In the opening scene of The sneerthe sixth novel by Éric Dupont, Mary Gallagher and Susan Kennedy, two prostitutes, make their way through the forest of drunks of the tavern of Charles McKiernen, alias Joe Beef, a poet and philanthropist who offers room and board to the most destitute and, incidentally, organizes fights between his dogs and bears — who spend most of their time downing pints of beer in their faces – on good nights.
This anecdote, inspired, by the way, by real events, is the least of the absurdities in this symphonic novel woven with magical realism. Here, children are born in melons, the color red creates distortions in space-time and religious processions evolve like snakes through the streets of Montreal, the drunkest city in North America.
With this family saga taking root in the embroidered melon farms at the foot of Mount Royal at the end of the 19th centurye century, Éric Dupont wanted first and foremost to write “his Montreal novel,” as The American Bride (Marchand de feuilles, 2012) may have been the one from Rivière-du-Loup. “And by all means, I tried to make Montreal magical.”
It was Mary Gallagher, mentioned during a meeting with her editor, who first provided the spark for The sneer, this woman who, on June 26, 1979, was brutally murdered by her friend Susan Kennedy in the Griffintown neighborhood. Susan is said to have decapitated her victim with an axe and then placed her head in a basket at the crime scene. According to legend, Mary Gallagher would return every seven years to the scene of the murder to try, in vain, to find her head.
“After hearing about this remarkable anecdote, I went home and started reading about it,” says the writer, who we met in his downtown apartment. “I realized that there was a huge gap between the legend told in songs and guided tours of haunted Montreal, for example, and the real story. By learning about Mary, I understood that she had been the victim of an injustice from the start, not only because she was beheaded, but also because the newspaper articles that appeared the day after her death described her as a bad person who deserved what had happened to her. On the other hand, the more you read about Susan Kennedy, the more you realize that she may have been schizophrenic and that there are even doubts about her guilt. As a good savior of the modern era that has a toxic relationship with the past, I wanted to right these wrongs.”
A Marxist consciousness
The sneer thus navigates between Mary, born in a Montreal melon, “swept” from the orphanage to the homes, experiencing there the luxury of time, idleness and love, there that of knowledge and reading, and Aimé, a privileged kid raised by his father and by the latter’s homosexual friend, fascinated by the promises of a bright future and the captivating colors of Expo 67, and who will be catapulted in spite of himself into the past, into the harshness of Montreal in 1879, condemned to sketch futuristic drawings from memory.
Through these two extraordinary destinies, Éric Dupont both traces and blurs the boundary between two worlds, that of the night and misery and that of the heights, of the mountain, of the summit of the chain. “When we talk about this period of history, we often use the same categories: the divisions between English-speakers and French-speakers, between Catholics and Protestants. However, if there was a dichotomy, it was mainly between the rich and the poor, and this, since the industrial revolution. This is what changed everything, even our notion of time, which has since been determined according to the role of each person in the production chain.”
After pausing, the writer returns to the oft-tossed quote that life is too short to do things you don’t like. “No, the real quote should be: I’m too rich to do things I don’t like. Poor people can’t afford to do things they like. Mary is pushed toward these thoughts when she comes to work for the Sanschagrin family and the woman of the house gives her time to rest. She is at the beginning of a Marxist awakening,” he says.
The time of color
The story, of kaleidoscopic richness and complexity, is thus traversed by the figure of time. In addition to questioning its value through the journey of his characters, Éric Dupont explores his relationship with color in an exercise that is almost akin to science fiction. “I became interested in color when I delved into the archives of Expo 67. It was the time of explosions of color, color TV, couches and walls that screamed “orange”. Today, everything is white, black or navy, even films. I wanted my story to match this wave.”
The author was therefore particularly interested in the Kaleidoscope, a pavilion at the Universal Exhibition devoted to color. “I found projections that showed a kind of struggle between different shades of red to gain attention. As I continued my research, I came across the spectrum that is used to classify colors. Red is always found on the far right, because it is a radiation, a wavelength. And a wavelength is a unit of time. If the temporal data disappears, there is no more color. This allowed me to dig a hole in space-time to engulf Aimé.”
The choice to place part of the story at the heart of Expo 67 also allowed the novelist to maintain with his story the irony and biting humor that were also found in his previous book, The Lilac Road (Marchand de feuilles, 2018). “This event represented the promise of the future. In reality, it was just veneer, bling-bling, an illusion that cost a lot and of which almost nothing remains. Going back to the end of the 19th centurye century, Aimé falls into one of the greatest darknesses that Quebec has ever known. But it also allowed me to show that we always remain the same throughout time, to underline the uselessness of certain human approaches.
Éric Dupont, however, reserves his sharpest gaze for the Church and Catholicism, eternal traumas of Quebecers. In a delightful sequence, he revisits a procession organized for the clergy around 1875 to invoke the Virgin Mary to fight against the invasion of Colorado beetles, an insect that spreads through potato fields. In addition to emphasizing the absurdity of the thing, he recalls the competition and contempt that persisted between the different religious orders, their selective charity, the wandering hands and closed eyes that crept in. “If there is one place where I do not feel guilty about chattering, it is in the commentary on Catholicism. I come from a family that was a privileged witness to the abuses of the Church, this proud institution that maintains that pride is the sin par excellence. It is the quintessence of irony.”