Marc Séguin wouldn’t want to appear to be playing punk, but the fantasies of destruction that punctuate his new novel, he admits, are also his. Meeting in his studio with the artist according to whom literature should be wary of morality.
Posted at 8:00 a.m.
“The man suspected the stories in the books of rocking consciences to kill the truth. Or at the very least to create a diversion,” writes Marc Séguin in A man and his dogs, his sixth novel, which traces the complex portrait, not always flattering, of a hunting guide encased in a certain incapacity, quite masculine, to tell the tides which inhabit him. If it were transposed to the big screen, it is Roy Dupuis who would embody it.
“I don’t know where I have to draw the line between the character and me”, confides with a little shy smile the painter, met on the seventh floor of Ateliers 3333, which he inaugurated a little more than a year in Saint-Michel.
If he is not in all respects similar to this animal friend who calls into question the very existence of this feeling called love, Marc Séguin undeniably shares his disdain for a literature which would send back to its reader a reassuring image of the world.
The last chapters of the novel, about which it is difficult to write without divulging them, thus contain several equivocal images, in the face of which it would be possible (but nevertheless erroneous) to conclude that the ideal woman, for the author, is a woman. mute.
“It’s sure that I’m going to play on the edge of the ravine,” said the man who would later admit to having spent the last three weeks “terrorized”, a painful ritual preceding the publication of each book. “I receive invitations for interviews and I am convinced that it is because people want to make fun of me. »
But this pathological insecurity is not enough to keep him from writing novels that are not flattering in the sense of the hair and from imagining a main character who is sometimes unsympathetic, or at least surly.
I don’t give myself the right in my moral hygiene to do cutesy things. I want that when you read my book or see a work, there is something that upsets you. A book that’s too rosy feeds my natural misanthropy, because it’s not true.
Marc Seguin
“So it’s sure that the person who usually reads Mary Higgins Clark and who is going to take me at face value, she’s going to shit on me by reading the end”, predicts the one who invites us to see in this outcome a metaphor of the fate humanity has in store for the planet. “But at the same time, I don’t want the painting to speak to you because it matches your sofa or that you like the book because it comforts you in your dogmas. Why are you reading if it’s to stay the way you are? »
feel alive
“I feel like we’re going in traffic / We’re going to break a couple of windows / Realize the hatred that lives in us”, sang in 2002 Vulgaires Machins, one of Marc Séguin’s favorite groups, which he listens to often with his sons.
As enraged as the punk formation by this world that the majority watches rush towards the wall with folded arms, the narrator ofA man and his dogs is also visited by his own fantasies of destruction: “That very tired evening, in Anticosti, he had dreamed of having poured an odorless neurotoxic poison into the city’s drinking water treatment system. Millions of people had died. His recurring dreams soothed his apprehensions, like landmarks. »
“I think I was born with an opposition disorder,” says the 52-year-old writer, sitting under one of his gigantic paintings. The comfort in which he lives thanks to his paintings is undeniable, but his distrust of the softening of the spirit watching the artist who is gentrifying is just as much.
PHOTO HUGO-SÉBASTIEN AUBERT, THE PRESS
Marc Seguin
What matters to him first and foremost? To feel alive, like all those young art graduates who populate Ateliers 3333. Or like all those punks, who want to set the system on fire, “because at least when you want to destroy something, you feel alive” .
So, yes, I manage to follow certain rules, but does that mean that I fit into the mould, that I’m flat, that I settled in a bobo workshop in Old Montreal, that I voted for the CAQ? Nope ! I don’t make art to sip champagne. I make art because I believe in the idea of the Trojan horse, which is invited somewhere and destroys everything once inside.
Marc Seguin
If he writes books, a time-consuming and not very lucrative activity, it is for the simple reason that he read a lot, especially in the period before his 30s, when his embarrassment padlocked all conversation. “The books helped me get through a lot of things, educated me on the human condition. »
“That’s why I want us to continue to have imperfect, rougher, rougher characters,” he explains. We have too many models that tend to be idealized. My character is like me: I’m full of knots and sometimes there’s a little flower that grows. I don’t want to go back to a time when we didn’t care about each other’s feelings, but it worries me, this time when everyone apologizes all the time before writing or saying anything . »
A man and his dogs
Marc Seguin
Lemeac
168 pages