Postmodernističke karakteristike romana Ako jedne zimske noći neki putnik Itala Calvina
Postmodern Elements in If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino

Summary/Abstract: In his novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, Italo Calvino creates an intertextual play, intervening deeply into narrative mechanisms by changing and shuffling their functions, starting with the fact that the reader of the novel coincides with the protagonist. The novel comprises a quest of the reader for the novel they started reading which has been, due to spelling errors, interrupted. The quest continues through numerous other beginnings of the novel that have been interrupted and turns into an adventure reminiscent of plots from commercial literature. The author gradually transforms the reader into a character, i.e. the protagonist, thus creating a novel that is not in search of its own coherence and credibility in terms of its trustworthiness, but a novel of narrative functions that seem to have been changed or dislocated, as in an unwalkable maze. Various parts of the novel are perceived as an encyclopaedia of topics the author had covered until a point which can now be read through texts by other authors in a heterogeneous range, both in their historical-geographical position and by genres. The tendency of the novel to reflect itself infinitely, as in a play of juxtaposed mirrors, does not coincide with narcissism but corresponds to a self-critical stance enforced by awareness that there is an undisputed dependency between the text itself and what is beyond it. In other words, this is a metanovel in which the narrative techniques and mechanisms constructing the story are emphasised, among them the provisional and conventional character of literary construction which does not imitate reality but is founded on conventional criteria and tricks. Calvino's ideal is constructing a complex work that will be acclaimed by the readership. Being aware that producing such a work is difficult, he offers no solutions and remains within a contradictory statement that the "tormented" writer wishes to be "productive" and vice versa. For that reason, the hypotheses of the novel are numerous and various - even antithetical - whereas the narratives to be told seem to be inexhaustible.

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