What story down there awaits its end?

If On a Winter's Night a Traveler

In her discussion of Calvino's novel If On a Winter's Night a Traveller, N. Katherine Hailes believes that the story is concerned with the nature of literature in a world were the words are represented as digital information, subject to mutation, deletion, and error.

"The textual body may be dismembered or ground into digital word dust, the narrative implies, but as long as there are readers who care passionately about stories and want to pursue them, narrative itself can be recuperated." -42

I found her description to be connected to my own exploration of narrative and returned to Calvino's novel for a critical read along these lines. In my opinion, Calvino is looking at reading and writing a novel from countless angles, one of which involves a rethinking of literature based on cybernetics and artificial intelligence. He is primarily creating a story for readers about the endless possibilities of reading.

Calvino is able to weave a tale of a seemingly random stack of novels, but it is important to realize that he is responsible for all the content in the book. The novel is a display of his finesse as a writer, as he is able to write chapters in a dozen literary genres. To me, this is an argument about the power of the writer over any algorithm. Calvino writes circles around any generative text. He painstakingly curates the content and its delivery.

In the beginning of the semester I was exploring algorithms for reading and textual analysis. It is becoming clear to me that without a focused curatorial approach, there is no power in these computer programs. At first I was looking at ways to draw meaning out of streams of text, but now I am looking at ways to highlight specific content within these streams. The algorithm is powerful when it has to find and emphasize, or even act upon a specific target. Otherwise it is nothing more than a glorified random number generator.

Although the Hailes might argue otherwise, it is not the reader who creates the story, it is the author. By seemingly doing the opposite, Calvino proves again that authors still write the best books.

A selection of quotes:

"You fling the book on the floor, you would hurl it out of the window, even out of the closed window, through the slats of the Venetian blinds; let them shred its incongruous quires, let sentences, words, morphemes, phonemes gush forth, beyond recomposition into discourse; through the panes, and if they unbreakable glass so much the better, hurl the book and reduce it to photons, undulatory vibrations, polarized spectra; through the wall, let the book crumble into atoms and molecules passing between atom and atom of the reinforced concrete, breaking up into electrons, neutrons, neutrinos, elementary particles more and more minute; through the telephone wires, let it be reduced to electronic impulses, into flows of information, shaken by redundancies and noises, and let it be degraded into a swirling entropy." p26

"'I've become so accustomed to not reading that I don't even read what appears before my eyes. It's not easy: they teach us to read as children, and for the rest of our lives we remain the slaves of all the written stuff they fling in front of us. I may have had to make some effort myself, at first, to learn not to read, but now it comes quite naturally to me. The secret is not refusing to look at the written words. On the contrary, you must look at them, intensely, until they disappear.'" p49

Leaning from the steep slope:

"There are days when everything I see seems to me charged with meaning: messages it would be difficult for me to communicate to others, define, translate into words, but which for this very reason appear to me decisive." p55

"How can you keep up with her, this woman who is always reading another book besides the one before her eyes, a book that does not yet exist, but which, since she wants it, cannot fail to exist?" p72

Looking down in the gathering shadow:

" I'm producing too many stories at once because what I want is for you to feel, around the story, a saturation of other stories that I could tell and maybe will tell or who knows may already have told on some occasion, a space full of stories that perhaps is simply my lifetime ... " p109

"The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest-- for example the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both --- must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which break off from their common story." p153

"... in the case of the novel you must consider that in the succession of sentences only one can pass at a time, whether it be individual or general, whereas the breadth of the visual field and the auditory field allows the simultaneous recording of a much richer and more complex whole." p203