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BOOK REVIEW (September 2016)
ITALO CALVINO ON THE LITERATURE MACHINE
Italo Calvino (1989). The Literature Machine: Essays, translated by Patrick Creagh
(London: Pan Books).
INTRODUCTION
This collection of essays on ‘the literature machine’ by the Italian writer Italo Calvino
will make more sense if we begin with the fragmentary note that he appends at the
end of this book. The autobiographical note focuses on his birth, childhood, and
early influences; that is about all that Calvino offers by way of autobiography. While
Calvino touches upon his origins and antecedents like Laurence Sterne’s depiction of
Tristam Shandy; he ‘finds nothing more to say’ about the living present. I use this
fragment as a point of entry into these essays on literary ontology because it is Italo
Calvino’s conscious intent to say that when we consider ‘the literature machine,’ it is
not possible to understand it in its entirety. All that can be done is to invoke the
literary fragment as a symbol of the writer’s frailty in a world where literature as a
discourse is situated in-between its own historical ‘conditions of possibility’ and
linguistic ‘conditions of articulation.’ Calvino then wonders whether any theory of
literary ontology can account for both these dimensions of literature. He begins with
a definition of the literature machine. What Calvino has in mind is the combinatorial
possibilities of the basic plots that constitute narrative structures such as those
identified by Vladimir Propp in his pioneering study of folktales. The sheer
inexhaustibility of literature is compared in his analysis to the endless combination
of moves that are possible in a game of chess; Calvino refers to this literary
mechanism as the ars combinatoria. The literature machine then is not a machine in
the literal sense of the term; it is only a symbol of the ars combinatoria.

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ON THE LITERARY CANON
This term ‘ars combinatoria’ should appeal as much to the mathematician as the
student of literature. The essays in this book are preoccupied with the problems of
literary ontology and the forms of literary combination that constitute the
underlying structure of the literary canon. It should not be difficult to understand
then why even mathematicians in France were interested in structural approaches to
literature in addition to anthropologists, philosophers, and semiologists.
The task of this literature machine is to produce both ‘order and disorder’ depending
on the occasion. When there is a proliferation of texts that is constituted by a
particular approach, it will lead to literary disorder; and when there is a paucity of
texts that is constituted by a particular approach it will lead to a greater sense of
literary order. This oscillatory movement then defines the broad contours of literary
history and the shape of the literary canon. What is however not clear is to find a
way of relating the afflatus or the unconscious of the individual author to the ars
combinatoria. In other words, why does the individual author realize his talent in the
choice of a particular combination of story, character, and plot? Most theories of
literature try to explain either the structure of the text or the expression of the
unconscious but not both. That then is why Calvino is resigned to a fragmentary
approach in his theory of the literature machine. However what these two
approaches have in common is the notion of ‘play.’ The author plays with an
informed sense of combinatorial possibilities albeit in the attempt to realize that
which surfaces in his text as a consequence of doing so. Authors preoccupied with
literary ontology however might seek to activate more than one plot simultaneously
in their narratives just to make the point that there is a range of plot combinations
available below the surface of the text and the reader’s conscious awareness. Such
narratives are not meant to be treated as referential constructs. In other words, they
only refer to their own origins as literary constructs rather than imitate a state of
affairs in the world. They are therefore described as ‘self-reflexive.’ The extent of
self-reflexivity in a text is an important consideration in the definition of literary
ontology.

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ON LITERARY ONTOLOGY
An important trend in post-modern narratives is therefore to either re-read or re-
write the realist narratives of an earlier era in order to bring out the different ‘levels
of reality’ that constitute its underlying linguistic structure. Literary ontology then
requires the collaboration of readers, writers, and literary critics who will legitimate
such creative endeavours. This book itself can be read then as a foray in critical
legitimation. That is also why Calvino explains his stance on science; it is important
to differentiate between the ‘science of literature’ and the ‘literature of science.’ That
is because the shift from the ‘quest for meaning’ to the ‘quest for structure’ in literary
analysis means that there will be inevitable comparisons between the uses of the
term ‘structure’ in a number of areas like mathematics, literature, and science; hence
Calvino’s interest in Barthesian semiology and the scientific treatises of Galileo.
Calvino points out that Galileo was one of the greatest of Italian writers despite
being a scientist because of his awareness of literary ontology and the structure of
natural languages. Galileo is therefore sensitized to the fact that language is not a
transparent medium that meekly reflects reality, but actively shapes it at the levels of
both thought and expression in the act of writing.
Calvino is also interested in the relationship between literature and philosophy. The
main limitation of existentialism as a philosophical approach, he argues, is that it
‘did not succeed in acquiring a literary stringency of its own.’ It is therefore
important for a writer to place literature before philosophy if he is to produce a
literary artefact which will find a place for itself within the history of literature as
well as the history of philosophy. Calvino’s interest in Northrop Frye’s ‘archetypal’
criticism is also related to his prefiguration of critical themes that animate
structuralist approaches to literary criticism. The most important of the basic
assumptions that Frye make is that it is possible to draw an analogy between
‘literary genres, agricultural rites, and the four seasons.’ Another important critical
achievement in Frye’s work is to encourage the literary appreciation of biblical texts.
For Frye, the Bible was more than a book; it was akin to a ‘library’ that symbolically
represented the difference between the ‘canonical’ and the ‘apocryphal’ texts of the

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Christian world. The institutional authority of the Catholic Church and the Church
fathers then is a prefiguration of the institutional conventions that played an
important role in the delineation of the literary canon. Calvino however is mainly
interested in the dialectical relationship between the canonical texts and the
apocryphal texts.
ON LITERARY GENRES
Calvino also defines the ‘territorial’ distinctions between genres like ‘comedy,
eroticism, and fantasy’ because the structuralist approach to literary analysis is
necessarily implicated in a theory of genres. It only makes sense to talk about the
literary machine in the context of the ars combinatoria if we understand whether the
rules of genre permit, or do not permit, certain plot combinations. In that sense, the
cinema is important because it helps Calvino to make generic comparisons between
the narrative mechanisms embodied by the function of the camera and those that
constitute the main conventions of close description in literature. So, for instance,
Calvino’s analysis of the close-up in cinema is as good as the Barthesian distinction
between ‘studium and punctum’ in the semiology of photography. 1
This is not just my comparison since Barthes’s distinction is specifically invoked by
Calvino in this book. The point that Calvino makes about the close-up is that it is
unique to the cinema; it has no counterpoint in the literary narrative. By varying the
distance between the camera and the object a range of meanings can be conveyed by
the film maker which is not easy to do in literature. The only near comparison then is
to the portrait in the history of painting. The comparison however is specific to this
point since a portrait painting is usually commissioned while literary narratives are
not.
LEVELS OF LITERARY REALITY
Furthermore, what the painter means by the artistic canon is worth comparing with
what the writer means by the literary canon. Calvino invokes the image of a
1 See Roland Barthes (1984). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, translated by Richard
Howard (London: Fontana).

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‘hypothetical bookshelf’ to represent the literary canon. Imagine a bookshelf that can
accommodate only a certain number of books that serve the function of Bloomian
precursors.2 What is the literary stance that the ephebe will have towards these books?
Which of these is he most affected by? Which of these will he have to displace in
order to clear space for himself? The structure and function of the literary canon then
is a constant motif in these essays by Calvino since every writer must ask himself
who he is performing for.3 Another important implication of the existence of the
literary canon is its deployment in literary studies. How will and should it be
deployed? What forms of political appropriation are permissible? And how does this
relate to whether the writer must be actively engaged in the great political questions
of his time? The answers to these questions will vary since they relate to the problem
of both political ideology and literary aesthetics. In other words, how much politics
will percolate into a literary text is related to what extent a writer’s aesthetics can
subsume the non-literary into the space of the literary; it will also be mediated by
considerations of genre. So, for instance, there will always be a lot more politics in
prose than in poetry though there is no rule against using poetry for political
purposes. That however does not mean that prose texts are necessarily simpler in
structure than a poetic text. Calvino goes on to demonstrate that the ontological
approach to literature is about basically identifying the various levels at which a text
must be situated before it is read. These levels are also related to the relationship
between the writer and his text and whether or not (like Flaubert) he identifies with
his characters. An important technique that Shakespeare criticism invariably deploys
is to explore the forms of identification between the main characters, the players, the
playwright, the audience and the levels of literary reality across which these
identifications take place. Calvino also points out that the Song of the Sirens in the
Odyssey could well be the tale of the Odyssey itself in miniature; that is probably
why Odysseus resists hearing it. Each of these literary levels – depending on which
we emphasize, constitutes an important level of reality in literary analysis.
CONCLUSION
Learning to read the classics means not only immersing oneself in the literary canon,
but above all developing the skills of interpretation necessary to appreciate the
ontological differences between these levels of literary reality. Calvino also provides
interpretations of writers like Ovid, Ariosto, Voltaire, Balzac, Manzoni, Fourier,
Stendhal, and Montale to illustrate these themes. These are the most difficult
2 For the relationship between literary precursors and ephebes, see Harold Bloom (1997). The
Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York and Oxford:Oxford University Press).
3 See also Harold Bloom (1994). The Western Canon: The School and Books of the Ages (New
York: Riverhead Books).

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chapters for most readers since they may not be adequately acquainted with these
writers to appreciate the points that Calvino makes about them. Nonetheless what
they have in common (unlike conventional literary criticism) is a preoccupation with
genre, language, and structure. These interpretations are important from the point of
view of the history of structuralism because structural approaches have mainly dealt
with either non-literary texts or with contemporary texts from French literature;
some of which is written, as it were, to explicitly embody the precepts of structuralism.
That is why interpreting texts that were written before the advent of structuralism as
an approach to literary criticism is a valuable way of thinking about questions of
literary ontology, canon formation, generic differences, and the relationship between
language, literature, and thought.
This collection of essays is an invaluable addition to those interested in the history of
structuralism and post-modernism in literary studies. It will not only provide a
number of insights in literary theory, but also prepare the more systematic reader for
engaging with the post-modern narratives of Italo Calvino.
SHIVA KUMAR SRINIVASAN