In his previous novel, Stranger’s Autobiography (Flammarion, 2020), shortlisted for the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Awards, Marie-Ève Lacasse unpacked everything: her sad and isolated childhood in a rigid family that discouraged artistic sensibilities, her desire to drop everything that led her to leaving her native Gatineau to start a new life in France, the margins in which she evolves and which prevent her from a very young age to fully belong to the world, the struggles and the revolutions that she leads through literature. The long and painful writing process gave birth to a sublime autofiction, but above all, to an artist, who until then refused to see herself as such.
“Allowing yourself to write, when you come from a family that opposes writing or that sees it at best as a hobby similar to knitting, it’s super long, she says, in an interview. with The duty during a brief stay in Montreal. To affirm myself as an artist was the most difficult thing to do, but today, I no longer have any accountability. I faced my monsters eye to eye. I’m free. »
It is this new freedom that today allows Marie-Ève Lacasse to present the missing, a novel in which she fully embraces fiction, and the creative work that it underlies, brilliantly taking up the ideological and formal challenges that she set herself at the start of writing.
Three women, Claire, Hélène and Joan, take refuge in a self-sufficient commune in the countryside following the disappearance of the husband of the first. Summoned to the police station, the friends raise, through their memories of the deceased, reflections on the relationships of domination that governed their lives, and the events that led to their emancipation from capitalist and heteropatriarchal models.
The reader, who here assumes the role of the policeman, is led to judge for himself the credibility and veracity of the words of the three women. “I wanted to give the reader a very active role. I was inspired by the movie Rashomon (1950), by Akira Kurosawa, in which the characters speak directly to the camera. Through their colors, their obsessions, their revelations, we advance little by little in the story. This form gives the book a thriller vibe, even if it isn’t. »
Artists and affects
The staged testimonies take place a few years after Ural Day, an event about which the reader has few details, but which refers to a collapse of the capitalist system, a tipping point of overconsumption and global warming. climatic.
Through the testimonies of her characters, who all go through the different crises of our time in their own way — environmental, migratory, heteropatriarchal — Marie-Ève Lacasse envisions an afterlife and offers a new imagination, a new way of living, a new definition of happiness.
“The role of writers is not to play politics and find possible solutions. The role of artists is to propose worlds in which we could project ourselves, in which we mobilize affects that make you want to change things. »
The novelist therefore conceives in The missing a post-capitalist paradigm in which the pooling of assets, tools of production, habitats and ways of eating and drinking becomes “desirable, pleasant, not frightening and not linked to the loss of privileges and comforts. It is, I believe, the only way to imagine that there can be a more enviable world than the one in which we are wading. »
A revolutionary happiness
Thus, the municipality in which Claire, Hélène and Joan evolve operates in complete autarky, outside the banking system. Each member of this community — made up mostly of women — offers a service, an expertise, a know-how to enable others to eat, dress, stay, reflect and learn. Claire, a trained winemaker, cultivates the vines and other fruit trees while Hélène, a former prostitute, teaches young children.
“I wanted to propose an ideal of degrowth which is a form of luxurious communism. I borrow from theoreticians, including Frédéric Lordon and Nicolas Framont, the idea that giving up material comfort is the real luxury. As Jean Giono said, the real wealth comes from the territory, the land and concrete knowledge, such as making bread, wine, sowing or harvesting, which have been captured by capitalism. It is a form of soft terrorism to reclaim them. »
At the commune, the door is open to all those who wish to reinvent themselves and are ready to get their hands dirty. Undocumented migrants, refugees, exiles… The past, origin, culture and standardized categories have little meaning in this living environment which tends towards equality and justice. “I also wanted to put down a set of images of heterosexual propaganda where there would only be the couple and the nuclear family as ideals of life. In the commune, the children are taken care of by everyone and the women can consider their emotional needs other than through the prism of the heteropatriarchal couple. »
To imagine this promising future where life is good, Marie-Ève Lacasse was particularly inspired by the agricultural producers she meets in the context of her work as a journalist in winemaking for the French daily Release ; a subject that she approaches from a sociological and political point of view, shedding light on farmers and restaurateurs who are questioning our way of life in a certain way.
“Although my book is a utopia, I think it is possible to adopt some of its premises on a small scale. The ideal would be to multiply this type of initiative on the same territory, so that it is one day possible to adhere to it at the structural level. »
While most futuristic novels are postapocalyptic dystopias, the writer is careful not to build on fear and panic. “I try to stage happy affects. Isn’t it more revolutionary to offer happiness? »