the narrative and the rules of the game. Readers can interpret the story as they like, but they can’t alter its structure. SPOILER ALERT: Lettore never finds the missing novels. No amount of effort can change this fact.

Still, the game persists. As readers, we engage in make-believe, adopting the role of Lettore. We suspend disbelief, pretend that the missing pages can be recovered, and try to anticipate the author’s next twist. It’s much like playing a linear video game - think of The Last of Us, for example. You can’t change the fate of the characters, but you play along regardless.

A labyrinth of books / Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

So, what elements do we have so far? Labyrinths, detective games, role-playing.

But Calvino has more tricks up his sleeve.

Who is the narrator of the novel?

Calvino plays a clever game of hide-and-seek with the reader. Madeleine Sorapure, another scholar of Calvino’s work, explains how he creates multiple images of himself within the text:

• There’s the narrator, who refers to Calvino in the third person;

• There’s Silas Flannery, a troubled writer whose diary we read. Flannery seems to be writing the very novel we’re reading;

• Then there’s the cunning translator Marana, a metafictionist figure who never appears directly but whose influence is felt in every new book Lettore encounters. [9]

Which of these figures is the real Calvino?

All and none. However, the point is in the game itself.

At its core, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler isn’t what we’d call an “interactive novel” today. However, it represents a significant step in exploring the boundaries of literature as a medium.

Huizinga’s claim about the play elements of culture is not about the elaborate game-like elements seen in Calvino’s novel. Calvino exaggerates the concept, turning the act of reading into a fully-fledged game. However, on a fundamental level, all reading is a form of play.

When we read, we follow the rules of the game (engaging with the text as it’s written) in pursuit of a reward - whether that’s knowledge, emotion, or something else. We participate willingly, interacting with the text both intellectually and emotionally. This interaction is a form of make-believe, an act of pretending - the basis of any act of interpretation.

This mechanism is at the heart of every cultural process and artistic interaction.

So just as Huizinga said, play is indeed integral to culture.

References:

1 - Huizinga, Johan (1938/1949). Homo Ludens. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London. Foreword;

2 - dice. From: Britannica. Available: https://www.britannica.com/topic/dice

3 - Caillois, Roger (1958/1961). Man, Play and Games (English Translation). University of Illinois Press, Chicago.

4 - Dada Collage by C. Cramer and K. Grant. From: Smarthistory. Available: https://smarthistory.org/dada-collage/

5 - automatism. From: Britannica. Available: https://www.britannica.com/art/automatism-art

6 - Barthes, Roland (1967/1977). The Death of the Author (essay). Fontana, London Available: https://sites.tufts.edu/english292b/files/2012/01/Barthes-The-Death-of-the-Author.pdf

7 - Reader, Writers, and Literary Machines. From: The New York Times. Based on Italo Calvino's lecture delivered in 1967. Published 1986. Available: https://www.nytimes.com/1986/09/07/books/readers-writers-and-literary-machines.html

8 - Salvatori, Mariolina. (1986) ‘Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter's Night a Traveler: Writer’s Authority, Readers Autonomy’, Contemporary Literature, 27(2), pp. 182-212.

9 - Sorapure, Madeleine (1985) ‘Being in the Midst: Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler’, Modern Fiction Studies, 31(4), pp. 702-710.