Once a month, under the pen of Quebec writers, The duty of literature proposes to revisit in the light of current events the works of ancient and recent history of Quebec literature. Discoveries? Proofreading? Different look? A choice. An initiative of the Académie des lettres du Québec, in collaboration with The duty.
In 1979, under the name of Louky Bersianik, Lucile Durand-Letarte published a story entitled The picnic on the Acropolis. Notebooks of Ancylin which she picks up to transform it Feast of Plato, one of the founding texts of Western philosophy, transmitted with respect throughout history. Exit from binary thought, splitting up of genres, women speaking out, enjoyment: everything is already in place to overturn the old order.
Appropriating this important work is from the outset an iconoclastic gesture for Bersianik. The picnic… makes resonate in him the very studied text of Plato, but he introduces a strangeness into it. Under the pen of the writer, the question of love is debated through dialogues between women, thus displacing in an irreverent way the remarks on Eros of Socrates and his band of friends and joyfully leading learned thoughts towards the question. of female enjoyment.
If the women and even the flute player were ousted from the banquet given by Agathon, Bersianik herself, during her little picnic among the good women, gives to hear the reflections of a tiny army of terrorists ready to dynamite the Greek text and to ridicule the thought of Socrates to highlight its fundamentally misogynistic character. From the solemn and grandiose banquet of the ancient philosopher, Bersianik makes one or two bites of sandwich, during a nocturnal and informal picnic which makes fun of the history of philosophy while being playful.
Patriarchy as a playground
Men are, for Bersianik, again and again invited to intellectual banquets worthy of Plato’s and they refuse to participate in real mixed places where the place of women is not determined in advance. From the start of Picnic…, Bersianik regrets the absence of men at the party that is his book. It will be for another time ! It is time to create a place where women can invent themselves at the very center of the patriarchal playground, the Socratic philosophy, by making it implode.
The iconoclasm of Bersianik’s thought is not merely parodic and amusing. It is intended to be tactical and, therefore, political. It is a question of desacralizing philosophy and of entering into a dialogue with it, even if it means forcing it and giving it a hard time.
Many feminist writers, well beyond the 1960s and 1970s, wanted to work on a political reworking of the texts of the tradition. We think of Monique Bosco and her rewriting of Medeato Nancy Huston taking up the tragic character of Jocasta, and even to Amélie Nothomb who wrote revenge for the women imprisoned and murdered in Blue Beard.
These appropriating re-inscriptions of myths and tales reveal and bring to life not only an original reflection but also female characters that history has stifled. At Bersianik, this diversion of Banquet is given to see through a deformation by a heterogeneous literary object, of the philosophical dialogue which will thus play with the essay, the political manifesto, the pamphlet, the poem, the fable, clippings of articles in the newspaper, dialogues and chatter, the scientific proposal (the Hite report on women’s sexuality), blank sheets on which to invent oneself, photos, and which will also include etchings and intaglios by Jean Letarte, Bersianik’s husband.
The whole of the book will be based on a structure making a sign to the music (prelude, concerto, fugue). The constant recourse to quotations, drawn from the thoughts of women, comes to create an intellectual community inside a refuge book. Women would be cramped in the conventional form that is the book. It is necessary to reinvent the latter to destroy its linearity, its rigid aspect. The genre of the notebook (in the plural here), which gives its subtitle to the Picnic…, allows an impure art of collage, an aesthetic bric-a-brac, disrespectful of the philosophical purity built through the ages. In doing so, Bersianik paradoxically shows the unconventional character of the Socratic dialogue and its freedom, which it leads to its climax.
With Picnic on the Acropolis, this is not the first time that Louky Bersianik has invaded the territory of tradition. In L’Euguelionein 1976, she had shamelessly entered the sacred places of the biblical text and travelogues (as they had been practiced by the writers of the XVIIIe century: Swift, Gulliver and Voltaire) in order to show, in the tradition of the Enlightenment, the arbitrariness of social values and sexual identities.
It’s from L’Euguelione what were born Notebooks of Ancyl. Chapter 63 of the third part of the book, dealing with Ancyl, was made into an imposing whole which was able to take shape in an autonomous text. But Ancyl, like many of Bersianik’s characters, can be found in several of the writer’s works. We see it in poems, short stories or plays, thus showing that the entire work proposes a becoming woman that cannot be given without thinking of an incessant transformation of a feminine posture through writing.
The feminists who meet on the Acropolis, a major place in Greek history, are named Ancyl, Aphélie, Avertine, Adizetu (a little circumcised African girl whose story was told in The Press), Edith, Epsilonne and Xanthippe, who historically was the wife of Socrates and who, in the Picnic, takes his intellectual revenge on his man and his speeches. Xanthippe here knows how to speak as well as her philosopher husband. She even admits to prefer, like her famous husband, young boys to old men.
The character of Ancyl, which is presented from the subtitle of the work, signs by name to a position of servant whose Latin term ancilla is the echo. By the resemblance of the word ancyl to the Greek word ankylos, which designates a bent state, we feel all the burden that this woman carries and that only her coming to the word will allow us to abandon. Many feminist texts have explored the need to find a voice for women caught in the silences of history. By Marie Cardinal, in The words to say itto Annie Leclerc, in Word of womenthe need for a feminine word is essential.
The pleasurable chaos of language
It is the language that allows the birth of women. Bersianik’s feminism demands a philosophical consideration of female jouissance, which would have existed only through male desire. The possibility of collective self-generation from a way of revisiting origins is central to this thought of a feminine sidelined and relegated to intellectual postures and practical and sexual positions that do not suit her. not.
This desire to enter language, inscribed, for example, in a tactic of feminizing words and invading the territory of language, is based on faith in the possibility of a writing where the body and the enjoyment of women in would come to find a place of existence. At the present time, when we want to bring out other identities through inclusive writing, Bersianik’s text signals the infinite creative capacity of language, its immense playful possibility. Language evolves and must remain malleable.
The utopian and political horizon in Bersianik can only be reached through associations, games and deformations of words that mistreat syntax through an intimate body to body.
The birth of the Caryatid
In this sense, the caryatids, those statue-columns which bear the Acropolis on their foreheads, which support the edifice of ancient Greek history and ensure the foundations of Hellenic grandeur, are summoned to take part in the picnic, to take shape and leave behind the historical immobility that marble confers on them. They must cease, these worthy vestals, to be the benevolent support of a law which ignores them and thus pass from an Apollonian ideal of beauty to a Dionysian practice of their body.
At the very end of the story, a caryatid, which has lost the Greek i that imprisoned it, begins to move. “Arms sprouted from her that lift Avertine and hold her tight against her like a barely saved child as this TERRIBLE ALIVE jumps nimbly from the support wall and walks […] in a cloud of dust where the dawn of this day infiltrates. […] Avertine is not afraid. She is exhausted. […]. There she falls asleep in the arms of the Caryatid she gave birth to. By this birth of the Caryatid, Avertine the midwife creates a mother for herself and joins a line.
We could of course dwell on the burlesque and childish aspect of Bersianik’s writing which, in the utopian world it creates, cannot escape what some still see as naivety or outrageous lyricism. At a time of restless, often feminist dystopias (one thinks of Le Guin or Margaret Atwood), the frankly playful side of the text can make you smile. However, any true utopia has a childish element of candor. Imagining a better world does not come from an accounting thought, caught in the traps of a narrow realism, without overflow. You have to appeal to an unbridled imagination to believe in a different and joyful life, when everything invites us to a good quality catastrophism.
“We must destroy the sexes. Do not compartmentalize, ”says Bersianik in an interview. At present, we would speak of an exit from binary thought. It is indeed this bursting of stereotyped genres, which begins with an anarchy messing up within language and gender, which Bersianik invites us to in his Picnic… And this chaos within the great Western banquet, very often cannibalistic, has something to dream about. A better world can only take root in fiction. And it is this literary power against philosophy that Bersianik makes heard, with laughter and with a certain joy.