Stéphane Dompierre was with friends in the countryside, one fine evening, under a sparkling sky. The kind of sky that doesn’t exist in Montreal. “And then we started downloading apps that identify stars. I even downloaded an app that identifies planes! »
Posted at 9:00 a.m.
Even deep in the forest, the writer had not managed to escape digital technologies, those which lighten many aspects of our daily lives, but which also tyrannize our relationship to time.
Fascinated by “the number of people who, every day, want to leave Facebook, and the number of people who do it for real”, in other words by the gap between our awareness of the dangers of a life lived through the filter of screen and our powerlessness to escape it, Stéphane Dompierre invents in horror comedy Novicehis seventh novel, a disconnection camp. A week, hollow in the woods, without a smartphone, tablet or computer. Hell is other people ? Imagine without WiFi.
Youtubers unable to even conceive that it is possible to live an experience without documenting it visually, influencer spreading moral lessons to the winds, cinephile not knowing the name of any actor; the 11 slaves of the machine, who submit to the martyrdom of this return to the time before the permanent connection, embody in a caricatural way failings that are not only those of addicts to likesbut also ours.
The beautiful lost time of waiting
Nostalgic, Dompierre? Would the man prefer to go back to the sweet days of the fax machine, or even the telephone on wheels? Pantoute, he solemnly swears.
I am not at all nostalgic, I live with the tools we have, but there is a reflection to be made on the way technology has reconfigured our brains and how it has replaced our memory.
Stephane Dompierre
Small laugh at the end of the phone – phone that we guess smart. Confidence: “I have a somewhat absurd general culture. I don’t remember obvious things, but sometimes I talk to my girlfriend and she says to me: “How come you know this information nestled there?” It’s because while looking for something, I got lost in the maze of the web”, in the proverbial “rabbit hole”.
There was also, for the writer, a reflection to lead on the erosion of time. Those over 25 may remember a time when it was impossible to tell someone you had arranged to meet that you couldn’t go, if they had already left his home.
PHOTO FRANÇOIS ROY, THE PRESS
Stephane Dompierre
“Our days were made up of these buffer zones where you were waiting for someone or something, alone with your thoughts, which exists less and less,” observes Dompierre. A net loss for any creator, who often sees his good ideas arise from these moments of suspension. “They say that technology has saved us time, and it’s true, but we only use this time to fall back into technology and become dazed. »
Reverse the codes
Largely inspired by slashersa subgenre of horror in which a psychopath shoots down anything that stands in his way, Novice nevertheless revises the codes. Starting with this executioner who does not do his job very efficiently. A subversion that the author attributes to his “rational side”.
When I watch a horror movie, I always ask myself: this guy who is masked in the depths of the forest, where did he buy his mask? What’s he eating for supper? Horror movie killers have a logic inherent in the fact that they kill, but once you take them out of that context, they don’t work at all.
Stephane Dompierre
Beyond this comic pirouette, Stéphane Dompierre also took pleasure in correcting the serious bad fold of so many slasherswho take pleasure with a little too much delight in torturing their female characters (while the male characters are liquidated in a much more expeditious way).
As literary director at Québec Amérique, Dompierre has attended and accompanied in recent years the thinking of several authors who place their feminism at the heart of their literary work, such as Stéphanie Boulay, Fanie Demeule, India Desjardins or Liz Plank. If he does not claim the label of feminist man, who sometimes appears more opportunist than enlightened, the young fifties refuses to close his eyes to the historical injustices and the deleterious fictional representations of which these women have enabled him to become aware.
“God knows I wrote a lot of characters who objectify the female body,” he says, without overplaying repentance, about his trilogy that compose One small step for man, Rude and Deceive Martine. If one would have to offer a truncated reading to these novels to perceive in their characters of men adrift examples to follow – a generous reader could even read there a portrait of the most ordinary ravages of what is now called masculinity toxic – some of their passages perhaps age a little less well. ” It’s something [l’objectification] which I was not aware of yet. »
Which is no longer the case, 18 years after its resounding entry into literature in 2004. “Women in slashers are chased after, have half of their laundry snatched away, they die in long suffering. It’s like torture porn, regrets Stéphane Dompierre. I had fun turning this trend around: I wanted the men to squeal, shout and run, while the women take the time to think and unite. »
In bookstores on 1er March
Novice
Stephane Dompierre
Quebec America
296 pages