Pascal Bacqué is a poet and author of La Guerre de la terre et des hommes.
They had been struck, these French writers, with four crippling and unforgivable flaws: the present of narration, the passage on France Culture, self-writing, and recognition for their publisher.
"Don't you want to write in the present of narration?" This
artifice erected in divine surprise, a little more than 80 years ago who believe themselves still born the day before, became the supreme criterion which made it possible to distinguish between a so-called literary writing and a transcription by Siri, or Alexia, of n any human chatter, egological or not.
Not that any chatter could not use the present of narration.
But all the same, when it comes to verbal tense, bakers and boilermakers offered, to their own temporal staging, this crutch of the past tense which suddenly deprived them of the choice on which the author's satisfaction feeds.
“Yesterday I forgot to put in the yeast
,” they would say;
but the suffering writer writes:
"Yesterday, I
.
The turn is played, the dough rises.
If by chance he is Jewish, he will remember the suffering of unleavened bread, and some family pathos will produce the miracle of an exit, if not from Egypt, at least in bookshops.
"This idiot, he forgot to weld the last sheet"
, will say the boilermaker in the nuclear power plant in crisis.
“This jerk.
He forgets to solder.
The last leaf.
Obviously, the scathing writer has not only used the present narrative here, but also an untimely punctuation.
Privilege of anger.
The passage on France Culture is like a broadcast of the present narration of the author.
Pascal Bacque
The passage on France Culture: broadcasting of the present of narration.
The journalist speaks less than he coos, depending on the time of the air, in a suave, compassionate (lunchtime) or inquisitive (rather at the end of the day) language.
The opportunity is given, at least, to make heard in voice what the present of narration produced in writing: the arbitrariness of a saying which is only authorized to say itself naked, therefore in the present (not that the writer obeys, outside the paths of his creation, the exclusivism of the present of narration - the past tense returns willingly, thanks to a few tickles -; but he undergoes the effects, sometimes transfiguration, sometimes stigmata, according to the strategy developed with the publisher - see
below)
.
An effect, however, is produced on the voice: constantly questioning, groping, generally dying - although sometimes greedy - it seems blinded by itself, by this nose on the handlebars of which, without being too proud, we can precisely detect a effect of the present of narration: by dint of sticking to this single temporal substance, we get stuck in it like a fly on paper
.
Without gravity: the suave journalist knows how to turn amazement into satisfaction, him.
Self writing.
The question is no longer to be embarrassed to talk about oneself, in the manner of a Montaigne who, after having confessed:
"I myself am the subject of my book"
, concludes for the reader:
"Farewell therefore »
.
The question is to be embarrassed not to speak only of oneself.
But the ego is a meager thing - everyone, especially the writer with trauma, with memory, with a personal hinterland, will be pleased with it.
So any writing that does not practice this leanness ("scalpel", "pure", "without concession") will always be regarded as a fantasy that will have to be dressed up in a ruse of the ego.
Whence the distanced writers, whose baroquisms conceal in truth an even more Jansenist drawing;
as there were blank alexandrines, there are therefore blank narration presents, coiled up in some madness, what do you know, imperfect subjunctive!
The French writer knew that his last hour had arrived;
because who does not know that "GPT" stands for Generative Pretrained Transformer?
But what is a French writer if not a “pre-trained generative transformer”?
Pascal Bacque
Recognition for the publisher.
We are touching the epicenter of the earthquake that is, for everyone, creation.
Like a curator, the publisher is required to be the true creator of these little beasts called authors.
The agent, alone, surpasses him - and even then, not all of them.
Who controls the present of narration, the passage on France Culture, the writing of oneself?
The publisher, of course, who is to his authors what the lady with the unicorn is to the Maltese bichon who watches her, combed and wise, on her cushion: the inaccessible ideal of an exteriority to oneself, where lies since the beginning of humanity meaning and truth.
In this case, it is called the margins
,
“15%”.
Then came the GPT chatter.
We were astonished, we admired, we were indignant.
One reason for all this: he could also write in the present of narration.
The French writer knew that his last hour had arrived;
because who doesn't know that "GPT" means Pretrained Generative Transformer?
But what is a French writer, if not, precisely, a "pre-trained generative transformer"?
Only one solution remained.
Terrible.
No longer write in the present of narration, in order to distance GPT chatter.
Pain.
Mourning impossible.
Trauma and anger.
If in Baudelaire, it had been necessary to dive (hell or heaven, what does it matter),
"into the depths of the unknown to find something new"
, was it going to be necessary for French writers to break with their publishers?
Break with France Culture?
Go to simple past?
No, there are horrors that cannot be suffered.
The compound past, then: the verbal tense of boilermakers and bakers, bakers and boilermakers.
Yes - the past tense!
“All our hope is there!”
This is how the French writer, to escape the divine surprise of the GPT chatter, imagined a sentence that at least the Californian beast would not have.
It said,
"A long time, I went to bed early."
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ChatGPT: "This is the most important event that has happened since the invention of the internet", assures Olivier Babeau