User:Samira/Calvino
The Night Rider
Calvino breaks down this story into its formula, and yet even when all its elements are nothing but signifiers. Even without destination, without decoration, what remains is the quintessential, which separates itself from action, and remains as the spirit of their intention.
This story is about a man, driving out of his city to reach his lover after they have quarrelled over the phone. His lover had threatened to call on another man who is hopelessly in love with her, and out of jealousy and love, out protagonist hurtles down the highway to reach her before he does.
This story is about a man driving from one city to another, in order to be understood by his lover. As he drives he considers his own story. Wondering if, by chance, this other man was speeding down the same highway, alongside him, maybe behind, maybe ahead. His jealousy escalating each time an anonymous, yet potentially threatening car drives past. It cannot be known whether or not any of this cars is in fact his rival, the man’s reaction remains the same.
This story is about a man driving from point A to B, with the intention of reaching his lover, so she might understand the sincerity of his feelings. Although, he understands, if he were to reach her, and find her in the same state in which he left her over the phone, the journey would have been for nothing. For in fact, the only expectation from his efforts are that they are requited, and yet for them to be requited, his lover must be equally unreachable in her journey.
This story is about a man, moving from point A to B, to reach his lover Y, threatened by his rival Z. The only way for his journey to have purpose, is if Y is in equal pursuit, on the other side of the highway, rushing from point B to point A.
At one point, he stops his car at a gas station, rushes to a payphone and calls Y, who lives in point B. She does not pick up, he is elated, reassured that she has in fact pursued him, requited his intentions. He turns his car around and heads back to his own city, point A.
Upon doing so, he wonders if Y has done the same, has rung him, found he wasn’t at home, turned her car around, and was speeding back.
They would never reach one another, nor know with any certainty whether this balanced chase had occurred at all. The confirmation of the act of their journey would debunk the meaning of their messages.
“To be sure, the price paid is high but we must accept it: to be indistinguishable from all the other signals that pass along this road, each with his meaning that remains hidden and undecipherable because outside of here there is no one capable of receiving us now and understanding us.”
“You cannot have your cake, and eat it” - the message would not exist if it were at a point of being received - the chase, and need of chase is the message in itself.
They are rendered to their most important value - the message which they wish to convey, the method in which they communicate so are unimportant. Becoming the essence/spirit/ghosts which are their intentions. “I can no longer accept any situation other than this transformation of ourselves into the messages of ourselves.”
Cybernetics and Ghosts
Can the writer be replaced by machine? Yes! but that doesn’t mean a thing, if the reader… is not weighed by the ghosts of our culture and is able withdraw myth from between the lines of the structure.
1.
Calvino begins by describing the beginning of language as a systematic sequence of signifiers. He then defines the role of the storyteller, who experiments with the combinations possible and pushes the limits of language, resulting in story.
It can be said that all narrative structures follow a finite amount of formulas. Calvino extends the question to all forms of narrative, literature in all tis complexity.
What we understand to be narrative fiction surpasses its content, and includes the relationship of the narrator, the story, and the reader. All of these existing within the work.
Today’s culture has hailed the ‘discrete’ over the ‘continuous’ understanding of the world heralded in the past. The ‘discrete’ meaning a series of discontinuous states. He compares this to the ‘electronic brain’ and its ability to process complex amounts of data.
Although the possibilities seem endless, there are a limited number of integers to create the code of mental plays. We are learning to dismantle and reassemble our most complex and unpredictable machine: language.
Calvino then diverges into examples of literature researched through cybernetics, mathematics and logic. Chomsky: structure of language Neo-formalism: calculates probabilities and quantity of information contained in poems
So, can we make a machine a poet?
Never intending for this to be put into practice, this is purely a hypothetical question, because why go through all the trouble to build a machine to become a poet?
A machine capable of assembly-line writing, able to form classic structures of narratives wouldn’t do to replace the writer. The true writing machine would by its own devise decide to break beyond the confines of its structure, experience the need to free its circuits and create disorder opposed to its own order.
2.
How could it be that the written word represents the soul? As far as he’s concerned the writer is confined to the rules set out by writers before him.
The work surpasses the writer, and exists divided between the writer, the history of the written word, the story being told, and the reader (weighed by historical and social understanding).
The writer becoming dissolved within his work, as his work must in itself lie within the perishable nature of phases, allowing literature to resurrect again from its ashes, and so the duty of the author is replaced by the mechanism of his actions.
3.
Calvino states he could be replaced by a machine, an idea that provides him with a sense of relief, order triumphing over disorder. Faced with the vertigo of the continuos and unclassifiable, the finite and ‘discrete’ is reassuring.
Can it be said that literature is simply a combination of various signifiers, when it in fact seeks to push beyond the formula of language and escape the finite combinations and say what cannot be said.
‘Myth is the hidden part of every story” - the unexplored that does not yet have the words to enable us to get there.
‘Myth is nourished by silence as well as words.’ Taboos based upon earlier phases of what was said, and the constructions of culture formed around it - set up in recognition of the symbols created by the myth provided by storytellers gone by.
Literature strives to cross the barriers of prohibition, redeeming territories and annexing the ‘unconscious’ thought into the language of the waking world.
4.
Language as machine: Freud: puns and feeble jokes are obtained by transformation in language, not with intention but an objective process, unexpectedly unleashing a pre-conscious idea.
Gombrich: the processes of poetry and art are a play on words… words working unexpectedly charged by meaning or unforeseen effect which the conscious mind would have arrived to deliberately - a premonition of an unconscious meaning.
Various formations and combinations can be created, yet it is only when it can be understood by a conscious being - that is to say a person endowed with the “ghosts” of the World, someone with a grip on the social and historical nature of the World.
This is the role of the storyteller - to act as a machine, continuously combining words until a moment where from within and beyond his phrasing, Myth comes into being seen.
5.
Myth vs. Fable.
Fable is often said to follow myth, as a vulgar or secular adaptation - folktales constructed to “teach” an audience. Others consider both to be balanced.
Calvino argues that fable precedes myth, as fables must be experimented with until myth is stumbled upon.
Myth crystallising instantly - immediately becoming removed from the author and upheld within culture - forming ritual, symbol, social structure, and our understanding of the world as it is.
Literature can act as a means to uphold values, and accept authority, although these are only phases, as it is the case that at a certain point, these values cave in on themselves and give rise to a movement in the opposite direction, refusing what has been said up to this point and striving to voice the unspoken. - Venturing into the taboo and transmitting it into culture.
6.
Orientation presupposes disorientation.. The said gives way to the unsaid and draws out a preconscious subject matter. Independent of the writing machine, it is the reader that charges it with meaning.