Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 38, No. 301.
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        Date: 2025-01-04 08:30:38+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: Calvino's cybernetics

To the present discussion on "AI, poetry and readers", I'd like to add
the following, from Italo Calvino's great lecture on cybernetics, first 
delivered in 1966, just when computing in (or and) the humanities, 
as it was called then, was just getting started in my corner of the 
world. Commentary on it might help.

A good English translation follows the Italian original.

WM
-----

"Cibernetica e fantasmi (Appunti sulla narrativa come processo
combinatorio)" (1967), in Una pietra sopra. Discorsi di letteratura e
società. Torino: Einaudi, 1980, p. 177.

"...la letteratura é si gioco combinatorio che segue le possibilita
implicite nel proprio materiale, indipendentemente dalla personalita del
poeta, ma é gioco che a un certo punto si trova investito d’un
significato inatteso, un significato non oggettivo di quel livello
linguistico sul quale ci stavamo muovendo, ma slittato da un altro
piano, tale da mettere in gioco qualcosa che su un altro piano sta a
cuore all’autore o alla societa a cui egli appartiene. La macchina
letteraria pud effettuare tutte le permutazioni possibili in un dato
materiale; ma il risultato poetico sara l’effetto particolare d’una di
queste permutazioni sull’uomo dotato d’una coscienza e d’un inconscio,
cioé sull’uomo empirico e storico, sara lo shock che si verifica solo in
quanto attorno alla macchina scrivente esistono i fantasmi nascosti
dell’individuo e della societa.

Per tornare al narratore della tribu, egli procede imperterrito a
permutare giaguari e tucani, fino al momento in cui da una delle sue
innocenti storielle esplode una rivelazione terribile: un mito, che
esige d’essere recitato in segreto e in luogo sacro."

------

"Cybernetics and Ghosts", in The Literature Machine: Essays. Trans.
Patrick Creagh. London: Secker and Warburg, 1987, p. 22.

"Literature is a combinatorial game that pursues the possibilities
implicit in its own material, independent of the personality of the
poet, but it is a game that at a certain point is invested with an
unexpected meaning, a meaning that is not patent on the linguistic plane
on which we were working but has slipped in from another level,
activating something that on that second level is of great concern to
the author or his society. The literature machine can perform all the
permutations possible on a given material, but the poetic result will be
the particular effect of one of these permutations on a man endowed with
a consciousness and an unconscious, that is, an empirical and historical
man. It will be the shock that occurs only if the writing machine is
surrounded by the hidden ghosts of the individual and of his society.

To return to the storyteller of the tribe, he continues imperturbably to
make his permutations of jaguars and toucans until the moment comes when
one of his innocent little tales explodes into a terrible revelation: a
myth, which must be recited in secret, and in a secret place."


--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk


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