As a fine embroiderer of the eternal, Dominique Fortier explores the fragility of relationships, desire and what remains of it — a sort of wreck that marks history — in two new publications that echo each other. With The ocean’s share (Alto) and Our Lady of all Maybes (Éditions du Passage), it brings back to life, in a certain way, the missing part of the other.
The author is interested in absence, in what passes like time, like all those small and large links that form the basis of existence, but also and above all in what remains, in letters in particular, fragile witnesses of the past. This is the idea that Dominique Fortier explores in her two stories, her “sister books” or “companion books”, as she likes to call them because they were born at the same time. A novel on one hand, poetry on the other – a first for Fortier – the two texts, as different as they may be, highlight above all the notions of absence, desire and assumed vulnerability.
The ocean’s share was born at the time she discovered the letters addressed by Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Correspondence that sawed her legs because she did not expect to “find so much fever, passion, madness in these letters,” she explains on the other end of the line, visibly moved. And since these letters only contain Melville’s part – half of the conversation – this will leave free rein for Fortier to imagine the relationship without faithfully respecting the chronology and the story.
For Our Lady of all Maybes, It is also the letters that “play the keystone,” she says poetically, because they are authentic letters from strangers that she found in Paris and then completed with lots unearthed everywhere. A story that opens with Notre-Dame Cathedral, partly burned, then with Philippe Petit, a tightrope walker who, in 1974, stretched his thread between the twin towers of the World Trade Center, monuments that appear solid and eternal until proven otherwise.
Fortier thus clings to the wrecks that remain from these shipwrecks, from these catastrophes, to the letters that are among the most fragile things, but which are, she says, “the survivors in a certain way.”
The Quest for the Invisible
It is this missing part that she enjoys reconstructing, this invisible imbued with desire, the one that is born in absence and allows us to imagine the other. Because, as Fortier says, we do not write to someone who is next to us.
“I have the impression that one never writes entirely to a real person, but that one writes a little to an invented person, that the letter constructs its recipient as Melville will construct the Hawthorne he needs to write his book.”
Because if fragility, vulnerability and abandonment run through the lives of the characters portrayed, it is because these themes are intimately linked to the act of writing itself, to which Fortier is, of course, linked.
“In writing, there is also this movement towards the other, this desire which is a desire for invention inseparable from writing. And Moby Dick, It’s interesting at that level too because, clearly, it’s not a novel about whaling as we were led to believe when we were made to read it in high school. It’s a novel that also talks about writing. This quest, this thing that is being hunted and about which we don’t know for a very long time whether it is real, imagined or a mixture of the two, can very well be seen as the very image of the book, the writing project itself,” explains the author.
Emphasizing that of course one does not need it to read or reread Moby DickFortier says that she has in The ocean’s share humbly tried to give different leads, to “evoke the fact that it is a novel which calls for multiple interpretations […] kaleidoscopic. Because it’s a novel, an opera, a tragedy, pieces of poetry, an encyclopedia, it’s a very, very great love song too. It’s all these things at the same time.”
And this is probably what confused the critics and readers of the 19th century.e century not knowing how to receive this giant. It took several years before the work was read and examined from a literary, rather than documentary, perspective.
The reader’s share
In both of her stories, Fortier goes back in time to create connections, to bring together contrasts, to cling to hope, to the invisible, to the missing part like a desire to make the other live. This premise is the very essence of writing for the author of Paper Cities. But the work cannot of course exist without the reader’s part.
“I truly believe that you always write half of a book and the reader will write the other half.” […] You shouldn’t give everything away. You have to leave some blank spaces in the text. You can’t be both the author and the reader of your novel. […] We need this second voice for the book to come into existence.”
Like the book, the letter is also for the author the same “kind of incarnation, that is to say the territory where the writer and the reader will be able to meet, and it is an object that is on the border between the real and the imagined, the invention”. A tipping point that inhabits her in the act of writing.
“I’m probably not the only one. When you’re a writer, you always have one foot in fiction. […] We ourselves are this territory, where the real and the invented will come to mingle their waters. At the same time, it says something very fundamental about what we are as human beings. Nancy Huston said of us that we were “the fabulating species”. Somewhere, obviously, we need to tell stories and to have stories told to us. […] It’s not just writers who are funny creatures, who need to be in the imaginary, it’s readers too. We need that like we need to breathe in another way.”