Multiplicity Intro

Multiplicity is the ability of literature to be analyzed ad infinitum. It is the detail within the detail within the detail that adds layers upon layers and thus compounds meaning. Conversely multiplicity is the ability to be singular and, while not shallow, obvious from the surface. As a plot convention multiplicity can be expressed in novels such as “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler” (Italo Calvino) which begins in one story and then within that story starts a new story etc. Similarly, Shakespeare’s play “The Taming of a Shrew” is a play within a play.
Multiplicity is that attribute of literature that allows for a sort of universal physics. It allows the simplest of details to connect and interconnect with myriads of disparate yet somehow related information. In this way no work is ever fully fleshed out, but on the flip side, each work stands as its own node in the massive network that is language no matter the length or depth of the piece.

Visibility Analogy

Time Machine. No, not the book by H.G. Wells, the automatic backup process deployed on the Mac OS X Leopard operating system. Time Machine is a versatile little program that backs up your entire computer whenever you plug in an external drive designated for use with Time Machine. The application creates a carbon copy of the user’s entire hard drive copying each file, folder, preference list, hidden setting, etc. (which by proxy means that every 1 and 0 is copied as well).
Thus a Hard Drive (HD) with 99 Gb used of 160 Gb will create an initial copy on the external HD of 99 Gb. Now comes the magic. Suppose the user creates 2 files before the next back up, and suppose those files are 1Gb files each. That means that 2 Gb have been added to the total used space on the HD (101 Gb for those keeping track). Instead of copying over the entire HD onto the backup drive, Time Machine simply adds the 2 new files to the backup but also makes a fresh copy of all of the rest of the files. ‘What?!’ you may be screaming, but worry not, thanks to the wonders of multi-hard linking your external hard drive only contains 101 Gb of data. Hard linked files are not like soft (symbolic) linked files in that deleting the original file will not result in loosing that file. Whereas a soft linked file is basically a roadmap for the file, a hard linked file is a ghost like clone of the file. If there were two hard links to a file and the user deleted the first file, the hard link would still be the file (whereas deleting the file would render a soft link useless). Hard links are like the many heads of the mythical Hydra. Each head is the Hydra, but cutting one off does not fell the beast.

Confusing as all of this is it does actually tie in to Calvino in a somewhat circuitous way. Hard links are the objective truth of which Calvino speaks. They are the universal truth because each link is in reality the file. Symbolic (soft) links are the subjective truth; they rely on a file to have any validity and once that file is removed they loose meaning. Hard links are, in a sense, true no matter what; they are objectively true. Soft links are, in a sense, true dependent on the state of the file; they are subjectively true.

Visibility Intro

Visibility is the driving force behind a story. Calvino muses how an image may drive words to form itself into a reality, or how conversely words may shape an image. The imagination then is a link, but is it a symbolic link or a hard link? Does the imagination help us to know what is really there, to point us back to one original truth, or does it merely redirect us to a different thought entirely, one that is particular to our system of thoughts? Put another way, is the imagination the proof of the subjective truth, or of the objective truth?

Calvino himself struggles to pin visibility down admitting that sometimes he begins with an image and lets it carry him forwards (in a purely subjective way [that is to an image that he creates that is entirely personal and his own]) but prefers to think of imagination as a way to understand a larger, objective knowledge (not of his own understanding, but of a universal sort of trueness).
Literature then is both that which can point back to a past ‘authority or tradition’ but can also work as novum – a work that is novel to the point of forcing the reader to question authority and tradition (as used in Sci-Fi literature).

The Ties that Bind