He talks in a strong loud voice, cuts others off, encroaches on my short words and my hesitations. The time he has available is not like mine. We have nothing in common, not even literature. The official critic prescribes that a woman should utter cries, shrieks, express madness; otherwise he will sanction me. I have not uttered cries, and I will not do so.
His wife says he writes her letters that are obscene and crude. When I am in a group, I can’t remember what each person has said. I remember those words. His wife’s words reveal the caricatural aspect of his pontificating discourse. He has another face that he keeps hidden.
He writes her long descriptive letters full of sexual fantasies, crude words. He describes what he would like to do to her. He imagines entering her in a hundred different ways. He is short and fat and she is round; most of these fantasies simply remain inaccessible and impracticable images. He opts for the language of organs, pricks, vulvas, vaginas, direct and explicit terms, a domain reserved for letters not meant for reality or literature. The dirty language is incompatible with the saccharine poetry he publishes annually.
When he reads, he is on the lookout for troubling expressions. An author can fall into a trap and show a face that contradicts what he actually says. The critic examines such involuntary confession, what the author wants to keep secret.
Here is the scene. There is a girl of fifteen, at the mercy of voyeurs and sexual predators. A really young girl, bursting with good health, an unknowing virgin, who moves about among mature men. His students are older than fifteen; they can accept or reject male advances. The freshness of fifteen does not last. He has fantasies about touching the girl since the other predators touch her with her parents’ approval. He imagines holding the innocent girl in his arms, cajoling her, working on her with the glib talk of an author of clandestine erotic writing. The teenager is not stupid. She understands that the man with the moustache and the Italian shoes is teaching her the letters of the erotic alphabet. She needs a mentor. He will be her professor of dirty language and the first moves under the sign of larval eroticism. He decides that he won’t go all the way. His attraction for underaged girls is not without danger. In order to better control himself, he recites the penal law as he writes up his fantasies. The thing hidden below his fat belly endows him with his virile character. He mustn’t confuse fantasy with reality. He says the girl’s sexuality is not yet developed. He dreams of the teenage girl the way a soft, energy-less man does, a latent man. It would be wrong to swell up his penis, to go turgescent over an image. He has to save his strength.
Then he changes his mind. The girl is in his arms because she dances with fifty-year-old drinkers. His lively penis requires attention. It is impossible to maintain the erection. His tormented mind focuses on the under-aged girl’s hand while his prick quivers in his thick hand with the short nails. The cologne he bought in Rome blends with the body odours. The image of the representative of the law fades. He insists: she’s not too young to have sex since that is what she wants and what her parents want. She moves from one man to the next, to whoever asks. The lascivious virgin is a lovely topic to write on. The critic’s trousers are stained. He goes to the bathroom adjoining his office, wipes off the stain with febrile movements. His wife, who reads his crude letters in dirty language, is not used to seeing a stain on the front of his pants.
The critic regrets not writing about the sentimental education of a young virgin. He refuses to write without transposing. He dare not betray the past he has overcome, or his wife, or his glorious future. The pedophile critic is amusing himself with the larval figure of the girl, who is too dumb at age fifteen to realize that she is surrounded by predators. There is no better way to express the desire to destroy her, for her own good and for the writer’s sexual pleasure. There is no better way to formulate the need to kill girls from poor backgrounds, dim-wits with embryonic sexuality.
I have seen the world of larvae. Your notebooks, your letters, your course notes are adorned with soft, energyless figures. I pay these embryonic reptilian flocks little heed. The miniscule monsters are alone. They all have the same inoffensive, childish colour. They make one think of a soft, sticky refusal of the structured body. That’s what you draw year after year. There’s an invisible abyss between your brain and your hand. Your sketches are runny and soft while your mouth preaches the avant-garde.
Unfinished projects have replaced actions. You make enthusiastic pronouncements, like all the others who dream in Technicolor. I am seduced by your promises, I am possessed by your fecund imagination. It was my virtue to believe in you. I envision the creative magic of intoxicating imagery. At night I sometimes dream about actually carrying out what you talk about. You want to construct ovalshaped houses from polymers, houses that resemble intergalactic vehicles and primitive huts, new futuristic and archaic assemblages.
You draw them. Your viscous and larval world takes shape. Your sketches represent architectural objects, habitations. You develop variations; you do research on polymers. You describe how a futuristic material and forms from some originary past can meet up. I have the gift to be able to believe in your mystifications. Your fictions on the topic of polymers went on for years, then they died out. The next project was born. Another one replaced that one. The story never reached the fabulous development of eggshaped houses.
You continue drawing. Your world is not consistent. Maggots, caterpillars, and other creeping beings come from your pen. The heaps of larvae remain in a rudimentary condition. The little beasties smile in beatitude and contentment. I look at them without seeing or interpreting them. The rigidity of your discourse has nothing to do with what you call your artistic production.
The pages I write are first attempts to free myself in the life we live together. You can’t help it; you lecture me and dictate your ideas. I make my way through heaps of instructions, negative words, unwritten laws, furious demands that I correct my thinking. That is the path my struggle has taken as I emerge from my statutory activities.
The man, who is very tall and thin and an alcoholic, has been weaned from his cocaine habit. He is recognized for being the leader of second wave formalism. His success and reputation stem from formalist texts and their exceptional construction. He is not a theorist. He has a rational and thoughtful understanding of language as play. During a polemical discussion he professes to be an atheist, contrary to the Jesuit and other outdated practices of the Duplessis era. In his work there is no underlying or suspect thought that might have its roots in long and intense religious studies.
At first reading, his work appears ludic. It takes a moment to get beyond its formulaic balance, which seems to be a categorical requirement. It is possible to remain on the surface of his discourse. His texts are resistant; the writing slips from one expression to the next, flawless and without connotation. The admiration accorded him by academics comes from this crazy ease when so many struggle to erase the past that adheres to the language. Puns and preciosity are the source of his mastery. Too many mothers have accorded this beloved child time to learn to play. He believes in the game of love and chance, cards in hand, the passport to the future. Words betray. He does not manage to speak like he writes. That is not permitted for the man who drinks alcohol and snorts cocaine. Some leeway is needed or he will suffocate in his formalist perfection, his intellectual affectation, and his pretension. He has kept his taste for juvenile wordplay, a puerile spirit, disarming jokes, the erratic desire to be the centre of the group. Not everyone has the gift of language. He commands a wild language that comes with sharp caustic wit. He performs, doing comic and cynical pirouettes, proof of a bright intellect and lively spirit. Constantly saying, re-saying, unsaying, he says nothing. He may not be suffering from logorrhoea, but he always has to have the last word.
This man has the mind of a censor. The formalist furore is not well known. He has not gotten involved with the left. He has never taken sides, never engaged politically, not in word or in the support of any cause.
His linguistic rigour prescribes empty patter and makes his sentences scintillate. His practice of playful literariness works against the political writers. His careful mind considers anything that doesn’t conform to formalist brilliance vulgar and messy. His texts assemble a series of luminescent letters, well-placed and well-spaced. That’s it, the neat text, the arduous game of the letter cleansed of whatever is not form. His wordplay, his nihilist pirouettes indicate that he is staying with his puerile pursuits. And though he may not have a position, except for his atheism, the most unexpected thing occurs and he forges a political perspective that doesn’t appear anywhere in his writing. So, when with all his official titles he takes sides with Mathieu the Stalinist, the surprise is complete. These kinds of men exist, men with a sophomoric wit, a kid’s sense of humour, little popes of parody, censors of the first order, dark forces of the literary police, thought police who issue prohibitions. He is the guard in charge, the counterfeiter who produces brand-new language, blazing white-hot. The great comic is watching us.
Specific to formalism is its ideological rigidity. I protect what I write. I hide my text from you. Besides you don’t really want to read what I write. It is a protective gesture to be secretive. I have to dissimulate, and this frightens me. My clandestine literary activity remains covert. Such humility hurts me. It makes me lose my voice.
In the name of your new doctrine you set yourself up as the model artist who does not produce. You scorn those who cannot resist writing, or painting, or the temptation to publish and exhibit their work. You proclaim that the workers are the masters of the intellectuals. They are at the source of total and complete knowledge, which is that of the working class. In contrast, knowledge derived from books is partial and ancillary. The expression of your superiority accrues before those who are not Stalinists. I resemble these others who are not Stalinists. You do not address me specifically. You issue general insults and imprecations.
You have a strong sense of yourself and the members of the party. You inform me that you are making History. You are fashioning it and you can force it, and those who are not with you are lost. Our country is on the verge of a catastrophe. Our current leaders are committing crime upon crime.
You refuse to pay your share of the monthly rent. When I mention it, you have a hundred reasons for not paying. You live at my expense, and treat me as an enemy. I am in danger. We copulate. Our bodies fuse, inseparable, silent. We are moved by untimely bursts. Insomnia consumes my nights. I am distraught from lack of sleep. Anxiety diminishes my ability to think. These are very difficult days. The feeling that I owe my family a symbolic debt returns. What was over, returns. My parents think I’ve settled down with you. I am getting ready to break our bonds. Neither one of them will accept this. I am supremely fearful of leaving.
You say to our friends: I am going to put this body to bed. You and your body, you are two different entities. You are not your body, and your body is not you. You exist beyond the corporeal. You are a head, a mind, an intelligence. For the moment, your body is what holds me. We are under tension. Morality hammers inside my head; I must not give in to sexual impulses. I transgress my secret law. We make love, my body is eager for yours. I am cleft in two. The gestural mechanics are irresistible. I am yours and you are mine. I reproach myself for this. What is happening is contradictory. The day I will leave you is approaching. I no longer listen to the internal voice assailing me. You don’t reject me, but you don’t respond either. You follow the impulse, the erotic instinct.
I am unearthing the story of a son and husband who was cherished, and serviced. I tell how he is perceived, how people wait for him to arrive, how he is promoted, how he chooses a companion willing to put up with him, take his hand, make his rise possible. I place a mirror before other promising adult sons. They have no reason to defend him except that through him they can overcome a similar situation. They project an ideal onto this intoxicated individual, an inflated image of themselves, the image of the young genius. My character is a symbol.
Men are the ones who don’t understand what I write. When I write about you I upset them; I irritate them. My words unveil their intimacy. I do not wrong them. I have met them at literary events. I insist: These men judge me according to their laws. Like you, they are the masters of the codes of language. They are bloated with self-importance. They have such high regard for their genius, their careers, their productions. The Stalinist is an archetype, the preferred figure for a personality cult. It lays bare part of the unconscious.
These men have hurt me. It is quite extraordinary that a woman who has been wounded to the quick in her language by a family that is hostile to knowledge should also be hurt by professors, writers, intellectuals.
The imbeciles want me to cry, shriek, exaggerate. They have established vile rules and cynical laws. They lie with every breath they take. They are high-speed word-producing machines. They make up names, titles, produce inexhaustible lists of their powers. You closely resemble these men from my little portrait gallery.
My letter will not erase the debt of my birth, the debt I have borne since my life began. I have not done you any wrong. I couldn’t see what was happening. My senses were dulled.
When you forbade me to go to the same places as you, the prohibition was clear. Later you talked about people who meet up again after their separation, who respect and like each other. You didn’t ask my opinion. You may deplore the fact that we don’t see each other, but you haven’t tried to see me. I made some brief attempts to approach you, writing down the dates in my notebooks. They are my evidence.
I write this letter which is coming to a close with great calm. I want to correct a persistent misunderstanding. What there was between us represents the sum of considerable experience.
I was in love with you. I deduce nothing from the condition of being in love in general. If you hadn’t become a Stalinist … the beginning of this sentence is absurd and pathetic. People ask why I didn’t fight your ideological allegiance. I became convinced that it was impossible to shake up the basis of your indoctrination, your irreducible certainties. Once I’d left you I understood the totality of your political principles.
I made a mistake when I took the initiative to separate from you. Any woman asks the man to leave the house. My psychological malaise made me kick myself out. I handed you the keys.
Life, Separated
THEN I STARTED THE ANALYSIS, Mathieu joined the party. Stalinist papers appeared on his desk a few days after my first appointment with the psychoanalyst. They are the most recent issues, placed in chronological order. The paper is fresh; they have not been read. Mathieu is the member of a group whose goals are announced loud and clear in a single unanimous voice. Just the thought of criticizing his political obedience makes me guilty. I am a Stalinist’s wife. I take the first steps. I go off to a distant neighbourhood to meet a disciple of Freud. My mind is not confused. I do not accept his position, his doctrinaire allegiance. We are antagonists. There is total misunderstanding. I will leave Mathieu.
I live in intense fear when I am alone. Mathieu’s arrival at home brings on a submissive attitude. I find it hard to tolerate his presence. For weeks, I have exhausted myself with insomnia, nervous tremors. We have terrible communication problems. I make every effort to decipher his words and gestures; he does nothing of the kind.
The scene can be described in a few words. Mathieu is about to return from the university. I go in circles in the big room that serves as salon and living room as well as the entrance to the apartment. My decision derives from an absolute necessity. I am at a deadend. I cannot live with a Stalinist without myself becoming a Stalinist. So many years spent secretly deconstructing religious indoctrination for my own guidance are for nothing in the face of a neophyte, a new convert. I keep telling myself I am in danger. I don’t say a word. I will not be indoctrinated.
Mathieu made the decision for himself. That’s how things are at our house. I collect my thoughts. I am going to speak,
make myself heard. He comes in with his boots, his winter coat and his leather briefcase, which he sets down on the rug. He takes off his boots, and hangs his coat in the closet.
Did we say hello, or good evening? Words have grown sparse, tense. The only words announcing that I would leave came from my trembling lips. I said it in the most laconic way: I am going to leave. He responded immediately: if you want to leave, leave. He didn’t take the time to think. I was rigid, so was he.
I feel an unease that translates into an excess of words. Those words provoke action, create the gesture that will kick me out into the shadows beyond. Without thinking about the consequences, I have promised to leave. Out of the furthest depths of my despair and the pessimism that was born from my childhood, I thought this demanding man loved me, and that like at the movies, he would cry: don’t leave, come back to me. It was not like a romantic film. On the contrary. The doors to the icy night swung open. Infinite cold. It is the dead of winter. He spoke to me like an enemy.
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