On the seventh floor of Ateliers 3333, in Saint-Michel in Montreal, Marc Séguin’s studio is invaded by the insistent cacophony of the Métropolitaine, this concrete monster, the red carpet of heavy goods vehicles, which disfigures and pollutes the metropolis. “One of the artists who rent a room downstairs told me that it reminded him of the sound of the river,” he says, a wry smile on his lips.
Paradoxical, for an artist, to settle on the edge of a highway, in a district that has rather bad press, to let inspiration and creation emerge. “Not for me,” replies the painter. I think artists have always been attracted to outlying neighborhoods. I could afford to buy a big loft in Old Montreal or the Mile-End, but real life is here. »
In his practice, Marc Séguin admits to enjoying going against trends, tickling conventions, creating discomfort and questioning. “There is nothing great that comes from comfort. »
Her new novel, A man and his dogs, is part of this desire for destabilization; the main character – not always easy to like – being designed to represent certain flaws in humanity that lead it straight to disaster.
love and destruction
Presented as a fable, the story paints the complex portrait of a man who maintains difficult relationships, imbued with rage and cynicism, towards reality and the beings he loves. Disillusioned by the artifice of affective conventions and by a consumerist society reinforced by pious wishes, he struggles to grasp all the ambiguity of the anger that inhabits him and to find the stones that will allow him to move forward and abandon himself. to love, in a world where the inevitable end is fast approaching.
“I am part of a generation where we started talking about the end of the world, where every day is struck by an ecological alarm, where this end has become our only authority. I asked myself the question: what happens to love, this state that represents infinity, when you know it’s going to end? I have a feeling these feelings are going to take on worry and spite. »
The man at the heart of the story is therefore presented – a rarity for a male character – through his quest for love, each encounter and potential woman in his life representing a metaphor for the development of society, from Antiquity to the precipice that t is the current era, going through the Industrial Revolution.
Although he is not strictly speaking Marc Séguin’s alter ego, the protagonist, like him, is inhabited by dreams and feelings of self-destruction, apocalyptic images for which he has no explanation. “It is perhaps in the nature of the artist to be crossed by something that cannot be explained by words. My role is not to understand it, it’s to objectify it, to channel this rage through art, to bring out something that has an impact. »
In the character, these obsessions echo the posture of humanity faced with the state of the world. “Bombs are sometimes useful in the measure of oneself,” he writes. Everything in the life of the protagonist embodies this destruction, beginning with his flight, into the woods with his dogs and into alcohol, which allows him to avoid this present. Like the intelligent urbanite, who knows what’s coming, but buys his car of the year with a smile and adheres to the ineptitude of a system punctuated by the purchase of coffee and toilet paper. »
Antiheroism
In rejection of this system, he seeks to reconnect with the essential, to honor the loyalty of animals, the rhythm of the seasons, migrations, reproductions. His posture allows him to capture truths that evolution ignores, but also positions him in a refusal to move forward, to adhere to progress, even social. In his questioning of the feeling of love, there is his reductive vision of women, his belief in the immutable order of nature.
When he finally meets the woman of his life, when he makes the choice of commitment, the latter is reduced to silence, letting the idea hover that love can only last if it is crystallized in a precise moment, that the ideal woman, as in the tales of our childhood, exists only deeply asleep.
“I am well aware that if we are satisfied with the first reading, I will not turn far from the chicane, launches Marc Séguin in a burst of laughter. The woman, Marie, is the apocalypse of my character, the culmination of her questioning of her right to love the end. As an artist, I need to upset and confuse people, to test the limits. Being guided by ideological rhetoric, as much contemporary literature does, is the equivalent of always taking your information from a newspaper that thinks like you, just standing still. The truth is more complex, and more interesting. »