Thirteen years after her death, finally freed from her physical appearance, it is through her writings that the writer Nelly Arcan now makes an impression. For the first time, Université Laval is offering a fifteen-week undergraduate course entirely devoted to the corpus of the author of Whoreof Crazy womanof The child in the mirror, or of Burqa of fleshwho wrote down both his obsession and his disgust for the bodily dictates imposed on women.
So also that the room The fury of what I thinkto the ingenious staging of Marie Brassard, returns to the poster at Espace Go, Nelly Arcan continues to influence a whole generation of young writers, says Karine Rosso, professor of literary studies at UQAM, who signed in 2019 a novel entitled My enemy Nelly.
“It’s a work that is polysemous, that says several things and has several layers,” she says. Nelly Arcan demonstrates the alienation of women from the injunction of a normative beauty, while denouncing it.
Even five years after the start of the #MeToo hurricane, these diktats remain strong, especially through social networks, such as Instagram, where young people, girls in particular, project an often idealized image.
The multiplied rooms, where the seven representations of Nelly Arcan arise in the room The fury of what I thinkare also reminiscent of the world of social networks today.
To be forty years old
If the relevance of the reflection remains, the seven actresses who embody Nelly Arcan have aged, since the first performance of The fury of what I think, in 2013, recalls Sophie Cadieux, who developed the piece and who still plays it today. They have passed the milestone of forty, with her aging body, this age which terrified Nelly Arcan so much, and which her suicide forever prevented her from crossing.
“We are now at the dreadful age that she decided not to live,” she said in an interview. Me I’m 45 years old. The majority of the actresses in the show were 35 years old when the play was created. Ten years later, we are on this slope, of women who are in a new space, which is not that of youth nor that of old age. I feel that for us, there is an assurance, a maturity in our playing, such a different echo to his texts, to his violence”. Certain themes in Arcan’s work, such as sex assignment at birth, are very current today.
Moreover, the realities that Nelly Arcan denounced, while submitting to them, remain today. Karine Rosso notes that millions and millions of women still have plastic surgery. And sex work, which Nelly Arcan practiced, especially during her studies in literature, is still the subject of debate among feminists.
Between emancipation and alienation
“The work of Nelly Arcan oscillates between emancipation and alienation”, remarks Catherine Parent, who gives the course Nelly Arcan, legacies, representations and filiations, offered by Laval University at the undergraduate level. “These realities are completely contemporary and I see it with the students who are touched by the work,” she adds. However, she notes, the era perhaps encourages solidarity more today than the female rivalries, which Arcan depicts.
In February, the magazine Voices and Images will devote an issue to the legacy of Nelly Arcan. Catherine Parent took part, with the author, professor and translator Lori Saint-Martin, who died a few weeks ago. “There will be no posthumous text from Lori. We signed the introduction with four hands”, specifies Catherine Parent.
Already, in 2012, Lori Saint-Martin made this disturbing analysis of the reception of the work of Nelly Arcan in Voices and Images.
“Sad thought, she had to die so that we forget the beautiful but too artificial woman who did not suit us and that we finally pay attention to her books; she had to extinguish the black light that there was in her so as not to overshadow her work, wrote then Lori Saint-Martin. Alive, she disturbed too much, like a person who was too beautiful or too ugly or too naked; the mirror of the feminine that she held out to us magnified the line to the unbearable, we were afraid that it was contagious. Dead, she inspires the compassion and respect that many denied her as long as she was there like a spoilsport, as long as her body was a screen between us and her words. It fascinates young academics, inspires conferences, articles, dissertations, and that’s good. All the burkas follow, as much the black veil as the open wound. »