Notes on the generative novel “If on a winter's night a library cardholder”

Abstract

This paper analyzes If on a Winter's Night a Library Cardholder, a generative novel developed by Robin Camille Davis for the NaNoGenMo – National Novel Generation Month 2016 edition. Considering that Davis’s project involved a computational re-reading of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, we herein discuss, in the light of Italo Calvino’s writings on combinatorics, the meanings arising from the technical resources used to produce such a highly metaliterary generative work. Due to the challenges of reading a novel produced by a machine, we also carry out an exercise of contrastive distant reading between If on a Winter's Night a Library Cardholder and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, by means of the web app Voyant Tools. We thereby map absolute and relative numbers of words, as well as the relations some of them bear with others nearby, especially terms from the semantic field of books and reading, which are central in Calvino’s and Davis’s works. As contributions to the area of Literature Studies, we point out features of If on a Winter's Night a Library Cardholder and possible methodological approaches for the study of generative novels.