Abstract
The paper offers a critical re-examination of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler using the Lacanian psychoanalytic framework. While existing scholarship on Calvino’s novel largely conceptualizes the text as one of the earliest and most celebrated representations of the “death of the author” and the subsequent and inevitable autonomy of the reader, this study investigates the “return of the author” in the novel through Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage. Extending Lacan’s theory into literature, the paper examines how the subjectivity of the reader and the author are constituted through their encounter with the text. It argues that the reader’s subjectivity is structured by the paradoxical presence of an author who is always there yet never fully accessible. In other words, the paper attempts to suggest that the “dead figure” of the author maintains its status as the prohibited “object of desire” and reappears in parts in the text according to the reader’s unconscious desire for them. The literary text is treated as analogous to the repository of signifiers that constitute the symbolic Other, with the writer and the reader functioning as the literary equivalents of the psychoanalytic mother and the child. This approach challenges the existing binary of authorial presence and absence, offering instead a psychoanalytic model of subject formation facilitated by the triadic relationship between the reader, the writer, and the text.