The Night, Some Objects, The Television Set, fear and representation
January 1, 1987 – May 21, 2018
Mélanie:
I now know delayed-action fear. I spend hours in front of the television set. I think and come close to all that like a child skirts silence and the muffled noises of voices transmitting anxiety. I know reality. I know humanity so suddenly like a shadow in my eyes. It moves slowly, so slowly, humanity, in its desires, slow snake in the desert, it hides, it sheds. It moves no more, is nothing but deserted skin. But the skin is there, similar, hollow, just like life at the foot of senitas and ocotillos. Fear of the hollow skin is ‘devilish’ just like a little fetish reality on beautiful orange and jade footpaths. Skin frightens tourists. That’s skin.
Nicole, March 30-31, 2016
The television set: boredom, beige, repetition, violence, lies, mediocrity.
I imagine that in 1952, the television set was magic, mystery, a scientific thrill, the joy of discovery.
Invented in 1923 and first sold in 1930. In France, the first live broadcast was in 1950. A Marivaux play broadcast live from the Comédie-Française on the only channel that existed at the time. In Québec, the first broadcast would be on September 6, 1952. My family probably got our first television set in 1954.
In 1983-1984, when I began writing Mauve Desert, just as the car, the pool, the motel and the bar were all part of a positive social and individual mythology associated with freedom, the television set was a symbol of the colonization of minds.
Nicole, April 27, 2016
The desert is an ally: its vastness, dangers and beauty create a melody, an accompaniment of transcendence. Everything else (motel, pool, car, revolver, television set) is ordinary, a necessity. And yet, symbol, myth and desire still pervade these objects, which cannot stand the test of time in the same way as the desert, which is time in motion.
Simon, October 12 – December 8, 2017
We were filming the scene with the television set, the one where Kathy cuddles up to Lorna one night as she watches the screen,
the television instills fear, a creeping fear
you weren’t there, you would arrive the following week
I’d brought an old television set with faux wood panels to show footage of the explosion
it was perched on a table surrounded by kitschy knick-knacks
between takes, my eyes were drawn to the television set: the YouTube video we were playing was no longer the one I’d thought it was. Familiar images of soldiers in the desert, the mushroom cloud and dust gave way to close-ups of explosions I’d never seen before. At first I thought they were abstract images or video art…
In Brussels, while out for a walk, I glimpsed a motorcycle in a garage whose door had been left open. Was it a Harley Davidson? I think it was an imitation. A recent Japanese model imitating an old and classic model (without wanting to promote the brand). You see a lot of motorcycles like that. Usually I wouldn’t give it much thought, but this time, the sight of chrome-plated cylinder heads, all that engineering intentionally left exposed, made me reflect as – I sometimes do – on the internal combustion engine, this technology from another time:
without truly understanding it, man has harnessed fire for thousands of years
heat
steam
explosion
propulsion
like the cannonball, for example.
The invention: an explosion occurs in a controlled environment and the projectile takes off.
What if we brought it back and projected it again ?
The invention of the internal combustion engine.
More than one hundred and fifty years after it was invented, the internal combustion engine still reigns supreme, not only in our cars, but at the heart of a system of symbols that represent power and freedom. After water and vapour, the inventors of progress turned their genius to fire. A spark, fuel, oxygen: ignition. Next, the fire pushes a piston into a cylinder, millions of times per minute. Four elements to harness … this reminds me that when the internal combustion engine was invented, the theory of the humours – which dates from Antiquity – was still seen as valid. Four humours: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile.
The Fire Age never really gave way to the Atomic Era.
It was just after I’d visited the Atomium for the first time. In 1958, for the Brussels World’s Fair, Belgium built an enormous reproduction of a crystal molecule.
The density of the crystal
– nine atoms –
to symbolize the molecule, lines are drawn between spheres representing the atoms
in the case of the crystal, the result is the Atomium
lines to distinguish the whole from the void that surrounds it
the density of the crystal is made from emptiness
a space of relative freedom, of infinite time, in which the particles circulate.
The void is half of everything.
This was back when we dreamed of the atom, of the energy contained within infinitely small matter, the invisible microcosm of elementary particles orbiting around each other like celestial bodies: planets and stars on an entirely different scale, but which made a similar mark on the imagination. They say that there is enough energy in an atom to shift the mass of a small alpine lake. In 1958, we still dreamed of harnessing that energy. A clean and infinitely renewable energy.
Three years later, the Soviets detonated the most powerful bomb ever created, the Tsar Bomba, an H-bomb with an energy equal to 57 million tons of TNT. This was not the first nuclear explosion, of course. There had been the Trinity Test, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. Atomic explosions. Then, in 1952, there had been the American operation, Ivy Mike: the first detonation of an H-bomb or thermonuclear bomb. Rather than splitting plutonium or uranium atoms, the non-operational bomb – it was the size of a three-storey building – fused hydrogen atoms. You have to use an A-bomb as a detonator to do it. The A-bomb is placed in a tank full of hydrogen. The explosion compresses the hydrogen and makes the atoms fuse together.
Ivy Mike: 10.4 megatons.
Little Boy was 15 kilotons, or 0.015 megatons.
1954, Castel Bravo: 15 megatons. The most powerful bomb the Americans had ever detonated.
1963, Tsar Bomba: 57 megatons. Total destruction over a 35-kilometre radius. The ground was turned into glass.
There were thousands of nuclear tests in the United States alone. One of them, carried out on July 6, 1962, involved detonating a yield of 104 kilotons at a depth of 194 metres. The goal was to see if nuclear weapons could have civilian applications (in mining, for example). The explosion created a radioactive cloud that rapidly separated into two plumes, rising to heights of 3 and 4.4 kilometres and scattering radioactive dust over more than 1000 kilometres and four different states.
In other archival documents, you can see soldiers approaching the site of an atomic explosion without any protection. In 1957, six men – five volunteers and a cameraman who would have preferred to be elsewhere (he had asked for protective clothing and had been refused) – stood beneath the airburst of an atomic missile. It was for a propaganda film intended to show that nuclear weapons were safe, which would not protect these men from cancer.
Although these tests were stopped nearly sixty years ago, all Americans have traces of radioactivity in their blood to this day.
At a meeting on May 31, 1945, there was a debate over whether it was really necessary to drop the Bomb on Hiroshima. After a napalm bombing campaign that had lasted over a year and had killed nearly a million people – “scorched, boiled, and baked to death,” in the words of General LeMay – in some sixty cities throughout Japan (including Tokyo, which had been almost completely flattened), there was not much left to destroy. Would dropping Little Boy really do any good? Oppenheimer, who was present at the meeting, replied that the very sight of the explosion would have an impact, that the visual effect of the Bomb would be “tremendous.”
In order to establish the symbolic power of atomic weapons, something needed to be destroyed. It could have been the Germans. The Americans had invested more than two billion dollars (in 1940s money) in the biggest scientific project in history to counter the Nazi threat, first and foremost.
After the explosion, President Truman made a televised announcement: thanks to the inventiveness of American scientists and the efforts of thousands of men, the United States had succeeded in “harnessing the basic powers of the universe,” therefore adding the atomic bomb to the American arsenal. Truman used the word “atomic.” The American public heard it for the first time. Even people who had been in on the secret before.
“Harnessing the basic powers” … like you harness a horse, a river, tug on the reins to establish control by force …
But had we truly mastered these powers?
The easiest way to harness energy is to create an explosion.
Emptiness is frightening. So maybe filling it with a huge fireball is comforting.
Emptiness is fascinating. The abyss. It was in one of Kundera’s works that I first read that vertigo isn’t fear of heights, but fear of your own desire to throw yourself into the void. For the pioneers of the atom, imagining the emptiness at the heart of fullness, the most compact matter, seeing this image in their head – particles revolving around each other, governed by electromagnetic principles – and approaching the unapproachable, the infinitely inaccessible, with understandable, schematized, and formulated laws must have been a perpetual source of fascination, even enjoyment.
The beauty of catastrophe … a new kind of vertigo.
In Chernobyl, people went out onto their balconies to admire the blueish-mauve sky. The fumes released by the fusion of the nuclear reactor made the atmosphere ionize, hence the colour. Oppenheimer was one of the first to observe this phenomenon. A rare sight. Those who witnessed this atomic twilight would later speak of a metallic taste in their mouths. Some would describe it as “chocolatey metal.” Patients who undergo radiation treatment experience the same taste. It is not the flavour of radioactive particles in the air, but rather due to the deterioration of the nervous system.
The beauty of catastrophe. A kind of poetry.
A literally exponential power barely balancing on a wire of terror.
When we were filming the scene with the television set – the one where Kathy cuddles up to Lorna one evening, increasingly terrorized and paralyzed in front of the screen – I think that I, like the character, got a glimpse of these infinite and normally concealed spaces, made visible by the destructive and newly infinite power of progress. Well, I say “visible” because of the mediation of the screen, but these spheres of energy and expansion truly act, razing islands, sinking deserted ships for the eager camera lens, irradiating thousands of square kilometres. All for a few seconds of pure poetry of destruction. Because the idea of establishing symbolic superiority over an increasingly symbolic enemy comes later, like an afterthought, doesn’t it?
Yes, beauty. The beauty of finally seeing an imaginary world of elementary particles, fundamental laws, laws that govern nature, being superimposed on reality. A poetry of limits where we see laws give way to chaos, a frenzy like the one at the beginning of time. “I am become death,” a phrase that would go down in history, a line resuscitated by issues of power and domination.
That is what Kathy contemplates, what paralyzes her. The emergence of systemic fear. The morbid result of a – dare I say masculine? – imagination that would eventually be exploited. And the TV would be its channel of communication.
Simon, March 29, 2018
In Mauve Desert, I was particularly struck by two masculine “entities.” There is Longman, of course, but also those “guys who came from far away” who are mentioned briefly. Only one of which is armed. These masculine presences hover like a threat – a past or potential one – a bit like the nuclear threat during the Cold War.
In one of our first exchanges, we both discuss the varying perception a person can have of a particular time depending on whether that person has lived through it, whether it’s a matter of memory or knowledge. And yet, since I was very young when the Berlin Wall fell, the only memory I have of the Cold War comes down to a few afternoon’s worth of films dubbed into French on TV. Any understanding I have of the backdrop of Mauve Desert stems from my knowledge of history and is completely divorced from my personal experience. I would love it if you could tell me how the social context led (or did not lead) to the emergence of Longman (alias Oppenheimer) in the pages of Mauve Desert.
And where do those guys who came from far away come from?
Are you drawing a link – tenuous or circumstantial though it may be – between the emergence of feminism and the evolution of the Cold War or the nuclear arms race?
How and why does fear appear in Mauve Desert, and what is the relationship between fear, Longman and the television?
And speaking of Longman, what does he represent? What is his relationship to the collective imagination (to collective fear)? And what about propaganda?…
Nicole, April 2-6, 2018
Dear Simon,
You refer to two male figures, Longman and those “guys who came from far away” who appear early in the novel. I use the word “guys” to emphasize their anonymity. Longman bridges Antiquity, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, communism, socialism and neoliberalism. The guys come from far away from the little story, but enjoy the privilege of being “guys.”
Simon, April 4, 2018
Guys “who came from far away,” of which only one was armed and all the others blond. A poetic strangeness that relegates the masculine world to the “outside” and brings a somewhat spooky sheen to “the inside” of fiction. It feels unreal because it’s different from the reality that we know, which is – to put it bluntly – patriarchal. The great thing about this excerpt is that the poetry allows all of it – this microcosm in which power relationships between men and women are partially reversed (even though Longman will not accept it) – to go undetected, without the reader noticing it at first. Well, by “reader,” I mean me.
Nicole, April 2-6, 2018
“Only one of them was armed.” I admit that I was playing here with the idea of singular vs. plural: “All the others were blond.” I was thinking of the “blond” youth from the last war who (of course) have blue eyes in the translation, which make them “superior.” The words may be poetic, but my allusion isn’t. It points to sexism through the metaphor of racism.
Longman represents the history of patriarchy, which – regardless of whether it was codified by religion or law – is a history of violence, domination, exploitation and alienation.
You may be right to ponder the unexpected semantic shift between the real Cold War and the one between men and women, although there is no comparison between the methods of deterrence used. In terms of gender, war – a destructive force (death, rape, slavery) – the Cold War – a force of negotiation and endurance – and peacetime (marriage and reproduction) go together. I find it interesting that for women, religion and the law have been responsible for killing them, treating them as inferior, subjugating them and justifying “charges” against them and “sentences” imposed upon them. But it’s clear that as feminist strategies evolve with the arrival of new reproductive technologies, social media and “new” gender identities, the strategies of the current Cold War are also evolving according to the potential of new technology. For example, the dirty bomb (also known as a radiological bomb or radiological dispersal device) is an unconventional bomb surrounded my radioactive material designed to explode and disperse when it is detonated. Its only purpose is to contaminate the area surrounding the explosion, a bit like how fake news contaminates the credibility of a political candidate or politician’s party. Women have had to bear the brunt of patriarchal dirty bombs and fake news for a long time, and it has taken us a long time to understand that. In both kinds of Cold War, 21st century-style, survival and reproduction are – in theory – made possible by technology.
Simon, April 7, 2018
I’m tempted to say, of course, like everyone who witnesses Angela Parkins’ murder and who is there in the bar as she falls to the ground in slow motion, that I didn’t see anything. Not the battle of the sexes and not even the Cold War motif, the first few times I read the novel.
Very young, I had no future like the shack on the corner which one day was set on fire by some guys who ‘came from far away,’ said my mother who had served them drinks. Only one of them was armed, she had sworn to me. Only one among them. All the others were blond. My mother always talked about men as if they had seen the day in a book. She would say no more and go back to her television set.
Right before this passage, there is the idea of reality being swallowed up by the indescribable desert. And there is the “I” that refers to being “very young” and speeding across the landscape. The mother is evoked right away through the car, the Meteor borrowed without permission.
Right after this passage, we follow this “I” who is “wild with arrogance” and who, at fifteen years of age, “driv[es] into the night with … absolutely delirious spaces edging the gaze.”
This “I” is of course Mélanie, which we will soon learn.
The burned shack and the guys who came from far away passed through the corner of my eyes and imprinted themselves onto my retinas. They stayed there like an afterglow, while I, like Mélanie (who prefers to live fast), was already moving on to other things. Between the desert and the teen’s thirst, the shack, the guys and the mother’s comment still had time to set the scene, better than the landscape would have done. The desert is not a backdrop here, but a living, “vibratory” entity, as you would say. The centre of this fictional universe is the mother. The reception, pool, clients and even the desert revolve around her. This is Mélanie’s world. And the novel depicts the energy Mélanie exerts to extricate herself from this gravity.
“Very young, I had no future.” From these first words, Mélanie is gathering momentum, heedless of the obstacles in her way. With a future to reinvent and reality giving way under her feet, Mélanie steps hard on the gas pedal to bend the light, as she says. Over her shoulder, we get a brief look at the mother in front of the television set, before once again being swept away along the mauve and orange lines that shape the landscape. We will barely have time to catch a glimpse of the fire in the night, the moonlight on the butt of the revolver and the glints of light in the blond hair of the guys gathered there. The poetic strangeness of a clashing scene that has no place in this orbital system, but is still present, like a narrative off-camera shot. In a way, the guys are relegated to the periphery of the narrative, to an exterior from which we can better situate this seemingly realist fictional universe, but in which certain power relationships are reversed.
You ask me what I understood from “only one of them was armed” and “all the others were blond.” The question caught me off guard because I’d never stopped to think about it, to be completely honest. The image just stayed with me. The shack in flames reminds me of another one that falls from the sky and smashes against a small Idaho country road in the Gus Van Sant film. Does my memory deceive me, or wasn’t River Phoenix blond as well? It’s a poetic strangeness that I like and that must have guided me through Mélanie’s cosmogony, without my being aware of it. This familiar, if somewhat outlandish, microcosm in which all the stars are women apart from Longman. And apart from those “guys,” of course, like a speck over the horizon.
Very young, there was no future and the world resembled a burned-out house like the one at the corner of the street torched by ‘strangers,’ so said my mother who had served them a drink. My mother thought only one of them was armed but no concern came over her for all the others had blue eyes. My mother often said that men were free to act as in books. She would finish her sentence then, once the uneasiness had passed, sit in front of the television set.
The paths of fear often lead to fear of the other, and then to insularity. As I reread these excerpts in order to better respond to your question, I realized that it was the words of the “original” version that I’d remembered. I think that with this version in mind, I simply overlooked this passage, superimposing my first impression onto it. I’d noticed that the translator exaggerates desire in her version, that the eroticism is more apparent in her hands. Now, I realize that all the sensations/emotions are magnified in that version.
That includes fear, which overrides the poetry in this excerpt.
The fear of a mother who is a catalyst, in a way, giving Mélanie the push she needs to leave.
A double-edged fear.
When I read it again, the thing that struck me was the association between the words “strangers,” “armed” and “blue eyes.” It’s no longer distance that’s being evoked, but difference. The kind of difference we’re suspicious of. Everything that is unfamiliar to us, our habits and our world. The mother is reassured by the eye colour of most of the “guys” in the group, but is worried about the one whose eyes are different. That one is armed. And the house will be torched.
The thing that drew my attention here is the circulation of meaning between versions. I told you that in my mind, the original and translated version blend together, so that my interpretation and the translator’s interpretation end up merging. And the poetry swells until it overwhelms the words with which it is created, colouring the entire fictional construction, Mélanie’s universe.
Nicole, April 8, 2018
In this paragraph, the mother is trying to teach her daughter about men. Her reasoning for doing so is unclear, since she doesn’t want to condemn all men. However, she uses the phrases “only one of them was armed” and “all the others had blue eyes.” Her confusion is reflected in the phrase “My mother always talked about men as if they had seen the day in a book.” There is a double constraint between “the greatness of Man” (science, philosophy, art) and the reality of the guys (everyday life). The mother is not at all reassured by “blue eyes,” but here the author feigns innocence in order to mask the discomfort with poetic metaphor. Then the mother returns to the television set, believing that she is escaping from a reality ruled by violence and fear. To a certain extent, she does the same thing we do with all the screens that distract, stimulate, enchant, lie and alienate us.
By the way, I should add that in my mind, “the shack on the corner which one day was set on fire” was set on fire by the KKK. I use the word “shack” because it was poor people who lived there and who were the victims of the fire, whose heinousness we try to forget by temporally distancing ourselves from it with the expression “one day.”
In short, the author is angry and Mélanie steps on the gas pedal.
Simon, April 10, 2018
I emphasized the Bomb because in the American-style portrait of Mélanie in my imagination, the teen had until recently obscured the landscape behind her.
Or maybe it was out of focus.
And now I learn that the explosion of light I had assumed was dawn is actually an atomic flash.
It was Jean-François Chassay who revealed this backdrop – which I had only half perceived – to me in his preface to the new edition of Mauve Desert. He speaks of an imaginary apocalyptic world and notes that the novel provides clues that link Mélanie’s story to a historical backdrop, that of the development of nuclear weapons in the American desert. A theme woven beneath the surface that I didn’t immediately notice the first few times I read the novel. I did feel the vibrations in the form of anguish emanating from Longman and even contaminating Mélanie’s existential quest. All the same, when you notice these references to History, there is no doubt about it: Longman is Oppenheimer’s poetic double and Angela Parkins is thrown from her horse by the explosion from a nuclear test.
You answer my question by explaining the way that the patriarchy developed and spread through time and segments of society. However, I get the impression that this “apocalyptic imaginary world” that pervades the plot is twofold and operates under the surface.
On one hand, as I was saying, it positions an entire network of symbols, forces and male imagination on the periphery of Mélanie’s cosmogony, encircling this small fictional universe built around a motel lost in the desert. In addition, Longman is interwoven with this universe and operates from the inside. This creates a twist in the narrative, and necessarily puts the characters’ feminine point of view into perspective. It’s this twist, I think, that allows Mauve Motel to avoid becoming a kind of feminist Disneyland. Although it is to some extent a story of hope, Mauve Desert is still imbued with a dark lucidity, as evidenced by its ending.
On the other hand, this imaginary world sets the stage for addressing the theme of death. Teen fiction writers, you told me, deal with the themes of transgression, sexuality, intensity. Here, Eros goes hand in hand with Thanatos, as he often does. As she discovers desire, Mélanie is already becoming familiar with death. A violent death, Angela’s death, that she will not see coming and that will come from the periphery where Longman looks on impassively.
It moves in a circle. Concentric circles. It might be the spiral you describe in Surfaces of Sense.
This method of placing the “guys” on the outside gives Longman a central and distinct position in this world of women. This must be another qualitative difference between guy and man that lends weight – again, a poetic weight – to your “demiurge of destruction.”
Have I told you that when I first read the novel, I associated the explosion – somewhat unconsciously – with the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995? It’s those images that came to mind. The nuclear threat, at least until very recently, wasn’t such an important part of my life for it to surface spontaneously when evoked poetically. Has this blunder altered my reading of Mauve Desert? I don’t think so. The clues and the keys scattered throughout the texts are only signs of its richness. There is therefore a reading level – that is neither inferior nor superior – in which a phrase such as “The exact calculation of languages that have ended up in space like an explosion” is more of a poem than a clue. And I’m pleased that with each reading, the text continues to reveal itself to me in a way that is both personal and collective.
That’s literature, isn’t it?
Nicole, April 17, 2018
Hi Simon,
Madrid, Casa de Velázquez. I’m completely immersed in the landscape.
You did a great job of reconstructing our conversation about “Longman and the guys.”
The term “concentric circles” seems more accurate to me than “spiral,” because I always use spirals to indicate positive movement. It has an energy of renewal and change. See in particular The Aerial Letter.
Thank you for the lovely photo of Mélanie. Can I post it on Facebook?
Here, I am immersed in an elsewhere of creation (hmm!) and the blue warmth of spring.
Love,
Nicole
Simon, April 21, 2018
You’re welcome.
I love the photo, this encounter between the author and her character. I also like that the image is still mysterious: the author faces the light reflected by the screen. She stands in the backlight of her own fiction. This photo depicts both filiation and the interplay of shadow and light that is inevitably established between a character and his or her creator.
This is not the face of literature, however.
It’s the face we have chosen.
Each of us has dreamed it, has planned it.
We’ve talked about it, speculated, negotiated.
And in the end, this one prevailed. Naturally.
Is it chance ?
Nicole, May 21, 2018
Dear Simon,
I’m at the Brasserie Outremont waiting for Hugo Amaral, the Portuguese translator of Mauve Desert, and reading an article by Carolina Ferrer, “Traduction, fission et trahison: L’hologramme de J. Robert Oppenheimer dans Le désert mauve de Nicole Brossard.” The more I read, the more I believe we’ll never be done exploring the different ways of reading the book or making our way through the things at the heart of the novel: translation, Mélanie, Longman, the desert, lesbian attraction, nuclear power, death.
After all these years of meetings, discussions and questions, I’m still fascinated by our journey, which continues to give rise to new questions and the joy of exploring the world beyond meaning.
Nicole