Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader. Nicole Brossard

urban sprawl that compresses the scene of a kiss, in Brossard’s novel French Kiss, for instance, with simultaneous scenes across Montreal, as though they could all be held together in the space between two ardent mouths opening for each other, or two generations, or ten, all the mouths open for each other.

       FUTURES

      In a time where the question of who and which bodies matter, we are again struck with the realization that Brossard has insisted on multiple bodies and on creating space for bodies both known and yet to be known. Language has changed in the half-century during which she has been writing, yes, and we have made some editorial decisions to address those changes in language. Pronouns, especially, have been necessarily oxygenated. So too, have terms of identification shifted. Language will and must continue to shift to accommodate our multiple lived realities. Or, as Brossard puts it, ‘writing is making oneself visible. To show all forms of experiences.’¹⁹ When we organized the section we named ‘Futures,’ we were thinking of the ways in which Brossard’s work faces horizons, which open outward. We were thinking, too, of the ways in which today’s future becomes tomorrow’s archive.

      There are multiple bodies present here too, in the editorial and curatorial gestures of this reader, and indeed in the crafting of this introduction – not to mention you, dear reader, who have been very much on our mind. So, when we say that Nicole Brossard’s work invites the reader to see (and understand that you are creating) the future in the present, it is a cautiously hopeful wager, because perhaps now more than ever that present is so multidimensional – and so easily co-opted and complicit. The present offers a space of anticipation, for the present vibrates in language and vibrates differently for each of us. It is there, in the vibrating present of language, that a space opens in the text. We are reminded of what Nicole Brossard shared with us while we were sitting in her dining room in the fall of 2019: ‘Reading turns us on. It’s mysterious, but we start to understand how literature works […] and we also discover what’s most interesting about human beings. By meandering in language, as in life, a whole world becomes available.’²⁰

      Our meeting took place on the day of the massive climate strikes across Canada. Half a million people gathered in Montreal. We had each attended before meeting at Brossard’s house to talk about the possibilities and pleasures of thinking together through and across languages – and generations, Geneviève’s baby in the arms of Brossard’s partner as we wound down from our work. To meander in language, to be turned on by the mysterious power of reading, to be interested in what each person was saying in the moment, and then to try to record it here for you to read – this feels future-oriented for us. This feels vital.

      The question of address too, has seemed vital, and has kept us company throughout the work of curation. Who is this ‘we’ hailed, sometimes, in Brossard’s writing? Who is called – then, now, in the future – by the shifting and often recurrent signifiers of woman, of lesbian, of poet? What if, as readers, we chafe against some of these signifiers, or feel adrift off the coast of them? Sometimes, the poet offers us some signposts.²¹ Sometimes these are satisfying maps for a reader. Sometimes, they leave us wanting more. Desiring conversation. Can or should we as readers infer collective subjectivity into the poet’s use of the singular pronoun ‘I’? Can the individual hail collectives, both imagined and on the edge of what is possible to imagine at a given moment in history?

      We are in the midst of climate catastrophe. Abuses of power rage on both global and local levels. Misogyny and fascism feel ever more present. As we finalize this introduction, the rail system in Canada has come to halt by cross-country blockades in support of the Wet’suwet’en. What is the power of poetry, and the possibilities of future-oriented collectivity in the face of these realities? Again, we turn to Brossard, who figures the work of writing as a quest for necessary pleasure in the midst of upheaval and turmoil. Brossard writes, ‘For my part, I have always made writing a place of pleasure, of quest, a space of dangerous intensity, a space for turbulence having its own dynamic.’²² We are living in turbulent times, but there has also always been turbulence at any given moment on our planet. Let’s imagine that getting out in front of turbulence, of advancing a teleology of desire – for jouissance, for pleasure, for the ‘dreaming parts of us’ – is possible, even political.²³ If we imagine that the time we spend together on these pages matters, then we are already facing new horizons. Brossard’s body of work is one that the reader wants to come back to. That readerly return is a guiding force of our editorial curation here. The sensual dimension of her narratives, in poetry as well as prose, welcome this. It is itself about the measure of desire, the measure of writing. It is easy to become infatuated, to admire the way Brossard’s sentences work beyond a single vanishing point, how they multiply desire. It’s a question of movement as much as energy, a question of the (d)rift between the writing, the written, and the sensations that gather there. Pleasure is never singular. Never over nor complete. Rattling language to multiply pleasure, there is a refusal to have pleasure denied.

      The Brossardian text has the capacity, a clarity, for drilling down into things, for illuminating what’s inside the sheath or shell of language, while being, at the same time, never straightforward. Opening vistas and spaces to inhabit, Brossard’s poetry and prose offer a radiant gesture, a kind of activism that is working in a different register by refocusing the narrative or by role modelling a new trajectory, a space of clarity, of energy – another way of being. That’s part of what’s so interesting about Brossard’s feminist poetics – that by excavating language in order to seek to uncover or more fully understand the history carried within the frame of a word, her poetry and prose are also always interrupting our expectations, shifting the light in an upward trajectory that is luminous, that illuminates, that penetrates the darkness of/in language.

      We have elected to close both ‘Futures’ and the Reader with another homage to Brossard’s innovation. In Picture Theory the reader discovers Hologram, a book within a book. A similar discovery occurs when we turn the page to find Mauve Horizon within the covers of Mauve Desert. Books hold worlds of possibility, even other books! Avant Desire ends with another book: And Suddenly I Find Myself Remaking the World. This full text was translated, as we mentioned, in part by Oana Avasilichioaei and in part by Rhonda Mullins. Each translator leaves something of her imprint on the text she has read and translated. This motion to and fro, from one thinking perspective to another, is part of the invitation we offer in reading Brossard’s essay, which crisscrosses translations and translators. Here, too, the electric energy of Brossard’s work is made multiple through these engagements in translations, as well as book design.

      Deep in the incandescence of language we surface and spiral back and forward to what is the ‘avant’ of desire: not original, as though existing in some mythic beginning, and yet there is something of the grandeur of myth in the Brossardian oeuvre. What comes before desire? Is there a before or does desire start with desire? This would suggest a kind of impossible trajectory, for how can desire leap toward desire? But perhaps that impossible movement in and out of itself is key to understanding how the concept of avant desire might come to embrace something untranslatable in Brossard’s writing (a reminder that tending to the present moment, to the body and word and thinking of the moment, we hold our own power, and in that holding of the present moment we have the possibility of creating our future. Or futures. We, all who are present in the text we have before us, wherever and whenever we are, we have the power. We occupy space in utopia when we are together, thinking, listening, and talking. We are in ‘the meeting place of our desires’ and ‘the future can’ and will ‘still be swayed.’²⁴

       Desirings

       LOGICAL SUITE

      from Nicole Brossard: Selections

      tr. Pierre Joris

      everything gels white

      in happy time

      deep dark also

      all