Chronicle | The Nelly Arcan matrix

Damnpublished by Seuil in 2001, is the only book from the years 2000-2004 that appears in our list, but it is the one that dominates, by far, all the other books cited over a quarter of a century. More than half of the participants registered Damn in their choices, and often in first position, which caused their score to explode.

Nelly Arcan perfectly matches the idea we had when launching this project, since 25 years later, we can no longer speak of a fad: Damn has become, without a doubt, a new classic, which continues to influence what is written, and culture in general, 15 years after the tragic death of its author.

This book would not have survived if it had not been powerful, if it did not still speak to us today, and perhaps even more than when it came out, since it never been also current. By writing about her past as an escort and her personal obsessions, Arcan frontally exposed themes that agitate our society, not without putting herself in danger. In this story halfway between literature and philosophy, which resembles a haunting song where pain and anger mingle, Arcan set the table, without knowing it at the time, for decades to come. She could never know how much.

When I announced to Martine-Emmanuelle Lapointe, professor of literature at the University of Montreal, that it was Damn of Nelly Arcan who is at the top, she is moved, and me too. “When you think about how this book was received at the time,” she says.

Who can forget it? Damn made a big splash upon its release, selected for the Femina and Medici prizes. But all this was accompanied by such a violent reaction, both towards the novel and its author, that we still wonder about this reception, as if no one had been prepared to receive such a book at the time.

“This work survived the bashing, because initially, we did not immediately recognize its great literary qualities, and I think that this is what survives now, what nourishes the youngest,” believes Martine-Emmanuelle Lapointe. “This sentence, this force in the subject… From the prologue of Damnthe narrator says she wants to be part of the writing community, the only one she wants to belong to. So there is something quite beautiful in this return. »

In this prologue, Arcan admits to having difficulty reading women’s books, because they “cannot manage to [la] distract from[elle-même] “. But she adds: “And then I envy them for being able to call themselves writers, I would like to think of them all the same, to think of them as I think of myself, as Smurfette, as a whore. But don’t worry about me, I will write until I finally grow up, until I reach those that I don’t dare to read. »

She will have done even better, by making many women writers want to write.

Before and after Arcan

David Bélanger, professor of literature at UQTR, explains the phenomenon as follows: “The novel Damn constitutes without a shadow of a doubt the book that marked the century; Arriving early, he will have been a major influence for authors and especially contemporary women authors – from the 2010s to the present day. But also and perhaps less obviously, this book will have been the standard bearer, with Borderline (2000) by Marie-Sissi Labrèche, which precedes it by a year, of a certain “scandalously intimate” self-fictional practice.

But this standard-bearer, he emphasizes, “will be above all marked by resistance in the cultural media sphere and opposition to the paradigm underlying this writing, which certainly makes it a work of importance, historically ; its polarization guarantees its relevance.”

Nelly Arcan was swept up in the whirlwind of the debate on autofiction which, at the turn of the 2000s, with for example Christine Angot or Annie Ernaux, shook the literary world. A genre particularly favored by women, which was received with a certain contempt, even exasperation, and to which “the literatures of the imagination” were spontaneously opposed.

This genre, however, has never left the shelves, and writers (especially women writers) who claim to be Nelly Arcan have multiplied. “Thus, emulation (self-fictional writing as commitment) and polarization (media and creative) make it the crossroads book of the literature of our century, the one which traces the before and after,” believes David Bélanger.

My colleague Laila Maalouf also remembers the enormous reaction this book generated at the time. “The publication of Damn was an electric shock for an entire generation of young women who, like me, were entering adulthood at the turn of the 2000s. It was THE book that needed to be read at that time. No one had dared to write in this way in Quebec until then; and even if she opened the way for autofiction in our literature, her work remains unique and unparalleled. Even today, it is a book that resonates in the memories of all those who read it. »

But why? According to author Kev Lambert, this is due to three aspects: style, feminist speech and the social reception of Damn. “This book is like a whirlwind, there is a kind of lyricism, where she recounts her childhood, a form of poverty in which the character grew up,” he notes. The feminist question is really central, through the alienation of women. Themes of the essay Girls in series by Martine Delvaux are already in Damn ; the serial aspect, the consumption of bodies, the construction of a feminine gender in relation to magazine images, in relation to very precise expectations. The narrator is stuck in these expectations, like in a spider’s web. »

Finally, there is the way in which the character Arcan was mistreated from the moment he appeared. “I was told that even for feminists, it was misunderstood at first,” remembers Kev Lambert. It took a few years for the feminist gesture to be understood in her work. There has also been a paradigm shift in reading around it. Other authors have claimed Arcan roots, such as Karine Rosso, Antoine Charbonneau-Demers and Marie Darsigny. Chloé Savoie-Bernard wrote a poem about her, Pomme wrote a song…”

Without forgetting that his work, among other things, inspired a film in 2016, Nelly by Anne Émond, and a piece, The fury of what I thinka creation by Marie Brassard and Sophie Cadieux.

“When a book finds itself cited, transformed, commented upon so much, it is because it continues to touch and live through fiction,” believes Karine Rosso, professor in the literary studies department at UQAM, who wrote In My enemy Nelly the influence that Arcan exerted on herself. And as a founding member of the feminist bookstore L’Euguélionne, she was able to observe how Damn still sells a lot, 25 years later, while the teacher notes that theses and memoirs on Nelly Arcan have never stopped being written.

“As is often the case with classics, this book was ahead of its time,” she says, noting that in 2001, it was believed that feminism was outdated and that the sexual revolution had emancipated women. “We were wrong and Nelly Arcan was one of the first to raise the red flag by saying that we had to continue to ask questions about gender relations. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, his work foreshadowed the contemporary obsession with the retouched image and the presentation of the self. She did not have time to comment on the social media phenomenon, but her first book already announced it. Like the chronicle of a predicted catastrophe…”

A classic is often visionary. But we are not born classic, we become one.

Damn

Nelly Arcan

Threshold

187 pages
(2001)