Context
Difficulty and Revolution
Douglas Glover
1. Why are some novels more difficult to
read than other novels? Why do some authors choose to write difficult
books when they could just as easily write so-called well-made books,
books that would presumably have a better chance of achieving a wide
audience and commercial success? If writing a book, like speaking, is a
form of communication, then doesn’t difficulty rather defeat the
purpose of writing at all? What is the difference between a difficult
book and a well-made book? And how do they both relate to the
not-writing of a book, to unwriting, to silence? I have in
mind a particular difficult writer, the late great Hubert Aquin, who
came out of silence on 24 October 1929, and went back to silence on 15
March 1977, when he shot himself to death in a courtyard of the Villa
Maria Convent in Montreal. A friend of mine used to take a shortcut
through the convent to his university classes. That morning he found
his usual route cordoned off by police barricades. Imagine this—a scene
worthy of the author: the silence of the suicide, hidden from his
public by the barricades and uniforms of an alien authority,
nevertheless drawing a crowd of titillated voyeurs (and readers) who
crane their necks, shake their heads and ask themselves what he meant
by turning himself into nothing. When Aquin died, he left a six-page fragment of a novel which would have been his fifth and which reads in part: Aquin, then, wrote five difficult novels, the chief difficulty of the last being its incompleteness. The other four are Prochain épisode (1965), Trou de mémoire (1968), L’Antiphonaire (1969) and Neige noir (1974). These were published in English translations as Prochain Épisode, Blackout, The Antiphonary, and Hamlet’s Twin. Since all the titles are tropes referring to devices within the novels, his Anglo-Canadian publisher’s decision to change Black Snow to Hamlet’s Twin appears as a final act of vandalism perpetrated on the body of the dead author’s text by the Toronto publishing establishment. Trou de mémoire won a Governor General’s Award in 1969, but the author, true to his
Quebec Separatist ideology, rejected it just as in his novels he chose
to reject an easy accommodation with the tyranny of the reader. Trou de mémoire is, in part, the story of a drug-addicted Quebec Separatist, also a
rapist and murderer. Giving such a novel the Governor General’s Award
was the supreme expression of a smugly patronizing federal government;
or, to put it another way, Canadian culture is such a bland and bloated
sponge that it can even soak up, dilute, and neutralize the poison of
the idea of its own annihilation. Had Aquin accepted the award (named,
as it is, for the representative of a conquering monarchy), had he
decided to acquiesce to the predominately English power structure of
this country, he would have been accepting the impotence of his own
book. The book says, again in part, We can’t talk; Canada says, Look,
Hubert (pronounced Hubert, in the English way, as in filbert or Cuthbert),
you difficult boy, we can talk about this. The way of refusal which
Aquin chose is the way of increasing difficulty. The book is not just a
book, Aquin is saying, it is a crime, an act of self-mutilation, a
revolutionary act which completely severs itself from the discourse
which preceded it. Aquin’s refusal of the Governor General’s
Award was not atypical of a life that included several such
non-dialogues with authority (and should also be looked at in light of
Paul-Émile Borduas’s famous Refus global two decades
earlier—all art is against the Anglicans of the spirit). In 1964, Aquin
was arrested for suspected terrorism, pleaded insanity, was bound over
for observation in a mental hospital and finally acquitted. Two years
later he tried to move to Switzerland but Swiss police quickly expelled
him on the say-so, he believed, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Finally, when the Parti Québécois came into power in Quebec in 1976 by
way of the polling booth rather than the sword, Aquin seems to have
expected an appointment as deputy minister of culture, an appointment
which never came. At his death, he remained an outsider who never made
it to the inside even when his party held the reins of government. It
was as if, having made the effort to render himself difficult—a man
whose favorite alter-ego was the failed and impotent revolutionary—he
could no longer make himself fit into a structure he had come to
despise even when the structure appeared to promise victory for his
ideals. Like Aeneas’s luckless pilot Palinurus, Aquin did not have the
stomach for success. Or perhaps, just perhaps, both Aquin and Palinurus
had some inkling of the difference between journeying toward Rome and
founding the city, the difference between wandering the open sea in
search of adventure and planning sewage systems and set-back
allowances. The spiritual poverty of the colonized man, that stance,
gave Aquin the freedom he needed to attack all totalizing
systems—political, philosophical and aesthetic. That freedom gave him
what he called, at the last, his “swagger,” his Black Romanticism, the
courage and comedy of despair that inform every word he wrote. The
paradox of Aquin as author is that out of impotence and disease he made
masterpieces of flashing, lapidary prose, that as a failure he was able
to write macabre, lewd, violent, hilarious and arrogant novels. This is
crucial. Aquin situated himself in the place where writing is
impossible and wrote. 2. If writing a novel is impossible,
then, naturally, writing the novel becomes the first adventure of the
novel. On the opening page of Prochain Épisode, the narrator (who claims to be writing the book) writes: This
triple denial is in itself an objective correlative, a complex image of
the difficulty Aquin throws in the reader’s path. The denials of
Québécois nationalist aspirations, of novel-writing, and of meaning
interweave and play leapfrog through the texts. But Aquin gives no clue
as to which is primary, which is the so-called referent. Are Quebec
nationalist aspirations (denied) a metaphor for the Death of God or the
late twentieth century collapse of the eighteenth-century liberation
philosophies, or vice versa? As Olympe Ghezzo-Quenum, one of the
several narrator-writer-editors of Blackout, writes: The primary devices of the well-made novel—plot, character,
setting and theme—are designed to imitate the structures of this
so-called reality. They situate and reassure the reader by promoting
verisimilitude, the quality (or illusion) of appearing to be real. By
emphasizing the difficulty, or even impossibility, of producing meaning over meaning itself, by piling up alternative but equivalent semiological systems,
Aquin obliterates these conventional novelistic devices. To put this
another way, a novel is a machine for the production of meaning. A
machine has two ways of not working (just as there are two sorts of
impossible novels): either you can’t turn it on, in which case the
writer is silent, or you can’t stop it, in which case the writer keeps
multiplying languages, endlessly and obsessively filling in the blanks
with different words. The difficult (now impossible) writer-novel
machine is either mutely autistic (or dead) or schizophrenic. Pierre
Magnant, the drug-intoxicated, “sexofugal”
pharmacist-separatist-rapistmurderer-novelist in Blackout, exclaims: “I am a living, one-man Pentecost.” In The Antiphonary, Christine Forestier writes: Aquin’s plots are hyper-melodramatic parodies of plot. A
French-Canadian separatist rapes and murders his English girlfriend,
then tracks down her sister and rapes her, then changes his name,
becomes his own editor, murders his literary double, and commits
suicide. A washed-up Montreal actor discovers that his wife is
committing incest with her father, ritually murders her (this includes
eating parts of her body) on their honeymoon in Norway, and then writes
a screenplay about it. Or his plots are otherwise unfinished or
mangled. The spy-thriller-within-the-novel of Prochain Épisode never gets written and the incompetent assassin never completes his mission; and in Blackout,
the initial (incomplete) text of Pierre Magnant’s novel is misplaced,
edited, interrupted, footnoted, abridged, rewritten, and criticized by,
not one, but a whole series of editors, lovers, and friends. Most
telling of all is Aquin’s use of the repetition as a plot device which
destroys plot in general. In Blackout, for example, there are two voyeuristic sex scenes—in the Redfern lab and the Neptune restaurant (the latter is more or less stuck in by one of Magnant’s over-zealous editors)—and two scenes in which
Magnant masturbates Joan in public. This repetition of the same event
is the antithesis of plot because it denies uni-directional time; it is
an anti-plot. “I’m writing,” says Pierre Magnant, “telling a story—my
story—telling any old thing . . . and who cares! As long as I say
nothing. . . .” Similarly, by inventing perfect twins,
doubles, and doppelgangers (Pierre Magnant and Olympe Ghezzo-Quenum,
Joan and Rachel Ruskin, Christine Forestier and Renata Belmissieri),
Aquin undermines the conventional notion of literary character. In the
imaginary world of the Aquinate, the thoughts of one character will
even bleed into the mind of its twin other. Pierre Magnant occasionally
lapses into the African reflections of his alterego, Olympe: 3. Having established this irreality by dynamiting the conceptual
and conventional pillars of verisimilitude and inserting their
mutilated corpses into his novels as parodies of structure, Aquin
builds an alternative structure, his anti-structure, using another set
of literary devices: repetition, parallelism, substitution, analogy,
allegory, irony, allusion, intertextuality, recurring imagery, puns,
jokes, digression, neologism, simile, and metaphor. Of course, these
devices are also used in conventional wellmade novels, but there they
do not assume the primacy of place they do in a difficult or impossible
novel. In a well-made novel, simile is safely confined within the
contextualizing bounds of plot, character, setting, and theme. X is like y, without much danger of confusion; it is always understood that x and
y are separate entities. Whereas in a difficult novel, an Aquinesque
novel, which lacks the contextualizing framework, x may be, or is, y, z, or beta, etc. In
the difficult novel, there is no action in the sense that there is no
plot, but there is plenty of action at the level of words, sentences
and paragraphs, and this action is always violent, a multi-car pile-up
of meaning on the expressway of the page. Aquin’s style is fast and
energetic, not because things happen quickly (because, in fact, hardly
anything happens), but because new connections are made simultaneously,
much as they are in a poem, by the process of semantic dislocation.
This phrase “semantic dislocation” comes from Viktor Shklovsky’s
pamphlet “Literature and Cinema”: On a rudimentary level, we are all familiar with devices of
dislocation. It’s not difficult to get the joke when Aquin calls his
Montreal pharmaceutical company Leacock, Leacock & French (the twin
African pharmaceutical firm is Chaucer, Chaucer, Chaucer & Webb).
Or when he coins cracked neologisms—sexofugal, psychovampire effect,
pyrophoric, onanomanic, etc. Or inserts crude homophones—turd of honour. But usually, the disruption is more complex, even if it looks simple. Watching a red truck in the street, the narrator of Prochain Épisode (locked up in an asylum for observation) recalls a similar truck used
by separatists to haul away guns stolen from the Mount Royal Armouries.
“Bye Bye Fusiliers Mont-Royal” he writes: Yet even this observation fails to exhaust the hermeneutic possibilities of Aquin’s little Farewell To Arms trope. For, after laying bare the device, Aquin plays with it; the
words “arms,” “disarmed” (two different meanings), and “armed” erupt
through the surface of the text and threaten to hijack it away from the
narrative flow. The phrase “disarmed for having been armed” further
introduces or intrudes the discourse of autobiography—briefly, Aquin
himself is the unnamed narrator of Prochain Épisode just as the
unnamed narrator is the incompetent assassin-hero of his spy-thriller
manqué; the walls of identity come tumbling down and we find ourselves
in a contradictory universe where everything is different and
everything is the same. A word from a secondary meaning sequence (level
of meaning, discourse)—the word “arms”—thrusts into the primary meaning
sequence, skews the context, and deforms the meaning. This secondary
sequence (beginning with a word) burgeons, balloons, and explodes,
detaching itself from the basic discourse, pulling free of the given
context and creating an independent or equivalent level of meaning
which runs parallel to the primary level of meaning. As in the case of
similes, the more disparate the two levels of meaning are, the more
powerful, surprising, and violent the effect will be. This,
in microcosm, at the level of the sentence, is precisely the device
Aquin uses in the macrocosm as the over-arching structure of his
novels. At root it is little more than an obsessive and relentless
parallelism. And
I’ll drown myself again in the depths of a warm, rumpled bed, in the
burning body of the one who loved me from one dangerous night to
another, from the black depth of Lake Geneva to its surface near the
sun. (Prochain Épisode) Laughter rose from the other
table as I relaxed after my exhausting race by looking into the inert
depth of the lake, by waiting to kill the time of a man whom I knew
only by his ability to be someone else. (Prochain Épisode) Poor
Renata, poor me as well, lost here in San Diego, while Renata, all
trembling, tried to go on to Chivasso and make herself known to the
printer Carlo Zimara. (The Antiphonary) 4. Aquin’s novels, then, are anti-novels that prove, to
paraphrase Nabokov, the impossibility of novels. By novels, of course,
I mean here the well-made novel, that amiable and entertaining
offspring of John Locke and bourgeois capitalism. Aquin’s novels are
semiological systems that soar above the earth without actually
being connected to it—like a hot air balloon without anchors; Aquin
consistently severs the safety lines of plot, character, and
meaning—defying the expectations of logic and the logic of expectation
and commercial rules of thumb. They are crimes against the novel; they
are miniature acts of revolution against a Quebec that betrayed herself
by not rising to the banner of rebellion in 1837, against Canada,
against the capitalist bourgeois reader, against history, and against
the whole course of Euro-Western civilization. Addressing his
French-Canadian double, Pierre Magnant, Olympe Ghezzo-Quenum writes: Just as in Prochain Épisode, the unnamed narrator complains: Aquin’s difficulty is not a matter of degree; he is writing in a
different language—and I don’t mean French. To “read into each book the
basic allegory of suffering (female) Quebec whose lover is forced to
the violence of rape and murder (terrorism) by the very impotence that
marks him as one of the colonized,” as Patricia Merivale instructs us
in her essay on Aquin in The Dictionary of Literary Biography,
is to miss the point. Labeling French Canadian thinkers like Aquin as
mere separatists is a favourite gambit of Anglo-Canadians who want to
pigeonhole and dismiss ideas that might prove more difficult to address
than periodic Gallic discontent (much like a male chauvinist dealing
with premenstrual syndrome). The fact is that French-Canadian
intellectuals had to stage a revolution against their own language (the
so-called Quiet Revolution of the forties and fifties) before they
could gird their loins for battle with the English. (Pierre Magnant
rages against both Anglicans and Aquin,
who studied philosophy in Paris in the early 1950s, was one of those
who broke the semi-feudal/Jesuitical lock of French-Canadian
conservativism. For the traditional Québécois, history stopped in 1759
with the Battle of the Plains of Abraham (in Prochain Épisode,
Aquin’s narrator writes that his novel is “the continuing gesture of a
patriot who waits, in an emptiness outside time, for his chance to take
up arms again”); just as for the Anglo-American Loyalist founders of
English Canada, history stopped in 1776 with the Declaration of
Independence. Both groups chose to step aside from the course of world
events and the growth of ideas. Both identified with attitudes of
conservation and reaction. Both found a spiritual home in the stuffy,
provincial atmosphere of colonial Victorianism. For an author in Aquin’s position to write a conventional
well-made novel (or to accept a Governor General’s Award) would be an
act of political betrayal and intellectual suicide. By betraying the
reader, he offers a deeper version of the truth of both the Canadian
confederal political system—“Our country is a cumbersome corpse”—and
the art of the novel. Instead of verisimilitude (the objective
correlative of so-called everyday reality which rests on a conventional
and pragmatic theory of meaning), he offers the anarchy of
hyper-realism. The book ceases to be a novel and becomes an event. “I
am not writing, I am written,” writes the narrator of Prochain Épisode. ___________________________ Excerpted from Douglas Glover’s collection of essays, Notes Home from a Prodigal Son (Oberon Press, 1999). (But I’ve lost the taste for telling stories, and here
I am, naked, with an essential, boring nudity. I’ve finished with
swaggering, friend, because right now I’m starting my last book. When
you read these lines, I’ll already be gone; and if I haven’t hung up
already, it’s only a matter of hours or days, because, frankly, I’m in
a hurry to betray you. . . . It’s you who are living, reader, and not
me, not me any longer! That last sentence couldn’t be less metaphoric.)
The semantic oscillation here between the word “friend”
and the word “betray” is vintage Aquin; Aquin is always betraying his
friend, the reader, by throwing difficulties in his path. The final
difficulty is silence; the last novel runs for six pages and then goes
blank (like the famous blank chapter in Tristram Shandy); it is
finished but endless; death also is a literary device. And it is
typical of the author to retreat backward into the void, which is the
source of words, while taunting the reader with the reader’s own
impotence. Not only is the reader fucked, he knows he is fucked and
hence is, to use Aquin’s own expression, superfucked (archi-fourré).
At heart, only one problem occupies me: how should I set about writing a story . . . ?
Having chosen the path of failed revolution, obscurity,
and difficulty, Aquin proceeds to draw the reader’s attention to failed
revolution, obscurity, and difficulty as subjects (the impossibility of
writing and the impossibility of a successful revolution in Quebec are
equivalent in the country of Aquin’s imagination). All subjects
(themes, aboutness) are punctuated with irony, i.e. within imaginary
quotation marks, because a novel that cannot be written cannot be about
anything (just as a revolution that fails is a rebellion, an entirely
different thing—hence, on one level, Prochain Épisode is an
allegorical account of the Canadian Rebellion of 1837written as a spy
thriller set in contemporary Switzerland). Difficulty becomes a
controlling metaphor for this and all the rest of Aquin’s novels, what
Joyce called an idéemére, an idea repeated so as to define a
pattern or form. The form of the novels is difficult, and the novels
are about difficulty. The novels, insofar as they are about anything,
are about their own impossible forms (just as Wittgenstein says there
are no facts except for statements about the rules for the use of
language). Aboutness, communication of truth, is constantly
denied—first by the Canadian federalist state, second by metaphysics
and third by the author who explodes meaning by the proliferation of meanings.
I know that the Fon tribe are inclined . . . to
construct interminable systems of analogies between events or between
people-systems which are utterly and absolutely impossible to evaluate
and which end up explaining everything. In this respect I recognize
that my mental processes are those of my race, and that I too often
tend to replace reason with a semiological system of some kind. This
fact I recognize.
This is typically Aquinesque double-edged humor. For in
talking about his native Fon tribe, Olympe (a pedantic French-African
pharmacist-revolutionist) is talking about language in general and
about writing novels in particular. The artist knows that there is no
meaning, that meaning only happens when you put two (or three,
or four, etc.) things together. And when you do this, you create a
semiological system which runs parallel to other semiological systems,
one of which might be the system of so-called reality.
Here begins the book I have pieced together from the
documents and fragments in my file. Without title, internal logic,
content, or any charm other than that of a kind of untidy truthfulness,
this book is composed in the form of an epileptic aura.
And in Prochain Épisode, the unnamed narrator writes:
I am this book from hour to hour and day to day; as long as
I don’t commit suicide, I have no intention of stopping. This
disorderly book and I, we are the same. This mass of pages is the
product of history, an unfinished part of myself and consequently, a
flawed witness to the hesitant revolution which I continue to proclaim
in the way open to me—institutional delirium.
For Aquin, difficulty resides in substituting the
proliferating unsystematic nonstructures of “institutional delirium”
for the conventional structures of the well-made novel. But this does
not mean his novels are insane, nonsensical, unstructured or impossible
to read. The phrase “institutional delirium” is itself a trope, a
metaphor for the kind of structure Aquin uses to oppose the structures
of the conventional wellmade novel. His novels only appear to be
unstructured so long as we apply to them the same criteria for
structure as we apply to the well-made novel. In fact, Aquin’s novels
do have plots, characters, settings and themes; it’s just that when
Aquin uses a conventional novelistic device, he deliberately and
relentlessly deforms it in order to prove that he doesn’t need it. In
the jargon of the Russian Formalists, Aquin makes things strange.
Yes, my homeland is no other than these shifting sands which imbed Lagos in its jewel-case of bluffs . . .
just as Christine Forestier in The Antiphonary seems able to recall and write about events which happened to Suzanne
Bernatchez-Franconi, who, following Christine’s suicide, reads her
manuscript:
Strange, the thing I found most shattering was her allusion
to San Mateo and South San Francisco . . . for I myself lived through
worse than hell in those peripheral municipalities of San Francisco
(San Mateo and S.S.F.) during the trip Albert and I made together in
the hope of getting back his two daughters (by his first marriage; he
had not seen them for five years). My God!—as Christine would say. . .
.
The double is the literary negation of personal identity
and the concept of character, just as the repetition of events is the
negation of time (causality) and plot. In the novel, these devices
wreak havoc with the conventions of verisimilitude, especially when, as
Aquin does, the author keeps drawing the reader’s attention to them
through pseudo-editorial interpolations. “A creature of words,” writes
Pierre Magnant:
I find my thoughts out of puff from trying to catch up with
words that escape by whole platoons regardless of verisimilitude and
despite a tendency for their stock to drop.
It seems clear that Aquin enjoys mutilating the patterns
of verisimilitude; his characters’ Charlie Chaplin-ish deadpan response
to the oddities of the novelistic world they find themselves
inhabiting, whether they are paranoiacs like Magnant or pedantic
editors intent on creating order like Olympe, is a constant source of
humour. When Magnant rapes and murders his Anglo lover, Joan, in a
McGill University animal research lab, surrounded by shrieking,
masturbating monkeys, which he refers to as “predarwinian beasts” and
“Rhesus macaques,” one of his editors (probably Olympe) inserts a
footnote:
A friend who is somewhat versed in paleontology has drawn
to my attention that, according to modern writers, the Rhesus monkey is
not to be classed among the Primates. This friend, to whom I showed the
passages where P. X. Magnant describes the apes in the Redfern
laboratory of McGill University, believes rather that the “voyeur”
monkeys mentioned in the MS are probably gibbons (also called Wou-Wou),
native to Java or Borneo, or perhaps Tchego chimpanzees which
proliferate in Lower Guinea and as far away as Ubangi. The popular name
of this African species is Koola-Kamba. . . .
In this manner, Aquin’s characters, who often find
themselves in the position of readers of their own impossible novels
(which are naturally full of impossible plots and impossible people),
try to impose their own mad or parodic logic on the swirling irreality
of his texts.
We live as if coated with rubber. We must recover the
world. . . . The purpose of the image is to call an object by a new
name. To do this, to make the object an artistic fact, it must be
abstracted from among the facts of life. To do this, we must first of
all “shake up” things. . . . We must rip things from their ordinary
sequence of associations. Things must be turned over like logs in a
fire. . . . The poet removes the labels from things. . . . Things
rebel, casting off their old names and taking on a new aspect together
with their new names. The poet brings about a semantic dislocation, he
snatches the concept out of the semantic sequence in which it is
usually found and transfers it with the aid of the word (trope) to
another meaning-sequence. And now we have a sense of novelty at finding
the object in a fresh sequence. This is one of the ways of making
things tangible. In the image we have the object, the recollection of
its former name, and the associations connected with the new name.
Not only does Aquin dislocate meaning, he also accumulates
dislocations. He takes the idea of semantic dislocation and plays with
it, runs riot with it, like a child with a hammer pounding everything
in sight—hence the apparent “institutional delirium” of his style. If
we understand that the phrases “semiological system” and
“meaning-sequence” are roughly equivalent, and in turn are equivalent
to “discourse,” “language game,” or “level of meaning,” then we can
describe Aquin’s anti-structure as the proliferation of levels of
meaning (like the energy rings surrounding the nucleus of an atom)
followed by an apparently random movement of syntagms (like electrons)
from one level to another (and when an electron moves between orbits,
energy is given off as a by-product). Christine Forestier, then, will
write sentences such as:
My sadness wipes out everything in its path: memory, joys,
brief ecstasies, other venereal delectations, the preambles,
paraphrases, long, supple, declarative caresses, the advances, the
indecent fingering.
—dislocating the discourses of sex and language (a
favourite Aquinian juxtaposition) by inserting words from one discourse
(that of rhetoric) in a series which begins and ends with the other
(that of sex). Reading Aquin, in part, becomes a game of identifying
and delighting in the interplay of multiple discourses or
meaning-levels or semiotic systems or even other books.
Farewell to arms! This unexpected pun saddens me again:
I’m ready to break into tears. All those arms stolen from the enemy,
hidden then discovered one by one, all those arms! And me, disarmed for
having been armed, disarmed also before the waning sun which silently
effaces itself in Ile Jésus.
Aquin puns on the title of a Hemingway novel (and, in a constant play of intertextuality, on The Lost Weekend, Gone With The Wind, Dark Room, which Magnant’s editor says is a reference to Nabokov’s Chambre Obscure, and two books by Nietzsche, Human All Too Human and Beyond Good And Evil).
Then he draws the reader’s attention to the pun. The Russian Formalists
called this “laying bare the device—and it’s a technique which Aquin
uses over and over; his characters are always writing their own books
and commenting reflexively on the process. (In the midst of writing a
political speech, Pierre Magnant interjects:
By and large, this opening bothers me a little. . . . The
only trouble with this incredible opener is, where to go next? I have
to catch the crowd again before the tension drops. My continuation
presents certain technical difficulties such as the matter of tone, the
volume in decibels and the index of gutturalization.)
The method of demonstrating the device is carried to exaggerated lengths in The Antiphonary where Christine quotes long passages in Latin from real or apocryphal
Renaissance works on rhetoric and composition. One chapter begins:
If at this point I take the liberty of using the
conventions of secondary and ternary narration, it is because I want to
gain time—or rather, catch up in time with what had taken place quite
outside the range of my possible knowledge. I don’t know if the
Asianists had a name for this type of literary procedure. Perhaps even
the ancient Greek rhetors had a term for it? Is it an ellipse? Or (what
do I know) an inverted anacluthon?
In a sense, literary theory itself becomes one of the
dominant themes of the novels, and the novels become these wonderful
museums of literary technique.
I side-slip in my memory, just as I side-slipped in my Volvo in the pass through the Mosses. (Prochain Épisode)
The parallel structure of the sentences takes the
place of the metaphorical connector—transformation occurs at the comma.
Apposition implies the identity or equivalence of levels of meaning.
Meanings collide, conflict, merge, and diverge in the continuous
multi-logic or polyphonic universe of the novel. The intoxicated,
violated, epileptic bodies of the characters become the body of the
text, the body of Quebec nationalism, and the world. The circuits
overload; the novels begin to spiral toward critical mass.
No, you are certainly not European, nor Cartesian, nor a rationalist humanitarian, nor a scholastic prototype of homo sapiens or homo decadens;
and this is why, by the way, I feel myself to be on the same wavelength
as you. You puke on that hateful logic which (as you so remarkably put
it in your speech) is “nothing but the professional warp of policemen
and judges.”
It’s no longer a matter of how to be original in
literature: suddenly I am disillusioned by the question of individual
existence.
This last, by the way, is a refutation for those cynics
who think of difficulty as the artist’s poor substitute for
originality. Aquin rejects the Modernist ideal of originality—along
with the fundamental corollary concept of individual identity—just as
surely as he rejected the Governor General’s Award. He is not trying to
be original just as he is not trying to be a good little Canadian
writer; by being difficult, he is simply trying to say what he is
trying to say.
our protonotaries and our arch-priests. . . . Let us
all together curse these official shitters of dead words, consecrated
as emollient agents and also as frightful enemies of blasphemy and the
curse!)
In so doing, they set an example the rest of the country has failed to follow.
But that’s the thing: this country has said nothing and
written nothing. It has produced neither fairy-tale nor epic that would
paint with all the artifice of invention its well-known destiny as a
conquered land. My country is and will remain for a long time in the
zone of sub-literature and subhistory. At best it will throw up a few
sickies like me, out of pure wastefulness, giving them no name. . . .
No one writes—except me. Oh, you’ll tell me the protonotaries and
clerks of the court are writers too. If so, the doctors who prescribe
suppositories are also writers! But I write at the level of pure
blasphemy.
The irony is that having risen against the old discourse of conservation (epitomized by the provincial motto Je me souviens),
Quebec rejoined a stream of history that is fast drying up, i.e. the
etiolate remnant of the eighteenth-century liberation philosophies and
modern bourgeois capitalism (epitomized by de Gaulle’s Vive le Quebec libre!, harking back as it does to the French Revolutionary battle cry, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité).
In the worldgame of ideological catch-up, Quebec now stands one step
behind what we might call the cutting edge of thought (contemporary
western Europe, for example, is trying to disengage itself from the
divisive discourse of nationalism), English-Canada, two steps
(especially Ontario where God is still not dead, and one of the hot
political issues is whether stores should open on Sunday).
An episode is born every time I sit down to write.
Every writing session is a singular event in itself, and only forms a
novel to the extent that I bind myself to my shattered past. An event
of its own, my book writes me.
An event doesn’t mean anything, it only happens. It is sui generis,
a thing in itself. Art happens at the infinitely tiny place between
unwriting and writing, between, as Aquin writes, “what she is thinking
and what she will never say.” Art doesn’t produce a message, it
embraces the polyphonic play of messages as its form. Form is its
message. What appears to be message is suffused with irony. And the
writer is continually drifting backward, backward behind the screen of
words, toward silence.
