Analogy for multiplicity in the new millennium: the nature of the search engine

The search engine has become a part of our generation’s everyday life. Anytime some form of knowledge has escaped us, what do we do but Google it. It has a seemingly infinite and overlapping spectrum of realms of knowledge and information, but that is not why I chose it as my analogy. It is the very mechanism of how the search engine operates that is most like multiplicity. Search engines are the new encyclopedias; they are what Calvino called the “open” encyclopedias. The e-lit itself had an interactive search function that gave hierarchy to its content. But hierarchy in the new millennium is not linear, it is circular. It is literal

ly like a web. And in fact, the reason I became so insistent upon the operation of the search engine as my analogy for multiplicity is because, once I had researched how it works, I came to find that search engines use what is called a “Web crawler,” or in other cases it is known as a spider, that retrieves the information or knowledge we seek from the infinite and overlapping World Wide Web. The web is never complete, however, and that is why it is itself an “open” encyclopedia. Although I would posit that we no longer live in an encyclopedic world, but one of open databases. Whatever the case, with a search engine we have a common nucleus to which the spider weaves an infinite and interconnected web of knowledge.

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Multiplicity in E-lit: Reconstructing Mayakovsky

“Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable” -Calvino, Multiplicity, page 124

Reconstructing Mayakovsky by Illya Szilak

This e-literature, contained in the second anthology, truly personifies multiplicity in our suspended era of traditional literature and the new technological aesthetic of electronic literature. The above quote by Calvino explicitly expresses the nature of this e-literature, as in it is a “combinatoria of experiences” of a hybrid media novel, as it is called. The basis of the e-novel is an imagined dystopia where every human struggle is eliminated by technology (a prevalent reflection in our millennium). The user becomes a part of the multi-layered narrative, having to engage with the links and make coherence out of the sheer multiplicity of the interface. There are audio podcasts, excerpts from low-brow genre fiction (as in the detective novel, historical fiction, and science fiction), “films” that seem to oblige the technologically driven dystopia, but even those are interrupted by animation created by the author that paints a more morbid picture of reality.

The e-literature suggests that the sense of literature as an encyclopedia is continually in change, because the Internet has created something more infinite for our knowledge: the database. Reconstructing Mayakovsky corrupts the traditional infrastructure of the novel, and its multiplicity is not tacit and subtle, but in flux, literally, as it swirls around the screen. The user has to interact with it, attempt to control it in order to understand it.

Our technologically driven generation will continue to weave webs of connections, because we have a World Wide Web. Multiplicity will continue to flourish outward, and its use a method of knowledge will become more infinite as information becomes more easily accessible and interactive.

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Calvino’s Multiplicity

“Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement”-Italo Calvino, Six Memos…, Multiplicity (pg. 112)

To Calvino, the contemporary novel is an encyclopedia. It tries to exhaust knowledge of itself from every possible angle. It is to be seen “as a method of knowledge, and above all as a network of connections between the events, the people, and the things of this world” (pg. 105).

He uses Carlo Emilio Gadda’s novel That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana as a demonstration for the analogy of “encyclopedism” that Gadda employs. He saw “the world as a knot, a tangled skein of yarn ” (pg. 106). Gadda’s encyclopedism starts with a seemingly insignificant element from which everything else is connected; this thing is at the center of a web of relationships, which, “if it were permitted to go on

further and further in every direction, it would end by embracing the entire universe” (pg. 107).

The modern novel, the novel of the 20th century, finds itself at what Calvino mentions as an “open” encyclopedia. Knowledgein the realm of literature is not exhaustive, and is continually in flux. It can therefore, never be finished. It is not a circle, but an indefinite line. As he demonstrates with Goethe and Mallarme, there is no universal novel. There can be no exhaustive book, as those who tried to create books about the whole universe, or The Absolute Book, arrived at failure.

On the scale of Calvino, there is multiplicity, its emblem the encyclopedia, and on the other end, there is nothingness. In between, there is a whole range of literature that is about something. But even a novel about nothing is about something: nothing.

My literary example is one by Italo Calvino himself, a novel which he actually uses in the Multiplicity section. Two semesters ago, I took a Narrative Experiments class, and one of the novels we had to read was Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. The basic question postulated by the class was, “what constitutes a narrative?” We read this novel,

pop-up books, graphic novels, even an entire novel of seemingly random questions. I feel, retrospectively, that If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler really exemplifies multiplicity. Calvino says in the Multiplicity section that his goal was to show “the essence of what a novel is by providing it in concentrated form, in ten beginnings; each beginning develops in very different ways from a common nucleus” (pg. 120). I remember readingthis novel and being so frustrated, because I wanted to know the ending. I wanted to know what happened. I understood the conflict from multiple perspectives, but there was no resolution. I think that the novel truly embodies what it means to be an “open” encyclopedia; neither have an ending, and both are continually in flux.

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