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Cybernetics and Ghosts
First storyteller had limited language, and devices to tell their story. They combined natural features.
Primitive oral narrative, like the folk tale that has been handed down almost to the present day, is modeled on fixed structures, on, we might almost say, prefabricated elements—elements, however, that allow of an enormous number of combinations.
The world in its various aspects is increasingly looked upon as discrete rather than continuous. I am using the term “discrete” in the sense it bears in mathematics, a discrete quantity being one made up of separate parts.
Just as no chess player will ever live long enough to exhaust all the combinations of possible moves for the thirty-two pieces on the chessboard, so we know (given the fact that our minds are chessboards with hundreds of billions of pieces) that not even in a lifetime lasting as long as the universe would one ever manage to make all possible plays.
“Electronic brains” - (binary system) - Their abacus of only two numerals permits them to make instantaneous calculations of a complexity unthinkable for human brains. They have only to count on two fingers to bring into play incredibly rapid matrices of astronomical sums.
Thought
The spirit is now a curve.
In history we no longer follow the course of a spirit immanent in the events of the world, but the curves of statistical diagrams, and historical research is leaning more and more toward mathematics.
Mankind is beginning to understand how to dismantle and reassemble the most complex and unpredictable of all its machines: language. Today’s world is far richer in words and concepts and signs than the world that surrounded primitive man, and the uses of the various levels of language are a great deal more complex.
Neo-Formalist school has been reborn, employing the use of cybernetics research and structural semiology for the analysis of literature. Headed by Kholmogorov, this school carries out studies of highly academic scientific nature based on the calculations of probabilities and the quantity of information contained in poems.
will we have a machine capable of replacing the poet and the author? Just as we already have machines that can read, machines that perform a linguistic analysis of literary texts, machines that make translations and summaries, will we also have machines capable of conceiving and composing poems and novels?
What would be the style of a literary automaton. The true vocation would be for classicism, the test to produce traditional works, poems with dosed metrical forms.
(in the time of writing) The machines of the literary avant-garde are still too human. They are still an entirely lyrical instrument, serving a typical human need: the production of disorder. The true literature machine will be one that itself feds the need to produce disorder, as a reaction against its preceding production of order: a machine that will produce avant-garde work to free its circuits when they are choked by too long a production of classicism.
nothing prevents us from foreseeing a literature machine that at a certain point feels unsatisfied with its own traditionalism and starts to propose new ways of writing, turning its own codes completely upside down.
Various aesthetic theories maintained that poetry was a matter of inspiration descending from I know not what lofty place, or welling up from I know not what great depths, or else pure intuition, or an otherwise not identified moment in the life of the spirit, or the Voice of the Times with which the Spirit of the World chooses to speak to the poet, or a reflection of social structures (but)
how does one arrive at the written page? By what route is the soul or history or society or the subconscious transformed into a series of black lines on a white page?
Literature as I knew it was a constant series of attempts to make one word stay put after another by following certain definite rules
What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration or intuition is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one’s nose, taking short cuts, whereas the machine would follow a systematic and conscientious route while being extremely rapid and multiple at the same time.
The author vanishes—that spoiled child of ignorance—to give Place to a more thoughtful person, a person who will know that the Author is a machine, and will know how this machine works.
(Goes on to develop a contrary point for emphasis) Did we say that literature is entirely involved with language, is merely the permutation of a restricted number of elements and functions? But is the tension in literature not continually striving to escape from this finite number? Does it not continually attempt to say something it cannot say, something that it does not know, and that no one could ever know?
Thought
Writing “I love you.”
A thing cannot be known when the words and concepts used to say it and think it have not yet been used in that position, not yet arranged in that order, with that meaning.
Thought
A child. Return to childhood thought. A child curiously mimics, but also there is breaking symbols and order - simply because they do not fully understand the language yet.
What stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.
…unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there.
The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions. The unconscious speaks—in dreams, in verbal slips, in sudden associations—with borrowed words, stolen symbols, linguistic contraband, until literature redeems these territories and annexes them to the language of the waking world.
The relationship between combinatorial play and the unconscious in artistic activity lies at the heart of one of the most convincing aesthetic theories currently in circulation, a formula that draws upon both psychoanalysis and the practical experience of art and letters.
rel:Homo Ludens - A Study of Play-Element in Culture
The processes of poetry and art, says Gombrich, are analogous to those of a play on words. It is the childish pleasure of the combinatorial game that leads the painter to try out arrangements of lines and colors, the poet to experiment with juxtapositions of words.
The labyrinth is made so that whoever enters it will stray and get lost. But the labyrinth also poses the visitor a challenge: that he reconstruct the plan of it and dissolve its power. If he succeeds, he will have destroyed the labyrinth; for one who has passed through it, no labyrinth exists.”
In their dungeon Edmond Dantès and the Abbot Faria go over the plans for their escape and wonder which of the possible variants is the right one. The Abbot Faria digs tunnels to escape from the castle, but he always goes wrong and ends up in ever-deeper cells. On the basis of Faria’s mistakes Dantès tries to draw a map of the castle. While Faria, by the sheer number of his attempts, comes close to achieving the perfect escape, Dantès moves toward imagining the perfect prison—the one from which no escape is possible.
rel:Trapped Projects
His reasoning: If I succeed in mentally constructing a fortress from which it is impossible to escape, this imagined fortress either will be the same as the real one - and in this case it is certain we shall never escape from here, but at least we will achieve the serenity of knowing we are here because we could be nowhere else - or it will be a fortress from which escape is even more impossible than from here - which would be a sign that here an opportunity of escape exists: we have only to identify the point where the imagined fortress does not coincide with the real one and find it.
Two Interviews on Science and Literature
On the relationship between science and literature: Barthes: In literature language is never transparent, and is never merely an instrument to convey a meaning or fact or thought or truth. It cannot mean anything but itself. The idea of language given by science is a neutral utensil that is used to say something else, to mean something foreign to it.
Queneau: stresses the place that mathematical thought, through the increasing “mathematicization” of the human sciences, is now acquiring in humanistic culture, and therefore in literature as well
Robinson Crusoe was a philosophical novel without knowing it, and even earlier Don Quixote and Hamlet—I do not know with what degree of awareness on the part of their authors—had opened up a new relationship between the phantom lightness of ideas and the heavy weight of the world. When we speak of the relationship between literature and philosophy we must not forget that the whole question begins there.
Northrop Frye The archetypal critic studies the poem as part of poetry, and poetry as part of the total human imitation of nature that we call civilization
…the Bible is not a book, but a library. That is, it is a selection of books placed one after another, which are given particular significance as a whole, and around which we place all other possible books.
Distaste for satire, as one component of satire is moralism and the other is mockery, two things Calvino doesn’t appreciate in others. The moralist things they are better. The mocker thinks he is smarter. Satire excludes the attitude of questioning and questing.
What I look for in the comic or ironic or grotesque or absurd transformation of things is a way to escape from the limitations and one- sidedness of every representation and every judgment