How Literature Is Written - A Vocational Career
An Explanation According to Italo Calvino
May 6, 2009
The motif of the muses bringing divine inspiration to the artist has been used several times in canonical literature. It occurs in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, is rewritten in Virgil's Aeneid, and can be found in Dante's Comedy, and Shakespeare's Henry V.
It is a metaphor for genius, for the spiritual act of literary creation, and to which many authors have held. But in Cybernetics and Ghosts, Italo Calvino poetically argues the case for literature as a craft, de-constructing the Romantic notion of inspiration and the author as appointed or chosen for his task. Calvino writes that:
“Writers, as they have always been up to now, are already writing machines; or at least they are when things are going well. 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 Literature Machine – What to Input, to Get an Output?
In this view on authorship, stories are created as a result of combined factors, sometimes known and unknown to the writer, which shape and filter the nature of the literature.
Calvino outlines literature and its relationship to these factors as “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 rules followed by other writers.”
What is clear, then, is that Calvino is in favour of the idea of literature as a machine, but that its processes are not understood. It is this misunderstanding, arguably, that creates notions of inspiration of intuition.
How Does the Machine Deliver Meaning?
If the creation of literary texts is mechanistic, but those that work the machine do not understand its mechanisms fully, then how is meaning created from these texts?
This, according to Calvino, can be attributed to internal and external sources. He states that “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”.
First, the author engages in a period of linguistic play, arriving at combinations that must at some point become fixed by a second level, and that level, according to Calvino, is social. He continues with the following:
“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 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 historic man”.
In other words, the endowment of meaning comes second. A story is not formed whole by the muse and given to an author to be discovered and translated, it is pieces together by a sense of emotional and empirical interest on the part of a social animal, living in human society, who is stirred to a set of linguistic combinations over another.
Calvino’s Literature Machine as a Symbol of Social Art
For Italo Calvino, then, literature is written by societies and communities; the so-called literature machine, or the author, is left playing over and over with linguistic combinations, until attributes of meaning, defined by values of a given society, and filtered through the author, come into contact with the best combination for a given social meaning.
The idea of a literature machine, then, far from dispelling notions of poetry, takes the inner life of the Romantic, divinely inspired poet, and gives it back to the community at large.
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