If the body were to fail me, my tongue would give it hope, if the language were to fail me, my body would forever be like a great noise in matter. » These words are from Nicole Brossard. She is known in Quebec above all as a poet, and in the long term. Here is an anthology of his essays, nicely titled The notch and duration, makes you (re)discover the essayist, the thinker, the philosopher that Nicole Brossard, 79 years old, has always been. And that she still is.
How come we don’t know more about Nicole Brossard’s essays? This is one of the questions that arises when reading this collection of 44 essays, written between 1969 and 2019, collected by Chloe Savoie–Bernard and Karim Larose. A summation book which allows us to follow, over 50 years, the evolution of one of Quebec’s lively and original thoughts.
It is true that his first book, published in 1965, is poetry; like his last, White piano (Hexagon), in 2011. Between the two, around thirty collections. But also novels, stories, theater. And more scattered tests.
” To write “I am a woman” is full of consequences” is one of the author’s signatures, which is woven into different texts, at different times. Essays where Nicole Brossard unfolds the issues of writing, especially that of women, of the links between body and writing, of political or poetic commitment, or both, of silence, of reading, always with a lively feminism, agile, inventive.
We see here that Nicole Brossard was thinking about what “a neutral language” would change long before today’s debates on inclusive writing. “It is undoubtedly because the language belongs to everyone that we rightly reappropriate it by taking the initiative to intervene when it gives the impression of being closed and our desire comes up against the use,” she wrote… in 1987.
She then already speaks of the language “like [d’]a large ensemble loaded with memory, rhythm, knowledge and above all disastrous symbolic incidences. The question then arose as to who I was (me/a woman) in this language and how to use it in a way that did not censor, eliminate or play against “the kind” of person I was. or could become.
Fluency of arguments
“She is ahead of certain very contemporary thoughts,” confirms Chloé Savoie-Bernard. But she herself did not have the will to bring together her essays, even though there is clearly very fine, very agile and very precise thinking. »
Which did not prevent the writer from opening her door and her archives wide to the two anthologists, who initially collected no less than 300 essays. The final collection, of 370 pages, “is only a micro-sample” of M.me Brossard, continues Chloé Savoie-Bernard.
“We kept what we could best read to our contemporaries. An anthology is always a choice; we did it in dialogue with our current concerns. » There are unpublished works there, extracts from conferences or symposia, texts already published collectively.
An anthology already existed, very different: written in English, FluidArgumentscollected by Susan Rudy and published in 2005 (Mercury Press), testifies to the influence of the poet and philosopher on the English side.
The choices of The notch and durationare very different, indicates Mme Savoie-Bernard. “We wanted to have texts that highlighted what we consider to be the recurring and most important motifs of his work, that is to say the search for meaning. »
Texts on the body as a reservoir of imagination, on translation, others which show the importance of political lesbianism for her, or of the motif of the spiral, or of revolt as a way of being in the world.
In the room of the poem, thought
These subjects come and return, like waves, like the necessity of joy, of enjoyment, which Brossard also addresses. “These are truly poet’s essays,” says the professor at Queen’s University in Kingston.
“It’s a bit like the antechamber of the poem; texts which go beyond, which give form, which continue the thought of the poem. There was always a desire in her to watch herself doing it, to reflect on her political action, then to say that, for her, the act of writing was political in itself, because it increased reality, extended reality, showed things in reality that could not exist otherwise. »
“That was his work, it was this quest for meaning there, in the poem and elsewhere. » “Because there are moments when the heart and the mind need bridge words, little bridges of prose that soothe, console and relieve the poem,” wrote Brossard in 2012, in The volatility of meaning.
Nicole Brossard was also part of a movement, the second wave of feminism in Quebec. Madeleine Gagnon and Louky Bersianik are from the same movement, and they also worked on their thinking and their fiction together. For Brossard, “it is always based on literature, and feminism is inseparable from literature, in literature and in language”.
Monitoring our thoughts
Even today, “Nicole Brossard’s thought is vast, almost rhizomatic. There are lots of things happening. He is someone who demands a lot of things from language. It’s really fun to talk to her. I would like us not to freeze it in one era. »
“It’s also something we can do to women who are aging: link them to their past accomplishments without seeing, without seeing what they have to contribute to contemporary thinking. I think Nicole Brossard is wise. »
What is Nicole Brossard thinking these days, in November 2023? On the use “that we will make of new technologies, because it is not only culture or civilization that we are changing but we will intervene more and more in the very nature of our species”, she wrote to Duty.
“It concerns the intimate, the body, the spaces of freedom that are the act of writing and literature, it concerns above all the very idea of thinking. Human beings have always been subject to surveillance of their gestures, their words and their writings, but never of their thoughts, their flow of consciousness. »
The poet-philosopher continues: “That said, nothing tickles me: the Bulgarian rose, a garden of silences, gestural emotions, the use of the wind, a bus stop. I am more and more at the height of presence. It’s intoxicating and painful. »
A major interview with Nicole Brossard, hosted by Chloé Savoie-Bernard, will take place at the Montreal Book Fair on Sunday, November 26. The writer will also hold signing sessions on November 24, 25 and 26.