“From the start, I must tell you, I had the feeling with each word that I was giving birth to a miracle, the miracle that there was something instead of nothing, even if the difficulties rose in scratches- giant skies. » Is it really Marcus, the narrator ofTake away the night, new novel by Monique Proulx, who talks here about her relationship to writing? Or is it Monique Proulx herself?
Posted yesterday at 11:00 a.m.
On the other side of the table, our host smiles as we nod. After the publication in 2017 of What’s left of me, a sprawling choral novel embracing Montreal in all its marvelous complexity, the writer spent two whole years writing nothing at all. That was until the character of Marcus reimposed on her, a Hasidic Jew who breaks with his community and finally tastes all that the metropolis has that is horrible and heady. She had dumped him in the middle of town at the end of that previous book and wanted to see the world again through his dazzled eyes.
“There is always a sense of wonder at having succeeded in laying down a few lines that seem to stand up on their own,” she explains about this “painful process of writing”. “Even after all these years, writing is still a laborious crossing of apparent reality. We must leave everyday language behind to enter this underground source where the universe of literature is held. Every time it feels like a deep dive. »
Writing, however, is not only about the gesture of writing, but also, on a daily basis, “a panoramic view of reality, a more benevolent view than usual. Every day things are revealed to us that we choose not to see and writing helps us to see beyond appearances”.
For Marcus, the purely ecstatic joy of his first moments out of the yoke of blind obedience will be followed by “this revelation that freedom is not something easy, that freedom means embracing all that is black in the world “.
Both a food deliverer for sores and an employee of a homeless shelter, the young man rubs shoulders with the opposites of this metropolis where opulence and destitution go hand in hand. It’s not new that Monique Proulx casts a human eye – in the sense that she gives them all their humanity – on homeless people.
The homeless are for me like canaries in a mine, they show us that the air everywhere becomes more and more unbreathable, stale. They are revealers that we don’t like to see, but poor people, we have to show them in our books, because it’s a reality.
Monique Proulx
When she arrived in Montreal more than 30 years ago, Monique Proulx experienced “the wonder of being in this urban abundance. I was not able to apprehend Montreal, this city so baroque. I was not able to grasp his soul”.
She will achieve this after 10 years of work in The Montreal Auroras (1996), among the most insightful portraits of this island that Quebec literature has known. If Montreal is more suggested than described in Take away the nightwe nevertheless perfectly feel these 1.8 million solitudes which every day try not to lose sight of their dreams.
“Today, I’m less amazed, even though I still love Montreal. But as in other big cities, despair is there. We feel anxiety, except on Mount Royal. When people walk on the mountain, I have the impression that they are taking leave of society. »
PHOTO MARCO CAMPANOZZI, THE PRESS
Monique Proulx
The best of us
With Take away the night, Monique Proulx continues to delve into one of the great questions of her work, that of transcendence: in what circumstances do humans manage to offer the best of themselves? Marcus finds as he rubs shoulders with the real world that if he wants to be good, to do useful work, God will be of no help, that the resources necessary to rise are found within him.
“To have access to one’s own transcendence is to fully experience one’s freedom, it is to appeal to what is highest in us. It is to realize that life is not as flat and anecdotal as it seems to be, that we are not just the sum of our banal and stupid little thoughts, of our bundles of prejudices, that it is possible to get off the hamster wheel in which we are all. »
Getting off this wheel is what writing has enabled Monique Proulx to do for nearly 40 years now. “For me, the only valid writing is the one thanks to which you connect to a territory that no longer even belongs to you, thanks to which you take off your little personal particularities, to become a kind of lightning rod. »
She finds it hard to see how anyone could conceive of this novel, in which she slips into the skin of a Hasidic ex-Jew, as cultural appropriation. “What’s included in the universe of my life doesn’t seem at all interesting to me,” she blurts out, although adding that “there are also all sorts of ways to talk about oneself”, like borrowing the voice of someone who, a priori, looks nothing like us.
You have to take on the experience of the other, from the inside, to understand how much we all come together. We are not going to take away from me the possibility of being the others, and of the others being me. I’ve always done just that.
Monique Proulx
A slow-paced writer, Monique Proulx sometimes confides that she wishes she could pick up the pace, but is nevertheless delighted to escape the “condemnation of the fast book”. “What is haste? she asks. “The urgency is not to produce. The urgency is to be at your best at all times. »
Be at your best and not add to the sum of works that are satisfied to entertain. “I think we’re terribly entertained,” she observes. With my books, I try to take readers somewhere inside of them, while what I call entertainment makes you completely forget all that you are, all that you could be. So let’s give some nourishment to the soul! I would like that by closing one of my books, we have the intuition that life is fantastic when it is taken from the good side. »
Take away the night
Monique Proulx
boreal
352 pages