ChatGPT in Deep Time: Technology and Temporality in Kate Mildenhall’s The Hummingbird Effect

[Extract] In 1967, the celebrated Italian writer Italo Calvino delivered a lecture in Turin, Italy, which would be published in the same year with the title “Cybernetics and Ghosts.” The piece is primarily concerned with the question of whether a machine will ever be developed that is “capable of replacing the poet and the author” (Calvino 12). Literature, Calvino asserts, is a “combinatorial game” that stumbles upon meaning unconsciously (21). Though all writing is functionally limited in the number of components and the ways in which they can be combined, the power of literature lies in its attempt to express the inexpressible: But is the tension in literature not continually striving to escape from this finite number? Does it not continually attempt to say something it cannot say, something that it does not know, and that no one could ever know? . . . The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language. (18) For Calvino, authors “are already writing machines”, and it is the reader who bestows meaning upon the texts they produce (15). The “poetic result” of literature is its effect on the reader, which Calvino ambiguously describes as “the shock that occurs only if the writing machine is surrounded by the hidden ghost of the individual and of his society” (22). Literature is created when a reader finds unexpected meaning arising from an ordered disorder; the literary work is haunted by a world that cannot be expressed in words.

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