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On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in If on a winter’s night a traveler, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Act of Reading
Academia and Publishing
Censorship and Government Oppression
Love, Lust, and Anxiety
Summary
Analysis
Your plane lands before you can finish On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon. While you’re going through airport security, someone confiscates your book, saying it’s banned in Ataguitania. In the airport, however, you meet a fellow traveler, a woman named Corinna who looks a lot like Lotaria, and she tells you she has her own copy of the book she can lend you at some point. But when you look at Corinna’s book, you see it’s actually Around an empty grave by Calixto Bandera. She explains it’s just a fake dust jacket.
In Chapter 8, Flannery said he would send the Reader to South America and maybe send Ludmilla’s sister, as well, to keep the Reader busy. This passage seems to confirm that Flannery got his wish, although the confusion over whether Corinna is really Ludmilla adds some ambiguity. While several of the story fragments have dealt with the theme of government oppression, the airport security staff confiscating books shows how oppression is beginning to creep into the frame story.
Themes
You tell Corinna that if the book’s dust jacket is a fake, the text is probably fake too. She admits that falsifications can be hard to stop—in Ataguitania, everything can be faked. All of sudden, while Corinna and you are waiting for a taxi, some police officers arrest the two of you. Corinna remains calm, claiming that she is Gertrude and that the cops need to take her to their headquarters at once. You are amazed, and so Corinna tells you that these cops are fake too.
Although Marana is initially nowhere to be found in Ataguitania (a fictional country), his presence seems to be everywhere, embodied by all the fakes. The Reader struggles to maintain any grasp on reality as Corinna turns out to possibly be someone else. Although Ataguitania takes things to the extreme, it represents how even in real-world countries the truth can be a difficult concept to pin down.
Themes
You end up in a station, where Corinna gives her name as Ingrid. Eventually, Corinna gets separated from you, and when she comes back, she’s in uniform and another officer calls her Alfonsina. Corinna explains that there’s a complicated situation of revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries in the country, and you may be taken to prison, but it will be a fake prison.
Corinna keeps changing identities, representing how it is difficult to ever truly know a person because they can contain so many sides. Although Corinna tries to reassure the Reader by telling him that he’s only going to a fake prison, this passage raises the question of whether a “fake” prison is any better than a legitimate prison—and raises the larger question of whether the revolutionaries are any different from the counterrevolutionaries if they both use similar tactics.
Themes
Corinna claims to be a real revolutionary infiltrating the ranks of false revolutionaries. You still worry about going to prison, but Corinna assures you it’s a good prison with a library. In addition, a prison can be the best place to find banned books. Your quest to come to Ataguitania to find a counterfeiter seems to be derailed. You wonder to yourself if Corinna is actually Lotaria or if she’s just someone who fills a similar role in the story.
As the Reader spends more time in Ataguitania, he finds it increasingly difficult determine what’s true, including whether or not he should trust Corinna. The Reader learns the danger of taking Marana’s way of thinking too far, realizing that once one begins to question the truth of some things, it can lead to an endless cycle of questioning reality.
Themes
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In prison, you make a complaint at the library about the book Around an empty grave by Calixto Bandera. The man at the desk says he’d like to perform a test to compare your impressions of the book to the results of a computer. He calls for the programmer, Sheila, and Corinna comes out, answering to yet another name.
Corinna’s connection to the computer programmer is yet another clue about her connection to Lotaria (who also uses a computer to analyze books). This passage hints at how “scientific” processes like this computer test of a book can be used to justify oppression by giving it false credibility.
Themes
While Corinna (as Sheila) is helping to set up the reading experiment, you grab her by the wrist and accuse her of being Lotaria. She claims that she doesn’t understand what you’re talking about. You accuse her whole revolution of just reproducing old forms of power, saying that whenever she takes off her uniform, there’s always another uniform underneath.
The Reader’s inability to find the truth makes him question whether all political ideologies are the same, leading to the same forms of repression. This illustrates the consequences of following Marana’s thinking to its logical extreme, and how it can cause a person to doubt everything around them. While this chapter does explore how oppression can take on many forms within different ideologies, it does not necessarily suggest that all political ideologies are the same—just that it might seem that way to someone as jaded about the concept of truth as Marana.
Themes
Corinna seems to challenge you, so you rip off her clothes, seeing under the outfit of Sheila the outfits of Alfonsina, Ingrid, and Gertrude, until at last you just see a naked body. She asks if her body is a uniform and then asserts that in fact it is. She begins undressing you. The narrator asks you what right you have to start getting naked with Corinna/Lotaria—wasn’t Ludmilla enough for you?
The way that the Reader semi-accidentally starts having sex with Corinna recalls the scene in the previous story fragment between the narrator and Madame Miyagi. Just as that narrator’s lust caused him to lose Makiko, the Reader seems to be in danger of losing Ludmilla due to his own lust.
Themes
Just then someone takes a photo, and a photographer accuses Captain Alexandra—Corinna—of attempting to have sex with a prisoner again. You and Corinna get up and compose yourselves, returning to the experiment. You get the sense that Corinna is nervous and that somehow the text by Calixto Bandera that she’s trying to pull up on the computer has gotten scrambled.
Also like the scene between the previous narrator and Madame Miyagi, the Reader gets interrupted in the middle of sex with Corinna. At the time this novel was written, computers were new, cutting-edge technology—and yet for all their advancements, they seem to be just as capable of errors as traditional books.
Themes
