Nicole Brossard’s work is both thrill and balm – and now,
in Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader, readers can encounter the
full range and scope of her trajectory. We have worked to curate selections
that will be relevant and, we think, exhilarating to new and returning readers
of Brossard’s work, and we have moved across genres and through time, not in a
linear way but in a way that fits the always-aliveness of her work. If Utopia
seems impossible to readers in 2020, Brossard’s work reminds us that when we
gather – either on the page reading, or in rooms together – our co-presence
conjures the possibility of Utopia.
Over a fifty-year period, Nicole Brossard has published
more than forty works of poetry, prose, essays, and non-fiction. She has broken
through the bonds of sexual and linguistic repression, and in doing so has
reached across several generations and two solitudes to enchant avant-garde,
feminist, and academic readers and writers nationally and internationally,
creating a radical, complex, and influential body of literature. It is work
that never forgets the importance of pleasure, and that never loses hope in the
possibility of Utopia. For the scholar Susan Rudy, Brossard’s writing is
comparable to Virginia Woolf in being ‘uncompromising’ in its ‘critique of patriarchal
reality, unrelenting in her love for women, and unequalled in [its] aesthetic
experimentation.’ Has any other Canadian writer enjoyed the kind of feverish
collaboration and translatory attention paid to Brossard? And has any other
Canadian writer had the kind of attention that comes not from the established
literary complex down but from the ground up? Poets, writers, and translators
have taken up Brossard’s work largely as a labour of love. This is quite
impressive when you consider that at the core of this fervour is a radial
lesbian innovative writer who comes to English only through translation. (“AVANT
DESIRE, THE FUTURE SHALL BE SWAYED,” An Introduction by Sina Queyras, Geneviève
Robichaud and Erin Wunker)
Sitting
at more than three hundred pages, Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader,
eds. Sina Queyras, Geneviève Robichaud and Erin Wunker (Toronto ON: Coach House
Books, 2020) is a “selected works” of fifty-plus years’ worth of Montreal writer Nicole Brossard’s works in English translation, from, as the back cover
attests, “her best-known writings but also includes hard-to-find interviews,
essays, and lectures.” From the very beginning of her work, Brossard’s work has
been uncompromising in their experiments with language and form, and
engagements with sexuality, desire, politics and social politics, and this new
collection attempts to acknowledge the myriad threads of her work through thematic
sections—“Desirings,” “Generations,” “The City,” “Translations, Retranslations,
Transcollaborations” and “Futures”—a noted difference from, say, a more
temporal editorial structure. The book is built as a sequence of threads pulled
from Brossard’s translated work, from her numerous books-in-translation to more
obscure pieces, including elements included in her prior selected through the University of California Press. The collection offers pieces from published
works such as French Kiss, or, A Pang’s Progress (Coach House Books,
1976), Turn of a Pang (Coach House Press, 1976) and Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon (Coach House Books, 2005), but also the collaboration “Mauve”
with Daphne Marlatt, originally published as a chapbook produced in an edition
of thirty copies back in 1987:
La réalité est un sursis au-delà
et du reel lorsqu’on
observe
en l’apparence virtuelle,
courbes
de ceci qui ressemble
ccombien de fois
les images : la bouche au
féminin
dose de sense émotion
dorsale
Real that of the
under-bent
curves of the virtual we
take for real
a gap delayed that-over-there re
semblance the images
repeat
mouth in the feminine,
dos€
of sense making a dorsal
commotion
Brossard’s
influence on writing and culture can’t be overstated: the ways in which her
work has been the forefront of what became a wave of writing engaged with
theory and literary form, form and theory engaged with desire, and desire
engaged with the politics of gender, sexuality, language and the body; centred
in Montreal but rippling out in waves throughout Quebec, Canada and beyond. Her
writing has consistently worked to explore boundaries, engaging with questions
and concerns that originally exploded across the culture throughout the 1960s,
70s, 80s and 90s. One just has to think of the number of touchstones her work
offers, including the incredibly powerful piece she wrote in response to the
Montreal Massacre, “6 December 1989 / Among The Centuries” from Fluid Arguments (translated by Marlene Wildeman): “Mysogyny, phallocentrism,
sexism, and anti-feminism are four words that could seem to be easily
interchangeable. It would be, however, a serious mistake to confuse one for another,
for they play very specific but oh so complementary roles when it comes to the
alienation, domination, and exploitation of women.” As Lisa Robertson wrote in
her introduction to Brossard’s Theory, A Sunday (Robertson’s essay is also
included in this collection): “The feminist writers of Montréal have altered
their city irrevocably. When women write about and from the cities they live
in, they are transforming the material ccity into a web of possibility and
risk. The description of the city bends back on itself – it not only represents,
it opens up a site for the political imagination. Through the fictive and
theoretical act, the city is reinscribed as a space for radical otherness.”
Her
work continues to explore the boundaries of what is possible with text,
blending lyric with theory, and a retrospective of this sort is, honestly, long
overdue. One could imagine how easily such a volume could have been twice as
large, given Brossard’s near-constant engagement and exploration through prose,
prose poetry, the lyric essay, poetry and works for the stage over more than five
decades-to-date. There aren’t too many contemporary Canadian writers who have predominantly
been known as writers of prose fiction who have incorporated so many ideas of
poetry and the lyric into their work and their thinking (the late Robert Kroetsch
might be another example of this), as well as such overwhelming engagements
with political concerns, especially early on in her writing career. And yet,
every inch of her work could be considered overwhelmingly and thoroughly
present, no matter when one might be encountering it. In an interview Catherine
Mavrikakis conducted with Nicole Brossard and Nathanaël, translated into the
English by Katia Grubisic, Brossard responds:
The French poet René Daumal
said, a novel says something while poetry does something. The whole posture is
different, certainly in terms of language, and of the tension in language. Because
a writer can shift from one genre to another, we can also ask the question of
prose poems, for instance. Why not write a poem, why write a prose poem? It’s
because prose balances the peaks of tension, whereas the poem always exists because
of the tension in meaning, and therefore in grammar, syntax, and rhetoric. It’s
always in the present when you’re reading it, and when you write it. Even if it
takes six months to work on a poem, you’re always in the present, you are
always in the moment. When you read it, too. And you can’t negotiate with a
poem, you can’t say, I love this part of the poem. You love it, or you
don’t. A novel – you can like parts of a novel, while other parts you don’t like
so much, but it’s negotiable. And it has to do with the span of the text,
obviously, its length. It really is a different way to relate to the world, to
look at the world, and of course another way to live in the present, to experience
one’s own present moment in the language, I think.
