INTRODUCTION: DEFINITION

Italo Calvino's novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveller of 1979 famously revolves around a reader in search of a book that he has started to read but that turns out to be incomplete. The book's opening sentences tell of a traveller arriving on a winter's night at the small station of a provincial town. In the final chapter the reader ends up in a library where one of the other readers warns him that finding the book will be very difficult since ‘once upon a time they all began like that, all novels. There was somebody who went along a lonely street and saw something that attracted his attention, something that seemed to conceal a mystery, or a premonition; then he asked for explanations and they told him a long story’; ‘the traveller always appeared only in the first pages and then was never mentioned again – he had fulfilled his function, the novel wasn't his story’.

In this chapter I shall take a closer look at this device of ‘the anonymous traveller’ in European literature. Calvino suggests that it is an old device (‘once upon a time they all began like that’), and my first question is ‘how old?’ Thus, I shall go back in time step by step and trace its origins. My quest will, not surprisingly in view of the topic of this volume, lead me to ancient Greece. The second question which I shall discuss is whether we can indeed draw up such a European history of a narrative device and speak of its Greek origins, or whether, perhaps, we should rather consider the anonymous traveller a narrative universal.