Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader. Nicole Brossard

Cybil Noland thinks before riding off again, a deep-sea wanderer aboard great incunabula.

      The power’s back on. The air conditioner’s working. In the corridor, the chambermaids are bustling back and forth again.

      When she got out of the shower La Sixtine turned on the radio. A sombre voice entered the room, spreading a smell of war and filth. The voice waded its way through ‘today the authorities’ and ‘many bodies in front of the cathedral, some horribly mutilated. Fetuses were seen hanging from the gutted bellies of their mothers. In places the snow seemed coated with blood. Old women, open-mouthed and staring toward the cold infinity of the region leading to the sea, spoke of human limbs scattered about the ground. Other witnesses talked of hearing the cries of children although no children have been found. At present the authorities are unable to say what group the dead belong to since from their clothing one cannot tell whether they are from the north-east or the east-north.’

      One after another the sentences fall to the room’s pink carpet. Cybil Noland watches from the spacious bed. La Sixtine sits on the edge of the bed with a towel about her hips and seems to be breathing with difficulty. Then, as if tired of trying to find her breath, she turns and curls her body into Cybil’s trembling nakedness. Her head weighs heavily. Her body is heavy. The present is a body. The body is a live, pure present that goes on forever between the electrical thrum of the air conditioner and the voice from the radio.

      Cybil Noland thinks about the morning she spent in a Covent Garden café. Her head that morning was full of a woman who wants to write a novel. This woman lacks vocabulary to describe the volcano of violence erupting in cities. She is sitting in a large kitchen. While she spoons sugar into her teacup with a little silver spoon, her hair brushes over the sugar bowl. She is young and resolute, in contrast with the fact that she is still in pyjamas at this late morning hour. There is a dictionary on the table. With one hand she holds the silver spoon and with the other absentmindedly turns the pages of the dictionary. She gets up and goes to the window, where for a minute she leans on the sill. From here she can see the approaches to Hyde Park, the texture of the day and the fine rain of this weather that penetrates the very core of one. She gazes into the distance. At the far side of herself, she ponders a fictional life. She observes so meticulously that the pondering fits her head and thoughts like a helmet. A book by Samuel Beckett lies on the table. The sugar bowl looks like a volcano. The woman lives alone, surrounded by ferns and a wealth of other plants to which she will put no names so that in their green anonymity they will create a fine, rich tropical forest for her. The rain falls slowly. She lights a cigarette. Why would she write this violent book? She has no special gift for it, or vocabulary or experience. She puts a hand on the dictionary and draws it close. The hand stays resting on the cover as though she’s about to take an oath. With the other hand she writes a list of violent words, words that turn one’s stomach, turn one’s head to suffering, to people and their progeny who thirst for vengeance. Beyond the window Hyde Park glows, adding to its mystery, offering its trees and green lawns as so many hypotheses that liven vertigo in contemplation of the future. Truth will never come without worry, nor will the illusion of truth. The woman pours herself another cup of tea. Her father’s oak-panelled library is filled with women’s books. Her father’s books are stacked in the north corner of the kitchen. They stand there like three Towers of Babel. Three towers of leather-bound volumes showing their gold-leafed spines.

      The fine rain keeps falling and the woman treasures those images of the north that make her homesick. It isn’t memory that does it, it’s this taste of happiness split in two by silence.

       Baroque d’aube

      1995, tr. 1997

       SIXTH BEND

      from Green Night of Labyrinth Park

      tr. Lou Nelson

       life is in the mouth that speaks

      multiplying ideological anchors, escapes ahead, syntheses, feints, and perspectives, always seeking a mirror, drifting on a word, butting up against another, obsessive or distraught, thought remains the most modern of the language games that unleash desire. In one’s mouth, thought is living proof that life is a statement that experiments with the truth of je thème.¹

      thus, the lesbian I love you that unleashes thought is a speaking that experiments with the value of words to the point of touch, stretching them out so that they can simultaneously caress their origin, their centre, and the extreme boundary of sense.

      in the lesbian mouth that speaks, life discerns itself by the sounds pleasure makes as it rubs up against a speaking.

       NINTH BEND

      from Green Night of Labyrinth Park

      tr. Lou Nelson

       I am breathing in rhetoric

      i am writing this text on several levels because reality is not sufficient, because beauty is demanding, because sensations are multiple, because putting a great deal of oneself into language does not eliminate the patriarchal horror, does not explain the composition of my subjectivity and all these images that move like a woman in orgasm. Energized by the raw material of desire, I write. Word matter, when it is too cold or too soft or so crazy that it is hard to contain in our thoughts, this matter that is eternally contemporary with our joys and energized bodies, murmurs and breathes, opens us to the bone and sews in wells and depths of astonishment. I exist in written language because it is there that I decide the thoughts that settle the questions and answers I give to reality. It is there that I signal assent in approving ecstasies and their configurations in the universe. I do not want to repeat what I already know of language. It is a fertile ground of vestiges and vertigo. Depository of illusions, of obsessions, of passions, of anger and quoi encore that obliges us to transpose reality. I am even more unwilling to retrace my steps since, in this very beautiful fragrant labyrinth of the solstice night, I owe it to myself to not erase the memory of my path, to not erase the strategies and rituals of writing that I had to invent in order to survive the customs and phallic events of life.

      1992

       Generations

       THE AERIAL LETTER

      from The Aerial Letter

      tr. Marlene Wildeman

      We concentrate avidly on the processes. Of writing, of desirous being, of ecstasy. We concentrate a great deal on the self. We exert ourselves, and in so doing we summon the other within ourselves to a reality that is transformed. Fiction seeks its own fictional subject and memory alone does not flinch. Memory makes itself plural, essential, like the version that foreshadows an aerial vision. Authentic as a first written draft. With each page, the necessary willingness to start over.

      For each time I must enunciate everything, articulate an inexpressible attitude, one that wants to remake reality endlessly, in order not to founder in its fictive version nor be submerged in sociological anecdote.

      On the one hand, taking on sociological reality by taking risks within. In order to dissolve its fictive character, in order to foil the impostures of the day-to-day anecdote. Here, a question: the text as ID card or identity as a science fiction of self in the practice of creating text? Those who have never been able to speak the reality of their perceptions, those for whom the conquest of personal emotional territory has been precluded politically and patriarchally, will grasp that identity is simultaneously a quest for and conquest of meaning. Desire slowly emanates from what is inadmissible in her project: transformation of the self, and the collectivity. Inadmissible will to change life, to change her life. Imperatives