At the age of fifteen, William S. Messier learned that an injury he thought had healed, which had occurred in his early childhood while he was performing acrobatics on the rings of his babysitter’s old module, had been threatening ever since. time to kill him. His second cervical vertebra — the axis tooth — was fractured. That is to say that the slightest shock, the slightest false movement could, without warning, have severed his spinal cord. “During the last ten years, you were a hair’s breadth from death,” the doctor tells him. “You were dancing, doing somersaults and sideways cartwheels, without worrying about anything. Without knowing that there were mines everywhere around you. »
In The miraclethe Sherbrooke writer revisits all the times he came close to death: a car accident, an overenthusiastic golden retriever, a basketball fight — childhood memories which, in hindsight, took a menacing turn.
After a stint in fiction – he has written three novels and a collection of short stories – William S. Messier made his first foray into self-narrative. “I have carried this story within me since the age of fifteen,” underlines the author, whom I met over coffee in the metropolis. I was aware that I had experienced something worth telling. But I didn’t know how to go about it. I recognized that there were twists and turns, elements that could interest people. At the same time, there was nothing romantic or tragic, no real adventure and no real danger. I was called a miracle, even though nothing really happened to me at all. It was really because it was an object that I couldn’t define that I wanted to know what happened next. »
Orality and digressions
The writer ultimately took almost ten years to find the form and tone that his story would take. “I first thought about a children’s album, but that didn’t allow me to get to the bottom of my thoughts. The most difficult thing was to move beyond the story being told and turn it into a literary text. »
He did his homework, delving into the biographies of the masters of autofiction, Annie Ernaux and Karl Ove Knausgård in mind — in the hope of finding his way. “I quickly realized that it wasn’t really me. I had a vision of self-narrative as something very calm, very interior, very introspective. My writing is more about action, about describing moments and movements. I had to make peace with that, especially since I couldn’t tell my story in a serious way. I mean, there are people who survive real affairs, who actually live in a minefield. »
The author ultimately allowed himself to be more influenced by the orality of American literature and humor to construct a story following the sinuous path of the digression, anchored in action and dynamism, carried by an oscillating tragicomic vision between self-deprecation and neurosis.
This realism borrowed from our neighbors to the South also runs through the entire work of William S. Messier. “Americans have a very intuitive relationship with language. They often depict themselves or their characters speaking. There’s something that interests me about assuming you’re telling a story and imitating a voice. When I read them, I feel like I have access to real life, in the utilitarian sense, and not just its intellectualization. I find that literature lives well in these moments, as much as in great interior moments. »
Homage to the ordinary and sincerity
Although he thought of making his story an adventure novel flirting with surrealism, the novelist judiciously fell back on ordinary life – that of an altogether peaceful childhood in the streets of an anonymous suburb of Eastern Townships. He cites the late François Blais who, in Paper 1 (L’Instant Same, 2018), wrote: “Everything we are, we are just a little bit. » “This sentence, which recalls the touching modesty of François Blais, describes well what I tried to tell: the story of a kid who was a little lucky, a little fearful, a little brave. A bit miraculous. Ordinary people spend their time being creative from a mundane life. This is what I wanted to explore. »
By going back through his memories, William S. Messier also questions the mechanisms of memory and the mysterious irony of its construction. “I struggle to remember certain crucial milestones in my life — my marriage is a blur of smiles and tears of joy, the birth of my two daughters is just a few images etched in my mind. But I can recite every insult that someone older or better said to me at any time in my childhood, as if it were singing the alphabet or counting to ten. », he writes.
“I read in the Washington Post that from an evolutionary point of view, humans benefit from remembering moments of difficulty to the detriment of moments of joy. It’s like testing ourselves so as not to repeat the mistakes of the past. There is a similar connection with fiction. Experiencing trauma vicariously, for example, allows us to create pathways in our brain and better protect ourselves against them. I also think that literary people are more neurotic than the average person, and attach themselves to the creative potential of unhappiness. That’s why it was so difficult for me to accept that my book would be more about joy and love than tragedy. »
By choosing to display the amazed look of one who measures his luck, William S. Messier fully embraces the cliché according to which life hangs by a thread, and that it is essential, without experiencing each moment with the consciousness of danger, to take advantage of all the moments that are granted to us on this planet.
“Here again, there are several authors who inspired me, like Dave Eggers, Miranda July or Jean-Christophe Réhel, writers who are sincere in their use of clichés. I don’t like to quote it, because it’s problematic, but David Foster Wallace called this tendency — which consists of claiming sincerity in the face of irony or disillusionment — the new literary radicalism. Above the Carpe Diem, I think my experience made me want to seek a presence in the world and in myself, a desire to align my life with what I want to be. Writing this novel allowed me to see the extent of my privileges, to find the right posture to demonstrate humility in what I tell and to embrace the power of my story for what it is. »