The writer, too, is engaged in acts of processing and combining, though not in obedience to an algorithm. It is interesting to revisit this argument in the era of AI, not least in light of Calvino’s brief, teasing claim that a true ‘literature machine’ would produce avant-garde work ‘to free its circuits when they are choked’ by classicism.
The machine’s ‘true vocation would be for classicism’, having the capacity to infer and follow stylistic rules exactingly. Calvino thought that the use of machines to destabilise literary form, or produce generative disorder, was eminently human. ‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’, the 1967 lecture that begins with the tribal storyteller, took its inspiration from avant-garde experiments with basic computers. That combination of formal and sensual qualities is also characteristic of Calvino, who called himself an ‘ex-historicist’: proof of his modesty as well as his enjoyment of the freedom implied by ‘ex’. Writing of Roland Barthes, Calvino approved of his rigour but argued that his real genius was to have achieved it since his mind was one ‘whose only sure criterion was pleasure’. He admired structuralists for their intellectual discipline but was interested in feeling as much as abstraction. The association between Calvino and theory was complicated from the beginning. But each book is also a detective story or a romance, with an array of characters, funny, vain, perceptive, lost, wise. Condensed descriptions can make these books sound like exercises: novels made up of the first chapters of other (fictional) novels or composed at the random direction of Tarot cards or consisting only of descriptions of cities. Both invite suspicion.Ĭalvino’s affinity with Parisian intellectuals (he was an Oulipo fellow traveller) has sometimes meant that his later fiction is interpreted as merely illustrating theoretical concepts – concepts a good deal less interesting than the novels themselves.
Both terms are more ambiguous than ‘novelist’. The Uses of Literature, a selection of his non-fiction published in English in 1986, opens: ‘It all began with the first storyteller of the tribe.’ He is also called a fabulist, as much for his narrative conceits as for his vast repertoire of Italian folktales.
Calvino himself embraced the description. Reviewers have tried to account for his interest in narrative at both the level of theory and pleasure by calling him a ‘storyteller’, meaning that he wrote books that are both compelling and showily self-aware. His admirers proselytise – not always helpfully – about The Joy of Semiosis. He has been pigeonholed as an Italian Queneau or a knock-off Borges.
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