Cybernetics and Ghosts from The Uses of Literature / Italo Calvino
“The storyteller began to put forth words, not because they thought others would reply with other, predictable words, but to test the extent to which words could fit with one another, could give birth to one another, in order to extract an explanation of the world from the thread of every possible spoken narrative, and from the arabesque that nouns and verbs, subjects and predicates performed as they unfolded from one another.
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The telling of stories allowed certain relationships among the various elements and not others, and things could happen in a certain order and not in others.
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The immobile world that surrounded tribal man, strewn with signs of the fleeting correspondences between words and things, came to life in the voice of the storyteller, spun out into the flow of a spoken narrative within which each word acquired new values and transmitted them to the ideas and images they defined. Every animal, every object, every relationship took on beneficial or malign powers that came to be called magical powers but should, rather have been called narrative powers, potentialities contained in the word, in its ability to link itself to other words on the plane of discourse.”