Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader. Nicole Brossard
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From letters to other generations to meditations on the millennia of oppressive patriarchal systems, Brossard’s work manages to ask hard questions about the necessity for pleasure in the midst of struggle. Her work poses these questions without losing hold of the body.
Here, the poetic process of making, of poiesis, invites and performs desire. This invitation and performance are both for and before the desired. Across languages and restrictions, standing before oppressive structures and before beloveds, reaching across oceans and other geographies to find community and connection. As Jennifer Moxley puts it in her introduction to Nicole Brossard: Selections, to reinvent language is no glib or novel act. To reinvent language, constantly, is an act of desire for a state freer from oppressions than where we are living now. And, as Brossard herself suggested in our discussions of this reader, writing allows us to create what doesn’t exist. It’s not the same as speech. Writing allows us to open and expand certain zones in the brain, certain zones of pleasure.
The city, too, is a zone of pleasure: it is both subject and character in Brossard’s work, and for this reason it, too, is a thematic anchor of Avant Desire. Often, the city is specific; Montreal, for example, is offered here as a complex space of cultural, political, and social richness that has come to seem a lesbian oasis for generations, as we see in the publication of Theory, a Sunday by Belladonna*, the innovative feminist New York press. Sometimes, the city is figural, standing in for freedoms of movement of language, and of desire (Intimate Journal). Still other times, the city marks a cosmopolitan engagement with conditions and possibilities of elsewhere, as in Green Night of Labyrinth Park.
Writing is to ‘see one’s desire come as far as possible, that is, closer: to the very edge, right to the limits – where it might very well falter.’8 And yes, there are limits. In her poetic essay ‘6 December 1989 Among the Centuries,’ for example, the reader encounters limits in the real time of the text. For younger readers, this essay performs the collective shock women experienced when a gunman went into a Montreal post-secondary space for learning, separated the women from the men, called the women ‘feminists’ and then shot fourteen of them dead. Gender-based violence is not new, nor is it being met with the collective and systemic work needed to eradicate it for every person. Brossard’s essay makes space for the frustration and rage one may experience when encountering, again, the violence of heteropatriarchy and misogyny. Moving from prose reflections on hope and freedom of movement, the speaker – not in her home city – learns of the violence against women at École Polytechnique, and the line falters. What the speaker desires – freedom of movement, freedom of thinking, freedom of desiring – meets the old structures of patriarchy and misogyny.9 In an interview about Le Désert mauve, Brossard stated, ‘the ending seems very surprising, even gratuitous, but that’s exactly what happened at the École Polytechnique, it’s exactly the same kind of hatred. So I haven’t imagined anything, I have only decoded a pattern that does not explode all the time, but is there all the time.’10 Met with the limits and refusals of misogyny, Brossard breaks the hegemony of the prose line to reach toward women. In so doing, she subverts patriarchal violence and refuses the proper names of the perpetrators. The text itself becomes a site of struggle to extend the limits and, finally, remove them altogether, if only on the horizon for now. But it is a horizon to reach for, daily.
The feminist city has been influential to locations and generations – from Daphne Marlatt and Betsy Warland, Lisa Robertson, Larissa Lai and Rita Wong in Vancouver, to Gail Scott and Erín Moure in Montreal, to Eileen Myles, Rachel Levitsky, Renee Gladman, Akilah Oliver, and the Belladonna* collaborative in New York, among many others, and now to another generation coming into their voices who are searching for a way to be present once more in very difficult political times. In yet another difficult time, literature can, we think, provide some roadmaps both for navigating struggle and for pointing to horizons beyond it. Disagreement is a vital aspect of feminist thought. We see Brossard as a model for helping us to confront and encounter these ruptures. As an example we’ve included a conversation between Nathanaël, Catherine Mavrikakis, and Brossard, which, we think, models productive disagreement. For, as Lisa Robertson points out in her introduction to Theory, A Sunday: ‘feminist culture, discourse, and resistance has shaped contemporary urban experience and urban space’ and while some writers, we three editors included, claim a certain city – Montreal for example – as a feminist city, Robertson reminds us that ‘there is no city without our voices’ – the city is us, and the city is diversity: diversity of bodies and voices and opinions.
The texts in this section move like the Situationists’ dérive, always thinking through a feminist lens. Indeed, concepts like dérive and délire put into play textual and readerly drifts that carry affective resonances, for moving is motion but it is also emotion. The collectivity that marks a ‘true’ dérive comes from the poetic engagement of the reader and the speaker across time, space, and geography. The hologram in Picture Theory (1991) or the folded or eroded vocabularies in Surfaces of Sense wield deft examples of this motion toward the unthinkable limits of the city as a textual body igniting both pleasure and curiosity, fact and affect. Beyond the conceptual and affective dimensions of mobility, stasis is overcome by narratives that drift just as the characters in her novels are also drifters. From A Book to French Kiss and Baroque at Dawn, her characters are in search of connections, an idea, a lover, a cause. Rather than a linear narrative, these books are composed of perspectives that intersect various vanishing points: a woman’s touch, the shape of her body, the curve of her mouth. In French Kiss, for instance, we’re plunged into an uninterrupted kiss ‘in which the text slows down in Camomille’s mouth, salivating letters and words of love the better to … suck on fragments of fiction.’ In Picture Theory, a book about perspectives, lesbian love, and science-fiction, those connections are holographic; the horizon here no longer operates as the meeting point of vertical and horizontal axes but is transformed into something much more oblique. Lines of desire are material traces of reading and writing, which are superimposed. These lines – drawn between reading and writerly acts – are kept in superposition, able to grasp at disparate realities at once: ‘Words begin to turn round on themselves, inciting reflection, inciting thought toward new approaches to reality.’11
TRANSLATIONS, RETRANSLATIONS, TRANSCOLLABORATIONS
Brossard’s work exists on a spectrum from pure translation to retranslations to what might be called transcollaboration. These are the themes that organize one of the larger sections of Avant Desire. Transcollaboration is a neologism we offer which gestures to the intimate relationship translation plays in her poetry and prose. We think transcollaboration might also indicate the soft edges we find in her texts that exist between writing and reading, as well as between her texts and the ones she brings into her work as an affirmatory poetics based in collaboration. To trace this generous poetics, we’ve choreographed a movement in this section – a kind of living pulse between the works – from translations and retranslations to transcollaborations. We see this webwork of translators’ engagements woven throughout this book, from Patricia Claxton, Robert Majzels and Erín Moure, Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood, and Barbara Godard, as well as in a new generation of translators like Jennifer Moxley, Angela Carr, Oana Avasilichioaei, Rhonda Mullins, and Katia Grubisic; we see it, too, in the homage of ideas from Charles Bernstein and in Bronwyn Haslam’s anagrammatic translations. These collaborations and translations come from across generations. These translators have made Brossard’s books, in English, possible and we have tried to include as many translators as possible.
Of course, it is crucial to begin with the acknowledgement that so often here translation is a form of collaboration. Some aspects of collaboration are more deeply entangled than others, however. These textual sites are where our use of the term transcollaboration comes from. Works of transcollaboration include those moments when the concept of authorship or translator-ship is brocaded with various configurations and reconfigurations that complicate the terms rewriting, rereading, and retranslating.
What we call transcollaboration also has roots in the torrent of feminist interventions in translation and translation theory between Québécoise