‘One thing is certain, I have never written to express myself, as they say, but rather to get away from myself.’
– Jon Fosse
A few weeks ago, I finished reading and reviewing a few books by Jon Fosse, the Nobel laureate for 2023.
Included in the list were seven books, collectively called Septology and bound in three titles.
You can check out my review which was published on Dec 29.
The writing of Fosse in Septology, as translated by Damion Searls, is unique and minimalistic.
There is limited punctuation and dialogues are short and snappy, mostly sticking to one-word answers.
In a way, you can even say that all seven books consist of one single sentence.
There is an abundance of “and and and, think think think”, even more than what we see in the writing of Ernest Hemingway.
The entire narration, throughout the book, is one monologue.
Just the way the writing is sparse, so are the settings and plot lines.
There are few characters and all of them seem to have a doppelganger.
There is a successful painter, Asle, the protagonist and there is also another painter, who is not so successful, named Asle.
The two are friends.
Then, there is a woman called Guro, and there is another woman called Guro.
The wife of Asle, now dead, is named Ales.
Because the story is told in a monologue, there is no coherency of time, as is typical in stream-of-consciousness writing.
Time jumps this way and that and from moment to moment.
And because characters have similar names, for a reader, it takes a fair amount of attention to figure out which Asle they are reading about and at which moment in time.
With his particular style, Fosse creates a lyricism in his narration.
The way thoughts of the protagonist flow, and when, as readers, we sync our thoughts to them, reading Fosse feels almost like a meditative exercise.
We go through words as if they are part of a hymn.
As the reader imagines the world Fosse is creating, they also start to feel that the monologue is not coming from Asle in the book but is swirling inside their brains.
Safe to say: the writing in Septology belongs to a master who is at the absolute peak of his artistry.
With that in mind, something interesting happened when my colleagues and I were working on our AI project, The Madison Cruz Bot.
While drafting a piece about our journey (check out the business column “Don’t Cage the Machine,” published December 11), I had a random thought: why not ask ChatGPT what it makes of Septology?
ChatGPT, version 4o, which is free, totally and spectacularly flunked the test.
A work of art like Septology proves too much for the AI brain, which is trained to look for patterns, coherency and linear flow of words.
While summarising Septology, ChatGPT produces some gibberish, which sounds smart but doesn’t say anything.
As I read the summary it had generated in response to my prompt, I saw that this mishmash in no way captured the essence of Septology.
The sentences were too academic, the language and words blase, and it reached insights that even university students would not draw.
Given that ChatGPT had such trouble with a basic prompt, I decided to torture it some more.
To the prompts I put to it, the responses by the AI were rubbish, and often flat-out wrong.
It had no clue about two characters called Asle, had no clue about Ales, confused Guro and Ales and had no idea of the plot progression.
The fault, however, is not strictly in ChatGPT.
Septology is not the kind of stuff that is going to be easy on any AI.
Fosse, to achieve what he wants to achieve, has deliberately written it in a way that defies a linear understanding of the text.
And he is hardly an outlier in his approach.
There are hundreds of books out there, books that are almost foundational texts for existing literature and literary traditions, which cannot be put into a straightjacket.
This, I believe, shows a limitation of ChatGPT and other AI systems, a kind of limitation which they may never be able to overcome.
Surely, AI systems will get better and in some instances may even create writing or stuff that is original, similar to that famous move by Google AlphaGo during a game of Go in 2016.
This was a move that experts said no human could comprehend.
But AI may never be able to write or create a work of art that humans can.
In Septology, the protagonist who is a painter often muses about the defining mark of a work of art.
And again and again his thoughts fix themselves on something that he can’t express in words.
But just to give it a shape and outline, he calls this quality “light”.
At one point, he thinks: “A picture is not done until there is light in it, even if that light is invisible.”
A few moments later, he thinks, “What matters isn’t what it literally says about this or that, it is something else, something that silently speaks in and behind the lines and sentences.”
When it comes to good writing, it is this invisible light that AI lacks.
And will likely always do, because AI is rooted in facts, in tangible bits of zero and one.
It has no capacity to deal with the abstract, silence or something that is invisible.
By its nature, it cannot, whereas by their nature, humans, even the most logical of us, even the most thoughtless of us, find dealing with abstract concepts as natural as breathing.
Living in a world that was high and heady on the techno-utopia of the sixties, Italo Calvino wrote several essays, which were later collected in a compilation titled The Literature Machine.
In the last few years, as ChatGPT has burst on the scene, Calvino’s essays have come under the spotlight.
In particular, there is one essay; Cybernetics And Ghosts.
In this essay, Calvino argued that a machine would be able to write the kind of literature that he writes.
“What would be the style of a literary automaton,” he asked.
And then answers: “I believe that its true vocation would be for classicism.”
But classicism; think the novels of Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens will just be the beginning.
Calvino imagined that after a while, there would be “a literature machine that, at a certain point, feels unsatisfied with its own traditionalism and starts to propose new ways of writing, turning its own codes completely upside down.”
That, according to him, will lead to, “the literature that corresponds perfectly to a theoretical hypothesis: it will, at last, be the literature.”
So convinced was Calvino that, in the same essay, he even went as far as to note that “at this point, I think I have done enough to explain why my place could perfectly be well occupied by a mechanical device.”
Decades later, I don’t think many intelligent people outside the techno-utopian bubble of Silicon Valley deeply believe in the supremacy of science and machines that made people in the sixties and seventies imagine a utopia.
After seeing what ChatGPT makes of Septology, I feel fairly confident that AI systems, although good for a number of things and more than capable of churning out B-grade writing, will ever be capable of matching humans.
Only Italo Calvino and not Calvino GPT could have written something like Invisible Cities or Castle of Crossed Destinies.
The ability to juggle abstract concepts and see the kind of layers that form these two books requires mental acuity and imagination that logic-driven systems cannot muster.
And to understand this, all you need to do is tell ChatGPT to write two paragraphs like I did in the style of Calvino or Fosse.
The output turned out to be rubbish.
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune.
