brossard essay

8/4/2019 Brossard Essay

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SHE WOULD BE THE FIRST SENTENCE OF MY NEXT NOVEL

By Nicole Brossard

The period during 1960s and early 1970s has been very important for Quebec literature. A

group of women deconstructed the conventional writing with their experimental efforts.

Those writers published many texts on feminine writing and tried to find a relationship

between gender and writing in literature and how the sexual relationships shaped the

language and literature to break male influence on language and writing.

Those writers were influenced by social and cultural changes in Quebec and modernization in

the early 1960 which is called La Révolution Tranquille (The Quiet Revolution). That period rose

up the emphasis on cultural differences and feminist thought in francophone province and

started many discussions about sexual politics in a wide area reaching even the misogyny. And

that led feminist writing and feminist subject to come up. The crucial emphasis was on

whether the women had a literature, and how different the literary representation was in

women literature.Being one of the most important writers of feminine writing, Brossard, had

an active role in that literary experimental movement during 1960s.

The essay, She Would Be the First Sentence of My Next Novel , is a conference paper written in

1992 for a symposium in Colorado. By next novel she refers to her book which would become

“Baroque d’aube” (Eng. Baroque at Dawn published in 1995. The original language of essay is

in French, though it was published in bilingual edition translated into English.

The essay is partly autobiographical and partly confessional. It deals with finding new ways of

using the language. The essay starts with third person narration describing the writing

experience of Brossard. Firstly, she explains how she is interested in the form and its



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transformation rather than the creation of the subject although it takes a long time until she

hunts the subject. The subject is ‘buried in number of semantic permutation’ according to her.

As a novelist and poet, she shows a deep interest in linguistics especially how literature

operates in semantic and pragmatic field during the process of creation of literary works.

She doesn’t approve the most novels’ format and function. She sees the prose and novel as a

production of bourgeois mentality. Therefore she calls her novels ‘anti-novels’ because of her

way of writing in which the words supersede the characters and plot.

She mentions about her various attempts of writing story. She always faces lack of motivation;

the reason is what she calls ‘missing action’. That is why she likes suspense in writing. Because

that gives her ‘feeling of moving forward’. She repeatedly talks about her resistance and

reaction towards the prose form of writing. However, she also admits that most famous

female writers achieved their fame and success in history of literature through prose,

accepting with the irony she says: “… thanks to prose, life had become worth living again for

women”. She criticizes the patriarchal domination on literature.

She is somehow explaining her preference which is not prose but the poetry. She is looking for

tense while she elevates the effects that a poem can have in a short while and that is certainly

something that prose lacks of. For her, prose operates where there is no dream whereas

poems come up where dreams and emotions are vivid.

Prose only deals with speculation between the characters and that is caused by the effort of

making them seem more alive than reality, which she finds disturbing. She considers the poem

something more personal and even more individualistic and special and she says: “In the poem

I takes care of everything”. Yet she continues explaining how she became more interested in

novel again. One of the reasons is as she says ‘slow dive into the length of time’ in which she

would have to look for necessary material for language to set the scenes and she would use



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the language in such a way that she would achieve the virtual dimension of images and

landscape.

She makes a gender comparison in writing. On that point she intends to show the relationship

between the gender and meaning. The importance of meaning and value is what makes

women marginal. For her, it would be different if she had been a man and those thoughts

justify why she put distance. Because she tries to find the words to make her more marginal

because that is the only way to make woman marginal since the woman has been confined so

far.

Her resistance to prose would form what she calls ‘Theoretical Fiction’. The definition is a kind

of observation to find the thinking body of woman and the wounds that reduce the capacity of

them. And certainly, those wounds are cleverly hidden. Thus after thinking about the wounds,

she gets more detailed description of those wounds: ‘Beauty marks, birthmarks, scratches,

cold sores, stretch marks etc.’ So, each mark reminds her of an incident, face, date and

different settings. While she tries to describe the story of each, she begins to have a different

experience something different which is emotional and which influence her narration.

Afterwards, while gathering those stories, she gets the impression of pure invention, pure

fiction.

She also gives information about her i.e. the character’s past. She is in her twenties in 1960s

and she explains that how her generation refused the Puritan Roman Catholic influence on

Quebec in the past. She also mentions the misfortunes and alienation of Quebec people and

that it was her generation’s responsibility to break with the past. That was the period that

witnessed the birth of Quebecois. There were many books published and those books included

the anger that was never expressed in pre-60s French Canadian novel.

Quebecois imaginaire was under two influences of French and English language. She defines

the French literary tradition having linguistic superego due to the French language and its



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features. French language and its way of expression caused an alienation of language and

alienation in colonized people, which is described as ‘collective defeat’ in the essay. As for the

English, she talks about American experience lacking urban metaphors. And between these

conflicts Quebecois imaginaire was stuck in nationalist issues. In that period Brossard’s

writings on gender and meaning in literature and feminine writing drew attention among the

political writers with nationalist themes.

There is a difference between novels written by women and writing in feminine. The concept

of writing in feminine is the product of feminist consciousness, practice of feminist thinking as

well as the representation of lesbian emotion and utopias. It was the direct inscription of

Modernism that formed that concept of writing in feminine.

She describes the writing feminine in Quebec literature period between 1975-1982 as full of

anger and utopias towards the patriarchal reality. The aim was to deconstruct heterosexism

through the redistribution of reality and fiction. And she explains how prose was suitable and

how it served woman writers for their purpose.

Woman radicalism of that period was against the male subjectivity and how it monopolized

‘the semantic space of the history’. She says “It is through men’s fiction that women became

fictional’ and she propose ‘exit fiction via fiction’.

There is constant repetition of the phrase “I am a woman of the present” once in every two

pages. And for every argument, she justifies herself with that phrase. With that she refers to

being contemporary among the centuries and cultures.

Finally, maybe the most remarkable example to understand the importance and value that she

gives to meaning is the comparison of violence with fiction. For her, violence is like fiction

because there is no limit. She says: “I am a woman of the present and I admit it, I do everything

I can to understand how men can call themselves sons of whores, sons of bitches, bad mothers’



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sons, and sons of God all in the same breath. I do everything I can to truly get the meaning of

words, but words fail me when it comes to describing the variety of objects which for centuries

have been rammed into women’s vaginas. Patience fails me when it comes to understanding

what violent men feel.”



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References

Gould, Karen. 1990. Writing in the Feminine: Feminism and Experimental Writing inQuebec.

Southern Illinois University Press Carbondale and Edwardsville

Lejtenyi, Patrick. 2005. Words of love, Author Nicole Brossard looks to lesbian desire for

inspiration. Mirror Archvies: Oct 20-26.2005 Vol. 21 No. 18

brossard essay

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