Italo Calvino's Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore is usually acclaimed on grounds of its experimentation with narrativity. More specifically, Calvino weaves the beginnings of ten different pseudo-novels into a larger plotline involving the adventures of a reader (Lettore), who the narrator addresses directly using the tu form. But, in fact, Calvino can also be interpreted as profoundly reflecting on several fundamental aspects of everyday human existence. In this paper I plan to discuss the theoretical significance Calvino gives to lovemaking, or what I will refer to as the amplesso. In particular, Calvino's narrator can be understood as distinguishing between the objective end and the possible subjective end or ends of the amplesso for any two lovers. Although the objective end initially appears to mirror Aristotle's account of the prime mover insofar as the lovers' behaviors necessarily approach climax, Aristotle himself presupposes a notion of linear order the narrator takes the amplesso to lack.
[...] More specifically, the narrator concludes that the various sense data the lovers might be said to be processing are “tutti i poveri alfabeti attraverso i quali un essere umano crede in certi momenti di star leggendo un altro essere umano.”[13] Firstly, the narrator immediately raises the issue of epistemology through his insertion of the verb credere. The implication is that lovers might believe they are connecting on some intimate level when they, for example, analyze modo di raccogliere e spargere i capelli,” but that this may or may not be the case in fact—after all, the degree to which the Lettrice's hairstyle might truly be said to reveal information about her is intuitively questionable. [...]
[...] Vi si può riconoscere una direzione.[6] Thus, according to the narrator, one is able to posit a kind of direction or order in the behaviors of the lovers as they approach climax, but this order is hardly Aristotelian. More specifically, the terms he uses to describe the movement of the lovers seem to presuppose that the path to climax is nonlinear—after all, divergence and spontaneity are hardly notions typically associated with, for example, mathematical linear functions like the parabola. Nonetheless, the narrator does take the amplesso to move towards climax in one way or another; hence, the telos or objective end of the amplesso as attributable to the narrator can be understood as the climax. [...]
[...] In fact, the narrator's parallel of the amplesso to reading only serves to corroborate further the interpretation that a subjective end in the former might be to understand one's partner more intimately. Now, the first definition the Merriam-Webster Dictionary gives for the verb read” is receive or take in the sense of (as letters or symbols) especially by sight or touch.”[11] Initially, the processes of reading and of the amplesso seem to have little in common—after all, intuitively the climax of the Heart of Darkness is not to be identified with the climax of a given amplesso. [...]
[...] Similarly, although the objective end of any amplesso is the climax, the two lovers engaged in a given amplesso might be behaving with an eye to ends other than climax. In particular, various details in the narrator's account of the two lovers suggests that two possible subjective ends might be the act of the amplesso itself and the attempt to understand one's partner on a deeper, more intimate level. Firstly, note how the narrator writes that the Lettore receives sodisfazione suo modo di leggerti [Lettore]”—after all, the locus of his enjoyment is not sexual pleasure or climax in the strict sense but rather the unique kind of intimacy he is experiencing with the Lettrice.[8] Accordingly, the implication is that the Lettore treats the process of the amplesso as an end-in-itself, at least when his partner is the Lettrice. [...]
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