In The cities of paper published in 2018 by Alto, Dominique Fortier explored the life of Emily Dickinson, probing the creative process and scrutinizing her art of creating a world from a few words. In The white shadows — which is offered as a second part of the work undertaken — the author plunges back into the poet’s universe in order to grasp the void left around her after her death.
Although she thought it impossible to weave a sequel to this first story, which began with the birth of Emily Dickinson and ended with her death, Dominique Fortier remained inhabited by the voice borrowed from paper towns. “It was a story that was closed on itself, she confides on the phone. Except that in the months and years that followed, when I was trying to immerse myself in another universe, strangely, the voice that I found was that of the paper towns […] The day I agreed to let myself be carried away by it, rather than persisting in trying to do something else, this book appeared. »
In The white shadowsDominique Fortier transports us to the 19thand century, in the family of the poetess where her sister, Lavinia, her sister-in-law Susan, and Mabel, the mistress of Austin, search the writings of this mysterious woman who left them when they undertake to publish her poems. “Even if my character was no longer there, there remained first of all the places that had fascinated me; that idea of a woman who lived alone in her room and all the people around who had known her, her entourage. And then, in a way, there remained the void to explore, explains Dominique Fortier. It became the subject of my book. What’s left when people are gone? What do they take away from us? And, conversely, what do they leave us of themselves through absence? »
Then, as a way of establishing links between the past and the present, also a way of getting out of fiction to look at it, Dominique Fortier interfered in the story, slipping into it an intimate “I” through which different reflections on death and its aftermath. “Between fiction and reflection, there is something at play there, and it seems to me that the space or the door that I open allows the reader to enter or leave — I’m not sure — , but in any case, it allows him to add his voice to what I’m saying and that’s important too […] I want it to be a dialogue between me writing and the person reading me and between the two of us and the text. So, a kind of three-voice dialogue, I would say”, sums up the author ofAt the peril of the sea and Good use of the stars.
Freeze time with literature
But what makes the strength of this story, the knot, or even the challenge of this staging, remains above all the evanescence of things, relationships, beings. Everything disappears one day. “There is not much that lasts, we live in impermanence. Even the things that remain do so in a changed way,” says Dominique Fortier. The transience of elements and relationships thus returns throughout the white shadows Whether it’s between Susan and Austin—her husband who slips through her fingers and prefers Mabel to her—or even Dickinson’s poems somewhat diluted in their essence, or at least transformed by the Higginson publisher before their publication. Little Millicent, Mabel’s daughter, carried by the poetry of Dickinson, also takes up this idea when she says that “we don’t listen enough to the dead or to children – or to birds”, three entities that carry within them this impermanence.
However, in this fleeting life, no one, of course, can stop time, “except Emily Dickinson, perhaps”, underlines Dominique Fortier with a smile. But literature, this space free of constraints, where anything can happen, would be a way to remedy this fatality. “For me, the challenge of literature has always been that. That’s why I started writing. I felt that [le temps] was happening at breakneck speed and I told myself that I had to find a way to stop the movement for a few seconds. »
Literature—just like Dickinson’s poems found by his sister—in a way makes it possible to disregard time. For Dominique Fortier, books are the best remedy she knows to remedy this headlong rush. “It may be the only thing that survives. If we were forever, we wouldn’t need […] of these witnesses who cross the centuries, but since nothing and no one is eternal, it’s like milestones. They are a bit of guides, a bit of beacons. Even the letters in fact. When Susan rereads Emily’s letters, it’s [pour elle] a way of making up for the absence. The very premise of the letter is that we are not there. Because if we were there with the person we love, we wouldn’t need to write to them. We could just whisper a story in his ear. It’s the same with books. »
Like those delicate, fragile, fossilized lily of the valley flowers found on the cover of white shadowsthe story bears luminous witness “not to what disappears, but to what remains”, concludes the author.