On September 19, 1986, exactly one year after Italo Calvino’s untimely death, the following essay, prefaced by the renowned Italianist Vittore Branca, was published in the Corriere della sera. In it, the great writer reflects on the prospects for and effects of automatic writing.
Right before he fell ill, Calvino had agreed to give the inaugural lecture for the 27th International Seminar on Advanced Culture at the Fondazione Cini on the topic of “Fantastic Universes.” “I would gladly return to Venice, to San Giorgio,” he told me, “and will resume my reflections on and further develop something I touched upon briefly in 1978 at your conference on Creativity. To wit: the reference I made to the Organization for the Electronic Production of Homogenized Literary Works (Organizzazione per la produzione elettronica di opere letterarie omogeneizzate = OEPHLW), an organization that sticks out its nose repeatedly in my novel If on a Winter Night a Traveler. The reference served as a conclusion to Calvino’s talk and has remained buried in the published version ever since, but we are publishing here. Flair, parodic intent, melancholy are all equally entangled in this imaginative account of a writer obliged to survive and continue on writing even after his death. It’s a polemical and anguished message: pure Calvino. V.(ittore) B.(ranca)
The Organization for the Electronic Production of Homogenized Literary Works (OEPHLW) has offered me its services. It’s not the first time they send one of their representatives my way. Their invitations to sign a contract have become more and more heavy handed, even threatening in tone. Now they have shown me some samples of their work: chapters of novels that I never wrote but that seem much more like “me” than anything else that I have ever written. Somewhere, I know not where, there’s an electronic brain that operates just like my brain does. It has inventoried all my suspenseful plots, the dramatic situations in international settings that I devise, my style and my mannerisms, the metaphors with which I would describe a mulatta encountered in a night club, the slang I employ in barstool banter, the pithiness of my descriptions of violent deaths.
What kind of impact does this have on me? My initial reactions are complex and contradictory. It’s as if I am standing face to face with an extension of myself that will continue on writing even after my death. And I sense that this extension of myself is taking possession of every one of my powers, depriving me of them as it takes them over. I’m wondering if that’s why I can’t write anymore: as soon as they programmed “him” to take over all of my imaginative powers, the author was no longer me, but rather “him.” To feel fully alive my role is now reduced to not writing and, by refusing to sign the OEPHLW contract, to impeding “him” from writing as well. That’s because as soon as I came to understand that, thanks to a computer, I could continue to write even after my death, writing has become associated in my mind with death. So, I’ve decided that I will start writing again when I’m dead…
At the same time, I can’t help but envy him: the efficiency and ease with which he operates. I wish I could be him. Were I to transform myself into a machine, my work would achieve the absolute objectivity to which I aspire, and at the same time I would be, more than ever, myself: the sum of the functions of all my mental processes, rigorously formalized, free from the smudges and distortions imposed by the approximations of existence.
I sometimes imagine that the book the woman is reading as she reclines in her deckchair is one of those written by the electronic device that so impecably replicates my style—a book in which everything is justified and necessary.
I once read in a book that objectivity of thought may be expressed by employing the verb “to think” in the impersonal third person: instead of “I think,” “it thinks” just as one might say “it rains.” Thought permeates the universe: on every occasion that’s the point of departure.
Will I ever be able to say “it’s writing today,” precisely as one says “it’s raining today” or “it’s windy today”?
Only when it becomes natural to make impersonal use of the verb “to write” will there be any hope that I can express something that exceeds the bounds of the individuality of a single being.
And what about the verb “to read”? Will it ever be possible to declare that “it’s reading today,” just as one states that “it’s raining”?
Upon reflection, reading is by necessity an individual act, far more so than writing. Even if writing succeeds in transcending the limitations of the author, it will be meaningful only when it is read by an individual and crisscross the circuits of his or her mind. Only the ability to be read by a singular person proves that what is written shares in the power of writing, a power founded on something that exceeds the individual.
The universe will go on expressing itself so long as someone can proclaim: “I read, therefore ‘it’ writes.”
