Like all crises, the pandemic we have been going through for two years has served as a revealer. And above all, it has highlighted our shortcomings.
A crisis that has revealed deep flaws in our way of dealing with health and illness, but also in our relationship to old age and death. This is what Mathieu Bélisle believes. Tracks that the essayist goes up in his third book, What dies in us a series of three essays followed by a luminous epilogue in the form of a “step aside”, all of which examine in their own way our relationship to death.
“We don’t know how to talk about death, old age and illness,” Mathieu Bélisle confides on the phone. I feel like we were collectively distraught at the start of this crisis. Both by the virus, which is of course a real threat, but also by the sudden fact that the possibility of death burst into everyday life. »
He points out that we live today in societies where these questions have almost become absent. Where the elderly and the sick have often been placed outside the normal circuit of life. The virus has created a kind of panic, a mixture of anger and amazement, as if these were in fact very archaic phenomena, he adds, which no longer really had anything to do with our societies.
This is one of the big flaws, he thinks, that we have seen. “We are in a world where we have cultivated so much performance, efficiency, attention paid to the present moment, to speed, to acceleration and to perfect plastic beauty that there is no longer any room for this which could be called, more broadly, vulnerability, weakness, imperfection. »
A veil over reality
Born in 1976, professor of literature at Jean-de-Brébeuf College in Montreal, Mathieu Bélisle quickly made his mark with the publication of his first book, Welcome to the land of ordinary life (Leméac, 2017), becoming one of the finest thinkers of his generation. The Unseen Empire (Leméac, 2020) explored the question of the mutation of the United States and its renewed hold on our lives.
“I have the impression that, throughout the pandemic, we mainly dealt with the figures, continues Mathieu Bélisle. Those of the number of victims, hospitalizations and vaccinations – and they are of course important – but they were there a bit like a veil draped over reality. »
Although the response to the pandemic question has been the same everywhere in large industrialized societies, in Quebec as well as in China, Mathieu Bélisle wonders if we don’t have a particular relationship to these questions here. “We are perhaps in one of the societies where the discourses that take charge of death, that take care of arranging a place for it in life have fallen the most at half mast. There has been a rather dramatic collapse of religion as an institution, but it’s unclear what took its place. »
For example, the fact that in Quebec the debate on the right to die with dignity has been taken up by politicians and medical authorities, he thinks, should not exhaust the subject, “especially not the famous matter of meaning”. Death has become a sort of taboo, a place where no one lives. Gold, What dies in us which he dedicates to his mother, “capable of extraordinary empathy”, poses the question bluntly: “Perhaps if we knew how to talk about death better, we would know how to die better; and that knowing how to die better, we would know how to live better. »
Rich and deep questions that the writer addresses in a personal way, with sensitivity and intelligence, as usual. “And I don’t have the answers”, he hastens to add, specifying that he does not write “to change the world, but to understand it, and to understand what is happening to us”.
“The weakness of our time is that death is no longer the subject of any common conception”, he also writes. Even the ecological threat remains largely abstract to us. “We no longer know how to talk about death since we no longer have the ability to believe in the future,” he points out. In a mode other than catastrophe and our eventual disappearance. As if we already felt collectively condemned. »
He quotes Pierre Vadeboncoeur (1920-2010), who became for him a tutelary figure, who said that Quebecers live in a kind of “quiet permanence”. As if nothing could really happen to them, deprived of a sense of tragedy, evolving on the margins of history.
More broadly, in his eyes, this “denial of death” is not a coincidence. Because everything conspires in the capitalist order in which we live so that these questions do not interest us. “Sickness, old age and death are non-consumption, unproductiveness, slowing down. And perhaps the world in which we live is not as free as we think, that it too has its share of taboos and prohibitions. »
On the sidelines of this central issue, he wonders in What dies in us on the dematerialization of human relationships during the pandemic, as well as the “dramatic reduction in the space of the sayable” that he has witnessed. As always, Mathieu Bélisle knows how to hit the bull’s eye in order to feed his thinking, summoning Sophocles as well as René Girard, Walter Benjamin, Romain Gary or Hergé and his Tintin in Tibet.
He recognizes that the religious and Protestant education he received – his father was a pastor –, even if he tried to get rid of it, could have shaped his “fascination for essential questions”. It no doubt also conditioned his particular relationship with the Quebec heritage, making him a sort of “viewer”, like Proust, a Jewish writer, with regard to French society.
“My intention is not to return to the past or even to religion,” recalls Mathieu Bélisle. But perhaps we should nevertheless rediscover a sensitivity contained in the very word religion, which means to link. Because everything is connected. And I have the impression that, in the modern and postmodern world, we have created a reality that is so compartmentalized, that we can no longer see the relationships between beings and things, between societies, between humans and the territory. There is a general crisis in the relationship. »