Once a month, from the pens of writers from Quebec, The duty of literature proposes to revisit in the light of current events works from the ancient and recent past of Quebec literature. Discoveries? Proofreadings? Different look? A choice. An initiative of the Académie des lettres du Québec in collaboration with The duty.
Moving to the countryside and living on good terms with animals: many dream of it. In the 1980s, novelist and playwright Jovette Marchessault did just that. Plus, she wrote about it. And there are books which, in dark times like the ones we are going through at the moment, literally shine in the night, sparkle on our bedside table. Books that open perspectives, reveal new horizons. Books that watch over us in some way. White pebbles for dark forests is one of them.
In this third novel of her autobiographical trilogy, Jovette Marchessault features Jeanne, a writer, in dialogue with Noria, her fictional double, her soul mate. At the heart of a questioning of writing and human fragility and a denunciation of the injustices and violence of our time, Marchessault tells the story of 20th century Americae century mixing the terrestrial and celestial world with an ancient memory. Thus, it approaches our path on earth from a mystical perspective and gives us a different view of it.
Jovette Marchessault’s entire journey is the criticism of an ordinary and conventional world which is imbued with a certain contemporary realism allergic to the spiritual and poor in memory. Painter, sculptor, novelist and playwright, she was born in a working-class neighborhood of Saint-Henri in 1938. “I am of celestial origin and I was born in Montreal in the 1930s,” she would later say.
In this environment of poorly paid jobs, endemic unemployment and the resulting humiliation, a character will play a crucial role in his life: his grandmother of indigenous origin. Between the ages of three and six, little Jovette lives with this grandmother at the eastern end of the island of Montreal, on the banks of the Saint Lawrence, where she discovers the beauty of the river and the richness of nature. With the latter, she learned in particular about medicinal herbs.
His grandmother also introduced him to drawing and painting and passed on to him the joy of existence. She becomes a spiritual and artistic guide for the child. The Herbal Mother, the second title of the trilogy, establishes her as a wildly creative mythical ancestor: “Grandmother draws chickens who are fundamentally happy, exalted, in a state of jubilation, cogitation, celebration. Chickens from the beginning of the world. » It was this same grandmother who gave him a taste for reading. When Jovette returned to live in her neighborhood of Saint-Henri, she received a book per week as a gift from her, starting at the age of eight.
The journey to art
At 13, after the death of her father, and her mother being immobilized by illness, Jovette Marchessault decided to leave school to work and contribute to the family’s income. Along with immigrant women, she is hired in a clothing workshop, the first in a series of small, poorly paid jobs. During this period, she immersed herself in literature and became a passionate autodidact.
In her twenties, as soon as she could with her meager savings, she boarded a Greyhound bus to travel across North America and sometimes head south. It was the Latin American women with whom she worked, she would later say, who gave her a taste for traveling.
In 1970, Jovette Marchessault began an artistic career as a painter and sculptor. She became known for her sculptures of telluric women who represent the guardians of places and the protectors of women, children and animals. His sculptures are made from scraps. Between 1970 and 1979, around thirty solo exhibitions of his works took place in Montreal, Quebec, Toronto, Paris, Brussels. She will participate in several group exhibitions in New York and Vancouver. She places her work within the framework of art brut or outsider art.
It was during this same period that his grandmother died. This death will plunge her into immeasurable pain. She then made a crucial decision: to stop painting, to leave her night job to engage in what she called a process of transmission. “I believe it was the visual arts that gave me the strength to write. With painting and sculpture, I immediately felt in contact with a cosmic, spiritual, psychic, cellular and molecular world,” she will explain.
The many ways of writing
In 1975, Jovette Marchessault made a notable entrance onto the literary scene with a novel: Like a child of the earth, volume 1. A solar spittle, which earned him the France-Québec literary prize. In this novel, the narrator travels on the roads of Jack Kerouac’s California, always in the familiar Greyhound coaches, on which a racing greyhound is painted (“I travel in the belly of a dog”, she writes). .
Kerouac is the desired brother, complicit in ecological and indigenous demands that foreshadow our current issues: “My old Jack, will you sit on the edge of the green cornfields and write a letter to King Kong. […] urges King Kong to return because our forests are more and more stunted, our apple trees no longer give flowers; our greed has damaged the heart of our trees, […] tell him that the wind that blows on Lake Michigan brings to the Native American land a terrible smell of blood, entrails, corned beef, of suffering. »
In 1980, she published an essay, Lesbian triptychwhose second text, Cows at night, is created at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde (TNM) by Pol Pelletier. It is a revelation for the actress, for the author and for the public. Cows at nighta vibrant and incantatory text, inaugurates his career as a playwright, at a time when women’s theater is taking its place on the main stages of Quebec.
During the same year, 1980, Marchessault wrote his first play, The sissies saga, which caused a sensation when it premiered at TNM in April 1981, directed by Michelle Rossignol. For Jacques Larue-Langlois, critic of the time at Duty, this is a great moment in the history of theater in Quebec. Will follow in November 1981 The earth is too short, Violette Leducdirected by Pol Pelletier at the Experimental Women’s Theater.
The first play starred Laure Conan, Germaine Guèvremont, Gabrielle Roy and Anne Hébert. The second piece, which focuses on censorship, introduces us to the much lesser known French novelist Violette Leduc. The autodidact in Jovette Marchessault, who was transformed thanks to literature, justifies this choice ardently: “Violette Leduc is one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century… and no one knows it. » In the documentary by Dorothy Hénault The terrible living onesMarchesssault explains: “It is a priority for me to recover my memory, which is a memory of history […] to find hidden women and erased women. »
During the 1980s, she left the city for good. ” To do what ? » she asks. ” Nothing. Simply give myself a chance… And then, I said to myself, maybe one day I will be able to create something, to bear witness to hope, to life. » In Estrie, near a pond, with the Appalachians which she contemplates in the distance, she settles in a brightly colored wooden house, with her animals, dogs, cats, chickens, geese, which she considers like his therapy groups.
It is this decor that we find in White pebbles for dark forests, at the same time as a reflection on the power that literature has to exceed reality: “Sometimes, I say to myself: it’s useless for me to try to tell this story. This is work beyond my strength. And then, what right does literature have to mingle with miracles? […] To write. Strike the air with your sword. Having a nervous breakdown in the belly of a carp. But still… If for once, she allowed herself to think beyond what she was allowed to think, literature. »
A vision embodied
Jovette Marchessault was a precursor in theater, by expanding the dramatic story – narrativity. Let us think today of the narrative form in the theater of Carole Fréchette and Jennifer Tremblay. Through his eleven plays, Marchessault pushed the boundaries of theatricality so that dramaturgy opened up to biography and documentary.
Above all, her work is driven by a vision which combines the natural world and the human world in a surprisingly current way, with a long-term feminist perspective. In the book From invisible to visible which is dedicated to her, Jovette Marchessault responds to Claudine Potvin on the culture transmitted from mother to daughter: “In White pebbles for dark forests, the “I” attempts to imbue itself with a new conception of human relationships and the links that unite us to the animal, plant and mineral world. It is a world that does not yet exist, but by dint of not only thinking about it, but above all speaking about it, writing about it, this “I” which is also that of humanity, will make it exist. »
This radical confidence in writing is based on the demand for a physical presence to what is or could be. When Jovette Marchessault taught literary creation at the University of Quebec in Montreal, her motto, reports one of her students, was “Embody your characters!” Incarnate yourself! “. She was not trying to bring another world into existence. She embodied another world.