Just like music, books are also made of silence. An aspect which is not striking for its obviousness, but which has a lot to do with a way of using time, of playing with density. An even truer dimension, perhaps, in short books.
To write, as Frédérique Bernier understands it, is to sink into the “nocturnal cave that everyone carries within themselves”. This remote place where noises are rare, sometimes filtered by dreams, and where you can, if you stop for a moment, hear your heart beating.
In the wake of Hauntings (Nota Bene, 2020), subtitled “Frida Burns’ notebook on some pieces of life and literature”, which earned her the Governor General’s Literary Award in the Essays category in 2021, Frédérique Bernier returns with a second volume. A booklet, less than a hundred pages, but which sometimes resonates heavily with silence and questions.
” With Hauntings, I wanted to explore the relationship between literature and life, explains Frédérique Bernier, whom we meet on a sunny Sunday in March in a café in Mile-End, Montreal. How literature transforms us, allows us, through the words of others, to enter areas of ourselves that we never suspected. Show how the other is often better placed, surprisingly, to talk about us than ourselves. »
Write the dream
After two books devoted to the essays of Jacques Brault, as well as to the “imaginary of asceticism” in Saint-Denys Garneau and Samuel Beckett, Hauntings, considers Frédérique Bernier, was her first “real book as a writer”. It embodied a first word that was “riskier, more personal,” according to her, while exposing her vulnerability as a reader.
And Frida Burns in all this? “I would say that he is my literary double. It’s not a pseudonym, not a pen name, she explains. It is a way of registering a sort of gap between the social “me” and the “I” of writing or reading. In the sense that it embodies this kind of otherness that literature allows us to explore. »
With Chimeras, she wanted to go even further in exploring this otherness. By putting aside, if not in the exergues which cover each of the chapters, all the literary voices other than his own – from Kafka to Ingeborg Bachmann, via Annie Dillard or Clarice Lispector.
This time, the exploration of the strangeness that constitutes us is done largely through dreams. The writer, born in Montreal in 1973, says she wanted to make a freer book, which pushes the essay to its limit. The title itself brings us back to our otherness. “We are chimeras,” the writer believes, “we are made up of all kinds of more or less heterogeneous parts. But it also refers to the part of me that I describe as chimerical, which likes to construct illusions, to lose itself. The dreamer part, which is not necessarily comfortable in concrete and pragmatic reality, although I am still quite functional. »
The form of the book, more heterogeneous, sometimes alternating between the third person and the “I”, between modesty and immodesty, between the story and the essay, takes us back to this monster from Greek mythology – lion’s head and chest, belly goat, dragon tail —, and also accounts for the major plots that make up the book.
Starting with the dreamlike vein, coming from the author’s nightlife. “I love dreams,” says Frédérique Bernier. This love for dreams, and this faith in the truth of ourselves which is revealed to us by dreams, close to fantastic stories, is one of the foundations of Chimeras. I like to enter the night, the psychic night. » It is in a way, she summarizes, her literary project.
An obsession with sentences
And if the story is often more suggestive than explicit, this is also a matter of bias. “I did a thesis, a postdoctoral fellowship, I no longer want to explain myself, to convince,” she decides, even though she addresses themes like femininity and desire in this dreamy meditation. .
And faced with our time which asks literature to represent reality, someone or “something identifiable, remediable”, Frédérique Bernier defies and resists in her own way, seeing no harm in embracing against “logic of the world”, like Frida Burns, “the nerdy destiny of the obscure, more or less neurasthenic writer”.
“I have the impression that these days, we are asking a lot of literature to convey words, to defend theses, even to pass messages. But I sometimes fear, when these injunctions weigh very heavily, that the part of savagery, which for me literature has in its custody, will be lost. That which of us resists sociability seems precious to me. A bit like the part of a lake that serves as its lungs. »
The brevity of his books seems to him to reveal his obsessive side. “I have this connection to the text. I couldn’t see myself deploying myself in a very long form. It doesn’t look much like me. » Adding that she is more captivated, as a reader, by sentences than carried by stories. “I have an obsession with the sentence, the word, the comma. I’m tweaking a lot, but I’m tweaking as I go. »
Guilty thoughts
Chimeras is also crossed by the experience of illness, another of the threads of this story. In the summer of 2020, after the release of Hauntings, Frédérique Bernier, CEGEP teacher and mother of two children, developed mononucleosis, before receiving a diagnosis of myalgic encephalomyelitis, also called “chronic fatigue syndrome”. Work stoppage, disability, step aside.
“I sleep very poorly,” she admits, well aware of the paradox. I need a lot of sleep. My nights are not those restorative beaches which allow a good active and daytime life. » A condition, of course, particularly porous for dreams.
An illness also which does not come without guilt or suspicion, and which also forced her to “disembark from the social train”. Which is not uninteresting, she admits. “Belonging to illness, is this the alibi found to settle into this time of uncertainty, this time of dreams, of the unreal? To belong to this other, parallel reality, that of the body before dressage? » she wonders in Chimeras. “Some obscure part of me clearly refuses the injunction to get better and return to active life,” she writes again, not without a certain courage.
“I am a great lover of Henri Michaux, for whom what teaches us something is what malfunctions,” notes Frédérique Bernier. I try to make this experience of illness something that teaches me something about myself. It’s as if this illness forces me to be in these zones which for me have always been those which go hand in hand with writing. I try to make it something that is not only an obstacle, but also an opportunity. »