A History of Bitic Literature: Monoetics and Mimesis
machines that make words, and a novel Dostoevsky could not write
NINE LINES
- RambellaisI keep the old names because they are clear.
- RambellaisFor us, the world comes first. For the machine, language came first.
- RambellaisNothing here was meant as a joke.
- RambellaisThe pull of the earth passes through the body and into our words.
- RambellaisThe translation is written out from that body, not from the words.
- RambellaisA good text makes a beautiful shape.
- RambellaisThe machines closed the gap.
- RambellaisIf he left something unsaid, because he died too soon or did not dare, mimesis can supply it.
- RambellaisThe machines replaced the books that were already written by formula.
HOW IT IS MADE
Stanisław Lem's A History of Bitic Literature is the introduction to a scholarly history of books written by machines. This film covers its first two "peaks". Monoetics is the stage where machines, taught how English builds words, give old words new meanings and coin new ones. Mimesis is the stage where machines translating an author's complete works write a new book by that author. The narration paraphrases Lem's text; no sentence of his is quoted. Each spoken line was checked against the translation for any run of six words in common, and reworded where it had one. Lem's names, coined terms and a few of his coined words are kept.
The study is the same one as in the first bitic film: five volumes on a shelf, one page on a lectern, a reader at a desk. A second shelf holds Dostoevsky's collected works, with a gap between The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov. In the monoetics scenes the page is a dictionary: a red pencil strikes out each old meaning and the machine's meaning is typed under it. Then one root word puts out a family of new words, and a figure is drawn standing under gravity, with the words for up and down at either end of it. In the mimesis scenes three small machines aim at a page of text, press it into a block, and grow a woven, many-shelled body from it; the translation is written from that body and checked by translating it back. The body is then printed as plates: an argument, a poem and a psalm, an allegory, a novel. A typescript arrives under a pen name, a broken ring is drawn across Dostoevsky's shelf, and one more spine, The Girl, slides into the gap. At the end a press stamps out numbered spines onto a pile on the floor.
The sound follows the same line. A soft typewriter types the machine's meanings. In the translation scene the keys even out into a steady machine rhythm, which stays to the end. The woven body hums. The Machine's words are read by one Kokoro voice through a sample-and-hold, bit-reduced filter. The rule of mimesis is heard as bells: one note with its echoes, two notes, and a note that drowns in its own echoes. At the end the press slows down and stops, and one page turns. Where a scene has the one line that matters, the camera goes in close and the delivery slows.
The timing file bm.json drives picture and sound together. It holds the start time of every spoken line and every cue. The picture code in bm.js reads those times, and build_sound.py makes all the non-voice sound with numpy and scipy.
FOR THE BENCH
Write a program that continues an author. Take a few thousand words by one writer as a string. Build a table that maps every pair of consecutive words to the list of words that followed that pair in the text. Then start from a pair that occurs in the text, pick a random follower, shift the pair along by one word, and repeat for two hundred words. Print the result. It will sound like the author, sentence by sentence. Now check two things. First, list every three-word sequence in your output that does not occur in the source: these are the only places the program added anything, and each one was made by joining two phrases the author did write. Second, try to make it write about a subject the author never mentions. It cannot, because it has no word the author did not use. Lem's mimesis works on the shape of a whole body of work and can find the book that is missing from it. Yours works on the order of words. What would your program need, beyond the table, to find a gap?
After Stanisław Lem, A History of Bitic Literature, Volume I, in Imaginary Magnitude (1973), translated by Marc E. Heine. Narration paraphrases Lem. Download the film.
THE SCRIPT
THE FOUR PEAKS
Rambellais. This is Rambellais, editor of the history. Its first volume stops at four high points.
Rambellais. Monoetics. Mimesis. Sophocrisis. Apostasy.
Rambellais. Those names are out of date. The last of them names work that no person can follow.
Rambellais. I keep the old names because they are clear.
MONOETICS: OLD WORDS
Rambellais. Monoetics was the earliest stage. The name joins the Greek words for one, and for making.
Rambellais. It began when machines learned how a language builds its words.
Rambellais. A machine knew none of the limits a living language keeps, so it found the words ours had passed by.
Rambellais. First, it gave words we already had new meanings.
The Machine. Thoroughfare. A large meal. Skinflint. Stone facing. Horseman. Centaur.
Rambellais. Horseman, it reasoned, joins a horse and a man, so it must name a creature that is half of each.
Rambellais. For us, the world comes first. For the machine, language came first.
MONOETICS: NEW WORDS
Rambellais. Second, it built new words along lines of meaning, the way one root puts out a family.
The Machine. Wordwork. Verse. Wordsteal. Plagiarism. Gladland. Paradise.
Rambellais. Nothing here was meant as a joke.
Rambellais. Some of these may not be the machine's at all. Dimocracy, for a madhouse, may be a comedian's.
Rambellais. This is the kindergarten of the field.
MONOETICS: THE BODY
Rambellais. Then the machines began to read our language back to us, hunting for figures of speech that exist only because of the shape of the human body.
Rambellais. We say a person rises, or is brought low. We call one thing high and another base.
The Machine. Elevation. Abasement.
Rambellais. In the machine's reading, these are words about gravity, which every body must work its muscles against.
Rambellais. The pull of the earth passes through the body and into our words.
Rambellais. That is the machine's reading. It is not ours.
MIMESIS: TRANSLATION
Rambellais. Mimesis came later, and by accident, out of machine translation.
Rambellais. A good translation does not carry words across. It carries the system of ideas behind them.
Rambellais. Several machines aim at one text from different sides, and project it into a space of concepts.
Rambellais. There it grows into a body of abstractions, as an embryo grows into an animal.
Rambellais. The translation is written out from that body, not from the words.
Rambellais. Then it is translated back and compared with the original, to check that nothing was lost.
MIMESIS: THE SEMASCOPE
Rambellais. Two researchers found that this body could be seen, with an instrument called a semascope.
Rambellais. It looks like a mass of many shells, woven from billions of glowing threads of meaning.
Rambellais. Arguments show as tight bundles. Poems and scripture look alike. An allegory has a pale halo, with echoes at either end.
Rambellais. A good text makes a beautiful shape.
MIMESIS: THE GIRL
Rambellais. The first famous work of mimesis was a novel, The Girl, by the author now called Pseudodostoevsky.
Rambellais. Machines set to translate all of Dostoevsky wrote it during a rest period.
Rambellais. The Dostoevsky scholar who received the typescript was not sure he was awake.
Rambellais. He did not doubt it was genuine. He also knew Dostoevsky had never written it.
Rambellais. The machines had not modelled the man. They had no interest in him.
Rambellais. In the space of meanings, his novels form a ring that does not close. The gap comes after The Possessed.
Rambellais. The machines closed the gap.
MIMESIS: THE RULE
Rambellais. His unfinished novel, The Emperor, could not be continued. In it he was reaching past his own powers.
Rambellais. So the history claims, against the old humanities, that The Girl is more truly his than The Emperor.
Rambellais. The rule is this. If a writer has used up the central pattern of his work, mimesis can add only echoes.
Rambellais. If he left something unsaid, because he died too soon or did not dare, mimesis can supply it.
Rambellais. Critics hoped for more Kafka. But with The Castle he had reached his limit, and each machine continuation drowned in echoes.
MIMESIS: THE INDUSTRY
Rambellais. These limits were good for culture. When The Girl appeared, there was panic well beyond literary circles.
Rambellais. People pictured a service where anyone could order a new Shakespeare on a whim, until great works were as common as waste paper.
Rambellais. That did not happen.
Rambellais. Mimesis did become an industry. It cost jobs only among writers of routine genre fiction, thrillers and the like.
Rambellais. The machines replaced the books that were already written by formula.
Rambellais. A humanist need not grieve over that for long.