A new student at the University of T., “a hell of opportunism and a paradise of curiosity” located in an anonymous European country, Lourdes is a buffet attendant during a day of conference organized by the “Laboratoire du Néo-Moi Feminisant” dedicated to a little-known Russian poet, Razuvaeva. In the room, a banner welcomes participants: “Don’t criticize other women” (in capital letters).
Lourdesthe second novel by Catherine Lemieux (A rare condition, Triptych, 2018), is a scathing campus comedy, a scathing satire of a university environment where professors and students feed each other with slogans and clichés. A rolling fire of humor and freedom, carried by sentences with precision as dense as they are manic. A rarity.
Born in the Îles-de-la-Madeleine in 1984, Catherine Lemieux lived there until the age of ten before moving with her family to Quebec. She says she left as soon as she could while studying comparative literature in Montreal, spending time in turn in London, Paris, and Berlin, before settling in Vienna, Austria, where she has lived for a year. decade.
“What draws me to write is not an idea, but rather a kind of emotional dissonance,” explains Catherine Lemieux, visiting Quebec this week. When I sense a false note in the words of others or in my own. This dissonance was very present at the university. »
Setting fire to the university
From her observation post during the symposium, the young North American comments, stalls, resists or descends into delirious “daydreams”. The mechanics of the symposium gradually become unhinged, becoming a festival of clichés, complacency and paradoxes. Lourdes, assailed by doubts and become “a deserter from our sisterhood militia” (says a character), ends up fleeing by setting fire to three trash cans.
Didn’t she ever want to set the university on fire herself? “Yes, certainly,” admits Catherine Lemieux, laughing. But if certain details of the novel, and sometimes the most grotesque, are borrowed from events that she herself experienced, they nevertheless make up, explains the writer, a small part of the book.
“I always write to get out of myself. Get me off my tongue, get me off my hinges. The pretext was a revolt that I had felt for a long time in this environment. An environment on which I was completely dependent. » A very small world that she left last year when finishing writing the novel, and from which she also “benefited greatly”, she admits.
I always write to get out of something. In the first book, it was to get out of Quebec. In this one, you could say it’s to get out of university.
“It’s still the ideal place for someone who wants to think, who wants to write, who wants to read, and who above all wants to stay out of the job market for as long as possible. » Although she also quickly realized that the neoliberal market had long since infiltrated the university.
If the Razuvaeva of the novel is imaginary, just like the fragments of poems which dot the novel, she owes a lot, says Catherine Lemieux, to the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaïeva (1892-1941). To her idealism, to the difficulties of her exile, to the ostracism she experienced at the end of her life. “I first conceived Razuvaeva as a figure of intransigence in a world of transactions. »
Heaviness of injunctions
While doubting is what she knows how to do best, Lourdes has in front of her and her “thirst for knowledge” a theory of “fierce militants of the good cause”, who speak “gibberish”, fueled by certainties. ready-made, suffering, careerism, addicted to algorithms and cat videos. United by a common and blind fervor for the “Atypical”.
“What I wanted to show is how the shots are a bit like things made of synthetic foam. No matter how much you twist them, crush them, they immediately return to their shape. This is the strength of clichés, their desperate malleability. »
The novelist and ironist believes that if doubt and debate are still possible in the academic world, we often seek to remove from words their part of mystery. “We always try to elucidate or reduce words to a single meaning, whereas ultimately, that is what literature does, we find ourselves behind the scenes of meaning, in the presence of forces which are always chaotic, impulsive, which have to do with desire. » This is what is completely repressed at the moment, she believes. “We can no longer speak of this ironic force which undoes language and which gives a work its aesthetic power. »
And on this level, “the Europe of spiritual celebration” has long since joined North America. “As North Americans, we idealize Europe, just as they idealize us. I realized while working at the European University that the faculty was doing the same thing. That is to say, to defuse the bombs that great works can be. Then to use a form of pseudo-contestatory technical speech, where the theory appears a bit like a sedative, to stifle any passion that literature could give rise to. »
Violence of the feminine we
Readers will quickly notice, moreover, that all the women who speak during the symposium speak as “we”. “What is violent is the feminine we. There is a very pernicious and very harmless violence there, believes Catherine Lemieux. This is basic ideological violence. That is to say, we include a person in a collective without asking their opinion. This is not unique to feminists. This is how any form of ideological oppression works. »
Catherine Lemieux recognizes that it often scares women, that it arouses something anxiety-provoking. “Because it’s not clear whether I’m on their side or not. But obviously yes. But obviously not, too, if I consider that they are doing something that I disapprove of. » She adds, however, that she did not write Lourdes thinking of feminists. “They will do what they want with it. »
Because the woman, the writer reminds us through this novel, is neither an angel nor a demon. And if the book comes from a sort of police reflex, through which she wanted to expose a fraud, the most important thing is elsewhere. It is “the poetic reflex which rather leads me to show the disturbing, overwhelming light of the nonsense in which we are immersed. I start to become delirious, that’s how it is,” she said, also aware of having written a book for happy few.
“I always write to get out of something. In the first book, it was to get out of Quebec. In this one, you could say it’s to get out of university. But it’s more important than that. It’s to get out of a false language,” considers this great reader of the German romantic ETA Hoffmann, Baudelaire, Poe and the surrealists, as well as representatives of Austrian satire such as Karl Kraus and Elfriede Jelinek.
And above all, she makes no secret of the influence of decadent and fin-de-siecle writers like Huysmans, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam or Rachilde. “For the hysteria of their language, their devotion to supernatural beauty. Their lack of faith in any form of authenticity. Their deep revolt against the smallness of man. And laughter, the harshness of laughter that we need to survive this brutality. »
But whether she is in Vienna or elsewhere, Catherine Lemieux admits that writing is linked to a form of strangeness in the world for her. “In Austria,” she points out, “I am definitely not in my place. That is to say, I do not have to force myself to distance myself from the world, from worldly festivities or from a collective political discourse. »