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.
I asked because I wanted to know what you took from these phrases and to see how meaning shifts in the vastness and encounters between words. All this to say that we’ll never be done exploring meaning and the pleasure of knowing that it is so unclear, so open, like the widespread idea that we need to stay alive.
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 20th 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 4e 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.
Nicole, March 30-31, 2016
The cinema is everywhere in Mauve Desert, and it seems natural to me that you wanted to make it into a film, that you wanted to translate words into pictures. Now, in 2016, I would maybe like to translate the ephemeral or the permanent into meaning, objects, even beings. To explore the strong impression that there lies an enigma that grasps us wholly by the heart, by the throat, by the bulk to one day instill in us as a certainty, a shadowy extension of the being.
Simon, April 13, 2016
Yesterday, I accidentally stumbled upon archival footage showing Fellini hard at work during the filming of Satyricon. It’s 1969. We see him directing the pool scene. There are a good hundred extras, maybe a dozen actors, the set is noisy. Waiting for the camera to roll, the extras – half naked and submerged to the waist in the pool – naturally converse and all these conversations inevitably form an impossible uproar. Used to large scenes, the master does not seem – at first, at least – bothered by the noise. He is focused, he directs: one who taps the bum of another using a flyswatter, to do it in such a way, another wringing the neck of a distinguished court lady to do it as if she were a chicken (he repeats this twice: “like a chicken”). He asks for a bit of quiet in the pool please, for everyone to stop moving and look at the camera. He says “let’s go,” then he explodes: “EVERYONE SHUT UP, DAMN IT!” and even louder: “STOP MOVING!”
He gets silence.
His gaze is firm, his face severe. “Action.” A loud buzz resonates across the stage, that’s the signal. He continues to give directions: “My dear, lower your head, a bit more, smile.” While saying this, his voice softens. His gaze too. As he commands her to smile, he gestures with two hands, on each side of his mouth, while opening the corners like a blossoming flower. Someone screams: “Rolling!” The master does not bat an eye, he directs: “Sing, Ligny,” “No moving in the pool!” “Roberto ….”
He never says “action.”
They’re rolling anyway.
As the scene comes to life in front of the camera, he keeps quiet, he lets things happen.
I think of this politics professor I had in CEGEP – I no longer remember his name – who, in the hallway in front of his classroom, had spoken to me about Fellini. It was the first time I had heard anyone talk about the celebrated Italian filmmaker. I must have been eighteen years old. The professor was complaining about modern cinema, too artificial according to him. In Fellini’s films, you eat, you burp, you fart, you live! “Like real life,” he told me. Yet, when I watch the “making of” Satyricon in black and white today, I see clearly that it is actually an impression of real life. That in fact, the film is based on – by humans, if I can say that – a worksite and that, while we don’t see the machines (in Italian, Fellini refers to the camera as “macchina”), it’s because their gaze is turned towards fiction.
And with them, we observe.
Soon, the frame of the screen no longer contains the fiction because our imagination – or our desire to believe that fiction is truer (or from another truth) than reality – completes the image beyond the edges. In the end, I mean that this video I happened to see yesterday on social media made me think of this professor whose face I remember very well, but whose name I can’t remember and that, in turn, this professor made me think of you because of this sentence that he might have said.
“Like real life,” these are also the words that you uttered at my wedding. We were reunited on the grounds of a motel on Isle-aux-Coudres. The ceremony had ended, the banquet too, drunkenness not only from alcohol, some people were picking at what was left of dessert, but most people had already started to dance. Had the sun already set? The moon was rising, full and round. I believe that we danced, yes, that’s it, we danced together to a Philippe Katerine song –Louxor, j’adore – and it was then, in that moment of poets clumsily swaying, that you said to me: “Like real life.”
It’s not the sentence that surprised me. I believe I understood what you meant to say, even though I recognize now as I write these lines that I never truly sought to understand the exact meaning that you gave it, preferring to leave it as an impression of understanding.
An impression … that’s definitely what it is, as the sentence remains imprinted in my memory and, even today, it only takes a video I saw on the internet to remind me of it.
Moreover – was it the same night or the next morning, another day or later – Fellini had been mentioned. Was it really you who brought him up? Our wedding would have had something “Felliniesque” about it. Indulgence maybe, but more certainly joyous improvising: someone had put together a wildflower bouquet for the bride (we hadn’t thought of that), another had brought firecrackers, they had roasted lambs on a spit suspended between a bike rack and a mile marker … I must say that I organized my wedding by myself and that, once the papers were signed, I let things go, I let go … and at the moment where the moon, full and round, came out from between the few clouds on that beautiful August evening, three young women jumped out from behind the groves and skipped around the bride and groom, holding firecrackers.
Joyous improvising … exactly what a film set – even one of Fellini’s – is not. Maybe these fabricated images help us find certain states of grace and magic that, sometimes, materialize in real life.
Nicole, April 26, 2016
“Like real life.” The sentence remains perfectly mysterious for me. Did I mean to say that despite the river, the country – I am certain that it also played a role, at least for me, the Montréaler – the full moon, the motel, the bride’s mauve dress, that stage exit on bicycle that you took along the shore, the wedding and the evening were cinematic? And yet, even in the middle of a surrealist sensation, literary guests and a magical impression of fiction, you were in reality “like real life”: A man with parents, a brother, a sister, guy friends, a spouse.
Yes, it’s me who said that it was a Felliniesque wedding for invoking an impression of fiction. It is moreover without doubt because your wedding gave the impression of extraordinary fiction that we talk about. It is also undoubtedly because each of our encounters were about fiction, “in search” of fiction to put the brakes on the reality that obscures everything, including its own potential.