Moby Dick, or the magnificent shipwreck

Moby Dick is to literature what Citizen Kane is in cinema in American culture: a monument, not to say a “paper monster”, as Dominique Fortier writes in The ocean’s share, which comes to us accompanied by his first collection of poetry, Our Lady of all Maybes.

But what do we really know about this crazy romantic enterprise that is Moby Dickwhich cannot be summed up as a simple whale hunt? More than ever, Dominique Fortier questions the mystery of creation, writing, reading, as well as the desire between beings and imaginations, all in a style that does not weaken, book after book.

Since his first novel, On the proper use of stars, In 2008, Fortier offered me exactly what I expect from literature: that the world around me disappears when I read.

Once again, she succeeds in this masterfully – I dare add that she makes good use of the stars of literature which guide her in the sea of ​​words, the theme of water irrigating all her writings.

With Paper cities And The white shadowsit was the poet Emily Dickinson. This time, it is Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick (published in 1851), and his passion for his contemporary, Nathaniel Hawthorne, famous for his novel The Scarlet Letter (1850).

Can we talk about a process if she revisits this interweaving between major figures of literature and her intimate relationship with writing?

“I realized that life is too short to miss out on the things that really interest us,” she sums up.

Fortier was not necessarily a great admirer of Melville or Moby Dickwhich she discovered like many readers through a required reading that had not left her with any memorable memories. But when she stumbled upon Melville’s correspondence with Hawthorne, it was the spark.

“It was unlike anything I had read and associated with Melville. It was so passionate, there was a kind of madness and fever. I quickly wanted to read the correspondence in full, only to realize that we only have half of it, Melville’s letters. It’s even better, because I had the part of shadow and mystery that I needed to write a novel.”

I also didn’t know that Melville had developed such an obsession with Hawthorne — you always learn a lot from Fortier, that’s another one of his qualities. Did you know that the electro artist Moby got his name from Moby Dickbecause he is a distant descendant of Herman Melville?

I remember some slightly homoerotic passages in Moby Dickthrough an encyclopedia on cetaceans, but don’t think that the writer has the bad taste to take Melville out of some closet; here, it is above all a question of admiration and inspiration, how books are written in connection with each other. Why, as for her Dickinson period, is she publishing two books that speak to each other this fall, in addition to the translation of a new novel by Anne Michael at Alto, The Winter Tomb ?

“If only I could explain why I write a book, in general…”

The art of abandonment

The ocean’s share And Our Lady of all Maybes are not books about love, but about desire, sublimated by writing. “In fact, we don’t know if Melville’s feelings were shared or not,” she notes. “I don’t know if it was really love, in fact. Desire is not the same thing as love. It is not a relationship directly with the other, it is a relationship to lack, a form of emptiness.”

Our Lady of all Maybes begins with the figure of the tightrope walker, in the shadow of the World Trade Center towers and the fire at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. “For me, the tightrope walker is an image of desire. Moving towards another without knowing if he is really there, if he really exists. It is an image of writing at the same time, which is a bit of the same kind of perilous enterprise, with a share of risk that you cannot really measure and control, and a share of abandonment, of course.”

She likes this phrase from the writer René Lapierre that she quotes: “To give up is not to renounce, it is to trust.” “In other words,” she adds, “it is to accept taking the risk, because it is worth it.”

This part of abandonment is necessary to write, to launch oneself without really knowing where one is going or to whom one is addressing oneself. Just as one will have to, at a given moment, abandon this book that one is writing in order to bring it into the world.

Now, if Melville worked so long Moby Dickis that he did not want to finish it, according to Fortier. “That would mean a kind of renunciation and separation from Hawthorne. It’s his Moby Dick, it’s what he’s chasing, this elusive figure of which we don’t really know if it’s real or imaginary. From the beginning, Hawthorne is the ocean for Melville. An uncontrollable force, a danger. But Melville was a sailor, he’s sure to go there.”

And it will be his greatest shipwreck, believes Dominique Fortier. In a short paragraph of the book, Melville, who has just finished his novel, has a dream in which Hawthorne is dead, while the critics receive it very badly Moby Dick. This is exactly what happened to the author, who died virtually anonymously many years after the publication of what posterity would consider a masterpiece.

Dominique Fortier welcomed me into her home after returning from her vacation in Maine, where she owns a house facing the sea, which was almost swept away by a storm. It was the sea that gave her the inspiration to add a few sentences at the last minute to her manuscript, which had been sent to the printers for a week. Small touches of black, she wanted, to better anchor the character, whom she surrounded with a black cat and a stuffed crow… That gives you an idea of ​​the attention to detail of this writer, capable of stopping the presses for additions that in no way serve a plot. “I needed the character of Hawthorne to be dark. Melville says several times that he is a figure of darkness, he says ““Ten times black”. I really see my books as paintings, I need a light mass here, darker there; they are like echoes and references.

The seduction of danger

The title The ocean’s share refers to what is called “the share of fire”, what one decides to abandon to the fire of a forest to protect what can still be protected. Alternating with Melville’s story, the narrator of the book maintains, as in a game of mirrors, a relationship with Simon, a writer described “like a poem”, while the voice of Lizzie, Melville’s wife, intrudes in a few chapters. I really ended up wondering if Fortier had not maintained a passion similar to that of Melville with a mysterious writer. That we no longer know too much if it is true or false, that we confuse the book with real life, that was a bit her objective rather very well achieved and she laughed a little at me with my questions.

The boundary between where reality ends and imagination begins is what interests Fortier the most. “I end up saying that it is the writer who occupies and embodies this territory, because we are always at the same time one foot in reality and one foot in something we invent.”

She confides in me that in recent years, it is fear that has shown her the path to follow. “Poetry, for me, was a leap like that, I found it quite terrifying to go there,” she admits, about her first collection. It is also out of a taste for risk that she offered to accompany on stage the actress Pascale Montpetit, who conceived a reading of her novel Paper cities at the International Literature Festival this fall.

Dominique Fortier also tells me that she plans to take flying lessons, because she has always been afraid of flying.

I don’t really know what to think of such a project, but I believe that the writer has long mastered this experience of launching herself into the void, each time managing to transport us far beyond what we could have imagined.

Emily, Nobody’s Daughterreading-show with Pascale Montpetit and Dominique Fortier at the FIL, September 20, 21 and 22

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The ocean’s share

Dominique Fortier

Alto

324 pages

Our Lady of all Maybes

Dominique Fortier

editions of the passage

92 pages