Italo Calvino's essay written in 1967, recommended by Thijs.
I absolutely love this text. it’s so beautifully written and indeed very helpful in shedding light on my project(s). it touches on some aspects that have been lingering abstractly in my head.

The combinatorial play of narrative possibilities

♥︎

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. But we also know that all these are implicit in the overall code of mental plays, according to the rules by which each of us, from one moment to the next, formulates his thoughts, swift or sluggish, cloudy or crystalline as they may be.

"I" as an apparatus

Literature as I knew it was a constant series of attempts to make one word stay put after another by following certain definite rules; or, more often, rules that were neither definite nor definable, but that might be extracted from a series of examples, or rules made up for the occasion-that is to say, derived from the rules followed by other writers.

And in these operations the person "1," whether explicit or implicit, splits into a number of different figures: into an "I" who is writing and an "I" who is written, into an empirical "I" who looks over the shoulder of the "I" who is writing and into a mythical "I" who serves as a model for the "I" who is written.
The "I" of the author is dissolved in the writing. The so-called personality of the writer exists within the very act of writing: it is the product and the instrument of the writing process.

yes the author is dead, which aligns with the self-reflexivity in modern literature:

writing is no longer just about telling a story, it’s about speaking with the awareness that I am telling a story right now.
the content of the words and the act of speaking collapse into one, where the writing process itself becomes the content.

↳ in this sense I really enjoyed reading The Lover's Discourse by Roland Barthes.

→ here, the author is not a person but a linguistic presence, just occupying a specific position within the writing.

→ it’s not the person behind “I” that matters, but rather how “I” functions within the language.

→ the word “I” no longer refers to the actual author; it’s a grammatical marker, a structural element playing its role in the sentence.

by removing the author as an authority, self-reflexive writing reveals the act of storytelling itself. making the way how the story is told is just as important as the story itself.
글쓰기 자체가 구조적 시스템이라면, "I"는 그 시스템이 작동하는 메커니즘 중 하나이다.

Reader's role

Once we have dismantled and reassembled the process of literary composition, the decisive moment of literary life will be that of reading. In this sense, even though entrusted to machines, literature will continue to be a "place" of privilege within the human consciousness, a way of exercising the potentialities contained in the system of signs belonging to all societies at all times. The work will continue to be born, to be judged, to be destroyed or constantly renewed on contact with the eye of the reader.

if the author is just one of the mechanism that functions within the system of structural system of writing, this alters the role of the reader.

now the reader has to focus on how language reveals itself, the self-reflexivity of the narrative and the way the structure of writing reveals the meaning.

The literature machine

will we also have machines capable of conceiving and composing poems and novels?

The interesting thing is not so much the question whether this problem is soluble in practice-because in any case it would not be worth the trouble of constructing such a complicated machine-as the theoretical possibility of it, which would give rise to a series of unusual conjectures. And I am not now thinking of a machine capable merely of "assembly-line" literary production, which would already be mechanical in itself.

I am thinking of a writing machine that would bring to the page all those things that we are accustomed to consider as the most jealously guarded attributes of our psychological life, of our daily experience, our unpredictable changes of mood and inner elations, despairs and moments of illumination.

now AI can write poems and novels, but not in the way Calvino imagined.
I totally agree with Calvino that what really matters isn’t what the machine can do or the technology itself, but what it’s theoretically capable of, the bigger ideas and possibilities behind it.

The true literature machine will be one that itself feels the need to produce disorder.

♥︎

...
To gratify critics who look for similarities between things literary and things historical, sociological, or economic, the machine could correlate its own changes of style to the variations in certain statistical indices of production, or income, or military expenditure, or the distribution of decision-making powers. That indeed will be the literature that corresponds perfectly to a theoretical hypothesis: it will, at last, be the literature.

The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable

우리가 어떤 것을 모른다고 말할 때, 그것은 아직 그 자리에 사용된 적 없는 단어와 개념들이, 그 순서로, 그 의미로 배치된 적이 없기 때문이다.

Myth and Fable

Myth

Calvino describes myth as the hidden part of story. deep, unconscious layer that has not been expressed through language
it also refers to taboos, silences, and things that can't be fully expressed due to social norms or political reason and what not
it requires rituals, symbols, and special time and place to be passed down
it exists in silence also, shaping everyday stories in ways we don't necessarily always notice

Fable

fable gives myth a palpable, concrete form. it turns hidden part into a structured narrative
while myth remain silent and buried, fable gives it a shape and expression
fable is always influenced by myth, which operates within its structure in a cyclical, repetitive way

↳ when a fable tries to move in a new direction, myth pulls it back

↳ meaning fable follows deeper mythological patterns and structures

The power of modern literature lies in its willingness to give a voice to what has remained unexpressed in the social or individual unconscious: this is the gauntlet it throws down time and again.

신화는 말로 다 표현할 수 없는 원초적인 이야기의 근원이고, 우화는 그것을 이야기로 구체화하고 형식화하는 과정이다.
그러나 신화는 우화속에서 보이지 않는 방식으로 계속 작동하며, 우화의 흐름을 조종하거나 되돌린다.
문학은, 이러한 신화적 요소를 발견하고, 금기의 경계를 넘어서 말할 수 없던 것을 말하는 시도로 작동한다.

Fable and Side Narrative

fable and side narrative are not exactly the same thing, however fable can operate as side narrative.

우화는 신화의 요소를 이야기로 구체화하는 장치이며 독립적인 구조를 가진 이야기일 수도 있고 주요 서사의 일부일수도 있음. 그러나 부차적서사는 주요서사와의 관계속에서만 작동하는 이야기임.

↳ 모든 우화가 부차적 서사인 것은 아니고, 특정한 맥락에서 우화가 주요서사를 보완하거나 균열을 만드는 방식으로 작동할 때, 부차적서사와 비슷한 기능을 할 수 있음.

주요 서사와 독립적으로 병치될 때
메인 내러티브에 대한 메타포로 작동할 때
서사의 흐름을 방해하거나 방향을 바꿀 때

Freudian word-play

as the key to a possible aesthetics of psychoanalysis, developed by Ernst Kris, Ernst Gombrich.

The pleasure of puns and feeble jokes is obtained by following the possibilities of permutation and transformation implicit in language.
...
that the juxtaposition of concepts that we have stumbled across by chance unexpectedly unleashes a preconscious idea, an idea, that is, half buried in or erased from our consciousness, or maybe only held at arm's length or pushed aside, but powerful enough to appear in the consciousness if suggested not by any intention on our part, but by an objective process.

At a certain moment things click into place, and one of the combinations obtained-through the combinatorial mechanism itself, independently of any search for meaning or effect on any other level-becomes charged with an unexpected meaning or unforeseen effect which the conscious mind would not have arrived at deliberately: an unconscious meaning, in fact, or at least the premonition of an unconscious meaning.

User:Zuhui//Personal Reader/Cybernetics and Ghosts

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