Once a month, The duty literature, written by Quebec writers, proposes to revisit, in the light of current events, works from the ancient and recent past of Quebec literature. Discoveries? Proofreading? Different look? A choice. An initiative of the Académie des lettres du Québec in collaboration with The duty.
I was one of those who, at the beginning of the year, started the conversation with ChatGPT. My overly indirect questions prompted the interface to profusely apologize about its true nature. I’m just an artificial intelligence, she warned, before saying anything to satisfy my request. I wanted to answer him: as for me, dear interface, I am only a writer. It’s not that I felt threatened in my job description. What scared me was the hasty judgment that the masses seemed ready to pass on the future of writing, and that in the name of their faith in machines.
For a boy of my temperament, writing is a form of life; writing, an instance of communication. Linguistic interfaces write half-truths from fragments of language, snippets of knowledge floating in the Cloud. They are helpful, but misleading. Their borrowed style aims in every way to create the illusion of a point of view. ChatGPT and its ilk are born imposters, programmed to win at all costs in the game of imitation. And they don’t hide it.
A little more and the bluff of these blablabots — let’s offer this portmanteau to the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) — would end up making us forget that people like you and me, caught up in the cogs of their passions and torn between the interests of the computer giants and applied research, wanted it that way. Innovation has a short memory. Technology, we forget too much, is an instance of culture, and a powerful vector of emotion. By pretending to ignore that it is from us, humans, all too human, that the machines borrow their will, we play who loses wins. What the machines want, we wanted it. Eventual conscious machines will perhaps be very saddened by the excessive attention we gave them when they did not yet exist.
years of invention
Literature glimpses realities that reason ignores. My conversation with the interface revived the memory of a singular Quebec book, steeped in the thought of machines and the emotions they arouse. machine manufacturing appeared at the end of the 1976 Olympic year. The author, Louis-Philippe Hébert, began his work in 1967, with eye episodes. In the meantime, he published disconcerting collections, whose poetic prose displays a kinship with the disturbing strangeness of the fantastic.
Innovation has a short memory. Technology, we forget too much, is an instance of culture, and a powerful vector of emotion. By pretending to ignore that it is from us, humans, all too human, that the machines borrow their will, we play who loses wins.
Ia machine factory manifests itself at an extraordinary turning point in our time, when Montreal has dreamed big and tried to assert its place in the world, even in the Universe. The period was also one of great inventiveness in Quebec literature. magazines like Red Herbs (founded in 1968) or The bar of the day (1965-1977), in which Hébert participated, welcomed all kinds of unclassifiable literary proposals, taking the side of aesthetics and affirming its place in the renovation of the City, at a time when political and ideological demands abounded . There is still much to learn from this adventurous attitude today.
Hébert is an actor sensitive to the possibilities of his time, aware that the avant-garde — and its recovery — is not the only prerogative of art. The year 1977 will see the massive marketing of the first personal computers, which kick off the computer wave. If a Georges Perec is the heir, admirably readable, of the New Roman, the Apple II, the TRS-80 or the Commodore PET are in turn indebted to the pure research programs financed by Xerox PARC or Bell Labs.
And we can go back even further, to the thought experiments of Alan Turing or Alonzo Church, whose speculations determine the architecture of modern computers. The inventions of engineering are often later than those of the imagination. The computers that surround us carry the traces of the paper fantasies that shaped them, while engineers struggled to give them material form.
Hébert presents an astonishing mixture of art and entrepreneurship, which is difficult to associate with the literary spirit. He recognizes, long before the “digital shift”, the cultural importance of computing. To the point that he put his literary career on hold from 1981 to animate Logidisque, a software “factory”. Alongside talented programmers, he mobilized poets such as Roger Des Roches, Nicole Brossard or Claude Beausoleil… A spreadsheet was baptized Magiciel, a word processor, The public writer… HUGO, one of the first French-speaking automatic correctors, was integrated since 1995 into Microsoft Word.
We can assume that this metabolization, like that of local companies like Softimage or Discreet Logic in the 1990s, will have enabled Logidisque to make a fortune. Hébert retired from the business and returned to literature in 2007, with The beach book, a vast narrative poem in which the wonders of Old Orchard figure prominently. It will never leave it, sometimes at the rate of more than one book per year.
melancholic machines
In machine manufacturing, already, Hébert thwarted any agreed upon literary program. The cover of the original edition, adorned with the most analogical gears, bears no mention of genre. The book, published by Éditions Quinze, goes on to describe fifteen mysterious systems that govern Canterelle’s life. In the geography of my imagination, I like to locate this village with a melodious name near the modernist ruins of Mirabel, with which its name rhymes wonderfully.
You could say that machine manufacturing is a collection of short stories — or a kind of novel without plot — which would participate in the “literature of the imagination”. But to say that would be to ignore that all literature, however realistic it may be, is a literature of the imaginary. I prefer to say that Hébert, like an Italo Calvino, who gave, with his Invisible cities (1972), a collection of cities, signs here a collection of machines.
Here are two “poetry-fictions”, two books of marvels from an era of intense speculation. But where Calvino dwells on utopia, Hébert veers unreservedly on the side of nightmare. machine manufacturingin the final analysis, probably has more to do with the Vermilion Sands (1971) by JG Ballard, a decadent seaside colony subjected to the automation of art and life.
Canterelle reminds me of those small towns in America built around a single industry. The village would have its “machine factory,” like Hershey, Pennsylvania, has its chocolate factory, or Norwell, Massachusetts, its cymbal factory. Canterelle’s social contract is otherwise sinister. The factory is the central processor of a system of systems, which since time immemorial has determined the life of the village.
There is no building here that is not also a “living machine”, to use Le Corbusier’s formula. The behavior of the villagers is governed by a discourse of utility conceived by those who preceded them, captives of plans and procedures whose meaning escapes them. Canterelle, far from the “intelligent cities” of contemporary town planning, has gradually become an unintelligible village, abandoned to its dysfunction.
loop song
The book spits out continuous prose, like the long ribbons of paper that come out of teleprinters. Entire pages are devoted to the description of the mechanics of the village. We visit the aqueduct, following the circuit of its multicolored waters on the surface, towards an underground necropolis whose drilling robots ensure the continuous expansion. We stop at the station where trains without carriages leave without returning. We can see the Place de l’Horloge, whose monolithic pylons seek to stem the course of time…
Each text restarts a machine and is dissected like an architectural blueprint, a half-decipherable engineering plan. We can no longer wonder who is narrating, but what is being told. The irruption of a human figure causes a jumping, a sudden change of scale in the weft of the stories. Presences are displayed, for a moment, with the desire to be a character, then are absorbed into the ambient texture, like bugs to be solved. It is almost exclusively men who appear in the middle of these celibate devices. Or monsters: beings without language, with altered bodies, coming from far outside to bump into the walls of the village, as a warning…
We understand, little by little, that Canterelle’s program has a destination. The body and the consciousness are subjected to a progressive compression, which assures those who submit to it a sort of perverse bliss. The village unmoors itself from the foundations of experience to drift out of time, into the space-memory of a post-human consciousness. The inhabitants of Canterelle, by accepting to submit to the “discourse of utility”, have been absorbed by the machines that surround them, while these move towards the plenitude, the epiphany of a style.
The machine-village has learned what we pretend to ignore: that humanity remains the essential substrate of digital calculation, and that any departure from time is doomed to failure for us. The ghost population that survives under the hum of the engines of the factory has forgotten its true nature. Canterelle plays a little music of being, a sad song, which plays again in a loop.