. Spinning .

A nice analogy to hypertext:

I said I would like to distinguish the sensation of each single ginkgo leaf from the sensation of all the others, but I was wondering if it would be possible. (…) If from the ginkgo tree a single little yellow leaf falls and rests on the lawn, the sensation felt in looking at is is that of a single yellow leaf.  If two leaves descend from the tree, the eye follows the twirling of the two leaves as they move closer, then separate in the air, like two butterflies chasing each other, then glide finally to the grass, one here, one there. (p. 199)

And this:

Passing again beneath the gingko, I said to Mr. Okeda that in the contemplation of the shower of leaves the fundamental thing was not so much the perception of each of the leaves as of the distance between one leaf and another, the empty air that separated them. (p. 202)

These passages are from the section On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon. Maybe I’ve become hypertextual to a degree of heightened sensitivity in creating and separating life and all I read into a different meaning of spaces, but this image certainly calls to my mind the individual writing spaces of hypertext software such as Storyspace, and presents to me the map of separation within the whole.

Then this, on adding sound and visuals to text:

(…) I tried to make the comparison with the reading of a novel in which a very calm narrative pace, all on the same subdued note, serves to enforce some subtle and precise sensations to which the writer wishes to call the reader’s attention; but in the case of the novel you must consider that in the succession of sentences only one sensation can pass at a time, whether it be individual or general, whereas the breadth of the visual field and the auditory field allows the simultaneous recording of a much richer and more complex whole. (p. 203)

Sure sounds like "Lights! Camera! Action!" to me. Yet I find it odd that in all the time I’ve studied hypertext–though it not be all that much I suppose–I have not heard Calvino mentioned along with other pioneers of new media. 

Then again, it could just be me as I crawl out of a literary rut and myopically gaze about.

This chapter has been absolutely delightful in its revelations.  Having broken the pattern of second person (Reader) as narrator pov, it has switched to first person and that in the character of Silas Flannery, author of portions (perhaps) of this mysterious novel.  And who comes to see him, after Lotaria and Ludmilla, and after his connection with the translator Ermes Marana, but the Reader!  Appearing in this chapter (8) in the third person via the first! 

Bad enough that Flannery sends the seekers of alien life after him, but the novel he brings to show Flannery is stolen by them.  What does this mean?  But it gets even better, and here is likely a spoiler of sorts:

I have had the idea of writing a novel composed only of beginnings of novels.  The protagonist could be a Reader who is continually interrupted.  The Reader buys the new novel A by the author Z.  But it is a defective copy…(p. 197)

How glorious!

Evidently Lotaria has a very different view towards reading for context:

She explained to me that a suitably programmed computer can read a novel in a few minutes and record the list of all the words contained in the text, in order of frequency.  "That way I can have an already completed reading at hand," Lotaria says, "with an incalculable saving of time.  What is the reading of a text, in fact, except the recording of certain thematic recurrences, certain insistences of forms and meanings?  (p. 186)

Well there ya go.  All that I’ve taken the time to dig out by myself is doable by a computer in "a few minutes."  Her theory may have some value:

"Words that appear eighteen times:  boys, cap, come, dead, eat, enough, evening, French, go, handsome, new, passes, period, potatoes, those, until…

"Don’t you already have a clear idea what it’s about?"  Lotario says.  "There’s no question:  it’s a war novel, all action, brisk writing, with a certain underlying violence.

Silas Flannery doesn’t know quite how to take this revelation.  To be sure, he’s feeling a bit down already as a writer and Calvino sics this woman on him.  Then her sister, Ludmilla pays the author a visit:

"My novels give you the idea of an ordinary person?"

"No, you see…The novels of Silas Flannery are something so well characterized…it seems they were already there before, before you wrote them, in all their details…It’s as if they passed through you, using you because you know how to write, since, after all, there has to be somebody to write them…"

I feel a stab of pain.  For this girl I am nothing but an impersonal graphic energy, ready to shift from the unexpressed into writing an imaginary world that exists independently of me. (p. 190)

What better way to express the idea of story writing itself?  What better manner to show that the author is independent of the writing, no matter what amount of agony of emotion and effort go into the work?  I love the little stories that Calvino presents to display the qualities of good writing–and good reading for that matter. 

This is truly a book about and for writers at all stages of their journey.

Coincidence seems to happen more often as you get older, or maybe you are just more aware.  One of yesterday’s posts in Hypercompendia notes the change in writing style an author may undergo that makes ‘old’ writing nearly unrecognizable as one’s own. 

This morning’s reading of Calvino brings me this, from Silas Flannery’s diary:

Though I leave the house as little as possible, I have the impression that someone is disturbing my papers.  More than once I have discovered that some pages were missing from my manuscripts.  A few days afterward I would find the pages in their place again.  But often I no longer recognize my manuscripts, as if I had forgotten what I had written, or as if overnight I were so changed that I no longer recognized myself in the self of yesterday. (p. 186)

The concept–whether this is the intention of Calvino in bringing out or not–is the influence of experience from reading, writing, and just observing and living life that changes a writer’s style.  The more he partakes, the greater the change.

In the next section, I see all hell breaking loose as Lotaria brings in the idea of electronic reading.

Readerly/Writerly, Shmeaderly/Shmiterly.  Had Barthes proposed his theories in Calvino-speak, I would have embraced them more readily. My resistance was not completely due to my stubborn streak but as much, I would think, to his manner of presenting them.

Here’s Calvino:

I am sure this Lotaria (that is her name) has read them only to find in them what she was already convinced of before reading them.
I tried to say this to her.  She retorted, a bit irritated: "Why? Would ou want me to read in your books only what you’re convinced of?"
I answered her: "That isn’t it. I expect readers to read in my books something I didn’t know, but I can expect it only from those who expect to read something they didn’t know."
(Luckily I can watch with my spyglass that other woman reading and convince myself that not all readers are like this Lotaria.)
"What you want would be a passive way of reading, escapist and regressive," Lotaria said. "That’s how my sister reads.  It was watching her devour the novels of Silas Flannery one after the other without considering any problems that gave me the idea of using those books as the subject of my thesis."  (p. 185)

And yet Flannery (whose thoughts are those above) pronounces Ludmilla–not Lotaria–to be the ideal reader.  Ludmilla does not wish to know the author, she does not want to change her image of an author by compare/contrast methods of a meeting or further research.  Or so Lotaria claims.

I think the best statement here is this:  "I expect readers to read in my books something I didn’t know, but I
can expect it only from those who expect to read something they didn’t
know."  It suggests the reader input–something an author cannot possibly be aware of–based on their experience, as well as their seeking a new experience from the reading. 

Put even more simply:  The reader giveth and the reader taketh away. 

In Chapter 8 we get a closer look at the supposed author of the book(s) that our Readers seek, and that is Silas Flannery. He is a mysterious figure, and one of the most intriguing as Calvino uses him to speak directly to the writer/reader of his book.

Previously, we’d learned that Flannery was going through a slow production time in his writing, and he found himself watching a young woman through a spyglass as she read, hoping that she was indeed reading his own work.  This chapter takes it further and poses some amazing trails (there’s that damned hypertext again!):

Idea for a story.  Two writers, living in two chalets on opposite slopes of the valley, observe each other alternately.  One of them is accustomed to write in the morning, the other in the afternoon.  Mornings and afternoons, the writer who is not writing trains his spyglass on the one who is writing.

One of the two is a productive writer, the other a tormented writer.  The tormented writer watches the productive writer filling pages with uniform lines, the manuscript growing in a pile of neat pages.  In a little while, the book will be finished: certainly a best seller–the tormenter writer thinks with a certain contempt but also with envy.  He considers the productive writer no more than a clever craftsman, capable of turning our machine-made novels, catering to the taste of the public; but he cannot repress a strong feeling of envy for that man who expresses himself with such methodical self-confidence.  It is not only envy, it is also admiration, yes, sincere admiration; …(p. 172)

Shades of Danielle Steel and J.K. Rowling!  It is the author’s traditional angst; that there be a dividing line between writing for the public or writing for oneself.  And why does the damn public have such shallow expectations anyway?

And here’s the flip side:

The productive writer watches the tormented writer as the latter sits down at his desk, chews his fingernails, scratches himself, tears a page to bits, gets up and goes into the kitchen to fix himself some coffee, then some tea, then camomile, then reads a poem by Holderlin (while it is clear that Holderlin has absolutely nothing to do with what he is writing), copies a page already written and then crosses it all out line by line, (…)

(…) The productive writer has never liked the works of the tormented writer; reading them, he always feels as if he is on the verge of grasping the decisive point, but then it eludes him and he is left with a sensation of uneasiness.  But now that he is watching him write, he feels this man is struggling with something obsure, a tangle, a road to be dug leading no one knows where; at times he seems to see the other man walking on a tightrope stretched over the voice, and he is overcome with admiration.  Not only admiration, also envy; because he feels how limited his own work is, how superficial compared with what the tormented writer is seeking.  (p. 173)

Don’t you just love it? And Calvino doesn’t leave it there, with the self-doubt of every author in his own way, but he continues along this path as each author spies upon the young woman reading, each imagining giving her his own manuscript, and Holy Hypertext, Batman! — the implications and possibilities of her reaction.

Calvino intrudes too upon the mind of the reader, the simple enjoyment of reading unfettered by the demands of writing.

This is a long chapter, but one where pieces are fitting together in the story of the two readers and the odd book(s) they seek to read.