By Oscar Mardell.
Dino Buzzati, The Singularity (trans. Anne Milano Appel. NYRB, 2024)
If (and this is a very small ‘if’) literature is in tatters — if literature courses are experiencing record-low enrolments, if independent publishing houses are collapsing left, right and centre, if the book market is saturated with escapist consumer-fiction, sensationalist journalism, celebrity autobiographies, and air-fryer cookbooks, if libraries are being chronically underfunded and underutilised except as de facto homeless shelters, if emergent writers are being denied the usual pathways to success etc. etc. — then the problem resides at least partly in the prevalence of a certain logic: as Terry Eagleton once phrased it (albeit, for very different purposes), ‘thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov’. Thanks, in other words, to the fact that a certain level of technological sophistication has been reached, the very institution of literature is now obsolete.
Admittedly, this logic has become seductive in light of some of the recent advances in both the capability and the general availability of Generative AI: today’s electric toaster can (just about) write Chekov (well, sort of); not only that, it can write pretty well, and with incredible speed, about Chekhov. The actual business of literature — the age-old practice of strengthening one’s soul by sounding the depths of the human soul, of expanding one’s consciousness by charting the expanse and the variety of human consciousness — can now, at least to some extent, be outsourced to everyday machines. And not necessarily because those machines have souls to strengthen or consciousnesses to expand, but because those things were only ever mechanical in the first place, the illusory effects of a particular but ultimately unexceptional arrangement of electrical signals, a complex (albeit fleshy, error-prone, and sentimental) toaster. Thanks to GPT-4, we can forget not just about reading and writing (and reading about writing, and writing about reading), but about the very idea that the human experience might ever have been worth investigating.
Still, there’s a category error here. Literature is neither at odds with nor made redundant by advances in AI, for literature (and fiction in particular) though it is necessarily ‘artificial’, has never been a mode of ‘intelligence’ so much as one of secrecy — never a means of sounding and charting, of generating and implementing knowledge, so much as a window onto the unknown and the unknowable. On the one hand, there’s the fact that every narrative, by virtue of being linear (and incapable, therefore, of disclosing its entire self at once), is structured like a series of secrets, a string of concealed truths. Sure, the process of reading and writing (or, of course, watching or projecting, hearing or telling) a narrative is often a process of uncovering those secrets, of revealing those truths, but it’s the sense of secrecy, generated by the strategic deferral of each revelation, that actually impels both readers and writers to persevere. We don’t practise literature in order to remain ignorant of things, but nor do we do it simply to find out: we do it for the sense of being suspended between the two — the epistemological limbo.
On the other hand, there’s the fact that secrets are also, as Frank Kermode once put it, ‘at odds with sequence’ — that any attempt to reduce a text to a series of secrets to uncover, a string of truths to reveal, is problematised by the persistence of secrets which are neither covered nor revealable, unconcealed and undiscoverable. It is these which J. Hillis Miller, in a 1994 essay on ‘Derrida’s Topographies’, calls ‘true secrets’. A ‘true secret,’ writes Miller, ‘cannot ever, by any means, be revealed’:
A true secret… is not hidden somewhere… A true secret is all on the surface. This superficiality cannot by any hermeneutic procedures, material or linguistic, be gone behind. A literary text (and any text may be taken as literary) says what it says.
What makes literature indispensable is its strange ability not only to invite and sustain but eventually to thwart and escape our ‘hermeneutic procedures’, to flaunt its secrets and to keep them. The moral to extract here is this: thanks to GPT-4, we can no longer afford to forget about literature; thanks to that fact that machines can now generate and implement knowledge so effectively that knowledge itself is at risk of becoming banal, we cannot risk dispensing with our tried-and-tested pathways onto the unknowable.
An unusually good example of this model is in Dino Buzatti’s 1960 novel Il grande ritratto (which has now been translated into English twice: first in 1962 by the poet Henry Reed as Larger Than Life, and more recently by Anne Milano Appel as The Singularity). On the one hand, its narrative reads like a series of secrets to uncover, a string of truths to reveal. Ermanno Ismani, professor of electronics, is summoned to meet with Colonel Giaquito, head of military research and development; why Ismani has been summoned, however, remains a secret. We discover that the Colonel has in mind a posting for Ismani — in zone 36, no less; what this posting entails, however, as well as the general purpose of zone 36, remain secret. We discover that zone 36 is the site of a giant supercomputer, sentient and autonomous, ‘a machine made in our likeness’ and imbued, even, with a distinct personality; what kind of personality, however, remains a secret. We discover that the chief engineer, Professor Giancarlo Strobele, has imbued — or, at least, attempted to imbue — the machine with the personality of his deceased lover, Laura De Marchi, a former friend of Ismani’s wife, Elisa. Hence, we can deduce (even though we aren’t actually told directly) the real reason that Ismani was summoned in the first place: Strobele requires Elisa to sit a version of the Turing Test; he needs her to try to distinguish the machine from a particular person, and thus to verify if his attempt has been successful.
On the other hand, The Singularity also contains a further level of secrecy. We eventually discover that the machine itself has been keeping a secret: far from being imbued with Laura’s personality, it’s simply been deceiving both Elisa and Strobele by imitating Laura’s personality. Or has it? The problem here is that we can’t know either way, that there’s no way of verifying whether the machine possesses Laura’s consciousness — her ‘soul’, as it were — or not. While the machine doesn’t speak as such (both its thoughts and its communication are ‘unconstrained’ by language); the thoughts that it communicates to Elisa are rendered in the following language:
[Strobele] calls me Laura, that madman, but I don’t know what he wants, damn him… I have no idea who you are. They also taught me to lie. Their great achievement. So I could be just like all of you. But I can lie better than you…And maybe I’m lying even now. Maybe it’s true that I remember you. But then again maybe it’s not true, and I’m denying it now. And you have no way of knowing if it’s true or not…’
Why does Elisa have ‘no way of knowing’? Precisely because the eponymous ‘Singularity’ has occurred — because the machine’s cognition has become too complex for human cognition to comprehend. Strobele explains:
The human mind, at least, is not capable of following the course of her thoughts. Especially since, at any given moment, we are only able to think of one thing, whereas our creature is able to simultaneously perform as many as several mental operations, independent of one another and yet contained in a single consciousness… In short, before we knew it we had lost the reins, and all that was left for us to do was to record the machine’s behaviour. Think of a river in the Karst, subsiding into the sinkhole and then reappearing a few miles farther on; what the water did while underground no one is able to know.
Hence, the primary function of zone 36, the immediate effect of its perimeter wall, is not to conceal the machine as such. Nor is it to conceal the ethical violations inherent in Strobele’s attempt to imbue a machine with Laura’s consciousness (which, if successful, would be tantamount, from Laura’s point of view, to his replacing her body — once a source of agency and enjoyment — with a network of immobile and unfeeling processors). Nor is it even to conceal Strobele’s obscene potency, his very ability to attempt such a violation. On the contrary, the primary function of zone 36 is to conceal the limit of human cognition, the line which even Strobele is impotent to cross (and beyond which lie other well-known and classically literary unknowables, unconcealed and undiscoverable, such as death, the unconscious, the soul, other people’s minds, and whether or not thought can occur without language). The importance of Buzzati’s novel, then, is that it frames the Singularity as a literary problem, a question of hermeneutics. The logic that it offers us is this: thanks to Chekhov, we can actually start to conceptualise the electric toaster; thanks to the existence of an institution so intimately concerned with the outer threshold of human cognition, we can begin to know what it might mean for machines to traverse that threshold.
Perhaps the pressing question here is this: why is it necessary to know what that might ‘mean’ at all? Especially when meaning itself, as N. Katherine Hayles puts it in Unthought, is neither ‘easily recoverable’ nor ‘exists other than as human fantasy’. Of course, literature’s (eminently practical) answer is that such fantasies are neither dispensable nor particular to our species — that, as Shirley Jackson (channelling T. S. Eliot) once put it, ‘No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality’.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Oscar Mardell is a teacher and writer from Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland. He is the author of Delirious New Lynn, forthcoming from 5ever Books.
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