The young girl, the cinema, the revolver, the night

January 1, 1987 – November 12, 2016

Mélanie:
It is half past midnight and the Bar is still full of customers. The music takes hold of everything. Everything is fluid and slow in Angela Parkins’ arms. I lack time to understand. There is no more time. Time has entered us in a minute detail like a scalpel, time compels us to reality. Time has slipped between our legs. Every muscle, every nerve, every cell is as music in our bodies, absolutely. Then Angela Parkins’ body moves slowly. Her whole body is pulled downward. Her body is heavy in my arms. My arms are heavy with the body of Angela Parkins. There is no more music. Angela Parkins’ sweat against my temple. Sweat on my hands. Angela, silence is harsh. Angela! A tiny pattern on the temple, a tiny little hole, eyespot. Angela, we’re dancing, yes? Angela Parkins has no more hips, no more shoulders or neck. She is dissolving. Angela’s eyes, quick the eyes! There is no more balance between us. My whole body is faced with disaster. Not a sound. The commotion all around like in a silent movie. At the far end of the room, there is longman’s impassive stare. The desert is big. Angela Parkins is lying, there, exposed to all eyes. Angela is dissolving in the black and white of reality. What happened ?

[…]

Of course Mélanie is night teen.

Simon, April 13, 2016

As you know, Mélanie the teenager has been with me for a long time. That being said, I realize that, generally speaking, the image of the young girl has fascinated me for a while now and this interest extends beyond the scope of Mauve Desert. There’s nothing original about it. Many men before me have been interested in her. There’s Little Lili or even The Little Thief by Claude Miller. And then there’s Manon of the Spring by that other Claude, Claude Berri. In these films, gazes lack nuance. Multiple perspectives (mainly masculine) converge on the young girl. Looks charged with desire, but also, for some older characters, with nostalgia or resignation. Of course, Miller and Berri are of another generation, a time when a girl became a woman in a man’s arms. It seems to me, however, that this image transcends masculine desire. It overtakes it and, in doing so, it becomes an object of fascination in what becomes an artistic quest for those filmmakers. That being said, it also seems to me that in those films, the young girl is more of a plot device than an actual character. Through her, various male characters discover themselves or even break against her. Even if the young girl has an effect on them, they are the true subjects.

In your writing, desire is present too, and is one of its driving forces. Not only in Mauve Desert, but in most of your work. This inclination is what brought you to Mélanie, but unlike Miller and Berri, your relationship with her is twofold; desire and self-identification merge, and Mélanie gains depth. The stakes change and incarnations of desire (also seen in Little Lili) shift completely. It may be a question of perspective, but it’s more likely a question of positioning. In your writing, the image of the young girl takes on new proportions. She is the protagonist of her own story and the concerns of the text are her concerns. It’s about her desire and her point of view on her reality.

Nicole, April 26, 2016

The young girl. There’s only one young girl in Mauve Desert. It’s not Mélanie, but her cousin Grazie, whom Mélanie would very much like to sleep with. At this point we could obviously lose ourselves in conjecture or have a long discussion about the masculine-feminine that’s in all of us or promoted by society in the form of passive/active roles and behaviours. Every “young girl” is given this label because of the male gaze alone. She is the object of desire and a thousand other imaginary systems that at times rejuvenate and at times make one reflect on his or her life. You understand this very well. Why do you say “young girl” when words like “teenager” or “girl” exist, words that are ambiguous, but dynamic, like a group of girls? Mélanie is Mélanie, at best a teenager who, as you put it, “is the protagonist of her own story and the concerns of the text are her concerns.” She could also be a teenager in the sense that James Dean was a teenager.

A young girl (whether in bloom or not) has already been categorized as heterosexual. I’m thinking of Nabokov’s Lolita and other books (See Va et nous venge by France Théoret. I need to do my research.) …

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 ?

Simon, April 13, 2016

I’m looking at the image of the young girl from a heterosexual (“straight”) perspective and adding a few words. Why? Why is she fascinating? Maybe it’s because the young girl’s time (or the adolescent’s time) is one where possibility overwhelms determinism. The euphoria induced by an unlimited, uninterrupted horizon is charged with youthful energy that is almost as boundless. But there’s more. For a long time, the image of the young girl has also been paradoxically fragile. The young girl possesses strength she must develop precisely because of her vulnerability. The young man is more fragile, less self-assured. More awkward too. The young girl knows she is being observed and she knows she bears the age-old (and unjust) burden of violent desire and fertility.

In Mélanie’s universe, which is fiction, desire is directed toward raw, organic, sensitive, living material
or toward objects so simple they never stop working.
The revolver.

The revolver is always loaded.

Nicole, March 30-31, 2016

Revolver: from the Latin revolvere = revolution

A revolver is essentially an expression of ever-present danger. The danger we carry within ourselves and the danger that surrounds us. In Mélanie’s glove compartment, it is a form of protection. In the hands of Longman, it’s a looming threat. To me, the ability to use and bear arms in the United States is abhorrent. Morally, but also because it’s an affront to my way of thinking. A firearm is dangerous for all kinds of reasons. It’s violence and death waiting to happen. How could generations of poets appropriate Breton’s phrase “The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd”? No doubt literature and real life were not as intertwined then as they are today.

We come full circle: from the gleaming body of the Meteor to the shining barrel of the revolver. Two symbols of spectacular virility (as a stand-in for seduction and intimidation) that belong as much in the domain of freedom-escape-exploration as they do in the domain of destruction.

Simon, March 7, 2016

Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m thinking it was just the word “Meteor” that you liked – that out of all the cars around you, you chose this one because you liked its name. I only say this because at first glance, this car doesn’t match your description of the speed and performance of the race car that Mélanie drives. The car – just like science, for that matter – interests you more as a concept or a symbol than as a subject. Besides, in Mauve Desert, when Lorna’s “hands found their way among the pistons, cylinders and greasy cables,” it’s clear that you know nothing about mechanics (it’s impossible to make your way between pistons and cylinders – not without dismantling the engine head, anyway). That isn’t so important. You have nonetheless contributed, alongside other writers, to elevating the Mercury Meteor to the rank of literary vehicles. In Québec, at least. The first mention of this car was probably by Jacques Geoffroy who, in his own book La catoche orange, published by Parti pris in 1970, speaks of it eloquently.

Pierre-Paul Geoffroy, Jacques’ brother, a member of the FLQ and known as such well before the October Crisis, had been arrested in March 1969 for successfully detonating a bomb at the Montréal Exchange on February 13 of the same year. He was condemned to 124 life sentences, getting off after only twelve years. His brother Jacques had never participated in these kinds of plots against the Commonwealth – Jacques was a poet activist – but his friend Pierre Harel made nothing short of a run for it from the first news of arbitrary arrests. He had good reason to do it, since the police paid a visit to his house and roughed up a poet who was staying there in his absence. An unfortunate case of mistaken identity: it was indeed Harel that they were targeting, as he was friends with Jacques, himself the brother of an FLQ member. Harel slipped between the cracks, but Jacques was not so lucky, and on November 5, 1970, he was accused of being a “member of an unlawful association.” Like a good number of poets of that era, he would be imprisoned while waiting for a trial that would never come. The War Measures Act remained in effect for sixty-six days. Enough to make Jacques dream of liberty. A topic that is raised in his only book, although the twenty-seven poems it contains were written several weeks before the Crisis. Although many of them critique the poet’s contemporary society – such as the poem entitled “Une famille unie est une famille qui boit du Papsie” – the one that I found most charming is a dream of escape and love. “Ma raison de vivre: Rita mon petit lapin en nanane” starts like this :

I have a 1963 Meteor for you
vast like my dreams
fiery like my passion
superb like the pride of the greats of this world
shining like the afternoon sun at lunchtime
burning like three dozen ‘lil weston breads
for you my dear my only reason for living
wa-ta-ta-tow

I wonder whether you knew the characters in this story. Well, for me, they’re characters. For you, they’re probably memories … whatever they are, when Claire Côté, humanities professor at CEGEP Lévis-Lauzon, dropped this poem into my hands – I was a student, I was maybe eighteen years old – I did not yet know the name Nicole Brossard, and I had no idea what a Mercury Meteor looked like. But even then, the name alone suggested the possibility of speed, leaving a trail of luminescent dust behind you.

Later, the Meteor resurfaced in my life with your Mélanie on board, the one from Mauve Desert. Mélanie is young, on the cusp of adulthood. She pushes hard on the gas, “wild with the damned energy of [her] fifteen years,” she “[leans] into [her] thoughts to make them slant reality toward the light.” For a long time, she stayed with me, and the questioning look she cast upon reality stays with me. Other than Mélanie, objects with well-defined outlines, with decided function, concrete and material objects serve as a vector for these questions that concern both adolescence and poetry: the revolver, the television set, the dancefloor and, of course, the automobile. A Mercury Meteor that I would find in the works of another writer, the novelist Deni Y. Béchard, whom I met at the Salon du livre de Montréal some time ago. I was reading his first novel Cures for Hunger published by Alto. It talks about his relationship with his father and his fascination with his troubled past as a bank robber. On the title page, we see the latter in his early twenties, leaning against the hood of a gorgeous convertible against a backdrop of mountains that could be in British Columbia. I asked the author what model the car was, and he replied that it was a Mercury Meteor. I objected:

“No, it can’t be a Meteor. It just so happens that I have one and it doesn’t look like that.”

“Well,” he replied, “since the book was published, many people have confirmed that it was indeed a Meteor. I even have testimonials: someone’s father had one, someone’s brother had one. Everyone says it’s a Meteor.”

I acquiesced, but I was not convinced. Subsequent research confirmed that it was a Meteor 1961. Mine is two years younger. However, in 1962, the car was redesigned. It pains me to say that the ’61 model is way cooler. Especially with a bank robber posing in front of it.

I wrote poems about the Meteor, three years before I even got one. Naturally, it was Mélanie that steered me towards the car. In fact, this character is the real subject of a book that bears her name and that was published in 2013 by L’Hexagone. I wrote this book in Mexico, where I picked up seven copies of El desierto malva, the Mexican translation of Mauve Desert. I got a group of women together to read the novel and to do some writing exercises. Out of the seven, two accepted the task, but they all kept the novel that I lent them. I promised you I’d bring you back at least one copy; I failed. However, the efforts were not in vain: Lyliana Chavez and Mariela Oliva agreed to immerse themselves in the universe of Mauve Desert. Their texts, freely translated by myself, are found in Mélanie, my book of poetry that some have described as a bastard novel and others as a UFO – in both cases, the descriptions give me great pleasure. As such, I made my mark on the Mercury Meteor’s literary legacy. After Jacques Geoffroy, you, and Deni Y. Béchard, I added a few lines to it.

But who remembers the Meteor? It’s not included in the Automobile Pantheon alongside the Pontiac Parisienne, Chevrolet Impala, Dodge Charger, Ford Thunderbird (which Susan Sarandon drives with Geena Davis in Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise). And I am convinced that it has not had the same impact on the imagination of American writers. And for good reason – the Meteor barely existed in the United States. While over there, it was only manufactured between 1961 and 1963. Ford had already commercialized it in Canada beginning in 1949. In 1960, the name Meteor became Mercury and remained as such until 1976.

Mercury is the entry-level subsidiary of Ford Motors. A digression: isn’t it interesting to see that while the mother brand has a man’s name, its cheaper subsidiary is named after an ancient Roman deity? Pride and prejudice? Just a thought.

If there are two things I’ve learned behind the wheel of a 1963 marine blue Mercury Meteor assembled in Oakville, Ontario, they are:

1) In the 60s and 70s, this model was widespread across Canada. In fact, it had been created specifically for this market. It was presented as a quintessentially Canadian car. To support this affirmation, different models of the Meteor were given names that have reverberated in the collective imagination: Rideau, Niagara, Montcalm.

2) It drives like an old pickup. Under the hood, of course, I have a V8, but it’s the smallest one Ford made – that is to say, 260 cubic inches. The transmission is manual, three-speed. The first serves to kick the heavy iron mass out of inertia, the second gives it the necessary momentum to shift into third gear, and the last is for rolling at comfortable speeds between 50 and 100 km/h. Yet, if Mélanie is driving at high speeds in the desert in a Meteor, that could mean that she is either driving at 110 km/h in my model (at over 100, I essentially feel like I’m putting my life at risk, especially since I don’t have seatbelts in my car) or that she is driving another model. It’s true that there were Meteor “sports” models with a beefier cylinder capacity. This is the case with the Montcalm S33, for example. These models are nevertheless pretty rare. I mean, why buy a high-end Mercury when you can get the Ford Galaxy 500 literally from the same dealer? Even my little V8 is pretty rare: it’s the six-cylinder model that was sold the most. I base these statements on my various encounters: at gas stations, red lights, parking lots, everywhere – people ask me “What year is it from?”, and that often leads to anecdotes – “My brother-in-law had one, but in burgundy” – then they ask “Is it a straight-six? My brother had a straight-six …,” etc. Almost all the father, uncle, grandparent Meteor owners that talked to me had a 170 cubic inch inline-six engine under the hood, the engine offered with the base model.

In any case, the Meteor Montcalm S33 simply did not exist in the United States. In its place, the Monterrey could hide a huge cylinder displacement under its iron dress. Finally, the reason I’m telling you this – all this anecdotal and technical information – is because, in fact, I want to get closer to Mélanie or, better yet, bring her closer to me. That is to say, that this translation that we want to facilitate from literary language to cinematic language and then towards theatrical language is also a transposition in time. Mélanie is from a world stuck at the tail end of the Cold War, where the spectre of the nuclear menace always lingered. In her world – that belongs to a fictionalized past – the Meteor is an old jalopy, not a collector’s automobile. No one stops Mélanie to ask her about the year of the model or the size of the motor. No one notices her car. She drives, anonymously and quickly, slicing through the desert like a hot knife in butter.

Mélanie drives an invisible old piece of junk. The modern equivalent could maybe be the Mercury Topaz. My mother had a Ford Tempo 1989. White with burgundy interior. For me, it was certainly the most anonymous car made in the last quarter century. Its design is entirely devoid of personality. Having said that, I don’t discredit the person who designed it, as the wind decided the Ford Tempo’s contours. In 450 hours of aerodynamic testing, the course of its lines were modified more than 900 times. Although from an engineering perspective it’s a revolutionary car, from the aesthetic standpoint – and in saying this, I am fully conscious of my subjectivity – it is certainly one of the ugliest cars in the history of the automobile industry. To preserve a link with the Meteor, then, I propose the Tempo’s twin: the Mercury Topaz. Essentially, from the early 80s on, Ford no longer made any effort to distinguish Fords from Mercurys. As such, the Thunderbird is identical to the Cougar, the Taurus is the same as the Sable, Tempo and Topaz are perfectly interchangeable. The only distinction: the symbol in the centre of the grille, as well as the grille itself.

So that solves the problem of the car’s anonymity. But, as the American automobile myth has diminished along with the size of the automobiles, the Topaz is completely emasculated. We must find another analogy for machismo. In fact, hats off to you: in Mauve Desert, you distilled the underlying and constant menace so well without explicitly saying that it’s nestled within and found in all objects, in the relationship between objects, the relationship between people and objects. The confusion between the end of the world, patriarchy and everyday life is perfect. This forms a continuum against which you oppose an anthology of strong women coming to restore equilibrium to the world, at least in fiction.

Today, few Mercury Topaz remain. If we consider the fact that it has not been produced for over twenty years, that’s probably to be expected. I said that I wanted to bring Mélanie closer to me, but I don’t think that it’s possible, or even desirable, to bring her towards us. I mean, here and now. It’s good to maintain a healthy distance from our fiction, to organize this space from which we can inject our own point of view. I can turn around and look back at the end of the 80s while maintaining a link with my positioning, but I can’t go back as far as the 60s. Placing myself back in this era puts me in a different relationship with the past – a historical past – a relationship that I should document, project myself into as one does into fiction. On the other hand, Mélanie belongs resolutely to the 20^th century, and it’s certain that things fade gradually into this new millennium. Family motels are definitely part of this.

Finally, if I cast doubt on the possibility of racing against death in a Mercury Meteor, I have to highlight that in a Ford Tempo equipped with a three-speed automatic transmission, I achieved a respectable speed of 180 km/h on the 4^e Rang between Honfleur and Saint-Lazare de Bellechasse. That was in 1992, and I’m not dead.

Nicole, March 30-31, 2016

One rightly associates the car with movement, freedom, speed, danger, excess, death.

The car is an undeniably North American symbol, it travels great expanses, often to the west or the south. The sun bathes the space, one rarely imagines an old guy at the wheel. The car is everywhere in our cinematographic images and our daily lives. In Europe, it would be the train.

Why did I choose the car, symbol par excellence of masculinity, to say nothing of virility?

Because the car is also the dream, melancholy (Rebel Without a Cause), adventure, the possibility of elsewhere (Thelma & Louise). At that time, I think I even dreamed about a bridge linking America and Europe, so that I could easily visit a desired woman. The car allows one to wander in thought. I’m thinking of the works of France Mongeau for example.

It is true that the car is a mythical object maintained as such for economic and commercial reasons, but it is also a mark of the values of the times. Some years they are beautiful, refined, elegant; other years, they are menacing like a tank, intimidating like a dictator. Five years ago, I began to appreciate cars for their form, and I confess that some of them evoked aesthetic pleasure in me.

Yes, it’s true that I chose the Meteor for its name that implies speed and adventure. It flies. An American-turned-Canadian writer, George Bowering, had written to me to tell me that the Meteor I was talking about had never really been American, that it had been sold mainly in Canada. This historical and realist fact did not affect me. Of course, the information could feed into the idea that it was a mistake, but it does not at all erode the symbolism of the Meteor: freedom, speed, excitement, danger. The same principle applies to the pistons, cylinders and oiled cables, that bespeak the manual labour inside the object, that are symbolic of innards and thoughts.

I like that you tell me the history of your connection with the Meteor and with your own, the gorgeous blue one. Moreover, our meeting in Québec, June 5, 2013, and the little drive we took in the blue Meteor behind the Musée national des beaux-arts are permanently etched into what I call my “fictional memory” – a memory that, I presume, will serve me all along our hybrid route through the Mauve Desert, and to which I will return even beyond that. Your description of the car makes me think about the meaning that objects carry in our lives according to our tastes, desires and the zeitgeist. I look at each of the objects that I chose for the chapter “Places and Things” and I am fascinated by the idea of freedom, coolness and possible transgressions inherent in the words “pool,” “motel,” “car,” “bar,” “tattoo,” “revolver.” They incorporate the body, sexuality, speed, change or solitude, imprint-trace, death and violence in themselves.

I could also talk about my relationship with the automobile. The automobile is a reality that comes to me, I am certain, through cinema.

I realize that Mauve Desert is all about one thing: freedom, an immense flight of freedom, of beauty defying boredom, mediocrity, corruption. But I must also say that this all rests on an ambiguity: the motel defined as inherently cheap. In general, it is linked to illicit, sexual, vulgar activities. The word “motel” does not make me think at all of families on vacation or old retired couples. That said, it always makes me think about solitude. A bit like the laundromats that, because of their neon-nocturnal lighting, are for me the epitome of solitude and abandonment.

Objects make us reflect on how much we invest in a word, the texture they create in our view of the state of the world. What in a word suddenly turns on the imagination, memory, desire? And why does it do this at this precise moment in collective and individual history? Why do certain words stand out in our conscience, offering us pleasure and fear simultaneously, while awakening a quest for meaning? Here, objects are described as more or less autonomous beings.