History’s Absent Hand: Lessons in Modes of (Textual) Production from Gaétan Soucy’s The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Following its initial publication in 1998, Gaetan Soucy’s third novel , La Petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes , has been translated into several languages, including Sheila Fischman’s critically acclaimed English version, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches (2000). While Soucy’s fictional autobiography is frequently read as a contemporary Gothic fairy tale and/or trauma memoir, this essay explores the text’s treatment of modes of material production as a lesson in re-visioning history as a process of “non-synchronous simultaneity” or ungleichzeitigkeit (in Ernst Bloch’s terms) that is ultimately based on an “absent cause” (Althusser, Jameson). Insofar as questions of material production in Soucy’s narrative include the central question of textual production, the essay considers how The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches anticipates problems of authenticity, authority, ownership, and literary estate that are necessarily raised by the novel’s own re-production as a text in translation. Finally, the essay examines the shift or translation from the technology of handwriting to that of print at the heart of Soucy’s complex, poetic novel as a potential parable for (in Marshall McLuhan’s term) a “post-literate” 21 st century, one pointing to a present in which what may be disappearing -- or becoming history -- includes precisely the “old” technology of the cursive hand itself.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".