In November 1967, Italo Calvino (1923-85) proudly declared that the world no longer needed writers like him. Or any writers, for that matter. Soon enough, he argued, computers would be able to do the job just as well, if not better. So what would be the point?

The people who had come to hear his lecture on ‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’ in Turin that day were taken aback. A few were probably even rather shocked. Coming from Calvino – of all people – the very idea seemed perverse. Even though his best-known works – Le città invisibili (1972) and Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (1979) – still lay in the future, he was already one of the leading lights of Italian literature. Over the past few years, he had forsaken realism for fantasy, and from his new home in Paris, he was marking himself out as a pioneer of the ‘unwritten’.  And yet, there he was, predicting his own obsolescence. Bizarrely, he even seemed happy about it, too.

It was typical of Calvino’s humour. He loved to tease people, especially when he was lecturing. It was part of his style. But he had good reason to be cheerful. And now, forty years after his death, it is why his books are more important than ever.

It all comes down to history. Calvino believed that if you want to understand the future of literature, you first have to look at its past. Back in the dim recesses of time, when human beings were just beginning to form stable communities, he argued, language was a simple affair. It consisted of a limited number of rudimentary words, reflecting the habits and lifestyle of the tribe. Since this was obviously quite restrictive, every time the tribe encountered new situations, the rules of their language had to evolve, so that the phrases at their disposal could be adapted to serve unfamiliar purposes. And as time went on, these rules became progressively more complex and malleable.

When the first storytellers came along, they naturally worked with what they had to hand. Given the paucity of concepts, their tales could draw on only a small range of narrative elements – trees, reindeer, fathers, rivers… And there were only a few actions which could be performed. But since the rules governing that language were so flexible, there were still countless ways of combining these components to create stories.

There was a caveat, though. Regardless of how infinitely many combinations it was theoretically possible to construct, the business of putting a story together owed little – if anything – to the free play of imagination. Rather, the narrative choices available to a storyteller were determined by the nature of language itself. Take grammar and syntax. They have a huge effect on what happens in a story. After all, each word, can only be combined meaningfully with a certain number of other words. So does common sense. Odysseus can’t return to Ithaca before he’s left for the Trojan War, any more than you can have a blue sky after the sun has set. So even if the storyteller can still decide which story he wants to tell, the possibilities available are completely independent of him.

For Calvino, this was key. Once you think of a story merely as an assemblage of discreet elements, combined according to logical rules existing outside the author, he realised, then literature becomes like mathematics. And this means that, in theory, ‘electronic brain’ – that is, computers – should be able to write literature just as well as human beings. Indeed, given that they can sort through possible combinations much more efficiently than us, they might be even better. So why would there be any need for authors in the future?

Calvino found this thought unusually appealing. Since breaking with Communism over the Soviet invasion of Hungary, he had found the world increasingly disorienting and frightening. Even as he was speaking, Italy was plunging into social unrest. Strikes were spreading; students were turning to violent protest; and the government – long dominated by the Christian Democrats – was beginning to seem worryingly unstable. In dark corners, hushed talk of revolution hung in the air; and everywhere, an atmosphere of tension took hold. Calvino worried that the world had become too unpredictable – and that, as a consequence, it would be impossible to capture lived experiences in his writing. In a strange way, the predictability of language was therefore reassuring. Even if it meant that literature, as a human activity, was doomed, it at least suggested that machines could preserve a deeper sense of order.

Calvino was far from being a voice in the wilderness. Even in 1967, there were plenty of others who held to a similarly ‘combinatorial’ view of language – and who were equally cheery about the prospect of ‘machine’ literature. One of the most notable was Calvino’s friend, Raymond Queneau (1903-76). A French poet, Queneau was fascinated by the idea that literature could be composed in precisely the same ‘mathematical’ way Calvino had outlined. Six years earlier, in 1961, Queneau had published Cent mille milliards de poèms. This was a book of ten rhymed sonnets, each line of which was printed on a separate strip of paper. Since the sonnets all followed the same rhyme scheme, this meant that each line could be read with any lines from the other nine. In total, one hundred billion different poems could be created in this way. And if so many possibilities could be created from such limited components, independent of an author, the mind boggled to think what literature a machine could create.

Just recently, advances in Artificial Intelligence have more than vindicated this optimism. Indeed, today, Calvino’s predictions look eerily prescient. The notion of a ‘literature machine’ – once so fanciful – is now a reality. Earlier this year, a new OpenAI model produced a short story in response to the prompt ‘Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief’. Although some readers were critical of its ‘emptiness’, others were pleasantly surprised by its quality. The novelist Jeanette Winterson even called it ‘beautiful and moving’, while Kamila Shamsie thought it could easily be mistaken for a work by Jorge Luis Borges. There is even growing evidence that some people may prefer literary pieces written by AI to those by human beings.

But this leaves us with a puzzle. If Calvino’s vision has come true, why should we bother to read human authors at all? Why, forty years after his death, should we read Calvino’s books, if we can get something equally good – if not better, from a machine?

Oddly enough, Calvino found the answer. Unlike many other writers who have tried to defend literature against the machines, he didn’t try to claim a special status for human authors or some unique insight that ‘electronic brains’ simply couldn’t access. Instead, he shifted his attention to the reader – and the reader alone.

To see what Calvino was getting at, let’s go back to the prehistoric storyteller. As the years roll by, he continues to put together his simple stories, endlessly arranging and rearranging the components, until all of a sudden, he happens upon something unexpected. It is beyond the reach of words. It is not spoken, but merely felt – darkly, distantly by presentiment. It awakens something deep within his listeners, something hidden in the recesses of their unconscious. It shocks and surprises. Indeed, it tears people to pieces, ‘like the fangs of a man-eating witch’.

What our storyteller has discovered is myth. As Calvino saw it, myth is just the ‘hidden part’ of literature, ‘the buried part, the region that is still unexplored, because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there’. But here’s the thing. Almost as soon as our storyteller has started to explore the world of myth, it starts to crystallize. It gives rise to rituals – like the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece, or the Flower Wars of the Aztecs. These rituals soon come to define a people and their values. And in time, they eventually come to reshape language, too. Some words take on a special potency, while others – which don’t fit with the spirit of the new rituals – become ‘taboo’.

This has profound implications. Since language is now divided into two spheres – the acceptable and the taboo – it follows that there are also two forms of literature. One is reinforcing. Framed in ‘acceptable’ language, it bolsters the unspoken, ritualised values of a people – and, as a result, strengthens the social structures then in place. But every now and then, another type of story suddenly appears – a ‘taboo’ story, that destabilises and subverts.

This second type of literature is anything but pleasant. Quite the opposite, in fact. Precisely because it takes us into the realm of the ‘forbidden’, it runs against the values of society. It rejects the habits of reason and common sense. It is confusing, bewildering, even frightening –  peopled with ghosts and monsters, like Minos’ labyrinth. In Calvino’s view, it was therefore peculiarly well suited to the modern world. It reflects the incomprehensibility of contemporary society, even as it rejects its social norms. It rips away the mask of acceptability which hides the strange and confusing reality lurking beneath. Its very strangeness is both a critique and a portrait. There were plenty of examples. Take Surrealist poets like the Comte de Lautréamont. Opposed to the rationalism from which the First World War had sprung, they instead embraced irrationality – plumbing the depths of their own unconscious in an effort to evoke a deeper, more unsettling truth. The same spirit is in Borges’ short stories. It is there in Grimm’s fairy tales. And it is even there in the strange, disorienting works of Thomas Pynchon.

Now, Calvino had no doubt that a literature machine could produce something very similar to this. Given enough time, any ‘electronic brain’ will combine and recombine words until it too happens upon something that stirs something unexpected in the reader, something which evokes feelings of discomfort and dread. But the key figure here is the reader – not the machine. Regardless of who – or what – is creating the literature, the power of any myth, the force of any taboo story still arises from the reader’s unconscious, and only from the reader’s unconscious. It is the reader who, as a member of society, recognises whether a story reflects or challenges the underlying social values. And it is also the reader who decides in what spirit to engage with that literature.

This is exactly why Calvino remains so urgent a writer. By the time he gave his lecture on ‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’, he had already begun to put down roots in the realm of fantasy. It was, in his view, the only way of representing the incomprehensibility of the modern world. Like his heroes Edgar Allen Poe and E. T. A. Hoffmann, he pushed beyond the limits of what ‘acceptable’ literature could achieve. In works like Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore, he pursued the logic of language until it crashed through into the realm of the unknown and the unsayable. He had, by then, long since retreated from political activism. Yet he nevertheless set out to explore the peculiarity and strangeness of society, to lift the rug of conventional rationality, and expose the foul bugs scurrying around confusedly underneath. His is a literature of uncertainty and doubt. And in a world increasingly dominated by crude, unkind certainties, dressed up in a cloak of ‘morality’, reading Calvino is an act of resistance in itself.