Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future: Recent Generations of Canadian Women Writing 9780773560222

Citation preview

ARCHAEOLOGIES OF AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE

This page intentionally left blank

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future Recent Generations of Canadian Women Writing KAREN S. MCPHERSON

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2006 isbn-13: 978-0-7735–3135-2 isbn-10: 0-7735–3135-1 Legal deposit fourth quarter 2006 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper. This book has been published with the help of grants from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and from the International Council for Canadian Studies through its Publishing Fund. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication McPherson, Karen S., 1950– Archaeologies of an uncertain future: recent generations of Canadian women writing / Karen S. McPherson. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-7735-3135-2 isbn-10: 0-7735-3135-1 1. Canadian fiction – Women authors – History and criticism. 2. Canadian fiction – 20th century – History and criticism. I. Title. ps8089.5.w6m365 2006

c810.9'9287

c2006-903693-4

This book was typeset by Interscript in 10/13 Palatino.

For Elise and to the memory of my mother, Gerry McPherson (1923–2000)

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

Acknowledgments Abbreviations Preface Introduction

ix

xiii

xv

Surviving the Century

1 The Language of Grief 2 3 4 5

Memory Works

58

Precarious Thresholds Thinking the Future Today and Tomorrow Notes

225

Bibliography Index

289

275

32

116 167 205

3

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments

It has been nearly ten years since I first began working on this project. I am grateful to the many friends, colleagues, and students who accompanied me at various times on this long journey. I want especially to thank Louise Dupré, Barbara Havercroft, René Lapierre, and Miléna Santoro, my colleagues in the iris research group, for their friendship, support, and inspiration. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Mary Wood, Monica Szurmuk, and Lisa Freinkl for our informal working group, which made the rainy winter less dreary and the months of writing less lonely. Many of the ideas in this book were generated, challenged, and honed by our conversations. Thanks as well to my kind and supportive colleagues in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Oregon, especially Barbara Altmann and Evlyn Gould, and to the many graduate students with whom I have had the pleasure of working on some of these texts. My advisees Karen Almquist and Elena Villa deserve special mention. Lee Talley was an incisive reader of early drafts of chapter 2. Neil Blackadder gave valuable research assistance in the early stages and Christina Lux provided skilled proofing and formatting of later drafts. Special thanks to Alice Parker for her generous and valuable feedback on the chapters on Brossard. I am also deeply grateful to all of my writers for their vision and their voices and especially to Nicole

x

Acknowledgments

Brossard, Marie-Claire Blais, and Louise Dupré for the light they cast on the present and on the path ahead as we venture into the twentyfirst century. Finally, I need to mention my mother, whose life and death shaped this project profoundly; my father and stepmother, who are showing me how to live, and age, with humanity and grace; my children who keep me believing in the future (special thanks to Andrés, who has had to live through the sometimes arduous gestation of this book); and my life companion, Elise, who does more than she will ever know to keep me believing in the present. This work was made possible in part by two research grants from the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon. In addition, two University of Oregon Junior Professorship Development awards and a New Faculty award gave me the time and resources to complete and revise the manuscript. I am grateful to the editorial staff at McGill-Queen’s University Press for helping me to obtain a publishing subvention from the Aid to Scholarly Publications Committee of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. I also want to express particular appreciation to Jane McWhinney, for her meticulous and perceptive editing of the manuscript. I gratefully acknowledge permission to use material previously published in different form in the following journals and edited volumes: “Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future in the Novels of MarieClaire Blais” in Québec Studies 25, spring 1998, 80–96; “Writing the Present in Nicole Brossard’s Baroque d’aube” in American Review of Canadian Studies, fall 2000, 361–83; “Survivre au siècle chez Marie-Claire Blais” in Francographies, tome II, no. 3, 2000; “Memory and Imagination in the Writings of Nicole Brossard” in International Journal of Canadian Studies 22, fall 2000; “The Future of Memory in Louise Dupré’s La memoria” in Doing Gender: Franco-Canadian Women Writers of the 1990s, eds. Paula Gilbert and Roseanna Dufault, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001, 142–59; and “Since Yesterday: Nicole Brossard’s Writing After Loss” in Nicole Brossard: Essays on Her Works, ed. Louise Forsyth, Guernica Editions, 2004, 52–67. The excerpt from “Without,” from White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems, 1946–2006 by Donald Hall, copyright © 2006 by Donald Hall, is reprinted by permission of Houghton Miffin Company. All rights reserved. Excerpts from “When I Am Asked” are reprinted by permission of Louisiana State University Press from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems by Lisel Mueller. Copyright © 1996 by Lisel Mueller.

Acknowledgments

xi

a n o t e o n tr a n s l a t i o n s When I am using a published translation for the English version of a French text, I have indicated this in the note accompanying the first citation from the work in question. I thereafter indicate whenever I have modified these translations. In all other cases, translations from the French are my own.

This page intentionally left blank

Abbreviations

acd ah as ba br ds fl fp h isag ji jsm jte m mmg mt o ocm s va vm

Marie-Claire Blais, Augustino et le choeur de la destruction Daphne Marlatt, Ana Historic Marie-Claire Blais, L’Ange de la solitude Nicole Brossard, Baroque d’aube Betsy Warland, Bloodroot: Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss Madeleine Gagnon, Le Deuil du soleil Marie-Claire Blais, Dans la foudre et la lumière Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces Nicole Brossard, Hier Margaret Atwood, In Search of Alias Grace Nicole Brossard, Journal intime Margaret Atwood, The Journals of Susanna Moodie Geneviève Amyot, Je t’écrirai encore demain Louise Dupré, La Memoria Diane-Monique Daviau, Ma Mère et Gainsbourg Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska, La Maison Trestler Joy Kogawa, Obasan Nicole Brossard, “Oeuvre de chair et métonymies” Marie-Claire Blais, Soifs Marie-Claire Blais, Visions d’Anna Madeleine Gagnon, Le Vent majeur

This page intentionally left blank

Preface Écrire c’est enjamber des murs, enjamber des morts, des mers, des siècles, c’est écraser le marbre statuaire, c’est faucher l’avenir, engendrer du futur archéologique. Écrire c’est marcher jusqu’à ce que le départ soit oublié. [Writing is striding across walls, striding across deaths, oceans, centuries, it’s crushing the statuary marble, it’s mowing down the future, engendering (from the) archaeological future. Writing is marching forward until the departure is forgotten.] Louky Bersianik1

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future: Recent Generations of Canadian Women Writing is a critical reflection on what it means to be living and writing now, at the beginning of a new millennium, in a world at risk whose future is at best uncertain. The book examines the struggles between degeneration and survival, between past and present, between present and future, as these tensions are reflected upon and inscribed in late twentieth-century works by twelve women writers from Quebec and English Canada. The analysis focuses on the ways in which these writers boldly confront past and present in their novels in order to try to imagine future(s). The project is articulated around an exploration of how certain recent women’s writing in Canada attempts, through different kinds of “archaeology,” including memory work, alternative histories, and translation, to transmute the death sentence that, as part of an apocalyptic vision of planetary self-destruction, seems to loom over so many late twentieth-century narratives.2 I use the term “archaeology” advisedly and in its most broadly humanistic connotation to suggest not only those processes of excavation and discovery of the past that are figured in many of these novels through explicit references to chronicles, archives, testimonies, genealogies, monuments and memorials,

xvi

Preface

but also to indicate the participation of these texts in conceptual processes that involve searching for readable evidence of the past in the present and for anticipatory traces of the present in the past. Using “archaeology” as a trope necessarily recalls Michel Foucault’s conceptual and methodological use of the term. Indeed, while I am not employing the trope in any intentionally Foucauldian way, I recognize that I am in some sense venturing into a signifying space first opened up by his work.3 Similarly, archaeologists themselves have embarked on more recent philosophical explorations of the archaeological paradigm. Probably the most influential of these theorists is Ian Hodder, who has articulated in a compelling way some of the relational, interpretive, and narrative dimensions of the archaeological process.4 Suggesting a kind of dialectical hermeneutic at work within the field, Hodder describes the need for what he calls “interpretation at the trowel’s edge.”5 Hodder’s archaeology, involving dynamic and creative negotiations between past and present, object and subject, thus covers much of the same territory as the literary and critical archaeologies that make up the present study.6 Foucault’s archaeological genealogies and Hodder’s fluid and boundary-breaking archaeological process are both in the background of my own archaeological project. But the “archaeologies of the future” of my title is first and foremost a reference to the idea of “une archéologie du futur” described and illustrated by two Quebec women writers in the early 1980s. Novelist and theorist Louky Bersianik delved into this concept in several essays collected in La Main tranchante du symbole.7 In “Les Agénésies du vieux monde” (1980), she wrote: “La patiente mise à jour de notre mémoire archéologique est déjà accusée de retarder l’histoire. Mais elle doit faire plus: elle doit l’arrêter dans son cours et la retourner comme un gant” [The patient updating of our archeological memory is already responsible for slowing down history. But it must do more: it must stop history in its tracks and turn it inside out like a glove].8 The following year, Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska published her landmark essay, L’Échappée des discours de l’oeil, in which she effectively did what Bersianik had described: she turned established patriarchal institutions – history, anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, philosophy – “inside out like a glove.”9 As if to illustrate the need for digging forward in order to re-imagine what came before, Ouellette-Michalska opened her essay with a “Postface” and closed it with a “Prologue.” In the “Postface” she wrote:

Preface

xvii

Moi et toutes les femmes … nous devions nous lever et courir interroger les signes … Il me fallait toucher les Tables de la Loi qui m’avaient prise aux mots. Il me fallait inventorier leurs règles, exorciser leurs rumeurs. À l’aube, je m’aventurai vers le passé. L’archéologie du futur commençait.10 [All the women and I had to rise and run to question the signs … I had to touch the Tables of the Law that had held me to my words. I had to inventory their rules, exorcise their rumblings. At dawn, I ventured towards the past. The archaeology of the future was beginning.]

In “L’Herbe était rouge et comme rôtie” (1984), Bersianik then further elaborated on this idea: “J’écris pour une archéologie du futur, pour que la mémoire du futur s’inscrive dans le présent de façon à ce que ce présent devienne une chose ancienne et dépassée” [I am writing for an archaeology of the future, in order that the memory of the future might inscribe itself in the present in such a way that this present may become something ancient and outmoded].11 In my understanding of and appropriation of Ouellette-Michalska’s and Bersianik’s concept, I focus not so much on women writers’ revisions of the past (although these certainly play a role in these writers’ works), but on the return (in and of the narrative) to the past in order – through a kind of literary trompe-l’histoire – to live it differently, or at least, through the creative workings of memory, to translate it forward into a different present with the possibility of imagining and in that way generating a different future. The trope of archaeology also serves to describe the process that I am myself undertaking as a reader of texts and contexts. I have organized this book around a series of “digs” into the different ways in which past, present, and future are connected and interpreted in the novels I am analysing. I begin in my Introduction by digging into history, considering rewritings of history and the project of feminist historiography in Margaret Atwood’s The Journals of Susanna Moodie and Alias Grace, Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska’s La Maison Trestler, and Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic. In chapter 1, I dig into loss, tracing the re-counting of women’s losses through the language of grief in Madeleine Gagnon’s Le Deuil du soleil and Le Vent majeur, DianeMonique Daviau’s Ma Mère et Gainsbourg, Betsy Warland’s Bloodroot: Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss, and Geneviève Amyot’s Je t’écrirai encore demain. In chapter 2, my analysis of loss and mourning leads me to a consideration of the work of memory, which I consider an avatar of mourning. I delve into memory work in Louise Dupré’s La

xviii

Preface

Memoria, Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, and Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces. From these engagements with loss and remembering, I move in the third chapter into the apocalyptic present of Marie-Claire Blais’s Visions d’Anna, L’Ange de la solitude, Soifs, Dans la foudre et la lumière, and Augustino et le choeur de la destruction. Here, I consider Blais’s vision of a threatened “generation” on the precarious threshold between annihilation and survival, hope and despair. Chapter 4 explores the frontiers of “reality” in Nicole Brossard’s Baroque d’aube, a novel in which interweavings of memory and imagination challenge both spatial and temporal bearings and suggest unprecedented ways of beginning to conceive of a future. Finally, in chapter 5, I read Brossard’s most recent novel, Hier, (in its dynamic intertextual engagement with two of her earlier texts, Journal intime and “Oeuvre de chair et métonymies”) as singularly emblematic of the “archaeology of the future” toward which Ouellette-Michalska and Bersianik pointed in the early 1980s. In its focus on examining the writings of a group of contemporary English Canadian and Quebec women writers within a unified conceptual framework, Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future seeks to contribute to the contemporary project of rethinking the literatures of the Americas. This project embraces national pluralisms, recognizes permeable and shifting borders, and promotes cross-cultural identities and identifications. There have been many excellent critical studies of contemporary Canadian writing by women, both anglophone and francophone, although it has been somewhat less common to find these two literatures considered together across the linguistic divide.12 This is hardly surprising, given that the distinct cultural milieux of English Canada and Quebec have for a long time been reflected in largely separate literary and critical traditions. Books treating theoretical problematics in relation to Canadian literature (such as Hallvard Dahlie’s Varieties of Exile: The Canadian Experience and Linda Hutcheon’s The Canadian Postmodern) have tended to limit themselves to studying the English-Canadian corpus. At the same time, critical studies in English that have included Quebec authors have also generally focused only on works available in English translation, paying little or no attention to the original French. With increasing awareness and acceptance of Canada’s multicultural and multilinguistic realities, however, the picture is beginning to change. Recently published theoretical scholarship includes a number of notable exceptions to the rule of distinct and separate anglophone and francophone literary traditions. Marie Vautier’s

Preface

xix

New World Myth, for instance, considers the reworkings of myth in six historiographic novels from both English-speaking Canada and Quebec, with close analysis of the French texts in their original language. It is, of course, important to recall that the work of many feminist writers in Canada has always constituted something of an exception to this general rule. There is a strong historical precedent for reading Quebec and English-Canadian women writers together: during the 1980s important feminist encounters took place between anglophone and francophone Canadian women scholars and authors, and a number of seminal bilingual and/or cross-cultural critical studies were published (among these, Barbara Godard’s Gynocritics/Gynocritiques and Shirley Neuman and Smaro Kamboureli’s A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing). The 1980s also saw the launching of the bilingual panCanadian review Tessera, following the groundbreaking 1983 Women and Words conference in Vancouver. Tessera, still publishing today, is evidence that the feminist consciousness of what Barbara Godard called a “collaboration in the feminine” among Canada’s anglophone and francophone women writers continues to define a productive and dynamic literary field within Canadian literature.13 Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future explores the changing contours of this literary field in relation to some of the theoretical preoccupations that mark the transition into the twenty-first century. Realized over a period of ten years, this book was in part an attempt to anticipate, respond to, and account for some of the effects of writing into the next (our present) century. Itself straddling two centuries (and indeed, two millennia), the project – in both its conception and its development – reflected my personal consciousness of the fragility and magnitude of this transition. One of my main reasons for wanting to write this particular book was to participate in some small way in a millennial meditation and conversation in the company of some of my favourite women writers. I hasten to add, however, that the present study makes no claim to represent the wide range and diversity of contemporary Canadian women writers. For one thing, all of these writers with the exception of two (Daviau, who was born in 1951, and Michaels, who was born in 1958) were over fifty in the year 2000. These are women of my own generation (or of the generation between mine and my mother’s), not of my daughter’s generation. Furthermore, the works by these women that I analyse in the present study (those “recent generations” of my title) were written when the authors were in their forties and fifties, for the most part already established in

xx

Preface

mid-career.14 They tell a particular story that is undoubtedly different from that being recounted by a vibrant new generation of Canadian women writers who are bearing witness, in their twenties and thirties, to the millennial shift. The corpus is similarly homogeneous in its emphasis on Canadian-born writers from families of European origin. The three exceptions to this (Kogawa, who was born in Canada of Japanese parents; Warland, who emigrated to Canada from the United States in 1973; and Marlatt, born in Australia, who moved to Canada in 1951 at the age of nine) hardly represent the multicultural diversity that has characterized both anglophone and francophone Canadian literature since “migrant literature” first gained momentum and critical attention in the mid-1980s. This said, I believe the Canadian women writers whom I have chosen to accompany on their reflective journeys across the millennial threshold are engaged in an archaeological process that has significance for all of us confronting the uncertain future of the world in which we are living today. If y2k proved to be a lot of fuss over nothing, the events of September 11, 2001 were a galvanizing cataclysmic event in many Western minds. The terrorist attacks and the U.S. military response marked, for many of the world’s citizens, the beginning of a new apocalyptic age. The war – first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq – and the continuing escalation of fighting since the official “end of the war,” not to mention the steady erosion of civil liberties in the United States and the trivializing and banalizing of torture, have conjured up nightmare visions of war without end, civilizations on the brink of annihilation. At the same time, the ever-intensifying struggles between progress and degeneration are accompanied by a terrifying tendency toward cultural amnesia. Our planet is in crisis. We need to pay attention. The need for both memory and imagination, for thinking beyond the same viciously circular paradigms of retaliation and aggression, has perhaps never been greater. We need visions of how human beings might outlive the legacies of inhumanity. So often, our writers are our visionaries. In my readings of the literary works that are the focus of the present study, I strive to show how these women authors, writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century, speak to our present as they offer ways of breaking cycles of damage and loss and of looking back and thinking ahead with attentiveness and care.

ARCHAEOLOGIES OF AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction

Surviving the Century Quelle intelligence et quelle tendresse peut-on déployer pour suspendre cette avidité à tuer, cette fascination de la mort qui contamine nos archives? Je rêve d’une histoire qui échapperait au désir d’anéantissement. Une chronique de la vie quotidienne, peut-être, d’une extrême simplicité, qui célébrerait la tendresse et la volonté de création. [What intelligence and what tenderness can we deploy to check this eagerness to kill, this fascination with death that contaminates our archives? I dream of a history that would escape the desire for annihilation. A chronicle of daily life, perhaps, of the utmost simplicity, that would celebrate tenderness and the will to create.] Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska1

millennial ending En résumé: le 31 décembre, 1999, lorsqu’à minuit j’ouvrirai une bouteille de champagne, il est certain qu’en la même seconde, ma page sera blanche comme une page de garde. [In short: the 31st of December 1999, when at midnight I open a bottle of champagne, you can be sure that, at that very instant, my page will be white, like the first page you see when you open a book.] Nicole Brossard2

In the 1980s and 1990s, people began living in self-conscious anticipation of the impending turn of the century. Taking the measure of the twentieth century within the parentheses of two fins de siècle, they started thinking in terms of beginnings and endings. What did it mean to reach the end of a hundred-year span? The question of “the meaning of the century” was perhaps particularly salient because one

4

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

hundred years is generally considered the outer limit of an individual human lifespan. In Century’s End: An Orientation Manual Toward the Year 2000, Hillel Schwartz describes the end of a century as a powerful confrontation with mortality: “Everything seems to be mortal and at risk.”3 He further argues that there is a coherent pattern to how we experience the ends of centuries and “learning the ropes of a century’s end has come to be akin to an ars moriendi, an art of dying well.”4 So Schwartz offers a “User’s Guide” in which he outlines a fin de siècle inventory that includes such familiar end-of-life strategies as “tying up loose ends,” “compulsively counting down,” and “going for broke.”5 But the end of the twentieth century was not just any fin de siècle; it also marked the end of a millennium and, as Schwartz points out, “the Millennium has a force of its own.”6 He explains that in accordance with Christian scriptural tradition the year 2000 “for centuries has attracted attention as not simply the conclusion of a millennium (a thousand years) but as the start of the Millennium, a sabbatical era of peace.” And Schwartz adds that even those who are not inclined to scriptural interpretation are “willy-nilly drawn to 2000 as a momentous historical divide.”7 Frank Kermode agrees that “the ends of centuries and a fortiori millennia are very convenient termini, either of the world or of epochs” and he further observes that “their attraction lies partly in their cyclical character … and partly in the fact that they mark or threaten a linear ending.”8 There is something about endings, Kermode suggests, that both terrifies and attracts us. Perhaps the attraction of an ending lies in its linear logic, its promise of meaning (“not mere sequence” but consequence): “we are programmed to seek not mere sequence but something I like to think of as pleroma, fullness, the fullness that results from completion … We like things to make sense.”9 But does the ending make sense? It is all, it seems, a matter of interpretation, and the human tendency is not only to seek the satisfaction of a conclusion but also to mistrust such finality. And again, if the sense of an ending is its finality, how does one make sense of it? Doesn’t an ending imagined as the ending of sense-making shut out the sense-maker and foreclose all interpretive strategies even in anticipation? As we have already suggested, however, there are endings and then there are endings. Edward Said makes a clear distinction between cyclical endings (in which beginning “can either be recovered or somehow returned to”) and “endings of an altogether, more or less terminal, finality,” endings in which “we sense … much more of the

Surviving the Century

5

conclusiveness of death.”10 We tend to enjoy birthdays and New Year’s celebrations with a mix of pleasure and pensiveness, and perhaps an undercurrent of anxiety, but usually without dread. But certain anniversaries may suggest not the reassuring passage of time (life going on) but rather the imminence of time’s ending. In many ways, the approach of y2k tapped into people’s latent anxiety.11 This anniversary would be different: the cyclical this time threatened to be terminal. People started thinking about apocalypse.12 What happens at the end of the millennium, many contend, is that as a culture we tap into what Catherine Keller has dubbed “the apocalypse script.”13 At the end of the twentieth century, our sense of apocalypse may be simply our anxiety about endings combined with the postmodern experience of living in an age in which progress and disaster seem to go hand in hand. But those who write about contemporary apocalypticism stress the distinction between a common parlance that generally falsely associates apocalypse with catastrophe alone and the apocalyptic tradition (which in Christian eschatology is rooted in the Book of Revelation) that tells a different story. As Lois Parkinson Zamora points out, “‘apocalypse’ is a synonym for ‘revelation’ (not for ‘disaster,’ though it is frequently misused as such).”14 Zamora goes on to articulate the apocalyptic vision within its traditional Judaeo-Christian context: “Thus apocalypse projects the patterns of creation, growth, decay, renewal, catastrophe onto history, encompassing the beginning and the end of time within its vision.”15 Apocalypse is the definitive end of an age, but it is also the initiation of “a timeless kingdom which will be perfectly righteous.”16 As Zamora explains, “the [apocalypse] myth comprehends both cataclysm and millennium, tribulation and triumph, chaos and order.”17 In Millennial Seduction, Lee Quinby makes a similar observation: “What makes living with apocalyptic belief tolerable for so many is its accompanying millennial dream, the current of hope that promises the fullness of Truth unveiled and visions of perfection for the elect.”18 Keller also refers to this more hopeful version of the apocalypse script in what she identifies as the “cryptoapocalypse in which … we all take part.”19 Among the traits of this often subconscious “apocalypse pattern” she includes “a proclivity … to expect some cataclysmic showdown in which, despite tremendous collateral damage (the destruction of the world as we know it), good must triumph in the near future with the help of some transcendent power and live forever after in a fundamentally new world.”20 But the new

6

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

“writers of the apocalypse” also note that such beliefs do not come easily at the end of the second millennium. The legacy of the twentieth century is that apocalypse has entered the minds of many without the accompanying belief in revelation. Krishan Kumar notes that “what we seem to have today is apocalyptic imagination without hope but also, more strikingly, a kind of millennial belief almost entirely emptied of the conflict and dynamism that generally belong to it. It is a millennial belief without sense of the future.”21 In Kumar’s analysis, postmodernity’s “death of grand narratives” – though “meant to be liberating” – has contributed to this “debased millennarianism, without a compensating utopian vision.”22 The postmodern apocalypse seems to be characterized by what Derrida chillingly refers to as “the inescapable catastrophe, the undeviating precipitation toward a remainderless cataclysm.”23 But Derrida’s apocalypse is more complicated than it might at first appear. For one thing, despite his own “apocalyptic tone,”24 Derrida refuses the apocalyptic conclusion that he has so vividly described, offering in its place “a warning in the form of a dissuasion: watch out, don’t go too fast.”25 Derrida’s call for “no apocalypse, not now” does not deny apocalyptic reality. Indeed, he readily acknowledges the risks of refusing apocalypse. Though one may seek “in the stockpile of history … the wherewithal … to translate the unknown into a known … domesticate the terror … circumvent … the inescapable catastrophe,” this “critical slowdown” does not abolish “the absolute referent.”26 There is no getting around it: “One may still die … and the death of what is still now and then called humanity might well not escape the rule.”27 Nevertheless, Derrida seems to suggest, we can choose not to rush into this. Similarly, as Said’s reading of Theodor Adorno makes clear, other temporal manipulations may be brought to bear on the catastrophe. For Said, approaches such as Adorno’s hint at the possibility of “ending and surviving together.”28 This possibility resides, in Adorno’s work, in the concept of “lateness.” Said argues that Adorno, in the end, offers lateness as the alternative to both hopelessness and transcendence: “Adorno is, I think, prepared to endure ending in the form of lateness but for itself, its own sake, not as a preparation for or obliteration of something else.”29 Both Derrida and Adorno seem to be offering theoretical ways not of surviving the catastrophe but of surviving in the catastrophe, by either deferring or prolonging its ending. Some feminist writers take a slightly different stance in relation to the apocalypse script. Lee Quinby argues for a feminist genealogical

Surviving the Century

7

approach to counter the “masculinist apocalypticism” that, she contends, “thwart[s] or prohibit[s] exercises of freedom” and “divests women of the means of self-determination.”30 She says that she is striving “as a millennial skeptic … to demythologize apocalypticism.”31 Despite the title of her book (Anti-Apocalypse), Quinby does not deny apocalypse. Rather, in the words of Keller, “she disarms apocalypse by stepping outside the entire religious myth system.”32 Keller, on the other hand, situates her own feminist critique within the eschatalogical tradition, striving like Quinby “to interrupt the [apocalypse] habit,” but from within.33 As she describes her approach: “I have come to claim the space of a counter-apocalypse.”34 In their preoccupation with and contestatory occupation of the millennial moment, Quinby’s “anti-apocalypse” and Keller’s “counterapocalypse” are similar to the approaches of Derrida and Said (via Adorno). But Keller’s and Quinby’s “apocalyptic” re-visions, even as they question the apocalypse script, do so in the name of salvaging something, reconfiguring the ending in such a way as to be able to imagine a feminist future.35 Their versions of apocalypse thus in some ways resemble Louky Bersianik’s feminist utopian reappropriation of the script. Bersianik’s description of the catastrophic present paints a grim and familiar picture: Au point de chute s’étale ce présent dominé par une société fossile et suicidaire malgré sa technologie avancée qu’elle utilise pour équilibrer la terreur avec une sorte de balancier des hémisphères qui entraîne les peuples de notre planète à jouer aux jeux olympiques de l’épouvante. [On the verge of collapse, there is spread before us this present, dominated by a society that is fossilized and suicidal despite the advanced technology that it uses to counterbalance terror with a kind of hemispheric pendulum that leads the people of our planet to play in the Olympic Games of dread.]36

But against this horrific vision, Bersianik evokes “une solution de continuité, une rupture radicale dans l’enchaînement des siècles” [a solution of continuity, a radical rupture in the sequence of centuries].37 She calls for a demolition of “la séquence [patriarcale] pour amorcer un nouveau commencement des temps” [patriarchal sequence in order to initiate a new beginning for new times].38 She imagines giving women, through the dismantling of patriarchal sequence and the imagining of different genealogies, “a memory of the future,” that is, a way of being (remembered) and of remembering (being) in the past, the present and

8

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

the future.39 Her exhortation: “Parlons-nous de la mémoire du futur, de l’habileté à faire des plans, à se projeter en avant” [Let’s talk to one another about the memory of the future, about the skill for making plans, for projecting oneself forward].40 The Canadian women writers whose works I examine in this and subsequent chapters are all writing in the shadow of an approaching millennial ending. The most explicit portrayals of an apocalyptic present and references to an impending cataclysm appear in the works of Marie-Claire Blais and Nicole Brossard. But concern with survival looms large in all of the novels considered in this study. Even when the millennial ending is not addressed directly, it seems to have left a residue in the minds of these authors. Their fictions inscribe women’s creative struggles with loss, vulnerability, invisibility, isolation, and mortality. In every text the question of survival is posed in provocative and, I would contend, distinctly gender-inflected ways. Writing at the end of the twentieth century is, for these women, writing (about/into) the future.

shifting ground Cette subversion, ce chamboulement total provoqué par moi, l’Autre femme, toutes les femmes, menace les assises de ce monde parce que je suis fabulée comme étant la terre et maintenant la terre tremble. [This subversion, this total upheaval provoked by me, the Other woman, all women, threatens the foundations of this world because I am fantasized as being the earth and now the earth is trembling.] Louky Bersianik41

Any consideration of how the writers in my study approach our fin de siècle necessarily takes place within the context of, and in reference to, ongoing critical discussions surrounding the relationship of feminism to postmodernism. The overlapping preoccupations of these two contemporary critical approaches are evident, as we have already seen, in the way their attention is drawn to “the end of the world.” In the unsettled age in which we live, both feminism and postmodernism undertake a radical deconstruction of hegemonic “master narratives.”42 As Linda Hutcheon puts it: “[Women writers] too have worked to replace ‘universal’ ‘Truth’ with particular truths … In their challenges to form as well as in their ideological critique, these are postmodern writers.”43

Surviving the Century

9

But Hutcheon adds an important caveat: “they are also feminist writers, and the difference of agenda must be respected.”44 Given that feminism and postmodernism are both already complex and contested theoretical constructs, an analysis of their intersections and tensions is inevitably positioned on constantly shifting ground. Nevertheless, to begin to understand how postmodernism’s “crises of legitimation”45 might function differently for women, it is likely prudent to define that ground at least provisionally and then attend to a number of nagging questions. What are the implications of a postmodernist critique of history and narrative for any kind of feminist forward-looking project? Is it inevitable that in our “postmodern condition” we lose the ability to envision a coherent future? If so, what kind of future can possibly be envisioned? Do feminist attempts to find in postmodernism a legitimation of certain strategic feminist agendas risk repeating (and dangerously) some of postmodernism’s own internal contradictions? Such concerns have been worried and skirted, dissected and debated by an entire generation of feminist theorists.46 Linda J. Nicholson and Nancy Fraser, in “Social Criticism Without Philosophy,” a seminal essay first published in 1988, offer perhaps the most cogent and constructive analysis of the encounter between feminism and postmodernism. Nicholson and Fraser assert that despite certain fundamental commonalities, these “two tendencies have proceeded from opposite directions.”47 They identify some common goals: both feminists and postmodernists “have tried to rethink the relationship between philosophy and social criticism to develop paradigms of criticism without philosophy.”48 But they then go on to note the two perspectives’ “complementary strengths and weaknesses”: “Postmodernists offer sophisticated and persuasive criticisms of foundationalism and essentialism, but their conceptions of social criticism tend to be anemic. Feminists offer robust conceptions of social criticism, but they tend at times to lapse into foundationalism and essentialism.”49 It is out of this critical complementarity that Nicholson and Fraser propose to imagine a “postmodern feminism.” The challenge, as they so eloquently put it, is: “How can we combine a postmodernist incredulity toward metanarratives with the social-critical power of feminism?”50 Their answer is to begin to imagine an approach in which postmodernism and feminism, drawing on one another’s strengths, nuance each other. Postmodernist critique would have to recognize the appropriateness of feminism’s continuing to use “the large theoretical

10

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

tools needed to address large political problems,” but, at the same time, in response to postmodernism’s warnings, “the categories of postmodern-feminist theory would be inflected by temporality [and] its mode of attention would be comparativist rather than universalizing.”51 Another important contributor to the discussion of whether it is possible to reconcile postmodernist and feminist agendas is Seyla Benhabib, whose main argument is that “among the legacies of modernity which today need reconstructing but not wholesale dismantling are moral and political universalism.”52 Benhabib acknowledges that “in their critique of the illusions of logocentrism and in their championing of the standpoint of the ‘other(s),’ postmodernist thinkers have been crucial allies for contemporary feminism.”53 But she also cautions: “The postmodernist position(s) thought through to their conclusions may eliminate not only the specificity of feminist theory but place in question the very emancipatory ideals of the women’s movements altogether.”54 Making a crucial distinction between “strong and weak versions of the theses of the death of Man, of History and of Metaphysics,”55 Benhabib argues that the strong versions are incompatible with feminist goals, that indeed they would undermine “the feminist commitment to women’s agency and sense of selfhood, to the reappropriation of women’s own history in the name of an emancipated future, and to the exercise of radical social criticism.”56 But, notes Benhabib, “weak” versions of the postmodernist stance may operate their critiques while still leaving room for “the situated and gendered subject.”57 Furthermore, Benhabib argues for feminism’s need to preserve its ethical and visionary qualities. Though she shares some of the concerns of the postmodernist theorists – “that in the name of such future utopia the present in its multiple ambiguity, plurality and contradiction will be reduced to a flat grand narrative” – she nevertheless insists: “we cannot deal with these political concerns by rejecting the ethical impulse of utopia.”58 Without discounting the risks, Benhabib affirms the importance of being able to formulate “a feminist ethic, a feminist politics, a feminist concept of autonomy and even a feminist aesthetic.”59 Her conclusion articulates the need for a political and theoretical feminist agenda that has its eye on the future: “Postmodernism can teach us the theoretical and political traps of why utopias and foundational thinking can go wrong, but it should not lead to a retreat from utopia altogether. For we, as women, have much to lose by giving up the utopian hope in the wholly other.”60

Surviving the Century

11

But what is or will be the wholly other? As if the negotiations between feminism and postmodernism were not already difficult enough, these categories have found themselves recently engaged in productive but troubling encounters with cultural, postcolonial, and queer theories. And as these theoretical constructs (like both feminism and postmodernism) are also struggling with the dilemmas of identity politics and the paradoxes of a binary model of inclusion and exclusion, the complications multiply. In the last decade, it has become clearer and clearer that conceptualizing feminisms must entail exploring the multiple categories of difference (including race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality) that complicate the idea of gender. But it has also become evident that such explorations need to realize that these categories are not themselves clearly delimited, discrete, or mappable. As Robyn Wiegman so aptly cautions in her introduction to The Lesbian Postmodern: “Even as the multiplication of categories beyond the singularity of gender has made possible a rethinking of the complexities of women’s varied social positioning, their conceptualization as discrete categories works precisely by cordoning off and hence limiting the potential excessibility of difference.”61 It is this “excessibility of difference,” Wiegman suggests, that has both epistemological and political potential.62 The challenge is to keep open the realm of possibilities while at the same time finding a ground to stand on. Wiegman and the other contributors to The Lesbian Postmodern offer a number of differing and provocative ways of mapping and of challenging the mapping of a terrain that might cover “lesbian,” “feminist,” and “postmodern.” Kathleen Martindale, in Un/popular Culture: Lesbian Writing After the Sex Wars, offers a different but equally compelling reading of the “trouble” that the “lesbian” brings to the postmodern category.63 But perhaps the most accomplished account and negotiation of this unsettled terrain is Lynne Huffer’s recent work on nostalgia, ethics, and “feminist futures.” In Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures, Huffer calls for “the elaboration of a bridge between the moral commitments represented by Benhabib and the fractured realities of our past and present lives.”64 In order to begin to accomplish this elaboration, Huffer draws on the work of Nicole Brossard (as I do in the last two chapters of this book for many of the same reasons). Describing Brossard’s work as “another kind of lesbian writing that is not just by a lesbian or about lesbians, but explores the very processes through which people and their stories are made invisible,” Huffer argues

12

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

that Brossard’s lesbian writing demystifies the nostalgic tendencies (and “the logic of presence and absence”) of contemporary feminist theories.65 In Huffer’s reading of Brossard, “this other kind of ‘lesbian’ writing might come to name a thick, holographic, urban poetry in which reality, fiction, and utopia would coexist.”66 As I previously noted, my exploration of the work of recent generations of Canadian women writers necessarily engages these ongoing theoretical discussions. Traces of this shifting ground will certainly be evident in the analyses that follow. But I would also contend that the authors in my study are generally less interested in the “postmodern condition” than in trying to figure out – in real and concrete terms – what comes next. In addition, their concerns are not so much with coherence as with meaning. And by meaning I intend not mere signification (comprehensible reference) but meaningful significance (mattering).67 What I think becomes clear, as we begin to explore “archaeologies of the future” in the various novels considered in this book, is that the process of searching for meaning is itself a source of meaning. The ground may be shifting but digging into the future matters.

te l l i n g h i s t o r i e s The past is made of paper. Margaret Atwood68

In her 1996 Charles R. Bronfman Lecture in Canadian Studies, Margaret Atwood pondered the increasing popularity of historical fiction: “Why is it that it is now – within the last fifteen or twenty years, and so near the end of the fragmenting and memory-denying twentieth century – that the Canadian historical novel has become so popular with writers and readers alike?” (isag 13, emphasis added). Noting that we are living “in a period in which memory of all kinds, including the sort of larger memory we call history, is being called into question” (isag 7), Atwood suggested a number of different reasons for this persistent return to the historical past in fiction. She cited “the lure of … the mysterious, the buried, the forgotten, the discarded, the taboo” (isag 19), nostalgia for a safer time, and the retrospective tendencies that come naturally with middle age.69 She also attributed the burgeoning interest in historical fiction in part to a pressing need to understand the present: “by taking a long hard look backwards,

Surviving the Century

13

we place ourselves” (isag 27). Furthermore, arguing that history is “[not] only about large trends and movements” (isag 7) but also about individuals, she asserted the intimate relationship between history and fiction. There are times in our experience when “memory, history, and story all intersect” and at such times, Atwood noted, “it would take only one step more to bring all of them into the realm of fiction” (isag 7). The past three decades have seen a number of important fictional works by Canadian women writers (Atwood among them) that centre on precisely such points of intersection. Anne Hébert’s 1970 novel, Kamouraska, based on an actual historical event, offers a prime example of a novelist turning a documented historical trace inside out in order to expose the imagined story it might contain. A similar gesture is evident in Margaret Atwood’s poem cycle The Journals of Susanna Moodie, also published in 1970, in which she reads and writes Susanna Moodie into the gaps and interstices of that nineteenth-century chronicler’s own published writings. In both cases the authors assert the fictional autonomy of their “characters” (Hébert writes of “mes créatures imaginaires” [my imaginary creations] and Atwood of the fact that her poems “were generated by a dream” before she ever read Moodie’s books70). The first-person narrative in each of these works gives voice to a historical woman and lets her tell her own story in ways she could not or did not in the documented past. The inscribed voice is both “remembered” and imagined, as Atwood clearly suggests when she comments that when she finally did read Susanna Moodie’s two books “it was not [Moodie’s] conscious voice but the other voice running like a counterpoint through her work that made the most impression on [her]” (jsm 63). The writing of historical fiction as a deliberate feminist project came into its own in Canada in the late 1970s and early 1980s.71 As the self-conscious postmodern strategies of what Linda Hutcheon in 1988 described as “historiographic metafiction” breached the containing walls of historical discourse, women writers entered and inhabited the newly opened spaces in order to challenge and subvert official versions of history. Hutcheon’s formulation insisted upon the open-end-edness of both fictional and historical enterprises: “Postmodern fiction suggests that to re-write and to re-present the past in fiction and in history is, in both cases, to open it up to the present, to prevent it from being conclusive and teleological.”72 Two prime

14

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

examples of such postmodern historiographic metafiction by women are Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska’s 1984 novel, La Maison Trestler, and Daphne Marlatt’s 1988 novel, Ana Historic. La Maison Trestler is fiction inspired by and based on the well-documented history of a house (an eighteenth-century manor house in Vaudreuil-Dorion, Quebec, that was opened to the public as a historical monument in 1969) and a family (that of Johann Joshef Tröstler, a German soldier who fought for the British in the American Revolution and subsequently settled in Lower Canada where he became a prosperous businessman and local political figure). Ouellette-Michalska decided to write her novel after a newspaper account about the Trestler house prompted her to seek out more of the story in the historical archives. Similarly, Daphne Marlatt based her novel Ana Historic on a brief mention of a woman named Mrs Richards in the civic archives of Vancouver, British Columbia, for 1873. In both novels, the authors undertake to fill in the empty spaces revealed by their readings of archival accounts. In both, they use the techniques of historiographic metafiction to inscribe the paradoxes of history and to challenge “authoritative” historical versions in which women are for the most part absent. Thus, in each novel a contemporary first-person narrator is engaged in uncovering the story of a woman from the past. Digging into that past in search of the untold story, the contemporary woman comes to know the historical woman through a complex process of identification and shared experience. The intertwined threads of contemporary and historical stories and of fictional and archival “truths” characterize this alternative way of doing history. As the parallel stories intersect and overlap they suggest how women’s ways of witnessing may challenge the linear authority of history. These two novels insist upon the fact that history does not end with the past. Memory and imagination combine to make the past an accessible and habitable space, and the temporal pleats and tucks of retrospective identification create intimate transhistorical encounters. In these moments, narrators can slip between the sheets in order to find (momentarily become, even give birth to) their own foremothers. Describing how she takes to her bed with a fever that mimes the historical protagonist Catherine’s fever, Ouellette-Michalska’s narrator makes explicit use of language and imagery that liken the writing process to something that occurs in a bed (intimate union, conception, birth): “Tout a commencé le jour où je me suis glissée entre

Surviving the Century

15

draps et cahier, la bouche sèche, un goût de sang travaillant les gencives occupées à retracer les mots de celle qui ne parlera jamais.” [Everything began the day I slid between sheets and notebook, my mouth dry, the taste of blood along my gums, busy retracing the words of the woman who will never speak] (mt 55, emphasis added). The narrator pursues the metaphor several pages later when she comments: “Catherine n’est pas née du sexe de ses parents. Elle est une création de mon esprit … Bientôt elle prendra corps … [Elle] grossit dans mes flancs et ma tête” [Catherine is not born from her parents’ sex. She is a creation of my mind … Soon she will take shape as a body … She grows in my womb and in my head] (mt 57). The association of this kind of narrative approach with a gendered angle of reflection is perhaps best represented by a much commented scene in Anne Hébert’s Les Fous de Bassan. The Pastor sets out to represent his history and genealogy through a series of black and white portraits of his forebears, and commissions his two female cousins to paint the women’s side of the family. The juxtaposition of their mural and his “galerie des ancêtres” [gallery of ancestors] offers a prime illustration of two distinctly different ways of making history.73 The male version is linear, straightforward and self-contained, public and presentable, authoritative, black and white. The women’s wall is messy, fragmented, colourfully chaotic, playfully suggestive, a disturbing jumbled scene of the suppressed, the taboo, the uncontainable and uncontrollable.74 The dynamic and relational nature of women’s history evoked in this emblematic scene anticipates the exuberant plurivocality and dialogism of Marlatt’s Ana Historic. Furthermore, in both Les Fous de Bassan and Ana Historic, women’s telling of history is aimed precisely at absence and driven by desire: Bousculant toute chronologie, s’inventant des grand’mères et des soeurs à foison, les jumelles découvrent le plaisir de peindre.75 [Upsetting all chronology, inventing for themselves grandmothers and sisters galore, the twins discover the pleasure of painting.] but I don’t want history’s voice. I want … something is wanting in me. and it all goes blank on a word. want. what does it mean, to be lacking? empty. wanton. vanish. vacant, vacuum, evacuate. all these empty words except for wanton (lacking discipline, lewd). a word for the wild. for the gap I keep coming to. (ah 48–9)

16

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

In Hébert’s and Marlatt’s formulations, women’s ways of witnessing history resist conclusions, accommodate mess and uncertainty, tend toward collective rather than centralized authority, and engage the body. Telling histories to begin to fill in the gaps involves marrying a receptive stance and an active process. In In Search of Alias Grace, Atwood suggests that such ought to be the nature of all historiographic negotiations: “What does the past tell us? In and of itself, it tells us nothing. We have to be listening first, before it will say a word; and even so, listening means telling, and then retelling. It’s we ourselves who must do such telling, about the past, if anything is to be said about it; and our audience is one another” (isag 37). Atwood makes no specific claims for a gendered approach, but her own two historiographic projects, The Journals of Susanna Moodie and Alias Grace, clearly participate in the kind of relational construction of history – and the concomitant challenge to a singular, linear, authoritative version – that Hébert and Marlatt associate with women’s appropriations of historical discourse. What is perhaps most striking about such appropriations is how women’s ways of witnessing confound boundaries. Spatial boundaries are blurred by the close association of flesh and text: bodies tell stories and stories tell of real bodies. Temporal boundaries are bent and distorted by narratives in which memory takes a tuck in history and pulls the past into the present. Generic boundaries buckle under the challenges that history and fiction bring to bear upon one another. In an analysis of Ouellette-Michalska’s La Maison Trestler and Francine Noël’s Myriam première, Laure Neuville describes how the works of certain contemporary Quebec women novelists call official histories into question, offering in their place “une nouvelle façon d’écrire l’histoire, basée sur la mémoire corporelle et sur l’empathie” [a new way of writing history, based on corporal memory and empathy].76 Histories based on women’s intimate recognition of and identification with other women in the past are in direct response to a “sterilized” version of history that “en gomme l’aspect humain et quotidien” [erases its human and daily aspects].77 The human, the daily, and the corporal may dirty up history a bit but they are indispensable to these women’s attempt to “reconstituer une histoire plurielle, une histoire qui fasse place à la différence, à l’Autre que la tradition patriarcale a toujours tenté d’occulter” [reconstitute a plural history, a history that makes room for difference, for the Other that patriarchal tradition has always tried to eclipse].78

Surviving the Century

17

th e e d g e o f t h e wo r l d come back, history calls, to the solid ground of fact, you don’t want to fall off the edge of the world – Daphne Marlatt79

An emblematic scene in La Maison Trestler stages an encounter between patriarchal historiographic tradition and a female narrator’s reconstructive project. Having been totally absorbed in both uncovering and imagining her eighteenth-century protagonist’s story, the narrator determines that the time has come to “faire la connaissance avec le père de Catherine” [meet Catherine’s father] (mt 243). Meeting the father is, not surprisingly, synonymous for her with meeting the elderly historian whose interest in the rise of the Quebec bourgeoisie has made him something of an authority on the Trestler family. As president of a brokerage firm, the old man certainly represents patriarchal power and privilege. Significantly, however, he is not a historian by profession; history is his pastime and his passion, and in this he resembles the narrator. Thus they meet on somewhat common ground. In the phone conversations that preceded their face-to-face meeting, the historian had revealed his particular interest in Iphigénie, Catherine’s niece. Iphigénie “le fait toujours rêver” [always makes him dream] (mt 243), and the historian bemoans the fact that her letters were destroyed.80 The narrator shares his distress over what she understands to be the systematic erasure of women from official histories: “Je sais. On a aussi brûlé des pages du journal intime de ma mère, de ma grand-mère, et de beaucoup d’aïeules. La femme de rêve n’écrit que pour ses tiroirs” [I know. They also burned pages of my mother’s diary, my grandmother’s, the journals of many of my foremothers. The woman of dreams only writes for her desk drawers] (mt 243–4). But this is the narrator’s interpretation, not the historian’s. Indeed, as historian and novelist together examine a photograph of J.J. Trestler, they almost immediately realize the extent to which their interpretations (both what they are seeking and what they are finding) diverge. They may both be personally invested in piecing together traces of the history of the Trestler family, but their underlying motivations are fundamentally different. The historian is interested in Iphigénie primarily as the granddaughter of the family patriarch and as the wife of a prominent lawyer and member of Parliament: “Il affectionne les épouses des politiciens, ce côté laiteux et clandestin du pouvoir souvent négligé des

18

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

historiens” [He has a particular fondness for politicians’ wives, that milky clandestine side of power often ignored by the historians] (mt 245). He is nuancing but not challenging the official historical record. Thus, he shows no interest whatsoever in Catherine, who married in defiance of paternal interdictions, broke definitively with the family, and subsequently brought legal action against her father in order to secure her maternal inheritance. The earliest encounter between the historian and the novelist had already revealed them to be uneasy collaborators. The irony of the historian’s initial appeal to the novelist for help in finding Iphigénie’s letters is not to be missed. He needed those letters because without them, “Je dois romancer, et ça me répugne” [I must fictionalize and that is repugnant to me] (mt 196). In contrast, the narrator’s practice was to let her pen move from fantasy to fantasy “aidé de quelques documents et d’une imagination démente” [with the help of some documents and a wild imagination] (mt 196). Even as they agreed to share resources, the historian and the novelist were wary of one another. Preferring “la passion du rêve au déterminisme des archives” [the passion of the dream to the determinism of the archives] (mt 196), the novelist resisted having to reconcile her imaginative project with newly presented historical data. The historian, in turn, was reluctant to get too involved with a fiction writer: “Il ne peut musarder avec une romancière sans mettre sur le même pied la fiction qui fabule et l’histoire qui dit vrai” [He can’t hang around with a woman novelist without giving equal status to fiction that makes things up and history that tells the truth] (mt 196). When the novelist finally meets the historian in person, the scene is marked by moments of unexpected complicity and similarity. As they together pore over the photos of J.J., his son Jean-Baptiste, and his granddaughter Iphigénie, the historian sees the history written there as a reassuring genealogy, noting how “les traits s’affinent avec les générations” [the features grow more refined with each generation] (mt 246). The narrator is aware of another perhaps more troubling “drame [qui] se joue derrière les traits” [drama being played out behind the features] (mt 246). In reflecting on their contrasting perspectives, however, the narrator notes also how fundamentally similar are their two projects. Each one’s interpretation is to some extent a product of projected desire. Their common ground is precisely the subjectivity of their history-making: Nous continuons d’échanger nos impressions sur les visages fixés à la cyanine, hasardant des hypothèses sur le caractère des personnages, leurs manies, leurs

Surviving the Century

19

penchants, les disculpant ou les incriminant selon le rôle que nous leur avons assigné dans nos récits respectifs. Nos têtes se touchent presque. Nos épaules ont pris le même angle d’inclinaison. Nous sommes les parfaits complices de l’époque que nous tentons de restituer. Nous sommes les passionnés amants des personnages que nous créons. (mt 249, emphasis added) [We continue to exchange our impressions of the faces fixed by cyanine dye, venturing hypotheses about the character of the subjects, their odd habits and tendencies, excusing them or incriminating them according to the role we’ve assigned them in our respective stories. Our heads are nearly touching. Our shoulders have adopted the same angle of inclination. We are the perfect accomplices of the epoch we are trying to reconstruct. We are the passionate lovers of the characters we are creating.]

Of course, it is only the novelist who sees their two projects this way, as she readily embraces the idea that history and fiction need not be opposed. Several weeks after their encounter, when she calls back to the brokerage firm to verify certain details of the office décor and learns that she has misremembered almost every one, she finds this wonderfully liberating: “Puisque les sens et la mémoire déforment à ce point le réel, je peux invoquer le passé en toute tranquillité” [Since the senses and memory deform the real to this degree, I can invoke the past with complete peace of mind] (mt 250). Her encounter with the historian has served to confirm her belief in the subjective and imaginative dimensions of history. She recognizes that history, memory, and imagination are always sharing the past and that: “L’Histoire avec un grand H, c’était avant tout un genre littéraire doté d’un style, de règles, de procédés. C’était, de toutes les histoires possibles, celle que l’on choisissait à des fins qui ne se révélaient que plus tard” [History with a capital H was above all a literary genre with a style, rules, procedures. It was, of all the possible stories, the one that was chosen for purposes that were only later revealed] (mt 250).

re-counting our losses holes. there were holes in the story you had inherited. Daphne Marlatt81

In 1982 Le Collectif Clio (self-described as “four women historians who have tried to tell history in a different way”) published L’Histoire des femmes au Québec depuis quatre siècles.82 Their project involved challenging the very definition of “history”: “None of us was willing to let

20

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

the history of men and a few illustrious women be passed off as the collective history of a whole population.”83 The Clio Collective’s work illuminated the fact that History’s definition inevitably determines its content. Indeed, the project of the Clio Collective historians was a clear response to the self-perpetuating cycle whereby restrictive definitions of history constitute limits to the collective memory that in turn shape what history is and does. By determining not only what goes into archives and museums, but even what is generally considered memorable, limited and limiting definitions of history produce an impoverished cultural legacy that can only leave future generations at a loss. Many stories outside of the scope of history go untold and unheard. As the Clio historians noted, “In spite of recent efforts by historians to compile a history of these anonymous people, there are still large gaps in our collective memory, especially regarding women.”84 Margaret Atwood was similarly frustrated in her attempts to uncover the story of Grace Marks: “History is more than willing to tell you who won the Battle of Trafalgar and which world leader signed this or that treaty, but it is frequently reluctant about the now-obscure details of daily life. Nobody wrote these things down, because everybody knew them, and considered them too mundane and unimportant to record” (isag 32, emphasis added). Of course, as the Clio history and Atwood’s Alias Grace both make amply evident, it is precisely in the “details of daily life” that one may find women’s stories. When these details are undocumented, one must somehow attempt to read in their absence the stories they might have told. Noting that her foremothers’ stories are missing in officially recorded histories, the narrator in La Maison Trestler expresses her personal sense of loss: “Mon premier aïeul repoussa Phipps à Rivière-Ouelle avec ses trois fils en 1691, mais j’ai perdu la trace de ses filles nées d’une Fille du Roy” [My first ancestor drove back Phipps at Rivière-Ouelle with his three sons in 1691, but I’ve lost track of his daughters, who were born to one of the Filles du Roi] (mt 70, italics in the original, emphasis added). There is no continuous thread to follow and so both story and history have to be reconstructed across the gaps. We have already seen in this novel how the narrator’s incursions into the archives – catalysed by desire and imagination – stage diachronic encounters and identifications that allow for a narration of the past which may begin to heal the ruptures in women’s history. But there are also moments when the narrator is able to trace her historical protagonist into the present through a recognition of how a

Surviving the Century

21

contemporary story of daily life repeats and continues an earlier one. The most striking occurrence of this is the moment when the narrator looks at Éva, the woman who is currently residing in the Trestler house, and realizes: “Les rides naissantes d’Éva, sa réserve et sa discrétion – ni fard, ni bagues, ni breloques – , m’en apprennent autant sur Catherine Trestler et la vie de cette maison que les papiers notariés du père” [Eva’s emerging wrinkles, her reserve and her discretion – no makeup, no rings, no bangles – teach me more about Catherine Trestler and the life of this house than the father’s notarized papers] (mt 110). The narrator then goes on to articulate how what she calls “women’s intimate geography” offers access to another side of history: [Le] corps tranquille [d’Éva], ravagé par la bronchite et les insomnies, dénonce l’imposture du spectaculaire. Elle sait que la banalité est le premier refuge de l’essentiel, et c’est le partage de cette évidence qui me la rend proche. Le bureau de poste, le courrier, la cuisine, la table, le lit. Je connais cette géographie intime des femmes. Cet envers de l’histoire officielle où s’affichent des dates, des guerres, des trafics de territoire, la prétention de régir le monde, l’incapacité d’en prévoir le déclin ou la chute. (mt 110) [Eva’s calm body, ravaged by bronchitis and insomnia, denounces the imposture of the spectacular. She knows that banality is where the essential mainly resides and our sharing of this fact brings her close to me. The post office, the mail, the kitchen, the table, the bed. I know this intimate geography of women. This other side of the official history with its display of dates, wars, territorial trafficking, the pretension of ruling the world, the incapacity of foreseeing its decline or fall.]

In Ana Historic, the domestic space of women’s “intimate geography,” imagined as women’s shared, private space, also becomes the scene of women’s writing. The novel opens with the female narrator’s whispered call into the dark. She is lying in bed beside her sleeping husband: “Who’s There? she was whispering. knock knock. in the dark. only it wasn’t dark had woken her to her solitude, conscious alone in the night of his snoring … he was dreaming without her in some place she had no access to … it was the sound of her own voice had woken her, heard like an echo asking, who’s there?” Awakened not by the imagined knocking but by her own voice and question, the woman is, in her solitude, both speaker and listener. But this is not the closed circle of an interior monologue: her question “Who’s

22

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

there?” forcefully opens up the space around her. Her own identity and voice are revealed to be inextricably tied to the connections she makes beyond her self. Furthermore, her question is both referentially and emotionally polysemic. The echoing “who’s there?” of the novel’s opening at first conjures up childhood fears of who might be there – the menacing stranger hiding in the dark – and who might not – the mother who teases her tardy two-year-old by murmuring “your Mummy’s gone.” But the narrator’s whispered call ultimately expresses her present feeling of abandonment following her mother’s suicide. It is the mother’s final and definitive absence that has awakened the narrator’s need to go searching for the missing, to speak into the darkness and emptiness in the hope of hearing an answering voice. The absent mother both interrupts the story (“and now you’re dead, Ina, the story has abandoned me. I can’t seem to stay on track, nor can my sentence” [ah 17]) and acts as its catalyst (“I want to talk to you … I want to say something” [ah 18]). Addressing Ina, Annie refuses to let her mother be gone. Desire conjures up the listening other, and then imagination and memory jumpstart the stalled story: “I-na, I-no-longer, I can’t turn you into a story. there is this absence here, where the words stop. (and then I remember –” (ah 11). But memory reaches back beyond the missing mother to earlier generations of women whose stories were untold. History is the ongoing story of missing mothers. And so memory, desire, and imagination weave together the threads of Annie’s narration as her telling moves among three intimately connected stories: her own, her mother Ina’s, and that of Ana Richards, a nineteenth-century woman whose trace she has uncovered in the Vancouver city archives. The women’s names inscribe their overlapping identities and at times their stories blend into one another, but the contrasts among them are equally significant. Annie’s fiction opens up a space in which both of the other women are recognized as writers incapable of telling the full stories that need to be told. Annie recalls her mother’s scribbled writings, hidden under the bed, as essentially insignificant “family stories for The Reader’s Digest” written “in a language that was not [hers]” (ah 20, 133). And although she finds the journal writings of Mrs Richards to be “writing with a touch of the sublime,” she is also aware of how much is missing from these accounts: “why she had to erase so much is never given” (ah 20, 30).85 It takes Annie’s own narration to realize the other women’s stories. She thus stages the scene of writing with and for both of the others, noting

Surviving the Century

23

that the few details of Mrs. Richards’s life to be found in the historical records do not yet tell the story: these are not facts but skeletal bones of a suppressed body the story is. there is a story here, Ina, I keep trying to get to. it begins: … At the other end of a square of light cast on the dark outside, unknown trees, sawdust and stump debris, a woman was sitting at an oilcloth-covered table … sitting and writing in that journal of hers … (ah 29–30, first ellipses in original)

Annie imagines this initial scene of writing and in the pages that follow she enters that imagined space and begins to inhabit – in order to tell – the other woman’s story. So she moves from Ana’s hand holding the pen to her own: and so she began, ‘a woman sitting at her kitchen table writing,’ as if her hand holding the pen could embody the very feel of a life. as if she could reach out and touch her … that curve of a shoulder, upper arm, wrist at another table in a different kind of light … (ah 45)

In this intimate encounter, Annie both reads and invents Ana’s story: I lean over her shoulder as she tries, as she doubts: why write at all? … she is writing her desire to be, in the present tense, retrieved from silence … each evening she enters her being, nameless, in the book she is writing against her absence. (ah 46, 47)

The book that Annie imagines Ana writing “against her absence” lies at the heart of the book that Annie is writing against her own absence. The silences and absences that Annie uncovers in the archives become her raw material in a history-making process that is creative and collaborative. Writing a woman’s life means filling in the holes in the historical record. Who’s there? Through empathic identification, Annie helps Mrs Richards find a first name, a story, and a voice. Like La Maison Trestler, Ana Historic revolves around the question of women’s place in history. The very title of Marlatt’s novel plays with the idea of a woman’s story existing beyond or even against the clearly defined domain of the Historic. The telling of Ana’s story occurs in the tension between “Ana Historic” and “an ahistoric.”86 Thus we find in this novel a scene very similar to the encounter between novelist and historian in La Maison Trestler. Annie has been a supportive wife and

24

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

diligent research assistant for her husband, Richard, a history professor. But as she grows less interested in his work and more involved in her own, she imagines their confrontation in telling terms: but what are you doing? I can imagine Richard saying … this doesn’t go anywhere, you’re just circling around the same idea – and all these bits and pieces thrown in – that’s not how to use quotations. irritated because I can’t explain myself. just scribbling, I’ll say … but this is nothing, I imagine him saying. meaning unreadable. because this nothing is a place he doesn’t recognize, cut loose from history and its relentless progress towards some end. this is undefined territory, unaccountable. and so on edge. (ah 81)

From Richard’s point of view, Annie’s project is incomprehensible. She is muddling around outside the territory of history and there is no accounting for this. Directionless and undefined, her work is therefore nothing – nothing he can recognize or appreciate. Annie sees herself seen by her historian husband as hopelessly marginal and precariously unbalanced. But Annie is not trying to account for herself to Richard; her work is addressed to the missing women (Ana and Ina) who are versions of herself. She is speaking of and to the historical marginalization and negation of women’s experiences.87 Her opposition to Richard’s kind of history is evident in the way in which the various archival documents scattered through her text are made to reveal what they have overlooked. Annie does not want to “contribut[e] to the Big Book”; she wants “to tell [her] own story … and yours. ours” (ah 79). And this means telling the story of what is missing. So what is missing? Historiographic fictions like Les Fous de Bassan, Alias Grace, La Maison Trestler, and Ana Historic move into undefined territory to recount the losses, secrets, absences, and gaps in women’s stories. Sometimes, as in Alias Grace, what is missing is the larger, more nuanced picture that emerges when one attends to overlooked or discounted historical details. A woman’s “history” raises the possibility of different readings of History’s established stories. Sometimes, as we find in Les Fous de Bassan, La Maison Trestler, and Ana Historic, what is missing is the truth about endemic violence against women: unspeakable stories of rape, incest, and murder.88 And often

Surviving the Century

25

these missing stories must be traced through a legacy of shame and fear that forecloses their telling. The narrator in Ana Historic describes this silencing process: “the mothers, the inheritance of the mothers. you taught me a lot. you taught me the uneasy hole in myself and how to cover it up” (ah 60). But the missing story may also be that of women’s power, often associated with the mysteries of the female body and especially with menstruation, childbirth, and women’s desire. The recuperation of women’s bodily experiences – previously either unrepresented or treated obliquely as dirty or unseemly in most literary contexts – is evident in Ana Historic in the move from the mother’s shame for “the body that betrays the self. bleeding, leaking, growing lumps, getting pregnant, having abortions and miscarriages” (ah 89) to the daughter’s celebration of menstruation: “the mark of myself, my inscription in blood … the words that flow out from within … the words of an interior history … that erupts like a spring, like a wellspring of being, well-being inside …” (ah 90, final ellipses in original). In similar fashion, scenes of childbirth as an empowering matrifocal experience occupy a central place in several of these narratives. As Adrienne Rich pointed out in Of Woman Born, the rare portrayals of childbirth in Western literature prior to the women’s movement of the 1970s tended to focus on horrifying descriptions of excruciating pain, “purposive” suffering, and grim outcomes.89 The second-wave feminist movement brought about an admittedly not uncontested reconsideration of childbearing as an example of (and metaphor for) women’s creativity and agency.90 In La Maison Trestler pregnancy and childbirth are depicted as crucial experiences that the narrator and her historical protagonist share as women. Childbearing represents an intimate body of knowledge and experience that connects women across space and through time. The narrator in Ouellette-Michalska’s novel, describing her protagonist’s pregnancy, knows that experience first-hand: Je connais cette jouissance de Catherine. J’ai déjà connu cette fête, aspirée par le ventre, créée par lui … Le monde passait par ce noyau qui me permettait d’éprouver ma puissance de femme. (mt 213–4) [I know Catherine’s pleasure in this. I have already known this celebration, breathed in, and created, by the belly … The world was passing through this nucleus that let me experience my woman’s power.]

26

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

When Catherine begins to go into labour, her experience is described as one that her husband cannot share: “Bientôt, il ne pourra plus la suivre dans la voie où elle s’est engagée. Il suspend son geste. Le mystère de la vie le confond” [Soon he will no longer be able to follow her along the path she’s started down. He interrupts his gesture. The mystery of life confounds him] (mt 233). But the female narrator, separated from her protagonist by nearly two hundred years, does know, and she narrates the other woman’s experience through and in relation to her own. Furthermore, her story both tells and refuses to tell what has been missing. The questions with which she opens her first-person account acknowledge the inevitable gaps in this story, gaps that her own narration will carry forward not as lack but as something that powerfully exceeds narrative containment: “A-t-on tout dit de la naissance? Tout écrit de ce qui ne peut s’écrire?” [Has everything been said about birth? Everything written about that which can’t be written?] (mt 234). The two birth stories coincide in the narration. After the detailed first-person account of the narrator’s labour and delivery of her son, we read: “Au même instant, dans une autre chambre, la sage-femme tamponne avec un linge les cuisses ouvertes de Catherine” [At the same instant, in another room, the midwife dabs at Catherine’s open thighs with a cloth] (mt 237). Once again the narrator and Catherine meet between the sheets, in the flesh, to begin to tell a missing chapter of women’s history. The climactic scene of Jeannie Alexander’s birthing in Ana Historic is similarly depicted as emblematic of women’s singular and collective potential to generate both life and meaning. The birthing room is evoked as women’s shared, private space in which something powerful, beautiful, and mysterious happens. Deeply moved by the events taking place in that room, Ana looks at the birthing woman supported by her women friends and knows “she was with women doing women’s work … It was a rite, an ancient place she had been admitted to, this crossing over into life” (ah 123). Ana Historic makes it very clear that this scene has been missing in the stories and histories. The narration of Jeannie’s labour is juxtaposed with the description of a boat race from a newspaper article in the archives. The comparison of these two “historical” events and accounts is telling. In the boat race, the article explains, the “Pearl” lost to the “Annie Fraser” because, “Well she came in second, and was consequently beaten; while the “Annie Fraser” came in first, and consequently won” (ah 124).

Surviving the Century

27

An explicit comparison had already been made in the text between “the ships men ride into the pages of history. the winning names [and] the nameless women who are vessels of their destiny” (ah 121). The story of Jeannie Alexander’s birthing thus extends this comparison, contrasting the narrated outcome of the boat race (an analysis and account which rely on “establish[ing] rule and precedent” and the assumption “that worth be established by competition” [ah 123]) with the narration of Jeannie’s labouring (an account that emphasizes circularity over linearity and collaboration over competition): woman a rhythm in touch with her body its tides coming in not first nor last nor lost she circles back on herself repeats her breathing out and in two heartbeats here not winning or losing labouring into the manifest. (ah 125)

The birthing process is about working with not against. And the birth itself is described in terms that make it clear that this is a hole that will tell its own story. Ana caught a glimpse of dark almost purple flesh and stood up, shocked. How dark it looked, an angry powerful o, stretched, stretched, hair springing black above. This was Jeannie, this was something else not Jeannie, not anyone, this was a mouth working its own inarticulate urge, opening deep – (ah 125)

Inscribed metaphorically as a kind of speaking in both Annie’s narration of the event and Ana’s (within quotation marks), the birth becomes a performance of the telling of its own story in its own language: Ana was saying Push, even as she caught a glimpse of what she almost failed to recognize: a massive syllable of slippery flesh slide out the open mouth … “What did I expect? This secret space between our limbs we keep so hidden – is yet so, what? What words are there? If it could speak! – As indeed it did: it spoke the babe, and then the afterbirth, a bleeding mass of meat.” (ah 126)

Thus, the telling of Jeannie Alexander’s birth story does more than just fill in a historical gap. It speaks directly of and to the contemporary narrator’s need to realize – through shared experience and through her account of that experience – the presence of what has been missing: “mouth speaking flesh. she touches it to make it tell her present in this other language so difficult to translate. the difference” (ah 126, emphasis added).

28

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

As women’s “difference” stands for what has been missing, we also find stories of women’s power associated with sexuality, physical pleasure, and desire. The drama that sets Catherine in opposition to her father in La Maison Trestler stages the confrontation between the father’s law and a daughter’s desire.91 Catherine’s decision to marry Éléazar Hayst in defiance of paternal interdiction is based upon her determination to acknowledge and attend to her own wants. She imagines challenging her father: “Car j’irai jusqu’au bout de mon désir, quelle que soit votre décision” [For I will follow through on my desire, no matter what you decide] (mt 173). Deeming that she has a right to happiness, joy, and pleasure, she will love and she will marry whom she pleases.92 Furthermore, embracing her own desire clarifies her vision of what has been left out of men’s visions of history. As she sits alone in her father’s study, she reflects on his view of political life, a world in which women have no role: “Ils ne savent pas que moi, et beaucoup d’autres femmes, brûlons d’un feu qui pourrait couvrir plusieurs chapitres de leurs livres” [They don’t know that I, and a lot of other women, are burning with a fire that could cover many chapters of their books] (mt 177). When she rises to leave the room, she has determined to act on her desire: “Je n’ai plus rien à faire dans cette pièce. L’histoire qu’on y raconte ne me concerne pas. Je dois rejoindre Éléazar et le convaincre de faire vite” [I have nothing more to do in this room. The history/story that they’re telling here doesn’t concern me. I must get back to Éléazar and convince him to act quickly] (mt 177). It is Catherine’s desire and passion that give her the power to act and that give her a voice. As she urges Éléazar to come to her in her bedroom, she recognizes the forces that have been unleashed in her: “il est trop tard pour renoncer à cette folie qui court, superbe, du ventre à la bouche” [it is too late to renounce this madness that rushes, superb, from belly to mouth] (mt 179). Another aspect of women’s sexuality that has been strikingly absent from the histories is women’s desire for other women.93 Indeed, the unprecedented power and subversive potential of this missing story – heralded in Virginia Woolf’s famous declaration, in A Room of One’s Own, that “Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature”94 – have given it a central place in many twentieth-century feminist theories.95 One reason for this is that, as many lesbian feminist theorists have insisted in one way or another, the perspective of lesbian desire is not a variation on or an addendum to the familiar patriarchal, heterosexual script; it tells a completely different story, one

Surviving the Century

29

that signifies beyond existing structures of meaning and interpretation. As Miléna Santoro puts it in her discussion of Nicole Brossard’s L’Amèr: “[Lesbian desire] is a desire that cannot but remain in excess, as a supplement to the teleological imperative of desire within the patriarchy, and thus uncontrolled and uncontrollable according to its laws.”96 Thus, among the many losses recounted and reclaimed in late twentieth-century fictions by women, we begin to find lesbian desire. In Ana Historic the narrator at one point remarks that she is no longer interested in “doing [her] part looking for missing pieces. at least not missing facts. not when there are missing persons in all this rubble” (ah 134). The most immediate reference here is to Ina, the lost mother, and by extension to all of the mothers lost in and to history. But one of the other missing persons that Ana Historic unearths is the lesbian. It is Annie’s encounter with Zoe, “this stranger [she] happen[s] to meet in the archives” (ah 59), that opens her eyes to the significance of her writing project. It is Zoe who urges Annie to write the absences, the gaps, the ellipses, “the words of an interior history that doesn’t include …” (ah 90, ellipses in the original). It is Zoe who keeps reminding Annie that writing history is not just about the past but also about the present and the future: “the real history of women, Zoe says, is unwritten because it runs through our bodies: we give birth to each other … it’s women imagining all that women could be that brings us into the world” (ah 131).97 And so it is Zoe who asks, in the passage that follows Annie’s remark about missing persons, “but what about Birdie Stewart?” (ah 134). Annie and Zoe have been puzzling over the holes in Ana’s story and Zoe brings up Birdie, an independent and enterprising woman referred to earlier in the text as “Vancouver’s first madam” (ah 47). When Zoe evokes a “shocking” scene between the two women in a room in Vancouver’s Gastown, she is recalling an earlier conversation between her and Annie about two different possible endings for Ana’s story. In the scenario suggested by the scant documentation in the archives, Mrs Richards “lived in a little three-room cottage back of the Hastings Sawmill schoolhouse, and afterwards married Ben Springer,” but in an imagined alternative version, Mrs Richards “gave piano lessons in her rooms in Gastown” and was “a secret friend perhaps to Birdie Stewart” (ah 106, 108). This was imagining the unimaginable. In that first imagined scene of Ana with Birdie, the narrator had spoken to and for Ana: “you have caught yourself turning in Birdie’s eyes … you had not imagined – this as history.

30

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

unwritten” (ah 109). Zoe’s role in empowering Annie to imagine “this” is clear. When Zoe first suggested a lesbian relationship between Ana and Birdie, Annie protested: “this is a monstrous leap of imagination” (ah 135). But Annie appears to have heeded Zoe’s response – “so be monstrous then” – as the narrative takes precisely that monstrous leap only a few pages later. In a short section titled “Not a Bad End,” we find Ana sitting in Birdie’s room in Gastown. The climax of their imagined encounter is a scene of reciprocal desire and mutual recognition. Significantly, this scene also tells the story of its own imagination and inscription, its figurative language suggesting the importance of the experience’s “legibility”: “You fear what you want.” Birdie’s hand cups her chin and turns it gently towards her, “am I right, love?” Lifting her eyes in a sudden rush of desire she reads likewise in Birdie’s face, a sudden rush of relief – “You see it written across my face,” she admits. (ah 139, emphasis added)

A woman’s desire for another woman becomes, in this recounted episode, a meaningful story. Its significance lies not merely in the fact of Annie’s having “imagined [her] way into what [Ana] really wants” (ah 140). Imagining Ana’s desire allows Annie to begin to imagine her own. Looking back into the past through the lens of what is conceivable in the contemporary text, Annie can imagine both a re-vision of that past and a different story in the continually unfolding present. In the final pages of Marlatt’s novel, Annie breaks into the story and then breaks out of it. Having first recognized her place in the narrative as not safely parenthetical but intimately involved, she then refuses to be contained by it, to find herself, like her mother before her, “flattened by destiny, caught between the covers of a book” (ah 150). She “break[s] the parentheses” and then refuses to let any ending close them around her again. Noting that “the story is ‘only a story’ insofar as it ends … in life we go on” (ah 150), she takes a bold leap into the unknown: she goes to Zoe’s house, where she steps into the story of her own desire. In answer to the text’s initial question – “who’s there?” – she now calls herself Annie Torrent, naming and claiming her independence and her passion. Thus framed and unframed, the scene of lesbian lovemaking in the novel’s final pages resists containment, encompassing all of the possibilities for intimate connection, presence, and meaning imaginable between A (Ana/Annie) and Z

Surviving the Century

31

(Zoe). Between A and Z and then beyond. The final paragraph of the novel leaves names and characters behind. In its play of pronouns, in its fluid imagery associating sex, birthing, writing, and reading, the final passage is insistently open, evoking the intimate encounter of women with women as the imagination of the future: we give place, giving words, giving birth, to each other – she and me. you. hot skin writing skin. fluid edge, wick, wick. she draws me out. you she breathes, is where we meet. breeze from the window reaching you now, trees out there, streets you might walk down, will, soon. it isn’t dark but the luxury of being has woken you, the reach of your desire, reading us into the page ahead. (ah 153)98

As we have seen, the historiographic fictions of Hébert, Atwood, Ouellette-Michalska, and Marlatt all highlight the telling interplay of public and private lives and stories, written and oral documentation, linear and circular and multi-dimensional narratives, subjectivity and objectivity, remembered and imagined outcomes. Furthermore, one discerns in all of these works a motivation to remember and recount, in order to carry our losses forward in memory. These fictions suggest that telling the story of what is lost or missing is integral to the survival process, a crucial way of making connections that help us to withstand our losses. Moving into and through the language of grief and the work of mourning, we may begin to imagine beyond those losses and so move creatively and collectively ahead into the future where, as Terry Tempest Williams so eloquently puts it, “grief dares us to love once more.”99

1

The Language of Grief [Writing] replaces the lost object it cannot represent with the very language of its grief. Richard Stamelman1

th e e n t i r e e n i g m a Ni l’amour, aussi grand fût-il, ni l’art – ni le beau, ni le vrai – ne seront d’aucun secours. Et si quelque lumière vient, parfois, si quelque consolation ou même quelque jouissance ou plaisir – et même le bonheur! – l’énigme restera entière: insurpassable, irréconciliable (avec la vie), insurmontable. (vm 121) [Neither love, however great it might be, nor art – not the beautiful, not the true – will be of any help. And if some light comes, sometimes, if some consolation or even some pleasure or enjoyment – even happiness! – the enigma will remain entire: unsurpassable, irreconcilable (with life), insurmountable.]

These lines occur in an epigraph to the section of Madeleine Gagnon’s novel Le Vent majeur that bears the title “C’est quoi, la mort?” [What is death?]. As Gagnon’s protagonist so succinctly puts it elsewhere in the novel, the enigma of death is such that “aucun mot, jamais et en aucune langue, ne donnera la mesure de la mort et du deuil” [no word, ever, in any language, will give the measure of death and bereavement] (vm 182–3). Death is “irreconcilable with life” and there is no language that can touch it. The impossibility of language – and particularly of writing – in the face of death is a frequent refrain in writings of and about mourning.

The Language of Grief

33

The opening line of Nicole Brossard’s Domaine d’écriture speaks of the effect of her father’s death on her writing: “Rien ne pouvait plus s’écrire” [Nothing could be written anymore].2 In Ma Mère et Gainsbourg, Diane-Monique Daviau observes about the aftermath of her mother’s death: “c’est toute l’écriture qui s’est refusée” [It is all writing that refused itself] (mmg 52). And in Bloodroot: Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss, Betsy Warland inscribes the following words in the middle of a blank page: “There are no words for where my mother went” (br 47). As Warland’s title suggests, certain losses cannot be told; one can only hope, later, to trace (that is, to pursue and to outline) their “untelling.” After her mother’s death, Madeleine Gagnon experienced the same bankruptcy of language. “Ma mère est morte,” she wrote, “Tous les récits se sont arrêtés” [My mother died and all telling stopped] (ds 98). In Le Deuil du soleil, Gagnon also cites a passage from Marguerite Duras’s La Mer écrite3: “‘La première visite aux tombes. On regarde, on lit les noms, l’âge du mort, l’ombre des croix dans l’eau du fleuve. Puis on parle de la mort. Puis on se tait. Que feriez-vous d’autre, vous?’” [“The first visit to the graves. One looks, one reads the names, the age of the person who died, the shadow of the crosses in the water of the river. Then one speaks of death. Then one is silent. What else would you do?”] (ds 72). Duras here presents the failure of language in the face of death as a natural and common experience. The need to speak of death is strong and immediate, but then one falls silent. What else would you do? Duras asks, and the challenge of that question haunts Gagnon’s text.4 On a number of occasions, Gagnon pauses in the midst of her writing to wonder how, and why, to write “cette épouvantable, mystérieuse – et, à plusieurs égards, absurde – réalité de la mort” [that dreadful, mysterious – and in many ways absurd – reality of death] (ds 150). Describing her mother’s slow and painful dying, for instance, she first speaks and then interrupts herself with a question: L’agonie est toujours pénible, mais la lucidité, jusqu’à la fin conservée, et la douleur physique extrême ont ajouté l’intolérable au seuil tragique sur lequel elle se tint de longs jours, désemparée. Comment écrire cela et pourquoi? (ds 99) [Death is always hard, but the lucidity, maintained right until the end, and the extreme physical suffering added intolerability to the tragic threshold on which she stood helplessly for many long days. How is it possible to write that? Why write that?]

34

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

The intolerability of which she writes suddenly becomes the intolerability and pointlessness of writing it. But the crisis of writing occurs not only in response to the unbearable experience and memory of suffering and death. Even when Gagnon is engaged in a kind of griefwriting that brings solace, addressing herself directly to the mother who has died – and finding, like her protagonist Joseph in Le Vent majeur, that “seuls les mots [l]’apaisent” [only words soothe her] (vm 133), the intolerable reality of her loss may nevertheless intrude at any moment and call that writing into question. In the midst of the chapter addressed and dedicated to her mother, she is silenced by doubts: Si je n’ai pas écrit hier, c’était à cause … des doutes. Pourquoi écrire? Pourquoi écrire ceci? Pourquoi poursuivre cette adresse à toi, alors que je te sais irrémédiablement partie, sans oreilles pour m’entendre et sans bouche pour me répondre? (ds 125) [If I didn’t write yesterday it was because … of doubts. Why write? Why write this? Why persist in addressing you, when I know that you are irreparably gone, without ears to hear me or mouth to answer me?]

The agonizing paradox of mourning is contained in this cry: Why? Why am I writing this? Why do I persist in speaking to you when I know you are no longer there to hear me? Why do I persist in addressing even these unanswerable questions to you now? The speaker, the writer, when confronted with the unarticulable reality of death and the irremediable absence of the Other, is silenced. As Duras said: “Que feriez-vous d’autre, vous?” But for both Duras and Gagnon that silence is in turn contained in a language that paradoxically both conserves it and breaks it. Recounting how she and a woman friend visited the cimetière Montparnasse, Gagnon describes how they silently placed flowers on Duras’s tomb and walked quietly to the place where Baudelaire was buried. Describing this scene, she once again identifies the enigma of mourning: “Non, rien d’autre à faire que se taire et pourtant ça s’écrit” [No, there’s nothing else to do but be silent and yet that is written] (ds 72). Even as Gagnon recognizes that language cannot give the measure of, cannot make sense of, the deaths that she survives and the loss and absence that are their traces, she writes. Many psychologists, philosophers, and literary critics have written on the literature of grief. Psychologist John Archer suggests that “the experience of bereavement generates a need to communicate thoughts

The Language of Grief

35

and feelings to others, to review past events and above all to make these events part of a meaningful pattern.”5 Critic Richard Stamelman similarly explains the literary reaction to grief as an attempt to find or make meaning in the place of loss: “For to be human is to know loss and to struggle with it. Yet we do more than confront and wrestle with loss. We also struggle to undo it, to reverse its actions, to find ways around it. We fill the hole that it opens in our lives with something meaningful, as if this tear in the fabric of human existence could ever be completely repaired.”6 Stamelman clearly articulates here the paradox inherent in writing one’s grief: one’s attempt to produce something meaningful from loss can never make sense of that loss, will never undo that loss. As he says, “to make what is lost re-present itself endowed with the immediacy and fullness that it once possessed is beyond the powers of imagination.”7 And yet, one writes. As both Archer and Stamelman suggest, why one writes has something to do with meaning (though as Stamelman also makes clear, one cannot write the meaning of one’s loss or adequately represent “the lost plenitude of an absent being”8). One writes because one’s grief has meaning. Stamelman’s description of how grief becomes a language is eloquent: “Loss may be beyond telling in that the object of loss cannot be fully represented; but grief for that loss is its sign. Emptiness becomes significant … While loss may be felt as beyond telling, grief is not. It is the way that loss speaks.”9 When the griever moves from the “telling silences” of “a grief too large for words”10 to the speaking or writing of loss, this is because, as Stamelman puts it: “Death is a void out of which language – the language that consoles, the language that offers catharsis, the language that strives to compensate, the language that desires, the language that seeks meaning – emerges.”11 Stamelman and Gagnon and Duras all seem to be saying the same thing: to be human is to know loss and to know loss, as a human, is to (need to) speak of it. Que feriez-vous d’autre, vous? To speak of it, and then perhaps to write of it. In the opening section of Le Deuil du soleil, which she calls “Moraisons,” Gagnon examines the paradoxical relationship between grieving and writing. Here she describes her writing project as imposed and directed by death itself: “Je l’écoute [la mort] et la regarde, et dois écrire ce qu’elle me dicte” [I listen to it [death] and watch it, and must write what it dictates to me] (ds 11).12 Death demands silence of her, she says, so that she may attend to what death is saying to her and what she in turn will translate onto the page.

36

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

It might at first seem contradictory to describe death as wholly irreconcilable with life and utterly resistant to articulation in language and then to imagine it speaking to and through the poet. But this is precisely what Gagnon does. In fact, she addresses the apparent contradiction by compounding it, making an explicit connection between the enigma of death and two other enigmas, that of love and that of poetry. “Aucun des termes de cette trinité, poésie-amour-mort,” she writes, “ne peut bien se connaître sans le secours des deux autres” [None of the terms of that trinity, poetry-love-death, can be known without the aid of the other two] (ds 12). Gagnon refers to the making of poetry, the act of love, and the actuality of death as “trois évidences énigmatiques que l’écriture seule pour moi éclaire” [three enigmatic facts that only writing sheds light on for me] (ds 12). These three obvious and enigmatic facts, Gagnon suggests, have in common their incontrovertible presence, their existence in “un présent neutre … qui n’a rien à dire, jamais, puisqu’il ne pense pas l’avant, ne peut non plus prévoir l’après” [a neutral present … that has nothing to say, ever, since it neither conceives of what precedes, nor can foresee what follows] (ds 40). Only writing can give these three enigmas voice: Le seul présent absolu c’est celui de la mort qui, Elle, ne passe pas ni n’advient: Elle est. Le seul présent absolu, c’est aussi celui de l’amour et du poème. Ce sont des actes devant lesquels les mots chutent. Seule l’écriture en acte peut les faire parler. (ds 40) [The one absolute present is that of death, which neither passes on nor comes into being: It is. The one absolute present is also that of love and of the poem. These are acts before which words fall silent. Only the act of writing can make them speak.]

For Gagnon, writing is “une solitude. Intégrale. Comme la mort” [a solitude. Whole. Like death] (ds 39), but this deathlike solitude is strangely one into which and through which death does speak. And given a voice, the present of death is no longer whole and absolute, for that voice speaks also of the time that follows, the time of survival, the time of mourning. Writing and grieving may be like death, but they are not death. To grieve and to write, one goes on living.13 On several occasions in Le Deuil du soleil, Gagnon refers to a line of Paul Valéry’s that may shed some light on her engagement in and dedication to a writing of grief. Valéry wrote: “Sachons rendre

The Language of Grief

37

l’énigme à l’énigme” [Let’s learn to give the enigma back to the enigma].14 The initial refusal of writing, the impossibility of touching the enigma of a death personally encountered eventually gives way to the necessity of language – not to explain, nor to attempt to surpass or reconcile, but simply to respond, to meet the insurmountable and irreconcilable enigma of death with the enigma of love. And to let that love express its loss through the enigma of writing.

motherloss For the first time, I meet this season without a mother. (br 120)

Generations of women writers have written eloquently, angrily, philosophically, sorrowfully, in fiction and in memoirs, in poetry and in essays, about the deaths of their mothers. One thinks, perhaps in particular, of Colette (in Sido) and Simone de Beauvoir (Une Mort très douce), but also of numerous contemporary responses to this incomparable loss, such as those of Annie Ernaux (Une Femme and Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit), Betsy Warland, and Madeleine Gagnon. The singular impact in women’s lives of the death of the mother is reflected in works like Helen Vozenilek’s 1992 anthology, Loss of the Ground-Note: Women Writing about the Loss of their Mothers, and Hope Edelman’s 1994 bestseller, Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss.15 The loss of the mother certainly figures importantly in many of the fictional works that are the object of the present study. The mother’s disappearance is central in Obasan and there are key motherlosses as well in Ana Historic, La Maison Trestler, La Memoria, Fugitive Pieces, L’Ange de la solitude, and Baroque d’aube. This chapter will focus, however, on works in which the authors are writing semi-autobiographically about their own personal losses: Gagnon’s Le Deuil du soleil, Amyot’s Je t’écrirai encore demain, Daviau’s Ma Mère et Gainsbourg, and Warland’s Bloodroot.16 In each of these texts, as we shall see, the death of the mother occupies a privileged position. In my reading of these grief writings, I want to suggest that the language of grief for the death of the mother constitutes an “archaeology of the future” that involves digging into the place of unimaginable loss in order to uncover and imagine the possibility of surviving that loss. Writing the death of the mother occurs always at the juncture of beginning and ending, presence and absence, body and nobody.

38

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

Daviau describes the uniquely ravaging effect of the mother’s death: Non seulement parce que la mère qu’on a ne peut mourir qu’une fois, mais surtout parce que cette mort-là, j’en suis convaincue, est la plus secouante, la plus dévastatrice de toutes, celle qui les contient toutes. (mmg 113, my emphasis) [Not only because the mother one has can only die once, but above all because that death, I am convinced, is the most distressing, the most devastating of all, the one that contains them all (all other deaths)].

Social scientist Lynn Davidman likewise describes motherlosses as “reverberating losses” that find their echoes in other losses throughout one’s life, and Louise Dupré refers to the loss of the mother as “le premier déracinement” [the first uprooting].17 In her article on Je t’écrirai encore demain, Dupré notes that even though Amyot’s book does not focus directly on the loss of the mother, references to the mother’s death, described as the earliest and most fundamental abandonment and referred to as “la catastrophe,” appear at a key point in the text, establishing it as the literal and figurative ground of all subsequent losses. At the same time, Dupré explains, writing her grief enables the narrator to “retrouver le maternel dans la langue: c’est à cette condition que la vie continue d’être possible malgré la mort, c’est à cette condition que se fait le deuil” [rediscover the maternal in language: this is what makes it possible for life to continue in spite of death, this is what makes grieving possible].18 The mother as the paradoxical site of both loss and consolation reappears in a key passage toward the end of Amyot’s text. Here the mother is first symbolically evoked through references to the sea (the familiar homophonic association of “mer” and “mère” in French reinforced by the “maternal” imagery used to describe the sea): Peut-être toute réponse vient-elle de la mer. Peut-être que la fin, comme en cela le commencement, appartient à la mer … Mais la mer, la mer je te dis. La mer. En toute incontenable beauté, sans cesse. Magnifique de fécondités outrancières. Généreuse … elle me vient en force, me gonfle et redescend, recommence plus forte, obscure, plus profonde, elle me prend au ventre … elle me fait marcher, marcher jusqu’à confondre le sable et l’eau en des mirages de premier jour, à jamais, je l’ai dans le sel de chacune de mes larmes, en abondance, dans les bras et elle me berce, berce, infiniment elle me berce … (jte 110–12) [Perhaps every answer comes from the sea. Perhaps the end, like the beginning, belongs to the sea … But the sea, the sea, I tell you. The sea. In wholly

The Language of Grief

39

uncontainable beauty, endless. Bursting with extravagant fecundity. Generous … She comes at me in force, fills me and then draws back, begins again stronger, obscure, deeper, she gets me right in the stomach … she makes me walk, walk until I confuse sand and water in mirages of the first day, forever, I have her in the salt of each of my tears, in abundance, in her arms, and she rocks me, rocks me, infinitely she rocks me …]

The sea is then explicitly and directly associated with the mother who is made metaphorically to figure the narrator’s experience of loss: “C’est le dernier jour, je la [la mer] quitterai demain, je le sais, comme un peu l’on porte sa mère dans la terre, avec au coeur la persistance rauque d’un grand appel de corbeau” [It is the last day, I will leave her [the sea] tomorrow, I know, somewhat as one bears one’s mother into the earth, with the coarse persistence of a crow’s great call in one’s heart”] (jte 112). It is not surprising that the mother’s death is such a singularly significant event. The mother is the first other, the one from whom one learns language. She is the first body and therefore initiates the first encounter with the possibility of mortality. She is the one from whom one first learns loss (as Freud’s pathology of melancholy insists).19 But she is also one’s companion through that first journey of survival since the original loss of the mother is mediated by one’s continuing – albeit changed – relation with her.20 Thus when the death of the mother comes, it is indeed, because it has already been, “le premier déracinement” [the first uprooting]. It furthermore seems clear that the bond between mother and child – and perhaps particularly between mother and daughter21 – is especially strongly defined by its physicality and that the mother’s death will therefore necessarily have a profound and uncanny effect on the child. As Warland notes, “She held us fast without pause for nine months” (br 173).22 Insofar as the child’s body holds the memory of that physical symbiosis, the death of the mother may be experienced almost as a phantom amputation. Warland’s description of watching her mother dying suggests that she is aware of losing some essential part of her own being and history: “My first home/(she housed me in her body)/being dismantled before my eyes” (br 77). In Bequest and Betrayal, Nancy K. Miller similarly insists upon the importance of the intimate physical bond between mother and daughter, noting that Adrienne Rich, in Of Woman Born, “maintains that … this ‘earliest enwrapment of one female body with another’ is the basis of a girl’s connection with the world.”23 Miller goes on to assert that “a daughter’s

40

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

deepest ideas about a mother’s body are inseparable from her ideas about herself. When as daughters we seek to create a portrait of our mothers, when we re-create our mothers’ physical presence in our lives, our own shadow falls on the picture we take.”24 The physicality of the mother-daughter connection figures importantly in the loss of the mother. Both Warland and Gagnon describe crucial moments (real or imagined) of physical closeness with their dying mothers in terms that explicitly recall the mother-infant bond. Warland describes the last time she held her mother’s hand: “How we began – sustenance flowing from my mother through the umbilical cord to me – was how we ended: sustenance spiriting from her arm to mine” (br 157). Gagnon describes a dream in which the journey of dying clearly mirrors the earlier journey of birth, as the daughter becomes mother to her dying mother: je te pris dans mes bras pour t’apaiser, te consoler … Je t’ai bercée comme toi tu avais su si bien le faire quand, enfants, nous étions malades … Te berçant, j’ai ressenti ce même bonheur viscéral maternel qui fut mien quand je berçais mes propres enfants. Tu étais si bien dans mes bras. (ds 131) [I took you in my arms to calm you, console you … I rocked you as you had known so well how to do when, as children, we were ill … Rocking you, I felt that same visceral maternal happiness that I had when I rocked my own children. You felt so good in my arms.]

Finally, Miller also reminds us that one’s relationships with one’s parents have profound implications for one’s own sense of identity and that therefore “the death of parents forces us to rethink our lives, to reread ourselves.”25 Much of the writing of motherloss is the writing of a son’s or daughter’s self, a narrative reconstruction of identity following the trauma of the loss of a parent.26 Given the particular intensity of the mother-daughter bond, and the widely theorized implications of that relationship for women’s identity construction, it is not surprising that women’s autobiographical writings should give a privileged place to daughters’ grief writings for their mothers’ deaths. But let us look more closely at what the loss of the mother means to the woman who writes. Warland puts it quite simply: “There is no story without mother” (br 184). Indeed, for the woman writer, the loss of the mother may mean the loss of all stories, the impossibility of imagining what could come after, the vacancy of all writing. But the woman who writes may come to realize that the corollary is also true:

The Language of Grief

41

that there is no mother without story. The only way perhaps to confront the enormity of the loss is, then, paradoxically, to tell the story of that loss, to dig into it, to give it voice. As Miller puts it: “A mother’s death may foreclose further twists of the plot that links generations of women. But the mother’s voice continues to reverberate in the daughter’s house of memory.”27 But why and how do these reverberating memories find voice in writing? It is worth recalling that the failure of language in the face of death is, as we earlier observed, a phenomenon frequently and paradoxically inscribed into grief writings. Such inscriptions are particularly common in writings about the death of the mother. Indeed, the written expression of grief in response to the uncircumventable loss of the mother is often presented precisely as deriving from and grounded in its own immediate impossibility. Again and again, what one reads about the death of the mother is how directly and unequivocally it stops writing, a correlation eloquently expressed in Gagnon’s juxtaposition of two simple declarative sentences: “Ma mère est morte le 30 décembre. Tous les récits se sont arrêtés” [My mother died on December 30. All stories stopped] (ds 98). Similarly, Daviau describes how her refusal to write this particular grief entailed her inability to write at all: [J]’ai entendu sans cesse le conseil suivant: écris. On voulait dire: écris làdessus. J’ai refusé. Écrire pour libérer, pour exorciser, non. Surtout pas ça. Ça, je me disais que c’était à moi comme rien ne m’avait encore appartenu dans ma vie. Je n’allais pas sortir ça de moi, m’en défaire, en somme, le donner quand c’était le seul lien qu’il me restait avec elle. J’ai refermé le bras sur mon fantôme et j’ai serré très fort. Alors, peu à peu, c’est toute l’écriture qui s’est refusée, l’écriture de tout, parce que ça et le reste faisaient partie d’un même tout. (mmg 51–2) [I kept hearing the following advice: Write. They meant: Write about it. I refused. To write to liberate, to exorcise, no. Above all not that. That, I told myself, was mine like nothing had ever belonged to me before in my life. I wasn’t going to let that out of me, separate myself from it, in short, give it over when it was the only link I still had with her. I closed my arms around my ghost and squeezed tight. Then little by little it was all writing that refused itself, writing about everything, because that and the rest were part of a same whole.]

What is strikingly clear in Daviau’s description is that the refusal of writing is experienced as both a choice and an inevitability. The

42

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

griever refuses to write, but at the same time writing refuses itself. Writing is impossible because, by coming after, it would necessarily break the bond between the griever and her grief. In recounting the shattering event of the mother’s death, writing would belie the finality of that death and undermine the timelessness of that loss. Nevertheless, as we saw earlier, it is precisely writing’s impossibility in the face of death that motivates, indeed necessitates, its eventual return. In “Literature and the Right to Death,” Maurice Blanchot suggests that a fundamental characteristic of all writing is its own impossibility. Literature, he says, “is built on top of its own ruins … [It is] its own negation.” This is because “literature is bound to language” and language ultimately designates only the absence of what it sets out to designate: “a word may give me its meaning, but first it suppresses it … The word gives me the being, but it gives it to me deprived of being.”28 But Blanchot goes on to argue that when one speaks or writes, one necessarily refers to something that can be negated through language, and that therefore “real death” is present in one’s language. And this, according to Blanchot, is what gives language meaning: “My speech is a warning that at this very moment death is loose in the world … Death alone allows me to grasp what I want to attain; it exists in words as the only way they can have meaning.”29 The way in which death authorizes and informs language may help to explain the return of writing as part of the grieving process. Language’s meaning is in a curious way the reality of death. As Blanchot puts it: “When we speak, we are leaning on a tomb, and the void of that tomb is what makes language true, but at the same time void is reality and death becomes being.”30 In his discussion of Foucault’s contention that “death engenders language,” Stamelman makes a similar point: “In every word we utter, death is present as that which has initiated our speaking and that sustains its being.”31 Foucault is describing language as an attempt “to keep mortality at bay,” which would seem to indicate that one speaks or writes always against the void of death. In the case of mourning, however, the situation is a bit more complicated. Faced with the death of a loved one, the inconsolable mourner is not seeking “to keep mortality at bay” – mortality is there – but rather to know it, to possess it. This griever wants not to write against death, but with it. Language, as an attempt to counter death, might, then, at first seem an unwelcome intervention, a denial of one’s most dearly

The Language of Grief

43

held truth. But the truth of mourning is that in the face of death one cannot help but realize one’s own mortality and this means one is not yet dead. It is only as a living, breathing human that one can mourn. As Blanchot suggests: “Death works with us in the world; it is a power that humanizes nature, that raises existence to being, and it is within each one of us as our most human quality.”32 Stamelman puts it clearly: “Death establishes the domain of the human.”33 So the refusal of writing and its eventual return seem both to be inevitable human responses to close encounters with death. Ultimately it is language that (albeit inadequately) contains the death that one cannot bear to lose.34

consolations In her poem “When I Am Asked,” Lisel Mueller describes how she began writing poems after her mother’s death.35 She refers to “the indifference of nature,” noting that she finally “placed [her] grief in the mouth of language, the only thing that would grieve with [her].” The life that went on around her, “everything blooming,” “the sun blar[ing] endless commercials for summer holidays,” did not reflect or share her grief. But language could and would grieve with her. Locating grieving somewhere between death and life, Mueller finds that in the midst of her loss, a language of grieving will allow her to remain, for a time, on that precious and precarious threshold.36 The death of a loved one leaves a person alone and unmoored, and part of the work of mourning is to reforge connections, both with the one lost and with the world in which one continues to live. Like Mueller, Gagnon finds some kind of companionship in language; the expression of her loss allows her to begin to remake vital connections. Indeed, in her conviction that death is dictating her grieving process, Gagnon’s first connection is with death itself. In her grief writing, death will guide her and she will follow, “quasi à l’aveuglette, avançant à pas feutrés et bien comptés, et sans savoir le plus souvent vers quelle clairière, devant quel horizon, cette avancée débouchera” [half blind, padding ahead with a measured step and most often not knowing toward what clearing, to what horizon, this progress will lead] (ds 14). Death will hold out to her the thread that she will trace through the labyrinth of her loss; following where death leads her, she will hold on to her thread “comme on tient à la vie” [as one holds

44

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

on to life] (ds 14). Furthermore, her many dead will accompany her on this journey, for her writing is “dicté par la présence nombreuse et récente de l’Absente” [dictated by the abundant and recent presence of the Absent one] (ds 18). The language and imagery that Gagnon uses here are striking in their apparent contradictions: death holds out a lifeline and the absent dead become “an abundant presence.” It is this capacity to bring death and life together, to mediate their essential contradiction, that makes language so uniquely suited to grieving. Language opens absence up to time, and in so doing it allows Gagnon to realize the presence of absence; and there is consolation in this process – not the consolation that attempts to minimize loss by focusing on what has not been lost or even on what has been gained, but rather the comfort and solace of sharing one’s loss and one’s inconsolability. Etymologically, consolation means “soothing and comforting with” and ultimately it is the fact of being with that brings comfort. For both Mueller and Gagnon, language offers this kind of consolation. Equally evident in Gagnon’s grief writings is the fact that reading others’ writings may also bring consolation.37 Le Deuil du soleil is full of references to and citations from other authors. In the section called “L’Encre noire des poètes,” Gagnon describes how reading two lines by the Québécois poet Paul Bélanger prompted her to begin working again on the grief writing that she had abandoned nine months earlier. In words that seem to echo Blanchot’s ideas about “the slope of literature” on which poets come together,38 Gagnon remarks that poetry is akin to, and therefore uniquely capable of translating into words, “la radicale brisure du temps que la mort provoque” [the radical break in time that death produces] (ds 56). As she describes adding her voice “à celles des poètes amis que j’ai besoin de lire et relire” [to those of the poet friends whom I need to read and reread] (ds 56), Gagnon suggests the importance not only of writing her grief but also of writing in company with others engaged in the same process of translating the ineffable experience of loss. In the two lines of poetry that had given her both consolation and motivation, Bélanger had said essentially the same thing, describing the poet as “celui qui s’éclaire à l’encre noire” [one who lights one’s way with black ink] and referring to writing as “un flambeau pâle qui se brûle dans la genèse du poème” [a pale torch that burns in the genesis of the poem] (ds 51). Bélanger’s words reminded Gagnon that writing lights the way for the poet as the light of each poet’s writing in turn illuminates the path for others.

The Language of Grief

45

Gagnon returns to this idea in “Cimetière aux oeillets,” her tombeau for Marguerite Duras. Reading Duras the evening before visiting her tomb, Gagnon reflects: Les poètes finissent toujours par se rejoindre, par-delà les fleuves, les océans et la mort même … Avec les poètes, les siècles n’ont plus de frontières, et la mort est un fleuve. De mots écrits sur les sables et les pierres. De mots de vie, seule éternité que nous connaissons, avec celle des fleurs déposées sur les tombes en forme de baisers. (ds 71–2) [Poets always end up coming together, beyond rivers, oceans and death itself … With poets, the centuries have no more boundaries, and death is a river. Written words on sand and rocks. Words of life, the only eternity we know, with that of flowers placed in the form of kisses on graves].

Gagnon subsequently cites the passage (discussed earlier) from La Mer écrite in which Duras describes how a mourner visits a gravesite: “Puis on parle de la mort. Et puis on se tait. Que feriez-vous d’autre, vous?” [Then one speaks about death. Then one is silent. What else would you do?]. In quoting Duras, Gagnon invites the other writer’s voice to speak in her own text. Moreover, this intimate and conversational voice, addressing its final and challenging question to the reader (“Que feriez-vous d’autre, vous?”), seems determined to transcend the boundaries of Duras’s own death to speak directly to Gagnon. And what is perhaps most striking about Gagnon’s quotation of this passage is how she then responds to it. Although she refers to Duras in the third person throughout the tombeau, in the single sentence immediately following the quotation from Duras, Gagnon shifts abruptly to the second-person familiar form to declare: “Nous avons déposé sur ta tombe des oeillets de poète” [We placed a bouquet of sweet william on your tomb] (ds 72, emphasis added).39 Both the act described and the describing of it represent what Gagnon had defined as “the only eternity we know”: placing flowers on a grave and writing “words of life.”40 This brief “dialogue” is indeed a moment of poets coming together “beyond death itself.” The resurrection of the dead in this interchange is of course an illusion. In her tombeau, Gagnon acknowledges that she is writing to Duras “en forme de lettre posthume” (ds 84). Duras still speaks and may still be addressed in Gagnon’s text, but she is nevertheless irremediably gone. The grave is still and always there, and it is not the one who has died but rather the bridge of language that keeps the griever company

46

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

in her grieving. Gagnon’s “words of life” bring consolation, not cure – and ultimately the life they save is her own.

th e tr u e s t l i e le dialogue avec les morts est sans doute le “mentir-vrai,” le plus vrai de tous les mensonges (ds 126) [the dialogue with the dead is undoubtedly the “true-lie,” the truest of all the lies]

As Sandra Bertman so succinctly puts it, “Death ends a life but not a relationship.”41 Indeed, grief work and memory make it possible for the griever to hold on to her dead even as she returns to her own mortal body and goes on living.42 The return to the flesh is not a denial of the loss that she has suffered but rather an affirmation of the ongoing connection, which, as a survivor, she now embodies. The truth of Bertman’s statement is strikingly evident in the tendency of many writers to address their grief writings directly to those whose deaths they are mourning. These written testimonials serve not only to bear witness to the lives of those who have died (with narrators recounting pieces of their loved ones’ life-stories for and to them); they also renew relationships that have been radically disrupted by death.43 Amyot’s Je t’écrirai encore demain and Gagnon’s “La Vie est une étoile” (the chapter for her mother in Le Deuil du soleil) are both structured around the narrative gesture of writing directly to the one who has died. The use of second-person address to the deceased also plays a major role in “C’est quoi, la mort?”, the section of Gagnon’s Le Vent majeur which comprises the letters that the protagonist Joseph writes to his dead wife, Véronique, over the course of ten years of mourning.44 In all these cases, the narration in the second-person inscribes into the text a dialogic structure that insists upon the continuing existence of the other. As Joseph explains in one of his letters to Véronique: T’écrire te redonne vie en quelque sorte. Je ne peux m’expliquer cet état de choses et n’en ai pas le désir. Je préfère laisser tout ça dans l’ombre, au moins te laisser exister le temps de quelques pages. (vm 151) [Writing to you gives you back life in some sense. I can’t explain to myself this situation and I don’t want to. I prefer to leave all that in obscurity, and at least let you exist for the length of time of a few pages.]

The Language of Grief

47

Like the narrators in “La Vie est une étoile” and Je t’écrirai encore demain, Joseph embarks upon a conversation that aims to bridge the gaps and fill the silences left by death. These mourners addressing themselves to the dead refuse to allow death to have the last word. They tell their loved ones what has been happening, share with them thoughts and feelings about their deaths, ask them questions, and explore the contours of the relationships that they had and still have with them. Calling out to them, the survivors affirm the vital role that those who have passed on continue to play in the lives of those who mourn them. These are powerful affirmations since, by saying “You are still in my life,” they are also in essence saying “You still are.” There are certain characteristics common to the dialogic secondperson discourse used by Amyot and Gagnon. We note especially the trope of invocation, the prevalence of verbs articulating the illocutionary acts being performed, and the rhetorical use of questions and conditional structures. In describing Amyot’s use of “verbes locutoires,” Louise Dupré insists upon the ways in which they affirm the truth and power of the enunciation, initiating a “travail d’énonciation qui est garant d’une continuité” [way of speaking that guarantees continuity].45 In Le Vent majeur, Joseph invokes Véronique’s presence through the persistent repetition of her name. He calls out to her with questions that may have no answer: “Tu es morte, Véronique! m’entends-tu quelque part te crier au long des jours et des nuits?” [You are dead, Véronique! Do you hear me somewhere calling to you all through the days and nights?] (vm 130). Indeed, his questions range from rhetorical to profoundly philosophical: “Pourquoi peindre, Véronique?” [Why paint, Véronique?] (vm 140); “Te souviens-tu? Le saistu? C’est quoi la mort?” [Do you remember? Do you know? What is death?] (vm 143). Yet the effect of the accumulation of these questions – including those that might be seen as nothing more than empty conversational accents (eg. “peux-tu t’imaginer?” [can you imagine?] [vm 138]) – is to inscribe the addressee solidly within the fictional space of the writing. In “La Vie est une étoile,” Gagnon also calls out, asking the fundamental question of whether there is anyone there to hear her cry: “M’entends-tu dans ton Ciel que je ne connais plus?” [Can you hear me in your Heaven that I no longer know?] (ds 116). But the major thrust of her writing, its apparent raison d’être, seems to be to narrate her mother’s story – that of her life and of her death – to her and for

48

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

her. In this second-person narration, the mother is the subject of her own life-story rather than the object of her daughter’s reminiscence. And the conversational nature of the address allows the reader to participate in the author’s fantasy and to imagine the mother’s reception of and acquiescence in the tale: “Mais la mort, jamais ne l’as-tu conçue” [But you never conceived of death] (ds 106); “L’été fut toujours ta saison préférée” [Summer was always your favourite season] (ds 113); “Tu étais lavandière, plieuse et repasseuse … tu savais faire pousser les fleurs” [You were a washerwoman, a folder and ironer … you knew how to make flowers grow] (ds 117); “Tu fis de la peinture” [You painted] (ds 120); “Tu étais fière de moi” [You were proud of me] (ds 123); “Je t’ai vue t’amenuiser, te défaire de la tête aux pieds” [I saw you growing smaller, coming apart from head to toe] (ds 131); “Tu étais passée déjà un peu de l’autre côté” [You had already crossed over a little to the other side] (ds 132); “Après tu t’éclipsas dans la nuit muette des temps” [After that you vanished into the silent night of all time] (ds 132). In similar fashion, Amyot’s writing struggles to realize and secure the continuing existence of the man whom she mourns. She repeatedly and self-consciously invokes him throughout her letters: “Je t’appelle ce matin à n’en pouvoir pas même écrire à quel point je t’appelle, je t’appelle à ne pouvoir qu’en râler, du fond de cette extrême affliction du jamais plus” [I am calling out to you this morning not able even to write just how much I am calling out to you, I am calling out to you able only to moan it from the depths of this extreme affliction of nevermore] (jte 32, emphasis added). She acknowledges that she is engaged in trying to call up the dead: “J’en appelle au petit enfant non tari que tu loges encore, viens, sors de là je t’en conjure, comme Lazare” [I appeal to the little child who is still there unstoppable within you, come on, come out of there I beseech you, like Lazarus] (jte 37). The questions that Amyot poses demand and expect answers: “Me reçois-tu encore, réponds-moi, m’est-il possible de te joindre de mes tumultes?” [Answer me – do you still receive me, is it possible for me to contact you through my upheavals?] (jte 23).46 She insists upon the other’s collaboration in her conversation: Ne va pas me dire que tu ne m’entends pas … Ne va pas me dire que tu n’es pas là, éclaté, propulsé glorieux dans cette lumière innombrable … ne va pas me dire que tu ne participes pas désormais de cette infinité provocante, de ce miracle incalculable … ne va pas me dire que tu ne m’entends pas. (jte 39, emphasis added).

The Language of Grief

49

[Don’t you tell me that you don’t hear me … Don’t you tell me that you are not there, brilliantly burst apart, propelled glorious into that unnamable light … don’t you tell me that you’re not participating from now on in that provocative infinity, in that incalculable miracle … don’t you tell me that you don’t hear me.]

Indeed, Amyot seems determined to write back into existence the one she has lost. She addresses to him a poignant litany of forceful affirmations of his presence and wholeness: “Je te dis que tu es intact” [I tell you that you are intact] (jte 43); “Je te dis pourtant que tu es intact” [Yet I tell you that you are intact] (jte 99).47 She insists upon his ability to share her memory of the very first loss that she experienced – her mother’s death when she was four-and-a-half years old: “Tu te souviens encore, j’en suis sûre, de l’événement primordial” [You still remember, I am sure, the primordial event] (jte 18). And finally, she engages in the powerful and creative gesture of inventing a scenario of ritualized mourning in which the two of them participate. Expressing her regret that they had never come up with any “rite de consolation” (ritual of consolation), she declares: “Je vais te dire comment cela aurait pu s’instaurer” [I am going to tell you how that could have come about] (jte 48). She then proceeds to evoke a series of scenes of lamentation in which they could grieve their dead together. Her narration of these scenes is initially hypothetical (“Nous nous serions arrêtés de marcher …” [We would have stopped walking …] [jte 48]) but it quickly takes on the immediacy and reality of the present tense (“Tu pleures, ton front contre le mien” [You weep, your forehead against mine] [jte 50]). This present tense dominates the six-page narration of their shared ritual of mourning and grieving. For the duration of these pages the fiction becomes the reality and in a clever twist of imaginative writing the dead man is able to be there to console the woman who mourns him as if the telling of it can truly make it be. Of course, as we have already noted, Amyot is quite aware that she is making these affirmations in the face of the incontrovertible fact of loss. The chapter that follows her present tense narration of the rituals of mourning begins with a litany of “tu fus” – the passé simple eloquently underlining the absence, in the present, of the other. Similarly, Amyot’s declarations of the other’s presence alternate with expressions of regret that acknowledge his absence: “Tu aurais dû le voir” [You should have seen it] (jte 77).48 Nevertheless, she repeatedly returns to affirming the power of her language to create a connection between them, the force of her affirmations directly proportionate to the strength of her desire: “je te dis que nous sommes

50

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

intacts, tu es là … Il conviendrait tant que tu sois là” [I tell you that we are intact, you are there … it would be so right for you to be there] (jte 10). Thus, she inscribes into her narrative a constant refrain of the expression “tu sais” [you know] that establishes their complicity and understanding in all that she is recounting: “Tu sais ce que c’est que ce temps d’avril” [You know what this April weather is like] (jte 77); “Tu sais ce que c’est: toutes les feuilles” [You know how it is: all the leaves] (jte 82); “Tu sais ce merveilleux temps des bettes, des concombres, du blé d’Inde, tu sais l’émotion de constater, de toucher, de mordre, d’avaler une année encore les offrandes affriolantes de la terre” [You know this marvellous season of cabbages and cucumbers and Indian corn; you know the emotion of each year once again seeing and touching and biting and swallowing the tempting offerings of the earth] (jte 115). And even when, as her grieving runs its course and she begins to accept the absence of the one who has died, she still addresses him: “Je ne ressens plus de toi cette présence précise, mort ou vif, qui m’a tant habitée après ton départ, et jusqu’à presque tantôt. Il n’y a plus tout à coup que ta disparition” [I no longer feel that precise presence of yours, dead or living, that inhabited me so much after your leaving and until quite recently. Suddenly there’s no longer anything left but your disappearance] (jte 116). And furthermore, she will continue to do so: “Je t’écrirai encore demain pour te donner d’autres nouvelles des enfants qui grandissent comme des arbres. Je sais que mes images sont des fontaines. Tu parlais souvent d’éternité” [I will write to you again tomorrow to give you other news of the children who are growing like trees. I know that my images are fountains. You often spoke of eternity] (jte 125). As Dupré says of Amyot’s book: “Je t’écrirai encore demain amorce un dialogue impossible que l’écriture cherche pourtant à rendre possible” [Je t’écrirai encore demain initiates an impossible dialogue that the writing nevertheless seeks to render possible].49 This internal tension between possible and impossible, between what is and what cannot be, is what Gagnon is referring to when she describes the dialogue with the dead as “le mentir-vrai” [the true-lie] (ds 126).50 Depicting this impossible dialogue as “la fibre première de la trame fictive” [the first thread of the fictional web], Gagnon acknowledges that “au fond, il est monologue, dialogue entre moi et l’autre en moi” [basically, it is a monologue, a dialogue between me and the other in me] (ds 126). But even this description of the fictitiousness of the undertaking contains the possibility of some other “truth.” Does not the “other in me” to

The Language of Grief

51

which Gagnon refers suggest the potential for a continuing, although altogether different, relationship with the one who has died? (We recall Joseph’s cry in Le Vent majeur: “Où es-tu Véronique, sinon en moi qui te cherche?” [Where are you, Véronique, if not in me, the one who is seeking you?] [vm 131]) Indeed, Gagnon further asserts that there is a fugitive truth in these fictions, a truth that seems to make the difference and the rupture between self and other less absolute: Si les survivants ont toujours parlé aux morts, c’est justement pour survivre en leur donnant faussement vie dans la vérité des mots – mirages, oasis – aperçue fugitivement avec le flot souterrain de l’étrange soi. (ds 126, my emphasis) [If survivors have always spoken to the dead, it is precisely in order to survive by falsely giving them life in the truth of words – mirages, oases – a truth fleetingly perceived with the underground tide of the strange self.]

Gagnon seems to be saying that the surviving self, in dialogue with the dead, also becomes other than itself, a “strange self,” and that there is truth to be glimpsed in this transformation. The thing about this ongoing relationship with the dead, what makes it a “real” relationship, is that it is ultimately also a relationship that changes one and that focuses one on life. As Joseph expresses it in Le Vent majeur: “Car t’écrire m’aide encore à vivre” [Because writing to you helps me still to live] (vm 172). Picking up Gagnon’s phrase “la mort avec la vie dedans” [death with life inside it], Miléna Santoro has proposed a compelling analysis of Gagnon’s articulation of the transformative potential of the grieving process. She notes that Gagnon’s grief writing involves an internalization of the loss and a (re)constitution of the self/subject via the approach to the Other: “If death thus incites the desire to write as the only way to reach out and touch the absent other, it is also true in Gagnon’s texts that this outward gesture of transmission and communication is accompanied by an equally important inward movement towards self-creation and self-knowledge.”51 This movement toward transformation is a commonly recognized function of the profound experience of loss and grief.52

seasons of grief While dialogues with the dead are common in grief writings, one also finds evocations of the living, and in particular, lovingly inscribed

52

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

inscriptions of the natural world. Despite the “indifference” of nature of which Mueller speaks in “When I Am Asked,” it is clear in many grief writings that nature may nevertheless also offer some measure of consolation. This is especially evident in Amyot’s Je t’écrirai encore demain. In the sixteen letters addressed to a beloved friend who has died, the poet carefully and tenderly describes her daily life and the details of the natural world that surrounds her – flowers, birds, snows, sunlight, river, sea.53 She addresses these descriptions to the absent other, motivated by the desire to share each continuing experience of life with him: “La présente est simplement pour te parler du fleuve. Tu aurais dû le voir lâcher ses glaces” [The present is simply to talk to you about the river. You should have seen it release its sheets of ice] (jte 77). Yet, like Mueller, Amyot is sensitive to the painful contradiction between life going on and the death it leaves behind, a tension that, with the arrival of spring, becomes almost unbearable: “Je préférais l’enfermement des neiges. Ta mort, sous cette pointe de printemps, est d’une cruauté barbare” [I preferred being closed in by the snows. Your death, as this spring reaches its peak, is barbarically cruel.] (jte 69). Spring follows winter, life goes on, and the dead are still dead. But once again it is writing that accommodates this contradiction. The consolation of nature comes to Amyot through her poetry, as, throughout a year of mourning, she records how nature measures the seasons of her grief.54 Amyot’s writing reminds us that grief has its seasons. Yet, it is nevertheless also true that grieving has its seasons and that time invariably tempers grief. Gagnon and Amyot both explicitly trace the seasons of their grief in their writings, marking time’s passage and reading its signs.55 Amyot’s text covers a period from one September through the September of the following year; Gagnon’s Le Deuil du soleil repeatedly gives temporal points of reference for its evolution from 3 January 1995 to August/September 1997.56 Systematic references to dates and to seasonal changes seem to offer these two writers not only a backdrop that sharpens the contours of the losses they have suffered but also a ritualistic way of measuring and working through their grief. I earlier suggested that language can mediate the contradiction between death and life. In similar fashion, the seasons of grief seem capable of holding irreparable loss and necessary survival in a delicate balance. One is able to be in that place of grieving, on the threshold of death and life, through time, for as long as one needs. But as time goes

The Language of Grief

53

on, that balance will shift. Death will not change, but everything else will. And over time the pain will become less immediate, less constant, and the wound will become a scar. This is life taking over, and this is why memory is so important. Indeed, it is precisely because time tempers grief that memory might be considered an avatar of mourning. As grief abates, memories keep the connections alive, both with the one who has died and with the fact of the loss itself. As Gagnon writes in her tombeau for her mother: “Sans cesse, je me dis que toi, maintenant mémoire, rien que mémoire et toute mémoire, toi, mémoire, tu vis” [Ceaselessly, I tell myself that you, now memory, nothing but memory and entirely memory, you, memory, live] (ds 109). In Motherloss, Lynn Davidman stresses the importance of taking time to grieve. She concurs with Kathy Charmaz’s view that in our contemporary society grief is too often approached clinically and treated as a “disease process.”57 Davidman writes: “The notion that grief is a finite process that can be resolved through clinical treatment exacerbates the cultural denial of mourning by keeping grief, like death, out of the realm of everyday experience … Taking time to grieve is associated with a failure to get ahead and to ‘move on’ with our lives.”58 Charmaz’s and Davidman’s analyses focus on society’s general intolerance for expressions of grief which are deemed either too public or too prolonged. Both authors warn against an overmedicalized approach to grieving and insist upon the importance of validating the process. They lament any tendency to view grief as something to get over as quickly and thoroughly as possible. Grief takes time. Within the therapeutic community, there is a general acceptance of the value and necessity of taking time to grieve, but there is also a prescriptive tendency to try to “normalize” the process. Many psychologists believe, in the words of Sandra Bertman, that “excessive mourning, in the sense of continued grieving or of refusing to admit change … is pathological.”59 And while most also consider “normal grieving” to be the appropriate response to loss, many of their statements about the nature and function of this “appropriate response” reveal the extent to which they are considering the grieving process within a medical paradigm of illness and recovery. In the words of Glen Davidson, for instance: “Normal grief is healthy and should, under favorable environmental conditions, lead not only to recovery, but also to growth and healthy change.”60 Words like “normal” and “healthy” and “recovery” are not neutral language.

54

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

The grieving process is commonly viewed as a voyage toward healing, and psychologists have offered different descriptive and prescriptive maps for the journey. The seminal work is, of course, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying, in which she defines five observable stages in the natural evolution of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.61 Many paradigms for the grieving process are essentially variations on Kübler-Ross’s five stages, and while it is generally noted that progression through these stages is not necessarily linear, almost all scenarios point to some kind of final “resolution” that enables the bereaved to go on with his or her life. As one of the women interviewed by Isabelle Yhuel put it: “Faire le deuil, c’est accepter l’idée que les choses ne seront plus jamais comme avant, et en même temps se dire que ça vaut le coup de continuer. [Grieving is accepting the idea that things will never again be what they were before, and at the same time telling oneself that it is worth going on].62 This goal is perhaps nowhere more explicit than in the grieving agenda proposed by William Worden in Dealing with Grief. Suggesting that real “grief work” actually begins where Kübler-Ross’s five stages leave off, Worden outlines what he terms “the tasks of grief”: accepting the reality of the loss, working through the pain of grief, adjusting to an environment in which your loved one is no longer present, and withdrawing emotional energy and reinvesting it in other relationships. One accepts, one adjusts, one reinvests. This, Worden asserts, is the “healthy” route; this is “recovery.” In her reading of Je t’écrirai encore demain, Dupré observes that Amyot’s letters “expriment la douleur de la perte en passant par toutes les étapes de la séparation, du désespoir à l’apaisement” [express the pain of the loss, passing through all the stages of separation, from despair to appeasement].63 Significantly, the final term described by Dupré is not “withdrawal” or “reinvestment” – or even “acceptance” – but rather “apaisement,” a word that suggests the actions of soothing, comforting, allaying. As Dupré points out, Amyot, in the course of her writing, arrives at a place where she can make peace with her loss. Granted, making peace is a kind of acceptance, but the emphasis is clearly on consolation, not cure. Amyot’s grief work seems in spirit closer to that described by Davidman than to the determinedly positivistic approach that Worden advocates. Rather than focus on a language of “recovery,” Davidman is inclined to talk about “coming to terms” and about “repair,” ideas that acknowledge the persistence of loss even in one’s survival of it.64

The Language of Grief

55

In the special issue of Autrement devoted to “Deuils,” Nicole Czechowski makes a similar point. Suggesting that some bereavements are irreparable, she goes on to question the very concept of repair in terms that Davidman would undoubtedly appreciate: Le postulat de la réparation mérite au moins d’être questionné. Si les cris, les larmes, la création ou les rituels aident à survivre, humanisent le “plus jamais”, doit-on pour autant parler de réparation? … Le terme de réparation ne devient acceptable que parce qu’il évoque l’idée de fêlure, de fissure, de brisure donc. [The premise of repair deserves at least to be questioned. If cries and tears and creations and rituals help one to survive, to humanize the “nevermore,” can we then even talk about repair? … The term repair only becomes acceptable because it evokes the idea of cracks, fissures, breaks].65

Indeed, adds Czechowski, “tout rêve de remplacer, combler ou effacer est illusoire” [any dream of replacing, filling or erasing is illusory]; those who mourn the loss of a loved one emerge from their grieving “un peu moins neufs, un peu plus fêlés, mais vivants” [a little less new, a little more fractured, but living].66 One of the persistent conditions of the grieving process, according to Czechowski, is to “prendre en compte cette réalité de la blessure et ses traces indélébiles” [take into account that reality of the wound and its indelible traces].67 Even if grief resolves itself into something else over time, even if there is appeasement and repair, indelible traces of that sorrow will always remain.68 In all of the various scenarios proposed for grieving, what is at stake for the mourner is his or her ability to go on living. But as Davidman and Czechowski suggest, the continuity and integrity of the grief itself are also at stake. The griever does not want to “get over” the loss so keenly felt: feeling that loss is all that remains, it is all that one can hold on to in the place of the person who has died. To lose that feeling would be unbearable, compounding one loss with another. Furthermore, it is in the context of the passage of time that death takes on some reality for the griever. As Daviau writes of her mother’s death: De ce voyage-là, elle ne rentrera pas. Et le monde continue, continuera de tourner. Étale, désormais, égal à lui-même. Cela s’appelle l’absence à tout jamais, immense. (mmg 36)

56

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

[She will not return from that voyage. And the world goes on, will go on turning. Becalmed, from now on, equal to itself. This is called absence for ever more, immense.]

Against the passage of time, the loss is immeasurable. Time cannot touch it. When Czechowski described the need to take into account the reality of one’s loss and its “indelible traces,” she defined this as “la condition du deuil accompli qui permet d’avancer sans trop trébucher, riche d’une mémoire” [the condition of the grieving process carried out in such a way as to allow one to move on without stumbling too much, rich with a memory].69 We have seen that consolation involves learning to share one’s grief, finding one’s place and one’s voice in a community of grieving, and we have suggested that the consolation of writing lies essentially in its ability to return the griever to a living, human community (defined by the sharing of language and the knowledge of death). But it is also important to remember that one returns, as Czechowski says, “rich with memory.” For memory may be the greatest consolation of all. At the very end of Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, the protagonist, Naomi, confronts and knows the immensity of her grief: “What stillness in this predawn hour. The air is cold, In all our life of preparation we are unprepared for this new hour filled with emptiness. How thick the darkness behind which hides the animal cry. I know what is there, hidden from my stare. Grief’s weeping. Deeper emptiness” (o 295). Personifying Grief as a “gaunt shell” and a “scarecrow” who has disguised himself in “all the familiar eyes of Love that are not his,” Naomi reflects that “the body of grief is not fit for human habitation.” Grief no longer brings her any consolation, but only “deeper emptiness.” She is ready to go on living: “Let there be flesh. The song of mourning is not a lifelong song.” In her call for flesh, Naomi is evoking a return to the living, mortal body, one that is fit for human habitation. It will be in the fullness of that flesh, in the humanness of that body, that she will now carry her loss, her sorrow, and her memories.70 In Obasan, as in the works of Gagnon and Amyot, it is the language of grieving and the consolation of memory that ultimately enable the mourner to embody her grief and to integrate it into her still living being. It is worth insisting once again upon the crucial role of language in the processes both of grieving and of memory. As we noted at the beginning of this discussion, the initial reaction to loss and grief is frequently the refusal of language. But as we have also seen, writing

The Language of Grief

57

eventually returns. There are many possible explanations for this. Writing one’s grief may be a way of using the alchemy of language to bring about what Gagnon calls “une conjuration des mauvais sorts de la mort” [a way of warding off the fatality of death] (ds 114). It may be, as she indicates, that the writing of death and of the dead is “l’ultime preuve vivante que rien ni personne ne meurt tout à fait” [the ultimate living proof that nothing and no one dies completely] (ds 114–15). It might also be the case, as we earlier suggested, that writing’s interminability is an apt response to the incomprehensibility of death, that the open-ended nature of both writing and reading (like love) allows them to inscribe the measurelessness of grief and loss, and to “rendre l’énigme à l’énigme.” Finally though, it seems that writing one’s grief opens up the possibility of both connecting and letting go. When Daviau finally manages to begin to put into words some of her grief for her mother’s death, the reasons for her return to writing are quite simple: Mais j’ai recommencé à écrire. Pour lui dire adieu, bien sûr – puisque à moi aussi, comme c’est arrivé souvent à d’autres, c’est la seule possibilité d’adieu qu’il reste. Mais aussi pour pouvoir continuer, tout simplement. (mmg 51) [But I began to write again. To say goodbye to her of course – since for me as well, as has often happened to others, this is the only possibility of farewell that remains. But also in order to be able to continue, quite simply.]

Here we see that saying goodbye and going on are intimately related acts. And I think it is important to recognize that one needs to be able to say goodbye not as a way to have done with it – not as a way to “bury the dead and return to the living” – but as a way to begin living in the full possession of one’s loss. There are some goodbyes one will spend one’s whole life saying. But these goodbyes are a way of both connecting and letting go. As Warland writes at the end of Bloodroot: “In the end there isn’t an end but an easeful resignation flowers understand” (br 196). Flowers understand. The poet invokes the flower as capable of understanding the incomprehensible, the inarticulable – but she does so in the language of grieving.

2

Memory Works Language remembers. Anne Michaels Remembering the past is crucial for our sense of identity … to know what we were confirms that we are. David Lowenthal1

h o w m e m o r y wo r k s In the previous chapter we referred to memory as an avatar of mourning, suggesting that as grief abates over time memories move in to re-establish and maintain connections with what has been lost. Writings engaged in the work of grieving are necessarily engaged in the work of memory, while, in corresponding fashion, underlying most memory works one can discern the traces of a story of loss. This chapter examines three fictions of loss – Louise Dupré’s La Memoria, Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, and Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces – in which memory is both the subject of the story and the vehicle of its telling. The inadequacies and redemptive possibilities of memory preoccupy the protagonists, while the stories themselves illustrate how memory works, both prompting and prompted by narration. In these three narratives of remembering, personal and cultural memories demand articulation, but the workings of memory are not simple. Each of these fictions enacts the tension between remembering and forgetting, each explores how the hunger to hold on to the past struggles against an equally strong impulse to leave pain and loss behind.2 Ultimately, however, memory breaks the silence and unlocks each story. Of course, as they fill absence with words and attempt to give voice to the unspeakable, narratives of memory also necessarily betray (and

Memory Works

59

continue to miss) the losses to which they respond.3 Nevertheless – and this is perhaps what drives both memory and narrative – by explicitly marking the place of loss, memory narratives paradoxically also preserve these losses (in maintaining one’s connection to them).4 Furthermore, the act of marking, the gesture toward preservation, tells the story of what has not been lost. Memory is not only “an index of loss” but also a dynamic strategy for survival.5 In the Introduction, we focused on a number of women’s writings that address and grapple with the elisions and distortions characteristic of official histories. We considered how personal and collective histories frequently constitute sites of loss intimately bound up with the process of grieving (explored in chapter 1) and the workings of memory.6 We further suggested that women’s ways of witnessing may challenge the linear authority of history and confound the boundaries between history and fiction. Our analysis of women writing history clearly demonstrated that history cannot be conceived of without memory. It is, in fact, memory that catalogues the missing pieces of the story, memory that reads the silences and absences of history. The present chapter once again explores the dense imbrication of history and memory. In Dupré’s La Memoria, it is suggested that the way through the labyrinth of personal memory may follow an itinerary mapped in a culture’s historical and mythic memory. In Kogawa’s and Michaels’s novels, the protagonists’ memory work arises from and directly engages the “crisis of history” represented by the inconceivable and unbearable horror of the Holocaust, in Fugitive Pieces, and of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan, in Obasan.7 There are many different ways of looking at history and memory together and in relation to one another. There is a long tradition of defining them in essential opposition (as in Pierre Nora’s declaration that “at the heart of history is a critical discourse that is antithetical to spontaneous memory”),8 but many formulations – even some that acknowledge these oppositional dimensions – also insist upon the essential interdependence of memory and history. As Davis and Starn explain: “It is the tension or outright conflict between history and memory that seem[s] necessary and productive.”9 Furthermore, it is not uncommon to view memory as either a source for or an interpreter of history. The historicizing process is frequently presented as a process of memory, the transformation of personal and cultural memories into history. Richard Terdiman, for instance, sees memory as “the agent of the construction of the past … the name we give to the faculty

60

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

that sustains continuity in collective and in individual experience.”10 Looking at history in its personal dimension, Mark Freeman also sees history and memory as necessarily associated: “the history one tells, via memory, assumes the form of a narrative of the past that charts the trajectory of how one’s self came to be.”11 For Freeman, memory is an interpretive act that makes sense of the recapitulated episodes that constitute a history. And inasmuch as the “idea of the self” and the “idea of history” are “mutually constitutive,”12 memory is always constructing the individual within his or her history. Freeman further suggests that history (unlike “chronicle”) already implies the interpretive gesture and thus the crucial role of memory. Peter Middleton and Tim Woods likewise view narrative, and writing in particular, as the link between memory and history. In their Literatures of Memory, they focus on how “writing makes the social memory of history possible.”13 But Middleton and Woods are keenly aware of the complex ways in which contemporary historiography is also challenged by what they call the “textual memory” evident in so many contemporary literary texts: “Contemporary historical studies has … become deeply concerned with the troubling persistence of modes of thought that have traditionally been the preserve of the arts and literary study: narrative, imagination and memory.”14 As we shall see, the works considered in this chapter are imbued with these persistent “modes of thought” and are, as such, instances of a kind of memory work that troubles history’s conscience.15 The analyses in this chapter revolve around three functions of memory: memory as conscience and contestation; memory as constitutive of self-identity; and memory as the guarantor of the future. A consideration of the treatment of these interrelated memory functions in the three novels reveals some of the ethical and epistemological issues at stake in these stories. It becomes clear that the work of memory both reflects and shapes a culture’s values and visions and that, just as women bring a new angle of reflection to the writing of history, so do their memory works suggest singular ways of looking back. The reliance on memory to contest hegemonic discourses is central to much contemporary theorizing. In his analysis of modernity’s “memory crisis” (which he locates in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Western cultures and defines as a disturbance in people’s ability to feel continuous with their own past), Terdiman posits memory as both constructive and contestatory in relation to the dominant discourses of history: “Dominance … is itself sustained by memory –

Memory Works

61

but a selective, highly ideologized form of recollection that brackets fully as much as it restores. But although memory sustains hegemony, it also subverts it through its capacity to recollect and restore the alternative discourses the dominant would simply bleach out and forget. Memory, then, is inherently contestatory.”16 As already mentioned, Middleton and Woods situate many of these contestatory alternative discourses within the realm of the literary. Writing about “the politics of memory” in ethnic literature, David Palumbo-Liu makes a similar observation and offers a compelling reading of the affinity between memory work and literary discourses.17 Palumbo-Liu first clarifies his use of the term “history”: he considers it that “dominant discourse assigning significance and order to things.”18 Within this broad definition, history encompasses a wide range of articulations: “It is transmitted and reaffirmed by and in a number of representational fields, one of which is literature.” But Palumbo-Liu then suggests that literature “may also provide a space for the revisionary act” inasmuch as it can be “configured as a privileged arena of free play of the imagination, unbounded by utilitarianism, objectivity, and ‘ordinary truth.’”19 As the locus of a “counterhistory,” however, literature must seek “an epistemological foundation that can challenge history’s authority to narrate the past.” For Palumbo-Liu, that epistemological foundation involves memory: “This alternative site of epistemological grounding, central to the positioning of the ethnic self in the realm of historical significance and most particularly promised in the realm of imaginative literature, brings us to consider another term alongside, and within, ethnic literature and history: memory. All notions of ethnic writing as revision of history point to this term, for it is through memory alone, as the repository of things left out of history, that the ethnic subject can challenge history.”20 In Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces, the narrator, Jakob Beer, makes a similar distinction between history and memory, between officially recorded “truth” and the truth of personal experience. His formulation insists upon the ethics of historicizing. The foundation that memory provides for the articulation of a counterhistory is not only epistemological but also ethical: “History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers. History is the Totenbuch, The Book of the Dead, kept by the administrators of the camps. Memory is the Memorbuch, the names of those to be mourned, read aloud in the synagogue” (fp 138). With this contrasting of official history and personal memory/story, we come full circle

62

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

to recognize once again the central role of mourning and grief work in the constructions of both history and memory. And we note that it is in the conscience and testimony of survivors, in their living voices, that the past lives on and speaks. The importance of keeping the past alive in memory and imagination cannot be overstated. As Carlos Fuentes put it: “There is no new creation without a living tradition, in the same way that there is no living present, or possible future, without a living past.”21 As we noted earlier in the context of our consideration of Mark Freeman’s work on memory, it is also common to associate memory with the construction of self-identity. Such an association is not surprising. By making and maintaining vital connections across time, memory may be considered fundamental to one’s experience of self, one’s understanding of the precious and fragile contours of one’s existence. Nor is it surprising that, as with other ways of looking at memory, there are multiple aspects and complexities: any consideration of memory as constitutive of the self also suggests the opposite. Exploring “the relationship between memory, temporality, writing and identity,” Nicola King addresses “the role of memory in the construction and reading of narratives of the self,” and argues, along with Christopher Bollas, that memory always involves a process whereby “the self is continuously created and destroyed.”22 There is no original fixed identity to be recovered and preserved through memory. Memory is rather what King calls “a continuous process of ‘re-membering,’ of putting together moment by moment, of provisional and partial reconstruction.”23 As King’s readings of a series of first-person writings amply illustrate, this “provisional and partial reconstruction” is what works continuously to create a sense of self. Memory inscribes and “re-members” the self’s remarkable existence across and through time despite the repeated dismantling of that self by time’s passage. It is through this continual re-membering of the self, in conjunction with the ways in which memory serves as history’s conscience, that the role of memory in opening up the future is conceived. In Cracking Up, Bollas describes memory as a process whereby “the work of the imaginary and symbolic upon the real” (the memory work of images and language brought to bear upon the otherwise inaccessible past) transforms the substance of recollection in order “to make this past available for the self’s future.”24 What is at stake is more than just Santayana’s warning that we are doomed to repeat the history that we forget; it is also clear that we can only move forward through the

Memory Works

63

awareness of memory. We can only see where we are going by knowing where we are coming from. And we can only see where we are coming from from the vantage point of where we are. As the inscription in human consciousness of the narrative of time’s passage, memory therefore constitutes a map for the future.

th e l a b y r i n t h o f m o u r n i n g : louise dupré’s la memoria Memory is an ecosystem. Mary Meigs

When Mary Meigs refers to memory as “an ecosystem,” she is emphasizing the urgency of not allowing the memories – however small, singular, or apparently insignificant – of “those who have always been silenced by history” to be wiped out.25 Nicole Brossard likewise sees women’s return to and through memory as a global necessity. It is through memory, writes Brossard, that women come to writing and through writing that they may begin to “apprendre à penser l’inimaginable, l’inconcevable” [learn how to think the unimaginable, the inconceivable].26 Brossard explains that, in a woman’s body “[memory] repeats itself endlessly, same scene, same decor, same people, unless there is narration. Without an internal account, without narrative illumination, without its text, memory is an eater of destiny.”27 For Brossard, then, writing marks a site where our memories and our desires may actually generate change. She describes this process as memory “work[ing] its own legend,” and she calls it “actualizing memory, one that initiates presence in the world.”28 Emma Villeray, the narrator of La Memoria, is involved in just such a memory process. Her struggle to survive her losses is a struggle toward self-conception and self-actualization. Her narration marks her evolution from a state of attente (curled up in a fetal position in her bed), to the beginnings of movement: “on se remet à bouger” [we get moving again] (m 91), and finally to full agency and entry into the world: “Je suis entrée dans le temps de la résurrection” [I have entered the time of resurrection] (m 196); “Je franchis la barrière” [And I go through the gate] (m 211).29 This evolution is not strictly linear; memory and mourning “work their legends” through repeated circlings back to the place of loss. But these are not closed, vicious circles – rather they resemble Brossardian spirals, opening onto new futures.30

64

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

After her abandonment by Jérôme, her lover of ten years, Emma cannot conceive of her past ever releasing its hold on her present. The broken relationship is tenaciously reconstituted in both the present and the future in Emma’s narration addressed to the absent Jérôme: “Un matin, il faudra bien qu’il y ait une lettre de toi dans la boîte, je m’acharne à me le répéter. On ne peut pas effacer dix ans de cette façon, la vie n’est pas une tablette magique” [There will have to be a letter from you in the mailbox one morning, I stubbornly keep telling myself. One cannot erase ten years just like that, life isn’t a magic notepad] (m 17). Why does Emma hold so firmly to the conviction that there is no such thing as vanishing without a trace? Is it despite or because of her younger sister Noëlle’s disappearance some twenty years earlier? You cannot just wipe out ten or twenty years. La vie n’est pas une tablette magique. Life isn’t a magic notepad. Yet, even the tablette magique is not what it pretends to be. Its magic lies elsewhere than in its ability to make words and images vanish in an instant. The tablette magique to which Emma refers is, in fact, none other than Freud’s Wunderblock, his Mystic Writing-Pad, notable precisely because what is apparently erased is never really gone. Freud saw this child’s toy as an ideal metaphor for the structure of “the perceptual apparatus of our mind.” As he noted, when the covering sheet is lifted, “the surface of the Mystic Pad is clear of writing and once more capable of receiving impressions. But it is easy to discover that the permanent trace of what was written is retained upon the wax slab itself and is legible in suitable lights.”31 The magic of Freud’s Mystic Writing-Pad was, then, not the disappearance but the permanent trace, the memory. It is this magic that captures Emma’s imagination. She recounts: Pour Noëlle, je dessinais de grandes maisons, tu sais, avec des fenêtres et puis je décollais la feuille plastifiée et tout disparaissait. Mais j’avais appuyé sur le crayon et la maison restait imprimée sur le canevas en dessous, elle se superposait aux arbres, aux oiseaux, aux chats, aux fillettes qui dansaient à la corde et aux mamans qui les surveillaient. Cela formait un étrange paysage que j’arrivais pourtant à déchiffrer. Aucune image n’était effacée. (m 17) [For Noëlle I used to draw large houses, you know, with windows, then when I lifted up the plastic-coated sheet everything disappeared. But I had pressed hard on the pencil and the house remained imprinted on the slate underneath. It was superimposed on the trees, the birds, the cats, the ropeskipping little girls and the mothers who watched them. It formed a strange landscape, yet I was able to make it out. None of the pictures were erased.]

Memory Works

65

But if images are never completely erased and there are no clean slates, how, then, does one go on after loss? This is the crux of La Memoria: as long as one is looking back, deciphering the “strange landscape” of the past, how can one look, much less move, ahead? Emma at one point notes that “la vraie question [c’est] la question du deuil” [the real question is the question of grieving] (m 115, translation modified). And it is by no means a simple question in the novel, for mourning encodes memory and functions paradoxically as both an obstacle to living on, to surviving, and as a way – perhaps the only way – to begin to do so. There are different kinds of memory and different kinds of mourning in La Memoria. At times memory is figured as a container, a place of safekeeping, a reliquary, for the urge to hold on to the past – to preserve and treasure it – is strong. To erect this kind of memory is to mount a defence against loss. But a repository of memories can easily become a prison house and the act of mourning then be experienced not as a process but as an eternal and interminable state, an emptying of presence, a death in life. In embracing this kind of memory, the survivor becomes (and thus does not survive) the loss. A figure emblematizing this kind of memory is evoked by Emma’s friend Bénédicte, who advises her to forget about Jérôme: “Il faut se souvenir de la femme de Loth” [We must remember Lot’s wife] (m 54).32 Lot’s wife, who was turned into a pillar of salt for having looked back, stands as a sign of the dangers of trying to hang onto the past. At times Emma seems to be thus transfixed: “Je suis devenue comme Noëlle,” she says, “Un corps vidé” [I’ve become just like Noëlle. An empty shell] (m 23). Emma’s father has also succumbed to this kind of memory. She attributes his death to the fact that he no longer wanted to live, for “la mémoire l’avait rattrapé. Noëlle … Rien ne pouvait le ramener vers nous” [His memory had caught up with him. Noëlle … Nothing could bring him back to us] (m 63). Indeed, Emma’s father’s dying words to her express his wish that she might find a way out of this cycle of loss: “Essaie d’oublier, toi” [You must try to forget] (m 64). But how can she forget? His death, compounding her losses, speaks louder than his words, making her even more determined to remember, to keep remembering. Besides, among her carefully preserved memories are other voices, other admonitions that directly challenge her father’s advice. She recalls in particular the words of the policemen who came to the house to question her after Noëlle’s disappearance – had she seen something that could help them locate the

66

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

missing girl? “Essayez de vous souvenir” [Try to remember] (m 45), they told her. She hadn’t been able to remember anything, and Noëlle was irretrievably lost. Could memory have been the key? Might a different future have been contained in that lost moment in the past? So while Emma has at times attempted to construct retaining walls to hold back the annihilating power of the past, her attempts to build “une mémoire propre … une raison aussi solide qu’une patrie” [(an) orderly memory … (an) acceptance of things … as solid as a native land] (m 160) are doomed to fail. There is no propriety, there is no reason, there is no homeland because “on ne s’habitue pas à l’idée de la disparition” [we never become accustomed to someone’s disappearance] (m 39). Emma’s mother, believing in her own way in “an orderly memory,” has had Noëlle’s name and birthdate carved onto the family tombstone. Although she, like Emma, is in many ways suspended in the limbo of mourning (essentially incapable, since Noëlle’s disappearance, of recognizing or being present for her remaining children), she nevertheless holds fast to the idea that one day, when they recover Noëlle’s body, they will be able to complete the inscription and find closure. For Emma even this tentative step, this nod toward a possible future, seems impossible, inconceivable: “Dans ma tête il y avait une fosse qui ne se refermerait jamais” [In my mind there was a grave that would never be closed] (m 46). With Jérôme’s departure, that grave becomes a gaping chasm into which Emma is endlessly falling, for Jérôme’s abandonment keeps alive and is kept alive by the unresolved disappearance of Noëlle two decades earlier. Emma’s incapacity to get beyond the event of Jérôme’s leaving may in part be explained by the fact of this retraumatization. That this is indeed a trauma is further suggested by the fact that it is in many ways the shock of Jérôme’s leaving that Emma cannot get over. In a repeated phrase that I believe intentionally recalls the traumatic climax of Nicole Brossard’s Le Désert mauve, Emma expresses this shock: “Je n’avais rien vu venir” [I hadn’t seen anything coming] (m 18).33 Jérôme’s departure radically undermines her sense of the meaning and predictability of the world and shakes her belief in her own integrity and identity. What can she know if she didn’t know that this turn of events was possible? Who was that person who walked so blindly into disaster? Surely that person will never exist again – then who, if anyone, has survived? The trauma one experiences is always also the traumatic loss of one’s pre-trauma self, for there is no reliable or reassuring way to re-member that self

Memory Works

67

that has been shattered. As contemporary feminist philosopher Susan Brison puts it: “How does one remake a self from the scattered shards of disrupted memory?”34 The trauma of multiple losses has produced a dual crisis for Emma: ontological and epistemological. Not only does she no longer know who she is but her sense of how she knows – and how she trusts her knowledge – has been radically undermined. Brison has described just such an “epistemological crisis” as a characteristic reaction to traumatic events. In the wake of trauma there seems to be no map: the self is fractured, the fabric of time and causality is violently rent. The survivor is left, Brison says, “with virtually no bearings by which to navigate.”35 Emma’s description of her own situation is strikingly similar: Une partie de ma vérité s’est détachée de moi, elle flotte, inaccessible dans l’espace, et je m’acharne à la rattraper. J’ai peur. Voilà ce qu’il me reste. La peur, le vent. Je m’accroche au sol pour ne pas m’envoler. (m 23) [A part of my reality has split off from me, it’s drifting in space, out of reach, and I’m desperately trying to catch hold of it again. I’m filled with fear. That’s what I have left. Fear. The wind. I cling to the ground so as not to be blown away.]

The question here is clearly one of both identity and survival. On one level Emma believes that it should be possible to fashion “an orderly memory,” to put the past neatly away in its proper place. But she at the same time rejects any memorializing reconstruction, since, when carried to its logical conclusion, this kind of memory is precisely what she most fears. This, she imagines, is the way in which Jérôme has remembered, and forgotten, her. She senses, in the apparent ease with which he has managed to entomb her memory, that she has left no impression at all. In fighting against this kind of memorializing erasure, Emma is fighting for her life. “Je ne veux rien oublier,” she says, “Guérir, oui, mais ne rien oublier” [I don’t want to forget anything. Get better, yes, but not forget anything] (m 165). Brison stresses the importance of “connectedness” in the process of healing from trauma. It is clear in Dupré’s novel that Emma’s recovery of her self is only possible in the context of her present connections with those around her. In one of the novel’s key scenes, Emma and her friend Bénédicte confess to one another that each one’s deepest fear is of losing the other. As they talk, it is also evident that in their minds this loss coincides with the fear of being forgotten:

68

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

J’ai peur de te perdre. J’ai dit seulement cela, 5 syllabes suspendues au dessus de moi, dans le vide … j’étais jalouse? J’ai fait signe que non, mais je craignais d’être délaissée. Oubliée. Dans ma gorge, la boule dure. Elle est venue avec le mot oubliée. Cet aveu m’avait rejetée dans un espace informe, un trou sans fond. (m 100) [“I’m afraid of losing you.” This is all I said, seven syllables suspended above me in empty space … was I jealous? I shook my head, I wasn’t, but I feared being abandoned. Forgotten. The lump sat in my throat. It came with the word “forgotten.” Confessing this had pitched me once more into a void without form, a bottomless pit.]

Emma wants to heal without forgetting – neither to be trapped in the past, nor to lose it – but she also wants not to be lost in it. She wants, in other words, also to heal without being forgotten. A central component of Emma’s healing work thus involves forging and maintaining connections with others that will extend through time. To heal in this way is not simple, because nothing is fixed (in either sense of the word – anchored or repaired). As Emma says of her conversation with Bénédicte: “nous avions affronté aujourd’hui notre peur la plus tenace et nous l’avions vaincue, jusqu’à la prochaine fois” [we had confronted our deepest fear today and conquered it, until the next time] (m 102). Remembering is an ongoing process of conscious and determined re-connection, which is why many of Emma’s most meaningful relationships throughout this period of crisis involve making the shared present memorable and promising and believing that it will be remembered. Immediately following Noëlle’s disappearance, Emma’s friend Bénédicte made every effort to ground Emma in the present by insisting upon their connectedness and upon the existence of a future. She slipped Emma a note whose second sentence read like a lifeline: “Pas question que tu rates tes examens. Nous étudierons ensemble” [“There’s no question of your failing your exams. We’ll study together”] (m 54, emphasis added), and she gave her a set of tarot cards, which they ritually used together to look into the future. Now, with Jérôme’s departure, Emma feels as if she has lost her “don de voyance” [gift of clairvoyance] (m 23), and Bénédicte is once again there for her. Significantly, Bénédicte’s orientation toward the future does not mean a total erasure of the past. For instance, it is Bénédicte who reconnects Emma with Vincent, a man who had been Emma’s friend and Bénédicte’s lover years earlier. Bénédicte also shares with Emma

Memory Works

69

a kind of repetition that opens up possibilities: “La répétition, c’était aussi ce beau vertige de fin de soirée, cette valse où depuis vingt ans nous pivotions sur nous-mêmes, en agrandissant constamment notre espace” [Also repeating itself was that glorious late-night giddiness, the waltz that for the last twenty years had had us swirling around in ever-widening circles] (m 56–7). Dancing together, Bénédicte and Emma participate in the conscious creation of shared future memories: “Nous chantonnions en comptant les mesures, nous nous enroulions autour de nos pas, nous voulions déposer, dans notre boîte à souvenirs, une scène à conserver toujours” [We hummed along with the music, we twisted around our steps – we wanted to store away in our memory chest a scene to hold on to forever] (m 57). Like Bénédicte, Vincent helps Emma to escape the paralysing embrace of the past. He offers her a future by constructing shared memories, their picture taken by a stranger, for instance: “Quand nous serons vieux, nous dirons, ‘Nous étions là’” [“In our old age we’ll say, ‘We were there.’”] (m 107). In addition, as her lover, he finds her and holds her in the present. In Vincent’s caresses, Emma recognizes “[son] désir fou de nous faire une place au milieu des ruines” [(his) passionate wish to create a place for us among the ruins] (m 92). The relationship awakens in Emma her own desires, which ground her in her present body, a grounding that, in turn, gives her a vision of the future and a sense of her own agency: “J’ai aimé cette vision, le désir qui crée un mouvement infini, le cercle du temps qui s’ouvre sans nous broyer. Je suis allée chercher une tablette, une plume et de l’encre mauve” [I liked that vision-desire creating infinite motion, the circle of time opening, and not crushing us. I went to get a note pad, a pen, and mauve ink] (m 43, translation modified). The most important companion on Emma’s journey, however, is Madame Girard, the former inhabitant of the house into which Emma moves after Jérôme’s departure. Emma’s new house, her attempt at a clean slate, still holds the indelible impression, the memory trace, of Madame Girard’s own traumatic history, for it was in the basement of this house that Monsieur Girard committed suicide. When Emma pays a visit to Madame Girard, the older woman offers her a new perspective on the role of memory in mourning. She shows her a collection of beautifully bound books of ancient history, saying “Voilà le réservoir infini de la mémoire … la memoria” [“There you have the infinite reservoir of memory … memoria.”] (m 67).36 Unlike Emma’s mother, whose mode of memorializing is to cover the place of absence with a tombstone,

70

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

Madame Girard offers a model of memory that is dynamic, one that strives to open up the past through narrative rather than to fix it, parenthetically, in time (between a birthdate and a deathdate). Madame Girard has another important lesson for Emma. In answer to Emma’s question about whether one can ever understand abandonment, Madame Girard whispers, “Il faut accepter même si on ne comprend pas” [“We have to accept things even if we can’t understand them.”] (m 66). But her acceptance is not blind. When Madame Girard heads off to Greece, she is not going in order to escape her past. She is consciously venturing into the past (indeed, into ancient history, the past of the human species) in order to be able to get through it. She will return. When Madame Girard makes another statement that serves as a kind of beacon for Emma (“Quand je reviendrai de voyage, je serai capable de retourner dans la cave”) [“When I return from my trip, I will be able to go down into the basement again”], Emma reflects: “Madame Girard essayait de se projeter dans le futur. Peut-être l’avenir fait-il aussi partie de la mémoire. De la memoria” [Madame Girard was trying to project herself into the future. Perhaps the future is also part of memory. Of memoria] (m 78). The “memoria” of the book’s title is precisely summed up by Madame Girard’s two statements to Emma: la memoria is both the acceptance of loss in all of its incomprehensibility and the belief in a future still connected to that loss, to that past. Madame Girard sets out on a journey “[au] fond de la mémoire humaine” [(to) the beginning of human memory] (m 205), and in her first letter to Emma from Crete, she describes her daily “pilgrimage” to Knossos: “elle se promenait dans les ruines, elle imaginait la vie dans ce labyrinthe grandiose, puis la légende, le Minotaure, et Ariane, Ariane et son fil” [She would walk among the ruins, picture life in that great labyrinth, think of the legend of the Minotaur, and Ariadne, Ariadne and her thread] (m 130, translation modified). In the book’s third section, this model of memory introduced by Madame Girard stands in marked contrast to the earlier model represented by Lot’s wife. In the story of the Cretan labyrinth, it is Ariadne who gives Theseus a thread to follow in order to get in to the centre of the labyrinth (where he can slay the Minotaur) and then get out again safely. In a sense Madame Girard’s own quest serves as Emma’s Ariadne’s thread. After rereading the letter, Emma goes out walking – “je rejoindrais Madame Girard dans son éblouissement” [I was going to join Madame Girard, be dazzled along with her] – and from the

Memory Works

71

top of the mountain she looks out, letting her mind stretch into the distance “jusqu’à cette force obscure qu’il faut pour recommencer. C’était le balancement vivant de la vie, hors des limites et des frontières, hors de la prison du passé” [all the way to that obscure force that is needed to start over again. I felt the dramatic swaying of life, outside of boundaries and frontiers, beyond the prison of the past] (m 131, translation modified). Madame Girard’s journey and her letter, her daily, repeated imaginings of the past, have taken Emma to a place where she can imagine a future, a place in which life goes on “beyond the prison of the past” and in which there is a way through the labyrinth. Upon her return from the mountain, Emma reflects: “Toute la journée, j’avais suivi un fil qui m’avait menée très loin. Vers une porte qui s’ouvrait sur les deux côtés du temps” [All day I had followed a thread that took me a long, long way from here. Right up to a door opening out onto both sides of time] (m 132). This double door of la memoria will be the way out of the labyrinth of mourning that will allow Emma not to have to turn her back on either the past or the future. Seule l’imagination peut contrer l’effritement. (m 40) [Only imagination can counter disintegration.]37

When Jérôme left, Emma was in the middle of trying to finish a translation. Her lack of progress on this project after his departure clearly mirrors the lack of movement in her life: “J’attends. Je me retrouve devant une réalité intraduisible et j’attends” [I am waiting. Ahead of me looms an untranslatable reality and I am waiting] (m 48, emphasis added, translation modified). Her breakthrough comes when Vincent urges her to work on a piece of writing of her own, a film scenario: “Il voudrait un texte de moi, c’est bien ce qu’il veut, un texte qui me ressemble” [He would like a text by me. That’s what he really wants, a text that is a reflection of me] (m 41, translation modified). In offering Emma this possibility, Vincent holds out to her another one of Ariadne’s threads, and she takes it, for shortly thereafter she does begin to make notes for the scenario. Furthermore, having that scenario in her imagination, she finds herself able to complete her translation. This represents a crucial stage in the healing process. When she looks at the finished manuscript of the translation, she remarks (addressing herself to the absent Jérôme): “Le manuscrit avait résisté à ton départ. Dans ma serviette, je portais la preuve de ma survie” [The manuscript

72

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

had withstood your leaving. In my briefcase I was carrying proof of my survival] (m 120). The finished translation represents her own translation from before the crisis to after it: “J’avais réappris à marcher, fièrement … à traduire la voix d’une autre femme, bien sûr, mais c’était aussi ma voix que je transportais au milieu de la rumeur, ma voix de rescapée” [I had learnt to walk again, proudly … to translate the voice of another woman. Yet I wasn’t only carrying her voice through the din but my own as well, my survivor’s voice] (m 120). Emma is able to complete the translation because she now has a map for the scenario that will keep her voice alive. Like any map of uncharted territory, hers is, of course, mostly empty, white space. On the first page of her notebook she has written simply three names – her own, Noëlle’s, and Jérôme’s – and on the last page she has inscribed two words: “The end” (m 47, in English in the original). These reference points do not achieve closure or convey any narrative logic; they are merely the roughest sketch of a couple of landmarks in an unknown territory. It is not until Emma is able to look through the door “that opens on both sides of time,” not until she has found a way to heal without forgetting, that she will be able to fill in all those intervening pages. She knows from the start what that writing will mean, that it is what some theorists have referred to as “mourning work” or “grief work.”38 “Un jour,” she thinks, “j’aurais terminé mon scénario. Je ne me sentirais plus obligée de porter du noir” [Someday my script would be finished. I wouldn’t feel that I had to wear black any more] (m 47). Through her “mourning work,” Emma may hope eventually to heal the breach between absence and presence. The work of mourning and the work of writing both involve a transformation, a painstaking process of translation of what was into what can be. The writer and the mourner – and Emma is both of these – must each confront the evidence of absence and enter that place of loss in order to grasp some piece of what was and carry it across into language, where it can tell the stories of both loss and survival. As Emma moves through the labyrinth of mourning, she often feels that she is merely walking in circles, that “la vie humaine est un scénario qui n’en finit pas de reprendre les mêmes scènes” [“human existence is a screenplay with the same scenes repeating themselves over and over”] (m 136). She sees history repeating itself and her life “comme une civilisation minuscule qui n’arrive pas à sortir de ses cercles” [as a tiny civilization stuck in a circular path] (m 154). But her

Memory Works

73

writing project offers her occasional glimpses of a world where past and future need not be mutually exclusive. One passage in particular shows the extent to which writing and language are fundamental to Emma’s acquisition of this vision: “Dans mon cahier, la vie se défait et je la regarde se défaire sans avoir peur, je ressens une sorte de tranquillité dans le mot douleur, il s’agit de la faire rimer avec couleur pour imaginer, sous son écorce, un début de joie” [In my notebook, life is disintegrating and I watch it disintegrate without being afraid. I feel a kind of serenity in the word “grief,” all I need do is make it rhyme with “leaf” to imagine a budding happiness underneath its skin] (m 144). The rhyming of despair and hope seems to make possible a transformative act of imagination that can in turn open up the possibility of beginning once again. When she first determines to write the scenario, Emma explains it as a way to “saisir la minute exacte où la vie nous reprend, la perte qui se transforme en fiction” [capture the precise moment when we come back to life, when loss is transformed into fiction] (m 43). Comment faire entrer maman dans mon scenario? (m 93) [How to bring Mama into my scenario?]

Toward the end of the novel’s third section, Emma imagines a woman weeping over her husband’s casket. The woman slowly rises, leaning on the cold body, pushing herself up as Emma thinks: “Voilà tout ce que je peux écrire aujourd’hui. Une femme effondrée, mais qui se relève. Une femme qui me précède” [That’s all I can write today. A woman who has collapsed but gets up again. A woman who has gone before me] (m 163, translation modified). It is tempting to read this weeping woman as a figurative representation of the two women in mourning whose grieving runs parallel to Emma’s: Madame Girard and Rosa, the Spanish neighbour. Just as Emma turns to Madame Girard for understanding, consolation, and direction, she also listens each evening for her neighbour’s song of grief: “j’entendrai sa voix chaude, veloutée. Et je me laisserai bercer. Dix heures, tous les soirs, la même complainte en espagnol. La tristesse traverse toutes les langues” [I’ll hear her warm velvety voice. And I will let myself be rocked and lulled by it. Every evening at ten, the same lament in Spanish. Sadness travels through every language] (m 27, translation modified). The comfort that Emma derives from her contact with Madame Girard and Rosa recalls the comfort a child receives from a

74

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

mother: “Alors Madame Girard s’est approchée et m’a prise dans ses bras. Je suis redevenue une petite fille, je me suis laissé bercer” [Then Madame Girard came over to me and took me in her arms. I became a little girl again, I let myself be rocked and comforted] (m 66, translation modified). The importance of this “maternal” comfort cannot be overstated, since it could be argued that the original loss in La Memoria was the loss of the mother.39 Emma expresses on a number of occasions her desire to be mothered. Observing a young girl playing on the sidewalk under the watchful eye of a woman on a nearby balcony, she thinks: “Envie d’avoir son âge, une mère qui m’envelopperait de son regard. Une mère qui ressemblerait à maman, avant le drame” [A sudden longing to be her age, have a mother who would focus her gaze on me. A mother like Mama before the tragedy] (m 38). Even when describing Jérôme’s departure to Vincent, she seems to be talking about an earlier, more primal loss: “Je dis tout, même la honte, ne plus être aimée, ne plus mériter d’être aimée, ni être bordée le soir avant de m’endormir” [I tell Vincent everything, even how ashamed I feel of not being loved any more, of not being worthy of love, of not being cherished enough to be tucked in at night before I go to sleep] (m 33, emphasis added). Emma seems to want to believe that it was only after Noëlle’s departure that her mother retreated into a place of nostalgia from which she could not save her (m 133). But there are indications that the mother’s “absence” predated the crisis of losing Noëlle. When her mother declared, “J’espère que Dieu me pardonnera … Je ne sais pas garder mes enfants,” [“I hope God will forgive me … I don’t know how to hold on to my children”], Emma tried to remind her that she was still there (“Tu as su me garder moi” [“You’ve managed to hold onto me”]). Her words made no impression. Her mother was “enfermée très loin à l’intérieur d’elle-même. Là où je n’avais jamais pu la rejoindre” [shut away in some remote spot deep inside herself. Where I had never been able to reach her] (m 95, emphasis added). It seems as if the mother, once lost, has always been lost. Emma’s relationship with her mother throughout the novel is complex and ambivalent. It is from her mother that Emma has inherited her romantic ideals, but while Emma clings to these ideals for herself, she finds them distressing in her mother. Flirting with Monsieur Quintal at the market, her mother “n’était plus notre mère” [wasn’t our mother any more] (m 30). So while Emma insists that she, unlike her mother, will live a life of passion and will have no children, her

Memory Works

75

feelings about her mother’s “renunciation” of the role of desirable woman are very mixed. She finds the transformation above all reassuring (“j’étais tranquille maintenant” [I needn’t worry any more]), but there is also a suggestion in her reference to the mother’s “coeur endormi” [sleeping heart] (m 30) that this withdrawal into “ce bonheur simple qui suit le renoncement” [that simple kind of happiness that follows renunciation] (m 31) might somehow have made her less capable of loving Emma in the way she needed to be loved. It is impossible for the reader to know, since Emma does not know, why mother and daughter cannot connect. At some point, probably very early, there was a failure in the relationship: “Quelque chose s’est brisé quelque part, je ne sais pas quand. Et je suis semblable à maman, je mets des bornes nettes aux époques, je dis avant et après, j’associe ces deux mots avec disparition et départ, mais je sais que c’est bien avant” [Somewhere along the way, I don’t know when, something was broken. And I am like Mama, I neatly section off time periods. I say “before” and “after,” I link these words with disappearance and departure, but I know it happened long before] (m 160). Part of Emma’s mourning work has to do with grieving and trying to make sense of that failure in order to find a way to reconnect with her mother or at least with the mother in her. All of the returns in the novel prefigure the final return in the last section of the book: the reappearance and definitive disappearance of Noëlle. When news arrives of Noëlle’s death in an auto accident in Los Angeles, Emma can only think that this resembles a scenario for a bad film: on her deathbed, her sister’s dying wish had been that her four-year-old daughter be cared for by her sister Emma. The daughter is named Emma, too, but her given name is Emmanuelle (a name that significantly combines both “Emma” and “Noëlle”). It is she, Emmanuelle, who is finally able to connect Emma simultaneously to both the past and the future. Noëlle’s daughter represents a human connection that embodies loss. Noëlle, now definitively found, is able to be both lost – and remembered. But not as a name and date inscribed on a tombstone. The living and growing person of Emmanuelle will remind Emma of her sister, and Noëlle will also be remembered by her daughter, who will keep her alive in memory. After vacillating between anger at her sister, who has now twice abandoned her, and acceptance of her final gift, Emma is able to make the step of imagination that she could not make earlier, a step that seems to rewrite the story of Lot’s wife: “On s’arrête, on se retourne

76

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

pour regarder les traces de ses pas, puis on se met à chanter, la complainte de Rosa, on bifurque, on avance vers une terre inconnue, on entraîne avec soi une enfant. C’est aimer, dans son état le plus simple” [You stop, you turn around to look at your footprints, then start singing Rosa’s lament. You have come to a fork and you take the road that leads to an unknown land. You are bringing a little girl along with you. This is loving in its simplest form] (m 183, translation modified). In preparation for Emmanuelle’s arrival, Vincent and Emma plan to have the basement renovated, turning it into an office for Vincent and, in the place where Monsieur Girard’s blood had splattered the dust, a playroom for Emmanuelle. Emma notes, however, that Monsieur Girard’s death will not be forgotten: “elle sera recouverte par des pas d’enfant” [it will be covered over by the footprints of a child] (m 197). This is a double “recovery,” both covering over and recuperation, healing without forgetting. Stepping in as mother to the motherless child, Emma has chosen to survive in the face of the incomprehensible. She has chosen to affirm and reaffirm the truth of the present in the face of the undeniable evidence of the past. She has found both reason and force of imagination to remake hope each day, to be able to promise her adopted daughter what we all need in part to hear and to believe in order to go on living: On ne meurt pas ici [People don’t die here]. “Chaque jour, le combat. Chaque jour, répéter, devant une enfant, on ne meurt pas ici” [The fight never ends. Each day one must repeat to a child, “People don’t die here”] (m 201). Noëlle’s death enables Emma finally to stop looking for her mother where she is not and to find her where she is. In this process, Emma becomes, in a sense, her own mother. In the closing section of the novel, Emma’s mother brings over for the young Emmanuelle’s bed a quilt made by her mother, and Emma suddenly looks through the double doors of la memoria, imagining her mother as her grandmother’s daughter and herself as her mother’s daughter and the mother of her sister’s daughter, seeing the generations of women extending in both directions and finding a place for herself there: Alors brusquement les années ont reculé, je l’ai remerciée d’une voix mouillée, ma voix brune de fillette robuste et aussi sa voix à elle quand elle disait merci à sa mère. J’ai eu l’impression de sentir dans ma chair ce que Madame Girard appelle la memoria, est-ce cela aussi devenir mère? (m 202) [As she did this, the years suddenly fell away. I thanked her in a voice

Memory Works

77

charged with emotion, my dark-and-sturdy-little-girl voice and also her voice when she would say thank you to her own mother. It was as though I could feel in every fibre of my body what Madame Girard calls memoria – is that also what it means to become a mother?]

f i g u r at i o n s o f m e m o r y : j o y k o g awa ’ s o b a s a n It does not bear remembering. None of this bears remembering. “You have to remember,” Aunt Emily said. “You are your history. If you cut any of it off you’re an amputee.” (o 60)

In our reading of La Memoria, we saw how memory, in the face of loss, may secure a sense of self, forge vital connections to the past, and make possible imaginings of the future. We further noted the importance in Emma’s story of the connection with the mother, the rupture between daughter and mother prefiguring the other traumatic losses in the novel. The bond between mother and child and the continuity of generations were shown to be in some fundamental way essential to the protagonist’s ability to go on with her life. In similar fashion, Obasan places the mother at the focal point of memory and places memory at the focal point of narration. The mother’s unexplained absence is the unthinkable loss at the heart of the story, the unanswered question, the hole in history. The story of the missing mother is the untold story that resists and yet insists upon narration. Obasan is an exploration of the crucial role of personal and historical memory in human development and evolution. Suggesting that what one thinks one cannot bear to remember does indeed bear remembering (because it is in any case never really forgotten), the novel insists upon the importance of being able to maintain connections to one’s past in order to venture into one’s future. Obasan recounts the dispersal and internment of a Japanese Canadian family during the Second World War. The narrator, Naomi Nakane, and her brother, Stephen, were raised by their Uncle Isamu and their Aunt Aya (Obasan) in the absence of their mother (who went to Japan in 1941 to visit family and never returned) and their father (who was sent to a labour camp in 1942, then briefly reunited with his family in 1945 only to be refused permission to accompany them when they were relocated to Alberta later that same year).40 Following three short prefatory passages (of which I will speak shortly), the novel

78

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

opens with a chapter in which Naomi, now a thirty-six-year-old Alberta school teacher, and her uncle make a nighttime pilgrimage to the prairie coulee near Uncle’s home. It is 9 August 1972, and Naomi comments that they have “come here once every year around this time” for the last eighteen years.41 Naomi does not know the reason for this yearly ceremonial journey and when she questions her uncle about it he does not explain. But they go through the ritual together. Approaching the coulee, Naomi says: “Nothing changes ne.”42 She knows that her uncle will then comment, as always: “Umi no yo … It’s like the sea.” And they will sit silently together in the tall prairie grasses and before they leave she will make her way down toward the water to pick one flower. The ritual seems timeless, and yet the narration in this first chapter shows how it is subtly inflected by the passage of time. Naomi remembers that on their first visit to the coulee her uncle had seemed to want to tell her something but held back, saying, “Too young … Still too young.” Now as she helps him to walk unsteadily across the ground, he murmurs, “Too much old man.” On that first visit, he had indicated that there might come a time when he would speak what was on his mind (“’Someday,’ he said.”). But now when she whispers to him: “Uncle … why do we come here every year?” he still does not answer. In the eighteen years between her being “too young” and his being “too old,” there has been no telling, there has always been this unanswered question between them. But now Naomi thinks: “From both Obasan and Uncle I have learned that speech often hides like an animal in the storm” (o 3). Although she makes no attempt to force the silence to speak, Naomi is clearly attentive to the fact that what is unspoken is in some sense hiding and waiting for articulation. The weight of that waiting permeates the scene: “We sit forever, it seems, in infinite night while all around us the tall prairie grasses move and grow” (o 3). And when Naomi rises, telling Uncle to “Wait here awhile,” we are conscious of her desire for some end to that waiting even though she only repeats the ritual action of “pick[ing] at least one flower before we go home” (o 4). This first chapter of the novel resonates with the juxtapositions of language and silence that are evoked in the prefatory material. Three short liminal pieces precede the first chapter: a biblical epigraph from the book of Revelation; a passage of disclaimer, acknowledgment, and dedication signed by Joy Kogawa; and a poetic reflection on silence that sets up the réseau métaphorique of stone/water/moon/ flower that runs through the novel. Many critics have explored one or

Memory Works

79

more of these successive openings of Obasan in order to show how they gloss and are glossed by the narrative that follows.43 The passage from Revelation suggests a promise of renewal, obstacles overcome, nourishment, and the possibility of language: To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna and will give him a white stone and in the stone a new name written

The “stone” is a persistent and mutable metaphor throughout the novel. In this epigraph the image is presented in a positive light: the white stone is a bearer of language and the language written in the stone is associated, as Arnold E. Davidson points out, with the promise of survival. The question of survival is also raised in the dedicatory passage that follows, in which Kogawa writes: “This book is dedicated to my mother and father and to those amazing people, the Issei – the few who are still with us and those who have gone.” The writing of Obasan is thus presented as a promise, a gesture back across the generations, a way to speak to and for those whose story has not been told and “those who have gone.” Indeed, the placement of this dedication seems to make it part of the revelatory experience promised in the first epigraph. But it is the final poetic epigraph that has been most frequently and persistently analysed as a key to reading the novel. Rather than making promises, these lines pose the challenge of silence to which the narrative responds44: There is a silence that cannot speak. There is a silence that will not speak. Beneath the grass the speaking dreams and beneath the dreams is a sensate sea. The speech that frees comes forth from that amniotic deep. To attend its voice, I can hear it say, is to embrace its absence. But I fail the task. The word is stone. I admit it. I hate the stillness. I hate the stone. I hate the sealed vault with its cold icon. I hate the staring into the night. The questions thinning into space. The sky swallowing the echoes.

80

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

Unless the stone bursts with telling, unless the seed flowers with speech, there is in my life no living word. The sound I hear is only sound. White sound. Words, when they fall, are pock marks on the earth. They are hailstones seeking an underground stream. If I could follow the stream down and down to the hidden voice, would I come at last to the freeing word? I ask the night sky but the silence is steadfast. There is no reply.

This passage clearly anticipates and articulates some of the thoughts and emotions that go unspoken in the first chapter.45 Silence is here figured as mortuary stone, “a sealed vault with its cold icon.” Unlike the white stone of the first epigraph, in which “a new name [is] written,” this stone brings no “living word” for “the word is stone.” Whether by virtue of its powerlessness or its refusal, the silence described here stands as the ultimate resistance to knowing. It brings only the stillness and stasis of death. Against this “steadfast silence” there is a strong desire for speech, for telling, for a voice that will utter “the freeing word.” And there are hints of a deep-buried source, “a sensate sea,” “an underground stream” where the “hidden voice” might be found. But the speaker wonders how to get there through the silence. Her attempts “to attend [the] voice [of the speech that frees]” and “to embrace its absence” fail. There is no reply to her questions. As we have already suggested, the first chapter picks up many of these themes and images. As Naomi sits beside her uncle waiting for the answer that does not come, her hands “rest beside his on the knotted mat of roots covering the dry earth, the hard untilled soil.” Moving her fingers through the tangled roots and grasses, she thinks: “Like the grass, I search the earth and sky with a thin but persistent thirst.” The grass’s thirst for life-giving groundwater thus figures Naomi’s desire for answers to her questions. Under the “hard untilled soil” there is water, and somewhere buried within the ungiving silence there is a life-giving source, a telling voice. The connection to the poetic epigraph is then made explicit in the description of the coulee at the end of that chapter, when Naomi moves “along the stretch [of the path] where the side of the slope oozes wet from the surface seepage of the underground stream.” In light of the significance of the “underground stream” specifically named in the earlier passage, Naomi’s descent to where she “can hear the gurgling of the slowly moving water” signals the possibility of an eventual return through memory to a place of knowing and telling. As on all of her previous pilgrimages to the

Memory Works

81

coulee, however, Naomi will return home once again with muddy shoes and a flower that she has picked but without having followed the underground stream “down to the hidden voice.” Yet, just as the focus on the passage of time in this chapter hints at some impending change, so does the last sentence of the chapter (which describes the deepening night around Naomi as she stands at the bottom of the coulee) also figuratively suggest significant geological changes: “I stand for a long time watching as the contours of the coulee erode slowly in the night” (emphasis added). The figuratively changing landscape suggests the coming upheaval in Naomi’s life. The second chapter opens with a date marker, 13 September 1972, a little more than a month after the trip to the coulee. The first sentence then makes clear that the change subtly forecast at the end of the preceding chapter has taken place: “In the future I will remember the details of this day, the ordinary trivia illuminated by an event that sends my mind scurrying for significance” (o 5–6). Naomi has just learned of her uncle’s death and her reflection that she “will remember” indicates that the narration of her story from this point on will occur under the sign of purposeful memory. In imagining the future as a time of remembering the present, Naomi shows that she understands memory as a crucial piece of making or finding meaning in the critical events of her life. She recognizes that the present must therefore also be a time of remembering the past. When she returns to Obasan’s house to give support and comfort to her widowed aunt, she is alert to the everyday details of existence that may begin to give her some way to make sense of what has happened. As we saw in La Memoria, one loss entails others and so it is with Uncle’s death that Naomi and her aunt Obasan begin to deal directly with the losses that preceded this one. For Naomi, this return to past losses is a return to her absent mother. Everything leads back to that original rupture (clearly prefigured in the reference to an “amniotic deep” in the poetic epigraph). The present time of grieving is a time of reconnection with that first loss. As we discussed in chapter 1, encounters with death bring awareness of the fragility of human attachments and a heightened need for connectedness among those who live on. After Uncle’s death, Naomi and Obasan are drawn gently together in their grief, and Obasan reaches out to Naomi with the threads that will connect her to her past.46 As long as Obasan and Uncle were holding the family together, the question of what happened to Naomi’s mother could

82

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

remain suspended.47 Now, when death intervenes and Obasan, echoing Uncle’s words to Naomi, declares herself “too old,” Naomi can no longer ignore the fact that the fabric of the family is stretched and frayed. When Obasan appears at Naomi’s bedside in the middle of the night and leads her up into the attic, she is acknowledging the importance of memory and her acceptance of the fact that she cannot shield her niece forever from the painful history that lies behind her. As the members of the older generation begin to die off, they must pass the family’s legacy on to the children if the family is to survive.48 The return to the past and the memory work that comprise the novel are contained within the frame of the two days Naomi spends at Obasan’s house following her uncle’s death. During that time Obasan gives her a package of documents that had been collected and saved by Naomi’s aunt Emily (her mother’s younger sister). Aunt Emily’s life’s work has been to expose the “crimes of history” (o 50) perpetrated against Japanese Canadians, and in the package are copies of her wartime correspondence with government officials, her conference papers, her diary written in the form of letters addressed to Naomi’s mother, and a grey cardboard folder containing two “narrow and long” envelopes in each of which are “blue-lined rice-paper sheets with Japanese writing which [Naomi] cannot read” (o 55). Memory is kindled both by the contents of this package and by the trip to the attic with Obasan. Naomi’s two aunts offer her two different versions of memory. Aunt Emily’s collected writings represent memory as witnessed history, a conscious historical praxis of documentation and contestation.49 Obasan’s relationship to memory is far more ambivalent. Remembering and forgetting are held in delicate balance. Memory may serve to secure one’s connection to one’s ancestors and perhaps thereby contribute to one’s sense of who one is, but if those connections have been violently broken, then perhaps one can only remember brokenness. And if memories of rupture sever connections, one has to be careful what one chooses to remember or what memories one passes on. Even though she hands Aunt Emily’s package over to Naomi, Obasan is not convinced of the advisability of venturing into that kind of memory. As Naomi begins to look through the contents of the parcel, Obasan hands her a familiar photograph and says, “Here is the best letter. This is the best time. These are the best memories” (o 56). The photo is of Naomi aged two or three “clinging to [her] mother’s leg on a street corner in Vancouver” (o 57). Obasan

Memory Works

83

wants to pass this happy memory along to Naomi and to have it stand in the place of all memory because, as Naomi reflects, speaking Obasan’s mind: “Questions from all these papers, questions referring to turbulence in the past, are an unnecessary upheaval in the delicate ecology of this numb day” (o 54–5). Shouldn’t it be possible to remember only the good times and let remembering stop there? But there is no way to corral memory. Examining the photograph, Naomi perceives and at the same time vividly recalls the uneasy circumstances in which it was taken. Her memory of her mother’s gentle touch on that occasion is accompanied by the memory of her own anxiety and fear at being the subject of a little boy’s stare. “Mortified by the attention,” she had taken refuge behind her mother. When her mother’s whisper that the boy will laugh if she hides “flushes [her] out of [her] hiding-place,” she feels dangerously exposed: “Only the sidewalk is safe to look at” (o 57). Remembering this episode, Naomi is drawn into reminiscence and reflection about the past, about her mother and her grandmother, about pleasure and comfort and security, but also about excruciating shyness and apprehension and a little girl’s silent listening. The chapter is rich with detailed and emotionladen memories of the family’s early life in Vancouver. But as one recollection leads to another, all lead ultimately to a realization of what is now missing. Left with “fragments of fragments … Segments of stories,” Naomi senses the potential of even these memories to engulf her: “If I linger in the longing, I am drawn into a whirlpool” (o 64).50 Unlike Aunt Emily, Obasan does not exhort her niece to remember everything. She would like to be able to protect her indefinitely from that whirlpool of longing and grief. Yet, like Emily, Obasan also hangs on to evidence of the past. Indeed, she lives surrounded by its traces: “Every home-made piece of furniture, each pot holder and paper doily is a link in her lifeline. She has preserved in shelves, in cupboards, under beds – a box of marbles, half-filled colouring books, a red, white and blue rubber ball. The items are endless. Every short stub pencil, every cornflakes box stuffed with paper bags and old letters is of her ordering. They rest in the corners like parts of her body, hair cells, skin tissues, tiny specks of memory. This house is now her blood and bones” (o 18). As this passage indicates, Obasan both inhabits and embodies memory. Each item saved, each “tiny speck of memory” in the corners of her house is both a piece of her self and a “link in her lifeline.” Through her careful acts of preservation, Obasan maintains the threshold between past and present. Throughout Naomi’s

84

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

life, however, Obasan has resolutely guarded this gateway, keeping the children safe from the devastating knowledge of what happened to their mother. Uncle’s death has led her to look back across that threshold and to open the gate for Naomi as well. When she takes Naomi with her up into the attic to search for something she does not name, she keeps repeating the word “lost,” which, the narrator tells us, is also the word for “dead.” Death and loss are, in this moment, indistinguishable, and Obasan’s search through the attic suggests that it is only in recovering something (some understanding?) of what has been lost that there can be survival. The memories that Obasan is seeking are part of the “lifeline” that she will hold out to her niece in this time of loss and forgetfulness.51 The episode in which Obasan and Naomi venture into the attic contains some of the novel’s most striking figurations of memory. Of course, attics themselves are archetypal representations of memory. An uninhabited storeroom where relics from the past are packed away for safekeeping, the attic is an obvious figure for memory’s conservative function. As a place seldom visited, whose contents may rest undisturbed for years, it is also a figure for the forgetful face of memory, for memories either dormant or repressed. In the attic, what is out of sight may indeed be out of mind and to venture there may be to journey both into the past and into the unconscious.52 Dark and dusty and filled with cobwebs, the attic in Obasan’s house is clearly a place not often visited. But Naomi and Obasan’s intrusion stirs things up. The description of what happens in the attic suggests some of the unsettling consequences of remembering. The past so carefully packed away has not been laid to rest; at the slightest provocation it may entangle and threaten to devour. Obasan moves a box aside: “she stretches the corner of a spider’s web, exquisitely symmetrical, balanced between the box and the magazines. A round black blot, large as a cat’s eye, suddenly sprouts legs and ambles across the web, shaking it” (o 29). Another spider then appears and confronts the first, which leaps away and vanishes between the floorboards. Startled by this dramatic incident, Naomi jerks her arm, and the flashlight she is carrying illuminates the ceiling and “a whole cloudy scene of carnage,” which she describes as a “graveyard and feasting-ground combined.” The tattered remains hanging “like evil laundry on a line” tell a story of spiders shredding and devouring, of how the past feeds the present and life feeds on death.

Memory Works

85

Naomi then focuses on the swarming dust, whose “specks pummel across the light.” Once again images of death take on a menacing life of their own. Even though Naomi repeats the common formula of dust as a symbol for death (“Everything, I suppose, turns to dust eventually”), she at the same time likens dust to the memories and dreams that continue to stir and evolve in the places that death leaves vacant: “All our ordinary stories are changed in time, altered as much by the present as the present is shaped by the past. Potent and pervasive as a prairie dust storm, memories and dreams seep and mingle through cracks, settling on furniture and into upholstery” (o 30). As another way of representing the memory process, this dust emphasizes that the attics of memory are not, and cannot be, hermetically sealed. If the spiders’ feasting-ground highlights both the conservative and destructive potential of memory, the penetrating dust insists upon the fact that memories do not stay tucked away and that past and present invariably and unexpectedly overlap: “Our attics and living-rooms encroach on each other, deep into their invisible places” (o 30). What the episode in the attic most explicitly develops, however, is the spider-and-web imagery used to represent Naomi’s encounters with the past. She likens her “memories of the dead … who refuse to bury themselves” to “threads of old spider webs, still sticky and hovering.” She compares the return of memory to the dangerous and immobilizing attack of a spider: “When I least expect it, a memory comes skittering out of the dark, spinning and netting the air, ready to snap me up and ensnare me in old and complex puzzles” (o 30–1). These images are picked up again in her reflection on how Obasan is being increasingly drawn back into a past that threatens to devour her: “The past hungers for her. Feasts on her. And when its feasting is complete? She will dance and dangle in the dark, like small insect bones, a fearful calligraphy” (o 31). The past is all-consuming and remembering it puts one in mortal danger of not being able to survive it. Other slightly less ominous images of memory do, however, compete with these. Of particular significance is the fact that the return of dangerous memories and haunting questions coincides with Naomi’s discovery of a patchwork quilt that her mother had made for her. The quilt is now “so frayed and moth-eaten it’s only a rag” (o 30) (a description that resonates with the “shredded rag shapes” that hang in the spiders’ graveyard), but Naomi remembers her mother piecing it together. Even in its fragile state, the quilt represents the mother’s care for her and recalls the possibility of wholeness and comfort and

86

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

protection. Both quilt and spider webs are associated with the imagery of threads (and lines and nets and twine and ribbons) that is so pervasive in the novel.53 The juxtaposition in this passage of two possible ways of looking at threads is emblematic of the overall treatment of such images in the novel – threads and webs may be signs of entanglement and entrapment or they may stand for the drawing together of families in closeness and safety.54 Given that Obasan is a book about loss and remembrance, Kogawa’s elaborate use of metaphor is not surprising. As Nicola King has remarked, “it is impossible to imagine or formulate memory and its operations without the use of metaphor.”55 Of course, the paradox of memory is that it holds what is not there, which is in a sense what metaphors also do. All of the figurations of memory in the novel thus come back to the dilemma that lies at the heart of metaphor itself: that to try to hold on to something through memory (or metaphor) is to acknowledge – and some might even say perpetuate the experience of – loss. Threads are broken, blankets are frayed, packages are misplaced. But, as we saw in the previous chapter, the work of grieving and the work of survival rely upon the mediation of both memory and language. The photograph that Obasan offers Naomi as containing “the best memories” is the basis for another central metaphor in the novel. Naomi’s figurative reading of the photograph comes by way of a series of memories and reflections triggered by the picture. When she imagines and describes her mother as a tree, she articulates a figural representation that resonates within the novel’s broad network of images of connection and grounding. But her development and transformation of this metaphor in relation to the events that she remembers (memory of presence leading always to memory of absence) reveals some of the reasons for her ambivalence about remembering. At the same time, her recourse to metaphor illustrates her need to bring language to bear on the losses in her past. Naomi’s figurative readings of the photograph come in response to her memory of two childhood traumas, one in which her mother protected her and one that she associates with her mother’s absence. Recalling a time when she inadvertently caused some baby chicks to be killed by a hen, she remembers how her mother’s nonjudgmental intervention guided her through the trauma of the event.56 Acting quickly and silently to save the chicks that were still alive, her mother at the same time took care to comfort and protect her daughter: “Her eyes are steady and matter of fact – the eyes of

Memory Works

87

Japanese motherhood. They do not invade and betray. They are eyes that protect, shielding what is hidden most deeply in the heart of the child” (o 71). When the two later speak of what happened, “there is no blame or pity.” Naomi realizes: “there is nothing about me that my mother does not know, nothing that is not safe to tell” (o 72). This deep connection of trust and communication between mother and daughter is reflected in images that Naomi then uses to describe the scene depicted in the photograph: “I am clinging to my mother’s leg, a flesh shaft that grows from the ground, a tree trunk of which I am an offshoot – a young branch attached by right of flesh and blood. Where she is rooted, I am rooted. If she walks, I will walk. Her blood is whispering through my veins. The shaft of her leg is the shaft of my body and I am her thoughts” (o 77). This is the family tree with its single root and many branches; the physical and spiritual connection of mother and child; a birthright and a cultural legacy. But this is only one possible reading of the image in the photo, for other channels of memory have been opened up by the picture as well. Even as she remembers her mother’s sheltering presence, Naomi recalls that there had been something that was not safe for her to tell. The memory of this secret then transforms the metaphor. Naomi had been sexually abused by a neighbour, Old Man Gower. She remembers her abuser whispering in her ear that she must not tell her mother and she now voices the question that underlay (and continues to underlie) that scene for her: “Where in the darkness has my mother gone?” (o 77). In Naomi’s narration, this question prompts her first to articulate the image (cited above) of her mother as a tree to which she is attached as a young branch. It is as if she conjures up this image to protect herself against the damaging implications of the story of abuse. But under the pressure of that painful memory, the image is almost immediately altered: “But here in Mr. Gower’s hands I become other – a parasite on her body, no longer of her mind. My arms are vines that strangle the limb to which I cling. I hold so tightly now that arms and legs become one through force. I am a growth that attaches and digs a furrow under the bark of her skin” (o 77). The symbiotic relationship has become a parasitic one, and there is danger to both mother and daughter in this forced connection. The desperation of the daughter’s attachment reveals her fear of the loss that has already taken place: “If I tell my mother about Mr. Gower, the alarm will send a tremor through our bodies and I

88

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

will be torn from her. But the secret has already separated us. The secret is this: I go to seek Old Man Gower in his hideaway. I clamber unbidden onto his lap. His hands are frightening and pleasurable. In the center of my body is a rift” (o 77). The secret is complicated by the fact that Naomi cannot articulate, except obliquely, what that secret is. Rather than name it, she immediately shifts the focus to her own complicity in Old Man Gower’s abuse, essentially blaming herself for the separation from her mother. Davidson’s analysis of how Naomi “desperately denies abuse by claiming that she had consented” seems to me very convincing.57 Insofar as she feels herself in some way responsible for her own victimization, she can read her mother’s absence as her just punishment. Her dreams vividly depict this definitive separation from her mother: “In my childhood dreams, the mountain yawns apart as the chasm spreads. My mother is on one side of the rift. I am on the other. We cannot reach each other. My legs are being sawn in half” (o 77).58 The final sentence retains the memory of the earlier imagery of living trees and vines but now Naomi’s body is dead wood, sawn lumber. The loss of the mother is experienced as a cleft within the self, an amputation. It is no accident that the imagery used to describe Naomi’s alienation from her mother recalls Aunt Emily’s exhortation to remember the past at all costs: “You are your history. If you cut any of it off you’re an amputee. Don’t deny the past. Remember everything … Denial is gangrene” (o 60). Health and survival will depend on returning to the traumatic past and re-membering it, rejoining the severed parts, and above all, finding a way to reconnect with the mother. Aunt Emily’s package represents her determination to offer her niece a way back to wholeness through memory. Significantly, Naomi finally receives this legacy of remembering from her other aunt, the one for whom “the time of forgetting is now come” (o 36). Indeed, it turns out that Aunt Emily’s thick parcel of documents was the lost object that Obasan had been seeking in the attic. When Naomi comes down to breakfast the next morning, the parcel is sitting on a stool in the kitchen. As we suggested earlier, after Uncle’s death Obasan is ready to let go of her role as guardian of the past. Having spent years relegating the family’s memories to a protective silence, she is now prepared to place those memories, and memory itself, in the hands of the next generation. The last item that Naomi pulls out of Aunt Emily’s package is her aunt’s diary, written in the form of letters addressed to “Nesan,”

Memory Works

89

Emily’s older sister, Naomi’s mother. As the dialogic nature of the journal evokes the presence of Naomi’s mother as listener, Naomi’s reading becomes a further extension of that imagined listening: “The book feels heavy with voices from the past – a connection to Mother and Grandma Kato that I did not know existed” (o 56). Uneasy at first, as if she is listening in on conversations that were never meant to include her, Naomi quickly comes to realize that Aunt Emily has sent her the diary for a reason: “I feel like a burglar as I read, breaking into a private house only to discover it’s my childhood house filled with corners and rooms I’ve never seen” (o 95). In giving her access to the stories and voices of her aunt, her mother, and her grandmother, the diary is putting her in touch with her own history. At the point at which the diary ends, in the spring of 1942, Emily and Grandpa Kato are preparing to head to Toronto and Obasan is about to move with Naomi and Stephen to the town of Slocan in the B.C. interior. Naomi’s reading of this journal having reconnected her with her own memories, she is now able to pick up the tale, to witness and narrate her own past from that time forward. In chapter 15, she returns in memory to the point at which Emily’s journal left off and her subsequent narration weaves together the immediacy of witnessing (“We are leaving the B.C. coast … I am a small child resting my head in Obasan’s lap”) and the interpretive force of recollection (“Not one of us on this journey returns home again”) (o 131, 132, 133). Naomi’s story continues to unfold as she sorts through the other contents of the parcel. Reading and remembering, she finds herself shuttling back and forth between past and present losses: “I want to get away from all this. From the past and all these papers, from the present, from the memories, from the deaths, from Aunt Emily and her heap of words” (o 218). But although she suggests that Emily’s words in all of the preserved letters and telegrams and petitions may be nothing more than futile “scratchings in the barnyard” (o 226), she nevertheless continues her excavations. Her diggings are marked by both urgency and reluctance. At one point a newspaper clipping about Japanese evacuees in Alberta triggers painful memories and she thinks: “Aunt Emily, are you a surgeon cutting at my scalp with your folders and your filing cards and your insistence on knowing all? The memory drains down the sides of my face, but it isn’t enough, is it? It’s your hands in my abdomen, pulling the growth from the lining of my walls, but bring back the anesthetist turn on the ether clamp down the gas mask bring on the chloroform when will

90

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

this operation be over Aunt Em?” (o 232–3). Naomi’s resistance to the painful operations of memory is, however, immediately followed by her insistent and detailed recounting of those same painful early years in Alberta. Indeed, even as she says “I cannot tell about this time, Aunt Emily. The body will not tell” (o 235), she tells. And so she moves, through memory, progressively closer to the defining losses in her past – her father’s death and her mother’s absence. Once memory has been engaged, it will not be silenced. Naomi’s memory of the moment when she finally acknowledged that her father was dead leads her almost immediately to reflect on her futile, and ultimately abandoned, attempts around that same time to learn what had happened to her mother and grandmother in Japan. She then recalls a “puzzling incident” that occurred several years later in 1954 during Aunt Emily’s first visit to Granton (o 256). Late at night Naomi had overheard a murmured conversation among the grownups.59 Watching through a crack in the door she saw sheets of blue paper handed back and forth as Uncle, Obasan, and Emily spoke in whispers about whether or not the children should be told. Obasan was praying and Aunt Emily was crying as she put the folded blue papers back into a grey cardboard folder which she then placed in her briefcase. This grey cardboard folder is among the materials collected in Aunt Emily’s package, but its contents are not part of Naomi’s initial excavations. It is Obasan who takes the blue papers from their ricepaper envelopes and spends much of the afternoon reading them silently with her magnifying glass. Later, after Emily and Stephen arrive with Nakayama-sensei, the minister picks up the pages from where Obasan has left them on the coffee table and reads through them in silence. When he asks whether it is not better now to speak of what the letters contain, Aunt Emily nods slowly. Then she in turn reads the letters silently before handing them back to Sensei, who reads them silently once again before finally beginning to read aloud. The story that the children were not told eighteen years earlier will not come to Naomi directly from the slippery blue pages with their Japanese writing. It comes to her first through her witnessing of the silent reading of those letters by those who have for so long sought to protect her from the painful knowledge that the letters contain; and then it comes to her through sound, through the words read aloud, through Sensei’s “faltering voice … almost drowned out by the splattering gusts against the window,” through the howling of the wind within which Naomi hears “other howling” (o 279).

Memory Works

91

Grandma Kato’s two letters speak to the impossibility and inevitability of testimony in the face of unbearable and unthinkable catastrophe. The first letter is a “brief and emotionless statement,” an articulation of the inadequacy of language to approach and even begin to convey any of the horror of what has been experienced. The second is “an outpouring,” equally strong evidence of the survivor’s desperate need to try to tell (o 280). Grandma Kato apologizes for “the burden of [her] words” (o 283), explaining that “the silence and the constancy of the nightmare had become unbearable” and that she hoped that she might, through the telling, begin “to extricate herself from the grip of the past” (o 282, 283). The tension between the unbearableness and the urgency of telling is mirrored in the reading and the listening that complete it. At the end of the first page, Sensei “stops reading and folds the letter as if he has decided to read no more” (o 281), but a short while later he opens it and begins to read again. As if in direct response to Obasan’s earlier suggestion that “it is better to forget” (o 54), Grandma Kato has written: “However much the effort to forget, there is no forgetfulness” (o 281). Naomi’s narration of this final breaking of the silence stresses the ways in which her own witnessing has been repeatedly mediated. The words through which the telling comes were never intended for her; theirs is an intercepted story, preserved through time, transmitted through the living voice, and translated through the gathered and still grieving family. Thus, as Naomi listens to the reading of the text, she listens across space and time to the underlying text of the event that the letters cannot ever represent. Listening, she imagines the story written in the minds and on the bodies of her mother and grandmother: “unthinkable memories alive in their minds [and] the visible evidence of horror written on their skin, in their blood” (o 281). These are the images and memories to which her own narrative tries to bear witness, as she retells the story that was told in her grandmother’s letter.60 But this is not the only story that Naomi hears and tells. Sensei had encouraged Naomi and her brother to listen deeply as he began reading the letters aloud: “‘Naomi … Stephen, your mother is speaking. Listen carefully to her voice’” (o 279). Indeed, behind the grandmother’s words lies the mother’s silence, but as Naomi listens she learns that this is a silence that speaks of a mother’s love for her children: “Mother, for her part, continued her vigil of silence. She spoke with no one about her torment. She specifically requested that

92

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

Stephen and I be spared the truth” (o 283). It is finally to this telling silence that Naomi must attend. This is the silence to which her own telling will finally give voice. In her study of the impossibility of representing events of historical horror like the Holocaust, Lea Wernick Fridman examines how catastrophic facts “call out for narrative and insist that they are part of a narrative at the same time that they refuse to be contained within narrative.”61 Fridman’s focus is on narrative and aesthetic strategies that attempt to negotiate this paradox, and she proposes “witnessed modes of knowing” as a possible narrative response to the catastrophic historical event that seems to render utterance impossible.62 The example that Fridman offers is that of the omitted and substituted narratives of “the horror” at the heart of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. She suggests that “the integrity of the omitted narrative … marks a boundary separating what is representable from what is not” and that this “clear and clearly marked boundary brings the unrepresentable, if not into view for the reader, within some sort of existential, or felt, proximity.”63 Fridman further notes: “It is where traumatic fact cannot articulate itself credibly in words or story that narrative falls back on a witnessed mode of knowing.”64 Fridman’s articulation of this “narrative mode that centers on a relay of witnesses”65 seems to me to be an apt description of what is happening in and to Naomi’s narration at the end of Obasan. As Sensei reads Grandma Kato’s letters, Naomi is able to witness what is not there – the pain that is too large and unspeakable to be inscribed in those pages. She is able to “know” her mother’s unbearable story only through its absence and its traces, which she witnesses and recognizes in her grandmother’s words, but also in the years of silence between the writing of those words and her hearing them.66 Naomi’s observation of Obasan’s and Emily’s and Sensei’s silent reading of the letters also participates in the “relay of witnesses” that marks this narrative mode. Naomi is able to bring her missing mother into presence in her story only by continuing this “witnessed mode of knowing.” When Naomi closes her eyes in order to be able to hear her mother (“Mother, I am listening. Assist me to hear you” [o 288]), the mother’s silence remains intact. It is only through Naomi’s own words addressed to her mother that her mother “speaks” to her in the book’s penultimate chapter. Both King-Kok Cheung and Marie Vautier have rightly insisted upon the importance of not reading speech and silence in Kogawa’s

Memory Works

93

novel as binary opposites within a Eurocentric feminist perspective inclined to make a woman’s coming to speech emblematic of her achievement of agency. Naomi’s relationship to silence throughout the novel is far more complicated, and any understanding of the novel’s final scenes depends upon an appreciation of this complexity. In Articulate Silences, Cheung analyses the writings of three Asian American women writers and challenges “perspectives that result in attributing silence solely to patriarchal constructions of womanhood and in eliding the issues of silencing and being silent.”67 Cheung’s main point is that “modalities of silence need to be differentiated” when reading across cultures. She notes that the three writers in her study all “speak to the resources as well as the hazards of silence.”68 Vautier’s reading of Obasan similarly stresses “Naomi’s complex appreciation of silence and of speech,” noting that “in this novel, silence and speech, history and theory, the past and the present are all subjected to recent postmodern and postcolonial questionings of the notion of truth.”69 Vautier points out that Naomi largely adheres to “Obasan’s philosophy that in silence lies strength” but that she at the same time comes to “resen[t] the lack of knowledge of the past imposed on her by Obasan’s silence.”70 Nevertheless, as Vautier’s reading suggests, when “speech has replaced the mother’s ‘voicelessness’” in order for healing to occur in the final pages of the novel, this is speech that preserves and contains the silence that it speaks. Cheung is even more explicit on this point, noting that in Kogawa’s novel “silence becomes, as it were, a figure of speech.”71 Furthermore, both Cheung and Vautier read the conclusion of Obasan in relation to what Cheung refers to as the novel’s “cryptic epigraph,” in which it was suggested that – if it could, if it would – silence itself might speak.72 Cheung’s reading locates the “key” to this apparent enigma in the idea of “attendance”73 as she recalls the epigraph’s lines: “The speech that frees comes forth from that amniotic deep. To attend its voice, I can hear it say, is to embrace its absence.” Attentive presence enables the listener to give voice to the silence that cannot or will not speak. In reading Obasan through the lens of “attendance,” Cheung elaborates on Gayle Fujita’s nuanced analysis of the ways in which Naomi’s Nikkei legacy has taught her “a nonverbal mode of apprehension,” a “deliberate attendance” that exemplifies “the positive use of silence.”74 Cheung’s reading of the “attentive silences” in Obasan allows her to find in the novel both an unflinching critique of the oppressive and damaging effects of certain silences and an appreciation

94

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

of “the enabling aspects” of others.75 Indeed, it becomes clear in Naomi’s attentive silence at the end of chapter 37 just how far, as Cheung so accurately puts it, “the avenues of silence and the avenues of speech are conjoined.”76 Naomi’s listening is marked first by a memory that seems to yield nothing but its desire: “it is as if I am back with Uncle again, listening and listening to the silent earth and the silent sky as I have done all my life” (o 288). But as she calls on her absent mother to assist her in hearing, she is attending that silence in a new way, speaking it and drawing it into her own speech. Naomi’s attendance is a form of memory work, a mode of witnessing across time and space that allows the absences and silences of the past to speak to and through her. What Naomi hears in her mother’s “voicelessness” is the memory of her mother’s living breath: “From the extremity of much dying, the only sound that reaches me now is the sigh of your remembered breath, a wordless word” (o 289). Though her mother “remain[s] in the voicelessness,” Naomi’s memory gives voice and meaning to that inarticulate silence. The remembered breath of the living mother is the “speech” that the daughter, remembering, attends. In chapter 38 Naomi’s attentiveness to that remembered speech takes the form of her own voice calling out to her mother: “How shall I attend that speech, Mother, how shall I trace that wave?” The listening daughter’s speech calls out to the mother’s silence and thereby attends her (waits for her, accompanies her, is present to and for her). It is the daughter who bears witness to what the mother cannot bear to tell: “Martyr Mother, you pilot your powerful voicelessness over the ocean and across the mountain, straight as a missile to our hut on the edge of the sugar-beet field. You wish to protect us with lies, but the camouflage does not hide your cries.” Hearing her mother’s cries despite the silence through which her mother sought to shield her from that knowledge, Naomi becomes a witness to her mother’s suffering: “Beneath the hiding I am there with you. Silent Mother, lost in the abandoning, you do not share the horror. At first, stumbling and unaware of pain, you open your eyes in the red mist and, sheltering a dead child, you flee through the flames. Young Mother at Nagasaki, am I not also there?” Through this insistent act of witness, this sharing of the horror, Naomi reconnects with her lost mother. The mother’s cries are relayed through the daughter’s telling. And at the same time, Naomi is able to break the silence and bear witness to the traumatic events in her own past. In her telling, the sufferings of mother and daughter are intimately

Memory Works

95

intertwined (references to a mountain breaking open and legs sawn in half explicitly recalling Naomi’s childhood dreams after she was abused by Old Man Gower): “In the dark Slocan night, the bright light flares in my dreaming. I hear the screams and feel the mountain breaking. Your long black hair falls and falls into the chasm. My legs are sawn in half. The skin on your face bubbles like lava and melts from your bones. Mother, I see your face. Do not turn aside” (o 290). Naomi’s act of witness, her telling, is about looking directly into the face of her mother’s suffering. It is also about finally revealing her own suffering. Through these revelations, Naomi is able to survive her losses and to begin to heal. We referred earlier in this chapter to Susan Brison’s assertion that the testimony through which one may begin to survive a trauma also requires the establishment of a connection with an empathic listener, someone willing and able to hear the survivor’s story.77 Dori Laub likewise stresses the vital role of “the listener to trauma [as] a participant and a co-owner of the traumatic event,” remarking that “the listener has to feel the victim’s victories, defeats and silences, know them from within, so that they can assume the form of testimony.”78 Naomi’s attention to and narration of her mother’s story in chapter 38 is the inscription of this kind of listening. At the same time, in addressing her mother, Naomi essentially imagines for herself a listener who makes her own testimony possible. The encounter prompts Naomi to reflect once again on the photograph that represents her memory of her connection to her mother. Her reading of the photo now echoes and expands on her earlier readings: “My fat arm clings to your leg. Your skirt hides half my face. Your leg is a tree trunk and I am branch, vine, butterfly. I am joined to your limbs by right of birth, child of your flesh, leaf of your bough” (o 291). In the metaphor of the tree, the profound connection between mother and daughter is reaffirmed (“child of your flesh, leaf of your bough”). But what is new is that the child is now able to imagine this connection in different terms. She is a branch of her mother’s tree, but she is also a vine and a butterfly.79 The vine may cling but it no longer strangles; the butterfly does not even cling. The image of the butterfly suggests a way of being separate, free, and yet connected at the same time.80 The memory of connection cannot, however, undo the trauma of violent separation or the anguish of loss. Naomi’s thoughts shift abruptly to a different tree image: “The tree is a dead tree in the middle of the

96

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

prairies. I sit on its roots still as a stone” (o 291). Naomi cannot deny the reality of the dead tree or of her own “woundedness.” Realizing that the silence between her and her mother has been their “mutual destruction,” she despairs of ever healing. She “beg[s] that the woundedness may be healed” but her mother “stay[s] in a black-and-white photograph, smiling [her] yasashi smile” (o 291). Marianne Hirsch, in her analysis of Holocaust photographs and “projected memory,” describes photographic images as “stubborn survivors of death.”81 But Hirsch goes on to remark that while photographs “affirm the past’s existence, its ‘having-been there,’ … in their flat two-dimensionality, they also signal its insurmountable distance.”82 Photographs offer but also frustrate access to the past. They are – in the context of both history and memory – relic, evidence, and trace, but as such they stand above all for what has been lost. The static relic can overcome the enormity of loss only through the dynamic memory work of interpretation and narration.83 As David Palumbo-Liu remarks of “the nonverbal icons of Naomi’s childhood” in Obasan, they are “documents of memory … that beg to be narrated.”84 The juxtaposition of the unchanging black-and-white photograph with Naomi’s constantly changing readings of its image highlights what Palumbo-Liu calls “[Naomi’s] deeply personal hermeneutic project.”85 The silent mother “smiling [her] yasashi smile” in the photo seems to challenge Naomi’s attempts to narrate the image, to make the memory speak and to find healing there. Yet Naomi’s narration does not end with the realization of the “mutual destruction” of mother and daughter wrought by their silences. Rather, Naomi finally finds a way to come to terms with the contradictions between past and present, absence and presence. Even as she acknowledges the immutability of the silences and erasures of the past, she affirms something about that past’s continuing connection to both present and future: “I can know your presence though you are not here. The letters tonight are skeletons. Bones only. But the earth still stirs with dormant blooms. Love flows through the roots of the trees by our graves” (o 292). The affirmation in this passage – I can know your presence though you are not here – is fundamental to Kogawa’s memory project. Even though only bones remain, memory is alive. Palumbo-Liu describes Obasan as “deeply engaged in a struggle to negotiate a way for memory to supersede history.”86 The goal, he notes, is “to inscribe significance where the dominant history has declared (through omission) that there is none.”87 The inscription of

Memory Works

97

significance is what Naomi’s memory work of interpretation and narration is all about. The significance that memory inscribes is not about analysable meaning – there is no way to make the catastrophe signify; it is rather about meaning as meaningfulness, connection, mattering, love. In the passage cited above, Naomi imagines how, through memory and mourning, love endures even after its object has ceased to be: “Love flows through the roots of the trees by our graves.” The work of memory and the work of mourning engage the imagination of the past and the present, evoking what one cannot see but knows is still there (roots, connections, the persistence of love); they also engage the imagination of the future, a survival beyond grief and loss, evoking what is yet to come (dormant blooms). In the novel’s final chapter, Naomi again reflects on the fundamental inadequacy of memory in the face of the absolute nature of loss. Flowing love and the recollection of shared melodies will not undo the graves, the “rotting of the flesh,” the “dead hands [that] can no longer touch our outstretched hands or move to heal” (o 294). Though “[remembered] voices pour down like rain” around her, Naomi “still feel[s] thirst” (o 295). But at this juncture and without in any way denying the enormity of her loss, she consciously chooses to step back from the dead and to reinhabit her own still living body: “This body of grief is not fit for human habitation. Let there be flesh. The song of mourning is not a lifelong song” (o 295). As her own living flesh becomes the embodiment of her memories and her grieving, she is able to say to those whose loss she mourns: “My loved ones, rest in your world of stone. Around you flows the underground stream” (o 295). In the novel’s final scene, Naomi goes back to the coulee that she had visited with Uncle only a month earlier. In returning to the site of the novel’s opening passage, this final scene constitutes an explicit inscription of the work of memory as both return and progression. Climbing down the slope into the coulee, Naomi descends both literally and figuratively to “the underground stream.” Only here – immersed in memory but firmly grounded in the palpable present (her shoes “mud-clogged again”) – does she reach a place of resolution where the stubborn opposition of stone (the silent dead) and water (the flow of love, desire, speech) is apparently undone. The moon is described as a “pure white stone,” but in its reflection on the surface of the river Naomi sees “water and stone dancing” (o 296).88 In direct reference to the imagery of the poetic epigraph, this figure suggests

98

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

the unlocking so ardently desired (“I hate the stillness. I hate the stone … Unless the stone bursts with telling … there is in my life no living word”). It also evokes the yearned-for reunion of opposed elements suggested in the epigraph’s description of words as “pockmarks on the earth … hailstones seeking an underground stream.” In the poetic language of the novel’s final chapter the stone finds the stream. In the reflected image of the dance of stone and water, described as a “quiet ballet, soundless as breath,” the quiet is not of death but of breath.89 The losses contained in the silence of memory and reflection find voice and telling in the metaphors as sound and silence, loss and survival come together in the breath, the sound and measure of life going on. The chapter’s final detail clearly figures that going on means letting go and that, through memory, there can be presence without flesh. Naomi had always picked and brought back at least one flower as a keepsake from her trips with Uncle to the coulee. In this final scene, however, Naomi picks no flower. She holds from a distance, holds by not holding. Down on the riverbank, she looks back up at where the wildflowers are growing beside the trickling stream and realizes that she can smell their perfume from where she is standing. Memory is in that inhalation – the invisible, the ineffable, the fleeting, taken in and cherished as part of life going on. But she is also breathing in the possibilities of the future. At the end of the previous chapter, Naomi had reflected that even among the skeletons “the earth still stir[red] with dormant blooms” (o 292). The blooming roses in the final scene are thus both memorial and potential. Naomi’s pilgrimage brings her to a place of presence where the past meets the future. Indeed, the last sentence of the chapter is a powerful affirmation of both memory and survival: “If I hold my head a certain way, I can smell [the flowers] from where I am” (o 296, emphasis added).90

legacies of remembering: anne michaels’s fugitive pieces Athos didn’t want me to forget. He made me review my Hebrew alphabet. He said the same thing every day: “It is your future you are remembering.” (fp 21)

Jakob Beer’s memoir begins with the recollection of the moment when he “squirmed from the marshy ground” of Biskupin and appeared, an orphaned and traumatized seven-year-old, before Athos

Memory Works

99

Roussos, who was working on the excavation of the buried city. Writing down the memory, the sixty-year-old Jakob likens this emergence and encounter to a rebirth: “No one is born just once. If you’re lucky, you’ll emerge again in someone’s arms” (fp 5). Indeed, Jakob’s leap “from underground into air” (fp 12) marked the beginning of his return from the deathlike place to which he had retreated after having witnessed the murder of his parents by the Nazis. He moved from a solitary existence defined by the most primitive survival instincts into a relationship with another human being, into life once again. He emerged into the arms of Athos, the Greek geologist who recognized the mud-caked boy as “human, just a child,” and scooped him up and smuggled him out of Poland, concealed under his heavy coat. When the two finally arrived at the island of Zakynthos, Athos “plucked the seven-year-old refugee Jakob Beer” from out of his trousers (fp 14). The image of Athos carrying Jakob to safety and finally bringing him forth into the world makes this rescue an act of both deliverance (salvation) and delivery (birth). As the boy’s koumbaros (his godfather), Athos sets out to protect, nurture, guide, and provide for Jakob. Throughout the long months that the two spend in hiding during the German Occupation, the boy dwells for the most part in a place of traumatic memory: “I spent the day writing my letter to the dead and was answered at night in my sleep” (fp 19). At the same time, he clings to Athos’s side, listening to the geologist’s stories, on some level aware that when Athos tells tales of his seafaring ancestors, he is offering Jakob a different past to remember, “a second history” (fp 20). Recounting “the history of the earth itself” (fp 21), Athos is also giving Jakob a different view of history and a lesson in survival: “We can’t stop the small accident, the tiny detail that conspires into fate … But we can assert the largest order, the large human values daily, the only order large enough to see” (fp 22). Even as he gives Jakob ways to begin to heal his shattered self, however, Athos knows that the boy must not risk forgetting his own language and memories. He cannot remake himself whole if he loses his past. So Athos and Jakob learn one another’s languages and Athos furthermore insists that Jakob study the Hebrew alphabet. In order to survive what he has been through, Jakob will need to be able to carry his memories forward in a language that will bear them. His cultural legacy is the legacy of where he came from and who he was. It is the legacy of a child’s personal loss of parents and sister but it is also the legacy of the Holocaust, of the systematic extermination of the Jews

100

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

and the attempt to erase the entire history of a people. The legacy of genocide demands remembering and telling, for this is the only way to survive that annihilation. Jakob’s heritage must not be forgotten. As Athos says: “It is your future you are remembering” (fp 21). The novel’s prefatory passage clearly places Jakob’s story in the realm of the literature of testimony, establishing the historical trauma of the Second World War as the context for the narrative that follows and underlining the obstacles to bearing witness: “During the Second World War, countless manuscripts – diaries, memoirs, eyewitness accounts – were lost or destroyed. Some of these narratives were deliberately hidden … by those who did not live to retrieve them … Other stories are concealed in memory, neither written nor spoken. Still others are recovered, by circumstance alone.” Jakob’s story emerges against the backdrop of what Shoshana Felman calls a “radical historical crisis in witnessing.”91 Any attempt to tell the story of the Holocaust was radically challenged by the systematic annihilation of any and all potential witnesses, the systematic suppression and destruction of all traces, the systematic undermining of all conventions of historymaking and documentation of historical fact. Furthermore, narrative witnessing was profoundly and fundamentally challenged by the atrocity of the events, the unspeakable horror visited upon millions of victims. Some narratives were lost or destroyed, but just as many others were silenced by the “opacity at the heart of historical catastrophe that robs us of our ability to meaningfully come to terms with the most disastrous events of human history.”92 The preface to Fugitive Pieces suggests that even testimonial narratives that are recovered and preserved carry the imprint and the memory of the myriad other stories that remain unspoken or irretrievable. To narrate historical horror is to bear witness to the unnarratable at the core of traumatic memory. The novel’s preface casts the shadow of these unrecovered and untold stories over the story we are about to read. The ghostly presences of other narratives – hidden, lost, or concealed in memory – haunt any attempt to speak of the unspeakable. Indeed, as Fridman contends, the untold story is “the silence of an unrepresentability that figures in all narratives of historical horror.”93 The preface tells us that the story we are about to read is an incidental act of witnessing, a chance unearthing, the fugitive pieces of a much larger story. It alerts us to the great absences around which Jakob’s story is constructed. Jakob’s account of hiding inside the wall of the cupboard and hearing the sounds of his parents being murdered captures the unbearable

Memory Works

101

immediacy and utter incomprehensibility of the traumatic event. Hearing “noises never heard before, torn from [his] father’s mouth” and the buttons from his mother’s chipped saucer scattered like “little white teeth,” Jakob is alert to – and will remember – every detail. Yet at the same time he internalizes the unintelligibility of what he has witnessed: “Blackness filled me, spread from the back of my head into my eyes as if my brain had been punctured. Spread from stomach to legs. I gulped and gulped, swallowing it whole” (fp 7). Paradoxically, at the time of the traumatic event, there coexist an excruciatingly detailed awareness and a mental and emotional blackout, an incapacity to register what is being registered. Dori Laub asserts that “massive trauma precludes its registration,”94 but clearly this is not the whole story. The thing about trauma – its very definition – is that it does register. Yet, as Cathy Caruth contends, the fact that traumatic events are “not fully grasped as they occur” is also what ultimately defines them as traumatic. The “unexpected and overwhelming violent” nature of the event and its unassimilability and consequent recurrence are what constitute the trauma.95 Caruth emphasizes the role of “belatedness” in the persistent experience of trauma: “traumatic experience, beyond the psychological dimension of suffering it involves, suggests a certain paradox: that the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it; that immediacy, paradoxically, may take the form of belatedness.”96 As she points out, it is the unassimilated nature of trauma that returns to haunt the survivor later on.97 The urgent, involuntary, and uncontrollable quality of traumatic recall is clearly evident in Jakob’s memories of what happened to his parents and sister: “I couldn’t keep out the sounds: the door breaking open, the spit of buttons. My mother, my father. But worse than those sounds was that I couldn’t remember hearing Bella at all. Filled with her silence, I had no choice but to imagine her face” (fp 10). This passage shows the incessant return and repetition of the traumatic moment but also the hole in witnessing, in memory. Jakob is haunted by what he witnessed and by what he did not. His sister Bella’s disappearance, unwitnessed and therefore unremembered, must be witnessed, over and over, in imagination. Yet when Jakob later says, “I did not witness the most important events of my life” (fp 17), he is speaking not only literally of the fact that he was hidden in the wall and did not actually see what happened to his family, but also of the fact that the entire traumatic event was something impossible to witness. Even what he did “witness” he was not able to

102

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

“know,” to make sense of, to bear to imagine. And so he bears his witness, as a burden he must carry forward into a future that is also always still the past. Dori Laub aptly notes that trauma’s “history of repetition … bears witness … to the historical occurrence of an event that, in effect, does not end.”98 But he further elaborates: “The victim’s narrative – the very process of bearing witness to massive trauma – does indeed begin with someone who testifies to an absence, to an event that has not yet come into existence, in spite of the overwhelming and compelling nature of the reality of its occurrence.”99 The holes in Jakob’s narrative bear out both of Laub’s affirmations about trauma and witnessing. The trauma is not over as long as one is still compelled to attempt to witness it. In the context of trauma, memory is double-edged: it can be something you do or something that happens to you. The voluntary memory of the survivor may insist upon the need not to forget, but the retraumatizing effects of involuntary memory may make an equally strong case for the need not to remember.100 Moving through his life as a survivor, Jakob bears this burden of witness. The question for him is the question of all survivors – what do you do with this burden, the burden of trauma, the burden of memory? How do you bear witness? The traumatized individual’s dilemma is intensified in the context of historical atrocities, where the imperatives of memory are challenged by the inadequacies of every conceivable mode of witnessing. As Anton Kaes writes: “The insistence on the impossibility of adequately comprehending and describing the Final Solution has by now become a topos of Holocaust research.”101 The twentieth-century crisis in witnessing posed a challenge both to history and to art. Although historians and artists have been impelled and have endeavoured to inscribe the Holocaust into cultural memory, their attempts either to tell the story directly or to translate it into other forms are marked by an awareness of the inevitable insufficiency of these attempts. Any and every form used to try to convey that history is a betrayal of its unspeakable content.102 But if one claims that the only possible and acceptable response to the unspeakability of the Holocaust is silence, then the ethics of historicizing run up against the ethics of memory. The dangers of betraying truth are counterbalanced by the dangers of denial and forgetting. Ultimately, the risk that silence may be complicitous in concealing the

Memory Works

103

extermination that produced it argues strongly for the importance of testimony. But the question remains: what form can testimony possibly take? Elie Wiesel cautioned against the impulse to turn testimony into literature, declaring on one occasion that there could be no such thing as “a literature of the Holocaust.”103 But he also argued, in an essay called “The Holocaust as a Literary Inspiration,” that “our generation invented a new literature, that of testimony. We have all been witnesses and we feel we have to bear testimony for the future.”104 The most celebrated articulation of the impossibility – or at least the fundamental impropriety – of Holocaust literature is probably Theodor Adorno’s 1949 declaration that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric.105 Almost everyone who has undertaken to write about the Holocaust – or to write about writing about the Holocaust – has done so in the long shadow of Adorno’s dictum. Citing the horrifying implications of following Adorno’s proscription, however, some have declared that the risk of barbarism needs to be taken, if only to keep the Holocaust from having succeeded in further silencing the human spirit.106 Indeed, Adorno himself later modified his position in the following terms: “I have no wish to soften the saying that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric … But Enzensberger’s retort also remains true, that literature must resist this verdict.”107 Shoshana Felman likewise argues for a rereading of Adorno, noting that even his original pronouncement contained what she calls an “aporetic” intention, suggesting “that, paradoxically enough, it is only art that can henceforth be equal to its own historical impossibility.”108 In Heidegger and “the jews”, Jean-François Lyotard formulated a similar response to Adorno’s celebrated interdiction: “What art can do is bear witness not to the sublime, but to this aporia of art and to its pain. It does not say the unsayable, but it says it cannot say it.”109 These various formulations all suggest that literary testimony sets up an internal confrontation with its own mode of witnessing, exerting a pressure on the language from the inside that transforms it and makes it, in Felman’s words, “a performative engagement between consciousness and history.”110 Not surprisingly, testimonial expression frequently takes narrative form. Describing narrative as “the process and the place wherein the cognizance, the ‘knowing’ of the event is given birth to,” Laub sees “the emergence of the narrative” as vital to the therapeutic project.111

104

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

Judith Lewis Herman similarly notes that “the goal of recounting the trauma story is integration”; it is this “narrative integration” that both produces and defuses the memory of the traumatic event.112 But the implications of bearing narrative witness extend beyond the possible therapeutic benefits for an individual who remembers and tells a story. As Maurice Halbwachs points out, memory is essentially a cultural phenomenon: “individuals always use social frameworks when they remember” and “the memory of the group realizes and manifests itself in individual memories.”113 Halbwachs suggests that this is generally true, but one might argue that there is an especially strong correlation when there has been a collectively experienced crisis or trauma. In such cases, cultural memory may be therapeutic for an entire community. Indeed, it may be essential to that community’s survival. In her analysis of Jewish American fiction, Victoria Aarons notes that “storytelling served Jewish communities as a means of bearing witness,” and she further maintains that “the necessity to bear witness, to make claims for the permanence and integrity of both the individual and the community, [is] a process of telling long ingrained in the Jew’s struggle for survival.”114 Aarons observes that many Jewish American authors create fictional characters whose individual lives “speak to a shared suffering and a shared cultural ethos” and she argues that these characters, “in telling their personal histories, bear witness to the survival – if only in memory – of a community.”115 In Fugitive Pieces, memory is intimately and explicitly associated with language, but the association is double-edged. As is evident in Athos’s determination that Jakob learn the Hebrew alphabet, language is the instrument of memory and thus signals the possibility of survival. But language also bears memory’s traumas. Jakob’s return to the world of the living at the very beginning of the novel is marked by a return of language, but this scene clearly illustrates the treacherous and traumatic nature of this return. Emerging from the mud in Biskupin, Jakob “screamed into the silence the only phrase [he] knew in more than one language, [he] screamed it in Polish and German and Yiddish, thumping [his] fists on [his] own dirty chest: dirty Jew, dirty Jew, dirty Jew” (fp 12–13). The language Jakob remembers in this moment of trauma holds the memory of what he most needs to forget. Later, Greek and English become his defence against painful memories: “I tried to bury images, to cover them over with Greek and English words” (fp 93). Thus, he erected his adopted languages

Memory Works

105

as a barrier against the past: “English could protect me; an alphabet without memory” (fp 101). When, on occasion, that barrier was breached, when in the Jewish market he suddenly heard “the ardent tongue of [his] childhood,” he felt “a jolt of grief” and “listened, thin and ugly with feeling” (fp 101). Jakob’s relation to the language of his memory was understandably marked by both fear and longing. At times it seemed his survival must depend upon finding sustenance in a new language, but then what kind of survival could there be in a language without memory? “The English language was food. I shoved it into my mouth, hungry for it. A gush of warmth spread through my body, but also panic, for with each mouthful the past was further silenced” (fp 92). Ultimately it was the silenced past that Jakob needed to preserve. Yet his challenge was to find or forge language for a silence that seemed incompatible with language: “I felt this was my truth. That my life could not be stored in any language but only in silence” (fp 111). And he came to imagine that the language of poetry might offer him this possibility, but only, and precisely, in its failure to undo the damage of loss: “So I lived a breath apart, a touch-typist who holds his hands above the keys slightly in the wrong place, the words coming out meaningless, garbled … I thought of writing poems this way, in code, every letter askew, so that loss would wreck the language, become the language” (fp 111). D.M.R. Bentley has referred to Michaels’s novel as “an exercise in ‘poetic knowing.’”116 He is here citing Michaels’s own articulation of a distinction between the kind of knowledge associated with history and a different mode of knowing associated with memory.117 Méira Cook similarly evokes Michaels’s attempt to “articulate the trauma of history in language that is itself in crisis.”118 The double crisis of history and language provokes Michaels’s “inquiry [into] how to force language to signify on the extreme edge of signification in order to tell a story that is irreconcilable with words because unbearable.”119 Her response, like that of her protagonist Jakob, is to seek in the language of poetry some other way of knowing and meaning and saying. Cook notes that “the predominant strategy employed by Michaels … is the extended and highly intricate use of metaphor,” and she further relates this to Michaels’s “fascination with the metaphoric potential of memory.”120 The risk of metaphor is, of course, precisely that one may become so fascinated with the figure that one forgets the absence at its centre, the loss that provoked it into being in the first place.

106

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

Nicola King offers a rather harsh critique of Michaels’s use of metaphor, arguing that she “produces the effect of ‘memorialisation’ which Lyotard warns against.”121 Accusing Michaels of perhaps too readily or too comprehensively “claim[ing] salvatory and healing powers for language, love and the sharing of memory,” King faults her for at times indulging in “metaphor and abstraction instead of leaving the unsayable unsaid.”122 Similarly, Cook’s reading of “the compulsive metaphorization” of Michaels’s “densely poetic” text reveals her awareness of the risks inherent in this narrative approach. She notes that the “lush, poetic discourse jars uneasily with the horrors [Michaels] is narrating and so contributes to our discomfort as readers.”123 But in the end, Cook argues for taking these risks: “Michaels’ compulsion to interpret, translate, construct tropes and connect meanings, in short, her determination to force the apparently meaningless world of the Holocaust to signify … is one possible answer to the monologic authoritarianism of the camps where no questioning of meaning was allowed.”124 Cook sees Michaels “bring[ing] to the prose of the traumatic narrative the unruly compulsions of poetry” and thereby seeking in language one possible response to the inevitable inadequacy of language.125 For Jakob, the move to writing was about memory’s relationship to meaning as mediated through language. This was the teaching he received from Athos and from Athos’s friend Kostas: “I already knew the power of language to destroy, to omit, to obliterate. But poetry, the power of language to restore: this was what both Athos and Kostas were trying to teach me” (fp 79). For Athos, memory and writing together offered the possibility of making some kind of meaningful return to and from senselessness and horror. And indeed, Jakob felt that the redemptive promise of Athos’s “backward glance gave [him] backward hope” (fp 101). Thus, after his godfather’s death, Jakob took upon himself the task of completing Athos’s project, a book that documented how the Nazis manipulated and falsified archaeological data in order to rewrite history. Jakob acknowledged that he did not share Athos’s belief and hope that in researching and writing Bearing False Witness he might finally arrive at some kind of redemptive resolution: “He asked endless questions to order his thoughts, leaving ‘why’ to the last. But in my thinking, I started with the last question, the ‘why’ he hoped would be answered by all the others. Therefore I began with failure and had nowhere to go” (fp 118). Nonetheless, he completed his godfather’s

Memory Works

107

project because the project itself was the “why” of Athos’s life and so it was meaningful to Jakob, who loved him. And he continued to write poems as well, returning in them again and again to the past, using the English language as “a sonar, a microscope, through which [he] listened and observed, waiting to capture elusive meanings buried in facts” (fp 112). But Jakob knew that his writing was not a mere tool or lens; he knew that “one can look deeply for meaning or one can invent it” (fp 136) and that writing perhaps meant doing both at the same time.126 Anne Michaels’s view of how memory works (reflected in the organizing metaphor of her novel) calls to mind Shoshana Felman’s definition of testimony: “As a relation to events, testimony seems to be composed of bits and pieces of a memory that has been overwhelmed by occurrences that have not settled into understanding or remembrance, acts that cannot be constructed as knowledge or assimilated into full cognition, events in excess of our frames of reference.”127 This could be describing Michaels’s view of the fragmented nature of both memory and testimonial writing. We see this idea in the prefatory references to stories that have been lost, concealed, “recovered, by circumstance alone.” We see it in the thematic emphasis placed throughout the novel on brokenness and fragments and traces as well as in the abundant references (both literal and metaphorical) to archaeology and relics. But it is the fugitive nature of the pieces in Michaels’s evocations that troubles and nuances the archaeological references. In order better to understand Michaels’s fugitive pieces, it might be useful to consider Nicola King’s discussion of two “contrasting models of memory within psychoanalytic theory”: the archaeological model that Freud developed throughout much of his work; and the “structural principle of Nachträglichkeit” that, according to King, appeared in Freud’s work in ways that necessarily “undercut” his “model of memory as preservation.”128 King cites a passage in which Freud identifies one aspect of the analyst’s role as constructing “what has been forgotten from the traces which it has left behind.”129 King’s reading of this passage emphasizes the protean nature of this model of memory: “The provisionality of such construction suggests that it will remain open to later reconstruction, not in the sense of the rebuilding of a ruined city, or of restoring the past ‘as it really was’, but as a continuous process of revision and retranslation.”130 Michaels’s fugitive pieces suggest both of Freud’s models – the careful excavation of fragments and the unending and always provisional process of

108

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

reconstruction. Such a view of memory emphasizes the complementary relationship of remembering and imagining. Even as it raises the idea of tensions between known and unknown, knowable and unknowable, it suggests the possibility that these together may constitute the subject and substance of memory. It is true that the contrasting psychoanalytic models of memory in some ways evoke Michaels’s uncompromising distinction between history and memory (“History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers” [fp 138]). But in their intimate juxtaposition they also remind us of the fundamental interconnection between history and memory that Michaels goes on to observe: “History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments” (fp 138). The essential coexistence of history and memory, of known and unknown, of fixed and provisional, is figured by Michaels as a “fluid” map: “Terra cognita and terra incognita inhabit exactly the same coordinates of time and space. The closest we come to knowing the location of what’s unknown is when it melts through the map like a watermark, a stain transparent as a drop of rain. On the map of history, perhaps the water stain is memory” (fp 137). The organizing metaphor of fugitive pieces might be understood to contain the suggestion of the possibility of wholeness. Might wholeness be fashioned out of fugitive pieces when Nachträglichkeit is brought to bear on archaeology? Or when one is aware of the water stains on the map of history? Or when imagination and desire fill in the gaps in memory? Recalling Palumbo-Liu’s reference, in his critical analysis of Obasan, to “the wholeness brought about by reading history with full memory,”131 one is tempted to imagine history and memory ideally completing each other. But how can memory ever be full? And how can the work of recovery or reconstruction ever claim to be completed or to have reproduced wholeness from loss? Rather than see wholeness as completion, however, Michaels tends to imagine a wholeness based upon the essential incompletion of lives. She signals this clearly in the last sentence of the preface. This sentence, citing words once penned by Jakob Beer, both names and (with its final ellipsis) performs the idea that a life is by definition unfinished: “Shortly before his death, Beer had begun to write his memoirs. ‘A man’s experience of war,’ he once wrote, ‘never ends with the war. A man’s work, like his life, is never completed … ’” Some of Jakob’s life’s work was devoted to continuing work left incomplete by others (finishing Athos’s book

Memory Works

109

and translating posthumous writings recovered after the war), but he also left his own work incomplete. His writing and his life thus both illustrated the importance of the idea of legacy; handing on and carrying on were ways of working toward a sense of wholeness without negating incompleteness, without trying to fix everything. The legacies in Fugitive Pieces tell stories of both loss and survival. Made up of memories and traces, fugitive pieces that the inheritor is continually trying to put together in a meaningful way, legacies are the mark and instrument of life’s going on. The idea of legacy is inherent in the mentoring relationships (of Athos with Jakob and of Jakob and Salman with Ben) and in the literary genealogies (Jakob completing Athos’s work and Ben as a reader of Jakob’s). Legacy is also evoked in the novel as an ongoing connection to the dead. In this context, a legacy is both what one receives in inheritance and what one gives back in recognition, gratitude, and love. We see this in Jakob’s writings to and about Athos as well as in the fact that Ben addresses his narration to Jakob. And if receiving a legacy means giving back, it also necessarily means giving forward. Michaels’s novel represents the idea of the transmission of legacies in many ways: the orphan son Jakob having been raised by Athos becomes a “father” to the orphan son Ben (whose name means simply “son”);132 what Jakob remembers of his sister, Bella, he finds in and also gives to Michaela; what Naomi receives from Ben’s parents she preserves and hands on to him. Many of the legacies in the novel are testimonial; Athos’s Bearing False Witness is emblematic of such legacies of truth. But the legacies that bind the characters together are also legacies of human connection. Most of the individual stories point to the importance of some kind of parent-child bond to nurture one’s sense of self and contribute to one’s ability to survive in the world. Just as in La Memoria and Obasan, legacies of caring in Fugitive Pieces are therefore frequently illustrated by a thematics of surrogacy. Substitute parents and children step in to fill empty places, healing brokenness but not erasing loss. The human legacy in Michaels’s novel is one of memories shared, connections maintained, visions and hope passed on. Two italicized passages in Jakob’s journal eloquently illustrate the legacy of loss and the legacy of surrogacy in the novel. The first is inscribed at a point in the narrative when Jakob has been immobilized in a state of anguished remembering and Alex has left him; the second occurs when Jakob is back on Idhra following Athos’s death. Each passage is a story. The story Jakob tells after Alex moves out is the monologue of a little boy whose

110

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

parents have left him with thirty-two tins of food, assuring him that they will return long before the tins run out. The mother and father made the boy promise not to leave the room until they came back. The food is gone and he is growing weaker but he is certain they must come now. The story Jakob tells while sitting in Athos’s room is about a woman named Zdena who takes home a little girl she finds waiting by the roadside. Someone had been supposed to come for Bettina, but never did. She is dirty and thirsty and Zdena brings her home, feeds her, cares for her. A stranger, seeing them together, comments, “She looks just like you” (fp 159). Jakob needs to remember and narrate both of these stories because together they are in fact his story. He needs to remember and tell both the story of losing and missing and waiting forever and the story of saving and caring and survival. An essential aspect of the legacy of human connection is the idea of mutuality, of simultaneous and reciprocal relation. Both mourning and survival involve this kind of exchange. As we discussed in chapter 1, mourning is a relationship. One continues to sing to the dead, to leave flowers on graves, to save photographs, to feed one’s memories. And survival depends upon going on in relation, not only to the dead but also to the living. The mutuality of relationship seems to be key to survival. In the story of Zdena and Bettina, we read a description of the child burrowing her face in the woman’s skirt: “It was not clear whether she wanted to be comforted or was intent on comforting” (fp 159). Thus, Athos says to Jakob, “We must carry each other. If we don’t have this, what are we” (fp 14) and so he “believed we saved each other” (fp 51). And Ben finally comes to the realization with which the book closes: “I see that I must give what I most need” (fp 294). One haunting image in Michaels’s novel is emblematic of the human legacy of loss and survival: the image of the weight of a sleeping child as the weight of grief. The comparison is first articulated by Jakob in the story of Zdena and Bettina: “Zdena felt her fortyyear-old breasts and belly go warm against the weight of the child. The grief we carry, anybody’s grief, Zdena thought, is exactly the weight of a sleeping child” (fp 158). The phrase and the image reappear later in Ben’s narration when he recounts back to Jakob the fact that the older man had spoken these words to Naomi: “I heard you tell my wife that there’s a moment when love makes us believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you’ll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone’s grief, you said, is the weight of a sleeping child” (fp 280–1). A

Memory Works

111

child sleeping in one’s arms is a comforting image for loss and grief, but there is another brief passage in Jakob’s memoir that shadows the Zdena story and associates the image explicitly with a scene of traumatic horror. During the time in Toronto when Jakob was immersed in thoughts of Nazi atrocities, seeking out “the horror which, like history itself, can’t be stanched” (fp 139), he pictured how soldiers had bayonetted babies in the Lòdz ghetto: “When the sport became too messy, the soldiers complained loudly, shouting about the blood running down their long sleeves, staining their uniforms, while the Jews on the street screamed in horror, their throats parched with screaming. A mother felt the weight of her child in her arms, even as she saw her daughter’s body on the sidewalk” (fp 138). The weight of the child is the weight of the mother’s grief in this moment when bearing and the unbearable coexist. The unbearableness of this weight haunts the image Jakob later uses. But so does the human connection that defies and survives the horror: her baby brutally ripped from her and murdered before her eyes, the mother still “felt the weight of her child in her arms.” When Jakob later refers to “our grief, anybody’s grief,” his formulation marks a determination to share the burden of grief. And when he compares this grief to the weight of a sleeping (not a dead) child, he associates the bearing of grief with a living connection and a continuing bond of love. Furthermore, this image of grief makes it both a heavy weight and a burden gladly borne (a sleeping child), suggesting that we are caretakers of our grief and that this grief is, in some way, precious to us. Why? Because it is also the weight of life, of human connection, of welcomed responsibility, of palpable memory, of enduring love. 133 In his litany of “the fragments of what Athos’s death contained,” Jakob identifies a crucial piece of the human legacy, the fact “that there’s nothing a man will not do to another, nothing a man will not do for another” (fp 114). In addition to naming the paradoxical patrimony of humanity and inhumanity, this phrase also points, albeit unintentionally, to a privileging of a male focus and genealogy in the novel. Granted, the use of “man” to designate all “human beings” in this sentence is conventional and linguistically accurate within the context. Nevertheless, it is subtly symptomatic of the way in which Michaels’s novel focuses primarily on the more complex humanity of her male characters. Referring to the “exaggerated discourse of the male quest” in Michaels’s novel, Méira Cook finds “disappointing” the author’s “consistent tendency to idealize the women her male

112

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

characters love.”134 And indeed, the novel does tend to treat women characters as emblems of loss (Bella) or salvation (Michaela, Naomi) rather than as individuals or agents of their own destinies. It is true that the women are also depicted as companions in memory, but as such they almost become merely anima figures for the male protagonists. There is, perhaps, another more generous way of reading the gendering in Fugitive Pieces, and this would be to ignore it and instead appreciate what it might be suggesting about the universality of the experience of loss. In noticing the ways in which Jakob’s and Ben’s stories resemble and resonate with those of Emma in La Memoria and Naomi in Obasan, we are reminded that nobody has a corner on the market of loss and that memory is not essentially or exclusively gendered. Still, as we have seen earlier in this and the previous chapter, there are different angles of reflection on loss that may be associated with women’s particular experiences (reflecting their historical silencing and erasure, their ways of inhabiting and knowing the body, their patterns of relationship). Unlike the case in Dupré’s and Kogawa’s novels, in Fugitive Pieces there is not a focus on a female protagonist’s memory work. But there are nevertheless, in a couple of places, suggestions of women’s singular ways of looking back and of looking ahead. These moments are significant because in them Michaels seems to suggest that men’s and women’s perspectives together can constitute a productive response to the experience of loss. There is, for instance, the implied female genealogy in the connection established between Ben’s mother and Naomi (“the daughter she longed for” [fp 252]), a bond that ultimately enabled the mother to pass her story on to her son. But the most striking evidence of how a woman’s perspective may come to reorient a man’s grief and memory work is probably the way in which, in the last section of the book, Ben stops addressing his narration to Jakob and begins to speak directly to his wife, Naomi. When Naomi becomes Ben’s interlocutor (a role, we should note, that she had already played both with Jakob Beer and with Ben’s parents), she becomes his conduit back from where he is lost in his loss. She reconnects him to the present in part because she offers him a different way of looking at the past.135 In the bipartite structure of Michaels’s novel, each of the four chapters of the second part (Ben’s story) bears the same title as one of the chapters in the first part (Jakob’s story). These echoes and juxtapositions reflect ways in which Jakob’s memoir informs Ben’s narrative;

Memory Works

113

they also tell a story of how one moves back and forth and around through time and grief. The chapter that occupies the weighty centre of Jakob’s memoir (covering Jakob and Athos’s arrival in Toronto and spanning the years until Athos’s death) is called “The Way Station” and constitutes a turning point in Jakob’s memory work. In Ben’s narrative, “The Way Station” is the final of the four chapters, placing the pivotal moment of Jakob’s story at the end; indeed, making the end of the novel a beginning. Jakob’s story had emphasized the fact that “grief requires time” (fp 54); Ben’s reminds us that grief is a way station, not the end of the line. “The Way Station” recounts Ben’s return from Greece to Toronto and to Naomi. This return is described as a solitary journey, each stage marked by observation, memory, and reflection. In a key passage, Ben remembers what Naomi had once told him: “When we married, Naomi said: Sometimes we need both hands to climb out of a place. Sometimes there are steep places, where one has to walk ahead of the other. If I can’t find you, I’ll look deeper in myself. If I can’t keep up, if you’re far ahead, look back. Look back” (fp 292, emphasis added). The moment he remembers and can finally hear these words is a crucial turning point for Ben. The following sentences mark simply and poignantly the immensity of the change that has taken place: “In my hotel room the night before I leave Greece, I know the elation of ordinary sorrow. At last my unhappiness is my own” (fp 292). One cannot avoid reading this episode as another rewriting of the old story of Lot’s wife. In Naomi’s version, loss becomes a human experience whose response requires looking back. One looks back in order to remember. One may look back in order to learn, as Jakob did, that the dead are whispering “not for [us] to join [them], but so that, when [we’re] close enough, [they] can push [us] back into the world” (fp 170). And one may also look back to find companions in memory, those who would accompany us in our grief and then, perhaps, move forward hand in hand with us into a future marked by “the elation of ordinary sorrow.” In Jakob’s final staggered arrival home, on the transatlantic flight, “for hours, leaning against the cold window, above the thick unmoving Atlantic,” he is everywhere at once – imagining Naomi in his absence, remembering scenes from his childhood, anticipating being where he is not yet. He ponders what he will and will not tell Naomi: “I’ll tell her about the half-million tons of water lifted from Lake Wascana and the tornado that rolled up a wire fence … But not about

114

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

the couple who hid in their room until the tornado passed, opening their bedroom door to find the rest of the house had disappeared” (fp 293). How much can they share? How deeply into trauma and loss can they venture together? Then, in the last passages of the chapter, just as the plane is about to begin its descent, Ben has two memories that appear to serve as beacons for his return. First, he remembers a story Naomi once told him, a story that he now tells back to her: “When you were a little girl you had a favorite bowl, with a design painted on the bottom. You wanted to eat everything, to find the empty bowl full of flowers” (fp 294). Naomi has bequeathed him this story of emptiness that is also fullness and in sharing it with her now he makes it his own as well. Then, as the plane begins to descend, Ben has another memory, a painful memory. At first, this vision recalls only solitude, loss, and grief. He remembers being six years old and coming downstairs in the middle of the night to find his father sitting at the kitchen table, eating and crying. But then, “from thousands of feet in the air,” Ben is suddenly also able to see his mother standing behind his father: “His head leans against her. As he eats, she strokes his hair. Like a miraculous circuit, each draws strength from the other” (fp 294). These two memories open up the ending of Fugitive Pieces to the final moment marked by Ben’s realization, “I see that I must give what I most need” (fp 294). And in each, the woman’s vision (Naomi seeing through loss and seeing loss through) and the vision of the woman (Ben’s mother accompanying the grieving father and completing the “miraculous circuit”) makes the man’s wider vision possible. As we have seen, Fugitive Pieces, like both La Memoria and Obasan, explores both the inadequacies and the redemptive possibilities of memory. For the individual, memory works to maintain connections and remake the traumatized self. In its ethical dimension, it is the vehicle of conscience and contestation. And as an integral part of the human legacy, it establishes a continuum of communication and caring and vision. But the central importance of memory in the all too human story of fugitive pieces is perhaps best summed up in Michaels’s novel when Athos says to Jakob: “No absence remains if there remains the memory of absence. If one no longer has land but has the memory of land, one can make a map” (fp 193). One can make a map to preserve the place and the fact of loss. One can make a map where known and unknown, where the preserved and the disappeared occupy the same coordinates. One can map the memory of

Memory Works

115

one’s losses, the endless terrain of one’s grief, and in so doing imagine the landscape, the explorations and itineraries of one’s continuing survival. A map is both memory and imagination, both past and future. You can use a map to find your way into or out of a labyrinth; you can give a map to someone else to help them find their way. The three fictions of loss examined in this chapter explore the cartographies of memory through time and space, language and silence, the sorrows and the elations of the human story.

3

Precarious Thresholds à quoi bon habiter sa vie, son corps, si demain l’avenir est interdit, tué … [what’s the good of inhabiting one’s life, one’s body, if tomorrow the future is prohibited, killed …] Marie-Claire Blais1

p o s t m o d e r n te r r i t o r y As early as 1980 in “Les Agénésies du vieux monde” Louky Bersianik wrote: Si l’on peut imaginer une mémoire future au moyen de la science fiction, peut-on imaginer une mémoire du futur, c’est-à-dire avoir en mémoire un avenir qui ne serait pas entièrement sécrété par le passé, une partie de celui-ci n’étant pas encore advenu; c’est-à-dire mémoriser le futur et s’en servir pour penser et agir dans le présent? [If one can imagine a future memory through science fiction, can one imagine a memory of the future, that is to say, can one have in memory a future that would not be entirely produced by the past, since one part of this past would not yet have happened; that is, can one memorize the future and use it in order to think and act in the present?]2

Particularly concerned with “women’s amnesia,” the absence or loss or forgetting of women in the history and memory of the race, Bersianik suggests an approach to the relentless march of time and history that might help to guarantee not only a different future but also a different present. In her 1984 text “L’Herbe était rouge et comme rôtie,” she

Precarious Thresholds

117

explains further that writing “for an archaeology of the future” means working in order to “rompre cette séquence [patriarcale] et glisser dans la fissure le commencement (le nouveau) d’un monde viable” [break that [patriarchal] sequence and into the fissure slide the beginning (the new) of a viable world].3 A number of fictional works published in Quebec since the early 1980s might be said to participate in or to be in some significant way informed by Bersianik’s conception of such an archaeological project.4 In particular Marie-Claire Blais’s Visions d’Anna (1982), Pierre (1984 and 1991), L’Ange de la solitude (1989), and her Soifs trilogy (1995, 2001, and 2005), as well as Nicole Brossard’s Le Désert mauve (1987), Baroque d’aube (1995), and Hier (2001), are all unquestionably written in the consciousness of an imperilled future. There is a vast and elaborate and decidedly postmodern territory to be explored here.5 In this territory the personal and the political are clearly interimplicated; violence and excess threaten human and planetary survival; generations struggle with one another and against the forces of degeneration; and visions may on occasion look beyond the horizon toward new dawns6 but often be no more than the claustrophobic, apocalyptic, and all too real hallucinations of young people in a world without horizons.7 This postmodern territory has become increasingly baroque for Blais and Brossard. In Brossard’s 1995 Baroque d’aube there is a passage in which the term “baroque” is itself commented upon in somewhat revealing terms: Tu pourrais décrire avec précision chaque mouvement qui te rapproche du cimetière. Tous les clichés de l’amour et de la mort rassemblés au pied des statues te ramènent à la vie … A l’entrée: des fleurs. Tu franchis le portail. Le mot baroque s’installe dans tes pensées. Te voilà entre les tombes parmi les anges, les cippes et les seaux de chaux. (ba 113, emphasis added) [You could describe precisely each movement that brings you closer to the cemetery. All the clichés of love and death assembled at the feet of the statues are bringing you back to life … At the gateway, flowers. You pass through. The word baroque comes to mind. Here you are among the angels and cippi and buckets of lime.] (translation modified)8

And here you are as well in Blais’s four most recent novels, L’Ange de la solitude, Soifs, Dans la foudre et la lumière, and Augustino et le choeur de la destruction, novels in which all the clichés of love and death seem to collide, novels in which the living move among the monuments to the dead, and gardens and cemeteries are hard to tell apart.

118

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

f u t u r e g e n e r at i o n s : l’ a n g e d e l a s o l i t u d e ce n’était pas un avenir, c’était une bien drôle de génération [it wasn’t a future, it was a really strange generation]9

L’Ange de la solitude is the story of the contemporary moment in which we are living, on our fragile planet under seige, at the tail end of a century. It is the story of the struggle between degeneration and survival; between past and present; between present and future. Its question is the question of future generations. From the very start there are signs of impending destruction, burnout, conflagration. After all, the novel begins with smoke: “Johnie fumait négligeamment ses cigarettes” [Johnie was casually smoking her cigarettes]. But these danger signs are muted, rendered seemingly innocuous by an atmosphere of dreamy passivity that surrounds “les filles de la bande” [the girls of the gang] (as 14, translation modified) and by the subtle shift from night to dawn evoked in the novel’s opening sentences: “Johnie fumait négligeamment ses cigarettes, c’était la nuit, bientôt l’aube. Johnie, Gérard, Polydor, Doudouline étaient réunies dans le salon de l’Abeille” (as 11). [Johnie was casually smoking her cigarettes, it was night, almost dawn. Johnie, Gérard, Polydor, Doudouline were together again in Abeille’s room.] The novel is divided into two sections, the first and longer of which is called “L’Univers de Johnie” [Johnie’s Universe]. The title is apt since Johnie’s perspective is subtly privileged in the novel. Yet this is not just Johnie’s story: resisting rigid boundaries, the point of view and the narrative voice circulate freely through the thoughts, memories, feelings, and observations, spoken and unspoken, of the young women of the group. Thus the reader experiences the intimacy of that world, while at the same time (or perhaps more accurately, from one moment to the next) standing back to look over Johnie’s shoulder at the place of that world in Johnie’s universe. At the beginning of the novel, the young women are waiting for L’Abeille to return. Gérard is sprawled in the armchair. Doudouline, stretched languorously across Polydor’s lap, recounts: L’Abeille n’est pas encore rentrée par cette nuit de pleine lune, vous l’avez vue partir, les filles, dans son veston de cuir si court sur les fesses … elle allait traîner dans le parc, sans doute. Il est quatre heures du matin et nous sommes là à l’attendre en buvant des bières. (as 11)

Precarious Thresholds

119

[Abeille’s not back yet on this fullmoon night. You watched her leave, girls, with her short little leather jacket barely reaching her ass … she was most likely going to go hang out in the park. It’s four in the morning and here we are drinking our beer, waiting up for her.] (translation modified)

Polydor, rocked and cradled on the cadences of Doudouline’s melodious voice, feeds her chocolate, and croons: “On n’est pas bien là, entre nous? [Isn’t this nice, just us here together?] (as 11)10 Entre nous – thus is named their shared and private space, a lesbian space (for I cannot help reading here a perhaps unintentional encoding of the title of Diane Kurys’s 1983 film). But of course the way in which this entre nous is posed, as a negative question, already shows its vulnerability: “On n’est pas bien là?” 11 This is the world of L’Ange de la solitude – a group of young women, among themselves, poised in an aimless and eternal present, on the threshold of an (at best) uncertain future, their “perpetual idleness” (as 11) figured in the narration by an endless series of imperfect tenses, repetitions, alliterations, the lulling rhythm of clauses spilling, flowing one into the next.12 Emblematic of this amniotic state, Doudouline and Polydor rock coupled in the sensual symbiosis that their names suggest (Doudouline, douleur [pain], do do [sleep], Polydor, peau [skin], lit [bed], dort [sleep]).13 Unlike the others, Johnie is not, however, wholly absorbed by this intimate, unanchored world. She is the only one of the young women to have guarded another, private space to which to retreat: Elle pensait que là où les filles de la bande n’avaient qu’un seul toit, la maison de l’Abeille, Johnie en avait plusieurs, de la maison de ses parents … elle pouvait aussi rentrer chez elle – les filles ne savaient rien de ce lieu qui s’appelait “chez-soi” – dans cet appartement secret qu’elle partageait avec Lynda. (as 24–5) [She was thinking about the fact that while the other girls in the group had only one roof, Abeille’s house, Johnie had several, from her parents’ house … she could also go home – the girls knew nothing about this place she called “home” – that secret apartment she shared with Lynda.] (translation modified)

And Johnie’s increasing detachment from the world of “les filles de la bande” is also manifest in her reflections on that world. Watching Gérard and thinking, “Dire que nous nous aimions tant, autrefois” [To think how we once loved each other] (as 11), Johnie names the uncrossable distance now between them – and that distance is the future:

120

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

cette pensée qui les avait séparées en un même élan: l’avenir, l’avenir contenu en chacune d’elles … et qui les avait plongées toutes deux dans une redoutable méditation, comme si elles eussent mesuré avec leurs corps, en s’embrassant et en se touchant dans les lieux les plus sensibles, combien leurs espérances de vie étaient modestes. (as 12, emphasis added) [the thought that had separated them in one instant: the future. The future contained in each of them … had plunged both of them into a fearful meditation, as if they had measured with their bodies, kissing and touching each other in the most sensitive places, how modest their aspirations in life were.]

Separated by the future, so it is that as they touch – “dans les lieux les plus sensibles” – they are now separated by the present as well. Johnie’s writing, however, is what seems to figure most insistently her growing distance from the others. When she bends over her notebooks in the early morning hours, Johnie is “suspendue, soudain, dans un monde différent” [suddenly suspended in a different world] (as 20); she feels “coupable de subtiles traîtrises lorsqu’elle osait s’emparer d’un crayon, d’un stylo sous les yeux de Gérard” [guilty of subtle betrayals when she dared to grab a pencil or a pen when Gerard was watching] (as 21, translation modified). Even when, as often happens, she allows Gérard to lure her away to go dancing, she hangs on to her determination: “J’écrirai cela demain” [I’ll write that tomorrow] (as 26). Her writing and her future together signal the inevitability of her eventual separation from that world of “entre nous.” Johnie’s role as a writer within the novel reminds us that the bleak world that the artist depicts also includes the artist who depicts it.14 To put this in another way, inasmuch as the novel survives its story of imminent disaster, it may itself be said to hold out some hope for the future. Johnie, reader of Tarot cards and writer of a lesbian history, her thesis De Sapho à Radclyffe Hall, is ideally qualified to evaluate and articulate the dimensions of the portending disaster. She sees that the security of the present is an illusion based upon the pretense that what is not seen cannot be hurt. Even in their private world, these young women can be hurt and are. Indeed, the hurt is already there because each brings with her some vestige of a damaging past – be it childhood abuse, orphanhood, abandonment, parental indifference, or overindulgence – and it seems likely that the future will only perpetuate that damage. As Johnie reflects: “On ne peut pas réparer la chair qui a été blessée, on ne se console pas de l’absence de ses morts” [One cannot repair flesh that has been wounded, one cannot be consoled for

Precarious Thresholds

121

the absence of one’s dead] (as 100, translation modified).15 Furthermore, Johnie seems to recognize that each of the young women contains within her a future that will eventually fracture the present, forcing her out of that refuge, and thrusting her back into the outside world where a planet is being destroyed and a generation of young people is dying. Yet unlike the pragmatic visionary Thérèse who, as the novel opens, has already abandoned the refuge and returned to the harsh reality of the world outside,16 the others seem determined to cling to the illusion of a safe haven. Though they may venture out, they unfailingly return. The repetition at key moments in the text of the expression “étaient réunies” [were together again/were gathered] from the novel’s second sentence makes this cycle of departure and return very clear.17 The young women do not seem to realize that there is already very little, if anything at all, to return to. It is immediately after Johnie’s meditation on the future that we look for the first time over her shoulder (in a sentence inserted parenthetically into the text) to see as she sees the world of “entre nous” from the imagined distance of a possible future: (Ainsi ces prénoms, pensait Johnie, Doudouline, Gérard, l’Abeille, n’appartenaient qu’à elles, qu’à l’appel de leurs refuges, de leurs abris; lorsqu’elles auraient fui la retraite magique, ne seraient-elles pas aussi tendres et nues que ces soldats que l’on eût dépouillés de leurs armures de feuillage dans un bois où l’ennemi sournois aurait pu se cacher derrière chaque arbre?) (as 12) [So it was that these names, thought Johnie, Doudouline, Gérard, Abeille, belonged to them alone, to the call of their hideouts, of their shelters; once they fled the magical retreat, wouldn’t they be as naked and vulnerable as those soldiers who were stripped of their camouflage in a forest where the sly enemy could be lurking behind every tree?] (translation modified)

Johnie’s own name helps to explain her reason for asking what might await them all beyond the shelter of their “retraite magique,” for Johnie is engaged in unearthing (and finding her place – entre nous – within) another community of women, a community constituted on a diachronic rather than a synchronic axis. We are told very early in the novel that Johnie is so called because of her passion for Radclyffe Hall (who had been known as John to her friends).18 Thus the dissertation that Johnie is writing, De Sapho à Radclyffe Hall, poses not only the question of past generations of lesbian writers and their legacy but also the question of future generations, including Johnie’s

122

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

own essay. As the inheritor of another’s name (but changed) and as the writer of a history (in progress), Johnie is clearly engaged in an archaeology of the future. As is, of course, Blais. And Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, embedded in L’Ange de la solitude, is one of the important determinants of that future. One piece of the act of generating one’s future must be the search for one’s own generation in the past, which for the purposes of this particular reading I feel justified in calling the search for mothers. Focused upon the younger generation, L’Ange de la solitude in fact tells the stories of two generations of women artists, posing the question of generation both on a procreative level – each daughter’s search for a mother or mothers from whom to receive the legacy of her own existence – and on a creative level – each artist’s need to generate something that will have the force to carry (her) over into the future. Radclyffe Hall is one of Johnie’s (and Blais’s) literary mothers, but what they inherit from her is not necessarily a fertile legacy: what she bequeathed them is hardly easy and is partly about the damage mothers do. In The Well of Loneliness, Stephen, the protagonist and narrator, broke utterly and completely with her biological mother; it was, in fact, the mother-daughter rupture that most powerfully articulated the daughter’s identity, even as it sealed her fate. This kind of ambivalence about mothers and about the possibilities of generating a future permeates Blais’s novel. What Blais and Johnie have inherited from Radclyffe Hall is precisely a well of loneliness. In the middle of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, Stephen’s mother, learning what Stephen is – a “thing” that she can only describe as “unspeakable” – addresses her daughter as follows: “All your life I’ve felt very strangely towards you … I’ve felt a kind of physical repulsion, a desire not to touch or to be touched by you – a terrible thing for a mother to feel … but now I know that my instinct was right; it is you who are unnatural, not I … And this thing that you are is a sin against creation … I can only thank God that your father died before he was asked to endure this great shame. As for you, I would rather see you dead at my feet than standing before me with this thing upon you – this unspeakable outrage that you call love – ”

An anguished Stephen interrupts: “Mother – you don’t know what you’re saying – you’re my mother –” to which Anna Gordon replies: “Yes, I am your mother, but for all that, you seem to me like a

Precarious Thresholds

123

scourge … And you have presumed to use the word love in connection with this – with these lusts of your body – you have used that word.” Repudiated, Stephen retreats to her father’s study, and a loneliness more desperate than any other wells up in her: All the loneliness that had gone before was as nothing to this new loneliness of spirit. An immense desolation swept down upon her, an immense need to cry out and claim understanding for herself, an immense need to find the answer to the riddle of her unwanted being. All around her were grey and crumbling ruins, and under those ruins her love lay bleeding … a piteous, suffering, defenseless thing, it lay bleeding under the ruins. She felt blind when she tried to look into the future, stupefied when she tried to look back on the past.19

When in 1989, forty years after The Well of Loneliness, Marie-Claire Blais’s L’Ange de la solitude was published, we again find a present of crumbling ruins: “à quoi bon d’ailleurs chercher à comprendre quelqu’un dans cette maison poussiéreuse où les murs, le plafond, tombaient en ruines” [what good was it anyway, trying to understand anyone in that dusty house where the walls and the ceiling were falling into ruin] (as 44, translation modified). And we find an endangered and perhaps even unimaginable future. But we also discover a new generation of women loving women, lesbian women who have not been cast out of their mothers’ houses, but have moved out, to exist for the most part on their own terms, in their own shared space. Nor are they portrayed as marginal to a “real world.” The world of the novel is their world – and they are at its centre. And yet The Well of Loneliness is still there, for just as Stephen, in her sudden and definitive exile, experienced a “new loneliness of spirit” and an “immense desolation,” so Johnie, writing her dissertation, begins to realize that it is not just a matter of hypothetical vulnerability in an imagined future; the enemy is real, there is no sure cover, and the attack might come at any moment: N’était-ce pas un peu ainsi: la société ressemblait à une forêt uniforme où poussait rarement la fleur sauvage, et comme si on eût été dans un état de guerre et qu’il y eût des soldats tapis dans l’herbe, ceux-ci déguisés en ce vert, uniforme feuillage afin de mieux se perdre dans la forêt, on ne pouvait plus distinguer les soldats de l’ennemi sournois qui se dérobait derrière les arbres, ces arbres qui avaient pris eux-mêmes la teinte de la forêt, partout

124

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

dans cette forêt en apparence si uniforme. Celui qui portait une couleur différente pouvait déclencher l’attaque de l’ennemi. (as 21) [Wasn’t this sort of how things were: society was like a monotonous forest where wildflowers rarely grew, and as if one were in a state of war and there were soldiers crouching in the grass, hidden in that green, monotonous foliage in order better to be lost in the forest, you could no longer tell the soldiers from the sly enemy that was hiding behind the trees, those trees that had themselves taken on the hue of the forest, everywhere in that forest that appeared so uniform. Anyone wearing a different color could trigger the enemy’s attack.] (translation modified)

“L’Univers de Johnie” begins under the sign of Radclyffe Hall, but in the course of Part I Johnie leaves the shelter of the “retraite magique” and “[transporte] son malheur si personnel … sous le soleil torride d’une île anglaise” [carries her personal misery to the blazing sun of an English isle] (as 40). And it is after Johnie’s return from the island, in the fallout from that adventure, that Radclyffe Hall is left behind and the image of the victim whose different colour will invite the attack has been replaced by that of a soldier, resplendent in his or her difference. The story of this transformation is in many ways at the heart of L’Ange de la solitude. Johnie had fled to the island in hopes of escaping the pain and humiliation that had invaded her world, for Lynda had gone off with a man and this time might not return. Haunted by signs of betrayal – the razor left in the apartment by the man Lynda had brought there, the cap behind which Gérard stole a kiss from a young stranger on the dance floor – Johnie saw her present disintegrating. So, on her distant island, Johnie proceeded to “dépérir paisiblement, dans une déliquescence un peu lâche, un peu ivre” [waste away in peace, in the somewhat cowardly, somewhat drunken dissolution of that island] (as 49, translation modified), taking up with Marianne, a rich, married, upperclass Englishwoman whose “personnage un peu hautain, une subtile analogie avec Virginia Woolf … l’avait d’abord séduite” [slightly haughty character, bearing a subtle resemblance to Virginia Woolf, had at first seduced her] (as 53, translation modified). Marianne’s pessimism, misogyny, homophobia, racism, and classism sowed the seeds of Johnie’s eventual awakening. She returned from the island to find Gérard desperately strung out on cocaine, and unreachable: “c’est ainsi que Gérard avait décidé de dépérir … Johnie sentait toute

Precarious Thresholds

125

son impuissance à ramener près d’elle ce visage à la dérive qui ne lui parlait plus” [this was how Gérard had decided to waste away … Johnie felt how utterly powerless she was to draw to her that lost and drifting face that no longer spoke to her] (as 74, 75, translation modified). Then Gérard vanished. At a crucial moment in the second part of the novel, Johnie “ressentait soudain l’absence de Gérard … comme un trou à vif” [suddenly felt the absence of Gérard like a hole in the core of her being] (as 105), and at the same time her thoughts turned to her relationship with Marianne. She had received a letter in which Marianne broke off their liaison, saying: “Vous êtes une lesbienne, et malgré mon attachement pour vous, je ne le suis pas. Nous ferions mieux d’oublier cette histoire” [You are a lesbian and, despite my fondness for you, I am not. We’d best forget this episode] (as 109, translation modified). This letter, along with the absence first of Lynda and then of Gérard, precipitated the crisis that brought the Angel of Solitude onto the scene: Elle avait retrouvé avec ce rejet de Marianne son Ange de la Solitude qui l’avait toujours attendue dans l’ombre, comme pour lui dire: “Quand donc défendras-tu tes droits? Toi qui es un soldat sans armes, quand donc cesseras-tu de te camoufler dans le feuillage qui t’abrite chez les filles de la bande, quand donc seras-tu toi-même, face au monde, dans une clarté resplendissante?” (as 109) [With Marianne’s rejection, she had discovered her Angel of Solitude, who had always been waiting for her in the shadows, as if to say to her, “So when are you going to defend your rights? You, an unarmed soldier, when are you going to stop camouflaging yourself in the foliage that shelters you among the girls of the group, when are you going to be yourself in the eyes of the world, in resplendent clarity?”] (translation modified)

This Angel of Solitude is in fact the same angel that has hovered from the very beginning over Johnie’s universe, for this passage refers directly back to the book’s epigraph, taken from Jean Genet’s Querelle de Brest: L’ange de la solitude, c’est-à-dire un être de plus en plus inhumain, cristallin, autour de qui se développent les bandes d’une musique basée sur le contraire de l’harmonie, ou plutôt une musique qui est ce qui demeure quand l’harmonie est usée.

126

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

[(The angel of solitude), that is to say … a being less and less human, crystalline, around whom swirl strands of a music based on the opposite of harmony – or rather, a music that is what remains after harmony has been used up, worn out.] 20

It is in part Johnie’s experience of exile that brings Genet into the picture, for among the upper-class tourists on the island she finds herself forced into an invisibility that seems false and hypocritical: En vivant dans la clandestinité ce qui n’était pas clandestin pour elle et qu’elle avait eu l’habitude de vivre au grand jour, ne trompait-elle pas les filles de la bande, leur netteté, leur franchise, avec ses mensonges et son hypocrisie? (as 54) [By living clandestinely a life that was not clandestine for her, that she was used to living out in the open, wasn’t she betraying the girls of the group, their openness and their frankness, with her lying and hypocrisy?] (translation modified)

But the trigger was Marianne’s pejorative use of the name “lesbienne,” which she thrust like a sword between them. As Johnie came face to face with the fact that Marianne had only scorn for her and for “sa différence qui ne devait pas se voir” [her difference that must not be seen] (as, 108),21 what had been a secret war between them, marked by Marianne’s condescension, became at once “franche et ouverte” [frank and open] (as 109). Genet’s angel of solitude is a warring angel and an angel of the apocalypse, associated with what Genet in Querelle called “inversion.” In Blais’s novel, this apocalypse is manifest in the era of “l’Étoile Rose,” an era marked by the aids epidemic, by oppression and prejudice and genocide, an era of loss and loneliness and isolation.22 But the apocalypse is also associated with revelation, and the appearance of the Angel of Solitude is, indeed, a moment of revelation for Johnie. It is a moment of revelation to her of the reality of the situation and by her of her true colours. At this instant she sees the immensity of the threat to the planet’s survival. And she determines to be visible, to refuse to “[se] camoufler dans le feuillage” any longer. Within the novel, Gérard is the figure of apocalyptic annihilation. She envisions the future as a conflagration that will mark her own – and the world’s – end: “Gérard pressentait, elle aussi … la menace de sa rapide extinction, cela dont elle avait si souvent parlé à Johnie, la

Precarious Thresholds

127

fin d’un univers qui serait lié à sa propre fin, dans les cendres d’une même agonie, Gérard et le monde” [Gérard could also sense the threat of her rapid extinction that she had so often spoken of to Johnie, the end of a universe that would be linked to her own end, in the ashes of one selfsame agony, Gérard and the world] (as 65, translation modified). When Gérard embarks upon the final journey that will lead to her destruction, she compares herself to a moth that must fly into a flame and be consumed: Gérard pensait qu’il était temps pour elle de s’initier aux dures expériences de la vie, de sortir de la chrysalide de tout son être rêveur et endormi, rude papillon qui se brûlerait vite à cette flamme, la drogue. (as 59) [Gérard thought it was time for her to initiate herself into life’s tougher experiences, time to come out of the cocoon of her whole dreamy, sleepy existence, a crude butterfly that would quickly burn in the flame of drugs.] (translation modified)

The cocoon, image of metamorphosis so often used to suggest rebirth, here brings into the world not a beautiful butterfly but only a vulgar mothlike “papillon” doomed to annihilate itself.23 Self-annihilation is at the core of Gérard’s apocalyptic vision: Gérard se demandait si [les autres] éprouvaient, comme elle … la panique de sentir que cela arrivait enfin, que la chrysalide était déchirée dans une secrète explosion de l’univers – cet univers qui ne faisait qu’exploser à chaque seconde, de toute façon, pensait Gérard, la planète se consumait seule avec ses trous de feu, ses guerres larvées ou géantes, un peu partout, et bientôt nous n’aurions pas même assez d’eau pour vivre tant la terre avait été brûlée. (as 59–60)24 [Gérard wondered if the others experienced, as she did … the panic of feeling that it was finally happening, the cocoon was rupturing in a secret explosion of the universe, a universe that just kept exploding every second, in any case, thought Gérard, the planet was devouring itself with its pits of fire, its latent or gigantic wars, just about everywhere, and soon we wouldn’t even have enough water to live, the earth had been burned so much.] (translation modified)

Watching the sleeping Gérard, who seems hardly to be breathing, Johnie reflects that “un deuil commençait à descendre” [sorrow/ grieving was beginning to settle] (as 76). Part II “Le seuil de la douleur” [The Threshold of Pain] is written under the sign of that “deuil” [bereavement, mourning, grief].25 The threshold that is

128

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

inscribed in this second part is the threshold marked by Gérard’s death by fire. But it is not entirely clear whether any crossing of this threshold is possible, whether there is any future on the other side. Immediately after the scene in Part I in which Johnie notes that “un deuil commençait à descendre,” there occurs a passage that contains perhaps the most striking image in Blais’s novel of the difficulties of generation in this era of degeneration. Johnie has a vision of a mother carrying her son on her shoulders: Johnie revit une femme que l’on voyait souvent dans les rues du quartier, se parlant seule, l’oeil ivre, traversant les rues parmi les voitures avec son fils de deux ans qu’elle trimbalait sur ses épaules. L’enfant assis sur les épaules de sa mère, ses mains jointes autour de ce front qui était son unique trésor sur cette terre, cet enfant obstiné à vivre malgré lui un tel malheur, sans une étincelle de clarté, de raison, pour le guider, et celle qui le portait sur ses épaules en le secouant de gauche à droite, comme un colis sans attaches, n’étaient-ils pas, pensait Johnie, les victimes d’une déchéance engendrée par une fin de siècle qui enterrait déjà ses vivants? (as 76) [Johnie saw again a woman whom one often saw on the streets of the neighbourhood, alone, talking to herself, drunken-eyed, crossing the street between cars carting along her two-year-old son on her shoulders. The child sitting on his mother’s shoulders, hands clasped around a forehead that was his only treasure on the earth, that child stubbornly living through that hardship in spite of himself, with no spark of reason or understanding to guide him, and the woman who carried him on her shoulders shaking him left and right like a package with no strings, weren’t these two, thought Johnie, the victims of a decay bred by a fin de siècle that was already burying its living?] (translation modified)

The implicit connection in Johnie’s mind between these reflections and Gérard (herself a victim buried alive) is clear. But this image also addresses the question of generation in a radical way. The wellknown image of each generation standing on the shoulders of giants (the previous generation) in order to see further is certainly evoked here, but subverted.26 The mother, “l’oeil ivre,” is unsteady and virtually unaware of her child as anything but a burden, and the child is obstinately determined to live, but “sans une étincelle de clarté.” Is there, then, no hope for future generations in L’Ange de la solitude? The question of generations leads us ultimately to Sophie, Doudouline’s mother, the one mother in the novel who, despite her obvious failings, nevertheless maintains a connection with all the

Precarious Thresholds

129

young women and seems capable of providing some continuity between past and present. It is Sophie whose words close Part I with the statement that “il y a encore l’avenir pour réparer tout” [there is still the future to fix everything] (as 91, translation modified). But in Part II, when she accompanies the young women to the river into which they will scatter Gérard’s ashes, Sophie names the present in no uncertain terms: “c’est un bien grand deuil” [it is a great mourning] (as 128). And as she waits for them to accomplish this ritual she thinks to herself that she is “une mère coupable. Pourquoi n’avaitelle pas empêché une telle catastrophe?” [guilty as a mother. Why hadn’t she prevented a catastrophe like this?] (as 133); but could anyone have changed the course of events? When, in the final scene of the book, the young women are once again gathered in L’Abeille’s living room, Sophie is not with them. Entre elles, in the absence of mothers, they hold hands around the birthday cake on which twenty birthday candles “se consumaient seules” [were burning themselves out]27 and they wish Gérard “bon anniversaire.” The ending leaves open the question of whether the threshold marks the possibility of new generations or whether it is merely a posthumous celebration, “un bien grand deuil.” There is an intriguing reference early in the novel to Johnie as “ce cygne dans la poussière du petit jour” [a swan in the dust of the early morning] (as 14). In some ways long-necked Johnie remains throughout the novel just that, “un cygne/signe” [swan/sign] (homophonic pairing often found in French poetry) to be deciphered. Sticking her neck out, resplendent warrior under the banner of the Angel of Solitude, she might be a sign of some possibility, of some future. Or hers might be merely a swan song – the keening of the swan whose mate has died and who herself has but a few more hours to live.

tr o p d e m é m o i r e : s o i f s Je suis possédée par ma mémoire, troublée chaque jour par une mémoire vivante, qui m’inscrit dans la réalité. Cette mémoire est exigeante et n’est pas tournée vers le passé. Lorsque je suis en pleine possession de mes moyens, elle devient une source de réunification. [I am possessed by my memory, troubled each day by a living memory that inscribes me into reality. This memory is demanding and is not turned towards the past. When I am in full possession of my faculties, it becomes a source of reunification.] France Théoret 28

130

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

In Nicole Brossard’s novel Baroque d’aube, there is a direct reference to thirst, the “soif” which, in the plural, is the title of Blais’s 1995 novel (and of the trilogy of which that novel constitutes the first volume). This reference occurs in the passage in which Cybil Noland puts on the “visiocasque” and the “dataglove” in order to experience virtual reality. Cybil is initiated into this experience by the Demers brothers, who have developed a vr program for underwater exploration. But as brother Philippe says to Cybil right before she puts on the helmet and gloves: “Ce n’est pas la peine de donner tous ces détails. L’important c’est l’amour du lieu. Que la première plongée éloigne à tout jamais l’idée de la mort” [There’s no point in giving all those details. What’s important is to love being there. To have the first dive banish all thought of death forever] (ba 171). Thus is the true purpose of the venture revealed – the experience of a virtual and eternal present. And so Cybil enters that virtual present in which “la réalité se superposa à la réalité” [reality superimposed itself on reality] floating within it for a while until: Soudain, j’eus soif. Une soif incommensurable qui augmentait au fur et à mesure que mon oeil faisait synthèse du présent. J’étais, je n’étais que présent, illusion de parfait présent, dépourvue d’histoire et de toute attache. Immobilisée dans un présent que toute ma vie j’avais proclamé être essentiel pour honorer l’intelligence des sens. Maintenant il y avait trop de présent. J’arrachai le visiocasque et les gants, épuisée, frémissante. Philippe me tendit un verre d’eau. (ba 175) [Suddenly I was thirsty. An immeasurable thirst that grew as my eye synthesized the present. I was present and nothing but, an illusion of perfect present, devoid of story or any attachment. Locked in a present which all my life I had proclaimed essential for doing justice to the intelligence of our senses. Now there was too much present. I tore off the visiohelmet and gloves, exhausted and trembling. Philippe handed me a glass of water.]

A reading of the rest of Brossard’s novel reveals some of the implications of this “double temps” [double time]. Indeed, it is in the fifth and final section of Baroque d’aube, the section in which the process of translation is central,29 that the virtual reality experience seems to be synthesized into the creative process (a process clearly grounded in

Precarious Thresholds

131

“la question du futur”). Cybil and her translator are undeniably engaged with that future: Le futur est une rumeur continue qui intoxique l’énergie du présent, nous tient constamment sur nos gardes. (ba 229) [The future is a constant rumour that poisons present energy and keeps us continually on our guard.] Nous revenons sur la question du futur … Nous ne savons pas comment arrêter de penser futur. (ba 242) [We come back to the question of the future … We can’t stop thinking future.] (translation modified)

And for Brossard the answer to that question lies in fiction: Le futur nous enracine dans la fiction. (ba 229) [The future roots us in fiction.] Il fallait imaginer fiction qui oblige à craquer dans la langue avec notre intelligence neuve du présent. (ba 235) [We should be imagining fiction that, with our latter-day unintelligence about the present, brings us to the brink in language.]

But the translation and the rapprochement that motivate the final section of Brossard’s novel30 – aspects of the Brossardian vision that enable her protagonist/narrator to comment on the last page that “sur le chemin de retour, nous nous sentons terriblement libre de plonger dans le proche futur” [on the way home we feel frightfully free to immerse ourselves in the near future] – are essentially absent from Blais’s novel. Soifs is a darker and more relentless vision and version of both present and future. No one in Soifs is able to take off the visiocasque and accept a long drink of water. Thirsts go unquenched or, if momentarily slaked, will inevitably return. There seems to be always “too much present” in Blais’s vision, writing at, and of, the century’s end. In Blais’s work, preoccupations with our fin de siècle and our uncertain future are not new with Soifs. In Visions d’Anna, the younger generation, all too aware of the legacy they have inherited, are in the grips of a lucid despair: pour [les adultes] c’était une certitude, ce mot, avenir, ils le prononçaient sans honte … cela leur arrivait de dormir, de s’assoupir quand la nuit tombait, mais

132

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

elle, Anna, ne connaissait jamais ce repos qui donnait aussi la certitude … à quoi bon habiter sa vie, son corps, si demain l’avenir est interdit, tué … cette vie comme tant d’autres ne serait qu’une sanglante poussière. (va 10) [for the adults it was a certainty, this word future, one they pronounced without shame … for they might sleep, they might doze off as night was falling, whereas Anna never knew this rest that also brought certainty … what was the use of inhabiting one’s life, one’s body, if tomorrow the future was forbidden, killed … this life, like so many others, would be only bloody dust.]

In Pierre La Guerre du printemps 81, we read: En l’an 2000 on ne se souviendrait plus d’avoir peint, écrit des livres … La torture serait l’église de l’an 2000 … On passerait de la privation d’eau, de lumière, aux menottes ou au supplice de la baignoire. [In the year 2000 one would no longer remember having painted, having written books … Torture would be the Church of the year 2000 … You would go from water deprivation and light deprivation to handcuffs and bathtub torture.]31

In L’Ange de la solitude, we saw the mother, Sophie, maintain her belief that “there is still the future to fix everything” (as 91) while the generation of daughters knows that “one cannot repair flesh that has been wounded”(as 100). The younger women see “des cendres à perte de vue” [ashes as far as the eye could see] (as 60), “un tas de cendres à l’horizon” [a mound of ashes on the horizon] (as 79, translation modified), “une fin de siècle qui enterrait déjà ses vivants” [a fin de siècle that was already burying its living] (as 76) and “ce XXIe siècle sans féerie” [this twenty-first century without magic] (as 98, translation modified). Indeed, in the gathering that closes that book, the young women grouped around Gérard’s posthumous birthday cake with its twenty burning candles, wishing a “Happy Birthday” to the vanished Gérard, who will never reach twenty, are emblematic of Blais’s apocalyptic vision. Reading a novel by Marie-Claire Blais has always been a challenging experience, one requiring stamina and flexibility. With their long sentences and changing points of view, the three volumes of the Soifs trilogy are not all that different from their predecessors except that they have no structural demarcations – no parts, sections, chapters, page breaks, or paragraphs. There are commas and a few question marks, and there’s the occasional period – but that’s it. Once you start

Precarious Thresholds

133

reading, you are in it and there seems to be nowhere to stop and no way of stopping until you reach the end. In Soifs, the first full stop occurs eight pages after the beginning of the novel, and the following sentence (if that is what these pages of prose between periods should be called) begins with the conjunction “Et” (And). Clearly the reading of Soifs is part of its pathology; it is a breathless process that produces thirst and delays its quenching; it is an experience of rushing headlong toward a constantly receding conclusion. Blais’s prose is also in many ways reminiscent of the writing of Virginia Woolf; the seamlessness of the narrative evokes a kind of Woolfian permeability. For both Blais and Woolf, however, the counterpart of this permeability is the inevitable and utter solitude of the individual.32 And for both Woolf and Blais, the lack of traditional punctuation seems to allow other elements to punctuate the narrative. One notices connections both causal and casual; one is aware of process as significant in its own right; and one can never forget – in the absence of punctuation – that the ultimate punctuation is of course the ultimate Full Stop: death. And writing in the knowledge of death, without punctuation, is often, as Donald Hall puts it, “intolerable.”33 The struggle to keep breathing is the fundamental rhythm in Soifs. The three-day-three-night fête whose first day marks the time of the novel is meant to celebrate the birth of Vincent, now just ten days old. But this veillée has qualities of both a birthday and a deathwatch, as the guests arrive at the garden gate while the baby Vincent sleeps in an upstairs bedroom, his fragile respiration an unspoken but constant worry to his parents. And explicit references to the “aube d’un siècle nouveau” [dawn of a new century] (s 250) make of this birthday/deathwatch also a kind of apocalyptic New Year’s Eve.34 As the baby’s father, Daniel, welcomes the party-goers, he is inwardly reflecting: ce souffle à peine oppressé de Vincent n’était-il pas, dans leurs vies, comme ce son menaçant, long, rugissant et grave, annonçant une secousse sismique; sous la brièveté de ce souffle oscillaient leurs vies comme des flammes dans le vent[?] (s 127) [wasn’t Vincent’s faintly laboured breathing like the menacing sound, drawn out and deep, that announced an earth tremor, under the brevity of that breathing their lives flickered like flames in the wind?]

Many others in the novel seem to be poised on the brink of crisis, but it is Renata Nymans, who is on the island recuperating from surgery

134

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

that removed a cancerous lung, whose “creuse sensation de soif” [hollow sensation of thirst] (an obsessively recurrent phrase)35 most clearly figures the “thirst” of the title and the difficulty in breathing with which that thirst is associated. Greedily chain-smoking forbidden cigarettes, Renata has been reborn, as her name suggests, but what seems to have risen from the ashes of the “last cigarette” smoked in the corridor of a New York hospital is Renata’s memory of and thirst for that taste of immortality, “la sensation de la mort évanescente un instant suspendue à ses lèvres” [the evanescent sensation of death suspended from her lips] (s 46). As in Blais’s earlier novels, and especially L’Ange de la solitude, the present is smouldering, individuals are playing with fire, each breath fans the flames, and death is figured as conflagration. In addition to the island that contains it, what holds Blais’s novel together is its seemingly seamless fabric of families. This fabric, as tightly woven and as kaleidoscopic as the novel itself, poses a constant challenge to the undoing and annihilation that haunt the text. The tensions and cohesions within and among the many different kinds of families (I am tempted to call them “postnuclear families”) constitute one of the novel’s most compelling visions. Blais has moved from Anna’s world (the fragile and imperfect mother-daughter relationship of Raymonde and Anna set against the rootlessness and hopelessness of an entire generation) and from Johnie’s world (a group of young women taking refuge together from their individual legacies of hurt, a “family gathering” without precedents and perhaps without future) to the world of Soifs, essentially the same world, but this time presented on a larger canvas and unmoored. Blais here gives us the island as a microcosmic expression of our own complex postnuclear world; we find different classes and races and generations, different occupations and histories, different beliefs and attitudes. There are more traditional and more or less intact families – whose faultlines all show – like those of the Pastor Jeremy or of Mélanie and Daniel; and there are broken families, lost families, damaged families, and chosen families. The picture is neither overly optimistic nor utterly pessimistic. Some of the most tender and perhaps lasting connections made within the familial networks are the more unexpected ones: the Pastor’s intransigeant bicycle-stealing son Carlos – with the dog he finds and calls Polly; Julio, who alone of his entire family had survived the trip to the island on a small raft through a violent storm – with the tiny sleeping Vincent; Jacques, the professor and Kafka scholar now dying of aids – with his young

Precarious Thresholds

135

friends Luc and Paul and his ex-lover Tanjou and with the sister from whom he had been estranged for years, all of them having come to care for him in his last days. In addition, there is a kind of narrative centre of gravity around Mélanie36 and her family: that is, her husband, Daniel, her three sons (Samuel, Augustino, and Vincent), her aunt Renata, and her mother, referred to as Mère. This established family configuration reveals a great deal about three different generations and their connections and disconnections, affinities and misapprehensions. The role and reflections of Mère are especially suggestive. Indeed, it is she who closes the novel, in a disconcertingly inconclusive or at least stubbornly selfdeluded way: “que ces jeunes gens s’amusent” [let the young people enjoy themselves], she thinks. Then, as she imagines what will happen during the next two nights of the fête, the text slips into the conditional mood: “[elle] entendrait … les voix de Samuel et Vénus déchirant la nuit lorsqu’ils chanteraient de leurs voix unies, ô que ma joie demeure, ô que ma joie demeure” [(she) would hear … the voices of Samuel and Vénus tearing into the night, when they sang with their united voices, O let my joy endure, O let my joy endure] (s 314).37 This closing passage suggests a projection into the future of a moment of plenitude, a moment of memory, for the conditional when used to express an imagined future often has a nostalgic quality. The future is imagined as an extension or repetition of a known present and, since all presents are destined to become past, it is imagined also as a place of regret and longing. The final and repeated subjunctive phrase, the remembered words of a song – ô que ma joie demeure – intensifies this image of longing and obstinate hope in the face of an uncertain future. The effect is of course partly ironic – for how can Mère dream of lasting joy in this world on the brink of destruction? – but it also articulates one of the essential frictions of any future, the fiction between hope and nostalgia. Tomorrow will become today. Today will become yesterday. That is the future tense (and the future tension). Trop de mémoire. This is the accusation leveled at Daniel by one of the older generation of writers: “il a déjà trop de mémoire” [he already has too much memory] (s 241, translation modified). For Daniel’s manuscript, Étranges Années, the story of innocent lost souls whose “eternal thirst” (s 223) would never be quenched, is full of “des prophéties insensées” [mad prophecies] (s 225). And Adrien explains to Daniel that there is too much abundance in his descriptions of

136

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

chaos: “plus de sobriété et de retenue, mon ami, votre manuscrit Les Étranges Années n’est-il pas un produit excité de notre temps” [you need more sobriety and more restraint, my friend, your manuscript Strange Years is an overexcited product of our time] (s 251). But memory is what drives Daniel to this excess and what enables him to write, for he is himself a “produit excité” of his time. Like Daniel’s manuscript, Blais’s novel is also driven by memories. First there are all the remembered personal losses and abandonments: Mère’s French governess, Renata’s first husband, Franz, and his sons, Julio’s mother and sisters and brothers, Daniel’s great-uncle Samuel killed at Dachau. But these are inseparable from the losses, the forgettings, the “trous de mémoire” [memory gaps] that threaten the entire human race.38 It is the Anna Amélias who haunt Mélanie – women who, like Woolf’s Judith Shakespeare, might have been, must have been, but were never allowed to be: Anna Amélia Puccini, Anna Amélia Mendelsohn. Renata is tormented by the bloody archives in which are buried, silenced, lost, so many generations of mutilated and murdered women. And her husband Claude, a magistrate, is thrown into despair at the thought that sons can never expiate the wrongs of their fathers, that in “cette redoutable profession de magistrat” [that fearsome and awe-inspiring profession of magistrate] (s 13, translation modified) he may be unable to avoid perpetuating injustice. Itself a “produit excité de notre temps” perhaps, Blais’s novel inscribes a relentless catalogue of horrors and atrocities to be remembered: rapes, massacres, lynchings, Viet Nam, child soldiers, ak47s, Chernobyl, Yugoslavia, the Gulf War, Jonestown, boat people, plagues, Haiti, Angola, Cambodia, aids, drug overdoses, slavery, Mozambique, planetary ecological disaster, capital punishment, the Holocaust. They are all there. In explicit detail. The novel bears witness. Of course, it is true that alongside Auschwitz and Hiroshima and the Ku Klux Klan’s White Horsemen of the Apocalypse there are also inscribed: the phoenix, Noah’s Ark, Atlantis, the land of milk and honey – although in Blais’s novel these tend to be visions without substance, offering little in the way of real response to the very real threats that have been catalogued. In fact, they seem rather to be merely alternative evocations of the end of the world. Is this what it means to have too much memory? But in the end, what alternative is there? One can hardly envy the situation of Frédéric, stricken with Alzheimer’s and afraid that with his memory he has also lost the ability to be himself remembered,

Precarious Thresholds

137

pathetically determined to “tout recommencer, jusqu’à ma mort” [start everything again, until I die] (s 295) but forced to resign himself to the overpowering need to sleep. Frédéric speaks of his sense of an imminent resurrection, but there is no evidence of such a transcendent ending in Soifs. The end of the novel is occupied by those who most successfully deny the end: Mère (like Sophie in L’Ange de la solitude) seems ready and determined to believe that the future is of one piece with the present and that it still can and will fix everything; and Caroline the photographer, desiring not to have to think about the massive extermination of youth, consciously chooses not to witness or photograph others’ misfortunes. These two might be heard saying, “After all, it’s not the end of the world!” And no, it isn’t … yet. It is just the end of the first day of Vincent’s fête – and both Vincent and Renata are still breathing. The prognosis is pretty bleak. Still, Soifs is only the first volume in Blais’s fin de siècle trilogy. Before we reach that third and final volume and before we learn whether the veillée de l’an is in fact a veillée de mort, and whether la fin de siècle is indeed la fin du monde – there will probably be time for several more last cigarettes.

moments of grace: dans la foudre et la lumière grâce aux mélodies de quelques notes de piano, nous verrions l’aube devancer les plus funestes calamités (fl 42) [with the tune of a few sweet piano notes we would see dawn forestalling the most disastrous calamities] (translation modified)39

In the second volume of Blais’s Soifs trilogy, we find ourselves once again in the precarious and imperilled world that we came to know in Soifs. Several years have passed, but the fact that life is apparently going on does not make the characters’ preoccupations with questions of meaningful survival any less acute. Renata is still obsessed with issues of innocence and justice in her struggle against the death penalty. Mélanie continues to campaign tirelessly for the rights and protection of oppressed women and their children. Daniel and Caroline and JeanMathieu and a host of others all wrestle with the dilemma of what it means to be an artist in a world filled with violence and suffering. Everyone is a few years older and the changing perspectives brought about by aging are evident in many of the characters’ reflections. Past

138

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

and future begin to look different to many of these characters as their children grow into adulthood or as they themselves approach their own declining years. The novel is keenly focused on the question of what the children are becoming and what the world has in store for them. There have been some unanticipated triumphs over circumstance. Vénus, who in Soifs looked as if she was heading for trouble (dressing provocatively, having sex with white men in the public toilets or at the local mixed Club), actually found some happiness in her marriage with Captain Williams before his death at sea. Living alone now in their fancy house, she seems prepared to look out for herself despite the threatening presence of the skulking groundskeeper, Rick. Vincent, whose laboured breathing as an infant made everyone fear for his future, has survived; and, in another seemingly hopeful turn of events, his parents now have another baby. Daniel and Mélanie’s decision to name this daughter Mai after a missing child even suggests an attempt to repair or at least confront in some small way the damage done to children: “ce prénom printanier, Mai, légué à l’enfant cadette de Mélanie et de Daniel, une même enfance menacée pourtant que Mélanie s’acharnerait à défendre contre des prédateurs infamants” [this springtime name, Mai, bequeathed to Mélanie and Daniel’s youngest child, still one and the same kind of threatened childhood that Mélanie would ferociously defend from vile predators] (fl 96, translation modified). At the same time, however, many of the fears for the children’s future expressed in Soifs are being realized. Carlos has moved on from pinching bikes and flinging his shoes over telephone wires to carrying a “38” revolver with which he will shoot his friend Lazaro in an argument over a watch. Augustino revels in playing computer games that allow him to play master of the universe bringing about cataclysmic destruction. Samuel, who has moved to New York to study dance, clings to the privilege of his upbringing, dreams of a comfortable world “à l’écart des valeurs du vieux monde” [nothing to do with the values of the old world] (fl 104), judges his parents’ idealism harshly, and has little sympathy for the ranting, homeless, thirteen-year-old girl he sees on the street and whom he calls la Vierge aux sacs [Our Lady of the Bags]. Overall, the future looks bleak. Blais’s novel evokes in equal measure the violence perpetuated by children and the violence inflicted upon them. Immersed in a debate over the application of the death penalty in the cases of youthful offenders, Renata struggles against

Precarious Thresholds

139

the portraits painted by her fellow judges of cold-blooded child criminals indiscriminately assassinating their classmates. She knows that these stories will be used to justify the institution of harsher penalties (including lowering the age for capital murder indictments) and that the punishments sought by the judges will be disproportionately visited on the poor and underprivileged. Aware of the dehumanizing circumstances that may have contributed to producing these young criminals, she feels pity for everyone involved. The case that haunts her above all is that of the eleven-year-old black boy Nathanaël now in prison after having accidentally shot another boy. Renata imagines him, a few years down the line, facing the death penalty. She pictures every detail of the horrifying scene: the waiting, the last meal, the boy’s repeated declaration of his innocence, his difficulty understanding what is happening to him, and then the electric chair. In the bungled execution that she imagines, the wrong sponge is placed on the boy’s head and catches fire when he is electrocuted. Nathanaël’s case represents for Renata the tragic destiny of a whole generation of children; it is “le Massacre des Innocents commandé par un fou” [the Slaughter of the Innocents ordered by a madman] (fl 134, translation modified). When her husband, Claude, tells her that she needs to “conserver l’objectivité humaniste du juge qu’elle était” [hold onto her judge’s humanistic objectivity] (fl 203), she resents his detachment. In her heart, she counters the objectivity of the judge with the compassion of the mother, thinking: “la profondeur de chaque être vivant, n’est-ce pas son innocence?” [isn’t innocence the deepest part of each living being?] (fl 203, translation modified). Dans la foudre et la lumière returns again and again to the question of whether and how parents can protect their children from harm and prepare them for the world. Reading email letters from his son, for instance, Daniel admits that Augustino “troubl[e] sa conscience” [troubles his conscience] (fl 59). Could he have shielded him better from a world in which a seven-year-old girl who crashes her plane in a storm – encouraged by the grown-ups around her to try to get into the Guinness Book of World Records – becomes for the young Augustino “l’héroïne de son millénaire” [his heroine for the millennium] (fl 58)? Should he have told his son, as Mélanie’s mother had told her years earlier when they were driving by an accident scene where a young girl had been killed: “Ne te retourne pas” [don’t look back] (fl 18)? But then, Mélanie’s own story reveals the futility of a parent’s attempt

140

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

to spare her child any painful encounter with the harsh realities of the world. Mélanie’s persistent memory of that little girl’s death reveals the ultimate failure of her mother’s intervention: “que la douleur de cette vision fût évitée à Mélanie, mais bien des années plus tard la douleur était encore violente” [Mélanie might have been spared the pain of that sight, but many years later that pain was still violent] (fl 19, translation modified). Indeed, Mélanie has lived her life refusing to accept Mère’s judgment that “nous n’y pouvons rien” [there’s nothing we can do] (fl 19) and is determined to remain vigilant to the suffering and injustice around her. The fact that many young people seem unaware of the menacing aspects of the world they live in troubles her: “des palmiers, des drapeaux oscillaient dans le vent, de quelle anxiété était remplie cette heure, pensait Mélanie, ces filles, ces garçons, trop sains, n’entendaient-ils pas le grondement des vagues” [palm trees and flags waved in the wind, what anxiousness filled this time of day, thought Mélanie, these girls and boys, really too healthy, couldn’t they hear the rumbling of the waves] (fl 20). Of course, the irony in Mélanie’s current situation is that her commitment to social change frequently takes her away from her own children, whom she leaves in the care of others.40 As she stands on the sidelines watching her oldest son, Samuel, preparing to leave for New York, she is aware of how sheltered he has been and she worries about his safety. Indeed, one of the central dilemmas facing parents seems to be that keeping one’s children safe and preparing them for the world are not always compatible goals. Probably the most heartbreaking story of a parent’s futile attempt to ensure a better future for her child is that of Caridad, Lazaro’s mother. Having risked everything to remove her son not only from an abusive family situation but also from an environment of militant terrorism and glorified religious martyrdom back in Egypt, Caridad thought she was opening up for Lazaro the possibilities of a new way of life. Fleeing her husband’s brutality as well as a society that required her to remain veiled and subservient, she had wanted her son to be “le fils de cette rébellion, [sa] fierté” [the son born of (her) rebellion and (her) pride] (fl 175). But Lazaro scorns her pacifism. Despite her attempts to turn him away from vengeance and toward mercy, he embraces his brothers’ obedience to “la loi du sang viril” [the manly code of blood] (fl 153). His confrontation with Carlos has taught him “what it means to be a man”:

Precarious Thresholds

141

j’obéirai à la loi du sang de mes frères, de mes cousins, je suis le fils de Mohammed, cette femme débauchée par des idées nouvelles n’est pas ma mère, non, les hommes et les femmes ne seront jamais égaux. (fl 176) [I will obey the law of blood, just like my brothers and cousins, I am the son of Mohammed, and this woman corrupted by newfangled ideas isn’t my mother, no, men and women will never be equals.] (translation modified)

It is no wonder that Daniel feels both hope and fear when he reflects on his children’s future. Augustino clearly inhabits a world both “luminous” and dark.41 On the one hand, Daniel’s son writes about participating in an international gathering of young people seeking to “improve the living conditions of children around the world” (fl 140); as Augustino explains, “tous, ils avaient une pensée, une idée, comment vivre mieux demain, comment sauver les animaux, tous les êtres vivants” [all had one thought, how to make life better tomorrow, how to save the animals and all living beings] (fl 141). On the other hand, however, he aspires to imitate the millionaire inventors of video games like Quake and Doom and Karnac that seem to Daniel frighteningly close to “le spectre d’une troisième guerre mondiale” [the apparition of a third world war] (fl 142). Many of the young people in Blais’s novels are lost in the sensual overload of an eternal present; others are depicted as venturing beyond their parents’ imaginings, but into what kind of future? In both cases, each generation thinks it sees further and more clearly than the other and intergenerational rifts based on distrust and misunderstanding produce parents and children who are profoundly ambivalent about one another. Repeated references to Mère’s admonition to her daughter “not to look” draw attention to the centrality of the question of witnessing in the novel. The actions of social and political activists – Renata’s work on capital punishment or Mélanie’s campaign on behalf of imprisoned women and their children – are acts of witnessing. A number of visionary “witnesses” also speak out in important ways: the reverend Paul, the reverend Ezechiel, the monk Asoka, la Vierge aux sacs. But the challenge of witnessing is most penetratingly and persistently addressed by the artists in the novel. Two artists are depicted as bearing stark witness to the ominous trends toward violence and disintegration in the world: Arnie’s dance projects are a “choreography” of death (fl 100) performed for

142

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

people dying of aids (“nous sachant tous condamnés, osons affronter la mort” [knowing we’re all condemned, we dare to confront death] [fl 35]); Charles’s poetry unflinchingly evokes the annihilation of everyone and everything. The dispassionate gaze of these artists is, however, associated with a fundamental cynicism and a fatalistic acceptance of their inability to prevent the grim outcomes to which their works bear witness. Arnie explains: “Je ne suis qu’un artiste, pas un guérisseur” [I’m only an artist, not a healer] (fl 101, translation modified), and Charles retreats into the ascetic life in order to write poems that his friend Jean-Mathieu judges to be “les erreurs d’une âme dépressive” [the misconceptions of a depressed soul] (fl 41, translation modified). Art serves a very different purpose for others in the novel. The two aging artists, Caroline and Jean-Mathieu, cling to an idea of art as decorous and humane. Caroline has long refused to photograph horrors, admitting that she is not “de ces artistes photographes valeureux qui avaient enregistré du siècle défunt les images les plus nocives, pétrifiantes” [one of those courageous photographic artists who had documented the most dangerous, petrifying images of the previous century] (fl 177). Artists capable of such acts of witnessing may be those to whom “on devait la continuité de la mémoire du monde” [we owe the continuation of the world’s memory] (fl 178, translation modified), but Caroline admits her own “lack of courage” in choosing rather to focus on beauty and to photograph only “ce qui était gracieux, quelque agrément d’existence” [that which is gracious, some pleasant part of existence] (fl 182). Jean-Mathieu, at the end of a long literary career, likewise notes that “avec le temps … nous sommes touchés par une irrémédiable sympathie pour tout ce qui vit, nous accueillons tous les paradoxes” [with time we are touched by an incurable sympathy for all that lives, we welcome any and all paradoxes] (fl 40). He urges Charles to take pleasure in “quelque complicité de jeunesse, de renaissance” [some sort of youthful collusion or rebirth] (fl 40). The aesthetic legacy that Caroline and JeanMathieu represent appears in many ways anachronistic within Blais’s world. Jean-Mathieu’s journey to Venice (replaying Mann’s Death in Venice) evokes the artist’s privileged place within a humanistic literary tradition but at the same time retells the story of the dying of that tradition. Still, these voices, speaking of the importance of beauty and sympathy, resonate within Blais’s novel in counterpoint to the grim testimonies of some of the other artists.

Precarious Thresholds

143

Dans la foudre et la lumière poses and enacts the question of the nature and possibilities of artistic witness. Most of Blais’s artists are struggling to determine what role to play in a chaotic and uncertain world. Are they of the world or in a place apart? Is their engagement primarily realistic or visionary, ethical or aesthetic? What is the artist’s mandate? What can the artist do? Of all of the artists in the novel, it is Daniel (husband, father, and writer in mid-career) who offers the most sustained and elaborate examination of the artist’s complex role. Daniel provides a focal point in the novel for the question of the artist’s role as a witness precisely because he stands at so many crossroads. In Dans la foudre et la lumière as in Soifs, he is associated with both memory and prophecy. He has strong attachments to an older generation of poets and writers, but is equally preoccupied with his children, the generation that will follow his own. He wavers between the solitary and the communal and struggles between retreat and engagement. Following the considerable success of his first novel, Les Étranges Années – acclaimed for its “qualité prophétique” [prophetic quality] (fl 32), Daniel has repaired to an artists’ retreat in a monastery in Spain in order to write. Upon his arrival at the “sanctuaire de l’écriture” and his installation in “[cette] chambre tant convoitée” [that room he had so coveted] he realizes, however, that “la vraie vie se pass[e] au-dehors” [real life (is) happening outside] (fl 44, translation modified). In that isolated and protected space devoted exclusively to art, he suddenly finds it hard to reconcile his experience of the world with his writing practice. He is particularly troubled by having seen a sparrow caught in some steel cables in the train station in Madrid on his way to the monastery. This sight had made him supremely conscious of his position as a privileged observer of suffering. Though penetrated by the “spectacle of suffering” (fl 32), he had done nothing to alleviate it.42 His unease with his observer role was reinforced by an encounter with a man on the train who told unrepentantly of having killed a wolf-dog that he had raised. Daniel reflected on the part he played in listening to this tale: “mais qui était Daniel, un impertinent, un intrus, s’immisçant dans toutes les vies, avec quelle mortifiante répréhension contre lui-même, il pensait à ce voyageur du train” [who was this guy Daniel anyway, an upstart busybody mixing in other people’s business, it was with revulsion for himself that he remembered the man on the train] (fl 45, translation modified). Later, when he sits down at his desk, however, he writes

144

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

the story of the man on the train and the wolf-dog. For Daniel also wants to believe in the value of writing what he has seen. Writing turns watching into witnessing, allowing him to denounce “ceux que la loi n’avait ni sanctionnés ni punis” [those whom the law had neither sanctioned nor punished] (fl 37, translation modified). Although Daniel does write while at the monastery, he is nevertheless troubled by the idea of retreating from the world in order to do so. Unlike the mystical Charles, Daniel knows himself to be “carnal,” and he recalls that he has always written “avec un ou plusieurs enfants sur les genoux” [with one or more children on his lap] (fl 37, translation modified). Even in his retreat, he is in regular communication with Augustino by email and with the poet Rodrigo, who has befriended him. His thoughts often return to his family, and, as he prepares to return home, having written disappointingly little in his “chambre austère,” he acknowledges the importance of these connections to his work: “comment écrire sainement sans un enfant sur les genoux” [it’s not healthy to write without a child … on your lap] (fl 184). The experience of parenting is closely related in Daniel’s mind to the business of writing. He recalls an episode in which, because of his naïve belief in “the permanence of a blue sky” and his negligence in having left Vincent’s medicine at home, his son had nearly died. Memories of this crisis reinforce his certainty that it is important always to be vigilant: “toute menace aurait dû être toujours présente à son esprit” [he should have borne all threats constantly in mind] (fl 44, translation modified). He holds a similar conviction about his role as a writer bearing witness to the perilous state of the world. But Vincent’s crisis also revealed the possibility of unexpected moments of grace: “par quel miracle Daniel avait-il bénéficié de ce moment de grâce où la vie de son fils n’avait pas sombré” [what miracle was it that allowed Daniel that moment of grace in which his son’s life had been preserved] (fl 44, translation modified). And such moments of grace are also part of Daniel’s understanding of the function of art. For Daniel, art – like a child on one’s lap – has to do with connection, with survival, with fear and hope, with the materiality of the world, and with the wonder of the spirit. Daniel is thus in fundamental disagreement with the young couple Mark and Carmen, whose sculptures and installations composed of trash and animal carcasses make a grim statement about the present state of the world (“Mark et Carmen semblaient dire en montrant leurs oeuvres, tels des embryons de la mort, regardez et vous comprendrez

Precarious Thresholds

145

dans quel univers nous vivons tous” [by putting these works on show, these embryos of death, Mark and Carmen seemed to be saying, look and see what universe we’re living in] [fl 185]). When Daniel expresses his admiration for the fourteenth-century painter Giotto (“[qui] a humanisé le visage de Dieu” [who gave God a human face]), Mark is scornful, declaiming: Giotto eût mieux fait de peindre des paysages que de nous imposer ses croyances en une divinité qui n’existe pas … car il n’y a que ce qui naît et meurt, c’est l’accident de la vie, et ce qui suit, la pourriture, qui est notre sort à tous. (fl 187) [Giotto would have done better to paint landscapes than foist off on us his belief in a god that doesn’t exist … for there is nothing that is not born and does not die; life’s accident and the decomposition that fellows, that’s our common destiny.] (translation modified)

Following this conversation Daniel experiences another unexpected “moment of grace,” one that seems to challenge Mark and Carmen’s nihilism. Three peacocks appear on the roof of the kitchen spreading their magnificent tails. This sight dissipates Daniel’s gloom, and breaks through his sense of isolation, reconnecting him with his family: n’était-ce pas miraculeux, surnaturel, qu’en remontant ce chemin des coquelicots aux pétales écarlates, où Daniel avait été si maussade le matin, il eût soudain la vision de trois paons se dressant, splendide … la poésie de cette manifestation subite avait apaisé quelques-unes des craintes de Daniel lorsqu’il vivait loin de ses amis … visitation du ciel ou miracle, Daniel écoutait venir vers lui les voix, les pensées de chacun de ses enfants au-delà des mers. (fl 188)43 [wasn’t it miraculous, sublime, to see three peacocks suddenly on the scarletpetalled poppy path, this morning he had come down it ill-tempered, and now here they were, standing with their splendidly rounded plumage fully spread … the sudden poetry in this display assuaged some of Daniel’s fears of living far away from friends … miracle or visitation from heaven, voices, the thoughts of each of his children, came to him from across the sea.]

Daniel’s return home shortly thereafter (following the news of JeanMathieu’s death) further suggests that the fulfillment of his artistic and personal quest involves finding himself again among family and friends. It is indeed the shared experience of loss that awakens his

146

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

appreciation for the multi-faceted life he has chosen: “heureux celui qui avait encore près de lui, comme Daniel, une femme, des enfants qu’il adorait, et encore tant de livres à écrire, bien que les enfants, les livres fussent aussi des sources de tracas” [happy the man, like Daniel, who had a wife and children he loved and all those books still to write, though of course both the books and the children were also a source of problems] (fl 212, translation modified). At the end of his pilgrimage, Daniel concludes that life, with all its dualities, is still worth living: “heureux celui qui vivait [et] éprouvait sans trop se plaindre ces souffrances et ces joies de la vie” [happy the man who lived through the pain and joy of life without complaining too much] (fl 212). Jean-Mathieu’s funeral brings together most of the characters in the novel in a climactic scene of mourning, connection, and reflection. Like the posthumous birthday in L’Ange de la solitude and the veillée/ fête in Soifs, this gathering marks a cusp between loss and survival, hopelessness and hope. It is fitting that Daniel should be a central figure in this communal ritual of grieving and remembrance, for he incorporates many of the dualities that characterize Blais’s world. He seeks solitude but also community. He feels anxiety but also hope. He experiences grief and loss but also a renewed appreciation for the value of life. Daniel is also pivotal because he maintains vital connections to both past and future. These connections are effectively represented in two key moments during the funeral – when he scatters Jean-Mathieu’s ashes and when he lifts his daughter Mai onto his shoulders. The scattering of the ashes represents both a connection to and a letting go of the past. When he received the news of his friend and mentor’s death, Daniel had reflected that this was “la fin d’un poète, l’écroulement d’un monde” [the death of a poet, a world collapsing] (fl 212). But his central role in the memorial ritual emphasizes not only the finality of this definitive break with the past (“l’écroulement d’un monde”) but also the possibility of some kind of continuing legacy grounded in memory. The same kind of double message is conveyed by Daniel’s gesture of lifting his daughter onto his shoulders. As we saw in the similar scene in L’Ange de la solitude discussed earlier in this chapter, the image of a parent bearing a child on his or her shoulders may be interpreted as a symbolic evocation of the idea of one generation helping the next to see further. It is also true, however, that in both instances Blais simultaneously inscribes a subversion of that optimistic symbolism. When Mélanie’s mother observes Daniel picking

Precarious Thresholds

147

up Mai she thinks: “cette distraite vigilance d’un père envers sa fille qu’il voyait si peu était surtout égoïste, décevante” [this distracted vigilance of a father toward the daughter he so rarely saw was particularly selfish and disappointing] (fl 222, translation modified) and she notes further that Mai looks unhappy and that Daniel is not heeding her requests to be put down. In addition to placing Daniel on the threshold of past and future, the funeral catalyses important reflections on memory, in particular those of Mélanie and her mother. When the two women come together on the deck of the boat that is taking them to Jean-Mathieu’s funeral, Mélanie expresses her anxiety about what her children will remember of the past. They will remember the great men, Gandhi and Einstein and Nelson Mandela, but will they also remember Rosa Parks and Emmeline Pankhurst? They will remember the great events, but will they also remember that Einstein, having laid the groundwork for the atomic bomb, came too late “to the defence of peace”? As a mother, Mélanie is deeply concerned with ensuring that the next generation not forget anyone or anything. Memory is the key to survival. Mélanie’s mother, Esther, does not feel the same urgency.44 She points out that even if Emmeline Pankhurst is forgotten, her legacy (gaining women in England the vote in 1918) is what matters: “c’est peut-être ainsi que rien ne se perd, aucun acte de courage” [perhaps in this way nothing is lost, no act of bravery] (fl 217, translation modified). Furthermore, Esther questions the need to preserve everything in memory: de ce siècle pétrifié dans ses lacunes et ses irréparables fautes, faut-il se souvenir de tout, je crois que nos enfants auront bien d’autres idéaux que ceux que nous leur avons laissés. (fl 218) [do we really have to remember every single one of this petrified century’s failings and irreparable faults? I think our children will have ideals of their own and not just the ones we leave for them.] (translation modified)

Esther suggests that memories of irreparable errors may be irrelevant in that the future is likely to transcend the past in unanticipated ways. But Mélanie is adamant: There can be no livable future without memory: il faut que mes enfants se souviennent de tout, on ne peut pas vivre décemment sans la mémoire de ce qui s’est passé avant nous, n’est-ce pas ce que tu me disais toi-même, maman? (fl 218)

148

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

[my children must remember absolutely everything, we can’t have a decent life without knowing what has gone on before us, isn’t that what you always used to tell us, Mama?]

This may well have been Esther’s legacy to her daughter, but she now feels differently. With age, she explains, one becomes less and less inclined to think about all the madness in the world: “j’ai appris à réduire mes ambitions et mes désirs” [I’ve learned to lower my ambitions and desires] (fl 218). She now chooses to spend her time cultivating her own garden. In her decision to devote herself to her trees and flowers rather than to actively “witness” history, Esther resembles Caroline. Both women insist on focusing on beauty rather than on the grim realities of the world, but they are not oblivious to the future; each is committed in her own way to preserving what is good in life. Caroline’s photographs of artists and musicians attempt to immortalize them, unchanged and incorruptible, just as Esther seeks in her garden to safeguard something precious and vulnerable. Esther explains: “Tous ces arbres méritent que je pense à eux et que je fasse tout en mon pouvoir afin qu’ils demeurent vivants dans un monde où chaque jour la nature est saccagée” [All these trees deserve my attention and all my efforts to keep them alive in a world where nature is ravaged every day] (fl 219, translation modified). When Esther talks of species of trees, however, Mélanie recalls a series of “tableaux d’horreur du siècle achevé” [pictures of the old century’s horrors] in which trees are merely the backdrop to scenes of brutality and slaughter. This is the history that must not be forgotten. How can her mother not see that? In their conversation, Esther and Mélanie take apparently opposing approaches to the question of memory. Mélanie worries that Esther’s selective memory fails to bear witness and thereby to do justice to the past. Esther in turn worries that in Mélanie’s tireless crusades to bear witness, she forgets to cultivate and enjoy her own garden. But mother and daughter are not really as far apart as they might seem. Esther’s attempt to offer a more nuanced explanation of her position ultimately reveals that even though she has chosen to focus on the positive, she has in fact forgotten nothing.45 In her initial attempt to explain herself further, Esther compares her reaction to Jean-Mathieu’s death with that of Daniel’s father, Joseph, whom she has seen crying. Having reflected that “la période de [l]a vie [de Jean-Mathieu] était révolue” [Jean-Mathieu’s

Precarious Thresholds

149

time ha[d] come] (fl 219), she had approached his death with a degree of acceptance – would Mélanie have her feel guilty for not crying? Esther is making this comparison in order to illustrate the fact that there are different ways of mourning and remembering, but the very appearance of Joseph weeping challenges her ability to remember selectively and pushes her narration into a testimonial mode. She tells her daughter that whenever she sees Joseph she cannot help but remember all the losses that he witnessed and survived in Poland: tout, je me souviens de tout, Mélanie … il est encore inscrit dans son âme, dans son corps, l’appel au secours que d’autres ont lancé avec lui en Pologne … on peut lire ce testament, sous l’encre invisible, épidémies, torture, avilissement, tueries par le gaz, exécutions, ce texte que Joseph porte encore en lui. (fl 220) [I remember everything, Mélanie … this is all still written in his soul and body, the cry for help he carried from Poland for all of them … and you can read it, written in invisible ink, the testament Joseph still carries in him to epidemics, torture, degradation, gassing, and execution.] (translation modified)

Thus, at the end of their conversation, Esther is essentially making Mélanie’s point – that the imperatives of memory cannot be ignored. The confrontation and interconnection between Mélanie and Esther recalls other pairings in the novel (Asoka and Ari, Marie-Sylvie and Jenny) which likewise centre on the question of whether it is better to tend one’s garden or to work to bring about change on a global level. The email correspondence between the worldly sculptor Ari and his friend, the idealistic monk Asoka, juxtaposes the sensual and the spiritual, the personal and the transcendent. Similarly, Marie-Sylvie, the young Haitian woman who cares for the children of Mélanie and Daniel, at first compares her situation unfavourably with that of her friend Jenny, who has left the island to do humanitarian work in an orphanage in North Korea. Jenny is off waging a brave battle against hunger and war, while she remains behind caring for a couple of spoiled and privileged children. Marie-Sylvie bemoans her own “gloomy solitude” until she recalls the joy she feels when holding the sleeping Mai in her arms. Then she is suddenly confident that her future will be brighter. None of these pairings establishes rigid dichotomies; rather, they all clearly show the importance of maintaining the dynamic communication between those who have chosen different paths. In every case it seems that each member of the pair must show

150

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

the other what not to forget: one needs to care for the world, but also one’s own backyard; one needs to value the past but also the present; one needs to heed suffering but also moments of grace; one lives in the lightning and in the light – dans la foudre et la lumière.46 As a gloss of Blais’s title, the novel’s epigraph (from Anne Hébert’s Ève) sets the stage for this conclusion: Source des larmes et du cri, de quelles parures vives nous léguas-tu la charge et l’honneur. L’angoisse et l’amour, le deuil et la joie se célèbrent à fêtes égales, en pleine face gravées, comme des paysages profonds. (fl 11) [Source of tears and cries, with what brilliant apparel you have honoured and laden us. Anguish and love, as mourning and joy, are equally celebrated, engraved as landscapes in our faces.]

The human legacy is to celebrate grief and joy “à fêtes égales” and, indeed, throughout the book we see ample evidence of both the suffering and violence to which “la foudre” refers and the hope and joy (and moments of grace) figured by “la lumière.” Furthermore, both words actually come up at strategic moments. “La foudre” appears in reference to Carlos’s shooting of Lazaro, Jessica’s plane crash, and Nathanaël’s execution.47 “La lumière” is associated by Jean-Mathieu with the possibility of saving the world from destruction (“grâce aux mélodies de quelques notes de piano, nous verrions l’aube devancer les plus funestes calamités, Jean-Mathieu se réveillerait inondé de lumière sur son lit blanc” [with the melody of a few sweet piano notes we would see dawn forestalling the most disastrous calamities, Jean-Mathieu would awaken in his stark white bed bathed in light] [fl 42, translation modified]), “La lumière” also appears in the context of Daniel’s visionary sighting of the three peacocks (“bientôt, dans quelques heures, Daniel serait bouleversé par la lumière sur les collines mauves … il entendrait les premières notes nocturnes du rossignol, ses modulations de joie, sans fin” [soon, a few hours from now, he would be touched deeply by the light on the purple hills … he would hear the first evening notes, the endless modulation of joy of the nightingale] [fl 188–9, translation modified]). In Jean-Mathieu’s repeated references to Dylan Thomas’s lines about dying (“Rage, rage against the dying of the light”), the light is also clearly figured as a positive life force. And throughout the novel light is implicitly associated with moments of unexpected kindness, moments of hope in the midst of despair: when a woman brings a coke

Precarious Thresholds

151

to la Vierge aux sacs or a stranger in Moscow offers Asoka a warm coat; when a group of soldiers who have “malevolently destroyed everything around them” (fl 74) subsequently rescue and care for an abandoned baby monkey; or when pianists whose countries are at war come together at a concert in Israel to play a duet by Schubert (“de la seule diplomatie de l’art naissait parfois quelque espoir de paix” [sometimes the diplomacy of art could give birth to a hope of peace] [fl 250]). The single occasion in the novel when “la foudre” and “la lumière” appear together – in a sentence that significantly also includes “la soif” – perfectly illustrates Blais’s vision of the precarious state in which humanity finds itself, balanced between hope and catastrophe: “si Carlos eût été là, Polly n’eût jamais connu ni la faim ni la soif, indivisibles, inséparables, Carlos, Polly, Carlos, Lazaro, dans la lumière, la foudre …” [if Carlos had been there, Polly would never have known hunger or thirst, indivisible, inseparable, Carlos, Polly, Carlos, Lazaro, in light and thunder] (fl 117–18, translation modified). In this passage, made up of a series of word pairings (faim/soif; indivisibles/inséparables; Carlos/Polly; Carlos/Lazaro), the light and the lightning are inextricably linked and together describe the ambiguities of Carlos’s situation. In Soifs, his adoption of the dog, Polly, suggested a unique opportunity for tenderness in the life of a boy headed ineluctably toward delinquence. Polly’s total devotion and utter dependence stand a chance of bringing out the best in Carlos.48 The appearance of the two in the very first scene of Dans la foudre et la lumière, however, highlights the extent to which Carlos is still split between violence and gentleness. He had been Polly’s “refuge, her lair.” But the dog now sees the boy’s hands, “hier si caressantes et souples” [yesterday so supple and ready to caress] (fl 3), balled into fists as he swears vengeance against Lazaro. The feud between Carlos and Lazaro likewise illustrates the struggle between harmony and discord that Carlos embodies, for Lazaro had been Carlos’s friend – “eux hier inséparables” [inseparable only yesterday] (fl 14) – before they argued over a stolen watch. Thus, the litany “Carlos, Polly, Carlos, Lazaro, dans la lumière, la foudre” defines the tenuous line that Carlos walks between sympathy and fury, connectedness and rupture.49 The juxtapositions of hope and despair that characterize Blais’s world place her characters on a precarious threshold between an uneasy present and an uncertain future. The first two volumes of the Soifs trilogy dig into that present and nudge at that future but ultimately rest

152

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

perched on the threshold. We noted earlier that Soifs concludes with Caroline and Mère both looking forward (perhaps blindly?) to a promising tomorrow (Caroline would lunch with Jean-Mathieu “sur la terrasse ensoleillée, l’air serait doux” [on the sunny terrace, the air would be mild] and Mère would see the white heron and hear the voices of Samuel and Vénus singing ô que ma joie demeure [S 314]). Dans la foudre et la lumière also ends with two characters imagining the future.50 The anticipatory reflections that close the second volume of the trilogy, however, represent distinct visions of the future which reinscribe the tensions between despair and hope that are the substance of the novel. Renata cannot help but see damage ahead: “la blessure, le coup, [viendrait] de ce qu’elle verrait demain, dans quelques années, Nathanaël, menottes aux poings allant vers la peine capitale … Nathanaël qui aurait pu être le fils de Renata, de son amour irréconciliable de la vie” [the wound, the blow (would come) from what she would witness tomorrow or in a few years’ time, Nathanaël handcuffed and going to the death chamber … Nathanaël, who might have been Renata’s son, born of her irreconcilable love of life] – (fl 250–1, translation modified). Suzanne, on the other hand, holds to her “théorie de l’espoir” [theory of hope] (fl 229) and her belief that life is stronger than death: “Suzanne s’anima joyeusement car il lui semblait enfin être de retour parmi les vivants où l’âme de Jean-Mathieu ne tarderait pas à revenir” [Suzanne joyously sprang to life for she felt as if she’d finally come back to the land of the living, where Jean-Mathieu’s soul would soon return] (fl 251, translation modified). And so the second volume of Blais’s trilogy leaves us once again on that familiar, precarious threshold wondering whether tomorrow will bring la foudre or la lumière, moments of violence or moments of grace, planetary destruction or another chance for survival.

“ c r i s d e c h o e u r ” : 51 augustino et le choeur de la destruction In the four years between the publication of Dans la foudre et la lumière in spring 2001 and the release of Augustino et le choeur de la destruction in February 2005, four years have also passed in the world of the Soifs trilogy. As is typical of Blais’s ever-expanding and recurring narrative trajectory, both change and continuity are inscribed in Augustino’s opening passage. The introduction in the first sentence of a new

Precarious Thresholds

153

character, the forty-year-old transvestite called Petites Cendres, takes place in a familiar setting – “les maisons peintes en rose, éclairées par le soleil, de la rue Esmeralda, de la rue Bahama” [the pink-painted houses, lit up by the sun, of rue Esmeralda, rue Bahama] (acd 13)52 – a setting into which wanders a stray dog sniffing about for traces of the master who abandoned him. Without any explicit identification of this dog, the scene immediately evokes and picks up the ongoing story of Carlos and Polly which has threaded its way through the two earlier volumes. The abandoned dog signals Carlos’s continued absence, recalling the passage in the second volume when Carlos was arrested for shooting Lazaro and Polly wandered off alone (fl 38). The opening pages of Augustino further highlight a number of thematic elements familiar in the world of Soifs: Petites Cendres’s feeling of suffocation, the “violence lourde” [weighty violence] of the man who assaults her, the “navrant état de manque” [distressing state of lack] that drills into her chest (acd 13–15). Then, in the first narrative transition to another character, comes a line that explicitly connects this volume to the preceding one: “et dans la foudre et la lumière larguant sa barque de pêcheur le long du quai, Lazaro pensait qu’il valait mieux travailler en mer que d’étudier et vivre chez sa mère, Caridad” [and in the thunder and light, casting off his fishing boat alongside the dock, Lazaro was thinking that working at sea was better than studying and living with his mother, Caridad] (acd 15). We saw that the association of “foudre” and “lumière” in the second volume of the trilogy occurred in connection with the story of Lazaro, Carlos, and Polly, figuring the connections and tensions among them but with a particular emphasis on Carlos’s split between violence and gentleness. Now in the final volume, light and thunder describe a similar split in Lazaro. Rejecting his charitable mother’s vision of the world and her call for forgiveness and compassion, he readies himself for vengeance and martyrdom, imagining taking part in a campaign of violence that would spread “une terreur sacré, religieuse” [holy, religious terror] (acd 17). Yet even as he contemplates this future and, “son corps frissonnant de rage” [his body trembling with rage], imagines avenging himself against Carlos, he hears the sound of a pelican struggling with a damaged wing and rushes to seek help for the wounded bird. When the pelican flies off suddenly and disappears into the distance, Lazaro has a feeling of anguish, reflecting that this world of birds may be

154

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

le dernier monde de Lazaro qui était encore capable de le séduire par sa vitalité, sa diversité, son courage devant l’incertitude de l’océan, un monde qui n’était pas encore porteur d’une lumière funeste et noire comme cette mission à laquelle ne cessait de penser Lazaro (acd 19) [the last of Lazaro’s worlds still capable of seducing him with its vitality, its diversity, its courage in the face of the uncertainty of the ocean, a world that did not yet carry a dark and sinister light like that mission that Lazaro was constantly thinking about].

The contrast between a dark and menacing world and a vision of natural beauty and vitality also clearly recalls the portrait of the young Augustino in the second volume of the trilogy. In his world at once dark and “luminous” (fl 143), Augustino had spent half his time playing computer games of planetary destruction and the other half trying to figure out how “to save animals and all living beings” (fl 141). The reference to thunder and light evokes all three young men (Carlos, Augustino, and Lazaro), who are pulled between a world of violence and a world of tenderness and humanity. The ways in which Lazaro’s character and story at the beginning of the third volume of Blais’s trilogy repeat and resonate with other characters and earlier stories illustrate what might be called the “fractal” nature of Blais’s world. Originally presented as a mathematical concept, fractals describe rough and irregular shapes that can be divided into parts that are similar in detail to the original object. The emphasis is both on repeating patterns and on infinite detail regardless of scale. To refer to fractals in the context of literary analysis may be presumptuous and is undoubtedly inaccurate in strictly scientific terms. Nevertheless, the basic concept seems to offer an apt analogy for Blais’s narrative technique.53 Her fractal world is an attempt to hold chaos and order (at least in the sense of pattern and familiarity) in balance. The dynamically repeating patterns (individual characters’ overlapping stories of thirst, breath, tensions between planetary destruction and human tenderness) give shape and meaning to the vast and seemingly chaotic picture on Blais’s monumental canvas. Yet even as the third volume of Blais’s trilogy returns the reader to a familiar world, there has been in the interim between the second and third volumes, a critical event that left its inevitable mark on the story and on the telling. In both real time and novel time, what happened between Dans la foudre et la lumière and Augustino et le choeur de la destruction was September 11, 2001. The world of Blais’s Soifs was already

Precarious Thresholds

155

apocalyptic before September 11; the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. catalysed that ongoing apocalypse in an instant. The terrifying event immediately invaded people’s collective consciousness of the world in which they were living and took up permanent residence there. And that altered consciousness, perhaps even more than the event itself, marked the extent and significance of the catastrophe. Although the tragedy of September 11, 2001 is not explicitly named in Blais’s novel, the ongoing story clearly plays out in the shadow of those missing towers54 and the graphic and detailed descriptions in the novel of a cataclysmic event that took place in Manhattan unquestionably recall the events of September 11. Samuel, “à qui la violence du monde venait d’être dévoilée” [to whom the world’s violence had just been revealed] (acd 89), reflects on the calm and ordinary morning before everything changed: employés de bureau, fonctionnaires, obscures secrétaires ordonnant sans panique l’ordre des choses, evanescent ce monde disparu … après le café du matin, hommes et femmes assemblés devant la lecture des premiers courriels de la journée, avant que le cataclysme ne les disperse tous par tourbillons, dans les escaliers, contre les barres des fenêtres d’où chacun vit qu’ils étaient encore vivants, tapis les uns contre les autres, échangeant peut-être un dernier mot de consolation (acd 131) [office workers, civil servants, obscure secretaries arranging the order of things without panic, this vanished world evanescent … after the morning coffee, men and women assembled to read their first emails of the day, before the cataclysm scattered them all in a whirlwind, in the stairways, against the bars of the windows from which each saw that they were still alive, crouched against one another, perhaps exchanging a last word of consolation].

Having witnessed the cataclysm, Samuel now imagines airplanes landing and taking off from his kitchen table and he has visions of bodies falling outside his apartment window: “il voyait … recommencer sans fin cet acte de leur chute” [he kept seeing … endlessly beginning again and again that act of their falling] (acd 131). Recalling the dire predictions of the Vierge aux sacs, Samuel now regrets having mocked her. He wonders where she might be: “sous quels décombres, à quel niveau si inférieur à toute citadelle, tour, forteresse dont les poutres d’acier en moins d’une heure avaient fondu” [under what rubble, at what level far below any citadel, tower, fortress whose steel girders had collapsed in less than an hour] (acd 130).

156

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

References to cataclysm, rubble, endless falling and a “monde disparu” indicate that what has happened between volume two and volume three may be, in fact, the end of the world. If so, Augustino is about surviving the world’s end, but this is not a triumphant survival. One lives on with that ending forever in one’s midst. Certainly, Samuel’s obsessive reliving of the events shows that the traumatic ending is never over. Witnessing is forced upon him: Samuel dormait-il ou était-il d’une conscience agitée dans son sommeil, de sa fenêtre il voyait s’éclairer d’une lumière automnale le mur d’en face, recommencer sans fin cet acte de leur chute (acd 131) [Whether he was sound asleep or in a state of troubled awareness in his slumber, Samuel kept seeing out his window how the opposite wall was lit up by an autumnal light, as he watched endlessly beginning again and again the act of their falling].

Yet Samuel is also engaged in bearing active witness through art. Arnie Graal’s choreographed spectacle requires an audience to remain standing throughout an entire night witnessing “le bruit d’une fanfare funeste, celle des incendies, la lenteur excessive des danseurs, surgis tels des revenants des murs de béton, de l’asphalte brûlé” [the noise of a baleful fanfare, the fanfare of the fires, the excessive slowness of the dancers, exploding suddenly like ghosts from the concrete walls and the burning asphalt] (acd 63). As one of the key dancers, Samuel goes over and over the remembered event in his mind in order to be able to reproduce it; his physical embodiment of the falling body is a vital aspect of his act of witnessing. But Graal’s dance emphasizes both what is seen and what is heard. Indeed, in Samuel’s memory of the event, witnessing means both watching and listening in order to be able to represent and narrate not only bodies but voices. As Samuel imagines the falling bodies, he also bears witness to their cries: quand il n’y avait que le vide pour les recueillir, un bras, une jambe, une tête surgissait avec le drapeau blanc, le flambeau de ses couleurs, viens à notre secours, criaient-ils tous de leurs voix aussi modérées que celles d’un chœur (acd 132) [when there was only the void to catch them, an arm, a leg, a head springing forth with the white flag, the torch of its colors, come help us, they all cried, their voices as restrained as those of a chorus].

Precarious Thresholds

157

The victims call out to the witnesses for help and these “cris du choeur” [cries of the chorus] demand to survive the disaster. That a chorus of voices should be audible behind Arnie Graal’s choreography is not surprising.55 The “choral dance” from which the term “choreography” derives was performed in classical Greek drama by the Chorus, who also spoke or sang as part of the performance.56 In addition, this chorus associated with the voices of the dying echoes an earlier description in the novel of a chorus of voices in the concentration camp of Terezin: un choeur d’hommes, de femmes émaciés chantaient pour des bourreaux … le requiem de leur propre ensevelissement, une musique dans laquelle ils seraient inhumés, ensevelis vivants, les femmes, les hommes de ce choeur avec leurs voix, ces voix soudain suspendues, coupées, tranchées (acd 33–4) [a chorus of emaciated men and women were singing for the torturers … the requiem of their own burial, a music in which they would be interred, buried alive, the women, the men of this chorus with their voices, these voices suddenly suspended, cut off, severed].

The amputed voices arising in the midst of these two scenes of destruction and annihilation clearly resonate with the “choeur de la destruction” of Blais’s title. But even before it is named in the title of the third volume, the “chorus” sums up the project of the Soifs trilogy in somewhat broader terms. Through all three novels are woven the voices of the many individuals who together people the island that serves in this trilogy as a microcosm of the contemporary world. The intertwining and intermingling of characters’ thoughts, stories, and experiences produce a fluid narration that becomes the voice of that humanity as a whole. In this woven tissue, as we have seen, are gathered references to the hard realities of the contemporary world (wars, terrorism, genocide, social inequalities, racism, disease, environmental poisoning, struggles for human rights); to the legacies of Western civilization and culture (art, music, philosophy, science, literature); and to personal preoccupations (solitude and community, family relations, aging, mortality). Furthermore, this polyphonic narration explores the dimensions of human consciousness (memories, visions, dreams, doubts, hopes). The word “chorus” is an apt designation for the orchestral effect of this ensemble of voices, and also for its social dimension and its testimonial function.

158

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

Blais’s polyphonic narration creates a collective voice that may at times, like the Chorus in Greek tragedy, not only tell, but analyse, judge, and warn. Of course, unlike the Chorus in Greek drama, the voices raised together in Blais’s novels are not necessarily harmonious, may not speak in unison, may not even be comprehensible. Indeed, in Augustino et le choeur de la destruction, the “chorus,” when referred to by name, plays a number of distinct and sometimes apparently contradictory roles. It can represent cacophony, the inarticulate cries of the crowd; or it may suggest clarity and a conscious act of witnessing. The voices of the throng calling for vengeance while watching public executions in Teheran are described as shouting “en choeur” [in unison] (acd 30); the “cacophonic language” of young people is perceived by Mère as forming “un choeur à peu près incompréhensible” [an almost incomprehensible chorus] (acd 197); “[le] choeur redoubtable et inéluctable” [the formidable and ineluctable chorus] of Britten’s War Requiem and the chorus of that other requiem, by Verdi or Mozart, sung in the concentration camp are voices of mourning (acd 36, 33); the chorus that Caroline remembers hearing in a somber, ruined Europe singing from Così fan tutti “des notes de joie dans cette nuit glaciale” [notes of joy in that glacial night] gives voice to hope and jubilation (acd 61). In Augustino, the eponymous “choeur” is both the inchoate babble of the crowd and the transcendent harmony of the choir. It is important to note, however, that the title of the third volume of the trilogy names not only the chorus but an individual as well. After the more general and largely symbolic and thematic titles of the first two volumes, the title of the third is striking for its specificity. Only in this volume does Blais emphasize one character above all the others in any sustained way.57 Why is this particular character so privileged, and what is the connection between him and the idea of the chorus? 58 In Soifs, Augustino at the age of four had asked “si c’était aujourd’hui qu’ils allaient tous mourir” [if today was the day they were all going to die] (s 75). At the age of twelve, in Dans la foudre et la lumière, he was the boy who sent his father in Spain disturbing emails that “troubled the father’s conscience” (fl 59) because of the son’s seemingly casual attitude to the dangers and violence of the world. But that same Augustino was also a young man who showed a special concern for the welfare of all living creatures. Already in the first two volumes, Augustino was in a sense a witness to his time, but not until in the third volume does he enter into full possession of this role. He is now sixteen and, much to his father’s dismay, has become a writer.

Precarious Thresholds

159

For the duration of his grandmother’s birthday celebration, the event that delimits the action of the novel, Augustino will remain sequestered in his room writing. This solitary writer, who is a member of a community and yet stands apart from the group, is a very familiar figure in Blais’s work. Augustino is an avatar, for example, of Johnie in L’Ange de la solitude and of his father, Daniel, in Dans la foudre et la lumière. Daniel, balancing doubt and hope as he hesitated between retreat and engagement, played a pivotal role in the second volume of the trilogy. The changing focus from father to son in the final volume reflects Blais’s concern with how legacies pass from one generation to the next. Survival depends on the possibility of future generations (both procreative and creative). Augustino’s privileged position in the final novel of the Soifs trilogy bears witness to Blais’s belief in young people’s uniquely penetrating and generative vision. The emphasis on an individual character who is a writer also adds a decidedly self-reflexive aspect to the work. Indeed, one may read Augustino as a figure for the author herself who, like a kind of coryphaeus, bears witness to the significance of events, channeling into her narration all the stories and all the voices that clamour around her to be heard. Of course, neither Blais nor Augustino occupies centre stage in the Soifs trilogy with the kind of narrative authority traditionally associated with the leader of the chorus; rather, they open up the space for a chorus of voices to speak. In fact, the polyphonic text itself becomes the “choeur” of the story. The passage that gives the novel its title clearly substantiates this reading: “Augustino qui se levait très tôt pour écrire … lisait à l’écran de l’ordinateur … ces mots qu’il avait écrits, un choeur invisible de la destruction” [Augustino who got up very early to write … was reading on his computer screen … those words that he had written, an invisible chorus of destruction] (acd 105, emphasis added). The focus on both Augustino and the “invisible chorus of destruction” that is, paradoxically, his creation encourages a retrospective view of the trilogy through the lens of this relationship. Not only does the juxtaposition highlight the complex interplay between solitude and community (a salient topic for Blais) but it also raises once again the question of the function and power of art (and more precisely of writing) in a world on the brink of destruction. As Blais approaches the end of her opus, she draws attention to the writer figure. While the multiple and diverse scenarios of which the novel is composed are playing out in the world beyond his door, what is Augustino doing, shut away in his room? What does his writing

160

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

mean? What might it accomplish? Blais’s Augustino questions the relationship between the writer and the clamouring voices of the world – and the relationship between the writer and the clamouring voices of the words he is putting on the page. The spotlight on Augustino furthermore asks us to consider the apparent contradiction between the bleak vision of the world conveyed in this young man’s writings and the hint of hope for that world associated with his very act of bearing witness in writing. We have seen before in Blais’s work this theme of the writer whose act of writing in some small way may belie the hopelessness of what he or she writes. Augustino eloquently illustrates how writing may actually transform the raw material of which it is made, alchemically extracting small glimmers from the gloom. The artist’s voice may carry the roars and mutters of the crowd, the moans of despair, and the inarticulate “cris de choeur,” but somehow, in that choral voicing, one can also discern beauty, hope, and possibility. It is furthermore telling that although Augustino is established as a solitary figure in the novel, he is also depicted in relationship. The relations between Augustino and his father, Daniel, played an important role in Dans la foudre et la lumière. Now, Augustino is represented primarily in relationship to his grandmother, Esther, who occupies a privileged place in this final novel, which is structured around the occasion of her birthday. Cross-generational encounters are hardly unprecedented in Blais’s work but the pairing of these characters occupies an important place in the trilogy and might be seen as putting into dialogue two figures for the author herself. In this relationship, the sharpening of perspective that comes with age meets the piercing vision that is the gift of youth. The connection between grandmother and grandson shows each generation questioning while perhaps also seeking some wisdom or insight from the other. At the same time, some of the obstacles to this intergenerational exchange are revealed. In Dans la foudre et la lumière, twelve-year-old Augustino walked in the garden with his grandmother, naming for her all the trees and flowers that she had planted long ago but whose names she had forgotten. But when she asked him to explain to her the phenomenon of her forgetfulness (“peux-tu me l’expliquer, toi, Augustino, toi qui sais déjà tant de choses” [can you explain it to me, Augustino, you who already know so many things] [fl 97]) – he ran off. So he was no longer there to hear her words of advice: “tu sais qu’il ne faut jamais rien oublier” [you know that one

Precarious Thresholds

161

mustn’t ever forget anything] (fl 97). In this early scene, Augustino is clearly the bearer of his grandmother’s memory and she furthermore looks to him for a certain wisdom and understanding, even as she herself has wisdom to impart, though he is perhaps not ready to receive it. But at the beginning of Augustino, the grandmother’s communication with the boy has become strained. She asks him to close his computer because “tu ne sembles pas comprendre, Augustino, qu’une vieille dame ne peut pas tout voir, qu’il y a des choses que je ne puis plus voir” [you don’t seem to understand, Augustino, that an old woman cannot see everything, there are things that I can no longer look at] (acd 24). Augustino reflects that for first time they are not understanding one another; in the past his grandmother had always welcomed his interruptions but now she continually asks him to leave her alone. She no longer wants him to explain things and refuses to answer his questions. He remembers that she used to say: “dans quelques années, tu seras peut-être savant ou philosophe et moi, ta grand-mère, je lirai avec fierté tes pensées dans un livre” [in a few years maybe you will be a scholar or a philosopher and I, your grandmother, will proudly read your thoughts in a book] (acd 24). Now, when he asks her how many more years she thinks the world will go on, she responds: “pour l’instant tu n’as que seize ans … comme si elle lui en voulait d’être si jeune” [for the moment you are just sixteen … as if she held his youth against him] (acd 24). He senses her doubts about the future: “ma grand-mère doute même de l’existence de ces années, elle qui a pris tout son temps pour être vieille un jour, quand moi j’ai peut-être peu de temps pour devenir jeune” [my grandmother doubts even the very existence of those years, she who took all the time in the world to become old one day, while I have perhaps very little time to become young] (acd 25). In this final volume Augustino is preoccupied with the future, whereas Esther’s gaze is retrospective. She is preoccupied with estimating the value of a life that is nearing its end. From the beginning of the novel to the end, her reflections on what constitutes “une vie réussie” [a successful life] run parallel with Augustino’s writing of witness. The juxtaposition and ultimate intersection of these two characters’ perspectives tell a story of generation(s) that is both personal and universal. But before considering where Augustino finally leads, we need to notice another shadow figure whose story runs in parallel with that of Augustino through the trilogy. The first appearance of Celui qui ne dort jamais [He who never sleeps] in Soifs establishes his close but

162

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

antithetical relationship with Augustino. Having discovered the bird cages in the garden empty and the yard strewn with coloured feathers, Marie-Sylvie de la Toussaint, the children’s Haitian governess, holds Augustino’s dying parakeet and knows that the carnage is the work of her crazy brother, who has been lurking around the premises. This brother had been nicknamed “Celui qui ne dort jamais” because of his work as a lookout back in Haiti. Charged with guarding the town night and day, he had, however, witnessed an outbreak of violence and brutality that turned him from a “veilleur de nuit” (night watchman) to “[le] Veilleur des morts” [the Watcher of the dead] (s 183) and left permanent scars upon his psyche. Marie-Sylvie recalls their rescue by a priest, who helped them escape the island by boat under a hail of machine-gun fire while their family and scores of others were being murdered in the village. Was it the hunger and thirst on the long boat journey, she wonders, that “avait ulcéré l’esprit de son frère” [had sickened her brother’s mind] (s 184)? Celui qui ne dort jamais haunts the margins of the world of Soifs, sacrificing animals in macabre rituals carried out in cemeteries and interrupting the night with the sound of his metal-bladed stick clanging against iron fences. The man who never sleeps now bears witness to the remembered horrors that keep him awake and that he in turn seems doomed to perpetuate, “car lourde de sang était l’ombre de Celuiqui-ne-dort-jamais” [for the shadow of Celui-qui-ne-dort-jamais was heavy with blood] (s 183).59 Holding Augustino’s dying parakeet, Marie-Sylvie anticipates comforting Augustino, whose pet has been killed, as she also remembers comforting the little brother who had fled their homeland with her. Indeed, she might be cradling them all – dying bird, heart-broken Augustino, traumatized little brother – in her hands at the same time as she envisions the possibility of healing the damage: Marie-Sylvie, écoutant les battements du coeur d’Augustino, n’était-il pas aussi petit dans les bras de Sylvie, entre ses mains, que la perruche, le lapin d’Augustin, son petit frère, sous les rafales des mitraillettes, ce coeur avait-il cessé de battre, Marie-Sylvie n’osait ouvrir sa main de peur d’y voir ruisseler le sang, mais vivant, Augustin était vivant, c’est ainsi que le prendraient dans leurs bras les gardes côtiers, lorsqu’ils échoueraient sur leur rivage, ô paradis de miel et de lait, Augustin est souriant et plein de vie, sa soeur le tiendrait sur sa poitrine … Augustin aurait miraculeusement survécu … car tout serait réparé, pensait Sylvie (s 185–6)

Precarious Thresholds

163

[Marie-Sylvie, listening to the beating of Augustino’s heart, wasn’t he as small in Sylvie’s arms, in her hands, as the parakeet, the rabbit of Augustin, her little brother, under the bursts of machine-gun fire, had this heart stopped beating, Marie-Sylvie dared not open her hand for fear of seeing the blood flowing there, but living, Augustin was living, thus it was that the coast guard would take him in their arms, when [their raft] washed up on the shore, oh paradise of milk and honey, Augustin is smiling and full of life, his sister would hold him to her breast … Augustin would have miraculously survived … for everything would be mended, thought Sylvie].

In this and subsequent references to Marie-Sylvie’s brother “Augustin,” it is not entirely clear whether Augustin is another younger brother killed during the escape or whether this is in fact the given name of Celui qui ne dort jamais. In either case, the Augustin whom Marie-Sylvie imagines miraculously healed stands in sharp contrast with the demented brother who now lurks menacingly in the shadows. The Augustin who did not survive the escape from Haiti is survived by a wandering, sleepless, vengeful ghost. That the lost brother, the figure behind the haunting presence of Celui qui ne dort jamais, is named Augustin makes explicit his function as a shadow figure for Augustino. How much – and yet how little – separates the privileged son of Mélanie and Daniel from his homeless, impoverished, tortured, violent double. In the last volume of the trilogy, Augustino directly acknowledges several vital aspects of the connection between his story and that of Marie-Sylvie and her brother. He admits that he feels slighted by the governess, who seems always to prefer the younger children and who “avait trop couvé la démence [de son frère Celui qui ne dort jamais]” [had been overly protective of (her brother’s) madness] (acd 107). But he further reflects: “la gouvernante me traite injustement, elle a ses raisons, j’écrirai son histoire” [the governess treats me unfairly, she has her reasons, I will write her story] (acd 107). Then, as he imagines the bright future awaiting him (“les études supérieures, l’apanage de la connaissance, la victoire universitaire, à chacun sa voiture de l’année” [higher education, the privilege of knowledge, academic victory, each with his own latest model car] [acd 107–8], he articulates his awareness of the existence of that shadow Other: comment estimer la valeur d’une telle vie quand Augustino pensait à l’existence misérable, jadis, de Marie-Sylvie de la Toussaint, comme son frère

164

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

forcené Celui qui ne dort jamais, serait-il demain, lui, Augustino, avec son intelligence, son savoir, le premier de cette classe d’élite des deux mille étudiants du XXIe siècle, cela aurait-il un sens, si ce siècle était destiné à une fin escarpée, décidée par la projection de ces missiles que tous refusaient de voir? (acd 108) [how to estimate the value of such a life when Augustino thought about the miserable existence, in times past, of Marie-Sylvie de la Toussaint, and of her deranged brother Celui qui ne dort jamais, if he, Augustino, were tomorrow to be, with his intelligence and his learning, the first in that elite class of two thousand students of the twenty-first century, would this have any meaning, if this century were destined for an abrupt end, determined by the launching of those missiles that everyone refused to see?]

As this passage indicates, both the very real (and generally ignored) possibility of imminent planetary destruction and the very real (but generally ignored) suffering of those less fortunate may call into question “le sens,” the meaning and direction of an individual’s life. How can one imagine a successful life in the face of such undeniable failures? Like the two previous volumes, however, Augustino ends with an evocation of moments of joy and beauty holding their own in the face of disaster. Mère describes to her friend Nora how in the first pages of his book Augustino had written, “nous pourrions bien nous lever, un jour, et ne plus rien reconnaître autour de nous … nous pourrions bien découvrir que nous n’avons rien” [we might get up one day and no longer recognize anything around us … we might well discover that we have nothing] (acd 298). But even as she is describing Augustino’s bleak vision, Mère suddenly falls silent because “le ciel était chaud et rayonnant, il lui semblait si doux de vivre” [the sky was warm and radiant, it seemed to her so sweet to be alive] (acd 299). It is a sublime summer day and in that moment Mère comes up with a possible resolution to the philosophical question of “une vie réussie” that has been dogging her: “c’est une vie où l’on doute … une aventure devant soi dont on ne sait rien, ou est-ce une existence dans l’incertitude et l’espoir du bonheur, ou tout cela à la fois” [it’s a life where one doubts … with an adventure ahead that one knows nothing about, or is it an existence in uncertainty and the hope of happiness, or all that at once] (acd 299). The coexistence of uncertainty and the hope of happiness defines the ending. Indeed, even as Augustino’s dark vision casts its shadow

Precarious Thresholds

165

across the final pages, Blais brings forward the youngest children. Mai and Lou are both already damaged, but the closing scenes suggest some respite, some comfort, perhaps “the hope of happiness.” Mai, who had been missing, is now back, laughing and cheerful, dancing around her friend Emilio and calling out “regarde comme il est beau, maman” [look how beautiful he is, Mama] (acd 300). Her mother, Mélanie, unaware that the girl has been sexually molested, feels her anxieties allayed. Similarly, Lou, child of an acrimonious divorce, finally stops crying for her mother and lets her father comfort her: “son père qui ne cessait de lui répéter, regarde bien, tout est si beau, tout est si beau” [her father who kept repeating to her, look, everything is so beautiful, everything is so beautiful] (acd 302). Of course, a close reading of these two scenes reveals the fragility of the children’s happiness. The insistence on looking and recognizing that things are beautiful might seem to protest too much. The children’s futures are unquestionably uncertain despite the strength of their parents’ desire for them to have “the hope of happiness.” As it ends, Augustino continues to maintain that delicate balance between hope and anxiety that defines Blais’s world. Furthermore, this novel’s ending, like those of the previous two volumes, is inscribed under the sign of a conditional of anticipation, and the two anticipated events are particularly telling. Mélanie looks forward to seeing Renata that evening, and Deandra and Tiffany prepare to visit their brother Carlos in jail on Sunday.60 The return of Renata may suggest rebirth, but it also focuses the ending on the pressing and unresolved issues of justice and mercy to which she has borne witness since the opening passages of the first novel in the series.61 Likewise, with the focus on Deandra and Tiffany, the conclusion of the trilogy picks up the story of Carlos that has threaded through the narrative since the very start. In the closing scene, the two girls are taking a photo of the dogs, Polly and Oreilles Coupées, so that they may bring it to their brother when they visit him in jail on Sunday. This final moment in the narrated story of Carlos and Polly is thus both heartbreaking and comforting. Bringing formal closure to the Soifs trilogy, the returns of both Renata and Carlos are inconclusive, unfinished. The inscription of these stories of continuity and evolution (especially in light of the anticipation, however modest, of a future beyond the ending) forestalls, at least for a while, any final and catastrophic climax.

166

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

In the end, the voice of the chorus of destruction (du choeur de la destruction) – that is, the words of the story, the story itself – is revealed to be also the voice at the heart of the destruction (au coeur de la destruction), a voice that continues to bear witness – even though the end of the world may be imminent – to “an existence in uncertainty and the hope of happiness.”

4

Thinking the Future Nous ne savons pas comment arrêter de penser futur. [We don’t know how to stop thinking future.] Nicole Brossard1

p o i n t d e d é pa r t La mort venait de partout. (ba 25) [Death was coming from every side.]

Many have suggested it: death is the one thing that we cannot know and that we cannot but know. It cannot be comprehended, described, or figured; it cannot be written, and yet all writing contains it.2 It is, as Blanchot put it, “impossible necessary death.”3 Blanchot elaborates: To write is no longer to situate death in the future – the death which is always already past; to write is to accept that one has to die without making death present and without making oneself present to it. To write is to know that death has taken place even though it has not been experienced, and to recognize it in the forgetfulness that it leaves – in the traces which, effacing themselves, call upon one to exclude oneself from the cosmic order and to abide where the disaster makes the real impossible and desire undesirable.4

Death is the paradox: point de départ, point d’arrivée.5 Derrida, with his concept of the trace in/of/as writing, has perhaps most provocatively and exhaustively articulated a relationship between death and

168

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

writing. As he put it in one of his earliest essays: “What I call writing, mark, trace, and so on … neither lives nor dies; it lives on.”6 Tourner la page tourner la mort d’un coup d’épaule et de mémoire7 [Turn the page turn death/ with a shove of the shoulder and of memory]

These lines from Nicole Brossard’s 1997 volume of poetry, Vertige de l’avant-scène, describe a fundamental and dynamic connection between death and memory. All memory is in the face of – and in the place of – death, since for a thing to be remembered it must first have ceased to be, in the present. And so it is memory, in the present, that keeps shoving death aside, turning the page in order for the story to go on. We proposed in chapter 2 that writing is always an operation of memory, the words on the page traces of and testimonials to what has been lost – what must now, in writing, be re-collected and represented. It is important to stress again, however, that this “writingthat-is-memory” is not merely an epitaph, a grave marker (and I would hasten to add here that not even an epitaph is ever merely an epitaph); in the fact of survival, of having crossed over the threshold of death in order to speak, to tell, the writing-that-is-memory ventures into the future just as boldly as it does into the past. The relic, the souvenir, when made to speak, is also the witness, and as such it is singularly consequential. In Stratégies du vertige, Louise Dupré describes the role of death in Brossard’s poetry as follows: Cette“mort enivrante” … telle qu’on la rencontre chez Brossard, n’est pas cette préoccupation pour le mortel en soi qu’on perçoit … chez plusieurs poètes masculins de la modernité … Car pour [Brossard], la mort est transcendée: elle n’interrompt pas la vie, elle la poursuit plutôt, la recommence à un autre niveau de perfection, elle exprime la victoire du continu sur le discontinu.8 [This “intoxicating death” such as one finds in Brossard’s writing, is not that preoccupation with the mortal in itself that one perceives in the works of certain male poets of modernity … Because for Brossard, death is transcended; it doesn’t interrupt life, rather it follows it, begins it again on another level of perfection. It expresses the victory of the continuous over the discontinuous.]

Thinking the Future

169

This is still, I believe, an accurate account of Brossard’s way of thinking about death, but I would also contend that in recent years, and especially in her novels Le Désert mauve and Baroque d’aube (perhaps in part as a function of their narrativity), death has taken on a political and personal reality for Brossard that has made it much less readily transcendable, though no less dynamic. Brossard’s most recent novels are suffused with an awareness of the fragility and vulnerability of all existence in a violent fin-de-siècle world. Turning the page on death is not so easy. At one point in Baroque d’aube, the writer Cybil Noland and her friend Jasmine talk about “la mort qui commence à partager la réalité en deux” [death and the way it’s beginning to divide reality in two] and literature “qui hésite à faire face avec son oeil bouleversé” [that shrinks from facing up with its tormented eye] (ba 67). The death that is now beginning to divide reality in two – at a certain stage in an individual’s life or at a particular time in the evolution of a civilization – demands an immediate and direct confrontation. This confrontation is the motivating force in Le Désert mauve, with Angela Parkins’s murder being thematically, formally, and theoretically the point of both rupture and suture. The same holds true, in a less punctual way, for Baroque d’aube, whose opening scene is set in the heart of a North American city “armée jusqu’aux dents” [armed to the teeth] (ba 13). Death is clearly already present and, as in Le Désert mauve, it is associated with the violence of late twentieth-century Western civilization. The opening scene in Baroque d’aube is, however, a scene of lovemaking, and the intimacy between Cybil Noland and the young woman she calls La Sixtine is “capable d’arrêter les bruits de la civilisation et de créer un temps fictif propice à l’apparition du visage essential de chacune” [capable of shutting out the sounds of civilization and creating a fictional time favourable to the appearance of each one’s essential face] (ba 19). As the women make love, the space within room 43 of the Hôtel Rafale is for a time vaster than the city that contains it. With the young woman’s orgasm, her body “avait fait le tour de la planète comme si le plaisir en elle était devenu un énorme réflexe de vie aérienne” [orbited the planet as if the pleasure in her had transformed to a stupendous aerial life reflex] (ba 13, my emphasis). Afterwards, “l’inconnue repose terriblement vivante” [the stranger at rest is terribly alive] (ba 14, my emphasis).9 The intimate physical connection between the two women is life-producing. It is as if, to borrow another line from Vertige de

170

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

l’avant-scène: “le savoir intime fend d’un jaune rare l’idée de la mort” [intimate knowledge cleaves with a rare yellow the idea of death].10 Yet this transcendence of time and space and death is only temporary. When La Sixtine switches on the radio a little later, “une voix grave” [a somber voice] spreads the odour of war and its “saletés” [filth] through the room (ba 22): La mort venait de partout, étalait du nord au sud, rayait la planète d’ouest en est, avançait vers les vivants avec un air de patriarche rassurant, puis d’un seul coup disséminait dans la chambre sa logique et d’autres instruments de mort en forme de phallange et de phallus. (ba 25) [Death was coming from every side, spreading from north to south, erasing the planet from west to east, advancing on the living with a reassuring patriarchal air, then at a single stroke disseminating in the room its logic and other deathly instruments in phalanx and phallus form.] (translation modified)

This description strikingly recalls a passage in Brossard’s 1980 text “Les Traces du manifeste”: nous appelons mémoire une forme précise de souvenir qui nous rappelle la mort le feu et la torture traversant les corps femelles la mort le feu et la torture comme trois cavaliers déchaînés chargés de répandre sur nous l’odeur de la peste patriarcale.11 [We call memory a precise form of recollection which reminds us of death fire and torture traversing female bodies death fire and torture like three horsemen let loose charged with diffusing over us the odour of the patriarchal plague.]

For Brossard, it is in women’s memory that the death, fire, and torture that have for so long traversed women’s bodies are forever inscribed, but it is also by way of memory that women may confront and survive them. Through memory, women come to writing and through writing they may begin to “apprendre à penser l’inimaginable, l’inconcevable” [to learn how to think the unimaginable, the inconceivable].12 The fact that for women writing-that-is-memory is also intimately bound up with the imagination of a different outcome and the necessity of fiction is clear in Brossard’s description of how women come to writing: Des femmes arrivent sur la place publique de la Littérature et du Texte. Elles sont pleines de mémoires: anecdotiques, mythiques, réelles et fictives. Mais

Thinking the Future

171

surtout, elles sont remplies d’une mémoire inédite et globale, une mémoire gyn/écologique qui rendue à sa réalité mise en mots devient comme une théorie fictive.13 [Women are arriving in the public squares of Literature and Text. They are full of memories: anecdotal, mythic, real, and fictional. But above all women are filled with an original all-encompassing memory, a gyn/ecological memory. Rendered in words, its reality brought to the page, it becomes fiction theory.]

In this encounter with a memory from which she has long been excluded, a woman comes up against the necessity of going back in time. The return, as Brossard sees it, is both paradoxical and necessary. Her description of the process in “Mémoire: hologramme du désir,” might also be a description of the project of Baroque d’aube: Je suis bien tentée de dire que la mémoire des femmes est comme un compte à rebours dans l’histoire de l’humanité. Oui, je crois qu’il y a dans la mémoire des femmes un déconte, c’est-à-dire une narration qui va dans le sens contraire à l’usage … Quelque chose est conté qui va vers un degré zéro, point de synthèse qui agit par la suite comme un signal de départ, d’envol, de dépassement. Somme toute, le déconte est un décompte, un build up de tension et d’excitation qui débouche sur la création. C’est en contant à l’envers son histoire, que celle qui écrit défait une à une les couches successives de mensonges … Plus nous décontons, plus notre histoire fait sens, plus nous décomptons, plus nous nous rapprochons de ce qui compte réellement pour nous. Le déconte alimente notre mémoire virtuelle … [I am very tempted to say that women’s memory is like a countdown in the history of humanity. Yes, I believe that in women’s memory there is an unrecounting, a narration that goes against the grain … Something is told that goes toward point zero, a point of synthesis that comes as a signal of departure, of taking flight, of going beyond. All in all, a countdown is a build up of tension and excitement. This countdown is exciting because for us it opens on creation. In telling her story backwards, she who writes peels away each successive layer of lies … The more we un-recount, the more our history makes sense; the more we count down, the more we draw nearer to what really counts for us. The countdown is at one and the same time our virtual and anticipatory memory.]14

The return to – and through – writing (in order to make our history “make sense” as a point of departure) is a crucial element in Brossard’s novels. In Le Désert mauve, translation figures just such a

172

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

“narration … against the grain.” The middle section, “Un livre à traduire” [A Book to Translate], is, in a sense, Maude Laures’s “unrecounting” of Laure Angstelle’s text, a process aimed at arriving at a “point of synthesis” that may ultimately make it possible to “changer le cours de l’histoire/changer le cours de la mort” [change the course of history and of the story/change the course of death].15 Baroque d’aube, with its elaborately twisted and enfolded temporal and narrative construction, certainly complicates the idea of returning and “making sense” in any literal or linear way.16 Yet, in the struggles that it inscribes against nostalgia (the return to the past as an endless return), Baroque d’aube also seems to suggest that as “we draw nearer to what really counts for us” we may approach “a point of synthesis that comes as a signal of departure, of taking flight, of going beyond.”17

m e m o r y a n d i m ag i nat i o n Tout doit passer par la mémoire et l’imagination. [Everything has to pass through memory and imagination.] (ba 137, translation modified)

One might assume that the most transparent and obvious intersection of memory and writing would occur in the autobiographical genres (the memoir, the confession, the journal intime), in which the author supposedly translates personal memories of lived experience into prose. But perhaps what Jeanette Winterson so provocatively suggests is true: “There’s no such thing as autobiography there’s only art and lies.”18 Without going into a discussion of the well-known pretensions and subversions of autobiographical genres, however, I would nevertheless note that the memory process that Brossard describes as “actualizing” and productive of writing, looks toward a horizon that is associated not with self-representation or historical accuracy, but with fiction. It is also worth noting that, as recent work on both autobiography and the novel has suggested, these two genres are no longer always as distinct and clearly defined as they once may have appeared.19 Much contemporary writing, especially by women, might most productively be considered within the hybrid generic category of “memoir/fiction.” The central place of memory in narrative, and especially in the novel, has been the focus of a great deal of critical work over the past

Thinking the Future

173

decades.20 As Richard Terdiman puts it: “It is the novel … that most organizes itself as a projection of the memory function and its disruptions. Novels are exercises in the process of memory.”21 Such a statement seems to follow naturally from Walter Benjamin’s idea, cited earlier, that death is what gives the storyteller authority. It may come as no surprise, then, that Baroque d’aube (as a “resolutely postmodern” novel22) raises within the genre of “roman” the spectre and question of autobiography. Baroque d’aube is a novel that pushes self-referentiality so far that it effectively fictionalizes itself – calling all of the standard distinctions between “fiction” and “reality” into question. Generally, when the author of a book more or less explicitly inscribes him or herself into that book, we assume this to signal the introduction of an autobiographical element into the work. Many authors have, of course, played quite audaciously with this assumption. What better way to insist upon the authority and authenticity of one’s inventions than to allow the fictional to subvert the autobiographical? To give the invention the power to call into question the priority (and thus the reality) of the inventor? Even within this ludic and subversive tradition, however, Baroque d’aube takes a very novel approach to the autobiographical. For what happens when the author of a novel appears within her novel, not as a first-person narrator, not even as a mere character, but rather as a character, a woman writer, who has been invented, created by one of the other characters in the novel? And what happens then when there is an incomplete or problematic identification between the eponymous author inside and outside the text? When some details suggest a correspondance between the author Nicole Brossard and the character Nicole Brossard, while others explicitly and dramatically undercut any such coincidence? One is then forced to ask: what’s in a name? And the answer is not simple. Further, one has to interrogate one’s own presuppositions about the meaning and direction (le sens) of all narrative. Who is, finally, behind the story? Where does/did the story start? Which parts are to be believed? What is memory here and what is imagination?23 Significantly the first reference to Nicole Brossard within Baroque d’aube occurs in the context of a London conference on autobiography at which Cybil Noland recalls having met the author. As we read Cybil’s account of this meeting, we at first have no reason to doubt that the Nicole Brossard romancière whom she met five years earlier in London is one and the same Nicole Brossard, author of Baroque d’aube.

174

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

When Cybil recalls what Brossard had said to her in the course of their long discussions, we are comfortable with the idea that we are hearing the author herself speaking to the questions of which she is herself, as a fictionalized character, a prime example. For instance, Cybil recalls that Brossard had maintained that “il était absurde de vouloir entrer dans le monde de la fiction en restant soi, même collée à la vérité de ses rêves les plus fous” [it was absurd to expect to remain oneself on entering a fictional world, even wedded to the truth of one’s most outlandish dreams] (ba 56). We can easily imagine Brossard, novelist and theorist, at that conference on autobiography teasing out the complex threads of referentiality and identity in writing. We recognize here Brossard, author of a Journal intime whose subtitle “ou voilà donc un manuscrit” [or here’s a manuscript] and whose concluding lines of poetry (“le poème est la certitude / qui me représente / parure d’éclat vertige / élémentales vouloir encore” [the poem is the certitude / that represents me / costume of brilliance vertigo / elementals still wanting]) reveal it to be in constant tension with itself.24 Indeed, it is perhaps useful, while reading Baroque d’aube, to recall in passing this Journal intime, published almost fifteen years earlier, in which the author plays with autoreferentiality, metatextuality, and temporality to produce a dynamic and heterogeneous text of which Barbara Havercroft writes: Si Brossard se sert de ces écarts temporels pour revoir les contraintes du journal intime, pour explorer les divers rapports entre le langage, le “réel” et la fiction, et poursuivre sa quête identitaire – à travers le mélange du passé, du présent et du futur – elle l’utilise également pour construire une sorte de temporalité au féminin … les sauts dans le temps … Ainsi les rapports entre les écarts énonciatifs et temporels témoignent des relations entre les femmes, passées et présentes, pour former une généalogie au féminin.25 [If Brossard uses these temporal gaps to revise the constraints of the journal intime, to explore the diverse relationships between language, the “real,” and fiction, and to pursue her quest for identity – through the mixing of past, present, and future – she also uses it in order to construct a kind of female temporality … leaps through time. Thus the relations between the enunciative and temporal gaps reveal the relations between women, past and present, in order to form a female genealogy.]

It seems clear that in Baroque d’aube the author is engaged in a similar “quête identitaire” and again in the potential construction and

Thinking the Future

175

projection of a “généalogie au féminin.” Yet how are we to read this genealogy? The mother-daughter filiations of authors and characters in Baroque d’aube inevitably produce a crisis of memory, for as each instance of creation or generation is/has been/will be in turn created or generated, so each moment of remembering is itself contained in memory. For Brossard, this crisis of memory does not, however, imply a threat to coherent existence or the confounding and subversion of the “quête identitaire.” On the contrary, it suggests the vital and interconnected roles of both memory and imagination within that quest. The complex and fluid genealogies of women writing in the novel open up the possibility of future generations and remind us that for Brossard writing is a way for women to realize their existence.26 Brossard’s fictions are memorializing, not in the sense of erecting a memorial in the place of loss (a gesture that would essentially reify the past and give death a convincing finality) but rather in the sense of actualizing the dynamic process of living memory. Brossard’s memorializing fictions enable her to “negotiate with reality” in order to “draw nearer to what really counts.”27 In these ongoing negotiations, she writes always to “faire acte de présence dans la langue. Pour que le vivant l’emporte” [make a statement of presence in language. In order for the alive to win out].28 Memorializing and fiction-making are, for Nicole Brossard, not about death but about living. As she observes in her poem “Ultrasons”: “La prose dit que rien ne meurt vraiment” [Prose says that nothing really dies].29 Concrete memorials erected in the place of loss do nevertheless figure in Baroque d’aube: there occur in the novel no fewer than six visits to cemeteries.30 As monuments to loss, cemeteries might be considered mere vantage points from which to witness “une suite de mortalités” [a succession of deaths] (ba 64), the progressive decomposition of bodies, tombstones, and eventually even the memories that make sense of these. But in Brossard’s novel, the cemetery is clearly not just a place of loss and a repository of relics and reminders, but a threshold. As a privileged locus of personal and collective memory, it is a place of temporal intersection, a place where the living go to remember the dead.31 Here “la vie recommence avec ses dates de naissance, ses noms de baptême et d’épouses” [life starts all over again with its birth dates, baptismal names and wives’ names]. Here “le temps oeuvre, rongeur qui construit son futur,” [time works like a rodent building its future] and Cybil “regarde au loin pendant que le vent du

176

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

nord, pendant que le dé du désir … soulève en elle l’extra des pensées permettant de naviguer entre les siècles” [gazes into the distance while the north wind, the die that desire would cast … fans those extradelectable thoughts that allow her to navigate among the centuries] (ba 63, my emphases, translation modified). Wherever she travels, Cybil visits cemeteries because they are places open onto both the past and the future, places from which to carry on, to “prendre la relève” in the face of death: “Dans un cimetière, on doit pouvoir prendre la relève du temps et des idées, du désir de vie, de tout ce qui entre dans les pensées et les images de chaque génération” [In a cemetery, the living should be able to carry on in place of time and thought, of the wish for life, of all that characterizes each generation’s thoughts and imagery] (ba 64). The cemetery, where text and image stand in for bodies and tell the story of lives past, is a prime locus for figuring the tensions between presence and absence, permanence and decay. Cybil’s habit of photographing her living self among the tombs emphasizes these tensions. Ironically, in trying to capture on film the difference between life and death, Cybil can, of course, only approach an erasure of that difference, since a photograph is itself a kind of memorial. But the taking of these photographs nevertheless marks the “present” moment (and the living presence of Cybil in the cemetery) as memorable. Cybil’s photography reminds us that memorials are not merely place markers for the missing past; they exist because of the human will to keep on remembering. The cemetery serves, then, as a place for mourning the dead and recalling the past, but also for surviving that past and venturing into an as yet undetermined future. When, at the end of one of her cemetery visits, Cybil takes several photos “pour plus tard, quand elle voudra, elle ne sait pas encore quoi” [for later when she will want – she doesn’t yet know what] (ba 65), it is apparent that the vast and unpredictable potential of the future is a consequence of interactions of memory, desire, and imagination in the present. Furthermore, cemeteries in Baroque d’aube are places of encounter and connection, especially among women. La Sixtine tells of having been taken by her first lover, the admiral’s wife, to visit the grave of that woman’s mother. Walking through the cemetery, the two women stop to read inscriptions and touch marble carvings, and at each stop the admiral’s wife tells La Sixtine stories. These stories lead the two women to become lovers, their intimate connection directly

Thinking the Future

177

associated with the narrative communion that occurred in the face of, and in the place of, death. Similar associations of intimacy, mortality, and narrative are suggested in the other cemetery visits in the novel. Cybil’s sojourns with her friends Jasmine and Lay both include visits to cemeteries and important conversations about life and death. Even when Cybil goes unaccompanied to Père-Lachaise and to the cemetery in Buenos Aires, she is not alone. In Père-Lachaise she asks a stranger to take her picture and smiles for the photo “comme si elle avait pris le bras de Proust, ou senti la main de Stein sur son épaule” [as though she had taken Proust’s arm or felt Stein’s hand on her shoulder] (ba 64). In Buenos Aires, she approaches and crosses paths with two women: “Du coin de l’oeil, tu devines que les deux femmes, les deux femmes se sont rapprochées, répétant le même geste” [Out of the corner of your eye, you surmise that the two women, the two women have come together, and again together] (ba 113, emphasis in original). Indeed, this image of two women coming together in a cemetery might be read as a mise en abyme of the novel as a whole. The emblematic nature of Cybil’s encounter with the two women in the cemetery in Buenos Aires is further suggested by the fact that it is in the context of this scene that the word “baroque” first appears in the text, explicitly connecting the episode to the larger story that contains it. Moreover, if we examine Brossard’s use of “baroque” in the novel, we find that the novel’s title, like the cemetery, indicates a threshold between loss and possibility. In a 1982 interview discussing her book Picture Theory, Nicole Brossard was asked by the editors of La Nouvelle barre du jour whether one might not characterize that novel as “baroque.” After all, they suggested, isn’t one of the hallmarks of the baroque “la mouvance, le changement de perspective” [mobility, changing perspective]?32 Brossard rejected such a definition, noting that for her baroque implied an imprecision that did not at all correspond to the kind of sharply changing perspectives inscribed in her work: “A l’analyse,” she added, “on verrait peut-être des correspondances avec le baroque mais dans ma pratique et mon circuit imaginaire, le baroque n’est pas intervenu comme inspiration” [On close analysis one might perhaps find correspondences with the baroque but in my practice and in my imaginative journey the baroque did not enter in as inspiration].33 Thirteen years later Brossard published Baroque d’aube, a novel that might in certain ways be read as a transfigured version, an avatar, of Picture Theory. Indeed, before the final section of Picture Theory,

178

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

“Hologramme,” there is a passage that seems strikingly to prefigure the voyage and project of Cybil Noland, Irène Mage, and Occident Desrives in Baroque d’aube: L’utopie luit dans mes yeux. La langue fiévreuse comme un recours polysémique … Je glisse hors-lieu-dit emportée par la pensée d’une femme convergente. Tranche anatomique de l’imaginaire: être coupée des villes linéaires pour entreprendre mon rêve dans la durée, casquée, virtuelle comme celle qui rassemble un jour ses connaissances pour un livre. [Utopia shines in my eyes. Language is feverish like a polysemic resource … I slip outside the place named carried away by the thought of a woman converging. Anatomical slice of the imaginary: to be cut off from linear cities to undertake my dream in duration, helmetted, virtual like the woman who gathers up her understandings for a book.]34

And the inaugural scene in Baroque d’aube could be read as a version of the unnarratable “scène blanche” [white scene] of women’s desire and pleasure that, in Picture Theory, was approached again and again à la dérive and through abstraction. What might it mean, then, to write Picture Theory under the sign of the baroque?35 In a sense, Brossard gives us the answer to this question in her interview with La Nouvelle barre du jour. When the editors commented on her “résistance devant le mot baroque” [resistance to the word baroque] she elaborated as follows: Je vois le baroque comme une grande exubérance, de relief et de forme. Si on fonctionne avec l’hologramme, c’est le sentiment du relief, et non pas le relief en tant que tel, qui prédomine. C’est un jeu d’images virtuelles et réelles. Simplement le fait de penser en terme d’hologramme et de laser (de lumière cohérente), cela nous place dans un tout autre type de rapport à la réalité, des rapports aux formes, qui transforme notre impression du monde, la connaissance, le savoir et l’illusion du monde … Je crois qu’il faut faire attention de ne pas connoter des sensations inédites du 20ème et du 21ème siècle avec d’autres sensations qui relèvent d’une toute autre pratique du corps dans l’espace, de l’oeil et conséquemment de l’imaginaire. [I see the baroque as a great exuberance, of contour and of form. If one operates with the hologram, it is the feeling of contour and not the contour itself that predominates. It is a game of both virtual and real images. Simply the fact of thinking in terms of the hologram and the laser (of coherent light) places us in a totally different kind of relationship to reality, a relationship to

Thinking the Future

179

forms that transforms our impression of the world, the acquaintance, the knowledge, and the illusion of the world … I think we need to be careful not to confuse new and unarticulated sensations of the 20th and 21st centuries with other sensations that arise from a totally different practice of the body in space, of the eye, and consequently of the imaginary.]36

In Baroque d’aube, Brossard is explicitly and purposely juxtaposing the “sensations inédites” of her holographic vision with the very different “pratique du corps” of the baroque. Brossard’s baroque is generally associated with the ways in which the past inscribes itself as excess upon the present. Its excesses take many forms: exuberance, spectacle, hyperbole, nostalgia, clichés of love and death, a taste for infinity. Thus the Buenos Aires cemetery is presented as a baroque spectacle: Tu pourrais décrire avec précision chaque mouvement qui te rapproche du cimetière. Tous les clichés de l’amour et de la mort rassemblés au pied des statues te ramènent à la vie … À l’entrée: des fleurs. Tu franchis le portail. Le mot baroque s’installe dans tes pensées. Te voilà entre les tombes parmi les anges, les cippes et les seaux de chaux. (ba 113) [You could describe precisely every movement that brings you closer to the cemetery. All the clichés of love and death assembled at the feet of statues are bringing you back to life … At the gateway, flowers. You pass through. The word baroque comes to mind. there you are among the angels and cippi and buckets of lime.]

Similarly, the padre Sinocchio’s description of the “magnificent examples of baroque style” to be found in Argentina emphasizes their spectacular and excessive nature: Le baroque, oh! la belle mine de spectacles. Saviez-vous, mademoiselle Noland, que [here he quotes Gerard de Cortanze:] “l’ensemble de la pensée baroque, animé par la nostalgie du Paradis Perdu (d’Ors) hésite entre le Chaos et le Cosmos”? [Sinocchio then continues:] Hyperboles, métaphores, goût de l’infini, vous ne vous ennuierez pas si vous écoutez votre coeur baroque. (ba 154–5) [Ah, the baroque, a feast for the eyes! Mademoiselle Noland, did you know that “baroque thought taken as a whole, actuated by a yearning for Paradise Lost (according to Ors), hesitates between Chaos and Cosmos”? Hyperboles, metaphors, a taste for infinity – you will never know boredom if you heed your baroque heart.]

180

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

In both of these examples the baroque is at the same time clearly associated with memory and memorializing, whether in the form of funerary statuary or the architectural spectacles inspired by a nostalgic desire for a lost Paradise. But this is precisely the kind of memorializing that suggests a present absorbed by the past and a memory process devoid of any “actualizing” potential. Indeed, we might even recognize these baroque spectacles in a description that Pierre Nora gives of his lieux de mémoire: “moments of history torn away from the movement of history, then returned; no longer quite life, not yet death, like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded.” But just as Nora’s lieu is, paradoxically, not only “a site of excess closed upon itself, concentrated in its own name, but also forever open to the full range of its possible significations,” 37 so is Brossard’s baroque radically inflected – by the dawn of the title and by the women coming together throughout the novel – so as to contest its own memorializing limits. A curious and unlikely joining of the past’s leftovers and hints of a possible future, Baroque d’aube reminds us that twilight and daybreak may sometimes be virtually impossible to tell apart.

occident’s project Nicole Brossard has explored many different geographical settings in her writing. She has populated the island, the city, the labyrinth, and the desert with women, opening up spaces for what Alice Parker has called “lesbian imag(in)ing.”38 In Baroque d’aube, Brossard ventures into a space that figures both expanse and depth and that metaphorically engages both imagination (the horizon) and memory (the ocean floor). The sea has always been there in Brossard’s work, often as ground to figure, surrounding her archipelagos and her island-cities, lapping at the minds of the women in her bars and parks and hotel rooms, and even, in its absence, haunting the memory of her desert.39 As “indescriptible” [indescribable] as the desert, the sea represents infinite risk and infinite possibility, qualities that for Brossard have always characterized the space of writing. At the centre of Baroque d’aube is “un projet de livre sur la mer” [a book project on the sea] (ba 54).40 This project involves a voyage that would appear archetypal even if the vessel upon which the travellers embark were not called the Symbol. The identity of the woman behind

Thinking the Future

181

the project, however, signals the vexed relationship between the Symbol’s voyage and the long tradition of men who set sail in search of new worlds, adventure, and glory. The oceanographer Occident DesRives is both of that Western tradition and separated from it. Her family name in particular reinforces this double reading,41 suggesting both the substantive “des rives” (which places her on the edges or margins of any “Occidental” agenda as well as of her own project “sur la mer”) and the verb “dériver” (which conveys not only the idea of traceable lineage or “derivation” but also that of diversion and drifting). In some ways, Occident is a feminist visionary. Her intention is to bring together three women (a scientist, a writer, and a photographer) to join the all-male crew of the Symbol for two weeks at sea off the coast of Argentina. While the crew carries out its mission, taking core samples from the ocean floor, she, Cybil Noland, and Irène Mages will engage in their own project. Occident’s vision is that, with their different perspectives, and through the encounters of art and science, image and words, surface and depth, the women may together penetrate and transform reality. The women’s project may be collaborative and visionary, but it is nevertheless undeniably the product of one woman’s drive and ambition. In fact, Occident is less a participant in the project than a catalyst and a director. She has brought Irène and Cybil along on a scientific mission as artists to “surprendre et faire plaisir. Procurer des émotions que la science ne peut expliquer” [catch people off guard and to give pleasure. Incite emotions that science cannot explain] (ba 83). They are part of her experiment. Cybil is quite conscious of the extent to which her involvement in the project has been secured by Occident’s forceful will and irresistible charms. As she allows herself to be drawn in, she senses that Occident’s words are hiding “une quête démesurée d’absolu” [an inordinate quest for the absolute] (ba 60). Cybil is not sure what to think of Occident and the reader of Baroque d’aube shares her uncertainty. As a figure of duality, is Occident necessarily a figure of duplicity? Or is she merely a victim of the duplicitous circumstances in which she finds herself? What does it mean that the three women are not embarking on a vessel of their own but will be sharing close quarters on the Symbol with Captain Nadeau, padre Sinocchio, the doctor Thomas Lemieux, and a crew of porno-watching

182

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

sailors? What is implied by Occident’s association with the “vivacious, charming, cultivated,” and sinister James Warland, a “shark” who wields his power and influence behind the scenes? Does the fact that Occident consorts with the likes of Warland raise questions about her own motives and allegiances? Or does it merely underscore the risks for women of trying to operate within “a man’s world”? Occident is not the first such figure to appear in Brossard’s writings. She is, in fact, in many ways an avatar of the géomètre Angela Parkins in Brossard’s Le Désert mauve, another woman straddling two worlds and anticipating the future. Both women are scientists whose professions involve taking the measure of a given domain while keeping an eye on the horizon. Both are dynamic and charismatic figures whose vision and drive seem capable of bringing other women together. Like Angela, Occident is fluent in different languages, conversant with both men and women. Like Angela, she is associated with the scandal of a woman’s body and the subversive potential of a woman’s voice. Both women are fatally engaged in bringing emotions and desire into the masculine world of science (not insignificantly, “désir” is included, anagrammatically, in the name DesRives). And like Angela, Occident is depicted as a solitary witness to monumental changes in history. Is it any wonder, then, that encountering a woman like Angela Parkins or Occident DesRives can lead to vertigo and have enormous consequences? When she is with Occident, Cybil has the dizzying sense of “un double présent … un temps mixte qui submerge dangereusement les sens” [et] “éveill[e] un maléfique présage” [a double present, a mixture of tenses that dangerously engulfs the senses] (ba 81). She senses that the other woman’s presence “éveill[e] un maléfique présage” [is awakening an evil portent] (ba 81). It is the incongruity, the momentum, and the momentousness of Occident’s vision and position that together produce the feeling of double time and foreboding in Cybil. She concludes that there is undoubtedly “quelque chose de trompeur dans l’intelligence qui nous renvoie sans cesse à l’art tragique de cocher aux mauvais endroits les bonnes réponses” [something fraudulent about an intelligence that keeps pointing us to the tragic art of checking off the right answers in the wrong places] (ba 81). It appears that, there on the Symbol, Cybil and Irène and Occident are in the wrong place at the right time. Cybil recalls that when she was a child, the world was simpler, following a rigidly reassuring patriarchal script:

Thinking the Future

183

[l]es femmes sont des mères, les hommes jouent les pères, un enfant égale un enfant. La famille est une famille. Les jeunes femmes ont des fiancés. Les fiancées sont de futures épouses. Les hommes portent le pantalon … tout est en règle grâce à Dieu. (ba 123) [the women are mothers, the men play at being fathers, one child equals one child. The family is a family. The young women have fiancés and are bridesto-be. The men wear the pants … everything is in order, thanks to God.]

But she even then had a sense of double time: Un double temps s’installait déjà en toi, sorte de réalité convexe qui te permettait de voir venir l’avenir. L’avenir tu en profitas car il était alors possible de faire des sauts joyeux dans l’histoire et d’en changer le cours … Les yeux braqués sur l’horizon, tu appris à faire fi du passé et à regarder les femmes dans les yeux. (ba 123) [A double time was already embedding itself in you, a kind of convex reality through which you could see where the future was coming from. You made the most of the future because it was possible back then to make exultant leaps in history and change its course … With your eyes fixed on the horizon, you learned to thumb your nose at the past and look women in the eye.]

Is this the same double time that Cybil experiences in the presence of Occident? Why did no dangerous vertigo, no “maléfique présage,” accompany the double vision of her childhood? Why was it easier back then to “faire fi du passé” and look women in the eye? What made it possible to fix your eyes on the horizon and take joyous leaps into history, maybe even changing its course? Answers to these questions may be gleaned from Brossard’s depiction of the contemporary moment in Baroque d’aube. As a child, Cybil was less susceptible to the weight of the past, the constraints of the present. But somewhere along the line the past overtook the present and both past and present began to cast long shadows across the future. The apparent failure of Cybil’s childhood idealism is not, however, merely the age-old story of every child’s loss of innocence. The “evil portents” are specifically symptomatic of the age in which Cybil is living, an age in which the future is not what it used to be. Cybil explains to La Sixtine, for instance, that books could once “enflammer des populations entières, les faire courir et chanter, les précipiter vers l’avenir” [enflame whole populations, make them run about and sing, or launch them headlong toward the future] (ba 75) but no

184

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

longer. In the late twentieth-century world in which “le présent futur de la planète tourne en un va-vite incertain, les livres … servent tout juste à penser quelques plaies” [the present-future of the planet is turning to potluck full-speed-ahead, books … at most serve only for reflecting on/ dressing a few open wounds] (ba 75–6, my emphasis, translation modified).42 Damage has been done.

penser quelques plaies Tout a commencé avec la mort de ma mère. (ba 91) [It all began with my mother’s death.]

In the face of the “va-vite incertain de la planète,” one is apt to turn one’s attention to what is known, to the legacies that the past has written on the present. One may set about assessing the damage already done and ad/dressing the wounds. In Baroque d’aube many of the most obvious wounds seem to be traceable to the loss of the mother. There are a number of instances of this, among them Irène Mage’s statement that “everything began with my mother’s death,” the Demers brothers’ collaborative experiments in virtual reality following and motivated by their mother’s death, and, of course, the copy of Samuel Beckett’s Molloy that circulates throughout the narrative. This intertext is particularly telling if we recall the first lines of Beckett’s novel: “Je suis dans la chambre de ma mère. C’est moi qui y vis maintenant. Je ne sais pas comment j’y suis arrivé” [I am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now. I don’t know how I got there]. As these lines suggest, a return to the mother may naturally raise questions of origin and identity, questions fundamental to Brossard’s complex and multilevelled narrative.43 The return to the absent mother, or to the place of the mother’s death, however, risks being an essentially nostalgic and impotent gesture. As Lynne Huffer reminds us, nostalgia is about the “inaccessible origin”; it is structured around the fact that “you can’t go home again.”44 Huffer’s critique of “feminist nostalgia” reveals the precise dangers of an attempted return to what she calls “the maternal past” since “the structure underlying nostalgic thinking reinforces a conservative social system” and “in a nostalgic structure, an immutable lost past functions as a blueprint for the future, cutting off any possibility for uncertainty, difference, or fundamental change.”45

Thinking the Future

185

The tension between the nostalgic and the visionary is at the heart of Baroque d’aube (as the title of the novel suggests). One of the challenges facing the women in Brossard’s novel is to find a way to keep the connection with the mother without yielding to the nostalgic impulse, without getting stuck in the past. The challenge is to “penser/ panser la plaie” in such a way as not to lose the mother or the self. Unlike most of the other characters, Cybil Noland has a mother who is still very much alive and figures in the novel. Irène’s reference to “touching bottom” triggers in Cybil an immediate desire to call her mother, the appropriately named Cassandre: “Cybil note les propos scandaleux d’Irène, souligne ‘toucher le fond,’ téléphone à Montréal” [Cybil makes a note of Irène’s scandalous remarks, underlines “touch bottom,” makes a phone call to Montreal] (ba 88). When her mother does not answer, she addresses her in imagination: “Ma mère … Vous qui avez prédit sans jamais vous tromper ce que deviendrait chacun de vos enfants, [vous] n’avez jamais eu de mots pour imaginer ce que je suis” [Mother … You who predicted unerringly what each of your children would become, (you) never found words to imagine what I am] (ba 88–9). In this scene, the return to the mother quite clearly cannot guarantee a continuity between past and present, for the mother is not home, and even if she were, the daughter is beyond her imagination. Forward-looking Cassandre could foresee disasters, but she could not look beyond the “mille dangers qui guettaient dans la pénombre de l’imagination” [thousand dangers lurking in the gloom of (her) imagination] (ba 89) to see what her daughter has become. The mother’s failure of imagination renders Cybil’s future inconceivable. When Cybil next returns in memory to her mother, there is suggested the possibility of locating a future vision in the past, but the episode is steeped in nostalgia. The circumstances of this return situate it unmistakably within culturally weighted paradigms of human memory. It is Palm Sunday on a Buenos Aires street (between the café Freud and the café Jung!). Church bells ring. Cybil sees a woman selling palm fronds and suddenly: “Pendant un moment, tu marches, ta petite main dans la main douce de maman Noland … Soudain il n’y a plus de distance culturelle. Tout coincide” [For a minute or two you’re walking with your little hand in the soft hand of Maman Noland … Suddenly there’s no cultural distance any more. Everything coincides] (ba 123). At this moment Cybil remembers that simpler world of her childhood

186

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

(mentioned above) in which “les églises sont remplies à craquer … La famille est une famille … Les hommes portent le pantalon … [the churches are filled to bursting … The family is a family … The men wear the pants] (ba 123). Cybil recalls her earlier capacity to transcend the limits of the present moment and envision and engender a future. But, as we have already suggested, that possibility so wistfully evoked is itself now part of a nostalgic structure that renders it inaccessible. Occident DesRives is the closest we come in the novel to a woman without a mother. She seems almost to have sprung fully formed like Athena from her father’s forehead, for she has no memory of her mother, having known her only “à travers des portraits, des peintures … de vieilles images, lithographies, photos, dessins dont [son] père s’entourait” [through paintings and photographs … old pictures, prints, snapshots, drawings that (her) father surrounded himself with] (ba 192, my emphasis). Her lack of any idea of “ce que signifie le corps à corps avec la mère” [what bonding with one’s mother means] (ba 192) has left her, as she says, “affectivement analphabète” [emotionally illiterate] (ba 193). Occident is not, however, portrayed as unmarked by her past: a long scar runs from her temple to her chin. Still, a scar (“une balafre”) is not an open wound (“une plaie”). Occident has always been motherless and cannot know how to miss her mother. She is scarred without being wounded. She is thus a figure singularly resistant to nostalgia, and it is perhaps for this reason that she is the one to envision the collaborative project “sur la mer.” Significantly, however, the scarred and “emotionally illiterate” Occident is ultimately incapable of seeing the project she has initiated through to completion. The realization of the project is left to Cybil, a woman who maintains a connection with her own mother (calling home in an attempt to “toucher le fond”) while at the same time moving resolutely beyond the limits of her mother’s vision.46 When Cybil tells Irène about the feeling of doubleness that she has in Occident’s presence and which leads her to “perd[re] facilement patience et le fil” [lose patience and the thread of (her) thoughts], Irène – who, since the death of her own mother, has been working on synthesizing images – recognizes and explains this away as merely “manque de focus” [lack of focus]. She adds: “C’est la vie, il ne faut pas en faire un drame” [“That’s life, you mustn’t make a production out of it”] (ba 86–7, translation modified). But Cybil, as a writer, is intent on following threads, seeking a meaning and direction for the story she is living and telling. For Cybil, il faut faire un drame. The

Thinking the Future

187

sensation of a double present thus leads her to a moment of crisis. She hears a voice speaking to her: Tu n’écriras pas ce roman. Tu n’as ni le talent ni l’audace. Ton instinct est disparu depuis le dernier livre. Depuis le monde a changé. Le monde change. À chaque instant, il faut imaginer ailleurs puisqu’on y est déjà. Presque. Tu as perdu le sens du présent. Le futur t’enivre. Tu t’extasie sur le passé … Tu crois que garder la distance te protégera contre la répétition … Avoue que tu aimerais bien toucher le fond sans trop te salir. (ba 111, italics in original) [You’re not going to write this novel. You don’t have the instinct or the courage for it. Your intuition dried up with that last book. The world has changed since. The world keeps changing. From minute to minute you have to imagine elsewhere because we’re already there. Almost. You’ve lost your sense of the present. The future has your head spinning. You’re in raptures over the past … You think keeping your distance will protect you from repeating yourself … Admit it, you’d like to touch bottom without dirtying yourself too much.]

There is no way around the dilemma of writing, the doubled reality, the double vision that it demands. The world is always changing. This is, paradoxically, the sense of the present: “From minute to minute you have to imagine elsewhere because we’re already there. Almost.” Writing cannot avoid or refuse the double time that makes it possible. This is also what the writer “Nicole Brossard” in the novel stresses when Cybil confides to her that her feeling of “un double temps” [a double time] and “un double dire” [a double telling] is plunging her into a state of “angoisse indicible” [indescribable anxiety] (ba 126). Each woman must face the test of telling alone, Brossard says, advising Cybil: “il faut se faire à l’idée qu’une phrase bien écrite ne camouflera jamais l’air idiot que donne le sentiment de pouvoir vaincre la mort; so tape the creative energy around your waist like a safety belt and forget about fear.” (ba 127, italics and English in the original) [“We must get used to the idea that a well-written sentence will never camouflage the moronic look it gives one to think that one can get the better of death; so strap creative energy around your waist like a safety belt and forget about fear.”]

As she urges her to accept the contradiction between presence and absence implicit in any “telling” and to use the creative energy that this contradiction sparks, Brossard offers Cybil the possibility of

188

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

seeing clearly through the double vision. Telling her to take the plunge, Brossard’s words unlock the future of writing for Cybil.

ta k i n g t h e p l u n g e The voyage of the Symbol is at once a voyage out and beyond and a voyage in and back. The deep-sea diving at the centre of the expedition involves the exploration of new worlds but is also suggestive of a process of venturing into human history and memory and the unconscious. In the section of the novel called “Le futur dark,” Cybil and Irène embark on their own voyages below the surface and one cannot help recalling earlier feminist versions of this kind of archetypal journey, among them Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving into the Wreck” and Margaret Atwood’s novel Surfacing, two works in which plumbing the depths is associated with regenerative potential for women. The women’s dives take place through the virtual reality program designed by the Demers brothers. Cybil makes three simulated undersea dives, each under the guidance of a different brother (the three brothers representing three different approaches to the vr experience). Pascal, the computer expert, takes the most scientific approach, reassuring Cybil and Irène before their first dive: “Comme vous n’êtes jamais descendues, vraiment, vous ne risquez rien” [“Since you’ve never been down there you’ll be running no risk”] (ba 169). But when Pascal utters the word “depth,” Cybil hears it not as a scientist would but as a writer. For her, the word is not a designation, a term capable of maintaining a safe and objective distance from what it designates. “Depth” becomes what it describes, and as Cybil enters that reality, she is once again overtaken by a feeling of double time: Le double temps rattrape Cybil. “Profondeur” tremble de ses trois syllabes dans l’air étouffant, oscille … Profondeur, c’est un mot mais déjà il se transforme en espace: une chambre d’hôtel avec un lit queen size … Une telle sensation de présent. (ba 171–2) [The double-time sensation catches up with Cybil. “Depth” … wobbles its single syllable in the stifling air, oscillates … Depth is a word but is already turning into a space: a hotel room with a queen-size bed … Such a present feeling.]

This “sensation de présent” in turn triggers a radical shift into firstperson narration.47 The distance between protagonist and narrator is

Thinking the Future

189

abolished. Everything is suddenly happening at the same time and in the same place, blurring all definitions of time and space. Aucune notion du temps. Rien d’autre qu’un espace ouvert aux impressions … J’étais hors contexte, tout à la fois rapprochée du sens et à distance de ce qui meurtrit les sens … Impossible toutefois de garder mon attention plus d’une seconde sur la même créature … J’étais, je n’étais que présent … dépourvue d’histoire et de toute attache … Maintenant il y avait trop de présent. (ba 174–5) [No notion whatever of time. Nothing but a space open to impressions … I was out of context, close to meaning and at the same time removed from things that ravage the senses … Yet no way could I hold my attention longer than a second on a single creature … I was present and nothing but, an illusion of perfect present, devoid of story or any attachment … Now there was too much present.]

Trop de présent. Her physical body suddenly resisting the virtual reality, Cybil tears off the viseohelmet and the datagloves. Within the vr experience she was surrounded by water that she soaked up like a sponge (ba 174), and yet she emerges from it overwhelmed by an immense thirst. That evening she turns to her manuscript as if she might find there “une solution qui puisse faire échec au double temps” [a solution capable of foiling the double time] (ba 175). Cybil’s second dive is in the company of Flash, who, like Irène, works with cameras and visual images. Flash values the dives for the sensations they generate: “You become what you feel,” he says (ba 170, English in the original). Cybil’s dive with Flash is, indeed, marked by “sensations fortes” but at the same time she thinks: “Je ne connais pas ce que je vois, je suis incapable d’imaginer ce que je vois” [I don’t know what it is I’m seeing, am unable to imagine what I’m seeing] (ba 178). She is reduced to silence. Later, during dinner, the feeling of double time is once again “devastating.” It is the brother Philippe whose perspective on the vr experience is closest to Cybil’s own. While Pascal spoke as a scientist and Flash as a visual artist, Philippe, the sailor, seems to speak as a poet, conscious of the emotional power of “profondeur”:48 “Il entre en nous, somme d’émotions impossible à chiffrer. L’important, c’est la profondeur. Descendre … L’important, c’est la capacité d’émerveillement.” (ba 167, 170)

190

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

[“It simply enters us, a sum of emotions impossible to enumerate. What’s important is the depth. Descending … Your capacity for wonder will be the important thing.”]

Philippe takes exception to Flash’s declaration that everything is about seeing and capturing the visual image without mediating emotion or metaphor: “La peur, Flash, comment peux-tu oublier que ce n’est pas une image, que ce ne sera jamais une image, cette chose qui est notre corps inquiet au milieu de ce qu’il y a de plus vaste.” (ba 168) [“Fear, Flash, how can you forget fear’s not just an image, it’ll never be just an image, this thing that’s one’s own unquiet body surrounded by all that immensity.”]

Unlike his brothers, Philippe believes that the magnitude of the experience, and its incomprehensibility, are inextricable from the fear that it naturally evokes. He does not believe, as Flash does, that one can “tout connaître à distance” [acquire knowledge at a distance] (ba 169). He knows that he is diving in the face of death and it is for this reason that he has developed a vr program for entering his mother’s room in order to bring her out of memory into presence. He explains: “Chaque fois que j’entre dans la chambre de maman, le présent égale la mémoire” [Each time I go into Maman’s room, the present equals memory] (ba 170). The stakes of his project are crystal clear: “Que la première plongée éloigne à tout jamais l’idée de la mort” [To have the first dive banish all thought of death forever] (ba 171). But, as the novelist Nicole Brossard reminded Cybil earlier, “le sentiment de pouvoir vaincre la mort” [to think that one can get the better of death] is a foolish illusion (ba 127). Cybil may enter the mother’s room, but she cannot banish the thought of death. She can only, through writing, perhaps momentarily elude it. When Cybil enters the mother’s room, the mother is standing at the window. Whose mother is this? The scene that follows, in its accumulation of detail, merely multiplies the answers to this question. On the bedside table is a newspaper dated 27 November 1943. The mother moves to the dressing table and takes a Larousse dictionary from the top drawer, looks up the word “woman.” Divining Cybil’s presence, she lifts her hair so that Cybil may fasten a gold chain at the nape of her neck. She moves to the bed. When she first lies down she crosses

Thinking the Future

191

her arms over her chest. Then she turns on one side and curls into a fetal position. Cybil sits beside her, strokes her cheek, holds her bony hand tenderly as she stretches out again, reaching her arms over her head. Soon relaxation transforms into tension. She begins gasping for breath, then spreads her legs, knees bent, until, all at once, there is complete identification and coincidence of Cybil and the mother: Soudain. Je la deviens. Une douleur terrible au bas du dos, au bas du ventre. La sensation que ça se déchire en moi. Je respire. Bruyamment m’abîme dans de longues séquences d’inspiration et d’expiration. Puis, il y a une enfant dans la chambre. L’enfant joue avec un dé. (ba 187) [Suddenly. I become her. A terrible pain low in my back, low in my belly. The feeling that something is tearing in me. I breathe. Noisily reaching deep in long sequences inhaling and exhaling. Then there’s a child in the room. The child is playing with a die.]

In oneiric fashion, this scene seems to have gathered details from elsewhere in the novel and from them constructed a new reality. The referential fluidity that results allows for reading the experience on many levels at once. The mother is childlike, even infantile; she is sensual, seductive; she is old, dying. When she lies on the bed, she first adopts a deathbed pose and then curls into a fetal position. When she stretches out again the tension growing in her body communicates first sexual arousal and then the agony of someone struggling for her last breath. Finally, the appearance of a girl-child in the room makes this last scene also, retrospectively but not exclusively, a scene of childbirth. It is the return to the mother that has staged this climactic encounter in which Cybil is both child and mother, giving birth to (and as) herself, her protagonist Cybil Noland, the author Nicole Brossard (the date on the newspaper is the actual date of birth of the author of Baroque d’aube), and Occident.49 Cybil’s vr experience of a return to the mother, even inasmuch as it ostensibly takes place in response to the mother’s death (Philippe’s initial motivation), is thus anything but nostalgic. The mother is the sign not of “an immutable lost past”50 but of a dynamic and ongoing process of generation that brings women together. There is no fixed beginning to this story and no fixed identity within it; rather, there is movement and the suggestion of a future. Neither nostalgic recollection nor wish-fulfillment dream, the vr return to the mother in Baroque d’aube vividly illustrates the kind of

192

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

memory that, in “Memory: Hologram of Desire,” Brossard called “virtual and anticipatory.” This memory does not presume to resolve the “double time” or banish the idea of death, but creatively and fearlessly meets the challenges of time and mortality: La mémoire est un présent dans nos yeux qui regardent le monde et rêvent d’horizon. Elle est dans la main qui pense à tracer son chemin dans le temps pluriel et résumé du vivant, signal ouvert sur l’instant où il est possible d’entrer dans le temps de l’image, de vibrer dans le double de l’image réelle et virtuelle du côté de la légende qui émeut, stimule et informe. Entrer dans le temps de l’image et de la légende, c’est entrer dans le questionnement de l’identité, c’est trouver la référence qui fait sens.51 [Memory is in our present eyes that look at the world and dream of horizon. It is in the hand that thinks to trace its path in the plural and condensed time of the present. Memory is a signal open to the instant when entering image time is possible, when it is possible to let oneself enter the double image, real and virtual, on the side of the legend that moves, energizes, and informs. To enter the time of image and legend is to enter into the questioning of identity, finding the reference that makes sense.] (translation modified)

In the many possible readings of this episode, one of the most compelling references is to Occident, as both the mother and the child being born. The association of Occident with the mother is initially established in the scene with the gold chain, which explicitly recalls an earlier scene in which Cybil notices the nape of Occident’s neck and the gold chain fastened there (ba 114). Occident is also described in an earlier passage as sleeping “les deux bras croisés sur sa poitrine” [arms crossed over her chest] (ba 99) just as the mother is here. Finally, the connection is suggested in the mother’s struggle for breath (“elle cherche son souffle” which recalls Occident’s asthma (“Occident cherchait son souffle” [Occident was trying to catch her breath] [ba 179]). Two details in particular support a reading of this passage as also indicating the birth of Occident. First, the child who appears in the room is playing with a die, an object explicitly associated with Occident in the novel. (Occident carries a “dé en or” [golden die] on her keychain; we learn that she grew up in her father’s casinos; and the first syllable of her family name is “dé.”52) Second, the chapter that immediately follows this scene, “La nuit occidentale,” not only describes the night of Occident’s final illness and death, but also includes Occident’s account

Thinking the Future

193

of her life story. It is, as she says, “la première fois [qu’elle] raconte cette histoire” [the first time (she’s) ever told this story] (ba 193). There is a narrative logic to having the motherless child who never experienced a “corps à corps avec la mère” go through the birth experience before her story can be told. The Occident who speaks her own story for the first time is not Occident sprung from her father’s brow, but Occident born of woman.

oc cidental nig ht “La nuit occidentale” that follows Cybil’s third vr experience makes it clear that Cybil has not “banished all thought of death forever.” The birth scene in the mother’s room closely approaches and in fact, in its temporal indeterminacy, contains the death scene in the chapter that follows – just as that death contains all the generations that were figured in the birth. The “occidental night” is the last night of the voyage, a night that descends so dark upon the three women that it seems “capable de tout raturer, de refouler dans l’oubli la splendeur antérieure” [capable of blotting out everything, crowding the earlier splendour into oblivion] (ba 189–90). Cybil has never known such a night: Nulle part dans le monde, la densité de la nuit n’avait semblé se resserrer si violemment autour d’elle. Nulle part le vaste monde peuplé de rancunes et d’espoirs avait-il été réduit à ce point inutile, silencieux comme un obstacle majeur à sa compréhension … Nuit close. Clôture de culture. Trop de tout … Trop nuit. Seule la toux sèche d’Occident égratigne la masse noire de la nuit. Chambre noir. (ba 190) [Nowhere in the world has the density of night seemed to press so cruelly around her. Nowhere has the vast world peopled with hopes and resentments been reduced to such pointlessness, such silence, a major obstacle to her understanding … A walled night. Cultural closure. Too much of everything … Too night. Only Occident’s cough abrades the black mass of the night. Darkroom.]

The apocalyptic imagery is striking: violence, pointlessness, incomprehensibility, excess. It is a night of no exit. It is the end of culture. Yet from out of this night, as Occident struggles for breath, comes a voice that seems to offer Cybil an answer both to her earlier doubts (“tu n’écriras pas ce roman” [“you’re not going to write this novel”])

194

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

and to the failure of her mother, Cassandre’s, imagination. Like a photographic image developing in the “chambre noire,” this voice emerges “claire et conquérante” [clear, triumphal] from the darkness to speak the future: Tu écriras ce livre … Tu refuseras de choisir entre la voix, la nuit, et la mer … tu réveilleras les monstres, les légendes … Tu embrasseras Occident sur son malheur de balafre rose, frissonant avec elle dans la mémoire du temps. Tu garderas l’équilibre au-dessus de l’abîme et de l’eau, vivras dans ton vertige. (ba 190–91) [You will write this book … You will refuse to choose from among this voice, the night and the sea … you will awaken dream monsters and legends … You will kiss Occident on her ugly pink scar, shuddering with her in the memory of the time. You will keep your balance above the abyss and the water, and live in your vertigo.] (translation modified)

The voice then changes into a source of light, an immense mirror, and finally a screen on which appear [d]es générations de femmes [qui] tournoient avec la plus grande lenteur, montrant leurs épaules et leurs profils, leurs seins remplis de lait, leurs hanches fortes de guerrières, la tête auréolée, décorée de fruits, d’une lyre, d’un peigne ou de la terre toute entière. (ba 191) [generations of women (who) rotate, showing their shoulders and profiles, their milk-filled breasts, their full warrior hips, their heads haloed or adorned with fruits, a lyre, a comb or the whole earth.]

After this vision of generations of women, Occident tells her story to Cybil and Irène, then exclaims on the strangeness of the night, remarking that she thought she heard a Siren’s voice. The voice that had spoken to Cybil of a future in which she would “vivr[e] dans [son] vertige” has called to Occident not as a sibyl but as a siren (alarm and allurement), signalling perhaps her approaching death. The three women lie on deck gazing into a night that is now filled with stars as Occident coughs more and more, struggling to breathe, lapsing into incoherency, finally dying at dawn. The death of Occident is in certain respects the death of the West. Several passages in the novel encourage the reader to associate the character Occident with what her name names. In Occident’s company, for instance, Irène insists on beginning her sentences with the

Thinking the Future

195

phrase “En Occident” (ba 99). And in the book’s final section, the narrator/author utters and then reflects on the word “Occident”: Le mot m’a échappé. Je l’ai aussitôt entouré d’images oxydant la merveille sonore … J’ai poursuivi en associant l’Occident au progrès, à la navigation et à la vulgarisation de l’individu, sa rapide ascension au sommet de la hiérarchie des espèces. (ba 212, my emphasis) [The word got away from me. I immediately surrounded it with images, each an oxidant of the marvel of sound … I ploughed ahead, associating the Occident with progress, navigation and the vulgarization of the individual and his rapid ascent to the top of the hierarchy of species.]

This passage not only associates (through the proximity of the homonyms) the progress of Western civilization with the image of oxidation (a transformation involving decomposition); it also implicitly associates both ideas with the oceanographer.53 In Brossard’s vision, the West contains its own potential disintegration (“oxydant”), but some women, remarkable for whatever reason in the world of men and power and therefore vulnerable, will also perish (Angela Parkins, Occident DesRives). Occident cannot survive the occidental night except “as a trace in the album”54 that Cybil and Irène will complete. The section of the novel that encompasses the voyage of the Symbol is entitled “Le futur dark.” The internal tensions in this title seem singularly appropriate to the description of the occidental night and the account of Occident’s death that mark the climax of the journey. “Le futur dark,” however, does not end with the death of Occident. A final short chapter in this section finds Cybil Noland once more in a hotel room, this time in Montevideo. She spends her days writing the text of the album that Occident had imagined as the final product of their collaboration. The feelings of double time have dissipated and she is once again “ce [qu’elle a] toujours été: seule” [what (she has) always been: alone] (ba 197). But is she? Writing in and from this familiar place, Cybil realizes the extent to which her voyage on the Symbol and her venture into virtual reality have changed her. It seems to her now that “[elle] ne pourr[a] plus [se] passer d’Occident et d’Irène” [(she) won’t ever manage without Occident and Irène anymore] (ba 198). Whatever happens, their voices will accompany her, “contemporaines et bouleversantes, comme ce qui plaide en faveur de la vie dans le monde sonore du changement et de la fiction” [contemporary and wondrous, like arguments in favour of life in the

196

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

sonorous world of change and fiction] (ba 198). They are part of her survival, as the work that she is doing is part of theirs. Determined to finish the text of the album, Cybil notes that “il y a beaucoup de mots pour survivre” [there are a great many words for surviving] (ba 198, translation modified).

rapprochements Like Mélanie in Le Désert mauve, Cybil embodies a tension between solitude and closeness. The deaths that mark the climaxes of the two novels vividly convey both the risks and the urgent necessity of women approaching one another. As she sits alone in the Hôtel Carrasco knowing that surviving means writing, Cybil still feels shame at having failed to defend her place at Occident’s side during the oceanographer’s final moments, at having allowed herself to be “polifermement refoulée à l’arrière-plan de la scène” [politely but firmly returned to the background of the scene] (ba 195) by the men gathered around the dying woman. Significantly, however, Baroque d’aube does not conclude with Cybil writing alone at the end of “Le futur dark”; it closes with a section that focuses on the relationship between a romancière and her traductrice. The meeting of writer and translator in “Un seul corps pour comparer” cannot but recall the rapprochements of writer, translator, and character(s) in Le Désert mauve. In that novel, despite the fact that at the end Mélanie “ne peu[t] tutoyer personne” [cannot get close to any you],55 the introduction of translator Maude Laures and the inscription of the process of translation gave a relational dimension to Mélanie’s solitude. As in that novel, where Maude Laures described the translation process as a “corps-à-corps avec le livre” [taking on the book body to body] allowing her to “se glisser anonyme et entière entre les pages” [slip anonymous and whole between the pages],56 Baroque d’aube treats translation as an erotically charged connection emblematic of the many other instances of women coming together in the novel. Both novels hint that in such rapprochements there is enormous creative potential, and perhaps even the possibility of “changing the course of the story.” The final section of Baroque d’aube forges – and at the same time baffles – connections and identifications, for the levels of narration in the novel are so interwoven as to confound any attempt to untangle them. It is almost impossible to make a clear and consistent distinction

Thinking the Future

197

between Cybil Noland the author and Cybil Noland the character, since the character is also an author (and the author is revealed to be always a character inasmuch as she must enter into her story in order to write it). Furthermore, in a radical reversal of narrative authority and logic, the Cybil Noland romancière of the middle sections is framed – in two senses of the word? – by her literary creations in/as the first and last sections of the book. The opening section, “Hôtel Rafale,” is represented in the sections that follow as a fictional creation of the writer Cybil, who has come to Rimouski to work on a “texte étrange écrit, il y a deux mois, durant un séjour à Los Angeles où elle avait entamé une histoire” [curious text she wrote two months ago in Los Angeles, where she began a story] (ba 54, translation modified). The distinction between “reality” and “fiction” in this script is, however, blurred by the fact that the writer has, in a risky narrative gesture, given her character her own name and quite possibly her own story as well. The closing section of the novel, with its unnamed first-person narrator, then further disperses and displaces narrative authority, destabilizing the subject. Who is speaking in “Un seul corps pour comparer”? Some details suggest correspondences between this narrator and Cybil (both writer and character), but others seem to call into question such readings. In some ways the “romancière anglaise” [the English novelist] (ba 210) who narrates the final section can most convincingly be assimilated to “la femme de Hyde Park,” a woman writer imagined as a character in a novel yet to be written by the Cybil Noland of the Hôtel Rafale. The Hyde Park woman, like Cybil herself, “voulait écrire un roman” [wanted to write a novel] (ba 23, translation modified). That in the final section of Baroque d’aube the narrator’s memories of the scene of writing (ba 221) precisely evoke the space imagined in “Hôtel Rafale” by Cybil for her protagonist (ba 23–5) hints at the possibility that both novels have been written. Furthermore, it suggests that the Cybil Noland who remarked near the end of “Le futur dark” that she did not know “ce qu’il adviendr[ait] de Cybil Noland, personnage” [what (would) become of Cybil Noland, the character] (ba 198) has also finished her story. It is tempting to try to read Baroque d’aube in this way according to a narrative genealogy of stories within stories, but the novel resists even such a reading. In the formal structure of Baroque d’aube, there is no fixed frame, no clear inside and outside. Details from a writer’s life enter that writer’s fictions, and details from a writer’s fictions enter her

198

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

life.57 The circulation of material (textual and anecdotal) from context to context both within the novel and beyond it resists comprehension (in the broadest sense of the term).58 But it is ultimately less important to be able to identify the narrator of “Un seul corps pour comparer” as one of the writer characters in the novel than to identify her with all of them.59 In its referential indeterminacy, the final section of Baroque d’aube essentially presents what it names: one single body for comparison. To compare, in Brossard’s work, is a fundamental and dynamic act. It has nothing to do with cataloguing differences and everything to do with rapprochements, with making connections. As Irène explains: Rien n’est jamais simple … Le moindre rapprochement entre deux objets de nature différente mais ressemblante crée en croissance exponentielle matière à réflexion … Comparer stimule … la réflexion qui permet de passer à l’action, c’est-à-dire de niveler l’écart entre les objets, les êtres; ou de l’accroître tant et si bien qu’il n’y a plus lieu de comparer. (ba 164) [Nothing is ever simple … The slightest similarity between two objects of different but like nature provides exponentially increasing food for thought … Comparison stimulates … thinking that enables us to proceed to action, which is to say, to equalizing the differences between objects and individuals; or else increasing them to the point where there is no further ground for comparison.]

Such is Cybil’s impulse when she begins to doubt the existence, and therefore the utility, of what she is imagining and writing. Even as she concludes that “il ne faut pas comparer les villes, les vivants, le fleuve à la mer,” [one should not compare cities or human beings or a river with the sea] she acknowledges: “comparer est la meilleure manière de trouver anecdote à son dire, de garder l’oeil ouvert, prêt à intervenir au milieu des récits. Comparer est la solution durable des vivants” [the best way to illustrate what one has to say, to keep one’s eye sharp and ready to intervene in a story, is by comparison. Comparison is our lasting solution in life] (ba 58, my emphasis). The solution to what? To the “double time” that unsettles her. To the dilemma of writing. To the dilemma of solitude. Comparer is a natural companion to rapprochement. In the first section of the novel, Cybil explains this to La Sixtine: “La soif constante que nous avons du récit de l’autre c’est un peu notre odorat. Sentir l’autre. Comparer. Ne jamais se sentir seule” [It’s a matter of nose partly, always wanting to know the other’s story as we do. Sniffing the other out. Comparing. Never feeling alone] (ba 28).

Thinking the Future

199

The paradox is, however, always there: one approaches the other by feeling/inhabiting one’s essential solitude and separateness. In “Un seul corps,” the writer/narrator describes her rapport with the translator: “Nous nous rapprochons, paradoxe, en nous livrant le moins possible” [We draw closer by revealing as little as possible of ourselves, a paradox] (ba 250). Similarly, writing – necessarily an act of comparison – requires solitude … and connection. The writer must, as the character Brossard says in the novel, “affronter seule l’épreuve du dire” [face the test of the telling alone] (ba 127). But this is not the whole story. As Brossard wrote in 1975: “Je ne peux pas écrire toute seule, mais moi solidaire comme en un seul corps ouvert, oui” [I cannot write entirely alone, but in this reality me in solidarity as in a single body open yes].60 As in the opening up of a single body, the “moi” goes from “solitaire” to “solidaire.”

un seul corps Il fallait tourner la langue vers le futur (ba 142) [Language must be turned toward the future]

For Brossard, the boundaries between body and language/text are fluid. In a 1975 essay, she articulated an intimate connection between desire and writing: “Si je désire une femme, si une femme me désire, c’est qu’il y a du commencement à l’écriture” [If I desire a woman, if a woman desires me, then there is the beginning of writing].61 This writing of desire is not referential or representational or theoretical for Brossard; it is, as Alice Parker puts it, “corporeal.”62 In Brossard’s writing, the “cortex” (corps/texte)63 is opened by and open to the desired and desiring body of the other woman. Writing is a place where bodies (will) come together. “Cortex” says this, but so also does “langue,” another potent word in the Brossardian lexical and conceptual universe.64 The opening scene of Baroque d’aube is emblematic of what it means in the “corps/texte” to “tourner la langue vers le futur.” But this scene of women coming together in body and in text is also contained in the “conclusions” of both Le Désert mauve and Baroque d’aube. In both novels, the possibility of turning “la langue” toward the future is inscribed in the endurance of connection and the persistence of desire. In Le Désert mauve, the translator Maude Laures gestures (in her own tongue) beyond the original catastrophic conclusion to offer a “horizon” to Mélanie’s gaze.65 In Baroque d’aube, the two women at the end (again, writer and translator)

200

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

are unable to stop “thinking future” (ba 242). Their physical and textual bodies come together in “un seul corps pour composer avec la jeune lumière du jour” [one single body to compound with the young light of day] (ba 260). In order better to understand this coming together of bodies, it is perhaps useful to consider a couple of Brossard’s principal figurations for “un seul corps ouvert.” One is the scene of lovemaking between two women. In this rapprochement marked by desire, the open body continues opening, as an imaginative leap is associated with the woman’s jouissance: Puis venait la fraction de seconde qui transformait l’iris en forme de croissant lunaire avant que le blanc du globe oculaire … fasse proliférer au fond des pensées le multiple du mot imaginaire. C’est ainsi que celle qui, l’instant d’avant, était une parfaite inconnue devenait une bien-aimée pouvant modifier le cours du temps en faveur du futur. (ba 19–20) [Then would come the split second that changed the iris into the shape of a crescent moon, before the white of the eye … proliferated multiples of the word imagery deep in her thoughts. This was how a woman who moments earlier had been a total stranger became a loved one capable of changing the course of time in favour of the future.] (translation modified)

Another, related figure is the tango, in which “il y avait la musique accordée / de nos corps / l’incontournable forme du désir” [there was the music in tune / of our bodies / the undeniable form of our desire].66 Both the love scene and the tango participate in what Parker calls “the thematics of presence in Baroque d’aube”;67 both are associated with an embodiment of and in the present. When La Sixtine comes to coil her body into Cybil’s trembling nakedness, “le présent est un corps. Le corps est vivant, pur présent” [the present is a body. The body is a pure living present] (ba 23). Listening to La Sixtine and her Fiction Tango Quartet play, Cybil feels that “tout est présent, réel, très physique. Énorme présent” [everything is present, real, very physical. Enormous present] (ba 45). Later, in “Un seul corps pour comparer,” when the writer and translator go dancing: “tango après tango, nous absorbons le présent” [tango after tango, we absorb the present] (ba 258). It is true that this “énorme présent” cannot hold off the idea of death forever. Death is there as the absence that all presence contains. Yet, in such moments, it is possible that “la vie dépasse les bornes”

Thinking the Future

201

[life goes beyond the bounds] (ba 47). When presence is experienced in the coming together of bodies, it is not the “illusion de parfait présent” [illusion of a perfect present] (ba 175) of Cybil’s first vr dive, nor the “présent du passé” [present of the past] (ba 46) that comes of La Sixtine wanting to know Cybil’s story. One enters this present, rather, as into “le vaste espace qui permet de circuler d’un siècle à l’autre” [the vast space that lets one move freely from one century to another] (ba 46). This is the space of [un] rêve si vaste qu’il est encore possible d’y naviguer librement, de s’essouffler en zigzaguant entre les personnages avec de la mémoire et du présent à souhait partout dans la bouche. (ba 47) [a dream so vast that it is still possible to navigate freely there, to get out of breath zigzagging between the characters with all you could want of memory and the present everywhere in your mouth.]

It is an open present, a present crossing its own boundaries, un présent du futur [a present of the future]. That this present is a place from which to imagine future is evident in the move from present to future tense in the closing lines of “Hôtel Rafale”: Puis, la vie dépasse les bornes, ruisselle de partout et encore. Il en sera ainsi toute la nuit. Elles circuleront dans le temps, menant de front plusieurs vies de femmes … Elles fileront à toute vitesse, voiliers ailés. Toute la nuit, elles veilleront, seront marines, euménides, amazones, madones et sirènes. Poètes dans le grand vivier de la nuit. (ba 47) [Then life over flows, streaming in every direction, and then again. It will be like this all night long. They will move freely through time, leading several woman’s lives at once … They will race at top speed, winged ships. All night they will keep watch, will be sailor-women, Eumenides, Amazons, madonnas and sirens. Poets in the great aquarium of the night.] (translation modified)

Through the night, in the rapprochements of women’s bodies, a future takes shape in which the feminine plural “elles” of Cybil and La Sixtine comes to encompass a multitude of women – indeed, it would seem, the entire history and mythology of women. The final reference to “poètes dans le grand vivier de la nuit” [poets in the great aquarium of the night] then makes clear the intimate connection between the desiring body and the writing body and the imaginative potential of this convergence.

202

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

Another important figure for “un seul corps pour comparer” [a single body for comparing] is, of course, the pairing of writer and translator (and implicitly, text and translation) at the end of the novel. Here, in a passage in which “un seul corps” becomes a refrain, the single body is at once the body of desire, the body of writing, and the body of the future: Un seul corps pour nous instruire du plaisir … Un seul corps pour trouver les mots nécessaires, pour nous obliger à répéter. Le même pour comparer. Corps de mémoire pour inventer et progresser vers le silence. (ba 219, my emphasis) [a single body for teaching us about pleasure … A single body for finding the necessary words, for obliging us to repeat them. The same for comparing. Body of memory for inventing and progressing towards silence.]

The narrator in the final section of the book is moving toward the future of writing and the writing of the future. She is moving from “je n’écris plus” [I no longer write] (ba 220) – where the present names only the lost past of writing and is therefore itself devoid of meaning or possibility – to “j’écrirai” [I will write] (ba 251). The passage to that future is by way of the present of writing. Brossard eloquently describes this present of writing in She would be the first sentence of my next novel (a text whose raison d’être, as its title indicates, is the next novel, the writing of the future): “J’écris pour faire acte de présence dans la langue. Pour que le vivant l’emporte” [I write in order to put in a token appearance in language. In order that the living may get the upper hand].68 The act of appearance is, as we have shown, an act of coming together. The approach to the moment of writing (in) the future in Baroque d’aube is thus first signalled by an intensified focus on the firstperson plural pronoun as marking a site of rapprochement: Nous nous rapprochons, paradoxe, en nous livrant le moins possible … Nous abondons physiquement dans le même sens au sujet d’un grand nombre d’idées. Nos pensées se chevauchent. Nous nous précipitons à la conquête des intentions dites intimes de l’autre. Trop de tout très vite au milieu des questions et des constellations nous rapproche. (ba 250) [We come together, paradox, by giving the least possible of ourselves … We abound physically in the same sense on the subject of a great number of ideas. Our thoughts overlap. We rush to the conquest of the so-called intimate intentions of the other. Too much of everything very quickly in the middle of questions and constellations brings us together.]

Thinking the Future

203

The passage that immediately follows this one moves through the tenses to arrive at “j’écrirai”: Nous avons pris rendez-vous … nous montons sur un bateau à aubes … la sensation de plaisir sera si forte que l’envie d’écrire me viendra … J’écrirai jusqu’à ce que je n’écris plus sombre tout naturellement dans le passé des mauvaises pensées. (ba 251, emphasis added except je n’écris plus italicized in original) [We made a date … we go on board a paddlewheel boat … the feeling of pleasure will be so strong that the desire to write will come to me … I will write until I no longer write is quite naturally swallowed up in the past of bad thoughts.]

Unlike “Le futur dark,” however, which closes with the “je” of the writer imagining a future that suggests the underlying future perfect of a work completed (“J’intitulerai l’album: La vitesse du silence” [I will call the the book: The Speed of Silence] [ba 199]), “Un seul corps pour comparer” closes with the first-person plural pronoun “nous” on the brink of the immediate future (“Sur le chemin de retour, nous nous sentons terriblement libre de plonger dans le proche avenir” [On the way back we feel terribly free to plunge into the immediate future] [ba 260]).69 The ending of Baroque d’aube in many ways resembles the conclusion of its first section, “Hôtel Rafale,” but there are significant differences: there is rapprochement between narrator and character(s) (“elles” has become “nous”); night is giving way to dawn (a “grand tatouage mauve entre la nuit et les premières lueurs d’aube” [a large mauve tattoo between the night and the first glimmers of dawn] [ba 260] takes the place of “le grand vivier de la nuit” [the great aquarium of the night] [ba 47]); and instead of the future tense, we find a present tense, but one, as we have already noted, that verges on the future. Here, the future is very clearly (in and of) the present. On the last page, the novel also inscribes a significant move from “un seul corps pour comparer” [a single body for comparing] to “un seul corps pour composer avec la jeune lumière du jour et la lueur des mots dans les yeux de la traductrice” [a single body for composing/ coming to terms with the young light of the day and the glimmer of the words in the translator’s eyes] (ba 260). The juxtaposition of the two verbs in Brossard’s text makes it impossible to read “composer avec” simply as an idiomatic expression meaning “to come to terms with.” One has “un seul corps” for composing/compounding with – with the dawn, with the words, with the other woman. The verbs “comparer” and “composer” are in many ways very close, both indicating

204

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

the act of bringing things together, but “composer” going further in its suggestion of a harmonizing movement and an act of creation. To compose is not, however, to conclude. Questions wedge their way into the ending of Baroque d’aube, keeping it open to the future.70 The final rapprochement in the novel – “rapprochement” being the last word in the text – is galvanized by the question that contains it. Posing itself on the ending’s brink, in a concerted determination to survive that ending, a final question looks beyond its own utterance to ask (as we ourselves are asking as we head together into the “espace inédit” [original space] of our shared past and future): “Qu’allonsnous chercher là dans le réflexe du rapprochement?” [What are we going to look for there in the reflex of coming together?] (ba 260). With its futur proche, this question imagines and illustrates that the present is just the beginning and that writing the present is the writing of the future. In the end, the balance is tipped toward the dawn as a consequence of the imaginative leap that Brossard associates always with writing. In “Memory: Hologram of Desire,” Brossard called writing a “voyage without end”: “Writing is what always returns to seek me out, warding off death and stupidity, fear and violence. Writing never lets me forget that if life has meaning, somewhere, it is in what we invent with our very lives, with the very aura of some words which, within us, form sequences of truth.”71 The language of this simple statement is telling: “writing never lets me forget.” In other words, writing is a way to bring together the time of memory and the time of imagination in order to make sense of both present and future. It is this synthesis of memory and imagination, of lives and language, that Parker characterizes as “mythic” in describing Brossard’s work: “Baroque d’aube has the energy of mythic dimensions, of cosmic discoveries that link what appears radically new to what we have always known.”72 When Brossard says that any meaning in our lives is located in what we invent with them, she is talking about the coming together of women in bodies and in language, emphasizing the essential connection for her between women’s lives and writing. As Parker has noted: “For Brossard everything depends on the act of writing,” and in the “spaces of possibility” opened up in the consciousness of women, “any woman has the potential to write, to create, to intervene in language.”73

5

Today and Tomorrow J’écris parce que le présent est incommensurable, habité en permanence d’aubes et de nuits, de siècles et de cultures. I write because the present is immeasurable, permanently inhabited by dawns and nights, by centuries and cultures. Nicole Brossard1

betting on the future Throughout a writing career that has spanned almost forty years, Nicole Brossard has always been “une femme du présent” [a woman of the present]2 with a “forward-looking gaze.”3 She has been witness and visionary, a voice for her time, a trailblazer and a beacon. While she has written unstintingly of the violence, fear, and destructiveness of a civilization at risk, she has just as insistently imagined horizons and dawns. At every stage, but especially since Le Désert mauve, Brossard has addressed the possibility of effecting some positive change, of finding a way to “changer le cours de l’histoire.” It is important to note, however, that for Brossard such a project necessarily involves not only a continual move forward but also a constant spiralling back. The analysis of Baroque d’aube in the last chapter touched on some of the promising complexities of a return to a past that can never be fixed because it is always part of a continually evolving present. Even as it emphasizes the workings of memory and the return to a primal scene of loss, Baroque d’aube is written under the sign of the future (dawn). And in the end the narrator imagines the present of writing as a place from which to make “sauts joyeux dans l’histoire” [joyous leaps into history]. By thus evoking the possibility of diving into the present of history, Baroque d’aube – with its

206

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

accompanying text She would be the first sentence of my next novel – situates Brossard’s writing at the juncture of yesterday with tomorrow. But if the harrowing and sometimes even tragic returns inscribed in Baroque d’aube are depicted as nevertheless enabling the idea of “joyous leaps” toward the future, in Brossard’s most recent novel the many returns are all about the idea of returning, the value of recollection, and the role of narration in response to abiding loss. In this book, as in virtually all of Brossard’s writing since Baroque d’aube, we sense a new fragility. Loss is a pervasive and haunting presence.4 After the mauve horizon and the baroque dawn of her previous works, we might have expected Brossard’s next novel to move ahead once again into the territory of a future in the process of being created. We might even have anticipated a new novel called Demain. But instead, Brossard’s latest prose text emerges under the sign and title of Hier. If Baroque d’aube inscribed the idea that writing the present is the writing of the future, Hier reminds us that our writing in the present is also always the writing of the past and that we go into the future in full possession of that past. The wager at the end of Baroque d’aube (“On mise sur le futur, jeton après jeton” [we stake our bets on the future, chip after chip] [ba 259]) left that text open to a string of final questions that resisted the ending’s apparent closure. But Hier opens with an entirely different kind of wager, with a first-person narrator who is wary of what may lie ahead and is consciously placing her stock in the past: “Comme d’autres marchent allègrement vers la folie afin de rester vivants dans un monde stérile, je m’applique à vouloir conserver” [While others walk blithely towards madness in order to remain living in a sterile world, I make a concerted effort to preserve] (h 11). Indeed, Hier is a novel constructed around precisely such an investment in the past. The pivotal locus of the novel is Quebec’s Musée de la civilisation, and the four central characters, each of them living with a legacy of loss, are all engaged in a concerted effort to preserve. Simone Lambert, haunted by the death of her lover, Alice, and by the departure and loss of her daughter, Lorraine, is the museum’s curator; Saskatchewan novelist Carla Carlson has come to Quebec to try to write the stories of loss she inherited from each of her parents; Simone’s granddaughter, Axelle Carnaval, through her scientific work in genetic engineering, seeks (albeit indirectly) to deal with the loss of her parents; and the first-person narrator, who works for Simone writing explanatory texts to accompany the museum exhibits, has been a

Today and Tomorrow

207

compulsive notetaker and journal-writer since the recent death of her mother. But this novel’s glance at yesterday does not mean it is turning its back on tomorrow. An investment in preservation may be another way of staking one’s bets on the future. Indeed, as a reading of Hier reveals, Brossard’s most recent novel – in its returns to and through loss – does preserve and carry forth her “forward-looking gaze.” Hier tells us that the text of today and tomorrow will still always contain the text of yesterday and, by the same token, that the story of yesterday will still always contain, in the telling, both today and tomorrow. Brossard’s writing is always in resonance with itself, each text arising from and woven back into the texts that went before.5 These resonances are lexical, thematic, conceptual, and emotional. Alice Parker’s remark in reference to a passage in one of Brossard’s early texts could in fact be applied to Brossard’s entire oeuvre: “Meaning emerges from the cycling back of key phrases and terms, each time located in a different context and therefore collecting new energy and affect.”6 Similarly, recurrent and interconnected scenes in Brossard’s fictions – the scene of desire, the scene of a woman dying, the scene of writing – illuminate one another as part of an encompassing and ongoing story. In attending to the resonances in Brossard’s work, we come to appreciate the organic and non-linear nature of her writing as it invites us to reread the past in light of the present and to reread the ever-unfolding present in light of the ever-changing past. Of the myriad echoes and traces of Brossard’s previous works discernible in Hier, I propose to attend to two whose resonances in the present work seem to me particularly strong: the inscription of generations of women in the 1996 prose text “Oeuvre de chair et métonymies”; and the prefiguration and anticipation of a novel to be written under the sign of “hier” in the 1984 Journal intime.

g e n e r a t i o n s o f wo m e n “Oeuvre de chair et métonymies” comprises a series of thirteen short prose pieces that Brossard composed at the time of the birth of her first grandchild in 1995.7 Although explicitly connected to this event in the dedication of the text to her daughter and granddaughter,8 Brossard’s “Oeuvre” opens with the distance and anonymity of a third-person narration that seems determined to resist the autobiographical impulse that prompted it: “Les deux femmes ne s’étaient pas vues depuis sept mois” [The two women hadn’t seen each other for seven months] (ocm 91). The first three pieces in “Oeuvre” describe the

208

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

changing relationship between “la jeune femme” [the young woman] and “la femme âgée” [the older woman] as the news of the daughter’s pregnancy leads the mother to reflect back on her own maternity and on the maternal legacy. The mother’s thoughts and emotions permeate this third-person narration and finally the mother’s voice is heard directly (although still contained within the narrative frame): “‘J’ai repris je à la vie,’ pensait la femme âgée” [“I took back I from life,” thought the older woman] (ocm 97). This recorded thought marks a realization on the part of the mother of the intimate connection between a maternal legacy lived in and through the flesh (life) and her own personal identity and voice. Thus, when the news finally comes of the granddaughter’s birth there is, not surprisingly, a shift in the narration from third-person to first-person. The naming of the child in the text (“fille Alexandra”) moves the story into autobiographical specificity, and yet it is, significantly, not the je (I) but the nous (we) that emerges, with the grandmother’s personal voice expanded and folded into the voice of a larger consciousness: Un jour à l’aube, à l’autre bout du fil, la voix de la jeune femme annonça que fille Alexandra avait vu le jour au milieu de la nuit, baignant dans le sang clair de sa mère comme tout enfant au premier instant de sa vie. L’enfant nous fait souvenir. (ocm 97–8, emphasis added) [One day at dawn, over the phone, the young woman’s voice announced that daughter Alexandra had come into the world in the middle of the night, bathing in her mother’s clear blood as does every baby in the first moments of life. The child makes us remember.]

From this point on, the third-person narrative voice opens up more and more to reveal the first-person voice that it contains.9 But this voice also continues to speak for the larger community of women. Thus, in the first lines of the central section called “Mer d’écriture,” the first-person pronoun repeatedly transcends its own textual inscription in a self-reflexive and self-questioning gesture, effectively personalizing the philosophical meditation that follows while at the same time placing the question of individual identity within the context of a broader genealogy: “J’ai repris je à la vie, qui suis-je donc?” écrivait-elle en pensant je dois comprendre d’où vient cette idée qu’“une femme avertie en vaut deux.” (ocm 101)

Today and Tomorrow

209

[“I took back I from life, who am I then?” she wrote thinking I must understand where the idea comes from that “an aware woman is as good as two women.”]

At the end of this section the narrator poses the question of intergenerational transmission: La femme avertie est-elle plus apte à transmettre sa science? Que peut-elle pour les générations de femmes à venir? L’intuition, dite féminine, suffit-elle à transformer une fille en femme avertie? (ocm 101) [Is the aware woman more capable of transmitting her knowledge? What can she do for the generations of women yet to come? Is intuition, said to be feminine, enough to transform a daughter/girl into an aware woman?]

This is a watershed moment in “Oeuvre”; these are the questions at its heart. What can mothers bequeath their daughters? What can and must daughters learn for themselves? In this moment, the grandmother’s legacy is revealed to be precisely these open questions. “Mer d’écriture” suggests that the knowledge transmitted from one generation to the next must always contain a degree of self-awareness, a recognition of the ways in which the future can never be contained or managed – or fully anticipated – by the past. A legacy is a conversation, requiring understanding in both directions. And so, in the section immediately following “Mer d’écriture,” the daughter’s voice emerges. Living in Germany, she appeals to her mother to write to her in French. She calls for her mother’s voice and her mother tongue, pleading: “Écris-moi. J’ai besoin de la langue française” (ocm 102). In this section, the daughter speaks as both daughter and mother. She describes the way language connects her to her own child and to the future: Tous les jours, enlacées, nous voyageons entre les syllabes étrangères de la langue ici et nous nous frayons un petit chemin de futur avec les mots français que je lui murmure à l’oreille. (ocm 102) [Every day, intertwined, we voyage among the foreign syllables of the language here and we clear ourselves a little path of future with the French words that I murmur in her ear.]

But she describes as well the connection she is seeking to maintain with her mother, a connection to her past that will also open up the future:

210

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

Ecris-moi. Sois ma mère encore un temps. Le temps de te lire et de comprendre la vérité que dans l’ensemble les femmes inventent comme des solutions de bonheur qui grisent l’esprit. (ocm 103) [Write me. Be my mother for a little while longer. Long enough to read you and to understand the truth that women as a whole invent like solutions of happiness that intoxicate our minds.]

It is the daughter’s call that unlocks the mother’s voice in the following section. For the first time in “Oeuvre” the mother speaks directly and at length in the first person. As if to ensure the ongoing conversation, she begins by sending back her own call to her daughter: “Dis-moi ce qui te fascine” [Tell me what fascinates you] (ocm 104). Her narration then progresses, weaving together the je and the nous, through the sections that follow. At a key moment she describes the insight that may be gained through age and experience: À vingt ans, les visages qui nous entourent n’ont d’histoire qu’au présent du regard que nous portons vers eux … Plus tard, on découvre que les visages et les corps sont matière à transformation. On devine alors que la fonction du temps est de traverser bien vivant comme un courant de chaleur et de pensée les corps doués de cette intelligence rusée dont nous apprenons à nous doter au fil des ans pour refouler élégamment l’idée de la mort comme un fin fond de lie. (ocm 107) [At twenty, the faces that surround us have no history beyond the present of the gaze we bring to them … Later we discover that faces and bodies are matter for transformation. Then we figure out that the function of time is to move – very alive like a current of warmth and thought – across the bodies endowed with that crafty intelligence that we learn to equip ourselves with over the years in order to hold elegantly in check the idea of death, like a fine sediment.]

With the lucidity of age, the mother reads history as a continuing process of transformation and a story of survival. But even as “Oeuvre” may be read as a gift of language and insight from mother (author Nicole) to daughter and granddaughter (Julie and Léa Nicole, to whom the work is dedicated), the maternal legacy embodied in this work is not one of imparted wisdom. It is rather an accompaniment, a gentle conversation, a gathering of women across the generations. Thus, the final two sections of the work complement one another and together inscribe the ongoing genealogy of mothers and daughters. The first, “Calendrier des Présences,” names the four

Today and Tomorrow

211

generations of women of Brossard’s family (her mother, herself, her daughter, and her granddaughter). Marguerite, Nicole, Julie, and Alexandra are listed with their years of birth and associated with corresponding historical and personal markers. The genealogy contained in this simple recitation is both personal and emblematic, for the personal record is also the story of the crossing of a century: “Le siècle se termine emportant quatre générations de femmes vers d’autres trouvailles qui rendront la terre minuscule et les enfants géants” [The century ends, carrying four generations of women toward other discoveries that will make the earth minuscule and the children giants] (ocm 110). In the final section, “Écris-moi encore,” the mother’s embracing vision of continuity and enormous change is, however, gently modulated by the daughter’s voice. Describing her desires and dreams, the daughter calls for a balance between wisdom and happiness. She makes a plea for the simple pleasures of being in the present. She entreats her mother once again to write to and for her.10 But she cautions: “Je sais que tu voudrais que le futur soit représenté par une fille parfaite. Le futur ne peut que nous ramener au présent du désir et de la nécessité” [I know that you would like the future to be represented by a perfect daughter. The future can only bring us back to the present of desire and necessity] (ocm 111). Even as she embraces the maternal legacy, and with it the work of metonymy (oeuvre de métonymie) that (her mother’s) writing represents, the daughter seems determined to recall her mother to the work of flesh (oeuvre de chair) that is embodied in their connection as mother and daughter. She reminds her: “La chair invisible, toujours à l’affût dans le ventre, créera de nouveaux ponts. Travail de vie et de mémoire, n’oublie pas si tu le peux, écris-moi encore” [The invisible flesh, always lying in wait in the belly, will create new bridges. Labour of life and memory, do not forget if you can, write me again] (ocm 111, emphasis added). Thus the daughter offers her mother a memory of the future. The daughter’s vision is perhaps less ambitious than the mother’s. She does not want to hear the “délires bruyants que les êtres pensant déversent dans la langue en songeant à l’éternité” [noisy ravings that thinking people pour out into language while dreaming of eternity] and she does not want to be reminded of the war and “autres contraintes universelles” [other universal constraints]. But, in calling on her mother to write (to) her again, the daughter reaches across the space and time between them to suggest that each has an important legacy to give the other. She

212

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

beseeches her mother: “Écris-moi des choses simples qui puissent m’attendrir et me donner espoir” [Write me simple things that can move me and give me hope] (ocm 111). And she challenges her: “Laisse-moi rêver, car je suis mobilisée pour le futur. Ma fille et moi sommes déjà en route. Désormais le monde nous appartient. Je l’ai décidé” [Let me dream, for I am mobilized for the future. My daughter and I are already en route. From now on the world belongs to us. I have decided this]. Brossard’s text to her daughter and granddaughter ends with her listening to the voice of the next generation. Letting that voice speak to and through her, she places her trust in the future. And the daughter’s final sentence promises her that this trust is well placed: “Nous serons solidaires des femmes des jeudis de mon enfance” [We will be in solidarity with the women of the Thursday gatherings of my childhood] (ocm 111). The “nous” of this sentence (given the signifying resonances of this pronoun throughout Brossard’s work) goes beyond its antecedent (“my daughter and I”) to represent an entire community of women as well. This sentence thus affirms the daughter’s determination to move forward in community, and in solidarity with the generations of women that went before.11 As I suggested earlier, there are perceptible intertextual resonances between “Oeuvre de chair et métonymies” and Brossard’s 2001 novel, Hier. These are to be found not only in the inscribed encounter between a grandmother and a granddaughter in the novel but also in its general preoccupation with generations of women and intergenerational legacies. In addition, I believe we may also anticipate the novel in a passage from the earlier text in which the word “hier” is the pivot around which Brossard weaves a connection between narration and survival in the most intimate terms: Oui, il faut sans doute aimer le bonheur simple pour que la vie continue. Voilà. Hier, beauté de neige lente sur Montréal. Un peu de miel sur mon pain. Grand frisson d’amour en regardant à nouveau les photos de toi et d’Alexandra. Plus tard dans la journée … j’ai sorti un vieux livre d’histoire universelle et une mappemonde. Chose simple me porte toujours ailleurs. (ocm 104–5, emphasis added) [Yes, we must no doubt love simple happiness in order for life to go on. So there it is. Yesterday, beauty of gentle snowfall on Montreal. A little honey on my bread. A big shiver of love looking again at the photos of you and Alexandra. Later in the day … I took out an old book of universal history and a map of the world. The simple thing always carries me somewhere else.]

Today and Tomorrow

213

Here, the telling of “yesterday” is a gift from mother to daughter, a simple gift of listening, of connection, and of vision. But “hier” also has a more extensive and complicated history in Brossard’s work.

archaeologies of hier Hier maman est morte, hier tout m’avale, hier Cuba coule en flammes, hier un texte qui commence ainsi. Hier, ante, hanté. Le passé me hante dans l’intimité du journal. [ji 48] [Yesterday Mama died, yesterday everything swallows me up, yesterday Cuba sinks in flames, yesterday a text that begins this way. Yesterday, before, haunted. The past haunts me in the intimacy of the journal.]

These lines from Nicole Brossard’s Journal intime (in an entry dated 19 March 1983) anticipate and prefigure the project of her novel Hier in provocative and unsettling ways.12 In the first sentence, the word “hier” threads together a series of familiar opening lines – from Albert Camus’s L’Étranger, Réjean Ducharme’s L’Avalée des avalés and Hubert Aquin’s Prochain épisode – and then completes the circle with the line “hier un texte qui commence ainsi” [yesterday a text that begins this way]. The present tense in both the Ducharme and Aquin excerpts has already temporally destabilized the adverb “hier” (as has also our memory that L’Étranger began with the word “Aujourd’hui”) but in this final line, time collapses (the text that begins yesterday is beginning this way today or, in imagination perhaps, tomorrow) and the adverb furthermore substantiates itself (flirting with nounness) while constituting itself both as less than what it signifies (hier – a simple word with which to begin a text) and more (hier – the text itself). The line “hier un texte qui commence ainsi” also links an important literary antecedent and its inaugural moment (Camus’s “Aujourd’hui maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas” – his novel being the only one of the three cited that does in fact actually literally open with the word “hier,” albeit belatedly) to a projected novel as yet unwritten in 1983.13 This first sentence of the Journal intime passage thus invites us to read “hier” in relation to its literary history, signalling an intentional and textual genealogy for Brossard’s later eponymic novel. The second sentence then places “hier” into an etymological configuration based on linguistic and thematic metonymies. This short litany – hier, ante, hanté – resembles the language of an equation (A=B=C). But it also suggests a process of

214

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

linguistic evolution, reworking the idea of “hier” as a kind of temporal pivot, a tracing of the past in the present, with the mobile – and silently stealthy – h of hier attaching itself to ante (before) in such a way that the present is hanté (haunted) by the naming of that past. What is this haunting? It is not merely that “all our yesterdays” hang around to make us aware of the way in which presence is constantly producing absence in its wake. Brossard’s litany of inaugural literary moments evokes vivid experiences of loss (Yesterday Mama died; yesterday everything swallows me up; yesterday Cuba sinks in flames).14 The word hier names both past and present; it signals loss but also memory. And “hier un texte qui commence ainsi” further reveals the word to be a sign of impending narrativity. The Journal intime entry thus suggests that “hier” will tell the story of the loss that it names. Telling is what the surviving self does. But in the following sentence of the passage – “le passé me hante dans l’intimité du journal” [the past haunts me in the intimacy of the journal] – the loss is suddenly personalized. This move complicates the idea of a narrative response, especially a literary one, even as it raises a series of questions about the relationship between the writing self and her past experience. What self is haunted by the past in the intimacy of the journal intime? What self is imagining and constructing a narrative response: “hier un texte qui commence ainsi”? What self is that narrative response in turn constructing?15 Of course, this is precisely what all of Brossard’s writing is about. That language is part of reality, not some vehicle trying more or less vainly to represent it. That the self writing is the writing self. And that this writing self is not neatly contained or containable within the categories “fictional” or “autobiographical.” As Barbara Havercroft so aptly points out in her nuanced reading of the complex heterogeneity of Brossard’s Journal intime, there is, for Brossard, no distinct barrier between a life lived and a life written: Aussi le Journal intime … opère-t-il un renversement de la perspective habituelle selon laquelle la vie précéderait le texte, pour le “remplir” par la suite: ici, le texte “remplit bien la vie.” Les énoncés autoréférentiels et métatextuels réalisent donc les procédés qu’ils décrivent, tout en signalant le rapport entre vivre et écrire.16 [Therefore the Journal intime brings about a reversal of the usual perspective according to which life would precede the text in order subsequently to “fill it in”: here, the text “nicely fills in life.” The autoreferential and metatextual

Today and Tomorrow

215

utterances thus carry out the procedures that they describe, all the while indicating the relationship between living and writing.]

Nevertheless, as the passage from the Journal intime cited above indicates, the word “hier” carries for Brossard two distinct markers, one literary (fictional) and one personal (autobiographical). It is because these distinct markers are so interrelated, however, that the “texte qui commence ainsi” cannot help but question itself on the grounds of reference. What is memory and what is construction? What is citation and what is invention? Who is author and who is character? Is yesterday merely a fiction, even just a fictional device? Or is it the point of reference that grounds all imagining and writing of the future? The many “yesterdays” of the Journal intime and the intimate “yesterday” of “Oeuvre de chair et métonymies” are all part of the past of Brossard’s Hier and are all contained within it. An archaeological dig into “hier” uncovers stories not only of loss but also of survival and hope for the future. Already in her Journal intime Brossard repeatedly traces the move from yesterday to today and tomorrow. The Journal’s final entries are punctuated by the signs of this trajectory: Note 29 Hier, je n’aurais pas dû écrire le mot cuisse … Note 30 Ce n’est pas la fin du monde quand on termine un cahier … Demain, c’est juillet l’éternité … Demain je saurai bien me replonger dans l’actualité … Demain, il s’agit d’une longue métamorphose de l’esprit et de la conscience, il s’agit des conséquences radicales d’une exigeante transition. Aujourd’hui, cela me revient qu’exister est toujours ce qui nous surprend à l’improviste. Demain ne me demandez pas ce que fut, ce que sera ma vie. Demain, il y a mon effroyable prétention à la lucidité. (ji 81–3, emphasis added) [Note 29 Yesterday, I shouldn’t have written the word thigh … Note 30 It isn’t the end of the world when one finishes a notebook. Tomorrow is July, eternity … Tomorrow I will be quite capable of diving back into actuality … Tomorrow, it’s about a long metamorphosis of the spirit and of consciousness; it’s about the radical consequences of a demanding transition. Today, I remember that existing is always what takes us by surprise. Tomorrow don’t ask me what my life was, will be. Tomorrow, there’s my appalling claim to lucidity.]

216

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

writing after loss In Hier the return to the personal voice of a journal intime – evident in a first-person narration punctuated repeatedly with the word “hier” – and that voice’s significant claim on much of the narrative space in the novel are striking. In the midst of the elaborate and shifting narrative construction so characteristic of Brossard’s novels, one is particularly moved by the urgency of the first-person narrator, who has “la certitude que pour écrire, il faut au moins une fois dans sa vie avoir été traversé par une énergie dévastatrice, presque agonique” [the conviction that in order to write, one must at least once in one’s life have been pierced by a devastating, nearly agonizing energy] (h 13). With this narrator’s repeated references to the fact that she is writing (and living on) “depuis la mort de [sa] mère” [since [her] mother’s death], Hier is marked by loss and by the ways in which past losses endure and define the present. Like Brossard’s previous narrative fictions Le Désert mauve and Baroque d’aube, her novel Hier consciously explores the transformative possibilities of women’s engagement with history and story. But it also moves conspicuously from her earlier more conceptual preoccupations with memory and the dimensions of narrativity to an urgent engagement with the vital role of both memory and narrative in responding to the preponderance and persistence of loss. The urgency of the first-person narration in Hier seems to convey the author’s growing concern with the personal reality of how loss touches each individual. In a talk that Brossard gave at suny Buffalo in October 2000, she remarked: “Do you know that last year at the same time [as my mother’s death] I was beginning a novel saying: It is through the space opened up by my mother’s silence that I look at the world, that I’ve learned that another world existed into which I could plunge, laugh at will, and survive all ordeals.”17 In Hier, the words that Brossard was “beginning her novel saying” are in fact spoken by the firstperson narrator.18 In conflating her personal bereavement and voice with the bereavement and voice inscribed into and by her fiction, Brossard makes it clear that both she and her narrator are writing after loss.19 Granted, it is important to note that the narrator’s voice is only one of the many voices in this complex and self-consciously constructed novel. Still, of the four main characters, the narrator seems in many ways to occupy a privileged position as subject of, and in, the story – this by virtue not only of her first-person narration but also of

Today and Tomorrow

217

the autobiographical underpinnings of the references to “hier” and the fact that her voice both opens and closes the novel.20 In accounting for her narrative enterprise, the narrator at first seems to suggest that her writings are her attempt not to be utterly subsumed by loss. In extracting and composing the stories of the lost past of each museum artifact, she is attempting to “entrer dans son paysage avec [sa] peine contemporaine” [enter into its world with [her] present-day grief] (h 25). This may be a way to try to control the experience of loss, but the narrator is also well aware that this writing mirrors the loss: “La peine est constante” [The grief is constant] (h 25). Narrating is necessary, but also painful and inadequate: “Il pleut depuis deux jours. Hier est un mot dont je fais mauvais usage. Depuis la mort de maman, je m’en sers contre le present” [It’s been raining for two days. Yesterday is a word I put to bad use. Since Mama’s death, I use it against the present] (h 27). Death and writing are pervasive themes in Hier. Throughout the novel, the scene of death and the scene of writing are closely related, and the central dramatic event is the staged scene of the death of Descartes performed in Carla Carlson’s hotel room. What had been Carla’s private and personal fiction (she is writing a novel into which she plans to incorporate “l’histoire inventée de la mort de Descartes” [the invented story of Descartes’s death] [h 93]) becomes a collective experience orchestrated by Carla and acted out by the four women gathered in her room. There are many superimposed layers of representation of this scene: within the narration of the chapter titled “La Chambre de Carla Carlson” the scene is further narrated, scripted, directed, acted, blocked for filming, transcribed, and glossed.21 This accumulation of attempts to represent the unrepresentable highlights the artifice of the scene itself, but also contributes to its impact as a screen for the other deaths and losses in the novel. The most significant aspect of this scene is probably the gathering together of the four women. As I have noted elsewhere, “encounters among women … seem always to be the emotional centre of Brossard’s writings. [And] the need for such connection in response to the pervasiveness of loss seems particularly acute in [her] most recent writings.”22 In Hier, the encounter and coming together of the women in the two penultimate chapters opens up a space for the final scene of writing in the last chapter. The title of the final chapter, “Chapitre cinq” [Chapter Five], marks it as a written narrative text and as the fifth chapter of a longer work, most likely a novel. But whose? Carla Carlson’s? The narrator’s?

218

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

Brossard’s? In a sense, all three. “Chapitre cinq” was after all associated with and attributed to Carla throughout the preceding sections. And it is in fact the fifth chapter of Brossard’s novel Hier. But this chapter also belongs unquestionably, and I would venture to say primarily, to the narrator, whose self-conscious voice fills it with the urgency of her desire both to narrate and to account for her narration.23 The chapter is composed of two parts: an eight-page narrative section in which the first-person narrator tells and reflects upon the end of her story, and a nine-page section entitled “quelques notes trouvées dans la chambre de l’hôtel clarendon” [a few notes found in the hotel room at the clarendon] which contains author’s notes ostensibly written and left behind by the narrator.24 Within the narrative pages is inscribed a powerful encounter between death and writing as the narrator comes to realize that in responding to her loss through constant notation she has in fact been attempting to keep from herself the reality and magnitude of that loss (“Je prenais des notes et quelqu’un mourait au milieu des notes que je prenais” [I was taking notes and someone was dying in the middle of the notes I was taking] [h 329]). Reaching the end of the writing (Chapter Five) brings her face to face with the end (death) that has been there in the writing all along. In this final self-accounting, she acknowledges and narrates the presence of that most personal loss (her mother’s death), which has haunted her and the text from the start. Her realization that “Tout ce temps, quelqu’un mourait devant moi” [All this time someone was dying in front of me] breaks through and challenges the constructedness and narrative play of the novel. At the same time, in articulating this realization (in the text of this chapter) Brossard and her narrator suggest the possibility of a different way of writing, that is, writing (after) loss as a paradoxical acceptance and refusal of its own impossibility. It is in precisely these terms, in “Chapitre cinq,” that the narrator is able to take possession of her loss. But what is perhaps most striking in the narrator’s final account of why and how she continues to write is her emphasis on writing as fundamentally about connection, community, and continuity: “Des notes encore pour revenir à l’idée d’un nous, d’une continuité au soleil” [More notes in order to come back to the idea of an us, of a continuity in the sun] (h 334). This vision recalls the generations of women and the perspective on the future in “Oeuvre de chair et métonymies.” It also evokes lines from Brossard’s Vertige de l’avant-scène that vividly articulate, in very similar terms, the mutual relationship of writing and

Today and Tomorrow

219

loss: “si c’est un livre c’est un espace pour durer relais de sens au bout de nos cendres” [if it is a book it is a space for lasting relay of meaning at the end of our ashes].25 But Hier does not end with this final accounting. The section of “found notes” that follows allows the book to outlast itself. Unattributed, unexplained, and uncontextualized, this section might appear to be an interesting but ultimately extraneous supplement to the constructed literary text, but in fact it is – by the very fact of its unfixability – an integral part. Reflecting and reflected in the novel that it accompanies, this section is both exterior to and contained within the narratives that precede it (both “Chapitre cinq” and Hier). Demanding to be read in constant return and relation to the earlier text, it thus inscribes a conclusion that has no closure. In fact, what “Quelques Notes Trouvées” offers is an overture. The last two fragments in this section point to writing’s potential to move us through memory into the future: La mémoire, on dit que c’est du silence ingouvernable. Tant mieux si l’écriture permet de détourner le cours des choses et d’irriguer là où le coeur est sec et demandant. C’est juste une petite phrase pour guérir. (h 346) [They say that memory is ungovernable silence. So much the better if writing allows us to alter the course of things and bring water to where the heart is parched and demanding. It is just one little phrase for healing.]

The possibility of “altering the course of things” is a more modest claim than the idea, expressed in Le Désert mauve, that one might “changer le cours de l’histoire/changer le cours de la mort” [change the course of history/change the course of death].26 But it also seems like a fitting answer to the daughter’s plea to her mother in “Oeuvre de chair et de métonymies”: “Écris-moi des choses simples qui puissent m’attendrir et me donner espoir” [Write me simple things that can move me and give me hope] (ocm 111). The first-person narrator in Hier who initially declared her determination to hang on to the past (“Je m’applique à vouloir conserver” [I make a concerted effort to preserve] [h 11]) at one point acknowledged making “mauvais usage” of the word “hier,” using it “against the present” (h 27). At the end of the narrative section of “Chapitre cinq” we find this narrator still writing everything down, still “making a concerted effort to preserve”: “Aujourd’hui je me tiens immobile

220

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

devant le fleuve … je note tout ce qui pourrait passer pour une histoire” [Today I stand immobile by the river … I note down everything that might pass for a story] (h 336). But her immobility and her continuing preoccupation with witnessing and documentation are no longer miscalculated. She is not using “hier” against the present any longer. She now writes in full and lucid possession of that past to which “hier” refers: “Je reste vigilante dans le seul espoir que rien de ce qui fut n’ait été inutile” [I remain vigilant in the hope only that nothing that was has been pointless] (h 336). Writing after loss, she is now poised to carry on the relay of meaning “au bout de nos cendres,” to write through the present to the possibility of a future.

in concluding In the end, Nicole Brossard’s Hier remains resolutely and expectantly open to tomorrow. The novel is thus emblematic of an archaeology of the future that means always digging deeper into the place where past and future meet. An archaeology of the future is an archaeology of presence: the past is never completely left behind but is worked into the present through memory and imagination. This archaeological approach writes (in) the present as a place from which to remember and to think ahead. Throughout her work, Brossard is unflinchingly lucid in her depiction of the threats to planetary survival that we face as a civilization. But she also always inscribes the possibility of changing the course of things – through imagination, connectedness, vision, language – and her books resist the closure of despair. So, once again, I draw my own book to a close with Nicole Brossard, as a way of undoing the finality of my own concluding and of looking ahead in good company. In 1997, in response to a series of questions posed by Peter Schulman and Mischa Zabotin as part of a project to determine what “the French intelligentsia” were thinking about the upcoming fin de siècle,27 Brossard spoke of the fact that human experience is now widely translated into images on a computer screen, “sous une forme si spectaculaire que nous lui attribuons un pouvoir mythique” [in a form so spectacular that we give it mythic power].28 This fin de siècle, notes Brossard, is indeed troubling pour qui a grandi en humaniste et pratique un art qui exècre le superficiel, la vitesse, un art qui reste profondément moral, c’est-à-dire attentive à la vie humaine dans ses petites et grandes luttes pour signifier au-delà de la reproduction.29

Today and Tomorrow

221

[for anyone raised as a humanist and practising an art that detests the superficial, the hasty, an art that remains deeply moral, that is to say attentive to human life in its smallest and greatest struggles to signify beyond mere reproduction.]

But in her reflections, Brossard at the same time reaffirms the persistence of the human experience: “Fin de siècle: une date, un anniversaire. On célèbre, un peu de nostalgie dans le regard, on prend quelques resolutions: la vie continue. On n’en est pas à un site près!”30 [Fin de siècle: a date, an anniversary. We celebrate, a little nostalgia in the gaze, we make a few resolutions: life goes on. We’re not going to let a website stop us!] There is no way of knowing how the future will turn out, says Brossard, but one will naturally continue looking both back and ahead. It is this process of trying to understand where we have come from and what we are trying to become that makes it, in her opinion, vital to keep writing: Je continue, peu importe le statut que l’on réservera à la littérature, car il y a des objets de pensée et d’émotion qui ne peuvent exister que conçus dans la langue. Produire et consommer ces objets (une phrase, un paragraphe, un chapitre, un livre, une oeuvre) me donne du plaisir. Leur existence est une source de fascination pour ce que nous ne sommes pas et tentons de devenir.31 [I go on, no matter what status they set aside for literature, for there are objects of thought and emotion that can only exist when conceived of in language. To produce and consume these objects (a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter, a book, an entire oeuvre) gives me pleasure. Their existence is a source of fascination for what we are not and what we are trying to become.]

Finally she emphasizes both what her generation has accomplished and what remains to be done: Peu de générations de femmes dans l’histoire du monde auront autant profité de la vie que la mienne, c’est-à-dire fait et dit ce qu’elles voulaient au nom de la dignité, de la creation et du plaisir. Bien sûr, fruit du hasard, il fallait naître en Amérique du nord, être blanche, être issue de la classe moyenne, rêver de changer le monde, faire d’énormes trous dans le patriarcat, et ironie du sort, faire une révolution “tranquille.” Inutile de dire que quoi que le XXIe siècle puisse nous offrir, il n’aura de sens que si nous mettons un terme à l’esclavage des femmes et de leur descendance.32 [Few generations of women in the history of the world have profited as much as mine from life, that is to say have done and said what they wanted in the name of dignity, creation, and pleasure. Of course, as a product of chance,

222

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

one had to be born in North America, be white and middle-class, dream of changing the world, make enormous holes in the patriarchy, and, through an irony of fate, wage a “quiet” revolution. Needless to say, whatever the twenty-first century may offer us, it will have no meaning unless we put a stop to the enslavement of women and their descendants.]

Ending this book with some kind of “in concluding” remarks means reading my own story to see where it has led me, noticing thematic and conceptual threads and snags, repeated and broken patterns, promising fragments and fragmented promises. In its own archaeological diggings, my project imposed a certain (necessarily artificial) order determined by the textual details I chose to extract, the questions I asked, the tools I used. Such strategic choices are important ways of finding (and making) meaning. But I hope I have also been sufficiently mindful of the dangers of too quickly and confidently filling in the blanks. In my readings and in my reflections I have tried to preserve the possibilities contained in the spaces and the silences. I have tried to attend to the ever-present losses. In the final analysis, I believe we can identify a number of recurrent themes and preoccupations in the works studied: the death of the mother as a defining loss; the interrelationship of writing and memory; the tensions between solitude and closeness; the interconnectedness of past, present, and future. Rather than proposing to put these pieces together into some kind of definitive and final account of the project’s “archaeologies of an uncertain future,” I would like to suggest that they indicate not a conclusion but a series of ongoing resonances and a suggestive network of relationships that is characteristic of this forwardlooking generation of contemporary Canadian women writers. Furthermore, as we move into our uncertain future, the words of these writers do indeed “irriguer là où le coeur est sec et demandant” [bring water to where the heart is parched and demanding], making it easier for us to believe in “un relais de sens au bout de nos cendres” [a relay of meaning/direction at the end of our ashes]. As a final note, I need to acknowledge once again that my critical venture is but a small foray into Canada’s vast and changing cultural landscape. The authors in my study address in different and provocative ways what it means to them to be living and writing now, at the beginning of a new millennium, in a world at risk. There are, however, many other women writers living and writing now in Canada

Today and Tomorrow

223

whose experiences must be very different. An archaeological study of works by immigrant women, women of different ethnicities and social class, and women of the younger generation could begin to map uncharted areas of this vast terrain. Indeed, I want to recognize that my project leaves its own traces, not only those in the text – fragments that my critical diggings brought to light (and others only halfuncovered) – but also those of the text itself. Since the present of this writing will soon become part of the past of which it writes, it eagerly extends an open invitation for future exploration.

This page intentionally left blank

Notes

p r e fac e 1 Le Pique-nique sur l’Acropole, 85. 2 See my book Incriminations: Guilty Women/Telling Stories for an analysis and exploration of this apocalyptic trend. In the final section, “Post(modern)script,” anticipating the present study, I suggest that certain feminist “postscriptings” (and in particular the work of Nicole Brossard) open up the possibility of rewriting the final death sentence. 3 Foucault’s “archaeology” is associated in particular with his writings published in the 1960s – Naissance de la clinique: une archéologie du regard médical (1963), Les Mots et les choses, une archéologie des sciences humaines (1966), and the work often considered a problematic turning point in Foucauldian theory, L’Archéologie du savoir (1969). Although a number of critics claim that Foucault subsequently abandoned “archaeology” to embrace a Nietszchean “genealogical” approach, others make a compelling argument for the fundamental interrelationship of the two paradigms within Foucault’s theory. Michael Mahon, in Foucault’s Nietzschean Genealogy, gives a good overview of the many different critical interpretations of Foucault’s move from “archaeology” to “genealogy” (101–7). Mahon’s own position, however, is that “there is a deep congruity between Foucault’s reading of Nietzschean genealogy and Foucault’s description of his own archaeology” (9). Citing Foucault’s articulation of the difference between archaeology and genealogy as “that between method and goal” (105),

226

Notes to page xvi

Mahon argues along with Arnold I. Davidson that for Foucault “genealogy does not so much displace archaeology as widen the kind of analysis to be pursued” (Davidson 227 cited in Mahon 211). Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner likewise argue that both approaches “re-examine the social field from a micrological standpoint that enables one to identify discursive discontinuity and dispersion instead of continuity and identity” (46). Such readings of Foucault insist upon the fact that his archaeological approach already incorporated an awareness of what would become his major genealogical concerns with relations of power and ethics. And indeed, Foucault’s “archaeology,” read in this light, might be considered a relevant antecedent for the application of the concept in the present study. 4 Hodder describes the role of interpretation in archaeology as both textual and narrative. He notes not only that “the site becomes the text” (The Archaeological Process 31) but also that it inevitably leads to the production of other texts. Digging and writing and reading are all intimately related: “Archaeologists dig, certainly. But increasingly they write, draw, or record as they dig. The process of digging is surrounded by paper, drawings, clipboards, pens and pencils, graph paper, tapes, masking tape, cameras, total stations, etc. … The processes of writing and encoding determine the way we see what we excavate” (Towards reflexive method, 16). Furthermore, Hodder adds, archaeological writing necessarily takes narrative form: “Narratives are a routine, if largely unrecognized, aspect of archaeological inquiry … Having stories or narratives in mind helps participants on a field project put their parts into a whole. Having stories in mind also leads us to raise questions. It is an essential part of the archaeological process … How we dig depends on the stories we are telling ourselves at the time of digging” (The Archaeological Process, 53, 55, emphasis added). 5 Hodder writes: “A methodology is needed which incorporates fluidity in the relationship between object, context and interpretation. This fluidity is a necessary and integral part of archaeological work, especially in the excavation process. It is necessary to foreground interpretation here since interpretation determines excavation and sampling strategies” (The Archaeological Process, 92–3). 6 In Reading the Past, Hodder describes “a post-processual phase in archaeological theory [that] involve[s] the breaking down of dichotomies, set up within archaeology, between individual and norm, structure and process, ideal and material [as well as, increasingly] between subject and object” (156). It is also worth noting that, in calling for reflexivity, relationality, interactivity, and multivocality within current archaeological methodologies, Hodder challenges established approaches within the field in much the same way that

Notes to pages xvi-xvii

7

8 9

10 11

227

various postmodern critiques have reconfigured other disciplines. See The Archaeological Process, 193–200. It is interesting to note that after Ouellette-Michalska’s use of the term in 1981 and Bersianik’s in 1984, the phrase “archaeology of the future” appeared in the title (“Towards an Archeology of the Future”) of one of the sections in Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1985 multimedia science fiction novel, Always Coming Home. Bersianik’s references to “une mémoire du futur” (in her 1985 essay “L’espace encombré de la signature,” La Main tranchante, 31) likewise echo contemporaneous references to “a memory of the future,” perhaps most notably Carlos Fuentes’s celebrated exhortation to “remember the future; imagine the past” in his essay “Remember the Future” in the 1985–1986 issue of Salmagundi. Most recently (October 2005), Fredric Jameson published a book called Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. While it is likely that his title was inspired by the title of Le Guin’s 1985 science fiction essay, the synchronicity of his title and mine (the present volume had already been accepted for publication when his came out) also suggests that the concept is currently resonant in the collective imagination. La Main tranchante, 243. Ian Hodder would appreciate Bersianik’s and Ouellette-Michalska’s feminist projects. In Reading the Past, Hodder welcomes the increasing diversity in the field of archaeology, citing three “alternative” perspectives that are productively challenging established approaches: indigenous archaeologies, feminist archaeologies, and working-class archaeologies (167–74). It is certainly the case that questions of how women’s experiences and perspectives may change the archaeological project have been raised more and more frequently within the field. In their article “The Legacy of Eve,” archaeologists Sîan Jones and Sharon Pay, for instance, clearly articulate the importance of taking gender into account: “To examine women’s past experience, theories and methodologies must be developped that incorporate the world as seen through women’s eyes, rather than classifying their views as subjective and contrasting them with objective knowledge” (163–4). Noting that “in view of women’s lack of status, prestige, and control in archaeological work, it is not surprising that gender issues and the archaeology of women have received such superficial attention” (164), Jones and Pay call for a continuing feminist critique in archaeology, arguing that “women have produced their own symbolic codes, often in opposition to the dominant male symbols” and that “women continue to invest material culture with their own symbolic meanings, but these meanings are often lost through non-recognition” (166–7). L’Échappée, 7–8. La Main tranchante, 25.

228

Notes to pages xviii–4

12 The critical literature on Quebec women writers, in both French and English, is abundant but there are only a handful of book-length, single-author studies that treat Quebec and English Canadian women writers together in any depth. These include Bayard, The New Poetics in Canada and Quebec; Howells, Private and Fictional Words; Carrière, Writing in the Feminine in French and English Canada: A Question of Ethics; and Knutson, Narrative in the Feminine: Daphne Marlatt and Nicole Brossard. 13 As Marie Carrière so aptly points out in her study of “writing in the feminine” in French and English Canada, “the all too limiting and factitious binary oppositions” were applied far less rigidly within certain literary movements: “established models of irreconcilable differences have not signified as much for some feminist writers in Canada” (14). In her introduction, Carrière gives a perceptive and detailed history of the collaborative relationships between English Canadian and Quebec feminist writers over the last twenty-five years. She also suggests that the scope and implications of some of these relationships (and she is referring in particular to “the movement of writing in the feminine”) now need to be given “serious consideration” (16). Her book offers an excellent example of the kind of synthesizing analytical approach that seems to be called for. 14 The single exception is Fugitive Pieces, which was published when Anne Michaels was thirty-nine.

introduction 1 mt 133. 2 La Lettre aérienne, 84. The essay “Synchronie,” from which the citation is taken, was written in 1982 and published as part of a feature in Le devoir called “Écrire en l’an 2000” [Writing in the Year 2000]. English versions are taken from Marlene Wildeman’s published translation, The Aerial Letter. Any modifications to the published English translation will be so indicated in my text. 3 Schwartz, xiv. 4 Ibid., xx. 5 Ibid., xvi–xvii. 6 Ibid., xiv. 7 Ibid. Obviously the millennial mindset is based upon the Christian calendar, and Frank Kermode has noted that “to attach grave importance to centuries and millennia you have to belong to a culture that accepts the Christian calendar as definitive, despite its incompatibility with other perfectly serviceable calendars” (251). But Schwartz makes the point that the Anno Domini

Notes to pages 4–5

8 9 10

11

12

13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20

229

calendar is “used worldwide for commerce, diplomacy, and scientific exchange” (xiv). This helps to explain why the anxiety surrounding y2k took on international proportions. Kermode, 251. Ibid. Said, 264. Said describes two different ways of approaching the end. On the one hand, there is the Swift and Beckett model where “at the end there is, properly speaking, nothing but the end” (265). On the other hand, some modern writers “differ from Swift and Beckett in that their sense of an ending is mitigated by some glimmer of redemption” (266). Said is particularly interested in the case of Adorno. He describes the lateness of Adorno as “includ[ing] the idea of surviving beyond what is acceptable and normal,” that is, “being at the end, fully conscious, full of memory, and also very (even preternaturally) aware of the present” (272). Adorno is a “scandalous, even catastrophic commentator on the present” (273). Citing Henri Focillon’s idea of “centurial mysticism,” Kermode remarks that “people (in our calendar tradition) project their fears and apprehensions on to centurial or millennial dates, thus making of these dates ‘a perpetual calendar of human anxiety.’” But, as Kermode goes on to stipulate, “they may also be a perpetual calendar of human hopes” (252). George Orwell had already marked 1984 in the collective consciousness in the West as a significant turning (if not ending) point. Certainly the apocalyptic vision made its way into a lot of science fiction toward the end of the twentieth century. In addition, the 1980s and early 1990s saw a number of critical and theoretical publications addressing the impending millennial ending. These include Zamora, ed., The Apocalyptic Vision in America (1982); Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now” (1984); Friedländer et al., eds., Visions of Apocalypse (1985); Schwartz, Century’s End (1990); and Bull, ed., Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World (1995, based on the 1993 Wolfson College Lecture Series). Keller, xiii. Zamora, 2. Zamora cites the etymological origin of the word “apocalyse” from the Greek apokalupsis meaning “to uncover or reveal.” Keller reads it as “to unveil” (1). Ibid., 3. Ibid., 3–4. Ibid., 4. Quinby, Millennial Seduction, 3. Keller, 8. Ibid., 11.

230 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

Notes to pages 6–9

Kumar, 205. Ibid., 207, 212. Derrida, “No Apocalypse,” 21. For more on the “apocalyptic tone” see Derrida’s “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy.” “No Apocalypse,” 21. Norris points out that while Derrida may seem, in this article, to be engaged in “a species of ‘irresponsible’ word-spinning in the face of terminal catastrophe” (241), he is in fact fully cognizant of the very real danger of the referent. Norris remarks that for Derrida, “to think the possibility of nuclear war – a very real and present possibility – is to think beyond the limits of reason itself” (245). Norris then argues that Derrida’s “point in thus raising the apocalyptic stakes is not to endorse a rhetoric of crisis” but rather to try to find “a means to comprehend that rhetoric, to take full account of its ‘performative’ aspect, before it achieves the referential status of a discourse whose final guarantee would be catastrophe itself” (247). “No Apocalypse,” 21, 28. Ibid., 21. Said, 267. Ibid., 273. Quinby, Anti-Apocalypse, 36, xxii, xxv. Quinby, Millennial Seduction, 10. Keller, 15. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 19. See Huffer for a detailed analysis and discussion of “feminist futures.” La Main tranchante, 267. Ibid., 266. Ibid., 267. Ibid., 17, 238–80. Ibid., 243. Ibid., 279. See Lyotard’s definition of postmodernism as “incredulity toward metanarratives” (The Postmodern Condition, xxiv). Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, 108. Ibid. See Habermas. Important names to mention in this regard include Nicholson, Benhabib, Butler, Bordo, Flax, and Cornell. Nicholson, 19. Ibid.

Notes to pages 9–13 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

68 69 70

71

231

Ibid., 20. Ibid., 34. Ibid. Benhabib, Situating the Self, 2. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 213. Ibid. Ibid., 229. Ibid., 214. Ibid., 229. Ibid., 230. Ibid. Wiegman, 15. It is interesting to note that Martindale also uses the neologism “excessibility” but in a more negative way (Martindale, 1–5). Martindale, see especially 11–12. Huffer, 139. Ibid., 131. Ibid. Once again my project finds common ground with Huffer’s. In her “Introduction,” Huffer describes the focus of her analysis: “to put it simply, this work has to do with meaning-making: the way we make sense of the world” (8). Meaning-making is not only a concern for the authors I consider in this book; it is my concern as well as we/I endeavour to dig into meaning in order to uncover what matters. isag 31. Atwood clarified this idea: “It is not the individual authors who are now fifty … I think it is the culture” (isag 26). Hébert, Kamouraska, 6 and jsm 62 (“Afterword”). Atwood also notes that although many of the poems were undoubtedly “suggested by Mrs Moodie’s books … they have detached themselves from the books in the same way that other poems detach themselves from the events that gave rise to them” (jsm 63). This period saw the publication of such works as Louky Bersianik’s ambitious rewriting of the Western humanist tradition in L’Euguélionne and Le Pique-nique sur l’Acropole; Antonine Maillet’s Pélagie-la-charrette (1979); Susan Swan’s The Biggest Modern Woman of the World (1983); and Heather Robertson’s Willie: A Romance (1983). Karen Gould’s seminal essay on historiographic fiction by Quebec women writers, “Québec Feminists Look Back,” also appeared in 1983. In addition, women’s (re)writings of history

232

72 73 74

75 76 77 78 79 80

81 82

83

Notes to pages 13–20

frequently intersected with autobiographical or semi-autobiographical projects, such as in Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed (1973), Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981), and the autobiographical writings of Jovette Marchessault. Vautier, in her chapter on Marchessault and Kogawa, offers an incisive reading of these authors’ autobiographical and/or historiographic fictions with a focus on “the narratorial promotion of women’s worldviews and the retellings of political history in the feminine” (157). Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 110. Hébert, Les Fous de Bassan, 17. The many insightful analyses of this emblematic scene include Smart’s reading of how the “bliss, madness, and overflowing” of the women’s mural reveal “the repressed truth of the murder” in order to subvert the Pastor’s version of history (205) and Gould’s insistence on how “the disruptive murals of Pat and Pam overwhelm and contest the closed, chronological orderliness of the pastor’s conventional exposition of male power” (“Absence and Meaning,” 924). Hébert, Les Fous de Bassan, 16. Neuville, 34. Neuville credits Ouellette-Michalska with the term “mémoire corporelle” (Neuville, 44, note 22). Ibid., 35. Ibid., 38. ah 111. It is interesting that the historian gives the narrator both a copy of his essay on the Trestler family and “le neuvième tome de son journal intime” [the ninth volume of his personal diary]. The coupling of academic essay and personal memoir might be seen to challenge the expected dichotomy between objective male historian and subjective female novelist. But, the reference to the “neuvième tome” of the historian’s “journal intime” adds an ironic twist: see what a simple diary becomes in the hands of the historian! ah 26 The Clio Collective, Quebec Women, 2, translation modified. A recognition of the constructed nature of all histories and of the pervasive biases of institutionalized history led to an embrace of “herstory” within the women’s movement in the United States and Canada in the 1970s and 1980s. Proponents of more inclusive historiographies strove to correct the systematic erasures and silencings of established histories. In keeping with this trend, historians like Natalie Davis set about questioning the rigid border between documentation and interpretation. At a time when novelists were more and more frequently inscribing archives in their fictions, historians were finding and appreciating “fiction in the archives.” Ibid., 11.

Notes to pages 20–3

233

84 Ibid. 85 Annie notes that the explanation for the holes in Mrs Richards’s account is “part of what is missing, like her first name, like her past that has dropped away” (ah 30). It is worth noting, however, that even what is there, in Annie’s narrative, is unstable and uncertain. The passages attributed to Mrs Richards’s journals, although presented within quotation marks, sometimes appear to be Annie’s inventions. For instance, she imagines how Mrs Richards would have looked in a photograph that was never taken: “she would be caught with a tiny frown between her eyes, lower lip dented by an apprehensive finger, pen idle before her, thinking: ‘My keenest pleasure is to walk in the woods’” (ah 31). The quoted passage that follows, framed by the narrator’s imaginings, raises the question of its own origin. Furthermore, even though she purports to be quoting fragments of a journal found in the city archives, the narrator mentions that the journal’s authenticity has been called into question and that it has been suggested that it might be a fiction “contrived later by a daughter who imagined (how ahistoric) her way into the unspoken world of her mother’s girlhood” (ah 30). But there are no records of there having been a daughter. 86 The text of Marlatt’s novel repeatedly authorizes a deconstruction of the title. We may read Ana Historic as the negated woman (“na”) embedded in a negated history (a-historic). But this negated history is – by way of the Annie/ Ana/Ina constellation – also the untold (untellable?) story of the first-person narrator and of her foremothers. See, for instance, the following passages: I-na, I-no-longer, I can’t turn you into a story. (ah 11) Ana/Ina whose story is this? (the difference of a single letter) (the sharing of a not) (ah 67) the a-historic hasn’t a speaking part. (ah 139) Yet the text also tells us that the title inscribes a subject of and in conversation: a-historic she who is you or me

234

Notes to pages 24–5

‘I’ address this to (ah 129) Ana is not a hollow palindrome encircling lack but a new beginning whichever way you look at her: Ana that’s her name: back, backward, reversed again, anew (ah 43) It is also interesting to note that in the childbirth scene in the novel, attended by Ana and narrated by Annie, the woman giving birth is named Jeannie, a name that contains “Annie.” 87 Note the neologism “hystery” that in Marlatt’s text inscribes the systematic “excision of women” (ah 88). The word deftly connects the erasure of women from history with the violence of hysterectomy as a corrective for “faulty” physiology and with the brutality of shock therapy as a treatment for women’s “mental illnesses” (for which history’s code word has been “hysteria”). “Hystery” resonates with the descriptions in the text of these operations: “the excision of wombs and ovaries by repression, by mechanical compression, by ice, by the knife. because we were ‘wrong’ from the start” (ah 88); “they erased whole parts of you, shocked them out, overloaded the circuits so you couldn’t bear to remember … you couldn’t put those phantom limbs together into a shape by which you recognized yourself. that shape walking through time towards you. obliterated in a neural explosion” (ah 149). 88 Thus we read in Marlatt’s novel: “whose truth, Ina? the truth is (your truth, my truth, if you would admit it) incest is always present” (ah 56). Patricia Smart has noted “anarchic, apocalyptic violence” inscribed into much of the literature of the revolutionary period in Quebec in the 1960s and 1970s (Writing, 188). What she finds particularly “troubling” is that “in almost all the novels written by men, it is a woman who is victim of the violence” (ibid., 189). Smart sees this violence against women as a reaction against the “mythical mother fantasized as overwhelming and ‘castrating’ by the patriarchal mind” (Ibid., 190). She further refers to a “cultural text” that predicates male power and agency on the domination of the (female) other: “as if ‘his story’ were unimaginable in any other terms than as an annihilation of ‘her story’” (Ibid., 211). 89 Rich, 152, 158–9.

Notes to pages 25–8

235

90 Of course, the interpretation of the maternal role was, and continues to be, problematic within feminist theories. We can trace the struggle from Beauvoir’s and others’ refusal to allow women to be defined exclusively by their procreative potential all the way to Huffer’s seminal reading of the dangerously nostalgic tendencies she finds in feminist formulations like those of Cixous and Kristeva that “celebrate a decidedly maternal body” (Huffer, 23). 91 As in the scenes of childbirth, the scene of awakening desire between Catherine and Éléazar is one that the narrator gradually enters and shares with her female protagonist. The narration moves almost seamlessly from “[Catherine] consent à le voir caresser et mordiller ses seins. Une bonne chaleur remplit son ventre” [Catherine agrees to let him caress and nibble at her breasts. A lovely warmth fills her belly] to “À mon tour, je me dévêts … Je ferme les yeux. Un peu de chaleur me vient. J’attends l’homme qui me délivrera de mes seize ans. Le souffle d’Éléazar se répand sur mes joues” [I, in turn, undress … I close my eyes. I feel a little warmth. I await the man who will deliver me from my sixteen years. Eleazar’s breath spreads over my cheeks] (mt 169). 92 Happiness, joy, and pleasure all figure in Catherine’s description of the feelings that her father’s law is seeking to suppress: “je possède quelque droit au bonheur” [I have some right to happiness]; “la fille de joie habite sous votre toit” [the joy girl/loose woman is living under your roof]; “Que m’importent, après tout, les doléances du père et son mépris du plaisir” [After all, what do I care about my father’s complaints and his scorn for pleasure] (mt 173, 175). 93 Within the history of homosexuality as “the love that dare not speak its name,” lesbian desire is perhaps doubly occulted inasmuch as women were already a blank page in the heterosexual story of desire. Referring to lesbian desire as “the preeminent and most unambiguous exemplar of women’s desires,” Elizabeth Grosz describes the obstacles to conceiving of lesbian desire within an “ontology of lack”: “I am asking how it is that a notion like desire, which has been almost exclusively understood in male (and commonly heterocentric) terms, can be transformed so that it is capable of accommodating the very category on whose exclusion it has previously been based. Desire has up to now functioned only through the surreptitious exclusion of women (and hence lesbians)” (Grosz, 70). 94 Woolf, 82. 95 The articles by Zimmerman (1981) and Farwell (1988) in Wolfe and Penelope’s 1993 anthology Sexual Practice, Textual Theory offer useful overviews of the evolution of lesbian feminist theory and criticism in the 1970s and 1980s. Over the course of the last twenty-five years, feminist theorists have continued to

236

96 97

98

99

Notes to pages 29–35

grapple with the implications and challenges of theorizing lesbian desire. Influential thinkers and writers worth noting include Luce Irigaray, Diana Fuss, Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, Alice Parker, Nicole Brossard, and Lynn Huffer. A number of important essay collections also explore the domain and begin to map the complexities of contemporary “lesbian theory.” See, for example, Munt, Wolfe and Penelope, and Doan. Santoro, Mothers, 177. There are strong intertextual resonances between Zoe’s description of women giving birth to one another and Nicole Brossard’s description of the lesbian as “une femme qui précède les femmes dans l’existence des femmes” [a woman who precedes women in women’s existence] (La Lettre aérienne, 108). Zoe might be considered the inscription of Nicole Brossard’s lesbian in Daphne Marlatt’s novel. This scene recalls the “scène blanche” [white scene] of women’s desire and pleasure in Nicole Brossard’s work. See chapter 4 for my discussion of how this scene in Picture Theory is rewritten in Baroque d’aube. Williams, 252.

chapter one 1 Stamelman, 29. 2 Alice Parker notes that “the grieving that followed Brossard’s unexpected loss of her father a year before her fortieth birthday [was] translated in Domaine d’écriture (1985) by [this] opening line” (Liminal Visions, 141). 3 The common association in French between the homonyms “mer” and “mère” is certainly operative in this text. 4 Duras’s question reappears in Gagnon’s text when she is writing about her father’s dying. Comparing his reactions to those of “l’animal en colère” [an animal in fury], Gagnon describes how “il peut hurler, frapper ou mordre s’il se sent agressé” [he can yell, hit, or bite if he feels attacked]. And of this profoundly visceral reaction to the indignities of dying, she remarks once again with Duras: “Que feriez-vous d’autre, vous?”(ds 142). 5 Archer, 35. 6 Stamelman, 3–4. His chapter, “The Representation of Loss,” offers a nuanced discussion of the relationship between language and loss. His references in particular to Paul de Man’s contention that literature is the persistent naming of loss are relevant to my own discussion. 7 Ibid., 5. 8 Ibid., 13. 9 Ibid.

Notes to pages 35–8

237

10 Ibid., 11. 11 Ibid., 49. Stamelman quotes Lacan: “The work of mourning is accomplished at the level of the logos … It is first of all performed to satisfy the disorder that is produced by the inadequacy of signifying elements to cope with the hole that has been created in existence, for it is the system of signifiers in their totality which is impeached by the least instance of mourning” (Lacan, 38 in Stamelman, 50). 12 In her essay “Writing and/in Mourning,” Miléna Santoro argues convincingly that Gagnon’s “inaugural experiences of loss” are closely associated with her own initial “coming to writing” (56–7). Santoro points out the close relationship in Gagnon’s thought between “la pulsion de Mort” and “la pulsion de Vie” and she further notes that even as “language is based on loss (the absent referent), … it provides a way to mediate that loss by enabling the writing subject to find a voice, and thus the promise of endurance” (55). 13 As Stamelman puts it: “Writing is an act of survivorship; it is what the survivor does in order to keep on going, to understand what has happened in his or her life, to give form, shape, and sound to the pain of losing” (19). 14 See ds 12, 126, 127. 15 Other autobiographical books written in response to the death of mother include Furman’s Ordinary Paradise, Rubin’s Tangled Lives, and Miller’s Bequest and Betrayal. 16 Why “semiautobiographically”? Some of these texts are generically more slippery than others when it comes to the refusal of transparently autobiographical reference. The texts of Amyot and Daviau both flirt with fiction and poetry. 17 Davidman, 166–7, and Dupré, “Racines poétiques,” 126. Social scientists have written about the correlation between degrees of attachment and intensity of grief and have compared grieving patterns to show that the highest levels of grief occur when parents lose children, then comes the death of spouses and finally adult children losing parents. This may be true – nevertheless, whether the grief of losing a mother is as “traumatic” or not, I would contend that it is often singularly profound in not totally understood ways. The idea that the grief corresponds to the intensity of the relationship may help us to understand why women in particular often feel the loss of the mother so profoundly. 18 Dupré, ibid., 123–4. Dupré associates the maternal roots of Amyot’s poetic language with “l’univers maternel dont parle Julia Kristeva, maternel d’un chant qui permet à la narratrice de survivre en dotant la langue d’une musique de la voix” [the maternal universe that Kristeva talks about, the maternal of a song that lets the narrator survive by endowing language with the music of the voice] (ibid., 124).

238

Notes to pages 39–41

19 Much has been written on the melancholic structure of motherloss as defined by Freud. In attempting to account for the missing mothers in Victorian fiction, Dever notes that in “Mourning and Melancholia” Freud “explicitly links the pathology of melancholia with the normative developmental phase of orality, and through this connection, situates the mother at the epicenter of both” (4). 20 In his analysis of Roland Barthes’s La Chambre claire, Stamelman writes that the “primal, originary other is the mother … She is the first being to teach the infant the painful but necessary truth of separation … But loss of maternal closeness also opens up a space of creativity, imagination, and fantasy” (260). 21 Hirsch and Rich both address the singular complexities of the relationship between daughter and mother, a relationship that Vozenilek describes as one of the most charged, complex, and crucial relationships women will ever have (8). Vozenilek notes that while “[s]ome women may begin exploring this dynamic while their mother is alive, for others, a deeper search and scrutiny takes place after her death” (ibid.). In an article published in 1997, Ireland comments that in recent years “feminists on both sides of the Atlantic have begun to examine the social, cultural, and psychological forces that have shaped the institution of motherhood” (35). Gould had identified this trend in Quebec writing in an important 1992 article: “[Quebec women of the ‘80s and ‘90s] are challenging traditional perspectives on mothers and mothering” (“Refiguring the Mother,” 113–14, cited in Ireland, 35). We see continuing evidence of this critical attention in the number of essays about mother-daughter relationships included in Dufault’s recently published anthology Women by Women. See Ireland for reference. 22 The experience of pregnancy establishes one physical relationship, but on a different, more molecular level, one also encounters the perceived “physical” connection implicit in the genetic link. Warland acknowledges this: “When parents die – abandon blood vessel – they still circulate within our thousands of miles of arteries and veins” (br 169). 23 Miller, 68. 24 Ibid., 59. 25 Miller, xiii. 26 Miller writes: “The death of parents – dreaded or wished for – is a trauma that causes an invisible tear in our self-identity” (ibid., x). 27 Ibid., 57. Miller appropriately evokes the work of Adrienne Rich, who wrote that the bond “between mother and daughter – essential, distorted, misused – is the great unwritten story.” She also refers to Jessica Benjamin’s article “The Omnipotent Mother,” noting: “When daughters write in the wake of a mother’s death, their books portray the double task of separation – the

Notes to pages 42–6

28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37

38

39 40

41 42

239

inevitable tension, as Benjamin puts it, between ‘struggle for independence’ and ‘confrontation with difference’” (ibid.). “Literature and the Right to Death,” 22, 41, 42. As Stamelman puts it, “Language is a condition of mediation designating the frailty of our relationship with the world and naming the loss that undermines all being” (6). Blanchot, ibid., 42–3. Ibid., 55. Stamelman, 34. Blanchot, ibid., 55. Stamelman, 36. We can easily understand why Blanchot repeatedly cites Hegel’s formulation that “language is the life that endures death and maintains itself in it.” Mueller, 198. Comte-Sponville describes this threshold as follows: “autant le deuil est du côté de la mort, comme événement, autant il est du côté de la vie, comme processus” [just as grieving is on the side of death as an event, so is it on the side of life as a process] (20). In her reading of the essential interconnection between life and death drives affirmed in Gagnon’s work, Santoro cites a line from Gagnon’s Les Cathédrales sauvages (“la pulsion de Mort se tisse avec celle de la Vie” [the Death drive is interwoven with that of Life]), noting that it illustrates “the psychoanalytic terms that continue to inform Gagnon’s thought” (“Writing and/in Mourning,” 55). Passages from Hélène Cixous’s Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing are woven into Warland’s reflections in Bloodroot. Similarly, Miller’s Bequest and Betrayal weaves together her own memoir/grief writings with readings of and reflections on the writings of others, including perceptive and penetrating readings of Beauvoir’s memoirs, Annie Ernaux’s books, Carolyn Steedman’s memoirs, and others. Blanchot notes that poets gather “on that slope. Why? Because they are interested in the reality of language, because they are not interested in the world, but in what things and beings would be if there were no world; [and] if this is what poetry is like … we will also know that no work which allows itself to slip down this slope towards the chasm can be called a work of prose” (Literature and the Right to Death, 51–2). The “oeillet de poète” has special significance in French as the flower of poets. These are “words of life” because that is what language is, but also because Gagnon’s use of the second-person adjective “ta” [your] forcefully realizes Duras’s existence in her text. Bertman, 160. Elsaesser refers to this as “mourning work” (242).

240

Notes to pages 46–52

43 Miller notes that “Writing about the dead is always both an end to the relation and the possibility of a new beginning”(157). 44 The address to the deceased in both Le Vent majeur and Je t’écrirai encore demain is in the form of letters. The epistolary form seems singularly appropriate for this gesture, since it necessarily contains both spatial and temporal distance and depends upon a faith in the existence of the absent other, capable of receiving the message. 45 “Racines poétiques,” 120, 123. 46 Amyot’s text includes not only rhetorical questions whose function is to inscribe a questioning that supposes an addressee but also genuine questions for which, in her writing, she is truly seeking answers. See for instance the series of questions on pages 70–4 as well as other key moments in the text, including: “Qu’as-tu connu au juste de l’amour?” [What did you really know of love?] (103); and “Trouves-tu quelque lumière au moins dans tes partances?” [Do you at least find some light in your departures?] (23). 47 One notes also, with Dupré, the performative aspect of the repetition of locutionary remarks, the litany of “je te dis”; “Je vais te dire”; “je te le répète”; but also the juxtaposition of these with the repeated refrain “J’aurais tant aimé/ voulu te dire,” which again shows the hesitation between the confident gesture and the realization of its inadequacy. 48 In general, the repeated use of the past conditional implicitly expresses this regret: “Tu aurais fait ton possible pour me rassurer” [You would have done everything you could to reassure me] (jte 24); “Tu aurais été d’accord” [You would have agreed] (jte 39); “Tu aurais parfaitement compris” [You would have totally understood] (jte 7). Note that there are also many instances of the use of the present conditional to a very different effect: these hypothetical utterances rather inscribe the possibility of a continuing relationship. 49 “Racines poétiques,” 120. 50 Of course, from another perspective all grief writing might be considered some variation of this “true lie,” for the writing of one’s grief generally seeks in one way or another to inscribe some triumph over the loss that prompted it. 51 “Writing and/in Mourning,” 73–4. 52 Similarly, Davidman focuses on the “biographical disruption” that comes with the loss of the mother and the “narrative construction of identity” that accompanies the telling of stories of motherloss (43). 53 The relationship between narrator and addressee in Amyot’s text is never clearly defined and I believe that this resistance to identification is intentional. Dupré reads the “tu” as the narrator’s brother (based on some suggestive textual evidence). My own reading finds this attribution problematic and I have chosen to refer to this male “other” simply as “friend.”

Notes to pages 52–6

241

54 Similarly, even as Mueller makes a clear distinction between nature and language, stressing nature’s indifference to her pain, she repeatedly evokes nature in the writing of her grief and in the language of poetry: “I sat on a gray stone bench / in a lovingly planted garden, / but the day lilies were as deaf / as the ears of drunken sleepers / and the roses curved inward” (198). The natural world around her cannot touch her grief, but her writing of it can. 55 In addition to references to dates, these authors focus on certain natural and seasonal measures as well – for instance, the maple tree repeatedly evoked in Le Vent majeur and all of the garden references in Je t’écrirai encore demain. 56 Likewise, in “La vie est une étoile” Gagnon’s writing to and for her mother is inscribed over the course of the days and weeks between the 14th of May and the 19th of June. And in Le Vent majeur, Joseph’s writings trace the course of ten years. 57 Charmaz as cited in Davidman, 282–3. 58 Davidman, 39. 59 Bertman, 160. 60 Glen W. Davidson, [Against Drunk Driving] The Grieving Process Booklet, as cited by Evelyn Clark in “Crisis Management / Coping with Trauma.” 61 Another commonly used paradigm lists four stages: shock and numbness, searching and yearning, disorientation and reorganization. 62 Yhuel, 89. 63 “Racines poétiques,” 119. 64 Davidman, 256, 234. 65 Czechowski, 11. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid., emphasis added. 68 It is interesting to note that Freud was well aware of the natural persistence of inconsolability, as evident in a letter he wrote to a friend: “Although we know that after … a loss the acute state of mourning will subside, we also know we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute” (Freud cited in Stamelman, xii). 69 Czechowski, 11, emphasis added. 70 The connection between moving on/surviving and memory is also evident in Dupré’s description of the resolution of Amyot’s grieving process: “retrouvant à la fin du recueil la ‘vivacité’ de son frère par l’écriture, la narratrice peut guérir, installer le disparu dans une mémoire apaisée, comme si les signes pouvaient redonner vie à l’autre” [rediscovering at the end of the volume her brother’s “vivacity” through writing, the narrator can heal, install the departed one in a comforted place of memory, as if the signs could give back life to the other] (“Racines poétiques” 120, emphasis added). Here writing and

242

Notes to pages 58–9

memory both play key roles in the “healing” process. Similarly, in Dupré’s novel La Memoria, her protagonist Emma works through her grief in much the same way, expressing her desire: “Guérir, oui, mais ne rien oublier” [Get better, yes, but forget nothing] (m 165).

chapter two 1 Michaels, “What the Light Teaches,” 113; Lowenthal, 197. 2 In describing Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Middleton and Woods call this kind of storytelling “reluctant anamnesis,” referring also to “Morrison’s sense of the emotional and cognitive resistances to remembering”(2). 3 By “continue to miss,” I mean not only that the narrative reconstruction never succeeds in reaching or adequately representing the loss but also that the narrating of loss keeps one yearning. 4 I am using “memory narratives” here to refer to the transformation of memory into story. The connection between memory and narrative has been widely discussed and analysed. Witness, for instance, the focus of a number of recent books: DeConcini, Narrative Remembering; King, Memory, Narrative, Identity; and Freeman, Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative, as well as the importance placed on narrative testimony in works about surviving trauma. While the narrative nature of much memory work is evident, I would also note, however, that articulations of memory may take other literary forms (one thinks in particular of poetry – elegy, tombeau, allegory). Stamelman’s analyses of the poetics of loss repeatedly address the close relationship between memory and poetry. In his reading of the writing of Elizabeth Bishop, for instance, he notes: “For Bishop, a poem is a representation of loss … [Poetry] is that which is left behind in place of an absent person, object, or event. It both remembers and mourns” (16). As we shall see, the poetry of memory is not only evoked but is in fact woven into the “memory narratives” in the novels of Kogawa, Dupré, and Michaels. 5 Davis and Starn have described memory as “an index of loss,” but further note that it is also “notoriously malleable,” susceptible to the interests that frame one’s remembering and therefore capable of becoming “an all too obliging mirror” (4). Their point is that memory is shaped by the present time of remembering, which might be another way of saying that memory has as much to do with survival as it has to do with loss. 6 In the Introduction, we also examined aspects of the metadiscourse of history. Noting that the definition of “history” will invariably determine and control its content, we highlighted the tautological nature of certain definitions and emphasized the fact that the process of defining history has ideological

Notes to pages 59–63

7

8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25

243

significance. Similarly, in the present chapter, the many different ways in which “memory” is theorized reveal a great deal about the underlying ideological assumptions and agendas that motivate these theories. Felman and Laub use the term “crisis in history” to refer to “the impossibility of writing history” after the Holocaust (xviii). They remark that the Holocaust “[opened up a] radical historical crisis in witnessing” (201). As Kogawa’s novel shows, a crisis in witnessing was also triggered by the unimaginable horror of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nora, 9. See also Davis and Starn on the relationship of history and memory: “History and memory are placed in sharp opposition, an opposition that was already ancient when it resurfaced in the pioneering studies of collective memory in this century” (4). Davis and Starn, 5. Terdiman, 7–8. Freeman, 33. Ibid., 28–9. Middleton and Woods, 5. Ibid., 8. History’s troubled conscience suggests that memory plays an ethical role. Middleton and Woods note: “As we probed the frequent debates about history and representations of time and space in postmodernity, it became clear to us that we needed to look more closely at the ‘ethics of history’, and the increasing calls for justice and responsibility in representing the past” (11). Terdiman, 20. While Palumbo-Liu is writing specifically about ethnic literature, his observations seem valid for any contestatory minority writing and are certainly relevant to our study of “re-visionary” writing by women. Palumbo-Liu, 212. Ibid. Ibid., my emphasis. Fuentes, 37. King, 8, 12. This process applies not just to traumatic memory. It arises because, according to Bollas, the “passing of time … is intrinsically traumatic” (119). Ibid., 175. Bollas, 143, 145. Bollas is using a psychoanalytic model based on Lacanian concepts of real, imaginary, and symbolic. He analyses history as “a psychic function” in these terms in order to show that the work of history is the making of meaning. Meigs, 59, 61. See also Greene: “Women especially need to remember because forgetting is a major obstacle to change”(298).

244 26 27 28 29

30

31 32

33 34 35 36

37 38

Notes to pages 63–72

La Lettre aérienne, 82. “Memory: Hologram of Desire,” 43. Ibid. English versions are taken from Liedewy Hawke’s published translation of Dupré’s novel. Any modifications to the published English translation will be so indicated in my text. See La Lettre aérienne: “De l’excès, du cercle (comme somme des fragments accumulés par les ruptures répétées) et du vide, j’en traduirais les effets au féminin par un glissement de sens allant de l’excès au délire, du cercle à la spirale et du vide à l’ouverture comme solution de continuité” [From excess, from the circle (as the sum of fragments accumulated from having been repeatedly shattered), and from the void, I would then translate the results into the feminine by a shift in meaning going from excess to ecstacy, from circle to spiral, and from void to opening, as a solution for continuity] (48). “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad,’” 473. Janice Haaken’s book Pillar of Salt offers a compelling analysis of the gender bias inherent in prevailing interpretations of the story of Lot’s wife, noting that: “For women, the act of remembering – of looking back – can feel transgressive, even sinful” (1). Haaken further argues that “the story of Lot’s journey out of Sodom and Gomorrah invokes a vision of parental authority based on submission to the absolute rule of the Father” (6) and that “for Lot’s wife, the story ends before we know what she has seen. Her fatal rebellion creates a disturbing void, one into which traditional theological interpretations are often projected, but it also may be employed as a metaphor for generative, symbolic space opened up for feminist analysis” (5). Schwarcz also reinterprets the legend of Lot’s wife, referring to the way in which Anna Akhmatova’s poem suggests that Lot’s wife looked back “out of her refusal to become deaf to the grief embedded in the past” (157). See Le Désert mauve, 51, 141, and 220. “Trauma Narratives,” 45. Ibid., 44. Michel Beaujour has written of the term “memoria” in its Renaissance context: “Par une confusion fructueuse, memoria tendra à se confondre avec la tâche de récupération du corpus antique et, corrélativement, avec celle de combler l’hiatus … entre l’Antiquité et le monde moderne” [Through a fruitful confusion, memoria will tend to become associated with the task of recovering the antique corpus and, correspondingly, with that of filling in the gap between Antiquity and the modern world] (107, my emphasis). Translation modified. See the discussion of grief work in chapter 1.

Notes to pages 74–9

245

39 The important role played by the loss of the mother in a woman’s quest for her own identity and agency is discussed by both Havercroft (“Auto/biographie et agentivité”) and Dupré (“Racines poétiques”) in the context of their respective readings of Ernaux’s Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit and Amyot’s Je t’écrirai encore demain. 40 It is likely that Naomi’s father is “for various reasons … not considered suitable for Eastern Placement” (206) because he has tuberculosis. As had happened with Naomi’s mother, her father first just vanishes: “Then one day suddenly Father is not here again and I do not know what is happening” (215). In both cases, Naomi expects to be reunited; only later does she realize that the disappearance is permanent. Naomi does receive letters from her father between 1945 and 1949, mostly family news and news about his failing health, but she never sees him again. She learns of his death from tuberculosis sometime in 1950, although, looking back later, she is not certain she was ever explicitly told: “It’s possible the words are never said outright” (247). 41 The full significance of the date as the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki only becomes clear toward the end of the novel when Naomi learns that her mother and grandmother had lived through the horror of that event and that her hideously wounded and disfigured mother had at that point insisted that her children back in Canada be spared the knowledge of what had happened. The date thus marks the point of total disjunction between past and present, the traumatic cataclysm that defies memory, the definitive loss of the mother. 42 Arnold E. Davidson stresses the repetitiveness of this scene and notes that: “In its repetitiveness, this annual ceremony denies change and denies even the fact that Uncle is becoming, as he ackowledges on what will prove to be his final visit to the coulee, ‘[t]oo much old man’” (30). Davidson also argues persuasively that “on some level [Naomi] knows – or at least suspects – what she, and her uncle, cannot articulate” (30), that is, that their pilgrimage on or around the date of the bombing of Nagasaki is connected to the story of what happened to her mother. Noting how Naomi’s first sentence – in English but with the Japanese sentence marker ne – helps to establish the “bicultural context” of the novel, Davidson makes the point that Naomi participates in this scene in two different modes of knowing and of speaking. 43 Among the most perceptive readings are those of Arnold E. Davidson (who offers detailed analyses of all three liminal pieces, showing how they address on many different levels the question of “the making of story from silence”), and King-Kok Cheung who argues against “apply[ing] the hierarchical opposition of language and silence to the very novel that disturbs the hierarchy” and who insists upon the ways in which there are not just oppressive silences in the novel but also positive “attentive” silences. Cheung points out that the

246

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

Notes to pages 79–83

poetic epigraph suggests – and this is reinforced later in the novel in the dream of the Grand Inquisitor – that the speech that frees may only be heard through the attentive silence of the listener. Davidson makes the same point about the “pervasive silence” in this epigraph: “It is against this silence that the novel must be told, must become its own ‘reply’” (ibid., 27). This passage also resonates in interesting ways with the earlier lines from the book of Revelation. The tension between lifeless stillness and the flowering of speech recalls perhaps the struggle implied in the line “To him that overcometh / will I give to eat / of the hidden manna.” And the “freeing word” seems to echo the “new name written” of the earlier verse. Even as Obasan seems ready to yield to the natural course of events (“Everyone someday dies”), and even as she continues fully to occupy the present (methodically digging the mud out of the soles of Uncle’s boots), she also moves decisively to reconnect Naomi to a past from which she had previously for the most part attempted to shield her. Even Naomi’s brother Steven’s departure did not destabilize the family, for he moved east to live with Aunt Emily, and Naomi stayed with Obasan and Uncle, who took the place of her missing parents. The ultimate survival of the Nakane and Kato family is revealed in Obasan to be clearly vulnerable. Naomi and her brother, Steven, seem to be permanently estranged from one another. Neither Steven nor Naomi has children. It is important to note that just as Obasan’s relationship to memory is not simple (she believes that certain things are better not remembered but she saves everything), neither is Emily’s approach exclusively pragmatic and contestatory. Her epistolary journal addressed to her sister is not first and foremost a systematic documentation of the “crimes of history” but rather a testament to the strong emotional bonds that define and unite families. The photograph is a catalyst for Naomi’s memories of family in chapter 9 of the novel. In chapter 10, when she hands the photo back to Obasan, her aunt speaks words that trigger other memories, specifically those cultural memories represented by the legend of Momotaro. Holding the photograph, Obasan speaks the words of the beginning of the Momotaro story (“Mukashi mukashi – In ancient times, in ancient times”). Suddenly, for Naomi, her Obasan has become “the old woman of many Japanese legends” and her voice reminds Naomi of all the voices (Mother’s, Father’s, Obasan’s, grandmother’s) that “from the very beginning” told her those old stories, “carrying [her] away to a shadowy ancestry.” In this chapter, the Momotaro story becomes her story as well. Memory is not only individual but is an essential part of a culture’s survival story as well.

Notes to pages 84–8

247

51 The strength of Obasan’s desire to recover the memories – Aunt Emily’s package – and to hand them on to Naomi is matched by the intensity of her own personal letting go of that past and that future (“Now old … Everything old.” “Eyes can no longer see.” “Everyone someday dies.” “Everything is forgetfulness.” “The time of forgetting is now come.” (o 19, 28, 30, 31, 36). 52 A Jungian reading of attics and locked or hidden rooms stresses the archetypal character of such dreamed, remembered, or imagined figures of the unconscious. To venture into an attic is to perform a kind of psychological archaeology. 53 One is reminded here of Mary Daly’s “spinning threads of connectedness” in Gyn/Ecology (389) where she analyses the spinning trope as the work of “spinsters.” Such an association is perhaps reflected in Naomi’s preoccupation with her own status and that of her aunt Emily as “old maids” (their “croneprone syndrome” [o 10]). Images of spinning and weaving can be powerfully significant for women, as Elaine Showalter discusses in Sister’s Choice. We can also recall the importance of the quilt made by the mother in La Memoria (discussed earlier in this chapter). 54 As part of this réseau métaphorique we could cite an earlier passage in which Naomi talks of her parents’ two families as “knit into a blanket once, [now] badly moth-eaten with time.” In this earlier passage she then compares the knitted fabric to “a few tangled skeins – the remains of what might once have been a fisherman’s net” (o 25). The image of the fisherman’s net is a positive one, associating this fabric and networking with her fisherman Uncle. But then the net becomes what holds or fails to hold the memories: “The memories that are left seem barely real. Grey shapes in the water. Fish swimming through gaps in the net. Passing shadows.” The net is rent and the memories are being lost. This kind of netting (and remembering) is very different from the immobilizing spider webs. 55 King, 25. 56 When Obasan hands Naomi the photograph of mother and daughter, she is giving her a piece of the family history and, along with it, a coherent idea of family and tradition. As we have already noted, Naomi’s narration first goes there – to the Momotaro story that was emblematic throughout her childhood not only of family connections but also of Japanese ways of dealing with separation. That memory is not adequate, however, for almost immediately after this Naomi remembers the episode with the chickens and her narration takes a detour into unsettling territory. 57 Davidson, 44. 58 Davidson has argued convincingly that this scene hints at a rape, and he further suggests that Naomi’s desperate claim of complicity may be a result of her internalization of the traumatic event in order to avoid being destroyed by it.

248

Notes to pages 90–4

59 There is a telling reference to this visit in the first chapter of the novel when Naomi and her uncle are walking by the coulee. She recalls that the first time they had walked there had been “in 1954, in August, two months after Aunt Emily’s initial visit to Granton,” and she remembers that “for weeks after she left, Uncle seemed distressed” (o 3). 60 Chapter 37 is for the most part not a direct quotation of Grandma Kato’s letter but rather a narrative recounting, in Naomi’s own voice, of the events it described. Thus, the listening Naomi is clearly present in the telling of the story, as we see, for instance, in the following passage: “As Grandma watched her, the woman gave her a vacant gaze, then let out a cry. It was my mother” (o 286). The horrible recognition in that moment is one that Naomi shares with her grandmother in the telling. 61 Fridman, 15. 62 Ibid., 20. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., 21. 66 Although Fridman is clearly talking about historical traumas and not necessarily personal losses, the unnarratable event at the heart of Naomi’s story is both, since what makes the loss of the mother impossible to witness is its total identification with the horrific destruction of Nagasaki. Historical and personal catastrophe perfectly coincide. 67 Cheung, 3. 68 Ibid. Of Kogawa, she writes: “She reveals the strengths and limits of discursive power and quiet forbearance alike; in doing so, she maintains the complementary functions of verbal and nonverbal expression” (128). 69 Vautier, 182, 183. 70 Ibid., 184, 185. 71 Cheung, 151. 72 “There is a silence that cannot speak. There is a silence that will not speak.” 73 Cheung, 152. 74 Fujita, 34, 39, 40. Like Fujita, Cheung contrasts “oppressive silencing” (139) with the protective silences of attendance. She also insists, however, on the need to pay attention to “the tonalities of silence in the novel” (139). She remarks that “whereas Fujita subsumes several forms of reticence under the rubric ‘attendance,’ … Kogawa [in fact] distinguishes among (and regards with varying attitudes) protective, stoic, and attentive silence” (128). Cheung’s reading is distinguished by its attentiveness to these nuances. 75 Cheung, 151. 76 Ibid., 162.

Notes to pages 95–7

249

77 See Brison: “Trauma survivors are dependent on empathic others who are willing to listen to their narratives” (Aftermath, 62). 78 Laub in Felman and Laub, 57, 58. 79 A number of critics have analysed Kogawa’s development of the tree image to represent Naomi’s mother. They cite, in particular, the passage in which Naomi learns that a Canadian maple now grows in Japan at the site where Naomi’s mother’s name has been found inscribed on a plaque. Karin Quimby aptly remarks that “the tree stands in the place of the dead mother” and that “the image of Canada’s national tree planted in Japan, signifying the mother, is again a powerful yet problematic claim of identity” (270). 80 The reference to a butterfly also recalls the episode of Stephen’s butterfly massacre earlier in the novel. As Naomi watches her brother whacking at the swarms of butterflies with his crutch she compares the designs on their wings to “infant eyes, staring up at us bodiless and unblinking,” but when Stephen’s frenzied slashing is over, she notices that “some brambles and vines are clinging to his pant leg and one butterfly he cannot see is hovering above his head” (o 145). Naomi’s identification with a butterfly might thus be seen to represent a similarly wondrous and unexpected survival. 81 “Projected memory,” 10. 82 Ibid. 83 It is probably not surprising that published autobiographies and memoirs often include pages of photographs or that memory writings frequently incorporate references to photographic images. As Lowenthal notes: “Family photographs serve as both goads to memory and as aids to its verification” (257). He further points out, however, that photos and other relics of the past “requir[e] interpretation and reconstruction” (367). 84 Palumbo-Liu, 222. 85 Ibid., 220–1. 86 Ibid., 220. 87 Ibid., 223. 88 Goellnicht aptly describes this moment as “Naomi’s culminating epiphany,” noting that it “unites, or holds in harmoniously negotiated tension, the ‘stone’ of silence and the ‘stream’ of language that have run through the novel” (“Minority History,” 297). See also Arnold E. Davidson’s reading of the “poeticepiphany resolution” in Obasan’s chapter 39 (74–8) and Grewal’s analysis of this scene as indicating “a psychological restoration, the harmony of emotions in a balanced dance of life” (155). Devereux aptly notes the importance of the fact that Naomi is wearing Aunt Emily’s coat when she returns to the coulee at the end of the novel, a detail suggestive of an integration or synthesis of the different ways of remembering represented by Naomi’s two aunts (243).

250

Notes to pages 98–101

89 The imagery of breath as a bridge between past and future is even more explicitly articulated in Itsuka, Kogawa’s sequel to Obasan, where the narrator refers to “the sound of the underground stream. It speaks through memory, through dream, through our hands, through our words, our arms, our trusting. I can hear the sound of the voice that frees, a light, steady, endless breath. I can hear the breath of life” (288). 90 It is, of course, important to note that Obasan does not conclude with this sentence but rather with an excerpt from one of Aunt Emily’s documents, a memorandum from the Co-operative Committee on Japanese Canadians sent in 1946 to the Canadian Parliament criticizing the Orders-in-Council for the deportation of Japanese Canadians. As Arnold E. Davidson argues, this addendum “places [Naomi’s] story in the larger context that Aunt Emily had always advocated” (80). See Davidson’s analysis of the novel’s “two open endings” (78). I particularly appreciate Palumbo-Liu’s perceptive reading of this conclusion: “The wholeness brought about by reading history with full memory, of finding the power through memory to write a deeply personal counter-history that injects the historical facts with a significance that had been hidden, distorted, or erased, redeems Naomi but does not outweigh the crimes of the past” (224). I tend to agree with Palumbo-Liu’s suggestion that the novel “end[s] with an uneasy compromise between personal optimism and political skepticism” (224). 91 Felman and Laub, 201, italics in the original. 92 Fridman, 55. 93 Ibid., 33. 94 Laub’s assertion that “massive trauma” temporarily shuts down “the observing and recording mechanisms of the human mind” (Felman and Laub, 57) is a little surprising. Using Freud, Caruth suggests in Trauma: Explorations in Memory that there is painstakingly complete and detailed recording going on – “literal registration” that gets “reproduced in flashback” but is associated with how the event “escapes full consciousness as it occurs” (152–3). Laub’s ideas on the way the traumatic event is not known at the time are very close to Caruth’s. His articulation of a “malfunction” in the “recording mechanisms of the human mind” may be referring more to the lack of full consciousness or processing than to the absence of traumatic memory. 95 Unclaimed Experience, 91. 96 Ibid., 91–2. Caruth’s use of the term “belatedness” refers to the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit, which offered a way of theorizing traumatic memory and the delayed and persistent effects of trauma in terms of an ongoing process of return and retranscription. See King’s discussion of Freud’s articulation and application of the concept in her chapter “Memory in Theory.”

Notes to pages 101–2

251

97 “Trauma is not locatable in the simple violent and original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature – the way it was precisely not known in the first instance – returns to haunt the survivor later on” (Unclaimed Experience, 4). Brison offers a compelling critique of Caruth’s discussion of “trauma as ‘missed experience’” (Aftermath, 32). Granting that the “full emotional impact [of a traumatic event] takes time to absorb and work through,” Brison nevertheless argues that many trauma survivors do not, as Caruth suggests, fail to experience the traumatic event (and most specifically the threat of death) as it happens. Brison notes that “research on trauma indicates that … the event is typically experienced at the time and remembered from that time” (32). Caruth and Brison seem to agree that there is something “unassimilated” in the experience, something that produces and necessitates the traumatic return to the event. But Brison is understandably wary of Caruth’s suggestion that despite “the precision of recall,” the trauma victim cannot accurately and consciously process the event in order to integrate it into memory. Brison argues that such a theory “makes it conceptually impossible for a survivor to bear reliable witness to trauma.” She also takes exception to Caruth’s apparent assertion that involuntary traumatic memories have more “truth value” than constructed narrative ones. See Brison’s discussion of “traumatic memory” in Aftermath, 69–72. 98 Laub in Felman and Laub, 67, italics in the original. Describing the temporal “entrapment” experienced by Holocaust survivors, Laub writes: “The traumatic event, although real, took place outside the parameters of ‘normal’ reality, such as causality, sequence, place and time … Trauma survivors live not with memories of the past, but with an event that could not and did not proceed through to its completion, has no ending, attained no closure, and therefore, as far as its survivors are concerned, continues into the present and is current in every respect” (69). The question of where and when the trauma ends is not just about the persistence of and return to the primal event; it is also about how retraumatization occurs and how later losses may continue the trauma of earlier losses. The time Jakob spent “buried” after his escape was a part and a prolongation of the traumatic event. This kind of repetition is in the nature of trauma. 99 Ibid., 57, emphasis added. 100 Though the pain of remembering made Jakob want to bury his past and occupy an amnesiac present (“I longed to cleanse my mouth of memory” [22]), he also clung to his memories and to his need to speak to and for those whom he had lost. The distinction here is between traumatic memory and testimonial memory. 101 Kaes, 207. Ernst Van Alphen offers an interesting way of understanding the incapacity of many Holocaust survivors to tell of their experiences. Referring

252

102

103 104 105 106

107 108

Notes to pages 102–3

to the Holocaust as a “narrative vacuum” (33), he argues that the “unrepresentability” of the Holocaust is essentially semiotic: “the split between the living of an event and the available forms of representation with/in which the event can be experienced” (27). While attempts to respond to the Holocaust in any artistic (and therefore aesthetic – representational, impressionistic and/or symbolic) form encounter the same challenges, attention has most frequently and persistently been paid to literary responses. The essays in Lang’s Writing and the Holocaust address from many different angles the question of the moral, theoretical, and aesthetic implications of writing about the Holocaust. Cited in Rosenfeld, 4. See Felman and Laub, 95. See Felman and Laub, 114. “Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch” [After Auschwitz to write a poem is barbaric] (Adorno, “Kulturkritik,” 30 and Prisms, 34). Lang writes: “One could concede the possibility of this failure [the inadequacy of all writing about the Holocaust, history no less than poetry] and still hold that such writing is justified – because of the menace of the alternative; that is, the silence into which the Holocaust would otherwise disappear. To avoid the latter, it could be argued, the risk of barbarism, or even worse, would be warranted” (3). The essays in Lang’s Writing and the Holocaust focus on the premise “that there is a significant relation between the moral implications of the Holocaust and the means of its literary expression” (1–2). Lang notes that “writing that takes the Holocaust as its subject requires moral as well as aesthetic justification” (4). The question of imaginative versus historiographic approaches is directly addressed in the section “Fiction as Truth” and in particular in the Roundtable Discussion. Cynthia Ozick claims the importance of not “making fiction out of data, or of mythologizing or poeticizing it” (284) but also notes that her own writing has “touched on the Holocaust again and again” and that she can begin to see the argument for “Holocaust imagery” as offering not “redemptive meaning, but rather … the universal sanctification of memory” (281–2). Leslie Epstein argues that “the war against the Jews was in some sense a war against certain qualities of the Jewish imagination” and that “lest those who destroyed European Jewry remain in a crucial sense victorious, [imaginative rendering of the Holocaust] must flourish” (261). The Nazi annihilation must not be allowed also to have achieved the permanent “destruction of the imagination” (263). See Felman and Laub, 34. Felman and Laub, 34. Felman also argues that although Paul Celan’s “Todesfugue” may have prompted Adorno’s original critique, an elaboration and a more nuanced understanding of Adorno’s idea shows that: “The whole

Notes to pages 103–5

109 110 111

112 113 114 115 116 117

253

endeavor of Celan’s poetic work can be defined, precisely, in Adorno’s terms, as poetry’s creative and self-critical resistance to the verdict that it is barbaric, henceforth, to write lyrically, poetically; a verdict which the poetry receives, however, not from the outside but from inside itself” (34). Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi similarly points out the complexity and persistent misreadings of Adorno’s position and the general lack of acknowledgment of how Adorno later modified his position (260). “Heidegger,” 47. Felman in Felman and Laub, 114. Laub in Felman and Laub, 57. As we saw in our earlier discussion of La Memoria, Brison likewise insists upon “the therapeutic aspects of narrative,” the need to tell one’s story to a receptive listener as an essential piece of surviving trauma (Aftermath, 110). Brison further notes, however, that narrative may offer a singular way out of the retraumatizing effects of memory. “Telling to live” may involve giving up some control over the past “in order to retell it, without having to ‘get it right,’ without fear of betraying it, to be able to rewrite the past in different ways, leading up to an infinite variety of unforeseeable futures” (ibid., 103). Herman, 181, as cited and discussed in Sturken, 235. Halbwachs, 40. Aarons, 60, 81. Ibid., 61. Bentley, 6. Bentley cites a passage from Michaels’s short essay “Cleopatra’s Love.” In this reflective piece, Michaels distinguishes knowledge and “poetic knowing” in the following terms: “Knowledge/History is essentially amoral: events occurred. ‘Poetic knowing’/Memory is inextricably linked with morality: history’s source is event, but memory’s source is meaning” (181). The idea that there might be a different way of “knowing” the unknowable or unrepresentable recalls Fridman’s concept of “a witnessed mode of knowing,” which she describes as “a modality of knowing … that comes into play exactly where words and stories fall apart”(20). Fridman elaborates on this idea with reference to Susan Shapiro’s observation that, in reading post-Holocaust testimony “we must listen … not only to the ‘what’ of their testimony, but to the witness of their language” (Shapiro in Fridman, 97). Fridman goes on to explain that “the witnessing to historical horror does not occur in the telling, but in the inflection of the telling” and that therefore “the critical project of reading such a literature is not to add to a rhetoric of impossibility but to describe ‘the rules of formation and linkage’ that are the conditions of testimony, that make testimony possible. It is to assist in the effort to make that testimony heard” (97–8).

254 118 119 120 121 122

123 124 125 126

127 128 129 130 131 132

Notes to pages 105–9

Cook, 22. Ibid. Ibid, 22, 26. King, 146. King, 148, 147. King notes, in this regard, that Michaels fails to do what Georges Perec accomplishes in W or The Memory of Childhood, and that she would have done better to heed Lyotard’s “advice,” which stipulates that art, in bearing witness, “does not say the unsayable, but says that it cannot say it” (cited in King, 147). Cook, 24, 16. Cook, 28. In Fugitive Pieces, Jakob Beer remarks that “the German language annihilated metaphor” (143). Cook, 29. Poetic language is a primary modality of memory in Michaels’s novel, although she also suggests other modes of remembering. These include a relationship with the earth (Athos tells Jakob, “Try to be buried in ground that will remember you” [76] just as Jakob later remarks that “truth speaks from the ground” [143]) and an emphasis on the constancy of voice (voice as a singularly persistent trace is associated with Bella and later echoed in references to Naomi’s belief that “the only thing you can do for the dead is to sing to them” [241]). Finally, however, it is the way in which memory finds meaning in each of these modalities that lets them perform the memory work. And not all language is grounded in this kind of meaning. What so strongly attracted Jakob to his first wife, Alex, was her excessive, sensual, pyrotechnic manipulation of language: “In her mouth English was dangerous and alive, edgy and hot” (132). But it was the hollowness, the void of meaning at the centre of her language play (epitomized in her passion for rhyming palindromes) that finally combined with her related determination to close the door on the past and forced the two of them apart. Felman in Felman and Laub, 5, emphasis added. King, 11, 16. “Constructions in Analysis,” cited in King, 16. King, 16, emphases added except “reconstruction” emphasized in original. Palumbo-Liu, 224. Ben’s legacy is that of what Hirsch has called “postmemory,” a term she uses “to describe the relationship of children of survivors of cultural or collective trauma to the experiences of their parents, experiences that they ‘remember’ only as the stories and images with which they grew up” (8). Hirsch is especially concerned with how this kind of memory “is mediated not through recollection but through projection, investment, and creation” (8). King also

Notes to pages 111–17

255

analyses how this kind of memory relates to trauma and testimony in her chapter on Elie Wiesel’s The Fifth Son. 133 The idea of grief as a burden also resonates with the phrase “to bear witness,” in the sense that we bear the weight of our experiences and the weight of memory, but we also bear (that is, carry across and deliver) the story of these. In this manner, the unbearable is borne. And this “bearing” – of grief and of witness – further evokes the bearing of a child in childbirth, the legacy of loss being also a legacy that survives to be handed on to the next generation. 134 Cook, 17. 135 It does bear repeating, however, that this is not the only story that Michaels tells. Even though she gives each of her male protagonists a female soulmate, there is nothing necessarily gender-specific in the companioning of memory as she depicts it. While the story of Ben and Naomi suggests a (possibly gendered) complementarity that may lead to healing, Jakob’s story emphasizes the universal human nature of both loss and recovery. In his narration, Jakob moves in the end from basically addressing his lost sister, Bella, to speaking to his imagined children: “My son, my daughter. May you never be deaf to love. Bela, Bella” (195). In thus speaking into the future, he imagines the next generation as containing his loss but also his survival and as “Bela, Bella” makes clear, gender is not what matters here.

chapter three va 10. Translations in my text of Visions d’Anna are my own. “Les Agénésies du vieux monde” in La Main tranchante, 249. Ibid., 25. As I noted in the Preface, Louky Bersianik and Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska both articulated the idea of an “archaeology of the future” in the early 1980s. Ouellette-Michalska’s L’Échappée des discours de l’oeil (a text in some ways similar to Bersianik’s L’Euguélionne) put this archaelogical approach into practice. In several essays in La Main tranchante du symbole, Bersianik articulated and further developed the theory of such an approach. 5 For two useful discussions of the use of the term “postmodern” in the context of Quebec feminism, see Scott et al., “Ce qu’on se dit le dimanche” and Godard et al., “Symposium on Feminism and Postmodernism in Quebec.” 6 There is such a visionary moment between Mélanie and Angela Parker in Le Désert mauve, 48–51 and 218–20. See my analysis of this scene in Incriminations, 172–9. 7 In Visions d’Anna, for instance, Anna’s visions are clearly apocalyptic: “Tant de vies vainement espérés allaient s’éteindre dans le chaos du XXIe siècle qui 1 2 3 4

256

Notes to pages 117–19

s’annonçait, seule Raymonde croyait que la sénescence du monde serait renouvelée demain, mais elle se trompait, pensait Anna … il n’y aurait pas d’avenir” [So many lives vainly hoped for were going to be extinguished in the chaos of the twenty-first century that was approaching, only Raymonde believed that from the senescence of the world there would be renewal tomorrow, but she was wrong, Anna thought … there would be no future] (va 14). 8 English versions are taken from Patricia Claxton’s published translation, Baroque at Dawn. Any modifications to the published English translation will be so indicated in my text. See chapter 4 for a more detailed discussion of Brossard’s use of the term “baroque” in Baroque d’aube. Not insignificantly, the baroque inscribed in Brossard’s novel seems to be associated not only with spectacle and excess, but with the threshold between past and future, the place of nostalgia and of writing: “Côté détresse ou exubérance baroque. Je sais seulement qu’il faut relire, se frotter à l’esprit ancien … Notre littérature est inséparable de la littérature, ultime nostalgie qui vaut pour l’avenir. Car nous serons encore là dans quelques siècles à nous interroger, à trembler tout notre saoul de peur et d’émerveillement” [The angst or baroque exuberance side. I only know we have to reread, rub against the mentality of the past … “Our” literature is inseparable from Literature, an ultimate nostalgia valid also for the future. Because a few centuries from now we will still be around, wondering, trembling a bellyful with anxiety and enchantment] (ba 249). The baroque postmodern evoked by Brossard might also be said to characterize the style and content of Marie-Claire Blais’s Soifs. 9 The epigraph is taken from the passage in L’Ange de la solitude where Sophie reflects on the life choices made by her daughter and some of her daughter’s friends: “sans doute, elles en avaient discuté entre elles, mais quand même, Polydor, avec sa théologie, la prêtrise pour une femme, comme l’homosexualité, ce n’était pas un avenir, c’était une bien drôle de génération” [certainly, they had already discussed it among themselves, but even so, Polydor, with her theology, the priesthood for a woman, like homosexuality, this was not a future. It was a really strange generation] (as, 81, translation modified). Sophie seems to be asking what kind of generation there can be without procreation. English versions are taken from Laura Hodes’s published translation, The Angel of Solitude. Any modifications to the published English translation will be so indicated in my text. 10 Translation modified. It is difficult to do justice to this sentence in English. The “on” of “On n’est pas bien là” is more personal and subjective (and more directly connected to the “nous” of “entre nous”) than the “this” of “isn’t this nice.” In addition, “entre nous” [among us] is one of those idiomatic French phrases for which there is no totally satisfactory English equivalent (which

Notes to pages 119–21

11

12

13

14

15

16

257

may explain why Diane Kurys’s film Entre nous was distributed in the United States with its original French title). The syntactical structure of the French question (a direct affirmation made doubly interrogative by the simple addition of a question mark and a negation that pleads to be contradicted) further contributes to this internal tension and vulnerability. True, this “perpetuelle oisiveté” can only comfort or cushion; it cannot mend. As I note later in this chapter, each of these young women has in one way or another been damaged in the past, and is, to a greater or lesser degree, both wounded and wounding in her present relationships. The names in Blais’s novels are significant on many different levels. In this chapter I discuss some of the intertexts and allusions, particularly in reference to Johnie and Thérèse in L’Ange de la solitude and to Mélanie and Renata in Soifs. I would venture to suggest, but as a hypothesis only, that Gérard’s name may also participate in a complex intertextual network with Québec “native son” Jack Kerouac’s autobiographical novel about his younger brother’s death, Visions of Gerard (1966, published in French in 1972) and Blais’s own Visions d’Anna. If this were so, Jack Kerouac (Ti-Jean in that novel) could be considered one of Johnie’s avatars. Similarly, no matter how desolate we may find Blais’s vision in some of her novels, the very fact of her writing them always seems to suggest the possibility of some purpose, some meaning, some hope. Thus L’Abeille must continue to live out the legacy of her mother’s death by ovarian cancer, not only as reexperienced through her abandonment by Thérèse but also in her art. She may have graduated from practising her scales on “the maternal piano” (to “perpétuer le destin inachevé de sa mère” [continue her mother’s unfinished destiny] [as 121, translation modified]) and have claimed her own creative identity as a painter, but she is soon in thrall to Paula, a woman artist of her mother’s generation, who acts out her own history of childhood abuse in her domination and brutalization of L’Abeille. Thérèse is a complex figure in the novel. Although she is absent from the beginning, she is at the same time always present: the portrait of her painted by L’Abeille, “Thérèse ou les plaisirs de l’été” [Thérèse or The Pleasures of Summer], hangs on the wall, emblematic of past innocence. Thérèse had been a kind of mother figure, holding the commune together. And every morning she had gone out to run to the top of the mountain, a ritual suggestive of her role as visionary, which her name also implies (for one cannot help but think of Sainte Thérèse d’Avila given the central role played by St Jean de la Croix in the novel). Thérèse’s revelation on the mountain was not of the future,

258

17

18

19 20

21

22

Notes to pages 121–6

however, but of the present, prompting her to return to the world to work on social problems (drug addiction, homelessness) and to pursue studies in gerontology. Nevertheless, L’Abeille reflected that Thérèse’s planet was no longer inviting (as 97). See L’Ange de la solitude, 95 and 134. The last occurrence of this phrase, in the final paragraph of the novel, is marked by a subtle temporal difference appropriate to the dramatic emphasis in the last scene (“s’étaient réunies” [had come together again] instead of “étaient réunies” [were together again]). Johnie’s name also explicitly associates her with two other Johns in the novel: St Jean de la Croix and Jean Genet. The importance of the identification with Jean Genet is discussed later in this chapter. Radclyffe Hall, 200–1, 203. The English version is from Anselm Hollo’s translation, Querelle. Hollo translates “L’ange de la solitude” as “the Angel of Loneliness,” but in the context of both Genet’s novel and Blais’s I find Laura Hodes’s choice to refer to “the Angel of Solitude” perhaps more accurate. Indeed, I would argue that the loneliness associated with Radclyffe Hall’s John (a loneliness named in the title of her novel) has been transformed into solitude by Blais in her evocation of Jean Genet’s “ange de la solitude.” (It is perhaps harder to determine for Genet’s “ange” in Querelle, whether “loneliness” or “solitude” is the best translation.) In reading the transition from Radclyffe Hall’s “loneliness” to Blais’s “solitude,” it might be useful to keep in mind the words of May Sarton in From May Sarton’s Well: “Loneliness is the poverty of the self; solitude is the richness of the self” (25). This sentence recalls a commonly used reference to homosexuality early in the twentieth century as “the love that dares not speak its name,” a phrase that appears on the jacket of the Avon edition of The Well of Loneliness. In her translation of the novel, Laura Hodes uses “the Pink Triangle” to render “L’Étoile Rose.” Blais’s image of “l’étoile rose” [the pink star], however, alludes both to the pink triangle that the Nazis forced homosexuals to wear and to more recent use of the emblem of the “pink star” by hiv/aids activists, referring specifically to the stigmatization and persecution of homosexuals with hiv. In the late 1970s, the image was adopted and given a certain degree of popular exposure both in the United States and France. See, for instance, Dominique Fernandez’s 1978 novel L’Étoile rose. Blais’s evocation in her novel of “l’Étoile rose” – and her vivid description of its historical evolution – points directly to this more contemporary context as well as to the time of “des fours crématoires [et] les prisons de la Sibérie” [crematoriums (and) prisons of Siberia] (as 110).

Notes to pages 127–33

259

23 The French word for butterfly is “papillon.” A moth is a “papillon de nuit” [night butterfly]. 24 The reference to the planet that “se consumait seule” [was alone consuming itself] in this passage resonates with other images in the book of self-consuming flames described in the same words: Johnie’s cigarettes and the birthday candles at the end. The opening image of Johnie smoking “négligeamment” thus becomes weighted with premonitory significance. 25 On a linguistic level, we experience the words “seul,” “seuil,” “deuil,” and “douleur” together as interrelated aspects of a single and singular experience of death and survival. 26 This image was popularized by Robert K. Merton in On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean postscript. 27 This refrain (“se consumaient seules”) emphasizes the inexorability of the self-destruction and the pervasiveness of the solitude at the heart of this gathering. Sophie’s absence further suggests that there is no place within this memorializing moment for either the hope (“l’avenir pour réparer tout” [the future to fix everything]) or the regret (“Pourquoi n’avait-elle pas empêché une telle catastrophe?” [Why hadn’t she prevented a catastrophe like this?]) that she represents. 28 Théoret, 11. 29 One could argue for describing Brossardian translation as an “archaeology of the future.” For a discussion of how Brossard, in Le Désert mauve, uses the trope of translation to open up the possibility of changing the course of the story and of history (“changer le cours de l’histoire”) and thus changing “the course of death,” see my chapter “Post(modern)script” in Incriminations. 30 I discuss this “rapprochement” (coming together) in my reading of Baroque d’aube in chapter 4. 31 Pierre: La Guerre du printemps 81, 74, 142, my translation. 32 See Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, 60; Mrs. Dalloway, 10 and 59; and “On Being Ill,” 14. The permeability to which I am here referring is described on one occasion by Woolf as a “tunnelling process” that she used in the creation of Mrs. Dalloway: “[digging] out beautiful caves behind [the] characters … The idea is that the caves shall connect” (A Writer’s Diary, 60). For Woolf, as for Blais, however, the connection does not in any way diminish the individual’s essential separateness, which Woolf defines in terms of the privacy and inviolability of the soul. 33 Reading this novel, I was strongly reminded of Donald Hall’s poem “Without” – a poem written about the dying of his wife, poet Jane Kenyon. Hall describes the time of dying or of waiting to die as a time without punctuation and his poem is itself without punctuation:

260

Notes to pages 133–41

hours days weeks months weeks days hours the year endures without punctuation … no spring no summer no autumn no winter no rain no peony thunder no woodthrush the book is a thousand pages without commas without mice maple leaves windstorms no castles no plazas no flags no parrots without carnival or the procession of relics intolerable without brackets or colons 34 English versions are taken from Sheila Fischman’s published translation, These Festive Nights. Any modifications to the published English translation will be so indicated in my text. 35 See, for example, pages 45, 46, 61, 63, 100, 111, 118, 139, 140, 141, 161, 247, and 264. 36 The resonances between the works of Blais and Brossard tempt me to see in Blais’s Mélanie a kinship to the Mélanie of Le Désert mauve. 37 The song is from J.S. Bach, Cantata 147: “Jésus, que ma joie demeure.” 38 I use the French phrase “trou de mémoire” here because of the way it echoes its opposite, “trop de mémoire,” and thereby also evokes the tensions at the heart of Soifs. 39 English versions are taken from Nigel Spencer’s published translation, Thunder and Light. Any modifications to the published English translation will be so indicated in my text. 40 The tension between public and private (or global and local action) is similarly illustrated in Renata’s case. She is haunted by the fact that the plane she had taken to New York had continued on to Honduras where it crashed, killing all of the schoolchildren on board. Not only can she not accept the injustice of so many innocent lives being lost – while a bunch of mediocre judges “plusieurs d’entre eux, symboles de la corrosion du monde” [many of them symbols of the corroding world] (fl 70) had gotten off the flight in New York and survived; she is also personally shaken by her own coldness and irritation toward those children whose noisy high spirits had interfered with her concentration as she tried to edit the paper on capital punishment that she would be delivering the next day. 41 “Seule la terre qu’habitait Augustino pouvait être aussi lumineuse avec ses tigres sauvages et ses dauphins; mais que penser de cette part plus obscure du monde d’Augustino où un jeu appelé Tremblement de terre propre signifiait un nettoyage sans concession du Vieux Monde” [only the earth Augustino

Notes to pages 143–50

42

43

44

45

46

261

inhabited could be so luminous with its wild tigers and dolphins, but what about that darker corner of Augustino’s world where a game called Righteous Earthquake meant ruthlessly cleaning out the Old World] (fl 143, translation modified). The trapped bird becomes for Daniel a symbol of suffering and a challenge to him to find a way to respond to that suffering. On one occasion, there is the suggestion that it is sometimes possible to free the bird. Thinking about the disturbing email letters he has received from Augustino, Daniel muses: “ces lettres d’Augustino à l’écran de l’ordinateur semblaient battre de l’aile comme le moineau prisonnier dans les câbles, à la gare de Madrid, ou comme ce roitelet agitant une aile cassée dans les herbes d’un champ que Daniel avait soigné, pour le voir filer presque intact vers le ciel” [these letters from Augustino appearing on the screen seemed to be beating their wings, like the sparrow caught in the cables in the Madrid station, or the wren flapping its broken wing that Daniel had found in the grassy field and nursed, then watched fly off almost unhurt into the sky] (fl 59, translation modified). Daniel’s experience of grace will also continue into the future: “bientôt, dans quelques heures, Daniel serait bouleversé par la lumière sur les collines mauves, vite blotti dans son lit … il entendrait les premières notes nocturnes du rossignol, ses modulations de joie, sans fin” [soon, in a few hours, Daniel would be overwhelmed by the light on the purple hills, quickly snuggled into his bed … he would hear the first nocturnal notes of the nightingale, its modulations of joy, without end] (fl 188–9, translation modified). In this description one hears echoes of the refrain that ran through Soifs and served as the beacon of hope at its conclusion: “Ô que ma joie demeure.” Mélanie’s mother is generally referred to only as Mère in the novels but in this important scene in which she and her daughter address one another directly she is also repeatedly designated by her name, Esther, as if perhaps to give her more autonomy in their discussion of memory and legacy. Similarly, Caroline’s references to Anne Frank revealed that however much one might desire to preserve a memory of the young girl in the happy and innocent state in which she appeared in an early photograph, the circumstances of history and the imperatives of memory forced Anne Frank into the position of witness and forced all who remember her to share in that witnessing. Although “la foudre” is literally lightning and not thunder, Nigel Spencer’s title for the English translation of the novel, Thunder and Light, deftly captures the double image of thunderbolt and light by echoing and altering the familiar expression “thunder and lightning.” Similarly, in French, “la foudre” is closely associated through meteorological metonymy with “le tonnerre” (thunder), thus enabling Blais’s title to juxtapose the resounding crack or

262

Notes to pages 150–1

rumble of a lightning strike with the silent presence of other kinds of light. Spencer’s translation of “la foudre” as “thunder” throughout most of the novel generally conveys the sense of the original, since the thunder seems naturally to evoke the thunderbolt. 47 See 38, 55 (three occurrences), and 137–8 (three occurrences). The word is also used in reference to the apocalyptic world in which Arnie Graal dances for the dying (“ne sais-tu pas que le seul tumulte que nous entendions distinctement est celui de la foudre?” [but you’ve got to know in this world the only sound that gets heard is thunder] [fl 95]) and to the Holocaust (in thoughts attributed to Anne Frank: “soudain elle accepterait avec lucidité que ce monde ne fût alors que misères et mort, ne serons-nous pas tous détruits par cette foudre, cette décharge que pour l’instant nous entendons à peine” [all at once, she would accept with lucidity that this world was nothing but misery and death, won’t we all be struck by this thunderbolt, this discharge that, for the moment, we can barely make out] [fl 181, translation modified]). The significance of the word is also clearly illustrated in the scene where Juan reads the newspapers to Frédéric, and the former pianist (now suffering from Alzheimer’s) wants only to hear the music reviews because “tout le reste n’est que foudre et malheur” [the rest is just thunder and misfortune] (fl 220). 48 Polly’s crucial and beneficial role in Carlos’s life is evident in a key passage in Soifs: “Carlos se releva, c’était l’heure où toutes les cloches sonnaient ensemble dans les églises, et Carlos avait Polly, Polly qui avait soif, qui avait faim, Polly qu’il avait laissée seule dans la remise, dans le noir, Polly, il avait Polly, et à l’église Vénus chantait, que ma joie demeure” [Carlos got to his feet, dazed, it was the hour when all the bells rang together in the churches, and Carlos had Polly, Polly who was thirsty, hungry, Polly whom he’d left alone in the shed, in the dark, Polly, he had Polly, and in the church Venus was singing, let my joy endure] (S 95). 49 Perhaps more than any other character in the novels, Carlos is made to figure the complexity of the tensions between la foudre and la lumière. Early in Soifs, while being beaten by his mother, Carlos has a vision of “le Saint Révérend” (Martin Luther King Jr) speaking to him from heaven: “un jour j’ai eu un rêve, et c’était pour toi, mon fils” [one day I had a dream and it was for you, my son]. The Reverend chides him for failing to fulfill this dream, for straying from the path: “tu passes ton temps à renifler de la cocaïne avec les Mauvais Nègres, te souviens-tu de ces trente-quatre Panthères noires tuées dans les rues de New York, non, car c’est elle que tu aimes, la glace à la vanille que fabriquent les Blancs” [you spend your time snorting coke with the Bad Niggers, do you remember those thirty-four Black Panthers who were killed in

Notes to pages 152–7

50

51 52 53

54 55

263

the streets of New York, no, because what you like is vanilla ice cream, made by the whites] (S 41–2). And then the Reverend utters prophetic words: “car la lumière, mon fils, c’est aussi la foudre” [because the light, my son, is also the lightning] (S 42). Suggesting the difficulty of distinguishing between the lightning and the light, the Reverend’s phrase skillfully indicates both that danger may hide in seemingly innocuous places and that light may in fact possess the force of lightning. If the phrase suggests an alternative to violence, Carlos does not embrace it. When the beating finally stops, he comes to his own conclusion: “Carlos aussi avait un rêve, il serait le plus grand, le plus fort” [Carlos too had a dream, he was going to be the biggest, the strongest] (S 42). As was the case in Soifs, verbs in the conditional mood mark these characters’ anticipatory thoughts. It is significant, however, that although Suzanne’s imagination of Jean-Mathieu’s return carries some of the idealizing and nostalgic quality that we identified in the use of the conditional at the end of Soifs, Renata’s evocation of the future is premonitory and edged with dread. In the French this phrase benefits from the homophony of the word choeur (chorus) with the word coeur (heart). A “cri de coeur” is a cry from the heart. Translations in my text of Augustino et le choeur de la destruction are my own. There is always a certain amount of uneasiness and mistrust when disciplines play the magpie with one another’s critical apparatuses, shamelessly borrowing and making over terms and concepts. While some literary scholars have embraced the language of chaos theory and fractals, other voices have been raised in protest. In a 2005 article in Narrative, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak asked: “Do we really need fractal geometry to tell us that ‘the loss of detail is almost always unwarranted?’” (107). It is worth mentioning that literary critics do have their own terminology for describing narrative phenomena that might be considered fractal. Literary analysis has long recognized and appreciated the technique of mise en abyme, which consists of the reproduction within a text or image of a smaller version of that text or image, thereby producing an infinite mirroring of the original. Karen Gould offers a perceptive analysis of Blais’s double use of mise en abyme and intertextuality in Soifs (see “La Nostalgie postmoderne,” 77–9). The phrase is an adaptation of the title of Art Spiegelman’s book In the Shadow of No Towers. Though the voices are here compared to those of a chorus and not actually described as one, later in the novel Samuel refers to “le gigantesque choeur de leurs appels, la plainte diffuse de leurs prières, dans toutes les voix et toutes les langues” [the gigantic chorus of their calls, the diffuse moan of their prayers, in all the voices and all the languages] (acd 225).

264

Notes to pages 157–65

56 Etymologically, “choreography” comes from the Greek coreƒa, a word for choral dance which shares a common origin with the Greek word for “chorus,” corÒj. 57 We suggested earlier that Daniel is in some ways similarly privileged in the second volume, but the naming of Augustino in the title of the third frames that narrative in a way that sets him uniquely apart from all of the other characters in the trilogy. 58 In a 26 March 2005 interview in Le devoir, Blais summed up her novel’s title: “Augustino, l’écrivain, est porteur d’espoir, tandis que le choeur, la foule, tout autour de lui, gronde” [Augustino, the writer, is a bearer of hope while the chorus, the crowd, all around him, roars and mutters]. My reading of Blais’s text, however, shows that her concept of the “choeur” within the novel is not as simple as this. I would argue that her title is, in fact, more nuanced than the juxtaposition she suggests by her use of “tandis que” [while, whereas] in her gloss of it in this interview. 59 The name of Marie-Sylvie’s brother is hyphenated in Soifs but not in the two later volumes. 60 “Mélanie pensait qu’elle verrait Renata ce soir” [Mélanie was thinking that she would see Renata that evening]; “cette photo que prenaient Deandra et Tiffany pour leur frère Carlos qui était en prison, et qu’elles verraient dimanche” [that photo that Deandra and Tiffany were taking for their brother Carlos who was in jail and whom they would see on Sunday] (acd 301, 302, emphasis added). Earlier in this chapter we discussed the use of the conditional mood in the endings of both Soifs and Dans la foudre et la lumière. It is significant to note that in all three novels many of the verbs that occur in the conditional mood in the final passages are verbs of witnessing, seeing, and hearing. In Soifs, “Mère verrait … le heron blanc … et [elle] entendrait aussi les voix de Samuel et Vénus déchirant la nuit” [Mère would see the white heron and she would also hear the voices of Samuel and Venus tearing into the night] (313, emphasis added). In Dans la foudre et la lumière, Renata “verrait demain, dans quelques années, Nathanaël, menottes aux poings allant vers la peine capitale” [would see tomorrow or in a few years’ time, Nathanaël handcuffed and going to the death chamber] (250–1, emphasis added, translation modified). 61 The complexity of Renata’s return in relation to questions of rebirth and/or survival is evident in the fact that she has begun smoking again (“mais si peu” [but just a little]). That this act might be interpreted either as selfdestructive or as evidence of life going on is suggested in Renata’s anticipation of having to justify herself to others: “je ne suis plus convalescente, dirait Renata, j’ai droit aux plaisirs de la vie” [I’m no longer convalescing, Renata would say, I have a right to the pleasures of life] (acd 292).

Notes to pages 167–72

265

chapter four 1 ba 242, translation modified. 2 Walter Benjamin wrote that “death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death” (94). 3 The Writing of the Disaster, 67. 4 Ibid., 66. 5 I am using the polysemous ambiguity of the French “point” here to suggest not only point of departure but no departure. 6 “Living On,” 103. 7 Brossard, Vertige de l’avant-scène, 33. 8 Dupré, Stratégies, 143, translation mine. 9 One, of course, thinks here of the celebrated 1986 National Film Board of Canada documentary film about Brossard, Jovette Marchessault, and Louky Bersianik entitled Les Terribles vivantes. 10 Brossard, Vertige de l’avant-scène, 54. 11 “Les Traces du manifeste” (1980) in La Lettre aérienne, 69. 12 Ibid., 82. 13 Ibid., 51. 14 “Mémoire,” 9. “Memory,” 44. The French version of this text is a recent translation by Brossard of the English text published in Trivia. In translating this text back into the original French in which it was delivered as a talk at the Third International Feminist Book Fair in Montreal in 1988, Brossard made certain modifications. For instance, her reference to “virtual and anticipatory memory” – a phrase I refer to in my own analysis – is rendered simply as “notre mémoire virtuelle.” 15 Le Désert mauve, 187, 220. One of Brossard’s earliest articulations of the idea of changing the course of History appears in her essay “La Lettre aérienne” (La Lettre aérienne, 66). The idea returns in Baroque d’aube, where Cybil recalls a time when “il était alors possible de faire des sauts joyeux dans l’histoire et d’en changer le cours” [it was then possible to make joyous leaps into history and change its course] (ba 123, translation modified). Although this is first presented (nostalgically) as a lost and naive possibility, the dynamic rewritings throughout the novel suggest precisely such “sauts joyeux.” The idea is not to return to the past but to dive into the present of history. 16 Katharine Conley and Alice Parker have both aptly noted that Brossard’s two novels (Le Désert mauve and Baroque d’aube) tend to resemble the Möbius strip with its “spiraling action” (Parker, Liminal Visions, 147). Conley proposed the Möbius strip (with its confounding of insides and outsides) as a figure for Le Désert mauve. Parker extends the application of this figure to Baroque d’aube where,

266

17 18 19

20

21 22

23

Notes to pages 172–3

as she notes, “the vanishing point of reality – of fiction – resembles the continuous turning of a Möbius strip, the complex enfolding of dimensions we can only calculate mathematically, a mise en abîme of texts within texts” (202). Brossard, “Memory,” 44. Winterson, 69. In a special issue of Voix et images (1996) devoted to “Effets autobiographiques au féminin,” Barbara Havercroft and Julie Le Blanc note that in the course of the last twenty-five years women have transformed literary and autobiographical genres, whether “sous forme de récit autobiographique, de livre de souvenirs, de mémoires, de journal intime (“réel” ou fictif), de poème en prose, de roman ou de récit autobiographique fictif ou même de journaux intimes enchâssées dans des romans” [in the form of autobiographical accounts, books of recollections, memoirs, personal journals and diaries (“real” or fictional), prose poems, fictional autobiographies, or even personal journals embedded in novels] (8). In my discussion of “memory work” in chapter 2, I cited a number of important critical works that address the connection between remembering and telling. Other studies that touch on the relationship between memory and narration include: Stanton, The Female Autograph; Frye, Living Stories, Telling Lives; Derrida, Mémoires: For Paul de Man; Brodzki and Schenk, Life/Lines; Krell, Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing; Olney, Memory and Narrative; Chamberlain and Thompson, Narrative and Genre (in the series Routledge Studies in Memory and Narrative; the special issue of Trivia (Fall 1988) on “Memory/Transgression: Women Writing in Quebec”; and the special issue of Representations (Spring 1989) on “Memory and Counter-Memory.” Terdiman, 25. A slightly tongue-in-cheek reference to the fact that a generation of Quebec writers (among them Brossard) who wrote for La Barre du jour in the late 1960s described themselves as “résolument moderne.” Such ontological and narratological indeterminacy is manifest throughout the novel. One could equally well cite the doubling and unstable ontological status of “Cybil Noland,” not to mention the dizzying effects of the fact that the protagonists invented by novelist Cybil Noland are in turn novelists inventing women protagonists who write. The novel’s authority is also complicated by Brossard’s subsequent publication of a series of conference papers given during the time of the composition of Baroque d’aube. As a companion piece, She would be the first sentence of my next novel/Elle serait la première phrase de mon prochain roman functions not as a commentary but almost as an extension of the novel itself. Many passages in Baroque d’aube appear verbatim but differently contextualized in She would be the first sentence.

Notes to pages 174–80

267

24 Journal intime (1998 edition), 95. 25 “Hétérogénéité énonciative,” 29. 26 Noting that it was through Man’s fictions that women became “fictives,” Brossard declared in She would be the first sentence: “Sortons de la fiction par la fiction. Nous existerons dans le récit que nous inventerons” [Let us get out of fiction by way of fiction. We will exist in the story that we invent] (98). 27 She would be the first sentence, 30–1; “Memory: Hologram of Desire,” 44. 28 She would be the first sentence, 132–3, my emphasis; bold in original. 29 “Ultrasons,” 48, italics in the original. This passage recurs in She would be the first sentence (50). 30 ba, 34, 63, 64, 66–7, 106, 112–13. 31 Nora notes that “lieux de mémoire” are lieux in “three senses of the word – material, symbolic, and functional” and that there must, above all, be a “will to remember” (18–19). The cemetery is precisely such a place. 32 “Entretien,” 193. 33 Ibid., 193–4. 34 Picture Theory, 188. English versions are taken from Barbara Godard’s published translation, Picture Theory. Any modifications to the published English translation will be so indicated in my text. 35 The formulation of this question is not meant to imply that Baroque d’aube is a rewriting of Picture Theory, nor that the later novel is subsumed under the baroque. I am suggesting, rather, that inasmuch as the later novel might be said to represent a transfiguration of some aspects of the earlier one, this re-presentation is carried out quite literally under the sign “Baroque d’aube.” It is also important to recognize that the baroque that materializes in the title of Baroque d’aube was already present in Picture Theory, though not, perhaps, in the way that the editors of La Nouvelle barre du jour seemed to be suggesting. The following passage from Picture Theory might be read as prefiguring the juxtaposition within the title of Brossard’s later novel: “Aux prises avec le livre, baroquante … la poésie traverse le quotidien millénaire pour revenir à l’idée d’elle que je poursuis bien au-delà de mon penchant naturel, elle qui pré-occupait la pensée a vu venir les mots comme de prévisibles attentats et elle en changea le cours” [At grips with the book, baroquing … poetry passes through the millennial quotidian in order to come back to the idea of her I have been following well beyond my natural inclination, she who preoccupied thought has seen words come like foreseeable attacks and changed their course] (188, underlining in the original, emphases mine). 36 “Entretien,” 194–5. 37 Nora, 12, 24. 38 Liminal Visions, 131. One recalls, among other Brossardian “geographies,” the islands of Curaçao and Martha’s Vineyard in Picture Theory; the city-islands

268

39

40

41

42

43 44

45 46 47

48

49

Notes to pages 180–91

of Manhattan and Montreal in Picture Theory and Amantes; the labyrinth of “La Nuit verte du Parc Labyrinthe”; the desert of Le Désert mauve. See ba, 194, where Occident refers to an etymological link between mare (sea) and maru (desert). Parker notes that, in an interview with Clea Notar, Brossard associated the desert with “the ancient sea floor it is” (Liminal Visions, 131). I have modified Claxton’s translation here. The “projet de livre sur la mer” is, as the English text indicates, “a projected book about the sea,” but it is also a project that will take place, literally, “on” the sea. Both project and product are important in Brossard’s original formulation. In the section “Penser quelques plaies” of the present chapter, I will further suggest that Baroque d’aube also includes “un projet de livre sur la mère.” I refer to “family name” rather than “patronym” here because Occident in fact subverts traditional genealogies of naming. It is Occident’s first name that is the “nom du père.” Her family name “DesRives” participates directly and explicitly in a female genealogy. In its plurality, “DesRives” connects Occident to Claire Dérive and Florence Dérive, characters in Brossard’s earlier text Picture Theory. The name also attaches her, through an elaborate textual genealogy, to Brossard herself by situating her squarely within the rich signifying tradition of the word “dérive” in Brossard’s fictional/theoretical universe. My translation of “penser quelques plaies” as both “reflecting on” and “dressing” the open wounds attempts to take into account the resonances of the homonym “panser” in the phrase. We might here recall that Havercroft’s analysis of Brossard’s “quête identitaire” showed it both implicating and implicated in women’s genealogies. Huffer, 8, 14. Huffer’s critique offers a useful lens through which to read the repeated returns to the mother (and in particular to the mother’s death) in Baroque d’aube. Huffer uses Brossard as an exemplary instance of the non-nostalgic gesture in writing, one which she associates with the possibility of lesbian desire. Ibid., 19. Cybil’s name suggests that she is, like her mother, a sibyl, a seer and prophetess. Narrative shifts between first-, second-, and third-person in the novel further emphasize the difficulty of locating a singular, authoritative voice within this multi-layered telling. Philippe the sailor-poet might be a figure imagined by the French Symbolists. In Liminal Visions, Parker comments on Brossard’s intertextual nods to Rimbaud’s “Bateau ivre” (85, 142) and Mallarmé’s “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard” (207). As we have pointed out, many of the details in this short passage contribute to the fluidity of the mother’s identity: the hotel-like room overlooking a

Notes to pages 191–9

50 51 52

53

54 55

56 57

58

59

60 61 62

63

269

river recalls the various hotel rooms occupied by Cybil Noland; the dictionary refers the reader back to “la femme de Hyde Park”; the gold chain and references to the nape of the mother’s neck allude to an earlier description of Occident (ba 114). Huffer, 19. “Mémoire,” 10, emphasis added. From its initial appearance in the words of the woman speaking her desire on the first page of the novel (“Dé, vaste moi” [ba 13]), the die is located within a complex semantic field, repeatedly related to gaming and gambling, risk and luck (for example, see ba 37, 193, 259) and explicitly associated with désir (ba 63). “Occident” is also etymologically connected to death in the novel when, at the end of “Le futur dark,” Cybil recalls having passed a night with Irène making “des jeux de mots sur la mort. Occire” (ba 199). Parker, Liminal Visions, 201. Le Désert mauve, 51 and 220. In her English translation of the novel, de Lotbinière-Harwood uses the phrase “I cannot get close to any you” to convey the sense of the French original, which means literally, “I cannot use the familiar form of address with anyone.” Ibid., 177. Three notable examples are the “sucrier [qui] ressemble à un volcan” [sugarbowl that resembles a volcano] (ba 23 and 205); the pietà image (ba 25, 68, 213); and the red coat (ba 90, 181). The boldest gesture in this regard may be the publication of She would be the first sentence which, as I noted earlier, contains long passages that also appear in the novel, thus forcing the reader to acknowledge the permeability of text and context. Note, however, that this “seul corps” is not a universalizing figure – it is rather, as Parker points out, a way of grounding everything in the “local, situated” (Liminal Visions, 205). La Lettre aérienne, 23, my emphasis. Ibid., 19. Liminal Visions, 15. Parker discusses at some length the corporeal nature of Brossard’s writing of desire (see especially 191–211). She refers to the “corporeality of [Brossard’s] textual practice” (202), noting further that her “corporeal writing” suggests, among other things, “the feminist project of writing and theorizing the body [and the] emphasis on embodiment which remains an important aspect of textuality” (192). See Brossard, “Le cortex exubérant.” Parker gives incisive commentary on the Brossardian concept of “cortex” (Liminal Visions, 60, 62, 79, 101, 121, 134).

270

Notes to pages 199–207

64 Brossard’s incomparable love poem “Sous la langue” is, in my opinion, the quintessential instance of “langue” in the Brossardian (or any) corpus. 65 Le Désert mauve, 220. 66 Brossard, “Le Tango de Paola Sola,” 32. 67 Liminal Visions, 202. 68 She would be the first sentence, 132. 69 Brossard’s “quête identitaire” is not for the “je” but for the “nous.” See La Lettre aérienne, 97: “Je parle au je pour assurer la permanence du nous.” 70 In Baroque d’aube, questions return again and again (ba 13, 38, 45, 208), (dialogically) inscribing a future in the very act of questioning. One is “travelling among questions. Aiming for the future” (ba 240). 71 “Memory,” 47. This passage also occurs near the end of the text of a lecture called “L’Écriture comme trajectoire du désir et de la conscience” which Brossard delivered in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, in May 1988. That lecture was translated into English by Alice Parker and published as “Writing as a Trajectory of Desire and Consciousness” in Feminist Critical Negotiations, edited by Parker and Meese. In Liminal Visions, Parker gives a penetrating reading of this paper and cites this particular passage in the French of the original manuscript: “L’écriture ne me permet jamais d’oublier que si la vie a un sens, quelque part, il est dans celui que nous inventons à même nos vies, à même l’aura de quelques mots qui, en nous, forment des séquences de vérité” (189). 72 “Myth and Memory,” 45. 73 Liminal Visions, 185, 189.

chapter five 1 She would be, 134–5. 2 The phrase “Je suis une femme du présent” [I am a woman of the present] threads its way through She would be the first sentence like a mantra (see 22, 60, 76, 102, 108, 114, and 128). In the first line of Liminal Visions, Parker also cites this phrase: “Nicole Brossard positions herself as ‘une femme du présent,’ a poet of modernity” (1). 3 See Gould, Writing in the Feminine, 53. 4 In conversation, Louise Dupré referred to “la fragilité” so strikingly evident in Hier. This fragility is also apparent in Brossard’s recent poetry (Vertige de l’avant-scène, Musée de l’os et de l’eau, Au présent des veines) as well as in Oeuvre de chair et métonymies. 5 One thinks here of the Brossardian spiral, a key conceptual figure that Brossard used to convey her “vision aérienne” [aerial vision] in La Lettre aérienne (102–3). For important discussions of Brossard’s spiral, see Dupré’s Stratégies

Notes to pages 207–13

6 7

8

9

10 11

12

271

du vertige (116–21), Gould’s Writing in the Feminine (78–85) and Santoro’s Mothers of Invention (202, 270–1). Liminal Visions, 46. Parker is analysing a passage from Brossard’s Double impression. Just as becoming a lesbian mother some twenty years earlier had led Brossard to write L’Amèr, becoming a grandmother for the first time draws her into an extended reflection on motherhood and on the connections and tensions between procreative and creative generation. The dedication reads simply: “Pour Julie et Léa Nicole.” The intimate relationship between Brossard and the granddaughter, who appears in the text as “Alexandra,” is here marked by the familiar “diminutif” [nickname] Léa and the inclusion of her middle name (which is also her grandmother’s name), Nicole. This text’s republication in 1998 in the reissued edition of Journal intime further marks it as autobiographical. In the sixth section, “Reproduction,” the first person breaks through momentarily to share the space with the third person: “[Dans les photos envoyées par sa fille, la mère] se surprenait à étudier le visage de l’enfant. Menton: côté père. Joues et front: côté mère. Yeux, pour combien de temps, tout à fait les miens” [In the photos sent by her daughter, the mother found herself studying the baby’s face. Chin: father’s side. Cheeks and forehead: mother’s side. Eyes, for how long, altogether mine] (ocm 100, emphasis added). After this, the narration employs style indirect libre to inscribe the mother’s thoughts, mostly with a series of questions that mark the text with a first-person voice even in the absence of the first-person pronoun: “Dans quelle langue Alexandra construirait-elle son monde intérieur? Montréal aurait-elle une place dans ses pensées?” [In what language would Alexandra construct her inner world? Would Montreal have a place in her thoughts?] (ocm 100). “Écris-moi” is also a call to the mother/writer to write the daughter to put her into language – which is what Brossard has done in this piece. These earlier generations are represented by “the women of the Thursday gatherings.” The community of women who gathered weekly with the mother (Brossard) when her daughter was young evokes earlier generations of women in community as part of the maternal legacy: “La jeune femme avait grandi entourée de femmes savantes et créatrices” [the young woman had grown up surrounded by wise and creative women] (ocm 95). It is important to note that the entire third section of the Journal intime (in which the cited passage occurs) is woven through with the refrain of “hier.” The entry dated 18 March 1983, which opens the section (ji 41), consists of three sentences (each beginning with the word “hier”) that together address ways in which yesterday connects to an imagining of today and tomorrow.

272

13

14

15

16 17 18

19

20

Notes to pages 213–17

The section then returns to pick up the threads of “hier” found in entries from earlier journals (from 1973 and 1975) which are incorporated into this one. (The consecutive dates listed on the entries in this section are: 18 March 1983; 15 July 1973; 19 March 1983; 27 November 1975; 20 June 1973; 19 March 1983; 30 June 1973; 19 March 1983; [?] March 1980; and 20 March 1983.) As we shall see, Brossard’s most recent novel, Hier, realizes this intertextual promise, with the recent death of the narrator’s mother constituting a central element of the text and being closely associated with “hier,” the sign under which the narration evolves. In the three opening sentences imagined by Brossard, these losses are clearly situated both in the pre-texts (those past events referred to in the opening lines) and in the ongoing texts of the three novels. Completing her journal entry for 19 March 1983, Brossard asks essentially the same questions in a challenge to her readers: “Qu’est-ce que vous me voulez au juste? De la littérature qui n’en aurait pas l’air? De l’écriture qui n’en serait pas? Do you want me to look cute? Mémoires, autobiographie, journal, fiction. Oh! bien sûr, il faut nuancer, mais c’est à qui de faire ce travail?” [What exactly do you want from me? Literature that doesn’t look like literature? Writing that isn’t writing? Do you want me to look cute? Memoirs, autobiography, journal, fiction. Oh! Of course, it all needs to be nuanced, but who’s to do this work?] (ji, 48, italicized sentence in English and italics in the original). “Hétérogénéité,” 26. “Silence and a Human Voice,” 37, emphasis added. “C’est à travers l’espace ouvert par le silence de ma mère que je regarde le monde, que j’ai appris qu’il existait un autre monde dans lequel je pouvais m’engouffrer, rire à volonté et sortir victorieuse de toutes les épreuves” [It is through the space opened by my mother’s silence that I look at the world, through that space I learned there was another world into which I could plunge, laugh as much as I want and emerge victorious from all the trials] (h 45). “Oeuvre de chair et métonymies” and Hier, both focused on interconnected generations of women, reflect the impact of two major events in Brossard’s life: the birth of her first grandchild in 1995 and her mother’s death in 1999. Daughters giving birth and mothers dying are horizons of a woman’s mortality and thus may profoundly affect the way she looks at the world. This is a tricky assertion to make about a novel that carries on the Brossardian legacy of challenging the idea of a privileged subject. One cannot read Hier without recalling the elusive, fragmentary, and multiple first persons in both Baroque d’aube and She would be the first sentence of my next novel. In my essay “Since Yesterday: Nicole Brossard’s Writing After Loss,” I discuss at some length how the novel weaves together different narrative modalities to create a

Notes to pages 217–18

21

22

23

24

273

hybrid space that “both reveals its constructedness and confounds any simple attempt to identify the source of that construction.” Indeed, while the plotting and scripting of the contingent and yet incidental relationships among the four women is presented in the novel as that of both the author Brossard and her first-person narrator, the other characters also seem to have their own agency – so much so that the narrative presence of the first-person narrator is all but invisible in their sections of the novel. Nevertheless, there is occasional evidence of her scriptings in some of their stories, frequently in the form of bracketed author’s notes. To give one example, at the end of one of Axelle’s chapters we suddenly read: “(Ecrire trois pages sur la Loi des mesures de guerre)” [(Write three pages on the War Measures Act)] (h 190). Since the scriptor of these inserted remarks is virtually invisible, however – except perhaps retrospectively in light of the “Quelques Notes Trouvées dans la Chambre de l’Hôtel Clarendon” with which the novel ends – the constructedness seems to exist without agency and therefore hardly detracts from the apparent autonomy of the characters. The gloss to which I refer, the translation into French of the portion of the scene that appears in Latin in the chapter, actually occurs in a liminal space, apparently outside this chapter, at the very end of the novel. “Since Yesterday,” 58. In this essay I also analyse the strange and compelling scene of Descartes’s death in Hier. Louise Forsyth’s 2005 edited collection, in which my essay appears, also includes insightful readings of Hier by Alice Parker, Louise Dupré, and Claudine Potvin. We might find further support for attributing this chapter to the narrator in a statement she made much earlier in the text: “Mes rencontres avec Carla me donnent parfois envie d’écrire. Un chapitre. Un seul. Pas de roman. Pas d’histoire. Seulement un chapitre, un objet visuel avec des paragraphes, des blancs, une vague blancheur des gestes au fil des jours” [My meetings with Carla sometimes make me want to write. A chapter. Just one. No novel. No story. Only a chapter, a visual object with paragraphs, blanks, a vague whiteness of gestures with the passing days] (h 156). Like the entire chapter, this section is also difficult to attribute definitively to one “author.” The content of the notes points to the first-person narrator but the title seems to refer to the hotel room that was in the previous section associated with Carla Carlson. It is the typography of the section-heading titles that supports a reading of these notes as part of “Chapitre cinq.” It could be argued that the final few pages of the book following this section – the French version of the Latin text from the chapter “La Chambre de Carla Carlson” – are not only, as they appear to be, an appendix to Brossard’s completed novel but also a third section of that final chapter, perhaps even an extension of or inclusion in the “Notes retrouvées.”

274

Notes to pages 219–21

25 Vertige, 11. We can trace Brossard’s idea of a “relais de sens” back to a passage in her short text “Intercepter le réel”: “Chaque figure est un relais, un dispositif de transmission. C’est dans le relais que nous lisons. En fait, nous donnons dans le relais comme dans une débauche de sens parce que dans le relais, le sens figure, fait image” [Each figure is a relay centre, a transmission device. We read in the relay. In fact, we participate in the relay, as if at an abundant feast of sense, for sense figures in the relay; it evokes image] (La Lettre aérienne, 146). I was reminded of this passage by Parker’s insightful reading of it in Liminal Visions (38–9). 26 See chapter 4 for a discussion of the evolution of this idea in Brossard’s work. 27 Schulman and Zabotin published their findings in 2001 as Le dernier livre du siècle: deux américains enquêtent sur l’intelligentsia française au tournant du siècle. 28 Brossard in Schulman and Zabotin, 252. 29 Ibid., 255. 30 Ibid., 252. 31 Ibid., 255. 32 Ibid., 255–6. Brossard rightly notes the particular context from which she is privileged to speak. The fin de siècle viewed from other perspectives and told in other voices would necessarily look different. Nevertheless, in this short essay, Brossard is also prepared to argue that there is a common human interest in figuring out how to remain “attentive to human life in its … struggles to signify beyond mere reproduction.”

Bibliography

p r i m a r y wo r k s Amyot, Geneviève. Je t’écrirai encore demain. Saint-Hippolyte, Québec: Éditions du Noroît, 1995. [jte] Atwood, Margaret. In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical Fiction. Charles R. Bronfman Lecture in Canadian Studies, 21 November 1996. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1997. [isag] – The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Poems. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1970. [jsm] Blais, Marie-Claire. L’Ange de la solitude. Montréal: VLB Éditeur, 1989. [as] – The Angel of Solitude. Trans. of L’Ange de la solitude by Laura Hodes. Vancouver: Talon Books, 1993. – Augustino et le choeur de la destruction. Montréal: Éd. du Boréal, 2005 . [acd] – Dans la foudre et la lumière. Montréal: Éditions du Boréal, 2001. [fl] – Soifs. Montréal: Éditions du Boréal, 1995. [s] – These Festive Nights. Trans. of Soifs by Sheila Fischman. Concord, Ontario, Canada: Anansi, 1997. – Thunder and Light. Trans. of Dans la foudre et la lumière by Nigel Spencer. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2001. – Visions d’Anna ou Le vertige. Montréal: Stanké, 1982. [va] Brossard, Nicole. Baroque d’aube. Montréal: Éditions de l’Hexagone, 1995. [ba]

276

Bibliography

– Baroque at Dawn. Trans. of Baroque d’aube by Patricia Claxton. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997. – Hier. Montréal: Éditions Québec-Amérique, 2001. [h] – Journal intime ou Voilà donc un manuscrit. Montréal: Éditions des Herbes rouges, 1984. Reprint as Journal intime suivi de Oeuvre de chair et métonymies. Montréal: Éditions des Herbes rouges, 1998. [ji] – “Oeuvre de chair et métonymies.” Femmes, corps et âme. Montréal: Musée de la civilisation and XYZ Éditeur, 1996. Reprint. Journal intime suivi de Oeuvre de chair et métonymies. Montréal: Éditions des Herbes rouges, 1998. [ocm] Daviau, Diane-Monique. Ma Mère et Gainsbourg. Québec: L’Instant même, 1999. [mmg] Dupré, Louise. La Memoria. Montréal: XYZ Éditeur, 1996. Reprint. Montréal: xyz Éditeur, 1997. [m] – Memoria. Trans. of La Memoria by Liedewy Hawke. Toronto: Simon & Pierre, 1999. Gagnon, Madeleine. Le Deuil du soleil. Montréal: VLB Éditeur, 1998. [ds] – Le Vent majeur. Montréal: VLB Éditeur, 1995. [vm] Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1981. Reprint. New York: Anchor Books, 1994. [o] Marlatt, Daphne. Ana Historic. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1988. [ah] Michaels, Anne. Fugitive Pieces. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. [fp] Ouellette-Michalska, Madeleine. La Maison Trestler ou le 8e jour d’Amérique. Montréal: Éditions Québec/Amérique, 1984. Reprint. Saint-Laurent, Québec: Bibliothèque québécoise, 1995. [mt] Warland, Betsy. Bloodroot: Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss. Toronto: Second Story Press, 2000. [br]

s e c o n d a r y wo r k s Aarons, Victoria. “Telling History: Inventing Identity in Jewish American Fiction.” Memory and Cultural Politics: New Approaches to American Ethnic Literatures. Eds. Amritjit Singh, Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr, and Robert E. Hogan. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996. 60–86. Aberbach, David. Surviving Trauma: Loss, Literature, and Psychoanalysis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Adorno, Theodor W. “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft” [1951] reprinted in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974. – Prisms. Trans. by Samuel and Shierry Weber. London: Spearman, 1967. Archer, John. The Nature of Grief: The Evolution and Psychology of Reactions to Loss. New York and London: Routledge, 1999.

Bibliography

277

Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. Toronto: McLelland & Stewart, 1996. Bayard, Caroline. The New Poetics in Canada and Quebec: From Concretism to Post-modernism. Toronto, Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1989. Beaujour, Michel. “Une mémoire sans sujet: Memoria à la Renaissance.” Corps écrit 11: 103–10. Beckett, Samuel. Molloy. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1951. Benhabib, Seyla, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser. Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. Benhabib, Seyla. “Feminism and Postmodernism.” Seyla Benhabib et al. Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. 17–34. – Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. – “Subjectivity, Historiography, and Politics.” Seyla Benhabib et al. Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. 107–25. Benjamin, Jessica. “The Omnipotent Mother: A Psychoanalytic Study of Fantasy and Reality.” Representations of Motherhood. Eds. Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nicolai Leskov.” Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968. 83–110. Bentley, D.M.R. “Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces.” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 41, (1997 FallWinter): 5–20. Bersianik, Louky. La Main tranchante du symbole: textes et essais féministes. Montréal: Éditions du remue-ménage, 1990. – Le Pique-nique sur l’Acropole: Cahiers d’Ancyl. Montréal: Éditions de l’Hexagone, 1992. Bertman, Sandra. “The Language of Grief: Social-Science Theories and Literary Practice.” Mosaic XV:1 (1982): 152–63. Best, Stephen and Douglas Kellner. Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1991. Blais, Marie-Claire. Pierre: La Guerre du printemps 81. Montréal: Éditions Primeur, 1984. Reprint as Pierre (definitive version). Paris: Acropole, 1986. Blanchot, Maurice. “Literature and the Right to Death.” The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays. Barrytown, New York: Station Hill Press, 1981. – The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. Bollas, Christopher. Cracking Up: The Work of Unconscious Experience. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995.

278

Bibliography

Bordo, Susan. The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1987. Brison, Susan. Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2002. – “Trauma Narratives and the Remaking of the Self.” Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Eds. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer. Hanover, New Hampshire, and London: University Press of New England, 1999. 39–54. Brodzki, Bella and Celeste Schenk, eds. Life/Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1988. Brossard, Nicole. The Aerial Letter. Trans. of La Lettre aérienne by Marlene Wildeman. Toronto: The Women’s Press, 1988. – “Le cortex exubérant.” La Barre du jour 44 (1974): 2– 22. – Le Désert mauve. Montreal: Éditions de l’Hexagone, 1987. – Domaine d’écriture. Montréal: La Nouvelle barre du jour, 1985. – “Entretien avec Nicole Brossard sur Picture Theory.” La Nouvelle barre du jour 118–19 (1982): 117–201. – “An Interview with Nicole Brossard.” With Clea Notar. Rubicon 10 (1988): 173–95. – La Lettre aérienne. Montréal: Éditions du remue-ménage, 1985. – Mauve Désert. Trans. of Le Désert mauve by Susanne de LotbinièreHarwood. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1990. – “Mémoire: hologramme du désir.” Québec Studies 31 (Spring/Summer 2001): 8–11. – “Memory: Hologram of Desire.” Trans. Lucille Nelson. Trivia, A Journal of Ideas. Part I: Memory/Transgression: Women Writing in Quebec 13 (Fall 1988): 42–7. – Picture Theory: Théorie, fiction. Montréal: Éditions de l’Hexagone, 1989. – Picture Theory. Trans. of Picture Theory: Théorie, fiction by Barbara Godard. New York: Roof Books, 1990. – She would be the first sentence of my next novel/ Elle serait la première phrase de mon prochain roman. Toronto: Mercury Press, 1998 – “Silence and a Human Voice: Vital Materials for a Future (excerpts).” Verdure 5–6 (February 2002): 32–7. – Sous la langue/Under Tongue. Bilingual edition. Trans. Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood. Montréal: L’Essentielle and Ragweed Press, 1987. – “Le Tango de Paola Sola.” La Nuit verte du parc labyrinthe. Laval, Québec: Éditions Trois, 1992. 25–32. – “Ultrasons.” La Nuit verte du parc labyrinthe. Laval, Québec: Éditions Trois, 1992. 43–58.

Bibliography

279

– Vertige de l’avant-scène. Trois-Rivières, Québec: Écrits des Forges, 1997. – “Writing as a Trajectory of Desire and Consciousness.” Trans. of “L’Écriture comme trajectoire du désir et de la conscience” by Alice Parker. Feminist Critical Negotiations. Eds. Alice Parker and Elizabeth Meese. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1992. 179–85. Bull, Malcolm, ed., Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World. Based on the 1993 Wolfson College Lecture Series. Oxford, uk and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1995. Butler, Judith. “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of “‘Postmodernism.’” Seyla Benhabib et al. Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. 35–57. – “For a Careful Reading.” Seyla Benhabib et al. Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. 127–43. Carrière, Marie. Writing in the Feminine in French and English Canada: A Question of Ethics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. – Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Chamberlain, Mary and Paul Richard Thompson, eds. Narrative and Genre (Routledge Studies in Memory and Narrative). New York and London: Routledge, 1998. Charmaz, Kathy. The Social Reality of Death: Death in Contemporary America. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison Wesley, 1980. Cheung, King-Kok. Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Clark, Evelyn. “Crisis Management/Coping with Trauma.” Corporate Storyteller Ezine Vol. 1 No. 1 (November 2001) . Collectif Clio. L’Histoire des femmes au Québec depuis quatre siècles. Montréal: Les Quinze, 1982. – [The Clio Collective]. Quebec Women: A History. Trans. of L’Histoire des femmes au Québec depuis quatre siècles by Roger Gannon and Rosalind Gill. Toronto: Women’s Press, 1987. Comte-Sponville, André. “Vivre, c’est perdre.” Autrement 128 (Deuils) (1992): 14–23. Conley, Katharine. “The Spiral as Möbius Strip: Inside/Outside Le Désert mauve.” Québec Studies 18 (1994): 149–58. Cook, Méira. “At the Membrane of Language and Silence: Metaphor and Memory in Fugitive Pieces.” Canadian Literature 164 (Spring 2000): 12–33.

280

Bibliography

Cornell, Drucilla. “What is Ethical Feminism?” Seyla Benhabib et al. Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. 75–106. – “Rethinking the Time of Feminism.” Seyla Benhabib et al. Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. 145–56. Czechowski, Nicole. “Éditorial.” Autrement 128 (Deuils) (1992): 11. Dahlie, Hallvard. Varieties of Exile: The Canadian Experience. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986. Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon Press, 1978. Reprint. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990. Davidman, Lynn. Motherloss. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Davidson, Arnold E. Writing Against the Silence: Joy Kogawa’s Obasan. Toronto: ECW Press, 1993. Davidson, Arnold I. “Archaeology, Genealogy, Ethics.” Foucault: A Critical Reader. Ed. David Couzens Hoy. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Davis, Natalie. Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenthcentury France. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1987. Davis, Natalie Zemon and Randolph Starn. “Introduction,” Representations 26 (1989), Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory: 1–6. DeConcini, Barbara. Narrative Remembering. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1990. Derrida, Jacques. “Living On: Border Lines.” Trans. James Hulburt. Deconstruction and Criticism. Eds. Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller. New York: Seabury Press, 1979. 75–176. – Mémoires: For Paul de Man. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. – “No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives).” Diacritics 14.2 (summer 1984): 20–31. – “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy.” Trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. Semeia 23 (1982): 63–97. Dever, Carolyn. Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Devereux, Cecily. “The Body of Evidence: Re-membering the Past in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan.” Intersexions: Issues of Race and Gender in Canadian Women’s Writing. Eds. Coomi S. Vevaina and Barbara Godard. New Delhi: Creative Books, 1996. 231–43. Doan, Laura, ed. The Lesbian Postmodern. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Dupré, Louise. “Racines poétiques, racines maternelles.” Revue des Lettres et de Traduction 4 (1998): 117–27.

Bibliography

281

– Stratégies du vertige: Trois poètes: Nicole Brossard, Madeleine Gagnon, France Théoret. Montréal: Éditions du remue-ménage, 1989. Duras, Marguerite. La Mer écrite. Paris, Marval: Diffusion Harmonia Mundi, 1996. Edelman, Hope. Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss. New York: Delta, 1994. Elsaesser, Thomas. New German Cinema: A History. Hampshire and London: Macmillan Education Ltd., 1989. Epstein, Leslie. “Writing About the Holocaust.” Writing and the Holocaust. Ed. Berel Lang. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988. 261–70. Ezrahi, Sidra DeKovan. “The Grave in the Air: Unbound Metaphors in PostHolocaust Poetry.” Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution. Ed. Saul Friedländer. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. 259–76. Farwell, Marilyn. “Toward a Definition of the Lesbian Literary Imagination.” Sexual Practice, Textual Theory: Lesbian Cultural Criticism. Eds. Susan J. Wolfe and Julia Penelope. Cambridge, Massachusetts and Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. Flax, Jane. Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Forsyth, Louise., ed. Nicole Brossard: Essays on Her Works. Toronto: Guernica Editions, 2005. Foucault, Michel. L’Archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. Freeman, Mark. Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative. New York and London: Routledge, 1993. Freud, Sigmund. “Constructions in Analysis.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (1953–74), vol. 1. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1966. 255–69. – “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad.’” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 21 (1940): 469–74. Fridman, Lea Wernick. Words and Witness: Narrative and Aesthetic Strategies in the Representation of the Holocaust. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Friedländer, Saul, Gerald Holton, Leo Marx, and Eugene Skolnikoff, eds. Visions of Apocalypse: End or Rebirth? New York and London: Holmes & Meier, 1985. Frye, Joanne S. Living Stories, Telling Lives: Women and the Novel in Contemporary Experience. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1986.

282

Bibliography

Fuentes, Carlos. “Remember the Future.” The New Salmagundi Reader. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1996. Fujita, Gayle K. “‘To Attend the Sound of Stone’: The Sensibility of Silence in Obasan.” MELUS 12.3 (Fall 1985): 33–42. Furman, Laura. Ordinary Paradise. Houston: Winedale, 1998. Genet, Jean. Querelle de Brest. Paris: Gallimard, 1953. – Querelle. Trans. of Querelle de Brest by Anselm Hollo. New York: Grove Press, 1974. Godard, Barbara, ed. Gynocritics: Feminist Approaches to Canadian and Quebec Women’s Writing/Gynocritiques: démarches féministes à l’écriture des Canadiennes et Québécoises. Toronto: ECW Press, 1987. Godard, Barbara, Sherry Simon, and Patricia Smart. “Symposium on Feminism and Postmodernism in Quebec: The Politics of Alliance.” Québec Studies 9 (Fall 1989–Winter 1990): 131–50. Goellnicht, Donald C. “Father Land and/or Mother Tongue: The Divided Female Subject in Kogawa’s Obasan and Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.” Redefining Autobiography in Twentieth-century Women’s Fiction. Eds. Janice Morgan, Colette T. Hall, and Carol L. Snyder. New York: Garland, 1991: 119–34. – “Minority History as Metafiction: Joy Kogawa’s Obasan,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 7–8 (1988–89): 287–306. Gould, Karen. “Absence and Meaning in Anne Hébert’s Les Fous de Bassan.” French Review 59:6 (May 1986): 921–30. – “La Nostalgie postmoderne: Marie-Claire Blais, Dante et la relecture littéraire dans Soifs.” Études littéraires 31:2 (Winter 1999): 71–82. – “Québec Feminists Look Back: Inventing the Text Through History.” Québec Studies 1:1 (Spring 1983): 298–308. – “Refiguring the Mother: Quebec Women Writers in the 80s.” International Journal of Canadian Studies 6 (Fall 1992): 113–25. – Writing in the Feminine: Feminism and Experimental Writing in Quebec. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. Greene, Gayle. “Feminist Fiction and the Uses of Memory.” Signs 16:2 (1991): 290–321. Grewal, Gurleen, “Memory and the Matrix of History: The Poetics of Loss and Recovery in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan and Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Memory and Cultural Politics: New Approaches to American Ethnic Literatures. Eds. Amritjit Singh, Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr, and Robert E. Hogan. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996. 140–74. Grosz, Elizabeth. “Refiguring Lesbian Desire.” The Lesbian Postmodern. Ed. Laura Doan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Bibliography

283

Haaken, Janice. Pillar of Salt: Gender, Memory, and the Perils of Looking Back. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1998. Habermas, Jürgen. Legitimation Crisis. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1975. Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Hall, Donald. “Without.” Without (poems). Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Hall, Radclyffe. The Well of Loneliness. Garden City, New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1928. Reprint. New York: Doubleday, 1981. Havercroft, Barbara. “Auto/biographie et agentivité au féminin dans Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit d’Annie Ernaux.” La Francophonie sans frontière: une nouvelle cartographie de l’imaginaire au féminin. Eds. Lucie Lequin and Catherine Mavrikakis. Montréal and Paris: Éditions de l’Harmattan, 2001. 517–35. – “Hétérogénéité énonciative et renouvellement du genre: le Journal intime de Nicole Brossard.” Voix et Images 64 (1996): 22–37. Havercroft, Barbara, and Julie LeBlanc. “Présentation.” Voix et Images 64 (1996): 6–9. Hébert, Anne. Les Fous de Bassan. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1982. – Kamouraska. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1970. Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1992. Hirsch, Marianne. The Mother-Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. – “Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy.” Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Eds. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer. Hanover, New Hampshire, and London: University Press of New England, 1999. 3–23. Hodder, Ian. The Archaeological Process: An Introduction. Oxford, UK, and Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1999. – Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology. 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. – ed. Towards reflexive method in archaeology: the example at Çatalhöyük. Cambridge, UK: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2000. Howells, Coral Ann. Private and Fictional Words: Canadian Women Novelists of the 1970s and 1980s. London, New York: Methuen, 1987. Huffer, Lynne. Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures: Nostalgia, Ethics, and the Question of Difference. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998. Hutcheon, Linda. The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary EnglishCanadian Fiction. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1988. – A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988.

284

Bibliography

Ireland, Susan. “The Figure of the Mother in the Novels of Monique Larue.” Women by Women: The Treatment of Female Characters by Women Writers of Fiction in Quebec since 1980. Ed. Roseanna Lewis Dufault. Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997. 34–53. Jones, Sîan and Sharon Pay. “The Legacy of Eve.” The Politics of the Past. Eds. Peter Gathercole and David Lowenthal. London: Unwin Hyman, 1990. 160–73. Kaes, Anton, “Holocaust and the End of History: Postmodern Historiography in Cinema.” Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution.” Ed. Saul Friedländer, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. 206–22, 377–80. Keller, Catherine. Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996. Kermode, Frank. “Waiting for the End.” Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World. Ed. Malcolm Bull. Oxford, UK, and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1995. 250–63. King, Nicola. Memory, Narrative, Identity: Remembering the Self. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Knutson, Susan. Narrative in the Feminine: Daphne Marlatt and Nicole Brossard. Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2000. Kogawa, Joy. Itsuka. Toronto and London: Viking Penguin, 1992. Krell, David Farrell. Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing: On the Verge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Kübler-Ross, Elizabeth. On Death and Dying. New York: Macmillan, 1969. Kumar, Krishan. “Apocalypse, Millennium and Utopia Today.” Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World. Ed. Malcolm Bull. Oxford, UK, and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1995. 200–26. Lacan, Jacques. “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet.” Yale French Studies 55–6 (1977): 11–52. Lang, Berel, ed. Writing and the Holocaust. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988. Lowenthal, David. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Lyotard, Jean-François. Heidegger and “the jews”. Trans. of Heidegger et “les juifs” by Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. – The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. of La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984 (1979).

Bibliography

285

Mahon, Michael. Foucault’s Nietzschean Genealogy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. Martindale, Kathleen. Un/popular Culture: Lesbian Writing After the Sex Wars. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. McPherson, Karen S. Incriminations: Guilty Women/Telling Stories. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994. – “Since Yesterday: Nicole Brossard’s Writing After Loss.” Nicole Brossard: Essays on Her Works. Ed. Louise Forsyth. Toronto: Guernica Editions, 2005. 52–67. Meigs, Mary. “Memories of Age.” Trivia: A Journal of Ideas. Part I: Memory/ Transgression: Women Writing in Quebec 13 (Fall 1988): 57–65. Michaels, Anne. “Cleopatra’s Love.” Poetry and Knowing: Speculative Essays and Interviews. Ed. Tim Lilburn. Kingston, Ontario: Quarry Press, 1995. 177–83. – “What the Light Teaches.” The Weight of Oranges/Miner’s Pond (poems). Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997. 109–20. Middleton, Peter and Tim Woods. Literatures of Memory: History, Time, and Space in Postwar Writing. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000. Miller, Nancy K. Bequest and Betrayal. Oxford and New York. Oxford University Press, 1996. Mueller, Lisel. Alive Together (poems). Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1996. Munt, Sally, ed. New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and Cultural Readings. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Neuman, Shirley C. and Smaro Kamboureli. eds. A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing. Edmonton, Alberta: Longspoon-NeWest, 1986. Neuville, Laure. “Écrire pour ‘vivre le temps à l’envers’”: Madeleine OuelletteMichalska et Francine Noël.” Le Roman québécois au féminin (1980–1995). Ed. Gabrielle Pascal. Montréal: Triptyque, 1995. 33–45. Nicholson, Linda J., and Nancy Fraser. “Social Criticism Without Philosophy: An Encounter Between Feminism and Postmodernism.” Feminism/Postmodernism. Ed. Linda J., Nicholson. New York and London: Routledge, 1990. 19–38. Nicholson, Linda. The Play of Reason: From the Modern to the Postmodern. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1999. Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations (spring 1989, no. 26): 7–25. Norris, Christopher. “Versions of Apocalypse: Kant, Derrida, Foucault.” Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World. Ed. Malcolm Bull. Oxford, UK, and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1995. 227–49. Olney, James. Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

286

Bibliography

Ouellette-Michalska, Madeleine. L’échappée des discours de l’oeil. Montréal: Éditions Nouvelle Optique, 1981. Ozick, Cynthia. Writing and the Holocaust. Ed. Berel Lang. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988. Palumbo-Liu, David, “The Politics of Memory: Remembering History in Alice Walker and Joy Kogawa.” Memory and Cultural Politics: New Approaches to American Ethnic Literatures. Eds. Amritjit Singh, Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr, and Robert E. Hogan. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996. 211–26. Parker, Alice. Liminal Visions of Nicole Brossard. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. – “Myth and Memory in Nicole Brossard’s Baroque d’aube and Vertige de l’avant-scène.” Doing Gender: Franco-Canadian Women Writers of the 1990s. Paula Ruth Gilbert and Roseanna L. Dufault, eds. Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001. 36–52. Pascal, Gabrielle, ed. Le roman québécois au féminin (1980–1995). Montréal: Triptyque, 1995. Quimby, Karin. “‘This is my own, my native land’: Constructions of Identity and Landscape in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan.” Cross-Addressing: Resistance Literature and Cultural Borders. Ed. John C. Hawley. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1996. 257 –93. Quinby, Lee. Anti-Apocalypse: Exercises in Genealogical Criticism. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. – Millennial Seduction: A Skeptic Confronts Apocalyptic Culture. Ithaca, New York, and London: Cornell University Press, 1999. Representations 26 (1989). Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory. Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Norton, 1986. Rosenfeld, Alvin and Irving Greenberg, eds. Confronting the Holocaust: The Impact of Elie Wiesel. Bloomington and London, UK: Indiana University Press, 1978. Rubin, Lillian B. Tangled Lives: Daughters, Mothers, and the Crucible of Aging. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000. Said, Edward W. “Adorno as Lateness Itself.” Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World. Ed. Malcolm Bull. Oxford, UK, and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1995. 264–81. Santoro, Miléna. Mothers of Invention: Feminist Authors and Experimental Fiction in France and Quebec. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002. – “Writing and/in Mourning: The Legacy of Loss in Recent Texts by Madeleine Gagnon.” Doing Gender: Franco-Canadian Women Writers of the 1990s. Paula Ruth Gilbert and Roseanna L. Dufault, eds. Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001. 53–77.

Bibliography

287

Sarton, May. From May Sarton’s Well: Writings of May Sarton. Selection and photographs by Edith Royce Schade. Watsonville, California: Papiermache Press, 1994. Schulman, Peter and Mischa Zabotin. Le dernier livre du siècle: deux américains enquêtent sur l’intelligentsia française au tournant du siècle. Paris: Romillat, 2001. Schwarcz, Vera. Bridge Across Broken Time: Chinese and Jewish Cultural Memory. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Schwartz, Hillel. Century’s End: An Orientation Manual Toward the Year 2000. New York: Currency Doubleday, 1996. Abridged revision of Century’s End: A Cultural History of the Fin de Siècle. New York: Doubleday, 1990. Scott, Gail, Nicole Brossard, Louise Cotnoir, Louky Bersianik, France Théoret, and Louise Dupré. “Ce qu’on se dit le dimanche.” Tessera 5 (September 1988): 27–38. Showalter, Elaine. Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing. Oxford, UK, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Smart, Patricia, Writing in the Father’s House: The Emergence of the Feminine in the Quebec Literary Tradition. Trans. of Écrire dans la maison du père: L’émergence du féminin dans la tradition littéraire du Québec by Patricia Smart. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “World Systems and the Creole.” Narrative 14.1 (2006): 102–12. Stamelman, Richard. Lost Beyond Telling: Representations of Death and Absence in Modern French Poetry. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1990. Stanton, Domna, ed. The Female Autograph. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Sturken, Marita. “Narratives of Recovery: Repressed Memory as Cultural Memory.” Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Eds. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer. Hanover, New Hampshire, and London: University Press of New England, 1999. 231–48. Terdiman, Richard. Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1993. Théoret, France. Journal pour mémoire. Montréal: Éditions de l’Hexagone, 1993. Trivia, A Journal of Ideas 13 (Fall 1988). Special Issue: Part I: Memory/Transgression: Women Writing in Quebec. Van Alphen, Ernst. “Symptoms of Discursivity: Experience, Memory, and Trauma.” Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Eds. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer. Hanover, New Hampshire and London: University Press of New England, 1999. 24–38. Vautier, Marie. New World Myth: Postmodernism and Postcolonialism in Canadian Fiction. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998.

288

Bibliography

Vozenilek, Helen. Loss of the Ground-Note: Women Writing About the Loss of Their Mothers. Los Angeles: Clothespin Fever Press, 1992. Wiegman, Robyn. “Introduction. Mapping the Lesbian Postmodern.” The Lesbian Postmodern. Ed. Laura Doan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Wiesel, Elie. “The Holocaust as Literary Inspiration.” Dimensions of the Holocaust: Lectures at Northwestern University. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1990. Williams, Terry Tempest. Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. New York: Pantheon, 1991. Winterson, Jeanette. Art and Lies. New York: Vintage, 1994. Wolfe, Susan J. and Julia Penelope, eds. Sexual Practice, Textual Theory: Lesbian Cultural Criticism. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1925. Reprint. New York: Harcourt Brace Joranovich, 1953. – “On Being Ill” (1930). The Moment and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt, 1948. – A Room of One’s Own. New York and London: Hogarth Press, 1929. Reprint. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989. – A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Leonard Woolf. London: Hogarth Press, 1954. Worden, J. William. Dealing with Grief. New York: Wiley, 1996. Yhuel, Isabelle. “’Emmène-moi au cimetière.’” Autrement 128 (Deuils) (1992): 76–93. Zamora, Lois Parkinson, ed. Introduction. The Apocalyptic Vision in America: Interdisciplinary Essays on Myth and Culture. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1982. Zimmerman, Bonnie. “What has Never Been: An Overview of Lesbian Feminist Criticism.” Sexual Practice, Textual Theory: Lesbian Cultural Criticism. Eds. Susan J. Wolfe and Julia Penelope. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.

Index

Aarons, Victoria, 104 absence: and grief, 44; and lost history, 21–2, 23; and solitude, 125; and writing as impossible, 42, 239n28 Adorno, Theodor, 6, 7, 103, 229n10, 252–3nn105, 108 Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of the Self (Brison): on Caruth, 251n97; on empathic listeners, 95, 249n77; on therapeutic narrative, 253n111; on traumatic memory, 251n97 “Agénésies du vieux monde, Les” (Bersianik), 116 Alias Grace (Atwood), 20 Amèr, L’ (Brossard), 29, 271n7 Amyot, Geneviève. See Je t’écrirai encore demain Ana Historic (Marlatt): childbearing in, 25, 26–7; historic/ahistoric in title of, 23–4, 233–4n86; lesbian

desire in, 29–30, 236nn97, 98; lost history in, 21–5, 233–4nn85–8; motherloss in, 37; and postmodernism, 14, 15, 16 Ange de la solitude, L’ (Blais), 118–29; absence in, 125; apocalypticism in, 118, 126–8, 132, 258n22, 259nn23–5, 27; archaeologies of the future in, 117, 121–2; damage in, 120–1, 257– 8nn12, 15,16; future visions in, 120; generation in, 128–9, 256n9; lesbian space in, 119, 256–7n10; mother-daughter relationships in, 122–3; motherloss in, 37, 257n15; names in, 121–2, 257n13, 257n18; safe haven in, 119, 121, 257–8nn16, 17; solitude in, 125–6, 258n20; vulnerability in, 119, 123–4, 257n11 Anti-Apocalypse (Quinby), 7 anxiety, 5, 229nn7,11 apocalypticism, xv, 3–8, 118, 131–2; and anxiety, 5, 229nn7,11; and

290

Index

Christianity, 4, 228–9n7; and death, 169, 193; and death of West, 194–5; Derrida on, 6, 230n25; and double time, 183–4; and “l’Etoile Rose,” 126, 258n22; and feminist writing, 6–8; and fin de siècle, xx, 3–5, 228– 9n7; and future visions, 5–6, 225n2, 257n14; increasing interest in, 229n12; and “lateness,” 6, 229n10; and memory, 136–7; and mortality, 4–5, 229n10; and postmodernism, 116–17, 255–6n7; and revelation, 5–6, 126, 229n14; and self-annihilation, 126–8, 129, 259nn23–5,27; and September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, xx, 154–5, 263n54; and survival, 155–6; and video games, 141, 260–1n41 Aquin, Hubert: Prochain épisode, 213 archaeologies of the future, xv, 220; early articulations of, xvi-xvii, 227n7, 255n4; and lost history, 116– 17; and motherloss, 37; and names, 121–2; and translation, 259n29. See also future visions archaeology, xv-xviii; and attic image, 247n52; and feminist writing, 227n9; Foucault on, xvi, 225–6n3; Hodder on, xvi, 226–7nn4–6,9; memory as, xvii, 107–8, 247n52. See also archaeologies of the future Archer, John, 34–5 Ariadne’s thread image, 70–1 Articulate Silences (Cheung), 93 atomic bomb, 59, 243n7, 245n41 attending, 93, 94, 248n74 Atwood, Margaret: Alias Grace, 20; historiographic projects of, 16; on history and fiction, 12–13, 231n69; In Search of Alias Grace, 12–13, 16,

20, 24, 231n69; The Journals of Susanna Moodie, 13, 16, 231n70; Surfacing, 188 Augustino et le choeur de la destruction (Blais), 152–66; apocalypticism in, 154–6; chorus in, 157–8, 166, 263nn51, 55, 264n56; conditional mood in, 165–6, 264n60; connection in, 160–1; future visions in, 165, 264n60; shadow figure in, 160–4, 264n59; violence vs. grace in, 153–4, 164–6, 264n61; witness in, 156–7, 158–9, 166; writing in, 158–60 autobiography: and fiction, 172–5, 266n19; and memory, 172–3; and motherloss, 37, 216, 237n16, 272n18; and person shifts, 207–8, 271n9; and postmodernism, 173, 266n22 Avalée des avalés, L’ (Ducharme), 213 Baroque d’aube (Brossard), 172–204; apocalypticism in, 183–4, 193, 194– 5; autobiography in, 172–5, 266nn22, 23; baroque in, 177–80, 267n35; cemeteries in, 175–7, 267n31; connection in, 196–9, 269nn57–9; damage in, 184, 268n42; death in, 169, 190, 192–3, 269n53; die image in, 192, 269n52; double time in, 130–1, 182–4, 186– 9, 198; and French Symbolists, 268n48; future visions in, 130–1, 185–6, 199–204, 205–6, 265n15, 270n70; generation in, 191–2, 194; importance of memory to women in, 171; lesbian desire in, 199–201; memorializing in, 175, 179–80; motherloss in, 37, 184, 186, 190,

Index 268nn43,44; narrative construction in, 172, 173, 188–9, 196–7, 265– 6nn16,23, 268n47; nostalgic vs. visionary in, 184, 185–6, 268nn44,46; Occident character in, 180–3, 186, 192–5, 268n41, 269n53; postmodernism in, 117, 256n8; return to mother in, 190–2, 268–9n49; sea imagery in, 180, 268nn39,40; and She would be the first sentence of my next novel, 266n23, 267nn26,29, 269n58; solitude in, 196, 199; survival in, 195–6; tango in, 200; witness in, 182; women’s genealogies in, 174–5, 267n26, 268n43 baroque postmodernism, 117, 177– 80, 256n8, 267n35 Barthes, Roland: La Chambre claire, 238n20 Beaujour, Michel, 244n36 Beauvoir, Simone de, 235n90, 239n37; Une Mort très douce, 37 Beckett, Samuel, 229n10; Molloy, 184 Beloved (Morrison), 242n2 Benhabib, Seyla, 10 Benjamin, Jessica: “The Omnipotent Mother,” 238–9n27 Benjamin, Walter, 173, 265n2 Bentley, D. M. R., 105, 253n117 Bequest and Betrayal (Miller), 39–40, 41, 237n15, 238–9nn26, 27, 37 Bersianik, Louky: “Les Agénésies du vieux monde,” 116; on apocalypticism, 7–8; on archaeologies of the future, xv, xvi, xvii, 116–17, 255n4; “L’Herbe était rouge et comme rôtie,” 116–17; and historical fiction, 231n71; La Main tranchante du symbole, 255n4; Les Terribles vivantes, 265n9

291

Bertman, Sandra, 46, 53 Best, Stephen, 226n3 betrayal, 58–9, 102, 103, 242n3, 252n106 Bishop, Elizabeth, 242n4 Blais, Marie-Claire: apocalypticism, 8, 116, 131–2; and archaeologies of the future, 117; fractal world of, 154, 263n53; and future visions, 257n14; Pierre: La Guerre du printemps 81, 117, 132; Visions d’Anna, 117, 131–2, 255–6n7, 257n13. See also L’Ange de la solitude; Augustino et le choeur de la destruction; Dans la foudre et la lumière; Soifs Blanchot, Maurice, 42, 43, 44, 239nn34, 38; “Literature and the Right to Death,” 42 Bloodroot: Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss (Warland): grieving process in, 57; motherloss in, 33, 37, 39, 40, 238n22; writing as impossible in, 33, 40 Bollas, Christopher: Cracking Up, 62, 243nn22, 24 breath imagery, 98, 133–4, 250n89 Brison, Susan. See Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of the Self; “Trauma Narratives and the Remaking of the Self” Brossard, Nicole: L’Amèr, 29, 271n7; and apocalypticism, 3, 8, 225n2; and archaeologies of the future, 117, 220, 255n6; and Blais, 130–1, 259n29, 260n36; and corporeality, 269n62; on death, 168–70; father’s death, 33, 236n2; on fin de siècle, 3, 220–1; on future visions, 167, 220– 2, 225n2; and geography, 180, 267– 8n38; and grandmotherhood,

292

Index

271nn7, 8; on importance of memory to women, 63, 170–1; and intertextual resonance, 207, 270–1n5; Journal intime, 174, 213–15, 271– 2n12,14,15; and lesbian desire, 29, 178, 236nn97, 98; “La Lettre aérienne,” 265n15; “Mémoire: hologramme du désir,“171; “Memory: Hologram of Desire,” 192, 204; on memory, 63, 66; “Oeuvre de chair et metonymies,” 207–13, 215, 218, 271nn7–11, 272n19; Picture Theory, 177–8, 267n35; and postmodernism, 11–12, 117, 256n8; on privilege, 221–2, 274n32; She would be the first sentence of my next novel/Elle serait la première phrase de mon prochain roman, 206, 266n23, 267nn26,29, 269n58, 270n2; “Sous la langue,” 270n64; and spiral, 63, 244n30, 265–6n16; Les Terribles vivantes, 265n9; “Les Traces du manifeste,“170; on translation, 130–1, 171–2, 259n29; “Ultrasons,“175; Vertige de l’avant-scène, 168, 218–19; as woman of present, 205, 270n2. See also Baroque d’aube; Le Désert mauve; Domaine d’écriture, Hier Camus, Albert: L’Étranger, 213 Canadian Postmodern, The (Hutcheon), xviii Carrière, Marie, 228n13 Caruth, Cathy, 101, 250nn94,96, 251n97 Cathédrales sauvages, Les (Gagnon), 239n36 Celan, Paul: “Todesfugue,” 252– 3n108

cemeteries, 175–7, 267n31 Century’s End: An Orientation Manual Toward the Year 2000 (Schwartz), 4 Chambre claire, La (Barthes), 238n20 Charmaz, Kathy, 53 Cheung, King-Kok, 92–4, 245–6n43, 248n68; Articulate Silences, 93; and “attendance,” 93–4 childbearing: feminist writing on, 25, 235n90; and generation, 26, 256n9; and historical fiction, 14–15; and lost history, 25–7; and motherloss, 39–40, 238n22; and return to mother, 191, 193; and witness, 255n133 chorus, 157–8, 263nn51,55, 264n56, 264nn56,58 Christianity, 4, 228–9n7 “Cimetière aux oeillets” (Gagnon). See Le Deuil du soleil Cixous, Hélène, 235n90; Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, 239n37 “Cleopatra’s Love” (Michaels), 253n117 Colette: Sido, 37 Collectif Clio, Le (The Clio Collective): L’Histoire des femmes au Québec depuis quatre siècles, 19–20, 232n82 Comte-Sponville, André, 239n36 Conley, Katharine, 265n16 connection, 196–199; and Brossard’s “cortex” (corps/texte), 199; and death, 217; and future visions, 69, 202–3, 204, 209–10, 270n69; and generation, 128–9, 160–1; and grief writing, 43–4, 57, 218–19, 274n25; and memory, 67–9, 73–4, 81–2, 86– 7, 94–5, 109–11, 246nn46–8,50; and

Index narrative construction, 196–8, 269n58; and translation, 196; and trope of spinning, 247n53; and writing, 197–9, 218–19, 269nn57,59 consolation, 38–9, 56–7, 237n18, 238n20 Cook, Méira, 105–6, 111–12 Cracking Up (Bollas), 62, 243nn22, 24 cultural survival, 99–100, 104, 246n50 Czechowski, Nicole, 55–6 Daly, Mary: Gyn/Ecology, 247n53 Dans la foudre et la lumière (Blais), 137–52; aging in, 137–8; conditional mood in, 263n50, 264n60; connection in, 144, 145–6; future visions in, 138–41, 261n43; memory in, 147–8, 261nn44,45; public/ private tension in, 140, 260n40; response to suffering in, 143–4, 261n42; threshold of past and future in, 146–7, 151–2; violence vs grace in, 138–9, 141, 148–52, 260– 1n41, 261–3nn46–9; witness in, 141–4, 261n45 Daviau, Diane-Monique: Ma Mère et Gainsbourg, 33, 37, 38, 41, 55–6, 57 Davidman, Lynn: Motherloss, 38, 53, 240n52 Davidson, Arnold E., 79, 88, 245nn42, 43, 246n44, 247n58, 249n88, 250n90 Davidson, Arnold I., 226n3 Davidson, Glen, 53 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 59, 232n82, 242n5, 243n8 de Man, Paul, 236n6 Dealing with Grief (Worden), 54

293

death, 269n53; and apocalypticism, 169, 193; and cemeteries, 175–7, 267n31; and connection, 217; and future visions, 200–1; and generation, 194; and memory, 168; as paradox, 167, 265n5; and return to mother, 190, 192–3; and sexuality, 169–70; threshold of, 43, 52, 239n36; writing as authorized by, 42–3, 167–8, 173, 239nn28,34, 265n2. See also apocalypticism; grieving process; motherloss Derrida, Jacques, 6, 7, 167–8, 230n25 Désert mauve, Le (Brossard): archaeologies of the future in, 117, 255n6; and Blais, 260n36; death in, 169; future visions in, 219; lesbian desire in, 199; narrative construction in, 265n16; scientist character in, 182; solitude in, 196, 269n55; translation in, 171–2, 196, 259n29; trauma in, 66 desire. See lesbian desire; sexuality Deuil du soleil, Le (Gagnon): autobiography in, 37, 237n16; “Cimetière aux œillets,” 45–6, 239nn39,40; connection in, 43–4; connection with other authors in, 44; dialogue with the dead in, 46, 47–8, 50–1; “L’Encre noire des poètes,” 44; grieving process in, 55, 57; “Moraisons,” 35; motherloss in, 37, 40, 41; time in, 52, 53, 241n56; “La Vie est une étoile,” 46–8; writing as impossible in, 33–4, 35, 36–7, 41, 236n4 Dever, Carolyn, 238n19 Devereux, Cecily, 249n88 dialogic form, 46–51, 89, 239n42, 240nn43,44,46–8

294

Index

“Diving into the Wreck” (Rich), 188 Domaine d’écriture (Brossard), grief in, 33 double présent. See double time double time, 130–1, 182–4, 187–8, 189, 198 Ducharme, Réjean: L’Avalée des avalés, 213 Dupré, Louise: on Amyot, 38, 47, 50, 54, 237n18, 240n47, 241–2n70; on Brossard, 168–9; Stratégies du vertige, 168–9. See also La Memoria Duras, Marguerite, 45, 239n40; La Mer écrite, 33, 34, 35, 45, 236n4 Échappée des discours de l’oeil, L’ (Ouellette-Michalska), xvi, 255n4 Edelman, Hope: Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss, 37 Elsaesser, Thomas, 239n42 “Encre noire des poètes, L’” (Gagnon). See Le Deuil du soleil Entre Nous (Kurys), 119, 257n10 epistolary form, 240n44 Epstein, Leslie, 252n106 Ernaux, Annie, 239n37; Une Femme 37; Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit, 37, 245n39 “Etoile Rose, l’,” 126, 258n22 L’Etranger (Camus), 213 Ève (Hébert), 150 Ezrahi, Sidra DeKovan, 252–3n108 failure of language. See writing as impossible Felman, Shoshana, 243n7; on Adorno, 103, 252–3n108; on “crisis in witnessing,” 100; definition of testimony in, 107

feminist writing: and apocalypticism, 6–8; and archaeology, 227n9; on childbearing, 25, 235n90; and corporeality, 269n62; and historical fiction, 13–16, 231–2n71; and history, 19–20, 232n82; on lesbian desire, 28–9, 235–6n95; and linguistic divide, xix, 228n13; on mother-daughter relationships, 238n21; and nostalgia, 184; and postmodernism, 8–12, 13–14, 230n42, 231n62 Femme, Une (Ernaux), 37 fin de siècle, xx, 3–5, 12–13, 220–1, 228–9n7, 231n69. See also apocalypticism Focillon, Henri, 229n11 Foucault, Michel, xvi, 42, 225–6n3 Fous de Bassan, Les (Hébert), 15, 16, 24, 232n74 Frank, Anne, 262n47 Fraser, Nancy: “Social Criticism Without Philosophy,” 9–10 Freeman, Mark, 60, 62 Freud, Sigmund: on grieving process, 241n68; on memory, 64, 107– 8, 250nn94,96; on motherloss, 39, 238n19; “Mourning and Melancholia,” 238n19 Fridman, Lea Wernick, 92, 100, 248n66, 253n117 Fuentes, Carlos, 62, 227n7 Fugitive Pieces (Michaels), 98–115; contestatory role of memory in, 61–2; and crisis in history, 59, 243n7; cultural survival in, 99–100; female vision in, 113–14; gender in, 111–12, 255n135; language in, 104– 5, 254n126; legacy in, 109–11,

Index 254–5n132; meaning-making in, 106–7, 254n126; metaphor in, 105– 6, 254n122; motherloss in, 37; poetic knowing in, 105, 253n117; rebirth in, 98–9; reconstruction in, 107–8; sleeping child image in, 110–11; and testimonial writing, 100, 102–4, 251n100; trauma in, 100–2, 251nn98,100; wholeness in, 108–9 Fujita, Gayle, 93, 248n74 future visions: and apocalypticism, 5– 6, 225n2, 257n14; Brossard on, 167, 220–2, 225n2; and children, 138–41, 165; conditional quality of, 135, 165, 263n50, 264n60; and connection, 69, 202–3, 204, 209–10, 270n69; and death, 200–1; and grace, 144, 145, 261n43; and lesbian desire, 31, 199– 201; and memory, 62–3, 70–1, 72–3, 75–7, 98, 243n24; and nostalgia, 185–6; and postmodernism, 117, 255n6; and questions, 204, 206, 270n70; and threshold of past and future, 151–2, 205–6; and translation, 130–1; and writing, 120, 202–3, 204, 207, 219, 221, 257n14. See also archaeologies of the future Gagnon, Madeleine: Les Cathédrales sauvages, 239n36; on connection with other authors, 44–6, 239nn39,40; and death drive, 239n36; on grief, 32, 237n12. See also Le Deuil du soleil; Le Vent majeur generation: and childbearing, 26, 256n9; and connection, 128–9, 160– 1; and death, 194; and grandmotherhood, 271n7; and motherloss, 122, 191–2; and survival, 79. See also women’s genealogies

295

Genet, Jean, 258n18; Querelle de Brest, 125–6, 258n20 Godard, Barbara, xix Goellnicht, Donald C., 249n88 Gould, Karen, 231n71, 232n74, 238n21, 263n53 Greene, Gayle, 243n25 Grewal, Gurleen, 249n88 grief as burden, 110–11, 255n133 grief writing, 32–57; and connection, 43–4, 57, 218–19, 274n25; and contestatory role of memory, 61–2; and dialogue with the dead, 46–51, 240nn43,44,46–8; and grieving process, 54–7, 241–2nn68,70; and identity, 51, 240n52; as impossible, 32–4, 37, 40, 41–2, 56, 236nn2,4; and motherloss, 38, 40–2, 238– 9n27; and narrative construction, 217–18; and natural world, 51–2, 241nn54,55; and other authors, 44– 6, 239nn37–40; as paradox, 34–7, 42, 92, 236n69, 237nn11–13; and threshold of past and future, 43, 52, 239n36; and time, 52–3, 241nn55,56; and writing as authorized by death, 42–3, 239nn28,34. See also motherloss grieving process: and grief writing, 54–7, 241–2nn68,70; importance of, 53; as mourning work, 239n42; and memory, 63, 69–70, 71–2, 241–2n70, 244n30; paradigms for, 54, 241n61 Grosz, Elizabeth, 235n93 Gyn/Ecology (Daly), 247n53 Haaken, Janice: Pillar of Salt, 244n32 Halbwachs, Maurice, 104 Hall, Donald, 133; “Without,” 259– 60n33

296

Index

Hall, Radclyffe: The Well of Loneliness, 121–3, 258nn20, 21 Havercroft, Barbara, 174, 214–15, 245n39, 266n19, 268n43 Hébert, Anne, Ève, 150; Les Fous de Bassan, 15, 16, 24, 232n74; Kamouraska, 13 Hegel, Georg W.F., 239n34 Heidegger and “the jews” (Lyotard), 103 “Herbe était rouge et comme rôtie, L’” (Bersianik), 116–17 Herman, Judith Lewis, 104 Hier (Brossard): apocalypticism in, 117; fragility in, 206, 270n4; future visions in, 207, 219, 220; and Journal intime, 213–15, 271–2n12,14,15; loss in, 214, 272n14; motherloss in, 207, 213, 216–17, 272nn13,18,19; narrative construction in, 216–18, 272–3n20,21,23,24; and “Oeuvre de chair et métonymies,” 212–13, 215, 218; preservation of past in, 206–7, 219–20; threshold of past and future in, 206; writing in, 216–19, 274n25 Hirsch, Marianne, 96, 238n21, 254– 5n132 Histoire des femmes au Québec depuis quatre siècles, L’ (Le Collectif Clio), 19–20, 232n82 historical fiction: and feminist writing, 13–16, 231–2n71; fictional autonomy in, 13, 231n70; and fin de siècle, 12–13, 231n69; and history, 13, 17–19, 24, 232n80; and postmodernism, 13–16, 232n74; See also specific works history: and apocalypticism, 5; changing, 172, 265n15; crisis in, 59, 102, 243n7; feminist, 19–20,

232n82; and historical fiction, 13, 17–19, 24, 232n80; as opposed to memory, 59, 243n8; and witness, 92, 248n66, 253n117. See also lost history; memory Hodder, Ian, xvi, 226–7nn4–6, 9 Hodes, Laura, 258nn20, 22 Holocaust: and crisis in history, 59, 102, 243n7; and cultural survival, 99–100, 104; and “l’Etoile Rose,” 258n22; and writing as impossible, 100, 102–3, 251–2nn101,102,105, 106,108. See also Fugitive Pieces “Holocaust as a Literary Inspiration, The” (Wiesel), 103 Huffer, Lynne: Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures, 11–12, 184, 231n67, 235n90, 268n44 Hutcheon, Linda, 8–9; The Canadian Postmodern, xviii; and historiographic metafiction 13 “hysteria,” 234n87 identity: and grief writing, 51, 240n52; and memory, 62, 63, 66–7, 243n22; and motherloss, 40, 238n26, 245n39; and trauma, 66–7; and writing, 214–15, 272n15 In Search of Alias Grace (Atwood), 12– 13, 16, 20, 24, 231n69 intimate geography, 21–2 invention, 22–3, 233n85 Ireland, Susan, 238n21 Itsuka (Kogawa), 250n89 Jameson, Fredric, 227n7 Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit (Ernaux), 37, 245n39 Je t’écrirai encore demain (Amyot): character identification in, 240n53;

Index dialogue with the dead in, 46, 47, 48–50, 240nn44, 46–8; grieving process in, 54, 241–2n70; motherloss in, 37, 38–9; natural world in, 52, 241n55; time in, 52 Jones, Sîan, 227n9 Journal intime (Brossard), 174, 213– 15, 271–2n12,14,15 Journals of Susanna Moodie, The (Atwood), 13, 16, 231n70 Kaes, Anton, 102 Kamouraska (Hébert), 13 Keller, Catherine, 5 Kellner, Douglas, 226n3 Kermode, Frank, 4, 228n7 Kerouac, Jack: Visions of Gerard, 257n13 King, Nicola, 62, 107, 254n122, 254– 5n132, Kogawa, Joy: Itsuka, 250n89. See also Obasan Kristeva, Julia, 235n90, 237n18 Kübler-Ross, Elizabeth: On Death and Dying, 54 Kumar, Krishan, 6 Lacan, Jacques, 237n11, 243n24 Lang, Berel: Writing and the Holocaust, 252n106 language: and legacy, 209, 271n10; and memory, 104–5, 254n126. See also writing; writing as impossible Laub, Dori, 95, 101, 102, 103, 243n7, 250n94; trauma and temporal “entrapment”, 251n98 Le Blanc, Julie, 266n19 Le Guin, Ursula K., 227n7 legacy: and connection, 109–11; and language, 209, 271n10; and

297

memory, 109–11, 147–8, 254– 5n132; and mother-daughter relationships, 208, 209–10, 211–12, 271n10; postmemory, 254–5n132; and women’s genealogies, 208–11, 212, 271n11; and writing, 159. See also connection; cultural survival lesbian desire: and apocalypticism, 126, 259n22; and corporeality, 199, 269n62; and entre nous, 119, 256– 7n10; feminist writing on, 28–9, 235–6n95; and future visions, 31, 199–201; and geography, 180; and lost history, 28–31, 235n93, 236nn97,98; and mother-daughter relationships, 122–3; and nostalgia, 268n44; and postmodernism, 11– 12; and rapprochement, 200; and writing, 199–200, 201, 270n64 “Lettre aérienne, La” (Brossard), 265n15 linguistic divide, xviii-xix, 228nn12,13 listening, 35, 93, 94, 249n77, 253n111. See also attending “Literature and the Right to Death” (Blanchot), 42 Literatures of Memory (Middleton and Woods), 60, 61, 243n15 Loss of the Ground-Note: Women Writing about the Loss of their Mothers (Vozenilek), 37, 238n21 lost history, 19–31; and absence, 21–2, 23; and archaeologies of the future, 116–17; and childbearing, 25–7; and feminist history, 19–20, 232n82; and historic/ahistoric, 23–4, 233–4n86; and invention, 22–3, 233n85; and lesbian desire, 28–31, 235n93, 236nn97,98; and marginalization,

298

Index

24, 234n87; and memory, 22, 63, 96– 7, 136, 243n25, 260n38; and sexuality, 28–31, 235nn91,92; and violence against women, 24–5, 234n88 Lot’s wife image, 65, 70, 75–6, 113, 244n32 Lowenthal, David, 58, 249n83 Lyotard, Jean-François, 254n122; Heidegger and “the jews”, 103; The Postmodern Condition, 230n42, Ma Mère et Gainsbourg (Daviau), 33, 37, 38, 41, 55–6, 57 Mahon, Michael, 225–6n3 Main tranchante du symbole, La (Bersianik), 255n4 Maison Trestler, La (OuelletteMichalska): childbearing in, 25–6; history in, 17–19, 232n80; lost history in, 20–1, 24; motherloss in, 37; and postmodernism, 14–15, 16; sexuality in, 28, 235nn91,92 Marchessault, Jovette, 232n71, 265n9 Marlatt, Daphne. See Ana Historic Martindale, Kathleen: Un/popular Culture: Lesbian Writing After the Sex Wars, 11, 231n62 Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures (Huffer), 11–12, 184, 231n67, 235n90, 268n44 meaning-making: and grief, 35; and memory, 81, 96–7, 106–7, 254n126; and postmodernism, 12, 231n67 Meigs, Mary, 63 “Mémoire: hologramme du désir” (Brossard), 171 Memoria, La (Dupré), 63–77; connection in, 67–9, 73–4; entrapment in memory in, 65–6; future visions in, 70–1, 72–3, 75–7; grieving process

in, 69–70, 71–2, 242n70; history in, 59; identity in, 63, 66–7; magic notepad image in, 64–5; motherloss in, 37, 73–5, 76; spinning/ weaving images in, 247n53 memory, 58–115; ambivalence about, 82–4, 85, 89–90, 246n49, 247n51, 248n59; and apocalypticism, 136–7; and archaeology, xvii, 107–8, 247n52; and attic image, 84–5, 247n52; and autobiography, 172–3; and baroque, 179–80; and betrayal, 58–9, 102, 103, 242n3, 252n106; and breath imagery, 98, 250n90; and change, 80–1; and connection, 67– 9, 73–4, 81–2, 86–7, 94–5, 109–11, 246nn46–8,50; contestatory role of, 60–2, 82, 243nn15,17, 246n49, 250n90; critical work on, 242n4, 266n20; and death, 168; and dialogic form, 89; entrapment in, 64, 65–6, 251n98; ethical role of, 102–3, 114, 243n15; excess of, 135–6; and future visions, 62–3, 70–1, 72–3, 75–7, 98, 243n24; and generation, 191–2; and grieving process, 63, 69–70, 71–2, 241–2n70, 244n30; and historical fiction, 13; and identity, 62, 63, 66–7, 243n22; imperative of, 147–9, 261n45; importance to women of, 63, 170–1, 243n25; and language, 104–5, 254n126; and legacy, 109–11, 147–8, 254–5n132; and listening, 93, 94, 249n77, 253n111; and lost history, 22, 63, 96–7, 136, 243n25, 260n38; and meaningmaking, 81, 96–7, 106–7, 254n126; and memorializing, 175; and motherloss, 41, 73–5, 76, 77; as opposed to history, 59, 243n8; and

Index photographs, 82–3, 86, 95–6, 246n50, 247n56, 249n83; postmemory, 254–5n132; and preservation of past, 83–4, 206–7, 219–20; and reconstruction, 107–8; Renaissance context of, 244n36; resistance to, 58, 242n2; and silence, 78–80, 90, 91–4, 245–6nn42–5, 248nn68,72,74; and spinning/weaving images, 84–6, 247nn53,54; and survival, 59, 76, 114–15, 147, 242n5; and testimonial writing, 100, 102–3, 251–2nn100, 101; as transgressive, 244n32; and violence against women, 87–8; and wholeness, 108–9; and witness, 91, 92, 94, 100, 101–2, 103, 136, 248nn60,66, 253n117, 261n45; and writing, 60, 63, 103–4, 170–1, 242n4, 253n111. See also trauma “Memory: Hologram of Desire” (Brossard), 192, 204 Mer écrite, La (Duras), 33, 236n4 Michaels, Anne, 58; “Cleopatra’s Love,” 253n117. See also Fugitive Pieces Middleton, Peter: Literatures of Memory, 60, 61, 243n15 millennialism. See apocalypticism Millennial Seduction (Quinby), 5 Miller, Nancy K.: Bequest and Betrayal, 39–40, 41, 237n15, 238– 9nn26, 27, 37 missing history. See lost history Molloy (Beckett), 184 “Moraisons” (Gagnon). See Le Deuil du soleil Morrison, Toni: Beloved , 242n2 Mort très douce, Une (Beauvoir), 37 mortality, and apocalypticism, 4–5, 229n10

299

mother-daughter relationships: and connection, 86–7; feminist writing on, 238n21; and legacy, 208, 209– 10, 211–12, 271n10; and lesbian desire, 122–3; and nostalgic-visionary tension, 185–6, 268nn44,46. See also motherloss Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss (Edelman), 37 motherloss, 37–41; and autobiography, 37, 216, 237n16, 272n18; and consolation, 38–9, 237n18, 238n20; and damage, 257n15; and death, 190; Freud on, 39, 238n19; and generation, 122, 191–2; and grief writing, 38, 40–2, 238–9n27; and identity, 40, 238n26, 245n39; importance of, 37, 237n15; and memory, 41, 73–5, 76, 77; and narrative construction, 216–17, 272– 3nn13,20; and nostalgia, 184, 186, 268n44; and physical bond, 39–40, 238n22; and preservation of past, 207; unique intensity of, 38, 237n17, 272n19; and women’s genealogies, 268n43 Motherloss (Davidman), 38, 53, 240n52 “Mourning and Melancholia” (Freud), 238n19 mourning work. See grief writing; grieving process Mueller, Lisel: “When I Am Asked ,” 43, 52, 241n54 narrative construction: and character as author, 173, 196–8, 266n23, 269n57; and extensions of the text, 266n23, 269n58; and fractals, 154, 263n53; and grief writing, 217–18;

300

Index

and motherloss, 216–17, 272– 3nn13,20; person shifts, 188–9, 207–8, 268n47, 271n9; and spiral, 172, 265–6n16 natural world, 51–2, 241nn54,55 Neuville, Laure, 16, 232n76 New World Myth (Vautier), xviii-xix Nicholson, Linda J.: “Social Criticism Without Philosophy,” 9–10 Nietzschean genealogy, 225–6n3 Nora, Pierre, 59, 180, 267n31 Norris, Christopher, 230n25 Obasan (Kogawa), 77–98; abuse in, 87–8, 247n58; ambivalence about memory in, 82–4, 85, 89–90, 246n49, 247n51, 248n59; atomic bomb in, 245n41; bicultural context of, 245n42; change in, 80–1; connection in, 81–2, 86–7, 94–5, 246nn46–8,50; contestatory role of memory in, 82, 246n49, 250n90; and crisis in history, 59, 243n7; cultural survival in, 246n50; grieving process in, 56; as historical fiction, 232n71; missing father in, 77, 245n40; motherloss in, 37, 77; repetition in, 78, 245n42; silence in, 78– 80, 91–4, 245–6nn42–5, 248nn68,72,74; spinning/weaving images in, 84–6, 247n54; survival in, 56, 79, 249n80; trauma in, 95–6, 245n41; tree metaphor in, 86, 87, 88, 95, 249n79; witness in, 91, 92, 94, 248nn60,66 “Oeuvre de chair et métonymies” (Brossard), 207–13, 215, 218, 271nn7–11, 272n19 Of Woman Born (Rich), 25, 39, 238nn21,27

“Omnipotent Mother, The” (Benjamin), 238–9n27 On Death and Dying (Kübler-Ross), 54 Orwell, George, 229n12 Ouellette-Michalska, Madeleine, xvixvii, 3, 232n76, 255n4; L’Échappée des discours de l’oeil, xvi, 255n4. See also La Maison Trestler Ozick, Cynthia, 252n106 Palumbo-Liu, David, 61, 96–7, 108, 243n17, 250n90 Parker, Alice, 180, 199, 204, 207, 236n2, 265–6n16, 268nn39,48, 269nn59,62, 270nn2,71 Pay, Sharon, 227n9 Perec, Georges: W or the Memory of Childhood, 254n122 photographs: and memory, 82–3, 86, 95–6, 246n50, 247n56, 249n83; and threshold of past and future, 176 Picture Theory (Brossard), 177–8, 267n35 Pierre: La Guerre du printemps 81 (Blais), 117, 132 Pillar of Salt (Haaken), 244n32 pluralism, xviii postmemory, 254–5n132 Postmodern Condition, The (Lyotard), 230n42 postmodernism: and apocalypticism, 116–17, 255–6n7; and autobiography, 173, 266n22; and baroque, 117, 177–80, 256n8, 267n35; and feminist writing, 8–12, 13–14, 230n42, 231n62; and future visions, 117, 255n6; and historical fiction, 13–16, 232n74; and meaningmaking, 12, 231n67 pregnancy. See childbearing

Index privilege, 221–2, 274n32 Prochain épisode (Aquin), 213 punctuation. See style “Québec Feminists Look Back” (Gould), 231n71 Querelle de Brest (Genet), 125–6, 258n20 Quinby, Lee, 5, 6–7; Anti-Apocalypse, 7; Millennial Seduction, 5 rapprochement. See connection repetition: and silence, 78, 245n42; and trauma, 101, 102, 251n98 Rich, Adrienne: “Diving into the Wreck,” 188; Of Woman Born, 25, 39, 238nn21,27 Room of One’s Own, A (Woolf), 28 Said, Edward, 4–5, 6, 7, 229n10 Santayana, George, 62 Santoro, Miléna, 29, 51, 239n36; “Writing in/and Mourning,” 237n12, Sarton, May, 258n20 Schulman, Peter, 220 Schwarcz, Vera, 244n32 Schwartz, Hillel: Century’s End: An Orientation Manual Toward the Year 2000, 4, 228–9n7 science fiction, 229n12 sea imagery, 38–9, 180, 236n3, 268nn39,40 self. See identity September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, xx, 154–6, 263n54 sexuality: and death, 169–70; and grieving process, 69; and lost history, 28–31, 235nn91,92; and translation, 196. See also lesbian desire

301

Shapiro, Susan, 253n117 She would be the first sentence of my next novel/Elle serait la première phrase de mon prochain roman (Brossard), 206, 266n23, 267nn26,29, 269n58, 270n2 Showalter, Elaine: Sister’s Choice , 247n53 Sido (Colette), 37 silence: and grief writing as paradox, 35; and memory, 78–80, 90, 91–4, 245–6nn42–5, 248nn68,72,74; vs testimony, 102–3, 251– 2nn101,105,106. See also writing as impossible Sister’s Choice (Showalter), 247n53 Smart, Patricia, 232n74, 234n88 “Social Criticism Without Philosophy” (Nicholson and Fraser), 9–10 Soifs (Blais), 129–37; apocalypticism in, 136–7, 154–5; breath in, 133–4; and Brossard, 130–1, 259n29, 260n36; conditional mood in, 135, 263n50, 264n60; families in, 134–5; future visions in, 135, 137, 263n50; memory in, 135–7; postmodernism in, 256n8; shadow figure in, 161–2, 264n59; solitude in, 133, 259n32; style in, 132–3, 259–60nn32,33; violence vs grace in, 151, 262– 3nn48,49 Soifs trilogy (Blais), 117, 257n13. See also Augustino et le choeur de la destruction; Dans la foudre et la lumière; Soifs solitude, 125–6, 258n20; and connection, 196, 199, 269n55; and style, 133, 259nn32,33; and writing, 159–60 “Sous la langue” (Brossard), 270n64 Spencer, Nigel, 261–2n46

302

Index

spinning/weaving images, 84–6, 247nn53,54 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 263n53 Stamelman, Richard, 32, 35, 42, 43, 236n6, 237nn11,13, 238n20, 239n28, 242n4 Starn, Randolph, 59, 242n5, 243n8 Steedman, Carolyn, 239n37 Stratégies du vertige (Dupré), 168–9 style, 132–3, 259nn32,33. See also narrative construction Surfacing (Atwood), 188 surrogacy, 109 survival: and apocalypticism, 155–6; and butterfly image, 249n80; cultural, 99–100, 104, 246n50; and generation, 79; and grieving process, 56; and memory, 59, 76, 114– 15, 147, 242n5; and writing, 195–6 Terdiman, Richard, 59–61, 173 Les Terribles vivantes, 265n9 Tessera, xix testimonial writing: and metaphor, 105–6, 254n122; and narrative, 103–4, 253n111; and poetic knowing, 253n117; and trauma, 251n100; and writing as impossible, 102–3, 251–3nn101,102,105,106,108. See also witness Théoret, France, 129 Thomas, Dylan, 150 Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (Cixous), 239n37 threshold of past and future: and cemeteries, 175–7, 267n31; and connection, 146–7; and future visions, 151–2, 205–6 time: destabilization of, 213; and grief writing, 52–3, 241nn55,56 “Todesfugue” (Celan), 252–3n108

“Les Traces du manifeste” (Brossard), 170 trauma: and belatedness, 101, 250n96; and connection, 95–6; and cultural survival, 104; and defiance of memory, 245n41; and entrapment in memory, 251n98; and grief writing as paradox, 92, 248n66; and identity, 66–7; and postmemory, 254–5n132; and tenacity of memory, 101, 250n94, 251n97; and testimonial memory, 251n100; and testimonial writing, 251n100; and witness, 101–2 Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Caruth), 250n94 “Trauma Narratives and the Remaking of the Self” (Brison): on connectedness, 67; on epistemological crisis, 67 “Ultrasons” (Brossard), 175 Un/popular Culture: Lesbian Writing After the Sex Wars (Martindale), 11 Valéry, Paul, 36–7 Van Alphen, Ernst, 251–2n101 Vautier, Marie, 232n71; on Kogawa, 92–3; New World Myth, xviii-xix Vent majeur, Le (Gagnon): dialogue with the dead in, 46–7, 51, 240n44; natural world in, 241n55; time in, 241n56; writing as impossible in, 32, 34 Vertige de l’avant-scène (Brossard), 168, 218–19 “Vie est une étoile, La” (Gagnon). See Le Deuil du soleil violence against women: and lost history, 24–5, 234n88; and memory, 87–8

Index virtual reality, 188–93 Visions d’Anna (Blais), 117, 131–2, 255–6n7, 257n13 Visions of Gerard (Kerouac), 257n13 Vozenilek, Helen: Loss of the GroundNote: Women Writing about the Loss of their Mothers, 37, 238n21 W or the Memory of Childhood (Perec), 254n122 Warland, Betsy. See Bloodroot: Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss The Well of Loneliness (Hall), 122–3, 258nn20,21 “When I Am Asked” (Mueller), 43, 52, 241n54 Wiegman, Robyn, 11 Wiesel, Elie, 103; “The Holocaust as a Literary Inspiration,” 103 Williams, Terry Tempest, 31 Winterson, Jeanette, 172 “Without” (Hall), 259–60n33 witness: and art, 141–3; and double time, 182; and grief as burden, 255n133; and history, 92, 248n66, 253n117; and memory, 91, 92, 94, 100, 101–2, 103, 136, 248nn60,66, 253n117, 261n45. See also testimonial writing women’s genealogies: and apocalypticism, 6–7; and legacy, 208–11, 212, 271n11; and memory, 76–7; and motherloss, 268n43; and writing, 121–2, 174–5, 267n26. See also generation Woods, Tim: Literatures of Memory, 60, 61, 243n15

303

Woolf, Virginia, 133, 259n32; A Room of One’s Own, 28, Worden, William: Dealing with Grief, 54 writing: as authorized by death, 42– 3, 167–8, 173, 239nn28,34, 265n2; and connection, 197–9, 218–19, 269nn57,59; and double time, 187– 8, 198; and future visions, 120, 202–3, 204, 207, 219, 221, 257n14; and identity, 214–15, 272n15; and lesbian desire, 199–200, 201, 270n64; and lost history, 23–4; and memory, 60, 63, 103–4, 170–1, 242n4, 253n111; and narrative instability, 196–8, 269n58; and solitude, 159–60; and survival, 195–6; and women’s genealogies, 121–2, 174–5, 267n26. See also feminist writing; grief writing; historical fiction; testimonial writing “Writing and/in Mourning” (Santoro), 237n12 Writing and the Holocaust (Lang), 252n106 writing as impossible: and absence, 42, 239n28; and grief, 32–4, 37, 40, 41–2, 56, 236nn2,4; and Holocaust, 100, 102–3, 251– 2nn101,102,105,106,108 year 2000 (Y2K). See fin de siècle Zabotin, Mischa, 220 Zamora, Lois Parkinson, 5, 229n14